‘I saw them together last night after dinner,’ Julia says. ‘I saw the way he looked at her, and I just presumed they were together. But what I saw then after, there was no question it was one-sided.’
‘She tried to fight him off?’ Neli asks, placing a speckled white square in her mouth.
‘Worse than that, she struggled but then seemed resigned to it.’ Julia shakes her head sadly but there’s a spiky anger in her voice. ‘Like she knew there was nothing she could do if he’d made up his mind. Qué chingadera.’
‘They should be castrated, every one of them,’ Neli says, shaking her headful of black curls.
Julia looks across at the young girl. ‘She’s so pretty, too. She’s going to have a rough journey.’
‘A lot of return trips to the cuerpomático,’ Neli agrees.
‘The what?’ Ixchel asks.
‘The cuerpomático?’ Neli repeats.
Ixchel shakes her head. She may have an accent, but her Spanish is excellent, and yet she hasn’t heard this word before. Perhaps it’s slang. Perhaps it’s made-up. Lydia doesn’t know it either.
‘You don’t know this word?’ Julia asks.
Ixchel shakes her head a second time. Lydia watches Luca at the round table while she listens to the women talk.
‘I thought all the guatemaltecas knew it.’ Neli allows the remainder of her tortilla to wilt back onto her plate.
‘Las guanacas también, y las catrachas.’ Julia leans forward on her elbows and pushes her plate aside. ‘It means your body is an ATM machine.’
Lydia tries to swallow, but the eggs and tortilla have formed a paste in her mouth. Her fork is full of rice, a crispy disk of plátano frito speared onto its tines. The fork hovers.
‘This is the price of getting to el norte,’ Neli says.
After some excruciating measure of seconds, Ixchel finds her voice, the Spanish words that are familiar. La violación. ‘Rape? Is the price?’
Both women look at her blankly. They cannot believe this is news to her. Has she been living under a rock before now?
‘How did you end up here, mamita?’ Neli asks, returning her attention to the food.
Ixchel does not answer.
Julia leans in and drops her voice low. ‘I have paid twice already.’
This disclosure, shared with a woman she seemed to shun only moments ago, is such an unexpected intimacy that Lydia makes a noise in her throat without meaning to. A wound of a sound. All three women look at her as she takes a sip of fruit punch and sets her still-full fork on the edge of her plate.
‘How about you?’ Julia returns her attention to Neli. ‘Have you paid?’
‘Not yet,’ Neli says grimly.
‘You?’ They all look expectantly at Lydia.
She shakes her head.
A smiling young woman approaches the table where Luca is sitting with the other children. ‘Who’s ready for a puppet show?’ she asks.
The little girl beside Luca shoots out of her chair, arms raised. ‘Me, me!’ she says.
‘Good, I need lots of helpers!’
‘I heard he was a sicario.’
This information snaps Lydia’s focus back to her own table. ‘What?’ she says, accidentally.
‘That’s the rumor.’ Julia shrugs. ‘Seems like they should know better than to let those narcos in.’
‘But he told the padre he was getting out,’ Neli intercedes. ‘Told him he got recruited by the cartel when he was just a kid and he never had any choice, you know the story. Had enough of that life and wanted to go to el norte.’
‘Which cartel?’ Ixchel asks because like most people, because of her personal experience, she’s more afraid of one particular cartel than others.
‘What does it matter?’ Neli says. ‘They’re all the same. Animales.’
‘They’re not,’ Julia insists. ‘Some of them are way worse than others.’
Neli makes a face like she’s skeptical, but doesn’t argue.
‘Like Los Jardineros,’ Julia says. ‘I heard they donated money to build a new cancer hospital in Acapulco.’
Lydia takes a sharp breath, but Neli waves a hand dismissively. ‘That’s just trying to buy people’s loyalty,’ she says. ‘Propaganda.’
‘But maybe the reason is less important than the fact,’ Julia says. Then she drops her voice to a whisper and leans in again, closing the space across the table to a tight circle. She names the unnameable cartel. ‘Los Zetas feed people their own body parts. Los Zetas hang babies from bridges.’
Lydia covers her mouth with her hand. Her fingers are cold and stiff, and beside her, Ixchel is crossing herself. Lydia will ask a question now, but she’ll make her voice light. Neutral.
‘So last night, the guy who got kicked out – which cartel was he?’
Julia shrugs. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘But if he really wants out, he better run. Far and fast, right? They don’t let those guys go.’
Lydia pushes her plate away. Far and fast, she thinks. Some things are so simple.
Chapter Fourteen
Six days and 282 miles from absolute calamity, Lydia and Luca take their leave from Huehuetoca and head north once again, following the trail of La Bestia. When Lydia considers how they’ve managed to survive the last week, to get this far from Acapulco and remain alive, her mind seizes. Because she knows she’s made both good and bad decisions in those six days, and that ultimately, it’s only by the grace of God that none of those choices have met with bad luck and resulted in catastrophe. That awareness incapacitates her. She can’t conceive of a plan to board the train, which is what they must do. They must get on the train. Meanwhile, walking will give her time to think. They filled their canteens before they left the shelter, but they stop at a small shop down the road and Lydia jams her bag with snacks. Because it’s a shop that’s used to migrants, they stock the kinds of things that migrants can carry and eat: nuts, apples, candy, granola, chips, carne seca. Lydia buys as much as she can fit in her pack. She buys a floppy hat, too, pink with white flowers, to protect her neck from the sun. It reminds her of the ugly thing Mamá used to put on when she gardened, and any time Lydia and Yemi caught their mother wearing it, they would titter and tease.
‘You laugh, but this hat is the reason I have the skin of a twenty-four-year-old!’ their mother would chide them.
Back outside, the freight tracks stretch out across the Mexican landscape like a beanstalk migrants must climb, and Luca and Mami go step by step, tie by tie, leaf by leaf. The sun is bright, but not too hot this early in the day. They hold hands briefly, and then sweat and separate, and then the cycle repeats. They take the westernmost route because Luca’s mind-map was convinced that, though that way was longer than the others, the relative topography would be kinder if they end up making much of the journey by foot, as it appears they might. He’s glad Mami didn’t press him to explain his instinct; she simply yielded to the gentle pressure of his hand as they’d set off.