Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

When at last a dim light begins to creep through the canopy, signaling the coming safety of daylight, Lydia’s mind releases her to sleep.

The joke at home had always been that Luca and Sebastián shouldn’t talk to Lydia until she was well into her second mug of morning coffee. She always had two at home and a third in the shop when she opened. She got into the habit of cleaning the filters and filling the carafe at night, so she wouldn’t have to contend with all that in the morning when she was still half-asleep. It was the first thing she did each day when her alarm went off, on her way to the bathroom: she’d flip the power switch on the coffeemaker and feel a gurgle of happy impatience when the red light came on. On Sundays when she had extra time, she’d steam milk for froth, or brew the grounds with cane sugar and cinnamon for café de olla . Now there’s no coffee at all most mornings, which triggers a daily headache, made worse when Lydia’s exhausted from lack of sleep.

They return to the tracks early, and there are a dozen or so other migrants gathered there waiting for the train. Nearby, a man wearing nice jeans and a clean collared shirt stands at the back of a pickup truck with the tailgate folded down. Inside there’s a huge pot of rice and a cooler stacked with steaming tortillas. He’s the padre from the trackside church with the pennant flags, and before he feeds the migrants, he offers them Communion and gives a blessing. Then he fills the tortillas with the rice and hands them out. He also has a big orange barrel that says gatorade even though it’s fruit punch. One of the other migrants fills paper cups and hands them around to whoever’s thirsty. Lydia and the girls sit on one of the benches and eat in silence. It’s Luca who notices.

‘Why are they waiting on that side of the track?’ He points.

‘Huh,’ Lydia says, chewing.

The migrants are gathered on the southbound side. Rebeca takes her tortilla with her as she walks over to the waiting men. She speaks with them, and then returns to explain.

‘We’ve missed the Pacific Route,’ she says.

‘What?’ Soledad sounds alarmed.

‘Not by much, don’t worry.’ Rebeca sits down beside her sister. ‘Only an hour south of here is Celaya.’

‘Ah, the third-largest city in the state of Guanajuato,’ Luca interjects quietly.

Both girls turn to gawk at him, and he slurps his fruit punch, embarrassed.

Rebeca continues, ‘So we can ride the train south and change at Celaya for the Pacific Route.’

‘But why?’ Lydia asks, sitting forward. ‘Isn’t it shorter if we go this way?’

‘It’s not safe,’ Rebeca says. ‘Our cousin told us—’

‘Everyone told us,’ Soledad corrects her.

‘Everyone told us we have to take the Pacific Route. All the other routes are super dangerous because of the cartels.’

The food is pasty in Lydia’s mouth.

‘Everyone says the same thing,’ Soledad agrees. ‘Only the Pacific Route is safe.’

Lydia doesn’t need to be convinced, but she does have a question. The girls seem to know a lot more than she does. ‘Do you know which cartels run which routes?’

‘No, but God is watching out for us,’ Rebeca says. She makes the sign of the cross. ‘We will be okay.’

Just to make sure, the sisters go into the church to light a candle while they wait.

When the southbound train comes through San Miguel de Allende, it doesn’t stop, but it’s traveling slowly, and the gathered men all board with ease. Luca watches the sisters jog along beside the train. Their fear makes them graceful and strong, their movements precise. Men wait at the top of the ladder to grab their hands and haul them onto the roof. Luca will not be left behind. He runs, and Mami with him, and he feels very brave until just at the moment when he grabs onto the advancing ladder, and the cursory vibration echoes into the palm of his hand and all down into the bones of his body, and that reverberation reminds him how small he is, and how colossal the train is, and how dead he would be if he let go at the wrong time. Mami’s behind him, and she boosts him from the backside, and he grips the ladder so hard his knuckles turn colors, and he’s almost afraid to let go with one hand so he can climb up to the next rung, but he knows he must because he has to make room for Mami. So he climbs, and the fear is like a balloon in his throat but now there are two men at the top, and one reaches down and grabs him by the backpack and the other by his upper arm, and now he’s on top of the train and Rebeca is smiling at him and here comes Mami over the edge. They did it.

‘Qué macizo, chiquito.’ Rebeca is impressed.

He grins.

Luca has never liked a girl before. Okay, that’s not exactly true, because he liked daredevil Pilar from school because she was really good at fútbol, and he liked his cousin Yénifer because she was nice to him like 85 percent of the time, even when she was mean to her brother, and he liked this one girl Miranda, who lived in their same apartment building, because she wore bright yellow sneakers and could make her tongue into the shape of a shamrock. So maybe it’s more accurate to say that Luca’s never been in love before. On top of the train, Luca watches Rebeca and tries to act like he’s not watching Rebeca. Not that anyone would notice anyway, because everybody’s too busy watching Soledad to notice anything else. In the half-light left over from Soledad’s corona, Rebeca glimmers like a secret sun. She’s stretched out on her back next to Luca on top of the train.

‘So why’d you guys leave home?’ she asks him.

Luca grinds his teeth and tries to formulate an answer quickly, before she can feel bad for having asked, but he can’t think of anything to say.

‘You running from your dad?’ she guesses.

‘No,’ Luca says. ‘Papi was great.’ He rolls onto his side so he can look at her even though that means his arm is no longer stretched alongside hers.

‘Are you a spy?’ she asks. ‘I won’t tell anyone, I swear.’ She’s holding a piece of cardboard over her face for shade, and her black hair is all looped through the holes in the metal grate beneath them.

‘Yes,’ Luca says. ‘I’m a spy. My government received a tip about a nuclear warhead on this train. I’m here to save the universe.’

‘Thank God, it’s about time.’ Rebeca laughs. ‘The universe needs saving.’

The train rocks unevenly beneath them. Nearby, Mami chats quietly with Soledad.

‘What about you?’ he asks. ‘Why did you leave home?’

‘Sigh.’ Rebeca frowns. She actually says the word suspiro instead of sighing, which is funny despite the unhappiness of her expression. ‘Everything was bad, in the end.’ She sits up. ‘Soledad is super pretty, you know?’ She lifts the cardboard to the side of her face where the sun is.

‘Is she? I didn’t notice,’ Luca says.

‘Payaso . ’ Rebeca laughs and uses the cardboard to swat him on top of the head. ‘Anyway. We come from a really small place, only a little scrap of a village in the mountains, or not even a village, really, because of how stretched out it is, just a collection of different tucked-away places where people live. And it’s a really out-of-the-way place – the city people call it a cloud forest, but we just call it home.’

‘Why cloud forest?’ Luca asks.

Rebeca shrugs. ‘I guess because of all the clouds?’

Luca laughs. ‘But every place has clouds.’

‘Not like this,’ Rebeca says. ‘In my place, the clouds are not in the sky; they’re on the ground. They live with us, in the yard, sometimes even in the house.’