Chapter Twenty-Three #3
He’s the most disturbing child Luca has ever seen.
He seems unaware of them, unaware of anything.
Mami shakes her head, but Soledad provides a one-word answer: drogas.
They move quickly past the boy, away from the cluster of migrants he seems to be orbiting.
In fact they are nearly ready to quit the railway yard altogether when three well-dressed young women appear at a crossing ahead on the tracks.
They wave their arms overhead and call out, “Hermanos, ?tenemos comida!” The men stand up from their clusters, pat the dust from their jeans, and gather for the offer of food.
One of the three women reads loudly from the Bible while the other two hand out tamales and atole.
Luca’s not hungry because, thanks to the doctor, they already had breakfast, but he’s learned never to turn down a gift of calories.
They eat gratefully, and when the women begin packing up their pots and gathering the spent rubbish, Lydia wonders if they should leave this place, too.
It feels squalid and dangerous, but there’s a rumor that one of the trains parked here is being loaded, that soon it will journey north.
Men are already climbing the ladders and spreading their packs out on top of the train.
The railway workers watch and make no move to stop them.
It seems so senseless and arbitrary, the way the government clears migrants from the trains in some places, spending millions of pesos and dollars to build those track-fences in Oaxaca and Chiapas and Mexico state, all while turning a blind eye in other locations.
There’s even a policía municipal parked just there on the corner, watching the migrants board.
He sips coffee from a paper cup. It feels almost like a trap, but Lydia’s too grateful to flex her suspicion.
The sisters’ bodies are battered and weakened, especially Soledad’s, from the miscarriage.
Being able to board while the train is stopped feels like luck, so they climb up gingerly, and Lydia can still get a whiff of blood from Soledad on the ladder above her.
They move back along the top of the train until they come to a car where there’s room for all four of them to be comfortable.
Just as they’re setting down, just as Lydia is pulling the canvas belts from her pack, a little girl peeks her head up over the edge of the train car.
She clambers up quickly and approaches Soledad without hesitation.
The girl is younger than Luca, perhaps six years old, and she’s alone.
Her black hair is cut short and shiny, and she wears jeans and brown leather boots.
She hunkers down very close to Soledad, who’s startled by the girl’s boldness, the intimacy of her posture.
She speaks rapidly, her upturned face very close to Soledad’s. Soledad leans away from her.
“Do you need work?” the girl asks quickly.
“My tía has a restaurant here and she needs a waitress. Do you want a job?” The girl puts her hand on Soledad’s arm, and tugs at her.
“Come on, quick. Come with me, I’ll show you the place.
” She pulls at Soledad’s elbow, and Soledad is so taken aback that she nearly rises to follow the child.
She knows she shouldn’t, that the girl is presumptuous, almost bullying.
But there’s a conflict between Soledad’s mind and her body, because her mind knows to mistrust this pushy little girl, but her body is biologically susceptible to the child’s cuteness, to the beautiful innocence of her young face.
Soledad feels momentarily distended between those two truths, but the spell is quickly broken because el policía municipal has gotten out of his car now, and is standing in a patch of mud beneath the train, still carrying his paper cup of coffee. He yells up to the little girl.
“Ximenita, leave those people alone! Get down from there.”
The little girl snaps her head in his direction and bolts. She drops Soledad’s arm and flings herself over the edge of the freight car and back down the ladder. She reappears a moment later in the distance, dashing away among the boulders and debris.
El policía calls after her. “Tell your papi I said no víctimas for you today!”
Soledad is eager for the hiss of the disengaged brakes and the rumble of the locomotive. When at last they begin to move, instead of happiness or relief, they all feel a tentative, miniature suspension of dread.
As they travel, Luca pays attention to the signs so he can check off familiar place-names on his mind-map, or add new dots for unfamiliar ones: Guamúchil, Bamoa, Los Mochis, check, check, check.
Roughly three hours after pulling out of Culiacán, in the middle of nowhere, they come to a place where other tracks meet the ones they’re traveling on, and then there are more and more tracks, until the rails are at least a dozen wide, and when the train slows down, Luca can see there are many migrants gathered here waiting, and again, no fence, no policías.
Nothing at all to prevent the whole crowd of them from boarding La Bestia.
The train stops, and easily a hundred men get on while the train sits idling, but then the locomotive cuts its engine, and the workers disembark and scatter to cars parked in a nearby lot, and everyone atop the train groans and curses.
La Bestia doesn’t move again for three nights.