‘How much money?’ Lydia asks.
Rebeca looks to Soledad, who’s still lying down, her head resting in her folded arms. Rebeca continues rubbing her sister’s back. ‘How much, Sole?’
Soledad answers without lifting her head or opening her eyes. ‘Four thousand each.’
Lydia is startled by the sum. ‘I thought it would be much more than that, like ten thousand pesos at least.’
‘Dollars,’ Soledad says, her voice muffled by the sleeve of her shirt. ‘Four thousand dollars.’
Dios Santo. Lydia does a quick intake of breath. She accepts dollars in the bookstore, so she’s familiar with the typical exchange rates, but not in these quantities. She strains to do the math in her head. It’s a lot of money, but they have enough, they have plenty. They will even have a small sum left, to get them started on the other side. But then she remembers the padre’s pep talk in Celaya. Every single one of you will be robbed. Every one. If you make it to el norte, you will arrive penniless, that’s a guarantee.
But it’s good, anyway, to have a plan, to look beyond what they might eat today or where they might sleep tonight. Lydia doesn’t feel ready for it, but she’s beginning to consider the future. She’s definitely not ready to look back, though, and she hopes she may accomplish one without necessitating the other.
‘So where do you meet this coyote? He’s expecting you?’ she asks Rebeca.
‘Yes, his name is El Chacal –’
Of course it is, Lydia thinks. Why would a coyote be named Roberto or Luis or José when he can be named The Jackal?
‘– and he works out of Nogales. When we get there, we call his cell phone. Look.’ Rebeca loosens the rainbow wristband she wears on her left arm and sticks her finger into a tiny hole on the inside. From there she unrolls a scrap of paper with the coyote’s phone number on it.
‘Good.’ Lydia nods. ‘Okay.’
So now they have a solid plan.
It’s amazing that riding on the top of a freight train can become boring, but it’s true. The tedium is spectacular. The chugging of the engine and the squeal of the metal are so constant that the migrants no longer hear those things. At towns where the train slows or stops, migrants get off, migrants get on, and they continue. The sun hikes high into the sky and glares down on them until their skin is so hot they can smell it, a little charred, and the brightness of the light bleaches the colors out of the landscape.
They pass through Mazatlán without stopping, where the tracks run alongside the ocean for a while, and the existence of sand there and the blueness of the sea remind Luca of home, which makes him feel obliterated instead of cheered. He’s glad when they turn inland and leave the beach behind. But then it’s back to hours of tedium, blended brown and green and gray, so it’s almost a welcome diversion when, a few miles outside Culiacán, the monotony is broken by screaming. A lone voice repeats the words over and over, like a siren: ¡la migra, la migra!
All around them, migrants grab their things quickly; some don’t even bother with that – they look once at the dust trails kicked up by the tires of the approaching trucks, they choose the opposite side of the train, and they bail.
‘Come on, Soledad, wake up,’ Rebeca says, her voice tight with panic. ‘We have to go.’
The train is slowing but hasn’t stopped, and the men on top aren’t waiting. They scatter. They bolt.
‘¡A la mierda con esto!’ Soledad curses, slinging her pack onto her shoulders.
‘What’s happening, Mami?’ Luca asks.
In theory, la migra is no threat to Lydia and Luca. As Mexican nationals, they cannot be deported back to Guatemala or El Salvador, and unlike most of their fellow migrants, they aren’t in the country illegally. They’re committing only the minor infraction of riding the train. So perhaps it’s only the pervasive panic all around them, perhaps it’s contagious. But no, Lydia just knows. She can tell that los agentes de la migra in their uniforms are not here to enforce law and order. She knows by the bone-deep fear born only of instinct that she can’t rely on their citizenship now to protect them. They are in mortal danger, she can feel it in her pores, in her hair.
The trucks converge like pack animals. The men inside are masked and armed. Lydia scrabbles frantically at the buckle on Luca’s belt, but her hands are shaking and she has to try three times before she can free him.
‘Mami?’ Luca’s voice is rising in pitch.
Hers is low. ‘We have to run.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
There are three trucks, all black and white with enormous roll bars, and together they speed across the roadless dirt and sidle up beside the tracks, spewing gravel and dust behind them. There are at least four agentes standing in the back of each truck, plus more inside, and they’re all kitted out like they’re going to war. Luca stares at them with his mouth open. They wear boots and kneepads and helmets and giant, studded Kevlar vests and gloves and dark black visors so you can’t see their eyes, and their faces are entirely covered by black balaclavas. Each one of them has weapons strapped all over his body and a really large gun slung diagonally across his chest, and Luca can’t even begin to imagine what they’d need all that weaponry for, just to catch a few migrants, and then he also thinks it would be impossible to tell the difference, in all that gear, between an agente federal de migración and a narcotraficante in disguise, and Luca isn’t sure there’s much difference between them anyway because a gun is a gun is a gun. Luca pees in his pants.
No one cares. Migrants are spilling over the edges of the train. The ladders are full, and some men don’t wait their turn; they jump from the top, and Luca cringes as he watches them land. One man doesn’t get up again after he leaps. He writhes on the ground clutching his broken leg. Many stumble and puff when they hit the ground, but they have to make a swift recovery. They stagger and pick up speed. Luca has many questions, but he understands that now is not the time to ask them, so he listens to Mami and does exactly as she instructs. They are the last ones to reach the top of the ladder, and the only good part about that is that it’s empty now – all the men have gone, and Luca can see them loping like jackrabbits through the fields, but it’s no use. Luca can see that it’s no use. Because la migra has planned the raid perfectly – the train, where they are now, is in the middle of just fields and fields and fields, all harvested, flat, brown, and bald. There is nowhere for those migrants to go, never mind how quick or clever or jackrabbity they might be. As soon as the migrants disembark from the train, they are done for. There is no town, no building, no tree, no bush, no ditch, no cover. And Luca nearly opens his mouth to share this observation with his mother, to suggest that maybe they’d be better off staying put, but then the train engages its brakes and they all lurch forward and Rebeca loses her grip on the ladder, and Soledad lunges for her, but misses her hand, but then catches her stringing hair only because it has come loose in the rush, and when she hauls her sister back in by the hair, they are both crying. They can all taste their hearts in their throats, and Luca says nothing at all as the train finally pulls to a jerky halt.
They run not because they have any feeling that they might actually escape, but rather against the certain futility of running, because their terror compels them to run. They run because every one of them understands that if they are caught, when they are caught, all the hard-fought progress they’ve managed up to this point will come to an abrupt end. Whatever they have suffered in order to get this far on their journey will have been for naught. They understand that the best-case scenario now is to be captured by a man who obeys the dictates of his uniform, a man who will detain them and process them, and then erase their entire journey, and send them back to wherever they started. That is the best-case scenario. On the other hand, they know, this capture might not be bureaucratic at all. Perhaps there’s no one waiting to process them, fingerprint them, and send them home. Instead, this capture may turn out to be much more nefarious than that: kidnapping, torture, extortion, a finger chopped off and photographed for the threatening text they will send to your family in el norte. A slow, excruciating death if your family doesn’t pay up. The stories are as common as the rocks in this field. Every migrant has heard them; they run.