CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
There are cultivated fields on both sides of the tracks, and Luca watches the farmer, sometimes on a tractor, sometimes on foot, as he tends to the rows of whatever crop he’s hoping to grow there in the rich seams of dirt. The farmer lets the stranded migrants fill their bottles from a long hose, and the water it dispenses is warm but clean. Sometimes a family comes and sells food and refrescos out of the back of their truck, but sometimes they don’t come, and Luca is very hungry. They rely on the kindness of their fellow migrants, who share their limited provisions. At night it gets cold, and some of the men build cheerful little campfires. Some folks sleep huddled up inside one of the empty freight cars, but it’s crowded and smelly, and even though the box car cuts the wind, the metal seems to conduct the cold into the migrants’ bones while they sleep. So Luca and Mami stay tucked in near one of the fires, wearing all of their clothes, and wrapped up together in their blanket like a colorful burrito. Everyone is exhausted and edgy, and by the middle of the second day in that arid, desolate place, some migrants give up waiting and start to walk. Luca can’t imagine where they’ll walk to, because there was no town for miles before they stopped here, and what if there’s no town for miles ahead either? He worries about that, and he prays when he watches the migrants strike out along the tracks. When a crew of ferrocarril workers arrives on the morning of the fourth day and prepares the train to depart, a cheer gathers in the camp and all the migrants begin to board, but Luca presses on his mami’s hand and insists they should wait.
‘Because this one is all the way on the right-hand track,’ he explains. ‘That one must go east, when the tracks split.’
He points north up the rails to where the dozen different tracks begin to merge, and then to merge again. Beyond a highway overpass, the number of tracks decreases to three, and then beyond that again, they merge to two. He and Rebeca walked there yesterday to explore, and they found the place where eventually the two tracks veered in different directions, one east, one west. But Lydia is anxious. They’ve waited so long already, and she can’t imagine not getting on this train. She shakes her head in exasperation.
‘He’s right.’ Two men at least a generation older than Mami are still seated on the far side of an empty track. ‘There are two tracks,’ one of the men says. ‘They run parallel from here to the village, and then they split. That train is going all the way to Chihuahua.’
‘We’re waiting for the Pacific Route train,’ his companion says. They might be identical twins. They have the same weather-beaten faces, the same neatly trimmed mustaches, the same warm timbre to their quiet voices. ‘If you want to cross at Nogales or Baja, you have to take the left-hand track from here.’
‘Thank you,’ Lydia says.
‘How do you know?’ Soledad asks them. She wants to understand how to learn these things.
‘We make this journey every other year. We’ve done it eight times.’
Lydia’s mouth drops open.
‘Why?’ Soledad asks.
The men shrug in unison. ‘We go where the work is,’ the first one says.
‘Come back to visit our wives and children,’ the second one adds.
‘Then we do it again.’ They both laugh, as if it’s a comedy routine they’ve been performing for years.
Soledad removes the backpack she’d put on in preparation for their departure, and slams it to the ground. ‘We’ve been waiting three days,’ she says. ‘Where is this train? What if it never comes?’ It’s difficult not to feel hysterical with the passing of the hours, the setting and rising of the sun. Honduras is no farther away today than it was yesterday.
‘It will come, mija.’ One of the men nods at her. ‘And your patience shall be rewarded.’ He reaches into the front pocket of his backpack and opens a wrapped parcel of carne seca. He hands two strips to Soledad, and then shares with the others. ‘The train will be along soon,’ he reassures them.
Luca bites gratefully into the salty, leathery strip. He rips it with his teeth. The second man leans forward and speaks softly to Soledad, who’s sitting on her pack now with her elbows resting on her knees. ‘And do not worry, morrita. Soon, Sinaloa will be well behind you. You will survive this. You have the look of a survivor.’
She drops her head low for a moment, so Luca worries about her. He expects that she’s crying, that everything she’s suffered is finally weighing her down, pressing her into the ground. But when she lifts her head, it’s the opposite of that. The man’s words have landed on her face and she does – she looks like an Aztec warrior.
The twin brothers tell stories while they wait, about their homes in Yucatán, about their wives and children, about the farms where they do seasonal labor in el norte, and about their third brother, a triplet, who they both agreed was the handsomest brother, before he was killed, six years ago, when the combine harvester he was driving on a farm in Iowa struck an overhead powerline. They bless themselves when they say his name. Eugenio. Luca recognizes the alchemy of recounting their brother’s name, and he blesses himself because it’s an eighth holy sacrament for migrants, repeating the names of your beloved dead. He tries it quietly on his own tongue: ‘Sebastián Pérez Delgado.’ But the shapes of it are too raw, still, too sharp. They flood his mouth with grief and for a moment, he has to bury his face. He has to breathe into the dark angles of his elbows. He has to fill his mind with other things. The capital of Norway is Oslo. There are 6,852 islands in the Japanese archipelago.
The brothers are a deeply calming presence. They are warm bread. They are shelter. And soon, just as the brothers assured them it would, the train arrives. It stops briefly, so they’re able to board easily, and after they help them up the ladder, the brothers move along to another car, where they can spread out, and give Lydia and the children some space of their own.
‘See you in el norte, manito,’ one of them says to Luca. ‘Look me up when you get to Iowa. We can have an hamburguesa together.’ He gives Luca a high-five, and then turns to follow his brother across the top of the train.
Rebeca sits down right where they are.
‘First class,’ Soledad jokes as Mami straps Luca onto the grating. She waves her arm around them. ‘I got us a private cabin.’
The train goes, and when they cross el río Fuerte, the landscape changes almost immediately from green to brown. They chug through the difficult farmland for an hour and a half, finally passing a sign that indicates they’ve crossed into the next state. Luca reads it out loud.
‘Bienvenido a Sonora.’
‘Y vete con viento fresco a Sinaloa.’ Rebeca bids good riddance to Sinaloa, but that invisible border does little to ease their newly intensified sense of constant fear.
Bacabachi, Navojoa, Ciudad Obregón, check, check, check. The desert asserts itself. Soon Luca can smell the ocean, but this time it reminds him of nothing about Acapulco because there’s no green here, no trees, no mountains, no dense mineral soil. No nightclubs or cruise ships or estadounidenses. Everything is sandy and dusty and dry, and the rock formations that lurch up from the ground have a brutal beauty. Even the trees look thirsty here, and Mami doesn’t have to pester Luca to drink. He sips frequently from his canteen, and his hair grows damp with sweat beneath Papi’s cap. By sunset they have, almost unbelievably, reached the city of Hermosillo, which is a place as parched and brown and alien as any Luca has ever seen, but its strangeness makes no impression on him, such is his mounting excitement.