‘Those tracks beneath your feet keep going and going,’ Mami confirms. ‘All the way to el norte.’
Luca’s gaze expands and he can nearly feel the tracks beneath him, trundling through the miles ahead, stretching beneath the daytime and nighttime skies, all the way to Texas. So then why can’t they buy a ticket?
‘The trains that run north from here are only for cargo,’ Mami says. ‘Not for people.’
With effort, Luca manages a single word. ‘Why?’
She shakes her head. ‘I don’t know, amorcito.’
It seems so simple when he asks it. Why? Didn’t there used to be passenger trains in Mexico, along with the freights? Lydia has a vague childhood memory of trains ferrying more than just cargo across the landscape. She remembers people standing on platforms holding luggage, the cheerful peal of a steam whistle. But the railways stopped carrying passengers a lifetime ago, and Lydia searches her gauzy memories, but it’s no use. She can’t remember why, and it doesn’t matter anyway.
Beside her, Luca continues stepping from tie to tie. He watches the toe of his blue sneakers press against the wood. Sometimes he asks why only because he’s programmed to ask it, she realizes. He doesn’t really care that she doesn’t have an answer, as long as she gives him something.
‘Some people ride the trains anyway,’ she says, glancing sideways at him. ‘Even without a ticket, even without seats.’
Luca looks up from his feet and studies her face. He says nothing, but his eyes are round.
‘They climb on top,’ she says. ‘Can you imagine that?’
Luca cannot.
Lydia feels encouraged by their progress. It feels good to grow the distance between Javier and them, but it’s also frightening to venture out from the vastness of Mexico City and back into the modest districts, where Lydia can feel the urban fog of invisibility begin to dissipate. It’s hard to feel inconspicuous when you’re a stranger in a small place. So Lydia keeps her head down and stays vigilant. They walk quickly, and Luca doesn’t complain, even when they pass a little bike repair shop and he longs to grab the handlebars of a bike leaning against the wall outside. It’s green with a golden bell, and Luca thinks it’s small enough for him. But they keep walking, and less than an hour later they happen upon a group of young migrants beside the tracks. They are all men, perhaps two dozen of them, gathered in a clearing behind a warehouse, just where the urban sprawl begins to diminish and the landscape begins to prickle and pop. A place between places.
Most of the migrants have backpacks and grim faces. They’re a thousand miles into their journeys already, weeks from Tegucigalpa or San Salvador or the mountains of Guatemala. They’re from cities or villages or el campo. Some speak the languages of K’iché or Ixil or Mam or Nahuatl. Luca likes to listen to the foreign sounds, the peaks and rolls of the words he doesn’t understand. He likes the way voices sound the same in every language, the way, if you train your ear to listen just outside the words, to only the shifting inflections, you can attach your own meaning to the sounds. Many of the men speak English, too. But here, as they wait for the northbound train outside Mexico City, they all speak Spanish. Most are Catholic and have placed their lives in God’s hands; they call on him with frequency and conviction. They invoke the blessings of his son and all the saints. It’s been two days since the last train, and the men have grown weary of waiting.
Nearby, a woman sells food from a cart. She takes tortillas from one pail and fills them with beans from a second pail. She serves them without smiling or speaking. Luca and Mami buy breakfast and find a shady place in a bald spot beneath a tree. Mami flings out the brightly colored blanket she bought at La Ciudadela after they left the library, and they sit. Nearby, two young men are reclining with their heads on their backpacks. One leans up on his elbow facing them.
‘Buen día, hermana, y que Dios la bendiga en su camino,’ he greets them.
‘Thank you,’ Lydia says. ‘And may God bless you on your travels as well.’
He leans back with his head on his pack while Luca and Mami eat. Then he says, ‘You seem fresh on your journey. You have strong energy. My brother and I have already been traveling for fourteen days.’
‘Where did you begin?’ she asks.
‘Honduras. My name is Nando.’
‘Hello, Nando,’ she says, without offering a name in return. He doesn’t ask.
‘Nando, can I ask you something?’ He props up again on his elbow. ‘Where is everyone?’ she asks.
‘Hah?’
‘Where are all the migrants? I expected there would be so many people here, waiting for the trains.’
‘Well, with the migrant shelter gone from Lechería and now the new fences, I guess a lot of migrants don’t stop here anymore. That’s why it’s only young men here now, hermana,’ he says. ‘The athletes.’
‘¡Los olímpicos!’ his brother says without raising his head or opening his eyes.
The brother is skinny except for his little potbelly, and Luca doesn’t think he looks much like an Olympian at all. His hat covers his face from the sun.
‘Really? The fence keeps people from stopping?’ Lydia asks. It seems such an unlikely deterrent.
‘Not only this fence,’ he says. ‘All the fences at all the train stations.’
‘They’re everywhere?’
The man shrugs. ‘Most places now, at least in the south.’
‘And all those expensive fences, they’re just to stop people from riding the trains?’
‘Yeah, they’re supposed to be for safety,’ he says. ‘But, see, they put the fence only where the train stops.’ He gestures back down the tracks, the way they came, and Lydia remembers the spot where the metal caging fell away and the track opened up. La migra had trucks there, watching the parade of foot traffic passing by. ‘By the time the train arrives here, it’s already picking up speed. So you have to jump on while it’s moving.’
Luca gasps, causing Lydia and Nando both to look over at him, so he returns his attention to his stuffed tortilla.
‘Haven’t you seen the government signs attached to the fences? Safety First!’ Nando laughs. ‘You going to jump onto a moving train, hermana?’
‘Maybe not.’ Lydia frowns. ‘Or maybe.’
The man draws his legs in and crosses them, looking at Luca. ‘What about you, chiquito? You going to jump onto La Bestia? Like a cowboy riding a bull at the rodeo?’
Luca’s never seen a rodeo, and he’s not even sure if he’s seen a real-life cowboy. He shrugs.
‘So that’s it? They put up some fences, and just like that, people stop coming?’
‘Who said they stopped coming? From my country, there are more people than ever, more and more all the time.’
‘So then if they’re not on the train, where are they?’
Nando shrugs. ‘Most go with coyotes now, all the way from my country. One safe house to the next, to the next. A whole network all the way to el norte. But it’s expensive, and sometimes those coyotes are no better than los criminales. So it’s the people who can’t afford that passage or who don’t trust the coyotes – they come to La Bestia.’
‘And when they get here, and find the fence? What do they do if they can’t get on the train?’
Nando plucks a blade of dry grass and hangs it from the corner of his mouth. ‘Ay, hermanita mía, I hate to tell you,’ he says. ‘They are walking.’
Lydia is dubious. ‘They walk all the way to Estados Unidos from Honduras?’
Luca makes some calculations in his head. Even if these hondureños go only to the southernmost point on the northern border, their total journey must be close to sixteen hundred miles. He wonders if it’s really possible for a human being to walk that far.
‘Unless la migra gets to them first and sends them back,’ Nando says. ‘Then they get some rest. An air-conditioned bus in the wrong d
irection. Then they start all over from scratch.’
Lydia takes the last bite of her food. ‘But you’re not worried about la migra?’ She wipes crumbs from the corners of her mouth.
‘Nah.’ He smiles. ‘You don’t have to outrun la migra. You only have to be faster than your brother. I got it covered.’
‘In your dreams, gordo,’ the brother says.
‘What about you, hermana? And your son? What will you do if la migra comes?’
Now it’s Lydia’s turn to lie back on her pack. Technically, la migra can’t send them anywhere, because they’re Mexican, and unlike Nando and many of the other migrants, they’re traveling in their own country; they can’t be deported. But Lydia knows that technicality won’t help them at all if la migra here happens to work for Los Jardineros. She shudders. ‘We’ll manage,’ she says.
Nando nods and smiles encouragingly at Luca. ‘Of course you will,’ he says.
At length, the migrants sitting or lying on the rails stand up and make the announcement to the others – they can feel reverberations in the track. The train is coming. Luca goes and puts his hand on the rail, but feels nothing.
‘It’s stopped down the line somewhere, chiquito,’ Nando says. ‘It’ll be along shortly.’
When a few minutes have passed, another man calls Luca over. ‘Feel now,’ he says, and Luca obeys, placing his hand on the hot metal.
He can feel the energy of the train percussing through the waiting steel. He draws his hand instinctively in, and backs away from the rails to return to Mami’s side. In the clearing, there’s a flurry of activity among the migrants, who will now attempt to board. Everyone gathers their belongings and scatters across the area. They lay claim to their own patches of ground, spreading out, giving one another space to run alongside the train. They watch also for la migra, which tends to time its raids to coincide with the train’s arrival. After two days of undercover waiting, more migrants are suddenly visible, emerging from their hiding places to attempt the perilous flying start.
Lydia quickly rolls up the blanket and straps it to the bottom of her pack. Then she turns to make the straps on Luca’s shoulders as tight as possible. The tails hang down his legs. She ties them in a knot and tucks the loose ends into his waistband. She shifts her weight nervously from foot to foot.
‘You want to do this, mijo?’ she asks him. She hopes he’ll say no. She hopes he says, ‘Mami, this is crazy, I don’t want to die, I’m scared.’ But Luca just looks at her. He doesn’t respond at all. ‘Maybe we’ll try,’ she says. ‘Let’s just watch first. We’ll see what happens.’ She feels sick with dread.
When the train rounds the distant bend and comes into view, when Lydia can look down the track at its approaching nose, it appears to advance in slow motion. We can do this, she says to herself. It’s not going that fast. It’s loud as it pulls into the clearing; she can feel the chug in her bones, in her sternum, and many of the men step into a trot alongside. It’s a challenge of competing details, all equally important, and Lydia finds herself rapt as she watches, trying to learn the techniques. You must match your speed to the train’s speed, she sees, adjusting as you go. You must find the ideal point of access, a protrusion, a ladder, a spot with plenty of grip and some way to quickly get to the roof of the car. You must fully commit to your position once you’ve chosen it. You must defend it from other migrants whose urgency matches your own. Under no circumstances can you attempt to change course once you’re under way. But you must also be mindful of tree limbs and other fixed hazards that threaten your track. You must pay close attention to what’s ahead of you on the ground. You must take care not to step in a hole or trip over a rock while you run, not to stumble beneath the grinding wheels of the beast. You must never, ever forget the power of those churning, groaning, clattering, rumbling wheels. They shriek as a reminder.
‘¡Qué Dios los bendiga!’ their new friend calls out as he leaves them and begins to run alongside the train.
His brother trots along behind him, their pace more than a jog, less than a sprint. Nando runs, oscillating his head to both watch where he’s going and assess the train cars behind for a good spot to climb on. He sees a ladder coming, two cars away. He slows down. One car away, he picks up his pace, glances in front of him, ducks beneath the slapping limb of a leafy shrub. He reaches for the ladder, wraps his fingers around the third rung. He takes two strides, three, four, with only his right hand on the ribs of La Bestia, and then all at once he swings his full weight from that arm. He reaches his left arm up now as well, his hand in a brief panic until his fingers find their target and seize. Now his body is caught, suspended. This. This is the moment of paramount risk. The arms attached, clinging, hauling. The body draped like a flag. The legs hanging low, not yet clear of the wheels.
‘Get up,’ the potbellied brother shouts. ‘Get your feet up!’ He runs.
And the instinct is to reach with those feet, to feel for what’s beneath, to scrabble for purchase, to find some way to boost your weight from below. But no. You must curl. Bring the feet up. Up. Up! Nando’s feet find the bottom rung. His arms stretch up to the next and now he’s climbing. Strong. Solid. A few more seconds – slap! – a passing tree branch threatens his grasp, scratches his side, but now he’s safe, he’s over the lip, and he lies down on top, offering a hand over the edge toward his brother, who is running now, below.
Lydia’s eyes are wide and now the brothers are gone, the other migrants around them dwindling in numbers as they board, one by one, two by two. She crushes Luca’s hand in her viselike grip, but doesn’t notice how hard she’s squeezing it and he doesn’t protest. They are rooted in place, unmoving, until all at once, every echo of the train is gone.
They walk.
There’s a new reverence to having seen it with their own eyes, the unfeeling crush of the wheels along their rails, the men clinging to the exoskeleton like beetles on a window screen.
In the backseat of Papi’s orange Volkswagen Beetle in Acapulco, Luca had his own little safety harness system. A bright blue cushion with monkeys on it that Papi had unfolded and somehow permanently affixed to the seat. When he was little, Luca liked the monkeys, the cushioned straps that went over his head and then around his waist. He felt snug in there. But last summer he started begging to be rid of the thing. It was babyish, he insisted. He was big enough to wear a regular seat belt now, he said. Luca watches the last hip of the now-silent train disappear around a distant bend, and cannot make sense of anything.
Chapter Twelve
Even if they knew how long it might be before the next train, they cannot conceive of boarding La Bestia now that they’ve seen how it’s done. Lydia thinks it over while they walk the seven miles to Huehuetoca. Would she put Luca on the ladder first? She would have to; there’s no way she could jump on and leave him standing beneath the train without her. Could she run and climb on if he held on to her neck, his legs wrapped tightly around her waist? It seems physically impossible. Each time she tries to picture it, the fantasy ends the same way. Butchery.
Luca distracts himself from how tired his legs are becoming by looking at the unusual sights. They pass a place that’s full of every kind of statue: bears, lions, cowboys, dolphins, angels, crocodiles. They pass some men who are laying bricks to build a wall. They pass a woman who’s vacuuming instead of sweeping her front step, which makes Luca squeeze Mami’s hand so she’ll see it, too. When they pass a school and Luca sees some kids playing fútbol in the yard, he realizes it’s Thursday, and that he should be in school in Acapulco, and Papi should be picking him up this afternoon because Thursday is Papi’s day to pick him up, and sometimes Papi buys him galletas and they eat them on the way home if he promises not to tell Mami. After that, Luca doesn’t look at the sights anymore. He watches his feet even though the sun feels hot on the back of his neck, and it takes them almost three hours to walk to Huehuetoca.
When they
arrive, they easily find the place they’re looking for, as it sits neatly beside the railroad tracks behind a wind-whipped green fence. The Casa del Migrante is a gathering of tents and simple structures on a large, flat parcel of land that’s saved from being beautiful only by the utilitarian character of its buildings. The wide road that separates the casa from the railroad tracks is of dirt and rubble, and it’s empty as far as Luca can see. It’s flat here for a long stretch, but in the distance, when he allows his eyes to follow the tracks to the horizon, Luca can see the landscape erupt upward on both sides. The clouds, puffy and brilliant, come down to meet it. There are bald fields all around and behind the casa, and on the far side of the tracks as well, but Luca can see that the soil has been tended, turned, striped with darker bands of earth where the farmers will sow their crops at the right season. There’s a rich mineral scent on the wind.
Luca and Lydia cross the parched road hand in hand and approach the chain link fence that’s been woven through with strips of green plastic so it’s no longer transparent. Three strings of barbed wire cut through the air atop the fence, and two signs hang beneath it. The first is a cloudy, sunstruck blue, and has a painting of Jesus and Mary, so Luca expects it to be a blessing, but it says: Brother Migrant, we will watch over you and protect you from polleros, guides, and coyotes so that you may enjoy a happy stay here with our hospitality. Anyone found to be in transgression of these specifications will be handed over to the appropriate authorities. May God protect you on your journey!
The second sign is much less flowery, a list of rules written in a plain black font, so long that its only decoration, a red banner at the very bottom, sits in direct contact with the dirt below: welcome, brother and sister travelers! Luca reads some of the rules at random.
•Persons requesting admission to the casa must be migrants. From this country or other countries, or deportees from the United States.
American Dirt : A Novel (2020) Page 13
