American Dirt : A Novel (2020)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  At the dinner table with Carlos and Meredith’s three boys, Luca wears his father’s hat, and Lydia doesn’t demand that he take it off, even when Meredith tells her youngest ‘no hats at the table.’ The older boy wipes his milk mustache and grins at Luca, still wearing the Yankees cap.

  ‘You like baseball?’ the boy asks.

  Luca only shrugs.

  He was always a quiet child. As a toddler, Luca never babbled. In fact, he didn’t speak at all until he was four years old, and by then Lydia had been panicking for two years. She began the practice of reading to him well before she suspected any problem, only because she was a book lover who enjoyed reading aloud to her baby. She liked the idea that, even before he understood them, he might begin with the most beautiful words, that he’d build language from a foundation of literature and poetry. So she started with Márquez and Tolstoy and the Brontës, and eventually, as a result of her growing alarm, she read to him not in the typical way that parents read fairy tales and bedtime stories to their children, but in a frenetic and urgent manner intended to save him. When her fears bloomed and the habit became more concerted, she called upon Paz and Fuentes, Twain and Castellanos. She was fluent in English, too (it had been her minor in college), so sometimes she read Yeats, rendering the lush green of Ireland in her Mexican accent.

  When Luca was an infant, she brought him to work tucked into a sling across her chest, and they read together between orders and customers and cleaning and stocking the shelves. Sometimes it was a long while between customers, so the two of them could submerge vividly into their stories. As he grew, he’d sit in a bouncy rocker or on a little play mat she set up for him in the corner behind the register. Eventually he was free to toddle around the shop, but when it was time to read, he always sat without prompting, cross-legged and silent, head angled to one side, as if creating a funnel of his ear for the words she’d give to him. She tried books with and without pictures. Colorful books, tactile books, poetry, photography, art. Children’s books, cookbooks, the Bible. Her son ran his hands carefully along the glossy or filmy pages, but still he did not speak. Sometimes she read until her voice gave out, and other days she quickly grew depressed by the solitary sound of herself in the shop, but whenever she wanted to quit, Luca would push the day’s book toward her insistently. He’d open it and press it back into her lap.

  The week before his fourth birthday, as they sat eating pozole at the kitchen table, Lydia lamented their boy’s silence for the hundredth time. Sebastián balanced his spoon on the edge of his bowl and studied Luca’s face. Luca studied him back.

  ‘Maybe you don’t speak Spanish,’ Sebastián said in Spanish.

  Luca, mimicking his father, balanced his spoon on his bowl, too.

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it,’ Sebastián said. ‘¿Cuál idioma hablas, mijo? English? Are you a gabacho? Wait!’ Sebastián snapped his fingers. ‘You’re Haitian. No – Arabic! Tagalog?’

  Lydia blinked slowly at her husband, but Luca smiled and tried to snap his fingers, too. Sebastián showed him how. Click click click. Lydia was alone in her desperation. She reasoned that Sebastián must be concerned, also, but his dogged optimism prevented him from revealing it. The doctors could find nothing wrong. Lydia felt like screaming.

  Instead, she patiently continued her efforts. Allende, Borges, Cervantes. She read so that the words she treasured might penetrate her son’s solitude. And then one day, as she turned the last, unsatisfying page of a short novel by some pretentious young writer, Luca sat up and shook his head. He brushed his hands across his knees. Lydia closed the book and set it on the table beside the rocker where they were seated together. Luca picked it up and opened it to the first page.

  ‘Let’s read that one again, please, Mami, except this time let’s make it a more agreeable ending.’

  Perfectly. As if simply continuing a conversation they’d been having his whole life. Lydia was so startled she nearly hurled him across the room. She pushed him off her lap onto his feet. She turned him around and stared at him. ‘What?’ Luca pressed his lips together. ‘What did you say?’ She gripped his arms at his sides, too roughly perhaps, in her fear that she was coming unhinged. ‘You spoke! Luca! You spoke?’

  After a brief and petrifying pause, he nodded.

  ‘What did you say?’ she whispered.

  ‘I would like to read it again.’

  She clapped both hands onto his cheeks, laughing and crying at once. ‘Ay, oh my God! Luca!’

  ‘With a better ending.’

  She crushed him into her chest and squeezed him there, and then she jumped up and took his hands and spun him in a circle.

  ‘Say it again. Say something else.’

  ‘What shall I say?’

  ‘Exactly that,’ she’d said. ‘My boy. He speaks!’

  Lydia closed the shop early that day and took Luca home to perform for his father. She remembers it so clearly, but she doesn’t trust that memory now, because the further she gets away from it, the more fanciful it seems. How could he have been so silent for all those years? And then, how could he have started talking like that, like a news anchor, like a college professor, in those beautiful, complex sentences all at once? It’s impossible. A miracle of syntax.

  But now, in Carlos’s turquoise house, after more than four years of talking beautifully in two languages, Luca’s voice retreats, and the erstwhile silence returns. Lydia sees it happening, and there’s nothing either of them can do to prevent it. It settles over him lightly at first, but soon, like a shellac, it hardens. By Wednesday morning, his muteness is pronounced. He responds to direct questions only with his face, his body. He perfects, once again, the art of the blank stare, and Lydia feels inside her some last, clinging boulder of sanity slipping.

  During these days of calcifying quiet, the dreadful wheel of Lydia’s mind never slows, no matter how she tries to arrest it. She keeps herself steady in front of Luca, but there are times when she has to excuse herself quickly. She slips into the bathroom and opens the tap so the running water will disguise the muffled, wrenching noises of her grief. Her body is a cramp of misery, and the physical sensation is so elemental that it makes her feel like a wild animal, a mammal bereft of her pack. At night, as she lies next to Luca in Sebastián’s godson’s narrow bed, she directs her thoughts toward blankness. She does this exercise with authority, and her mind obeys. She repeats this over and over: don’t think, don’t think, don’t think. And because of this self-control, she moves mercifully toward sleep. The flashbacks dump adrenaline into her bloodstream a hundred times a day, so her body is helpfully exhausted. Her eyelids drop. But then there’s the moment after letting go, the momentary drift after casting off from the shore and before being caught by the current, and in that lapse, she plummets. Her limbs jerk, her heart clobbers, and her brain provides the memory once again of clacking gunfire, the odor of burning meat, the sixteen beautiful faces, scrubbed blank of their animation and turned vacant toward the sky. She sits up in bed, steadies her pitching breath, and tries not to wake Luca beside her. Every night, this hurdle between wake and sleep. This one patch she can’t cross. What kind of person does not bury her family? How could she leave them there in the backyard with their eyes and their mouths open, the blood cooling in their veins? Lydia has seen outspoken widows before, widows made brave by their anguish. She’s watched them talk into the cameras, refusing to be silenced, placing blame where it belongs, scorning the violence of cowardly men. Naming names. Those women get gunned down at funerals. Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think.

  On Wednesday, Carlos takes the day off work to drive the third church van to Mexico City. Lydia leaves Abuela’s red overnight bag on the end of the bed where they’ve spent the last three nights. Inside are her heels and Luca’s dress shoes. She’s crammed everything else into the two backpacks, and that’s all they will carry now. They will fly north from Mexico City, she’s decided
. It’s their only option. They will go with only these two backpacks so they’ll be nimble, so they won’t have to stand gazing at the baggage carousel waiting for what they don’t need anyway. Lydia doesn’t know what, if anything, Carlos and Meredith have told the Indiana missionaries about their two extra passengers, but no one asks her any questions when they get in. The teenagers flash their gooey smiles and try to talk to her about their Savior, but Lydia pretends not to speak English. She keeps one arm around Luca in the backseat and tries to act the way a normal person would act. She has difficulty remembering. The missionaries have duffel bags and fancy backpacks, and every single one of the girls wears her hair (curly or straight, coarse or silky) in two French braids. It’s a missionary code, Lydia realizes, and she reaches up to touch her ponytail. The girl on the bench seat beside her notices.

  ‘You want me to do yours?’ She smiles at Lydia. ‘We all do each other’s.’

  Lydia hesitates, because the most impeccable French braids in the world wouldn’t cause anyone to mistake her for a teenage missionary from Indiana. But even ludicrous armor is better than nothing. The girl mistakes Lydia’s reticence for a language barrier, so she points to her own braids, the braids of the two girls in the row ahead, and then to Lydia’s hair. ‘You like? French braids?’

  Lydia nods, pulling the ponytail holder out of her thick, black hair, and turning her back to the girl, who begins crawling her fingers along Lydia’s scalp. It’s hot in the van. When the girl is finished, she asks if anybody has a mirror. There are five teenage girls in this van, and not one of them is vain enough to carry a pocket mirror. Finally, one of the girls opens the camera app on her iPhone, switches it to selfie mode, and hands it to Lydia. ‘They’re so pretty on you!’ she says loudly, pointing to the braids. ‘¡Me gusta!’

  Lydia looks at herself on the screen, twisting her head slightly to inspect the braids. She looks younger, she thinks, a little. She smiles and hands the phone back. Relief washes over Lydia when the singing starts, because the clamor of it fills the van and leaves no room for thinking. All the missionaries sing, and Carlos, too, loudly and cheerfully.

  ‘You should nap,’ she says quietly into Luca’s ear as they approach Axaxacualco. He looks at her without blinking. ‘I see traffic ahead. You should nap on the floor, here. Cozy.’ Lydia reaches beneath the bench seat and makes a space between two of the larger duffel bags. Luca slips into it and makes himself small. A stuffed backpack makes a pillow. He closes his eyes as the traffic begins to snag, and with it, the breath in Lydia’s chest. The girls sing ‘Jesus, Take the Wheel’ louder. Carlos catches Lydia’s eye in the rearview mirror. He blinks once, because it’s all the reassurance he can offer her. The line of cars in front of them has come to a stop. Theirs is the second of the three vans. Meredith is driving the one in front.

  In the road ahead, two young men, two teenage boys, really, tote AR-15s. Perhaps it’s precisely because that make of gun isn’t quite as prolific or as sexy as the ubiquitous AK-47 here that Lydia finds it all the more terrifying. Ridiculous, she knows. One gun will make you as dead as another. But there’s something so utilitarian about the sleek, black AR-15, like it can’t be bothered to put on a show.

  Sometimes the muzzle of one of those guns makes it inside the rolled-down window of a waiting car, but generally they remain outside, pointing skyward. The boys hold their weapons with both hands. Mostly the drivers don’t flinch. Mostly the drivers defer to the boys’ exaggerated egos, go along with their pretend swagger, because although no one expects the boys to open fire, they all know that the only road to genuine bravado runs through faking it first. It’s only a matter of time, and no one wants to find out if today is the day these boys finally mean it. One by one, the drivers reach carefully into their wallets or purses or glove compartments to extract the mordidas. They hand over the money without complaint, and with genuine bendiciones, because these boys could be anyone, they could be the drivers’ brothers or children or grandchildren. Certainly, they are someone’s.

  Carlos rolls and brakes, rolls and brakes. Luca keeps his eyes closed, and the missionaries sing. Lydia prays for the unlikely possibility that the boys on the road ahead are uncorrupted autodefensas.

  The singing missionaries are conducting their own brand of bravado, too, because even though the roadblock is exciting to them, even though their pastor, who’s in the van behind, explained that roadblocks are quite common here and nothing to be alarmed by, that they’re almost like passing through a toll gate, the girls know that toll booth operators in Indiana don’t carry automatic weapons. Secretly, in the sinful hidden chambers of their hearts, most of these girls had looked forward to experiencing a roadblock – the exotic thrill of it, the wash of adrenaline, the stories they’d get to tell when they returned home to Indiana! But on the way down from Mexico City, they’d been waved right through without stopping. A guilty disappointment. Still, now that the moment is actually upon them, now that they can see the boys in the road ahead, close in age to themselves and brandishing unthinkable weapons, now that their inexperienced missionary nervous systems are flooding their bloodstreams with chaotic hormones, every one of those braided girls feels sick with fright. Some of them wish for the courage to witness to the boys, to save them by reminding them of Jesus. But mostly they just want to go home. One of the girls in the front seat, the one with the iPhone, tries to start another round of singing, but no one joins her and the effort falters after a couple of bars. Carlos rolls down his window.

  The boys stand on either side of the van ahead. Lydia can make out Meredith’s silhouette in the driver’s seat, talking to the boy at her window. He must be the one in charge. Meredith gestures with a finger to the other two vans behind, and both boys look back. Lydia freezes in her seat. There’s no way they can notice her here, in the backseat of the van’s darkened interior. The boy jefe on the driver’s side of the van wears a plain blue ball cap with no insignia. He directs his colleague to investigate the other vans. The boy passes between the bumpers of the idling vehicles and approaches Carlos’s window, the business end of his AR-15 tracing the dotted white lines of the road. Lydia glances down at Luca on the floor and sees that his eyes are wide open, as round as soupspoons. She shifts mildly in her seat so her legs mostly cover him.

  ‘Where are you heading today?’ the boy asks Carlos, to make sure he tells the same story as Meredith.

  ‘Only to the airport in Mexico City. Our visitors are flying home today.’

  ‘¿De dónde eres?’ he says to the girl directly behind Carlos.

  ‘They don’t speak much Spanish,’ Carlos says in Spanish. ‘They’re from Indiana.’

  The boy tips his head slightly inside the rolled-down window and surveys the silent, smiling girls. If he’s susceptible to their pheromones, he’s getting bombarded. His eyes land on Lydia, and he scrunches up his mouth.

  ‘Who’s the woman?’

  ‘One of our counselors.’

  ‘¿Estadounidense también?’ The boy has a handsome, skeptical face.

  ‘No, she’s from here. She’s one of ours.’

  ‘Why’s she sitting in back?’

  Lydia knows not to glance at Luca, but he’s her only anchor left in the world, and her eyes want to go to him. She glues her gaze to the back of Carlos’s seat.

  ‘One of the girls was carsick,’ Carlos says. ‘She went back there to help.’

  Lydia lifts her hand and places it maternally, mechanically, between the shoulder blades of the girl beside her, the girl who braided her hair. Lydia rubs a circle on the girl’s upper back, and the girl wonders how Lydia can tell she’s scared. The girl is grateful for the small demonstration of comfort, and gives Lydia a watery smile. The boy at the window wraps the fingers of one hand over the edge of the door and speaks directly to Lydia.

  ‘¿Cómo se llama, Doña?’

  ‘Mariana,’ Lydia lies.

  ‘She s
till sick, Mariana?’ He points to the girl beside her with his chin.

  ‘She’s feeling a little better, I think,’ Lydia says, still rubbing the girl’s back. ‘Not great.’

  The unwitting girl supports the story by going quite pale in the face. She leans slightly forward and Lydia thinks perhaps she really is about to vomit.

  The boy lingers, his AR-15 hovering just outside the window, his eyes scrutinizing the lines of her face. He leans his head slightly inside the window again. ‘Only girls in this van? No boys?’ he asks.

  On the floor beneath Mami’s feet, Luca’s eyes gape and his mouth stays clamped shut. He doesn’t even breathe. He’s become an expert at hiding, perfectly still inside his body.

  ‘All the boys are in the van behind,’ Carlos says.

  The boy taps on the open window with the flat of his hand. Carlos hands him a thin fold of bills.

  ‘Ten cuidado, y que Dios te bendiga,’ Carlos says.

  The boy nods, folds the bills into the back pocket of his jeans, and trots past Lydia’s window to the van behind. As he passes her window, Lydia sees the small, uncomplicated tattoo of a machete high on his neck behind his left ear. Confirmation: these are Javier’s boys, Los Jardineros. There’s the collective sound of breath being released into the van, but not Lydia’s. She allows her eyes to travel briefly to Luca’s little upturned face. The eyes are closed now, and she presses hers closed as well, for a moment of suspended relief. She can feel her pulse in her eyelids.