Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

‘You seen any visitors?’ the voice says. ‘Migrantes ? ’

Lydia’s heart feels like machinery in her chest. Rebeca and Soledad are standing, facing each other, their fingers tangled together in the darkness, their heads tipped down in prayer. They cannot hear the little boy’s answer, but then the bang of the door and the mother’s voice is there again.

‘Víctor, I told you to come inside,’ she says.

A man’s voice, beyond the gate. ‘We were just asking him if he’d seen any migrants. We had a few get off the train just at the end of the street.’

‘We haven’t seen anyone,’ she says. ‘I was out here with him until only a moment ago. Go inside.’

The door bangs once again.

‘Little girl down the street saw them heading this way.’

‘They must have turned before they got here. We were outside all afternoon. You have a cell phone, or I just call the station house if we see them?’

The voices drop lower, become momentarily indiscernible. Lydia opens her eyes wide, as if she can increase her range of hearing that way. At this very moment, Lydia knows, the woman may be pointing to the doorway of this shed. She may be mouthing the words There are four of them, inside the shed . Los agentes de la migra may be unholstering their weapons. Lydia trembles with the thought and closes her eyes again. Her finger slips inside Sebastián’s wedding ring. Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think . And then there’s a kind of miracle, a tiny distraction: her finger moves absently through the void of Sebastián’s ring and provokes a funny idea, that it’s like the magic ring from The Hobbit, that if she slips her finger fully inside and holds on to Luca, it will make them both invisible. Seguro. She can make out the woman’s words again. A shift of the wind.

‘I picked too much oregano for supper,’ she’s saying. ‘Please, here, take some with you.’

After the footsteps retreat to the vehicle, and the engine rumbles away, and the woman opens and closes the door to her house again, Soledad and Rebeca join Lydia and Luca in sitting on the floor. Slowly, their collective heartbeats return to a normal pace. Slowly, they begin whispering to one another in the darkness.

‘Should we leave?’ Soledad asks.

‘Not yet,’ Lydia says. ‘They’re still searching the neighborhood. Let’s wait until it’s really dark out.’

Rebeca is crying, hunched over her legs. Luca touches her hand, and she flinches, which hurts his feelings. But instead of withdrawing, he persists, and then Rebeca softens, melts into him like a pat of butter on a pan. Luca pulls her head onto his shoulder and strokes her hair.

‘It’s okay, nothing bad happened,’ he tells her. ‘It’s okay.’

‘I can’t do this anymore,’ she says. ‘It’s too frightening.’

‘Stop it,’ Soledad says.

‘I just want to die. I want it to be over,’ Rebeca says without any inflection to her voice at all.

‘Well, you don’t get to decide that, Rebeca,’ her sister says.

‘I want to go home.’

‘There is no home. We’re going to make a new home. This is the only way forward, so we go forward. Adelante. No more crying now.’

Soledad wipes at her sister’s face with her thumbs, and the tough love works. Rebeca sits up and makes a loud sniff, and is finished with her despair.

‘We’re almost there,’ Soledad says. ‘You heard Luca earlier. Three hundred miles, right, chiquito ?’

‘That’s right,’ Luca says.

‘Three hundred miles,’ Soledad says. ‘And then it’s all over. All this nightmare, the whole thing, all of it. We will be in el norte, where no one can hurt us anymore. We’ll make a good, safe life. And Papi will get better and we’ll send for him, and then we’ll bring Mami and Abuela, too. Everything will be better, you’ll see.’

Rebeca doesn’t believe a single word of it. She doesn’t even understand how Soledad can preserve that kind of naïveté after everything she’s been through. Rebeca has been cured of innocence. She knows there’s no safe place for them in the world, that el norte will be the same as anywhere else. Hope cannot survive the poison of her recent proof: the world is a terrible place. San Pedro Sula was terrible, Mexico is terrible, el norte will be terrible. Even her gold-dappled memories of the cloud forest are beginning to rot and decay. When she reaches back in her mind now, it’s not her mother’s voice she remembers, or the scent of drying herbs , or the chorus of the tree frogs at night, or the cool wash of the clouds on her arms and hair. It’s the poverty that drove her father and all the men away to the cities. It’s the advancing threat of the cartels, the want of resources, the ever-present hunger. So it’s only for the sake of her sister that Rebeca nods her head.

‘Everything we’ve been through?’ Soledad says. ‘It’ll all be worth it. We’ll leave it behind and have a new beginning.’

Rebeca looks at the floor but her eyes are unfocused. ‘Like it never happened,’ she says.

They stay in the shed while Víctor and his mother eat supper in the house, while the neighbors come home from work and greet their families, while the clouds skid across the lid of Hermosillo, and the sun sinks orange into the horizon. Beyond the perimeter of the city, the Sonoran Desert trades heat with the sky. As twilight cools the land and the human city prepares for sleep, the desert pops and teems with life. Lydia and the sisters plan to rest until the neighborhood is entirely quiet, to slip out during the darkest hours of the night. Luca is too hungry to sleep, so he’s very grateful when the woman appears with a pot of cold beans and a stack of dry tortillas. She places these items on the floor among them and then steps back toward the doorway. Luca doesn’t wait for her to leave; he uses a tortilla to scoop up the beans, and almost bites his finger in his hurry. There’s no light, but their eyes have adjusted to the dark.

The woman whispers, ‘You can rest here for a while. But please be gone before daylight.’

Before dawn, Lydia, Luca, and the sisters walk deeper into the city, where they discover that the railway fence in Hermosillo is serious business, expensive infrastructure. Tax pesos at work. In fact, it’s not a fence at all, but a concrete wall topped with razor wire in threatening coils. Inside that wall, a train rumbles past with migrants asleep on top, their arms folded across their chests, their hats over their faces. On this side of the wall, six migrant men sleep wrapped around their packs while one keeps watch. He has no shoes. He greets them as they approach.

‘What happened to your shoes?’ Lydia asks.

‘Stolen,’ he says.

Soledad recognizes his Honduran accent. ‘Ay, catracho, ¡qué barbaridad!’

He nods, scratches his chin. ‘At least they didn’t get my beard,’ he says.

Lydia cannot stop thinking about the man, even after they’ve passed well beyond him, farther into the city, where they have to find breakfast and stock up their water supply. How could he make a joke like that, a man so destitute that even his shoes have been taken from him? Lydia is rationing toothpaste. Her hair feels greasy and her skin dry. She’s aware of these discomforts daily. If someone took her shoes, she would give up, she thinks. That would be the ultimate indignity. Sixteen dead family members she can survive, as long as her toes are not naked before the world.

They find a large park with broad, paved walkways and a string of orange Porta Potties left over from a concert the night before. Luca leans over the edge of a fountain and submerges his arms up to the elbow. Lydia has a growing sense that her very humanity is under siege, so as a flimsy defense against that attack, she permits herself to spend 10 pesos on a cup of coffee from a vendor. The caffeine hits her bloodstream like a dream of another life. She sips it slowly and allows the steam to curl around her face while she thinks about that man and his shoes. The encounter has provoked in her an urgent feeling about the importance of shoes. So she will convert some portion of their remaining money to new shoes now, she decides. Here in Hermosillo, today. She looks to the girls’ feet as well, and notices that both of their sneakers could use replacing. They wear low-top Converses; Soledad’s are black and Rebeca’s gray. The shoes are sun-faded and worn, but at least they’re comfortable, well broken-in, Lydia tells herself. She wishes she had extra money. They wait in the park until the shops open, and Lydia spends almost half their remaining cash on two decent pairs of hiking boots for herself and Luca. They’re just ordinary leather with heavy stitching and thick rubber soles. But no. These boots are miraculous, extraordinary; they are mythological winged sandals. These are the boots that will cross the desert passage to el norte . It feels like a crater in her chest when Lydia hands over her money.