Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

‘See?’ she says. ‘Guapo como tú.’

Luca grins again, and nods. ‘He does look like me, Mami, look,’ he says. ‘Except no teeth.’

Rebeca holds the photograph so Lydia can see. ‘He lost those two both on the same day, and then he was like a vampire,’ the girl says to Luca. ‘Did you lose yours yet?’

A potent memory. It looms up unbidden: Papi pulling his first tooth – a bottom one, from the middle. The tooth had been loose for weeks and then one night during dinner, Luca took a bite of his tampiqueña and a point of pain shot through his gums. He dropped his fork, moved the food to the back of his mouth, swallowed it in an unchewed lump, and then examined the damage. The tooth, he found, had been pushed askew. It leaned like an ancient grave in soft ground. He touched it softly with one finger, and was horrified by its slackness. Mami and Papi both put down their forks to watch. But Luca was so afraid of the pain that he found himself unable to do anything. And then Mami had tried, for perhaps twenty minutes, to coax him to open his mouth just a little so she could have a look. But Luca was steadfast and mute, his lips clamped shut. When Mami finally lost her patience, Papi eased into place beside Luca. He made funny faces intended to illustrate what happened to children who didn’t allow for the timely removal of ejected teeth. And Luca laughed despite his fear, and in the gap of that laughter, he finally submitted to opening his little mouth while Mami watched from across the table. Papi reached in there so gently Luca didn’t even feel the presence of his fingers against the tooth. But he does remember Papi’s hands along his face, one securely cupping his chin, the other reaching inside. Luca remembers the salty tang of Papi’s fingers and the triumphant smile when those fingers emerged with the prize of that tiny tooth. Luca’s eyes popped so wide when he saw it, and he gasped. He couldn’t believe there was no pain, no feeling at all. Papi had simply reached in there and lifted the little thing out. And then they all laughed and squealed at the table together, and Luca jumped out of his chair, disbelieving, and his parents both hugged and kissed him. He ate the rest of his tampiqueña while the new hole in his mouth gathered small pieces of food he had to sluice out with milk. That night they left the tooth beneath his pillow and El Ratoncito Pérez came to retrieve it, leaving Luca a poem and a new toothbrush in its place.

Luca lifts one hand to his mouth now and sucks on his knuckle, but it’s not the same, and he has to bat at that memory like a pesky bug. A horsefly. The gone taste of his father’s hands. Mami sees this, reaches out, and squeezes his toe through his sneaker, just a gentle pressure that brings him back to this dusty overpass. He breathes into his body.

‘Couldn’t get on the train, huh?’ Among other things, Soledad has a gift for changing the subject at exactly the right moment. She’s more tentative than her sister, but it’s hard to remain standoffish with Luca there, all eyelashes and coy dimples.

Lydia wriggles out of her backpack and retrieves a canteen. ‘Not yet.’

‘They’ve made it a lot harder. Safety first! ’ Rebeca discharges a puff of air that, in another setting, might pass for laughter.

‘Yeah.’ Mami shakes her head. ‘Safety.’

‘You’ve been on the trains?’ Luca asks.

Soledad twists to look at him, resting her chin on her shoulder. ‘All the way from Tapachula, more or less.’

Luca thinks of the men running alongside the train in the clearing outside Lechería, the way they ascended, one by one, and disappeared, while he and Mami watched, unable to move. He thinks of the deafening roar and clatter of La Bestia, shouting its warnings into their hearts and bones while they watched, and he feels awed by these two powerful sisters. ‘How?’ he asks.

Soledad shrugs. ‘We’ve learned some tricks.’

Mami hands Luca a canteen, and he drinks. ‘Like what?’ Mami asks. ‘We need some tricks.’

Soledad retracts her dangling legs and folds them beneath her, shifting her spine and shoulders into a stretched posture, and Lydia sees, even in this minor animation of the girl’s body, how the danger rattles off her relentlessly. These sisters haven’t befriended anyone since they left home; they, too, have kept to themselves as much as possible. But they haven’t yet met anyone so young as Luca on their journey. Neither have they met anyone so watchfully maternal as Lydia. So it’s a great pleasure to feel normal for a minute, to inhabit the softness of a friendly conversation. There can’t be any harm in sharing some advice with their fellow travelers.

‘Like this,’ Soledad says, gesturing at the tracks beneath them. ‘One thing we noticed is they spend all that money on fences around the train stations, but nobody has thought yet to fence the overpasses.’

Luca watches Mami’s face as she surveys their position now from the angle of this new information. Mami leans ever so slightly forward and gauges the distance to the ground beneath them. It’s not that far. But then she tries to imagine how this space would change with the noise and weight and presence of La Bestia charging through it. ‘You board from here?’ she asks incredulously.

‘Not here,’ Soledad corrects her. ‘Because you’d hit your head as soon as you dropped. The overpass would knock you right off before you got your balance. We sit on this side to watch for it coming. But then you jump on over there.’ She points.

Luca follows the direction of her gesture across the roadway, and he sees there, affixed to the guardrail, a bleached white cross with a burst of faded orange flowers at its center. Likely a memorial, he realizes, for someone else who attempted to board the train at this place, and didn’t manage it. He bites his lip. ‘You just jump on top?’

‘Well, not always,’ Soledad says. ‘But, yes, if the conditions are right, you just jump on top.’

‘And what makes the conditions right?’ Lydia asks. ‘Or wrong?’

‘Well. The first thing is, you have to choose carefully where to do it. So this place is good because you see,’ she says, standing and pointing across the roadway to the tracks beyond, ‘you see the curve there, just ahead?’

Lydia stands, too, so she can see where the girl is pointing.

‘The train always slows down for a curve. When it’s a big curve, it slows way down. So we know it’ll be going slow when it passes. And then the next thing is to make sure there are no other hazards ahead. That’s why we chose this overpass instead of the first one.’

Lydia looks south, back along the path they just walked. She hadn’t even noticed that first overpass when they’d walked beneath it. She’d only been grateful for its momentary shade, a shallow respite from the sun.

‘Because if you jumped on over there, on that one,’ Rebeca adds, taking up the explanation for her sister, ‘you’d only have a moment to get your balance before you’d have to hit the deck to pass beneath this one. Tricky.’

Lydia blinks and shakes her head. She can’t envision it.

‘So we sit here,’ Soledad continues. ‘We watch. We wait for the train. And when we see one we like, we cross the road, we gauge the speed, we make the decision to board, and then we drop.’

‘Like going off a diving board?’ Luca asks, thinking of the water park at El Rollo.

‘Not exactly,’ Soledad says. ‘First you lower your backpack, because it makes you top-heavy, wobbly. So you toss that first. And then you squat down really low. You don’t dangle, because if you do that your feet will get going with the train and then your top half won’t catch up. You get stretched like a slingshot. So you roll your body up small and hop on like a frog. Low and tight. And just make sure your fingers grab something right away.’