American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (31 page)

‘If you want a ride to Culiac
á
n tomorrow, I can come back in the morning,’ he says, and then he’s gone before they even have time to thank him.

After they’ve eaten and locked themselves inside their tiny room,
after they’ve managed to lug the wide, heavy nightstand across the carpet and wedge it beneath the doorknob for extra security, Lydia collects everyone’s pants. The room does not have a bathroom, but there is, oddly, a toilet in one corner, and a yellow sink beside it. The water that emerges from the faucet of that sink is the color of sand, but Lydia doesn’t mind because the discoloration serves to camouflage the colors she has to wash out of those jeans. Luca’s, Rebeca’s, and Soledad’s. She uses the cracked bar of soap in the dish, and she scrubs and scrubs until finally the water she wrings from the denim returns to its original murky dun color.

By the time she’s finished, Luca is snoring softly on one of the room’s two single beds, and the sisters, too, are already asleep, curled up together. Soledad cradles her sister’s head in her arms, and their hair is fanned out in one twisted, black wave across their shared pillow. Lydia rummages through her pack for her toothbrush, and rations a smear of paste onto the bristles. She considers the brown water from the tap before sticking the toothbrush under there and wetting it. At home, there was a whole routine before she got into bed. It could take twenty minutes some nights. Cold cream, toner, moisturizer, floss, toothpaste, mouthwash, lip balm. Some nights tweezers, too, or clippers or nail files. Of course, the occasional exfoliant or mask. Hand cream. Fluffy socks if her feet were chilly. Sebasti
á
n would whisper-call from the bedroom, trying not to wake Luca in his impatience, ‘
Madre de Dios,
wife, the Eiffel Tower was built faster!’ But when she was finished, he’d always fold back the covers to invite her in. He’d drape them over her when she was settled, along with the top half of himself. His breath was clean when he kissed her.

Lydia avoids her reflection in the harsh yellow light of the rusty mirror. She spits into the sink and rinses her mouth. She splashes murky water over her face and neck and dries herself off with the shirt she wore for the last two days. When she finally slips into bed beside Luca, before she can even invoke her
don’t think
mantra, exhaustion descends like anesthesia and blots out everything else. They sleep.

Some hours later and well before dawn, Rebeca wakens Lydia from a black sleep.

‘It’s Soledad,’ Rebeca whispers to Lydia. ‘Something’s wrong with her.’

Lydia disentangles herself from Luca, who smacks his lips in his sleep, and then rolls tighter into a ball facing the wall. A good deal of light comes in through the room’s only window, which has an insufficient curtain and is positioned beneath an overzealous streetlamp. Lydia moves to the other twin bed, where Soledad sits rocking over her legs and clutching her stomach.

‘Soledad? Are you okay?’

She clenches her jaw and rocks her body forward. ‘Just bad cramps.’

Lydia looks up at Rebeca, whose face is a cloud of worry. ‘Just sit with Luca,’ Lydia says. ‘Make sure he stays asleep.’

Rebeca sits at the foot of Luca’s bed.

‘Can you stand?’ Lydia asks.

Soledad gathers her strength and then rocks herself onto her feet. There’s a dark stain on the mattress beneath her and the mineral scent of blood. Lydia grips her under the elbow and steers her around the bed toward the corner of the room where the plumbing is. She positions the flimsy curtain to give Soledad as much privacy as possible while she miscarries her baby.

Good to his word, the doctor returns in the morning and drives them to Culiac
á
n. The girls’ jeans are still damp and stiff from Lydia’s scrubbing, but they wear them anyway, and the sun isn’t long drying them. It eats the moisture from their clothes and their hair and skin. Rebeca moves a little easier and Soledad with a little more difficulty than yesterday. Lydia wants to buy a packet of sanitary napkins for Soledad, but they’re ex
pensive, so she puts her embarrassment away and asks the doctor, who, being a doctor, thinks nothing of the request and complies without hesitation. He also buys them breakfast and a tube of sunscreen, which he urges them to use, and for Luca, a comic book. When he takes his leave, he does so abruptly, to release them from the effort of gratitude.

Lydia cannot wait to get back on the train, to get away from the nightmarish memories of this place, to be traveling north at high speed. She’s terrified as they walk the tracks through the city that they will be spotted, that the guard from yesterday will be out driving to work –
Do these men commute to work? Is that what they call it? Do they kiss their wives and children goodbye each morning and then climb into the family sedan and set out for a day of raping and extortion, and then return home exhausted in the evenings and hungry for their pot roast?
 – and he’ll see her, he’ll see the four of them walking north along the tracks, and the information will snap into place, and he’ll remember: her face smiling beside Javier’s in that picture. She pushes Luca gently in the back, ushers him into a faster pace. They cross over a muddy river on a skeletal railway bridge, and discover a train yard where the tracks are lined on one side with giant boulders. A few clusters of migrants wait there, surrounded by the dirty colors of litter and debris, mud and weeds. There’s a boy among them, slightly older than Luca, but certainly younger than Rebeca. He stands while the other migrants sit hunching their shoulders against him. His eyes are unfocused and his posture is the shape of a question mark.
His hands float unsteadily in front of him, and he sways strangely on his curved legs.

‘Mami, what’s wrong with him?’ Luca asks.

He’s the most disturbing child Luca has ever seen. He seems unaware of them, unaware of anything. Mami shakes her head, but Soledad provides a one-word answer:
drogas
. They move quickly past the boy, away from the cluster of migrants he seems to be orbiting. In fact they are nearly ready to quit the railway yard altogether when three well-dressed young women appear at a crossing ahead on the tracks. They wave their arms overhead and call out,
‘Hermanos, ¡tenemos comida!’
The men stand up from their clusters, pat the dust from their jeans, and gather for the offer of food. One of the three women reads loudly from the Bible while the other two hand out tamales and
atole
. Luca’s not hungry because, thanks to the doctor, they already had breakfast, but he’s learned never to turn down a gift of calories. They eat gratefully, and when the women begin packing up their pots and gathering the spent rubbish, Lydia wonders if they should leave this place, too. It feels squalid and dangerous, but there’s a rumor that one of the trains parked here is being loaded, that soon it will journey north. Men are already climbing the ladders and spreading their packs out on top of the train. The railway workers watch
and make no move to stop them. It seems so senseless and arbitrary, the way the government clears migrants from the trains in some places, spending millions of pesos and dollars to build those track-fences in Oaxaca and Chiapas and Mexico state, all while turning a blind eye in other locations. There’s even a
polic
í
a municipal
parked just there on the corner, watching the migrants board. He sips coffee from a paper cup. It feels almost like a trap, but Lydia’s too grateful to flex her suspicion.

The sisters’ bodies are battered and weakened, especially Soledad’s, from the miscarriage. Being able to board while the train is stopped feels like luck, so they climb up gingerly, and Lydia can still get a whiff of blood from Soledad on the ladder above her. They move back along the top of the train until they come to a car where there’s room for all four of them to be comfortable. Just as they’re setting down, just as Lydia is pulling the canvas belts from her pack, a little girl peeks her head up over the edge of the train car. She clambers up quickly and approaches Soledad without hesitation. The girl is younger than Luca, perhaps six years old, and she’s alone. Her black hair is cut short and shiny, and she wears jeans and brown leather boots. She hunkers down very close to Soledad, who’s startled by the girl’s boldness, the intimacy of her posture. She speaks rapidly, her upturned face very close to Soledad’s. Soledad leans away from her.

‘Do you need work?’ the girl asks quickly. ‘My
t
í
a
has a restaurant here and she needs a waitress. Do you want a job?’ The girl puts her hand on Soledad’s arm, and tugs at her. ‘Come on, quick. Come with me, I’ll show you the place.’ She pulls at Soledad’s elbow, and Soledad is so taken aback that she nearly rises to follow the child. She knows she shouldn’t, that the girl is presumptuous, almost bullying. But there’s a conflict between Soledad’s mind and her body, because her mind knows to mistrust this pushy little girl, but her body is biologically susceptible to the child’s cuteness, to the beautiful innocence of her young face. Soledad feels momentarily distended between those two truths, but the spell is quickly broken because
el polic
í
a municipal
has gotten out of his car now, and is standing in a patch of mud beneath the train, still carrying his paper cup of coffee. He yells up to the little girl.

‘Ximenita, leave those people alone! Get down from there.’

The little girl snaps her head in his direction and bolts. She drops Soledad’s arm and flings herself over the edge of the freight car and back down the ladder. She reappears a moment later in the distance, dashing away among the boulders and debris.

El polic
í
a
calls after her. ‘Tell your
papi
I said no
v
í
ctimas
for you today!’

Soledad is eager for the hiss of the disengaged brakes and the rumble of the locomotive. When at last they begin to move, instead of happiness or relief, they all feel a tentative, miniature suspension of dread.

As they travel, Luca pays attention to the signs so he can check off familiar place-names on his mind-map, or add new dots for unfamiliar ones: Guam
ú
chil, Bamoa, Los Mochis, check, check, check. Roughly three hours after pulling out of Culiac
á
n, in the middle of nowhere, they come to a place where other tracks meet the ones they’re traveling on, and then there are more and more tracks, until the rails are at least a dozen wide, and when the train slows down, Luca can see there are many migrants gathered here waiting, and again, no fence, no
polic
í
as.
Nothing at all to prevent the whole crowd of them from boarding La Bestia. The train stops, and easily a hundred men get on while the train sits idling, but then the locomotive cuts its engine, and the workers disembark and scatter to cars parked in a nearby lot, and everyone atop the train groans and curses. La Bestia doesn’t move again for three nights.

Chapter Twenty-Four

There are cultivated fields on both sides of the tracks,
and Luca watches the farmer, sometimes on a tractor, sometimes on foot, as he tends to the rows of whatever crop he’s hoping to grow there in the rich seams of dirt. The farmer lets the stranded migrants fill their bottles from a long hose, and the water it dispenses is warm but clean. Sometimes a family comes and sells food and
refrescos
out of the back of their
truck, but sometimes they don’t come, and Luca is very hungry. They rely on the kindness of their fellow migrants, who share their limited provisions. At night it gets cold, and some of the men build cheerful little campfires. Some folks sleep huddled up inside one of the empty freight cars, but it’s crowded and smelly, and even though the box car cuts the wind, the metal seems to conduct the cold into the migrants’ bones while they sleep. So Luca and Mami stay tucked in near one of the fires, wearing all of their clothes, and wrapped up together in their blanket like a colorful burrito. Everyone is exhausted and edgy, and by the middle of the second day in that arid, desolate place, some migrants give up waiting and start to walk. Luca can’t imagine where they’ll walk to, because there was no town for miles before they stopped here, and what if there’s no town for miles ahead either? He worries about that, and he prays when he watches the migrants strike out along the tracks. When a crew of
ferrocarril
workers arrives on the morning of the fourth day and prepares the train to depart, a cheer gathers in the camp and all the migrants begin to board, but Luca presses on his
mami
’s hand and insists they should wait.

‘Because this one is all the way on the right-hand track,’ he explains. ‘That one must go east, when the tracks split.’

He points north up the rails to where the dozen different tracks begin to merge, and then to merge again. Beyond a highway overpass, the number of tracks decreases to three, and then beyond that again, they merge to two. He and Rebeca walked there yesterday to explore, and they found the place where eventually the two tracks veered in different directions, one east, one west. But Lydia is anxious. They’ve waited so long already, and she can’t imagine not getting on this train. She shakes her head in exasperation.

‘He’s right.’ Two men at least a generation older than Mami are still seated on the far side of an empty track. ‘There are two tracks,’ one of the men says. ‘They run parallel from here to the village, and then they split. That train is going all the way to Chihuahua.’

‘We’re waiting for the Pacific Route train,’ his companion says. They might be identical twins. They have the same weather-beaten faces, the same neatly trimmed mustaches, the same warm timbre to their quiet voices. ‘If you want to cross at Nogales or Baja, you have to take the left-hand track from here.’

‘Thank you,’ Lydia says.

‘How do you know?’ Soledad asks them. She wants to understand how to learn these things.

‘We make this journey every other year. We’ve done it eight times.’

Lydia’s mouth drops open.

‘Why?’ Soledad asks.

The men shrug in unison. ‘We go where the work is,’ the first one says.

‘Come back to visit our wives and children,’ the second one adds.

‘Then we do it again.’ They both laugh, as if it’s a comedy routine they’ve been performing for years.

Soledad removes the backpack she’d put on in preparation for their departure, and slams it to the ground. ‘We’ve been waiting three days,’ she says. ‘Where is this train? What if it never comes?’ It’s difficult not to feel hysterical with the passing of the hours, the setting and rising of the sun. Honduras is no farther away today than it was yesterday.

‘It will come,
mija.
’ One of the men nods at her. ‘And your patience shall be rewarded.’ He reaches into the front pocket of his backpack and opens a wrapped parcel of
carne seca
. He hands two strips to Soledad, and then shares with the others. ‘The train will be along soon,’ he reassures them.

Luca bites gratefully into the salty, leathery strip. He rips it with his teeth. The second man leans forward and speaks softly to Soledad, who’s sitting on her pack now with her elbows resting on her knees. ‘And do not worry,
morrita
. Soon, Sinaloa will be well behind you. You will survive this. You have the look of a survivor.’

She drops her head low for a moment, so Luca worries about her. He expects that she’s crying, that everything she’s suffered is finally weighing her down, pressing her into the ground. But when she lifts her head, it’s the opposite of that. The man’s words have landed on her face and she does – she looks like an Aztec warrior.

The twin brothers tell stories while they wait, about their homes in Yucat
á
n
,
about their wives and children, about the farms where they do seasonal labor in
el norte,
and about their third brother, a triplet, who they both agreed was the handsomest brother, before he was killed, six years ago, when the combine harvester he was driving on a farm in
Iowa struck an overhead powerline. They bless themselves when they say his name.
Eugenio
. Luca recognizes the alchemy of recounting their brother’s name, and he blesses himself because it’s an eighth holy sacrament for migrants, repeating the names of your beloved dead. He tries it quietly on his own tongue: ‘Sebasti
á
n P
é
rez Delgado.’ But the shapes of it are too raw, still, too sharp. They flood his mouth with grief and for a moment, he has to bury his face. He has to breathe into the dark angles of his elbows. He has to fill his mind with other things.
The capital of Norway is Oslo. There are 6,852 islands in the Japanese archipelago
.

The brothers are a deeply calming presence. They are warm bread. They are shelter. And soon, just as the brothers assured them it would, the train arrives. It stops briefly, so they’re able to board easily, and after they help them up the ladder, the brothers move along to another car, where they can spread out, and give Lydia and the children some space of their own.

‘See you in
el norte, manito,
’ one of them says to Luca. ‘Look me up when you get to Iowa. We can have an
hamburguesa
together.’ He gives Luca a high-five, and then turns to follow his brother across the top of the train.

Rebeca sits down right where they are.

‘First class,’ Soledad jokes as Mami straps Luca onto the grating. She waves her arm around them. ‘I got us a private cabin.’

The train goes, and when they cross
el r
í
o
Fuerte, the landscape changes almost immediately from green to brown. They chug through the difficult farmland for an hour and a half, finally passing a sign that indicates they’ve crossed into the next state. Luca reads it out loud.

‘Bienvenido a Sonora
.
’

‘Y vete con viento fresco a Sinaloa.’
Rebeca bids good riddance to Sinaloa, but that invisible border does little to ease their newly intensified sense of constant fear.

Bacabachi, Navojoa, Ciudad Obreg
ó
n, check, check, check. The desert asserts itself. Soon Luca can smell the ocean, but this time it reminds him of nothing about Acapulco because there’s no green here, no trees, no mountains, no dense mineral soil. No nightclubs or cruise ships or
estadounidenses
. Everything is sandy and dusty and dry, and the rock formations that lurch up from the ground have a brutal beauty. Even the trees look thirsty here, and Mami doesn’t have to pester Luca to drink. He sips frequently from his canteen, and his hair grows damp with sweat beneath Papi’s cap. By sunset they have, almost unbelievably, reached
the city of Hermosillo, which is a place as parched and brown and alien as any Luca has ever seen, but its strangeness makes no impression on him, such is his mounting excitement.

‘Rebeca, we’re almost there,’ he says.

He’s been trying to pump oxygen back into her flagging person for days. He’s like a small, human bellows, and she a fire that’s dimmed to embers.

‘Almost where?’ she says.

The light is drawing out of the sky, the train is slowing, and on the car ahead of them, the twin brothers are making to disembark.

‘Almost to
el norte,
’ Luca says.

She gives him a skeptical look, which wasn’t the response he was hoping for. He snuffles his chin inside the zipper of his hoodie, but Mami leans forward and asks him to repeat himself.

‘We’re almost to
el norte,
’ he says. ‘We’re due south of Nogales now, only about three hundred miles.’

‘Three hundred miles,’ Soledad repeats. ‘What does that mean? How far have we come already?’

‘From Honduras?’

‘Yes.’

He tips his head up and squints with thought. ‘I’d say that is more than two thousand miles.’

Soledad’s eyes get big. A hesitant smile seeps into her features. She makes minimal effort to defeat it. She nods her head. ‘More than two thousand miles. We’ve come more than two thousand miles?’

‘Yes.’

‘And now we have only three hundred left to go?’

‘Yes, that’s what I’m telling you. We’re getting close.’

‘How long will that take, three hundred miles?’ Soledad asks.

Luca shakes his head. ‘I don’t know, a few hours?’

‘Why, you want to stay on the train?’ Rebeca sounds worried. ‘It’s getting dark soon.’

‘Look, we’re stopping,’ Mami says.

The brothers have disembarked and walked a decent stretch already, so it would be easy to miss the sound they emit at that moment, were it not for the fact that Luca, Lydia, Soledad, and Rebeca are all acquainted with that sound now. It’s a sound recognizable from both their recent experiences and their nightmares. The brothers are yelling.

‘¡Migra! ¡La migra! ¡Huyan, ap
ú
rense! ¡Viene la migra!’

This time the terror doesn’t gather or grow; it crashes in on them all at once. Lydia yanks the belt off Luca in a movement so swift and violent he nearly cries. The sisters are already halfway down the ladder and they don’t wait for a reasonable place to get off. The memory of Sinaloa makes them fast, not despite their damaged bodies, but because of them. They leap wildly down to the uneven ground with their unfastened backpacks thudding against them. Luca is next, and then Lydia, and thank God they’re in the city already because they scramble down the shallow embankment and immediately there are alleys and roads and walls and gardens and houses and open garages and a barefoot little girl gaping at them while she licks at an ice pop and a woman who has a food cart attached to her bicycle and a dog with a spot over one eye and tall grass around their ankles and then concrete underfoot and the brothers have gone in a different direction and there are still three or four other migrants behind them. It’s been four days since Lydia twisted her ankle, and she’s relieved to feel that the twinge has disappeared. It’s strong beneath her weight. She looks at the sisters ahead of her and considers what would happen if they got separated now; how or if they’d ever find each other again. She chases after them as quickly as she can, dragging Luca frantically behind her. They run past a shaded garden where a little boy is juggling a
bal
ó
n de f
ú
tbol
on his knees, and a woman wearing faded jeans and flip-flops is watering her boxed herbs. She stops when she sees them, and without moving her head or raising her voice, she says, ‘
¡Oye!
’ in a manner that’s so subtle Lydia almost misses it. But the woman’s face has snagged her attention, and again almost without moving any part of her body, she juts her chin toward the darkened doorway of a covered shed in the back corner of her garden. ‘
R
á
pido,
’ she says, again without raising her voice.

Lydia doesn’t hesitate to consider the pros and cons. She restrains Luca with one hand on his shoulder, and then calls out as quietly as she can, ‘Rebeca. Here.’

And the sisters skid, turning to look at them. Lydia has already pushed Luca through the gate, and he’s running beneath a shade tree with riotous pink blossoms, and he’s ducking inside the darkened doorway of that shed, and Lydia is right behind him and now here come the sisters until they are all there together, squeezed into the cooled and musty little space, and the exertion of their breath sounds terribly loud, and Lydia can hear the pumping of blood in her ears, a dreadful, vulgar pulse, and she curls her head over her knees and laces her fingers together behind her head and Luca throws an arm around her lower back and they all sit as still and silent as possible until, after a few minutes, they hear the mother calling to the little boy, and she says, ‘Come on, I’ve picked some oregano for dinner. Inside, let’s go.’ And in the silent moment that follows, the fears that Lydia hadn’t paused to entertain before come flocking in and lodge in her throat.
This woman has trapped us here; she has gone to get
la polic
í
a;
she has gone to get someone much worse than
la polic
í
a,
this will be the end for us, why did I trust her, why didn’t we keep running
. It’s too late for these fears, of course, because the decision has been made, and they can’t venture out now because they’ve given up their lead, and now they’re stuck here while
la migra
combs the neighborhood. Lydia gets hold of herself in the only way she can.
Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think.
And then they hear the bang of a door and the woman calls out again to her child. ‘Close that gate before you come in!’ And there’s a creak and a clang as he slams the gate, the echoing bounce of the
bal
ó
n
when the little boy lets it drop, and then the rumble of a car or truck, a vehicle door opening, slamming, footsteps, and a new voice.