‘Some people ride the trains anyway,’ she says, glancing sideways at him. ‘Even without a ticket, even without seats.’
Luca looks up from his feet and studies her face. He says nothing, but his eyes are round.
‘They climb on top,’ she says. ‘Can you imagine that?’
Luca cannot.
Lydia feels encouraged by their progress. It feels good to grow the distance between Javier and them, but it’s also frightening to venture out from the vastness of Mexico City and back into the modest districts, where Lydia can feel the urban fog of invisibility begin to dissipate. It’s hard to feel inconspicuous when you’re a stranger in a small place. So Lydia keeps her head down and stays vigilant. They walk quickly, and Luca doesn’t complain, even when they pass a little bike repair shop and he longs to grab the handlebars of a bike leaning against the wall outside. It’s green with a golden bell, and Luca thinks it’s small enough for him. But they keep walking, and less than an hour later they happen upon a group of young migrants beside the tracks. They are all men, perhaps two dozen of them, gathered in a clearing behind a warehouse, just where the urban sprawl begins to diminish and the landscape begins to prickle and pop. A place between places.
Most of the migrants have backpacks and grim faces. They’re a thousand miles into their journeys already, weeks from Tegucigalpa or San Salvador or the mountains of Guatemala. They’re from cities or villages or el campo. Some speak the languages of K’iché or Ixil or Mam or Nahuatl. Luca likes to listen to the foreign sounds, the peaks and rolls of the words he doesn’t understand. He likes the way voices sound the same in every language, the way, if you train your ear to listen just outside the words, to only the shifting inflections, you can attach your own meaning to the sounds. Many of the men speak English, too. But here, as they wait for the northbound train outside Mexico City, they all speak Spanish. Most are Catholic and have placed their lives in God’s hands; they call on him with frequency and conviction. They invoke the blessings of his son and all the saints. It’s been two days since the last train, and the men have grown weary of waiting.
Nearby, a woman sells food from a cart. She takes tortillas from one pail and fills them with beans from a second pail. She serves them without smiling or speaking. Luca and Mami buy breakfast and find a shady place in a bald spot beneath a tree. Mami flings out the brightly colored blanket she bought at La Ciudadela after they left the library, and they sit. Nearby, two young men are reclining with their heads on their backpacks. One leans up on his elbow facing them.
‘Buen día, hermana, y que Dios la bendiga en su camino,’ he greets them.
‘Thank you,’ Lydia says. ‘And may God bless you on your travels as well.’
He leans back with his head on his pack while Luca and Mami eat. Then he says, ‘You seem fresh on your journey. You have strong energy. My brother and I have already been traveling for fourteen days.’
‘Where did you begin?’ she asks.
‘Honduras. My name is Nando.’
‘Hello, Nando,’ she says, without offering a name in return. He doesn’t ask.
‘Nando, can I ask you something?’ He props up again on his elbow. ‘Where is everyone?’ she asks.
‘Hah?’
‘Where are all the migrants? I expected there would be so many people here, waiting for the trains.’
‘Well, with the migrant shelter gone from Lechería and now the new fences, I guess a lot of migrants don’t stop here anymore. That’s why it’s only young men here now, hermana,’ he says. ‘The athletes.’
‘¡Los olímpicos!’ his brother says without raising his head or opening his eyes.
The brother is skinny except for his little potbelly, and Luca doesn’t think he looks much like an Olympian at all. His hat covers his face from the sun.
‘Really? The fence keeps people from stopping?’ Lydia asks. It seems such an unlikely deterrent.
‘Not only this fence,’ he says. ‘All the fences at all the train stations.’
‘They’re everywhere?’
The man shrugs. ‘Most places now, at least in the south.’
‘And all those expensive fences, they’re just to stop people from riding the trains?’
‘Yeah, they’re supposed to be for safety,’ he says. ‘But, see, they put the fence only where the train stops.’ He gestures back down the tracks, the way they came, and Lydia remembers the spot where the metal caging fell away and the track opened up. La migra had trucks there, watching the parade of foot traffic passing by. ‘By the time the train arrives here, it’s already picking up speed. So you have to jump on while it’s moving.’
Luca gasps, causing Lydia and Nando both to look over at him, so he returns his attention to his stuffed tortilla.
‘Haven’t you seen the government signs attached to the fences? Safety First!’ Nando laughs. ‘You going to jump onto a moving train, hermana?’
‘Maybe not.’ Lydia frowns. ‘Or maybe.’
The man draws his legs in and crosses them, looking at Luca. ‘What about you, chiquito? You going to jump onto La Bestia? Like a cowboy riding a bull at the rodeo?’
Luca’s never seen a rodeo, and he’s not even sure if he’s seen a real-life cowboy. He shrugs.
‘So that’s it? They put up some fences, and just like that, people stop coming?’
‘Who said they stopped coming? From my country, there are more people than ever, more and more all the time.’
‘So then if they’re not on the train, where are they?’
Nando shrugs. ‘Most go with coyotes now, all the way from my country. One safe house to the next, to the next. A whole network all the way to el norte. But it’s expensive, and sometimes those coyotes are no better than los criminales. So it’s the people who can’t afford that passage or who don’t trust the coyotes – they come to La Bestia.’
‘And when they get here, and find the fence? What do they do if they can’t get on the train?’
Nando plucks a blade of dry grass and hangs it from the corner of his mouth. ‘Ay, hermanita mía, I hate to tell you,’ he says. ‘They are walking.’
Lydia is dubious. ‘They walk all the way to Estados Unidos from Honduras?’
Luca makes some calculations in his head. Even if these hondureños go only to the southernmost point on the northern border, their total journey must be close to sixteen hundred miles. He wonders if it’s really possible for a human being to walk that far.
‘Unless la migra gets to them first and sends them back,’ Nando says. ‘Then they get some rest. An air-conditioned bus in the wrong direction. Then they start all over from scratch.’
Lydia takes the last bite of her food. ‘But you’re not worried about la migra?’ She wipes crumbs from the corners of her mouth.
‘Nah.’ He smiles. ‘You don’t have to outrun la migra. You only have to be faster than your brother. I got it covered.’
‘In your dreams, gordo,’ the brother says.
‘What about you, hermana? And your son? What will you do if la migra comes?’
Now it’s Lydia’s turn to lie back on her pack. Technically, la migra can’t send them anywhere, because they’re Mexican, and unlike Nando and many of the other migrants, they’re traveling in their own country; they can’t be deported. But Lydia knows that technicality won’t help them at all if la migra here happens to work for Los Jardineros. She shudders. ‘We’ll manage,’ she says.