American Dirt : A Novel (2020)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  Lydia’s older sister, Yemi, had selected Lydia, who was just seventeen the year their father died and Yénifer was born, to be the girl’s godmother. Lydia remembers holding the baby over the baptismal font and crying. She made sure not to wear mascara that day so she wouldn’t stain the baptismal dress. She’d known she would cry, not from joy or the honor of being the godmother or the emotion of the moment, but because her father wasn’t there to see it. So Lydia’s own tears had splattered across the child’s forehead along with the holy water, and Lydia was surprised to see, through the blur of her vision, that the baby in her arms didn’t join in her tears. Yénifer’s eyes were wide and blinking. Her mouth, a perfect and puckered pink bow. Lydia loved that baby so much that she couldn’t imagine she’d ever love her own child more. When Luca was born, years later, Lydia learned the incomparability of that kind of love, of course. But it was still Yénifer, that somber, shining girl, who had allayed her grief when she lost the second baby. Wise little Yénifer at nine years old, who’d cried with her and stroked her forehead and reassured her, ‘But you do have a daughter, Tía. You have me.’

  The enormity of Lydia’s loss is incomprehensible. There are so many griefs at once that she can’t separate them. She can’t feel them. Beside her, the sisters talk lightly to Luca and he responds with his reanimated words. There’s an effervescence among them that feels extraordinary. The sound of Luca’s voice is an elixir.

  The sun feels hotter when they’re sitting still, and Lydia notices that her arms are as tan as childhood. Luca, too, is a shade browner than usual, and there are dots of perspiration all along his hairline beneath Sebastián’s cap. But the wait beneath that sapping sun is almost too brief, Lydia thinks. She could’ve used more time to talk herself into this. It’s not even two hours before the distant rumble of the train grows into their consciousness and all four of them rise without speaking and begin to ready themselves. In truth, Lydia’s in no way convinced that they’re actually going to go through with it. She hopes they do because they need to be on that train. And she hopes they don’t, because she doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want Luca to die. She feels as if she’s outside her own body, listening to that train approach, moving her backpack to the other side of the roadway, prompting Luca along in front of her. She packs their canteen into the front pocket of her backpack and zips it up. Even if she felt confident that she could jump onto a moving train, how can she ask her son to do this crazy thing? Her shoulders feel loose, her legs erratic beneath her. Adrenaline sluices all through her jittery body.

  Beside her, Luca follows a crack in the asphalt beneath his sneakers. He keeps his eyes and thoughts fixed on the minutiae. He leaves it to Mami to take in the broad sweep of the task at hand: the dun-colored grasses and scrubby trees crowding the embankment, the dome of blue overhead, the overpass and train tracks intersecting like a cross. The wind fuzzes through Luca’s hair as the noise of the train grows closer, the booming clatter and reverberation of those monster wheels hauling themselves along the metal of the track – the very loudness of that noise seems designed as a warning that enters through your ears but lodges in your sternum: stay away, stay away, stay away, don’t be crazy, don’t be crazy, don’t be crazy. Luca holds his backpack by the top handle, low in front of him with both hands. There’s one kid at school who’s a daredevil. Her name is Pilar, and she’s always doing crazy stunts. She leaps from the very top of the jungle gym. She flies from the highest arc of the swing. Once, she climbed a tree beside the school gate and shimmied out on an upper limb, from where she climbed onto the roof of the school building. She did cartwheels up there until the principal called her abuela to come talk her down. But not even Pilar would jump onto a moving train from an overpass, Luca thinks. Pilar would never, in a million years, believe steady, rule-following Luca capable of participating in such madness. He watches the nose of the train approach and disappear beneath the southern edge of the roadway. He turns then, and sees it emerge from beneath his feet. Mami peers over the edge of the low guardrail just as the train pulls itself into view.

  ‘It’s good.’ Rebeca smiles at them. ‘Nice and slow.’

  ‘Ready?’ Soledad says.

  Her little sister nods. Lydia’s face is grim while she watches the girls. Luca studies the stretch of the train and sees a few migrants clustered near the tail end, on the last five or six cars. One is standing, silhouetting his body into an X, and he waves at them. Luca waves back.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Soledad says.

  She and her sister line up beside each other, smack in the center of the track. They squat, holding their packs beneath them, and wait for the right car. They look for one that’s flat on top. One that has the kind of grating you can walk on, sit on, grab onto. The first half of the train is all rounded tanker cars, so they wait. And then finally, quite slowly, Soledad tosses her pack and then follows it. With one graceful, chaotic, suicidal lurch, she moves her body from the fixed to the moving, she drops – Lydia can’t tell how far it is – six feet? ten? – and then the girl is instantly receding, her form growing smaller as she moves away with the train.

  ‘Come on!’ she shouts back to her sister. ‘Now!’

  And then Rebeca, too, is gone, and Lydia realizes how quickly this has to happen, that they have no time to weigh their options, no time to consider best practices. She rejects the awareness that all her life she’s been afraid she would jump accidentally, like that girl from her favorite novel, from cliffs, from balconies, from bridges. But now she knows, with 100 percent certainty, she knows she would never have jumped, that the fear has always been an elaborate trick of her mind. Her heels are glued to the roadway. A week ago she’d have screamed at Luca to get back from there. She’d have told him not to stand so close to the edge. She’d have reached out and grabbed his arm to convince herself that he was safe, that he would stay put. Now she has to launch her child onto this moving train beneath them. The small cluster of migrants on the last few cars is approaching. They duck low to pass beneath the roadway and then, when they emerge on the other side, they’re facing Lydia, their arms open wide, they gesture at her to toss the backpacks. She tosses the backpacks. And then she grabs Luca by his two shoulders, stands behind him.

  ‘Step over,’ she instructs him.

  Luca steps over without hesitation or objection. His heels are on the roadway. The toes of his little blue sneakers stick out into the air as the train passes beneath them. Luca hums to cover the dreadful noise of the train.

  ‘Squat low,’ she tells him. ‘Just like the girls did.’

  He squats low. If he jumps from this place and dies, it will be because he did exactly what Lydia told him to do. She feels as though she’s watching herself in a nightmare doing a monstrous thing that makes her panic. A thing, thank God, that she would never do in real life. And then just as she’s about to reel him in, to crush his small head against her chest, to wrap him in her arms and weep with relief that she wakened in time, she hears it. With conviction, Sebastián’s voice, cutting through all the external and internal noise.

  The voice, then, when she opens her mouth and screams into Luca’s ear, is almost not her own. ‘Go, Luca! Jump!’

  Luca jumps. And every molecule in Lydia’s body jumps with him. She sees him, the tight tuck of him, how small he is, how absurdly brave he is, his muscles and bones, his skin and hair, his thoughts and words and ideas, the very bigness of his soul, she sees all of him in the moment when his body leaves the safety of the overpass and flies, just momentarily, upward because of the effort of his exertion, until gravity catches him and he descends toward the top of La Bestia. Lydia watches him drop, her eyes so big with fear they’ve almost left her body. And then he lands like a cat on all fours, and the velocity of his leap clashes with the velocity of the train, and he topples and rolls, and one leg splays toward the edge of the train, pulling his weight with it, and Lydia tries to scream his name, but her voice has
snagged and gone, and then one of the migrant men catches him. One big, rough hand on Luca’s arm, the other on the seat of his pants. And Luca, caught, safe in the strong arms of this train-top stranger, lifts his moving face to seek her. His eyes catch her eyes.

  ‘I did it, Mami!’ he screams. ‘Mami! Jump!’

  Without a thought in her head except Luca, she jumps.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The year before Sebastián’s murder, Mexico was the deadliest country in the world to be a journalist, no safer than an active war zone. No safer even than Syria or Iraq. Journalists were being murdered in cities all across the country. Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. And yet, because Los Jardineros didn’t specifically target reporters the way most cartels did, Sebastián hadn’t received an official cartel death threat for almost two years. So it’s not quite accurate to say that Sebastián and Lydia felt a false sense of security; no one in Acapulco felt secure. The free press was a critically endangered species in Mexico. But in the aftermath of their discovery that Lydia’s friend was La Lechuza, the absence of an explicit warning from him, combined with the fact of her fraught but genuine attachment to Javier, functioned as a sort of short-term analgesic for the worst of their personal fears.

  Sebastián continued to take the usual precautions: he avoided adhering too closely to a daily routine, he limited driving his recognizable orange Beetle to crime scenes, and whenever he wrote a particularly risky piece, he used the anonymous byline staff writer to conceal his identity. In those cases, the paper also sprang for a hotel room in the tourist district. He’d take Lydia and Luca and they’d hunker down for a few days out of sight. When it appeared that retaliation was not forthcoming, they’d reemerge and continue with their lives. But those safeguards were largely illusory. Sebastián knew that any research he conducted, any crime he investigated, any source he contacted, was a potential land mine. He was as careful as a truth-telling Mexican journalist can be.

  For her part, Lydia became hypervigilant for any signs of danger. Javier continued to visit her in the bookstore almost weekly, and the torment she’d felt the first night she’d discovered the truth about him slowly gave way to something else. She still sat with him, served him coffee, spoke with him about a range of subjects. She listened twice more when he read her poems from his Moleskine notebook. She even smiled authentically at him, and despite a sickening feeling of culpability and a reluctance to admit it, she was still charmed by him. His intellect, his warmth, his vulnerability and sense of humor – none of it had changed. Yet, when there was news of a fresh murder, which happened more infrequently than before but not infrequently enough, Lydia experienced a sort of exaggerated emotional flinch, and she knew that her careful retreat from him was not only necessary but also inevitable. Her behavior need only follow what her heart had already accomplished.

  ‘What if we tell him?’ Lydia said to Sebastián the week before Yénifer’s quinceañera.

  They’d dropped Luca at her sister, Yemi’s, house earlier for a sleepover with Adrián.

  ‘Tell who what?’

  ‘Tell Javier about the article. Before it comes out.’

  Sebastián closed his leather menu and set it down on his plate.

  ‘¿Estás loca, mujer?’

  She was buttering a warm roll from the covered basket, and didn’t look up at him. ‘Yes. But I think I’m serious, too.’ She pressed the butter into the bread and waited for it to soften.

  Sebastián looked away from her, out over the water. The restaurant was on a hilltop above the bay and it was dusk, and he could see lights winking through the valley below, their ghost-lights glimmering echoes in the water. He didn’t want to consider the idea. He wanted to consider the view and the menu and his beautiful wife. After years of narco journalism he’d become good at compartmentalizing, at putting all the ugliness away. Sebastián was skilled at enjoying himself. But he respected Lydia and didn’t want to be dismissive.

  ‘If we talk about this for two minutes, do you promise then that we can not talk about it for the rest of the night?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled and bit into her bread.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Why would we tell him? What’s the benefit of doing that?’

  She took a sip of water. ‘To gauge his response ahead of time, to know what we’re up against.’ Sebastián sat very still while he listened. ‘Maybe he’d even meet with you. You could get him to go on the record.’

  ‘Do you think he’d do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe? I mean, we know how smart he is. Maybe he’d see it as an opportunity to try and control the message. Get some good PR, get out ahead of the curve.’

  ‘Every narco has a Robin Hood complex.’

  ‘Right, so you appeal to that. Maybe he’d even like it.’

  ‘But that’s exactly what I’m afraid of. I can’t be beholden to him.’

  ‘No, I know.’

  ‘But he might not know. He might think this means I’m his new PR guy. I’m on his payroll after this.’

  ‘Ay.’ Lydia grimaced.

  ‘It’s too risky,’ Sebastián said, opening his menu. ‘What are you going to eat?’

  Lydia read the article on Monday evening, the night before it went to press. She and Sebastián had to calculate the level of risk, to determine their safest course of action for the coming days. The paper had offered to put them up in a hotel again, to get them out of sight. The piece would not be published under his name, but it would be easy enough to figure out who’d written it. Any one of his sources could reveal him to Javier. They already may have.

  Sebastián paced behind her while she read at the kitchen table from his laptop: la lechuza revealed: portrait of a drug lord. The story was accompanied by several photographs. Sebastián and his editor had selected a flattering picture of Javier, sitting elegantly with his legs crossed at the knee, one arm draped across the back of a velvet couch. He wore dark jeans and a tweed blazer, and looked every inch the bookish professor, his eyes warm behind the thick glasses, his face smiling but not smug. Lydia thought again of the first morning he’d come into the shop, how deeply his friendship, his vulnerability, had affected her in the months before she understood who he was. She still felt reluctant to learn more unpleasant things about him. She still felt a memory of fondness for him, which unnerved her. She pressed her eyes closed and took a deep breath before she began.

  She was amazed by Sebastián’s familiarity with his subject – he clearly knew a very different Javier than she did, and yet the account was both objective and compassionate. In her husband’s words, she recognized her friend’s intensity, but she also discovered for the first time the gruesome details of Javier’s capacity for cruelty. The beheadings were only the beginning. Los Jardineros were also known to dismember their victims and rearrange their body parts into horror show tableaux. According to Sebastián’s report, during Los Jardineros’ war with the previous cartel, Javier was rumored to have shot the two-year-old son of a rival while the boy’s father watched. He’d painted the man’s face with the blood of his murdered child. Those details had been mythologized, of course; there was no proof of that brutality, but when she read that, Lydia closed her eyes for nearly three minutes before she could continue. The article also highlighted the grisly statistics of Javier’s ascension: during the transition of power, Acapulco’s murder rate was the highest in Mexico and one of the highest in the world. The city hemorrhaged tourism, investment, young people, and that kind of bleeding was difficult to stanch even after the violence tapered off. It was also true that, though the bloodshed had become less visible to the average citizen in recent months, there were still a dozen or more murders in the city each week. In addition to those numbers, countless more had silently disappeared. The very essence of Acapulco had changed; its people were permanently altered. Entire neighborhoods were abandoned as people fled the rubble of their lives a
nd headed north. For those who left, el norte was the only destination. If a tourist mecca like Acapulco could fall, then nowhere in Mexico was safe.

  The profile drew a bright line between Javier’s ascent and the truth of the city’s ruin. It was a brutal new cosmopolis, and its ugliness was underscored by the memory of Acapulco’s glorious past. Sebastián’s account was heartbreaking, unvarnished, and utterly convincing. It also credited Javier with the dawning peace, commended the control he exercised over his men, and appealed to him for continued restraint. It ended with a psychological profile of the man himself, and as Lydia read it, she knew it to be exactly true. Unlike his contemporaries and predecessors, La Lechuza was not flashy, gregarious, or even particularly charismatic. He seemed enlightened. But like every drug lord who’s ever risen to such a rank, he was also shrewd, merciless, and ultimately delusional. He was a vicious mass murderer who mistook himself for a gentleman. A thug who fancied himself a poet. The article ended with the inclusion of a poem written by Javier himself, and Lydia’s mouth dropped clean open when she saw it there in print. She knew this poem. The first one he’d ever shared with her.

  ‘How in God’s name did you get this?’ she whispered.

  Sebastián stopped pacing long enough to lean over her shoulder. Lydia read the poem again, even more terrible printed there on-screen than it had been when Javier had entrusted it to her.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Sebastián said. ‘That was crazy. You know we run that annual poetry contest? His daughter, Javier’s daughter, sent it in. She submitted it on his behalf. I guess she wanted to surprise him.’

  ‘Wow,’ Lydia said. ‘Marta.’

  The inclusion of the poem was mortifying. It served to coalesce all the facts into a vivid portrayal and to corroborate, somehow, the accuracy of Sebastián’s description. As she closed the browser and leaned back in her chair, Lydia discovered that there were many different ways to feel horrified at once.