Жанин Камминс - American Dirt

‘Try to stand up straight,’ Marisol tells him.

He tries, he unfolds himself. But this time, when he coughs on the exhale, there’s no breathing in again. His eyes are round with panic, his hands fly up to his throat, and the skin on his neck sucks in. Then the tiniest honk of a wheeze, and he coughs again. And again, he cannot inhale. And now his lips are turning blue. Beto’s fingernails are turning blue. It happens so fast. He flaps his hands near his neck.

Marisol snatches the inhaler from him, and shakes it, and puts it in his mouth, and squeezes it, but it’s empty like the sky, barren. There’s nothing. Beto falls back on his bottom, and it’s almost comical because he’s such a payaso and he’s always making everybody laugh, so it’s almost funny, because he falls down on his butt like a diapered baby with his legs extended, but it’s not funny at all, because he’s writhing now, and even that desiccant cough has ceased. They’re all gathered around him now, they’re all terrified, they’re breathless, but there’s nothing they can do, even though six miles away, as the crow flies, in a brightly painted orange building on Frontage Road in the tiny community of Río Rico, Arizona, there’s a pharmacy. Behind the counter in that pharmacy, there’s a bin containing four brand-new albuterol inhalers. Of course, there are nonprescription alternatives as well, and steroids for when symptoms are acute. When Beto passes out, Nicolás starts chest compressions. He doesn’t know if that’s the right thing to do, but he can’t do nothing, so Marisol joins him, tips Beto’s head back, pinches his nose, and breathes into his mouth. She blows with all her might, but she can’t get his little chest to rise.

They’re on their knees in the desert, all of them. The migrants pray while Marisol and Nicolás work on Beto. They stay that way for a long time, much longer than it would be reasonable to expect that their efforts might bear fruit. No one wants to acknowledge the passage of time. No one wants to be the one to call it, not even El Chacal. They feel a critical danger to their immortal souls, to be the one to admit: Beto is gone. Soledad and Rebeca are both crying, Lydia’s crying, Luca is crying. But there are no tears, with all that crying. There’s no water left in their bodies to make tears. El Chacal puts his hand at last on Nicolás’s shoulder.

‘ Basta, ’ he says.

Nicolás finishes his compressions, but then stops Marisol from leaning down again, from trying another breath. He reaches across Beto and puts his hands on her shoulders. They lean toward each other with the boy between them. They make a tent with their bodies.

‘No,’ Marisol says. She puts her hands on him, on his forehead, on the stillness of his heart. She reaches for his hands, brings them in front of him, still supple.

He is so small.

The other deaths. Or other losses. They were excruciating.

But they felt… rational. They felt somehow honest: there was risk undertaken. And risk sometimes results in the collection of an unjust payment.

But this. Jesus.

Marisol crumples over him, all the breaths he couldn’t take. She gulps them, she squeezes them in her fists. ‘Papá Dios . ’ She cries over him until, at last, El Chacal pulls her away.

One by one, he pulls them each away. He puts his body between theirs and Beto’s. He touches their arms or their shoulders, and releases them. Slim and David stand beside the grim-faced coyote, each with one hand on the other’s shoulder.

‘We will carry him,’ Slim says.

El Chacal looks up at him. He considers the angle of the sun, their deficit of water, the fatigue of their depleted bodies.

‘No.’ He shakes his head. He takes the painted sheet from his pack and, to Slim, says, ‘Help me wrap him.’

Then El Chacal takes a phone from his pack, powers it on, and drops a pin to mark the location. ‘I’ll come back for him.’

They all stare at him, but no one moves.

‘I promise,’ he says. ‘We have to go now.’

This time, Luca doesn’t look back.

In a remote campsite at the end of an unnamed road that’s traveled not infrequently by the green and white trucks of the US Border Patrol, two RVs are waiting. The RVs have been parked there for two days, with tarps stretched from poles out front, and coolers full of beer and food nearby. There are lawn chairs set around a central campfire, and country music on an old-fashioned radio with a retractable antenna and a knob on one side. The men sitting at that campsite each day have made sure to nod and wave at the passing Border Patrol agents when they come. The men in those lawn chairs have done the pleasant, casual work of making themselves and their vehicles familiar. The agents stopped by one day and talked to them for maybe ten minutes. The men allowed the agents to look inside their RVs. They had nothing to hide.

When El Chacal and his ten remaining migrants walk into that camp two and a half hours early, the waiting men aren’t ready for them. The Border Patrol checkpoint on Route 19 is still open. They can’t leave for at least three more hours. What if someone comes by before then? Where are they going to hide eleven people in the middle of nowhere? It’s too hot to sit inside the RVs. There’s not enough gas to run the air conditioners while they wait.

El Chacal shrugs. ‘We had no choice’ is all he says.

It’s a comfortable, tucked-in little campsite, and they’re relatively protected here from the noise of the relentless wind. So they turn off the radio and sit in silence, hoping they’ll hear the engine of any approaching vehicle before it appears. None does. The migrants drink water and water and blessed water. They sit in the shade of the RVs and drink Gatorade too. Marisol cries abundantly, unblinkingly, as soon as her body’s hydrated enough to make tears. She doesn’t beckon the tears, but they come. They stream down her face unregulated, like tributaries. They gather in glistening puddles on her hands. Luca and Lydia keep their eyes and mouths closed.

No one speaks.

At 5:15 p.m., the two men begin packing up the campsite and ushering the migrants inside. Marisol and the two sisters board first. Lydia wants to say something to El Chacal. Something to convey her gratitude, and to allay his wounded conscience. There’s nothing. She puts one hand briefly on his arm, and he stares at the ground beneath the tires. He nods once, focusing on the clumps of wild grass, the glinting pebbles in the dirt. Lydia climbs into the RV. Luca is on the bottom step behind her, but he doesn’t follow. He stops with El Chacal as well.

‘He needs a sky-blue cross,’ Luca says.

The coyote nods once, and there are tears that stand in his eyes. They are the first of their kind. ‘A sky-blue cross,’ he repeats.

Luca nods.

‘I’ll make sure of it, mijo, ’ the coyote says.

And then Luca leans close and whispers something in the coyote’s ear. And the man reaches up and takes Luca in his arms, and Luca folds himself around the coyote’s neck, and they embrace for a long moment, and then they turn away from each other quickly, and Luca ascends the steps. Lydia watches through the window as El Chacal lifts his pack from one of the lawn chairs, hoists his replenished water supplies, and heads back into the desert.

‘What did you say to him?’ Lydia asks Luca when he sits down on the bench seat beside her.

Luca shrugs. ‘I told him he was a good man for bringing us here.’

There are hollow compartments beneath the benches and the beds, the men show them. They have to climb into those compartments, squeeze and fold themselves up. Soledad has heard stories of other coyotes forcing migrants to strip naked at this stage of the journey, so no one will cause problems. Taking the migrants’ clothes is a kind of insurance policy, so no one will try to escape before the coyote is ready to set them free. She’s heard that sometimes the coyotes make those naked migrants wear diapers, too, so they can stay hidden in the dark for hours. She rubs her hands down her thighs and feels grateful for her denim armor. In the second RV, the driver scrutinizes Slim and David, and asks, ‘Think you can fit?’