Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

The man swallows. He says quietly, ‘Oaxaca.’

El comandante draws his pistol and shoots the man between the eyebrows.

Rebeca jumps, her skin and her bones. Lydia cries out. Every migrant in the line cries out. Luca begins sobbing and screaming. He clamps his hands over his ears and squeezes his eyes closed and rocks himself. ‘No, no, no.’ El comandante clears his throat irritably, a tiny sound which is louder than all the reverberating noise in the room. With huge eyes and a cracked mouth, Rebeca is staring at the slump of a man beside her. His eyes are still open as he falls over onto her lap. He bleeds onto her legs. Rebeca doesn’t move.

‘Should anyone else be interested in lying to me about where you are from, allow me to suggest that you reconsider,’ el comandante says. ‘Now I will ask again: Who here is a Mexican national?’

Luca is shaking his head frantically, but Lydia takes a deep breath, and ‘I am,’ she says. This time she’s the only one.

El comandante turns and approaches her. ‘This is your son?’

She doesn’t breathe. ‘We are from Acapulco, in the state of Guerrero,’ she says. ‘The governor is Héctor Astudillo Flores, and the state capital is Chilpancingo.’

Before she can stop him, Luca moves swiftly to his feet. He’s trembling, but he stands up straight, tips his head back, and closes his eyes. His voice is clear as he takes over for his mami . ‘Although the site of Acapulco has cultural influences ranging back to the eighth-century Olmecs, it wasn’t established as a major port until the arrival of Cortés in the 1520s. The city has a current population of more than six hundred thousand inhabitants, and a tropical climate with distinct wet and dry seasons—’

‘Is he for real?’ el comandante interrupts. He’s looking at Lydia.

‘Yes,’ she says.

The man’s face looks very different when he’s smiling, as he now is at Luca. He looks grandfatherly. Portly. Wild, bushy eyebrows. A pebbly wash of gray around the temples. This man who just shot a shackled human being between the eyes.

‘Tourism is the main eco—’

‘ Mijo, stop,’ Mami says.

Luca snaps his mouth closed and sits back down on her lap. He turns sideways there, so his body is mostly covering her. El comandante leans his hands on his knees.

‘Where did you learn all that?’ he asks.

Luca shrugs.

‘Did you make it up?’

‘No.’

‘You wouldn’t lie to me?’

‘No.’ Luca would pee again if he wasn’t dehydrated. He buries his face in Mami’s neck.

El comandante straightens himself up again. ‘So you are from Acapulco.’

She hesitates even though it’s too late. She already told the truth because there was no alternative; she can’t change her answer now. ‘Yes,’ she says.

‘And why did you leave such a glorious place?’

El comandante looks into her face, and Lydia doesn’t see any recognition there. Sebastián’s face, the slain reporter, has made the national news, but hers has not. Neither has Luca’s nor Abuela’s nor Yénifer’s, nor any of their other sixteen slaughtered loved ones. It’s only that traveling text message that might identify her. Lydia takes a deep breath. She will not lie; she will tell some of the truth.

‘The city has become extremely violent, frightening. I could no longer afford the costs of running my business.’

‘So you left.’

‘Yes.’

‘In search of a better life for your remarkable son.’ He smiles a toothy smile at Luca.

‘Yes.’

‘Smart.’

Lydia does not answer.

‘Stand up then,’ el comandante instructs.

Luca stands like a baby fawn and helps Lydia, who struggles with her wrists tied behind her. She leans on Luca and gets to her feet. The pain in her ankle is still there, but it’s diminished. The twang of a slight sprain. If she were at home she might think to ice it, to use it as an excuse to get out of cooking dinner for the evening. She’d send Sebastián out to pick up tortas .

‘Anyone else?’ el comandante asks.

Rebeca stares open-mouthed at the dead man on her lap. Soledad looks as if she’s considering speaking, but Lydia silences her with a panicky twist of her neck.

‘Untie her,’ el comandante says to one of the guards, who approaches Lydia with a sharp blade. She winces when she feels the unpleasant pressure against her skin, but a moment later, there’s a snap and her arms drop loose. The plastic zip tie is still attached to one arm, which she holds out now so the man can cut it and snag it from her wrist. Should she thank him? Lydia doesn’t make a sound.

‘Gather your belongings,’ el comandante instructs her.

Luca steps forward with her, and together they collect their packs from the pile. Lydia knows it’s foolish to look for the machete and its holster, but she does anyway. It’s gone, of course.

‘Follow me.’ El comandante returns to the office, and Lydia and Luca follow.

Inside, he tells them to sit. There’s a notebook at an old metal desk, behind which el comandante sits in an upholstered office chair. The pen atop the notebook is gold with something engraved on its edge, and the incongruity of that pen, of the impending paperwork, while the corpse of a recent man is still warm just beyond the door, is too much. Lydia feels her mind slipping. Surely this is the worst moment of their lives. Wait, no. All their family was murdered. Nothing can ever be worse than that. Once again, she and Luca seem about to escape the horrific fate of everyone around them. How does this keep happening? When will their luck run out? Will it happen right now? Will he recognize her, pull up her picture on his phone, give her a forehead bullet from Javier? Her breathing feels rapid and shallow.

‘Now then,’ el comandante says. He opens a drawer in the desk and retrieves a cell phone, which makes her heartbeat hammer in her ears. ‘Stand just there against the blue poster.’ He indicates a patch of blue pinned to the wall. Lydia stares at it, reluctant to obey. Reluctant to disobey. She stands in front of the poster, and el comandante takes her photograph. ‘You next,’ he says to Luca. Luca does as he’s bid, and then sits back in the chair beside his mother.

‘You have identification?’ el comandante asks.

‘Yes.’

‘Let’s see it, please.’

The gunshot that killed that non-Oaxacan migrant is still a sensory echo in her ears. Lydia opens her pack with trembling fingers and finds her wallet. From this she withdraws her voter ID card, proof both that she’s a Mexican citizen and that she’s the woman Javier Crespo Fuentes is hunting. It feels like a rescue boat and a torpedo at once. She places it in his open hand, careful not to touch his skin. He waves his fingers at her to indicate that she should hand over the rest of the wallet as well. He photographs the ID, and then tucks it back in the clear pocket where it lives. Then he withdraws the money from the billfold and counts it: just shy of 75,000 pesos, or about $3,900. Lydia put a lot of thought into the way she divided and stored their money, anticipating robbery. At the first Casa del Migrante back in Huehuetoca, another migrant had advised her to make sure she stashed money in different places, so if they got robbed, when they got robbed, the thieves might not find all of it. So she’d put a third of everything they had into the billfold. It was a decent sum. Most people wouldn’t expect her to have more than that. She’d divided the rest into ten equal portions of 15,000 pesos each and hidden them in various places: one wad is sewn into her bra strap beneath her left armpit, one’s in her underwear against her right hip. One remains in the banker’s envelope zipped into the hidden bottom compartment of Luca’s backpack. Another is flattened and tucked beneath the insoles of her mother’s gold lamé sneakers. Right now Lydia feels both grateful that she did that and terrified that there will be some punishment if el comandante finds some portion of the reserves. He opens another drawer in the desk and places most of their 75,000 pesos in an envelope. He returns the rest to the wallet.