American Dirt

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The first time a head turned up by itself on the street in Acapulco, it was a big deal. It was a twenty-two-year-old head, with curly black hair shaved close on the sides and left long on top. It had a small gold hoop earring in its right ear. Its eyelids swelled and its tongue protruded from its mouth. It was left on top of a public phone booth outside Pizza Hut, right next to the Diana Cazadora fountain. Rolled up and stuck into the corner of its mouth like a cigarette was a note that read: ‘Me gusta hablar.’ I like to talk.

The woman who found the head as she walked home from her shift as a night nurse at the Hospital del Pacífico was not a woman ordinarily horror-struck by the sight of blood. But that day, just as dawn tipped its westerly light across the pavements of Acapulco, causing the head to throw its queer, bodiless shadow from atop the phone booth and toward the feet of that weary nurse, she screamed, dropped her purse, and ran three blocks before retrieving her phone from her pocket and calling the police. The officers descended; the media swarmed. People passing through the area on their way to work or school were aghast. They took the time to get down on their knees and bless themselves, to offer up some thorough prayers on behalf of the anonymous soul who had once belonged to that head. It was famous.

Until the second one.

By the time the head count reached a dozen, a shameful, self-protective apathy began to spread in the gut of the city so that, in the mornings, when a call would come in that a head had been found, on the beach or at el zócalo or on the green of the ninth hole at el club de golf, the dispatcher answering the phone would sometimes make a joke.

‘Go for the putter. That hole is an easy par three.’

Back then, Sebastián had been the first one to recognize it for what it was: the city’s steep, wholesale descent into the maw of the warring cartels. While other journalists were reluctant to acquiesce to the truth of their collapsing reality, Sebastián shouted it from his headlines:

cartels exhibit brutal surge in violence

terror and impunity: cartels get away with murder

And most dramatically, after a particularly bad weekend, which saw the murders of two journalists, a city councilwoman, three shopkeepers, two bus drivers, a priest, an accountant, and a child holding a cob of buttered corn on the beach, his sandy feet still damp from the ocean, a simple pronouncement in two-inch letters:

That Monday morning Lydia sat behind her register in the bookshop reading her husband’s unflinching account of the weekend’s murders while her tea turned cold and bitter in its cup. She’d found it particularly difficult to leave Luca at the school gate that morning. She’d gripped his tiny hand with ferocity and rubbed the bumps of his knuckles with her thumb while they walked. Luca had pretended not to notice, but he’d swung his lunch box more vigorously than usual. When she kissed him goodbye at the gate, she spotted a powdering of dried toothpaste along his bottom lip. She licked her thumb and smeared it away, while he protested the gesture as asqueroso. Gross. Perhaps he had a point. But he’d kissed her back anyway, his lips all gloppy and wet, and for once, Lydia didn’t discreetly wipe away the trail he left on her cheek. For once, she didn’t turn and hurry off the moment he darted past the principal and into the courtyard. She waited there instead, one hand flat against the cinder block wall, and gazed after him. She didn’t turn away until his little green-and-white uniform became invisible amid a sea of others.

To Lydia, the change had felt sudden, lurching. She’d gone to bed the night before in the same city where she’d been born and raised, where she’d lived her entire life except for the brief spin of years through college in Mexico City. Her dreams had been populated by the same whipped current of ocean air, the same bright, liquid colors, the same thrumming beats and aromas of her childhood, the same languorous swaying of hips that had always defined the pace of life here in this place she knew so well. Sure, there had been new violence, an unfamiliar hitch of anxiety. Sure, crime was on the rise. But until that morning, the truth had felt insulated beneath the illusory film of Acapulco’s previous immunity. And then Sebastián’s headline had ripped that protective skin away. All at once, the people had to look and to see. They could pretend no longer: Acapulco Falls. Briefly, Lydia hated her husband for that headline. She hated his editor.

‘I mean, it’s a little melodramatic, don’t you think?’ she’d challenged him when he stopped by the shop to pick her up for lunch. She flipped the sign to read cerrado and then locked the door behind them.

Sebastián frowned at her. ‘Actually, I don’t think it can be melodramatic enough. I don’t think words exist that can sufficiently capture the atrocity of what’s happening here.’ He slung his hands into his pockets and watched her face as they walked. He spoke carefully, endeavoring to suppress the accusatory note in his voice, but it was there. She could hear it. ‘You don’t agree? That it’s unspeakably horrific?’ A kind of mild, repressed superiority.

‘I mean, of course I do, Sebastián. It’s insane.’ She dropped her keys into her bag and wouldn’t meet his eye. ‘But Acapulco Falls? Like Rome is burning? I mean, look around. It’s a regular day, the sun is shining. Look, there are tourists.’ She nodded toward a café on the corner where a group of rowdy estadounidenses sat at an outdoor table in the shade of an awning.

There were several nearly empty carafes of wine on their table. ‘We should get one of those,’ Sebastián said.

And though it was not yet noon, Lydia agreed, and they mostly drank their lunch that day instead of eating it. She cut her eyes at him across the table and did not say the things she wanted to say, that it was asinine of him to write this stuff, that he was turning himself into a target, that she wanted no part of his righteous campaign of truth, that she hoped he was satisfied with his byline and that it was worth the danger. She did not say: You are a father. You are a husband. But he felt all of it there, in the angle of her gaze across the table. And he didn’t respond by condemning her lack of courage. He didn’t bristle against her resentment or pick at the waiting scab. He knew her vigilance was not a shortcoming. He held her hand across the table and studied his menu in silence.

‘I think I’ll have the soup,’ he said.

That was more than a year and a half before she’d met Javier. But thinking back on it now, from the bottom bunk of the women’s room at the Casa del Migrante in Huehuetoca with Luca sleeping heavily on her arm, she wonders if Javier had anything to do with those first heads, if he saw them or sanctioned them, if he swung the weapon responsible for severing one of them from its body. Of course he did, she thinks. He must have. What was once inconceivable now seems foolishly plain. Por Dios, how would her life be different at this very moment if she’d accepted that truth sooner?

There was a time once, perhaps a year ago, when a customer came into her shop on a windy day, his hair tossed up in a mess, and his cheeks reddened by the wind. A shiver of animation skated in on his shoulders. He was agitated and spoke quickly to Lydia. There’d been a shooting a few blocks away. Some men had pulled up on a motorcycle and shot a local journalist twelve times in the head. The man was still lying there dead in the street.

‘Who was it, who was it?’

The customer shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Some reporter.’

Lydia bolted. She grabbed her cell phone and ran outside. She left the man standing at her counter unattended. She left without ringing up his purchases. She hit Sebastián’s number while she ran down the street. Straight to voicemail. She panicked and cried out. When she got to the corner, she realized she didn’t know which way she was running. Where was this shooting? Which street? She turned in circles. Hit redial. Straight to voicemail. The shopkeepers were standing in their doorways.

‘Where was it?’ she asked the shoe store owner and she hit Sebastián’s number for a third time. Voicemail. The shoe salesman pointed, and Lydia ran. She turned another corner and another, hitting redial all the time. She called out for directions as she ran, and people pointed, and she kept going, and she kept hitting redial and she kept running, and then she stopped when she got to the street where la policía were just pulling up, where a crowd of onlookers had gathered in a clump around the body. She stopped because she didn’t want to go any closer. She didn’t want to see. Her husband lying there in the puddle of his spent life. Her thumb was cold as she redialed Sebastián’s number three more times. Voicemail. She was crying before she approached, her hair stringing across her face in the wind, collecting her tears. She clasped the cell phone with both hands in front of her. She walked the double yellow line like it was the plank of a ship, her legs wilty beneath her.

And then it was not him. There was so much blood that it was at first difficult to ascertain, but within a few moments she could see clearly, no, those were not his shoes. No, Sebastián’s hair was not that length, his legs were not that thick. Oh my God, the relief. It was not him. She cried harder and harder. It was not him. A stranger scooped Lydia into her big, doughy arms then and held her while she cried. The woman was enormous and smelled of powder, and Lydia did not resist her emphatic embrace, nor did she correct the woman’s assumption that her breakdown was caused by some familiarity with the deceased reporter. After all, that notion did feel approximately true. So Lydia allowed the stranger to comfort her, to murmur over her tears, to offer her the kindness of a tissue from the pocket of her sweater, and in a few minutes it was all over. For Lydia. It was some other widow’s turn that day. And when she finally extracted herself from the stranger’s arms, Lydia’s body felt jerky and clattery with adrenaline as she walked the several blocks back to her shop to find that her customer had left his money, plus a little extra, on the counter beside the register.

She’s still afraid that, one day, it will be Sebastián. She’s been afraid for so long that now she can’t catch up to the facts: it was already him, and the rest of her family. It really did happen; all those years of worry did not prevent it. And not only Sebastián, but Mamá, too, and Yemi and her beautiful children, and none of them had chosen to marry Sebastián, or to take on the risks of his profession as their own. Only she had done that, and now her family had paid for her choice. The fears of her past and the horrors of her present are so mixed up they feel like the unmatching pieces of a rompecabezas, like she’s trying to piece together things that were never meant to fit.

Perhaps she’s just not ready. Lydia knows the stages of grief, and this is denial. Instead of acceptance she wants to recall Sebastián’s face, lunch that day in the café, the boyish tilt of his posture at the small table after their first glass of wine. They’d laughed together, and Sebastián had made a show of looking discreetly down her top, of rubbing her thigh beneath the table, of asking if she wanted to head back to the shop early so he could help her ‘check inventory’. But in the slick heat of the memory that follows, she cannot conjure Sebastián’s face. The absolute absence of him feels like unmitigated terror.

Lydia is startled by the lateness of the daylight when she opens her eyes, and for a moment, she doesn’t know where she is. Luca is already awake beside her, watching her, his black eyes clear through the curtain of his sleep-sticky lashes. She can smell something cooking, and there’s the distant clinking of forks against dishes. ‘Come on, let’s get some food.’ She sits up, but then leans back and presses her lips against the warm expanse of Luca’s cheek. There’s such comfort there that she stays for a minute, her hands against the softness of his skin.

Luca sits bolt upright in bed, his hands flying up to his head to confirm what he already knows, that Papi’s hat is not there. He wears it even when he sleeps now, and when he has to remove it to shower, he makes Lydia hold it in her hands until he comes out. She’s not allowed even to set it down. Neither is she allowed to put it on her own head, because it must maintain the precise smell of Papi mingled with Luca, a mix that Luca is very pleased to note has not diminished but only intensified in the time he’s been wearing it. Perhaps Papi’s smell is also his smell, and he can keep enhancing it by its continued use. They mustn’t accidentally introduce any new ingredients, therefore, to corrupt the purity of the hat. It must’ve fallen off last night, when he was sleeping, or during one of his many trips up and down from the top bunk to the bathroom.

‘Don’t worry, mijo,’ Lydia says, sitting up after him, because it’s immediately evident what he’s looking for, and he’s already left the warm nest of the bottom bunk and clambered up to riffle through the top bunk. The bed frame squeaks as he digs through the covers. There’s an audible sigh of relief from above, and then the hat appears, perched triumphantly on the end of Luca’s outstretched arm, over the edge of the bed.

There are plenty of jóvenes, teenagers, at the shelter, but only a few younger children, and at breakfast they all sit together at a round table in the center of the room. A little girl pops up from this table when Luca enters, and draws him by the elbow to an empty seat. Lydia makes him a plate, and one for herself, and then sits at a table nearby with two other women, Neli and Julia, both in their early twenties, both from Guatemala. Neli is pudgy with curly hair. Julia is slender, with dark skin and almond-shaped eyes. Lydia nods and smiles politely as they introduce themselves, but she keeps quiet, afraid of her own voice, afraid she’ll betray herself in some way she hasn’t considered. Her accent, a turn of phrase, some unconscious custom that might identify her. She does not reach for the loops at her neck. Neli and Julia recognize caution, and they understand. They don’t press her. Lydia turns her face toward her plate, briefly closes her eyes, and blesses herself. Neli and Julia resume their conversation.

‘She wasn’t even going to tell anyone?’ Neli asks. ‘God bless her.’

‘Said she didn’t want to make a fuss. It’s only because I happened to step into the hallway just at that moment,’ Julia says. ‘And I saw it with my own eyes! I saw what he did to her. I chased him away from her and then got the padre right away.’

‘And what did the padre do?’ Neli wants a play-by-play. She’s taking her time with her food, shredding a tortilla into host-size pieces, which she places on her tongue one at a time.

‘The padre was great, he went in and fished that cholo right out of his cot. Sent him packing.’

‘And I slept through the whole thing!’ Neli seems disappointed. ‘I heard he put up a bit of a fight, too.’

Across the room, the girl at the center of last night’s scandal, a sixteen-year-old from San Salvador, keeps her face tipped down toward her own plate. Her shoulders are rolled in so far toward each other that her body seems to be trying to swallow itself. Lydia chews even though the eggs are scrambled and the chewing is unnecessary. Her mouth needs something to do. Another woman approaches their table and points to the empty chair beside Lydia. Neli waves her hand to indicate that it’s free. The woman sets her plate down and pulls out the chair. She’s wearing a pink skirt and flip-flops, and has a multicolored ribbon woven into the two long braids down her back. If her clothing didn’t mark her as an indigenous woman, then her heavily accented Spanish would. Neli and Julia steal glances at each other as the woman takes her seat. She smiles at them and offers her name as Ixchel, but Neli and Julia continue their conversation without pause, turning their bodies almost imperceptibly away from her. It’s a rudeness that Lydia would’ve endeavored to counteract in her old life, with a smile and a kind word. Perhaps even a rebuke to the offending party. Because Lydia perceives that the Guatemalan women are snubbing the newcomer due to bigotry, because she’s an india. And Lydia is suitably offended on Ixchel’s behalf, but performing an act of decorum would mean putting herself at risk, so instead she keeps her eyes on her plate, scoops some eggs into a tortilla.

‘I saw them together last night after dinner,’ Julia says. ‘I saw the way he looked at her, and I just presumed they were together. But what I saw then after, there was no question it was one-sided.’

‘She tried to fight him off?’ Neli asks, placing a speckled white square in her mouth.

‘Worse than that, she struggled but then seemed resigned to it.’ Julia shakes her head sadly but there’s a spiky anger in her voice. ‘Like she knew there was nothing she could do if he’d made up his mind. Qué chingadera.’

‘They should be castrated, every one of them,’ Neli says, shaking her headful of black curls.

Julia looks across at the young girl. ‘She’s so pretty, too. She’s going to have a rough journey.’

‘A lot of return trips to the cuerpomático,’ Neli agrees.

‘The what?’ Ixchel asks.

‘The cuerpomático?’ Neli repeats.

Ixchel shakes her head. She may have an accent, but her Spanish is excellent, and yet she hasn’t heard this word before. Perhaps it’s slang. Perhaps it’s made-up. Lydia doesn’t know it either.

‘You don’t know this word?’ Julia asks.

Ixchel shakes her head a second time. Lydia watches Luca at the round table while she listens to the women talk.

‘I thought all the guatemaltecas knew it.’ Neli allows the remainder of her tortilla to wilt back onto her plate.

‘Las guanacas también, y las catrachas.’ Julia leans forward on her elbows and pushes her plate aside. ‘It means your body is an ATM machine.’

Lydia tries to swallow, but the eggs and tortilla have formed a paste in her mouth. Her fork is full of rice, a crispy disk of plátano frito speared onto its tines. The fork hovers.

‘This is the price of getting to el norte,’ Neli says.

After some excruciating measure of seconds, Ixchel finds her voice, the Spanish words that are familiar. La violación. ‘Rape? Is the price?’

Both women look at her blankly. They cannot believe this is news to her. Has she been living under a rock before now?

‘How did you end up here, mamita?’ Neli asks, returning her attention to the food.

Ixchel does not answer.

Julia leans in and drops her voice low. ‘I have paid twice already.’

This disclosure, shared with a woman she seemed to shun only moments ago, is such an unexpected intimacy that Lydia makes a noise in her throat without meaning to. A wound of a sound. All three women look at her as she takes a sip of fruit punch and sets her still-full fork on the edge of her plate.

‘How about you?’ Julia returns her attention to Neli. ‘Have you paid?’

‘Not yet,’ Neli says grimly.

‘You?’ They all look expectantly at Lydia.

She shakes her head.

A smiling young woman approaches the table where Luca is sitting with the other children. ‘Who’s ready for a puppet show?’ she asks.

The little girl beside Luca shoots out of her chair, arms raised. ‘Me, me!’ she says.

‘Good, I need lots of helpers!’

‘I heard he was a sicario.’

This information snaps Lydia’s focus back to her own table. ‘What?’ she says, accidentally.

‘That’s the rumor.’ Julia shrugs. ‘Seems like they should know better than to let those narcos in.’

‘But he told the padre he was getting out,’ Neli intercedes. ‘Told him he got recruited by the cartel when he was just a kid and he never had any choice, you know the story. Had enough of that life and wanted to go to el norte.’

‘Which cartel?’ Ixchel asks because like most people, because of her personal experience, she’s more afraid of one particular cartel than others.

‘What does it matter?’ Neli says. ‘They’re all the same. Animales.’

‘They’re not,’ Julia insists. ‘Some of them are way worse than others.’

Neli makes a face like she’s skeptical, but doesn’t argue.

‘Like Los Jardineros,’ Julia says. ‘I heard they donated money to build a new cancer hospital in Acapulco.’

Lydia takes a sharp breath, but Neli waves a hand dismissively. ‘That’s just trying to buy people’s loyalty,’ she says. ‘Propaganda.’

‘But maybe the reason is less important than the fact,’ Julia says. Then she drops her voice to a whisper and leans in again, closing the space across the table to a tight circle. She names the unnameable cartel. ‘Los Zetas feed people their own body parts. Los Zetas hang babies from bridges.’

Lydia covers her mouth with her hand. Her fingers are cold and stiff, and beside her, Ixchel is crossing herself. Lydia will ask a question now, but she’ll make her voice light. Neutral.

‘So last night, the guy who got kicked out – which cartel was he?’

Julia shrugs. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘But if he really wants out, he better run. Far and fast, right? They don’t let those guys go.’

Lydia pushes her plate away. Far and fast, she thinks. Some things are so simple.