American Dirt

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Shortly before two o’clock in the morning, El Chacal gets them moving again. He wants to make camp before the morning twilight begins to ascend. He’s walked this exact route dozens of times before. He knows just where they’re going and how long it takes to get there. He knows they can make do with a lot less water if they avoid walking during the heat of the day. But now that it’s late spring and the nights are growing shorter, he also knows there’s little time to spare before the light comes. He pushes the group to the top of their pace. They’re probably three miles north of the border but still hours from safety, from the nearest town, by the next time El Chacal makes the whistle. This time Beto, half-asleep on his feet, stumbles into Slim in front of him, and they tumble into a small heap together on the desert floor. Beto giggles and apologizes, but El Chacal snaps at him and puts one finger against his lips. Slim claps a meaty hand over Beto’s mouth to ensure silence.

Ahead, at the foot of a hill they’re nearly halfway down, Luca can see the faint white trace of a road, winding its way snakelike through the landscape. They’re standing beneath a huddle of scrappy trees, but below them, there’s little to no cover until the far side of the road. Several hundred yards to the right, four pickup trucks are parked together.

‘Carajo,’ El Chacal says out loud.

Up to now, Luca has rather enjoyed this one perk of having his whole life annihilated: he’s suddenly privy to a world where grown-ups sometimes curse out loud. He’s even tried some of those words out on his own tongue, but in this instance, hearing El Chacal say carajo when he sees those pickup trucks makes Luca feel deeply unsettled.

‘What are they doing here at this time of night?’ Choncho asks the coyote quietly.

El Chacal shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. There’s a trailhead there.’ He points to the far side of the road. ‘Sometimes we hike that way if there’s no one here. It’s a little-used trail. But this…’ The coyote spits into the dirt at his feet. ‘These are not day hikers.’ El Chacal wears a pair of binoculars from a length of cord around his neck, which he lifts and squints into now. It’s too dark to see anything except the outline of the trucks, and an interior cab light that’s been left on inside one of them. It’s still very dark here, but the blackness is beginning to diffuse into a range of discernible grays. Soon the light will follow. El Chacal gathers the migrants out of their line and into a clump so he can speak to them all at once.

‘There are four trucks parked at the trailhead below,’ he says. ‘It’s a remote trailhead. I’ve never seen anyone parked out here before. So my guess, it’s either a cartel waiting for a delivery, in which case, watch your backs because somebody might be coming along behind you.’

Lydia’s body goes rigid, and she reaches for Luca in the dark. She pulls him close.

‘Or, more likely, it’s one of those crazy fucking vigilante groups,’ the coyote says. ‘Out playing nighttime Power Rangers, in which case, watch your fronts, because those hijos de puta would like nothing better than to mount a stuffed migrant head over their mantel at home.’

Luca grimaces, even though it strikes him as slightly funny, the notion of his head stuffed and mounted on a shiny slab of wood in a yanqui cabin somewhere.

None of it’s funny to Lydia. She hadn’t been naïve enough to think they were in the clear yet, but she did think the nature of the most pressing threat would’ve changed by now. She thought that here in el norte, she’d have to worry more about Border Patrol, about the possibility of Luca being taken from her, and less about random men with guns enforcing their own decrees. She avoids ranking the possibilities in terms of their potential for violence. Whatever their uniforms, their accents, their faces, no importa. She knows that anyone they encounter here, in this wild, desolate place, would mean the end.

‘What are we going to do?’ Marisol asks.

El Chacal is already removing his pack. ‘We’ll wait here,’ he says. ‘This is the only cover. Anyway, the trucks look more like vigilantes than carteleros.’

‘How can you tell?’ Choncho asks.

The coyote hands Choncho the binoculars without removing them from his neck. The big man peers into them. ‘They’re not fancy enough to be narcos,’ El Chacal says. ‘And if they’re vigilantes, as I suspect, they’ve probably gone migrant hunting up the trail on the far side. We wait here. They’ll eventually go back to the trucks and we can pass after they leave.’

‘But what if they are narcos?’ Marisol asks. Lydia shudders involuntarily, rubs her hands over her face, and shrugs her hood up. ‘Won’t we be sitting ducks, right between them and whatever shipment they’re waiting for?’

‘Mira, I’ve already paid the toll to pass through here,’ El Chacal says. ‘I play by their rules.’

‘But whose rules?’ Lydia can no longer keep the question to herself. She has to know which cartel is the self-appointed owner of this scrap of desert.

‘Los Jardineros?’ Lorenzo asks.

The coyote doesn’t answer, and in the silence that follows, Lorenzo catches Lydia’s eye. Lorenzo paces like a caged animal. This terrible hypothetical finally presses itself into Lydia’s consciousness: Would it be worse to get caught by estadounidenses, who would take Luca from her? Or to get caught by mexicanos, who would return them to Javier? With effort, she represses the speculation. Neither thing can happen. They must succeed. She claps her fists against her thighs and stretches her cramping legs.

Choncho hands the binoculars back to El Chacal and begins removing his pack. Slim and their sons do the same, setting their water jugs wordlessly on the ground, and reclining against their backpacks.

El Chacal takes a measured sip of water from his own jug. ‘Find a place to tuck yourself in, in case the sun comes up before we’re able to move.’

The coverage isn’t great here in this stand of scrappy trees, but there is a thicket nearby, and Rebeca, Soledad, and Lydia all set themselves up facing the rear, watching the path they’ve already taken halfway down the hill, waiting for the shapes of their nightmares to emerge from the dark. Luca sits back-to-back with Mami, and has time to consider how strange it is that being a migrante means you spend more time stopping than in motion. Their lives have become an erratic wheel of kinesis and paralysis. Beto falls asleep. Nicolás falls asleep. Marisol would like to fall asleep. They’ve all grown fatigued. Light grows in the eastern sky, and by the time the dozen men approach the four trucks on the road below, picking their way down the trail on the opposite hill, it’s bright enough for El Chacal to see them clearly with the assistance of his binoculars. ‘Vigilantes,’ he confirms.

The men, dressed entirely in camouflage and bearing enough visible weaponry that anyone not knowing better would presume them to be authorized military, take their time at the trucks. They open coolers, remove drinks and food. They gather at the back of one of the trucks and pass a thermos of coffee. They’re close enough now that, when the wind shifts in certain directions, the migrants can hear a whip of laughter here, a scrap of a sentence there. Those shifting acoustics are terrifying, because those sounds must also travel in reverse. The migrants all become aware of their anatomy. No one wants to sneeze or fart. They pray for the men to go away. Breakfast takes forever and then, just when it seems they are packed up and ready to go, they discover the interior cab light that was left on in one of the trucks. The battery is dead.

By the time the men locate some jumper cables, maneuver the trucks into position, hook everything up, get the truck running, spend five to ten minutes congratulating one another on getting the truck running, and finally, at long last, parade themselves down the road and out of sight, it is full daylight in the desert.

The migrants are still almost a mile from the hidden place where El Chacal intends to make camp for the day, and now they must contend with the danger of the glaring daylight. He shakes Nicolás and Beto to wake them.

‘Let’s go,’ he says. ‘Double time.’

Luca’s limbs feel stiff after the time spent shivering on the cold ground. He’s happy to get them going again, and happy when the warmth begins to seep back into his legs. The road below is nothing like the roads Luca imagined he’d encounter in the USA. He thought every road here would be broad as a boulevard, paved to perfection, and lined with fluorescent shopfronts. This road is like the crappiest Mexican road he’s ever seen. Dirt, dirt, and more dirt.

To the northwest there’s a huddle of hills taller than the ones they’ve encountered so far, and after they cross the road, El Chacal begins to ascend the slope of the closest one. It’s steep, and everyone focuses their energy on moving their bodies efficiently uphill.

‘Why don’t we go around?’ Lorenzo complains.

‘Because we take my route,’ El Chacal tells him.

‘But that way looks way easier.’ Lorenzo points north.

‘Vete entonces.’

El Chacal dislikes Lorenzo. There’s a tension between these two men, Luca understands, because there’s a tension between Lorenzo and every person he encounters. Most people, because of decorum, attempt to disguise that conflict, but the coyote doesn’t bother, and Luca likes that. Instead, when Lorenzo speaks, El Chacal makes a face that’s like the opposite of rolling his eyes, where his features get really still, and he looks away from Lorenzo with his eyelids half-closed, and he just waits for the words to go away. After a moment, he reanimates himself and presses on.

When they reach the apex of the hill and behold the vista on the other side, an uncomfortable feeling of both thrill and dread shivers right through Luca’s whole body. It’s so severe that Mami actually sees the quake of his limbs from her peripheral vision, and turns her head to look at him. He makes sure not to catch her eye. He’s enraptured, anyway, by the panorama that caused the feeling in him; they all are.

On the far side of this hill are a hundred more just like it, and probably a hundred more beyond those that they can’t see, because the hills get taller and sharper and more formidable as they go. The sunlight cracks across them in crazy stabs of brightness. The hills are covered in golden, wind-beaten grasses, spiky plants, and scrubby trees. There are huge boulders everywhere, studded into the creases of the hills, perched on rickety ledges, gathered in hollows like intransigent families. A few of the rocks are so gargantuan they dwarf the hills beneath them. The sky is merciless above, wheeling clouds to shift the light, playing tricks, making it impossible to gauge distances, but never covering the hot, ruthless globe of the sun. Luca pauses there to snatch the hat from his head and stuff it into his coat pocket. He’s suddenly covered with sweat. He peels the scarf and jacket off, and unzips his backpack to stuff them in. He retrieves Papi’s red hat and takes a whiff of the hatband before fixing it back onto his head and reslinging the backpack onto his shoulders, but the coyote looks over and shakes his head.

‘You can’t wear the hat,’ he says. ‘You can spot that red from a mile away.’

Luca frowns at Mami, but she nods, and Luca unhappily removes Papi’s hat. He hands it to Mami, and she tries to zip it back into his pack.

‘You can wear mine.’ Lydia removes her hat and holds it out to him.

‘But it’s pink,’ he protests.

‘Hardly.’

‘I’ll take it!’ Beto says.

Lydia laughs. ‘I wish I had an extra one for you,’ she says. She plops it on Luca’s head and returns to the zipper on Luca’s pack, trying to get Papi’s hat back in. The backpack is stuffed. She pauses to pull a white T-shirt out from inside. ‘Here,’ she says, handing the shirt to Beto. ‘Use this.’

He fixes the neck of the T-shirt over his head and lets the fabric drape down his neck to shield his skin from the sun. He grins at Lydia. ‘Thanks.’

Everyone has paused here, suddenly aware of the mounting heat. They’re all peeling off layers and regrouping. Slim and Choncho are sharing water from one of their jugs. There’s a reason this landscape is devoid of people, why it’s still feasible to cross here without getting caught. It seems impossible that any creature could survive in such a place.

‘It doesn’t even look real,’ Mami says.

Beside Luca, Lorenzo removes his own cap and wipes his brow. That hat was pristine the first time Luca saw it, at the migrant shelter in Huehuetoca. Now the brim is still flat, but the sun has sapped its color from black to gray. That change is startling to Luca. He’s unaccustomed to the potency of the Sonoran sun, how quickly it corrodes whatever’s beneath its gaze. He pulls Mami’s hat off his head to examine it more closely, and he realizes that the pink really isn’t pink anymore. It’s only the bleached memory of pink, a dirty sand color. That’s what Mami meant when she said hardly. Lorenzo leans his hands on his knees and looks out across the hopeless vista.

‘Ay, no manches, cabrón,’ he says. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’

‘I guess this is what he meant by grueling.’ Beto wheezes, pulling the empty inhaler from his pocket to suck on it.

‘You okay?’ Luca asks, gesturing at the inhaler.

Beto shrugs and tries to regulate his breath, his eyes squinting against the brightness of the sun. ‘Why, you got some albuterol in there?’ He pokes at Luca’s backpack. ‘Because I’ll take it if you do!’

Both boys laugh, and Beto’s sounds like a dying balloon.

‘Venga, mijo,’ Mami says, prompting Luca to walk in front of her. ‘You, too, Beto. You okay to walk?’

He doesn’t waste any more breath on words but nods and gets moving.

Each hill looks like it would take a half a day to walk up, and a half a day to walk back down. The migrants file downhill in El Chacal’s wake. They’re silent now, descending into the first seam of the valley, struggling to keep their minds strong as they face the enormity of their undertaking. The wind rockets across the landscape and whips Rebeca’s hair into a black tornado. Their feet crunch through the witchy yellow grass, and Luca’s body is flooded with awful excitement. They’re in the United States now, and already it looks like a movie set, but with real desert animals that can kill you, like scorpions and rattlesnakes and mountain lions. Luca experiences a swamp of tingly, nauseating confusion.

‘Luca.’ Mami’s right behind him. Sometimes it’s like she can hear what he’s thinking. ‘You doing okay?’

He nods.

‘I’m proud of you, mijo,’ she whispers so no one else can hear. She makes a muscle. ‘Eres bien fuerte. Papi would be proud.’

El Chacal knows where there’s a water station, a place where aid workers leave water for passing migrants. He’s made them conserve their supplies anyway, because sometimes the water’s not there – sometimes the Border Patrol or vigilantes find it first and destroy it. But today it’s there, marked by a whipping blue flag atop a pole, three huge jugs sitting on a pallet beneath a tarp. It’s not cold, but it’s the best water Lydia has ever tasted. Her head was beginning to pound because she was conserving their supply, but now she drinks her fill from her canteen, and feels the pain diminish at once. It feels like a miracle, to drink. She refills her canteen again and drinks some more. Luca drinks very little.

‘As much as you can, amorcito,’ she insists.

‘But I’ll get a cramp. We have to walk so fast.’

‘Cramps you can live with,’ she says. ‘Drink.’

They rest beside the water station for ten minutes, filling their jugs and drinking and drinking, and filling them again before they strike out deeper across the valley floor. El Chacal has warned them to stay quiet, to listen all the time for the sound of engines, but the wind is too loud for that. Beto starts chatting to Choncho.

‘Where you guys from?’ Beto asks.

Choncho is slow to respond, not from reluctance, but just because that’s his way. ‘Veracruz,’ he says eventually.

‘That in Mexico?’

Another pause. ‘Yes.’

‘I didn’t know they made Mexicans as big as you.’

Choncho laughs, and it sends a ripple through the whole group.

Beto looks from Choncho to his brother Slim to their two sons. ‘Everybody in Veracruz as tall as you?’

‘No,’ Choncho says slowly. ‘Much taller.’

Beto is listing all the tallest people he can think of from el dompe, when El Chacal makes the low-pitched warning whistle. Marisol spots the problem at the same time, and inadvertently cries out. She points across the valley to a ridge on the far side where a trail of fawn, powdery dust rises up through the foliage. El Chacal does his whistle once more, commanding everyone to drop, and it’s instant, the way they obey. They drop like they were shot, all fifteen of them right where they stand. ‘Get into the shade if you can,’ he says.

The light is vigorous here. To be in it is to be discovered, to be out of it is to be concealed. When the desert sunlight shines on any scrap of moving color, that color radiates like a beacon. Mami and Luca huddle together beneath the shade of a rock, pressed up beside a silk tassel tree. Catkins hang down from its branches in pale green curtains that drop their clinging flowers into Mami’s hair. Tucked into this dark alcove and curled behind their backpacks, they’re invisible from the ridge where that plume of dust is growing steadily across the hillside in a sputtering line. Around them, the other migrants squirm to find cover, flattening themselves into the parched grasses, twisting themselves into the spiky shadows of yuca fronds, folding themselves into the silhouette of a cypress tree. They all become perfectly motionless and silent. Even Beto is quiet, lying flat among the blond stalks, his toes pointing up to the sky. When three minutes have passed, they finally hear the vague rumble of an engine slurring itself into the wind. After another full minute, the vehicle appears on a slope not far above them, on the next hill over. It’s the distinct white-and-green Chevy Tahoe of the US Border Patrol.

El Chacal’s face betrays nothing. ‘Nobody move,’ he says quietly. He’s well hidden between Marisol and Nicolás in the shade of a standing rock. Because he knows it might be some time before they can move again, he always makes sure to land in a comfortable position. He sits on his bottom with his knees up, and trains his binoculars on the passenger seat of the Chevy Tahoe, where a Border Patrol agent trains his own military-grade binoculars back toward them.

We are invisible, Luca says to himself, and he closes his eyes. We are desert plants. We are rocks. He breathes deeply and slowly, taking care that his chest doesn’t rise and fall with the cycle of his breath. The stillness is a kind of meditation all migrants must master. We are rocks, we are rocks. Somos piedras. Luca’s skin hardens into a stony shell, his arms become immovable, his legs permanently fixed in position, the cells of his backside and the bottoms of his feet amalgamate with the ground beneath him. He grows into the earth. No part of his body itches or twitches, because his body is not a body anymore, but a slab of native stone. He’s been stationary in this place for millennia. This silk tassel tree has grown up from his spine, the indigenous plants have flourished and died here around his ankles, the fox sparrows and meadowlarks have nested in his hair, the rains and winds and sun have beaten down across the rigid expanse of his shoulders, and Luca has never moved. We are rocks. At length, the Tahoe finishes its noisy, indiscreet voyage across the ridge and disappears over a low rim into the next seam of the valley beyond.

El Chacal doesn’t waste time on chitchat. The sun is lodging itself ever higher into the hot, bright shelf of the sky, and they should’ve made camp an hour ago. It’s not safe for them to be exerting themselves beneath the burning lamp of the sun. It will sap them. ‘Vámonos,’ he says. ‘¡Apúrense!’ Just as quickly as they dropped, everyone rises, collects their belongings, and once again they’re on the move.

By late morning, just as that sun is sucking all the moisture from their depleted bodies, just as Rebeca feels ready to give up, behind the skirting of a deep hill, they come to a shaded fold of land where a cluster of trees hides a good camp. Sumac and mountain mahogany band together beneath the jagged ridges, so their camp is entirely concealed from view. They are deeply in shade, and it’s a blessed relief to be out from under the sun. There are signs all around the clearing of previous campers: discarded plastic water bottles, a ripped black T-shirt covered with salt stains, a worn pink sneaker, much smaller than Luca’s. El Chacal goes directly to a soft clump of sand beneath a tree where all the rocks have been cleared. He pitches his pack down beside the trunk and immediately settles himself in to sleep. The others follow suit. It’s easy for the men, who seem to sleep wherever they drop. Marisol lies flat on her stomach and rests her head on her outstretched arms. She, too, is asleep instantly. The sisters are restless, and they move several times before they find comfort.

Despite her exhaustion, Lydia expects to have trouble sleeping. She flings out their blanket anyway, and she and Luca collapse onto it. The desert sun is so bright that even here in the deep shade, Lydia finds herself squinting to block out the light. When she opens her eyes to look around, the landscape beyond this seam of shade is one wide expanse of sepia, everything bleached into varying fractures of brown by the adamant sun. Choncho notices her wakefulness and gives her a somber nod, which Lydia interprets as a promise to watch over her and her sleeping child. You rest. I will make sure nothing happens to you, is the meaning she chooses to attach to that ambiguous nod. And with that imagined vow of protection, at once, she drops into sleep.