Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

‘Mami, look!’ He yawns. ‘What are they?’ On a ridge above them, rows of colorful houses snake up the hillside, all in matching clusters: red, blue, green, purple.

‘Oh, they’re just houses, amorcito .’

‘Only houses?’ It’s turned into a bright young morning. They’ve been on the road almost two hours.

‘Why are they so colorful like that?’

‘Just for decoration, I think.’

‘They look like LEGOs.’

Lydia’s breath hitches in her chest every time the bus jerks or turns or changes its speed, but there’s no stopping. No armed men standing in the road. And soon, buildings line both sides of the narrow street and they’ve made it. They’re in Chilpancingo. She makes the sign of the cross over herself and traces a smaller version on Luca’s forehead. They pull up in front of a familiar building, a miniature of the station they embarked from in Acapulco this morning. The driver stops the bus and there’s the loud hiccupping noise as he engages the brakes. He stands and announces past his mustache, ‘Five-minute stop.’

A couple passengers stand up from their seats to stretch. At the front, someone gets off for a cigarette, but Lydia and Luca are the only ones who begin gathering their things to disembark. Everyone on board is heading to the capital.

‘Are we getting out, Mami?’

‘Yes, mi amor .’

But then she stands next to her seat in the narrow aisle with her backpack strapped to her shoulders and looks down at her sleepy son, at the top of his tousled black head, and she wishes they could make a run for it. She wishes they could hunker down in here, camouflaged among the travelers on this bus, and hold their breath all the way to Mexico City. Maybe they’d make it. Maybe the roadblock between here and there would be innocuous. A brief stop, a fistful of bills, a languorous waving through. Thump thump, two slaps on the side of the bus as it rolls on its merry way. Lydia imagines it all with a quiver of hope. The bus driver emerges from the terminal now and gets back on the bus. New passengers begin to board, and the driver takes their tickets one by one.

‘Mami?’

‘Come on.’

As the shadow of the bus pulls away from the sidewalk, Lydia and Luca emerge into the blinking daylight of Chilpancingo. She feels both relieved and disheartened to be off the bus. But she takes a moment to remind herself that she’s managed to get them this far: nineteen hours and sixty-eight miles away from the epicenter of calamity. With each minute and mile that passes, Lydia knows she’s increased their chances of survival. She needs to take encouragement where she can find it. She mustn’t despair at the enormity of the task yet ahead. She should focus only on the immediate next steps. Find Sebastián’s college roommate.

On the sidewalk, she tightens the straps on Luca’s backpack, which are drooping too far from his small shoulders. He looks like a turtle with an inadequate shell, yet somehow he’s managed to draw his most vulnerable parts tightly within himself. She wonders about the lasting effects of that retraction.

‘What’s next, Mami?’ Luca asks her, in the flat tone of voice that seems to be his only inflection now.

‘Let’s find an internet café,’ she says.

‘But you have Papi’s tablet, right?’

It’s powered off in her backpack, and she’s not going to turn it back on. She also left the SIM card of her own cell phone in a garbage can outside the bank in Playa Caletilla. She felt marginally crazy, paranoid, as she pried the thing out with her fingernail, but she didn’t want to be a blue dot flashing on some remote, hostile screen. She adjusts the brim of Sebastián’s Yankees cap slightly lower on her son’s forehead. She should buy one for herself, too, she thinks.

‘Let’s go,’ she says.

El Cascabelito Internet Café is just opening for the day when Lydia purchases a coffee and fifteen minutes to look more closely at maps online. She buys Luca a bag of platanitos, too, but the green foil package sits unopened on the desk. Lydia chooses a computer in the back corner, one that has two chairs and a privacy partition so they’re hidden from view of the door. Luca draws his heels up to the seat of the chair and rests his chin on his knees, but his eyes remain unfocused on the platanitos while Lydia studies the screen. From Chilpancingo there are only two viable routes to Mexico City, and both are virtually guaranteed to have roadblocks. Lydia chews the inside of her mouth, and her knee undertakes a jittery hop beneath the desk. They can’t exactly walk to Mexico City from here. Lydia’s never been claustrophobic, but today she feels so trapped. She can feel it in her limbs, a panicky longing to stretch. She can’t see any way out. Dismay will not help .

She opens Facebook and finds Sebastián’s friend. He’s an attorney, and his profile shows the name of his law firm, but it’s Sunday and it won’t be open. She checks his About tab, and scrolls down to his likes: a local newspaper, a couple nonprofits, his alma mater, a fan page for Adidas sneakers, so much fútbol . But then, there. Bingo: a Pentecostal church here in Chilpancingo. A worship service at nine o’clock. She looks it up and finds it’s about two miles away. There’s a bus down the main thoroughfare, and twenty minutes later, Luca and Lydia are on it.

Lydia worries she wrote the address down wrong, because when they get off the bus, the street is lined with shops, all closed on a Sunday morning. They find the number they’re looking for sandwiched between an electronics store and a jeweler. But just as she’s double-checking the address on the scrap of paper in her hand, a young man pushing a baby carriage approaches and opens the door for his pregnant wife. Lydia peeks inside before the door swings closed, and she sees rows of folding chairs facing a stage. Luca tugs on her sleeve and directs her attention to a sign she hadn’t noticed, propped in the window: Iglesia Pentecostal Tabernáculo de la Victoria. There’s no steeple or stained glass, but this is the place.

Inside, it’s bigger than she imagined, with low ceilings, and fans attached to the walls. There’s a full drum kit, an amplifier, and some huge speakers set up behind the pulpit. There’s no cross, no font of holy water at the entrance, but Lydia blesses herself out of habit, and Luca follows her example. She waits for some bubble of feeling to follow – a whisper from her legion of newborn angels, or perhaps a low-down rage at God instead. But nothing comes; it’s spiritual tumbleweed. Un desierto del alma because she has room only for fear.

They sit in the last row, near the wall, and Lydia stows their backpacks under their folding chairs. She covers her face with her hands and instructs Luca to do the same, but it’s not veneration. It’s only for concealment, in case any of Los Jardineros are Pentecostal Christians, in case they traffic drugs on a Monday, stab people on a Thursday, and then come here seeking forgiveness on a Sunday. It doesn’t seem more outlandish than anything else that’s happened.

Through the screen of her interlaced fingers, Lydia watches the square of stark sunlight on the tiled floor grow brighter every time someone opens the glass door to come in. A few of the congregants notice them in the back row, and give them a welcoming nod or a smile, but most walk right past and find their usual seats.

The church is almost half-full by the time Carlos appears behind his wife and children. The wife greets everyone with hugs, and has the sharp voice of a gabacha above the hum of reverent conversation in the room. Lydia half stands from her seat and lifts a hand in greeting, but Carlos doesn’t see her. The youngest son alerts him, points to Lydia in the corner, and Carlos turns.