Lydia wishes this boy would move away from them. Nine days and 426 miles from their escape, they haven’t made any headway at all.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Luca likes the estates where all the homes are lined up like soldiers wearing identical uniforms: indestructible white stucco walls, helmets of red Spanish tile, all tilted at the same angle to the sun. He likes the anonymity of them, and thinks how nice it would be to live inside one of those houses with Mami, how nobody’d ever find them there. One thing he doesn’t like is when the train tracks temporarily veer south, because even though he misses home, he misses only the life that existed in Acapulco before the quinceañera, and he understands that to be a place that no longer exists. It’s nostalgia for a phantom limb. So he’s relieved when the tracks bend toward the west again, and then, near a neat little town in Jalisco, sidle up beside el río Grande de Santiago and, at long last, curve northward.
The city appears gradually and with several false starts where Luca observes all the familiar symptoms of an urban metropolis: food vendors who pause at their grills to wave up at the passing migrants, the occasional clothesline strung with bright colors snapping in the sunny wind, a gathering of rowdy kids along the fence of a schoolyard. And then boom, it all recedes, and it’s just cornfields, cornfields, cornfields. Two times this happens. Three. Four. And then finally, unmistakably: Guadalajara.
Second-largest city in Mexico. State capital of Jalisco. Population: one and a half million people.
All across the top of the train, migrants prepare to disembark. They wake their friends, stuff wadded-up jacket-pillows into their bags; they tighten the straps on one another’s backpacks. Mami unstraps herself from the train but leaves Luca’s belt attached to the grating. Lorenzo sits in the same spot, in the same position, and observes. Luca doesn’t like the way he watches Rebeca and Soledad.
‘Mami,’ Luca says as the train slows enough that some of the men on their car begin to climb down the ladders and jump to the gravel below.
Lydia is rolling up her canvas belt, and she looks at Luca with her what? face.
‘I don’t need the belt,’ he says.
‘You need the belt.’
‘Mami.’
This time she does the more aggressive version of her what? face.
‘If I’m able to jump on and off a moving train, don’t you think it’s a little silly to buckle me in like a toddler?’ Luca juts out his chin at her. She grabs that chin in her hand, pulls her face down to his. The unchanged nature of her temper when he’s ill-mannered is a comfort like a hot bath.
‘It is not silly,’ she says. ‘We ride these trains because we have no choice, but they are extremely dangerous, Luca. Did you learn nothing back there when that man fell—’
‘Okay,’ he says, irritably. ‘Fine.’ He tries to wriggle his chin away from her, but she only squeezes harder. He still has control of his own eyeballs, though. She can’t squeeze those. He moves his gaze away from her face, to her left ear.
‘Don’t interrupt me,’ she says. ‘And look at me when I’m speaking to you.’
He looks at that earlobe.
‘Luca. Look at me.’
He returns his gaze to her face momentarily and then moves it away again.
‘Listen. I know this is all crazy. It’s reckless and wild, riding these trains, sleeping in strange places, eating strange things. And I know I haven’t said it before now, but, Luca, I’m so proud of you.’
He looks her briefly in the eye.
‘I am,’ she says. ‘It’s incredible, how strong you are, that you’re able to do these inconceivable things.’
Luca has an unexpected thought. ‘Can you imagine what Papi would say?’
Lydia lets go of his chin and smiles at him. ‘Papi would say we are both crazy.’
Tears spring into Luca’s eyes, but he doesn’t want them there, so he makes them disappear. Lydia drops her voice to a whisper. ‘Papi would be so proud of you. You’re capable of things I had no idea you could do, Luca.’ She squeezes his knee. ‘I never knew.’ She reaches across the landscape of their tangled legs to grab Luca’s hand. ‘But you are still my boy, do you understand?’
He nods.
‘Y por Dios, if anything happened to you, Luca. I couldn’t bear it. I know how much you’ve grown in these last days. But your body is still only eight years old.’
‘Almost nine,’ he says.
‘Almost nine,’ she agrees. ‘But please, please listen. Never be complacent. Never assume you’re safe on this train. No one is safe, do you understand? No one.’ She squeezes his hands. ‘Machismo will get you killed.’
Luca nods again.
The train has slowed to a placid roll beneath them, and Soledad and Rebeca both tie up their hair to disembark. They’re wearing their backpacks, and they’re turned, talking with the group of four men who’ve been in front of them since Celaya. One of the men has made this journey before – he’s been deported twice from San Diego, so this is his third pass through Guadalajara. He’s warning them. Lorenzo eavesdrops.
‘You have to get off before El Verde,’ the man tells the sisters. ‘You have to walk the next part of the tracks.’
‘Why?’ Soledad reaches up to tighten her black hair in its fixed coil.
‘The people in this city are kind to migrants, God bless them. You will find a good welcome here. But first you have to get past la policía. They clear the trains at El Verde, and if they catch you—’ The man finishes only with a shake of his head.
‘Don’t let them catch you.’ Soledad fills in the blank for him.
‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘And stay with a group. You can come with us if you want.’ His friends, one by one, begin moving toward the ladder, and he follows.
Rebeca relays all this information quickly to Lydia and suggests going with them. Lydia hesitates. She knows how dangerous it is to trust anyone on La Bestia. There are thugs and rapists and thieves and narcos hidden in the ranks of la policía in every town, but it’s not only the police who deserve their suspicion. It’s every single person they meet – shopkeepers, food vendors, humanitarians, children, priests, even their fellow migrants. Especially their fellow migrants. She glances at Lorenzo’s clean, expensive sneakers. It’s a common tactic for bad actors to ride the trains posing as migrants, working to gain the trust of unsuspecting travelers, so they can lure them into a secluded place where they can commit some violence against them. Lydia understands the increased probability of that violence being leveled against the sisters. Any gesture of kindness, any valuable nugget of shared information, any pitiful story of heartbreak may be only a well-designed trap. A prequel to robbery or rape or kidnapping. Lydia’s brain makes her do the work of considering all this before she decides. But there’s no time. The train rolls on and the men are getting off. In fact the whole train seems to be emptying.
These four men seem kind. They have the steep accents of Central Americans. They’re probably Central Americans, right? Lydia has to decide. Lorenzo’s waiting for her to decide, too. Why is he waiting? His lingering presence makes the decision. She unbuckles Luca and stuffs his belt into her pack.
‘Let’s go.’
Lorenzo follows.
For the first while, it’s all warehouses to one side of the tracks, and all dirt and grass and open sky on the other, so Luca has the impression of walking just outside of something, like the warehouses are a kind of border, fencing something better beyond. They stick to the tracks, where dozens of migrants walk ahead of and behind them, in a sort of miniature caravan. The boy Lorenzo hangs close, not walking with them exactly, but following only a few feet behind, matching his pace to theirs. Luca is worried about that boy, but he’s distracted by the unmistakable smell of chocolate, which adds to the sense that, nearby, there’s something much better.