American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (35 page)

Beto is talking beside her. ‘I heard if your life is in danger wherever you come from, they’re not allowed to send you back there.’

To Lydia it sounds like mythology, but she can’t help asking anyway, ‘You have to be Central American? To apply for asylum?’

Beto shrugs. ‘Why? Your life in danger?’

Lydia sighs. ‘Isn’t everyone’s?’

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The sisters call the coyote from a pay phone. They feel
like professional telephone users now, and they make the call without Luca’s assistance. Soledad tells the coyote they’ve arrived in Nogales, and they have three more people now who want to join their crossing.

‘Can they walk?’ he asks. ‘This is the no-frills package. They have to be in good shape.’

‘Yeah,’ Soledad assures him. ‘They’re good.’

‘Where are you now?’

Soledad presses the receiver to her ear and looks around. ‘I don’t know, we’re right by the border,’ she says. ‘By the train tracks.’

‘You can see the American flag there, on that big white building?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yeah, I know where you are.’

The coyote tells her to meet him at a plaza a couple blocks away. He’ll be there within the hour. She’s excited when she hangs up the phone. She tells Lydia and the boys the news.

‘He says it’s good if you come. We have to go meet him now.’

They want to call Papi first, and they try three times, but it’s an international call and they don’t understand all the codes, so they finally have to enlist Luca’s help. It turns out they don’t have enough money
anyway, so they settle on a prayer instead.

‘He’ll be okay,’ Rebeca insists. If she says it enough times, she can maybe make it true.

At the Plaza Ni
ñ
os H
é
roes, there are ornate benches painted a vivid gold, but all the ones set in the shade are already taken, so Luca and Beto sit on the edge of another planter, and Lydia sits on a low step nearby. The sisters walk quiet laps together through the square, their arms folded tightly in front of themselves, and their heads tipped toward each other. Lydia watches people notice them, their remarkable beauty, their visible exhaustion.

Lydia’s worried about so many things she can’t pin one down to examine it. She’s worried about being out in the open like this, about being recognized. Whenever someone looks at her and then looks at their cell phone, there’s a little racehorse of adrenaline that clobbers through her body. She feels it mostly in her stomach and her joints. She sits close to the wall with her pack at her feet, where she imagines she’s inconspicuous. This is the one benefit of being a migrant, of having effected this disguise so completely: they are nearly invisible. No one looks at them, and in fact, people take pains
not
to look at them. She hopes that general indifference extends to the
halcones,
if Javier has them here in Nogales. She also worries about money. How expensive the coyote might be, how she’ll gain access to her mother’s bank account, and even if it works, how little money they’ll have left after they cross. She worries about the coyote, too. Her mother’s money is their last hope, and the idea of withdrawing that money and handing it over to a stranger is maddening. What questions will she ask him to ascertain the worth of his character? After he has their money, what incentive does he have to get them safely to their destination? What’s to keep him from leading them all deep into the desert and abandoning them there to die? And ultimately: What choice does she have?

Luca and Beto talk quietly nearby, swinging their feet from the planter, banging their heels against the wall beneath them. Beto scratches a twig along the top of the planter like a pencil. Luca plucks two leaves off a shrub and intertwines their stems, twisting them around in his fingers. So Lydia is worried about all these things, and yet, she has a new understanding about the futility of worry. The worst will either happen or not happen, and there’s no worry that will make a difference in either direction.
Don’t think
. She leans her elbows on her knees.

When he arrives, El Chacal finds the sisters without trying.

‘
Dios m
í
o,
’ he says, by way of introduction, shaking his head.

Soledad can feel him assessing them, the angles of their faces, the problem of their beauty. She feels the hesitation this causes him, and she likes that hesitation is the thing it causes rather than something else. She’s relieved as she watches him push past his reluctance. He nods at them.

‘Soledad?’ he says.

‘Me,’ she responds. ‘And this is my sister, Rebeca.’ She pinches her sister’s elbow, and Rebeca nods.

He’s a small man, only slightly taller than the sisters. His face is handsome, with angular cheekbones and a clean shave. His cheeks are a shade rosier than the rest of his skin, which makes him look more cheerful than he otherwise might. He’s wiry and lean in his clean Levi’s and red Gap T-shirt. He looks like a migrant himself, except his Adidas sneakers appear brand-new. ‘Where are the others?’ he asks.

‘They’re sitting,’ Soledad says. ‘Over there.’ She walks toward them and the coyote follows.

‘
Ay,
’ he says, when he sees them. ‘A lady and two kids?’ He shakes his head.

The boys are already in earshot, and they both hop down from the planter.

‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ Beto says. ‘I’m twenty-three. I just have a growth disorder.’

Beto knows the words
growth disorder
because one of the kids he knew in
el dompe
had a growth disorder, and even though that kid was the same age as Beto, he stopped growing when they were both six, and Beto kept going until he was twice that boy’s height. It was one of the visiting priests from San Diego who told them about growth disorders. It didn’t matter anyway, because knowing the words didn’t make the kid start growing again. Beto grins at the coyote.

‘Twenty-three,
de verdad
?’ El Chacal says.

‘Plus, I have the voice of an angel,’ Beto says, and then he places one hand on his heart and breaks into song. A very loud, not entirely off-key rendition of some pop song Luca’s heard before but doesn’t know the name of. When he gets to the rap part, El Chacal holds up one hand to shush him. ‘Impressive, though, right?’ Beto says. ‘They called me the J Balvin of
el dompe
.’

The coyote looks unblinkingly at Beto, who does an impromptu tap dance right there in the middle of the square.

‘Okay, okay,
si
é
ntate
.’ El Chacal doesn’t like to draw attention.

Beto hoists himself back onto the edge of the planter.

Lydia stands. ‘My son and I have come all the way from Guerrero. We rode La Bestia. We are capable; we won’t slow you down.’

Rebeca speaks up. ‘You wouldn’t believe the things that little dude can do. He could walk a week in the desert if he had to.’

The coyote frowns, turns to Soledad. ‘Your cousin told you I
have a good track record, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know why I have a good track record?’

She shakes her head.

‘Because I don’t take kids. I don’t like leaving people behind. I don’t like people dying in the desert. So I choose people who won’t die.’

Luca holds on to his mother’s hand. ‘I have no intention of dying,’ he says.

El Chacal turns his attention to the boy. ‘No one
intends
to die,’ he says to Luca.

‘Yes,’ Luca concedes. ‘But I intend
not
to die.’ Lydia holds her breath. She can see that Luca’s making an impression. ‘There’s a difference,’ Luca says.

‘Oh?’ The coyote leans back to get a better look at Luca’s face beneath Papi’s cap.

‘Yes,’ Luca says. ‘I have considered it.’

‘You’ve considered it!’ El Chacal laughs. ‘You have considered dying?’

‘Of course,’ Luca says.

‘And?’

‘And I’m not interested in dying yet.’

The coyote nods. ‘I see.’

‘So I will stay alive.’

‘Okay.’

‘With or without your help,’ Luca says. Lydia pinches the back of his neck lightly. ‘But of course, your help would be a significant advantage.’

Now the coyote laughs harder. ‘
¡
Ó
rale!
’ he says, holding his hands up in front of him. ‘Okay, okay.’

Beto hops down to the ground. The kid knows when to keep
quiet; he doesn’t say a word.

‘Okay,’ the coyote says again. Then he looks at Lydia. ‘You can pay?’

She tries to make her face blank, her voice loose. ‘What is the price?’

‘Five thousand for you. Six each for the kids.’

‘Dollars?’ Lydia’s mouth drops open.

‘Claro.’

The sisters paid only four each. ‘But I thought—’

The coyote intercepts her argument. ‘It’s not a negotiation. I have enough
pollitos
to cross without you. I don’t need the money. If you want to come, that is the price.’

Lydia closes her mouth. She’s short. She doesn’t know exactly how short, but they don’t have enough. Her stomach drops, and for the first time in days, she feels like she’s going to cry. The flare of her nostrils, the swamp of fluid into her sinuses, it’s almost a relief. She wasn’t sure she was still capable of crying.

‘How much is that in pesos?’ Beto removes the wad of cash from his pocket, and is flicking through it, counting.

The coyote pushes Beto’s hands down out of sight. ‘Put it away,’ he says. ‘You trying to get killed or just robbed?’ Beto stuffs the money back into his pocket while the coyote looks around to see if anyone’s watching them. ‘Listen, if we’re going to do this, the first thing is, you have to not be an idiot, okay?’

Beto looks sheepish and doesn’t clown. ‘Okay,’ he says with genuine remorse. ‘Sorry.’

The coyote nods. ‘Don’t do anything until I tell you to do it, right?’

Beto nods again.

‘You don’t even piss or sneeze without my permission. And for
God’s sake, you don’t ball out with a wad of money and start counting it in the middle of the street.’

‘Okay.’

El Chacal returns his attention to Soledad. ‘It’s going to be tight quarters in the apartment with the extra people, but it’s only a couple days.’

‘Apartment?’ she asks. She’s taken her backpack off to drink from her water bottle. Luca and Beto collect their things.

‘Yeah, a place I use for staging. You’ll be there a day or two until the others arrive.’ He begins to walk, and Lydia grabs her backpack to fall in step behind him.

‘I need to go to a bank first,’ she says.

He turns and looks at her, eyebrows up. ‘A bank?’ he says, as if she’s requested they stop by the moon for a moment.

‘Yes. To get your money,’ she says.

‘A bank!’ El Chacal says again. ‘Maybe I should’ve charged you more!’ He laughs when he says this, and although Lydia is cheered by his unexpected congeniality, by his quickness to laugh, she can’t manage to join him.

Lydia is relieved to find a branch of her mother’s bank nearby, and she leaves Luca outside with the sisters. The building looks freshly whitewashed, and it makes her aware of how worn-looking and dirty she is. She pauses to check her reflection in the window. She’s been wearing the same powder-blue, button-up blouse for three days. Her armpits feel damp, and her hair is a mess. She hopes she smells okay; she can’t tell anymore. Lydia never wore makeup when she was younger, but since she turned thirty, she’s taken extra care with a bit of powder most mornings, a light dusting to cover the lines across her forehead. At work, she wore a light coat of mascara and a slick of nude lip gloss. She washed her hair every second day, and usually wore it in a ponytail when she was stocking the shelves. The woman in the window looks nothing like that recent Lydia. This woman is thinner and darker, with ropes of muscles in her neck and arms. This unshowered woman has dark circles beneath
her eyes and a grim visage. She wishes for the armor of her small makeup pouch at home, hanging by its drawstring from a wooden hook in the family bathroom, but the bewilderment is almost comforting; perhaps no one would recognize her from Javier’s photograph after all. She’d like to take off the floppy hat, too, and stuff it into her backpack, because she feels ridiculous, like she’s going to church in her bathing suit. But even with the changes to her appearance, she’d feel too conspicuous without it.
Enough wishing.
There’s a security camera mounted on a bracket above her, and Lydia doesn’t want to be on it. She lowers her face beneath the hat as she opens the door of the bank, and steps inside.

In the fluorescent-lit, air-conditioned vestibule, Lydia’s arms immediately come up in goose bumps. Her body has become unused to electric comforts. She rubs both arms to warm herself, removes her mother’s bank card from the purse, and checks the account balance again at the ATM. It’s still all there, still untouched, 212,871 pesos. Lydia blows air through her parted lips. There’s a withdrawal limit of 6,000 pesos per day, and Lydia has delayed this moment for many reasons, not least of which is that she’s not sure how she’ll get her hands on the money without the required documentation. She knew it was safer to leave the money in the bank while they traveled anyway. But it’s also true that delaying the withdrawal was easier for Lydia, who isn’t ready to ratify the awful truth that her mother is really gone. She knows it will feel like stealing her mother’s money. She wants it to feel that way. Because Lydia has not been able to grieve, there’s still some significant way in which it
feels like only she and Luca have gone, that the rest of their family is still intact and happy, living their lives as usual in Acapulco. She imagines Sebasti
á
n brushing past her hanging makeup pouch in the bathroom each morning, damp from the shower, his bare body wrapped in the blue towel. Lydia wishes she could further delay pulling the plug on that artifice.