American Dirt : A Novel (2020) Read online

  When they arrive, the police pull yellow escena del crimen tape across both ends of the block to discourage traffic and make room for the macabre motorcade of emergency vehicles. There are a lot of officers, a whole army of them, who move around and past Luca and Lydia with choreographed reverence. When the senior detective approaches and begins asking questions, Lydia hesitates for a moment, considering where to send Luca. He’s too young to hear everything she needs to say. She should dispatch him to someone else for a few minutes, so she can give forthright answers to these dreadful questions. She should send him to his father. Her mother. Her sister, Yemi. But they are all dead in the backyard, their bodies as close as toppled dominoes. It’s all meaningless anyway. The police aren’t here to help. Lydia begins to sob. Luca stands and places the cold curve of his hand across the back of his mother’s neck.

  ‘Give her a minute,’ he says, like a grown man.

  When the detective returns, there’s a woman with him, the medical examiner, who addresses Luca directly. She puts a hand on his shoulder and asks if he’d like to sit in her truck. It says SEMEFO on the side, and the back doors are standing open. Mami nods at him, so Luca goes with the woman and sits inside, dangling his feet over the back bumper. She offers him a sweating can, a cold refresco.

  Lydia’s brain, which had been temporarily suspended by shock, begins working again, but it creeps like sludge. She’s still sitting on the curb, and the detective stands between her and her son.

  ‘Did you see the shooter?’ he asks.

  ‘Shooters, plural. I think there were three of them.’ She wishes the detective would step aside so she can keep Luca in her line of sight. He’s only a dozen steps away.

  ‘You saw them?’

  ‘No, we heard them. We were hiding in the shower. One came in and took a piss while we were in there. Maybe you can get fingerprints from the faucet. He washed his hands. Can you believe that?’ Lydia claps her hands loudly, as if to scare off the memory. ‘There were at least two more voices outside.’

  ‘Did they say or do anything that might help identify them?’

  She shakes her head. ‘One ate the chicken.’

  The detective writes pollo in his notebook.

  ‘One asked if he was here.’

  ‘A specific target? Did they say who he was? A name?’

  ‘They didn’t have to. It was my husband.’

  The detective stops writing and looks at her expectantly. ‘Your husband is?’

  ‘Sebastián Pérez Delgado.’

  ‘The reporter?’

  Lydia nods, and the detective whistles through his teeth.

  ‘He’s here?’

  She nods again. ‘On the patio. With the spatula. With the sign.’

  ‘I’m sorry, señora. Your husband received many threats, yes?’

  ‘Yes, but not recently.’

  ‘And what exactly was the nature of those threats?’

  ‘They told him to stop writing about the cartels.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or they would kill his whole family.’ Her voice is flat.

  The detective takes a deep breath and looks at Lydia with what might be interpreted as sympathy. ‘When was the last time he was threatened?’

  Lydia shakes her head. ‘I don’t know. A long time ago. This wasn’t supposed to happen. It wasn’t supposed to happen.’

  The detective folds his lips into a thin line and remains silent.

  ‘They’re going to kill me, too,’ she says, understanding only as these words emerge that they might be true.

  The detective does not move to contradict her. Unlike many of his colleagues – he’s not sure which ones, but it doesn’t matter – he happens not to be on the cartel payroll. He trusts no one. In fact, of the more than two dozen law enforcement and medical personnel moving around Abuela’s home and patio this very moment, marking the locations of shell casings, examining footprints, analyzing blood splatter, taking pictures, checking for pulses, making the sign of the cross over the corpses of Lydia’s family, seven receive regular money from the local cartel. The illicit payment is three times more than what they earn from the government. In fact, one has already texted el jefe to report Lydia’s and Luca’s survival. The others do nothing, because that’s precisely what the cartel pays them to do, to populate uniforms and perform the appearance of governance. Some of the personnel feel morally conflicted about this; others do not. None of them have a choice anyway, so their feelings are largely immaterial. The unsolved-crime rate in Mexico is well north of 90 percent. The costumed existence of la policía provides the necessary counterillusion to the fact of the cartel’s actual impunity. Lydia knows this. Everyone knows this. She decides presently that she must get out of here. She stands up from her position on the curb and is surprised by the strength of her legs beneath her. The detective steps back to give her space.

  ‘When he realizes I’ve survived they will return.’ And then the memory comes back to her like a throb: one of the voices in the yard asking, What about the kid? Lydia’s joints feel like water. ‘He’s going to murder my son.’

  ‘He?’ the detective says. ‘You know specifically who did this?’

  ‘Are you kidding me?’ she asks. There’s only one possible perpetrator for a bloodbath of this magnitude in Acapulco, and everyone knows who that man is. Javier Crespo Fuentes. Her friend. Why should she say his name out loud? The detective’s question is either a stage play or a test. He writes more words in his notebook. He writes, La Lechuza? He writes, Los Jardineros? And then shows the notebook to Lydia. ‘I can’t do this right now.’ She pushes past him.

  ‘Please, just a few more questions.’

  ‘No. No more questions. Zero more questions.’

  There are sixteen bodies in the backyard, almost everyone Lydia loved in the world, but she still feels on the precipice of this information – she knows it to be factual because she heard them die, she saw their bodies. She touched her mother’s still-warm hand and felt the absence of her husband’s pulse when she lifted his wrist. But her mind is still trying to rewind it, to undo it. Because it can’t really be true. It’s too horrific to be actually true. Panic feels imminent, but it doesn’t descend.

  ‘Luca, come.’ She reaches out her hand, and Luca hops down from the medical examiner’s truck. He leaves the still-full refresco on the back bumper.

  Lydia grabs him, and together they walk down the street to where Sebastián parked their car, near the end of the block. The detective follows, still trying to speak to her. He doesn’t accept that she has quit the conversation. Was she not clear enough? She stops walking so abruptly he almost stumbles into her back. He draws up on his tiptoes to avoid a collision. She spins on her foot.

  ‘I need his keys,’ she says.

  ‘Keys?’

  ‘My husband’s car keys.’

  The detective continues speaking as Lydia pushes past him again, pulling Luca along behind her. She goes back through the gate into Abuela’s courtyard and tells Luca to wait. Then she thinks better of it and brings him into the house. She sits him on Abuela’s gold velveteen couch with instructions not to move.

  ‘Can you stay with him, please?’

  The detective nods.

  Lydia pauses momentarily at the back door, and then squares her shoulders before pushing it open and stepping out. In the shade of the backyard, there’s the sweet odor of lime and sticky charred sauce, and Lydia knows she will never eat barbecue again. Some of her family members are covered now, and there are little bright yellow placards set up around the yard with black letters and numbers on them. The placards mark the locations of evidence that will never be used to seek a conviction. The placards make everything worse. Their presence means it’s real. Lydia is aware of her lungs inside her body – they feel raw and raggedy, a sensation she’s never experienced before. She steps toward S
ebastián, who hasn’t moved, his left arm still bent awkwardly beneath him, the spatula jutting out from beneath his hip. The way he’s splayed there reminds Lydia of the shapes his body makes when he’s at his most vividly animated, when he wrestles with Luca in the living room after dinner. They squeal. They roar. They bang into the furniture. Lydia runs soapy water into the kitchen sink and rolls her eyes at them. But all that heat is gone now. There’s a ticking stillness beneath Sebastián’s skin. She wants to talk to him before all his color is gone. She wants to tell him what happened, hurriedly, desperately. Some manic part of her believes that if she tells the story well enough, she can convince him not to be dead. She can convince him of her need for him, of the greatness of their son’s need for him. There’s a kind of paralyzed insanity in her throat.

  Someone has removed the cardboard sign the gunmen left weighted to his chest with a simple rock. The sign in green marker said: toda mi familia está muerta por mi culpa (My whole family is dead because of me).

  Lydia crouches at her husband’s feet, but she doesn’t want to feel the cooling of his pallid skin. Proof. She grabs the toe of one shoe, and closes her eyes. He’s still mostly intact, and she feels grateful for that. She knows the cardboard sign could have been affixed to his heart with the blade of a machete. She knows that the relative neatness of his death is a sort of deformed kindness. She’s seen other crime scenes, nightmarish scenes – bodies that are no longer bodies but only parts of bodies, mutilados. When the cartel murders, it does so to set an example, for exaggerated, grotesque illustration. One morning at work, as she opened her shop for the day, Lydia saw a boy she knew down the street kneeling to unlock the grate of his father’s shoe store with a key dangling by a shoelace around his neck. He was sixteen years old. When the car pulled up, the kid couldn’t run because the key snagged in the lock; it caught him by the neck. So los sicarios lifted the grate and hung the kid by the shoelace, by the neck, and then pummeled him until all he could do was twitch. Lydia had rushed inside and locked the door behind her, so she didn’t see when they pulled down his pants and added the decoration, but she heard about it later. They all did. And every shop owner in the neighborhood knew that that kid’s father had refused to pay the cartel’s mordidas.

  So yes, Lydia is grateful that sixteen of her loved ones were killed by the quick, clinical dispatch of bullets. The officers in the yard avert their eyes from her, and she feels grateful for that, too. The crime scene photographer sets his camera down on the table beside the drink that still bears a smudge of Lydia’s truffle-colored lipstick on its rim. The ice cubes have melted inside, and there’s a small puddle of condensation on the napkin around her glass. It’s still wet, and that feels impossible to Lydia, that her life could be shattered so completely in less time than it takes for a ring of condensation to evaporate into the atmosphere. She’s aware that a deferential hush has fallen over the patio. She moves to Sebastián’s side without standing. She crawls on hands and knees, and then hesitates, staring at his one outstretched hand, the ridges and lines of his knuckles, the perfect half-moons of his nail beds. The fingers do not move. The wedding band is inert. His eyes are closed, and Lydia wonders, absurdly, if he closed them on purpose, for her, a final act of tenderness, so that when she found him, she wouldn’t have to observe the vacancy there. She claps a hand over her mouth because she has a feeling the essential part of herself might fall out. She shoves the feeling down, tucks her fingers into the fold of that unresponsive hand, and allows herself to lean gently across his chest. He is cold already. He is cold. Sebastián is gone, and what’s left is only the beloved, familiar shape of him, empty of breath.

  She places her hand on his jaw, his chin. She closes her mouth very tightly and places her palm against the coolness of his forehead. The first time she ever saw him, he was slouched over a spiral notebook in a library in Mexico City, pen in hand. The tilt of his shoulders, the fullness of his mouth. He was wearing a purple T-shirt, some band she didn’t know. She understands now that it wasn’t the body but the way he animated it that had thrilled her. The flagstones press into her knees while she covers him with prayers. Her tears are spasmodic. The bent spatula sits in a puddle of congealed blood, and the flat part still bears a smudge of uncooked meat. Lydia fights a roll of nausea, slips her hand into her husband’s pocket, and retrieves his keys. How many times during their life together has she slipped her hand into his pocket? Don’t think it, don’t think it, don’t think. It’s difficult to remove his wedding ring. The loose skin of his knuckle scrunches up beneath the band so she has to twist it, she has to use one hand to straighten his finger and the other to twist the ring, and in this way, at last, she has his wedding band, the one she placed on his finger at the Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad more than ten years ago. She slips it onto her thumb, places both hands on the crate of his chest, and pushes herself to her feet. She lurches away, waiting for someone to challenge her for the items she took. She almost wants someone to say she can’t have them, that she can’t tamper with evidence or some horseshit like that. How satisfying it might be, momentarily, to have a direct receptacle for some lashing belt of her rage. No one dares.

  Lydia stands with her shoulders loose to the earth. Her mother. She moves toward Abuela, whose body is one of those now loosely covered with black plastic. An officer steps to intercept her.

  ‘Señora, please,’ he says simply.

  Lydia looks at him wildly. ‘I need a last moment with my mother.’

  He shakes his head once, the slightest movement. His voice is soft. ‘I assure you,’ he says, ‘that is not your mother.’

  Lydia blinks, unmoving, her husband’s car keys gripped in the vise of her hand. He’s right. She could spend more time in this landscape of carnage, but why? They are all gone. This is not what she wants to remember of them. She turns away from the sixteen horizontal shapes in the yard and, with a squeak and a bang, passes through the doorway into the kitchen. Outside, the officials resume their activities.

  Lydia opens the closet in her mother’s bedroom and withdraws Abuela’s solitary piece of luggage: a small red overnight bag. Lydia unzips it and finds that it’s full of smaller purses. It’s a bag of bags. She dumps them on the bed, opens her mother’s nightstand, pulls a rosary and a small prayer book from the drawer, and puts them in the overnight bag along with Sebastián’s keys. Then she stoops down and sticks her arm beneath her mother’s mattress. She sweeps it back and forth until her fingertips brush a fold of paper. Lydia pulls the wad out: almost 15,000 pesos. She puts them in the bag. She throws the pile of small purses back in her mother’s closet, takes the bag to the bathroom, opens the medicine cabinet, and grabs what she can – a hairbrush, a toothbrush, toothpaste, moisturizer, a tube of lip balm, a pair of tweezers. They all go into the bag. She does all this without thinking, without really considering which items might be helpful or useless. She does it because she can’t think of what else to do. Lydia and her mother are the same shoe size, a small blessing. Lydia takes the only pair of comfortable shoes from her mother’s closet – quilted gold lamé sneakers with a zipper on one side that Abuela wore for gardening. In the kitchen, the raid continues: a sleeve of cookies, a tin of peanuts, two bags of chips, all surreptitiously stuffed into the bag. Her mother’s purse hangs on a hook behind the kitchen door, alongside two other hooks that hold Abuela’s apron and her favorite teal sweater. Lydia takes the purse down and looks inside. It feels like opening her mother’s mouth. It’s too personal in there. Lydia takes the whole thing, folds the softened brown leather into the end pocket of the overnight bag, and zips it in.

  The detective is sitting beside Luca on the couch when Lydia returns, but he’s not asking questions. His pad and pencil are resigned on the coffee table.

  ‘We have to go,’ she says.

  Luca stands without waiting to be told.

  The detective stands, too. ‘I must caution you against returning home right
now, señora,’ he says. ‘It may not be safe. If you wait here, perhaps one of my men can drive you. We might find a secure location for you and your son?’

  Lydia smiles, and there’s a brief astonishment that her face can still make those shapes. A small puff of laughter. ‘I like our chances better without your assistance.’

  The detective frowns at her but nods. ‘You have somewhere safe to go?’

  ‘Please don’t concern yourself with our well-being,’ she says. ‘Serve justice. Worry about that.’ She’s aware that the words are leaving her mouth like tiny, unpoisoned darts, as futile as they are angry. She makes no effort to censor herself.

  The detective stands with his hands in his pockets and frowns toward the floor. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss. Truly. I know how it must look, every murder going unsolved, but there are people who still care, who are horrified by this violence. Please know I will try.’ He, too, understands the uselessness of his words, but he feels compelled to tender them nonetheless. He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a card with his name and phone number on it. ‘We will need an official statement when you’re feeling up to it. Take a few days if you need.’

  He proffers the card, but Lydia makes no move to take it, so Luca reaches up and grabs it. He’s maneuvered himself in close beside his mother, laced one arm behind her through the strap of the red overnight bag.

  This time, the detective doesn’t follow them. Their shadows move as one lumpy beast along the sidewalk. Beneath the windshield wiper of their car, an instantly recognizable orange 1974 Volkswagen Beetle, there is a tiny slip of paper, so small that it doesn’t even flit in the hot breeze that gusts up the street.