American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (40 page)

‘Do you remember that show, from when we were kids?’ she asks Marisol in the blackness. ‘The one with the flying dumpster?’

Marisol remembers.

During the second hour of driving, there’s a light on the path ahead, and the trucks roll to a stop at a checkpoint. There is light enough, just, for Soledad to recognize the uniform of
los agentes federales de migraci
ó
n.
Immediately, Rebeca begins to cry. She scrapes her heels along the bed of the pickup and writhes back into her sister’s arms. Soledad shushes her and wraps an arm around her forehead. She presses Rebeca’s face into the hollow of her neck and tells her to close her eyes. She hums softly to her sister in the comfort of their ancient language.

‘Soon this will all be past. Soon we will be safe. Close your eyes, sister.’

Rebeca breathes deeply into Soledad’s neck, and her tears wet the soft brown curve of her sister’s skin without sound. El Chacal gets out of the truck and steps toward the two guards, who are armed with flashlights and AR-15s. They greet him in a familiar manner, and he hands them an envelope. They talk for perhaps two minutes, and when the coyote returns to the truck,
los agentes
approach, shining their flashlights onto the faces of each migrant in turn. Rebeca does not lift her face from Soledad’s shoulder when the beam touches her skin. Soledad sets her jaw and grits her teeth and stares directly into the light. Her eyes water, but she does not blink.

‘
Oye, jefe,
maybe we’ll keep this one,’ one of the guards says to El Chacal, whose window in the cab of the truck is rolled all the way down.

The coyote is leaning out, but before he has a chance to answer, Luca stands bolt upright, startling Lydia, who lunges for him.

‘You cannot keep her!’ he shouts. ‘You cannot have her, no one is allowed to have her. She is her own person, and she is coming with us!’

The beam of the flashlight swings toward Luca and the circle of light finds his face in the dark. His black eyes glimmer and his hands are balled into tight little fists.

‘¡Mira, el jefecito!’

‘Luca, sit down!’ Lydia grabs him and wrestles him into her lap.

But the guard is laughing. He leans into the bed of the truck, and Soledad tightens her grip on Rebeca.

‘Don’t worry, little man,’ the guard says to Luca. ‘I was only joking.’ He swings the light back to Soledad. ‘You are lucky to have such a brave and fearsome bodyguard, se
ñ
orita.’

‘Yes,’ Soledad says mechanically.

He returns his attention to Luca. ‘You keep fighting, little man. That’s the kind of mettle you’re going to need in
el norte
.’

Lydia begins to breathe again but doesn’t loosen her hold on Luca. When it’s her turn to endure the beam of light on her features, she doesn’t breathe. She keeps her eyes open and low, and prays these men don’t work for Javier. She prays that her face isn’t lodged in a text message on one of their cell phones. The flashlight lingers, and then swings across to Marisol. Lydia breathes.

‘Godspeed!’ the agent calls out, as he steps backward away from the truck.

‘¡Nos vemos pronto!
’
El Chacal salutes the men with a parting wave as they continue their trek.

More than three hours after leaving the apartment in Nogales, the two pickup trucks, now with their headlights off, and covered in a thick layer of desert dust, pull to a stop. Without the ambient light of the trucks’ dashboards and taillights, the migrants find themselves in absolute darkness. They are half a mile’s walk from Estados Unidos. El Chacal lines them up outside the trucks and tells them they need only be aware of the person in front and the person behind them. It’s too dark to see him, but his voice takes on such a warm animation it’s almost visible itself, a shot of color against the black of night. He’s all safety and faithful authority. He is perfectly contagious energy. With his guidance, they all believe this is possible. They don’t even know his real name, but they entrust him with their lives. He tells them they’re going to move quickly and it’s vital to keep up. It’s paramount that no one gets separated from the group.

‘If you hear this noise, freeze.’ He makes a short, low-pitched whistle. ‘If I make that noise, it means you have to be absolutely still and silent until I say it’s time to move again. This is the signal that it’s time to move again.’ He makes a double-clicking noise with his tongue that’s impressively audible. ‘If we get caught – is everybody listening? This is important. If we get caught, do not tell them which one of us is the coyote. Understood?’

‘Why?’ This is Lorenzo.

‘You don’t need to know why, but I’m going to tell you why, just so you don’t get any stupid ideas,’ El Chacal says. ‘If we get picked up, and they find out I’m the coyote
,
you’ll all be deported without me, right? I’ll get arrested, and you’ll get sent home. If
los carteles
find out who squealed on the coyote and interrupted their income stream, you’ll have hell to pay.
You have enough troubles from
los carteles,
yes?’

Lorenzo makes some noise that passes for an affirmative.

‘So you keep your mouth shut. If we get caught, we all get deported together, we come back and try again. You get three tries for the price of one. Agreed?’

Everyone agrees, and then El Chacal lights a low lamp and spends a few minutes preparing. He unscrews the lid from a jar of minced garlic and instructs everyone to smear some on their shoes as a rattlesnake deterrent. The smell reminds Lydia of cooking, of home, but she’s even more afraid of snakes than she is of nostalgia, so she’s generous with her new boots and with Luca’s. Then the coyote outfits everyone with the water they must carry. The jugs are heavy and awkward, but nothing’s more critical. Lydia uses one of her canvas belts, looping it through the jug handles and then through the bottom straps of her backpack. The bottles slosh and bang against her hips as she walks, so she tightens the straps to fix them in place. Luca carries only one bottle; he can barely manage the weight of that. The men carry four gallons each, and Nicol
á
s also has a fancy hiking backpack that’s filled with water he can drink from a long tube over his shoulder. They all try not to think about the heat of the desert, the distance they must walk to reach safety after they cross, and the quantity of water they carry.

The migrants stay in the positions El Chacal assigns for them, so the coyote is first, followed by Choncho and Slim, followed by Beto and Luca, Lydia, the sisters, and then Marisol. The rest of the men are at the rear. They move north at a pace that’s rapid enough to be almost startling, and Lydia tries to watch Luca’s nearly invisible outline ahead. The fresh air is cold moving through their lungs, and after those fidgety days in the apartment, it’s exhilarating to be moving their bodies northward across the starlit earth. There’s no talking, but their footfalls against the uneven terrain and their bodies’ small sounds of exertion take on the qualities of conversation. Everyone concentrates on not falling, not stepping wrong, not bumping into the person in front of them. They stay alert to the real danger of twisting an ankle. They try, but mostly fail, to suppress their fear of the unseen, omnipresent Border Patrol.

There’s no fence in this stretch of desert because there’s no need of one. They are roughly twenty miles east of Sasabe and twenty miles west of Nogales, where the Pajarito Mountains serve as the border fence. It’s cold. Luca is wearing every item of clothing they bought at that Walmart in Diamante before they left Acapulco: jeans, T-shirt, hoodie, warm jacket, and thick socks. His new boots are tied and double-knotted. Papi’s baseball cap is stowed carefully in the side pocket of Luca’s pack, and he’s wearing the warm stocking hat and scarf he got from the old lady in Nogales, but even with all that, even though he feels damp with sweat along his spine, his nose and fingers are freezing. He wishes they’d thought to buy gloves, too. Sometimes El Chacal makes the quick whistle, and they all stand absolutely still and silent until he gives the double-click command for them to continue. There’s one place where Luca can hear the electronic hum of some unseen machinery. Choncho falls into step beside Luca and points up to a blinking red light mounted high on a post nearby. They’re almost directly beneath it. It swivels. And when the blinking red eye looks away, El Chacal makes the double-click, and they move very quickly, almost at a run through the darkness, until they are up and over a small ridge, beyond the sweep of that swiveling, mechanical eye.

‘Congratulations,’ Choncho whispers loudly to Luca. ‘You’ve just outsmarted your first United States Border Patrol camera.’

Luca grins in the dark, but Lydia feels a lurch in her stomach, a passing grief at what that must mean.

‘We are in the United States already?’ she whispers.

‘Yes,’ Choncho says.

Lydia expected the crossing would be momentous. That it would happen in an instant, that she would, in the space of one footstep, leave Mexico and enter the United States. She expected to be able to pause, however briefly, so she might look back and reflect, both physically and metaphorically, at what she’s leaving behind: the omnipresent fear of Javier and his henchmen. After eighteen days and sixteen hundred miles of endurance, she wants to feel that she’s slipping his noose. But she wants to look further back than that, too, to her life before the massacre, to her happy childhood in Acapulco. The orange bathing suit she wore every day during the summer of her sixth birthday. Diving from the cliffs at La Quebrada when she was a teenager. Walking on Barra Vieja with her father when she was still small enough to hold his hand without embarrassment. The million endearing grievances of her mother. College, Sebasti
á
n, the bookstore. Holding Luca outside her body for the first time. Lydia expected there would be a moment when these notions would flood through her, all at once, like a small death. A portal. She’d hoped, like one of those desert rattlesnakes, to shed the skin of her anguish and leave it behind her in the Mexican dirt. But the moment of the crossing has already passed, and she didn’t even realize it had happened. She never looked back, never committed any small act of ceremony to help launch her into the new life on the other side. Nothing can be undone.
Adelante.

The sky is clear and there are stars overhead, but the moon is new, so even when it rises, it offers no light to their path. Ideal conditions for crossing, the coyote assures them as they stumble through the dark. For an hour they trudge through the desert without speaking. At eleven o’clock, they take shelter beneath a rocky outcrop because, the coyote explains, these are prime border patrolling hours, and
la migra
is thick in this sector. He tells them to rest, but none of them do. They sit in fear, their eyes blinking like inadequate lamps. They pass three hours that way, listening to the foreign sounds of the desert all around them. It’s terrifying to hear grunting and snuffling and clicking and shrieking, sometimes at a distance, sometimes rather close, and to not be able to see what kinds of creatures are creating all that racket. It’s a queer, vulnerable feeling to sit without armor among nocturnal animals, knowing they can see you and smell you and feel you there. Knowing that you’re blind to their presence should they decide to approach. Every one of those migrants prays while they wait. Even Lorenzo remembers that he once believed in God.

Chapter Thirty-One

Shortly before two o’clock in the morning, El Chacal
gets them moving again. He wants to make camp before the morning twilight begins to ascend. He’s walked this exact route dozens of times before. He knows just where they’re going and how long it takes to get there. He knows they can make do with a lot less water if they avoid walking during the heat of the day. But now that it’s late spring and the nights are growing shorter, he also knows there’s little time to spare before the light comes. He pushes the group to the top of their pace. They’re probably three miles north of the border but still hours from safety, from the nearest town, by the next time El Chacal makes the whistle. This time Beto, half-asleep on his feet, stumbles into Slim in front of him, and they tumble into a small heap together on the desert floor. Beto giggles and apologizes, but El Chacal snaps at him and puts one finger against his lips. Slim claps a meaty hand over Beto’s mouth to ensure silence.

Ahead, at the foot of a hill they’re nearly halfway down, Luca can see the faint white trace of a road, winding its way snakelike through the landscape. They’re standing beneath a huddle of scrappy trees, but below them, there’s little to no cover until the far side of the road. Several hundred yards to the right, four pickup trucks are parked together.

‘
Carajo,
’ El Chacal says out loud.

Up to now, Luca has rather enjoyed this one perk of having his whole life annihilated: he’s suddenly privy to a world where grown-ups sometimes curse out loud. He’s even tried some of those words out on his own tongue, but in this instance, hearing El Chacal say
carajo
when he sees those pickup trucks makes Luca feel deeply unsettled.

‘What are they doing here at this time of night?’ Choncho asks the coyote quietly.

El Chacal shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. There’s a trailhead there.’ He points to the far side of the road. ‘Sometimes we hike that way if there’s no one here. It’s a little-used trail. But this
.
.
.’ The coyote spits into the dirt at his feet. ‘These are not day hikers.’ El Chacal wears a pair of binoculars from a length of cord around his neck, which he lifts and squints into now. It’s too dark to see anything except the outline of the trucks, and an interior cab light that’s been left on inside one of them. It’s still very dark here, but the blackness is beginning to diffuse into a range of discernible grays. Soon the light will follow. El Chacal gathers the migrants out of their line and into a clump so he can speak to them all at once.

‘There are four trucks parked at the trailhead below,’ he says. ‘It’s a remote trailhead. I’ve never seen anyone parked out here before. So my guess, it’s either a cartel waiting for a delivery, in which case, watch your backs because somebody might be coming along behind you.’

Lydia’s body goes rigid, and she reaches for Luca in the dark. She pulls him close.

‘Or, more likely, it’s one of those crazy fucking vigilante groups,’ the coyote says. ‘Out playing nighttime Power Rangers, in which case, watch your fronts, because those
hijos de puta
would like nothing better than to mount a stuffed migrant head over their mantel at home.’

Luca grimaces, even though it strikes him as slightly funny, the notion of his head stuffed and mounted on a shiny slab of wood in a yanqui cabin somewhere.

None of it’s funny to Lydia. She hadn’t been na
ï
ve enough to think they were in the clear yet, but she did think the nature of the most pressing threat would’ve changed by now. She thought that here in
el norte,
she’d have to worry more about Border Patrol, about the possibility of Luca being taken from her, and less about random men with guns enforcing their own decrees. She avoids ranking the possibilities in terms of their potential for violence. Whatever their uniforms, their accents, their faces,
no importa
. She knows that anyone they encounter here, in this wild, desolate place, would mean the end.

‘What are we going to do?’ Marisol asks.

El Chacal is already removing his pack. ‘We’ll wait here,’ he says. ‘This is the only cover. Anyway, the trucks look more like vigilantes than
carteleros
.’

‘How can you tell?’ Choncho asks.

The coyote hands Choncho the binoculars without removing them from his neck. The big man peers into them. ‘They’re not fancy enough to be narcos,’ El Chacal says. ‘And if they’re vigilantes, as I suspect, they’ve probably gone migrant hunting up the trail on the far side. We wait here. They’ll eventually go back to the trucks and we can pass after they leave.’

‘But what if they are narcos?’ Marisol asks. Lydia shudders involuntarily, rubs her hands over her face, and shrugs her hood up. ‘Won’t we be sitting ducks, right between them and whatever shipment they’re waiting for?’

‘
Mira,
I’ve already paid the toll to pass through here,’ El Chacal says. ‘I play by their rules.’

‘But whose rules?’ Lydia can no longer keep the question to herself. She has to know which cartel is the self-appointed owner of this scrap of desert.

‘Los Jardineros?’ Lorenzo asks.

The coyote doesn’t answer, and in the silence that follows, Lorenzo catches Lydia’s eye. Lorenzo paces like a caged animal. This terrible hy
pothetical finally presses itself into Lydia’s consciousness: Would it be worse to get caught by
estadounidenses,
who would take Luca from her? Or to get caught by
mexicanos,
who would return them to Javier? With effort, she represses the speculation. Neither thing can happen. They must succeed. She claps her fists against her thighs and stretches her cramping legs.

Choncho hands the binoculars back to El Chacal and begins removing his pack. Slim and their sons do the same, setting their water jugs wordlessly on the ground, and reclining against their backpacks.

El Chacal takes a measured sip of water from his own jug. ‘Find a place to tuck yourself in, in case the sun comes up before we’re able to move.’

The coverage isn’t great here in this stand of scrappy trees, but there is a thicket nearby, and Rebeca, Soledad, and Lydia all set themselves up facing the rear, watching the path they’ve already taken halfway down the hill, waiting for the shapes of their nightmares to emerge from the dark. Luca sits back-to-back with Mami, and has time to consider how strange it is that being a
migrante
means you spend more time stopping than
in motion. Their lives have become an erratic wheel of kinesis and paralysis. Beto falls asleep. Nicol
á
s falls asleep. Marisol would like to fall asleep. They’ve all grown fatigued. Light grows in the eastern sky, and by the time the dozen men approach the four trucks on the road below, picking their way down the trail on the opposite hill, it’s bright enough for El Chacal to see them clearly with the assistance of his binoculars. ‘Vigilantes,’ he confirms.

The men, dressed entirely in camouflage and bearing enough visible weaponry that anyone not knowing better would presume them to be authorized military, take their time at the trucks. They open coolers, remove drinks and food. They gather at the back of one of the trucks and pass a thermos of coffee. They’re close enough now that, when the wind shifts in certain directions, the migrants can hear a whip of laughter here, a scrap of a sentence there. Those shifting acoustics are terrifying, because those sounds must also travel in reverse. The migrants all become aware of their anatomy. No one wants to sneeze or fart. They pray for the men to go away. Breakfast takes forever and then, just when it seems they are packed up and ready to go, they discover the interior cab light that was left on in one of the trucks. The battery is dead.

By the time the men locate some jumper cables, maneuver the trucks into position, hook everything up, get the truck running, spend five to ten minutes congratulating one another on getting the truck running, and finally, at long last, parade themselves down the road and out of sight, it is full daylight in the desert.

The migrants are still almost a mile from the hidden place where El Chacal intends to make camp for the day, and now they must contend with the danger of the glaring daylight. He shakes Nicol
á
s and Beto to wake them.

‘Let’s go,’ he says. ‘Double time.’

Luca’s limbs feel stiff after the time spent shivering on the cold ground. He’s happy to get them going again, and happy when the warmth begins to seep back into his legs. The road below is nothing like the roads Luca imagined he’d encounter in the USA. He thought every road here would be broad as a boulevard, paved to perfection, and lined with fluorescent shopfronts. This road is like the crappiest Mexican road he’s ever seen. Dirt, dirt, and more dirt.

To the northwest there’s a huddle of hills taller than the ones they’ve encountered so far, and after they cross the road, El Chacal begins to ascend the slope of the closest one. It’s steep, and everyone focuses their energy on moving their bodies efficiently uphill.

‘Why don’t we go around?’ Lorenzo complains.

‘Because we take my route,’ El Chacal tells him.

‘But that way looks way easier.’ Lorenzo points north.

‘Vete entonces
.
’

El Chacal dislikes Lorenzo. There’s a tension between these two men, Luca understands, because there’s a tension between Lorenzo and every person he encounters. Most people, because of decorum, attempt to disguise that conflict, but the coyote doesn’t bother, and Luca likes that. Instead, when Lorenzo speaks, El Chacal makes a face that’s like the op
posite of rolling his eyes, where his features get really still, and he looks away from Lorenzo with his eyelids half-closed, and he just waits for the words to go away. After a moment, he reanimates himself and presses on.

When they reach the apex of the hill and behold the vista on the other side, an uncomfortable feeling of both thrill and dread shivers right through Luca’s whole body. It’s so severe that Mami actually sees the quake of his limbs from her peripheral vision, and turns her head to look at him. He makes sure not to catch her eye. He’s enraptured, anyway, by the panorama that caused the feeling in him; they all are.

On the far side of this hill are a hundred more just like it, and probably a hundred more beyond those that they can’t see, because the hills get taller and sharper and more formidable as they go. The sunlight cracks across them in crazy stabs of brightness. The hills are covered in golden, wind-beaten grasses, spiky plants, and scrubby trees. There are huge boulders everywhere, studded into the creases of the hills, perched on rickety ledges, gathered in hollows like intransigent families. A few of the rocks are so gargantuan they dwarf the hills beneath them. The sky is merciless above, wheeling clouds to shift the light, playing tricks, making it impossible to gauge distances, but never covering the hot, ruthless globe of the sun. Luca pauses there to snatch the hat from his head and stuff it into his coat pocket. He’s suddenly covered with sweat. He peels the scarf and jacket off, and unzips his backpack to stuff them in. He retrieves Papi’s red hat and takes a whiff of the hatband before fixing it back onto his head and reslinging the backpack onto his shoulders, but the coyote looks over and shakes his head.

‘You can’t wear the hat,’ he says. ‘You can spot that red from a mile away.’

Luca frowns at Mami, but she nods, and Luca unhappily removes
Papi’s hat. He hands it to Mami, and she tries to zip it back into his pack.

‘You can wear mine.’ Lydia removes her hat and holds it out to him.

‘But it’s pink,’ he protests.

‘Hardly.’

‘I’ll take it!’ Beto says.

Lydia laughs. ‘I wish I had an extra one for you,’ she says. She plops it on Luca’s head and returns to the zipper on Luca’s pack, trying to get Papi’s hat back in. The backpack is stuffed. She pauses to pull a white T-shirt out from inside. ‘Here,’ she says, handing the shirt to Beto. ‘Use this.’

He fixes the neck of the T-shirt over his head and lets the fabric drape down his neck to shield his skin from the sun. He grins at Lydia. ‘Thanks.’

Everyone has paused here, suddenly aware of the mounting heat. They’re all peeling off layers and regrouping. Slim and Choncho are sharing water from one of their jugs. There’s a reason this landscape is devoid of people, why it’s still feasible to cross here without getting caught. It seems impossible that any creature could survive in such a place.

‘It doesn’t even look real,’ Mami says.

Beside Luca, Lorenzo removes his own cap and wipes his brow. That hat was pristine the first time Luca saw it, at the migrant shelter in Huehuetoca. Now the brim is still flat, but the sun has sapped its color from black to gray. That change is startling to Luca. He’s unaccustomed to the potency of the Sonoran sun, how quickly it corrodes whatever’s beneath its gaze. He pulls Mami’s hat off his head to examine it more closely, and he realizes that the pink really isn’t pink anymore. It’s only the bleached memory of pink, a dirty sand color. That’s what Mami meant when she said
hardly
. Lorenzo leans his hands on his knees and looks out across the hopeless vista.

‘
Ay
,
no manches, cabr
ó
n,
’ he says. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’