American Dirt

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The cave, when they finally reach it, is warm and dry, and the rising sun paints the back wall orange and pink and yellow. It’s not a sunken cave with a dark hole of a mouth like Luca expected when he heard the word cueva, but rather, it’s as if a huge divot has been hollowed out of the earth with an ice-cream scoop, and then softened and cleaned by the elements. There are several copper nails hammered into the top of the cave’s opening, and El Chacal takes a sheet from his pack that’s painted in earthy stripes the exact colors of the landscape. He tacks this sheet onto the nails above, dropping the migrants into a light shade.

The migrants look different in this morning’s light than they did in yesterday’s. Some of them had already known they were capable of walking away from a wounded man, of abandoning a person in the desert to save themselves. Marisol, for example, believes there’s almost no despicable thing she wouldn’t do in order to get back to her daughters. Lorenzo would trample a baby to get to el norte. For others among them, the discovery of their own compliance is an unpleasant surprise. They all know how lucky they are that it was Ricardín who broke his leg, and not them, and the recognition of that good fortune makes them each feel damned, doomed. Unconscionable.

‘Men outside first,’ the coyote orders them, when the sheet is fixed in place.

Lorenzo groans, but the others duck through without complaint. Rebeca is soaked and there’s a dank smell rising off the back of her neck where the hood of her sweatshirt has gathered the oils running from her sopping hair. Her toes are frozen, and her feet feel raw in her shoes, but she’s terrified of taking off her clothes.

‘It’s the only way to get dry.’ Soledad plops down on her backside and peels off her soggy sneakers. Her toes are tingly. ‘I feel better already,’ she says.

They all undress. They don’t look at one another. Beto stays in only his underwear because he has nothing else to put on, so Lydia fishes out the same spare T-shirt he wore as a makeshift hat yesterday and hands it to him. The rain has had an unhealthy effect on his lungs, and he rattles and wheezes when he lifts his arms to pull the gifted T-shirt over his head. Lydia finds her own spare clothes, rolled inside a plastic bag in her pack, to be reasonably dry. Luca’s, too. Soledad stands up and removes her sweater, which she holds up in front of Rebeca like a curtain so her sister can change. They all peel the clothes from their wet bodies. They slip into large T-shirts and change their underwear. They’ll have to stretch their jeans to dry on the rocks outside.

Even though there’s a new solemnity among them in the absence of Choncho and Ricardín, the solace of this place, this moment, is extraordinary. The ordeal of the rain makes Lydia appreciate the comfort of dryness in a way she never even considered before now. While the men strip and change in the cave, she and Luca sit just outside the sheet with their bare legs stretched out in the sunshine. It’s still early morning in the desert, but the temperature is rising quickly. The rock is soft and dry beneath them, and the sun warms the patches where their skin is chafed and tender. Luca wants to ask Mami what they’re going to do when they get to el norte, but he’s afraid she won’t have an answer, and besides, he doesn’t want to jinx the nearness of their arrival. There’s one question that won’t leave him alone, though.

‘What about Rebeca and Soledad?’ he says. ‘Do you really think they’ll go to Maryland?’

Lydia squints her eyes against the brightness of the growing day and pulls his feet onto her lap to examine his blister. The Band-Aid from last night is still surprisingly well fastened to his heel, so she doesn’t mess with it. She can feel the warm weight of Sebastián’s ring sitting in the hollow at the base of her throat. A mild breeze crosses her bare brown knees, and Luca wiggles his toes.

‘It’s always been their plan,’ Lydia says carefully.

‘But couldn’t they change their plan?’ he says. ‘If we ask them?’

The sky is scrubbed fresh and stark blue by the gone rain, but every trace of that water has evaporated from the earth around them. It feels like a dream, all that rainfall. This is a cycle, she thinks. Every day a fresh horror, and when it’s over, this feeling of surreal detachment. A disbelief, almost, in what they just endured. The mind is magical. Human beings are magical.

‘Anything’s possible, Luca,’ she says, looking past her toes and out across the ruddy landscape. And maybe they really could change their plans. Lydia thinks about how adaptable migrants must be. They must change their minds every day, every hour. They must be stubborn about one thing only: survival.

The moon has risen like a frail white eggshell against the blueness of the daytime sky.

‘Can they stay with us?’ Luca asks. ‘Can they live with us?’

‘Yes,’ she answers him easily. ‘If they want to.’

Lydia can’t imagine saying goodbye to Soledad and Rebeca now. Another parting.

‘And maybe Beto?’ Luca asks.

‘Oh my goodness!’ She laughs. ‘We’ll see.’

Luca doesn’t ask Mami if she thinks Choncho managed to get Ricardín to the Ruby Road. He doesn’t ask if she thinks someone found them by now, if they’re okay. He’s already made up the answers to those questions in his own mind; they are the answers he needs them to be.

Their drinking supplies are beginning to run low, which feels ludicrous after all that water. The coyote instructs them to drink what they need, but conserve as much as they can. In the large cave, they sleep all morning, and by mid-afternoon they are thirsty and sweaty and hungry, and the relative comfort of this place has melted with the oppressive heat of the day. They endeavor to sleep through their discomfort. They know that tonight is the last night, and they’re all eager to get out of here, to get where they’re going, to descend from this airless, waterless, colorless nowhere and get to that road down there, to follow it to where there’s life.

It becomes stifling in the cave because the camouflage of the hanging sheet, now weighted with rocks along its bottom to prevent the wind from billowing it in and out of the cave, also prevents that breeze from cooling them. Rest becomes difficult, and Rebeca is hot and frustrated when she sits up in the cave and finds everyone else asleep. All around her, the other migrants make the breathy noises of unquiet sleep. Beto is the loudest, wheezing impressively with every breath, but he doesn’t stir. He uses one arm as a pillow, and sleeps with his mouth wide open, trying to draw the oxygen out of the air. Rebeca jams her bare feet into her sneakers and steps over him. The sneakers are scratchy and misshapen from being so wet and then drying out again, but she doesn’t bother tying them. She only has to find somewhere to pee. Lorenzo opens his eyes as the girl picks her way across and around the sleeping migrants. He looks right up the smooth brown skin of her leg as she passes, and is rewarded by the sight of her yellow cotton underwear beneath her baggy white T-shirt. She ducks beneath the hanging sheet and steps outside. Without a sound, Lorenzo sits up from his place, leaves his shoes off, and follows her.

Rebeca rounds the side of the cave, leaves the softness of rock behind her, and steps into the scraggy tangle of undergrowth in search of a place to empty her bladder. There are scrubby trees here, and she ducks beneath one, pulling her cotton panties to her knees and squatting in the shade. She hears Lorenzo before she sees him, because he grunts at the prickly sharpness of plants and stones underfoot. She stands immediately, leaving a trickle of urine down the inside of one leg. She snatches her panties up around her hips and pulls the T-shirt down.

He gives her a crooked smile, an attempt at charm. ‘Should’ve worn my shoes,’ he says, stepping painfully toward her across the rocks. ‘Guess I’m not as smart as you.’

Rebeca takes two steps back. Away from him. She puts one hand out and feels the rough bark of the rosewood she just watered. Its boughs are low overhead. A small branch tangles in her hair.

‘I’m just taking a piss,’ he says. ‘Just like you.’ He’s not wearing a shirt, only boxer shorts with a stretchy elastic waistband. He tugs them down right in front of her and pulls out his engorged penis. Rebeca does not want to see it. She looks at the path behind him, the path she took around the side of the cave, and knows she cannot return that way, not without walking toward him, without passing directly by him with his disgusting erect penis. She’s already crying as she turns and ducks beneath the branch of the tree behind her, ripping out a strand of her hair as she goes. Lorenzo is quick, much quicker than she thought he’d be without shoes on, and before she’s managed to get very far at all, he’s already on her, first with a violent yank of her wrist in his grip, and then the hot wetness of his mouth all over her, her cheek, her neck, her ear. Rebeca fights, swinging with her free arm, but then he grabs that one, too, so now he has her pinned, her two wrists encircled by the fetters of his strong hands, and he presses all his weight on top of her. He pins her back against the rugged rock face and she can feel the hard club of his anatomy pushing against her stomach. She knows there are tears coming down her face, but she feels entirely powerless to change anything. She tries anyway, swinging her knee up to find that her legs, too, are now pinned beneath his weight. So then she strikes with the only thing she has left – her head. And she manages to connect, once, twice, she headbutts him, but he only laughs and tells her he likes it rough. She fights and cries, and tries to get her hands loose, tries to use her teeth, her elbows, tries to get her arms between their bodies, to push him off, but she doesn’t scream, she holds in her scream, because they’re in the United States now, and if she screams and she’s lucky, it will be Slim or David who answers that cry, but if she’s unlucky it will be la migra. When has she ever been lucky? Her head goes limp. Her neck, limp. Rebeca stares up past the contorted menace of Lorenzo’s strained face. She stares up at the blank blue sky above him and waits for the worst part to happen. She wants it to be over with.

But then it doesn’t. It doesn’t happen. Because just as she feels the brutality of his hands traveling down the length of her rigid body, just as he pulls at the fabric of her underwear, there’s another voice.

‘Oye naco, get the fuck up off her this instant or I will blow your pinche brains out.’

All at once, the violence recedes. The pressure recedes. The cruel weight of his body is lifted off her, and Rebeca slides down the rock face, trembling.

Lorenzo stands, stuffing himself back into his shorts. ‘Chingada, güey, we were just having some fun, right? Relájate, hermano.’

Rebeca is trembling and shaking, and she uncurls herself from his shadow and moves away from him as quickly as she can. The quaking of her limbs is a tremendous, rackety throb. She feels skeletal, juddery. She jerks and shudders and feels as though her legs might not hold her, but soon she’s away from him and standing next to El Chacal, who has his pistol stretched out toward Lorenzo. Soledad is here, too, now, and Rebeca is crying as she reaches for her sister, but Sole moves past her. Soledad’s eyes are hard and black in the ruthless light of the desert. They glitter as she stares at Lorenzo in his droopy boxer shorts. She looks at his tall, muscular frame, the slight smirk that twists across his mouth, his bare feet. She sees the sickle tattoo with its three drops of blood, just visible as he stands in profile, with one hand still leaning against the rock. She can see the shape of his erection beneath the fabric of his shorts, and she reaches out very deliberately to the coyote beside her.

El Chacal has never read academic theories of trauma psychology, but he has seen a thousand different varieties of it here in the desert. He is, in every practical sense, an expert in the field. He knows better than to give Soledad the gun. But on the other hand, the coyote feels nothing but disgust for Lorenzo. After seventeen years of ferrying people through the desert, he’s learned to tell the good from the bad, even in difficult circumstances. He understands that once in a while, a person is not worth saving. So perhaps it’s not entirely accidental, what happens; maybe El Chacal willfully mistakes Soledad’s gesture for something else. When she reaches out and puts her hand on the pistol, he allows it, he lowers the weapon. He tells himself it’s a tactical feminine intervention, a de-escalation. The coyote barely reacts when she disarms him.

And then it happens so quickly. She steps forward abruptly, swings the pistol up, and points it at her sister’s would-be rapist. Carajo. This is not what El Chacal expected, not really. He steps after her, reaches toward her outstretched hands. ‘Soledad.’

She swings it toward him for only a split second, but it’s enough to convince him to freeze. She settles it swiftly back on Lorenzo, who’s no longer smirking. He raises his hands in front of him.

‘Yo,’ he says, and perhaps it was going to be I’m sorry.