American Dirt

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

For both Lydia and the sisters, there’s a constant tug-of-war between the gruesome feeling that something’s chasing them, that they must move quickly away, and a physical hesitation, a reluctance to move blindly toward whatever unknown demons may loom in the road ahead. The Casa del Migrante they find in Celaya is a respite from that tug-of-war, and as such, after a sleepless night outdoors for Lydia, a holy blessing without compare.

It’s only midday when they arrive. Luca and Rebeca play basketball in the yard and no one else can join, some complicated game with jumbled rules of their own devising. Lydia and Soledad sit quietly together, watching from a nearby bench. They help in the kitchen, listening to las noticias on television, and then Lydia naps. When she wakens, she watches her son playing dominoes with Rebeca. She notes how quickly those two have bridged the gap between their respective ages, eight and fourteen – Luca seems to have grown up and Rebeca to have simplified quite neatly – so they meet seamlessly in the middle. It feels as though they’ve known each other forever, as though these girls have always been here, waiting to become a part of their lives. That night Luca asks if he can snuggle in beneath Rebeca’s arm in her bunk.

‘It’s not appropriate.’ Lydia draws the line.

Luca knew it was a long shot anyway, but hardly any of the rules from his old life seem to apply anymore, so he figured it was worth asking. He climbs in bed without complaint. Lydia hauls her backpack beneath the sheets by her feet and wraps its strap twice around her ankle. They all sleep soundly. Glory, glory to have a door with a lock.

Soledad has told Lydia nothing of where she and her sister came from or what they endured. Lydia’s said nothing of her family’s circumstances either, but there’s that silent bond of knowing between them regardless, a magic that’s marginally maternal, but entirely female. So it’s not surprising that in the morning, the girl, who seems much older than just the eighteen months that separate her from her sister, and who’s not typically so forthcoming about private matters regarding her body, confides to Lydia that she’s pregnant. Taking her cue from Soledad, Lydia endeavors to deliver her response to this news in a calm, unvarnished manner.

‘Your baby will be a US citizen,’ she whispers across the top of her coffee cup.

Soledad shakes her head and stands up from the table to clear her plate. ‘The baby isn’t mine,’ she says. When she stretches her arms above her and her baggy T-shirt grazes the waist of her jeans, her tummy is still flat.

That day and night at la casa are so significant in their restorative value that, in the weeks to come, when they think back to the halcyon memory of this place, their stay here will seem much longer than it was. Like all priests in Mexico, the padre who runs la casa wears regular street clothes, a yellow polo shirt and a softened pair of blue jeans with a tar stain on one leg. His only religious adornment is a simple wooden cross that hangs from a leather cord around his neck. He’s slender, with gray hair and glasses. There are more than twenty migrants resuming their journey today, and the padre gathers them in the yard before they leave. He gives a speech that Lydia thinks of as a kind of pep talk with an identity crisis – because he means to encourage them, but there’s no pep in his talk. He stands on an upturned milk crate in front of the gathered crowd, and mostly, he warns them.

‘If it’s possible for you to turn back, do so now. If you can go home again and make a life for yourself where you came from, if you can return there safely, I implore you: please do so now. If there is any other place for you to go, to stay away from these trains, to stay away from el norte, go there now.’ Luca has his arm around Rebeca’s waist, his head leaning in, her arm around his shoulder. Lydia looks at their faces; they do not flinch from these hard words. Some of the other migrants shift their weight nervously beneath them. ‘If it’s only a better life you seek, seek it elsewhere,’ the padre continues. ‘This path is only for people who have no choice, no other option, only violence and misery behind you. And your journey will grow even more treacherous from here. Everything is working against you, to thwart you. Some of you will fall from the trains. Many will be maimed or injured. Many will die. Many, many of you will be kidnapped, tortured, trafficked, or ransomed. Some will be lucky enough to survive all of that and make it as far as Estados Unidos only to experience the privilege of dying alone in the desert beneath the sun, abandoned by a corrupt coyote, or shot by a narco who doesn’t like the look of you. Every single one of you will be robbed. Every one. If you make it to el norte, you will arrive penniless, that’s a guarantee. Look around you. Go ahead – look at each other. Only one out of three will make it to your destination alive. Will it be you?’ He points at a man in his fifties with a neatly trimmed beard and a fresh T-shirt.

‘¡Sí, señor!’ the man answers.

‘Will it be you?’ He points to a woman about Lydia’s age with a silent toddler on her hip.

‘¡Sí, señor!’ she says.

‘Will it be you?’ he points at Luca.

Lydia feels a crush of wild despair steal over her, but Luca lifts his small fist in the air and shouts his response. ‘¡Sí, seré yo!’

The speech does the job of energizing the migrants and steeling their resolve, which in turn makes them restless and impatient during the long wait for the train. In the third hour, a few give up waiting and begin to walk. In the fourth and fifth hours, more follow. Luca, Lydia, and the girls head toward the western edge of the city in search of an overpass, but the only one they find is way too high. Jumping from there would be suicide. So they search instead for a curve where the train might slow down. It’s midafternoon by the time La Bestia finally arrives, and it’s more crowded than they’ve seen it before. Even from a distance, Lydia can see the silhouette of migrants atop the cars. It’s moving much faster than when they boarded yesterday at San Miguel de Allende.

Lydia nearly says they should wait, they’re not going to make it. She wants to articulate her hesitation, but she’s not quick enough, and now the train is too loud. The noise thunders into her bones. They all run, and she holds Luca’s hand tightly in her fist. The men atop the train shout down to them, instructions and encouragement. Rebeca goes up first, and then Soledad, who reaches back for Luca. He grabs at her with his free hand, and there’s a terrifying moment where he’s stretched between them, one arm taut with Soledad on the shrieking beast, and the other linked to Lydia racing beneath. He’s like taffy, soft and exposed. And then Lydia hurls his little arm toward the train, and he’s up. Soledad has him, and then the men from above, lifting. He is safe, he is safe. Lydia runs, not yet relieved, not until she joins him there, she runs and the train is picking up speed and she’s falling behind the ladder, and she can’t keep up, and then a burst of panic makes her legs go like pistons and she grabs at the metal bars, terrified, terrified that her legs won’t be able to maintain this speed, that they’ll drop, that she’ll go under, but this is not her day, because all at once her feet have found the bottom rung, and her hands are only one rung above them, and the train is picking up speed so quickly now, she can’t believe the velocity, but her body, all four of her limbs are attached to the train now, and she’s curled there at the bottom of the ladder like a bug, and she allows herself one tiny sob of relief before she uncurls herself and, pushing up from the bottom rung, begins to climb. When she gets to the top she reaches for Luca, and she straps them down quickly with the belts, and then she holds him and cries quietly into his hair until her heart begins to calm.

Lydia wants to keep Luca and the sisters to herself, to set their little group apart from the others as a unit. But the men are so friendly, so eager to help. Too eager, she worries. There aren’t many women on La Bestia, and very few children, so Lydia feels noticed by every single man they see. She’s aware that she and her companions represent something to these men. They look like home. Or they look like salvation. Or they look like prey. To an halcón they might look like reward money. And even if none of that were true, the two sisters cause a stir wherever they go, just by the very presence of their faces. Lydia is distracted by these observations, which is why, despite her constant watchfulness, she doesn’t immediately notice the boy near the other end of their train car watching her.

But Luca does. And he remembers. And in the act of remembering, he experiences a strange, incongruous moment of satisfaction, a brief wash of endorphins he’s never noticed before, but that his brain has been performing all his life, a slight chemical self-congratulatory pleasure for achieving this task of almost perfect recall: Luca has seen that face before. He recognizes that boy, and so even before the tattoo is visible from where the boy is sitting cross-legged at the other end of the train car, Luca recollects it – the bloody sickle creeping out of the sock. The three drops of bloodred ink dripping from the blade. Luca shivers beneath the hot sun. The boy is staring at Mami. And then, as Luca watches him, he retrieves a phone from his pocket, scrolls around a little bit, and then looks back at Mami again. Then he puts it in his pocket. Luca is paralyzed by fear. A moment passes before he can give wind to his voice.

‘Mami,’ he says simply, and he thinks he says it quite calmly, though his body, still strapped to the top of that train, feels like a wild flap of panic. Mami leans in but not close enough. He flutters his hand so she understands. Come here. Get closer. Do it quickly. Lydia scoots closer to him.

‘Mami, I recognize someone.’

These words alone are enough to send a slice of cold down Lydia’s spine. ‘Okay,’ she says, willing her brain to slow down. Okay. ‘Who is it?’ Her arms and legs feel like they’ve turned to liquid, but the fingers of one hand stay tightly curled around the grating. The other hand goes automatically to the chain at her neck. She slips her index finger inside Sebastián’s wedding ring.

‘Don’t look,’ Luca says. ‘He’s staring at you, at us.’

Lydia’s mantra comes heroically crashing through her consciousness, penetrating the violent static of this new information. Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think, her brain tells her. ‘Okay,’ she repeats. ‘Who?’

Luca leans so his lips graze the top of her ear. ‘The boy from the first Casa del Migrante at Huehuetoca.’

Lydia breathes deeply. Okay. Some boy they crossed paths with along the way. She feels relief in the jellylike roll of her shoulders. ‘Oh, Luca,’ she says. And she wants to reprimand him for scaring her to death, but how is he supposed to know what may or may not provoke a stampede of dread in the confusing wasteland of their new life? So she also wants to laugh, to kiss him, to tell him not to worry so much. She puts her arm around him. ‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘It’s okay.’

‘Don’t you remember, that really bad kid – that cholo who got kicked out of the casa for bothering that girl? He did something bad to her?’

Yes, she remembers. Oh shit. The women at breakfast claimed he was a sicario.

Only moments ago, Lydia had dared to feel comforted by their unlikely progress. She’d allowed herself to indulge in the new fear of anonymous, indiscriminate threats. Now here is some sicario from God-knows-what cartel, staring her down from a hundred yards away. She looks at the other migrants seated around them. Any one of them could be a narco. Any one of them could be a Jardinero. She folds herself over her legs so her face is nearly touching the grating in front of her, or rather, her body does this without her mind instructing it to. An instinct to hide herself, to melt into the scenery, to disappear. Luca leans down, too.

‘There’s something else,’ he says, because he knows, although he doesn’t understand how he knows it or what it means, that there’s something deeply unsettling about the tattoo.

‘What is it?’ Lydia is ready for this information, whatever it is. She opens the door to it.

‘A tattoo. He has a tattoo.’

Her machete is strapped to her shin beneath her pant leg. She can feel the cinch of the holster, the way it presses into her skin. She whispers to Luca. ‘What sort of tattoo?’

‘Like a big, curved knife, Mami,’ he says. ‘With three drops of blood.’

Lydia’s mouth goes dry, her fingers cold. Her body trembles from the inside out, core to tip, beginning in her lungs. But to Luca, her face looks calm and impassive.

‘Like a sickle?’ She needs, but does not want, clarity. ‘Like this?’ She traces the shape of it on the palm of his hand with her finger.

Luca nods.

‘Thank you for telling me, mijo,’ she says. ‘You did the right thing. Good boy.’ She touches his ear.

Before Lydia can formulate a plan, before she can absorb this information, indeed, before she can even turn her face in the direction Luca has indicated to glimpse the boy with the Jardinero tattoo, there’s a collective shriek and terrible commotion two cars up. They turn instinctively in the direction of the clamor. Everyone holds their breath and then almost immediately, with a long hoot of its whistle, the train enters a tunnel and all is in darkness.

‘Mami!’ Luca screams.

‘I’m here.’ Lydia gropes for his hand. ‘I’m here, mijo.’

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know, mijo.’

‘I’m scared.’

‘I know, mijo, it’s okay.’

She reaches through the blackness and touches the soft fuzz at the back of his head. The tunnel is a short one, and soon they blast out into daylight again, and the sisters, who’d been dozing in a small heap until the commotion, sit up and blink rapidly at each other. A weary Morse code.

‘What happened?’ Soledad asks.

There’s still a lot of yelling coming from the car two ahead of theirs, and a couple of voices begin to emerge from the fray, louder than the others. One man is wailing, ¡Hermano, hermano, hermano! And then he stands up on top of the train, and his companions grab him and pull him back down, and then a moment later the scene repeats itself. He seems determined to jump off, and now the story is traveling back along the train until it gets to the cluster of men seated in front of the sisters. One young man turns to share it.

‘His brother fell off.’

Soledad gasps and crosses herself. ‘Dios mío, how?’ she asks.

The man points back at the tunnel they just passed through. ‘Didn’t see the tunnel. Was sitting up too tall on his knees, and bang. He hit his head on the top of the tunnel and got knocked right off.’

Soledad’s face is a twist of horrified compassion. She leans past the young man because she can see now, beyond him, that the wailing brother is back on his feet a third time. The words fly out of her mouth by instinct, her hand darts toward him. ‘Stop him!’ she screams. ‘Grab him!’

But it’s too late. The man has jumped. He’s a distorted silhouette of arched arms and legs against the bleary yellow of the late-morning sky. His shadow makes the shape of grief as he hurtles toward the earth.

‘Too far, it’s too far.’ Soledad’s voice is still working independently of her body. ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’

Their train car is already passing where the jumper has landed. His body rolls down the steep embankment and away. Luca counts his arms and legs: one, two, three, four. He counts them again to make sure. He still has all four, but they don’t seem to be working. His body comes to a stop in a thicket of weeds, and the train storms on without him. Without his brother.

Soledad is almost catatonic after watching the man jump, as if the incident loosened the fragile scab of her own suffering. She lies down again, and Rebeca pulls her sister’s head into her lap. She strokes Soledad’s long, black hair back away from her forehead, and quietly sings a song in a language Lydia has never heard before. Soledad stays there unblinking, but soon her expression softens, her dark eyebrows turn slack, and her lids flutter closed. She drifts into some state akin to sleep.

Lydia doesn’t stare at the boy at the other end of the freight car, but she’s hyperaware now of his attention. He sits with his legs outstretched and his weight leaned back on his propped hands, and he’s watching them. Lydia does recognize him now, but only because Luca mentioned it. He’s wearing oversize red shorts and a huge white T-shirt. Over that, the giant red-and-black tank top jersey of some professional basketball team, and big diamond earrings in both ears. The jewelry is probably fake, but it does the trick of making him look like a hip-hop star, which is exactly the look he was hoping to achieve when he shaved those two tiny pinstripes into his right eyebrow.

Lydia doesn’t turn her head. With the precision of a huntress, she can sense his movements with her peripheral vision – when he lifts his flat-brimmed black baseball cap to scratch beneath it, when he leans slightly over the edge of the train car to spit, when he unscrews the cap from his water bottle to take a drink. She wonders if he can feel her anxiety, if her studied nonchalance is biologically ineffective, if her body is shooting off alarm pheromones he can detect. A primal consciousness has sprung up between them. So she’s aware, too, of the ways her own body responds when, on a long stretch of straight, open track, he lifts himself up from his position and moves toward them. Lydia’s heartbeat increases, her pupils dilate, her grip on Luca tightens, indeed all her muscles either constrict or twitch, and her skin prickles with goose bumps. Her palms grow slick and clammy. She lets go of Luca and gropes at the machete strapped to her lower leg beneath her pants.

Everyone watches the young man pick his way gingerly past the groups of migrants on the train top. Everyone always watches when someone is on the move – they look for signs of drunkenness or erratic behavior. They look for the gleam of a concealed blade. They’re especially alert to this young man because it’s so obvious what he is. They lean away from him as he passes.

‘You looking for the café car, amigo?’ an older man in a straw hat asks him. The nearby migrants laugh but it’s a suspicious laughter. Why is he alone? Where does he think he’s going?

‘Just stretching my legs,’ the young man answers.

They keep an eye on his tattoo after he passes, their friendliness a tinny facade. Most migrants understand the significance of those three drops of tattooed blood: one for each kill.

Lydia pulls the machete from its small holster and draws it out from beneath her pant leg as the boy approaches. She presses the button to engage the blade and feels gratified by its appearance. Luca watches her silently as she conceals it beneath her sleeve. Some small flash of instinct advises Lydia to ditch the blade and watch instead for a passing bush, for some soft landing point, and then to pitch her son from the train as soon as she spots a place where he might survive the fall. She reaches over and briefly grabs his leg to make sure her body doesn’t wildly obey that foolish impulse. She presses gravity onto his folded legs and feels grateful for the insurance of the canvas belt. The boy’s shadow is upon them. Lydia doesn’t look up.

‘Yo, I think I know you,’ he says.

He puts his body down in the very small space between Lydia and the sisters. He squeezes in there, and if her body could tense up any further, it would. She can feel Rebeca trying to catch her eye, but she doesn’t look at the girl, because she doesn’t want to draw her into whatever this is. Rebeca reshuffles her body, making room for the newcomer, and meanwhile, Lydia’s brain has been so busy telling her to run that it failed to come up with a suitable plan for this moment, so she says the first words that show up in her mouth.

‘I didn’t think so, but my son recognized you from back the road a way – outside Mexico City.’ She does not say Huehuetoca in case the memory of his eviction from that place provokes his anger. She holds her body like a cocked gun.

‘¿Ah, sí?’ He leans over to smile at Luca, which confuses Lydia. She can’t understand the chitchat. If he’s a sicario, then why is he plopped down here shooting the breeze? And where is his weapon inside all that abundant clothing? ‘Wuddup, güey?’ he says to Luca. ‘Cool hat.’ He stretches to touch the brim of Papi’s red baseball cap, but Luca moves out of his reach. ‘Anyway, I’m Lorenzo,’ he says, putting his hand out to Lydia. She’s never been more reluctant to shake someone’s hand, but she shakes it lightly and retracts herself quickly, replacing her grip on the machete beneath her sleeve. ‘And you are?’

He can’t be any older than eighteen, twenty, Lydia thinks. How is it that he speaks like this, as if she owes him her name? ‘Araceli.’ She expels the fake name on her breath like a surfer riding a dying tide.

Lorenzo shakes his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

Lydia bites the inside of her mouth. If she ever doubted herself capable of stabbing another human being, that uncertainty is no more. ‘Pardon me?’

‘You’re not Araceli.’

The only response she can manage is a soft snorting noise. Luca leans against her. When Lorenzo reaches into his pocket, she coils her body so tightly she begins to shake. She will thrust the blade into his neck. But no. She’s in a bad position; there’s no leverage. Would she be able to kill him? Or would she only injure him, incite him to repay her failed violence? It would be better to jump. To curl around Luca like a shell so at least he would survive this moment. The leap from the speeding train. But could Luca survive whatever follows that, once she’s gone? Lydia will get only one opportunity to sacrifice herself – then Luca’s on his own forever. Her body twitches with indecision. She turns the handle of the concealed machete, cold against her palm. But then Lorenzo’s hand emerges from his pocket with only a cell phone. No pistol, no blade. He clicks the thing to life and scrolls through the pictures.

Lydia’s breath shudders through her.

‘That’s you, right?’ He turns the phone so she can see. It’s a selfie Javier took of the two of them together at the bookstore. They’re on opposite sides of the counter, both leaning across, their foreheads touching at the temple. Lydia looks directly at the camera, but Javier’s face is turned slightly in, his eyes pulled toward her. Lydia remembers the day he took it, how he told her that Marta had instructed him thoroughly in the art of the selfie, how hard they had laughed together.

‘Lydia Quixano Pérez, right?’ the boy beside her says.

She tucks her lips inside her mouth and twists her neck once, but there’s nothing even marginally convincing in the gesture. Lorenzo holds the phone up beside her face to check her features against the likeness.

‘Yep yep. Good-looking folks,’ he says. And then, in a voice that sounds uncannily sincere, ‘I’m sorry about your family.’

What passes for silence on the train is the slow-motion roar of the engine hauling countless tons of chugging, clacking steel along the track behind it. The wheels shriek in their tracks, metal whines against metal, the couplers between the cars knuckle and grind and squeal. Several beats of that kind of silence pass before Lydia finds her voice.

‘What do you want?’

Lorenzo powers the phone off and puts it back in his pocket. ‘What do I want? Shoot.’ He whistles. ‘Same things as anybody, I guess. Nice house, a little bling, a good-lookin’ girl.’ He turns and smiles at Rebeca, who’s still sitting quite close to them, but doesn’t seem to be listening. She doesn’t meet his gaze, and Lydia doubts she can hear their conversation over the noise of the train. On her lap, Soledad’s eyes are still closed. Lorenzo examines his nails, looking for one to bite, while Lydia watches.

‘What do you want from me?’ she clarifies.

He finds a tiny, unassaulted white corner of fingernail and rips it off with his teeth. He spits it over the edge. ‘Nothin’.’ He shrugs. ‘Just being neighborly.’

‘Where did you get that picture?’ Lydia scrunches up her nose and uses her chin to point in the direction of the phone in his pocket.

‘Mami, I hate to tell you,’ he says. ‘Everybody in Guerrero got that picture.’

Lydia sucks in a breath. It’s not exactly news, but it does validate her fear. ‘For what purpose?’ She wants absolute clarity.

Lorenzo smirks at her sideways. ‘You for real?’

‘I need to know what we’re up against.’

Lorenzo pauses. Then shrugs. ‘Word was to bring you in.’

This is a surprise. Maybe only Hollywood gangsters say things like dead or alive, but that was what she’d expected. She tries to push this information into her internal hard drive, but it doesn’t compute. ‘Not to kill me?’ she asks. ‘To kill us?’

Lorenzo sighs. This isn’t how this conversation was supposed to go. She’s not supposed to be the one asking the questions. ‘Güey, I said too much already. I’m not trying to get myself killed, too.’

Lydia shifts uncomfortably beside him, the handle of the machete growing sweaty in her hand. ‘So that’s why you’re here? To bring us in?’

Maybe Javier wants only to kill them himself, to witness her suffering. She and Luca will not go with this boy. She will kill him if she has to; she’ll do it in front of Luca if she must.

‘Nah,’ Lorenzo says. ‘I left all that behind me in Guerrero.’ He waves his arm toward the south.

Lydia does not loosen her grip on the machete. ‘Okay.’

‘De verdad, new leaf.’ He grins. ‘I’m out.’

She feels unqualified to assess this claim. She makes no response.

‘How’d you get outta Acapulco, though?’ Lorenzo asks after a moment. ‘Everybody was looking for you. You got magic powers or something? You some kind of santera? ¿Una bruja?’

Lydia surprises herself with a laugh, but it’s only a husk of a sound. ‘I suppose fear has certain magical properties.’ She’ll never know how narrow their escape really was, that two of Javier’s men opened the door to their room at the Hotel Duquesa Imperial just as she and Luca were entering the lobby of the hotel next door.

‘So where you heading to now?’ Lorenzo asks.

‘I don’t know,’ she lies. ‘We haven’t really decided.’

Lorenzo pulls his knees up so his baggy shorts sag beneath. He gathers his arms around his legs. ‘I’m going to LA,’ he says. ‘I got a cousin out there in Hollywood, doing his thing.’

‘As good a place as any,’ she says.

And then the train silence returns, and in that thundering quiet, she wonders: Why? If he was well connected in Los Jardineros, if he was making enough money to afford those expensive sneakers and that decent cell phone? If he was okay with earning that first drop of tattooed blood, and the second, and the third, then what made him leave Guerrero? There are infinite possible answers, she knows. Perhaps he disliked murdering. Perhaps he felt that the acts of violence he committed had some undesirable effect on him. Perhaps he had nightmares, the faces of the people he’d killed floating up before him whenever he closed his eyes. Maybe he was haunted, hunted, ragged in his soul. Or maybe the precise opposite was true. Perhaps he was so entirely without conscience that he’d been unable, even, to adhere to whatever deformed excuse for a moral code Los Jardineros exercised. Maybe he raped the wrong woman. Or stole money from one of his jefes. Or maybe he murdered so gleefully that his depravity turned him into a liability. Maybe he’s running, too. Or maybe none of these things are true. Perhaps he hasn’t left Los Jardineros at all, and he really is here only for her.

Whatever the case, Lydia feels shriveled by Lorenzo’s presence. He’s a menace, sitting beside her, and now the threat feels urgent again. It’s all around her. She breathes it, and it’s the same as ever: senseless, confusing, categorically terrifying. Javier feels as close as the day she first confronted him in the bookshop. The Russian nesting dolls. He’d reached for her hand. She can feel his fingers pressing into the veins at her wrist. She can hear that sicario urinating into the toilet on the other side of Abuela’s green-tiled wall.

Lydia wishes this boy would move away from them. Nine days and 426 miles from their escape, they haven’t made any headway at all.