‘¿Quién está a cargo aquí?’ The man stands, even though they’ve been told to sit, and speaks past the shoulder of the officer who’s been set to guard them, to the man they all suspect of being in charge, el agente who’s sitting on the folded-down tailgate of his pickup truck with one foot planted in the dirt beneath him and the other dangling from the tailgate. His posture is casual, so it’s surprising when he stands quickly and approaches the migrant who addressed him. Lydia watches, barely breathing, because this exchange might tell them everything they need to know about the hours ahead. She doesn’t realize she’s digging her fingernails into Luca’s arm until he begins to squirm. She lets go, rubbing apologetically at the little gouge marks she accidentally made in his skin.
‘What do you need?’ El agente stands very close to the migrant, and Lydia understands that this is deliberate, that he hopes to frighten the other man, which strikes her as both juvenile and effective.
‘I am a Mexican national. You have no right to detain me,’ the migrant says. ‘I want to know who’s in command of this unit.’ El agente is tall enough that the migrant has to crane his neck to look up, his chin level with the top of the Kevlar vest.
‘I am in charge,’ el agente says, and then he claps a hand onto the shoulder of his comrade beside him. ‘And he is in charge. And you see that guy over there? With the gun? He is also in charge. Everyone who looks like me? This uniform? We are in charge. And we have the right to detain whoever we like. Take a seat.’
After a few minutes and some removed conversation, most of los agentes get into two of the three trucks and leave, so only five remain on the roadside with the migrants. With those two departing vehicles, so, too, disappear the migrants’ hopes that this might be a clean, administrative experience. Fewer uniforms means fewer witnesses. The captives eye one another nervously, but no one moves. Even if the five remaining agents weren’t so heavily armed, even if one of the migrants felt inclined to run, there’s nowhere for them to go. Because of these circumstances, the handcuffs, when they appear, feel both gratuitous and alarming. They’re not real handcuffs, but plastic zip ties. At first Lydia hopes they’re only going to shackle the men. They begin at the end, standing the migrants up one at a time. They pat them down for weapons, cell phones, money. They take their backpacks and zip-tie their wrists behind them. One man complains when they take his money, and el agente backhands him across the face with his radio. Luca’s eyes grow wide.
‘Mijo, look,’ Mami says, pulling Luca close. ‘Look at that cloud.’ She points.
‘It looks like an elephant,’ he says.
‘Yes, and then see there? What’s it picking up in its trunk?’
Luca squints. He knows what she’s doing, trying to distract him. She doesn’t want him to see. And he could tell her it doesn’t matter anymore, that he’s seen so much worse than this already, but he understands that it’s as much for her as it is for him, this distraction. She needs to feel like she can still mother him, still provide him with some relief, no matter what horrible things are happening fifteen feet away. Luca can hear that man crying softly. Luca can imagine, without raising his eyes to confirm such things, that there’s a glossy trickle of bright blood leaking from that man’s nose or lip. Luca focuses on the cloud-elephant because it’s something he can do for Mami.
‘I think he’s picking a flower.’
Mami touches her cheek to his. ‘I think he’s shaking hands with a little mouse.’
When all the migrant men are handcuffed, nineteen of them, Luca counts, los agentes come to the sisters. They move to take Rebeca first, but Soledad steps in front of her.
‘Everybody wants to be a hero,’ one of los agentes mutters. His partner laughs.
They turn Soledad around and take a long time patting her down. Much longer than they took on any of the men. Luca can feel Mami trembling beside him. The officers flap the bottom of Soledad’s oversize white T-shirt, billowing air beneath it, and then they bend down to look up it. They stick their hands up there.
‘Think she’s packing?’ the partner asks.
‘Oh, she’s packing all right.’
When they cuff her, they pull her T-shirt at the back so it’s stretched tight against the white outline of her bra, and they gather up all the loose material and bind it into the zip ties behind her, along with her wrists. The material rides up to show a few inches of her brown tummy, and all the migrant men show their solidarity for her by turning their eyes to the ground.
‘That’s better,’ says el agente who cuffed her. He tosses Soledad’s confiscated backpack into the bed of the truck along with the others, but when Soledad moves to sit back down on the ground with the other migrants, he grabs her by the elbow. ‘You sit up here instead.’ He points to the folded-down tailgate.
Soledad’s face betrays nothing. She sits where instructed, and makes sure not to watch while they do the same to Rebeca. Soon her sister is seated up beside her, and they lean against each other, consoling each other with the heat of their touching shoulders. Lydia endures her turn next. They face her away from Luca and remove her hat to study her face. She squints in the sunlight, but they replace the hat without comment before groping her breasts and her backside. They find the machete strapped to her leg, and they laugh while they unbuckle the holster. One of the men throws it into the bed of the pickup truck with a thunk.
‘Don’t worry, mijo, it will be okay,’ she says to Luca without turning to face him.
Luca is sitting cross-legged with his elbows on his knees. Soledad and Rebeca both stare silently at him, as if they can make a bubble of protection around him just by the resolve of their eyes.
The officer speaks to Lydia without inflection, without anger or hostility, in exactly the same tone of voice Lydia would use if she were talking to the automated teller when she does her banking by phone. ‘Shut up,’ he says, and he slides his hand between her legs. He brushes his pinky finger back and forth along the crotch of her jeans. Lydia clamps her mouth shut and begins to cry.
Luca leans forward to stand up, but Rebeca calls out to him. ‘What is the third-largest city in the United States?’ she asks.
Luca is confused. ‘What?’
Rebeca repeats the question.
‘Well, that’s easy, it’s Chicago,’ Luca says. ‘Once you get down to around the fifth- and sixth-largest it’s a lot trickier because those populations are changing by a significant percentage year by year, but – wait, why?’
Seated on the tailgate with her hands tied behind her, Rebeca shrugs. ‘Just curious.’