American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (45 page)

You are not free until I am free
,
he typed back.
Return her to me.

‘
Ay, no,
’ Lydia says out loud beneath the rosewood tree. ‘No.’

The phone battery is almost full, but there’s only one bar of a signal. Lydia holds it up overhead and swings it around. She emerges from beneath the tree, steps over Lorenzo’s body, and scrambles up the rock wall beside him with his phone. Here. Two bars, three bars. Before she can stop herself, she opens the contact for El
É
l and hits the video call button. Already it’s ringing. Lydia knows the ringtone. It’s Pavarotti singing ‘Nessun Dorma’. Ridiculous. Pretentious. Pedestrian. He thought he was aristocratic because he wrote shitty poetry and listened to opera. He’s a murderer. He’s a scumbag. He’s bourgeois. But she is in his pocket, now. She knows. She is on top of a cave in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. She is standing over the dead body of his assassin, and now she has the upper hand, and he will not follow her into this next life. He will not haunt her, and she will not be afraid, no. She and Luca will be free. It ends here.

She hears his voice before she sees him.

‘
Dime,
’ he says. Anxious for news of her death.

‘Tell you what? That I am dead? That my son is dead?’

‘
Dios m
í
o,
Lydia.’ He says her name.
Lydia
. And it sounds the same way it has always sounded coming out of his mouth.
Lydia
.

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we are alive.
Estamos vivos.
’

‘Lydia,’ he says it again, and it’s so confusing. Because her hatred of him is enormous. It’s the biggest feeling she has ever felt. It’s stronger even than the love she felt for Sebasti
á
n, the day they held hands and kissed in front of the altar at the Nuestra Se
ñ
ora de la Soledad cathedral. It’s deeper than the colossal, unnameable thing she felt the day she pushed Luca out of her body and into the world. It’s darker than the hole her
papi
left behind when he died without saying goodbye. Her hatred is a living succubus, vast enough and quick enough and wicked enough to crest up from her heart and take wing, to expand across the hundreds of miles between them, to engulf the whole city of Acapulco, to veil the room in which he’s standing, to overshadow him and overcome him, to slip into his mouth and choke him from the inside out. She hates him so much she can murder him from sixteen hundred miles away, just by wishing for it. But he is saying her name. ‘Lydia.’

His face is haggard. Skeletal.

‘I never wished for your death,’ he says. ‘Surely you know that, Lydia. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.’

She blinks. Pulls the camera away from her face. She closes her mouth and surveys the desert landscape. And suddenly she knows what he’s saying to be exactly true. All this time, all her planning, all her strategy and self-congratulations, it was all an illusion.

‘I could never harm you, Lydia.’

Her mouth opens with an incredulous gasp. ‘Harm! You could never harm me? You have harmed me, se
ñ
or. You have tortured me. You have destroyed my whole world, everything.’

‘No, Lydia. I never meant—’

‘
¡C
á
llate la boca!
’ she shouts over him. ‘Do you think I care what you
meant
? Or how you justify your monstrosities? I’m calling only to tell you that this is over. Do you understand? It’s over.’

Javier sighs delicately on the other end of the phone. She sees him do this. A familiar mannerism, once beloved. And it tilts her psyche like a fun house.

‘But it can never be over, Lydia,’ he says sadly. ‘We have both lost everything.’

No.

‘That is horseshit, Javier. You have lost one thing. One!’

He pauses, lifting his wet eyes. ‘The only thing.’

Lydia’s heartbeat feels like a club, but her voice is lower. ‘The most important thing,’ she concedes. ‘But that gave you no right! No right!’

He’s in a comfortable sunbeam in Acapulco, in her homeplace.
There’s a cup of espresso at his elbow. She is filthy and penniless and homeless and widowed and orphaned in the desert. He props his phone somewhere in front of him so his image becomes steady on her screen. He removes his glasses, cleans the lenses. His mouth is an impossible frown. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ he says, blinking rapidly.

‘I will survive,’ she says. ‘Because I still have Luca. I have Luca.’

His mouth is a gash.

‘This has to be over now,’ she says.

Javier places the glasses back on his face, pushes them up his nose.

‘I killed the
sicario
you sent.’

‘You what?’

‘Yes. He’s dead. Look.’ Lydia scrambles to the edge of the little ridge and points her phone down at Lorenzo. Later she might feel guilt about this, about using his body to advance her own purpose, about celebrating Lorenzo’s death, even in pretense. Later she might ask herself why Javier’s last seven text messages had gone unanswered, unread. She might even wonder about Lorenzo’s extinguished potential for redemption. But not right now. She points the phone back to her own face. ‘So we can be finished now, yes? Or should we keep on killing people?’

Javier unleashes a noise that’s half sob and half laughter. He wants to plead not guilty by reason of grief. She knows grief is a kind of insanity. She knows.

Lydia is a beacon on that ridge.

The disgust in her mouth has a taste like bile. ‘Goodbye, Javier.’

She doesn’t bother hanging up. She tosses the cell phone into the dirt, and the camera yawns up at the vacant sky.

In front of the cave, in the hot height of the desert afternoon, three hours before they should safely set out with the dropping sun, the others are moving quickly down the slope and away into the valley below. Luca, with Rebeca, is waiting for her. Lydia takes his hand.

Chapter Thirty-Six

It’s not far. El Chacal keeps telling them it’s not far. It’s
mostly downhill, he tells them. Two miles. Less, even.

‘Come on, you can do it,’ he says. ‘We’re almost there.’

But it’s not the terrain or the distance. It’s the heat. There’s a reason migrants move through the desert mostly at night, in the waxing and waning hours, and it’s not for cover of darkness. After all,
la migra
in
el norte
have helicopters, motion-sensing cameras, searchlights, all the nightgear.
La migra
have infrared goggles here, come on. It’s the murderous sun. There can be no more rationing of water, because their bodies need it, their bodies will not continue without it. They drink their provisions, and it’s not enough. The water pours through them, and out through their skin. It soaks their clothes, their necks, their hair. Beto keeps stopping to lean over, to breathe. It’s an extra labor, an extra tax. He’s dizzy, and he starts to cough. El Chacal swears under his breath. It’s only two more miles. They’ve come so far, they’re almost there.
Carajo
,
come on.
Their progress is too slow. It’s a nightmare.

This is the worst crossing the coyote has made in years. He knew he shouldn’t have brought a kid. Two kids. Four women. He knew there’d be problems. But then again, he admits to himself, those six have been the ones to survive this trek so far. They’re stronger than he gave them credit for, even the asthmatic one.
Dammit,
El Chacal would never have agreed to bring that kid if he’d known about the asthma. Sneaky
pendejito
. He’d like to wring the kid’s neck. But first he has to get them to shade, to water.

‘Come on! Pick it up!’ he says. There’s no time to lose.

He really tries, but Beto cannot move. He cannot
pick it up
. He coughs and splutters, and shakes his head and leans on his knees, and the sun beats down on the back of his head. His black hair eats and swallows the heat from the sun, and his head is so hot, and his neck is burning, and Beto wants to make a joke. He tries to think of a joke he can make without using words, without spending precious breath. It hurts. It’s so scary. Enormous pressure on his chest,
gigante.
An elephant, a hippo, the gargantuan, double-wide tires of a Mack truck, crushing trash in
el dompe
. It mashes down on his lungs. An avalanche of garbage. He cannot breathe.
I cannot breathe
. There are no jokes.

Marisol rubs his back and murmurs into his ear, because she’s seen this before. Her daughter Daisy had asthma when she was younger. Not this bad, but still, Marisol is familiar. Daisy’d been croupy as a baby, and as she grew into a toddler, she and Rogelio had her tested for allergies. Dogs, cats, pollen. They had to be careful with her, because whenever something triggered her, she struggled for days. They’d have to take her to the emergency room for albuterol treatments. Once, she had an asthma attack on a playdate, and it was terrifying, because Marisol was sitting in the kitchen with the other mom, drinking tea, and Daisy didn’t come to her until it was too late. She was already in trouble. Marisol dug frantically through her purse and came up empty-handed. The inhaler was on the bathroom counter at home. They raced out of there so fast, Marisol didn’t even buckle her seat belt. When she pulled out, she backed into the bumper of a car parked at the edge of the driveway, and she didn’t even stop to leave a note. At home, she turned on the hot shower to steam up the bathroom, and gave Daisy three puffs from the inhaler. Then a fourth. Daisy sat on the closed lid of the toilet, and Marisol stood in the steam, clutching her phone, ready to dial 911. It was tense and frightening, but within minutes, the sucking sounds in Daisy’s little chest subsided. The whistling loosened. She breathed.

Beto worsens. Gone is the loose, gurgling cough he’s had all week. Gone is the previous wheeze. He hacks, dry and tight.

Marisol raises her voice over the sounds of his distress. ‘Stay calm. Breathe slowly.’ But her own heartbeat is quick as a rabbit’s.

There’s no shade here. El Chacal turns in circles, combing the landscape for a better spot, some minor refuge from the sun. If they have to take a break, they need to break in shade. Every minute here saps the water tables of their bodies that much lower. But there’s nothing nearby, and the kid cannot move.

‘Try to stand up straight,’ Marisol tells him.

He tries, he unfolds himself. But this time, when he coughs on the exhale, there’s no breathing in again. His eyes are round with panic, his hands fly up to his throat, and the skin on his neck sucks in. Then the tiniest honk of a wheeze, and he coughs again. And again, he cannot inhale. And now his lips are turning blue. Beto’s fingernails are turning blue. It happens so fast. He flaps his hands near his neck.

Marisol snatches the inhaler from him, and shakes it, and puts it in his mouth, and squeezes it, but it’s empty like the sky, barren. There’s nothing. Beto falls back on his bottom, and it’s almost comical because he’s such a
payaso
and he’s always making everybody laugh, so it’s almost funny, because he falls down on his butt like a diapered baby with his legs extended, but it’s not funny at all, because he’s writhing now, and even that desiccant cough has ceased. They’re all gathered around him now, they’re all terrified, they’re breathless, but there’s nothing they can do, even though six miles away, as the crow flies, in a brightly painted orange building on Frontage Road in the tiny community of R
í
o Rico, Arizona, there’s a pharmacy. Behind the counter in that pharmacy, there’s a bin containing four brand-new albuterol inhalers. Of course, there are nonprescription alternatives as well, and steroids for when symptoms are acute. When Beto passes out, Nicol
á
s starts chest compressions. He doesn’t know if that’s the right thing to do, but he can’t do nothing, so Marisol joins him, tips Beto’s head back, pinches his nose, and breathes into his mouth. She blows with all her might, but she can’t get his little chest to rise.

They’re on their knees in the desert, all of them. The migrants pray while Marisol and Nicol
á
s work on Beto. They stay that way for a long time, much longer than it would be reasonable to expect that their efforts might bear fruit. No one wants to acknowledge the passage of time. No one wants to be the one to call it, not even El Chacal. They feel a critical danger to their immortal souls, to be the one to admit: Beto is gone. Soledad and Rebeca are both crying, Lydia’s crying, Luca is crying. But there are no tears, with all that crying. There’s no water left in their bodies to make tears. El Chacal puts his hand at last on Nicol
á
s’s shoulder.

‘
Basta,
’ he says.

Nicol
á
s finishes his compressions, but then stops Marisol from leaning down again, from trying another breath. He reaches across Beto and puts his hands on her shoulders. They lean toward each other with the boy between them. They make a tent with their bodies.

‘No,’ Marisol says. She puts her hands on him, on his forehead, on the stillness of his heart. She reaches for his hands, brings them in front of him, still supple.

He is so small.

The other deaths. Or other losses. They were excruciating.

But they felt
.
.
. rational. They felt somehow honest: there was risk undertaken. And risk sometimes results in the collection of an unjust payment.

But this. Jesus.

Marisol crumples over him, all the breaths he couldn’t take. She gulps them, she squeezes them in her fists.
‘
Pap
á
Dios
.
’
She cries over him until, at last, El Chacal pulls her away.

One by one, he pulls them each away. He puts his body between theirs and Beto’s. He touches their arms or their shoulders, and releases them. Slim and David stand beside the grim-faced coyote, each with one hand on the other’s shoulder.

‘We will carry him,’ Slim says.

El Chacal looks up at him. He considers the angle of the sun, their deficit of water, the fatigue of their depleted bodies.

‘No.’ He shakes his head. He takes the painted sheet from his pack and, to Slim, says, ‘Help me wrap him.’

Then El Chacal takes a phone from his pack, powers it on, and drops a pin to mark the location. ‘I’ll come back for him.’

They all stare at him, but no one moves.

‘I promise,’ he says. ‘We have to go now.’

This time, Luca doesn’t look back.

In a remote campsite at the end of an unnamed road that’s traveled not infrequently by the green and white trucks of the US Border Patrol, two RVs are waiting. The RVs have been parked there for two days, with tarps stretched from poles out front, and coolers full of beer and food nearby. There are lawn chairs set around a central campfire, and country music on an old-fashioned radio with a retractable antenna and a knob on one side. The men sitting at that campsite each day have made sure to nod and wave at the passing Border Patrol agents when they come. The men in those lawn chairs have done the pleasant, casual work of making themselves and their vehicles familiar. The agents stopped by one day and talked to them for maybe ten minutes. The men allowed the agents to look inside their RVs. They had nothing to hide.

When El Chacal and his ten remaining migrants walk into that camp two and a half hours early, the waiting men aren’t ready for them. The Border Patrol checkpoint on Route 19 is still open. They can’t leave for at least three more hours. What if someone comes by before then? Where are they going to hide eleven people in the middle of nowhere? It’s too hot to sit inside the RVs. There’s not enough gas to run the air conditioners while they wait.

El Chacal shrugs. ‘We had no choice’ is all he says.

It’s a comfortable, tucked-in little campsite, and they’re relatively protected here from the noise of the relentless wind. So they turn off the radio and sit in silence, hoping they’ll hear the engine of any approaching vehicle before it appears. None does. The migrants drink water and water and blessed water. They sit in the shade of the RVs and drink Gatorade too. Marisol cries abundantly, unblinkingly, as soon as her body’s hydrated enough to make tears. She doesn’t beckon the tears, but they come. They stream down her face unregulated, like tributaries. They gather in glistening puddles on her hands. Luca and Lydia keep their eyes and mouths closed.

No one speaks.

At 5:15 p.m.
,
the two men begin packing up the campsite and ushering the migrants inside. Marisol and the two sisters board first. Lydia wants to say something to El Chacal. Something to convey her gratitude, and to allay his wounded conscience. There’s nothing. She puts one hand briefly on his arm, and he stares at the ground beneath the tires. He nods once, focusing on the clumps of wild grass, the glinting pebbles in the dirt. Lydia climbs into the RV. Luca is on the bottom step behind her, but he doesn’t follow. He stops with El Chacal as well.

‘He needs a sky-blue cross,’ Luca says.

The coyote nods once, and there are tears that stand in his eyes. They are the first of their kind. ‘A sky-blue cross,’ he repeats.

Luca nods.

‘I’ll make sure of it,
mijo,
’ the coyote says.

And then Luca leans close and whispers something in the coyote’s ear. And the man reaches up and takes Luca in his arms, and Luca folds himself around the coyote’s neck, and they embrace for a long moment, and then they turn away from each other quickly, and Luca ascends the
steps. Lydia watches through the window as El Chacal lifts his pack from one of the lawn chairs, hoists his replenished water supplies, and heads back into the desert.

‘What did you say to him?’ Lydia asks Luca when he sits down on the bench seat beside her.

Luca shrugs. ‘I told him he was a good man for bringing us here.’

There are hollow compartments beneath the benches and the beds, the men show them. They have to climb into those compartments, squeeze and fold themselves up. Soledad has heard stories of other coyotes forcing migrants to strip naked at this stage of the journey, so no one will cause problems. Taking the migrants’ clothes is a kind of insurance policy, so no one will try to escape before the coyote is ready to set them free. She’s heard that sometimes the coyotes make those naked migrants wear diapers, too, so they can stay hidden in the dark for hours. She rubs her hands down her thighs and feels grateful for her denim armor. In the second RV, the driver scrutinizes Slim and David, and asks, ‘Think you can fit?’

Slim nods. ‘We’ll make it work.’

‘It’s only forty-five minutes, right?’ David asks.

‘Thereabouts,’ the driver says.

David tries out a yanqui phrase he’s been saving. ‘Piece of cake.’

Luca’s heart thuds in his chest. They hear the engine start up, feel the rumble of vibrating machinery. The driver pulls on the steering wheel and tugs the curtain across behind his head.

‘Next stop, Tucson!’ the driver says loudly.

The drive is slow. Painfully slow. There are deep potholes and sharp bends and the road is wide enough for only one vehicle at a time, so in the event of oncoming traffic, the RVs must pull up and wait for the approaching car to pass. At length they turn onto a slightly wider road, and a short time later the man in the driver’s seat calls out quietly, ‘Border Patrol. Nobody move.’ The driver waves at the agents in the approaching vehicle, and they recognize him as one of the campers who’s been staying way out, south of the Lobo Tank these last few days. The agents’ names are Ramirez and Castro, and they think about pulling the guy over, checking his RV for wets. But he’s a white guy with a cowboy hat and a mustache that looks like it’s been growing on his face since before they became ironic. Besides, their shift is almost over. Nobody wants to do paperwork during happy hour. They salute him, and squeeze their Chevy Tahoe past the RV with inches to spare. In back, the migrants hold their breath as they hear the tires of the passing vehicle crunch by just outside their window, and then the
click click
of the steering wheel when the driver centers the RV on the road again. And now they’re rolling.