Luca’s jeans are heavy with rainwater and he has to walk with his legs spread apart because the wet denim chafes between his thighs and against one spot at the back of his left hip. He’s glad for the new hiking boots, and glad that Mami insisted he wear them all around the apartment for the two days in Nogales, to break them in. He’s glad he hadn’t complained or argued, even though he’d wanted to. But even with that extra practice, with each step he’s increasingly aware of a pinpoint, a tiny dot only the width of a thread, on the back of his left heel, that’s beginning to trouble him. At first he ignores it. Then he addresses it. He tells it that no puny, insignificant speck of pain will prevent him from reaching his destination. He tells it that he would endure a hundred such pains, a thousand, without blinking an eye. He is Luca! His whole family has been murdered! He is unstoppable!
‘Mami.’ His voice is soft with pain, curdled.
‘What is it, mijo?’
‘I have a blister,’ he confesses. It’s excruciating. He cannot go on.
Mami presses her lips together and draws him to the side of the trail, out of the line. The other migrants don’t stop or even slow. They continue at speed, and by the time Lydia’s down on one knee with Luca’s pant leg rolled up at the cuff and his sock pulled down, they’ve all passed. It’s difficult to see in the dark and the rain, but El Chacal has forbidden the use of flashlights, so Lydia draws her face down close to Luca’s heel to investigate. His socks are sopping, and she runs her hand across the back of his foot, where she can feel the forming bubble of a blister. There’s nothing she can do for him because of the dampness of his skin, the dampness of his jeans, the dampness of everything. Band-Aids are impossible. But she has to try. She unslings her pack, finds the zippered compartment on one side where she stashed a handful of Band-Aids before they set out. They are wet, of course, but Lydia selects the driest one, from the middle of the stack. She opens her coat and leans over his ankle, trying to make an umbrella of her body.
‘Take the boot off,’ she says.
‘But, Mami, they’re going,’ he says. ‘We don’t have time.’
‘Do it quickly,’ she snaps.
Luca obeys, tugging on the laces, ripping off the boot, which somersaults to the ground beneath.
‘Sit here.’ She points to her pack, and Luca sits. ‘Sock, too,’ she says, and then she glances up through the streamers of rain, to where she thinks she can still see the last of the group disappearing into the darkness. She stashes the wrapped Band-Aid between her lips. Luca whips off the wet sock, and she crams it into her pocket, untucks her shirt from beneath her hoodie, and uses her shirttail to dry his foot as best she can. His little toes are pruned. She tucks his foot into the warm fold of her armpit, and then reaches over Luca’s shoulder to unzip the backpack he’s still wearing. She knows there are two pairs of socks inside, right-hand side, near the bottom. She worries that her panic will make her clumsy, that she won’t be able to find the socks, groping blindly into the pack this way, that she’ll find them, and drop them, and they’ll be drenched and useless, and they will have lost the group for nothing, that they will die here, not shot through with cartel bullets at a family party, but alone in the desert. They will both die because of a blister. Because of rain. No. There, her fingers brush against a soft ball of rolled socks, still dry. Gracias a Dios. She tugs them out and sticks them into her armpit with the foot, zips the pack. The other migrants are gone now. She can no longer see them or hear them, but all her senses strain after them, she sends her mind to follow the direction they were taking. God, please let us find them, she prays. She peels the wrapper off the Band-Aid, spits the papers onto the ground, gives Luca’s foot another wipe with her shirttail, blows on the damp foot with her meager breath, and then presses the adhesive bandage against the curve of his skin. Please, God, let it stick. She unfolds the dry socks and tugs one onto his foot. It seems to take hours, the wriggling of the foot into the tube of material, the correct placement of the seam across the toe, the adjustment of the dry cotton into position around the afflicted heel. She thinks about putting the second one on him, too. An extra layer of protection between the boot and the skin. Would that be better or worse for the blister? Extra padding, but a tighter fit. The time constraint is the deciding factor. She tucks the other dry sock beneath her bra strap and retrieves the toppled boot. She loosens the laces and pulls at the tongue. She wipes the inside of the boot with her shirttail, and Luca jams his foot in. She yanks on the laces.
‘I’ll do it, Mami,’ he says.
She holds her coat over him while he ties the boot quickly, impressively, and then, ‘I’m good,’ he says. ‘I’m okay, Mami. Thank you.’ And he stands up from her backpack. He takes a few steps to test the repair. ‘Much better,’ he says.
Lydia has refastened the side zipper on her pack, and is already walking after him, jogging, really, while she slings the backpack around to her shoulders. The gallon jugs of water bang and slosh beneath. ‘Go, mijo, quickly, we have to catch up,’ she says.
Altogether, the delay cost them perhaps two and a half minutes. Maybe three. Enough time to become completely lost from the group. They’re well out of earshot because all they can hear is the thundering wash of the rain hammering down all around them. Lydia feels panicky, all her fears compressed into a tight ball that lodges in her chest. This is how it happens, she thinks. And her voice becomes frantic as she urges Luca to move faster, but he’s remembering, too, that day outside Culiacán when la migra were chasing them and Mami twisted her ankle and fell. They can’t afford a twisted ankle on top of everything else, Luca thinks, and that worry slows him into a pace that’s too cautious. So perhaps this will be it instead, they will die from caution.
‘Apúrate, mijo, please.’ Lydia fights against a mounting scream in her throat, and now there’s a new doubt: What if they’re hurrying in the wrong direction, diverging only slightly from the path, a fork, so that with each step, they stray a little farther from the group? This is the way they went, isn’t it? There’s no possibility of tracking them in this rain, in this dark. They have to just go. Move. Keep moving. In desperation Lydia breaks the crucial rule about silence, and she calls out for them, but there’s no response. They walk and stumble and hurry through the dark for some time, and every few minutes, she breaks that rule again, louder and more desperately each time Lydia tries a name.
Soledad.
Rebeca.
Beto.
Help.
Nicolás.
Choncho.
Where are you?
Luca is no longer in front of her or behind her, but beside her, holding her hand, and she glances infrequently at the darkness of his eyes, and she sees that he’s calm. He doesn’t share her panic.
‘It’s okay, Mami,’ he says at length. ‘This is the right way.’
She believes him because she must. And he knows these things. Doesn’t he?
Chacal.
Marisol.
Slim.
Hello?
The only answer is the whip of falling rain in thick cords upon their shoulders, fat drops spattering against their hoods. She pushes through the darkness, and in some detached corner of her mind where operations are still functioning normally, she makes jokes for herself, about being lost in the desert for forty days, for forty millennia. Her Catholic vision of hell is all wrong: there’s no fire, no wretched burning. Hell is wet and cold and black and lost. Her brain tap-dances and contracts, and then. Then. She sees a shape moving through the darkness. A shadow. A barely discernible movement, a distant blotch of black that’s a slightly dimmer shade of black than all the fixed blacks around it. Lydia yelps, and feels a shot of hope club through her sternum, and she squeezes Luca’s hand, and drags him into a quicker pace, and she charges after that blotch of black as it moves through the invisible landscape, and she’s not imagining it. It’s no mirage. It continues its traject
ory, bump, bump. It moves forward, and Lydia fixes her eyes on it and she follows, she pulls Luca, she runs, heedless of the treacherous ground beneath their feet, until the shape grows larger, closer, and it is a backpack. It is Ricardín’s backpack. She calls out once more.
Ricardín.
David.
And the shape pauses. Turns toward her. They are found. They are saved.
Salvación. Salvación. Lydia cries.
Ricardín ushers her into the line ahead of him, ahead of his primo David. And here are the sisters, Rebeca. Soledad. It’s easy for Lydia to believe the girls might not have noticed their absence. It’s so dark and the rain is falling so hard, it’s difficult to observe anything beyond the border of your own hood, your outstretched hands, your churning feet. Lydia doesn’t want to know if the sisters noticed they were gone, if they mentioned it to El Chacal, or asked him to stop and wait. If she doesn’t know, then she doesn’t have to ask herself what she might have done in their position. It’s okay now anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s okay. Lydia crosses herself in the darkness. She breathes into her shoulders. She inhales the endless rain.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The downpour stops. Just as abruptly as it started. And in its wake, Luca hears a new chorus of uncomfortable music in their midst. Their shoes squelch beneath them. The drenched denim of their jeans murmurs stiffly when their legs move against each other. Luca’s teeth chatter, and he becomes so cold he can almost hear his brain shivering in his skull. He begins to wonder if being freezing and wet in the aftermath of rain might be worse than the rain itself, the same way your body, once adapted to the cold Pacific water of Acapulco Bay, can yearn for the mantle of that water after you emerge onto the hot, dry sand of Playa Condesa. Your body can get mixed up about what’s hot and what’s cold, Luca thinks, but then it begins to rain again, and Luca knows that his hypothesis was una mierda. The night passes in misery, in bouts of torrential rain and intermittent periods of respite. Lydia tries to maintain her sense of relief, her feeling that they are saved. But their backpacks and jeans chafe their skin raw, and then it rains again. Every one of them, once or twice at least, every one of them despairs. The only thought that sustains them is the notion that each moment they endure this misery is one less moment they have yet to endure.
‘There’s a blessing of the rain,’ El Chacal says as they lace their way through the seam of a canyon. ‘Everybody hates it.’
Luca and Lydia have returned to their place near the front of the line, behind Choncho and Slim and Beto. Rebeca and Soledad are directly behind them now, followed by Marisol, Nicolás, Lorenzo, David and Ricardín, and then the two quiet men who carry their names in secret. The boulders in this seam of land are broad and smooth underfoot, slick with water, and Luca notices that he can begin to make out their shapes in the dark. They come to a place where the boulders form a kind of natural staircase the migrants descend, and then the walls of the canyon rise up on either side of them, and they walk along the bottom of a gulch, where a stream of rainwater sloshes around their ankles. They follow El Chacal tight along the left-hand side of the gulley, where the path is driest, and irregular ledges jut from the canyon walls. It’s just the kind of landscape the daredevil Pilar from school would like to climb if she were here, Luca thinks. He could climb it, too, he knows now. He can do things Pilar never dreamed of. The first traces of dark gray daylight brush the walls of the gorge by degrees while the coyote talks. ‘When it rains, the narcos stay in their SUVs. La migra agents stay in their dens. We sneak past while they take shelter.’
‘Only migrants venture out in the rain,’ Choncho says.
‘Only lunatics,’ Slim corrects him.
But the rain is fickle in the desert, and as the lid of night slowly lifts, Luca watches the oppressive clouds rolling like the wheels of La Bestia across the still-dark sky. Those clouds gather and crush and demolish, and after they pass, they leave a blank void of gray nothing behind them. Soon the sun will come and fill that void with hot color. Soon la migra will return.
They walk in haste.
‘How much farther?’ Beto asks, because no one has spoken in a long time, and even more than he wants an answer, he wants to hear the reassuring sound of another human voice.
‘An hour, maybe less,’ the coyote answers.
Most people who meet El Chacal at this stage of his life presume he got his moniker because of his work as a coyote, but in fact his family has called him that since he was twelve years old. When he was a boy in Tamaulipas, Juan Pedro, as he was known back then, found a pup one day on the side of the road. The pup’s mother had been struck by a car and killed. The other littermates had scattered or been picked off by the time Juan Pedro arrived and found the lone pup sitting bereft beside the cold body of its mother. Juan Pedro took the pup home, and as it grew, despite the meticulous care and affection Juan Pedro gave it, it became a wild, rangy-looking thing. People in the village took to calling the pup ‘The Jackal’, which was fine by Juan Pedro, who liked the wildness of it. But then they began calling Juan Pedro ‘Mother of Jackal’, which he didn’t like quite so much. He endured that name for some time and was glad when eventually folks stopped mentioning the dog entirely and shortened his nickname to ‘El Chacal’.
Despite the name, El Chacal had no intention of becoming a coyote. Few people do. He crossed once many years ago, when he was still a young man looking for work, and he intended to make just the one crossing. It was much easier back then, but still no picnic – not in Arizona. The other migrants he was with during that first crossing found it strenuous and difficult. But El Chacal discovered that he liked these high-desert places. He found that they suited him, they opened his lungs and the good heat of his body. He spent a few months working as a dishwasher at a diner in Phoenix, and whenever he had time off, he liked to go hiking through the canyons. It wasn’t long before he went home to Tamaulipas. The next time he crossed, he did it alone, without a guide. It was crazy, but he did it without difficulty. He did it with a map and a compass, and what’s more, he enjoyed it the way some people enjoy boot camp or a marathon. He liked the strain it put on his muscles and his mind. He liked the undercurrent of survivalist danger. So then he did it again. Several more times without company, and each time he crossed, he grew stronger and smarter, he adjusted his route, perfected his bearings. Then he brought a group of friends from Tamaulipas with him. They were so impressed by his knowledge of the land, by the apparent ease with which he navigated the difficult terrain, that they hired him to bring their girlfriends, their children, their cousins, their parents. Quite accidentally, El Chacal found himself with a thriving business in human smuggling.
It was exciting for him to be good at something after a lifetime of mediocrity in Tamaulipas. His reputation grew, and as the border tightened and his previous routes became impassable, as he had to strike farther and farther into the desert, into more arduous, perilous tracks all the time, El Chacal realized he could charge a lot of money for this service. Then the cartels moved in.
So he doesn’t make as much money now, and what’s more, he doesn’t enjoy the work as he once did. He used to feel like a minor hero, a guide with the power to lead people to the promised land. Now he pays la migra and the cartels both for the privilege of crossing this binational scrap of dirt. They eat his profits and his freedom. When they demand favors of him, he cannot say no. Sometimes they ask him to carry something he doesn’t want to carry. Once in a while they tell him to take someone he doesn’t want to take. Soon El Chacal will retire. He has enough money saved, and now that he’s almost thirty-nine years old, the travails of this repetitive journey are beginning to outweigh his boyish sense of adventure. He’ll go home to Tamaulipas. Maybe he’ll marry Pamela, whom he’s loved since he was a boy. Maybe she’ll finally say yes. Why not? Meanwhile, he tries to be stern with the migrants. He tries to be detached because attachments can be fatal. He needs to be at libert
y to make decisions for the good of the group, and if he grows too fond of one of his pollitos, that makes it harder to make a tough decision in a pinch, to leave someone behind if he sees they’re not going to make it. But recently, it’s difficult for him to discern how much of his callousness is still an act. He wears a rosary around his neck to countermand his worries about the flagging condition of his soul. The tattoo on his right forearm reads jesús anda conmigo, and mostly, he still believes it. He wants it to be true.
When they hear the cry behind them, the migrants instinctively duck, but El Chacal, still on his feet, turns toward the sound. Across the tops of the migrants’ heads he sees, approaching from behind and moving as swiftly as a nightmare through the charcoal colors of the canyon, a fast-flowing black mass of water. It’s descending the staircase behind them.
‘Get up!’ he shouts. ‘¡Arriba!’ His voice bangs and echoes against the walls of the canyon, all his furtive inclinations suspended. He shouts at them, ‘Get up, up!’
He leaps from rock to rock ahead, and then reaches for a broad ledge just higher than his waist, and hoists himself aloft. The migrants follow, and El Chacal reaches back to help them up, first Luca and Beto, then the sisters and Lydia, and now Lorenzo is already up. ‘Help them!’ El Chacal shouts at him, so Lorenzo leans down, gives Marisol his hand, and pulls her up, and in this way, one by one the migrants scramble up and away from the advancing wall of water, and those at the front try to move up again, to make room for the others to follow, and here’s another ledge, just higher, so they climb up and up, ascending the wall, and they’re almost all up out of the bottom of the gorge now, and it looks so obvious from here, with the water coming so quickly, with the discovery of the alternate path, this higher path, made up entirely of these jutting ledges, that it’s an ancient riverbed beneath them. Jesucristo.
American Dirt : A Novel (2020) Page 40