American Dirt : A Novel (2020) (39 page)

‘So you were in detention for two months?’ Nicol
á
s asks.

Marisol nods.

‘What was that like?’

She pauses to consider the question, and as she remembers, she winces. ‘I mean
.
.
.’ She gropes for a word to encompass her memories of that place, but she can’t find one substantial enough. ‘Horrible?’ she says. ‘Like you’d expect, I guess. I slept on a mat in a cold cell. It was freezing all the time,
como una hielera
. No blankets, no pillows, only those tinfoil things. I woke up stiff and sore every morning, with a kink in my neck. They wouldn’t replace my contact lens solution, so when that ran out, at least I didn’t have to look at the walls closing in.’

Nicol
á
s cringes while she talks. ‘I couldn’t hack it. I’m claustrophobic.’

‘Yeah, it was utterly dehumanizing.’ Marisol sighs. ‘But my lawyer thought I had a good chance, so I told myself to be strong, that it would all be worth it.’

‘Good for you, sticking it out,’ Nicol
á
s says. ‘I left after two days. They were going to transfer me to El Paso, so I did voluntary departure. I knew I’d rather walk through the desert than spend another day in that place.’

‘But it was such a waste of time!’ Marisol says. ‘Two months I sat in that cell without my daughters.’ She presses her eyes closed and then opens them again. ‘So many mothers in there without their daughters, without their children.’ Her eyes fall to the floor and her voice drops to a whisper, but they can all hear it in the hushed room. ‘Most of those women were separated from their children at the border,’ she says. ‘When they were caught coming in. Some had babies taken right out of their arms. I thought those women would lose their minds. They didn’t even know where their children were – some of them were too young to talk, too young to remember their names.’

Lydia leans forward over Luca, who’s sitting between her legs. She pinches his T-shirt between her finger and thumb. It’s too much. They all glance at her without meaning to. They don’t want her to think the same thoughts they’re thinking, so they quickly look away. Marisol tries to change the subject. Back to Nicol
á
s. ‘Weren’t you eligible for a student visa? As a PhD candidate?’

‘I took a sabbatical for one semester.’ He shrugs. ‘Didn’t realize I had to file extra paperwork for that.’

‘So that was it?’ Marisol asks. ‘You got deported because of paperwork?’

‘Yep.’ He nods, straightens his spine, and spreads his hands
wide, palms up, as if he’s the product of a magic trick. His deportation is a ludicrous feat of wonder.

Lydia will not think about any of it. Most especially, she won’t think about those families separated at the border. The children lifted straight out of their mothers’ arms. She absolutely cannot. It’s not possible, to have made it this far, and then to lose him.
No.
She runs her hands through Luca’s hair. She makes her fingers into the shapes of scissors and thinks about the haircut she’ll give him when they get to Arizona. This is what her brain can hold.

At midday, they take a siesta. They will sleep for the afternoon and get
up in time to have one last meal in Mexico before tonight’s journey. They stretch their bodies out in the spaces they’ve claimed for sleep, Choncho and Slim joining the two quiet men in the back bedroom, their sons David and Ricard
í
n finding space in the hallway and on the kitchen floor. Lorenzo and Nicol
á
s take the leather couches. Only Soledad cannot rest. She returns to pacing the street outside. Lorenzo goes to the window while everyone else is asleep and watches her.

When she returns to the hot, quiet apartment, she’s startled to find Lorenzo sitting up on the couch looking at her. His shoes are off, but it doesn’t appear he’s been sleeping. She moves quickly past him and into the kitchen, where she fills her water bottle from the tap and takes a long drink. She can feel him looking at her back, but she doesn’t turn to intercept his gaze. She refills the bottle again, and then turns toward the bedroom where her sister and the others are sleeping.

‘Yo, what’s your hurry?’ His voice is quiet, careful not to wake Nicol
á
s, who’s breathing heavily on the facing couch. Lorenzo’s attempt at a flirtatious tone comes out menacing instead.

But Soledad’s not afraid of him. There are a dozen other people in this apartment; there’s nothing he can do to her here. Besides, what Soledad has been through in these last months? She’s hard as nails. Almost nothing scares her anymore. She turns and narrows her eyes at him. She makes her voice unambiguous. ‘I’m in a hurry to get some rest. You should be, too.’

Lorenzo adjusts his position on the couch, stretches his torso out in front of him, and leans his head back against the cushions. ‘Yeah. Whatever,’ he says.

Soledad realizes then that he’s holding a cell phone in his hand. He leans forward and tosses it toward the arm of the couch by his feet. She freezes, turns her back on him again, and takes one step toward the bedroom before changing her mind. She turns back to face him. ‘That phone work?’

He picks his head up off the couch. ‘Pssh, yeah, what you think, it’s for decoration?’

She takes two steps back toward the living room, sets her water bottle
on the counter, and hovers there for a moment. She doesn’t want to be indebted to a person like this, but it could be days before she has another opportunity. ‘Can I make a call?’

Lorenzo smirks at her. ‘What’s it worth to you?’

Soledad feels something sour swarm up in her mouth. She doesn’t answer but pretends with her face that the joke’s funny. Her smile is hollow, but she sees how it works on him – just that – a fake smile, and he goes all gooey and hopeful. In his mind, she’s already naked.
What a scumbag,
she thinks.

He holds the phone out to her. ‘Go ahead.’

She stretches so she can take the phone from a distance. ‘Thanks,’ she says. The door to the bedroom is already open for air circulation, and the lights are off inside. Rebeca and Luca sleep nearest the door, wrapped up together and dreaming, because Lydia’s initial objection to that kind of closeness is so far gone they hardly remember it now. Sole takes two steps into the room and squats down beside her sleeping sister. She hesitates to wake her.

‘Rebeca,’ she whispers, touching her sister’s shoulder lightly. Luca’s eyes pop open, but Rebeca is still asleep. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says to Luca, but he’s already fallen back asleep. ‘Rebeca,’ she says again, shaking her sister more roughly. Her sister breathes deeply and doesn’t move. Soledad stands and moves quietly through the apartment, up the stairs, and back out to the street.

She removes the tiny scrap of paper with the hospital’s phone number from where it’s folded into a tiny square in her pocket. She presses the numbers. It takes her two tries, but then the phone at the Hospital Nacional in San Pedro Sula is ringing.

‘Hello?’

There are several transfers before Soledad hears the familiar voice of the nurse Ángela on the line. She can feel adrenaline coursing through her shoulders, her neck. When Soledad looks back on this moment for the rest of her life, when she relives it, really, she will come to believe that she already knew what the nurse was going to say, she knew it well before the words emerged from her mouth and traveled into that faraway phone, before they bounced out across cell towers and satellites and reverberated back into this borrowed cell phone here on the border of the United States, and fell into her waiting ear. She will come to believe that she knew it from the moment Lorenzo handed her that phone, from before that even, from when she first stood on the pavement in Nogales and wrapped her fingers around the bars that demarcated the border of Estados Unidos, from when she sat on that cold, dirty toilet in Navolato while that unwanted but still loved baby fell out of her, from the first day she felt the thudding and thrumming of La Bestia beneath her bones, from the first time Iv
á
n raped her, from way before that even, before she ever set eyes on the city of San Pedro Sula, from the days when her father used to hoist her onto his shoulders and she’d wrap her tiny baby-arms around his sweaty forehead while he swiped a path for them through the cloud forest with his machete. She will come to believe that she knew this truth from the day she was born, when her father first held her in his arms and gazed upon her beautiful face with love and love and love.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Ángela says.

Alone in the street, Soledad bends in half, planting the palms of her hands hard against her knees. She doesn’t cry, but instead shakes and shakes. She paces but cannot find anywhere to escape her panic. She says the word
no
out loud more than a hundred times, tight through the garble of her seizing throat. She flaps her hands to try to shake the adrenaline out of her, but the grief has descended like a demon beast, and she realizes immediately that the burden of that grief must be hers alone to bear. Rebeca must survive the desert, and she might not survive the desert if she has to do it while carrying this monster on her back. She will not tell her sister.
My fault.
So she gets down on her two knees right there in the street and feels the sharp pebbles pressing up through her jeans. She prays and prays that God has taken Papi quickly into heaven, that somehow her father will forgive her for the death she has caused him.

‘I’m so sorry, Papi. Forgive me, Papi, please,’ she says over and over again.

Her legs feel shaky so she moves to sit on the curb, wondering vaguely how the news will travel up the mountain to the village. She wonders if Mami and Abuela already know. She wonders if she will ever see them or hear their voices again. Because Papi was the only hub connecting them, and now he’s gone. One of the other men from the mountain who works in the city will hear, she thinks, and in sorrow he will carry that unholy news on the bus, three hours up the narrow, disappearing roads into the clouds. He’ll deliver it to Mami and Abuela. She closes her eyes to that thought. She puts it away from her because Soledad has been through enough to know that she’s at her limit, that she can go no further into that anguish without vanishing forever. The only thing that matters now is Rebeca. She can still save Rebeca.

When she stands up from that curb, Soledad is already a ghost of herself. Perhaps very deep within her, there’s still some smoldering wick that was once the flame of her person, but she cannot feel it there. She opens the door of the apartment, and descends.

Chapter Thirty

They’ve all packed their scant belongings, prepared and
eaten the remaining food, and are drinking instant coffee by the time the sun begins to slant toward the horizon and El Chacal returns. Beto has nothing to pack. Marisol has ditched her black wedges in favor of some Adidas trail hikers. No one talks as they ascend the staircase out of the apartment one last time. There are two open-bed pickup trucks parked outside, and the back of one is half-filled with several dozen plastic gal
lon jugs of water, painted black. Lorenzo approaches the white truck, so Lydia herds Luca toward the blue one. Beto, the sisters, and Marisol all climb in after them, among the water jugs. Nicol
á
s, too. He sits beside Marisol.

‘So, do you have a girlfriend back at college?’ she asks.

Nicol
á
s shakes his head.

‘You know, my daughter is a college student in San Diego. A sociology major. What’s your field of study?’

Nicol
á
s’s eyebrows animate themselves across his forehead. ‘I study evolutionary biology and biodiversity in the desert,’ he says.

‘Oh.’ Marisol is unable to muster any appropriate follow-up questions.

‘What the hell is that?’ Beto asks.

Nicol
á
s laughs. ‘It means I study how organisms evolve, and what environmental factors influence that evolution, and vice versa.’

Beto looks at him blankly.

‘Specifically, I study the migration patterns of certain desert butterflies, and the effect of those changing migration patterns on certain flowering shrubs.’

‘Desert butterflies, huh?’ Beto says suspiciously.

‘Yes.’

‘You study, like, where they go?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that’s, like, a whole job? That’s all you do?’

Nicol
á
s grins at Beto.

‘Man, I want to go to college,’ the boy says.

El Chacal is securing the liftgate at the back of the other truck, and now he walks over to theirs. He looks at them individually, checking their gear. His own shoes are solid, lightweight hikers, dusty enough to appear as if they could belong to any migrant, albeit one with the means to buy himself boots for the trek. He’s dressed like he was the day he met them in the plaza – close-fitting jeans and a gray Under Armour T-shirt this time. His backpack, sitting on the seat in the cab, is tiny. His jacket, made of waterproof Gore-Tex, is light enough to tie around his slim waist. His cheeks, as usual, are a cheerful shade of pink in the light brown expanse of his face. Everything about his body seems designed for the wilderness. He is lean, muscular, compact, and he moves with efficiency as he steps from migrant to migrant, examining their footwear, their moods, the weight of their packs. Nobody with a sniffle or a sneeze will be allowed to make the journey. He stops when he gets to Beto.

‘Where’s your bag?’ he asks.

Everyone else is clutching their pack in front of them. Beto has nothing.

‘I don’t need no bag,
g
ü
ey,
’ Beto says. ‘Everything I need is right here.’ He taps on the side of his head with one finger.

‘That crazy brain of yours going to keep you warm tonight?’

‘What are you talking about, warm?’ Beto says. ‘
No manches, g
ü
ey.
We’re in the middle of a heat wave. It’s like a million degrees outside.’

It is April in the Sonoran Desert, and uncommonly warm this week. Today’s high was ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit.

‘So you don’t have a jacket? A coat, sweater, nothing?’ El Chacal asks.

‘I’ll be fine!’ Beto says.

‘Out of the truck.’ El Chacal unlatches and folds down the tailgate.

‘
Ó
rale,
g
ü
ey,
’ Beto says. ‘For real, I’m fine, I don’t need a jacket.’

‘Out,’ El Chacal repeats. ‘I was very specific. I told you what you needed, I told you what would happen if you didn’t adequately prepare.’

‘But—’

‘And you find yourself a coyote who says he will take you across without the right gear? Don’t fucking pay him. Because he doesn’t give a shit about you, and you will die, understand? Come on, now. Out.’

‘But I’ll get one! I’ll get a jacket!’ Beto’s voice is rising to a frantic pitch.

‘It’s too late,’ the coyote says, slapping a hand impatiently on the bed of the truck. ‘Get a jacket and I’ll take you next time.’

Beto stands up and begins to move slowly toward the tailgate, reluctance in every cell of his body. Luca tugs on Mami’s arm, but she
doesn’t respond. She should have checked with him. He seems a thousand years old, but he’s only ten, and he saved them; he bought their passage. So how hard would it have been for her to ask:
Now, Beto, you have a good jacket, right?
But she didn’t. And now it’s too late. There’s nothing she can do. She squeezes Luca’s hand, a meager apology for her failure of foresight, her scarcity of heroism. The rest of the migrants look helplessly at Beto, but Nicol
á
s is unzipping his pack. Beto sits with a thump on the back of the liftgate, his feet dangling over, procrastinating. He riffles through his brain for an argument or plea he might make.

‘Here.’ Nicol
á
s tosses a heavy, fleece-lined, zippered hoodie onto the boy’s lap.

Beto’s face brightens at once, and Lydia heaves a relieved smile. Luca grins. Beto snatches up the thick, brown fabric and scrambles back to his feet. He ties the arms of the hoodie around his waist while Nicol
á
s zips his backpack again.

El Chacal watches the young PhD student. ‘You have another one for yourself?’

‘And a thermal, plus a rain poncho.’

The coyote nods and slams the liftgate back into position. Beto has already returned to settle himself back into his spot beside Luca, but El Chacal walks around the side of the pickup truck and speaks quietly into the boy’s ear. He leans his hands on the edge of the truck, and Beto twists to face him, one knee flopped over, the other propped up.

‘You were lucky Nicol
á
s helped you out,’ the coyote says to the boy. ‘I never take kids across, and this is why. I’m not trying to babysit, and I don’t want anybody dying of stupidity. Don’t make me regret bringing you.’

Beto’s face endures a rare slash of stillness, and the sincerity of it threatens to rob Lydia of her careful restraint.

‘When I tell you that something’s important, you heed me, understand?’ El Chacal says. Beto nods earnestly. ‘Because when I say
importante
it means you will die if you don’t listen. This journey is no joke. If I say jump, you jump. If I say
c
á
llate,
you shut your mouth. If I say you need a jacket, you need a
pinche
jacket.’ He takes one step back and turns so he can see the migrants in both truck beds. He raises his voice so they can all hear. ‘Same goes for all of you. You hear? This is a gru
eling journey. Two and a half nights of arduous hiking, and I am your only lifeline. If there’s any problem with that, or if you don’t think you can make it, this is your last chance to say so.’

The coyote carries a pistol on these crossings to aid in convincing reluctant migrants about the absolute nature of his authority. He makes sure the migrants know he has the gun by carrying it quite openly in a holster slung low around his jeans. It serves mostly as a useful psychological prop, and he very seldom has to use it. Beto isn’t impressed by the gun, which he glimpsed when the coyote was standing beside the other truck, but he is affected by the subtle intensity of the man’s words. Beto knows the truth when he hears it.

‘
Oye,
’ the boy says. ‘I’m sorry.’ Beto is like a wide-open moon shining up at the coyote
,
and something in his yearning sends the memory of Sebasti
á
n falling across Lydia’s mind like a ruler across an outstretched knuckle. How long will the memory of his father sustain her own child? How long before he’s looking up at strangers this way? Grief-adrenaline swamps through her body, but Lydia closes her eyes and waits for it to pass.

El Chacal nods, opens the passenger door, and climbs in.

They drive southwest into the desert sunset. There’s nothing unusual about a couple of trucks full of migrants heading out into the wilderness from Nogales. No one will try to stop them; anyone who looks can see what they’re up to, but no one here cares. Lydia is the only one concerned about hiding herself. She slumps low in the bed of the truck, and shields her face with her faded hat when other vehicles approach and pass.

‘Why south?’ Luca asks as they turn left out of the town, but she doesn’t know.

She’s relieved when the drive turns to barely paved roads that eventually become unpaved roads that eventually become trails that can hardly be called roads at all. They are pocked with holes and ruts, and the gravel feels loose beneath the tires. They’re alone in the desert now, no other cars for miles around, and the migrants hang on to the edges and bounce uncomfortably in the beds of the pickup trucks, their bones juddering when they cross a dip they aren’t expecting. Lydia holds Luca down to keep him from flying out, but their progress is careful and slow.

When the trucks eventually point west, and then northwest, Luca wonders if they’re moving perpendicular to that boundary now, that place where the fence disappears and the only thing to delineate one country from the next is a line that some random guy drew on a map years and years ago. They haven’t seen another vehicle for almost an hour, so to pass the time, Nicol
á
s names some of the species of animals that live here, some they might encounter on their travels: ocelots, bobcats, coatimundi, javelina, whiptail lizards, mountain lions, coyotes, rattlesnakes.

‘Rattlesnakes?’ Marisol says.

Rabbits, quail, deer, hummingbirds, jaguars.

‘Jaguars!’ Beto says.

‘Rare, but not yet extinct in Sonora, sure. Foxes, skunks,’ Nicol
á
s says. ‘And don’t even get me started on the butterflies.’

Luca thinks of all of those animals running willy-nilly, back and forth across the border without their passports. It’s a comforting notion. Rebeca is only half listening. She doesn’t really want to consider what kind of wildlife they may encounter on their journey. She’s unconcerned about it in any case. She thinks of her own remote, wild place, full of noisy, big-eyed creatures of its own. It feels almost impossible that the cloud forest still exists. She wants to close her eyes and travel back there. Wants to feel the cool softness of the clouds against her cheeks and eyelashes. She wants to hear the echoing drips of rainfall spattering among the big, fat leaves. The memory of that bright, liquid, ethereal place is fading from her grasp. When she closes her eyes now, she cannot recall the sound of her
abuela
’s singing or the smell of the
chilate
. It’s all been obliterated from her, and the grief of that eradication feels like a weight she must carry in her limbs. When she breathes now, in this desert place, the air feels waterless in her nose, her scalp scorched by the sun where her hair parts.

Rebeca leans her head against her sister’s shoulder and watches the changing colors of the landscape. The sun sinks in front of them and turns the sandy earth orange and pink. The sky, too, is filled with crazy, vivid pinks and purples and blues and yellows, and the colors are slow to deepen, slow to slip into blackness, but when at last they are gone, the darkness is deeper and more vast than anything Luca has ever seen. He cannot see his knees drawn up in front of him. He cannot see his own fingers wiggling in front of his eyes. He gropes for Mami’s hand in the blackness, and when she feels him there, she pulls him closer and folds her wing around him. No one talks much after the sun is gone. Their eyes yawn open and seize on any suggestion of light. They stay each in their own mind, considering the hours ahead.

Lydia remembers a show from her childhood, not like these slick, indistinguishable cartoons Luca watches, shows that are beamed into televisions worldwide with their big-eyed, squeaky-voiced monsters of backtalk. It was a memorable show, an incredible low-budget job with handmade puppets and real junkyard magic. Lydia remembers the theme song, where all the characters would zoom around the earth in this rackety dumpster, except the dumpster was like a chariot, but only when all
the friends were onboard, because if even one of them was missing, it was just a regular old dumpster, with hovering flies and sticky puddles. But when all the friends were together, the dumpster would glimmer and shoot off into the sky, and then stars would burst from its exhaust pipes, and don’t ask Lydia why a dumpster had exhaust pipes, she was only six when she watched that show, but
Dios m
í
o,
it was something.

She doesn’t know why she’s remembering that show right now – she hasn’t thought of it in years, and this blue pickup truck is no magic dumpster. But Lydia has that same swooping, rocketing feeling she used to get when she watched that eruption of scrap-heap stars, when she saw how tightly the friends would curl their fingers around the lip of their vessel to keep themselves safely inside, never mind gravity or physics or the fiery reality of planetary atmosphere. Anything was possible.