Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

‘ Amigos, hoy es su día de suerte, ’ he says loudly so they can all hear. Today is your lucky day. ‘I will walk with you.’

The migrants in front of Luca and Mami cheer, but Rebeca and Soledad exchange worried glances. The man falls in step beside them.

‘You are right to be afraid,’ he tells them. ‘But not of me.’

Rebeca sticks her thumbs under the straps of her backpack and says nothing.

‘You have come a long way, yes? Honduras? Guatemala?’

‘Honduras.’ Rebeca is first to relent.

‘Your journey has been okay so far?’ he asks.

Rebeca shrugs. They walk for a few moments in silence, only the sound of their jeans swishing beneath them as they go. Luca holds Mami’s hand, but he strains against it, pulling her arm nearly taut as he tries to hear what the man is saying to the sisters.

‘Well, I want you to have happy memories of Guadalajara.’ He smiles, and catches Luca looking at him. He’s so large he could use that machete as a toothpick. Luca shies back to Mami’s side. ‘My name is Danilo, and when you get to wherever you’re going, when you find a job and a good house, and you meet a beautiful gringo boy and you get married and have your children, one day, when you’re an old lady and you’re tucking your nietos into bed, I want you to tell them that long, long ago, you met a nice man in Guadalajara named Danilo, and that he walked with you, and that he swung his machete around to make sure the knuckleheads didn’t get any ideas.’

Rebeca laughs now; she can’t help herself.

‘See? I’m not so bad.’

Soledad is still apprehensive. ‘Where are all these knuckleheads hiding out?’

‘Oh, amiguita .’ Danilo frowns. ‘I am afraid you will meet many of them in short order.’

Soledad raises her eyebrows but doesn’t respond.

‘It’s like the good, the bad, and the ugly in this city,’ Danilo says.

‘And the beautiful!’ Lorenzo adds, gesturing toward the sisters.

Lydia cringes. Why is he still here? Walking just behind them and listening in on every word. She shudders at his remark, noting how the girls draw their bodies closer in instinctive response. Danilo continues as if Lorenzo hasn’t spoken at all.

‘It’s a long walk from here into the migrant places,’ he says. ‘And there are many dangers.’

‘What kind of dangers?’ Lydia asks.

‘The usual kind,’ Danilo says. ‘ La policía, railroad employees, security guards. Especially dangerous for you two.’ He looks at the sisters briefly. ‘It’s better to get off the tracks before you get to Las Juntas – go into the streets and make your way to one of the shelters. There are signs for them, or shopkeepers will point the way. If anyone says they will take you there, don’t go with them. If anyone offers you a job or a place to stay, don’t go with them. If anyone talks to you first, don’t speak with them. If you need directions, ask only the shopkeepers. I will go with you as far as La Piedrera. A few miles.’

‘Why?’ Soledad asks.

‘Why what?’

‘Why walk with us?’

‘Why not?’ Danilo says. ‘I do this at least three times a week, a walk with the migrants. It’s my hobby. Good exercise.’

‘But if it’s as dangerous as you say, why do you it? What’s in it for you?’

Danilo has the kind of eyes that protrude slightly from beneath his lids, so there’s no possibility of hiding their expression when he’s in conversation. Luca can see that he’s not annoyed by Soledad’s inquiry. He appreciates her skepticism. ‘I will tell you the truth,’ he says. Then he pauses for a moment to smooth down his mustache with his thumb and index finger. ‘When I was a teenager, I stole a truck. My father died in a work accident, and I was angry with his employer, so I stole that man’s truck. I destroyed all the windows and the headlights using my father’s hammer. And then I slashed its tires and I drove it into a sewer ditch.’

‘Seems reasonable to me,’ Rebeca says.

‘I drank for three months, and I did terrible things in my grief. But I never got caught, and God provided me with a good life anyway, despite my sins. So this is my penance. I am like the guardian devil for migrants who pass through my little neighborhood. I protect them.’

Soledad looks up at him, narrowing one eye as she searches his expression for indications of deceit. She finds none. ‘Okay.’

Danilo laughs. ‘Okay?’

‘Yes, okay,’ Soledad says. They are quiet again for a few moments.

‘You ever have any trouble?’ Lorenzo asks from behind them. ‘Ever get beat up or anything?’

Danilo turns without removing the machete from his shoulder and looks back at him. ‘Not anymore,’ he says.

Lorenzo nods and jams his hands into his pockets. ‘Cool, cool.’

Luca begins chatting with Danilo and the sisters, so Lydia drops back to walk beside Lorenzo. She’s both repelled by him and drawn to the information he might be able to provide. Maybe he knows which cartels have alliances with Los Jardineros, which routes present the greatest dangers of her being recognized. She doesn’t know how to begin the conversation, because in her mind, every question sounds like an accusation. Finally she speaks one out loud.

‘How is it that you came to be traveling alone? Don’t you have family in Guerrero?’

‘Nah, not really.’ Lorenzo has plucked up a blade of dry grass from beside the tracks and tucked it into the corner of his mouth. He speaks past it. ‘My mom got married a few years ago and her husband didn’t really want me around, so I split.’

Lydia glances over at him. ‘How old are you?’

‘Seventeen.’

Younger than she thought. ‘And how old when you left home?’

Lorenzo looks up from his feet and snags the grass blade from his mouth. ‘Pssh, I dunno. Thirteen, fourteen. Old enough to look after myself.’ Lydia takes care not to contradict him, but he feels it anyway. ‘Not everybody has a mami like you, all right? Some mothers don’t give a shit.’ He tosses the grass at his feet.

‘I’m sorry,’ Lydia says.

‘Whatever. No importa .’ He slings his hands into the pockets of his baggy shorts. ‘I was traveling with my homeboy anyway. We left together because he wanted to get out, too, but then we got separated in Mexico City and I haven’t heard from him since.’

‘But you have a cell phone,’ she says.

‘Yeah, his stopped working.’

‘Oh.’

They walk quietly for a few minutes, and then he says, ‘Yo, it was really sad what happened to el jefe ’s daughter, but for real, what he did to your family? Eso fue de locos .’

Lydia frowns. ‘What?’

‘La Lechuza. What he did to your family, it was too much. When I saw that girl on the news in her quinceañera dress—’

That girl. ‘My niece.’

‘Yeah—’

‘My goddaughter. Yénifer.’

‘Yeah, when I saw her on the news, I mean for real I was already thinking about leaving, but that was it for me. Shit is out of control down there.’

Lydia cannot discuss this with him. They are only bodies to him, strangers on the news, people like the ones he has killed himself. That girl in her quinceañera dress . But then Lydia’s mind snags on a previous detail, an exit ramp.

‘What happened to his daughter?’ she asks. Lorenzo looks confused, so Lydia clarifies. ‘Javier’s daughter, La Lechuza’s daughter. You said it was sad, what happened to her.’

‘Yeah, you didn’t hear?’

‘Hear what? What happened?’

On the day Sebastián’s article was published, Javier read it in the backseat of his car while his driver shuffled him through the sluggish morning streets of Acapulco. All his life, Javier had enjoyed an almost preternatural ability to predict incidents and their outcomes. When he was eleven years old and his father was diagnosed with colon cancer, Javier knew that death would be swift; he knew that his mother, who’d previously been a good mother, devoted and affectionate, would handle it poorly, that she’d medicate her grief with alcohol and new men. He foretold and accepted her abandonment well before it came to pass. As a result of that aptitude, Javier was almost immutably composed. Nothing ever really surprised him.