‘Where are they going?’ Rebeca asks no one.
The second line of track is separated from theirs by a space of only five or six feet, and one young boy, not much older than Luca, is standing atop the southbound train. He seems to be gauging whether or not he could jump the gap. A group of men yell and gesture wildly at him, so he clambers down the nearby ladder instead, and jumps down to the ground. Then he runs north alongside the northbound train. The train is traveling quite slowly now, and Luca leans over the edge in astonishment to watch the running boy beneath. He looks up at Luca and grins. He grips the moving ladder of Luca’s freight car and hauls himself up. Luca leans back up and waits for the boy’s head to emerge over the lip, which is black and shiny in the desert sunlight. On the idling southbound train, a loud cheer goes up for the boy’s victorious transfer, and the boy shouts back to the men, who all wave and smile.
‘¡Vaya con Dios!’ the boy yells at the men he’s leaving behind. ‘¡Ya me voy pa’l otro la’o!’
Another cheer. ‘Be careful and God bless you!’ another man yells.
And then the train begins to gain speed again, and the clacking returns to its shriek and rumble, and the boy walks over to them without even crouching, and he plops himself down carelessly. Unlike most migrants, the boy does not carry anything, nor does he wear a hat to shield his berry-brown face from the sun. Because of that fact, his exposed features are dry and burnished. His lips are cracked with peels of white, but the chapping doesn’t interfere with the brightness of his smile. He puts his hand out to bump fists with Luca, who responds reflexively, the way any eight-year-old boy would, without even thinking.
‘¿Qué onda, güey?’ the boy says, using the borderland slang that marks him immediately as a northerner.
Luca doesn’t know exactly what qué onda, güey means because he doesn’t know anyone who talks like this, but he understands enough to know it’s a friendly greeting, so he replies by saying hello. Lydia, who believed her capacity for surprise had been exhausted, is genuinely taken aback by the boy’s arrival. She doesn’t know what to make of him. On the one hand, he gives the instant impression of being gregarious, friendly, charismatic. On the other hand, she’s wary of everyone she meets now, and although this child seems very young, she knows that boys this age are prime candidates for gang recruitment. And why is he alone? Why so friendly with Luca? She puts one arm defensively around her son. This child’s face is round, his eyes, nose, and cheeks, all round. His eyelids look puffy, but the black eyes beneath them are clear and intense. He’s wheezing slightly, and as they all watch, he removes an inhaler from the pocket of his jeans, shakes it vigorously, places it to his lips, and takes a puff. Then he breathes deeply and coughs a little.
‘It’s empty.’ He shrugs, replacing the inhaler in his pocket. ‘But the memory of the medicine helps.’
Luca smiles, but Lydia furrows her brow.
‘Will you be okay?’ she asks. Despite her instinctive suspicion, she’s still a mother, and you can’t fake a wheeze like that.
The boy coughs again, once, twice, and then spits something solid over the edge of the train car. ‘It will pass in a minute,’ he wheezes.
They watch him for signs of a medical emergency, though it’s unclear how they could help if the episode does not, in fact, pass. He sits up straight, looks out across the landscape, folds his legs into the shape of a pretzel, and concentrates on breathing slowly. As he does this, Lydia’s relieved to see the existence of a hole in the sole of his sneaker. No boy with an empty inhaler and a hole in his sneaker could belong to a gang or cartel.
After he manages to regain a steady breath, the boy turns to Luca and says, ‘I’m Beto. What’s your name?’
‘Hello, Beto. I’m Luca.’
Beto nods. Their train is passing a village that seems to have grown right out of the tracks – just a cluster of houses the same rusty color as the land, and two competing taquerías that face off across the lone street.
‘Is your breathing better now?’ Luca asks.
‘Yeah, it’s fine,’ Beto says. ‘Happens whenever I run too fast, but you learn how to be calm until it passes, because if you freak out, that makes it worse.’
Luca nods.
‘It’s cool to meet another kid,’ Beto announces then. ‘I don’t see that many kids out here. How old are you?’
‘Eight.’
‘I’m ten. Almost eleven, though.’ He says this like a very wise old man.
Luca has about a thousand questions for Beto, but the effect of having them all packed so tightly together in his brain is that none of them shakes loose and gets through the gate. Lydia leans into the opening left by Luca’s silence.
‘Beto, are you traveling alone?’ Luca can tell that his mami is trying not to sound judgmental, but the effort isn’t entirely successful. Beto doesn’t seem to care, or even to notice.
‘Yep, just me.’ He grins, displaying the absence of two teeth on the bottom, a canine and a molar side by side, so the hole is a double-wide. Beto sticks his tongue through it.
Now it’s Soledad’s turn. ‘Were you traveling south?’ she asks.
‘I was. Temporarily. But now I’m traveling north,’ he says without irony.
Soledad doesn’t know quite how to respond, but Beto saves her the trouble by changing the subject.
‘Guau, you’re really pretty,’ he says.
Soledad blinks but doesn’t respond.
‘Must be a pain in the ass, huh?’
She laughs.
He returns his attention to Luca. ‘So where you guys from?’
Luca glances at Mami, who responds with only the tiniest shake of her head. ‘Mami and I are from . . . Puebla,’ he decides. ‘And the sisters are Ecuadorian.’
Beto nods. The lie doesn’t matter at all; those places may as well be Antarctica or Mars as far as he’s concerned.
‘How about you?’ Luca asks. ‘Where are you from?’
‘I’m from Tijuana,’ Beto says. ‘But we call it TJ. I was born there, in the dompe.’
An utterly bizarre piece of information. So odd, in fact, that Luca’s not sure he understands. Again, this is an unfamiliar word, dompe. Luca looks at Mami to translate, but she seems confused as well.
‘What’s a dompe?’ Luca asks.
Beto smirks. ‘You know, a dompe, where people dump their garbage. The trucks come. You know, a dompe.’
‘You mean like a vertedero?’ Luca asks, using the Spanish word for ‘dump’.