American Dirt

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

All that’s left of Lydia and Sebastián’s life savings is the paltry sum el comandante returned to Lydia’s wallet after he collected the price for her and Luca. It’s a total of 4,941 pesos, or around $243. In regular life, that kind of money is substantial. It would buy many weeks’ worth of groceries. It would go toward rent or doctors’ bills or putting gas in the Beetle. But now the amount feels negligible. They have nothing. If they get to el norte, they will have to start from scratch. Already they need new shoes; Luca’s are beginning to run thin in the soles, Abuela’s gold lamé sneakers are peeling apart at the toe. The $243 minus some new shoes – it’s not enough. Lydia feels destitute. But thank God they still have her mother’s money in the bank, enough to pay a coyote to help them cross. That’s all she can think about for now.

When at last the guard opens the door and they stagger out of captivity, Lydia’s not thinking about the money anyway. The guard stays in her mind, his searching expression, his groping for the memory of her face. She knows he’s back there still, that he could remember her at any moment: yes, Dios mío, that’s her, the one who belongs to Los Jardineros.

They run. They don’t know where they are, how far they are from the train or the city. They’ve emerged from a large warehouse in a rural landscape and they don’t hear any distant rumble of locomotive or car engine. They run toward the leftover glow in the sky, pink fading to purple where the sun recently descended, due west over the uneven ground, through ruts and ditches and holes burrowed by unseen animals, across rocks and roots and twisted clumps of plant life, hoping to intercept a road that runs from south to north. The pain in Lydia’s ankle asserts itself only when she flexes her foot, so she tries to keep it straight. Both girls limp, too, but Soledad is like a ball of fire, and she batters herself against the pain while she runs. Luca encourages all of them like a breathless cheerleader as they go.

‘Come on, Rebeca, you can do it. Keep up, Mami, let’s go.’

Soledad pushes ahead. She would run all the way to el norte. When they come to a road, they pause. No cars in sight, the twilight still pink around them. Soledad stands close to Lydia. She reaches for Lydia’s hand.

‘Thank you.’ She trembles.

Lydia is beset by guilt. She’d been ready to leave them there. ‘It was Luca,’ she says.

Soledad grabs the top of Luca’s hair. She bends down and looks into his face. ‘You saved our lives. You know that? You and your mami.’ She doesn’t let go of Lydia’s hand.

Luca smiles, and Rebeca begins to cry, a tight, high-pitched sound that startles him. Her face is a twist of distress and her breath crashes out of her between sharp hums. Her jeans are covered in the dead man’s blood mixed with some of her own, and the button has been ripped off the fly, so they no longer stay up. Lydia retrieves one of the belts from her backpack and laces it through the girl’s belt loops for her. Rebeca winces and shakes but endures Lydia’s kindness. She fastens the buckle herself. Soledad stands behind and twists her sister’s black hair into a ponytail, revealing a dark purple bruise on her neck. She touches the spot softly with her finger. Rebeca turns to her, and the girls embrace. Rebeca shudders and cries and they all wait close together until she’s able to walk again. She folds her arms in front of her because her bra is gone.

They turn north to follow the road, and the light fades from purple to indigo to blue, and by the time they pass the outskirts of a village, they’re walking in darkness. Lydia watches over her shoulder the whole time, waiting for the approach of a distant light, a distant gunshot. Her exhaustion is no match for her fear, and she keeps pushing ahead as quickly as they can go. They’re all very thirsty because they finished whatever water they had with them hours ago, and there’s no shop here, no river or stream. It seems too dangerous to venture into the tiny village. They’re not yet far enough away from the warehouse, those men. They don’t want to reveal themselves. But they haven’t eaten today, and they are hungry. Despite their adrenaline, they weaken as they go. Occasionally the headlights of a car approach, and they dart away from the road to hold still against whatever cover they can find. They know without speaking that this new fear is a burden they’re all carrying together, this sense that they haven’t really escaped, that they’re not safe. Any one of those cars could be carrying the men who abducted them earlier. Those men, with or without the knowledge of their comandante, may decide to come after them, to repeat and repeat and repeat the things they did to Rebeca and Soledad in the back of their truck earlier. They may decide to drag Lydia into the trunk of a car by her hair, to rip Luca from her arms, to shoot him on the side of the road and then drive her through the night back to Acapulco, to Javier. He’s waiting for her there.

At length they begin to sense the ragged glow of a town to the north. They pass a juncture, and the traffic becomes steadier. They can no longer flee from the road each time a car passes because there are too many.

‘We’ll get water,’ Lydia says. ‘Soon there will be a place. Someone will give us water.’ There is no real indication of how true this might be, but she says it because she needs it, and it’s encouragement enough for the others to quicken their pace. The land is flat, and the lights of the town soon come into view. A car passes them, slows down ahead, pulls onto the shoulder, and stops. Lydia puts a hand out to stop Luca from walking any farther. Rebeca and Soledad both freeze. They draw their bodies close together. The car reverses some way toward them, and the girls run from the road, but there’s nowhere for them to go. Lydia stands her ground. She leans down automatically to retrieve her machete from its holster, forgetting that it’s gone now. She curses mildly under her breath – $243 minus two pairs of shoes and a new machete. She puts Luca behind her. The door on the driver’s side opens, and a man steps out. He’s wearing cowboy boots, jeans, a button-up shirt. He stays beside his car, doesn’t attempt to approach them.

‘Are you okay?’ he calls into the darkness.

‘Fine,’ Lydia answers.

‘Migrants?’

Lydia does not respond.

‘We see many migrants on this road at night, some in very poor condition,’ the man explains. ‘And no one knows where they’re coming from. You’re well off the migrant trail here. How did you come to be in this neighborhood?’

Lydia tightens her lips, but he continues talking, undeterred by their reticence to speak to him.

‘I’m a doctor,’ he says. ‘I have a clinic, not far. If you want, I can take you to safety.’

Soledad snorts, but Rebeca squeezes her arm. ‘It’s not funny.’

Soledad dissolves into full-on hysterics.

‘Is something wrong?’ the man asks.

‘Safety!’ Soledad howls with laughter.

Luca presses in beside his mami. ‘Why is she laughing, Mami? What’s wrong with her?’

‘Sh,’ Mami says. ‘She has been through so much. Sometimes people break down for a minute. She will come back to herself, mijo.’

They watch as the man walks to the trunk of his car and opens it. Lydia grips Luca’s neck and takes two steps back, but when the man reaches into the trunk, he retrieves only a gallon jug of water. He sets it on the side of the road.

‘Listen, I’ll leave this here for you,’ he says. ‘I might have…’ He interrupts himself and turns back into the trunk. ‘I thought I had some cookies here, too, but my son must have eaten them. I’ll leave the water.’ He’s holding his keys in his hand, and Luca can hear them clink against one another. ‘But if any of you need medical attention, I may be able to help. If you are hungry, I can get you some food.’

Lydia peers through the darkness at the sisters off the side of the road. Her eyes have adjusted to the light so she can make out their faces but can’t read their expressions.

‘How far is it to town?’ Soledad asks.

‘Not far,’ the doctor says. ‘Another two or three miles. A half hour’s walk will get you to the edge of the city.’

‘What city is it?’ This is Luca. The word city has excited him, as it indicates a place larger than he expected.

‘Navolato,’ the doctor says. ‘About twenty miles west of Culiacán.’

Luca closes his eyes to look at the map in his mind. He can see Navolato there, a small dot next to Culiacán’s large dot, but he hasn’t stored any information about this place. Twenty miles, Lydia thinks. How in God’s name will we get back to the train? The sisters are in no condition to walk much farther.

‘Are there migrant services in Navolato?’ Lydia asks.

‘No,’ the man says. ‘I don’t think so. But there’s a church. They always help.’

‘What about in Culiacán? Are there migrant services there?’

‘Maybe. I’m not sure.’

Lydia allows a big gust of a breath to billow out of her. The surge of stunned gratitude she experienced when all four of them emerged from that warehouse, alive and together, is still with her, but it’s beginning to fade behind exhaustion and lingering fear.

‘Are you hungry?’ the man asks.

‘Yes,’ Luca says.

‘Do you want a ride?’

Again, Lydia looks to the sisters.

‘Nope,’ Soledad says.

Lydia’s own disappointment, her eagerness to trust this man, surprises her, but she wants trace evidence of goodness in the world. She needs a glimmer. She can see only the outline of the man’s body ahead, lit by the peripheral glow of his car, the headlights pointing the opposite direction behind him.

‘Thank you anyway,’ Lydia says.

She ventures a few steps toward him, and Luca trots ahead. The jug of water sits near the back bumper, close to the man’s feet. Luca pries the cap off the jug and lifts it, but it’s too heavy for him and it sloshes awkwardly. The man helps. He holds the jug steady while Luca drinks and drinks. Luca turns his face away to breathe before going back for another long drink. Lydia stands behind him and waits for him to finish. She can hear the sisters approaching behind her, but they hang back in the shadows.

‘Listen, I don’t want to press you,’ the doctor says. ‘But it’s not safe for you to be out on this road at night. There’s a lot of activity in this area. There have been some terrible stories. Maybe you already know.’

Soledad snorts again, but this time it’s a solitary sound. She can no longer locate what was funny about it before. Concern creases the doctor’s face. A miniflashlight dangles from his key chain, and this he clicks on. He turns the small beam toward the girls’ legs to confirm what he thought he could see or smell there in the darkness: a significant amount of blood. And not only on Rebeca’s jeans, Lydia can see now. Soledad’s are covered as well, and the blood there isn’t dry. Luca is still drinking. The doctor clicks off the flashlight.

‘Please,’ he says. ‘Won’t you let me help you?’

Soledad crosses her arms. Rebeca makes her jaw into the shape of a square. It’s Luca who speaks up.

‘How do we know you’re really a doctor?’

‘Ah.’ The man puts a finger in the air, then retrieves a wallet from his back pocket. There’s an identification card there. The man’s picture. It says ‘Doctor Ricardo Montañero-Alcán’. Luca breathes on it before handing it back.

‘That doesn’t prove anything,’ Soledad observes. ‘You can be a doctor and still be a narco, too. You can be a doctor, a teacher, a priest. You can be a federal police officer and still murder people.’

The doctor nods, slipping the wallet back into the pocket of his jeans. ‘It’s true,’ he concedes.

‘And why do you want to help us anyway?’ Soledad asks.

The man touches the gold crucifix around his neck. ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink.’

Lydia automatically blesses herself. ‘A stranger and you welcomed me.’ She completes the line of scripture, passing the water jug to Rebeca, who drinks only a little before passing it to Soledad.

‘We should go with him,’ Luca declares.

The man lets Soledad scroll through his phone first. He shows her his Facebook page, photographs of his wife and children. She’s so hungry, so depleted. She relents.

The doctor wants to take them to his clinic, but they refuse, so he drives them into the city, to a poorly whitewashed two-story building instead, with a shop on the bottom floor and bars on the windows above. Large red letters proclaim the building to be the Techorojo Motel. The shop beneath has a red awning and an open-air counter where two young women wear smock-aprons and eye the approaching patrons with considerable suspicion. Behind them are shiny tinfoil snacks and bottled soft drinks in neon colors. There’s also a grill, the aroma of cooking meat, and the shallow sound of a cheap radio playing música norteña, heavy on the accordion. The doctor buys them food and pays for their room.

‘If you want a ride to Culiacán tomorrow, I can come back in the morning,’ he says, and then he’s gone before they even have time to thank him.

After they’ve eaten and locked themselves inside their tiny room, after they’ve managed to lug the wide, heavy nightstand across the carpet and wedge it beneath the doorknob for extra security, Lydia collects everyone’s pants. The room does not have a bathroom, but there is, oddly, a toilet in one corner, and a yellow sink beside it. The water that emerges from the faucet of that sink is the color of sand, but Lydia doesn’t mind because the discoloration serves to camouflage the colors she has to wash out of those jeans. Luca’s, Rebeca’s, and Soledad’s. She uses the cracked bar of soap in the dish, and she scrubs and scrubs until finally the water she wrings from the denim returns to its original murky dun color.

By the time she’s finished, Luca is snoring softly on one of the room’s two single beds, and the sisters, too, are already asleep, curled up together. Soledad cradles her sister’s head in her arms, and their hair is fanned out in one twisted, black wave across their shared pillow. Lydia rummages through her pack for her toothbrush, and rations a smear of paste onto the bristles. She considers the brown water from the tap before sticking the toothbrush under there and wetting it. At home, there was a whole routine before she got into bed. It could take twenty minutes some nights. Cold cream, toner, moisturizer, floss, toothpaste, mouthwash, lip balm. Some nights tweezers, too, or clippers or nail files. Of course, the occasional exfoliant or mask. Hand cream. Fluffy socks if her feet were chilly. Sebastián would whisper-call from the bedroom, trying not to wake Luca in his impatience, ‘Madre de Dios, wife, the Eiffel Tower was built faster!’ But when she was finished, he’d always fold back the covers to invite her in. He’d drape them over her when she was settled, along with the top half of himself. His breath was clean when he kissed her.

Lydia avoids her reflection in the harsh yellow light of the rusty mirror. She spits into the sink and rinses her mouth. She splashes murky water over her face and neck and dries herself off with the shirt she wore for the last two days. When she finally slips into bed beside Luca, before she can even invoke her don’t think mantra, exhaustion descends like anesthesia and blots out everything else. They sleep.

Some hours later and well before dawn, Rebeca wakens Lydia from a black sleep.

‘It’s Soledad,’ Rebeca whispers to Lydia. ‘Something’s wrong with her.’

Lydia disentangles herself from Luca, who smacks his lips in his sleep, and then rolls tighter into a ball facing the wall. A good deal of light comes in through the room’s only window, which has an insufficient curtain and is positioned beneath an overzealous streetlamp. Lydia moves to the other twin bed, where Soledad sits rocking over her legs and clutching her stomach.

‘Soledad? Are you okay?’

She clenches her jaw and rocks her body forward. ‘Just bad cramps.’

Lydia looks up at Rebeca, whose face is a cloud of worry. ‘Just sit with Luca,’ Lydia says. ‘Make sure he stays asleep.’

Rebeca sits at the foot of Luca’s bed.

‘Can you stand?’ Lydia asks.

Soledad gathers her strength and then rocks herself onto her feet. There’s a dark stain on the mattress beneath her and the mineral scent of blood. Lydia grips her under the elbow and steers her around the bed toward the corner of the room where the plumbing is. She positions the flimsy curtain to give Soledad as much privacy as possible while she miscarries her baby.

Good to his word, the doctor returns in the morning and drives them to Culiacán. The girls’ jeans are still damp and stiff from Lydia’s scrubbing, but they wear them anyway, and the sun isn’t long drying them. It eats the moisture from their clothes and their hair and skin. Rebeca moves a little easier and Soledad with a little more difficulty than yesterday. Lydia wants to buy a packet of sanitary napkins for Soledad, but they’re expensive, so she puts her embarrassment away and asks the doctor, who, being a doctor, thinks nothing of the request and complies without hesitation. He also buys them breakfast and a tube of sunscreen, which he urges them to use, and for Luca, a comic book. When he takes his leave, he does so abruptly, to release them from the effort of gratitude.

Lydia cannot wait to get back on the train, to get away from the nightmarish memories of this place, to be traveling north at high speed. She’s terrified as they walk the tracks through the city that they will be spotted, that the guard from yesterday will be out driving to work – Do these men commute to work? Is that what they call it? Do they kiss their wives and children goodbye each morning and then climb into the family sedan and set out for a day of raping and extortion, and then return home exhausted in the evenings and hungry for their pot roast? – and he’ll see her, he’ll see the four of them walking north along the tracks, and the information will snap into place, and he’ll remember: her face smiling beside Javier’s in that picture. She pushes Luca gently in the back, ushers him into a faster pace. They cross over a muddy river on a skeletal railway bridge, and discover a train yard where the tracks are lined on one side with giant boulders. A few clusters of migrants wait there, surrounded by the dirty colors of litter and debris, mud and weeds. There’s a boy among them, slightly older than Luca, but certainly younger than Rebeca. He stands while the other migrants sit hunching their shoulders against him. His eyes are unfocused and his posture is the shape of a question mark. His hands float unsteadily in front of him, and he sways strangely on his curved legs.

‘Mami, what’s wrong with him?’ Luca asks.

He’s the most disturbing child Luca has ever seen. He seems unaware of them, unaware of anything. Mami shakes her head, but Soledad provides a one-word answer: drogas. They move quickly past the boy, away from the cluster of migrants he seems to be orbiting. In fact they are nearly ready to quit the railway yard altogether when three well-dressed young women appear at a crossing ahead on the tracks. They wave their arms overhead and call out, ‘Hermanos, ¡tenemos comida!’ The men stand up from their clusters, pat the dust from their jeans, and gather for the offer of food. One of the three women reads loudly from the Bible while the other two hand out tamales and atole. Luca’s not hungry because, thanks to the doctor, they already had breakfast, but he’s learned never to turn down a gift of calories. They eat gratefully, and when the women begin packing up their pots and gathering the spent rubbish, Lydia wonders if they should leave this place, too. It feels squalid and dangerous, but there’s a rumor that one of the trains parked here is being loaded, that soon it will journey north. Men are already climbing the ladders and spreading their packs out on top of the train. The railway workers watch and make no move to stop them. It seems so senseless and arbitrary, the way the government clears migrants from the trains in some places, spending millions of pesos and dollars to build those track-fences in Oaxaca and Chiapas and Mexico state, all while turning a blind eye in other locations. There’s even a policía municipal parked just there on the corner, watching the migrants board. He sips coffee from a paper cup. It feels almost like a trap, but Lydia’s too grateful to flex her suspicion.

The sisters’ bodies are battered and weakened, especially Soledad’s, from the miscarriage. Being able to board while the train is stopped feels like luck, so they climb up gingerly, and Lydia can still get a whiff of blood from Soledad on the ladder above her. They move back along the top of the train until they come to a car where there’s room for all four of them to be comfortable. Just as they’re setting down, just as Lydia is pulling the canvas belts from her pack, a little girl peeks her head up over the edge of the train car. She clambers up quickly and approaches Soledad without hesitation. The girl is younger than Luca, perhaps six years old, and she’s alone. Her black hair is cut short and shiny, and she wears jeans and brown leather boots. She hunkers down very close to Soledad, who’s startled by the girl’s boldness, the intimacy of her posture. She speaks rapidly, her upturned face very close to Soledad’s. Soledad leans away from her.

‘Do you need work?’ the girl asks quickly. ‘My tía has a restaurant here and she needs a waitress. Do you want a job?’ The girl puts her hand on Soledad’s arm, and tugs at her. ‘Come on, quick. Come with me, I’ll show you the place.’ She pulls at Soledad’s elbow, and Soledad is so taken aback that she nearly rises to follow the child. She knows she shouldn’t, that the girl is presumptuous, almost bullying. But there’s a conflict between Soledad’s mind and her body, because her mind knows to mistrust this pushy little girl, but her body is biologically susceptible to the child’s cuteness, to the beautiful innocence of her young face. Soledad feels momentarily distended between those two truths, but the spell is quickly broken because el policía municipal has gotten out of his car now, and is standing in a patch of mud beneath the train, still carrying his paper cup of coffee. He yells up to the little girl.

‘Ximenita, leave those people alone! Get down from there.’

The little girl snaps her head in his direction and bolts. She drops Soledad’s arm and flings herself over the edge of the freight car and back down the ladder. She reappears a moment later in the distance, dashing away among the boulders and debris.

El policía calls after her. ‘Tell your papi I said no víctimas for you today!’

Soledad is eager for the hiss of the disengaged brakes and the rumble of the locomotive. When at last they begin to move, instead of happiness or relief, they all feel a tentative, miniature suspension of dread.

As they travel, Luca pays attention to the signs so he can check off familiar place-names on his mind-map, or add new dots for unfamiliar ones: Guamúchil, Bamoa, Los Mochis, check, check, check. Roughly three hours after pulling out of Culiacán, in the middle of nowhere, they come to a place where other tracks meet the ones they’re traveling on, and then there are more and more tracks, until the rails are at least a dozen wide, and when the train slows down, Luca can see there are many migrants gathered here waiting, and again, no fence, no policías. Nothing at all to prevent the whole crowd of them from boarding La Bestia. The train stops, and easily a hundred men get on while the train sits idling, but then the locomotive cuts its engine, and the workers disembark and scatter to cars parked in a nearby lot, and everyone atop the train groans and curses. La Bestia doesn’t move again for three nights.