American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (21 page)

‘Was school the same there as it was back home?’

Rebeca makes a sad smile. ‘No, Luca. Nothing was the same.’ She turns to look over her shoulder at Soledad. ‘But we tried to make the best of it anyway. We never had much schooling at home, or only when we were little, so it was hard for us to catch up. And there weren’t many other
indios
there, so we felt out of place. We hoped to take the bus back up the mountain some weekends with Papi so we could visit with Mami and Abuela and our friends, so we could gulp the clouds and refill our spirits, but weeks and then months went by, and Papi was always working, and we never had extra time or money for the bus, and then Sole, she accidentally got a boyfriend.’

Luca holds up one hand. ‘Wait. How do you accidentally get a boyfriend?’

‘Sh,’ Rebeca says. ‘Don’t let her hear you.’

Luca drops his voice, leans closer. ‘But how?’

‘Like, she was walking home one day by herself and this boy noticed her, and he called to her. That was always happening to her wherever she went in the city, so she just did what she always did, which was to ignore him, but he didn’t like that, so he chased after her and grabbed her by the throat and a few other parts and he told her that he was her boyfriend now.’

Luca feels his face wash into a shade of gray.

‘
Ay,
I shouldn’t be telling you all this stuff,’ Rebeca says. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, I can handle it,’ Luca says. ‘You don’t have to be sorry.’

Rebeca picks at a loose orange thread on the seam of her jeans. ‘I haven’t been able to talk to anybody about this since it happened,’ she says. ‘Only Soledad, and she won’t speak of it.’

Luca nods. ‘I understand.’

‘But it’s like you’re my friend, you know?’ Rebeca smiles.

‘I am,’ Luca says, and he feels proud.

‘You seem a lot older than you are. Like you’re this old man in this tiny body.’

Luca tries to take this as a compliment. His body isn’t tiny; it’s only moderately smaller than a typical eight-year-old’s. ‘I’ve seen bad things, too,’ he assures her.

‘Yeah?’

He nods.

‘I guess you wouldn’t be on top of this train if you hadn’t.’

‘
Es un prerrequisito,
’ Luca says. A prerequisite.

Rebeca nods.

‘My
papi
died,’ he whispers. He hasn’t wanted to say those words out loud, to admit it. This is the first time, and he can feel the words leaving his chest, like something rotten has broken off inside him and fallen away. There is a ragged wound now, where he’d been holding those words.

‘Oh no,’ Rebeca says. She leans forward like she’s suddenly off balance, but then she touches her forehead against his and they both close their eyes.

The rest of the sisters’ story emerges in stolen moments over the next
several days. How Soledad’s unwanted ‘boyfriend’ turned out to be the
palabrero
of the local
clica
of an international gang. How he was, therefore, just violent and powerful enough to do whatever he liked to her without fear of reprisal, but not quite violent or powerful enough to preserve her all for himself. How Soledad’s life quickly deteriorated into a series of lurid traumas. How Soledad confided some of it to Rebeca but went to extravagant lengths to hide the situation from their
papi
because she understood that, were he to discover her circumstances, his resulting efforts to protect her would get him killed.

Rebeca knows that Iv
á
n, which was the name of the unwanted boyfriend, sometimes allowed Soledad to go to school, and sometimes did not. But there is much she doesn’t know – how he always allowed Soledad to go home at nights because the idea of her having a curfew served, in the depravity of his mind, to sustain her virtue. How her decency, her moral resistance to him, her very obvious loathing, all turned him on. How, as Soledad began to perceive this, she sometimes pretended to enjoy his company in hopes he’d grow tired of her. And how now, when Soledad remembers that pretend enjoyment, she feels flooded with shame. It was futile anyway, because that effort at subterfuge was no match for her beauty.

One day Iv
á
n showed Soledad a picture of the hotel where her father worked. He said her father’s name to her, and then gave her a cell phone and instructed her to answer it whenever it rang or beeped, no matter what she was doing. He showed her how to text. ‘It’s good to be alive, right, Sole?’ he said, and she cringed at the way he shortened her name, as if he were someone she loved.

During all those weeks of suffering, Soledad, who knew the only flimsy protection she could offer her baby sister was her unaccustomed distance, barely saw Rebeca at all. When Iv
á
n called, Soledad stopped whatever she was doing, as instructed, and she went to him. She left her shopping basket in the middle of the aisle, or got out of the line where she waited for the bus, or lifted herself out of the chair in the middle of her reading class, and she moved across the city to him like a zombie magnet.

Twice, Soledad saw Iv
á
n shoot people in the back of the head. Once, she watched him kick a nine-year-old boy in the stomach until he coughed up blood because that was one of the ways they initiated new
chequeos
into the gang. That day, she asked him what would happen if she didn’t answer her cell phone sometime, and he backhanded her in the mouth, leaving a bruise along her lower jaw and a welt on her lip that was difficult to explain to Papi. ‘I only meant if I was in the shower or something,’ she explained to Iv
á
n afterward, ‘or if my
papi
was there and I couldn’t answer.’ And when she said this, Iv
á
n cocked back and pretended he was going to hit her again, and Soledad winced and cowered, and Iv
á
n laughed and said, ‘Just answer your phone,
puta
.’ And after that, he let one of his homeboys pay him to be alone with her for an hour.

Soledad didn’t actively want to die, not really. She’d always been a happy child. She remembered how it had felt to be happy, and she wasn’t sure she could ever feel that feeling again, but the memory of it provided her with some measure of hope. Still, during that long stretch of weeks with Iv
á
n, there were plenty of times when it crossed her mind to drag a razor blade across the raised tangle of vessels in her wrist. Or to lift the homemade gun from where Iv
á
n placed it on his bedside table before he did what he did to her, to train it on him and pull the trigger. To shoot him and watch his brains splatter satisfyingly against the ceiling above him, and then to turn the gun on herself before his homies could swoop in and punish her. To be done with it all, to be free from this repetitive torture. But then she thought of her
papi,
the suffering her release would cause him. Her
mami
and
abuela
back home in the cloud forest, too, when Papi would have to go home to their mountain place and deliver the news. But more than any of that, even, Soledad thought of Rebeca. Her sister was afraid, but still intact. Rebeca was still undiscovered, and it was the improbable miracle of that truth that kept Soledad going. The possibility of her baby sister’s salvation.

Then one afternoon, Iv
á
n lay in bed wearing boxer shorts and smoking a cigarette. He blew the smoke toward Soledad where she sat slightly curled over herself on the edge of the bed near his feet. ‘So I heard you got a sister,’ he said, nudging her backside with his toe. Soledad was very grateful not to be facing him when he said this, because she knew her face would’ve told the whole story of panic that these words provoked. ‘How come you never mentioned her?’

Soledad was wrapped in a sheet; it was tucked beneath her arms. She made her face into the approximation of a smile and turned it toward him. ‘We’re not close,’ she said. ‘She’s nothing like me.’

Outside she could hear two of Iv
á
n’s homeboys arguing, but there were also children playing somewhere beyond, squealing, chasing one another up the block. The sunlight rocketed through the open window.

‘Nothing like you, huh?’ he said, sitting up and yanking the sheet down to her waist. He tapped the bottom of her breast and watched it
react. ‘That’s not what I heard.’ Then he tossed his still-full cigarette into the ashtray beside the bed and sat up on his knees. ‘Damn, girl. Lemme get in there again.’

Soledad endured him with something more immediate and terrifying than her regular revulsion, and when he was finished, and he instructed her to come back in the morning and bring her sister, she went home, packed her backpack, took all the little bit of money Papi had managed to save from the coffee can on top of the refrigerator, and then sat down at the table to wait for Rebeca to get home. She wrote Papi a note:

Querido Papi:

I love you so so much, Papi, and I’m sorry for these words I have to write that I know will break your heart. And I’m sorry for taking all your savings, but I know that you work hard and save this money only for us, and I know that you’d insist we take it and use it to get away from here if you knew the terrible things that were happening to me. And I didn’t tell you sooner because I thought I could protect you and Rebeca if I stayed quiet and just did what they told me to do, but there are monsters in this city, Papi, and now I’m so scared, and I have to get Rebeca out of here before they hurt her, too. So we’re leaving today, Papi. We are already gone. And you must be very careful and look after yourself, please. We are taking you with us in our hearts, and we will call you when we get to
el norte,
Papi. And we’ll send for you when we have jobs, and you can come to us, and you can bring Mami and Abuela, too, and we will all be together again as it is meant to be.

God bless you, Papi, until we meet again.

All my love, from your devoted daughter, full of sorrow,

Soledad

Much of this Rebeca doesn’t know. But she does know that Soledad texted their cousin C
é
sar in Maryland that afternoon while she waited for Rebeca to get home. And she knows that C
é
sar didn’t ask any questions because he already knew all the worst possible answers and all he wanted to do was get them out of there. Rebeca knows that C
é
sar asked if they could wait a few days so he could try to arrange for a coyote to bring them all the way from Honduras to
el norte,
but Soledad told him they couldn’t wait. They were leaving today, right now. Rebeca knows that C
é
sar has since prepaid for their crossing with a trustworthy coyote who will meet them at the border. Rebeca doesn’t know that the sum of money their cousin paid for their crossing was $4,000 each. But even if she had known, that kind of money doesn’t even make sense to her. It’s so far into the realm of the incomprehensible that it might as well have been $4 million.

As Rebeca reveals what scraps of story she does have to Luca, he starts to understand that this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into
el norte
beyond. Some, like Rebeca, share their stories carefully, selectively, finding a faithful ear and then chanting their words like prayers. Other migrants are like blown-open grenades, telling their anguish compulsively to everyone they meet, dispensing their pain like shrapnel so they might
one day wake to find their burdens have grown lighter. Luca wonders what it would feel like to blow up like that. But for now he remains undetonated, his horrors sealed tightly inside, his pin fixed snugly in place.

Chapter Seventeen

For both Lydia and the sisters, there’s a constant tug-
of-war between the gruesome feeling that something’s chasing them, that they must move quickly away, and a physical hesitation, a reluctance to move blindly toward whatever unknown demons may loom in the road ahead. The Casa del Migrante they find in Celaya is a respite from that tug-of-war, and as such, after a sleepless night outdoors for Lydia, a holy blessing without compare.

It’s only midday when they arrive. Luca and Rebeca play basketball in the yard and no one else can join, some complicated game with jumbled rules of their own devising. Lydia and Soledad sit quietly together, watching from a nearby bench. They help in the kitchen, listening to
las noticias
on television, and then Lydia naps. When she wakens, she watches her son playing dominoes with Rebeca. She notes how quickly those two have bridged the gap between their respective ages, eight and fourteen – Luca seems to have grown up and Rebeca to have simplified quite neatly – so they meet seamlessly in the middle. It feels as though they’ve known each other forever, as though these girls have always been here, waiting to become a part of their lives. That night Luca asks if he can snuggle in beneath Rebeca’s arm in her bunk.

‘It’s not appropriate.’ Lydia draws the line.

Luca knew it was a long shot anyway, but hardly any of the rules from his old life seem to apply anymore, so he figured it was worth asking. He climbs in bed without complaint. Lydia hauls her backpack beneath the sheets by her feet and wraps its strap twice around her ankle. They all sleep soundly. Glory, glory to have a door with a lock.

Soledad has told Lydia nothing of where she and her sister came from or what they endured. Lydia’s said nothing of her family’s circumstances either, but there’s that silent bond of knowing between them regardless, a magic that’s marginally maternal, but entirely female. So it’s not surprising that in the morning, the girl, who seems much older than just the eighteen months that separate her from her sister, and who’s not typically so forthcoming about private matters regarding her body, confides to Lydia that she’s pregnant. Taking her cue from Soledad, Lydia endeavors to deliver her response to this news in a calm, unvarnished manner.

‘Your baby will be a US citizen,’ she whispers across the top of her coffee cup.

Soledad shakes her head and stands up from the table to clear her plate. ‘The baby isn’t mine,’ she says. When she stretches her arms above her and her baggy T-shirt grazes the waist of her jeans, her tummy is still flat.

That day and night at
la casa
are so significant in their restorative value that, in the weeks to come, when they think back to the halcyon memory of this place, their stay here will seem much longer than it was. Like all priests in Mexico, the padre who runs
la casa
wears regular street clothes, a yellow polo shirt and a softened pair of blue jeans with a tar stain on one leg. His only religious adornment is a simple wooden cross that hangs from a leather cord around his neck. He’s slender, with gray hair and glasses. There are more than twenty migrants resuming their journey today, and the padre gathers them in the yard before they leave. He gives a speech that Lydia thinks of as a kind of pep talk with an identity crisis – because he means to encourage them, but there’s no pep in his talk. He stands on an upturned milk crate in front of the gathered crowd, and mostly, he warns them.

‘If it’s possible for you to turn back, do so now. If you can go home again and make a life for yourself where you came from, if you can return there safely, I implore you: please do so now. If there is any other place for you to go, to stay away from these trains, to stay away from
el norte,
go there now.’ Luca has his arm around Rebeca’s waist, his head leaning in, her arm around his shoulder. Lydia looks at their faces; they do not flinch from these hard words. Some of the other migrants shift their weight nervously beneath them. ‘If it’s only a better life you seek, seek it elsewhere,’ the padre continues. ‘This path is only for people who have no choice, no other option, only violence and misery behind you. And your journey will grow even more treacherous from here. Everything is working against you, to thwart you. Some of you will fall from the trains. Many will be maimed or injured. Many will die. Many, many of you will be kidnapped, tortured, trafficked, or ransomed. Some will be lucky enough to survive all of that and make it as far as Estados Unidos only to experience the privilege of dying alone in the desert beneath the sun, abandoned by a corrupt coyote, or shot by a narco who doesn’t like the look of you. Every single one of you will be robbed. Every one. If you make it to
el norte,
you will arrive penniless, that’s a guarantee. Look around you. Go ahead – look at each other. Only one out of three will make it to your destination alive. Will it be you?’ He points at a man in his fifties with a neatly trimmed beard and a fresh T-shirt.

‘
¡S
í
, se
ñ
or!
’ the man answers.

‘Will it be you?’ He points to a woman about Lydia’s age with a silent toddler on her hip.

‘
¡S
í
, se
ñ
or!
’ she says.

‘Will it be you?’ he points at Luca.

Lydia feels a crush of wild despair steal over her, but Luca lifts his small fist in the air and shouts his response.
‘¡S
í
, ser
é
yo!’

The speech does the job of energizing the migrants and steeling their resolve, which in turn makes them restless and impatient during the long wait for the train. In the third hour, a few give up waiting and begin to walk. In the fourth and fifth hours, more follow. Luca, Lydia, and the girls head toward the western edge of the city in search of an overpass, but the only one they find is way too high. Jumping from there would be suicide. So they search instead for a curve where the train might slow down. It’s midafternoon by the time La Bestia finally arrives, and it’s more crowded than they’ve seen it before. Even from a distance, Lydia can see the silhouette of migrants atop the cars. It’s moving much faster than when they boarded yesterday at San Miguel de Allende.

Lydia nearly says they should wait, they’re not going to make it. She wants to articulate her hesitation, but she’s not quick enough, and now the train is too loud. The noise thunders into her bones. They all run, and she holds Luca’s hand tightly in her fist. The men atop the train shout down to them, instructions and encouragement. Rebeca goes up first, and then Soledad, who reaches back for Luca. He grabs at her with his free hand, and there’s a terrifying moment where he’s stretched between them, one arm taut with Soledad on the shrieking beast, and the other linked to Lydia racing beneath. He’s like taffy, soft and exposed. And then Lydia hurls his little arm toward the train, and he’s up. Soledad has him, and then the men from above, lifting. He is safe, he is safe. Lydia runs, not yet relieved, not until she joins him there, she runs and the train is picking up speed and she’s falling behind the ladder, and she can’t keep up, and then a burst of panic makes her legs go like pistons and she grabs at the metal bars, terrified, terrified that her legs won’t be able to maintain this speed, that they’ll drop, that she’ll go under, but this is not her day, because all at once her feet have found the bottom rung, and her hands are only one rung above them, and the train is picking up speed so quickly now, she can’t believe the velocity, but her body, all four of her limbs are attached to the train now, and she’s curled there at the bottom of the ladder like a bug, and she allows herself one tiny sob of relief before she uncurls herself and, pushing up from the bottom rung, begins to climb. When she gets to the top she reaches for Luca, and she straps them down quickly with the belts, and then she holds him and cries quietly into his hair until her heart begins to calm.

Lydia wants to keep Luca and the sisters to herself, to set their little group apart from the others as a unit. But the men are so friendly, so eager to help. Too eager, she worries. There aren’t many women on La Bestia, and very few children, so Lydia feels noticed by every single man they
see. She’s aware that she and her companions
represent
something to these men. They look like home. Or they look like salvation. Or they look like prey. To an
halc
ó
n
they might look like reward money. And even if none of that were true, the two sisters cause a stir wherever they go, just by the very presence of their faces. Lydia is distracted by these observations, which is why, despite her constant watchfulness, she doesn’t immediately notice the boy near the other end of their train car watching her.

But Luca does. And he remembers. And in the act of remembering, he experiences a strange, incongruous moment of satisfaction, a brief wash of endorphins he’s never noticed before, but that his brain has been performing all his life, a slight chemical self-congratulatory pleasure for achieving this task of almost perfect recall: Luca has seen that face before. He recognizes that boy, and so even before the tattoo is visible from where the boy is sitting cross-legged at the other end of the train car, Luca recollects it – the bloody sickle creeping out of the sock. The three drops of bloodred ink dripping from the blade. Luca shivers beneath the hot sun. The boy is staring at Mami. And then, as Luca watches him, he retrieves a phone from his pocket, scrolls around a little bit, and then looks back at Mami again. Then he puts it in his pocket. Luca is paralyzed by fear. A moment passes before he can give wind to his voice.

‘Mami,’ he says simply, and he thinks he says it quite calmly, though his body, still strapped to the top of that train, feels like a wild flap of panic. Mami leans in but not close enough. He flutters his hand so she understands.
Come here. Get closer. Do it quickly
. Lydia scoots closer to him.

‘Mami, I recognize someone.’

These words alone are enough to send a slice of cold down Lydia’s spine. ‘Okay,’ she says, willing her brain to slow down. Okay. ‘Who is it?’ Her arms and legs feel like they’ve turned to liquid, but the fingers of one hand stay tightly curled around the grating. The other hand goes automatically to the chain at her neck. She slips her index finger inside Sebasti
á
n’s wedding ring.

‘Don’t look,’ Luca says. ‘He’s staring at you, at us.’

Lydia’s mantra comes heroically crashing through her consciousness, penetrating the violent static of this new information.
Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think,
her brain tells her. ‘Okay,’ she repeats. ‘Who?’

Luca leans so his lips graze the top of her ear. ‘The boy from the first Casa del Migrante at Huehuetoca.’

Lydia breathes deeply.
Okay.
Some boy they crossed paths with along the way. She feels relief in the jellylike roll of her shoulders. ‘Oh, Luca,’ she says. And she wants to reprimand him for scaring her to death, but how is he supposed to know what may or may not provoke a stampede of dread in the confusing wasteland of their new life? So she also wants to laugh, to kiss him, to tell him not to worry so much. She puts her arm around him. ‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘It’s okay.’

‘Don’t you remember, that really bad kid – that cholo who got kicked out of the
casa
for bothering that girl? He did something bad to her?’

Yes, she remembers.
Oh shit.
The women at breakfast claimed he was a
sicario
.

Only moments ago, Lydia had dared to feel comforted by their unlikely progress. She’d allowed herself to indulge in the new fear of anonymous, indiscriminate threats. Now here is some
sicario
from God-
knows-what cartel, staring her down from a hundred yards away. She looks at the other migrants seated around them. Any one of them could be a narco. Any one of them could be a Jardinero. She folds herself over her legs so her face is nearly touching the grating in front of her, or rather, her body does this without her mind instructing it to. An instinct to hide herself, to melt into the scenery, to disappear. Luca leans down, too.

‘There’s something else,’ he says, because he knows, although he doesn’t understand how he knows it or what it means, that there’s something deeply unsettling about the tattoo.

‘What is it?’ Lydia is ready for this information, whatever it is. She opens the door to it.

‘A tattoo. He has a tattoo.’

Her machete is strapped to her shin beneath her pant leg. She can feel the cinch of the holster, the way it presses into her skin. She whispers to Luca. ‘What sort of tattoo?’

‘Like a big, curved knife, Mami,’ he says. ‘With three drops of blood.’

Lydia’s mouth goes dry, her fingers cold. Her body trembles from the inside out, core to tip, beginning in her lungs. But to Luca, her face looks calm and impassive.

‘Like a sickle?’ She needs, but does not want, clarity. ‘Like this?’ She traces the shape of it on the palm of his hand with her finger.

Luca nods.

‘Thank you for telling me,
mijo,
’ she says. ‘You did the right thing. Good boy.’ She touches his ear.

Before Lydia can formulate a plan, before she can absorb this information, indeed, before she can even turn her face in the direction Luca has indicated to glimpse the boy with the Jardinero tattoo, there’s a collective shriek and terrible commotion two cars up. They turn instinctively in the direction of the clamor. Everyone holds their breath and then almost immediately, with a long hoot of its whistle, the train enters a tunnel and all is in darkness.