Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

He’s just washed his hands and returned to the fluorescent light of the hallway when he sees Padre Rey and Néstor talking to a young man in the doorway of the men’s bunk room. Luca recognizes the young man as a migrant who arrived late that afternoon, before dinner. He’s wearing long, red shorts and a white T-shirt, socks but no shoes, and he’s carrying his backpack in front of him, unzipped. There’s a pair of clean, expensive, white sneakers on the floor beside him.

‘At least let me get dressed first,’ he says. ‘Man, this is bullshit. You’re supposed to help people.’

Néstor steps behind him into the darkened interior of the dorm room, between the man and the sleeping migrants beyond.

‘We can talk further, but not here. You are disturbing the whole facility,’ Padre Rey says calmly. ‘Please, just come with us to the main room, where we can talk without waking everyone.’

‘This is bullshit, Padre, that puta is lying,’ the man says, raising his voice to a shout. ‘Bullshit!’

Inside the dorm room, several men get out of their bunks and stand alongside Néstor, creating a kind of wall. They cross their arms, plant their legs wide. Luca stays frozen in his spot beside the bathroom door. He should turn and go the other way. He should scoot down the hall and back to the women and children’s room, he should climb back up past Mami’s head and settle himself into the covers, where he should allow his body, temporarily relieved of stomach cramps, to rest. But he’s paralyzed, transfixed. He’s unaware of his own racing pulse, his shallow breath, his fingers scrabbling into the smooth seams between the painted cinder blocks of the wall behind him.

‘ ¡Chinga tu madre! ’ the young man yells.

‘Let’s go, hermano .’ It’s the first time Luca has heard Néstor use his voice. It’s as solidly built as his body. ‘Don’t make it harder than it has to be.’

The young man stoops and grabs his sneakers with one hand as Néstor and the other men close the distance behind him, encouraging him into the hallway without touching him. When he straightens to follow Padre Rey down the corridor, Luca notes the shape of a sickle tattoo with three bloodred droplets on the blade jutting out from the man’s sock. It’s carved into the calf muscle of his right leg. Luca doesn’t know what the tattoo means, exactly, but he doesn’t need to understand it for it to amplify his sense of dread. That bloody sickle unsticks Luca from the wall and sends him dashing down the hallway back to the women’s dorm. He runs bang into Mami as he barrels through the door.

‘Luca,’ she says. ‘Oh my God, Luca, where were you?’ She doesn’t wait for an answer. Her hands are on his shoulders, and she places him farther inside the room before sticking her head out into the hallway to see what all the noise is about, but all she can see is Néstor and a few other men following Padre Rey toward the front of the building. She goes back inside and allows the door to click shut behind her. Luca is trembling.

‘What happened?’ she whispers.

He shakes his head.

‘But what was all the shouting about?’

He shakes again, and his face looks all carved up with worry.

‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’

She pulls him into her arms and crushes his head against her chest. His little arms reach around behind her and cling. They stay like that until she lifts him under the armpits. He’s too big for it, and his weight is enough that she struggles beneath it. But he wraps his legs around her waist, and she carries him back to their bunk. He doesn’t go up to the top bed this time. She makes her body into a shield behind and around him. She wraps one arm and leg over the top of his small figure, makes her breath deep and slow for him, so that his breath will line up with hers, so that he’ll rest and sleep. But Lydia stays vigilant until morning.

The first time a head turned up by itself on the street in Acapulco, it was a big deal. It was a twenty-two-year-old head, with curly black hair shaved close on the sides and left long on top. It had a small gold hoop earring in its right ear. Its eyelids swelled and its tongue protruded from its mouth. It was left on top of a public phone booth outside Pizza Hut, right next to the Diana Cazadora fountain. Rolled up and stuck into the corner of its mouth like a cigarette was a note that read: ‘ Me gusta hablar .’ I like to talk.

The woman who found the head as she walked home from her shift as a night nurse at the Hospital del Pacífico was not a woman ordinarily horror-struck by the sight of blood. But that day, just as dawn tipped its westerly light across the pavements of Acapulco, causing the head to throw its queer, bodiless shadow from atop the phone booth and toward the feet of that weary nurse, she screamed, dropped her purse, and ran three blocks before retrieving her phone from her pocket and calling the police. The officers descended; the media swarmed. People passing through the area on their way to work or school were aghast. They took the time to get down on their knees and bless themselves, to offer up some thorough prayers on behalf of the anonymous soul who had once belonged to that head. It was famous.

Until the second one.

By the time the head count reached a dozen, a shameful, self-protective apathy began to spread in the gut of the city so that, in the mornings, when a call would come in that a head had been found, on the beach or at el zócalo or on the green of the ninth hole at el club de golf, the dispatcher answering the phone would sometimes make a joke.

‘Go for the putter. That hole is an easy par three.’

Back then, Sebastián had been the first one to recognize it for what it was: the city’s steep, wholesale descent into the maw of the warring cartels. While other journalists were reluctant to acquiesce to the truth of their collapsing reality, Sebastián shouted it from his headlines:

cartels exhibit brutal surge in violence

terror and impunity: cartels get away with murder

And most dramatically, after a particularly bad weekend, which saw the murders of two journalists, a city councilwoman, three shopkeepers, two bus drivers, a priest, an accountant, and a child holding a cob of buttered corn on the beach, his sandy feet still damp from the ocean, a simple pronouncement in two-inch letters:

That Monday morning Lydia sat behind her register in the bookshop reading her husband’s unflinching account of the weekend’s murders while her tea turned cold and bitter in its cup. She’d found it particularly difficult to leave Luca at the school gate that morning. She’d gripped his tiny hand with ferocity and rubbed the bumps of his knuckles with her thumb while they walked. Luca had pretended not to notice, but he’d swung his lunch box more vigorously than usual. When she kissed him goodbye at the gate, she spotted a powdering of dried toothpaste along his bottom lip. She licked her thumb and smeared it away, while he protested the gesture as asqueroso . Gross. Perhaps he had a point. But he’d kissed her back anyway, his lips all gloppy and wet, and for once, Lydia didn’t discreetly wipe away the trail he left on her cheek. For once, she didn’t turn and hurry off the moment he darted past the principal and into the courtyard. She waited there instead, one hand flat against the cinder block wall, and gazed after him. She didn’t turn away until his little green-and-white uniform became invisible amid a sea of others.

To Lydia, the change had felt sudden, lurching. She’d gone to bed the night before in the same city where she’d been born and raised, where she’d lived her entire life except for the brief spin of years through college in Mexico City. Her dreams had been populated by the same whipped current of ocean air, the same bright, liquid colors, the same thrumming beats and aromas of her childhood, the same languorous swaying of hips that had always defined the pace of life here in this place she knew so well. Sure, there had been new violence, an unfamiliar hitch of anxiety. Sure, crime was on the rise. But until that morning, the truth had felt insulated beneath the illusory film of Acapulco’s previous immunity. And then Sebastián’s headline had ripped that protective skin away. All at once, the people had to look and to see. They could pretend no longer: Acapulco Falls . Briefly, Lydia hated her husband for that headline. She hated his editor.