American Dirt

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The sisters call the coyote from a pay phone. They feel like professional telephone users now, and they make the call without Luca’s assistance. Soledad tells the coyote they’ve arrived in Nogales, and they have three more people now who want to join their crossing.

‘Can they walk?’ he asks. ‘This is the no-frills package. They have to be in good shape.’

‘Yeah,’ Soledad assures him. ‘They’re good.’

‘Where are you now?’

Soledad presses the receiver to her ear and looks around. ‘I don’t know, we’re right by the border,’ she says. ‘By the train tracks.’

‘You can see the American flag there, on that big white building?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yeah, I know where you are.’

The coyote tells her to meet him at a plaza a couple blocks away. He’ll be there within the hour. She’s excited when she hangs up the phone. She tells Lydia and the boys the news.

‘He says it’s good if you come. We have to go meet him now.’

They want to call Papi first, and they try three times, but it’s an international call and they don’t understand all the codes, so they finally have to enlist Luca’s help. It turns out they don’t have enough money anyway, so they settle on a prayer instead.

‘He’ll be okay,’ Rebeca insists. If she says it enough times, she can maybe make it true.

At the Plaza Niños Héroes, there are ornate benches painted a vivid gold, but all the ones set in the shade are already taken, so Luca and Beto sit on the edge of another planter, and Lydia sits on a low step nearby. The sisters walk quiet laps together through the square, their arms folded tightly in front of themselves, and their heads tipped toward each other. Lydia watches people notice them, their remarkable beauty, their visible exhaustion.

Lydia’s worried about so many things she can’t pin one down to examine it. She’s worried about being out in the open like this, about being recognized. Whenever someone looks at her and then looks at their cell phone, there’s a little racehorse of adrenaline that clobbers through her body. She feels it mostly in her stomach and her joints. She sits close to the wall with her pack at her feet, where she imagines she’s inconspicuous. This is the one benefit of being a migrant, of having effected this disguise so completely: they are nearly invisible. No one looks at them, and in fact, people take pains not to look at them. She hopes that general indifference extends to the halcones, if Javier has them here in Nogales. She also worries about money. How expensive the coyote might be, how she’ll gain access to her mother’s bank account, and even if it works, how little money they’ll have left after they cross. She worries about the coyote, too. Her mother’s money is their last hope, and the idea of withdrawing that money and handing it over to a stranger is maddening. What questions will she ask him to ascertain the worth of his character? After he has their money, what incentive does he have to get them safely to their destination? What’s to keep him from leading them all deep into the desert and abandoning them there to die? And ultimately: What choice does she have?

Luca and Beto talk quietly nearby, swinging their feet from the planter, banging their heels against the wall beneath them. Beto scratches a twig along the top of the planter like a pencil. Luca plucks two leaves off a shrub and intertwines their stems, twisting them around in his fingers. So Lydia is worried about all these things, and yet, she has a new understanding about the futility of worry. The worst will either happen or not happen, and there’s no worry that will make a difference in either direction. Don’t think. She leans her elbows on her knees.

When he arrives, El Chacal finds the sisters without trying.

‘Dios mío,’ he says, by way of introduction, shaking his head.

Soledad can feel him assessing them, the angles of their faces, the problem of their beauty. She feels the hesitation this causes him, and she likes that hesitation is the thing it causes rather than something else. She’s relieved as she watches him push past his reluctance. He nods at them.

‘Soledad?’ he says.

‘Me,’ she responds. ‘And this is my sister, Rebeca.’ She pinches her sister’s elbow, and Rebeca nods.

He’s a small man, only slightly taller than the sisters. His face is handsome, with angular cheekbones and a clean shave. His cheeks are a shade rosier than the rest of his skin, which makes him look more cheerful than he otherwise might. He’s wiry and lean in his clean Levi’s and red Gap T-shirt. He looks like a migrant himself, except his Adidas sneakers appear brand-new. ‘Where are the others?’ he asks.

‘They’re sitting,’ Soledad says. ‘Over there.’ She walks toward them and the coyote follows.

‘Ay,’ he says, when he sees them. ‘A lady and two kids?’ He shakes his head.

The boys are already in earshot, and they both hop down from the planter.

‘You don’t have to worry about me,’ Beto says. ‘I’m twenty-three. I just have a growth disorder.’

Beto knows the words growth disorder because one of the kids he knew in el dompe had a growth disorder, and even though that kid was the same age as Beto, he stopped growing when they were both six, and Beto kept going until he was twice that boy’s height. It was one of the visiting priests from San Diego who told them about growth disorders. It didn’t matter anyway, because knowing the words didn’t make the kid start growing again. Beto grins at the coyote.

‘Twenty-three, de verdad?’ El Chacal says.

‘Plus, I have the voice of an angel,’ Beto says, and then he places one hand on his heart and breaks into song. A very loud, not entirely off-key rendition of some pop song Luca’s heard before but doesn’t know the name of. When he gets to the rap part, El Chacal holds up one hand to shush him. ‘Impressive, though, right?’ Beto says. ‘They called me the J Balvin of el dompe.’

The coyote looks unblinkingly at Beto, who does an impromptu tap dance right there in the middle of the square.

‘Okay, okay, siéntate.’ El Chacal doesn’t like to draw attention.

Beto hoists himself back onto the edge of the planter.

Lydia stands. ‘My son and I have come all the way from Guerrero. We rode La Bestia. We are capable; we won’t slow you down.’

Rebeca speaks up. ‘You wouldn’t believe the things that little dude can do. He could walk a week in the desert if he had to.’

The coyote frowns, turns to Soledad. ‘Your cousin told you I have a good track record, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know why I have a good track record?’

She shakes her head.

‘Because I don’t take kids. I don’t like leaving people behind. I don’t like people dying in the desert. So I choose people who won’t die.’

Luca holds on to his mother’s hand. ‘I have no intention of dying,’ he says.

El Chacal turns his attention to the boy. ‘No one intends to die,’ he says to Luca.

‘Yes,’ Luca concedes. ‘But I intend not to die.’ Lydia holds her breath. She can see that Luca’s making an impression. ‘There’s a difference,’ Luca says.

‘Oh?’ The coyote leans back to get a better look at Luca’s face beneath Papi’s cap.

‘Yes,’ Luca says. ‘I have considered it.’

‘You’ve considered it!’ El Chacal laughs. ‘You have considered dying?’

‘Of course,’ Luca says.

‘And?’

‘And I’m not interested in dying yet.’

The coyote nods. ‘I see.’

‘So I will stay alive.’

‘Okay.’

‘With or without your help,’ Luca says. Lydia pinches the back of his neck lightly. ‘But of course, your help would be a significant advantage.’

Now the coyote laughs harder. ‘¡Órale!’ he says, holding his hands up in front of him. ‘Okay, okay.’

Beto hops down to the ground. The kid knows when to keep quiet; he doesn’t say a word.

‘Okay,’ the coyote says again. Then he looks at Lydia. ‘You can pay?’

She tries to make her face blank, her voice loose. ‘What is the price?’

‘Five thousand for you. Six each for the kids.’

‘Dollars?’ Lydia’s mouth drops open.

‘Claro.’

The sisters paid only four each. ‘But I thought—’

The coyote intercepts her argument. ‘It’s not a negotiation. I have enough pollitos to cross without you. I don’t need the money. If you want to come, that is the price.’

Lydia closes her mouth. She’s short. She doesn’t know exactly how short, but they don’t have enough. Her stomach drops, and for the first time in days, she feels like she’s going to cry. The flare of her nostrils, the swamp of fluid into her sinuses, it’s almost a relief. She wasn’t sure she was still capable of crying.

‘How much is that in pesos?’ Beto removes the wad of cash from his pocket, and is flicking through it, counting.

The coyote pushes Beto’s hands down out of sight. ‘Put it away,’ he says. ‘You trying to get killed or just robbed?’ Beto stuffs the money back into his pocket while the coyote looks around to see if anyone’s watching them. ‘Listen, if we’re going to do this, the first thing is, you have to not be an idiot, okay?’

Beto looks sheepish and doesn’t clown. ‘Okay,’ he says with genuine remorse. ‘Sorry.’

The coyote nods. ‘Don’t do anything until I tell you to do it, right?’

Beto nods again.

‘You don’t even piss or sneeze without my permission. And for God’s sake, you don’t ball out with a wad of money and start counting it in the middle of the street.’

‘Okay.’

El Chacal returns his attention to Soledad. ‘It’s going to be tight quarters in the apartment with the extra people, but it’s only a couple days.’

‘Apartment?’ she asks. She’s taken her backpack off to drink from her water bottle. Luca and Beto collect their things.

‘Yeah, a place I use for staging. You’ll be there a day or two until the others arrive.’ He begins to walk, and Lydia grabs her backpack to fall in step behind him.

‘I need to go to a bank first,’ she says.

He turns and looks at her, eyebrows up. ‘A bank?’ he says, as if she’s requested they stop by the moon for a moment.

‘Yes. To get your money,’ she says.

‘A bank!’ El Chacal says again. ‘Maybe I should’ve charged you more!’ He laughs when he says this, and although Lydia is cheered by his unexpected congeniality, by his quickness to laugh, she can’t manage to join him.

Lydia is relieved to find a branch of her mother’s bank nearby, and she leaves Luca outside with the sisters. The building looks freshly whitewashed, and it makes her aware of how worn-looking and dirty she is. She pauses to check her reflection in the window. She’s been wearing the same powder-blue, button-up blouse for three days. Her armpits feel damp, and her hair is a mess. She hopes she smells okay; she can’t tell anymore. Lydia never wore makeup when she was younger, but since she turned thirty, she’s taken extra care with a bit of powder most mornings, a light dusting to cover the lines across her forehead. At work, she wore a light coat of mascara and a slick of nude lip gloss. She washed her hair every second day, and usually wore it in a ponytail when she was stocking the shelves. The woman in the window looks nothing like that recent Lydia. This woman is thinner and darker, with ropes of muscles in her neck and arms. This unshowered woman has dark circles beneath her eyes and a grim visage. She wishes for the armor of her small makeup pouch at home, hanging by its drawstring from a wooden hook in the family bathroom, but the bewilderment is almost comforting; perhaps no one would recognize her from Javier’s photograph after all. She’d like to take off the floppy hat, too, and stuff it into her backpack, because she feels ridiculous, like she’s going to church in her bathing suit. But even with the changes to her appearance, she’d feel too conspicuous without it. Enough wishing. There’s a security camera mounted on a bracket above her, and Lydia doesn’t want to be on it. She lowers her face beneath the hat as she opens the door of the bank, and steps inside.

In the fluorescent-lit, air-conditioned vestibule, Lydia’s arms immediately come up in goose bumps. Her body has become unused to electric comforts. She rubs both arms to warm herself, removes her mother’s bank card from the purse, and checks the account balance again at the ATM. It’s still all there, still untouched, 212,871 pesos. Lydia blows air through her parted lips. There’s a withdrawal limit of 6,000 pesos per day, and Lydia has delayed this moment for many reasons, not least of which is that she’s not sure how she’ll get her hands on the money without the required documentation. She knew it was safer to leave the money in the bank while they traveled anyway. But it’s also true that delaying the withdrawal was easier for Lydia, who isn’t ready to ratify the awful truth that her mother is really gone. She knows it will feel like stealing her mother’s money. She wants it to feel that way. Because Lydia has not been able to grieve, there’s still some significant way in which it feels like only she and Luca have gone, that the rest of their family is still intact and happy, living their lives as usual in Acapulco. She imagines Sebastián brushing past her hanging makeup pouch in the bathroom each morning, damp from the shower, his bare body wrapped in the blue towel. Lydia wishes she could further delay pulling the plug on that artifice.

But the existence of this electronic money is a miracle. A one-shot parachute. She writes her mother’s name in a binder on the counter, and then waits in a chair until the branch manager calls her into a private cubicle. Lydia sits, setting her backpack on the empty chair beside her. It’s a woman who sits in the chair facing her, so that feels like a bit of luck. The woman wears a navy blazer and has a single streak of gray in her hair. Her face is kind. Lydia studies the woman’s features for a moment and makes a snap decision. She will tell her everything. All of it. She will throw herself on the mercy of this stranger’s kind face.

It’s only the third time Lydia has told her story. The first was to Carlos in the office above the church in Chilpancingo and the second was to the nun, Hermana Cecilia, at the first Casa del Migrante in Huehuetoca. Both times, the telling had taken a toll on Lydia, but both times, she’d received in return something that felt like salvation.

‘What can I do for you today?’ the branch manager asks, folding her hands in front of her on the desk. She doesn’t lean away, or eye the backpack suspiciously. She is gracious, and her name is Paola, according to her square, brown name tag.

‘I—’ Lydia begins, but then her nostrils flare and all the words catch in her throat. Lydia presses her eyes closed once, slowly, and begins again. ‘I need to close my mother’s account.’

‘Okay,’ Paola says. ‘I can help you with that. Is your mother… can she come with you to do that, or…’

‘She’s deceased,’ Lydia says.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry for your loss.’ Paola says this not unkindly, but mechanically, and only because it’s the thing people say.

This isn’t at all how Lydia wanted to begin, so formal, so cold. She shakes her head, inches her chair closer to the desk. Paola does not back away.

‘I need your help,’ Lydia says.

Paola nods. ‘Of course,’ she says, reaching out to pat Lydia’s hand before clasping her own hands together on the desk again. ‘All we need, then, is her death certificate and a copy of her will, if you have it—’

Lydia stops the woman from talking by clearing her throat. She looks not at Paola’s face but at the knot of her hands on the desk between them, at the simple gold wedding band. She speaks without looking up.

‘My mother was murdered. My whole family was murdered by the cartel in Acapulco. My husband, my sister. Sixteen of my family members.’ She is speaking very quietly now, leaning toward Paola across the desk, and she can hear that Paola’s breathing has changed – no – has stopped, actually. She glances up at the woman’s face and sees the same stillness there. It’s a paralysis born of empathy, so Lydia chases the rest of the words out of her mouth quickly, before she loses her nerve or her track, before she begins to cry. ‘My son and I escaped. He’s there, just outside. We had money, but we were kidnapped in Sinaloa and now it’s gone. And we need my mother’s money to pay the coyote now. To get across. I’m my mother’s only remaining child.’

There’s only one hand left on the desk now, the one with the wedding ring. The other has gone up to Paola’s face, to Paola’s mouth, where its presence might prevent the escape of some of Paola’s informal reaction. ‘Oh my God,’ Paola says. Because what else could she possibly say? She opens a lower drawer and withdraws a box of tissues, which she places on the desk between them. ‘That birthday party massacre in Acapulco, I read about you. Your family, oh my God. I’m so sorry.’

‘Thank you,’ Lydia says. ‘It was my niece’s quinceañera. Yénifer.’

Paola crumples a tissue from the box and holds it beneath her nose. Lydia takes one, too. Then they look each other in the eye. Lydia whispers.

‘Do you have children?’

Paola nods. ‘Three.’

‘I’m afraid we’re going to die. This money is the only way to save my son.’

Paola pushes her rolling chair back from the desk. ‘Wait here,’ she says.

She’s gone for what feels like a very long time, and when she returns, she’s carrying a folder stacked with documents. She sits back into the chair, and Lydia straightens her posture. Paola opens the folder and, using the mouse, clicks the computer monitor to life. ‘Do you have any identification?’

‘Yes.’ Lydia digs into her backpack and finds her voter ID card. She hands it to Paola, who studies it for a moment, looks more closely at Lydia’s face, and then sets it on the folder.

‘Bank card?’

‘Yes.’ She produces this as well.

‘Are you a custodian on your mother’s account?’

‘No.’

‘And you don’t have a death certificate for her, I’m sure,’ Paola says.

‘No.’

‘Or a copy of her will?’

‘No.’ Lydia tries not to panic. Surely this woman is going to try to help her. She understands. She knows that Lydia has none of these documents, has no way of obtaining any of these documents without returning to Guerrero and getting herself killed. But what if it’s simply impossible? What if Paola is trying to help Lydia find a loophole, but all she’s really doing is confirming the inevitable bad news that Lydia has no legal right to this money? Lydia tries to breathe deeply, but everything shakes.

‘What is your line of work?’ Paola asks.

‘I own a bookstore in Acapulco. Or I did. I guess I still do.’

Paola types into the computer. ‘Name of the business?’

‘Palabras y Páginas.’

She types some more, and then twists the monitor so Lydia can see. She’s not filling in forms, Lydia realizes. She’s googling her. Verifying her story. Making sure this is not a con job. ‘This is you?’

She’s opened the website Lydia’s been meaning to update. There is her picture on the ‘contact’ page. She’s wearing black leggings and an oversize sweater. It’s an outfit she’ll never wear again. It’s in her dirty clothes hamper in Acapulco. Lydia’s unremarkable happiness in the photograph takes her breath away, and a sob cuts loose into the cubicle. Lydia wishes the walls stretched all the way to the ceiling. Her eyes are two lines, her mouth, a line. She nods her head at Paola, who reaches across the desk and squeezes Lydia’s hand. Then she stands and steps around the desk. She removes Lydia’s backpack from the chair and sits down beside her.

‘My nephew disappeared last August,’ Paola whispers. ‘He was missing for three days. When they found him, his head…’ She pauses for a long moment, so Lydia thinks she might not continue. But she’s only gathering strength. ‘His head was separated from his body.’ Her hand trembles in Lydia’s. They squeeze each other tightly. ‘He was a beautiful boy,’ she says.

And now it’s Lydia’s turn to experience that empathy-paralysis. The depth of her feeling surprises her, because how can she have any leftover grief available for other people, for Paola’s murdered nephew? But there it is – an anguish that makes her feel hollow in the bones, despair for a beautiful boy Lydia never met. For the innumerable griefs of all those stolen boys, stretching from family to family like one of Luca’s connect-the-dots. It’s so big, the pain. It’s exponential. Each violent death amplifies itself a hundred times, a thousand times. Everyone in this bank knows some small or large portion of that grief. Everyone in Nogales. Everyone who lives in a place that’s been carved up into plazas and parceled out for governance by men like Javier. For what?

Lydia lets go. All the torrent of emotion she’s been corralling for weeks, it all tries to squeeze through at once. She curls into a tight ball in the wooden chair and she sobs quietly, and her body is a knot of grief, and Paola is a stranger, but her hands on Lydia’s back are the hands of God. They are Sebastián’s and Yemi’s and Yénifer’s. They are her mother’s hands. Lydia weeps into Paola’s lap, and Paola weeps with her. They weep for themselves and for each other. And when they’re finished, they clean themselves up using only the Kleenex on Paola’s desk.

Paola rubs Lydia’s knee roughly and then honks her nose into a tissue. She tosses it like a three-pointer into the wastebasket on the far side of the little cubicle. And then, ‘I might lose my job,’ she says quietly. ‘But I will get you that money.’

Lydia’s head pounds. She closes her eyes in grateful disbelief. The aftermath is like a jackhammer in her sinuses.

It takes a few minutes, but soon there’s an envelope fat with cash, and then Paola produces her own purse from a locked drawer in the bottom of her filing cabinet, and hands Lydia an extra 500-peso note. ‘For your son,’ she says.

Lydia hugs her, and there’s no way to thank her. It’s impossible.