‘Yeah, yeah, a vertedero,’ Beto says.
Lydia, because her English is slightly more sophisticated than Luca’s, begins to understand that this boy’s native language is not exactly the Spanish of Mexico, nor is it the English of the United States, but rather some kind of semantic borderland crossbreed. Still, this insight does nothing to clarify what the boy means when he says he was born in a dompe. Luca literally scratches his head – a gesture Lydia hasn’t seen him make, she now realizes, since the decimation of their family. It’s a gesture that in fact she never noticed before, and therefore she didn’t miss when it vanished, but now that she sees it again, she’s floored by an accompanying revelation that the gesture, one thumb on top of his ear, three fingers raking through his hair above, is specific to Luca’s intellectual curiosity. It’s a tic that happens only when he’s intrigued by something, when he finds something interesting. The reappearance of it, therefore, feels to Lydia like evidence that her son might survive, that he might be capable, after fifteen days and fourteen hundred miles, of temporarily losing himself in a moment of uncorrupted curiosity. The feeling that thuds through her sternum is hope.
‘So you were born in a garbage dump?’ Luca asks carefully, trying not to be rude, and not understanding that there’s nothing at all discourteous about the question, because Beto is neither ashamed of the facts of his origin nor, for that matter, even aware that the facts of his origin might, in other people, incite feelings of discomfort. His origin is simply his origin, and he tells the story without any kind of appreciation of the effect it might provoke.
He laughs. ‘Yeah, well, I wasn’t born in the garbage, though. Just near it. In Colonia Fausto González. You heard of it?’
Luca shakes his head.
‘It’s kinda famous,’ Beto says proudly.
Lydia knows a little about las colonias of Tijuana because she’s read the books, because Luis Alberto Urrea is one of her favorite writers, and he’s written about the dumps, about kids like Beto who live there. That flare of recognition makes her feel like she knows him already, at least slightly, but that feeling is half-hollow, a shadow puppet. Because though she may understand something of this boy’s circumstances, she doesn’t know him. Still, the familiarity has the effect of thawing the part of her that would otherwise remain hardened to him.
And then Beto tells them his whole life story, all of it without stopping, without even really taking a breath, how he doesn’t remember his father, who went to el norte when Beto was still a baby. But he remembers his mami, who was a garbage picker in el dompe before they closed it. And he remembers his big brother, Ignacio, who’s still there in el dompe, buried beneath a sky-blue, hand-painted cross with his name, Ignacio, and the words mijo, 10 años.
Beto reminds Luca that he’s ten years old, and explains that that’s the same age his brother, Ignacio, was when he was squashed by the back tire of a garbage truck while reaching for the miraculous, round, unblemished sphere of a balón de fútbol he’d spotted amid the refuse. An unprecedented treasure. Beto, who was eight years old and standing nearby at the time, was so stunned by Ignacio’s screams that he failed to secure the balón for his dying brother. (Instead, a pimple-faced kid named Omar got it.) Because of the softness of the ground beneath the truck’s tires, Beto explains, Ignacio was not entirely flattened, but rather compressed into the garbage beneath him – crushed just enough that he survived for three dreadful days. It wasn’t long after that, and the sky-blue cross, that Beto’s mami disappeared, too, first into a drunken stupor, next into a new, more rancid haze, and finally, into the ether.
Beto is afraid of turning eleven, because it feels like a treachery to his brother. ‘But I guess it would be worse to not turn eleven, right?’ He laughs, and Lydia and the sisters attempt to join him in that sound.
Luca does not laugh but feels compelled to give the boy something in return for his story. He unzips the side pocket of his backpack, which is sitting in his lap, and fishes out his tube of Orange Mango Blast Blistex. He hands it to Beto, who takes it without saying anything, removes the cap, smears it across his lips, and then makes a loud ah sound. He hands it back to Luca, and doesn’t say thank you, but Luca knows the ah was an expression of gratitude.
‘So wait,’ Soledad says, finally turning her whole body toward him instead of just her head. ‘Isn’t Tijuana right at the border?’
‘Yeah, it is,’ Luca says, looking at Soledad with approval.
She intercepts the look. ‘You’re not the only one who can read a map around here,’ she says, and then back to the newcomer, ‘So then what are you doing here if you were already right at the border? Why were you traveling south? And all those other migrants, too, traveling south?’
‘Oh, those guys are all deportados.’
Soledad cringes. ‘All of them?’
‘Sure.’ Beto shrugs. ‘TJ is full of deportados. There’s more people going south than north in Tijuana. You can tell them apart from the regular migrants because of their uniforms.’
‘Uniforms?’ Luca asks.
‘Yeah, all the migrants wear the same uniforms, right? Dirty jeans, busted shoes, baseball hats.’
‘You don’t have a hat,’ Luca observes.
Beto shrugs. ‘I’m not a real migrant. I’m just a poser.’
‘So what’s different about the deportados then?’ Soledad prompts him back to the subject.
‘They are haunted by the cries of their absent children in el norte.’
They all stare at him.
‘I’m just messing,’ he says. ‘It’s that they don’t have backpacks.’
Lydia snaps her fingers. ‘The backpacks,’ she says. ‘Yes, that’s what they were missing. The backpacks.’
‘Why don’t they have backpacks?’ Luca asks.
‘Because they’re deportados. They live in the United States, güey. Like forever. Like, for ten years maybe. Since they were babies, maybe. And then they’re on their way to work one morning, or coming home from school one day, or playing fútbol in the park, or shopping at the mall for some fresh new kicks, and then bam! They get deported with whatever they happen to be carrying when they’re picked up. So unless they happen to be carrying a backpack when la migra gets them, they usually come empty-handed. Sometimes the women have their purse with them or whatever. They don’t get to go home and pack a bag. But they usually have nice clothes, at least. Clean shoes.’
Lydia clutches her pack in front of her. She doesn’t want to think about this. The dream of getting to Estados Unidos is the only thing sustaining them right now. She’s not prepared to begin considering all the horrible things that might happen after, if they’re lucky enough to achieve that first, most fundamental goal.