American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (12 page)

‘You want me to do yours?’ She smiles at Lydia. ‘We all do each other’s.’

Lydia hesitates, because the most impeccable French braids in the world wouldn’t cause anyone to mistake her for a teenage missionary from Indiana. But even ludicrous armor is better than nothing. The girl mistakes Lydia’s reticence for a language barrier, so she points to her own braids, the braids of the two girls in the row ahead, and then to Lydia’s hair. ‘You like? French braids?’

Lydia nods, pulling the ponytail holder out of her thick, black hair, and turning her back to the girl, who begins crawling her fingers along Lydia’s scalp. It’s hot in the van. When the girl is finished, she asks if anybody has a mirror. There are five teenage girls in this van, and not one of them is vain enough to carry a pocket mirror. Finally, one of the girls opens the camera app on her iPhone, switches it to selfie mode, and hands it to Lydia. ‘They’re so pretty on you!’ she says loudly, pointing to the braids.
‘¡Me gusta!
’

Lydia looks at herself on the screen, twisting her head slightly to inspect the braids. She looks younger, she thinks, a little. She smiles and hands the phone back. Relief washes over Lydia when the singing starts, because the clamor of it fills the van and leaves no room for thinking. All the missionaries sing, and Carlos, too, loudly and cheerfully.

‘You should nap,’ she says quietly into Luca’s ear as they approach Axaxacualco. He looks at her without blinking. ‘I see traffic ahead. You should nap on the floor, here. Cozy.’ Lydia reaches beneath the bench seat and makes a space between two of the larger duffel bags. Luca slips into it and makes himself small. A stuffed backpack makes a pillow. He closes his eyes as the traffic begins to snag, and with it, the breath in Lydia’s chest. The girls sing ‘Jesus, Take the Wheel’ louder. Carlos catches Lydia’s eye in the rearview mirror. He blinks once, because it’s all the reassurance he can offer her. The line of cars in front of them has come to a stop. Theirs is the second of the three vans. Meredith is driving the one in front.

In the road ahead, two young men, two teenage boys, really, tote AR-15s. Perhaps it’s precisely because that make of gun isn’t quite as prolific or as sexy as the ubiquitous AK-47 here that Lydia finds it all the more terrifying. Ridiculous, she knows. One gun will make you as dead as another. But there’s something so utilitarian about the sleek, black AR-15, like it can’t be bothered to put on a show.

Sometimes the muzzle of one of those guns makes it inside the rolled-down window of a waiting car, but generally they remain outside, pointing skyward. The boys hold their weapons with both hands. Mostly the drivers don’t flinch. Mostly the drivers defer to the boys’ exaggerated egos,
go along with their pretend swagger, because although no one expects the boys to open fire, they all know that the only road to genuine bravado runs through faking it first. It’s only a matter of time, and no one wants to find out if today is the day these boys finally mean it. One by one, the drivers reach carefully into their wallets or purses or glove compartments to extract the
mordidas
. They hand over the money without complaint, and with genuine
bendiciones,
because these boys could be anyone, they could be the drivers’ brothers or children or grandchildren. Certainly, they are someone’s.

Carlos rolls and brakes, rolls and brakes. Luca keeps his eyes closed, and the missionaries sing. Lydia prays for the unlikely possibility that the boys on the road ahead are uncorrupted
autodefensas
.

The singing missionaries are conducting their own brand of bravado, too, because even though the roadblock is exciting to them, even though their pastor, who’s in the van behind, explained that roadblocks are quite common here and nothing to be alarmed by, that they’re almost like passing through a toll gate, the girls know that toll booth operators
in Indiana don’t carry automatic weapons. Secretly, in the sinful hidden chambers of their hearts, most of these girls had looked forward to experiencing a roadblock – the exotic thrill of it, the wash of adrenaline, the stories they’d get to tell when they returned home to Indiana! But on the way down from Mexico City, they’d been waved right through without stopping. A guilty disappointment. Still, now that the moment is actually upon them, now that they can see the boys in the road ahead, close in age to themselves and brandishing unthinkable weapons, now that their inexperienced missionary nervous systems are flooding their bloodstreams with chaotic hormones, every one of those braided girls feels sick with fright. Some of them wish for the courage to witness to the boys, to save them by reminding them of Jesus. But mostly they just want to go home. One of the girls in the front seat, the one with the iPhone, tries to start another round of singing, but no one joins her and the effort falters after a couple of bars. Carlos rolls down his window.

The boys stand on either side of the van ahead. Lydia can make out Meredith’s silhouette in the driver’s seat, talking to the boy at her window. He must be the one in charge. Meredith gestures with a finger to the other two vans behind, and both boys look back. Lydia freezes in her seat. There’s no way they can notice her here, in the backseat of the
van’s darkened interior. The boy
jefe
on the driver’s side of the van wears a plain blue ball cap with no insignia. He directs his colleague to investigate the other vans. The boy passes between the bumpers of the idling vehicles and approaches Carlos’s window, the business end of his AR-15 tracing the dotted white lines of the road. Lydia glances down at Luca on the floor and sees that his eyes are wide open, as round as soupspoons. She shifts mildly in her seat so her legs mostly cover him.

‘Where are you heading today?’ the boy asks Carlos, to make sure he tells the same story as Meredith.

‘Only to the airport in Mexico City. Our visitors are flying home today.’

‘
¿De d
ó
nde eres?
’ he says to the girl directly behind Carlos.

‘They don’t speak much Spanish,’ Carlos says in Spanish. ‘They’re from Indiana.’

The boy tips his head slightly inside the rolled-down window and surveys the silent, smiling girls. If he’s susceptible to their pheromones, he’s getting bombarded. His eyes land on Lydia, and he scrunches up his mouth.

‘Who’s the woman?’

‘One of our counselors.’

‘
¿Estadounidense también?
’ The boy has a handsome, skeptical face.

‘No, she’s from here. She’s one of ours.’

‘Why’s she sitting in back?’

Lydia knows not to glance at Luca, but he’s her only anchor left in the world, and her eyes want to go to him. She glues her gaze to the back of Carlos’s seat.

‘One of the girls was carsick,’ Carlos says. ‘She went back there to help.’

Lydia lifts her hand and places it maternally, mechanically, between the shoulder blades of the girl beside her, the girl who braided her hair. Lydia rubs a circle on the girl’s upper back, and the girl wonders how Lydia can tell she’s scared. The girl is grateful for the small demonstration of comfort, and gives Lydia a watery smile. The boy at the window wraps the fingers of one hand over the edge of the door and speaks directly to Lydia.

‘
¿C
ó
mo se llama, Do
ñ
a?
’

‘Mariana,’ Lydia lies.

‘She still sick, Mariana?’ He points to the girl beside her with his chin.

‘She’s feeling a little better, I think,’ Lydia says, still rubbing the girl’s back. ‘Not great.’

The unwitting girl supports the story by going quite pale in the face. She leans slightly forward and Lydia thinks perhaps she really is about to vomit.

The boy lingers, his AR-15 hovering just outside the window, his eyes scrutinizing the lines of her face. He leans his head slightly inside the window again. ‘Only girls in this van? No boys?’ he asks.

On the floor beneath Mami’s feet, Luca’s eyes gape and his mouth stays clamped shut. He doesn’t even breathe. He’s become an expert at hiding, perfectly still inside his body.

‘All the boys are in the van behind,’ Carlos says.

The boy taps on the open window with the flat of his hand. Carlos hands him a thin fold of bills.

‘
Ten cuidado, y que Dios te bendiga,
’ Carlos says.

The boy nods, folds the bills into the back pocket of his jeans, and trots past Lydia’s window to the van behind. As he passes her window, Lydia sees the small, uncomplicated tattoo of a machete high on his neck behind his left ear. Confirmation: these are Javier’s boys, Los Jardineros. There’s the collective sound of breath being released into the van, but not Lydia’s. She allows her eyes to travel briefly to Luca’s little upturned face. The eyes are closed now, and she presses hers closed as well, for a moment of suspended relief. She can feel her pulse in her eyelids.

‘Everybody good?’ Carlos asks in English, turning in his seat to look each of the girls in the face.

They giggle their replies. Lydia nods, dropping her hand back to her lap. It feels like a very long time before the boy completes his interview at the window of the third van. He waves when he passes again to rejoin his compatriot at the front of the queue. Both boys let go of their guns long enough to sling them onto their backs so they can lug the large log of their makeshift gate off the roadway. They open just enough space to allow the cavalcade of missionary vans to pass through.

A half hour later as they cross over
el puente
Mezcala Solidaridad above
el r
í
o
Balsas, the girls gasp and point their cameras out the windows and into the lush green canyons below. When Luca climbs out from his nest to snuggle in beneath her arm, Lydia finally begins to breathe.

Chapter Ten

They’ve survived long enough to see the sun-clogged
streets and throttling colors of Mexico City. That is no small thing. They are now four days and 236 miles removed from their doom. But it’s more than that, Lydia knows. Because the anonymity of the capital represents the fragile passage to their future. From here, she can feel a measure of hope; it may be possible to disappear. Lydia has determined that the least harrowing of their options is to fly. Something like superstition caused her to delay selecting a destination, but she did research all the northern border cities and compile a short list of the leading possibilities. From west to east: Tijuana, Mexicali, Nogales, Ciudad Ju
á
rez, Nuevo Laredo. Any one of those airports will do, like a back-porch screen door, hidden and intimate. From any one of those cities you can smell the fresh-baked pies on the windowsills of
el norte
.

When Carlos rolls open the back door of that church passenger van and the braided girls and their crammed backpacks spill out onto the bright tarmac, Luca and Lydia follow.

Beside the open back door of the van, Carlos grips Lydia’s hands and whispers intensely into her ear. ‘He’s still with you,’ he says. ‘I can feel it. He’ll watch over you and your son. You will be okay.’

Lydia envies his certainty. They embrace without tears while the braided girls and their adolescent male counterparts from the other vans avert their scandalized faces. Meredith stands beside Luca, awkwardly trying to adjust his backpack for him while he subtly dodges her efforts. When Carlos lets go of Lydia, Meredith steps forward to hug her, too, but whatever warmth once existed between the two women, mostly because of their husbands’ bond, has been extinguished. Still, Lydia’s gratitude is authentic. She looks Meredith in the eye.

‘I know how problematic this was for you,’ she says. ‘To undertake
this risk for us.’ Meredith shakes her head, but as a gesture of repudiation it’s feeble. ‘I’m very grateful, Meredith. You probably saved our lives. Thank you.’

‘God be with you,’ Meredith says, and then the swell of noisy jabber from the gathered teenagers comparing roadblock stories consumes all other conversation, and both women are relieved to part ways. The automatic terminal doors yawn open with a rumble as the first few teenage missionaries amble through. While Carlos and Meredith say their goodbyes to the Indiana pastor-and-wife team, Lydia and Luca duck beneath the shade of an awning and make their way toward the tram that will deliver them to the terminal for domestic flights.

Luca has never been on a tram before. He tries not to feel interested in it, but it’s amazing the way the slick, glassy thing arrives soundlessly and disgorges its people onto the platform. Luca grips his mother’s hand, and steps out of the way while the people and their luggage jostle past them. He watches his feet as he and his mother navigate the tiny gap between fixed and moveable. Mami pulls him onto the tram without resistance, and they’re in the front car, so how can Luca help but press his hands and forehead against the angled glass? Any kid would feel a little thrill in his tummy, watching the increasing speed of the track slip beneath his feet and vanish. It’s like a roller coaster, gliding silently above the crisscrossing cars and buses, the taxis and lampposts, the aprons of runway dotted with waiting aircrafts, and trucks with crazy staircases on their backs. A plane swoops down in front of them, huge in the window, and Luca springs back from the glass with a gasp.

‘Mami!’ he says.

It’s the first word he’s spoken in three days, and he immediately regrets the sound of it, the plain, disloyal happiness of it. Mami smiles at him, but it’s not her regular smile, and there’s no mistaking the endeavor of it for actual joy. So why isn’t he broken like that? What’s wrong with him, that he can behave so normally? Mami runs her fingers across the top of his head and he pushes his face back toward the glass. He watches the tram swallow the track beneath them.

Inside the terminal, the mechanical hum of air-conditioning is like a sheen behind all the other noises: a little girl holds her mother’s hand and rolls her dog-shaped suitcase behind her by the leash, a man shouts into his cell phone in a throaty, unfamiliar language, a woman clacks hurriedly along on her angry heels. There is the smell of lemon and freon. Luca follows Mami to a little kiosk with a screen on it, and he watches while she clicks around on there for a few minutes. Then he thinks he shouldn’t be watching her, but he should be watching other people, to make sure nobody’s noticing them, so he turns and looks, and no one is watching them except that little girl with the dog-shaped suitcase. She’s standing in line with her mother, or rather sitting on the back of her suitcase. When her mother moves forward, she pushes with her feet to keep up. Luca would like a suitcase like that.

‘We can’t book from here.’ Mami interrupts his thoughts. ‘It won’t let you buy a same-day ticket. We have to get in line.’ Mami picks up her backpack, which she’d set down on top of her feet, and Luca follows her over to get in line. He’s happy to have a closer look at the dog suitcase, which, he can now see, also has a furry tail and ears.

The girl sees him admiring it and she smiles. She’s about the same age as Luca, maybe a year younger. ‘You can pet him if you want to,’ she says. ‘He doesn’t bite.’

Luca takes a step back and hides his face behind Mami. But then a moment later, he reaches out and brushes the tip of the dog’s tail with his fingers. The girl laughs and then her mother says, ‘Let’s go, Naya,’ and the girl waves, pushing with her sneakers, all the way up to the ticket counter.

Luca and Mami are next, and soon they’re standing in front of a lady wearing a blue suit and a red silk scarf. Her round face is repeated in miniature on the plastic name tag hanging from her neck. She smiles at Luca.

‘Hello, little jet-setter!’ she says to him. ‘First time flying?’

He looks up at Mami, and she nods, so he nods, too. Flying! He can’t believe they’re going to fly. He’s not sure he wants to fly, but it’s possible he
really
wants to fly. It’s hard to tell.

‘We’re taking a little spontaneous vacation,’ Mami says to the ticket agent.

The woman’s hands are poised over her keyboard. ‘Okay. Where to?’

‘I was thinking of Nuevo Laredo?’

The woman clacks around on her keyboard at a comical speed. She can’t really be typing that fast, Luca thinks. She’s pretending. She frowns.

‘No flights until Friday. Are you hoping to leave today?’

‘Yes.’ Mami leans her elbows up on the ticket counter. ‘What about Ciudad Ju
á
rez?’

Clack clack clack.
‘Yes, that would work, there’s a three o’clock flight, stopping over in Guadalajara. Arrives in Ju
á
rez at 7:04 p.m.’

Mami bites her lip. ‘Nothing direct?’

Clack clack.
‘There’s a nonstop at 11:10 tomorrow morning.’

Mami shakes her head. ‘Okay, let’s try Tijuana.’

This time the woman covers up the sound of her typing with chatter. She doesn’t even look at the screen or at her hands. They move in front of her as if they’re two animals, independent of her body. She turns her round face toward Mami.

‘Fun town. Ever been there?’

Mami shakes her head.

‘I used to fly. I was a flight attendant before I had the babies. Did the Tijuana route, so once in a while we got to stay overnight.’ She winks at Luca. ‘Hope you like to party!’

Luca digs his fingernails into the palms of his hands to stop himself from thinking about parties, and the woman returns her round face and her round eyes to the screen in front of her.

‘There’s a direct flight to Tijuana at 3:27 p.m. Gets in at 5:13 p.m. They’re two hours behind us.’

‘Perfect,’ Mami says. ‘Two seats?’

‘Sure. And when do you want to return?’

Mami looks down at her gold sneakers against the terrazzo floor. Luca doesn’t understand her hesitation, that she’s attempting to perform an algorithm of calamity in her mind. Lydia knows they have exactly 226,243 pesos left because she counted it on the floor in Carlos’s bathroom in Chilpancingo. They’ve already spent more than 8,000 pesos on the hotel and supplies and bus tickets. She also has her mother’s purse, with a bank card she’s afraid to use. Abuela had a savings account, and however much there is, they’re going to need it. They’ll have to pay a coyote when they get to the border, and if they’re lucky, there will be a small sum left over to sustain them until she figures out what’s next. They can scarcely afford to throw money away on a return airplane ticket they’re not going to use. But neither can they afford to tell this friendly
woman, this stranger, this potential
halc
ó
n,
that they’re traveling only one way. Luca squeezes Mami’s hand. ‘Returning next week, same day,’ she says.

‘Very good,’ the woman says brightly, but Luca worries that her smile has turned a little stale. ‘We can get you on a return flight, let’s see, how about 12:55 p.m
.
Gets in here at 6:28 p.m., nonstop.’

Mami nods. ‘Good, yes, good. What’s the price?’

The woman adjusts her red scarf as she scrolls down. Her fingernails are square and they’re painted the color of concrete. They click when she taps on the screen. ‘Three thousand six hundred ten pesos each.’

Mami nods again, and swings her backpack around to balance it on her knee. She takes out her wallet from the side pocket while the woman continues clacking on the keyboard.

‘I can pay in cash?’

‘Yes, of course,’ the woman says. ‘I just need photo ID.’

Mami has separated their money into various places, keeping around 10,000 pesos in the wallet. Luca watches while she counts out the bills for the tickets, seven pink, two orange, one blue. She stacks the notes on the counter, and the woman picks them up to begin counting. Mami digs into the sleeve of the wallet then and retrieves her voter ID card, which makes a little snap when she places it on the counter. The ticket agent sets the money across her keyboard and picks up Mami’s
ID. She holds it in one hand and types with the other.

‘Thank you.’ She hands the card back to Mami and looks at Luca.

‘And what about you?’ She smiles. ‘Did you bring your voter registration card?’

Luca wags his head. He obviously can’t vote.

She returns her attention to Mami. ‘So I just need a birth certificate or some documentation to verify legal custody.’

‘Of my son?’ Mami asks.

‘Yes.’

Mami shakes her head, and the skin around her eyes flushes pink. Luca thinks she might cry. ‘I don’t have,’ she says. ‘I don’t have that.’

‘Oh.’ The woman clasps her hands together and leans back from her keyboard. ‘I’m afraid he can’t fly without it.’

‘Surely you can make an exception? He’s obviously my son.’

Luca nods.

‘I’m sorry,’ the ticket agent says. ‘It’s not our policy – it’s the law. Every airline is the same.’ She’s neatening the colorful money back into its stack. She’s handing the stack back to Mami, but Mami won’t take it, so she sets it on the counter between them.

‘Please,’ Mami says, dropping her voice low and leaning in. ‘Please, we are desperate. We have to get out of the city. This is the only way, please.’

‘Se
ñ
ora, I’m sorry. I wish I could help you. You’ll have to visit the Oficina Central del Registro Civil and request a copy of the birth certificate or you won’t be able to fly. There’s nothing I can do. Even if I could give you a ticket, you wouldn’t make it past security.’

Mami snatches the money and jams it into the back pocket of her jeans along with her ID. Her face is still changing colors, and now it looks whitened, washed-out.

‘I’m sorry,’ the woman says again, but Mami has already turned to go. Luca follows and he doesn’t ask where they’re going, and soon they’re on the metro. When they emerge at Isabel la Cat
ó
lica station, Luca’s conflicted feelings only intensify, because being in Mexico City is a bona fide adventure. Everything is different here from Acapulco, and Luca struggles to take in all the color: the whipping flags, the fruit vendors, the baroque colonial buildings sitting shoulder to shoulder with their blocky modern neighbors. Music spills from wrought iron balconies, vendors hawk rows of luminous
refrescos,
and everywhere there is art, art, art. Murals, paintings, sculptures, graffiti. On one street corner, a colorful statue of tall Jesus – that’s how Luca thinks of it because it’s small for a statue but very tall for an adult human – stands with one fold of his bright green robe slung jauntily over his arm. Beneath this genuine onslaught of sensory stimulation, Luca manages to temporarily bury his guilt. His mouth hangs slightly open as he walks beside Mami, gulping in the scenery.

At a stall, Mami buys tamales and a bag of cut cucumbers. It’s almost two o’clock, and Luca’s hungry, so they sit beneath an umbrella to eat. He considers how strange it is that certain things haven’t changed. The salted cucumbers taste just as they did before everyone died. His knuckles haven’t changed. His fingernails. The width of Mami’s shoulders. He chews without speaking. When their lunch is finished, Mami takes him to a square, concrete building with a statue of naked dancers in front, where the man behind the counter tells them that in order to get a copy of Luca’s birth certificate, they have to go to the registration office in the state where he was born.