American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (32 page)

‘You seen any visitors?’ the voice says.
‘Migrantes
?
’

Lydia’s heart feels like machinery in her chest. Rebeca and Soledad are standing, facing each other, their fingers tangled together in the darkness, their heads tipped down in prayer. They cannot hear the little boy’s answer, but then the bang of the door and the mother’s voice is there again.

‘V
í
ctor, I told you to come inside,’ she says.

A man’s voice, beyond the gate. ‘We were just asking him if he’d seen any migrants. We had a few get off the train just at the end of the street.’

‘We haven’t seen anyone,’ she says. ‘I was out here with him until only a moment ago. Go inside.’

The door bangs once again.

‘Little girl down the street saw them heading this way.’

‘They must have turned before they got here. We were outside all afternoon. You have a cell phone, or I just call the station house if we see them?’

The voices drop lower, become momentarily indiscernible. Lydia opens her eyes wide, as if she can increase her range of hearing that way. At this very moment, Lydia knows, the woman may be pointing to the doorway of this shed. She may be mouthing the words
There are four of them, inside the shed
.
Los agentes de la migra
may be unholstering their weapons. Lydia trembles with the thought and closes her eyes again. Her finger slips inside Sebasti
á
n’s wedding ring.
Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think
. And then there’s a kind of miracle, a tiny distraction: her finger moves absently through the void of Sebasti
á
n’s ring and provokes a funny idea, that it’s like the magic ring from
The Hobbit,
that if she slips her finger fully inside and holds on to Luca, it will make them both invisible.
Seguro.
She can make out the woman’s words again. A shift of the wind.

‘I picked too much oregano for supper,’ she’s saying. ‘Please, here, take some with you.’

After the footsteps retreat to the vehicle, and the engine rumbles away, and the woman opens and closes the door to her house again, Soledad and Rebeca join Lydia and Luca in sitting on the floor. Slowly, their collective heartbeats return to a normal pace. Slowly, they begin whispering to one another in the darkness.

‘Should we leave?’ Soledad asks.

‘Not yet,’ Lydia says. ‘They’re still searching the neighborhood. Let’s wait until it’s really dark out.’

Rebeca is crying, hunched over her legs. Luca touches her hand, and
she flinches, which hurts his feelings. But instead of withdrawing, he persists, and then Rebeca softens, melts into him like a pat of butter on a pan. Luca pulls her head onto his shoulder and strokes her hair.

‘It’s okay, nothing bad happened,’ he tells her. ‘It’s okay.’

‘I can’t do this anymore,’ she says. ‘It’s too frightening.’

‘Stop it,’ Soledad says.

‘I just want to die. I want it to be over,’ Rebeca says without any inflection to her voice at all.

‘Well, you don’t get to decide that, Rebeca,’ her sister says.

‘I want to go home.’

‘There is no home. We’re going to make a new home. This is the only way forward, so we go forward.
Adelante.
No more crying now.’

Soledad wipes at her sister’s face with her thumbs, and the tough love works. Rebeca sits up and makes a loud sniff, and is finished with her despair.

‘We’re almost there,’ Soledad says. ‘You heard Luca earlier. Three hundred miles, right,
chiquito
?’

‘That’s right,’ Luca says.

‘Three hundred miles,’ Soledad says. ‘And then it’s all over. All this nightmare, the whole thing, all of it. We will be in
el norte,
where no one can hurt us anymore. We’ll make a good, safe life. And Papi will get better and we’ll send for him, and then we’ll bring Mami and Abuela, too. Everything will be better, you’ll see.’

Rebeca doesn’t believe a single word of it. She doesn’t even understand how Soledad can preserve that kind of na
ï
vet
é
after everything she’s been through. Rebeca has been cured of innocence. She knows there’s no safe place for them in the world, that
el norte
will be the same as anywhere else. Hope cannot survive the poison of her recent proof: the world is a terrible place. San Pedro Sula was terrible, Mexico is terrible,
el norte
will be terrible. Even her gold-dappled memories of the cloud forest are beginning to rot and decay. When she reaches back in her mind now, it’s not her mother’s voice she remembers, or the scent of drying herbs
,
or the chorus of the tree frogs at night, or the cool wash of the clouds on her arms and hair. It’s the poverty that drove her father and all the men away to the cities. It’s the advancing threat of the cartels, the want of resources, the ever-present hunger. So it’s only for the sake of her sister that Rebeca nods her head.

‘Everything we’ve been through?’ Soledad says. ‘It’ll all be worth it. We’ll leave it behind and have a new beginning.’

Rebeca looks at the floor but her eyes are unfocused. ‘Like it never happened,’ she says.

They stay in the shed while V
í
ctor and his mother eat supper in the house, while the neighbors come home from work and greet their families, while the clouds skid across the lid of Hermosillo, and the sun sinks orange into the horizon. Beyond the perimeter of the city, the Sonoran Desert trades heat with the sky. As twilight cools the land and the human city prepares for sleep, the desert pops and teems with life. Lydia and the sisters plan to rest until the neighborhood is entirely quiet, to slip out during the darkest hours of the night. Luca is too hungry to sleep, so he’s very grateful when the woman appears with a pot of cold beans and a stack of dry tortillas. She places these items on the floor among them and then steps back toward the doorway. Luca doesn’t wait for her to leave; he uses a tortilla to scoop up the beans, and almost bites his finger in his hurry. There’s no light, but their eyes have adjusted to the dark.

The woman whispers, ‘You can rest here for a while. But please be gone before daylight.’

Chapter Twenty-Five

Before dawn, Lydia, Luca, and the sisters walk deeper
into
the city, where they discover that the railway fence in Hermosillo is serious business, expensive infrastructure. Tax pesos at work. In fact, it’s not a fence at all, but a concrete wall topped with razor wire in threatening coils. Inside that wall, a train rumbles past with migrants asleep on top, their arms folded across their chests, their hats over their faces. On this side of the wall, six migrant men sleep wrapped around their packs while one keeps watch. He has no shoes. He greets them as they approach.

‘What happened to your shoes?’ Lydia asks.

‘Stolen,’ he says.

Soledad recognizes his Honduran accent.
‘Ay, catracho, ¡qu
é
barbaridad!’

He nods, scratches his chin. ‘At least they didn’t get my beard,’ he says.

Lydia cannot stop thinking about the man, even after they’ve passed well beyond him, farther into the city, where they have to find breakfast and stock up their water supply. How could he make a joke like that, a man so destitute that even his shoes have been taken from him? Lydia is rationing toothpaste. Her hair feels greasy and her skin dry. She’s aware of these discomforts daily. If someone took her shoes, she would give up, she thinks. That would be the ultimate indignity. Sixteen dead family members she can survive, as long as her toes are not naked before the world.

They find a large park with broad, paved walkways and a string of orange Porta Potties left over from a concert the night before. Luca leans over the edge of a fountain and submerges his arms up to the elbow. Lydia has a growing sense that her very humanity is under siege, so as a flimsy defense against that attack, she permits herself to spend 10 pesos on a cup of coffee from a vendor. The caffeine hits her bloodstream like a dream of another life. She sips it slowly and allows the steam to curl around her face while she thinks about that man and his shoes. The encounter has provoked in her an urgent feeling about the importance of shoes. So she will convert some portion of their remaining money to new shoes now, she decides. Here in Hermosillo, today. She looks to the girls’ feet as well, and notices that both of their sneakers could use replacing. They wear low-top Converses; Soledad’s are black and Rebeca’s gray. The shoes are sun-faded and worn, but at least they’re comfortable, well broken-in, Lydia tells herself. She wishes she had extra money. They wait in the park until the shops open, and Lydia spends almost half their remaining cash on two decent pairs of hiking boots for herself and Luca. They’re just ordinary leather with heavy stitching and thick rubber soles. But no. These boots are miraculous, extraordinary; they are mythological winged sandals. These are the boots that will cross the desert passage to
el norte
. It feels like a crater in her chest when Lydia hands over her money.

There are many migrants gathered beside the tracks in Hermosillo, and some of the campsites appear permanent. An older couple sits on a plaid couch beneath a tarp while the woman tends to a fire where you might expect a coffee table to be. Just outside the expensive gate, no one seems to care that migrants are waiting for La Bestia. The fence ends at the gated opening across the tracks, and just inside that gate, two guards sit in the shade of a small hut, waiting to open and close the gate when the train is ready. The gate, like the fence, is topped with razor wire, but there’s nothing to stop migrants from slipping underneath the gate, where there’s a two-foot gap Luca could easily roll through. Anyone could go under the fence here, and the guards don’t seem interested in preventing them, but no one tries. They’re content to wait just outside the gate instead, where, the other migrants inform Lydia, the train will emerge from its cage eventually, slowly, and everyone will clamber on.

The wait there with the other migrants feels like the longest stretch of hours in Soledad’s life. Ever since Luca told her how close they are to
el norte,
she fancies she can smell it there on the horizon, all McNuggets and fresh Nikes. She can almost see it shimmering in the distance, and her whole body twitches with the yearning for it. She leans north with her spine, her eyes, her lungs. While the others sleep that night on the cold, packed earth against the cinder block wall of the bordering gardens, she paces the tracks in the moonlight, tense with fear that something more will happen now that they’re this close, some fresh horror will swoop down on them and steal the dream they’ve almost accomplished. She tries to doze, and when her head begins to pound, she realizes she’s been holding her breath.

In the morning, a local resident drapes a hose over the garden wall so the migrants can brush their teeth, wet their faces, and fill their canteens. A contingent of older ladies walks the tracks, passing out blessings with homemade bagged sandwiches and pickles. A guard from the hut calls Luca over and passes him a grape lollipop through the chain-link fence. Lydia is on alert at all times now, for Lorenzo, or for anyone like Lorenzo, for anyone who might recognize her. Whenever there’s a delay of this sort, her worry grows that he’ll catch up to them, that he’ll appear walking toward them at any moment. Or that someone else will have too much time to think it over and there will be a
snap
! An
ah-ha
! She keeps the ugly pink hat flopped over her face all the time.

‘Mami, can I wear my sneakers?’ Luca asks.

He’s been wearing the new boots since yesterday, and they’re stiff. She wants him to break them in, but he has to do it in small doses.
There’s no point in him getting blisters before they even get to the desert. His blue sneakers are tied together by the laces and strung through one strap of his backpack.

‘Go ahead and change,’ she says.

When he takes the boots off, she gathers them up and ties them together in the same fashion. She changes hers, too.

It’s late morning when there’s a squawk from the radio in the guards’ hut, and the migrants sit up and take notice. Minutes later, the guards swing their expensive gates wide open for the train that appears in the distance. The cage is open, and now all they have to do is wait while the train chugs slowly toward them. The migrants clamber aboard in groups, women and children first. The men help, and the guards watch. One guard even tosses a migrant’s backpack up to him after it rolls off the edge.

Lydia catches Soledad’s eye. ‘Don’t forget to be afraid,’ she says.

‘This is not normal,’ Soledad responds.

But they’re up quickly. Easily. And the train doesn’t pick up substantial speed until everyone is aboard, almost as if the engineer was taking care to safely accommodate the migrants. To give them a boost. Lydia blesses herself anyway. She traces the sign of the cross on Luca’s forehead every time.

And then a strange thing happens as they travel north out of Hermosillo and deeper into the Sonoran Desert: they begin to notice other migrants moving in the opposite direction. Just a trickle at first, two on foot, and then another two, and Lydia cannot imagine where they’ve come from, walking south as they are, and emerging from what seem to be endless tracts of vast and barren desert. They are unmistakably migrants. She’s not sure how she knows this, but she does. Still, there’s something different about them, and it’s not only that they’re traveling in the wrong direction. Lydia can’t put her finger on it. Then, only a
few miles north of Hermosillo, a second line of track sidles up alongside theirs. Because the vast majority of the Mexican railways are single-track lines, these lay-bys, these miniature exit ramps, exist at intervals so one train can pull off and idle, to await the approach of another coming from the opposite direction. In this way the trains can pass one another, north and south, and carry on, using the same line of track to their destinations. It’s in just such a lay-by that they see a southbound train now idling, and Soledad sits up taller as they approach it. She shields her eyes from the sun in case they’re playing tricks on her. But no, it’s true – the southbound train is packed with migrants. They wave and salute and call out greetings to them as their train slows to a clacking crawl to pass.

‘Where are they going?’ Rebeca asks no one.

The second line of track is separated from theirs by a space of only five or six feet, and one young boy, not much older than Luca, is standing atop the southbound train. He seems to be gauging whether or not he could jump the gap. A group of men yell and gesture wildly at him, so he clambers down the nearby ladder instead, and jumps down to the ground. Then he runs north alongside the northbound train. The train is traveling quite slowly now, and Luca leans over the edge in astonishment to watch the running boy beneath. He looks up at Luca and grins. He grips the moving ladder of Luca’s freight car and hauls himself up. Luca leans back up and waits for the boy’s head to emerge over the lip, which is black and shiny in the desert sunlight. On the idling southbound train, a loud cheer goes up for the boy’s victorious transfer, and the boy shouts back to the men, who all wave and smile.

‘
¡Vaya con Dios!
’ the boy yells at the men he’s leaving behind.
‘¡Ya me voy pa’l otro la’o!’

Another cheer. ‘Be careful and God bless you!’ another man yells.

And then the train begins to gain speed again, and the clacking returns to its shriek and rumble, and the boy walks over to them without even crouching, and he plops himself down carelessly. Unlike most migrants, the boy does not carry anything, nor does he wear a hat to shield his berry-brown face from the sun. Because of that fact, his exposed features are dry and burnished. His lips are cracked with peels of white, but the chapping doesn’t interfere with the brightness of his smile. He puts his hand out to bump fists with Luca, who responds reflexively, the way any eight-year-old boy would, without even thinking.

‘
¿Qu
é
onda, g
ü
ey?
’ the boy says, using the borderland slang that marks him immediately as a northerner.

Luca doesn’t know exactly what
qu
é
onda, g
ü
ey
means because he doesn’t know anyone who talks like this, but he understands enough to know it’s a friendly greeting, so he replies by saying hello. Lydia, who believed her capacity for surprise had been exhausted, is genuinely taken aback by the boy’s arrival. She doesn’t know what to make of him. On the one hand, he gives the instant impression of being gregarious, friendly, charismatic. On the other hand, she’s wary of everyone she meets now, and although this child seems very young, she knows that boys this age are prime candidates for gang recruitment. And why is he alone? Why so friendly with Luca? She puts one arm defensively around her son. This child’s face is round, his eyes, nose, and cheeks, all round. His eyelids look puffy, but the black eyes beneath them are clear and intense. He’s wheezing slightly, and as they all watch, he removes an inhaler from the pocket of his jeans, shakes it vigorously, places it to his lips, and takes a puff. Then he breathes deeply and coughs a little.

‘It’s empty.’ He shrugs, replacing the inhaler in his pocket. ‘But the memory of the medicine helps.’

Luca smiles, but Lydia furrows her brow.

‘Will you be okay?’ she asks. Despite her instinctive suspicion, she’s still a mother, and you can’t fake a wheeze like that.

The boy coughs again, once, twice, and then spits something solid over the edge of the train car. ‘It will pass in a minute,’ he wheezes.

They watch him for signs of a medical emergency, though it’s unclear how they could help if the episode does not, in fact, pass. He sits up straight, looks out across the landscape, folds his legs into the shape of a pretzel, and concentrates on breathing slowly. As he does this, Lydia’s relieved to see the existence of a hole in the sole of his sneaker. No boy with an empty inhaler and a hole in his sneaker could belong to a gang or cartel.

After he manages to regain a steady breath, the boy turns to Luca and says, ‘I’m Beto. What’s your name?’

‘Hello, Beto. I’m Luca.’

Beto nods. Their train is passing a village that seems to have grown right out of the tracks – just a cluster of houses the same rusty color as the land, and two competing taquer
í
as that face off across the lone street.

‘Is your breathing better now?’ Luca asks.

‘Yeah, it’s fine,’ Beto says. ‘Happens whenever I run too fast, but you learn how to be calm until it passes, because if you freak out, that makes it worse.’

Luca nods.

‘It’s cool to meet another kid,’ Beto announces then. ‘I don’t see that many kids out here. How old are you?’

‘Eight.’

‘I’m ten. Almost eleven, though.’ He says this like a very wise old man.

Luca has about a thousand questions for Beto, but the effect of having them all packed so tightly together in his brain is that none of them shakes loose and gets through the gate. Lydia leans into the opening left by Luca’s silence.

‘Beto, are you traveling alone?’ Luca can tell that his
mami
is trying not to sound judgmental, but the effort isn’t entirely successful. Beto doesn’t seem to care, or even to notice.

‘Yep, just me.’ He grins, displaying the absence of two teeth on the bottom, a canine and a molar side by side, so the hole is a double-wide. Beto sticks his tongue through it.