American Dirt

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Soledad pulls the trigger, and Rebeca watches without any reaction at all. She doesn’t wince or jump or gasp. She doesn’t look away. Soledad would like to shoot him again and again. She imagines bullet holes in todos los agentes in Sinaloa, imagines Iván’s brains splattered on the ceiling above her, and she’d like to keep shooting Lorenzo forever. She doesn’t even need to leave the desert now because the satisfaction of standing here shooting is all she needs for the rest of her life. It feels like a buckle in time, like hours or years pass while she stands there holding that gun. So then it also feels like a slow-dawning realization she has, that she might yet use one of those bullets for herself, and in so doing, join Papi, but then she wonders if she can still make it to Papi, to the good place where he is. She looks at the gun in her hand, and sees it there at the end of her arm as if from a great distance, and as she watches, it turns slowly toward her, so the hole where the bullets come out is nearly facing her. But there are other hands covering hers now, strong and gentle, and together, all four hands point the gun toward the ground. El Chacal loosens the grip of Soledad’s fingers and untangles the warm chunk of metal from her grasp.

When Soledad finally looks up from her hands and settles her eyes on her sister, what she sees in Rebeca’s face is a mirror of what she feels inside herself. It’s a nothingness. It’s the blankness of that painted sheet blowing free in the hot desert wind. There is no joy, no relief, no regret, no disbelief. The sisters clasp hands and walk carefully back toward the cave, picking their way among the stones and the spiky plants with their eyes wide open.

El Chacal stands over the body. Guilty. It’s not the first time one of his pollitos has died in the desert. Hell, it might not even be the first time today. But this one he could have prevented. He knows he’s responsible. He makes the sign of the cross over the corpse, but it’s God he addresses. ‘Perdóname, Señor.’

They have to break camp quickly in case anyone nearby heard the shot. When the coyote returns to the cave, the migrants are already dressing in their dry, stiffened clothing. They’re distressed, especially the two boys. Beto shakes his empty inhaler and takes a hollow puff, but they can all see the skin sucking into the depressions above his collarbones with each breath. He leans over and plants his hands on his knees. He closes his eyes to concentrate on deep, slow breathing. Marisol rubs his back.

‘Is he okay to move?’ El Chacal says. ‘We have to move.’

Marisol leans down to Beto, the sleeve of her blouse making a small curtain for him, like the one a nurse might draw around his bed, were he in an emergency clinic in Tucson. Beto doesn’t answer, but with his eyes still closed, he nods. Marisol gives El Chacal a thumbs-up. ‘He’s okay.’ Beto’s breath knocks like a rattlesnake.

The sisters move mechanically to dress themselves and pack their belongings. Their expressions are impassive. Marisol and Nicolás fall into helping them, zipping their backpacks, readying their shoes. The two silent men stand outside, apart. Slim and David look grim-faced and waxy. The confirmed death of one among them has forced them to contemplate what they’d heretofore managed not to consider too closely: That their brother and son, their uncle and father, may have by now met a similar end. Or no, not a similar end, in fact. A much worse one.

They probably made it out of the canyon, by Ricardín slinging his arm around his tío’s strong neck. Perhaps they fashioned a splint so they could stagger up from ledge to ledge, and climb out of the gorge. Maybe Ricardín was able to tolerate the pain of walking, somehow, another mile on that smashed and gnarled leg. Surely they drank their reserves of water on that journey, however long it took them, hot and exposed beneath the bald desert sun. Maybe they were able to save a few mouthfuls for the end. If they made it as far as the Ruby Road, while the sun sucked all the moisture from their bodies, how long were they able to last there, on that unshaded dirt, while they waited for someone to find them? How long does it take for a person to dehydrate and die in the Sonoran Desert? What happens when your body becomes so thirsty it no longer follows basic commands like keep going, wave your arms, call for help. Don’t close your eyes. Wake up. Wake up! Are you aware, when your companion falls into the dirt beside you, when his body can’t take another step? Can you feel your own kidneys shutting down, your liver failing, your skin shriveling onto your bones? Can you feel your brain cooking inside your skull? Or do you lose consciousness before all that?

Mercy.

The coyote tells everyone to move quickly. He pulls the sheet from its nails and wraps it into a ball. He knows he will never return to this place again.

Lydia is not sorry Lorenzo is dead. Neither does she feel bad that Soledad was the one to kill him, beyond whatever emotional fallout that truth might one day have for the girl she’s grown so fond of. But she does worry that something vital may be broken inside herself, because Luca is suitably upset, but for her, it seems like death – even sudden, violent death – may no longer have the capacity to shock her. It’s a fear she needs to press like a bruise, to test its tenderness. Both of Luca’s heels are wrapped with Band-Aids and fresh socks, his boots tied snugly to his feet, and he’s holding Rebeca’s hand. The magic that exists between those two billows up and covers them like a force field. His presence reanimates Rebeca, erasing her blankness and filling her in with a trace of color. That energy, in turn, calms Luca, and returns him to himself.

‘I’ll only be a second,’ Lydia says to El Chacal as he stuffs the colored sheet into his pack. ‘I need to see him.’

‘Wait,’ the coyote says, and then he bends into the space where Lorenzo had been sleeping. His discarded T-shirt is there, his shorts and shoes. El Chacal reaches into the pocket of the shorts and pulls out a black canvas wallet with Minecraft characters on it. There’s a scritch of Velcro as the coyote opens the wallet, but there’s no ID inside. He’d been hoping for something he could leave with the body, because that act of identification is the smallest kindness, and one El Chacal can afford to give. Still, maybe someone will recognize the wallet, which will remain intact long after the skin is gone, long after the flesh is entirely scavenged or decomposed. Bodies disappear with astonishing speed in the desert. It’s helpful to find some personal item near the bleached bones. He hands the wallet to Lydia. ‘Just leave this with him,’ he says.

When El Chacal returns to his packing, Lydia notices the cell phone, too, tucked inside one of Lorenzo’s expensive sneakers. She picks it up. Luca watches her, but he’s calm now, with Rebeca. She nods at him, and then climbs up the outside of the cave to where Lorenzo’s body is still fresh in the dirt. It feels wrong to see him like this. Not only dead, but also without clothes. It’s embarrassing to see the vulnerability of his bare chest. His eyes are open, and Lydia thinks about closing them, but she doesn’t owe him that. She doesn’t want to touch him, but she nudges his bare foot with her toe and watches his leg react. It wobbles and settles. He’s really dead. And still she feels nothing. She stands so her shadow falls across his face and says a Hail Mary. She says the Fatima prayer, she tries.

O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy. Amen.

It’s not enough.

She’s not praying for Lorenzo. She presses her lips together so hard her teeth bite into the flesh. She’s praying for herself, for grace. For everything she lost. For all the mistakes she made. For the apology she can never give to Sebastián. For being wrong about Javier. For being wrong about everything. For surviving when everyone else died. For being so numb. She is praying for her boy and their decimated lives.

A sudden wind creaks through the nearby rosewood tree and flips through Lydia’s hair. She squats down next to Lorenzo, and there’s the violent flashback of this posture on Abuela’s back patio. It floods in at her shoulders and at once she can feel it in her whole body. The sharp ache of tenderness, the half-moons of Sebastián’s pink fingernails. There was love. There was love. She had a family, and then they were gone. All at once, their bodies splayed out in grotesque shapes across the patio. Yénifer’s white dress, red. Her beautiful hair. Adrián’s balón de fútbol abandoned in the grass near his feet.

Mamá.

So there it is. The welling reservoir of grief, keen and profound beneath the bruise, the proof of her humanity, still intact. She needs to bury it back where it was. She can’t indulge it yet. She imagines a hole in the desert floor, all her pain inside. She imagines covering it with dirt, pressing down on the earth with her soiled hands. Lydia tucks the canvas Minecraft wallet beneath one slender, outstretched arm. She can see now, from the bareness of Lorenzo’s chest, the mold of his shoulders, what he’d been concealing beneath that troublesome shell. He’s only a boy. She stands and looks down again at the wreckage of the young body beneath her. And this is the moment.

This is the moment of Lydia’s crossing. Here at the back of this cave somewhere in the Tumacacori Mountains, Lydia sheds the violent skin of everything that’s happened to her. It rolls down from her tingling scalp off the mantle of her shoulders and down the length of her body. She breathes it out. She spits it into the dirt. Javier. Marta. Everything. Her entire life before this moment. Every person she loved who is gone. Her monumental regret. She will leave it here.

She stands at Lorenzo’s feet.

She turns away from him.

‘I forgive you,’ she says.

Lydia has already turned to go when she remembers his phone. She stoops again, to leave it where someone might find it. She stretches out her hand and sees it there, the innocuous, shiny thing, black plastic and gleaming metal in her hand. She closes her fingers around it and stands up again. She presses the button that makes it turn on, and she knows how, because it’s a nicer, newer version of her own phone, the phone that’s powered off, SIM card removed, stuffed inside her spare socks in the bottom of her pack right now. She is untraceable. But what about Lorenzo? Did he ever consider how his signal might be pinging between cell towers, triangulating his location? The thing glows to life in her hand, and there’s no passcode or lock, it just opens right up, and Lydia has to cover the screen to see it beneath the glare of the sun. She walks to the rosewood tree and ducks into its shade. There are text messages, seven of them. Unread. Her thumb hovers over the screen. But then she jerks her head up and looks around, over her shoulder. They are miles from nowhere. Alone. What is she afraid of? She touches her thumb to the screen and the messages swarm up, they tumble open. They are from someone named El Él. The Him. Lydia curls over the phone, and it’s instant, the way she consumes the information. It takes her no time at all to read them, and to know.

El Él.

L L.

La Lechuza.

The bottom drops out of her stomach. He’s been tracking her.

Nineteen days. 1,626 miles.

Only seconds ago, she felt liberated. She was free of him, the fear of him. He cannot follow her where she is going. No.

‘No!’ she says out loud.

She almost throws the phone. She almost kicks Lorenzo in his dead ribs for his easy betrayal, for his treachery, for his nature. She’d like to bash his head against that rock, to kill him again, my God. It won’t help. There’s no act she can perform that would appease the violent rush she now feels in her limbs. There are no swear words magical enough to carry some piece of this violence away from her. She is a tornado. She’s an eruption. She’s an huracán.

She reads the texts again. She scrolls back, and back. To Guadalajara. Eleven days ago. Lorenzo had sold them out, proclaimed himself finished with Los Jardineros forever, and insisted that this piece of intel was a parting gift for the jefe, a gesture of good faith. He’d sent Javier a surreptitious photograph of Lydia in profile. She was wrapped around Luca, the two of them squinting out from atop La Bestia. Tus amigos están en Guadalajara, Patrón, the text read.

Javier had been in the coroner’s office in Barcelona when the text came in, and his wife had admonished him for looking at his phone while they were there to identify their daughter’s body, and to fill out the paperwork that would allow them to bring Marta home. The contempt he felt for his wife in that moment was entirely new, and Javier didn’t even bother responding to her reprimand. He looked at her with mild disgust, and returned his attention to his screen.

You are not free until I am free, he typed back. Return her to me.

‘Ay, no,’ Lydia says out loud beneath the rosewood tree. ‘No.’

The phone battery is almost full, but there’s only one bar of a signal. Lydia holds it up overhead and swings it around. She emerges from beneath the tree, steps over Lorenzo’s body, and scrambles up the rock wall beside him with his phone. Here. Two bars, three bars. Before she can stop herself, she opens the contact for El Él and hits the video call button. Already it’s ringing. Lydia knows the ringtone. It’s Pavarotti singing ‘Nessun Dorma’. Ridiculous. Pretentious. Pedestrian. He thought he was aristocratic because he wrote shitty poetry and listened to opera. He’s a murderer. He’s a scumbag. He’s bourgeois. But she is in his pocket, now. She knows. She is on top of a cave in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. She is standing over the dead body of his assassin, and now she has the upper hand, and he will not follow her into this next life. He will not haunt her, and she will not be afraid, no. She and Luca will be free. It ends here.

She hears his voice before she sees him.

‘Dime,’ he says. Anxious for news of her death.

‘Tell you what? That I am dead? That my son is dead?’

‘Dios mío, Lydia.’ He says her name. Lydia. And it sounds the same way it has always sounded coming out of his mouth. Lydia.

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we are alive. Estamos vivos.’

‘Lydia,’ he says it again, and it’s so confusing. Because her hatred of him is enormous. It’s the biggest feeling she has ever felt. It’s stronger even than the love she felt for Sebastián, the day they held hands and kissed in front of the altar at the Nuestra Señora de la Soledad cathedral. It’s deeper than the colossal, unnameable thing she felt the day she pushed Luca out of her body and into the world. It’s darker than the hole her papi left behind when he died without saying goodbye. Her hatred is a living succubus, vast enough and quick enough and wicked enough to crest up from her heart and take wing, to expand across the hundreds of miles between them, to engulf the whole city of Acapulco, to veil the room in which he’s standing, to overshadow him and overcome him, to slip into his mouth and choke him from the inside out. She hates him so much she can murder him from sixteen hundred miles away, just by wishing for it. But he is saying her name. ‘Lydia.’

His face is haggard. Skeletal.

‘I never wished for your death,’ he says. ‘Surely you know that, Lydia. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.’

She blinks. Pulls the camera away from her face. She closes her mouth and surveys the desert landscape. And suddenly she knows what he’s saying to be exactly true. All this time, all her planning, all her strategy and self-congratulations, it was all an illusion.

‘I could never harm you, Lydia.’

Her mouth opens with an incredulous gasp. ‘Harm! You could never harm me? You have harmed me, señor. You have tortured me. You have destroyed my whole world, everything.’

‘No, Lydia. I never meant—’

‘¡Cállate la boca!’ she shouts over him. ‘Do you think I care what you meant? Or how you justify your monstrosities? I’m calling only to tell you that this is over. Do you understand? It’s over.’

Javier sighs delicately on the other end of the phone. She sees him do this. A familiar mannerism, once beloved. And it tilts her psyche like a fun house.

‘But it can never be over, Lydia,’ he says sadly. ‘We have both lost everything.’

No.

‘That is horseshit, Javier. You have lost one thing. One!’

He pauses, lifting his wet eyes. ‘The only thing.’

Lydia’s heartbeat feels like a club, but her voice is lower. ‘The most important thing,’ she concedes. ‘But that gave you no right! No right!’

He’s in a comfortable sunbeam in Acapulco, in her homeplace. There’s a cup of espresso at his elbow. She is filthy and penniless and homeless and widowed and orphaned in the desert. He props his phone somewhere in front of him so his image becomes steady on her screen. He removes his glasses, cleans the lenses. His mouth is an impossible frown. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ he says, blinking rapidly.

‘I will survive,’ she says. ‘Because I still have Luca. I have Luca.’

His mouth is a gash.

‘This has to be over now,’ she says.

Javier places the glasses back on his face, pushes them up his nose.

‘I killed the sicario you sent.’

‘You what?’

‘Yes. He’s dead. Look.’ Lydia scrambles to the edge of the little ridge and points her phone down at Lorenzo. Later she might feel guilt about this, about using his body to advance her own purpose, about celebrating Lorenzo’s death, even in pretense. Later she might ask herself why Javier’s last seven text messages had gone unanswered, unread. She might even wonder about Lorenzo’s extinguished potential for redemption. But not right now. She points the phone back to her own face. ‘So we can be finished now, yes? Or should we keep on killing people?’

Javier unleashes a noise that’s half sob and half laughter. He wants to plead not guilty by reason of grief. She knows grief is a kind of insanity. She knows.

Lydia is a beacon on that ridge.

The disgust in her mouth has a taste like bile. ‘Goodbye, Javier.’

She doesn’t bother hanging up. She tosses the cell phone into the dirt, and the camera yawns up at the vacant sky.

In front of the cave, in the hot height of the desert afternoon, three hours before they should safely set out with the dropping sun, the others are moving quickly down the slope and away into the valley below. Luca, with Rebeca, is waiting for her. Lydia takes his hand.