Nando nods and smiles encouragingly at Luca. ‘Of course you will,’ he says.
At length, the migrants sitting or lying on the rails stand up and make the announcement to the others – they can feel reverberations in the track. The train is coming. Luca goes and puts his hand on the rail, but feels nothing.
‘It’s stopped down the line somewhere, chiquito,’ Nando says. ‘It’ll be along shortly.’
When a few minutes have passed, another man calls Luca over. ‘Feel now,’ he says, and Luca obeys, placing his hand on the hot metal.
He can feel the energy of the train percussing through the waiting steel. He draws his hand instinctively in, and backs away from the rails to return to Mami’s side. In the clearing, there’s a flurry of activity among the migrants, who will now attempt to board. Everyone gathers their belongings and scatters across the area. They lay claim to their own patches of ground, spreading out, giving one another space to run alongside the train. They watch also for la migra, which tends to time its raids to coincide with the train’s arrival. After two days of undercover waiting, more migrants are suddenly visible, emerging from their hiding places to attempt the perilous flying start.
Lydia quickly rolls up the blanket and straps it to the bottom of her pack. Then she turns to make the straps on Luca’s shoulders as tight as possible. The tails hang down his legs. She ties them in a knot and tucks the loose ends into his waistband. She shifts her weight nervously from foot to foot.
‘You want to do this, mijo?’ she asks him. She hopes he’ll say no. She hopes he says, ‘Mami, this is crazy, I don’t want to die, I’m scared.’ But Luca just looks at her. He doesn’t respond at all. ‘Maybe we’ll try,’ she says. ‘Let’s just watch first. We’ll see what happens.’ She feels sick with dread.
When the train rounds the distant bend and comes into view, when Lydia can look down the track at its approaching nose, it appears to advance in slow motion. We can do this, she says to herself. It’s not going that fast. It’s loud as it pulls into the clearing; she can feel the chug in her bones, in her sternum, and many of the men step into a trot alongside. It’s a challenge of competing details, all equally important, and Lydia finds herself rapt as she watches, trying to learn the techniques. You must match your speed to the train’s speed, she sees, adjusting as you go. You must find the ideal point of access, a protrusion, a ladder, a spot with plenty of grip and some way to quickly get to the roof of the car. You must fully commit to your position once you’ve chosen it. You must defend it from other migrants whose urgency matches your own. Under no circumstances can you attempt to change course once you’re under way. But you must also be mindful of tree limbs and other fixed hazards that threaten your track. You must pay close attention to what’s ahead of you on the ground. You must take care not to step in a hole or trip over a rock while you run, not to stumble beneath the grinding wheels of the beast. You must never, ever forget the power of those churning, groaning, clattering, rumbling wheels. They shriek as a reminder.
‘¡Qué Dios los bendiga!’ their new friend calls out as he leaves them and begins to run alongside the train.
His brother trots along behind him, their pace more than a jog, less than a sprint. Nando runs, oscillating his head to both watch where he’s going and assess the train cars behind for a good spot to climb on. He sees a ladder coming, two cars away. He slows down. One car away, he picks up his pace, glances in front of him, ducks beneath the slapping limb of a leafy shrub. He reaches for the ladder, wraps his fingers around the third rung. He takes two strides, three, four, with only his right hand on the ribs of La Bestia, and then all at once he swings his full weight from that arm. He reaches his left arm up now as well, his hand in a brief panic until his fingers find their target and seize. Now his body is caught, suspended. This. This is the moment of paramount risk. The arms attached, clinging, hauling. The body draped like a flag. The legs hanging low, not yet clear of the wheels.
‘Get up,’ the potbellied brother shouts. ‘Get your feet up!’ He runs.
And the instinct is to reach with those feet, to feel for what’s beneath, to scrabble for purchase, to find some way to boost your weight from below. But no. You must curl. Bring the feet up. Up. Up! Nando’s feet find the bottom rung. His arms stretch up to the next and now he’s climbing. Strong. Solid. A few more seconds – slap! – a passing tree branch threatens his grasp, scratches his side, but now he’s safe, he’s over the lip, and he lies down on top, offering a hand over the edge toward his brother, who is running now, below.
Lydia’s eyes are wide and now the brothers are gone, the other migrants around them dwindling in numbers as they board, one by one, two by two. She crushes Luca’s hand in her viselike grip, but doesn’t notice how hard she’s squeezing it and he doesn’t protest. They are rooted in place, unmoving, until all at once, every echo of the train is gone.
They walk.
There’s a new reverence to having seen it with their own eyes, the unfeeling crush of the wheels along their rails, the men clinging to the exoskeleton like beetles on a window screen.
In the backseat of Papi’s orange Volkswagen Beetle in Acapulco, Luca had his own little safety harness system. A bright blue cushion with monkeys on it that Papi had unfolded and somehow permanently affixed to the seat. When he was little, Luca liked the monkeys, the cushioned straps that went over his head and then around his waist. He felt snug in there. But last summer he started begging to be rid of the thing. It was babyish, he insisted. He was big enough to wear a regular seat belt now, he said. Luca watches the last hip of the now-silent train disappear around a distant bend, and cannot make sense of anything.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Even if they knew how long it might be before the next train, they cannot conceive of boarding La Bestia now that they’ve seen how it’s done. Lydia thinks it over while they walk the seven miles to Huehuetoca. Would she put Luca on the ladder first? She would have to; there’s no way she could jump on and leave him standing beneath the train without her. Could she run and climb on if he held on to her neck, his legs wrapped tightly around her waist? It seems physically impossible. Each time she tries to picture it, the fantasy ends the same way. Butchery.
Luca distracts himself from how tired his legs are becoming by looking at the unusual sights. They pass a place that’s full of every kind of statue: bears, lions, cowboys, dolphins, angels, crocodiles. They pass some men who are laying bricks to build a wall. They pass a woman who’s vacuuming instead of sweeping her front step, which makes Luca squeeze Mami’s hand so she’ll see it, too. When they pass a school and Luca sees some kids playing fútbol in the yard, he realizes it’s Thursday, and that he should be in school in Acapulco, and Papi should be picking him up this afternoon because Thursday is Papi’s day to pick him up, and sometimes Papi buys him galletas and they eat them on the way home if he promises not to tell Mami. After that, Luca doesn’t look at the sights anymore. He watches his feet even though the sun feels hot on the back of his neck, and it takes them almost three hours to walk to Huehuetoca.
When they arrive, they easily find the place they’re looking for, as it sits neatly beside the railroad tracks behind a wind-whipped green fence. The Casa del Migrante is a gathering of tents and simple structures on a large, flat parcel of land that’s saved from being beautiful only by the utilitarian character of its buildings. The wide road that separates the casa from the railroad tracks is of dirt and rubble, and it’s empty as far as Luca can see. It’s flat here for a long stretch, but in the distance, when he allows his eyes to follow the tracks to the horizon, Luca can see the landscape erupt upward on both sides. The clouds, puffy and brilliant, come down to meet it. There are bald fields all around and behind the casa, and on the far side of the tracks as well, but Luca can see that the soil has been tended, turned, striped with darker bands of earth where the farmers will sow their crops at the right season. There’s a rich mineral scent on the wind.