American Dirt

CHAPTER THIRTY

They’ve all packed their scant belongings, prepared and eaten the remaining food, and are drinking instant coffee by the time the sun begins to slant toward the horizon and El Chacal returns. Beto has nothing to pack. Marisol has ditched her black wedges in favor of some Adidas trail hikers. No one talks as they ascend the staircase out of the apartment one last time. There are two open-bed pickup trucks parked outside, and the back of one is half-filled with several dozen plastic gallon jugs of water, painted black. Lorenzo approaches the white truck, so Lydia herds Luca toward the blue one. Beto, the sisters, and Marisol all climb in after them, among the water jugs. Nicolás, too. He sits beside Marisol.

‘So, do you have a girlfriend back at college?’ she asks.

Nicolás shakes his head.

‘You know, my daughter is a college student in San Diego. A sociology major. What’s your field of study?’

Nicolás’s eyebrows animate themselves across his forehead. ‘I study evolutionary biology and biodiversity in the desert,’ he says.

‘Oh.’ Marisol is unable to muster any appropriate follow-up questions.

‘What the hell is that?’ Beto asks.

Nicolás laughs. ‘It means I study how organisms evolve, and what environmental factors influence that evolution, and vice versa.’

Beto looks at him blankly.

‘Specifically, I study the migration patterns of certain desert butterflies, and the effect of those changing migration patterns on certain flowering shrubs.’

‘Desert butterflies, huh?’ Beto says suspiciously.

‘Yes.’

‘You study, like, where they go?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that’s, like, a whole job? That’s all you do?’

Nicolás grins at Beto.

‘Man, I want to go to college,’ the boy says.

El Chacal is securing the liftgate at the back of the other truck, and now he walks over to theirs. He looks at them individually, checking their gear. His own shoes are solid, lightweight hikers, dusty enough to appear as if they could belong to any migrant, albeit one with the means to buy himself boots for the trek. He’s dressed like he was the day he met them in the plaza – close-fitting jeans and a gray Under Armour T-shirt this time. His backpack, sitting on the seat in the cab, is tiny. His jacket, made of waterproof Gore-Tex, is light enough to tie around his slim waist. His cheeks, as usual, are a cheerful shade of pink in the light brown expanse of his face. Everything about his body seems designed for the wilderness. He is lean, muscular, compact, and he moves with efficiency as he steps from migrant to migrant, examining their footwear, their moods, the weight of their packs. Nobody with a sniffle or a sneeze will be allowed to make the journey. He stops when he gets to Beto.

‘Where’s your bag?’ he asks.

Everyone else is clutching their pack in front of them. Beto has nothing.

‘I don’t need no bag, güey,’ Beto says. ‘Everything I need is right here.’ He taps on the side of his head with one finger.

‘That crazy brain of yours going to keep you warm tonight?’

‘What are you talking about, warm?’ Beto says. ‘No manches, güey. We’re in the middle of a heat wave. It’s like a million degrees outside.’

It is April in the Sonoran Desert, and uncommonly warm this week. Today’s high was ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit.

‘So you don’t have a jacket? A coat, sweater, nothing?’ El Chacal asks.

‘I’ll be fine!’ Beto says.

‘Out of the truck.’ El Chacal unlatches and folds down the tailgate.

‘Órale, güey,’ Beto says. ‘For real, I’m fine, I don’t need a jacket.’

‘Out,’ El Chacal repeats. ‘I was very specific. I told you what you needed, I told you what would happen if you didn’t adequately prepare.’

‘But—’

‘And you find yourself a coyote who says he will take you across without the right gear? Don’t fucking pay him. Because he doesn’t give a shit about you, and you will die, understand? Come on, now. Out.’

‘But I’ll get one! I’ll get a jacket!’ Beto’s voice is rising to a frantic pitch.

‘It’s too late,’ the coyote says, slapping a hand impatiently on the bed of the truck. ‘Get a jacket and I’ll take you next time.’

Beto stands up and begins to move slowly toward the tailgate, reluctance in every cell of his body. Luca tugs on Mami’s arm, but she doesn’t respond. She should have checked with him. He seems a thousand years old, but he’s only ten, and he saved them; he bought their passage. So how hard would it have been for her to ask: Now, Beto, you have a good jacket, right? But she didn’t. And now it’s too late. There’s nothing she can do. She squeezes Luca’s hand, a meager apology for her failure of foresight, her scarcity of heroism. The rest of the migrants look helplessly at Beto, but Nicolás is unzipping his pack. Beto sits with a thump on the back of the liftgate, his feet dangling over, procrastinating. He riffles through his brain for an argument or plea he might make.

‘Here.’ Nicolás tosses a heavy, fleece-lined, zippered hoodie onto the boy’s lap.

Beto’s face brightens at once, and Lydia heaves a relieved smile. Luca grins. Beto snatches up the thick, brown fabric and scrambles back to his feet. He ties the arms of the hoodie around his waist while Nicolás zips his backpack again.

El Chacal watches the young PhD student. ‘You have another one for yourself?’

‘And a thermal, plus a rain poncho.’

The coyote nods and slams the liftgate back into position. Beto has already returned to settle himself back into his spot beside Luca, but El Chacal walks around the side of the pickup truck and speaks quietly into the boy’s ear. He leans his hands on the edge of the truck, and Beto twists to face him, one knee flopped over, the other propped up.

‘You were lucky Nicolás helped you out,’ the coyote says to the boy. ‘I never take kids across, and this is why. I’m not trying to babysit, and I don’t want anybody dying of stupidity. Don’t make me regret bringing you.’

Beto’s face endures a rare slash of stillness, and the sincerity of it threatens to rob Lydia of her careful restraint.

‘When I tell you that something’s important, you heed me, understand?’ El Chacal says. Beto nods earnestly. ‘Because when I say importante it means you will die if you don’t listen. This journey is no joke. If I say jump, you jump. If I say cállate, you shut your mouth. If I say you need a jacket, you need a pinche jacket.’ He takes one step back and turns so he can see the migrants in both truck beds. He raises his voice so they can all hear. ‘Same goes for all of you. You hear? This is a grueling journey. Two and a half nights of arduous hiking, and I am your only lifeline. If there’s any problem with that, or if you don’t think you can make it, this is your last chance to say so.’

The coyote carries a pistol on these crossings to aid in convincing reluctant migrants about the absolute nature of his authority. He makes sure the migrants know he has the gun by carrying it quite openly in a holster slung low around his jeans. It serves mostly as a useful psychological prop, and he very seldom has to use it. Beto isn’t impressed by the gun, which he glimpsed when the coyote was standing beside the other truck, but he is affected by the subtle intensity of the man’s words. Beto knows the truth when he hears it.

‘Oye,’ the boy says. ‘I’m sorry.’ Beto is like a wide-open moon shining up at the coyote, and something in his yearning sends the memory of Sebastián falling across Lydia’s mind like a ruler across an outstretched knuckle. How long will the memory of his father sustain her own child? How long before he’s looking up at strangers this way? Grief-adrenaline swamps through her body, but Lydia closes her eyes and waits for it to pass.

El Chacal nods, opens the passenger door, and climbs in.

They drive southwest into the desert sunset. There’s nothing unusual about a couple of trucks full of migrants heading out into the wilderness from Nogales. No one will try to stop them; anyone who looks can see what they’re up to, but no one here cares. Lydia is the only one concerned about hiding herself. She slumps low in the bed of the truck, and shields her face with her faded hat when other vehicles approach and pass.

‘Why south?’ Luca asks as they turn left out of the town, but she doesn’t know.

She’s relieved when the drive turns to barely paved roads that eventually become unpaved roads that eventually become trails that can hardly be called roads at all. They are pocked with holes and ruts, and the gravel feels loose beneath the tires. They’re alone in the desert now, no other cars for miles around, and the migrants hang on to the edges and bounce uncomfortably in the beds of the pickup trucks, their bones juddering when they cross a dip they aren’t expecting. Lydia holds Luca down to keep him from flying out, but their progress is careful and slow.

When the trucks eventually point west, and then northwest, Luca wonders if they’re moving perpendicular to that boundary now, that place where the fence disappears and the only thing to delineate one country from the next is a line that some random guy drew on a map years and years ago. They haven’t seen another vehicle for almost an hour, so to pass the time, Nicolás names some of the species of animals that live here, some they might encounter on their travels: ocelots, bobcats, coatimundi, javelina, whiptail lizards, mountain lions, coyotes, rattlesnakes.

‘Rattlesnakes?’ Marisol says.

Rabbits, quail, deer, hummingbirds, jaguars.

‘Jaguars!’ Beto says.

‘Rare, but not yet extinct in Sonora, sure. Foxes, skunks,’ Nicolás says. ‘And don’t even get me started on the butterflies.’

Luca thinks of all of those animals running willy-nilly, back and forth across the border without their passports. It’s a comforting notion. Rebeca is only half listening. She doesn’t really want to consider what kind of wildlife they may encounter on their journey. She’s unconcerned about it in any case. She thinks of her own remote, wild place, full of noisy, big-eyed creatures of its own. It feels almost impossible that the cloud forest still exists. She wants to close her eyes and travel back there. Wants to feel the cool softness of the clouds against her cheeks and eyelashes. She wants to hear the echoing drips of rainfall spattering among the big, fat leaves. The memory of that bright, liquid, ethereal place is fading from her grasp. When she closes her eyes now, she cannot recall the sound of her abuela’s singing or the smell of the chilate. It’s all been obliterated from her, and the grief of that eradication feels like a weight she must carry in her limbs. When she breathes now, in this desert place, the air feels waterless in her nose, her scalp scorched by the sun where her hair parts.

Rebeca leans her head against her sister’s shoulder and watches the changing colors of the landscape. The sun sinks in front of them and turns the sandy earth orange and pink. The sky, too, is filled with crazy, vivid pinks and purples and blues and yellows, and the colors are slow to deepen, slow to slip into blackness, but when at last they are gone, the darkness is deeper and more vast than anything Luca has ever seen. He cannot see his knees drawn up in front of him. He cannot see his own fingers wiggling in front of his eyes. He gropes for Mami’s hand in the blackness, and when she feels him there, she pulls him closer and folds her wing around him. No one talks much after the sun is gone. Their eyes yawn open and seize on any suggestion of light. They stay each in their own mind, considering the hours ahead.

Lydia remembers a show from her childhood, not like these slick, indistinguishable cartoons Luca watches, shows that are beamed into televisions worldwide with their big-eyed, squeaky-voiced monsters of backtalk. It was a memorable show, an incredible low-budget job with handmade puppets and real junkyard magic. Lydia remembers the theme song, where all the characters would zoom around the earth in this rackety dumpster, except the dumpster was like a chariot, but only when all the friends were onboard, because if even one of them was missing, it was just a regular old dumpster, with hovering flies and sticky puddles. But when all the friends were together, the dumpster would glimmer and shoot off into the sky, and then stars would burst from its exhaust pipes, and don’t ask Lydia why a dumpster had exhaust pipes, she was only six when she watched that show, but Dios mío, it was something.

She doesn’t know why she’s remembering that show right now – she hasn’t thought of it in years, and this blue pickup truck is no magic dumpster. But Lydia has that same swooping, rocketing feeling she used to get when she watched that eruption of scrap-heap stars, when she saw how tightly the friends would curl their fingers around the lip of their vessel to keep themselves safely inside, never mind gravity or physics or the fiery reality of planetary atmosphere. Anything was possible.

‘Do you remember that show, from when we were kids?’ she asks Marisol in the blackness. ‘The one with the flying dumpster?’

Marisol remembers.

During the second hour of driving, there’s a light on the path ahead, and the trucks roll to a stop at a checkpoint. There is light enough, just, for Soledad to recognize the uniform of los agentes federales de migración. Immediately, Rebeca begins to cry. She scrapes her heels along the bed of the pickup and writhes back into her sister’s arms. Soledad shushes her and wraps an arm around her forehead. She presses Rebeca’s face into the hollow of her neck and tells her to close her eyes. She hums softly to her sister in the comfort of their ancient language.

‘Soon this will all be past. Soon we will be safe. Close your eyes, sister.’

Rebeca breathes deeply into Soledad’s neck, and her tears wet the soft brown curve of her sister’s skin without sound. El Chacal gets out of the truck and steps toward the two guards, who are armed with flashlights and AR-15s. They greet him in a familiar manner, and he hands them an envelope. They talk for perhaps two minutes, and when the coyote returns to the truck, los agentes approach, shining their flashlights onto the faces of each migrant in turn. Rebeca does not lift her face from Soledad’s shoulder when the beam touches her skin. Soledad sets her jaw and grits her teeth and stares directly into the light. Her eyes water, but she does not blink.

‘Oye, jefe, maybe we’ll keep this one,’ one of the guards says to El Chacal, whose window in the cab of the truck is rolled all the way down.

The coyote is leaning out, but before he has a chance to answer, Luca stands bolt upright, startling Lydia, who lunges for him.

‘You cannot keep her!’ he shouts. ‘You cannot have her, no one is allowed to have her. She is her own person, and she is coming with us!’

The beam of the flashlight swings toward Luca and the circle of light finds his face in the dark. His black eyes glimmer and his hands are balled into tight little fists.

‘¡Mira, el jefecito!’

‘Luca, sit down!’ Lydia grabs him and wrestles him into her lap.

But the guard is laughing. He leans into the bed of the truck, and Soledad tightens her grip on Rebeca.

‘Don’t worry, little man,’ the guard says to Luca. ‘I was only joking.’ He swings the light back to Soledad. ‘You are lucky to have such a brave and fearsome bodyguard, señorita.’

‘Yes,’ Soledad says mechanically.

He returns his attention to Luca. ‘You keep fighting, little man. That’s the kind of mettle you’re going to need in el norte.’

Lydia begins to breathe again but doesn’t loosen her hold on Luca. When it’s her turn to endure the beam of light on her features, she doesn’t breathe. She keeps her eyes open and low, and prays these men don’t work for Javier. She prays that her face isn’t lodged in a text message on one of their cell phones. The flashlight lingers, and then swings across to Marisol. Lydia breathes.

‘Godspeed!’ the agent calls out, as he steps backward away from the truck.

‘¡Nos vemos pronto!’ El Chacal salutes the men with a parting wave as they continue their trek.

More than three hours after leaving the apartment in Nogales, the two pickup trucks, now with their headlights off, and covered in a thick layer of desert dust, pull to a stop. Without the ambient light of the trucks’ dashboards and taillights, the migrants find themselves in absolute darkness. They are half a mile’s walk from Estados Unidos. El Chacal lines them up outside the trucks and tells them they need only be aware of the person in front and the person behind them. It’s too dark to see him, but his voice takes on such a warm animation it’s almost visible itself, a shot of color against the black of night. He’s all safety and faithful authority. He is perfectly contagious energy. With his guidance, they all believe this is possible. They don’t even know his real name, but they entrust him with their lives. He tells them they’re going to move quickly and it’s vital to keep up. It’s paramount that no one gets separated from the group.

‘If you hear this noise, freeze.’ He makes a short, low-pitched whistle. ‘If I make that noise, it means you have to be absolutely still and silent until I say it’s time to move again. This is the signal that it’s time to move again.’ He makes a double-clicking noise with his tongue that’s impressively audible. ‘If we get caught – is everybody listening? This is important. If we get caught, do not tell them which one of us is the coyote. Understood?’

‘Why?’ This is Lorenzo.

‘You don’t need to know why, but I’m going to tell you why, just so you don’t get any stupid ideas,’ El Chacal says. ‘If we get picked up, and they find out I’m the coyote, you’ll all be deported without me, right? I’ll get arrested, and you’ll get sent home. If los carteles find out who squealed on the coyote and interrupted their income stream, you’ll have hell to pay. You have enough troubles from los carteles, yes?’

Lorenzo makes some noise that passes for an affirmative.

‘So you keep your mouth shut. If we get caught, we all get deported together, we come back and try again. You get three tries for the price of one. Agreed?’

Everyone agrees, and then El Chacal lights a low lamp and spends a few minutes preparing. He unscrews the lid from a jar of minced garlic and instructs everyone to smear some on their shoes as a rattlesnake deterrent. The smell reminds Lydia of cooking, of home, but she’s even more afraid of snakes than she is of nostalgia, so she’s generous with her new boots and with Luca’s. Then the coyote outfits everyone with the water they must carry. The jugs are heavy and awkward, but nothing’s more critical. Lydia uses one of her canvas belts, looping it through the jug handles and then through the bottom straps of her backpack. The bottles slosh and bang against her hips as she walks, so she tightens the straps to fix them in place. Luca carries only one bottle; he can barely manage the weight of that. The men carry four gallons each, and Nicolás also has a fancy hiking backpack that’s filled with water he can drink from a long tube over his shoulder. They all try not to think about the heat of the desert, the distance they must walk to reach safety after they cross, and the quantity of water they carry.

The migrants stay in the positions El Chacal assigns for them, so the coyote is first, followed by Choncho and Slim, followed by Beto and Luca, Lydia, the sisters, and then Marisol. The rest of the men are at the rear. They move north at a pace that’s rapid enough to be almost startling, and Lydia tries to watch Luca’s nearly invisible outline ahead. The fresh air is cold moving through their lungs, and after those fidgety days in the apartment, it’s exhilarating to be moving their bodies northward across the starlit earth. There’s no talking, but their footfalls against the uneven terrain and their bodies’ small sounds of exertion take on the qualities of conversation. Everyone concentrates on not falling, not stepping wrong, not bumping into the person in front of them. They stay alert to the real danger of twisting an ankle. They try, but mostly fail, to suppress their fear of the unseen, omnipresent Border Patrol.

There’s no fence in this stretch of desert because there’s no need of one. They are roughly twenty miles east of Sasabe and twenty miles west of Nogales, where the Pajarito Mountains serve as the border fence. It’s cold. Luca is wearing every item of clothing they bought at that Walmart in Diamante before they left Acapulco: jeans, T-shirt, hoodie, warm jacket, and thick socks. His new boots are tied and double-knotted. Papi’s baseball cap is stowed carefully in the side pocket of Luca’s pack, and he’s wearing the warm stocking hat and scarf he got from the old lady in Nogales, but even with all that, even though he feels damp with sweat along his spine, his nose and fingers are freezing. He wishes they’d thought to buy gloves, too. Sometimes El Chacal makes the quick whistle, and they all stand absolutely still and silent until he gives the double-click command for them to continue. There’s one place where Luca can hear the electronic hum of some unseen machinery. Choncho falls into step beside Luca and points up to a blinking red light mounted high on a post nearby. They’re almost directly beneath it. It swivels. And when the blinking red eye looks away, El Chacal makes the double-click, and they move very quickly, almost at a run through the darkness, until they are up and over a small ridge, beyond the sweep of that swiveling, mechanical eye.

‘Congratulations,’ Choncho whispers loudly to Luca. ‘You’ve just outsmarted your first United States Border Patrol camera.’

Luca grins in the dark, but Lydia feels a lurch in her stomach, a passing grief at what that must mean.

‘We are in the United States already?’ she whispers.

‘Yes,’ Choncho says.

Lydia expected the crossing would be momentous. That it would happen in an instant, that she would, in the space of one footstep, leave Mexico and enter the United States. She expected to be able to pause, however briefly, so she might look back and reflect, both physically and metaphorically, at what she’s leaving behind: the omnipresent fear of Javier and his henchmen. After eighteen days and sixteen hundred miles of endurance, she wants to feel that she’s slipping his noose. But she wants to look further back than that, too, to her life before the massacre, to her happy childhood in Acapulco. The orange bathing suit she wore every day during the summer of her sixth birthday. Diving from the cliffs at La Quebrada when she was a teenager. Walking on Barra Vieja with her father when she was still small enough to hold his hand without embarrassment. The million endearing grievances of her mother. College, Sebastián, the bookstore. Holding Luca outside her body for the first time. Lydia expected there would be a moment when these notions would flood through her, all at once, like a small death. A portal. She’d hoped, like one of those desert rattlesnakes, to shed the skin of her anguish and leave it behind her in the Mexican dirt. But the moment of the crossing has already passed, and she didn’t even realize it had happened. She never looked back, never committed any small act of ceremony to help launch her into the new life on the other side. Nothing can be undone. Adelante.

The sky is clear and there are stars overhead, but the moon is new, so even when it rises, it offers no light to their path. Ideal conditions for crossing, the coyote assures them as they stumble through the dark. For an hour they trudge through the desert without speaking. At eleven o’clock, they take shelter beneath a rocky outcrop because, the coyote explains, these are prime border patrolling hours, and la migra is thick in this sector. He tells them to rest, but none of them do. They sit in fear, their eyes blinking like inadequate lamps. They pass three hours that way, listening to the foreign sounds of the desert all around them. It’s terrifying to hear grunting and snuffling and clicking and shrieking, sometimes at a distance, sometimes rather close, and to not be able to see what kinds of creatures are creating all that racket. It’s a queer, vulnerable feeling to sit without armor among nocturnal animals, knowing they can see you and smell you and feel you there. Knowing that you’re blind to their presence should they decide to approach. Every one of those migrants prays while they wait. Even Lorenzo remembers that he once believed in God.