Even though they’d been near the front of the line, Choncho and Slim and their sons are still below in the gulch because they stayed to help the others. The migrants on the ledge step back to make room for the stragglers to scramble up. They spread out, hasten to scale the ascendant ledges, to reach higher ground. And now Slim is up on the first ledge below, and he reaches back for his nephew David, and their thick forearms slap against each other as they grab wrists and Slim hoists the boy up. And now Choncho is up, too, but Ricardín is last, Slim’s son. And the water is so fast and so high that it doesn’t reach Ricardín’s ankles first and then engulf his legs, but rather it hits the entire back of his body at once and knocks him forward, and he’s dragged along in its maw like a ragdoll, and they all shout and yelp, and El Chacal and the two brothers run and leap from ledge to ledge after him, or after his backpack really, because that’s all they can see now, his large and floating backpack, the same one that was Lydia’s redemption in the darkness, and then Ricardín’s arms come flailing out of the water and he manages to flip himself somehow, and then the backpack is immediately dragged from his body, his arms slip right out and it’s gone, and Ricardín makes one perfunctory effort to reach for the pack, and then realizes immediately that the pack is not the priority, so he returns his attention to his own flagging body, his unusually large frame, whose strength has never failed him before. His papi and tío are on the embankment above him, and the coyote is there, and no one can believe how fast this happened, how the water came out of nowhere, and how fast and strong and deep it is. They’re reaching for him, and yelling for him, and he can hear his father’s voice but he can’t do anything because the water has his arms pinned, and his legs are churning and he keeps spitting out mouthfuls of water, but as soon as he spits out one, his mouth is already full again, and it’s not only water, but water and soil and sticks and debris, and he’s going to drown in it. Ricardín knows he’s going to drown, and he has the thought that it would be almost funny to drown in a flash flood in the desert, and then he realizes that he doesn’t want his death to be funny, or even almost funny, so he focuses all his energy on his abdominal muscles, on bending himself in half, so the top part of his body comes up out of the water and once, twice, he reaches for his father’s hands and misses, and then – wham! – just like that, he bangs into a rock with his head, and then another right after that, and now he can taste blood, his tooth – his front tooth is sharper than it’s always been, and his lip is bleeding. But he is not going to die here, he refuses to die here, in such a stupid, undignified way, when he has a big, strong body to save him, so he looks up at his father on the ledge above, and manages to turn himself just enough so the next rock he hits feet-first, and then another and again, until he’s almost bouncing himself along in the water, from boulder to boulder, and when the next one comes, he uses it, and the momentum of the water, to catapult himself up toward the ledge above, and again he misses his tío’s outstretched hand, but the men are yelling encouragement at him, and keeping pace with his swift progress by leapfrogging each other, and he knows his plan is a good plan, and if he can do it again it will work, so again he twists in the water, except this time, when the next boulder comes and he reaches out his leg, it gets caught there, in an underwater crevasse, and the water pushes his body past, but keeps his leg wrenched under, and he can feel the bone snap, and he screams out in pain, but now his father and his tío are there just above him, and the pain is wicked, but their hands are on him, his papi has his arm, and his tío has the hood of his sweatshirt, and they are hauling him back against the current and toward his wrong-way leg. He feels no relief when the coyote is there, too, when they fix their six strong hands on him and together haul the top half of his weight up from the floodwaters and drape it over the lip of the earth above. His body is twisted awkwardly, but he has purchase now, they’ve got him. He will not drown. The water from his drenched body stains the dirt beneath him a darker color, and his fingers scrabble at the earth, but the lower half of his body is still in the water, stuck.
He feels no relief because he knows.
‘My leg is broken.’ Ricardín does not cry. ‘It’s definitely broken. I broke my leg.’
And it’s just as well the other migrants have not followed this far downstream, because no one wants to see or to hear the horrific business of removing the boy’s leg from where it’s caught in the crevasse below.
The only question is who will stay with him. Slim and Choncho have both done this journey enough times to know how it works, and to accept the terrible fate without complaint. They don’t plead with El Chacal or the other migrants. They don’t beg for help or ask them to stay. Although it would be a reasonable response in these circumstances, they don’t drift toward hysteria at the thought of being left alone and immobilized here in the desert. It’s Choncho who makes the final decision.
‘Because I’m the older brother, that’s why.’
Slim nods.
‘I’ll stay with my godson,’ Choncho says. ‘We’ll give you a head start, and when he’s feeling up to it, I’ll get him to the Ruby Road. You take David and go find work for both our families.’
The brothers embrace, the hard, back-smacking embrace of working men. Then Slim pulls his son’s wet head into his arms.
‘I’m sorry, Papi,’ Ricardín says.
Slim shakes his head. ‘Gracias a Dios, you escaped with your life. That’s all that matters.’
Ricardín and David pray with their fathers before the four of them part ways.
‘Call Teresa when you get to a phone, when you get picked up,’ Slim tells his brother. ‘And I’ll call her when we get to Tucson, and make sure you’re safe.’
Choncho nods.
‘And take this.’ Slim sets one of his water jugs down beside his son.
‘Papi—’
‘Take it, Ricky,’ Slim says. He squats down on his haunches and looks his son in the eye, and then squeezes his shoulder, and stands up with his hat pulled low. He turns his face quickly away.
Behind him, Choncho hugs his son, his hand like a mitt on the back of David’s neck. They’re both well over six feet tall. Choncho kisses his boy on top of the head, and then gives him a light shove toward his uncle. ‘Stay out of trouble,’ he says.
‘Keep the rising sun to your backs,’ El Chacal tells them. ‘The Ruby Road is barely a mile from here.’
A mile, Luca thinks. With a broken leg.
When the coyote herds the migrants back to their route, when they ascend from the canyon into the hot pink dawn, only Luca looks back from the gap at Ricardín and his tío still sitting on the ledge below. The others keep moving, and Luca can feel their unified will, pushing themselves forward like cogs in machinery, like an escalator. They can’t stop the engine or even slow it down. It moves on despite the new rot in their collective spirit. Even the coyote’s energy seems to be flagging. But they move on. They move on.
The migrants are shuffling past Luca, who hovers now, in the gap. Behind them, Choncho pulls his brown baseball cap low over his eyes, and Ricardín’s face is a wet twist of pain. How will they climb out of there when he can’t walk? Luca wonders. How will they make it to the road? Then he banishes that thought and prays instead. Please let them make it to the road.
‘Luca, ven,’ Mami says.
He scrambles to catch up.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The cave, when they finally reach it, is warm and dry, and the rising sun paints the back wall orange and pink and yellow. It’s not a sunken cave with a dark hole of a mouth like Luca expected when he heard the word cueva, but rather, it’s as if a huge divot has been hollowed out of the earth with an ice-cream scoop, and then softened and cleaned by the elements. There are several copper nails hammered into the top of the cave’s opening, and El Chacal takes a sheet from his pack that’s painted in earthy stripes the exact colors of the landscape. He tacks this she
et onto the nails above, dropping the migrants into a light shade.
The migrants look different in this morning’s light than they did in yesterday’s. Some of them had already known they were capable of walking away from a wounded man, of abandoning a person in the desert to save themselves. Marisol, for example, believes there’s almost no despicable thing she wouldn’t do in order to get back to her daughters. Lorenzo would trample a baby to get to el norte. For others among them, the discovery of their own compliance is an unpleasant surprise. They all know how lucky they are that it was Ricardín who broke his leg, and not them, and the recognition of that good fortune makes them each feel damned, doomed. Unconscionable.
‘Men outside first,’ the coyote orders them, when the sheet is fixed in place.
Lorenzo groans, but the others duck through without complaint. Rebeca is soaked and there’s a dank smell rising off the back of her neck where the hood of her sweatshirt has gathered the oils running from her sopping hair. Her toes are frozen, and her feet feel raw in her shoes, but she’s terrified of taking off her clothes.
‘It’s the only way to get dry.’ Soledad plops down on her backside and peels off her soggy sneakers. Her toes are tingly. ‘I feel better already,’ she says.
They all undress. They don’t look at one another. Beto stays in only his underwear because he has nothing else to put on, so Lydia fishes out the same spare T-shirt he wore as a makeshift hat yesterday and hands it to him. The rain has had an unhealthy effect on his lungs, and he rattles and wheezes when he lifts his arms to pull the gifted T-shirt over his head. Lydia finds her own spare clothes, rolled inside a plastic bag in her pack, to be reasonably dry. Luca’s, too. Soledad stands up and removes her sweater, which she holds up in front of Rebeca like a curtain so her sister can change. They all peel the clothes from their wet bodies. They slip into large T-shirts and change their underwear. They’ll have to stretch their jeans to dry on the rocks outside.
Even though there’s a new solemnity among them in the absence of Choncho and Ricardín, the solace of this place, this moment, is extraordinary. The ordeal of the rain makes Lydia appreciate the comfort of dryness in a way she never even considered before now. While the men strip and change in the cave, she and Luca sit just outside the sheet with their bare legs stretched out in the sunshine. It’s still early morning in the desert, but the temperature is rising quickly. The rock is soft and dry beneath them, and the sun warms the patches where their skin is chafed and tender. Luca wants to ask Mami what they’re going to do when they get to el norte, but he’s afraid she won’t have an answer, and besides, he doesn’t want to jinx the nearness of their arrival. There’s one question that won’t leave him alone, though.
‘What about Rebeca and Soledad?’ he says. ‘Do you really think they’ll go to Maryland?’
Lydia squints her eyes against the brightness of the growing day and pulls his feet onto her lap to examine his blister. The Band-Aid from last night is still surprisingly well fastened to his heel, so she doesn’t mess with it. She can feel the warm weight of Sebastián’s ring sitting in the hollow at the base of her throat. A mild breeze crosses her bare brown knees, and Luca wiggles his toes.
‘It’s always been their plan,’ Lydia says carefully.
‘But couldn’t they change their plan?’ he says. ‘If we ask them?’
The sky is scrubbed fresh and stark blue by the gone rain, but every trace of that water has evaporated from the earth around them. It feels like a dream, all that rainfall. This is a cycle, she thinks. Every day a fresh horror, and when it’s over, this feeling of surreal detachment. A disbelief, almost, in what they just endured. The mind is magical. Human beings are magical.
‘Anything’s possible, Luca,’ she says, looking past her toes and out across the ruddy landscape. And maybe they really could change their plans. Lydia thinks about how adaptable migrants must be. They must change their minds every day, every hour. They must be stubborn about one thing only: survival.
The moon has risen like a frail white eggshell against the blueness of the daytime sky.
‘Can they stay with us?’ Luca asks. ‘Can they live with us?’
‘Yes,’ she answers him easily. ‘If they want to.’
Lydia can’t imagine saying goodbye to Soledad and Rebeca now. Another parting.
‘And maybe Beto?’ Luca asks.
‘Oh my goodness!’ She laughs. ‘We’ll see.’
Luca doesn’t ask Mami if she thinks Choncho managed to get Ricardín to the Ruby Road. He doesn’t ask if she thinks someone found them by now, if they’re okay. He’s already made up the answers to those questions in his own mind; they are the answers he needs them to be.
Their drinking supplies are beginning to run low, which feels ludicrous after all that water. The coyote instructs them to drink what they need, but conserve as much as they can. In the large cave, they sleep all morning, and by mid-afternoon they are thirsty and sweaty and hungry, and the relative comfort of this place has melted with the oppressive heat of the day. They endeavor to sleep through their discomfort. They know that tonight is the last night, and they’re all eager to get out of here, to get where they’re going, to descend from this airless, waterless, colorless nowhere and get to that road down there, to follow it to where there’s life.
It becomes stifling in the cave because the camouflage of the hanging sheet, now weighted with rocks along its bottom to prevent the wind from billowing it in and out of the cave, also prevents that breeze from cooling them. Rest becomes difficult, and Rebeca is hot and frustrated when she sits up in the cave and finds everyone else asleep. All around her, the other migrants make the breathy noises of unquiet sleep. Beto is the loudest, wheezing impressively with every breath, but he doesn’t stir. He uses one arm as a pillow, and sleeps with his mouth wide open, trying to draw the oxygen out of the air. Rebeca jams her bare feet into her sneakers and steps over him. The sneakers are scratchy and misshapen from being so wet and then drying out again, but she doesn’t bother tying them. She only has to find somewhere to pee. Lorenzo opens his eyes as the girl picks her way across and around the sleeping migrants. He looks right up the smooth brown skin of her leg as she passes, and is rewarded by the sight of her yellow cotton underwear beneath her baggy white T-shirt. She ducks beneath the hanging sheet and steps outside. Without a sound, Lorenzo sits up from his place, leaves his shoes off, and follows her.
Rebeca rounds the side of the cave, leaves the softness of rock behind her, and steps into the scraggy tangle of undergrowth in search of a place to empty her bladder. There are scrubby trees here, and she ducks beneath one, pulling her cotton panties to her knees and squatting in the shade. She hears Lorenzo before she sees him, because he grunts at the prickly sharpness of plants and stones underfoot. She stands immediately, leaving a trickle of urine down the inside of one leg. She snatches her panties up around her hips and pulls the T-shirt down.
He gives her a crooked smile, an attempt at charm. ‘Should’ve worn my shoes,’ he says, stepping painfully toward her across the rocks. ‘Guess I’m not as smart as you.’
Rebeca takes two steps back. Away from him. She puts one hand out and feels the rough bark of the rosewood she just watered. Its boughs are low overhead. A small branch tangles in her hair.
‘I’m just taking a piss,’ he says. ‘Just like you.’ He’s not wearing a shirt, only boxer shorts with a stretchy elastic waistband. He tugs them down right in front of her and pulls out his engorged penis. Rebeca does not want to see it. She looks at the path behind him, the path she took around the side of the cave, and knows she cannot return that way, not without walking toward him, without passing directly by him with his disgusting erect penis. She’s already crying as she turns and ducks beneath the branch of the tree behind her, ripping out a strand of her hair as she goes. Lorenzo is quick, much quicker than she thought he’d be without shoes on, and before she’s managed
to get very far at all, he’s already on her, first with a violent yank of her wrist in his grip, and then the hot wetness of his mouth all over her, her cheek, her neck, her ear. Rebeca fights, swinging with her free arm, but then he grabs that one, too, so now he has her pinned, her two wrists encircled by the fetters of his strong hands, and he presses all his weight on top of her. He pins her back against the rugged rock face and she can feel the hard club of his anatomy pushing against her stomach. She knows there are tears coming down her face, but she feels entirely powerless to change anything. She tries anyway, swinging her knee up to find that her legs, too, are now pinned beneath his weight. So then she strikes with the only thing she has left – her head. And she manages to connect, once, twice, she headbutts him, but he only laughs and tells her he likes it rough. She fights and cries, and tries to get her hands loose, tries to use her teeth, her elbows, tries to get her arms between their bodies, to push him off, but she doesn’t scream, she holds in her scream, because they’re in the United States now, and if she screams and she’s lucky, it will be Slim or David who answers that cry, but if she’s unlucky it will be la migra. When has she ever been lucky? Her head goes limp. Her neck, limp. Rebeca stares up past the contorted menace of Lorenzo’s strained face. She stares up at the blank blue sky above him and waits for the worst part to happen. She wants it to be over with.
But then it doesn’t. It doesn’t happen. Because just as she feels the brutality of his hands traveling down the length of her rigid body, just as he pulls at the fabric of her underwear, there’s another voice.
‘Oye naco, get the fuck up off her this instant or I will blow your pinche brains out.’
All at once, the violence recedes. The pressure recedes. The cruel weight of his body is lifted off her, and Rebeca slides down the rock face, trembling.
American Dirt : A Novel (2020) Page 41