American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (33 page)

Now it’s Soledad’s turn. ‘Were you traveling south?’ she asks.

‘I was. Temporarily. But now I’m traveling north,’ he says without irony.

Soledad doesn’t know quite how to respond, but Beto saves her the trouble by changing the subject.

‘
Guau,
you’re really pretty,’ he says.

Soledad blinks but doesn’t respond.

‘Must be a pain in the ass, huh?’

She laughs.

He returns his attention to Luca. ‘So where you guys from?’

Luca glances at Mami, who responds with only the tiniest shake of her head. ‘Mami and I are from
.
.
. Puebla,’ he decides. ‘And the sisters are Ecuadorian.’

Beto nods. The lie doesn’t matter at all; those places may as well be Antarctica or Mars as far as he’s concerned.

‘How about you?’ Luca asks. ‘Where are you from?’

‘I’m from Tijuana,’ Beto says. ‘But we call it TJ. I was born there, in the
dompe
.’

An utterly bizarre piece of information. So odd, in fact, that Luca’s not sure he understands. Again, this is an unfamiliar word,
dompe
. Luca looks at Mami to translate, but she seems confused as well.

‘What’s a
dompe
?’ Luca asks.

Beto smirks. ‘You know, a
dompe,
where people dump their garbage. The trucks come. You know, a
dompe
.’

‘You mean like a
vertedero
?’ Luca asks, using the Spanish word for ‘dump’.

‘Yeah, yeah, a
vertedero,
’ Beto says.

Lydia, because her English is slightly more sophisticated than Luca’s, begins to understand that this boy’s native language is not exactly the Spanish of Mexico, nor is it the English of the United States, but rather some kind of semantic borderland crossbreed. Still, this insight does nothing to clarify what the boy means when he says he was born in
a
dompe
. Luca literally scratches his head – a gesture Lydia hasn’t seen him make, she now realizes, since the decimation of their family. It’s a gesture that in fact she never noticed before, and therefore she didn’t miss when it vanished, but now that she sees it again, she’s floored by an accompanying revelation that the gesture, one thumb on top of his ear, three fingers raking through his hair above, is specific to Luca’s intellectual curiosity. It’s a tic that happens only when he’s intrigued by something, when he finds something interesting. The reappearance of it, therefore, feels to Lydia like evidence that her son might survive, that he might be capable, after fifteen days and fourteen hundred miles, of temporarily losing himself in a moment of uncorrupted curiosity. The feeling that thuds through her sternum is
hope
.

‘So you were born in a garbage dump?’ Luca asks carefully, trying not to be rude, and not understanding that there’s nothing at all discourteous about the question, because Beto is neither ashamed of the facts of his origin nor, for that matter, even aware that the facts of his origin might, in other people, incite feelings of discomfort. His origin is simply his origin, and he tells the story without any kind of appreciation of the effect it might provoke.

He laughs. ‘Yeah, well, I wasn’t born
in
the garbage, though. Just near it. In Colonia Fausto Gonz
á
lez. You heard of it?’

Luca shakes his head.

‘It’s kinda famous,’ Beto says proudly.

Lydia knows a little about
las colonias
of Tijuana because she’s read the books, because Luis Alberto Urrea is one of her favorite writers, and he’s written about the dumps, about kids like Beto who live there. That flare of recognition makes her feel like she knows him already, at least slightly, but that feeling is half-hollow, a shadow puppet. Because though she may understand something of this boy’s circumstances, she doesn’t know
him
. Still, the familiarity has the effect of thawing the part of her that would otherwise remain hardened to him.

And then Beto tells them his whole life story, all of it without stopping, without even really taking a breath, how he doesn’t remember his father, who went to
el norte
when Beto was still a baby. But he remembers his
mami,
who was a garbage picker in
el dompe
before they closed it. And he remembers his big brother, Ignacio, who’s still there in
el dompe,
buried beneath a sky-blue, hand-painted cross with his name,
Ignacio
, and the words
mijo,
10
a
ñ
os
.

Beto reminds Luca that he’s ten years old, and explains that that’s the same age his brother, Ignacio, was when he was squashed by the back tire of a garbage truck while reaching for the miraculous, round, unblemished sphere of a
bal
ó
n de f
ú
tbol
he’d spotted amid the refuse. An unprecedented treasure. Beto, who was eight years old and standing nearby at the time, was so stunned by Ignacio’s screams that he failed to secure the
bal
ó
n
for his dying brother. (Instead, a pimple-faced kid named Omar got it.) Because of the softness of the ground beneath the truck’s tires, Beto explains, Ignacio was not entirely flattened, but rather compressed into the garbage beneath him – crushed just enough that he survived for three dreadful days. It wasn’t long after that, and the sky-blue cross, that Beto’s
mami
disappeared, too, first into a drunken stupor, next into a new, more rancid haze, and finally, into the ether.

Beto is afraid of turning eleven, because it feels like a treachery to his brother. ‘But I guess it would be worse to not turn eleven, right?’ He laughs, and Lydia and the sisters attempt to join him in that sound.

Luca does not laugh but feels compelled to give the boy some
thing in return for his story. He unzips the side pocket of his backpack, which is sitting in his lap, and fishes out his tube of Orange Mango Blast Blistex. He hands it to Beto, who takes it without saying anything, removes the cap, smears it across his lips, and then makes a loud
ah
sound. He hands it back to Luca, and doesn’t say thank you, but Luca knows the
ah
was an expression of gratitude.

‘So wait,’ Soledad says, finally turning her whole body toward him instead of just her head. ‘Isn’t Tijuana right at the border?’

‘Yeah, it is,’ Luca says, looking at Soledad with approval.

She intercepts the look. ‘You’re not the only one who can read a map around here,’ she says, and then back to the newcomer, ‘So then what are you doing here if you were already right at the border? Why were you traveling south? And all those other migrants, too, traveling south?’

‘Oh, those guys are all
deportados
.’

Soledad cringes. ‘All of them?’

‘Sure.’ Beto shrugs. ‘TJ is full of
deportados
. There’s more people going south than north in Tijuana. You can tell them apart from the regular migrants because of their uniforms.’

‘Uniforms?’ Luca asks.

‘Yeah, all the migrants wear the same uniforms, right? Dirty jeans, busted shoes, baseball hats.’

‘You don’t have a hat,’ Luca observes.

Beto shrugs. ‘I’m not a real migrant. I’m just a poser.’

‘So what’s different about the
deportados
then?’ Soledad prompts him back to the subject.

‘They are haunted by the cries of their absent children in
el norte
.’

They all stare at him.

‘I’m just messing,’ he says. ‘It’s that they don’t have backpacks.’

Lydia snaps her fingers. ‘The backpacks,’ she says. ‘Yes, that’s what they were missing. The backpacks.’

‘Why don’t they have backpacks?’ Luca asks.

‘Because they’re
deportados
. They live in the United States,
g
ü
ey
. Like forever. Like, for ten years maybe. Since they were babies, maybe. And then they’re on their way to work one morning, or coming home from school one day, or playing
f
ú
tbol
in the park, or shopping at the mall for some fresh new kicks, and then
bam
! They get deported with whatever they happen to be carrying when they’re picked up. So unless they happen to be carrying a backpack when
la migra
gets them, they usually come empty-handed. Sometimes the women have their purse with them or whatever. They don’t get to go home and pack a bag. But they usually have nice clothes, at least. Clean shoes.’

Lydia clutches her pack in front of her. She doesn’t want to think about this. The dream of getting to Estados Unidos is the only thing sustaining them right now. She’s not prepared to begin considering all the horrible things that might happen after, if they’re lucky enough to achieve that first, most fundamental goal.

Soledad sits back and bites her lip. ‘So when they get deported they just give up and go home?’ she asks. ‘Why don’t they try to cross back over?’

‘I mean, some of them try,’ Beto explains. ‘But it’s impossible to cross at Tijuana now. Unless you have, like, tons of money or you’re working with one of the cartels. They got tunnels. A few years ago it was easy. I even knew some guys from
el dompe
who would make extra money taking migrants across. The fence was full of holes, plus ladders, boats – there were a thousand ways to get across.’

‘And now?’

‘Now it’s like a war zone, all drones and cameras and
la migra
just waiting over there like a gang of overpaid goalkeepers. Plus,
los deportados
got money. They are all rich from working in
el norte
. So they can afford a vacation before they go back. They go home to visit.’

Soledad bites nervously at the inside of her lip.

‘But don’t worry,’ Beto says. ‘Nogales is supposed to be better. I mean, it’s supposed to be easier to get across, because nobody wants to cross in the desert and stuff, so there’s not as much Border Patrol. That’s why I didn’t try to cross at TJ. I’m going to Nogales to get across.’

Beto presses his lips together, and Luca can smell the orange and mango of the Blistex. It gives him a feeling of gladness.

‘That’s where this train is going, right? Nogales?’ Beto asks, leaning back on his elbows and stretching his legs in front of him.

‘We hope so,’ Luca says.

‘There’s one more major junction,’ Beto says. ‘At Benjam
í
n Hill, the tracks split. Straight north to Nogales, or west to Baja. When I was coming down, I was supposed to get off there and change trains, but we didn’t stop, so I just kept rolling south until we hit that lay-by.’ He sighs. ‘I hope we don’t end up back in Tijuana. Imagine if I just did a Bestia sightseeing tour of the countryside and wound up back in
el dompe
?’

Soledad groans. ‘So you mean we might have to change again?’ she says. ‘When we’re this close?’

‘I guess we’ll see,’ Beto says, reaching into his pocket and drawing out a fistful of sunflower seeds. He munches them and spits the shells over the edge of the train without sitting up. He offers to share them with the others, but his hands are sweaty, and no one takes him up on his generosity.

‘How long you been traveling?’ Soledad asks him.

‘Only a few days,’ he says. ‘I guess this is my third or fourth day. That your sister?’

He points at Rebeca with his chin. She’s only half facing them, watching the passage of the impossible landscape: scrubby welters of green growing from the powdery earth, the arc of hot blue above them, the serrated brown of the distant mountains, the increasingly rare sight of a vehicle on the parallel highway.

‘Yes, that’s Rebeca,’ she says. ‘And I’m Soledad.’

‘How come she’s so quiet?’ Beto asks. ‘She doesn’t talk?’

Rebeca turns her face but not her eyes toward him. ‘I used to talk,’ she says. ‘Now I don’t talk anymore.’

Beto sits up and brushes the salt and the sunflower-seed dust from his fingertips. ‘Fair enough,’ he says.

Two hours later they slow but do not stop as they pass through the small town of Benjam
í
n Hill, and Luca feels encouraged by the fact that, after the tangle of tracks recedes back to a single line, they’ve emerged on the easternmost route, which continues due north toward Nogales.

Santa Ana, Los Janos, Bambuto, check, check, check. By early afternoon, Luca spots an airplane low in the sky. It becomes larger and flies lower until it seems like it will collide with their train. They all duck, pinning themselves flat to the top of the train as they pass the runway of Nogales International Airport.