American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (17 page)

‘Don’t worry,
mijo,
’ Lydia says, sitting up after him, because it’s immediately evident what he’s looking for, and he’s already left the warm nest of the bottom bunk and clambered up to riffle through the top bunk. The bed frame squeaks as he digs through the covers. There’s an audible sigh of relief from above, and then the hat appears, perched triumphantly on the end of Luca’s outstretched arm, over the edge of the bed.

There are plenty of
j
ó
venes,
teenagers, at the shelter, but only a few younger children, and at breakfast they all sit together at a round table in the center of the room. A little girl pops up from this table when Luca enters, and draws him by the elbow to an empty seat. Lydia makes him a plate, and one for herself, and then sits at a table nearby with two other women, Neli and Julia, both in their early twenties, both from Guatemala. Neli is pudgy with curly hair. Julia is slender, with dark skin and almond-shaped eyes. Lydia nods and smiles politely as they introduce
themselves, but she keeps quiet, afraid of her own voice, afraid she’ll betray herself in some way she hasn’t considered. Her accent, a turn of phrase, some unconscious custom that might identify her. She does not reach for the loops at her neck. Neli and Julia recognize caution, and they understand. They don’t press her. Lydia turns her face toward her plate, briefly closes her eyes, and blesses herself. Neli and Julia resume their conversation.

‘She wasn’t even going to tell anyone?’ Neli asks. ‘God bless her.’

‘Said she didn’t want to make a fuss. It’s only because I happened to step into the hallway just at that moment,’ Julia says. ‘And I saw it with my own eyes! I saw what he did to her. I chased him away from her and then got the padre right away.’

‘And what did the padre do?’ Neli wants a play-by-play. She’s taking her time with her food, shredding a tortilla into host-size pieces, which she places on her tongue one at a time.

‘The padre was great, he went in and fished that cholo right out of his cot. Sent him packing.’

‘And I slept through the whole thing!’ Neli seems disappointed. ‘I heard he put up a bit of a fight, too.’

Across the room, the girl at the center of last night’s scandal, a sixteen-year-old from San Salvador, keeps her face tipped down toward her own plate. Her shoulders are rolled in so far toward each other that her body seems to be trying to swallow itself. Lydia chews even though the eggs are scrambled and the chewing is unnecessary. Her mouth needs something to do. Another woman approaches their table and points to the empty chair beside Lydia. Neli waves her hand to indicate that it’s free. The woman sets her plate down and pulls out the chair. She’s wearing a pink skirt and flip-flops, and has a multicolored ribbon woven into
the two long braids down her back. If her clothing didn’t mark her as an indigenous woman, then her heavily accented Spanish would. Neli and Julia steal glances at each other as the woman takes her seat. She smiles at them and offers her name as Ixchel, but Neli and Julia continue their conversation without pause, turning their bodies almost imperceptibly away from her. It’s a rudeness that Lydia would’ve endeavored to counteract in her old life, with a smile and a kind word. Perhaps even a rebuke to the offending party. Because Lydia perceives that the Guatemalan women are snubbing the newcomer due to bigotry, because she’s an
india
. And Lydia is suitably offended on Ixchel’s behalf, but performing an act of decorum would mean putting herself at risk, so instead she keeps her eyes on her plate, scoops some eggs into a tortilla.

‘I saw them together last night after dinner,’ Julia says. ‘I saw the way he looked at her, and I just presumed they were together. But what I saw then after, there was no question it was one-sided.’

‘She tried to fight him off?’ Neli asks, placing a speckled white square in her mouth.

‘Worse than that, she struggled but then seemed resigned to it.’ Julia shakes her head sadly but there’s a spiky anger in her voice. ‘Like she knew there was nothing she could do if he’d made up his mind.
Qu
é
chingadera
.’

‘They should be castrated, every one of them,’ Neli says, shaking her headful of black curls.

Julia looks across at the young girl. ‘She’s so pretty, too. She’s going to have a rough journey.’

‘A lot of return trips to the
cuerpom
á
tico,
’ Neli agrees.

‘The what?’ Ixchel asks.

‘The
cuerpom
á
tico
?’ Neli repeats.

Ixchel shakes her head. She may have an accent, but her Spanish is excellent, and yet she hasn’t heard this word before. Perhaps it’s slang. Perhaps it’s made-up. Lydia doesn’t know it either.

‘You don’t know this word?’ Julia asks.

Ixchel shakes her head a second time. Lydia watches Luca at the round table while she listens to the women talk.

‘I thought all the
guatemaltecas
knew it.’ Neli allows the remainder of her tortilla to wilt back onto her plate.

‘Las guanacas tambi
é
n, y las catrachas.’
Julia leans forward on her elbows and pushes her plate aside. ‘It means your body is an ATM machine.’

Lydia tries to swallow, but the eggs and tortilla have formed a paste in her mouth. Her fork is full of rice, a crispy disk of
pl
á
tano frito
speared onto its tines. The fork hovers.

‘This is the price of getting to
el norte,
’ Neli says.

After some excruciating measure of seconds, Ixchel finds her voice, the Spanish words that are familiar.
La violaci
ó
n
. ‘Rape? Is the price?’

Both women look at her blankly. They cannot believe this is news to her. Has she been living under a rock before now?

‘How did you end up here,
mamita
?’ Neli asks, returning her attention to the food.

Ixchel does not answer.

Julia leans in and drops her voice low. ‘I have paid twice already.’

This disclosure, shared with a woman she seemed to shun only moments ago, is such an unexpected intimacy that Lydia makes a noise in her throat without meaning to. A wound of a sound. All three women look at her as she takes a sip of fruit punch and sets her still-full fork on the edge of her plate.

‘How about you?’ Julia returns her attention to Neli. ‘Have you paid?’

‘Not yet,’ Neli says grimly.

‘You?’ They all look expectantly at Lydia.

She shakes her head.

A smiling young woman approaches the table where Luca is sitting with the other children. ‘Who’s ready for a puppet show?’ she asks.

The little girl beside Luca shoots out of her chair, arms raised. ‘Me, me!’ she says.

‘Good, I need lots of helpers!’

‘I heard he was a
sicario
.’

This information snaps Lydia’s focus back to her own table. ‘What?’ she says, accidentally.

‘That’s the rumor.’ Julia shrugs. ‘Seems like they should know better than to let those narcos in.’

‘But he told the padre he was getting out,’ Neli intercedes. ‘Told him he got recruited by the cartel when he was just a kid and he never had any choice, you know the story. Had enough of that life and wanted to go to
el norte
.’

‘Which cartel?’ Ixchel asks because like most people, because of her personal experience, she’s more afraid of one particular cartel than others.

‘What does it matter?’ Neli says. ‘They’re all the same.
Animales
.’

‘They’re not,’ Julia insists. ‘Some of them are way worse than others.’

Neli makes a face like she’s skeptical, but doesn’t argue.

‘Like Los Jardineros,’ Julia says. ‘I heard they donated money to build a new cancer hospital in Acapulco.’

Lydia takes a sharp breath, but Neli waves a hand dismissively. ‘That’s just trying to buy people’s loyalty,’ she says. ‘Propaganda.’

‘But maybe the reason is less important than the fact,’ Julia says. Then she drops her voice to a whisper and leans in again, closing the space
across the table to a tight circle. She names the unnameable cartel. ‘Los Zetas feed people their own body parts. Los Zetas hang babies from bridges.’

Lydia covers her mouth with her hand. Her fingers are cold and stiff, and beside her, Ixchel is crossing herself. Lydia will ask a question now, but she’ll make her voice light. Neutral.

‘So last night, the guy who got kicked out – which cartel was he?’

Julia shrugs. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘But if he really wants out, he better run. Far and fast, right? They don’t let those guys go.’

Lydia pushes her plate away.
Far and fast,
she thinks. Some things are so simple.

Chapter Fourteen

Six days and 282 miles from absolute calamity, Lydia
and Luca take their leave from Huehuetoca and head north once again, following the trail of La Bestia
.
When Lydia considers how they’ve managed to survive the last week, to get this far from Acapulco and remain alive, her mind seizes. Because she knows she’s made both good and bad decisions in those six days, and that ultimately, it’s only by the grace of God that none of those choices have met with bad luck and resulted in catastrophe. That awareness incapacitates her. She can’t conceive of a plan to board the train, which is what they must do. They must get on the train. Meanwhile, walking will give her time to think. They filled their canteens before they left the shelter, but they stop at a small shop down the
road and Lydia jams her bag with snacks. Because it’s a shop that’s used to migrants, they stock the kinds of things that migrants can carry and eat: nuts, apples, candy, granola, chips,
carne seca
. Lydia buys as much as she can fit in her pack. She buys a floppy hat, too, pink with white flowers, to protect her neck from the sun. It reminds her of the ugly thing Mam
á
used to put on when she gardened, and any time Lydia and Yemi caught their mother wearing it, they would titter and tease.

‘You laugh, but this hat is the reason I have the skin of a twenty-four-year-old!’ their mother would chide them.

Back outside, the freight tracks stretch out across the Mexican landscape like a beanstalk migrants must climb, and Luca and Mami go step by step, tie by tie, leaf by leaf. The sun is bright, but not too hot this early in the day. They hold hands briefly, and then sweat and separate, and then the cycle repeats. They take the westernmost route because Luca’s mind-map was convinced that, though that way was longer than the others, the relative topography would be kinder if they end up making much of the journey by foot, as it appears they might. He’s glad Mami didn’t press him to explain his instinct; she simply yielded to the gentle pressure of his hand as they’d set off.

Lydia knows that her plan to go to Denver is inadequate, that it might be difficult to track down her
t
í
o
Gustavo. Abuela used to complain that her baby brother had turned into a gringo when he left for
el norte
all those years ago, when he was still a young man, and never looked back. Lydia knows only that her
t
í
o
married a white lady, changed his name to Gus, and started his own company, something in construction. Was it plumbing or electric? And what if he changed his last name, too? She’s never met his children, her
primos
yanquis. She doesn’t even know their names. When she dwells too long on these facts, she begins to panic, so she strips it all back to manageable, step-by-step pieces:
Move north. Reach the border. Find a coyote. Get across. Take a bus to Denver
. There will be churches there. Libraries, internet access, immigrant communities. People willing to help. For now just move north, move north. Get Luca out of danger.

A couple hours’ walk northwest of the migrant shelter, Luca and Mami encounter two teenage sisters wearing matching rainbow wristbands on their slender left arms, sitting on an overpass above the train tracks, and dangling their feet below. Both girls are very beautiful, but the slightly older one is dangerously so. She wears baggy clothing and an intense scowl in a failing effort to suppress that calamitous beauty.
The younger one leans back on her stuffed backpack, but they both sit up when they see Luca. The studied hardness of their expressions melts. Together they make the ‘oh’ of cuteness that teenage girls often emit for smaller children.

‘
¡Mira, qu
é
guapo!
’ the younger sister sings out in an unfamiliar accent.

‘So cute,’ the older one agrees.

They both have abundant black hair; stark, expressive eyebrows; dark, penetrating eyes; perfectly aligned teeth; full lips; and apple-shaped cheeks. The older one has something extra, something undefinable that makes her entirely arresting. Luca fixes his eyes on her accidentally and cannot seem to remove his gaze once it’s alighted upon her. Mami does, too. The girl is so beautiful she seems almost to glow, more colorful than the landscape in which she sits. The dingy gray of the concrete overpass, the pebble brown of the tracks and the earth, the faded blue of her baggy jeans, the dirty white of her oversize T-shirt, the bleached arc of the sky, it all recedes behind her. Her presence is a vivid throb of color that deflates everything else around her. An accident of biology. A living miracle of splendor. It’s a real problem.

‘
Oye, ¿ad
ó
nde van, amigos?
’ the less beautiful one calls out to them when they’re directly beneath her feet.

‘Where everyone goes,’ Lydia says, shielding her eyes so she can look up at the girls above them. ‘To
el norte
.’ She removes the ugly pink hat from her head and uses it to fan herself. Beneath it, her sweaty hair sticks to her forehead.

‘Us, too!’ she says, swinging her feet. ‘Your son is so cute!’

Lydia looks over at Luca, who’s smiling up at the girls, the most genuine smile that’s escaped his face since the morning of Y
é
nifer’s
quincea
ñ
era
.

‘My name is Rebeca, and this is my sister, Soledad.’ The girl speaks to Luca directly.
‘¿C
ó
mo te llamas, chiquito?’

Lydia, who’s fallen into the habit of answering for her silent son, opens her mouth to reply but –

‘Luca,’ he says. His voice clear like a bell, no hint of rust from all those days without use. Lydia snaps her mouth shut in surprise.

‘How old are you, Luca?’ Rebeca asks.

‘I am eight years old.’

The sisters look at each other with animation, and the younger one claps her hands together. ‘I knew it! Just exactly the same age as our little cousin at home. His name is Juanito. He looks like you! Doesn’t he look like Juanito, Sole?’

Soledad the Beauty smiles reluctantly. ‘He does,’ she admits. ‘Like twins.’

‘You want to see his picture?’ Rebeca asks. Luca looks at Mami, who’s been very cautious about stopping to talk with people. But these girls have returned her boy’s voice to him. She nods. ‘Come up!’ Rebeca says.

She removes a fragile plastic bag of wrapped photographs from the front pocket of her sister’s backpack and flips through them. Luca scrambles up to join the girls on the overpass while Mami watches from below. She tries to survey their location, but the seam of land cut by the tracks here makes a poor vantage point for visibility, so she follows Luca up the steep, sandy little hill. The girls aren’t actually sitting on the overpass at all, but on a metal grate that sticks off the roadway on one side of the overpass like a hazardous catwalk. Lydia tests it with her foot before stepping over. Luca squats on the roadway side, leaning his elbows on the low guardrail. Rebeca leans back against this, and together they stare at the pictures.

‘See?’ she says.
‘Guapo como t
ú
.’

Luca grins again, and nods. ‘He does look like me, Mami, look,’ he says. ‘Except no teeth.’

Rebeca holds the photograph so Lydia can see. ‘He lost those two both on the same day, and then he was like a vampire,’ the girl says to Luca. ‘Did you lose yours yet?’

A potent memory. It looms up unbidden: Papi pulling his first tooth – a bottom one, from the middle. The tooth had been loose for weeks and then one night during dinner, Luca took a bite of his
tampique
ñ
a
and a point of pain shot through his gums. He dropped his fork, moved the food to the back of his mouth, swallowed it in an unchewed lump, and then examined the damage. The tooth, he found, had been pushed askew. It leaned like an ancient grave in soft ground. He touched it softly with one finger, and was horrified by its slackness. Mami and Papi both put down their forks to watch. But Luca was so afraid of the pain that he found himself unable to do anything. And then Mami had tried, for perhaps twenty minutes, to coax him to open his mouth just a little so she could have a look. But Luca was steadfast and mute, his lips clamped shut. When Mami finally lost her patience, Papi eased into place beside Luca. He made funny faces intended to illustrate what happened to children who didn’t allow for the timely removal of ejected teeth. And Luca laughed despite his fear, and in the gap of that laughter, he finally submitted to opening his little mouth while Mami watched from across the table. Papi reached in there so gently Luca didn’t even feel the presence of his fingers against the tooth. But he does remember Papi’s hands along his face, one securely cupping his chin, the other reaching inside. Luca remembers the salty tang of Papi’s fingers and the triumphant smile when those fingers emerged with the prize of that tiny tooth. Luca’s eyes popped so wide when he saw it, and he gasped. He couldn’t believe there was no pain, no feeling at all. Papi had simply reached in there and lifted the little thing out. And then they all laughed and squealed at the table together, and Luca jumped out of his chair, disbelieving, and his parents both hugged and kissed him. He ate the rest of his
tampique
ñ
a
while the new hole in his mouth gathered small pieces of food he had to sluice out with milk. That night they left the tooth beneath his pillow and El Ratoncito P
é
rez came to retrieve it, leaving Luca a poem and a new toothbrush in its place.

Luca lifts one hand to his mouth now and sucks on his knuckle, but it’s not the same, and he has to bat at that memory like a pesky bug. A horsefly. The gone taste of his father’s hands. Mami sees this, reaches out, and squeezes his toe through his sneaker, just a gentle pressure that brings him back to this dusty overpass. He breathes into his body.

‘Couldn’t get on the train, huh?’ Among other things, Soledad has a gift for changing the subject at exactly the right moment. She’s more tentative than her sister, but it’s hard to remain standoffish with Luca there, all eyelashes and coy dimples.

Lydia wriggles out of her backpack and retrieves a canteen. ‘Not yet.’

‘They’ve made it a lot harder.
Safety first
!
’ Rebeca discharges a puff of air that, in another setting, might pass for laughter.

‘Yeah.’ Mami shakes her head. ‘Safety.’

‘You’ve been on the trains?’ Luca asks.

Soledad twists to look at him, resting her chin on her shoulder. ‘All the way from Tapachula, more or less.’

Luca thinks of the men running alongside the train in the clearing outside Lecher
í
a, the way they ascended, one by one, and disappeared, while he and Mami watched, unable to move. He thinks of the deafening roar and clatter of La Bestia, shouting its warnings into their hearts and bones while they watched, and he feels awed by these two powerful sisters. ‘How?’ he asks.

Soledad shrugs. ‘We’ve learned some tricks.’

Mami hands Luca a canteen, and he drinks. ‘Like what?’ Mami asks. ‘We need some tricks.’

Soledad retracts her dangling legs and folds them beneath her, shifting her spine and shoulders into a stretched posture, and Lydia sees, even in this minor animation of the girl’s body, how the danger rattles off her relentlessly. These sisters haven’t befriended anyone since they left home; they, too, have kept to themselves as much as possible. But they haven’t yet met anyone so young as Luca on their journey. Neither have they met anyone so watchfully maternal as Lydia. So it’s a great pleasure to feel normal for a minute, to inhabit the softness of a friendly conversation. There can’t be any harm in sharing some advice with their fellow travelers.

‘Like this,’ Soledad says, gesturing at the tracks beneath them. ‘One thing we noticed is they spend all that money on fences around the train stations, but nobody has thought yet to fence the overpasses.’

Luca watches Mami’s face as she surveys their position now from the angle of this new information. Mami leans ever so slightly forward and gauges the distance to the ground beneath them. It’s not that far. But then she tries to imagine how this space would change with the noise and weight and presence of La Bestia charging through it. ‘You board from here?’ she asks incredulously.

‘Not here,’ Soledad corrects her. ‘Because you’d hit your head as soon as you dropped. The overpass would knock you right off before you got your balance. We sit on this side to watch for it coming. But then you jump on over there.’ She points.

Luca follows the direction of her gesture across the roadway, and he sees there, affixed to the guardrail, a bleached white cross with a burst of faded orange flowers at its center. Likely a memorial, he realizes, for someone else who attempted to board the train at this place, and didn’t manage it. He bites his lip. ‘You just jump on top?’

‘Well, not always,’ Soledad says. ‘But, yes, if the conditions are right, you just jump on top.’

‘And what makes the conditions right?’ Lydia asks. ‘Or wrong?’

‘Well. The first thing is, you have to choose carefully where to do it. So this place is good because you see,’ she says, standing and pointing across the roadway to the tracks beyond, ‘you see the curve there, just ahead?’