‘You were lucky Nicolás helped you out,’ the coyote says to the boy. ‘I never take kids across, and this is why. I’m not trying to babysit, and I don’t want anybody dying of stupidity. Don’t make me regret bringing you.’
Beto’s face endures a rare slash of stillness, and the sincerity of it threatens to rob Lydia of her careful restraint.
‘When I tell you that something’s important, you heed me, understand?’ El Chacal says. Beto nods earnestly. ‘Because when I say importante it means you will die if you don’t listen. This journey is no joke. If I say jump, you jump. If I say cállate, you shut your mouth. If I say you need a jacket, you need a pinche jacket.’ He takes one step back and turns so he can see the migrants in both truck beds. He raises his voice so they can all hear. ‘Same goes for all of you. You hear? This is a grueling journey. Two and a half nights of arduous hiking, and I am your only lifeline. If there’s any problem with that, or if you don’t think you can make it, this is your last chance to say so.’
The coyote carries a pistol on these crossings to aid in convincing reluctant migrants about the absolute nature of his authority. He makes sure the migrants know he has the gun by carrying it quite openly in a holster slung low around his jeans. It serves mostly as a useful psychological prop, and he very seldom has to use it. Beto isn’t impressed by the gun, which he glimpsed when the coyote was standing beside the other truck, but he is affected by the subtle intensity of the man’s words. Beto knows the truth when he hears it.
‘Oye,’ the boy says. ‘I’m sorry.’ Beto is like a wide-open moon shining up at the coyote, and something in his yearning sends the memory of Sebastián falling across Lydia’s mind like a ruler across an outstretched knuckle. How long will the memory of his father sustain her own child? How long before he’s looking up at strangers this way? Grief-adrenaline swamps through her body, but Lydia closes her eyes and waits for it to pass.
El Chacal nods, opens the passenger door, and climbs in.
They drive southwest into the desert sunset. There’s nothing unusual about a couple of trucks full of migrants heading out into the wilderness from Nogales. No one will try to stop them; anyone who looks can see what they’re up to, but no one here cares. Lydia is the only one concerned about hiding herself. She slumps low in the bed of the truck, and shields her face with her faded hat when other vehicles approach and pass.
‘Why south?’ Luca asks as they turn left out of the town, but she doesn’t know.
She’s relieved when the drive turns to barely paved roads that eventually become unpaved roads that eventually become trails that can hardly be called roads at all. They are pocked with holes and ruts, and the gravel feels loose beneath the tires. They’re alone in the desert now, no other cars for miles around, and the migrants hang on to the edges and bounce uncomfortably in the beds of the pickup trucks, their bones juddering when they cross a dip they aren’t expecting. Lydia holds Luca down to keep him from flying out, but their progress is careful and slow.
When the trucks eventually point west, and then northwest, Luca wonders if they’re moving perpendicular to that boundary now, that place where the fence disappears and the only thing to delineate one country from the next is a line that some random guy drew on a map years and years ago. They haven’t seen another vehicle for almost an hour, so to pass the time, Nicolás names some of the species of animals that live here, some they might encounter on their travels: ocelots, bobcats, coatimundi, javelina, whiptail lizards, mountain lions, coyotes, rattlesnakes.
‘Rattlesnakes?’ Marisol says.
Rabbits, quail, deer, hummingbirds, jaguars.
‘Jaguars!’ Beto says.
‘Rare, but not yet extinct in Sonora, sure. Foxes, skunks,’ Nicolás says. ‘And don’t even get me started on the butterflies.’
Luca thinks of all of those animals running willy-nilly, back and forth across the border without their passports. It’s a comforting notion. Rebeca is only half listening. She doesn’t really want to consider what kind of wildlife they may encounter on their journey. She’s unconcerned about it in any case. She thinks of her own remote, wild place, full of noisy, big-eyed creatures of its own. It feels almost impossible that the cloud forest still exists. She wants to close her eyes and travel back there. Wants to feel the cool softness of the clouds against her cheeks and eyelashes. She wants to hear the echoing drips of rainfall spattering among the big, fat leaves. The memory of that bright, liquid, ethereal place is fading from her grasp. When she closes her eyes now, she cannot recall the sound of her abuela’s singing or the smell of the chilate. It’s all been obliterated from her, and the grief of that eradication feels like a weight she must carry in her limbs. When she breathes now, in this desert place, the air feels waterless in her nose, her scalp scorched by the sun where her hair parts.
Rebeca leans her head against her sister’s shoulder and watches the changing colors of the landscape. The sun sinks in front of them and turns the sandy earth orange and pink. The sky, too, is filled with crazy, vivid pinks and purples and blues and yellows, and the colors are slow to deepen, slow to slip into blackness, but when at last they are gone, the darkness is deeper and more vast than anything Luca has ever seen. He cannot see his knees drawn up in front of him. He cannot see his own fingers wiggling in front of his eyes. He gropes for Mami’s hand in the blackness, and when she feels him there, she pulls him closer and folds her wing around him. No one talks much after the sun is gone. Their eyes yawn open and seize on any suggestion of light. They stay each in their own mind, considering the hours ahead.
Lydia remembers a show from her childhood, not like these slick, indistinguishable cartoons Luca watches, shows that are beamed into televisions worldwide with their big-eyed, squeaky-voiced monsters of backtalk. It was a memorable show, an incredible low-budget job with handmade puppets and real junkyard magic. Lydia remembers the theme song, where all the characters would zoom around the earth in this rackety dumpster, except the dumpster was like a chariot, but only when all the friends were onboard, because if even one of them was missing, it was just a regular old dumpster, with hovering flies and sticky puddles. But when all the friends were together, the dumpster would glimmer and shoot off into the sky, and then stars would burst from its exhaust pipes, and don’t ask Lydia why a dumpster had exhaust pipes, she was only six when she watched that show, but Dios mío, it was something.
She doesn’t know why she’s remembering that show right now – she hasn’t thought of it in years, and this blue pickup truck is no magic dumpster. But Lydia has that same swooping, rocketing feeling she used to get when she watched that eruption of scrap-heap stars, when she saw how tightly the friends would curl their fingers around the lip of their vessel to keep themselves safely inside, never mind gravity or physics or the fiery reality of planetary atmosphere. Anything was possible.
‘Do you remember that show, from when we were kids?’ she asks Marisol in the blackness. ‘The one with the flying dumpster?’
Marisol remembers.
During the second hour of driving, there’s a light on the path ahead, and the trucks roll to a stop at a checkpoint. There is light enough, just, for Soledad to recognize the uniform of los agentes federales de migración. Immediately, Rebeca begins to cry. She scrapes her heels along the bed of the pickup and writhes back into her sister’s arms. Soledad shushes her and wraps an arm around her forehead. She presses Rebeca’s face into the hollow of her neck and tells her to close her eyes. She hums softly to her sister in the comfort of their ancient language.