American Dirt : A Novel (2020)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  Lydia can’t believe her eyes. What the fuck is this, some kind of moral code this monster has? He’s leaving us with money? A guard stands in the corner watching them. He’s the same man who googled the governor of Oaxaca earlier. He’s staring hard at Lydia while el comandante writes her name in the book, along with the sum of money he took from them. He frowns at the name written there in his own hand and taps the back of his pen against the page. The guard clears his throat.

  ‘Something on your mind, Rafa?’

  He’s been leaning against the wall and now he stands erect, shakes his head slightly. ‘She looks familiar. Doesn’t she look familiar to you?’

  El comandante looks up from the notebook to regard Lydia more closely.

  ‘I can’t say she does. Do you look familiar to us?’

  Lydia’s throat has gone dry. ‘I have one of those faces,’ she says.

  El comandante returns his attention to the paperwork, but Rafa pins his eyes to her face, and she can see it in his expression, the way he’s riffling through the file cabinet of his memory, trying to place her. She can see it in the set of his mouth and eyes, the way he examines her, Where has he seen her before? And Lydia’s whole body feels juddery with panic. Whatever this transaction is going to be, dear God, let it be fast, before this man remembers. She twists in her chair, an effort to subtly obscure her face. She leans toward Luca but she can still feel the guard’s scrutiny like a malevolent clock. The time of their anonymity is expiring.

  But el comandante has moved on. ‘What is your name, son?’ he says to Luca.

  Luca looks sideways at his mami. ‘Tell him the truth.’

  ‘Luca Mateo Pérez Quixano.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I’m eight years old.’

  On the line beneath her name, using the fancy pen, el comandante writes +1, with Luca’s name and age.

  ‘In what city do you intend to live?’

  ‘We’re not sure yet,’ Lydia says. ‘Maybe Denver.’

  He writes that down, too.

  ‘You understand what’s going on here,’ el comandante says.

  Lydia doesn’t know how to answer. She doesn’t want to say Violence, kidnapping, extortion, rape. She doesn’t want to say Evil and wickedness. She doesn’t want to say, My death if we don’t get out of here quickly. There’s no agreeable reply.

  ‘Sometimes there’s unfortunate fallout.’ El comandante waves his hand vaguely in the direction of the murdered man in the next room, and smiles at Luca, whose face is entirely blank. ‘But you will remember this fallout. And that memory will serve you well in maintaining your silence, and thereby your future well-being.’

  The words future well-being pierce Lydia’s heart like a bell. She holds herself very still. El comandante replaces the cap on his pen, closes the cover of his notebook, and leans across it with his hands folded on top.

  ‘Most of these people are bad guys anyway, young man. It’s important for you to understand that. They’re not innocents. They’re gang members, they’re running drugs. They’re thieves or rapists or murderers, like the norteño president says. Bad hambres.’ He mispronounces the word hombres in the style of the US president who, attempting to call migrants bad men, inadvertently referred to them as bad hunger instead. It’s a joke now, full of irony. Bad hunger. El comandante toes the line. ‘They had to leave where they came from because they got in trouble there, you understand. Good people do not run away.’

  Luca opens his mouth, and Lydia watches him consider speaking. With every molecule in her body, she wills him to be silent. Luca closes his mouth.

  ‘Nevertheless, most of them will be okay,’ el comandante continues. ‘Some of them will be able to pay their own ransom. Like you. Those who can’t are likely to have family in el norte who can help. They will be here only one or two days, they will pay their toll, and they’ll be on their way. Understand? Nothing to worry about.’ He stands up from his chair but remains behind the desk. ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you to keep this business to yourselves.’

  Lydia shakes her head. ‘No, señor.’

  ‘You needn’t hear about the dreadful things that happen to people who tell tales in Sinaloa.’

  She shakes her head again. Who would she tell?

  ‘Good, then,’ el comandante says. ‘Our business is concluded. Rafa?’ He turns to the guard behind him. ‘See them out and send the next one in.’

  Rafa turns from Lydia, which movement underlines her overwhelming hope of deliverance. They are being dismissed. She can hardly believe it. She grips Luca’s hand and stands shakily from her chair. In the corner behind the desk, Rafa opens a metal door Lydia hadn’t noticed before. It’s bolted at the top, but he reaches up and unlatches it. He presses on the bar that opens the door, and a slice of daylight pours in around its perimeter. Lydia moves her body toward that miraculous light.

  But Luca doesn’t move, and her arm snags with his fixed weight.

  ‘Luca, come on,’ she says with a capricious note of hysteria in her voice. She lunges for him, but he dodges her grasp. ‘Luca, what are you doing?’ She grabs his arm, so agitated she could kill him herself.

  ‘We can’t leave them,’ he says.

  Luca’s heart feels like a flapping bird in his chest, like that time a sparrow accidentally flew into their apartment from the balcony and couldn’t find its way out again, and then it beat itself against the glass over and over until Papi caught it in a towel and smuggled it out the door to freedom. Luca’s heart is in a similar terror, so it feels as if the glass of his rib cage might shatter and fall if the bloodied carcass of his heart doesn’t smash itself into dead pulp first.

  His mother stares at him in awe. What is he doing? ‘Luca—’

  ‘No, Mami, they can’t pay,’ he says. ‘They don’t have any money.’

  El comandante slumps back into his chair with his elbows on the rests and makes a tent of his fingers. He seems amused by the exchange. Luca turns to face him.

  ‘What happens to people who can’t pay?’

  ‘Young man, your loyalty is admirable—’

  ‘What will happen?’

  Something frightful flashes across el comandante’s face, and once again Lydia reaches for Luca. But the man relents. ‘It’s okay, I won’t harm him,’ he says to Lydia. ‘I respect his courage. Please, sit.’

  Lydia looks to the door. It had been opened. She had seen the fading daylight beyond, and she’s loath to relinquish that promise of freedom. But there is Luca, back in the chair, more afraid of leaving the sisters than he is of staying longer in this nightmare. Despite everything he’s been through, or maybe also because of it, her boy has weighed the call of his conscience above the call of his own salvation. If we survive this, Lydia thinks, I shall feel very proud. She shrinks two inches, her whole body collapsing from the lungs inward, and sits down beside her son, careful to keep her face turned away from the guard.

  ‘Who is he talking about?’ el comandante asks.

  ‘The two girls,’ Lydia says, ‘with the rainbow wristbands.’

  ‘Your son is a very impressive young man,’ el comandante says.

  It’s deeply unsettling for Lydia to field a compliment from him. ‘The girls have no family to help them,’ she says.

  ‘They only have us,’ Luca says.

  El comandante breathes heavily, bounces the end of his pen lightly across the top of the notebook. ‘Those girls would fetch a price on the open market. Two beauties like that?’ He whistles, then looks again to Luca. ‘But I wish to reward your bravery and fidelity. Very impressive.’ He sits up. Back to Lydia. ‘You have money?’

  Lydia hesitates.

  El comandante grins. ‘A woman who looks like you, who speaks like you? You have more money, yes?’

  Lydia closes her eyes, and in that darkness she sees Soledad and Rebeca as s
he first encountered them on that overpass outside Huehuetoca, their singsong voices, their legs dangling down. She sees their vivacity and spirit. Her mind also reproduces, in that moment, the white lace, the dark red stain of Yénifer’s quinceañera dress. A sob cuts into her gut but doesn’t rise. Lydia opens her eyes. She nods.

  El comandante raises his voice. ‘Rafa, bring the girls in.’ To Lydia, ‘Seventy-five thousand pesos.’

  She gapes.

  ‘Each.’

  That sum is almost all the money they have left. He’s demanding more for each sister than he took for Luca and Lydia combined, and she has a sickening moment of understanding that this amount is predetermined. It’s the calculated value of their worth as human capital. If Lydia doesn’t pay, someone else will buy the sisters. And then she also immediately perceives how her own price will skyrocket if that guard is able to recall why he recognizes her. The possibility of that recollection is like a ticking bomb in this box of a room.

  Luca studies her face, and for him, she does not waver.

  ‘We will pay.’

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  All that’s left of Lydia and Sebastián’s life savings is the paltry sum el comandante returned to Lydia’s wallet after he collected the price for her and Luca. It’s a total of 4,941 pesos, or around $243. In regular life, that kind of money is substantial. It would buy many weeks’ worth of groceries. It would go toward rent or doctors’ bills or putting gas in the Beetle. But now the amount feels negligible. They have nothing. If they get to el norte, they will have to start from scratch. Already they need new shoes; Luca’s are beginning to run thin in the soles, Abuela’s gold lamé sneakers are peeling apart at the toe. The $243 minus some new shoes – it’s not enough. Lydia feels destitute. But thank God they still have her mother’s money in the bank, enough to pay a coyote to help them cross. That’s all she can think about for now.

  When at last the guard opens the door and they stagger out of captivity, Lydia’s not thinking about the money anyway. The guard stays in her mind, his searching expression, his groping for the memory of her face. She knows he’s back there still, that he could remember her at any moment: yes, Dios mío, that’s her, the one who belongs to Los Jardineros.

  They run. They don’t know where they are, how far they are from the train or the city. They’ve emerged from a large warehouse in a rural landscape and they don’t hear any distant rumble of locomotive or car engine. They run toward the leftover glow in the sky, pink fading to purple where the sun recently descended, due west over the uneven ground, through ruts and ditches and holes burrowed by unseen animals, across rocks and roots and twisted clumps of plant life, hoping to intercept a road that runs from south to north. The pain in Lydia’s ankle asserts itself only when she flexes her foot, so she tries to keep it straight. Both girls limp, too, but Soledad is like a ball of fire, and she batters herself against the pain while she runs. Luca encourages all of them like a breathless cheerleader as they go.

  ‘Come on, Rebeca, you can do it. Keep up, Mami, let’s go.’

  Soledad pushes ahead. She would run all the way to el norte. When they come to a road, they pause. No cars in sight, the twilight still pink around them. Soledad stands close to Lydia. She reaches for Lydia’s hand.

  ‘Thank you.’ She trembles.

  Lydia is beset by guilt. She’d been ready to leave them there. ‘It was Luca,’ she says.

  Soledad grabs the top of Luca’s hair. She bends down and looks into his face. ‘You saved our lives. You know that? You and your mami.’ She doesn’t let go of Lydia’s hand.

  Luca smiles, and Rebeca begins to cry, a tight, high-pitched sound that startles him. Her face is a twist of distress and her breath crashes out of her between sharp hums. Her jeans are covered in the dead man’s blood mixed with some of her own, and the button has been ripped off the fly, so they no longer stay up. Lydia retrieves one of the belts from her backpack and laces it through the girl’s belt loops for her. Rebeca winces and shakes but endures Lydia’s kindness. She fastens the buckle herself. Soledad stands behind and twists her sister’s black hair into a ponytail, revealing a dark purple bruise on her neck. She touches the spot softly with her finger. Rebeca turns to her, and the girls embrace. Rebeca shudders and cries and they all wait close together until she’s able to walk again. She folds her arms in front of her because her bra is gone.

  They turn north to follow the road, and the light fades from purple to indigo to blue, and by the time they pass the outskirts of a village, they’re walking in darkness. Lydia watches over her shoulder the whole time, waiting for the approach of a distant light, a distant gunshot. Her exhaustion is no match for her fear, and she keeps pushing ahead as quickly as they can go. They’re all very thirsty because they finished whatever water they had with them hours ago, and there’s no shop here, no river or stream. It seems too dangerous to venture into the tiny village. They’re not yet far enough away from the warehouse, those men. They don’t want to reveal themselves. But they haven’t eaten today, and they are hungry. Despite their adrenaline, they weaken as they go. Occasionally the headlights of a car approach, and they dart away from the road to hold still against whatever cover they can find. They know without speaking that this new fear is a burden they’re all carrying together, this sense that they haven’t really escaped, that they’re not safe. Any one of those cars could be carrying the men who abducted them earlier. Those men, with or without the knowledge of their comandante, may decide to come after them, to repeat and repeat and repeat the things they did to Rebeca and Soledad in the back of their truck earlier. They may decide to drag Lydia into the trunk of a car by her hair, to rip Luca from her arms, to shoot him on the side of the road and then drive her through the night back to Acapulco, to Javier. He’s waiting for her there.

  At length they begin to sense the ragged glow of a town to the north. They pass a juncture, and the traffic becomes steadier. They can no longer flee from the road each time a car passes because there are too many.

  ‘We’ll get water,’ Lydia says. ‘Soon there will be a place. Someone will give us water.’ There is no real indication of how true this might be, but she says it because she needs it, and it’s encouragement enough for the others to quicken their pace. The land is flat, and the lights of the town soon come into view. A car passes them, slows down ahead, pulls onto the shoulder, and stops. Lydia puts a hand out to stop Luca from walking any farther. Rebeca and Soledad both freeze. They draw their bodies close together. The car reverses some way toward them, and the girls run from the road, but there’s nowhere for them to go. Lydia stands her ground. She leans down automatically to retrieve her machete from its holster, forgetting that it’s gone now. She curses mildly under her breath – $243 minus two pairs of shoes and a new machete. She puts Luca behind her. The door on the driver’s side opens, and a man steps out. He’s wearing cowboy boots, jeans, a button-up shirt. He stays beside his car, doesn’t attempt to approach them.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he calls into the darkness.

  ‘Fine,’ Lydia answers.

  ‘Migrants?’

  Lydia does not respond.

  ‘We see many migrants on this road at night, some in very poor condition,’ the man explains. ‘And no one knows where they’re coming from. You’re well off the migrant trail here. How did you come to be in this neighborhood?’

  Lydia tightens her lips, but he continues talking, undeterred by their reticence to speak to him.

  ‘I’m a doctor,’ he says. ‘I have a clinic, not far. If you want, I can take you to safety.’

  Soledad snorts, but Rebeca squeezes her arm. ‘It’s not funny.’

  Soledad dissolves into full-on hysterics.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ the man asks.

  ‘Safety!’ Soledad howls with laughter.

  Luca presses in beside his mami. ‘Why is she laughing, Mami? What’s wrong with
her?’

  ‘Sh,’ Mami says. ‘She has been through so much. Sometimes people break down for a minute. She will come back to herself, mijo.’

  They watch as the man walks to the trunk of his car and opens it. Lydia grips Luca’s neck and takes two steps back, but when the man reaches into the trunk, he retrieves only a gallon jug of water. He sets it on the side of the road.

  ‘Listen, I’ll leave this here for you,’ he says. ‘I might have . . .’ He interrupts himself and turns back into the trunk. ‘I thought I had some cookies here, too, but my son must have eaten them. I’ll leave the water.’ He’s holding his keys in his hand, and Luca can hear them clink against one another. ‘But if any of you need medical attention, I may be able to help. If you are hungry, I can get you some food.’

  Lydia peers through the darkness at the sisters off the side of the road. Her eyes have adjusted to the light so she can make out their faces but can’t read their expressions.

  ‘How far is it to town?’ Soledad asks.

  ‘Not far,’ the doctor says. ‘Another two or three miles. A half hour’s walk will get you to the edge of the city.’

  ‘What city is it?’ This is Luca. The word city has excited him, as it indicates a place larger than he expected.

  ‘Navolato,’ the doctor says. ‘About twenty miles west of Culiacán.’

  Luca closes his eyes to look at the map in his mind. He can see Navolato there, a small dot next to Culiacán’s large dot, but he hasn’t stored any information about this place. Twenty miles, Lydia thinks. How in God’s name will we get back to the train? The sisters are in no condition to walk much farther.