American Dirt : A Novel (2020)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  They run not because they have any feeling that they might actually escape, but rather against the certain futility of running, because their terror compels them to run. They run because every one of them understands that if they are caught, when they are caught, all the hard-fought progress they’ve managed up to this point will come to an abrupt end. Whatever they have suffered in order to get this far on their journey will have been for naught. They understand that the best-case scenario now is to be captured by a man who obeys the dictates of his uniform, a man who will detain them and process them, and then erase their entire journey, and send them back to wherever they started. That is the best-case scenario. On the other hand, they know, this capture might not be bureaucratic at all. Perhaps there’s no one waiting to process them, fingerprint them, and send them home. Instead, this capture may turn out to be much more nefarious than that: kidnapping, torture, extortion, a finger chopped off and photographed for the threatening text they will send to your family in el norte. A slow, excruciating death if your family doesn’t pay up. The stories are as common as the rocks in this field. Every migrant has heard them; they run.

  Lydia’s mind is clear of all thoughts except running as she propels herself and Luca along the furrowed earth as quickly as their bodies can go. Ahead of them, the sisters begin to pull away. Luca’s moving as fast as he can, but his legs are so small. It doesn’t matter. The train has chugged ahead to where it was instructed to stop, and the trucks have crossed the tracks behind it, and an agente in one of those trucks speaks into a bullhorn.

  ‘Stop running. There is nowhere for you to go. Hermanos migrantes, sit down and rest where you are. We are here to collect you. We will collect you with or without your cooperation. Your choice now is to make us happy or to make us angry. Hermanos migrantes, we have food and water for you. Sit down and rest where you are.’

  The disembodied voice coming, as it does, from the barrel chest of a masked man and traveling across the bald fields with the attached squawk of the bullhorn, is the creepiest thing Luca’s ever heard. The message is intended to enfeeble them, to make them understand the powerlessness of their position, and on some of the men, it works. Among the breakaway clusters, a few stop running. They put their hands on their hips, their knees, their chests heaving. They look up at the sky with some mixture of impotent rage and dread and acceptance. They sit down in the dirt, their legs extended, their heads collapsing into the cradles of their hands.

  But the voice doesn’t debilitate Luca; on the contrary, it makes him run faster. It reminds him of the times at Abuela’s house when she’d ask him to go down to the basement and get another bottle of ginger ale to put in the refrigerator, and he knew he had to go down there and do it, but Abuela’s basement was creepy. Even if you turned on all the lights and sang loudly to yourself the whole time, you’d still get only halfway back up the stairs before you’d feel that ice-cold certainty that something evil was chasing you, that it was right behind you grazing the slick of your neck, that it would, in another second, clutch at your ankle and yank you into the depths. The bullhorn engenders that same feeling, except a thousand times worse, because it’s real.

  Luca runs with his wet pants and his mami’s hand and all the horrific memories of Abuela’s green shower stall. And then Mami cries out and it all goes into slow motion: Mami’s cry, a shrill, corporeal thing, it bubbles out of her like a fully formed bird and it flies, but Mami doesn’t. She goes the other direction, down, down. She tumbles, slow, slow. And Luca, because he’s familiar with people being shot, because he has just observed the many, many guns of la migra, because everyone else in his family was killed by a bullet, presumes quite naturally that Mami is dead. Why else would she cry out like that? Why else would she fall? It’s so slow. First her hands. Then her head, her shoulder. Because of her significant velocity, she tumbles. Her back, her bottom. Her knees. She is on her knees in the dirt and Luca is no longer holding her hand. She is on her knees and her hands. Luca reaches for her arm. He’s afraid to pull. Afraid that she’s propped up like that only by some strange trick, and that if he unsettles the weight that’s resting on her arms and legs, her body will collapse, and that it will never animate itself again. He pushes past that fear. He grabs for her arm.

  ‘Mami, come on. Mami, run.’

  There is no blood, he notices. No blood. Gracias a Dios. He feels himself begin to breathe.

  ‘I can’t run,’ Mami says. ‘I can’t run. I’m sorry, Luca. My ankle.’ She stands. It’s her ankle! It’s only her ankle. She tests her weight on it. A slice of pain. Not too bad. She hobbles in a small circle. She can walk, but she can’t run.

  ‘Okay,’ Luca says. His face is very wet.

  He turns and sees Rebeca and Soledad still going, growing smaller into the distance as they run, and everything feels like euphoria now, in this terrible moment. Because Mami’s voice still works and the sisters are still running. He clutches Mami around her belly, and she drapes an arm over him. Nothing else matters, Luca thinks. As long as she’s okay.

  Lydia keeps Luca’s head there, pressed against her side so he won’t see the tears sliding down her face. She doesn’t know how caked with dirt she is, doesn’t know that the tears are cleaning telltale trails down her face that will divulge her tears later, even after she dries them.

  ‘It’s okay, mijo,’ she says. ‘We have every right to be here, to travel in our own country. We are Mexican. They can’t do anything to us. We will be okay.’

  Luca believes her, but she doesn’t manage to convince herself. The trucks have spread out to round everyone up. The farthest one has already passed the sisters, and is circling back, hemming them in.

  ‘Hermanos migrantes, stop running. Sit down and rest where you are.’

  An agente hops out of the nearest truck and approaches Luca and Lydia, keeping one hand on his biggest gun. He uses it to gesture at them without using his voice so they know where to go.

  When Lydia was a teenager and her tío died, her tía remarried a man who owned a cattle ranch in Jalisco. It was a two-day drive up the coast to the wedding with her parents and sister, and Lydia never forgot what it was like being there on that hacienda, how the wind was loud in their ears and the new tío’s dogs herded the spooked cattle. They were tireless, those black-and-white working dogs, and they ran in big, swooping arcs to hem in the nervous cows. The cattle stamped and twisted fretfully. Lydia remembers how everyone else that day was amazed by those dogs, smiling, panting, running in happy arcs. How disciplined they were! How effortless it seemed for them! Lydia was the only one who felt sorry for the frightened cows. Everyone seemed to forget that they were animals, too. That memory returns now as the trucks swoop in arcs around the panicked migrants. Lydia has never before likened herself, on purpose or by any metaphorical accident of psychology, to an animal. So there’s a crushing despair that accompanies this recollection. How animalistic they are in this field. She feels like prey.

  Once la migra has rounded everyone up, Soledad and Rebeca included, the agentes march them to the nearest paved road. Everyone is sweaty, disheveled, and out of breath from running. Soledad and Rebeca made it farther than almost anyone before the truck looped around and forced them to turn back. Rebeca pauses and plants her hands on her knees to catch her breath. Soledad spits into the dirt. Everyone is angry and frustrated and reluctant to obey, but los agentes prod them roughly when they don’t walk fast enough. Luca counts the gathered migrants, which doesn’t provide any information about potential escapees because he didn’t count them before they were scattered, so there’s no baseline number. It doesn’t matter, he thinks, because he can see all the way to the horizon from here, the slight brown arc of the earth. No one got away. Beside him, Lydia limps, the pain in her ankle subsiding to a dull throb. They wait at the side of the road, and no one tells them what they’re waiting for, or how long the wait will be. There are twenty-three migrants here, and despair has s
ettled into their features like a powdery dust. While they wait, Lydia keeps her face low beneath the floppy pink hat and watches los agentes for clues about what manner of captivity this might turn out to be. One of the other migrants is outraged. He has no intention of cooperating.

  ‘¿Quién está a cargo aquí?’ The man stands, even though they’ve been told to sit, and speaks past the shoulder of the officer who’s been set to guard them, to the man they all suspect of being in charge, el agente who’s sitting on the folded-down tailgate of his pickup truck with one foot planted in the dirt beneath him and the other dangling from the tailgate. His posture is casual, so it’s surprising when he stands quickly and approaches the migrant who addressed him. Lydia watches, barely breathing, because this exchange might tell them everything they need to know about the hours ahead. She doesn’t realize she’s digging her fingernails into Luca’s arm until he begins to squirm. She lets go, rubbing apologetically at the little gouge marks she accidentally made in his skin.

  ‘What do you need?’ El agente stands very close to the migrant, and Lydia understands that this is deliberate, that he hopes to frighten the other man, which strikes her as both juvenile and effective.

  ‘I am a Mexican national. You have no right to detain me,’ the migrant says. ‘I want to know who’s in command of this unit.’ El agente is tall enough that the migrant has to crane his neck to look up, his chin level with the top of the Kevlar vest.

  ‘I am in charge,’ el agente says, and then he claps a hand onto the shoulder of his comrade beside him. ‘And he is in charge. And you see that guy over there? With the gun? He is also in charge. Everyone who looks like me? This uniform? We are in charge. And we have the right to detain whoever we like. Take a seat.’

  After a few minutes and some removed conversation, most of los agentes get into two of the three trucks and leave, so only five remain on the roadside with the migrants. With those two departing vehicles, so, too, disappear the migrants’ hopes that this might be a clean, administrative experience. Fewer uniforms means fewer witnesses. The captives eye one another nervously, but no one moves. Even if the five remaining agents weren’t so heavily armed, even if one of the migrants felt inclined to run, there’s nowhere for them to go. Because of these circumstances, the handcuffs, when they appear, feel both gratuitous and alarming. They’re not real handcuffs, but plastic zip ties. At first Lydia hopes they’re only going to shackle the men. They begin at the end, standing the migrants up one at a time. They pat them down for weapons, cell phones, money. They take their backpacks and zip-tie their wrists behind them. One man complains when they take his money, and el agente backhands him across the face with his radio. Luca’s eyes grow wide.

  ‘Mijo, look,’ Mami says, pulling Luca close. ‘Look at that cloud.’ She points.

  ‘It looks like an elephant,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, and then see there? What’s it picking up in its trunk?’

  Luca squints. He knows what she’s doing, trying to distract him. She doesn’t want him to see. And he could tell her it doesn’t matter anymore, that he’s seen so much worse than this already, but he understands that it’s as much for her as it is for him, this distraction. She needs to feel like she can still mother him, still provide him with some relief, no matter what horrible things are happening fifteen feet away. Luca can hear that man crying softly. Luca can imagine, without raising his eyes to confirm such things, that there’s a glossy trickle of bright blood leaking from that man’s nose or lip. Luca focuses on the cloud-elephant because it’s something he can do for Mami.

  ‘I think he’s picking a flower.’

  Mami touches her cheek to his. ‘I think he’s shaking hands with a little mouse.’

  When all the migrant men are handcuffed, nineteen of them, Luca counts, los agentes come to the sisters. They move to take Rebeca first, but Soledad steps in front of her.

  ‘Everybody wants to be a hero,’ one of los agentes mutters. His partner laughs.

  They turn Soledad around and take a long time patting her down. Much longer than they took on any of the men. Luca can feel Mami trembling beside him. The officers flap the bottom of Soledad’s oversize white T-shirt, billowing air beneath it, and then they bend down to look up it. They stick their hands up there.

  ‘Think she’s packing?’ the partner asks.

  ‘Oh, she’s packing all right.’

  When they cuff her, they pull her T-shirt at the back so it’s stretched tight against the white outline of her bra, and they gather up all the loose material and bind it into the zip ties behind her, along with her wrists. The material rides up to show a few inches of her brown tummy, and all the migrant men show their solidarity for her by turning their eyes to the ground.

  ‘That’s better,’ says el agente who cuffed her. He tosses Soledad’s confiscated backpack into the bed of the truck along with the others, but when Soledad moves to sit back down on the ground with the other migrants, he grabs her by the elbow. ‘You sit up here instead.’ He points to the folded-down tailgate.

  Soledad’s face betrays nothing. She sits where instructed, and makes sure not to watch while they do the same to Rebeca. Soon her sister is seated up beside her, and they lean against each other, consoling each other with the heat of their touching shoulders. Lydia endures her turn next. They face her away from Luca and remove her hat to study her face. She squints in the sunlight, but they replace the hat without comment before groping her breasts and her backside. They find the machete strapped to her leg, and they laugh while they unbuckle the holster. One of the men throws it into the bed of the pickup truck with a thunk.

  ‘Don’t worry, mijo, it will be okay,’ she says to Luca without turning to face him.

  Luca is sitting cross-legged with his elbows on his knees. Soledad and Rebeca both stare silently at him, as if they can make a bubble of protection around him just by the resolve of their eyes.

  The officer speaks to Lydia without inflection, without anger or hostility, in exactly the same tone of voice Lydia would use if she were talking to the automated teller when she does her banking by phone. ‘Shut up,’ he says, and he slides his hand between her legs. He brushes his pinky finger back and forth along the crotch of her jeans. Lydia clamps her mouth shut and begins to cry.

  Luca leans forward to stand up, but Rebeca calls out to him. ‘What is the third-largest city in the United States?’ she asks.

  Luca is confused. ‘What?’

  Rebeca repeats the question.

  ‘Well, that’s easy, it’s Chicago,’ Luca says. ‘Once you get down to around the fifth- and sixth-largest it’s a lot trickier because those populations are changing by a significant percentage year by year, but – wait, why?’

  Seated on the tailgate with her hands tied behind her, Rebeca shrugs. ‘Just curious.’

  The officers have finished with Lydia, and they seat her back on the ground beside Luca.

  ‘Come on, little man,’ they say to him.

  Luca stands. He puts his arms and legs out and makes his body into the shape of an X. They remove his backpack and throw it into the back of the truck with the others. He does not complain. They turn his pockets inside out. He does not complain. They remove Papi’s red baseball hat from his head.

  ‘Nice hat. You a Yankees fan?’ one of them says.

  ‘You can’t have it,’ Luca says. ‘It belonged to my papi.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Where’s your papi now?’

  ‘He’s dead.’ Luca wields that truth like a battle-ax.

  The officer is impassive, but he nods and sticks the hat back onto Luca’s head. Luca turns and puts his wrists together so they can cuff him. The officers laugh.

  ‘Nah, chiquito, we’re not going to cuff you,’ the first one says. ‘That your mami over there? Go sit with your mami.’

  Luca doesn’t understand why, but he feels ashamed not to be cuffed. Dimin
ished. His face flushes hot, but he goes and sits down on Mami’s lap, nonetheless, which is a thing he hasn’t done for at least two years.

  When the two vans arrive, the officers open the back doors and usher the migrants inside. There are no seats or windows. They are unmarked cargo vans, and Lydia knows that probably means they’re all going to die. Her mind is racing and blank at once. She doesn’t recall the details, the words, the exact numbers or dates, but she’s remembering the disappearance of those forty-three college students from that bus in Guerrero in 2014. The massacre of 193 people in San Fernando in 2011. Just a few months ago, 168 human skulls found in a mass grave in Veracruz. Who will miss Luca and Lydia if they disappear? We have already disappeared, she thinks. We already do not exist. When she looks at Luca, she sees the shape of his cranium beneath his skin.