American Dirt : A Novel (2020)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  There are many migrants gathered beside the tracks in Hermosillo, and some of the campsites appear permanent. An older couple sits on a plaid couch beneath a tarp while the woman tends to a fire where you might expect a coffee table to be. Just outside the expensive gate, no one seems to care that migrants are waiting for La Bestia. The fence ends at the gated opening across the tracks, and just inside that gate, two guards sit in the shade of a small hut, waiting to open and close the gate when the train is ready. The gate, like the fence, is topped with razor wire, but there’s nothing to stop migrants from slipping underneath the gate, where there’s a two-foot gap Luca could easily roll through. Anyone could go under the fence here, and the guards don’t seem interested in preventing them, but no one tries. They’re content to wait just outside the gate instead, where, the other migrants inform Lydia, the train will emerge from its cage eventually, slowly, and everyone will clamber on.

  The wait there with the other migrants feels like the longest stretch of hours in Soledad’s life. Ever since Luca told her how close they are to el norte, she fancies she can smell it there on the horizon, all McNuggets and fresh Nikes. She can almost see it shimmering in the distance, and her whole body twitches with the yearning for it. She leans north with her spine, her eyes, her lungs. While the others sleep that night on the cold, packed earth against the cinder block wall of the bordering gardens, she paces the tracks in the moonlight, tense with fear that something more will happen now that they’re this close, some fresh horror will swoop down on them and steal the dream they’ve almost accomplished. She tries to doze, and when her head begins to pound, she realizes she’s been holding her breath.

  In the morning, a local resident drapes a hose over the garden wall so the migrants can brush their teeth, wet their faces, and fill their canteens. A contingent of older ladies walks the tracks, passing out blessings with homemade bagged sandwiches and pickles. A guard from the hut calls Luca over and passes him a grape lollipop through the chain-link fence. Lydia is on alert at all times now, for Lorenzo, or for anyone like Lorenzo, for anyone who might recognize her. Whenever there’s a delay of this sort, her worry grows that he’ll catch up to them, that he’ll appear walking toward them at any moment. Or that someone else will have too much time to think it over and there will be a snap! An ah-ha! She keeps the ugly pink hat flopped over her face all the time.

  ‘Mami, can I wear my sneakers?’ Luca asks.

  He’s been wearing the new boots since yesterday, and they’re stiff. She wants him to break them in, but he has to do it in small doses. There’s no point in him getting blisters before they even get to the desert. His blue sneakers are tied together by the laces and strung through one strap of his backpack.

  ‘Go ahead and change,’ she says.

  When he takes the boots off, she gathers them up and ties them together in the same fashion. She changes hers, too.

  It’s late morning when there’s a squawk from the radio in the guards’ hut, and the migrants sit up and take notice. Minutes later, the guards swing their expensive gates wide open for the train that appears in the distance. The cage is open, and now all they have to do is wait while the train chugs slowly toward them. The migrants clamber aboard in groups, women and children first. The men help, and the guards watch. One guard even tosses a migrant’s backpack up to him after it rolls off the edge.

  Lydia catches Soledad’s eye. ‘Don’t forget to be afraid,’ she says.

  ‘This is not normal,’ Soledad responds.

  But they’re up quickly. Easily. And the train doesn’t pick up substantial speed until everyone is aboard, almost as if the engineer was taking care to safely accommodate the migrants. To give them a boost. Lydia blesses herself anyway. She traces the sign of the cross on Luca’s forehead every time.

  And then a strange thing happens as they travel north out of Hermosillo and deeper into the Sonoran Desert: they begin to notice other migrants moving in the opposite direction. Just a trickle at first, two on foot, and then another two, and Lydia cannot imagine where they’ve come from, walking south as they are, and emerging from what seem to be endless tracts of vast and barren desert. They are unmistakably migrants. She’s not sure how she knows this, but she does. Still, there’s something different about them, and it’s not only that they’re traveling in the wrong direction. Lydia can’t put her finger on it. Then, only a few miles north of Hermosillo, a second line of track sidles up alongside theirs. Because the vast majority of the Mexican railways are single-track lines, these lay-bys, these miniature exit ramps, exist at intervals so one train can pull off and idle, to await the approach of another coming from the opposite direction. In this way the trains can pass one another, north and south, and carry on, using the same line of track to their destinations. It’s in just such a lay-by that they see a southbound train now idling, and Soledad sits up taller as they approach it. She shields her eyes from the sun in case they’re playing tricks on her. But no, it’s true – the southbound train is packed with migrants. They wave and salute and call out greetings to them as their train slows to a clacking crawl to pass.

  ‘Where are they going?’ Rebeca asks no one.

  The second line of track is separated from theirs by a space of only five or six feet, and one young boy, not much older than Luca, is standing atop the southbound train. He seems to be gauging whether or not he could jump the gap. A group of men yell and gesture wildly at him, so he clambers down the nearby ladder instead, and jumps down to the ground. Then he runs north alongside the northbound train. The train is traveling quite slowly now, and Luca leans over the edge in astonishment to watch the running boy beneath. He looks up at Luca and grins. He grips the moving ladder of Luca’s freight car and hauls himself up. Luca leans back up and waits for the boy’s head to emerge over the lip, which is black and shiny in the desert sunlight. On the idling southbound train, a loud cheer goes up for the boy’s victorious transfer, and the boy shouts back to the men, who all wave and smile.

  ‘¡Vaya con Dios!’ the boy yells at the men he’s leaving behind. ‘¡Ya me voy pa’l otro la’o!’

  Another cheer. ‘Be careful and God bless you!’ another man yells.

  And then the train begins to gain speed again, and the clacking returns to its shriek and rumble, and the boy walks over to them without even crouching, and he plops himself down carelessly. Unlike most migrants, the boy does not carry anything, nor does he wear a hat to shield his berry-brown face from the sun. Because of that fact, his exposed features are dry and burnished. His lips are cracked with peels of white, but the chapping doesn’t interfere with the brightness of his smile. He puts his hand out to bump fists with Luca, who responds reflexively, the way any eight-year-old boy would, without even thinking.

  ‘¿Qué onda, güey?’ the boy says, using the borderland slang that marks him immediately as a northerner.

  Luca doesn’t know exactly what qué onda, güey means because he doesn’t know anyone who talks like this, but he understands enough to know it’s a friendly greeting, so he replies by saying hello. Lydia, who believed her capacity for surprise had been exhausted, is genuinely taken aback by the boy’s arrival. She doesn’t know what to make of him. On the one hand, he gives the instant impression of being gregarious, friendly, charismatic. On the other hand, she’s wary of everyone she meets now, and although this child seems very young, she knows that boys this age are prime candidates for gang recruitment. And why is he alone? Why so friendly with Luca? She puts one arm defensively around her son. This child’s face is round, his eyes, nose, and cheeks, all round. His eyelids look puffy, but the black eyes beneath them are clear and intense. He’s wheezing slightly, and as they all watch, he removes an inhaler from the pocket of his jeans, shakes it vigorously, places it to his lips, and takes a puff. Then he breathes deeply and coughs a little.

  ‘It’s empty.’ He shrugs, replacing the inhaler in his pocket. ‘But the memory of th
e medicine helps.’

  Luca smiles, but Lydia furrows her brow.

  ‘Will you be okay?’ she asks. Despite her instinctive suspicion, she’s still a mother, and you can’t fake a wheeze like that.

  The boy coughs again, once, twice, and then spits something solid over the edge of the train car. ‘It will pass in a minute,’ he wheezes.

  They watch him for signs of a medical emergency, though it’s unclear how they could help if the episode does not, in fact, pass. He sits up straight, looks out across the landscape, folds his legs into the shape of a pretzel, and concentrates on breathing slowly. As he does this, Lydia’s relieved to see the existence of a hole in the sole of his sneaker. No boy with an empty inhaler and a hole in his sneaker could belong to a gang or cartel.

  After he manages to regain a steady breath, the boy turns to Luca and says, ‘I’m Beto. What’s your name?’

  ‘Hello, Beto. I’m Luca.’

  Beto nods. Their train is passing a village that seems to have grown right out of the tracks – just a cluster of houses the same rusty color as the land, and two competing taquerías that face off across the lone street.

  ‘Is your breathing better now?’ Luca asks.

  ‘Yeah, it’s fine,’ Beto says. ‘Happens whenever I run too fast, but you learn how to be calm until it passes, because if you freak out, that makes it worse.’

  Luca nods.

  ‘It’s cool to meet another kid,’ Beto announces then. ‘I don’t see that many kids out here. How old are you?’

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘I’m ten. Almost eleven, though.’ He says this like a very wise old man.

  Luca has about a thousand questions for Beto, but the effect of having them all packed so tightly together in his brain is that none of them shakes loose and gets through the gate. Lydia leans into the opening left by Luca’s silence.

  ‘Beto, are you traveling alone?’ Luca can tell that his mami is trying not to sound judgmental, but the effort isn’t entirely successful. Beto doesn’t seem to care, or even to notice.

  ‘Yep, just me.’ He grins, displaying the absence of two teeth on the bottom, a canine and a molar side by side, so the hole is a double-wide. Beto sticks his tongue through it.

  Now it’s Soledad’s turn. ‘Were you traveling south?’ she asks.

  ‘I was. Temporarily. But now I’m traveling north,’ he says without irony.

  Soledad doesn’t know quite how to respond, but Beto saves her the trouble by changing the subject.

  ‘Guau, you’re really pretty,’ he says.

  Soledad blinks but doesn’t respond.

  ‘Must be a pain in the ass, huh?’

  She laughs.

  He returns his attention to Luca. ‘So where you guys from?’

  Luca glances at Mami, who responds with only the tiniest shake of her head. ‘Mami and I are from . . . Puebla,’ he decides. ‘And the sisters are Ecuadorian.’

  Beto nods. The lie doesn’t matter at all; those places may as well be Antarctica or Mars as far as he’s concerned.

  ‘How about you?’ Luca asks. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘I’m from Tijuana,’ Beto says. ‘But we call it TJ. I was born there, in the dompe.’

  An utterly bizarre piece of information. So odd, in fact, that Luca’s not sure he understands. Again, this is an unfamiliar word, dompe. Luca looks at Mami to translate, but she seems confused as well.

  ‘What’s a dompe?’ Luca asks.

  Beto smirks. ‘You know, a dompe, where people dump their garbage. The trucks come. You know, a dompe.’

  ‘You mean like a vertedero?’ Luca asks, using the Spanish word for ‘dump’.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, a vertedero,’ Beto says.

  Lydia, because her English is slightly more sophisticated than Luca’s, begins to understand that this boy’s native language is not exactly the Spanish of Mexico, nor is it the English of the United States, but rather some kind of semantic borderland crossbreed. Still, this insight does nothing to clarify what the boy means when he says he was born in a dompe. Luca literally scratches his head – a gesture Lydia hasn’t seen him make, she now realizes, since the decimation of their family. It’s a gesture that in fact she never noticed before, and therefore she didn’t miss when it vanished, but now that she sees it again, she’s floored by an accompanying revelation that the gesture, one thumb on top of his ear, three fingers raking through his hair above, is specific to Luca’s intellectual curiosity. It’s a tic that happens only when he’s intrigued by something, when he finds something interesting. The reappearance of it, therefore, feels to Lydia like evidence that her son might survive, that he might be capable, after fifteen days and fourteen hundred miles, of temporarily losing himself in a moment of uncorrupted curiosity. The feeling that thuds through her sternum is hope.

  ‘So you were born in a garbage dump?’ Luca asks carefully, trying not to be rude, and not understanding that there’s nothing at all discourteous about the question, because Beto is neither ashamed of the facts of his origin nor, for that matter, even aware that the facts of his origin might, in other people, incite feelings of discomfort. His origin is simply his origin, and he tells the story without any kind of appreciation of the effect it might provoke.

  He laughs. ‘Yeah, well, I wasn’t born in the garbage, though. Just near it. In Colonia Fausto González. You heard of it?’

  Luca shakes his head.

  ‘It’s kinda famous,’ Beto says proudly.

  Lydia knows a little about las colonias of Tijuana because she’s read the books, because Luis Alberto Urrea is one of her favorite writers, and he’s written about the dumps, about kids like Beto who live there. That flare of recognition makes her feel like she knows him already, at least slightly, but that feeling is half-hollow, a shadow puppet. Because though she may understand something of this boy’s circumstances, she doesn’t know him. Still, the familiarity has the effect of thawing the part of her that would otherwise remain hardened to him.

  And then Beto tells them his whole life story, all of it without stopping, without even really taking a breath, how he doesn’t remember his father, who went to el norte when Beto was still a baby. But he remembers his mami, who was a garbage picker in el dompe before they closed it. And he remembers his big brother, Ignacio, who’s still there in el dompe, buried beneath a sky-blue, hand-painted cross with his name, Ignacio, and the words mijo, 10 años.

  Beto reminds Luca that he’s ten years old, and explains that that’s the same age his brother, Ignacio, was when he was squashed by the back tire of a garbage truck while reaching for the miraculous, round, unblemished sphere of a balón de fútbol he’d spotted amid the refuse. An unprecedented treasure. Beto, who was eight years old and standing nearby at the time, was so stunned by Ignacio’s screams that he failed to secure the balón for his dying brother. (Instead, a pimple-faced kid named Omar got it.) Because of the softness of the ground beneath the truck’s tires, Beto explains, Ignacio was not entirely flattened, but rather compressed into the garbage beneath him – crushed just enough that he survived for three dreadful days. It wasn’t long after that, and the sky-blue cross, that Beto’s mami disappeared, too, first into a drunken stupor, next into a new, more rancid haze, and finally, into the ether.

  Beto is afraid of turning eleven, because it feels like a treachery to his brother. ‘But I guess it would be worse to not turn eleven, right?’ He laughs, and Lydia and the sisters attempt to join him in that sound.

  Luca does not laugh but feels compelled to give the boy something in return for his story. He unzips the side pocket of his backpack, which is sitting in his lap, and fishes out his tube of Orange Mango Blast Blistex. He hands it to Beto, who takes it without saying anything, removes the cap, smears it across his lips, and then makes a loud ah sound. He hands it back to Luca, and doesn’t say thank you, but Luca knows the ah was
an expression of gratitude.

  ‘So wait,’ Soledad says, finally turning her whole body toward him instead of just her head. ‘Isn’t Tijuana right at the border?’

  ‘Yeah, it is,’ Luca says, looking at Soledad with approval.

  She intercepts the look. ‘You’re not the only one who can read a map around here,’ she says, and then back to the newcomer, ‘So then what are you doing here if you were already right at the border? Why were you traveling south? And all those other migrants, too, traveling south?’

  ‘Oh, those guys are all deportados.’

  Soledad cringes. ‘All of them?’

  ‘Sure.’ Beto shrugs. ‘TJ is full of deportados. There’s more people going south than north in Tijuana. You can tell them apart from the regular migrants because of their uniforms.’

  ‘Uniforms?’ Luca asks.

  ‘Yeah, all the migrants wear the same uniforms, right? Dirty jeans, busted shoes, baseball hats.’