American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (41 page)

‘I guess this is what he meant by
grueling
.’ Beto wheezes, pulling the empty inhaler from his pocket to suck on it.

‘You okay?’ Luca asks, gesturing at the inhaler.

Beto shrugs and tries to regulate his breath, his eyes squinting against the brightness of the sun. ‘Why, you got some albuterol in there?’ He pokes at Luca’s backpack. ‘Because I’ll take it if you do!’

Both boys laugh, and Beto’s sounds like a dying balloon.

‘
Venga, mijo,
’ Mami says, prompting Luca to walk in front of her. ‘You, too, Beto. You okay to walk?’

He doesn’t waste any more breath on words but nods and gets moving.

Each hill looks like it would take a half a day to walk up, and a half a day to walk back down. The migrants file downhill in El Chacal’s wake. They’re silent now, descending into the first seam of the valley, struggling to keep their minds strong as they face the enormity of their undertaking. The wind rockets across the landscape and whips Rebeca’s hair into a black tornado. Their feet crunch through the witchy yellow grass,
and Luca’s body is flooded with awful excitement. They’re in the United States now, and already it looks like a movie set, but with real desert animals that can kill you, like scorpions and rattlesnakes and mountain lions. Luca experiences a swamp of tingly, nauseating confusion.

‘Luca.’ Mami’s right behind him. Sometimes it’s like she can hear what he’s thinking. ‘You doing okay?’

He nods.

‘I’m proud of you,
mijo,
’ she whispers so no one else can hear. She makes a muscle. ‘
Eres bien fuerte
. Papi would be proud.’

El Chacal knows where there’s a water station, a place where aid workers leave water for passing migrants. He’s made them conserve their supplies anyway, because sometimes the water’s not there – sometimes the Border Patrol or vigilantes find it first and destroy it. But today it’s there, marked by a whipping blue flag atop a pole, three huge jugs sitting on a pallet beneath a tarp. It’s not cold, but it’s the best water Lydia has ever tasted. Her head was beginning to pound because she was conserving their supply, but now she drinks her fill from her canteen, and feels the pain diminish at once. It feels like a miracle, to drink. She refills her canteen again and drinks some more. Luca drinks very little.

‘As much as you can,
amorcito,
’ she insists.

‘But I’ll get a cramp. We have to walk so fast.’

‘Cramps you can live with,’ she says. ‘Drink.’

They rest beside the water station for ten minutes, filling their jugs and drinking and drinking, and filling them again before they strike out deeper across the valley floor. El Chacal has warned them to stay quiet, to listen all the time for the sound of engines, but the wind is too loud for that. Beto starts chatting to Choncho.

‘Where you guys from?’ Beto asks.

Choncho is slow to respond, not from reluctance, but just because that’s his way. ‘Veracruz,’ he says eventually.

‘That in Mexico?’

Another pause. ‘Yes.’

‘I didn’t know they made Mexicans as big as you.’

Choncho laughs, and it sends a ripple through the whole group.

Beto looks from Choncho to his brother Slim to their two sons. ‘Everybody in Veracruz as tall as you?’

‘No,’ Choncho says slowly. ‘Much taller.’

Beto is listing all the tallest people he can think of from
el dompe,
when El Chacal makes the low-pitched warning whistle. Marisol spots the problem at the same time, and inadvertently cries out. She points across the valley to a ridge on the far side where a trail of fawn, powdery dust rises up through the foliage. El Chacal does his whistle once more, commanding everyone to drop, and it’s instant, the way they obey. They drop like they were shot, all fifteen of them right where they stand. ‘Get into the shade if you can,’ he says.

The light is vigorous here. To be in it is to be discovered, to be out of it is to be concealed. When the desert sunlight shines on any scrap of moving color, that color radiates like a beacon. Mami and Luca huddle together beneath the shade of a rock, pressed up beside a silk tassel tree. Catkins hang down from its branches in pale green curtains that drop their clinging flowers into Mami’s hair. Tucked into this dark alcove and curled behind their backpacks, they’re invisible from the ridge where that plume of dust is growing steadily across the hillside in a sputtering line. Around them, the other migrants squirm to find cover, flattening themselves into the parched grasses, twisting themselves into the spiky shadows of yuca fronds, folding themselves into the silhouette of a cypress tree. They all become perfectly motionless and silent. Even Beto is quiet, lying flat among the blond stalks, his toes pointing up to the sky. When three minutes have passed, they finally hear the vague rumble of an engine slurring itself into the wind. After another full minute, the vehicle appears on a slope not far above them, on the next hill over. It’s the distinct white-and-green Chevy Tahoe of the US Border Patrol.

El Chacal’s face betrays nothing. ‘Nobody move,’ he says quietly. He’s well hidden between Marisol and Nicol
á
s in the shade of a standing rock. Because he knows it might be some time before they can move again, he always makes sure to land in a comfortable position. He sits on his bottom with his knees up, and trains his binoculars on the passenger seat of the Chevy Tahoe, where a Border Patrol agent trains his own military-grade binoculars back toward them.

We are invisible,
Luca says to himself, and he closes his eyes.
We are desert plants. We are rocks.
He breathes deeply and slowly, taking care that his chest doesn’t rise and fall with the cycle of his breath. The stillness is a kind of meditation all migrants must master.
We are rocks, we are rocks. Somos piedras
. Luca’s skin hardens into a stony shell, his arms become immovable, his legs permanently fixed in position, the cells of his backside and the bottoms of his feet amalgamate with the ground beneath him. He grows into the earth. No part of his body itches or twitches, because his body is not a body anymore, but a slab of native stone. He’s been stationary in this place for millennia. This silk tassel tree has grown up from his spine, the indigenous plants have flourished and died here around his ankles, the fox sparrows and meadowlarks have nested in his hair, the rains and winds and sun have beaten down across the rigid expanse of his shoulders, and Luca has never moved.
We are rocks
. At length, the Tahoe finishes its noisy, indiscreet voyage across the ridge and disappears over a low rim into the next seam of the valley beyond.

El Chacal doesn’t waste time on chitchat. The sun is lodging itself ever higher into the hot, bright shelf of the sky, and they should’ve made camp an hour ago. It’s not safe for them to be exerting themselves beneath the burning lamp of the sun. It will sap them. ‘
V
á
monos,
’ he says.
‘
¡Ap
ú
rense!
’
Just as quickly as they dropped, everyone rises, collects their belongings, and once again they’re on the move.

By late morning, just as that sun is sucking all the moisture from their depleted bodies, just as Rebeca feels ready to give up, behind the skirting of a deep hill, they come to a shaded fold of land where a cluster of trees hides a good camp. Sumac and mountain mahogany band together beneath the jagged ridges, so their camp is entirely concealed from view. They are deeply in shade, and it’s a blessed relief to be out from under the sun. There are signs all around the clearing of previous campers: discarded plastic water bottles, a ripped black T-shirt covered with salt stains, a worn pink sneaker, much smaller than Luca’s. El Chacal goes directly to a soft clump of sand beneath a tree where all the rocks have been cleared. He pitches his pack down beside the trunk and immediately settles himself in to sleep. The others follow suit. It’s easy for the men, who seem to sleep wherever they drop. Marisol lies flat on her stomach and rests her head on her outstretched arms. She, too, is asleep instantly. The sisters are restless, and they move several times before they find comfort.

Despite her exhaustion, Lydia expects to have trouble sleeping. She flings out their blanket anyway, and she and Luca collapse onto it. The desert sun is so bright that even here in the deep shade, Lydia finds herself squinting to block out the light. When she opens her eyes to look around, the landscape beyond this seam of shade is one wide expanse of sepia, everything bleached into varying fractures of brown by the adamant sun. Choncho notices her wakefulness and gives her a somber nod, which Lydia interprets as a promise to watch over her and her sleeping child.
You rest. I will make sure nothing happens to you,
is the meaning she chooses to attach to that ambiguous nod. And with that imagined vow of protection, at once, she drops into sleep.

Chapter Thirty-Two

They don’t wait until dark to set out. As soon as the sun
dips near the ridge at the western end of the valley, and their shadows lengthen to undulating streaks of black along the desert floor, El Chacal tells them to make themselves ready.

‘Tonight is
dif
í
cil,
’ the coyote tells them. ‘Eight miles, rough terrain. You have to keep up. If you fall behind, we cannot wait for you. I won’t risk the whole group for one individual. So listen up,
esto es importante
. It’s life or death.’ El Chacal clears his throat to make sure everyone’s listening. ‘Just west of here, the road we crossed early this morning cuts north and runs sort of parallel to the route we’re taking, okay?’

They all nod.

‘If you get separated from the group. If you fall, if you twist an ankle, if you decide you need a rest or a piss or a scratch or a sleep, if for any reason you cannot keep up, you go to that road. That is the Ruby Road. Border Patrol and locals pass there regularly. You won’t die out here if you get to that road. In a few hours, someone will find you there.’

It’s a grim business, the Ruby Road, and none of them can picture it yet, not while things are going well. Right now that road is to be avoided at all costs, it’s the very nexus of their fear. It’s impossible for the migrants to imagine the desperation that might, only a few hours hence, convince them to seek deliverance there.

‘We travel this way.’ El Chacal gestures with a slice of his hand. ‘North. So which way is the road? I want you all to know it. Lorenzo! Which way is the road?’

Lorenzo doesn’t answer.

‘It’s west,’ El Chacal repeats with exasperation. ‘Which way is west?’

Lorenzo reaches for his phone but there’s no signal in the desert.

‘It’s that way.’ Luca points west.

‘Claro que s
í
.’
The coyote ruffles Luca’s hair. ‘This kid’s not gonna die in the desert.’

They eat nuts and strips of beef jerky while they walk. The PhD student Nicol
á
s has some kind of protein paste in single-serving tinfoil tubes. They look and smell disgusting, but they’re packed with nutrients, and indeed, his energy is impressive. He’s directly behind Lydia this evening, and he makes quiet conversation as they walk. She wonders if the protein tubes are caffeinated.

‘Whatever you do, don’t go to Arivaca,’ he’s saying. ‘If you’re dying of thirst, those people will pull up a lawn chair and sip lemonade while they watch.’

‘Ah, they’re not so bad,’ El Chacal interrupts from ahead. ‘There are good people in Arivaca, too. Life is complicated for them, living so close to the line.’

Nicol
á
s raises his remarkable eyebrows. Although Arivaca is a tiny, remote town of fewer than seven hundred people, a forty-five-minute drive down empty roads from its nearest neighbor, Nicol
á
s, like most people who live in southern Arizona, knows its reputation as a merciless, hardscrabble outpost, a place where vigilante militiamen murdered a nine-year-old girl and her father years ago, hoping to pin the blame on illegal migrants. The vigilantes wanted to stoke community fear and incite outrage by inventing a group of murderous migrant bogeymen, so they broke into the Flores family home, and shot little Brisenia in the head. She was wearing turquoise pajama bottoms and red-painted fingernails when she died, curled up on the love seat in her living room. But because Nicol
á
s is a young, politicized liberal who’s never been to Arivaca, he hasn’t observed how the shame of that murder still weighs on the tiny town. He’s never been close to a tragedy that barbaric, never experienced a shock so primitive that it shakes him to the very core of his beliefs. In short, Nicol
á
s has never had a fundamental change of heart. So he’s unaware of the way Newton’s third law can resonate in a place like this: for every wickedness, there is an equal and opposite possibility of redemption. In any case, the point is moot. Lydia has no intention of going to Arivaca, a place where the only way out is to turn yourself in, to ask for help. She and Luca are going to make it to Tucson, to safety.

They hike almost three miles without incident, and it’s amazing to watch the colors leach back into the desert after the day’s blanching. There’s a moment, Lydia realizes, or no, more than a moment – a span of perhaps fifteen minutes just at twilight – when the desert is the most perfect place that exists. The temperature, the light, the colors, all hang and linger at some unflawed precipice, like the cars of a roller coaster ticking ever so slowly over the apex before the crash. The light droops ever farther from the sky, and Lydia can smell the heat of the day wicking away from her skin. Luca’s backpack bobs in front of her. For the first time since she stood up from the chair on her mother’s back patio in Acapulco and left her iced
paloma
sweating on the table, Lydia feels like they might survive. A weird lurch of something like exhilaration. And then, quite suddenly, it’s very dark and very cold. Colder than the night before, if she’s not imagining it, and that chill has the effect of prompting all fifteen of them to move faster. The ground is jagged, studded with rocks, pitching and rising unpredictably, pockmarked by the hidey-holes of unseen animals. Lydia prays that no one falls. The sisters have been uncommonly quiet, she notices, and she worries about their stamina, so soon after their bodies have endured those other traumas. Lydia prays, too, for Luca’s feet in his new boots, and for Soledad’s and Rebeca’s feet, for her own feet.
Dear God, keep them strong and unblistered, let them step only in places where human feet are supposed to go
.

El Chacal moves at a brutal pace. The rendezvous point is just over a dozen miles north of the border as the crow flies, but those miles cover some of the roughest terrain in North America, with elevation changes of up to seven thousand feet. Their two-and-a-half-day path winds around the worst of the impassible sections, and funnels them toward cattle tanks in case they get desperate for water, all while keeping them as far away from popular hiking trails and known
migra
patrolling routes as possible. At the end of tonight’s walk, near dawn, when they make camp in a cavelike formation a few miles west of Tumacacori-Carmen, Arizona, they’ll be almost home free. The migrants don’t know this yet. They don’t
know any of the details, really, because El Chacal likes to keep things relatively covert. If anything goes wrong, if a migrant wanders off, or lags behind and gets picked up, the coyote doesn’t want that migrant confessing the whole thing to Border Patrol. All they need to know is to follow El Chacal. To do what he tells them to do. If they listen, if they obey, if they persevere, he’ll see to it that they survive this journey. Tomorrow night, they’ll be pleasantly surprised by the shortness of their walk. There will be the delighted sounds of wonder among them as they approach the campsite where two RVs are waiting to drive them up the crude, unpaved road that eventually ushers them onto the kind of smooth northern highway they’ve all envisioned; the flat, wide pavement of Route 19 awaits. The Border Patrol checkpoint there is closed for a specific number of hours each week. The coyote, with the exchange of regular money for reliable information, knows which hours those are.

It’s a forty-five-minute drive from there to Tucson, to the optimistic anonymity of urban Arizona. It’s so close. The migrants don’t even realize how close. But now, in the fifth hour of their vigorous hike, as the loose gravel of the black slope they’re descending in some unnamed canyon slips treacherously underfoot, just as their spirits are beginning to mirror the fatigue of their bodies, there’s an almighty crack in the sky, followed by a downpour. They’re shocked, all of them, and even Nicol
á
s and El Chacal, who are both well prepared with rain gear, are soaked before they manage to get their ponchos on. Their bodies want them to seek shelter, and it takes some measure of minutes for them to quell those
instincts and return to their pace, trudging through those curtains of rain.

Luca’s jeans are heavy with rainwater and he has to walk with his legs spread apart because the wet denim chafes between his thighs and against one spot at the back of his left hip. He’s glad for the new hiking boots, and glad that Mami insisted he wear them all around the apartment for the two days in Nogales, to break them in. He’s glad he hadn’t complained or argued, even though he’d wanted to. But even with that extra practice, with each step he’s increasingly aware of a pinpoint, a tiny dot only the width of a thread, on the back of his left heel, that’s beginning to trouble him. At first he ignores it. Then he addresses it. He tells it that no puny, insignificant speck of pain will prevent him from reaching his destination. He tells it that he would endure a hundred such pains, a thousand, without blinking an eye. He is Luca! His whole family has been murdered! He is unstoppable!

‘Mami.’ His voice is soft with pain, curdled.

‘What is it,
mijo
?’

‘I have a blister,’ he confesses. It’s excruciating. He cannot go on.

Mami presses her lips together and draws him to the side of the trail, out of the line. The other migrants don’t stop or even slow. They continue at speed, and by the time Lydia’s down on one knee with Luca’s pant leg rolled up at the cuff and his sock pulled down, they’ve all passed. It’s difficult to see in the dark and the rain, but El Chacal has forbidden the use of flashlights, so Lydia draws her face down close to Luca’s heel to investigate. His socks are sopping, and she runs her hand across the back of his foot, where she can feel the forming bubble of a blister. There’s nothing she can do for him because of the dampness of his skin, the dampness of his jeans, the dampness of everything. Band-Aids are impossible. But she has to try. She unslings her pack, finds the zippered compartment on one side where she stashed a handful of Band-Aids before they set out. They are wet, of course, but Lydia selects the driest one, from the middle of the stack. She opens her coat and leans over his ankle, trying to make an umbrella of her body.

‘Take the boot off,’ she says.

‘But, Mami, they’re going,’ he says. ‘We don’t have time.’

‘Do it quickly,’ she snaps.

Luca obeys, tugging on the laces, ripping off the boot, which somersaults to the ground beneath.

‘Sit here.’ She points to her pack, and Luca sits. ‘Sock, too,’ she says, and then she glances up through the streamers of rain, to where she thinks she can still see the last of the group disappearing into the darkness. She stashes the wrapped Band-Aid between her lips. Luca whips off the wet sock, and she crams it into her pocket, untucks her shirt from beneath her hoodie, and uses her shirttail to dry his foot as best she can. His little toes are pruned. She tucks his foot into the warm fold of her armpit, and then reaches over Luca’s shoulder to unzip the backpack he’s still wearing. She knows there are two pairs of socks inside, right-hand side, near the bottom. She worries that her panic will make her clumsy, that she won’t be able to find the socks, groping blindly into the pack this way, that she’ll find them, and drop them, and they’ll be drenched and useless, and they will have lost the group for nothing, that they will die here, not shot through with cartel bullets at a family party, but alone in the desert. They will both die because of a blister. Because of rain. No. There, her fingers brush against a soft ball of rolled socks, still dry.
Gracias a Dios
. She tugs them out and sticks them into her armpit with the foot, zips the pack. The other migrants are gone now. She can no longer see them or hear them, but all her senses strain after them, she sends her mind to follow the direction they were taking.
God, please let us find them,
she prays. She peels the wrapper off the Band-Aid, spits the papers onto the ground, gives Luca’s foot another wipe with her shirttail, blows on the damp foot with her meager breath, and then presses the adhesive bandage against the curve of his skin.
Please, God, let it stick
. She unfolds the dry socks and tugs one onto his foot. It seems to take hours, the wriggling of the foot into the tube of material, the correct placement of the seam across the toe, the adjustment of the dry cotton into position around the afflicted heel. She thinks about putting the second one on him, too. An extra layer of protection between the boot and the skin. Would that be better or worse for the blister? Extra padding, but a tighter fit. The time constraint is the deciding factor. She tucks the other dry sock beneath her bra strap and retrieves the toppled boot. She loosens the laces and pulls at the tongue. She wipes the inside of the boot with her shirttail, and Luca jams his foot in. She yanks on the laces.

‘I’ll do it, Mami,’ he says.

She holds her coat over him while he ties the boot quickly, impressively, and then, ‘I’m good,’ he says. ‘I’m okay, Mami. Thank you.’ And he stands up from her backpack. He takes a few steps to test the repair. ‘Much better,’ he says.

Lydia has refastened the side zipper on her pack, and is already walking after him, jogging, really, while she slings the backpack around to her shoulders. The gallon jugs of water bang and slosh beneath. ‘Go,
mijo,
quickly, we have to catch up,’ she says.

Altogether, the delay cost them perhaps two and a half minutes. Maybe three. Enough time to become completely lost from the group. They’re well out of earshot because all they can hear is the thundering wash of the rain hammering down all around them. Lydia feels panicky, all her fears compressed into a tight ball that lodges in her chest.
This is how it happens,
she thinks. And her voice becomes frantic as she urges Luca to move faster, but he’s remembering, too, that day outside Culiac
á
n when
la migra
were chasing them and Mami twisted her ankle and fell. They can’t afford a twisted ankle on top of everything else, Luca thinks, and that worry slows him into a pace that’s too cautious. So perhaps this will be it instead, they will die from caution.