El Chacal’s face betrays nothing. ‘Nobody move,’ he says quietly. He’s well hidden between Marisol and Nicolás in the shade of a standing rock. Because he knows it might be some time before they can move again, he always makes sure to land in a comfortable position. He sits on his bottom with his knees up, and trains his binoculars on the passenger seat of the Chevy Tahoe, where a Border Patrol agent trains his own military-grade binoculars back toward them.
We are invisible, Luca says to himself, and he closes his eyes. We are desert plants. We are rocks. He breathes deeply and slowly, taking care that his chest doesn’t rise and fall with the cycle of his breath. The stillness is a kind of meditation all migrants must master. We are rocks, we are rocks. Somos piedras. Luca’s skin hardens into a stony shell, his arms become immovable, his legs permanently fixed in position, the cells of his backside and the bottoms of his feet amalgamate with the ground beneath him. He grows into the earth. No part of his body itches or twitches, because his body is not a body anymore, but a slab of native stone. He’s been stationary in this place for millennia. This silk tassel tree has grown up from his spine, the indigenous plants have flourished and died here around his ankles, the fox sparrows and meadowlarks have nested in his hair, the rains and winds and sun have beaten down across the rigid expanse of his shoulders, and Luca has never moved. We are rocks. At length, the Tahoe finishes its noisy, indiscreet voyage across the ridge and disappears over a low rim into the next seam of the valley beyond.
El Chacal doesn’t waste time on chitchat. The sun is lodging itself ever higher into the hot, bright shelf of the sky, and they should’ve made camp an hour ago. It’s not safe for them to be exerting themselves beneath the burning lamp of the sun. It will sap them. ‘Vámonos,’ he says. ‘¡Apúrense!’ Just as quickly as they dropped, everyone rises, collects their belongings, and once again they’re on the move.
By late morning, just as that sun is sucking all the moisture from their depleted bodies, just as Rebeca feels ready to give up, behind the skirting of a deep hill, they come to a shaded fold of land where a cluster of trees hides a good camp. Sumac and mountain mahogany band together beneath the jagged ridges, so their camp is entirely concealed from view. They are deeply in shade, and it’s a blessed relief to be out from under the sun. There are signs all around the clearing of previous campers: discarded plastic water bottles, a ripped black T-shirt covered with salt stains, a worn pink sneaker, much smaller than Luca’s. El Chacal goes directly to a soft clump of sand beneath a tree where all the rocks have been cleared. He pitches his pack down beside the trunk and immediately settles himself in to sleep. The others follow suit. It’s easy for the men, who seem to sleep wherever they drop. Marisol lies flat on her stomach and rests her head on her outstretched arms. She, too, is asleep instantly. The sisters are restless, and they move several times before they find comfort.
Despite her exhaustion, Lydia expects to have trouble sleeping. She flings out their blanket anyway, and she and Luca collapse onto it. The desert sun is so bright that even here in the deep shade, Lydia finds herself squinting to block out the light. When she opens her eyes to look around, the landscape beyond this seam of shade is one wide expanse of sepia, everything bleached into varying fractures of brown by the adamant sun. Choncho notices her wakefulness and gives her a somber nod, which Lydia interprets as a promise to watch over her and her sleeping child. You rest. I will make sure nothing happens to you, is the meaning she chooses to attach to that ambiguous nod. And with that imagined vow of protection, at once, she drops into sleep.
Chapter Thirty-Two
They don’t wait until dark to set out. As soon as the sun dips near the ridge at the western end of the valley, and their shadows lengthen to undulating streaks of black along the desert floor, El Chacal tells them to make themselves ready.
‘Tonight is difícil,’ the coyote tells them. ‘Eight miles, rough terrain. You have to keep up. If you fall behind, we cannot wait for you. I won’t risk the whole group for one individual. So listen up, esto es importante. It’s life or death.’ El Chacal clears his throat to make sure everyone’s listening. ‘Just west of here, the road we crossed early this morning cuts north and runs sort of parallel to the route we’re taking, okay?’
They all nod.
‘If you get separated from the group. If you fall, if you twist an ankle, if you decide you need a rest or a piss or a scratch or a sleep, if for any reason you cannot keep up, you go to that road. That is the Ruby Road. Border Patrol and locals pass there regularly. You won’t die out here if you get to that road. In a few hours, someone will find you there.’
It’s a grim business, the Ruby Road, and none of them can picture it yet, not while things are going well. Right now that road is to be avoided at all costs, it’s the very nexus of their fear. It’s impossible for the migrants to imagine the desperation that might, only a few hours hence, convince them to seek deliverance there.
‘We travel this way.’ El Chacal gestures with a slice of his hand. ‘North. So which way is the road? I want you all to know it. Lorenzo! Which way is the road?’
Lorenzo doesn’t answer.
‘It’s west,’ El Chacal repeats with exasperation. ‘Which way is west?’
Lorenzo reaches for his phone but there’s no signal in the desert.
‘It’s that way.’ Luca points west.
‘Claro que sí.’ The coyote ruffles Luca’s hair. ‘This kid’s not gonna die in the desert.’
They eat nuts and strips of beef jerky while they walk. The PhD student Nicolás has some kind of protein paste in single-serving tinfoil tubes. They look and smell disgusting, but they’re packed with nutrients, and indeed, his energy is impressive. He’s directly behind Lydia this evening, and he makes quiet conversation as they walk. She wonders if the protein tubes are caffeinated.
‘Whatever you do, don’t go to Arivaca,’ he’s saying. ‘If you’re dying of thirst, those people will pull up a lawn chair and sip lemonade while they watch.’
‘Ah, they’re not so bad,’ El Chacal interrupts from ahead. ‘There are good people in Arivaca, too. Life is complicated for them, living so close to the line.’
Nicolás raises his remarkable eyebrows. Although Arivaca is a tiny, remote town of fewer than seven hundred people, a forty-five-minute drive down empty roads from its nearest neighbor, Nicolás, like most people who live in southern Arizona, knows its reputation as a merciless, hardscrabble outpost, a place where vigilante militiamen murdered a nine-year-old girl and her father years ago, hoping to pin the blame on illegal migrants. The vigilantes wanted to stoke community fear and incite outrage by inventing a group of murderous migrant bogeymen, so they broke into the Flores family home, and shot little Brisenia in the head. She was wearing turquoise pajama bottoms and red-painted fingernails when she died, curled up on the love seat in her living room. But because Nicolás is a young, politicized liberal who’s never been to Arivaca, he hasn’t observed how the shame of that murder still weighs on the tiny town. He’s never been close to a tragedy that barbaric, never experienced a shock so primitive that it shakes him to the very core of his beliefs. In short, Nicolás has never had a fundamental change of heart. So he’s unaware of the way Newton’s third law can resonate in a place like this: for every wickedness, there is an equal and opposite possibility of redemption. In any case, the point is moot. Lydia has no intention of going to Arivaca, a place where the only way out is to turn yourself in, to ask for help. She and Luca are going to make it to Tucson, to safety.