The speech does the job of energizing the migrants and steeling their resolve, which in turn makes them restless and impatient during the long wait for the train. In the third hour, a few give up waiting and begin to walk. In the fourth and fifth hours, more follow. Luca, Lydia, and the girls head toward the western edge of the city in search of an overpass, but the only one they find is way too high. Jumping from there would be suicide. So they search instead for a curve where the train might slow down. It’s midafternoon by the time La Bestia finally arrives, and it’s more crowded than they’ve seen it before. Even from a distance, Lydia can see the silhouette of migrants atop the cars. It’s moving much faster than when they boarded yesterday at San Miguel de Allende.
Lydia nearly says they should wait, they’re not going to make it. She wants to articulate her hesitation, but she’s not quick enough, and now the train is too loud. The noise thunders into her bones. They all run, and she holds Luca’s hand tightly in her fist. The men atop the train shout down to them, instructions and encouragement. Rebeca goes up first, and then Soledad, who reaches back for Luca. He grabs at her with his free hand, and there’s a terrifying moment where he’s stretched between them, one arm taut with Soledad on the shrieking beast, and the other linked to Lydia racing beneath. He’s like taffy, soft and exposed. And then Lydia hurls his little arm toward the train, and he’s up. Soledad has him, and then the men from above, lifting. He is safe, he is safe. Lydia runs, not yet relieved, not until she joins him there, she runs and the train is picking up speed and she’s falling behind the ladder, and she can’t keep up, and then a burst of panic makes her legs go like pistons and she grabs at the metal bars, terrified, terrified that her legs won’t be able to maintain this speed, that they’ll drop, that she’ll go under, but this is not her day, because all at once her feet have found the bottom rung, and her hands are only one rung above them, and the train is picking up speed so quickly now, she can’t believe the velocity, but her body, all four of her limbs are attached to the train now, and she’s curled there at the bottom of the ladder like a bug, and she allows herself one tiny sob of relief before she uncurls herself and, pushing up from the bottom rung, begins to climb. When she gets to the top she reaches for Luca, and she straps them down quickly with the belts, and then she holds him and cries quietly into his hair until her heart begins to calm.
Lydia wants to keep Luca and the sisters to herself, to set their little group apart from the others as a unit. But the men are so friendly, so eager to help. Too eager, she worries. There aren’t many women on La Bestia, and very few children, so Lydia feels noticed by every single man they see. She’s aware that she and her companions represent something to these men. They look like home. Or they look like salvation. Or they look like prey. To an halcón they might look like reward money. And even if none of that were true, the two sisters cause a stir wherever they go, just by the very presence of their faces. Lydia is distracted by these observations, which is why, despite her constant watchfulness, she doesn’t immediately notice the boy near the other end of their train car watching her.
But Luca does. And he remembers. And in the act of remembering, he experiences a strange, incongruous moment of satisfaction, a brief wash of endorphins he’s never noticed before, but that his brain has been performing all his life, a slight chemical self-congratulatory pleasure for achieving this task of almost perfect recalclass="underline" Luca has seen that face before. He recognizes that boy, and so even before the tattoo is visible from where the boy is sitting cross-legged at the other end of the train car, Luca recollects it – the bloody sickle creeping out of the sock. The three drops of bloodred ink dripping from the blade. Luca shivers beneath the hot sun. The boy is staring at Mami. And then, as Luca watches him, he retrieves a phone from his pocket, scrolls around a little bit, and then looks back at Mami again. Then he puts it in his pocket. Luca is paralyzed by fear. A moment passes before he can give wind to his voice.
‘Mami,’ he says simply, and he thinks he says it quite calmly, though his body, still strapped to the top of that train, feels like a wild flap of panic. Mami leans in but not close enough. He flutters his hand so she understands. Come here. Get closer. Do it quickly. Lydia scoots closer to him.
‘Mami, I recognize someone.’
These words alone are enough to send a slice of cold down Lydia’s spine. ‘Okay,’ she says, willing her brain to slow down. Okay. ‘Who is it?’ Her arms and legs feel like they’ve turned to liquid, but the fingers of one hand stay tightly curled around the grating. The other hand goes automatically to the chain at her neck. She slips her index finger inside Sebastián’s wedding ring.
‘Don’t look,’ Luca says. ‘He’s staring at you, at us.’
Lydia’s mantra comes heroically crashing through her consciousness, penetrating the violent static of this new information. Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think, her brain tells her. ‘Okay,’ she repeats. ‘Who?’
Luca leans so his lips graze the top of her ear. ‘The boy from the first Casa del Migrante at Huehuetoca.’
Lydia breathes deeply. Okay. Some boy they crossed paths with along the way. She feels relief in the jellylike roll of her shoulders. ‘Oh, Luca,’ she says. And she wants to reprimand him for scaring her to death, but how is he supposed to know what may or may not provoke a stampede of dread in the confusing wasteland of their new life? So she also wants to laugh, to kiss him, to tell him not to worry so much. She puts her arm around him. ‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘It’s okay.’
‘Don’t you remember, that really bad kid – that cholo who got kicked out of the casa for bothering that girl? He did something bad to her?’
Yes, she remembers. Oh shit. The women at breakfast claimed he was a sicario.
Only moments ago, Lydia had dared to feel comforted by their unlikely progress. She’d allowed herself to indulge in the new fear of anonymous, indiscriminate threats. Now here is some sicario from God-knows-what cartel, staring her down from a hundred yards away. She looks at the other migrants seated around them. Any one of them could be a narco. Any one of them could be a Jardinero. She folds herself over her legs so her face is nearly touching the grating in front of her, or rather, her body does this without her mind instructing it to. An instinct to hide herself, to melt into the scenery, to disappear. Luca leans down, too.
‘There’s something else,’ he says, because he knows, although he doesn’t understand how he knows it or what it means, that there’s something deeply unsettling about the tattoo.
‘What is it?’ Lydia is ready for this information, whatever it is. She opens the door to it.
‘A tattoo. He has a tattoo.’
Her machete is strapped to her shin beneath her pant leg. She can feel the cinch of the holster, the way it presses into her skin. She whispers to Luca. ‘What sort of tattoo?’
‘Like a big, curved knife, Mami,’ he says. ‘With three drops of blood.’
Lydia’s mouth goes dry, her fingers cold. Her body trembles from the inside out, core to tip, beginning in her lungs. But to Luca, her face looks calm and impassive.
‘Like a sickle?’ She needs, but does not want, clarity. ‘Like this?’ She traces the shape of it on the palm of his hand with her finger.
Luca nods.
‘Thank you for telling me, mijo,’ she says. ‘You did the right thing. Good boy.’ She touches his ear.