American Dirt : A Novel (2020)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  Luca whispers in her ear, ‘With a population of almost seven hundred thousand, Denver, nicknamed the Mile High City because of its elevation, is located just east of the Rocky Mountain foothills.’ Reciting from the memory of flash cards. ‘It is the state capital of Colorado and one quarter of its population claims Mexican heritage.’

  Lydia squeezes his arm, reaches up, and runs a hand through his black hair. The summer before last, when Luca’s enduring interest in maps began to shift from fascination to obsession, Lydia kept him busy at the bookstore with guidebooks and atlases. It seems impossible that back then, just so recently, Acapulco was bright with tourists and music and the shops and the sea. Rock pigeons strutted across the sand. Vast foreign cruise ships disgorged their sneakered passengers onto the streets, their pockets fat with dollars, their skin glistening from coconut-scented sunscreen. The dollars filled the bars and restaurants. In Lydia’s bookshop, they filled the register. Those tourists bought the guidebooks and atlases, along with serious novels and frivolous novels and souvenir key chains and tiny tubes of sand corked with tiny stoppers that Lydia kept in a big fishbowl beside the register. And, ay, Dios mío, those tourists couldn’t get enough of Luca. Lydia set him up like a puppet on a stool, and he’d tell them, in precise English, about the places where they came from. He was six years old. A wunderkind.

  ‘With a population of six hundred and forty thousand, Portland is located at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers and is the largest city in the state of Oregon. The city was incorporated in 1851, sixty-five years after its eastern namesake in coastal Maine.’

  Henry from Portland, Oregon, stood in front of Luca with his mouth hanging open. ‘Marge, come here, you’ve gotta see this! Do it again.’ Marge joined her husband, and Luca repeated his spiel. ‘Incredible. Kid, you are just incredible. Marge, give the kid some money.’

  ‘Did you make all that up?’ Marge asked skeptically, digging in her purse for some money regardless.

  ‘Nah, he knew the rivers,’ Henry defended him. ‘How could he make that up?’

  ‘It’s real,’ Luca said. ‘I just remember things. Especially about maps and places.’

  ‘Well, Henry’s right, it’s incredible.’ Marge gave him a dollar. ‘And in perfect English! Where did you learn such perfect English?’

  ‘Acapulco,’ Luca said simply. ‘And YouTube.’

  Lydia watched in silence and felt obscenely proud. Smug, even. Her boy was perfect – so smart and accomplished, so guapo and happy. She’d been teaching him English for almost as long as he’d been speaking Spanish. It was a skill that she knew would serve him well, growing up in a tourist town. But he quickly outstripped her knowledge of the language, and then they proceeded to learn together, mostly on her phone or computer. YouTube lessons, Rosetta Stone, soap operas. They often spoke English to each other when Sebastián wasn’t around, or when they pretended to have a secret in front of him. Sometimes they tried out slang on each other. She called Luca dude and he called her shorty. Marge and Henry laughed at Luca’s pragmatic charm and then gathered their friends from the cruise ship and returned to watch him perform. They offered him a dollar for every city he could tell them about. He made thirty-seven dollars that day and could’ve kept going, except the tourists had to get back to their ship.

  So, yes, this geography bee has been almost two years coming. But Lydia cannot think of details right now, the annulled logistics of her life. Her brain can’t hold them. Even the biggest, most fundamental facts seem impossible to comprehend. Outside the stall, the bathroom door swings open. There’s no squeak, but they can tell someone has come in because suddenly the sounds beyond the door are temporarily louder, and then softer again as the door swings shut. They both hold their breath. Luca is still draped over Mami’s back, and she grips his arms where they encircle her neck. The pads of his fingers turn yellow as they dig into the bones of Mami’s wrist. She doesn’t move. He squeezes his eyes shut. But soon there’s the sound of the door latching on the neighboring stall. An older woman loudly clearing her throat. Luca can feel Mami let go of her breath like the air leaving a deflated balloon. He puts his lips against her neck.

  After the lady in the stall next door finishes her business and washes her hands and compliments herself out loud in the bathroom mirror, it’s time for them to venture back out. He knows they can’t stay in this bathroom forever, but his heart beats in a clamorous thud when Mami opens the door. It’s time to get on the bus. When they cross the lobby, Luca registers the faces of the people who remain in the terminal: the immaculate lady behind the counter with her lips outlined a shade darker than the lips themselves, the man in his paper hat selling coffee, the couple with the fussy baby who are waiting until the last minute to board. On the television affixed to the wall, Luca sees a prim newscaster and then, starkly, Abuela’s little house. The yellow crime scene tape flutters and sags. The camera focuses on the courtyard gate hanging open, and then the back patio, the tented shapes of Luca’s family covered by plastic tarps, the grim faces of los policías as they walk, stoop, stand, scratch, breathe, as they do the things living people do when they walk among corpses. Luca squeezes his mother’s hand, not to get her attention, but to prevent himself from crying out. She doesn’t look up. She pulls him along the shiny, tiled floor, but he feels as if he’s walking in a sucking sand at high tide. Luca waits for the crack of a bullet to strike the front wall of the terminal. He waits for the shower of raining glass. But now his feet are on the pavement outside, and the pavement is a shadowy purple in the growing cast of daylight. His sneakers are blue there. Only two people wait in front of them to board the bus. Only one. Mami pushes him on ahead of her, and then she’s there, too, glued to his backpack, propelling him down the aisle past extruding knees and elbows. And when he collapses into the seat, against the soft fabric of the cushions, and Mami plops down next to him, he feels more grateful and relieved than he ever has in his entire life.

  ‘We made it,’ he says quietly.

  Mami opens her lips without moving her teeth. She doesn’t look relieved. ‘Okay, mijo,’ she says. She pulls his head onto her lap and strokes his hair until, as their bus rambles north onto the Viaducto Diamante and gathers speed, he falls asleep.

  Chapter Seven

  It’s a victory to get out of Acapulco alive, Lydia knows this. Yes, they’ve cleared the first significant hurdle. She’d like to feel her son’s surge of relieved optimism, but she knows too much about the reach and determination of Los Jardineros and their jefe to experience any real respite from her fear. She stares out the window and keeps her head low.

  In the early days of their marriage, Lydia and Sebastián took frequent weekend trips to Mexico City, trading cities with the tourists. They’d both gone to college there. It was where they met, and though neither of them had any desire to live in the capital, they enjoyed being close enough to visit. In those days, the state of Guerrero felt safe, insulated. Their country had its share of narcotraficantes back then, but they felt as distant as Hollywood or Al Qaeda. The violence would erupt in concentrated, faraway bursts: first Ciudad Juárez, then Sinaloa, then Michoacán. Acapulco, ringed by mountains and sea, retained its sunny bubble of protective tourism. The salty ocean air, the wheeling calls of the seagulls, the big sunglasses, the wind whipping down the boulevard to toss the ladies’ hair around their sun-browned faces, it all intensified that swollen illusion of immunity.

  It typically took Lydia and Sebastián just over four hours to drive from Acapulco to Mexico City in their orange Beetle because Sebastián sped like a lunatic around the gentle mountain curves, up and down the scenic slopes of the highway. Even though his driving was questionable, the road was broad and smooth. Lydia looked out over the landscape, at the sunshine leaning between the distant peaks, the terraces of clouds stepping down toward the irregular earth, the rooftops and steeples of the fleeting villages, and she felt safe with her new husband
in their little orange car. At Chilpancingo they often stopped for a coffee or a sandwich. Sometimes they met with friends – Sebastián’s college roommate lived there with his wife and the baby who became Sebastián’s godson. And then a couple hours later, in Mexico City, they’d find a cheap hotel and walk the city for hours. Museums, shows, restaurants, dancing, window-shopping, the Bosque de Chapultepec. Or sometimes they wouldn’t leave their hotel room at all, and Sebastián, sweaty, laughing, tangled in the sheets, would whisper into his wife’s hair that they could have stayed in Acapulco and saved some money.

  Lydia tips her head back against the bus seat behind her. It’s inconceivable that those memories are from ten years ago, inconceivable that Sebastián is really gone. She feels a monstrous lurch inside her, so she reaches out to touch the soft curve of Luca’s sleeping ear. Everything devolved so rapidly in recent years. Acapulco always had a heart for extravagance, so when at last she made her fall from grace, she did so with all the spectacular pageantry the world had come to expect of her. The cartels painted the town red.

  As their bus passes the crooked shoulders of trees and a scar of blasted rock face where the road cuts through the countryside, Lydia notes that they’ve already reached Ocotito. She prays there will be no roadblock between here and Mexico City, but she knows that’s impossible. Even before Acapulco fell, the roadblocks around Guerrero, as in much of the country, had become a menace. They are manned by gangs or narcotraficantes or police (who may also be narcotraficantes) or soldiers (who may also be narcotraficantes) or, in recent years, by autodefensas – armed militias formed by the inhabitants of certain towns to protect their communities from cartels. And these autodefensas may also, of course, be narcotraficantes.

  In character, the roadblocks range from inconvenient to life threatening. It’s because of the existence of the more serious ones that Lydia and Sebastián stopped traveling regularly to the capital shortly after Luca was born, the reason Luca has been to Mexico City only once before, when he was too young to remember it, and the reason Lydia allowed her driver’s license to expire almost two years ago. They seldom left Acapulco now, and Lydia, like most women in Mexico’s more precarious states, never travels alone by car anymore. This truth has felt like a growing, but theoretical, irritation to Lydia over the last couple of years, an affront to her contemporary feminine autonomy. But today it feels like a very real noose around her neck. She may have managed their escape from Acapulco for now, but she knows they’re still trapped in Guerrero state, and she can feel the roadblocks all around the periphery of her mind, closing in on them.

  Without waking Luca, Lydia spreads out the map and pins it with one hand to the seat in front of her. She studies the spreading veins of the roadways and feels the ticking futility of that action. If only their bodies could pass unimpeded along these highways as quickly and safely as her finger traces the route along the map. If the roadblocks were represented on the map key, their icon might be a tiny AK-47. But they’re not on the map, because they’re always moving, to maintain the element of surprise. Lydia knows that every road between here and Mexico City will have at least one roadblock occupied by Los Jardineros. She knows that the boys manning those roadblocks will be looking specifically for her and for Luca. She imagines that some of those boys are both ambitious and violent, that they’ll be eager to recognize her. She wonders what reward they might receive for delivering her, either whole or in pieces, to her friend.

  Lydia tries to refold the map along its previous creases, but her patience is flimsy, and she shoves it into the pocket of the seat in front of her. She tries to think clearly, to review their options. Most people she would ordinarily turn to for help are dead, and even if they weren’t, asking for help is akin to walking into a friend’s kitchen wearing a suicide vest. The risk of her very presence seems too selfish to consider. Although she’s aware that Chilpancingo is crawling with Jardineros, she also knows that if they hope to avoid a roadblock, they will have to get off there. Boarding this bus felt like a tremendous victory only a few minutes ago, but maybe it was a mistake. Maybe they’re speeding into a trap. She watches Luca, the rise and fall of his chest as he sleeps, and she attempts to match the rhythm of his breath.

  When she was a kid, Lydia loved the Choose Your Own Adventure books. At the end of each chapter, you’d have to decide what to do next. Ride your bike to the park, flip to page twenty-three. Follow the mysterious stranger, flip to page forty-two. Whenever Lydia didn’t like the outcome of her plot, or sometimes even when she did, she would backtrack and make a different choice. She liked being able to revise her own decisions, liked knowing that nothing was permanent, that she could always start over and try again. But it was also true that sometimes it didn’t matter, the maze of the book seemed to funnel her back to the same result, no matter what she decided. This morning she and Luca had selected the 6:20 a.m. bus from Diamante, and now it’s traveling north without delay. She closes her eyes and prays it was the right choice.

  Luca wakes up as the bus approaches Chilpancingo. Lydia can’t see much from their seats halfway back, but she tries. She leans into the aisle and looks for a roadblock ahead. Luca leans his forehead against the window, and presses his finger against the smudgy glass.

  ‘Mami, look!’ He yawns. ‘What are they?’ On a ridge above them, rows of colorful houses snake up the hillside, all in matching clusters: red, blue, green, purple.

  ‘Oh, they’re just houses, amorcito.’

  ‘Only houses?’ It’s turned into a bright young morning. They’ve been on the road almost two hours.

  ‘Why are they so colorful like that?’

  ‘Just for decoration, I think.’

  ‘They look like LEGOs.’

  Lydia’s breath hitches in her chest every time the bus jerks or turns or changes its speed, but there’s no stopping. No armed men standing in the road. And soon, buildings line both sides of the narrow street and they’ve made it. They’re in Chilpancingo. She makes the sign of the cross over herself and traces a smaller version on Luca’s forehead. They pull up in front of a familiar building, a miniature of the station they embarked from in Acapulco this morning. The driver stops the bus and there’s the loud hiccupping noise as he engages the brakes. He stands and announces past his mustache, ‘Five-minute stop.’

  A couple passengers stand up from their seats to stretch. At the front, someone gets off for a cigarette, but Lydia and Luca are the only ones who begin gathering their things to disembark. Everyone on board is heading to the capital.

  ‘Are we getting out, Mami?’

  ‘Yes, mi amor.’

  But then she stands next to her seat in the narrow aisle with her backpack strapped to her shoulders and looks down at her sleepy son, at the top of his tousled black head, and she wishes they could make a run for it. She wishes they could hunker down in here, camouflaged among the travelers on this bus, and hold their breath all the way to Mexico City. Maybe they’d make it. Maybe the roadblock between here and there would be innocuous. A brief stop, a fistful of bills, a languorous waving through. Thump thump, two slaps on the side of the bus as it rolls on its merry way. Lydia imagines it all with a quiver of hope. The bus driver emerges from the terminal now and gets back on the bus. New passengers begin to board, and the driver takes their tickets one by one.

  ‘Mami?’

  ‘Come on.’

  As the shadow of the bus pulls away from the sidewalk, Lydia and Luca emerge into the blinking daylight of Chilpancingo. She feels both relieved and disheartened to be off the bus. But she takes a moment to remind herself that she’s managed to get them this far: nineteen hours and sixty-eight miles away from the epicenter of calamity. With each minute and mile that passes, Lydia knows she’s increased their chances of survival. She needs to take encouragement where she can find it. She mustn’t despair at the enormity of the task yet ahead. She should focus only on the immediate next steps. Find Sebast
ián’s college roommate.

  On the sidewalk, she tightens the straps on Luca’s backpack, which are drooping too far from his small shoulders. He looks like a turtle with an inadequate shell, yet somehow he’s managed to draw his most vulnerable parts tightly within himself. She wonders about the lasting effects of that retraction.

  ‘What’s next, Mami?’ Luca asks her, in the flat tone of voice that seems to be his only inflection now.

  ‘Let’s find an internet café,’ she says.

  ‘But you have Papi’s tablet, right?’

  It’s powered off in her backpack, and she’s not going to turn it back on. She also left the SIM card of her own cell phone in a garbage can outside the bank in Playa Caletilla. She felt marginally crazy, paranoid, as she pried the thing out with her fingernail, but she didn’t want to be a blue dot flashing on some remote, hostile screen. She adjusts the brim of Sebastián’s Yankees cap slightly lower on her son’s forehead. She should buy one for herself, too, she thinks.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she says.

  El Cascabelito Internet Café is just opening for the day when Lydia purchases a coffee and fifteen minutes to look more closely at maps online. She buys Luca a bag of platanitos, too, but the green foil package sits unopened on the desk. Lydia chooses a computer in the back corner, one that has two chairs and a privacy partition so they’re hidden from view of the door. Luca draws his heels up to the seat of the chair and rests his chin on his knees, but his eyes remain unfocused on the platanitos while Lydia studies the screen. From Chilpancingo there are only two viable routes to Mexico City, and both are virtually guaranteed to have roadblocks. Lydia chews the inside of her mouth, and her knee undertakes a jittery hop beneath the desk. They can’t exactly walk to Mexico City from here. Lydia’s never been claustrophobic, but today she feels so trapped. She can feel it in her limbs, a panicky longing to stretch. She can’t see any way out. Dismay will not help.