Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

‘I’ll do it, Mami,’ he says.

She holds her coat over him while he ties the boot quickly, impressively, and then, ‘I’m good,’ he says. ‘I’m okay, Mami. Thank you.’ And he stands up from her backpack. He takes a few steps to test the repair. ‘Much better,’ he says.

Lydia has refastened the side zipper on her pack, and is already walking after him, jogging, really, while she slings the backpack around to her shoulders. The gallon jugs of water bang and slosh beneath. ‘Go, mijo, quickly, we have to catch up,’ she says.

Altogether, the delay cost them perhaps two and a half minutes. Maybe three. Enough time to become completely lost from the group. They’re well out of earshot because all they can hear is the thundering wash of the rain hammering down all around them. Lydia feels panicky, all her fears compressed into a tight ball that lodges in her chest. This is how it happens, she thinks. And her voice becomes frantic as she urges Luca to move faster, but he’s remembering, too, that day outside Culiacán when la migra were chasing them and Mami twisted her ankle and fell. They can’t afford a twisted ankle on top of everything else, Luca thinks, and that worry slows him into a pace that’s too cautious. So perhaps this will be it instead, they will die from caution.

‘ Apúrate, mijo, please.’ Lydia fights against a mounting scream in her throat, and now there’s a new doubt: What if they’re hurrying in the wrong direction, diverging only slightly from the path, a fork, so that with each step, they stray a little farther from the group? This is the way they went, isn’t it? There’s no possibility of tracking them in this rain, in this dark. They have to just go. Move. Keep moving. In desperation Lydia breaks the crucial rule about silence, and she calls out for them, but there’s no response. They walk and stumble and hurry through the dark for some time, and every few minutes, she breaks that rule again, louder and more desperately each time Lydia tries a name.

Soledad.

Rebeca.

Beto.

Help.

Nicolás.

Choncho.

Where are you?

Luca is no longer in front of her or behind her, but beside her, holding her hand, and she glances infrequently at the darkness of his eyes, and she sees that he’s calm. He doesn’t share her panic.

‘It’s okay, Mami,’ he says at length. ‘This is the right way.’

She believes him because she must. And he knows these things. Doesn’t he?

Chacal.

Marisol.

Slim.

Hello?

The only answer is the whip of falling rain in thick cords upon their shoulders, fat drops spattering against their hoods. She pushes through the darkness, and in some detached corner of her mind where operations are still functioning normally, she makes jokes for herself, about being lost in the desert for forty days, for forty millennia. Her Catholic vision of hell is all wrong: there’s no fire, no wretched burning. Hell is wet and cold and black and lost. Her brain tap-dances and contracts, and then. Then. She sees a shape moving through the darkness. A shadow. A barely discernible movement, a distant blotch of black that’s a slightly dimmer shade of black than all the fixed blacks around it. Lydia yelps, and feels a shot of hope club through her sternum, and she squeezes Luca’s hand, and drags him into a quicker pace, and she charges after that blotch of black as it moves through the invisible landscape, and she’s not imagining it. It’s no mirage. It continues its trajectory, bump, bump. It moves forward, and Lydia fixes her eyes on it and she follows, she pulls Luca, she runs, heedless of the treacherous ground beneath their feet, until the shape grows larger, closer, and it is a backpack. It is Ricardín’s backpack. She calls out once more.

Ricardín.

David.

And the shape pauses. Turns toward her. They are found. They are saved.

Salvación. Salvación. Lydia cries.

Ricardín ushers her into the line ahead of him, ahead of his primo David. And here are the sisters, Rebeca. Soledad. It’s easy for Lydia to believe the girls might not have noticed their absence. It’s so dark and the rain is falling so hard, it’s difficult to observe anything beyond the border of your own hood, your outstretched hands, your churning feet. Lydia doesn’t want to know if the sisters noticed they were gone, if they mentioned it to El Chacal, or asked him to stop and wait. If she doesn’t know, then she doesn’t have to ask herself what she might have done in their position. It’s okay now anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s okay. Lydia crosses herself in the darkness. She breathes into her shoulders. She inhales the endless rain.

The downpour stops. Just as abruptly as it started. And in its wake, Luca hears a new chorus of uncomfortable music in their midst. Their shoes squelch beneath them. The drenched denim of their jeans murmurs stiffly when their legs move against each other. Luca’s teeth chatter, and he becomes so cold he can almost hear his brain shivering in his skull. He begins to wonder if being freezing and wet in the aftermath of rain might be worse than the rain itself, the same way your body, once adapted to the cold Pacific water of Acapulco Bay, can yearn for the mantle of that water after you emerge onto the hot, dry sand of Playa Condesa. Your body can get mixed up about what’s hot and what’s cold, Luca thinks, but then it begins to rain again, and Luca knows that his hypothesis was una mierda . The night passes in misery, in bouts of torrential rain and intermittent periods of respite. Lydia tries to maintain her sense of relief, her feeling that they are saved. But their backpacks and jeans chafe their skin raw, and then it rains again. Every one of them, once or twice at least, every one of them despairs. The only thought that sustains them is the notion that each moment they endure this misery is one less moment they have yet to endure.

‘There’s a blessing of the rain,’ El Chacal says as they lace their way through the seam of a canyon. ‘Everybody hates it.’

Luca and Lydia have returned to their place near the front of the line, behind Choncho and Slim and Beto. Rebeca and Soledad are directly behind them now, followed by Marisol, Nicolás, Lorenzo, David and Ricardín, and then the two quiet men who carry their names in secret. The boulders in this seam of land are broad and smooth underfoot, slick with water, and Luca notices that he can begin to make out their shapes in the dark. They come to a place where the boulders form a kind of natural staircase the migrants descend, and then the walls of the canyon rise up on either side of them, and they walk along the bottom of a gulch, where a stream of rainwater sloshes around their ankles. They follow El Chacal tight along the left-hand side of the gulley, where the path is driest, and irregular ledges jut from the canyon walls. It’s just the kind of landscape the daredevil Pilar from school would like to climb if she were here, Luca thinks. He could climb it, too, he knows now. He can do things Pilar never dreamed of. The first traces of dark gray daylight brush the walls of the gorge by degrees while the coyote talks. ‘When it rains, the narcos stay in their SUVs. La migra agents stay in their dens. We sneak past while they take shelter.’

‘Only migrants venture out in the rain,’ Choncho says.

‘Only lunatics,’ Slim corrects him.

But the rain is fickle in the desert, and as the lid of night slowly lifts, Luca watches the oppressive clouds rolling like the wheels of La Bestia across the still-dark sky. Those clouds gather and crush and demolish, and after they pass, they leave a blank void of gray nothing behind them. Soon the sun will come and fill that void with hot color. Soon la migra will return.