He feels no relief because he knows.
‘My leg is broken.’ Ricardín does not cry. ‘It’s definitely broken. I broke my leg.’
And it’s just as well the other migrants have not followed this far downstream, because no one wants to see or to hear the horrific business of removing the boy’s leg from where it’s caught in the crevasse below.
The only question is who will stay with him. Slim and Choncho have both done this journey enough times to know how it works, and to accept the terrible fate without complaint. They don’t plead with El Chacal or the other migrants. They don’t beg for help or ask them to stay. Although it would be a reasonable response in these circumstances, they don’t drift toward hysteria at the thought of being left alone and immobilized here in the desert. It’s Choncho who makes the final decision.
‘Because I’m the older brother, that’s why.’
Slim nods.
‘I’ll stay with my godson,’ Choncho says. ‘We’ll give you a head start, and when he’s feeling up to it, I’ll get him to the Ruby Road. You take David and go find work for both our families.’
The brothers embrace, the hard, back-smacking embrace of working men. Then Slim pulls his son’s wet head into his arms.
‘I’m sorry, Papi,’ Ricardín says.
Slim shakes his head. ‘Gracias a Dios, you escaped with your life. That’s all that matters.’
Ricardín and David pray with their fathers before the four of them part ways.
‘Call Teresa when you get to a phone, when you get picked up,’ Slim tells his brother. ‘And I’ll call her when we get to Tucson, and make sure you’re safe.’
Choncho nods.
‘And take this.’ Slim sets one of his water jugs down beside his son.
‘Papi—’
‘Take it, Ricky,’ Slim says. He squats down on his haunches and looks his son in the eye, and then squeezes his shoulder, and stands up with his hat pulled low. He turns his face quickly away.
Behind him, Choncho hugs his son, his hand like a mitt on the back of David’s neck. They’re both well over six feet tall. Choncho kisses his boy on top of the head, and then gives him a light shove toward his uncle. ‘Stay out of trouble,’ he says.
‘Keep the rising sun to your backs,’ El Chacal tells them. ‘The Ruby Road is barely a mile from here.’
A mile, Luca thinks. With a broken leg.
When the coyote herds the migrants back to their route, when they ascend from the canyon into the hot pink dawn, only Luca looks back from the gap at Ricardín and his tío still sitting on the ledge below. The others keep moving, and Luca can feel their unified will, pushing themselves forward like cogs in machinery, like an escalator. They can’t stop the engine or even slow it down. It moves on despite the new rot in their collective spirit. Even the coyote’s energy seems to be flagging. But they move on. They move on.
The migrants are shuffling past Luca, who hovers now, in the gap. Behind them, Choncho pulls his brown baseball cap low over his eyes, and Ricardín’s face is a wet twist of pain. How will they climb out of there when he can’t walk? Luca wonders. How will they make it to the road? Then he banishes that thought and prays instead. Please let them make it to the road.
‘Luca, ven,’ Mami says.
He scrambles to catch up.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The cave, when they finally reach it, is warm and dry, and the rising sun paints the back wall orange and pink and yellow. It’s not a sunken cave with a dark hole of a mouth like Luca expected when he heard the word cueva, but rather, it’s as if a huge divot has been hollowed out of the earth with an ice-cream scoop, and then softened and cleaned by the elements. There are several copper nails hammered into the top of the cave’s opening, and El Chacal takes a sheet from his pack that’s painted in earthy stripes the exact colors of the landscape. He tacks this sheet onto the nails above, dropping the migrants into a light shade.
The migrants look different in this morning’s light than they did in yesterday’s. Some of them had already known they were capable of walking away from a wounded man, of abandoning a person in the desert to save themselves. Marisol, for example, believes there’s almost no despicable thing she wouldn’t do in order to get back to her daughters. Lorenzo would trample a baby to get to el norte. For others among them, the discovery of their own compliance is an unpleasant surprise. They all know how lucky they are that it was Ricardín who broke his leg, and not them, and the recognition of that good fortune makes them each feel damned, doomed. Unconscionable.
‘Men outside first,’ the coyote orders them, when the sheet is fixed in place.
Lorenzo groans, but the others duck through without complaint. Rebeca is soaked and there’s a dank smell rising off the back of her neck where the hood of her sweatshirt has gathered the oils running from her sopping hair. Her toes are frozen, and her feet feel raw in her shoes, but she’s terrified of taking off her clothes.
‘It’s the only way to get dry.’ Soledad plops down on her backside and peels off her soggy sneakers. Her toes are tingly. ‘I feel better already,’ she says.
They all undress. They don’t look at one another. Beto stays in only his underwear because he has nothing else to put on, so Lydia fishes out the same spare T-shirt he wore as a makeshift hat yesterday and hands it to him. The rain has had an unhealthy effect on his lungs, and he rattles and wheezes when he lifts his arms to pull the gifted T-shirt over his head. Lydia finds her own spare clothes, rolled inside a plastic bag in her pack, to be reasonably dry. Luca’s, too. Soledad stands up and removes her sweater, which she holds up in front of Rebeca like a curtain so her sister can change. They all peel the clothes from their wet bodies. They slip into large T-shirts and change their underwear. They’ll have to stretch their jeans to dry on the rocks outside.
Even though there’s a new solemnity among them in the absence of Choncho and Ricardín, the solace of this place, this moment, is extraordinary. The ordeal of the rain makes Lydia appreciate the comfort of dryness in a way she never even considered before now. While the men strip and change in the cave, she and Luca sit just outside the sheet with their bare legs stretched out in the sunshine. It’s still early morning in the desert, but the temperature is rising quickly. The rock is soft and dry beneath them, and the sun warms the patches where their skin is chafed and tender. Luca wants to ask Mami what they’re going to do when they get to el norte, but he’s afraid she won’t have an answer, and besides, he doesn’t want to jinx the nearness of their arrival. There’s one question that won’t leave him alone, though.
‘What about Rebeca and Soledad?’ he says. ‘Do you really think they’ll go to Maryland?’