American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (24 page)

‘Why?’ Soledad asks.

‘Why what?’

‘Why walk with us?’

‘Why not?’ Danilo says. ‘I do this at least three times a week, a walk with the migrants. It’s my hobby. Good exercise.’

‘But if it’s as dangerous as you say, why do you it? What’s in it for you?’

Danilo has the kind of eyes that protrude slightly from beneath his lids, so there’s no possibility of hiding their expression when he’s in conversation. Luca can see that he’s not annoyed by Soledad’s inquiry. He appreciates her skepticism. ‘I will tell you the truth,’ he says. Then he pauses for a moment to smooth down his mustache with his thumb and index finger. ‘When I was a teenager, I stole a truck. My father died in a work accident, and I was angry with his employer, so I stole that man’s truck. I destroyed all the windows and the headlights using my father’s hammer. And then I slashed its tires and I drove it into a sewer ditch.’

‘Seems reasonable to me,’ Rebeca says.

‘I drank for three months, and I did terrible things in my grief. But I never got caught, and God provided me with a good life anyway, despite my sins. So this is my penance. I am like the guardian devil for migrants who pass through my little neighborhood. I protect them.’

Soledad looks up at him, narrowing one eye as she searches his expression for indications of deceit. She finds none. ‘Okay.’

Danilo laughs. ‘Okay?’

‘Yes, okay,’ Soledad says. They are quiet again for a few moments.

‘You ever have any trouble?’ Lorenzo asks from behind them. ‘Ever get beat up or anything?’

Danilo turns without removing the machete from his shoulder and looks back at him. ‘Not anymore,’ he says.

Lorenzo nods and jams his hands into his pockets. ‘Cool, cool.’

Luca begins chatting with Danilo and the sisters, so Lydia drops back to walk beside Lorenzo. She’s both repelled by him and drawn to the information he might be able to provide. Maybe he knows which cartels have alliances with Los Jardineros, which routes present the greatest dangers of her being recognized. She doesn’t know how to begin the conversation, because in her mind, every question sounds like an accusation. Finally she speaks one out loud.

‘How is it that you came to be traveling alone? Don’t you have family in Guerrero?’

‘Nah, not really.’ Lorenzo has plucked up a blade of dry grass from beside the tracks and tucked it into the corner of his mouth. He speaks past it. ‘My mom got married a few years ago and her husband didn’t really want me around, so I split.’

Lydia glances over at him. ‘How old are you?’

‘Seventeen.’

Younger than she thought. ‘And how old when you left home?’

Lorenzo looks up from his feet and snags the grass blade from his mouth. ‘Pssh, I dunno. Thirteen, fourteen. Old enough to look after myself.’ Lydia takes care not to contradict him, but he feels it anyway. ‘Not everybody has a
mami
like you, all right? Some mothers don’t give a shit.’ He tosses the grass at his feet.

‘I’m sorry,’ Lydia says.

‘Whatever.
No importa
.’ He slings his hands into the pockets of his baggy shorts. ‘I was traveling with my homeboy anyway. We left together because he wanted to get out, too, but then we got separated in Mexico City and I haven’t heard from him since.’

‘But you have a cell phone,’ she says.

‘Yeah, his stopped working.’

‘Oh.’

They walk quietly for a few minutes, and then he says, ‘Yo, it was really sad what happened to
el jefe
’s daughter, but for real, what he did to your family?
Eso fue de locos
.’

Lydia frowns. ‘What?’

‘La Lechuza. What he did to your family, it was too much. When I saw that girl on the news in her
quincea
ñ
era
dress—’

That girl.
‘My niece.’

‘Yeah—’

‘My goddaughter. Y
é
nifer.’

‘Yeah, when I saw her on the news, I mean for real I was already thinking about leaving, but that was it for me. Shit is out of control down there.’

Lydia cannot discuss this with him. They are only bodies to him, strangers on the news, people like the ones he has killed himself.
That girl in her quincea
ñ
era dress
. But then Lydia’s mind snags on a previous detail, an exit ramp.

‘What happened to his daughter?’ she asks. Lorenzo looks confused, so Lydia clarifies. ‘Javier’s daughter, La Lechuza’s daughter. You said it was sad, what happened to her.’

‘Yeah, you didn’t hear?’

‘Hear what? What happened?’

On the day Sebasti
á
n’s article was published, Javier read it in the back
seat of his car while his driver shuffled him through the sluggish morning streets of Acapulco. All his life, Javier had enjoyed an almost preternatural ability to predict incidents and their outcomes. When he was eleven years old and his father was diagnosed with colon cancer, Javier knew that death would be swift; he knew that his mother, who’d previously been a good mother, devoted and affectionate, would handle it poorly, that she’d medicate her grief with alcohol and new men. He foretold and accepted her abandonment well before it came to pass. As a result of that aptitude, Javier was almost immutably composed. Nothing ever really surprised him.

So it was uncharacteristic that he failed to see the article coming. He wondered if his love for Lydia had blinded him to the inevitability of it, and that possibility caused him to feel a faint wrinkle of resentment toward her. Even before he read it and even with the anonymous byline, Javier, who read the article with his usual equanimity, presumed the article was the work of Lydia’s husband, whose journalistic expertise in the drug trade was well-known. Initially, he didn’t need to measure his response, because the article didn’t provoke much feeling in him. On the contrary, Javier regarded it to be a mostly fair depiction of his life. There were, of course, some marginal inaccuracies, one or two instances of exaggeration. There was more righteous condemnation than Javier was prepared to accept, but that was to be expected. Beyond those details, Javier thought, Sebasti
á
n had managed to apprehend something true about the essence of Los Jardineros in Acapulco. And he was bewildered but unexpectedly pleased by the inclusion of his poem. Javier presumed that Lydia had somehow given it to her husband. Had she memorized it? (A flattering notion.) Secretly photographed it with her cell phone during a moment of lapsed judgment? Though the poem revealed something intimate about him, it also illuminated his humanity, he thought. He therefore portended that it might make him beloved by the people. He neither smiled nor scowled as he folded the newspaper and set it in the sunbeam on the leather seat beside him.

Instead, he tried to anticipate the impact the article might have on his future. He understood immediately that there would be ramifications, that his relative anonymity was a thing of the past, that his liberty had been permanently compromised. He’d always known this would happen one day. He hadn’t expected it to be so soon, but he would adapt. It was, at worst, a nuisance. Perhaps it could even be fun. He couldn’t recall another time the press had devoted so much attention to a cartel as young as Los Jardineros. It had taken years of established work before ordinary people began to recognize the names El Chapo Guzm
á
n or Pablo Escobar, and there were plenty of people who still loved those men for their generosity and mythos, even after their spectacular downfalls.

The only thing that truly unsettled Javier was his speculation that Lydia, his dear Lydia, had betrayed his confidence with the poem. That betrayal he had not foreseen, and it caused a treacherous quickening in his chest. But then it occurred to him that perhaps she hadn’t been disloyal at all. Maybe she’d provided the poem as a faithful contribution, a nod to his true self. Maybe the poem was a gift.

Lydia knew Javier as well as anyone knew him. His first response to the article was exactly as she’d predicted.

At that same moment, several miles away, just at the outskirts of the city, on a sprawling
finca
with glittering all-day views of the turquoise sea, Javier’s wife was also reading the article. She was a woman who had never been beautiful, but who took care to appear as if she might once have been. Her hair was platinum, her mascara and lipstick tastefully applied, her bosoms maintained by the architecture of expensive lingerie, her nails, gleaming and square and only a shade pinker than natural. She hadn’t had a cigarette in almost three years, yet here she was, smoke curling from the tip of her quivering menthol. She had a name, but she seldom heard it. Instead, she heard
Mam
á
or
Mi Reina
or
Do
ñ
a
. She’d reached an age where she expected each day to be the unveiling of some quiet new sorrow, and where she simultaneously believed there was nothing left in life that could truly surprise her. As she pursed her lips to draw on the menthol, the fine lines around her mouth became grooves. She stained the filter of her cigarette with a shimmer of gold-coral lipstick and blew the smoke out over one shoulder. A nervous maid soundlessly approached and tipped extra coffee into her waiting cup. There were gulls out wheeling over the dappled blue horizon. The bougainvillea sang. But she sat, wordlessly rereading Sebasti
á
n’s article for the third time. It troubled her. It’s unsettling to see, emboldened by the veracity of black and white, the most deeply suppressed grapplings of your own smothered conscience, printed right there in the newspaper for all the world to read. Javier’s wife had failed to sufficiently calm herself when their daughter, Marta, called from boarding school in Barcelona later that afternoon and destroyed her with the simplicity of a single question:
Mam
á
, is it true?
And because of her failure, in that moment, to adequately reassure her daughter, she would forever blame herself for what happened next.

Three days later, on the day before Y
é
nifer’s
quincea
ñ
era,
the boarding school dean called to relay the news that Marta had been found hanging from the air-conditioning vent in her dorm room by a pair of her roommate’s knotted tights. The suicide note was addressed only to her father.

‘One more death should not matter much.’

Chapter Nineteen

Just on the outskirts of Guadalajara, inhaling the fragrance
of chocolate, Lydia stops dead in her tracks. Her hand flies up to her mouth. Lorenzo turns to face her.

‘Yeah, so I guess the daughter read that article your husband wrote,’ he says.

‘Oh my God,’ Lydia says.

‘You didn’t know this?’

Lydia’s voice falters.

‘Yeah, somebody sent her the article, and when she read it, she freaked out and killed herself. Left her
papi
a suicide note. Shit was ugly. That’s why.’ Lydia’s mind races to put the pieces together while the boy
sicario
talks. ‘That’s why he went
loco
. Said you betrayed him, said your husband was responsible, said you were all gonna pay. He was really fucked-up.’

‘Wait.’ Because her brain has seized. It’s too full.
Marta
. Isolated memories surge up in Lydia’s consciousness one after another and then pop like bubbles. Javier in the bookstore, Skyping with his daughter in Barcelona before an exam. Her apprehension, his fatherly encouragement. Javier laughing when he told Lydia about the pogo stick Marta bought him for his fiftieth birthday. How he’d tried it out just to please her and ended up with his back in spasms. Javier’s insistence that Marta was the only good thing he’d ever done in his life.
Es mi cielo, mi luna, y todas mis estrellas.
My sky, my moon, and all my stars. There’s an unwelcome pang in Lydia’s chest.

‘She didn’t know? She didn’t know about her father, about the cartel?’

‘I guess not.’

‘How could she not know?’ It seems so unlikely, but Lydia immediately perceives her own hypocrisy. She hadn’t known either. The first domino of her understanding teeters and falls.

Lorenzo shrugs. ‘I don’t know. But he made your family like a straight-up vendetta. It was practically a press release for Los Jardineros. Usually when there’s a job, you only hear what you need to hear, and it’s only the people involved who know anything about it, but this time was different. Everybody in the city knew, everybody in Guerrero.’

Lydia begins shuffling her feet beneath her again, but her mind is whirring like a disengaged motor. She is blindsided. All this time, all these miles, the same futile, idiotic refrain kept presenting itself through her thoughts.
This wasn’t supposed to happen
.
It wasn’t supposed to happen
. She’d misjudged him. She had missed something. A thousand times, she’d replayed the conversation she’d had with Sebasti
á
n the night before the article came out. He’d asked if they should go to a hotel for a few days, to be on the safe side.

‘No, I think we’re fine,’ she’d told him.

‘A hundred percent?’

‘Yes,’ she’d said. ‘A hundred percent.’

How that answer has haunted her. It has followed her into sleep every night. It has twisted in her gut without reprieve. All the frivolous reasons she hadn’t wanted to go to the hotel: She hated to uproot Luca, for him to miss school, for her business to suffer. She hated the interruption to their routine. And she’d believed, truly, that Javier wouldn’t hurt them. What she wouldn’t give to go back to that moment with Sebasti
á
n, to say anything else. To suck those words back in and obliterate them.
A hundred percent,
she’d said. How presumptuous she’d been, how foolhardy! Of course she couldn’t account for every eventuality. Why hadn’t she seen that sooner? She could never have predicted this, but she could’ve predicted that something unpredictable might happen.
Why, why, why.
Her body feels like cracked glass, already shattered, and held in place only by a trick of temporary gravity. One wrong move and she will come to pieces.

Marta’s death changed everything, of course. It changed everything. Behind her shock, Lydia can sense waves of competing emotions, but she shuts them all down.
De ninguna manera.
She will feel nothing about Javier’s dead daughter. No, Lydia will not even say her name. She will feel nothing about his anguish. The note he sent her at the Duquesa Imperial:
I’m sorry for your pain and mine. Now we are bound forever in this grief.

No.

No.

His grief is not the same as hers. Lydia will not feel empathy for him. She will rage. She will inhabit the fury of her own senseless bereavement, the one that Javier invented for her. Instead, she will walk, she will leave him behind, she will repeat the sixteen names of her murdered family. Innocents, all of them. Sebasti
á
n especially. An honorable man doing his job.

She will list them and repeat them and remember. Sebasti
á
n, Yemi, Alex, Y
é
nifer, Adri
á
n, Paula, Arturo, Est
é
fani, Nico, Joaqu
í
n, Diana, Vicente, Rafael, Luc
í
a, and Rafaelito. Mam
á
. Repeat. Her husband, her sister, her niece and nephew, her aunt, her two cousins, all their beautiful children. Her
mam
á
.
Lydia will not stop saying their names.

Lorenzo is saying something beside her, but his voice recedes behind her own recitation. She needs to be away from him. She will walk beside Luca instead, press his warm fingers into the palm of her hand.

Her repetition will become a prayer.

They pass into busier neighborhoods with curious dogs and kids riding bikes and women pushing strollers. Luca sees one man with a white cowboy hat riding an old pony and talking on his cell phone, which makes him laugh. There are also girls who look to be around the sisters’ age who stand near the tracks in groups of two and three. They wear clothes that look like Mami’s underwear, and white high heels or knee-high boots. They have neon pink lips, and they call out to their countrymen in their Central American accents as they walk past. The girls invite the men to come have a beer or a smoke or a rest, and Luca knows there’s something off about their appearance, their dress, something improper about their posture – so languorous against the bustle of the day. But he doesn’t understand how it all works. He doesn’t understand the difference between the men who shake their heads sadly and avert their eyes, and the ones who leer and whistle, who trot off to disappear into darkened doorways with those young dress-up girls. When he tries to ask Mami about them, she only shakes her head and squeezes his hand.

Several times they pass clusters of uniformed men who rouse themselves when they notice the passing migrants, but each time this happens, Danilo removes the still-sheathed machete from his shoulder and swings it alongside his body as he walks. He does some elaborate shuffle that passes for a dance, and sings as they go, ‘
¡Guadalajara, Guadalajara! Tienes el alma de provinciana, hueles a limpio, a rosa temprana
.
.
.
’ When the men in their uniforms notice him, they return their interest elsewhere, so by the time they reach La Piedrera, Lydia feels as though Danilo has saved their lives perhaps seven times. She grips his hand and says thank you, but he shrugs it off and wishes them a safe continued journey. He turns and ambles back down the tracks the way they came. They hear him singing as he goes.
‘¡Guadalajara, Guadalajara! Sabes a pura tierra mojada.’

‘I wish he could come with us all the way to
el norte,
’ Rebeca says to Soledad as they watch him go.

‘I can take care of you,’ Lorenzo says in response.

The sisters turn to look at him.

‘Nah, we’re all set,’ Rebeca says. ‘Thanks.’

Lorenzo shrugs, but Soledad has no patience for this cholo and has never been a champion of subtlety anyway. She wheels on him.

‘Are you still here? Did we invite you to join us or something? Because I don’t remember doing that.’

‘Damn, girl.
C
á
lmate
. We’re all going to the same place, aren’t we?’

‘Are we?’

‘I mean, what, you own Guadalajara now?’

She turns away. ‘Come on,’ she says to Rebeca.

The girls start to walk, and Luca with them. Lydia doesn’t move. She knows Lorenzo could use that phone in his pocket to call Javier right now. He could snap her neck and then snap her picture, collect a big reward. Her death could make him a Jardineros hero. But isn’t it possible that, beneath the shield of his baby narco swagger, he’s also a scared boy, alone in the world and running for his life? And isn’t it also probably true that if he persists in not murdering them, he might know more things about the cartels that could help them? He’s already been a wellspring, and Lydia would like the chance to interview him further, to pump him for more information. Luca and the girls look back at her from the corner they’re about to turn. Luca is holding Rebeca’s hand. The pace of their life has become so fast and so slow; Lydia never has enough time to make decisions. She works from instinct alone, and her instinct is strong in this instance. It tells her to go, to get away from him.

‘Can I ask you one thing?’ she says.

He shrugs.

‘Do you think he’s still looking for us?’

‘
Sin duda alguna,
’ he says. Without a doubt.

It’s not surprising, but still, there’s no comfort in the validation. Her body feels leaden. ‘But we’re safer here, yes?’

Lorenzo’s wearing a string backpack. He squints and looks around. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I mean, anywhere is safer than Acapulco.’

‘But he has alliances in other
plazas
?’

‘
Claro que s
í
,
there’s a lot more cooperation with the other cartels than there was before him. He’s got reach. Deep into rival territories.’

‘Which ones?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know. What do I look like, some kind of
maldito
expert?’

Well. Yes,
she thinks. She moves her lips to one side. ‘I’m just trying to determine our safest route.’

‘There is no safest route, far as I can tell,’ he says. ‘You just gotta run like hell.’

She looks into his face, broad and young. His eyes are heavily lidded, his upper lip softened by a feeble crop of hair. He has the remnants of a breakout high on one cheekbone. He’s a veritable kid. Who has murdered at least three people.

‘Lorenzo, you’re not going to tell anyone, are you?’ she asks. She tries to anchor his gaze, but he looks away.

‘Nah, I told you already. I’m done with all that. I’m out.’ He jams his hands into the pockets of his shorts.

She nods skeptically. ‘Thank you.’

‘Ni modo
.
’

It’s an effort to turn her back to him, because she is still afraid. The shock of a blade entering her flesh, severing her spine. The pile of her body in the road beside the tracks. ‘
Suerte,
Lorenzo,’ she says, and she turns to go. It’s even harder not to look back after she rejoins Luca and the sisters, but she knows he might interpret any backward glance as a weakness or an invitation, so she only imagines him falling behind. She pictures him following from a hidden distance, but she doesn’t turn to confront her suspicions. She keeps moving,
adelante,
keeps Luca and the girls moving. It’s not until hours later, on the doorstep of a migrant shelter, that she accords herself a pause of reassurance. Just before she enters, she turns and allows her gaze to sweep up and down the vacant road, to linger and search in every shadow, and to thank God. He is gone.

They’re exhausted by the time they arrive. There are good migrant services in the city, and between that and Danilo’s modest heroics, the Hershey’s Kisses, Luca has difficulty reconciling all the genuine kindness of strangers. It seems impossible that good people – so many good people – can exist in the same world where men shoot up whole families at birthday parties and then stand over their corpses and eat their chicken. There’s a frazzling thrum of confusion that arcs out of Luca’s brain when he tries to make those two facts sit side by side.

At the shelter, Rebeca and Soledad stand guard for each other outside the bathroom door. It’s a luxury to slough the dust of the road off your skin, to soap up and stand beneath a spray of warm water, to watch it pool at your feet, grimy and brown, before it circles the drain and disappears forever. Soledad likes to think of the water molecules racing down the drainpipes, intermingling and dispersing, joining other pipes beneath the streets of the city, gathering volume and speed as they rush and tumble toward some unknown destination. She likes to think of the filth she washes from her skin, diluted and diluted until it no longer exists as filth at all.

Although Soledad has the cell phone Iv
á
n gave her, she can’t use it to make phone calls or text because it has no credit. If it did have credit, Soledad still wouldn’t use it, for two reasons: first, except for her
primo
C
é
sar, no one she knows has a cell phone anyway, and second, like Lydia, she’s afraid that if she uses the phone, Iv
á
n will then somehow be able to find her. So the phone functions mostly as a repository of photographs, but also as a propeller that reminds Soledad how far she has come, and how much better her life will be when she gets to
el norte
.