American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (28 page)

After a few minutes and some removed conversation, most of
los agentes
get into two of the three trucks and leave, so only five remain on the roadside with the migrants. With those two departing vehicles, so, too, disappear the migrants’ hopes that this might be a clean, administrative experience. Fewer uniforms means fewer witnesses. The captives eye one another nervously, but no one moves. Even if the five remaining agents weren’t so heavily armed, even if one of the migrants felt inclined to run, there’s nowhere for them to go. Because of these circumstances, the handcuffs, when they appear, feel both gratuitous and alarming. They’re not real handcuffs, but plastic zip ties. At first Lydia hopes they’re only going to shackle the men. They begin at the end, standing the migrants up one at a time. They pat them down for weapons, cell phones, money. They take their backpacks and zip-tie their wrists behind them. One man complains when they take his money, and
el agente
backhands him across the face with his radio. Luca’s eyes grow wide.

‘
Mijo,
look,’ Mami says, pulling Luca close. ‘Look at that cloud.’ She points.

‘It looks like an elephant,’ he says.

‘Yes, and then see there? What’s it picking up in its trunk?’

Luca squints. He knows what she’s doing, trying to distract him. She doesn’t want him to see. And he could tell her it doesn’t matter anymore, that he’s seen so much worse than this already, but he understands that it’s as much for her as it is for him, this distraction. She needs to feel like she can still mother him, still provide him with some re
lief, no matter what horrible things are happening fifteen feet away. Luca can hear that man crying softly. Luca can imagine, without raising his eyes to confirm such things, that there’s a glossy trickle of bright blood leaking from that man’s nose or lip. Luca focuses on the cloud-elephant because it’s something he can do for Mami.

‘I think he’s picking a flower.’

Mami touches her cheek to his. ‘I think he’s shaking hands with a little mouse.’

When all the migrant men are handcuffed, nineteen of them, Luca counts,
los agentes
come to the sisters. They move to take Rebeca first, but Soledad steps in front of her.

‘Everybody wants to be a hero,’ one of
los agentes
mutters. His partner laughs.

They turn Soledad around and take a long time patting her down. Much longer than they took on any of the men. Luca can feel Mami trembling beside him. The officers flap the bottom of Soledad’s oversize white T-shirt, billowing air beneath it, and then they bend down to look up it. They stick their hands up there.

‘Think she’s packing?’ the partner asks.

‘Oh, she’s packing all right.’

When they cuff her, they pull her T-shirt at the back so it’s stretched tight against the white outline of her bra, and they gather up all the loose material and bind it into the zip ties behind her, along with her wrists. The material rides up to show a few inches of her brown tummy, and all the migrant men show their solidarity for her by turning their eyes to the ground.

‘That’s better,’ says
el agente
who cuffed her. He tosses Soledad’s confiscated backpack into the bed of the truck along with the others, but when Soledad moves to sit back down on the ground with the other migrants, he grabs her by the elbow. ‘You sit up here instead.’ He points to the folded-down tailgate.

Soledad’s face betrays nothing. She sits where instructed, and
makes sure not to watch while they do the same to Rebeca. Soon her sister is seated up beside her, and they lean against each other, consoling each other with the heat of their touching shoulders. Lydia endures her turn next. They face her away from Luca and remove her hat to study her face. She squints in the sunlight, but they replace the hat without comment before groping her breasts and her backside. They find the machete strapped to her leg, and they laugh while they unbuckle the holster. One of the men throws it into the bed of the pickup truck with a
thunk
.

‘Don’t worry,
mijo,
it will be okay,’ she says to Luca without turning to face him.

Luca is sitting cross-legged with his elbows on his knees. Soledad and Rebeca both stare silently at him, as if they can make a bubble of protection around him just by the resolve of their eyes.

The officer speaks to Lydia without inflection, without anger or hostility, in exactly the same tone of voice Lydia would use if she were talking to the automated teller when she does her banking by phone. ‘Shut up,’ he says, and he slides his hand between her legs. He brushes his pinky finger back and forth along the crotch of her jeans. Lydia clamps her mouth shut and begins to cry.

Luca leans forward to stand up, but Rebeca calls out to him. ‘What is the third-largest city in the United States?’ she asks.

Luca is confused. ‘What?’

Rebeca repeats the question.

‘Well, that’s easy, it’s Chicago,’ Luca says. ‘Once you get down to around the fifth- and sixth-largest it’s a lot trickier because those populations are changing by a significant percentage year by year, but – wait, why?’

Seated on the tailgate with her hands tied behind her, Rebeca shrugs. ‘Just curious.’

The officers have finished with Lydia, and they seat her back on the ground beside Luca.

‘Come on, little man,’ they say to him.

Luca stands. He puts his arms and legs out and makes his body into the shape of an X. They remove his backpack and throw it into the back of the truck with the others. He does not complain. They turn his pockets inside out. He does not complain. They remove Papi’s red baseball hat from his head.

‘Nice hat. You a Yankees fan?’ one of them says.

‘You can’t have it,’ Luca says. ‘It belonged to my
papi.
’

‘Oh yeah? Where’s your
papi
now?’

‘He’s dead.’ Luca wields that truth like a battle-ax.

The officer is impassive, but he nods and sticks the hat back onto Luca’s head. Luca turns and puts his wrists together so they can cuff him. The officers laugh.

‘Nah,
chiquito,
we’re not going to cuff you,’ the first one says. ‘That your
mami
over there? Go sit with your
mami
.’

Luca doesn’t understand why, but he feels ashamed not to be cuffed. Diminished. His face flushes hot, but he goes and sits down on Mami’s lap, nonetheless, which is a thing he hasn’t done for at least two years.

When the two vans arrive, the officers open the back doors and usher the migrants inside. There are no seats or windows. They are unmarked cargo vans, and Lydia knows that probably means they’re all going to die. Her mind is racing and blank at once. She doesn’t recall the details, the words, the exact numbers or dates, but she’s remembering the disappearance of those forty-three college students from that bus in Guerrero in 2014. The massacre of 193 people in San Fernando in 2011. Just a few months ago, 168 human skulls found in a mass grave in Veracruz. Who will miss Luca and Lydia if they disappear?
We have already disappeared,
she thinks.
We already do not exist.
When she looks at Luca, she sees the shape of his cranium beneath his skin.

The migrant men are loaded into the dark vans first. They sit awkwardly inside with their legs extended and their hands cuffed behind them, trying not to tip over on one another. Some of them are already crying. The first van is full; the doors are closed. Lydia and Luca are last to be loaded into the second van. Rebeca and Soledad are still seated on the tailgate of
la migra
truck.

‘My daughters,’ Lydia says to the officer who fondled her as he hoists her now into the back of the van.

‘Your what?’

Lydia points with her chin to the sisters in the back of the truck.

‘Those are your daughters?’ he asks, even though they both know that the two Central American girls with their Honduran accents and their skin an entirely different shade than Luca’s are not Lydia’s daughters.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We need to stay together.’

‘No room,’ he says, lifting Luca into the van beside her. ‘Van’s
full.’

He slams the left-hand door, but Lydia sticks her leg out to block the second door with her foot.

‘Please,’ she says, looking across at the silent sisters. Rebeca and Soledad stare back at her, their expressions ranging like a quarrel of sparrows across their faces. ‘Please, we have to stay together.’

‘Don’t worry,’ the man says, pushing Lydia’s leg back inside the van. ‘We’ll give the girls a ride.’

When he slams the door, Lydia’s almost grateful for the blackness.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Behind Lydia’s most immediate fear of being murdered
in obscurity, or worse, watching Luca suffer some act of brutality, she’s also afraid that, whomever these men are working for, they may find out who she is and submit her to a different kind of murder instead. Even if they’re not actively looking for her, they might discover her accidentally, as Lorenzo did. If they are working for a cartel, which seems increasingly undeniable, and they do recognize her, they wouldn’t necessarily have to be allies of Los Jardineros to identify her as a valuable commodity. There are any number of ways they could use her: as a bargaining chip, a peace offering, a humiliating prize, an expression of competitive violence. Lydia still has her voter ID card in her wallet. Why? Why hadn’t she gotten rid of it? If she survives this captivity, she will destroy it before they go any farther. She will surrender her name; she has already relinquished everything else. Lydia thinks again of Marta, swinging from the vent of that distant dorm room. She thinks of Javier in grief. And though she can’t conceive of forgiving him for what he’s done, she also wonders, now that she knows about his daughter, if she might’ve been able to reason with him, given the chance, to appeal to that decimated, fatherly part of him. To plead for mercy, for her life and Luca’s.

Beside her, Luca presses his head against her arm. ‘Mami, I’m scared.’

‘I know,
amorcito
.’

‘Where did they take Rebeca?’

‘I don’t know,
amorcito
.’

She curls her head over his because it’s all the comfort she can give him. She tries not to think about what Soledad and Rebeca are enduring right now. Her body shudders in an effort to sling her imagination shut. Sweat trickles down her spine, and the hot air in the van feels damp and close. The reek of fear is thick. But when Luca slips his little hand up beneath her hair and clutches the nape of her neck, the sensation of his slick palm against her skin is like a shot of determination. They will survive this. They must. She curves her whole body toward him in the dark.

When finally the van doors open, the light is painful after all the blackness. The migrants feel sweaty and dizzy and thirsty. Luca’s pants haven’t dried because it was so humid inside the van. The stale urine has a piquant odor, but no one mentions it. Maybe not all of it is coming from Luca. The migrants scoot on their butts toward the open doors and try to hop down without falling. It’s a cement floor beneath them. Dim fluorescent lights high overhead. They’re inside a large warehouse, and the men in charge are no longer wearing uniforms. It takes a moment for these facts to land in Lydia’s consciousness. It’s not a precinct or a jail or an immigration detention center, but a dingy, anonymous warehouse.
Carajo.

In one corner, there’s a utility sink with water running, and the migrants are permitted one at a time to stick their heads under the murky tap and take a drink. The water tastes of rust and hard-boiled eggs. Luca can’t reach.

‘Please, can you untie me so I can help my son?’ Lydia asks
one of the guards.

He doesn’t answer her but instead lifts Luca so he can stick his mouth beneath the faucet.

‘What stinks?’ the man asks and then, realizing it’s Luca, tosses him down.
‘¡Qu
é
cochino!’

Luca manages not to cry. He stands next to his
mami
. They are
made to sit on the floor, and for a long time that’s all they do, lined up along a wall, listening to whatever sounds they can hear: a steady trickle of water dripping into that filthy sink, the clacking of some metal rollers nearby, the occasional furtive whisper of one migrant to another, the unafraid voices of the guards echoing from a nearby room where they’re talking and laughing. They’re smoking in there, too. Luca can smell it. The migrants don’t ask questions or complain. No one moves. Some of them pray quietly together. After what feels like hours, a door in one wall rolls up on its tracks, and all the migrants squint from the onslaught of unexpected daylight. A truck rolls in, the one with all their backpacks, the one with Rebeca and Soledad seated in the bed, facing the rear with their backs to the cab, their wrists still bound behind them. The door quickly rolls shut again.

‘Mami! They’re here,’ Luca says, and he starts to stand, but Mami tells him to sit back down again.

‘Luca, don’t look at them or talk to them yet,’ Lydia says. ‘Wait a minute. Let’s see how they are.’

Luca sits, even though he doesn’t fully understand what Mami means by ‘how they are’.
They’re here!
He was worried he’d never see them again. Mami leans forward in the dirty light. She asserts her face into his so Luca has no choice but to look at her.

‘Luca, these are very bad people. You understand?’

Luca hardens his lips against each other. He investigates a
small tag of rubber tread that’s come loose from the sole of his shoe.

‘We have to be careful not to draw extra attention to ourselves now, okay? You have to be very quiet and still until we figure out what’s going to happen.’

Luca tugs at the rubber tag until it snaps.

‘Okay,
mijo
?’

He doesn’t answer.

Lydia is amazed by the girls’ arrival. She, too, presumed they would never see one another again. When the men were finished with the sisters, they could’ve chosen to keep them or sell them or kill them, and that’s frankly what Lydia expected, insofar as she permitted herself to expect anything at all. Lydia had buried that presumption in a shallow place, an unmarked place, for the last several hours. She’d pushed it away because she didn’t have room for it. The girls do not look well.

Soledad has a black eye and a scraped cheek on the same side. Her hair is wild and full of grit. Rebeca is bleeding at the temple. Just a thin, bright red cord against her skin. Her mouth is swollen and raw. A guard pulls them by the ankles, one at a time, toward the liftgate of the truck and flings them to the floor like sacks of rice. Soledad and Rebeca don’t complain with their voices or faces or bodies. They’re both limp – all the flinch has gone out of them. The sisters land near the far end of the line of migrants, and they don’t move from where they’re placed. Rebeca closes her eyes at once. Soledad keeps hers open. She lifts her chin, leans forward, and looks down the line until she sees Luca sticking out a little from the rest of the migrants. She nods at him once.

‘Soledad,’ he says, just loudly enough for her to hear. Because he knows without knowing that the act of saying her name in that moment is the flag she needs in order to return to herself.

‘Rebeca,’ he says also. But Rebeca squeezes her eyes shut even tighter. She’s not ready. She pulls her knees up in front of her and buries her face there.

Now the five men who were in that truck with the sisters are uncarefully unloading the backpacks. They wear untucked white T-shirts over their dark blue uniform pants, and Lydia wonders if they’re real
agentes
who also work for the cartel, or if the uniforms and trucks are just elaborate costumes and props.
Qu
é
importa.
They stand in the bed and toss everything down in a heap. Luca can feel the whole line of migrants clicking to attention, their spines snapping them upright. A fizz of nervousness in the air. A few more men from the office come to join them, and soon the one in charge stands before them. The others call him
comandante
.

‘Is anyone here a Mexican citizen?’ he asks.

‘I am,’ Lydia says. Three or four other voices join hers.

El comandante
steps up to the first man, seated directly beside Rebeca.
El comandante
nudges the migrant’s worn shoe with the toe of his boot. ‘You’re Mexican?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You’re not lying to me?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You wouldn’t lie to me?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Where are you from?’

‘From Oaxaca.’

‘City?’

The man nods.

‘In what state is the city of Oaxaca?’
el comandante
asks.

The man hesitates. ‘Oaxaca state?’ He is unsure.

‘Yes,
amigo
. The city of Oaxaca is in the state of Oaxaca. Congratulations. You must have done very well in school, in Oaxaca.’

The migrant squirms where he sits.

‘And tell me,’
el comandante
continues. ‘Who is the governor of Oaxaca now?’

‘The governor?’

‘Yes, the governor. Of the state of Oaxaca. Where you are from.’

Another hesitation. ‘We, uh. We had elections recently. The governor, the last governor, he was um
.
.
.’ The man shakes his head.

‘Surely you know the governor’s name?’
el comandante
says.

‘Esperanza?’

El comandante
turns to a guard standing behind him, who’s googling Oaxaca on his phone. He shakes his head. ‘Governor of Oaxaca is Hinojosa.’

El comandante
returns his attention to the migrant. ‘Now. Would you like to tell me again where it is you’re from?’

The man swallows. He says quietly, ‘Oaxaca.’

El comandante
draws his pistol and shoots the man between the eyebrows.

Rebeca jumps, her skin and her bones. Lydia cries out. Every migrant in the line cries out. Luca begins sobbing and screaming. He clamps his hands over his ears and squeezes his eyes closed and rocks himself. ‘No, no, no.’
El comandante
clears his throat irritably, a tiny sound which is louder than all the reverberating noise in the room. With huge eyes and a cracked mouth, Rebeca is staring at the slump of a man beside her. His eyes are still open as he falls over onto her lap. He bleeds onto her legs. Rebeca doesn’t move.

‘Should anyone else be interested in lying to me about where you are from, allow me to suggest that you reconsider,’
el comandante
says. ‘Now I will ask again: Who here is a Mexican national?’

Luca is shaking his head frantically, but Lydia takes a deep breath, and ‘I am,’ she says. This time she’s the only one.

El comandante
turns and approaches her. ‘This is your son?’

She doesn’t breathe. ‘We are from Acapulco, in the state of Guerrero,’ she says. ‘The governor is H
é
ctor Astudillo Flores, and the state capital is Chilpancingo.’

Before she can stop him, Luca moves swiftly to his feet. He’s trembling, but he stands up straight, tips his head back, and closes his eyes. His voice is clear as he takes over for his
mami
. ‘Although the site of Acapulco has cultural influences ranging back to the eighth-century Olmecs, it wasn’t established as a major port until the arrival of Cort
é
s in the 1520s. The city has a current population of more than six hundred thousand inhabitants, and a tropical climate with distinct wet and dry seasons—’

‘Is he for real?’
el comandante
interrupts. He’s looking at Lydia.

‘Yes,’ she says.

The man’s face looks very different when he’s smiling, as he now is at Luca. He looks grandfatherly. Portly. Wild, bushy eyebrows. A pebbly wash of gray around the temples. This man who just shot a shackled human being between the eyes.

‘Tourism is the main eco—’

‘
Mijo,
stop,’ Mami says.

Luca snaps his mouth closed and sits back down on her lap. He turns sideways there, so his body is mostly covering her.
El comandante
leans his hands on his knees.

‘Where did you learn all that?’ he asks.

Luca shrugs.

‘Did you make it up?’

‘No.’

‘You wouldn’t lie to me?’

‘No.’ Luca would pee again if he wasn’t dehydrated. He buries his face in Mami’s neck.

El comandante
straightens himself up again. ‘So you are from Acapulco.’

She hesitates even though it’s too late. She already told the truth because there was no alternative; she can’t change her answer now. ‘Yes,’ she says.

‘And why did you leave such a glorious place?’

El comandante
looks into her face, and Lydia doesn’t see any recognition there. Sebasti
á
n’s face, the slain reporter, has made the national news, but hers has not. Neither has Luca’s nor Abuela’s nor Y
é
nifer’s, nor any of their other sixteen slaughtered loved ones. It’s only that traveling text message that might identify her. Lydia takes a deep breath. She will not lie; she will tell some of the truth.

‘The city has become extremely violent, frightening. I could no longer afford the costs of running my business.’

‘So you left.’

‘Yes.’

‘In search of a better life for your remarkable son.’ He smiles a toothy smile at Luca.