American Dirt : A Novel (2020)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  ‘Which cartel?’ Ixchel asks because like most people, because of her personal experience, she’s more afraid of one particular cartel than others.

  ‘What does it matter?’ Neli says. ‘They’re all the same. Animales.’

  ‘They’re not,’ Julia insists. ‘Some of them are way worse than others.’

  Neli makes a face like she’s skeptical, but doesn’t argue.

  ‘Like Los Jardineros,’ Julia says. ‘I heard they donated money to build a new cancer hospital in Acapulco.’

  Lydia takes a sharp breath, but Neli waves a hand dismissively. ‘That’s just trying to buy people’s loyalty,’ she says. ‘Propaganda.’

  ‘But maybe the reason is less important than the fact,’ Julia says. Then she drops her voice to a whisper and leans in again, closing the space across the table to a tight circle. She names the unnameable cartel. ‘Los Zetas feed people their own body parts. Los Zetas hang babies from bridges.’

  Lydia covers her mouth with her hand. Her fingers are cold and stiff, and beside her, Ixchel is crossing herself. Lydia will ask a question now, but she’ll make her voice light. Neutral.

  ‘So last night, the guy who got kicked out – which cartel was he?’

  Julia shrugs. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘But if he really wants out, he better run. Far and fast, right? They don’t let those guys go.’

  Lydia pushes her plate away. Far and fast, she thinks. Some things are so simple.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Six days and 282 miles from absolute calamity, Lydia and Luca take their leave from Huehuetoca and head north once again, following the trail of La Bestia. When Lydia considers how they’ve managed to survive the last week, to get this far from Acapulco and remain alive, her mind seizes. Because she knows she’s made both good and bad decisions in those six days, and that ultimately, it’s only by the grace of God that none of those choices have met with bad luck and resulted in catastrophe. That awareness incapacitates her. She can’t conceive of a plan to board the train, which is what they must do. They must get on the train. Meanwhile, walking will give her time to think. They filled their canteens before they left the shelter, but they stop at a small shop down the road and Lydia jams her bag with snacks. Because it’s a shop that’s used to migrants, they stock the kinds of things that migrants can carry and eat: nuts, apples, candy, granola, chips, carne seca. Lydia buys as much as she can fit in her pack. She buys a floppy hat, too, pink with white flowers, to protect her neck from the sun. It reminds her of the ugly thing Mamá used to put on when she gardened, and any time Lydia and Yemi caught their mother wearing it, they would titter and tease.

  ‘You laugh, but this hat is the reason I have the skin of a twenty-four-year-old!’ their mother would chide them.

  Back outside, the freight tracks stretch out across the Mexican landscape like a beanstalk migrants must climb, and Luca and Mami go step by step, tie by tie, leaf by leaf. The sun is bright, but not too hot this early in the day. They hold hands briefly, and then sweat and separate, and then the cycle repeats. They take the westernmost route because Luca’s mind-map was convinced that, though that way was longer than the others, the relative topography would be kinder if they end up making much of the journey by foot, as it appears they might. He’s glad Mami didn’t press him to explain his instinct; she simply yielded to the gentle pressure of his hand as they’d set off.

  Lydia knows that her plan to go to Denver is inadequate, that it might be difficult to track down her tío Gustavo. Abuela used to complain that her baby brother had turned into a gringo when he left for el norte all those years ago, when he was still a young man, and never looked back. Lydia knows only that her tío married a white lady, changed his name to Gus, and started his own company, something in construction. Was it plumbing or electric? And what if he changed his last name, too? She’s never met his children, her primos yanquis. She doesn’t even know their names. When she dwells too long on these facts, she begins to panic, so she strips it all back to manageable, step-by-step pieces: Move north. Reach the border. Find a coyote. Get across. Take a bus to Denver. There will be churches there. Libraries, internet access, immigrant communities. People willing to help. For now just move north, move north. Get Luca out of danger.

  A couple hours’ walk northwest of the migrant shelter, Luca and Mami encounter two teenage sisters wearing matching rainbow wristbands on their slender left arms, sitting on an overpass above the train tracks, and dangling their feet below. Both girls are very beautiful, but the slightly older one is dangerously so. She wears baggy clothing and an intense scowl in a failing effort to suppress that calamitous beauty. The younger one leans back on her stuffed backpack, but they both sit up when they see Luca. The studied hardness of their expressions melts. Together they make the ‘oh’ of cuteness that teenage girls often emit for smaller children.

  ‘¡Mira, qué guapo!’ the younger sister sings out in an unfamiliar accent.

  ‘So cute,’ the older one agrees.

  They both have abundant black hair; stark, expressive eyebrows; dark, penetrating eyes; perfectly aligned teeth; full lips; and apple-shaped cheeks. The older one has something extra, something undefinable that makes her entirely arresting. Luca fixes his eyes on her accidentally and cannot seem to remove his gaze once it’s alighted upon her. Mami does, too. The girl is so beautiful she seems almost to glow, more colorful than the landscape in which she sits. The dingy gray of the concrete overpass, the pebble brown of the tracks and the earth, the faded blue of her baggy jeans, the dirty white of her oversize T-shirt, the bleached arc of the sky, it all recedes behind her. Her presence is a vivid throb of color that deflates everything else around her. An accident of biology. A living miracle of splendor. It’s a real problem.

  ‘Oye, ¿adónde van, amigos?’ the less beautiful one calls out to them when they’re directly beneath her feet.

  ‘Where everyone goes,’ Lydia says, shielding her eyes so she can look up at the girls above them. ‘To el norte.’ She removes the ugly pink hat from her head and uses it to fan herself. Beneath it, her sweaty hair sticks to her forehead.

  ‘Us, too!’ she says, swinging her feet. ‘Your son is so cute!’

  Lydia looks over at Luca, who’s smiling up at the girls, the most genuine smile that’s escaped his face since the morning of Yénifer’s quinceañera.

  ‘My name is Rebeca, and this is my sister, Soledad.’ The girl speaks to Luca directly. ‘¿Cómo te llamas, chiquito?’

  Lydia, who’s fallen into the habit of answering for her silent son, opens her mouth to reply but –

  ‘Luca,’ he says. His voice clear like a bell, no hint of rust from all those days without use. Lydia snaps her mouth shut in surprise.

  ‘How old are you, Luca?’ Rebeca asks.

  ‘I am eight years old.’

  The sisters look at each other with animation, and the younger one claps her hands together. ‘I knew it! Just exactly the same age as our little cousin at home. His name is Juanito. He looks like you! Doesn’t he look like Juanito, Sole?’

  Soledad the Beauty smiles reluctantly. ‘He does,’ she admits. ‘Like twins.’

  ‘You want to see his picture?’ Rebeca asks. Luca looks at Mami, who’s been very cautious about stopping to talk with people. But these girls have returned her boy’s voice to him. She nods. ‘Come up!’ Rebeca says.

  She removes a fragile plastic bag of wrapped photographs from the front pocket of her sister’s backpack and flips through them. Luca scrambles up to join the girls on the overpass while Mami watches from below. She tries to survey their location, but the seam of land cut by the tracks here makes a poor vantage point for visibility, so she follows Luca up the steep, sandy little hill. The girls aren’t actually sitting on the overpass at all, but on a metal grate that sticks off the roadway on one side of the overpass like a hazardous catwalk. Lydia tests it with her foot befo
re stepping over. Luca squats on the roadway side, leaning his elbows on the low guardrail. Rebeca leans back against this, and together they stare at the pictures.

  ‘See?’ she says. ‘Guapo como tú.’

  Luca grins again, and nods. ‘He does look like me, Mami, look,’ he says. ‘Except no teeth.’

  Rebeca holds the photograph so Lydia can see. ‘He lost those two both on the same day, and then he was like a vampire,’ the girl says to Luca. ‘Did you lose yours yet?’

  A potent memory. It looms up unbidden: Papi pulling his first tooth – a bottom one, from the middle. The tooth had been loose for weeks and then one night during dinner, Luca took a bite of his tampiqueña and a point of pain shot through his gums. He dropped his fork, moved the food to the back of his mouth, swallowed it in an unchewed lump, and then examined the damage. The tooth, he found, had been pushed askew. It leaned like an ancient grave in soft ground. He touched it softly with one finger, and was horrified by its slackness. Mami and Papi both put down their forks to watch. But Luca was so afraid of the pain that he found himself unable to do anything. And then Mami had tried, for perhaps twenty minutes, to coax him to open his mouth just a little so she could have a look. But Luca was steadfast and mute, his lips clamped shut. When Mami finally lost her patience, Papi eased into place beside Luca. He made funny faces intended to illustrate what happened to children who didn’t allow for the timely removal of ejected teeth. And Luca laughed despite his fear, and in the gap of that laughter, he finally submitted to opening his little mouth while Mami watched from across the table. Papi reached in there so gently Luca didn’t even feel the presence of his fingers against the tooth. But he does remember Papi’s hands along his face, one securely cupping his chin, the other reaching inside. Luca remembers the salty tang of Papi’s fingers and the triumphant smile when those fingers emerged with the prize of that tiny tooth. Luca’s eyes popped so wide when he saw it, and he gasped. He couldn’t believe there was no pain, no feeling at all. Papi had simply reached in there and lifted the little thing out. And then they all laughed and squealed at the table together, and Luca jumped out of his chair, disbelieving, and his parents both hugged and kissed him. He ate the rest of his tampiqueña while the new hole in his mouth gathered small pieces of food he had to sluice out with milk. That night they left the tooth beneath his pillow and El Ratoncito Pérez came to retrieve it, leaving Luca a poem and a new toothbrush in its place.

  Luca lifts one hand to his mouth now and sucks on his knuckle, but it’s not the same, and he has to bat at that memory like a pesky bug. A horsefly. The gone taste of his father’s hands. Mami sees this, reaches out, and squeezes his toe through his sneaker, just a gentle pressure that brings him back to this dusty overpass. He breathes into his body.

  ‘Couldn’t get on the train, huh?’ Among other things, Soledad has a gift for changing the subject at exactly the right moment. She’s more tentative than her sister, but it’s hard to remain standoffish with Luca there, all eyelashes and coy dimples.

  Lydia wriggles out of her backpack and retrieves a canteen. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘They’ve made it a lot harder. Safety first!’ Rebeca discharges a puff of air that, in another setting, might pass for laughter.

  ‘Yeah.’ Mami shakes her head. ‘Safety.’

  ‘You’ve been on the trains?’ Luca asks.

  Soledad twists to look at him, resting her chin on her shoulder. ‘All the way from Tapachula, more or less.’

  Luca thinks of the men running alongside the train in the clearing outside Lechería, the way they ascended, one by one, and disappeared, while he and Mami watched, unable to move. He thinks of the deafening roar and clatter of La Bestia, shouting its warnings into their hearts and bones while they watched, and he feels awed by these two powerful sisters. ‘How?’ he asks.

  Soledad shrugs. ‘We’ve learned some tricks.’

  Mami hands Luca a canteen, and he drinks. ‘Like what?’ Mami asks. ‘We need some tricks.’

  Soledad retracts her dangling legs and folds them beneath her, shifting her spine and shoulders into a stretched posture, and Lydia sees, even in this minor animation of the girl’s body, how the danger rattles off her relentlessly. These sisters haven’t befriended anyone since they left home; they, too, have kept to themselves as much as possible. But they haven’t yet met anyone so young as Luca on their journey. Neither have they met anyone so watchfully maternal as Lydia. So it’s a great pleasure to feel normal for a minute, to inhabit the softness of a friendly conversation. There can’t be any harm in sharing some advice with their fellow travelers.

  ‘Like this,’ Soledad says, gesturing at the tracks beneath them. ‘One thing we noticed is they spend all that money on fences around the train stations, but nobody has thought yet to fence the overpasses.’

  Luca watches Mami’s face as she surveys their position now from the angle of this new information. Mami leans ever so slightly forward and gauges the distance to the ground beneath them. It’s not that far. But then she tries to imagine how this space would change with the noise and weight and presence of La Bestia charging through it. ‘You board from here?’ she asks incredulously.

  ‘Not here,’ Soledad corrects her. ‘Because you’d hit your head as soon as you dropped. The overpass would knock you right off before you got your balance. We sit on this side to watch for it coming. But then you jump on over there.’ She points.

  Luca follows the direction of her gesture across the roadway, and he sees there, affixed to the guardrail, a bleached white cross with a burst of faded orange flowers at its center. Likely a memorial, he realizes, for someone else who attempted to board the train at this place, and didn’t manage it. He bites his lip. ‘You just jump on top?’

  ‘Well, not always,’ Soledad says. ‘But, yes, if the conditions are right, you just jump on top.’

  ‘And what makes the conditions right?’ Lydia asks. ‘Or wrong?’

  ‘Well. The first thing is, you have to choose carefully where to do it. So this place is good because you see,’ she says, standing and pointing across the roadway to the tracks beyond, ‘you see the curve there, just ahead?’

  Lydia stands, too, so she can see where the girl is pointing.

  ‘The train always slows down for a curve. When it’s a big curve, it slows way down. So we know it’ll be going slow when it passes. And then the next thing is to make sure there are no other hazards ahead. That’s why we chose this overpass instead of the first one.’

  Lydia looks south, back along the path they just walked. She hadn’t even noticed that first overpass when they’d walked beneath it. She’d only been grateful for its momentary shade, a shallow respite from the sun.

  ‘Because if you jumped on over there, on that one,’ Rebeca adds, taking up the explanation for her sister, ‘you’d only have a moment to get your balance before you’d have to hit the deck to pass beneath this one. Tricky.’

  Lydia blinks and shakes her head. She can’t envision it.

  ‘So we sit here,’ Soledad continues. ‘We watch. We wait for the train. And when we see one we like, we cross the road, we gauge the speed, we make the decision to board, and then we drop.’

  ‘Like going off a diving board?’ Luca asks, thinking of the water park at El Rollo.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Soledad says. ‘First you lower your backpack, because it makes you top-heavy, wobbly. So you toss that first. And then you squat down really low. You don’t dangle, because if you do that your feet will get going with the train and then your top half won’t catch up. You get stretched like a slingshot. So you roll your body up small and hop on like a frog. Low and tight. And just make sure your fingers grab something right away.’

  Luca’s heart is hammering in his chest just thinking about it. He reminds himself to breathe. Then he looks at Mami, taking it in, considering their likelihood of survival. He feels a sudden surge of manic e
nergy coursing through his body, so he has to stand and spring and kick and let it loose into the world.

  ‘If you get really lucky, sometimes the train might even stop,’ Rebeca says. ‘And then you just climb down. Simple.’

  ‘But there’s plenty of times we let a train go by, too,’ Soledad says. ‘If it’s moving fast, we don’t even try. We’ve already seen two people who tried to board and didn’t make it.’

  Lydia looks at Luca to see how this information will affect him, but he gives nothing away.

  ‘Were those people boarding the same as you? From the top like this?’

  ‘No!’ Rebeca seems almost proud. ‘We’re the only ones who board like this. I haven’t seen anybody else do it.’

  Lydia screws up her mouth. So these girls are either brilliant or insane. ‘How many times have you done this?’ she asks.

  The sisters look at each other, and it’s Soledad who answers. ‘Five, maybe? Six?’

  Lydia lets out a deep, low breath. She nods. ‘Okay.’

  ‘You want to come with us?’ Rebeca asks. It’s not until after the words are out that she glances at her sister, remembering they’re always supposed to check with each other first about everything. Soledad touches the top of Rebeca’s head, and the gesture reassures her sister in the language of their lifelong intimacy that it’s fine.

  ‘Maybe,’ Lydia answers, ignoring the hitch in her lungs as she expels the word.

  They talk a little while they wait, and Lydia learns that the girls are fifteen and fourteen years old, that they’ve traveled over a thousand miles so far, that they miss their family very much, and that they’ve never been on their own before. They don’t say why they left home, and Lydia doesn’t ask. They both remind her of Yénifer, though it’s probably only their age. The sisters are taller and more slender, darker skinned than her niece, and both are luminous and funny. Yénifer had been studious and solemn. Even as a baby she’d had a certain gravity to her.