Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

‘Everybody wants to be a hero,’ one of los agentes mutters. His partner laughs.

They turn Soledad around and take a long time patting her down. Much longer than they took on any of the men. Luca can feel Mami trembling beside him. The officers flap the bottom of Soledad’s oversize white T-shirt, billowing air beneath it, and then they bend down to look up it. They stick their hands up there.

‘Think she’s packing?’ the partner asks.

‘Oh, she’s packing all right.’

When they cuff her, they pull her T-shirt at the back so it’s stretched tight against the white outline of her bra, and they gather up all the loose material and bind it into the zip ties behind her, along with her wrists. The material rides up to show a few inches of her brown tummy, and all the migrant men show their solidarity for her by turning their eyes to the ground.

‘That’s better,’ says el agente who cuffed her. He tosses Soledad’s confiscated backpack into the bed of the truck along with the others, but when Soledad moves to sit back down on the ground with the other migrants, he grabs her by the elbow. ‘You sit up here instead.’ He points to the folded-down tailgate.

Soledad’s face betrays nothing. She sits where instructed, and makes sure not to watch while they do the same to Rebeca. Soon her sister is seated up beside her, and they lean against each other, consoling each other with the heat of their touching shoulders. Lydia endures her turn next. They face her away from Luca and remove her hat to study her face. She squints in the sunlight, but they replace the hat without comment before groping her breasts and her backside. They find the machete strapped to her leg, and they laugh while they unbuckle the holster. One of the men throws it into the bed of the pickup truck with a thunk .

‘Don’t worry, mijo, it will be okay,’ she says to Luca without turning to face him.

Luca is sitting cross-legged with his elbows on his knees. Soledad and Rebeca both stare silently at him, as if they can make a bubble of protection around him just by the resolve of their eyes.

The officer speaks to Lydia without inflection, without anger or hostility, in exactly the same tone of voice Lydia would use if she were talking to the automated teller when she does her banking by phone. ‘Shut up,’ he says, and he slides his hand between her legs. He brushes his pinky finger back and forth along the crotch of her jeans. Lydia clamps her mouth shut and begins to cry.

Luca leans forward to stand up, but Rebeca calls out to him. ‘What is the third-largest city in the United States?’ she asks.

Luca is confused. ‘What?’

Rebeca repeats the question.

‘Well, that’s easy, it’s Chicago,’ Luca says. ‘Once you get down to around the fifth- and sixth-largest it’s a lot trickier because those populations are changing by a significant percentage year by year, but – wait, why?’

Seated on the tailgate with her hands tied behind her, Rebeca shrugs. ‘Just curious.’

The officers have finished with Lydia, and they seat her back on the ground beside Luca.

‘Come on, little man,’ they say to him.

Luca stands. He puts his arms and legs out and makes his body into the shape of an X. They remove his backpack and throw it into the back of the truck with the others. He does not complain. They turn his pockets inside out. He does not complain. They remove Papi’s red baseball hat from his head.

‘Nice hat. You a Yankees fan?’ one of them says.

‘You can’t have it,’ Luca says. ‘It belonged to my papi. ’

‘Oh yeah? Where’s your papi now?’

‘He’s dead.’ Luca wields that truth like a battle-ax.

The officer is impassive, but he nods and sticks the hat back onto Luca’s head. Luca turns and puts his wrists together so they can cuff him. The officers laugh.

‘Nah, chiquito, we’re not going to cuff you,’ the first one says. ‘That your mami over there? Go sit with your mami .’

Luca doesn’t understand why, but he feels ashamed not to be cuffed. Diminished. His face flushes hot, but he goes and sits down on Mami’s lap, nonetheless, which is a thing he hasn’t done for at least two years.

When the two vans arrive, the officers open the back doors and usher the migrants inside. There are no seats or windows. They are unmarked cargo vans, and Lydia knows that probably means they’re all going to die. Her mind is racing and blank at once. She doesn’t recall the details, the words, the exact numbers or dates, but she’s remembering the disappearance of those forty-three college students from that bus in Guerrero in 2014. The massacre of 193 people in San Fernando in 2011. Just a few months ago, 168 human skulls found in a mass grave in Veracruz. Who will miss Luca and Lydia if they disappear? We have already disappeared, she thinks. We already do not exist. When she looks at Luca, she sees the shape of his cranium beneath his skin.

The migrant men are loaded into the dark vans first. They sit awkwardly inside with their legs extended and their hands cuffed behind them, trying not to tip over on one another. Some of them are already crying. The first van is full; the doors are closed. Lydia and Luca are last to be loaded into the second van. Rebeca and Soledad are still seated on the tailgate of la migra truck.

‘My daughters,’ Lydia says to the officer who fondled her as he hoists her now into the back of the van.

‘Your what?’

Lydia points with her chin to the sisters in the back of the truck.

‘Those are your daughters?’ he asks, even though they both know that the two Central American girls with their Honduran accents and their skin an entirely different shade than Luca’s are not Lydia’s daughters.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘We need to stay together.’

‘No room,’ he says, lifting Luca into the van beside her. ‘Van’s full.’

He slams the left-hand door, but Lydia sticks her leg out to block the second door with her foot.

‘Please,’ she says, looking across at the silent sisters. Rebeca and Soledad stare back at her, their expressions ranging like a quarrel of sparrows across their faces. ‘Please, we have to stay together.’

‘Don’t worry,’ the man says, pushing Lydia’s leg back inside the van. ‘We’ll give the girls a ride.’

When he slams the door, Lydia’s almost grateful for the blackness.

Behind Lydia’s most immediate fear of being murdered in obscurity, or worse, watching Luca suffer some act of brutality, she’s also afraid that, whomever these men are working for, they may find out who she is and submit her to a different kind of murder instead. Even if they’re not actively looking for her, they might discover her accidentally, as Lorenzo did. If they are working for a cartel, which seems increasingly undeniable, and they do recognize her, they wouldn’t necessarily have to be allies of Los Jardineros to identify her as a valuable commodity. There are any number of ways they could use her: as a bargaining chip, a peace offering, a humiliating prize, an expression of competitive violence. Lydia still has her voter ID card in her wallet. Why? Why hadn’t she gotten rid of it? If she survives this captivity, she will destroy it before they go any farther. She will surrender her name; she has already relinquished everything else. Lydia thinks again of Marta, swinging from the vent of that distant dorm room. She thinks of Javier in grief. And though she can’t conceive of forgiving him for what he’s done, she also wonders, now that she knows about his daughter, if she might’ve been able to reason with him, given the chance, to appeal to that decimated, fatherly part of him. To plead for mercy, for her life and Luca’s.