American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (27 page)

At a tiny village surrounded by mango orchards, La Bestia crosses without notice into Sinaloa. Soledad is stretched out, her pack tucked beneath her as a pillow and her fingers wrapped into the grating. Her face looks awash in a sickly gray.

‘How are you feeling?’ Lydia asks. The vocabulary of her former life is inadequate now, but it’s all she has.

Soledad opens her mouth, but then closes it again without answering and shakes her head.

‘When I was pregnant with Luca, olives helped with the nausea,’ she says quietly. Then her mind does a litany of counterarguments.
When I was pregnant with Luca, I was not fifteen years old. When I was pregnant with Luca, I did not have to travel thousands of miles on top of a freight train. When I was pregnant with Luca, he was not conceived by rape
.

‘Olives?’ Soledad grimaces, readjusts her chin on her backpack, and closes her eyes, but it’s no use. After two deep breaths, she lunges for the side of the train and vomits over the edge.

Rebeca watches, her eyes wide with worry. Then she hands her pack to Luca and crawls across to her sister. She rubs the small of Soledad’s back and waits for the retching to subside.

There’s a briny cut to the air as the tracks draw near the ocean. Mango groves give way to palm trees in sandy soil, and outside a tiny village, a couple dozen migrant men have made a large camp. They cheer when they see the train approaching, but the beast doesn’t slow, it’s moving too fast for them to board, so the men stand despondent, watching it thunder past. Luca waves, and a few wave back. Most reclaim their positions in the scanty shade to rest while they wait for the next train, but one man decides to try. He runs alongside the tracks while the others watch. They shout and whoop at him, a lot of competing noise, conflicting advice. He manages to get one hand up on a passing ladder, but
his legs can’t keep up. His arm is snagged, but the legs hang down. The watching men yell louder and more frantically.

‘Luca.’ Mami tries to draw his attention away, but he’s leaning over to watch, transfixed by the dangling man. They all are.

It’s clear he won’t make it, that he can’t haul himself up from that position. One arm binds him to the velocity of La Bestia. They all hold their breath. The man’s face is tipped up so Luca can see his expression, the moment he shifts from determination to acceptance. For a moment beyond that, he delays letting go, so Luca has the impression the man is savoring it, these final seconds when his life is intact. When at last his grip fails and he falls, there’s still a hope, briefly, that he’ll land clear of the tracks. That happens sometimes. A fluke of lucky physics and biology. But no. This man is sucked instantly beneath the wheels of the beast.

His mangled screams can be heard above the sounds of the churning train. Luca looks back and sees the migrants gathering in a knot on the tracks behind them, assessing the pieces of the severed man. Lydia does not cry for that wounded man, but she does pray for him. She prays that he won’t survive his mutilation, that merciful death comes quickly for him. More fervently, she prays that whatever impression the incident has on Luca, it won’t cause him any further harm. Surely her son may soon reach a limit of what a resilient child might endure without triggering some permanent internal decay.

‘Don’t worry,
amorcito,
’ she tells him. ‘That man will be fine.’

Luca protests. ‘He was in two pieces, Mami.’

Her voice is light. ‘That’s what doctors are for.’ She feigns confidence in the way all mothers know how to do in front of their children. She wears the fierce maternal armor of deceit. She allows only a moment to pass before she changes the subject, turning to Rebeca. ‘So what will you girls do when you get to the border? You have a plan, how to cross?’

‘Yes, our
primo
went last year, into Arizona, and then he got a ride from there to Maryland. That’s where he lives, and we’re going to stay with him. We’re using the same route, the same coyote.’

‘How’d he find the coyote?’ Lydia is constantly reminded that her education has no purchase here, that she has no access to the kind of information that has real currency on this journey. Among migrants, everyone knows more than she does. How do you find a coyote
,
make sure he’s reputable, pay for your crossing, all without getting ripped off?

Thankfully, Rebeca is flush with insight. ‘Loads of people from our village used him before. He was recommended. Because you can’t just pick any coyote. A lot of them will steal your money and then sell you to the cartel, you know?’

Lydia has never met a coyote. It’s possible she’s never even met anyone who’s met a coyote.

‘You should use our guy,’ Rebeca says. ‘Unless you already
have one lined up.’

Lydia shakes her head. ‘We don’t.’

Rebeca smiles. ‘So we can go together.
Mi primo
C
é
sar – he says this guy is the best. It took them only two days of walking and then somebody picked them up in a camper van on the other side and drove them to Phoenix. Gave ’em bus tickets from there to wherever they were going. It’s a lot of money, but he’s safe.’

‘How much money?’ Lydia asks.

Rebeca looks to Soledad, who’s still lying down, her head resting in her folded arms. Rebeca continues rubbing her sister’s back. ‘How much, Sole?’

Soledad answers without lifting her head or opening her eyes. ‘Four thousand each.’

Lydia is startled by the sum. ‘I thought it would be much more than that, like ten thousand pesos at least.’

‘Dollars,’ Soledad says, her voice muffled by the sleeve of her shirt. ‘Four thousand dollars.’

Dios Santo.
Lydia does a quick intake of breath. She accepts dollars in the bookstore, so she’s familiar with the typical exchange rates, but not in these quantities. She strains to do the math in her head. It’s a lot of money, but they have enough, they have plenty. They will even have a small sum left, to get them started on the other side. But then she remembers the padre’s pep talk in Celaya.
Every single one of you will be robbed. Every one. If you make it to
el norte
,
you will arrive penniless, that’s a guarantee
.

But it’s good, anyway, to have a plan, to look beyond what they might eat today or where they might sleep tonight. Lydia doesn’t feel ready for it, but she’s beginning to consider the future. She’s definitely not ready to look back, though, and she hopes she may accomplish one without necessitating the other.

‘So where do you meet this coyote? He’s expecting you?’ she asks Rebeca.

‘Yes, his name is El Chacal –’

Of course it is,
Lydia thinks.
Why would a coyote be named Roberto or Luis or Jos
é
when he can be named The Jackal?

‘ – and he works out of Nogales. When we get there, we call his cell phone. Look.’ Rebeca loosens the rainbow wristband she wears on her left arm and sticks her finger into a tiny hole on the inside. From there she unrolls a scrap of paper with the coyote’s phone number on it.

‘Good.’ Lydia nods. ‘Okay.’

So now they have a solid plan.

It’s amazing that riding on the top of a freight train can become boring, but it’s true. The tedium is spectacular. The chugging of the engine and the squeal of the metal are so constant that the migrants no longer hear those things. At towns where the train slows or stops, migrants get off, migrants get on, and they continue. The sun hikes high into the sky and glares down on them until their skin is so hot they can smell it, a little charred, and the brightness of the light bleaches the colors out of the
landscape.

They pass through Mazatl
á
n without stopping, where the tracks run alongside the ocean for a while, and the existence of sand there and the blueness of the sea remind Luca of home, which makes him feel obliterated instead of cheered. He’s glad when they turn inland and leave the beach behind. But then it’s back to hours of tedium, blended brown and green and gray, so it’s almost a welcome diversion when, a few miles outside Culiac
á
n, the monotony is broken by screaming. A lone voice repeats the words over and over, like a siren:
¡la migra, la migra!

All around them, migrants grab their things quickly; some don’t even bother with that – they look once at the dust trails kicked up by the tires of the approaching trucks, they choose the opposite side of the train, and they bail.

‘Come on, Soledad, wake up,’ Rebeca says, her voice tight with panic. ‘We have to go.’

The train is slowing but hasn’t stopped, and the men on top aren’t waiting. They scatter. They bolt.

‘
¡A la mierda con esto!
’ Soledad curses, slinging her pack onto her shoulders.

‘What’s happening, Mami?’ Luca asks.

In theory,
la migra
is no threat to Lydia and Luca. As Mexican nationals, they cannot be deported back to Guatemala or El Salvador, and unlike most of their fellow migrants, they aren’t in the country illegally. They’re committing only the minor infraction of riding the train. So perhaps it’s only the pervasive panic all around them, perhaps it’s contagious. But no, Lydia just
knows.
She can tell that
los agentes de la migra
in their uniforms are not here to enforce law and order. She knows by the bone-deep fear born only of instinct that she can’t rely on their citizenship now to protect them. They are in mortal danger, she can feel it in her pores, in her hair.

The trucks converge like pack animals. The men inside are masked and armed. Lydia scrabbles frantically at the buckle on Luca’s belt, but her hands are shaking and she has to try three times before she can free him.

‘Mami?’ Luca’s voice is rising in pitch.

Hers is low. ‘We have to run.’

Chapter Twenty-One

There are three trucks, all black and white with enormous
roll bars, and together they speed across the roadless dirt and sidle up beside the tracks, spewing gravel and dust behind them. There are at least four
agentes
standing in the back of each truck, plus more inside, and they’re all kitted out like they’re going to war. Luca stares at them with his mouth open. They wear boots and kneepads and helmets and giant, studded Kevlar vests and gloves and dark black visors so you can’t see their eyes, and their faces are entirely covered by black balaclavas. Each one of them has weapons strapped all over his body and a really large gun slung diagonally across his chest, and Luca can’t even begin to imagine what they’d need all that weaponry for, just to catch a few migrants, and then he also thinks it would be impossible to tell the difference, in all that gear, between an
agente federal de migraci
ó
n
and a
narcotraficante
in disguise, and Luca isn’t sure there’s much difference between them anyway because a gun is a gun is a gun. Luca pees in his pants.

No one cares. Migrants are spilling over the edges of the train. The ladders are full, and some men don’t wait their turn; they jump from the top, and Luca cringes as he watches them land. One man doesn’t get up again after he leaps. He writhes on the ground clutching his broken leg. Many stumble and puff when they hit the ground, but they have to make a swift recovery. They stagger and pick up speed. Luca has many questions, but he understands that now is not the time to ask them, so he listens to Mami and does exactly as she instructs. They are the last ones to reach the top of the ladder, and the only good part about that is that it’s empty now – all the men have gone, and Luca can see them loping like jackrabbits through the fields, but it’s no use. Luca can see that it’s no use. Because
la migra
has planned the raid perfectly – the train, where they are now, is in the middle of just fields and fields and fields, all harvested, flat, brown, and bald. There is nowhere for those migrants to go, never mind how quick or clever or jackrabbity they might be. As soon as the migrants disembark from the train, they are done for. There is no town, no building, no tree, no bush, no ditch, no cover. And Luca nearly opens his mouth to share this observation with his mother, to suggest that maybe they’d be better off staying put, but then the train engages its brakes and they all lurch forward and Rebeca loses her grip on the ladder, and Soledad lunges for her, but misses her hand, but then catches her stringing hair only because it has come loose in the rush, and when she hauls her sister back in by the hair, they are both crying. They can all taste their hearts in their throats, and Luca says nothing at all as the train finally pulls to a jerky halt.

They run not because they have any feeling that they might actually escape, but rather against the certain futility of running, because their terror compels them to run. They run because every one of them understands that if they are caught, when they are caught, all the hard-fought progress they’ve managed up to this point will come to an abrupt end. Whatever they have suffered in order to get this far on their journey will have been for naught. They understand that the best-case scenario now is to be captured by a man who obeys the dictates of his uniform, a man who will detain them and process them, and then erase their entire journey, and send them back to wherever they started. That is the best-case scenario. On the other hand, they know, this capture might not be bureaucratic at all. Perhaps there’s no one waiting to process them, fingerprint them, and send them home. Instead, this capture may turn out to be much more nefarious than that: kidnapping, torture, extortion, a finger chopped off and photographed for the threatening text they will send to your family in
el norte
. A slow, excruciating death if your family doesn’t pay up. The stories are as common as the rocks in this field. Every migrant has heard them; they run.

Lydia’s mind is clear of all thoughts except running as she propels herself and Luca along the furrowed earth as quickly as their bodies can go. Ahead of them, the sisters begin to pull away. Luca’s moving as fast as he can, but his legs are so small. It doesn’t matter. The train has chugged ahead to where it was instructed to stop, and the trucks have crossed the tracks behind it, and an
agente
in one of those trucks speaks into a bullhorn.

‘Stop running. There is nowhere for you to go.
Hermanos migrantes,
sit down and rest where you are. We are here to collect you. We will collect you with or without your cooperation. Your choice now is to make us happy or to make us angry.
Hermanos migrantes,
we have food and water for you. Sit down and rest where you are.’

The disembodied voice coming, as it does, from the barrel chest of a masked man and traveling across the bald fields with the attached squawk of the bullhorn, is the creepiest thing Luca’s ever heard. The message is intended to enfeeble them, to make them understand the powerlessness of their position, and on some of the men, it works. Among the breakaway clusters, a few stop running. They put their hands on their hips, their knees, their chests heaving. They look up at the sky with some mixture of impotent rage and dread and acceptance. They sit down in the dirt, their legs extended, their heads collapsing into the cradles of their hands.

But the voice doesn’t debilitate Luca; on the contrary, it makes him run faster. It reminds him of the times at Abuela’s house when she’d ask him to go down to the basement and get another bottle of ginger ale to put in the refrigerator, and he knew he had to go down there and do it, but Abuela’s basement was creepy. Even if you turned on all the lights and sang loudly to yourself the whole time, you’d still get only halfway
back up the stairs before you’d feel that ice-cold certainty that something evil was chasing you, that it was right behind you grazing the slick of your neck, that it would, in another second, clutch at your ankle and yank you into the depths. The bullhorn engenders that same feeling, except a thousand times worse, because it’s real.

Luca runs with his wet pants and his
mami
’s hand and all the horrific memories of Abuela’s green shower stall. And then Mami cries out and it all goes into slow motion: Mami’s cry, a shrill, corporeal thing, it bubbles out of her like a fully formed bird and it flies, but Mami doesn’t. She goes the other direction, down, down. She tumbles, slow, slow. And Luca, because he’s familiar with people being shot, because he has just observed the many, many guns of
la migra,
because everyone else in his family was killed by a bullet, presumes quite naturally that Mami is dead. Why else would she cry out like that? Why else would she fall? It’s so slow. First her hands. Then her head, her shoulder. Because of her significant velocity, she tumbles. Her back, her bottom. Her knees. She is on her knees in the dirt and Luca is no longer holding her hand. She is on her knees and her hands. Luca reaches for her arm. He’s afraid to pull. Afraid that she’s propped up like that only by some strange trick, and that if he unsettles the weight that’s resting on her arms and legs, her body will collapse, and that it will never animate itself again. He pushes past that fear. He grabs for her arm.

‘Mami, come on. Mami, run.’

There is no blood, he notices. No blood.
Gracias a Dios.
He feels himself begin to breathe.

‘I can’t run,’ Mami says. ‘I can’t run. I’m sorry, Luca. My ankle.’ She stands. It’s her ankle! It’s only her ankle. She tests her weight on it. A slice of pain. Not too bad. She hobbles in a small circle. She can walk, but she can’t run.

‘Okay,’ Luca says. His face is very wet.

He turns and sees Rebeca and Soledad still going, growing smaller into the distance as they run, and everything feels like euphoria now, in this terrible moment. Because Mami’s voice still works and the sisters are still running. He clutches Mami around her belly, and she drapes an arm over him.
Nothing else matters,
Luca thinks.
As long as she’s okay.

Lydia keeps Luca’s head there, pressed against her side so he won’t see the tears sliding down her face. She doesn’t know how caked with dirt she is, doesn’t know that the tears are cleaning telltale trails down her face that will divulge her tears later, even after she dries them.

‘It’s okay,
mijo,
’ she says. ‘We have every right to be here, to travel in our own country. We are Mexican. They can’t do anything to us. We will be okay.’

Luca believes her, but she doesn’t manage to convince herself. The trucks have spread out to round everyone up. The farthest one has already passed the sisters, and is circling back, hemming them in.

‘
Hermanos migrantes,
stop running. Sit down and rest where you are.’

An
agente
hops out of the nearest truck and approaches Luca and Lydia, keeping one hand on his biggest gun. He uses it to gesture at them without using his voice so they know where to go.

When Lydia was a teenager and her
t
í
o
died, her
t
í
a
remarried a man who owned a cattle ranch in Jalisco. It was a two-day drive up the coast to the wedding with her parents and sister, and Lydia never forgot what it was like being there on that
hacienda,
how the wind was loud in their ears and the new
t
í
o
’s dogs herded the spooked cattle. They were tireless, those black-and-white working dogs, and they ran in big, swooping arcs to hem in the nervous cows. The cattle stamped and twisted fretfully. Lydia remembers how everyone else that day was amazed by those dogs, smiling, panting, running in happy arcs. How disciplined they were! How effortless it seemed for them! Lydia was the only one who felt sorry for the frightened cows. Everyone seemed to forget that they were animals, too. That memory returns now as the trucks swoop in arcs around the panicked migrants. Lydia has never before likened herself, on purpose or by any metaphorical accident of psychology, to an animal. So there’s a crushing despair that accompanies this recollection. How animalistic they are in this field. She feels like prey.

Once
la migra
has rounded everyone up, Soledad and Rebeca included, the
agentes
march them to the nearest paved road. Everyone is sweaty, disheveled, and out of breath from running. Soledad and Rebeca made it farther than almost anyone before the truck looped around and forced them to turn back. Rebeca pauses and plants her hands on her knees to catch her breath. Soledad spits into the dirt. Everyone is angry and frustrated and reluctant to obey, but
los agentes
prod them roughly when they don’t walk fast enough. Luca counts the gathered migrants, which doesn’t provide any information about potential escapees because he didn’t count them before they were scattered, so there’s no baseline number. It doesn’t matter, he thinks, because he can see all the way to the horizon from here, the slight brown arc of the earth. No one got away. Beside him, Lydia limps, the pain in her ankle subsiding to a dull throb. They wait at the side of the road, and no one tells them what they’re waiting for, or how long the wait will be. There are twenty-three migrants here, and despair has settled into their features like a powdery dust. While they wait, Lydia keeps her face low beneath the floppy pink hat and watches
los agentes
for clues about what manner of captivity this might turn out to be. One of the other migrants is outraged. He has no intention of cooperating.

‘¿Qui
é
n est
á
a cargo aqu
í
?’
The man stands, even though they’ve
been told to sit, and speaks past the shoulder of the officer who’s been set to guard them, to the man they all suspect of being in charge,
el agente
who’s sitting on the folded-down tailgate of his pickup truck with one foot planted in the dirt beneath him and the other dangling from the tailgate. His posture is casual, so it’s surprising when he stands quickly and approaches the migrant who addressed him. Lydia watches, barely breathing, because this exchange might tell them everything they need to know about the hours ahead. She doesn’t realize she’s digging her fingernails into Luca’s arm until he begins to squirm. She lets go, rubbing apologetically at the little gouge marks she accidentally made in his skin.

‘What do you need?’
El agente
stands very close to the migrant, and Lydia understands that this is deliberate, that he hopes to frighten the other man, which strikes her as both juvenile and effective.

‘I am a Mexican national. You have no right to detain me,’ the migrant says. ‘I want to know who’s in command of this unit.’
El agente
is tall enough that the migrant has to crane his neck to look up, his chin level with the top of the Kevlar vest.

‘I am in charge,’
el agente
says, and then he claps a hand onto the shoulder of his comrade beside him. ‘And he is in charge. And you see that guy over there? With the gun? He is also in charge. Everyone who looks like me? This uniform? We are in charge. And we have the right to detain whoever we like. Take a seat.’