American Dirt : A Novel (2020)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  ‘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.

  ‘Mami!’ Luca screams.

  ‘I’m here.’ Lydia gropes for his hand. ‘I’m here, mijo.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know, mijo.’

  ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘I know, mijo, it’s okay.’

  She reaches through the blackness and touches the soft fuzz at the back of his head. The tunnel is a short one, and soon they blast out into daylight again, and the sisters, who’d been dozing in a small heap until the commotion, sit up and blink rapidly at each other. A weary Morse code.

  ‘What happened?’ Soledad asks.

  There’s still a lot of yelling coming from the car two ahead of theirs, and a couple of voices begin to emerge from the fray, louder than the others. One man is wailing, ¡Hermano, hermano, hermano! And then he stands up on top of the train, and his companions grab him and pull him back down, and then a moment later the scene repeats itself. He seems determined to jump off, and now the story is traveling back along the train until it gets to the cluster of men seated in front of the sisters. One young man turns to share it.

  ‘His brother fell off.’

  Soledad gasps and crosses herself. ‘Dios mío, how?’ she asks.

  The man points back at the tunnel they just passed through. ‘Didn’t see the tunnel. Was sitting up too tall on his knees, and bang. He hit his head on the top of the tunnel and got knocked right off.’

  Soledad’s face is a twist of horrified compassion. She leans past the young man because she can see now, beyond him, that the wailing brother is back on his feet a third time. The words fly out of her mouth by instinct, her hand darts toward him. ‘Stop him!’ she screams. ‘Grab him!’

  But it’s too late. The man has jumped. He’s a distorted silhouette of arched arms and legs against the bleary yellow of the late-morning sky. His shadow makes the shape of grief as he hurtles toward the earth.

  ‘Too far, it’s too far.’ Soledad’s voice is still working independently of her body. ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’

  Their train car is already passing where the jumper has landed. His body rolls down the steep embankment and away. Luca counts his arms and legs: one, two, three, four. He counts them again to make sure. He still has all four, but they don’t seem to be working. His body comes to a stop in a thicket of weeds, and the train storms on without him. Without his brother.

  Soledad is almost catatonic after watching the man jump, as if the incident loosened the fragile scab of her own suffering. She lies down again, and Rebeca pulls her sister’s head into her lap. She strokes Soledad’s long, black hair back away from her forehead, and quietly sings a song in a language Lydia has never heard before. Soledad stays there unblinking, but soon her expression softens, her dark eyebrows turn slack, and her lids flutter closed. She drifts into some state akin to sleep.

  Lydia doesn’t stare at the boy at the other end of the freight car, but she’s hyperaware now of his attention. He sits with his legs outstretched and his weight leaned back on his propped hands, and he’s watching them. Lydia does recognize him now, but only because Luca mentioned it. He’s wearing oversize red shorts and a huge white T-shirt. Over that, the giant red-and-black tank top jersey of some professional basketball team, and big diamond earrings in both ears. The jewelry is probably fake, but it does the trick of making him look like a hip-hop star, which is exactly the look he was hoping to achieve when he shaved those two tiny pinstripes into his right eyebrow.

  Lydia doesn’t turn her head. With the precision of a huntress, she can sense his movements with her peripheral vision – when he lifts his flat-brimmed black baseball cap to scratch beneath it, when he leans slightly over the edge of the train car to spit, when he unscrews the cap from his water bottle to take a drink. She wonders if he can feel her anxiety, if her studied nonchalance is biologically ineffective, if her body is shooting off alarm pheromones he can detect. A primal consciousness has sprung up between them. So she’s aware, too, of the ways her own body responds when, on a long stretch of straight, open track, he lifts himself up from his position and moves toward them. Lydia’s heartbeat increases, her pupils dilate, her grip on Luca tightens, indeed all her muscles either constrict or twitch, and her skin prickles with goose bumps. Her palms grow slick and clammy. She lets go of Luca and gropes at the machete strapped to her lower leg beneath her pants.

  Everyone watches the young man pick his way gingerly past the groups of migrants on the train top. Everyone always watches when someone is on the move – they look for signs of drunkenness or erratic behavior. They look for the gleam of a concealed blade. They’re especially alert to this young man because it’s so obvious what he is. They lean away from him as he passes.

  ‘You looking for the café car, amigo?’ an older man in a straw hat asks him. The nearby migrants laugh but it’s a suspicious laughter. Why is he alone? Where does he think he’s going?

  ‘Just stretching my legs,’ the young man answers.

  They keep an eye on his tattoo after he passes, their friendliness a tinny facade. Most migrants understand the significance of those three drops of tattooed blood: one for each kill.

  Lydia pulls the machete from its small holster and draws it out from beneath her pant leg as the boy approaches. She presses the button to engage the blade and feels gratified by its appearance. Luca watches her silently as she conceals it beneath her sleeve. Some small flash of instinct advises Lydia to ditch the blade and watch instead for a passing bush, for some soft landing point, and then to pitch her son from the train as soon as she spots a place where he might survive the fall. She reaches over and briefly grabs his leg to make sure her body doesn’t wildly obey that foolish impulse. She presses gravity onto his folded legs and feels grateful for the insurance of the canvas belt. The boy’s shadow is upon them. Lydia doesn’t look up.

  ‘Yo, I think I know you,’ he says.

  He puts his body down in the very small space between Lydia and the sisters. He squeezes in there, and if her body could tense up any further, it would. She can feel Rebeca trying to catch her eye, but she doesn’t look at the girl, because she doesn’t want to draw her into whatever this is. Rebeca reshuffles her body, making room for the newcomer, and meanwhile, Lydia’s brain has been so busy telling her to run that it failed to come up with a suitable plan for this moment, so she says the first words that show up in her mouth.

  ‘I didn’t think so, but my son recognized you from back the road a way – outside Mexico City.’ She does not say Huehuetoca in case the memory of his eviction from that place provokes his anger. She holds her body like a cocked gun. />
  ‘¿Ah, sí?’ He leans over to smile at Luca, which confuses Lydia. She can’t understand the chitchat. If he’s a sicario, then why is he plopped down here shooting the breeze? And where is his weapon inside all that abundant clothing? ‘Wuddup, güey?’ he says to Luca. ‘Cool hat.’ He stretches to touch the brim of Papi’s red baseball cap, but Luca moves out of his reach. ‘Anyway, I’m Lorenzo,’ he says, putting his hand out to Lydia. She’s never been more reluctant to shake someone’s hand, but she shakes it lightly and retracts herself quickly, replacing her grip on the machete beneath her sleeve. ‘And you are?’

  He can’t be any older than eighteen, twenty, Lydia thinks. How is it that he speaks like this, as if she owes him her name? ‘Araceli.’ She expels the fake name on her breath like a surfer riding a dying tide.

  Lorenzo shakes his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Lydia bites the inside of her mouth. If she ever doubted herself capable of stabbing another human being, that uncertainty is no more. ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘You’re not Araceli.’

  The only response she can manage is a soft snorting noise. Luca leans against her. When Lorenzo reaches into his pocket, she coils her body so tightly she begins to shake. She will thrust the blade into his neck. But no. She’s in a bad position; there’s no leverage. Would she be able to kill him? Or would she only injure him, incite him to repay her failed violence? It would be better to jump. To curl around Luca like a shell so at least he would survive this moment. The leap from the speeding train. But could Luca survive whatever follows that, once she’s gone? Lydia will get only one opportunity to sacrifice herself – then Luca’s on his own forever. Her body twitches with indecision. She turns the handle of the concealed machete, cold against her palm. But then Lorenzo’s hand emerges from his pocket with only a cell phone. No pistol, no blade. He clicks the thing to life and scrolls through the pictures.

  Lydia’s breath shudders through her.

  ‘That’s you, right?’ He turns the phone so she can see. It’s a selfie Javier took of the two of them together at the bookstore. They’re on opposite sides of the counter, both leaning across, their foreheads touching at the temple. Lydia looks directly at the camera, but Javier’s face is turned slightly in, his eyes pulled toward her. Lydia remembers the day he took it, how he told her that Marta had instructed him thoroughly in the art of the selfie, how hard they had laughed together.

  ‘Lydia Quixano Pérez, right?’ the boy beside her says.

  She tucks her lips inside her mouth and twists her neck once, but there’s nothing even marginally convincing in the gesture. Lorenzo holds the phone up beside her face to check her features against the likeness.

  ‘Yep yep. Good-looking folks,’ he says. And then, in a voice that sounds uncannily sincere, ‘I’m sorry about your family.’

  What passes for silence on the train is the slow-motion roar of the engine hauling countless tons of chugging, clacking steel along the track behind it. The wheels shriek in their tracks, metal whines against metal, the couplers between the cars knuckle and grind and squeal. Several beats of that kind of silence pass before Lydia finds her voice.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Lorenzo powers the phone off and puts it back in his pocket. ‘What do I want? Shoot.’ He whistles. ‘Same things as anybody, I guess. Nice house, a little bling, a good-lookin’ girl.’ He turns and smiles at Rebeca, who’s still sitting quite close to them, but doesn’t seem to be listening. She doesn’t meet his gaze, and Lydia doubts she can hear their conversation over the noise of the train. On her lap, Soledad’s eyes are still closed. Lorenzo examines his nails, looking for one to bite, while Lydia watches.

  ‘What do you want from me?’ she clarifies.

  He finds a tiny, unassaulted white corner of fingernail and rips it off with his teeth. He spits it over the edge. ‘Nothin’.’ He shrugs. ‘Just being neighborly.’

  ‘Where did you get that picture?’ Lydia scrunches up her nose and uses her chin to point in the direction of the phone in his pocket.

  ‘Mami, I hate to tell you,’ he says. ‘Everybody in Guerrero got that picture.’

  Lydia sucks in a breath. It’s not exactly news, but it does validate her fear. ‘For what purpose?’ She wants absolute clarity.

  Lorenzo smirks at her sideways. ‘You for real?’

  ‘I need to know what we’re up against.’

  Lorenzo pauses. Then shrugs. ‘Word was to bring you in.’

  This is a surprise. Maybe only Hollywood gangsters say things like dead or alive, but that was what she’d expected. She tries to push this information into her internal hard drive, but it doesn’t compute. ‘Not to kill me?’ she asks. ‘To kill us?’

  Lorenzo sighs. This isn’t how this conversation was supposed to go. She’s not supposed to be the one asking the questions. ‘Güey, I said too much already. I’m not trying to get myself killed, too.’

  Lydia shifts uncomfortably beside him, the handle of the machete growing sweaty in her hand. ‘So that’s why you’re here? To bring us in?’

  Maybe Javier wants only to kill them himself, to witness her suffering. She and Luca will not go with this boy. She will kill him if she has to; she’ll do it in front of Luca if she must.

  ‘Nah,’ Lorenzo says. ‘I left all that behind me in Guerrero.’ He waves his arm toward the south.

  Lydia does not loosen her grip on the machete. ‘Okay.’

  ‘De verdad, new leaf.’ He grins. ‘I’m out.’

  She feels unqualified to assess this claim. She makes no response.

  ‘How’d you get outta Acapulco, though?’ Lorenzo asks after a moment. ‘Everybody was looking for you. You got magic powers or something? You some kind of santera? ¿Una bruja?’

  Lydia surprises herself with a laugh, but it’s only a husk of a sound. ‘I suppose fear has certain magical properties.’ She’ll never know how narrow their escape really was, that two of Javier’s men opened the door to their room at the Hotel Duquesa Imperial just as she and Luca were entering the lobby of the hotel next door.

  ‘So where you heading to now?’ Lorenzo asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she lies. ‘We haven’t really decided.’

  Lorenzo pulls his knees up so his baggy shorts sag beneath. He gathers his arms around his legs. ‘I’m going to LA,’ he says. ‘I got a cousin out there in Hollywood, doing his thing.’

  ‘As good a place as any,’ she says.

  And then the train silence returns, and in that thundering quiet, she wonders: Why? If he was well connected in Los Jardineros, if he was making enough money to afford those expensive sneakers and that decent cell phone? If he was okay with earning that first drop of tattooed blood, and the second, and the third, then what made him leave Guerrero? There are infinite possible answers, she knows. Perhaps he disliked murdering. Perhaps he felt that the acts of violence he committed had some undesirable effect on him. Perhaps he had nightmares, the faces of the people he’d killed floating up before him whenever he closed his eyes. Maybe he was haunted, hunted, ragged in his soul. Or maybe the precise opposite was true. Perhaps he was so entirely without conscience that he’d been unable, even, to adhere to whatever deformed excuse for a moral code Los Jardineros exercised. Maybe he raped the wrong woman. Or stole money from one of his jefes. Or maybe he murdered so gleefully that his depravity turned him into a liability. Maybe he’s running, too. Or maybe none of these things are true. Perhaps he hasn’t left Los Jardineros at all, and he really is here only for her.

  Whatever the case, Lydia feels shriveled by Lorenzo’s presence. He’s a menace, sitting beside her, and now the threat feels urgent again. It’s all around her. She breathes it, and it’s the same as ever: senseless, confusing, categorically terrifying. Javier feels as close as the day she first confronted him in the bookshop. The Russian nesting dolls. He’d reached for her hand. She can fe
el his fingers pressing into the veins at her wrist. She can hear that sicario urinating into the toilet on the other side of Abuela’s green-tiled wall.

  Lydia wishes this boy would move away from them. Nine days and 426 miles from their escape, they haven’t made any headway at all.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Luca likes the estates where all the homes are lined up like soldiers wearing identical uniforms: indestructible white stucco walls, helmets of red Spanish tile, all tilted at the same angle to the sun. He likes the anonymity of them, and thinks how nice it would be to live inside one of those houses with Mami, how nobody’d ever find them there. One thing he doesn’t like is when the train tracks temporarily veer south, because even though he misses home, he misses only the life that existed in Acapulco before the quinceañera, and he understands that to be a place that no longer exists. It’s nostalgia for a phantom limb. So he’s relieved when the tracks bend toward the west again, and then, near a neat little town in Jalisco, sidle up beside el río Grande de Santiago and, at long last, curve northward.

  The city appears gradually and with several false starts where Luca observes all the familiar symptoms of an urban metropolis: food vendors who pause at their grills to wave up at the passing migrants, the occasional clothesline strung with bright colors snapping in the sunny wind, a gathering of rowdy kids along the fence of a schoolyard. And then boom, it all recedes, and it’s just cornfields, cornfields, cornfields. Two times this happens. Three. Four. And then finally, unmistakably: Guadalajara.

  Second-largest city in Mexico. State capital of Jalisco. Population: one and a half million people.

  All across the top of the train, migrants prepare to disembark. They wake their friends, stuff wadded-up jacket-pillows into their bags; they tighten the straps on one another’s backpacks. Mami unstraps herself from the train but leaves Luca’s belt attached to the grating. Lorenzo sits in the same spot, in the same position, and observes. Luca doesn’t like the way he watches Rebeca and Soledad.