American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (23 page)

‘I don’t know,’ she lies. ‘We haven’t really decided.’

Lorenzo pulls his knees up so his baggy shorts sag beneath. He gathers his arms around his legs. ‘I’m going to LA,’ he says. ‘I got a cousin out there in Hollywood, doing his thing.’

‘As good a place as any,’ she says.

And then the train silence returns, and in that thundering quiet, she wonders:
Why?
If he was well connected in Los Jardineros, if he was making enough money to afford those expensive sneakers and that decent cell phone? If he was okay with earning that first drop of tattooed blood, and the second, and the third, then what made him leave Guerrero? There are infinite possible answers, she knows. Perhaps he disliked murdering. Perhaps he felt that the acts of violence he committed had some undesirable effect on him. Perhaps he had nightmares, the faces of the people he’d killed floating up before him whenever he closed his eyes. Maybe he was haunted, hunted, ragged in his soul. Or maybe the precise opposite was true. Perhaps he was so entirely without conscience that he’d been unable, even, to adhere to whatever deformed excuse for a moral code Los Jardineros exercised. Maybe he raped the wrong woman. Or stole money from one of his
jefes
. Or maybe he murdered so gleefully that his depravity turned him into a liability. Maybe he’s running, too. Or maybe none of these things are true. Perhaps he hasn’t left Los Jardineros at all, and he really is here only for her.

Whatever the case, Lydia feels shriveled by Lorenzo’s presence. He’s
a menace, sitting beside her, and now the threat feels urgent again. It’s all around her. She breathes it, and it’s the same as ever: senseless, confusing, categorically terrifying. Javier feels as close as the day she first confronted him in the bookshop. The Russian nesting dolls. He’d reached for her hand. She can feel his fingers pressing into the veins at her wrist. She can hear that
sicario
urinating into the toilet on the other side of Abuela’s green-tiled wall.

Lydia wishes this boy would move away from them. Nine days and 426 miles from their escape, they haven’t made any headway at all.

Chapter Eighteen

Luca likes the estates where all the homes are lined up
like soldiers wearing identical uniforms: indestructible white stucco walls, helmets of red Spanish tile, all tilted at the same angle to the sun. He likes the anonymity of them, and thinks how nice it would be to live inside one of those houses with Mami, how nobody’d ever find them there. One thing he doesn’t like is when the train tracks temporarily veer south, because even though he misses home, he misses only the life that existed in Acapulco before the
quincea
ñ
era,
and he understands that to be a place that no longer exists. It’s nostalgia for a phantom limb. So he’s relieved when the tracks bend toward the west again, and then, near a neat little town in Jalisco, sidle up beside
el r
í
o
Grande de Santiago and, at long last, curve northward.

The city appears gradually and with several false starts where Luca observes all the familiar symptoms of an urban metropolis: food vendors who pause at their grills to wave up at the passing migrants, the occasional clothesline strung with bright colors snapping in the sunny wind, a gathering of rowdy kids along the fence of a schoolyard. And then boom, it all recedes, and it’s just cornfields, cornfields, cornfields. Two times this happens. Three. Four. And then finally, unmistakably: Guadalajara.

Second-largest city in Mexico. State capital of Jalisco. Population: one and a half million people.

All across the top of the train, migrants prepare to disembark. They wake their friends, stuff wadded-up jacket-pillows into their bags; they tighten the straps on one another’s backpacks. Mami unstraps herself from the train but leaves Luca’s belt attached to the grating. Lorenzo sits in the same spot, in the same position, and observes. Luca doesn’t like the way he watches Rebeca and Soledad.

‘Mami,’ Luca says as the train slows enough that some of the men on their car begin to climb down the ladders and jump to the gravel below.

Lydia is rolling up her canvas belt, and she looks at Luca with her
what?
face.

‘I don’t need the belt,’ he says.

‘You need the belt.’

‘Mami.’

This time she does the more aggressive version of her
what?
face.

‘If I’m able to jump on and off a moving train, don’t you think it’s a little silly to buckle me in like a toddler?’ Luca juts out his chin at her. She grabs that chin in her hand, pulls her face down to his. The unchanged nature of her temper when he’s ill-mannered is a comfort like a hot bath.

‘It is not silly,’ she says. ‘We ride these trains because we have no choice, but they are extremely dangerous, Luca. Did you learn nothing back there when that man fell—’

‘Okay,’ he says, irritably. ‘Fine.’ He tries to wriggle his chin away from her, but she only squeezes harder. He still has control of his own eyeballs, though. She can’t squeeze those. He moves his
gaze away from her face, to her left ear.

‘Don’t interrupt me,’ she says. ‘And look at me when I’m speaking to you.’

He looks at that earlobe.

‘Luca. Look at me.’

He returns his gaze to her face momentarily and then moves it away again.

‘Listen. I know this is all crazy. It’s reckless and wild, riding these trains, sleeping in strange places, eating strange things. And I know I haven’t said it before now, but, Luca, I’m so proud of you.’

He looks her briefly in the eye.

‘I am,’ she says. ‘It’s incredible, how strong you are, that you’re able to do these inconceivable things.’

Luca has an unexpected thought. ‘Can you imagine what Papi would say?’

Lydia lets go of his chin and smiles at him. ‘Papi would say we are both crazy.’

Tears spring into Luca’s eyes, but he doesn’t want them there, so he makes them disappear. Lydia drops her voice to a whisper. ‘Papi would be so proud of you. You’re capable of things I had no idea you could do, Luca.’ She squeezes his knee. ‘I never knew.’ She reaches across the landscape of their tangled legs to grab Luca’s hand. ‘But you are still my boy, do you understand?’

He nods.

‘
Y por Dios,
if anything happened to you, Luca. I couldn’t bear it. I know how much you’ve grown in these last days. But your body is still only eight years old.’

‘Almost nine,’ he says.

‘Almost nine,’ she agrees. ‘But please, please listen. Never be complacent. Never assume you’re safe on this train. No one is safe,
do you understand? No one.’ She squeezes his hands. ‘Machismo will get you killed.’

Luca nods again.

The train has slowed to a placid roll beneath them, and Soledad and Rebeca both tie up their hair to disembark. They’re wearing their
backpacks, and they’re turned, talking with the group of four men who’ve been in front of them since Celaya. One of the men has made this journey before – he’s been deported twice from San Diego, so this is his third pass through Guadalajara. He’s warning them. Lorenzo eavesdrops.

‘You have to get off before El Verde,’ the man tells the sisters. ‘You have to walk the next part of the tracks.’

‘Why?’ Soledad reaches up to tighten her black hair in its fixed coil.

‘The people in this city are kind to migrants, God bless them. You will find a good welcome here. But first you have to get past
la polic
í
a
. They clear the trains at El Verde, and if they catch you—’ The man finishes only with a shake of his head.

‘Don’t let them catch you.’ Soledad fills in the blank for him.

‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘And stay with a group. You can come with us if you want.’ His friends, one by one, begin moving toward the ladder, and he follows.

Rebeca relays all this information quickly to Lydia and suggests going with them. Lydia hesitates. She knows how dangerous it is to trust anyone on La Bestia
.
There are thugs and rapists and thieves and narcos hidden in the ranks of
la polic
í
a
in every town, but it’s not only the police who deserve their suspicion. It’s every single person they meet – shopkeepers, food vendors, humanitarians, children, priests, even their fellow migrants. Especially their fellow migrants. She glances at Lorenzo’s clean, expensive sneakers. It’s a common tactic for bad actors to ride the trains posing as migrants, working to gain the trust of unsuspecting
travelers, so they can lure them into a secluded place where they can commit some violence against them. Lydia understands the increased probability of that violence being leveled against the sisters. Any gesture of kindness, any valuable nugget of shared information, any pitiful story of heartbreak may be only a well-designed trap. A prequel to robbery or rape or kidnapping. Lydia’s brain makes her do the work of considering all this before she decides. But there’s no time. The train rolls on and the men are getting off. In fact the whole train seems to be emptying.

These four men seem kind. They have the steep accents of Central Americans.
They’re probably Central Americans, right?
Lydia has to decide. Lorenzo’s waiting for her to decide, too.
Why is he waiting?
His lingering presence makes the decision. She unbuckles Luca and stuffs his belt into her pack.

‘Let’s go.’

Lorenzo follows.

For the first while, it’s all warehouses to one side of the tracks, and all dirt and grass and open sky on the other, so Luca has the impression of walking just outside of something, like the warehouses are a kind of border, fencing something better beyond. They stick to the tracks, where dozens of migrants walk ahead of and behind them, in a sort of miniature caravan. The boy Lorenzo hangs close, not walking with them exactly, but following only a few feet behind, matching his pace to theirs. Luca is worried about that boy, but he’s distracted by the unmistakable smell of chocolate, which adds to the sense that, nearby, there’s something much better.

‘Do you smell that?’ Luca asks Rebeca.

‘¿Chocolate?’

He nods.

‘Nope. Don’t smell it,’ she says.

Luca laughs. ‘Well, I sure do.’

They trudge ahead, passing behind the Hershey’s factory without ever realizing it’s there. Luca presses a fist against his stomach to discourage the groaning. They haven’t eaten since breakfast at the
casa
in Celaya, and now it’s late afternoon.

‘Hungry?’ Mami asks.

He nods.

‘Me, too.’

When the warehouses give way to brick and cinder block homes, the migrants are cheered by the appearance of two pigtailed girls in school uniforms, one slightly larger than the other, one with dimples, and one with a scab on her knee. Their mother sits at a wooden stall nearby, with a cooler of drinks and a small grill. She’s selling lemonade and hot ears of grilled corn. A fat baby sleeps in a stroller by her side. There’s a large basket there, to which the girls return in swoops, retrieving armloads of little white paper bags. These they pass out to the migrants with their blessings.

‘
Bienvenidos a Guadalajara,
’ the girls say, ‘and may God bless you on your journey.’

The one with the scabby knee presses a bag into Luca’s hand and one into Rebeca’s.

‘Thank you,’ Luca says.

The girl skips away, the hem of her blue plaid skirt brushing against her brown legs as she goes. Luca rips into the bag.

‘Mami! It’s chocolate!’ There are three Hershey’s Kisses inside.

As the city grows dense around them, people come and go across the tracks, carrying lunch boxes or bags of groceries. Kids with brightly colored backpacks hold their mothers’ hands and clamber across the rails. Many of them look Luca and Mami right in the eye, and say, ‘God bless you,’ and they smile. Luca would like to smile back, but he feels peculiar, too. He is unaccustomed to pity.

At El Verde, there’s a bench outside a neat, walled-in garden. The bench is painted orange, pink, and yellow, and a sign on the wall behind it reads
migrantes
pueden
descansar
aqu
í
.
Migrants can rest here. A large, mustached man is sitting on the bench, and when he sees the migrants approaching, he stands, fixes a cowboy hat over his bald head, and retrieves a bat-sized machete from the ground beneath him. He walks toward the tracks with the machete still in its sheath, and keeps it tipped back over one shoulder.

‘
Amigos, hoy es su d
í
a de suerte,
’ he says loudly so they can all hear. Today is your lucky day. ‘I will walk with you.’

The migrants in front of Luca and Mami cheer, but Rebeca and Soledad exchange worried glances. The man falls in step beside them.

‘You are right to be afraid,’ he tells them. ‘But not of me.’

Rebeca sticks her thumbs under the straps of her backpack and says nothing.

‘You have come a long way, yes? Honduras? Guatemala?’

‘Honduras.’ Rebeca is first to relent.

‘Your journey has been okay so far?’ he asks.

Rebeca shrugs. They walk for a few moments in silence, only the sound of their jeans swishing beneath them as they go. Luca holds Mami’s hand, but he strains against it, pulling her arm nearly taut as he tries to hear what the man is saying to the sisters.

‘Well, I want you to have happy memories of Guadalajara.’ He smiles, and catches Luca looking at him. He’s so large he could use that machete as a toothpick. Luca shies back to Mami’s side. ‘My name is Danilo, and when you get to wherever you’re going, when you find a job and a good house, and you meet a beautiful gringo boy and you get married and have your children, one day, when you’re an old lady and you’re tucking your
nietos
into bed, I want you to tell them that long, long ago, you met a nice man in Guadalajara named Danilo, and that he walked with you, and that he swung his machete around to make sure the knuckleheads didn’t get any ideas.’

Rebeca laughs now; she can’t help herself.

‘See? I’m not so bad.’

Soledad is still apprehensive. ‘Where are all these knuckleheads hid
ing out?’

‘Oh,
amiguita
.’ Danilo frowns. ‘I am afraid you will meet many of them in short order.’

Soledad raises her eyebrows but doesn’t respond.

‘It’s like the good, the bad, and the ugly in this city,’ Danilo says.

‘And the beautiful!’ Lorenzo adds, gesturing toward the sisters.

Lydia cringes.
Why is he still here?
Walking just behind them and listening in on every word. She shudders at his remark, noting how the girls draw their bodies closer in instinctive response. Danilo continues as if Lorenzo hasn’t spoken at all.

‘It’s a long walk from here into the migrant places,’ he says. ‘And there are many dangers.’

‘What kind of dangers?’ Lydia asks.

‘The usual kind,’ Danilo says. ‘
La polic
í
a,
railroad employees, security guards. Especially dangerous for you two.’ He looks at the sisters briefly. ‘It’s better to get off the tracks before you get to Las Juntas – go into the streets and make your way to one of the shelters. There are signs for them, or shopkeepers will point the way. If anyone says they will take you there, don’t go with them. If anyone offers you a job or a place to stay, don’t go with them. If anyone talks to you first, don’t speak with them. If you need directions, ask only the shopkeepers. I will go with you as far as La Piedrera. A few miles.’