American Dirt : A Novel (2020)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  ‘It’s okay, mijo, go look,’ she says. But Luca clings only more tightly to her hand. ‘Okay, then let’s sit.’ She steers him to an empty computer table and they sit.

  When the idea first occurred to her as she squatted in the shade of the Oficina Central del Registro Civil, it occurred as camouflage: they could disguise themselves as migrants. But now that she’s sitting in this quiet library with her son and their stuffed backpacks, like a thunderclap, Lydia understands that it’s not a disguise at all. She and Luca are actual migrants. That is what they are. And that simple fact, among all the other severe new realities of her life, knocks the breath clean out of her lungs. All her life she’s pitied those poor people. She’s donated money. She’s wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t even want them.

  Lydia sits back in her chair and looks at her boy, who’s staring at a reclining fuchsia figure hovering on the wall above his head. Migrante. She can’t make the word fit him. But that’s what they are now. This is how it happens. They’re not the first to go – Acapulco is emptying of its people. How many of her neighbors have fled in the last year? How many have disappeared? After all those years of watching it happen elsewhere, of indulging their remote pity, of shaking their heads as the stream of migrants flowed past them at a distance, from south to north. Acapulco has joined the procession, she realizes. No one can stay in a brutal, bloodstained place.

  Lydia pulls her eyes away from Luca and focuses on the screen in front of her. Her search now is born not only of panic, but of true desperation. There are no other options left for them. She opens a browser and finds the route that brings La Bestia closest to Mexico City. She lifts the headphones from their hook beside the computer and plugs them in. She checks YouTube first, and it’s all horrible. So much more horrible than she even imagined. But it’s better to know, to be prepared. She makes herself watch, and she pays no mind to the quickening of her breath or the racing of her pulse while she absorbs the stories.

  The possible manners of death available on La Bestia are all gruesome: You can be crushed between two moving cars when the train rounds a bend. You can fall asleep, roll off the edge, get sucked beneath the wheels, have your legs sliced off. (When that happens, if the migrant isn’t killed instantly, he usually bleeds to death in a remote corner of some farmer’s field before anyone finds him.) And finally, there’s the ubiquity of ordinary human violence: You can die by beating or stabbing or shooting. Robbery is a foregone conclusion. Mass abductions for ransom are commonplace. Often, kidnappers torture their victims to help persuade their families to pay. On the trains, a uniform seldom represents what it purports to represent. Half the people pretending to be migrants or coyotes or train engineers or police or la migra are working for the cartel. Everybody’s on the take. Here’s a Guatemalan man – twenty-two years old – who lost both legs three days before his interview. He’s missing a front tooth as well. ‘Somebody told me, before we got on the train,’ he says, ‘if you fall, if you see your arm or your leg getting sucked under there, you have a split second to decide whether or not to put your head in there too.’ The young man blinks into the camera. ‘I made the wrong choice,’ he says.

  When she’s seen enough of the horror stories, Lydia bows her head for a moment to assess her state of mind. Because despite everything she’s just seen, she also knows that, like all criminal enterprises in Mexico, La Bestia is controlled by the cartels. Or rather, by a specific cartel, the mother of all cartels, an organization so nightmarish that people won’t utter its name, and in this moment that’s the key factor for Lydia. Because that cartel is not Los Jardineros. She knows from Sebastián’s research that Javier’s influence now extends well beyond the borders of Guerrero, that he has established alliances with cartels that stretch the length of Mexico. That he controls plazas as far away as Coahuila along the Texas border. But if that reach extends to La Bestia, she knows it must be limited there. Javier is not the jefe on the trains. So her choice, then, is whether to escape one monster by running into the den of another.

  Half a million people survive this journey every year, she tells herself. This will provide anonymity. No one will be looking for them on La Bestia. Javier would never imagine her traveling this way; she can scarcely imagine it herself. So perhaps she and Luca will have the same chance as anybody else at surviving the beast. Perhaps their chances will be better, in fact, because they have the means to prepare for the journey, and they’ve already proven themselves to be survivors. So it comes down to this: her fears of La Bestia, the prevalence of violence, kidnapping, death, those fears feel theoretical. They don’t measure up against her new blood-cold fear of Javier, the memory of her mother’s green-tiled shower, that sicario eating Sebastián’s chicken drumsticks as he stepped among the corpses of her family.

  Lydia decides that her plan, though shocking, is sound. She opens a clean browser to carefully research the route. In Mexico City, it looks like migrants gather at Lechería, within the limits of the city’s northern sprawl. From there, the line travels a hundred miles north before diverging in three separate directions. There’s a commuter train to Lechería not far from here, in Buenavista. Lydia’s stomach does an acrobatic tumble.

  ‘This is madness,’ she says out loud.

  Luca snaps his eyes at her but utters nothing. She replaces the headphones on their hook beside the computer and stands up to gather their things.

  ‘No.’ She heaves her backpack onto her shoulders, and gestures for Luca to follow. ‘No,’ she says again. Because she, the sensible, bookstore-owning, devoted mother-and-wife Lydia, the one from last week, is fighting with this new Lydia, the deranged Lydia, the one who thinks dragging her eight-year-old son onto the top of a moving freight train is a good idea. Neither Lydia has a better plan. ‘No,’ she says one last time. And then they’re back outside in the riotous sunshine with nothing left to do.

  In the market at La Ciudadela, Lydia buys a blanket and four canvas belts. They set out to find the commuter train to Lechería.

  Chapter Eleven

  The commuter rail station is located at one end of a vast shopping mall with a Sephora and a Panda Express and even an ice rink. The street in front is crowded with pink taxis and red buses. The shoppers and vendors wear fancier clothes than you usually see in Acapulco. Everyone has clean sneakers. At the bookstore window, Lydia pauses briefly to gaze at the tiered rainbow of gleaming books on display: the season’s new releases, some of which are featured in her own window at home. She thinks of the driver who makes her deliveries stopping outside her shop, tenting his hands above his eyes while he peers through the grate and darkened glass. She thinks of her two part-time employees: bespectacled Kiki, who can never be trusted to stock shelves because she stops to read every book that passes through her hands, and Gloria, who’s never read a grown-up book in her life but has great taste in children’s literature, and is a diligent worker. She wonders how they’ll manage now, without the bookshop income both their families rely on. Lydia thinks of her stockroom gathering dust, her undelivered parcels. When she steps back from the bookstore window, her hand leaves a ghost print on the glass.

  Lydia and Luca have to wait in line at the Banamex on the third floor, and a girl nearby is hawking postcards from a large canvas bag. The Zócalo at sunset, the Palacio de Bellas Artes lit up like Christmas. Lydia thinks about buying one and addressing it to Javier. What would she write there in the blank space? Would she appeal to his abandoned humanity, acknowledge his weird condolences, plead for their lives? Would she make some futile attempt to articulate her hatred and grief? For all her love of words, at times they’re e
ntirely insufficient.

  In the bottom of her backpack, folded carefully into a compartment she hasn’t unzipped since they left Acapulco, is her mother’s purse. Inside that purse, tucked into a slit in her wallet, is her mother’s bank card. Lydia knows her mother’s PIN because she’s the one who helped set it up, who taught her how to use it. The small, brown handbag is the same one her mother has carried for literally as long as Lydia can remember. The leather is thick and was stiff when Lydia was younger, but it’s grown soft from years of use. The clasp broke long ago, so it’s only the flap folded over the opening that keeps whatever’s inside from falling out. Lydia does not pause to reminisce. She leans her backpack against the glass wall beside her and opens her mother’s purse. Luca doesn’t watch. He stands beside her, picking at the corner of a large sticker affixed to the glass, advertising low-interest loans. Not long ago Lydia would have corrected this behavior, would have told her son that someone paid good money for that sticker and it’s not his to pick from the window. Not now. She stares into her mother’s purse. There’s a particular smell, or rather a conglomeration of smells. It assails her, even here, between McDonald’s and the Crepe Factory. The aroma evokes immediate memories that Lydia refuses to indulge. It’s old leather and Kleenex (both used and unused) and the cinnamon gum her mother always buys, and the black licorice drops she likes, wrapped in a small white paper bag, and a miniature tube of hand lotion with apricot extract, and the clean, babylike smell of her pressed powder compact, all combined into the intimate, unmistakable scent of Lydia’s childhood. Mamá.

  Luca smells it, too. He mouths her name without turning his face away from the glass, ‘Abuela,’ and renews his attack on the sticker.

  Lydia breathes through her mouth. When it’s their turn she stands at the ATM with the detritus of her life spilling out of the backpack around her feet. A young woman using the adjacent ATM is careful not to look at them. Lydia is embarrassed by the woman’s caution. In addition to fending off her memories, Lydia is also frightened. She worries that this single electronic transaction will be like shooting up a flare to mark her location. Her hand trembles as she jams her mother’s ATM card into the machine and punches in the code. The machine beeps loudly and spits the card back out.

  ‘¡Me lleva la chingada!’ she says. Luca turns to look at her. ‘It’s fine,’ she lies. And inserts the card into the machine a second time. She takes greater care now, watches the way her fingers shake as she punches in the code. She knows it. It’s Luca’s birthday. It has to work.

  It works. Gracias a Dios.

  It’s unusual in a culture where adult children take care of their aging parents that Lydia’s mother even had a savings account. Indeed, owning an ATM card made Abuela something of an anomaly among her peers, even in a robust urban economy like Acapulco’s, even among Mexico’s solid and growing middle class. But then, Lydia’s mother had always been something of an anomaly. She’d always done things a little out of step with her generation. She refused the first two boys who asked to marry her, for example. And much to her mother’s consternation, when she finally did deign to get married, well past her prime at the age of twenty-four, she did not immediately quit her job as a bookkeeper at a local hospital but instead returned to school to further her education. She was already three years a missus when she was certified as a public accountant and got a job working for the city. Her parents and peers sometimes raised their eyebrows at Abuela’s choices, but Lydia’s father loved being married to a trailblazer, even after their two daughters were born and he had to do more diaper changing than he meant to sign up for. So Lydia grew up with a mother who emphasized the importance of being independent and saving for the future. A mother who had loaned her the money to open her bookstore. Though Lydia had been grateful, she’d never imagined that her mother’s eccentricity might one day save her life.

  The number pops up on the screen in front of her, and it’s more money than Lydia had dared to hope for: 212,871 pesos; more than $10,000. Lydia breathes a fragment that might just be relief, but feels like joy. This is a lot of money. The women in Abuela’s gardening club would be scandalized by the amount. Lydia retracts the card and replaces it reverently in her mother’s purse without making a withdrawal. It’s safer to leave it in the bank until they need it. If money could solve all their problems, she and Luca would be saved. And yet there’s still no way for them to buy their way out of Mexico City, and now, with this single electronic transaction, she knows she may have dropped a pin on Javier’s map. She’d known that the vastness of Mexico City would be her only chance to make this transaction without immediately revealing themselves, and now that she’s done it, they have to move. They order tacos at the food court, and Luca asks for extra sour cream, which Lydia finds remarkably comforting. They eat them on the 6:32 p.m. commuter train to Lechería.

  * * *

  It’s still light out, with long shadows reclining across the pavements, by the time Luca and Mami arrive at the address she found at the library, but the doors of the Casa del Migrante are locked and the windows are darkened. Mami shields her eyes against the glass, and Luca follows suit. He can see nothing inside. A woman walks past them on the sidewalk, pulling a rolling metal cart full of groceries.

  ‘Está cerrado,’ she says.

  ‘Closed?’ Mami turns to look at her. ‘For the night?’

  ‘No, closed for good. A few months ago. The neighbors complained. It was too many problems for the community. Look here.’ The lady lets go of her cart and opens the metal mailbox hanging beside the door. She draws out a pamphlet and hands it to Lydia.

  ‘Amigo migrante,’ Lydia reads aloud. ‘The neighbors of Lechería invite you to continue your journey to the Casa del Migrante in its new location at Huehuetoca.’ Lydia snorts. ‘How hospitable of them.’

  The lady throws her hands up in the air. ‘It’s not the fault of the migrants, you poor people, but where you go, the problems follow.’ She returns to her cart, tips it onto its wheels.

  ‘But wait,’ Lydia says, ‘where is Huehuetoca?’

  The woman starts walking. ‘North,’ she says, waving back over her shoulder. Lydia looks at Luca, who only shrugs. He could tell her that Huehuetoca is about seventeen miles away, because he saw it on the map when Mami was looking up Lechería on the computer in the library, but his tongue lacks the capacity to formulate the words Mami, it’s too far to walk tonight, so he follows his mother the wrong way down the street for three blocks, back toward the train station and the setting sun, before she spots a group of men wearing backpacks and baseball caps. Luca can tell her anxiety is growing with the length of their shadows. Soon it will be dark. The men turn to look at them as they approach, and they greet Mami immediately.

  ‘Saludos, señora. ¿Cómo va?’

  ‘Good, thank you. Can you tell us how to get to Huehuetoca?’ she asks. ‘We just found this message – the migrant shelter is closed.’

  ‘Yes, it’s closed. It’s a hike up there to that other place, señora,’ the youngest man says. There’s something sour on his breath.

  ‘How far?’

  ‘A distance. It has to be ten, fifteen miles from here.’

  ‘Wow.’

  The men all nod. One has a toothpick in his mouth. He’s leaning on a low wall.

  ‘Is there a bus?’

  ‘No bus, but you can take the train from here to the end of the line at Cuautitlán. That gets you a little closer. You can walk from there, maybe four, five hours.’ Only the youngest man talks. The other two watch the conversation like it’s a tennis match. Luca watches them watch the tennis.

  ‘That’s too far tonight,’ Mami says.

  ‘You can camp with us.’ The man grins. ‘Go in the morning, señora.’ His body moves like a noodle, and the offer feels abrupt and dubious. Luca steps in between the men and his mother, not from any real sense of martyrdom, but because he’s observed that, on oc
casion, the presence of children serves to inhibit people’s bad behavior. He tugs on Mami’s hand, and together they get moving.

  At Lechería station once again, they take the next northern-bound train to the end of the line at Cuautitlán, where Mami splurges on a cheap motel room. She tells Luca it’s their last stay in a hotel for a very long time.

  In the morning, she wakes him at first light, and they set out north toward Huehuetoca, not necessarily because they need to find the migrant shelter, but because they need to find the migrants.

  Cuautitlán is the last stop on the commuter railway line, but the tracks continue north. A new million-dollar fence separates the street from the tracks; it’s part of the Mexican government’s Programa Frontera Sur, which is funded largely by the United States, and aims to clear migrants from the trains. Migrants can’t jump onto the trains here because the fence keeps them out, but about a mile north of the station that fence ends abruptly, so Luca and Lydia walk up the grassy little berm and stay beside the tracks.

  Luca doesn’t understand why they have to walk. He knows they have enough money to buy a ticket. He’d like to ask Mami about it, but his voice stays sealed inside. He hops from tie to tie on the outside of the track, and Lydia watches their backs to make sure there’s no train coming. He still has the ticket card from yesterday in his pocket – the one they bought from Lechería to Cuautitlán. Mami trusted him to be in charge of his own ticket, even though they had to swipe it twice – once getting on the train and then again getting off. He digs into his pocket now and pulls out the card. He tugs on Mami’s sleeve, and she turns to look at him. He waves the card at her, and she understands what he wants to know, because she understands everything.

  ‘You can’t buy tickets for these trains,’ she explains. ‘That was the last stop.’

  Luca frowns, and a small groove appears in his forehead. He tilts his head up and squints. He can see the tracks. He crawls his fingers upward through the air, tracing the railway lines he can see on the map in his memory.