American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (29 page)

‘Yes.’

‘Smart.’

Lydia does not answer.

‘Stand up then,’
el comandante
instructs.

Luca stands like a baby fawn and helps Lydia, who struggles with her wrists tied behind her. She leans on Luca and gets to her feet. The pain in her ankle is still there, but it’s diminished. The twang of a slight sprain. If she were at home she might think to ice it, to use it as an excuse to get out of cooking dinner for the evening. She’d send Sebasti
á
n out to pick up
tortas
.

‘Anyone else?’
el comandante
asks.

Rebeca stares open-mouthed at the dead man on her lap. Soledad looks as if she’s considering speaking, but Lydia silences her with a panicky twist of her neck.

‘Untie her,’
el comandante
says to one of the guards, who approaches Lydia with a sharp blade. She winces when she feels the unpleasant pressure against her skin, but a moment later, there’s a snap and her arms drop loose. The plastic zip tie is still attached to one arm, which she holds out now so the man can cut it and snag it from her wrist. Should she thank him? Lydia doesn’t make a sound.

‘Gather your belongings,’
el comandante
instructs her.

Luca steps forward with her, and together they collect their packs from the pile. Lydia knows it’s foolish to look for the machete and its holster, but she does anyway. It’s gone, of course.

‘Follow me.’
El comandante
returns to the office, and Lydia and Luca follow.

Inside, he tells them to sit. There’s a notebook at an old metal desk, behind which
el comandante
sits in an upholstered office chair. The pen atop the notebook is gold with something engraved on its edge, and the incongruity of that pen, of the impending paperwork, while the corpse of a recent man is still warm just beyond the door, is too much. Lydia feels her mind slipping. Surely this is the worst moment of their lives. Wait, no. All their family was murdered. Nothing can ever be worse than that. Once again, she and Luca seem about to escape the horrific fate of everyone around them. How does this keep happening? When will their luck run out? Will it happen right now? Will he recognize her, pull up her picture on his phone, give her a forehead bullet from Javier? Her breathing feels rapid and shallow.

‘Now then,’
el comandante
says. He opens a drawer in the desk and retrieves a cell phone, which makes her heartbeat hammer in her ears. ‘Stand just there against the blue poster.’ He indicates a patch of blue pinned to the wall. Lydia stares at it, reluctant to obey. Reluctant to disobey. She stands in front of the poster, and
el comandante
takes her photograph. ‘You next,’ he says to Luca. Luca does as he’s bid, and then sits back in the chair beside his mother.

‘You have identification?’
el comandante
asks.

‘Yes.’

‘Let’s see it, please.’

The gunshot that killed that non-Oaxacan migrant is still a sensory echo in her ears. Lydia opens her pack with trembling fingers and finds her wallet. From this she withdraws her voter ID card, proof both that she’s a Mexican citizen and that she’s the woman Javier Crespo Fuentes is hunting. It feels like a rescue boat and a torpedo at once. She places it in his open hand, careful not to touch his skin. He waves his fingers at her to indicate that she should hand over the rest of the wallet as well. He photographs the ID, and then tucks it back in the clear pocket where it lives. Then he withdraws the money from the billfold and counts it: just shy of 75,000 pesos, or about $3,900. Lydia put a lot of thought into the way she divided and stored their money, anticipating robbery. At the first Casa del Migrante back in Huehuetoca, another migrant had advised her to make sure she stashed money in different places, so if they got robbed, when they got robbed, the thieves might not find all of it. So she’d put a third of everything they had into the billfold. It was a decent sum. Most people wouldn’t expect her to have more than that. She’d divided the rest into ten equal portions of 15,000 pesos each and hidden them in various places: one wad is sewn into her bra strap beneath her left armpit, one’s in her underwear against her right hip. One remains in the banker’s envelope zipped into the hidden bottom compartment of Luca’s backpack. Another is flattened and tucked beneath the insoles of her mother’s gold lam
é
sneakers. Right now Lydia feels both grateful that she did that and terrified that there will be some punishment if
el comandante
finds some portion of the reserves. He opens another drawer in the desk and places most of their 75,000 pesos in an envelope. He returns the rest to the wallet.

Lydia can’t believe her eyes.
What the fuck is this, some kind of moral code this monster has? He’s leaving us with money?
A guard stands in the corner watching them. He’s the same man who googled the governor of Oaxaca earlier. He’s staring hard at Lydia while
el comandante
writes her name in the book, along with the sum of money he took from them. He frowns at the name written there in his own hand and taps the back of his pen against the page. The guard clears his throat.

‘Something on your mind, Rafa?’

He’s been leaning against the wall and now he stands erect, shakes his head slightly. ‘She looks familiar. Doesn’t she look familiar to you?’

El comandante
looks up from the notebook to regard Lydia more closely.

‘I can’t say she does. Do you look familiar to us?’

Lydia’s throat has gone dry. ‘I have one of those faces,’ she says.

El comandante
returns his attention to the paperwork, but Rafa pins his eyes to her face, and she can see it in his expression, the way he’s riffling through the file cabinet of his memory, trying to place her. She can see it in the set of his mouth and eyes, the way he examines her,
Where has he seen her before?
And Lydia’s whole body feels juddery with panic. Whatever this transaction is going to be, dear God, let it be fast, before this man remembers. She twists in her chair, an effort to subtly obscure her face. She leans toward Luca but she can still feel the guard’s scrutiny like a malevolent clock. The time of their anonymity is expiring.

But
el comandante
has moved on. ‘What is your name, son?’ he says to Luca.

Luca looks sideways at his
mami
. ‘Tell him the truth.’

‘Luca Mateo P
é
rez Quixano.’

‘How old are you?’

‘I’m eight years old.’

On the line beneath her name, using the fancy pen,
el comandante
writes
+
1, with Luca’s name and age.

‘In what city do you intend to live?’

‘We’re not sure yet,’ Lydia says. ‘Maybe Denver.’

He writes that down, too.

‘You understand what’s going on here,’
el comandante
says.

Lydia doesn’t know how to answer. She doesn’t want to say
Violence, kidnapping, extortion, rape
. She doesn’t want to say
Evil and wickedness
. She doesn’t want to say,
My death if we don’t get out of here quickly
. There’s no agreeable reply.

‘Sometimes there’s unfortunate fallout.’
El comandante
waves his hand vaguely in the direction of the murdered man in the next room, and smiles at Luca, whose face is entirely blank. ‘But you will remember this fallout. And that memory will serve you well in maintaining your silence, and thereby your future well-being.’

The words
future well-being
pierce Lydia’s heart like a bell. She holds herself very still.
El comandante
replaces the cap on his pen, closes the cover of his notebook, and leans across it with his hands folded on top.

‘Most of these people are bad guys anyway, young man. It’s important for you to understand that. They’re not innocents. They’re gang members, they’re running drugs. They’re thieves or rapists or murderers, like the
norte
ñ
o
president says. Bad
hambres
.’ He mispronounces the word
hombres
in the style of the US president who, attempting to call migrants
bad men,
inadvertently referred to them as
bad hunger
instead. It’s a joke now, full of irony. Bad hunger.
El comandante
toes the line. ‘They had to leave where they came from because they got in trouble there, you understand. Good people do not run away.’

Luca opens his mouth, and Lydia watches him consider speaking. With every molecule in her body, she wills him to be silent. Luca closes his mouth.

‘Nevertheless, most of them will be okay,’
el comandante
continues. ‘Some of them will be able to pay their own ransom. Like you. Those who can’t are likely to have family in
el norte
who can help. They will be here only one or two days, they will pay their toll, and they’ll be on their way. Understand? Nothing to worry about.’ He stands up from his chair but remains behind the desk. ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you to keep this business to yourselves.’

Lydia shakes her head. ‘No, se
ñ
or.’

‘You needn’t hear about the dreadful things that happen to people who tell tales in Sinaloa.’

She shakes her head again. Who would she tell?

‘Good, then,’
el comandante
says. ‘Our business is concluded. Rafa?’ He turns to the guard behind him. ‘See them out and send the next one in.’

Rafa turns from Lydia, which movement underlines her overwhelm
ing hope of deliverance. They are being dismissed. She can hardly believe it. She grips Luca’s hand and stands shakily from her chair. In the corner behind the desk, Rafa opens a metal door Lydia hadn’t noticed before. It’s bolted at the top, but he reaches up and unlatches it. He presses on the bar that opens the door, and a slice of daylight pours in around its perimeter. Lydia moves her body toward that miraculous light.

But Luca doesn’t move, and her arm snags with his fixed weight.

‘Luca, come on,’ she says with a capricious note of hysteria in her voice. She lunges for him, but he dodges her grasp. ‘Luca, what are you doing?’ She grabs his arm, so agitated she could kill him herself.

‘We can’t leave them,’ he says.

Luca’s heart feels like a flapping bird in his chest, like that time a sparrow accidentally flew into their apartment from the balcony and couldn’t find its way out again, and then it beat itself against the glass over and over until Papi caught it in a towel and smuggled it out the door to freedom. Luca’s heart is in a similar terror, so it feels as if the glass of his rib cage might shatter and fall if the bloodied carcass of his heart doesn’t smash itself into dead pulp first.

His mother stares at him in awe.
What is he doing?
‘Luca—’

‘No, Mami, they can’t pay,’ he says. ‘They don’t have any money.’

El comandante
slumps back into his chair with his elbows on the rests and makes a tent of his fingers. He seems amused by the exchange. Luca turns to face him.

‘What happens to people who can’t pay?’

‘Young man, your loyalty is admirable—’

‘What will happen?’

Something frightful flashes across
el comandante
’s face, and once again Lydia reaches for Luca. But the man relents. ‘It’s okay, I won’t harm him,’ he says to Lydia. ‘I respect his courage. Please, sit.’

Lydia looks to the door. It had been opened. She had seen the fading daylight beyond, and she’s loath to relinquish that promise of freedom. But there is Luca, back in the chair, more afraid of leaving the sisters than he is of staying longer in this nightmare. Despite everything he’s been through, or maybe also because of it, her boy has weighed the call of his conscience above the call of his own salvation.
If we survive this,
Lydia thinks,
I shall feel very proud
. She shrinks two inches, her whole body collapsing from the lungs inward, and sits down beside her son, careful to keep her face turned away from the guard.

‘Who is he talking about?’
el comandante
asks.

‘The two girls,’ Lydia says, ‘with the rainbow wristbands.’

‘Your son is a very impressive young man,’
el comandante
says.

It’s deeply unsettling for Lydia to field a compliment from him. ‘The girls have no family to help them,’ she says.

‘They only have us,’ Luca says.

El comandante
breathes heavily, bounces the end of his pen lightly across the top of the notebook. ‘Those girls would fetch a price on the open market. Two beauties like that?’ He whistles, then looks again to Luca. ‘But I wish to reward your bravery and fidelity. Very impressive.’ He sits up. Back to Lydia. ‘You have money?’