American Dirt

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The downpour stops. Just as abruptly as it started. And in its wake, Luca hears a new chorus of uncomfortable music in their midst. Their shoes squelch beneath them. The drenched denim of their jeans murmurs stiffly when their legs move against each other. Luca’s teeth chatter, and he becomes so cold he can almost hear his brain shivering in his skull. He begins to wonder if being freezing and wet in the aftermath of rain might be worse than the rain itself, the same way your body, once adapted to the cold Pacific water of Acapulco Bay, can yearn for the mantle of that water after you emerge onto the hot, dry sand of Playa Condesa. Your body can get mixed up about what’s hot and what’s cold, Luca thinks, but then it begins to rain again, and Luca knows that his hypothesis was una mierda. The night passes in misery, in bouts of torrential rain and intermittent periods of respite. Lydia tries to maintain her sense of relief, her feeling that they are saved. But their backpacks and jeans chafe their skin raw, and then it rains again. Every one of them, once or twice at least, every one of them despairs. The only thought that sustains them is the notion that each moment they endure this misery is one less moment they have yet to endure.

‘There’s a blessing of the rain,’ El Chacal says as they lace their way through the seam of a canyon. ‘Everybody hates it.’

Luca and Lydia have returned to their place near the front of the line, behind Choncho and Slim and Beto. Rebeca and Soledad are directly behind them now, followed by Marisol, Nicolás, Lorenzo, David and Ricardín, and then the two quiet men who carry their names in secret. The boulders in this seam of land are broad and smooth underfoot, slick with water, and Luca notices that he can begin to make out their shapes in the dark. They come to a place where the boulders form a kind of natural staircase the migrants descend, and then the walls of the canyon rise up on either side of them, and they walk along the bottom of a gulch, where a stream of rainwater sloshes around their ankles. They follow El Chacal tight along the left-hand side of the gulley, where the path is driest, and irregular ledges jut from the canyon walls. It’s just the kind of landscape the daredevil Pilar from school would like to climb if she were here, Luca thinks. He could climb it, too, he knows now. He can do things Pilar never dreamed of. The first traces of dark gray daylight brush the walls of the gorge by degrees while the coyote talks. ‘When it rains, the narcos stay in their SUVs. La migra agents stay in their dens. We sneak past while they take shelter.’

‘Only migrants venture out in the rain,’ Choncho says.

‘Only lunatics,’ Slim corrects him.

But the rain is fickle in the desert, and as the lid of night slowly lifts, Luca watches the oppressive clouds rolling like the wheels of La Bestia across the still-dark sky. Those clouds gather and crush and demolish, and after they pass, they leave a blank void of gray nothing behind them. Soon the sun will come and fill that void with hot color. Soon la migra will return.

They walk in haste.

‘How much farther?’ Beto asks, because no one has spoken in a long time, and even more than he wants an answer, he wants to hear the reassuring sound of another human voice.

‘An hour, maybe less,’ the coyote answers.

Most people who meet El Chacal at this stage of his life presume he got his moniker because of his work as a coyote, but in fact his family has called him that since he was twelve years old. When he was a boy in Tamaulipas, Juan Pedro, as he was known back then, found a pup one day on the side of the road. The pup’s mother had been struck by a car and killed. The other littermates had scattered or been picked off by the time Juan Pedro arrived and found the lone pup sitting bereft beside the cold body of its mother. Juan Pedro took the pup home, and as it grew, despite the meticulous care and affection Juan Pedro gave it, it became a wild, rangy-looking thing. People in the village took to calling the pup ‘The Jackal’, which was fine by Juan Pedro, who liked the wildness of it. But then they began calling Juan Pedro ‘Mother of Jackal’, which he didn’t like quite so much. He endured that name for some time and was glad when eventually folks stopped mentioning the dog entirely and shortened his nickname to ‘El Chacal’.

Despite the name, El Chacal had no intention of becoming a coyote. Few people do. He crossed once many years ago, when he was still a young man looking for work, and he intended to make just the one crossing. It was much easier back then, but still no picnic – not in Arizona. The other migrants he was with during that first crossing found it strenuous and difficult. But El Chacal discovered that he liked these high-desert places. He found that they suited him, they opened his lungs and the good heat of his body. He spent a few months working as a dishwasher at a diner in Phoenix, and whenever he had time off, he liked to go hiking through the canyons. It wasn’t long before he went home to Tamaulipas. The next time he crossed, he did it alone, without a guide. It was crazy, but he did it without difficulty. He did it with a map and a compass, and what’s more, he enjoyed it the way some people enjoy boot camp or a marathon. He liked the strain it put on his muscles and his mind. He liked the undercurrent of survivalist danger. So then he did it again. Several more times without company, and each time he crossed, he grew stronger and smarter, he adjusted his route, perfected his bearings. Then he brought a group of friends from Tamaulipas with him. They were so impressed by his knowledge of the land, by the apparent ease with which he navigated the difficult terrain, that they hired him to bring their girlfriends, their children, their cousins, their parents. Quite accidentally, El Chacal found himself with a thriving business in human smuggling.

It was exciting for him to be good at something after a lifetime of mediocrity in Tamaulipas. His reputation grew, and as the border tightened and his previous routes became impassable, as he had to strike farther and farther into the desert, into more arduous, perilous tracks all the time, El Chacal realized he could charge a lot of money for this service. Then the cartels moved in.

So he doesn’t make as much money now, and what’s more, he doesn’t enjoy the work as he once did. He used to feel like a minor hero, a guide with the power to lead people to the promised land. Now he pays la migra and the cartels both for the privilege of crossing this binational scrap of dirt. They eat his profits and his freedom. When they demand favors of him, he cannot say no. Sometimes they ask him to carry something he doesn’t want to carry. Once in a while they tell him to take someone he doesn’t want to take. Soon El Chacal will retire. He has enough money saved, and now that he’s almost thirty-nine years old, the travails of this repetitive journey are beginning to outweigh his boyish sense of adventure. He’ll go home to Tamaulipas. Maybe he’ll marry Pamela, whom he’s loved since he was a boy. Maybe she’ll finally say yes. Why not? Meanwhile, he tries to be stern with the migrants. He tries to be detached because attachments can be fatal. He needs to be at liberty to make decisions for the good of the group, and if he grows too fond of one of his pollitos, that makes it harder to make a tough decision in a pinch, to leave someone behind if he sees they’re not going to make it. But recently, it’s difficult for him to discern how much of his callousness is still an act. He wears a rosary around his neck to countermand his worries about the flagging condition of his soul. The tattoo on his right forearm reads jesús anda conmigo, and mostly, he still believes it. He wants it to be true.

When they hear the cry behind them, the migrants instinctively duck, but El Chacal, still on his feet, turns toward the sound. Across the tops of the migrants’ heads he sees, approaching from behind and moving as swiftly as a nightmare through the charcoal colors of the canyon, a fast-flowing black mass of water. It’s descending the staircase behind them.

‘Get up!’ he shouts. ‘¡Arriba!’ His voice bangs and echoes against the walls of the canyon, all his furtive inclinations suspended. He shouts at them, ‘Get up, up!’

He leaps from rock to rock ahead, and then reaches for a broad ledge just higher than his waist, and hoists himself aloft. The migrants follow, and El Chacal reaches back to help them up, first Luca and Beto, then the sisters and Lydia, and now Lorenzo is already up. ‘Help them!’ El Chacal shouts at him, so Lorenzo leans down, gives Marisol his hand, and pulls her up, and in this way, one by one the migrants scramble up and away from the advancing wall of water, and those at the front try to move up again, to make room for the others to follow, and here’s another ledge, just higher, so they climb up and up, ascending the wall, and they’re almost all up out of the bottom of the gorge now, and it looks so obvious from here, with the water coming so quickly, with the discovery of the alternate path, this higher path, made up entirely of these jutting ledges, that it’s an ancient riverbed beneath them. Jesucristo.

Even though they’d been near the front of the line, Choncho and Slim and their sons are still below in the gulch because they stayed to help the others. The migrants on the ledge step back to make room for the stragglers to scramble up. They spread out, hasten to scale the ascendant ledges, to reach higher ground. And now Slim is up on the first ledge below, and he reaches back for his nephew David, and their thick forearms slap against each other as they grab wrists and Slim hoists the boy up. And now Choncho is up, too, but Ricardín is last, Slim’s son. And the water is so fast and so high that it doesn’t reach Ricardín’s ankles first and then engulf his legs, but rather it hits the entire back of his body at once and knocks him forward, and he’s dragged along in its maw like a ragdoll, and they all shout and yelp, and El Chacal and the two brothers run and leap from ledge to ledge after him, or after his backpack really, because that’s all they can see now, his large and floating backpack, the same one that was Lydia’s redemption in the darkness, and then Ricardín’s arms come flailing out of the water and he manages to flip himself somehow, and then the backpack is immediately dragged from his body, his arms slip right out and it’s gone, and Ricardín makes one perfunctory effort to reach for the pack, and then realizes immediately that the pack is not the priority, so he returns his attention to his own flagging body, his unusually large frame, whose strength has never failed him before. His papi and tío are on the embankment above him, and the coyote is there, and no one can believe how fast this happened, how the water came out of nowhere, and how fast and strong and deep it is. They’re reaching for him, and yelling for him, and he can hear his father’s voice but he can’t do anything because the water has his arms pinned, and his legs are churning and he keeps spitting out mouthfuls of water, but as soon as he spits out one, his mouth is already full again, and it’s not only water, but water and soil and sticks and debris, and he’s going to drown in it. Ricardín knows he’s going to drown, and he has the thought that it would be almost funny to drown in a flash flood in the desert, and then he realizes that he doesn’t want his death to be funny, or even almost funny, so he focuses all his energy on his abdominal muscles, on bending himself in half, so the top part of his body comes up out of the water and once, twice, he reaches for his father’s hands and misses, and then – wham! – just like that, he bangs into a rock with his head, and then another right after that, and now he can taste blood, his tooth – his front tooth is sharper than it’s always been, and his lip is bleeding. But he is not going to die here, he refuses to die here, in such a stupid, undignified way, when he has a big, strong body to save him, so he looks up at his father on the ledge above, and manages to turn himself just enough so the next rock he hits feet-first, and then another and again, until he’s almost bouncing himself along in the water, from boulder to boulder, and when the next one comes, he uses it, and the momentum of the water, to catapult himself up toward the ledge above, and again he misses his tío’s outstretched hand, but the men are yelling encouragement at him, and keeping pace with his swift progress by leapfrogging each other, and he knows his plan is a good plan, and if he can do it again it will work, so again he twists in the water, except this time, when the next boulder comes and he reaches out his leg, it gets caught there, in an underwater crevasse, and the water pushes his body past, but keeps his leg wrenched under, and he can feel the bone snap, and he screams out in pain, but now his father and his tío are there just above him, and the pain is wicked, but their hands are on him, his papi has his arm, and his tío has the hood of his sweatshirt, and they are hauling him back against the current and toward his wrong-way leg. He feels no relief when the coyote is there, too, when they fix their six strong hands on him and together haul the top half of his weight up from the floodwaters and drape it over the lip of the earth above. His body is twisted awkwardly, but he has purchase now, they’ve got him. He will not drown. The water from his drenched body stains the dirt beneath him a darker color, and his fingers scrabble at the earth, but the lower half of his body is still in the water, stuck.

He feels no relief because he knows.

‘My leg is broken.’ Ricardín does not cry. ‘It’s definitely broken. I broke my leg.’

And it’s just as well the other migrants have not followed this far downstream, because no one wants to see or to hear the horrific business of removing the boy’s leg from where it’s caught in the crevasse below.

The only question is who will stay with him. Slim and Choncho have both done this journey enough times to know how it works, and to accept the terrible fate without complaint. They don’t plead with El Chacal or the other migrants. They don’t beg for help or ask them to stay. Although it would be a reasonable response in these circumstances, they don’t drift toward hysteria at the thought of being left alone and immobilized here in the desert. It’s Choncho who makes the final decision.

‘Because I’m the older brother, that’s why.’

Slim nods.

‘I’ll stay with my godson,’ Choncho says. ‘We’ll give you a head start, and when he’s feeling up to it, I’ll get him to the Ruby Road. You take David and go find work for both our families.’

The brothers embrace, the hard, back-smacking embrace of working men. Then Slim pulls his son’s wet head into his arms.

‘I’m sorry, Papi,’ Ricardín says.

Slim shakes his head. ‘Gracias a Dios, you escaped with your life. That’s all that matters.’

Ricardín and David pray with their fathers before the four of them part ways.

‘Call Teresa when you get to a phone, when you get picked up,’ Slim tells his brother. ‘And I’ll call her when we get to Tucson, and make sure you’re safe.’

Choncho nods.

‘And take this.’ Slim sets one of his water jugs down beside his son.

‘Papi—’

‘Take it, Ricky,’ Slim says. He squats down on his haunches and looks his son in the eye, and then squeezes his shoulder, and stands up with his hat pulled low. He turns his face quickly away.

Behind him, Choncho hugs his son, his hand like a mitt on the back of David’s neck. They’re both well over six feet tall. Choncho kisses his boy on top of the head, and then gives him a light shove toward his uncle. ‘Stay out of trouble,’ he says.

‘Keep the rising sun to your backs,’ El Chacal tells them. ‘The Ruby Road is barely a mile from here.’

A mile, Luca thinks. With a broken leg.

When the coyote herds the migrants back to their route, when they ascend from the canyon into the hot pink dawn, only Luca looks back from the gap at Ricardín and his tío still sitting on the ledge below. The others keep moving, and Luca can feel their unified will, pushing themselves forward like cogs in machinery, like an escalator. They can’t stop the engine or even slow it down. It moves on despite the new rot in their collective spirit. Even the coyote’s energy seems to be flagging. But they move on. They move on.

The migrants are shuffling past Luca, who hovers now, in the gap. Behind them, Choncho pulls his brown baseball cap low over his eyes, and Ricardín’s face is a wet twist of pain. How will they climb out of there when he can’t walk? Luca wonders. How will they make it to the road? Then he banishes that thought and prays instead. Please let them make it to the road.

‘Luca, ven,’ Mami says.

He scrambles to catch up.