Library Limelights 274

 

Jeanine Cummins. American Dirt. New York: Flatiron Books, 2019.

The word is extraordinary: an extraordinary book. We’ve all seen news and images of migrant movement toward the southern border of the United States; desperate people seeking refuge, legally or otherwise. Author Cummins immediately sucks us into the shock experienced by a middle-class, liberal Mexican family in Acapulco. Living with the powerful drug cartels and administrative corruption is a fact of life invisible (mostly) to tourists. Lydia is a bookshop owner who enjoys an unexpected intellectual friendship with Javier, a constant visitor to her shop. Her husband Sebastián Pérez Delgado is a journalist who dares to expose the identity of the leader of the (fictional) Los Jardineros cartel; Lydia is stunned when she learns the man is Javier. Sebastián knew the risks of his reporting but his entire family pays a huge price. Only Lydia and their son Luca survive the atrocities; we are with them every step of their journey to escape the cartel’s long arm.

Homeless, no passport, little money, they are walking wounded, headed for el norte, the only possible destination. Learning to ride the trains, avoiding la migra officials, enduring flimsy shelters, scrounging for food, the kindness of strangers, fear of cartel spies, suspicion of everyone; trekking the Sonoran desert, trusting a coyote for illicit entry into the USA, avoiding their patrols—so many chances to deceive and harm them. Being caught by U.S. immigration officials means the cruelty of detention and separation from Luca. Making a few faithful friends is lifesaving in more ways than one—Honduran sisters Soledad and Rebeca, ten-year-old Beto, Marisol the deportado, a few non-predatory men. You can follow their torturous route on a map. Lydia, always haunted that Javier will never stop hunting her to finish the family of the man who defied him.

It’s difficult now to imagine Acapulco in its once-ideal golden days as a vacation destination. For that matter, substitute any Mexican resort town where cartel operations are substrata. Cummin’s style is captivating; her details are authentic. You forget that Lydia and her cohort are fictional; the mind-boggling stories of these brave people are real.

One-liners

▪ Seldom had she experienced such profound and authentic friendship in her life. (73)

▪ Everything is digital now, and what good will it do to run a thousand miles away if her name raises a red flag in some online database? (76)

▪ Because she, the sensible, bookstore-owning, devoted mother-and-wife Lydia, the one from last week, is fighting with this new Lydia, the deranged Lydia, the one who thinks dragging her eight-year-old son onto the top of a moving freight train is a good idea. (96)

▪ Los Jardineros were also known to dismember their victims and rearrange their body parts into horror show tableaux. (145)

▪ Tears spring into Luca’s eyes, but he doesn’t want them there, so he makes them disappear. (182)

▪ Whenever someone looks at her and then looks at their cell phone, there’s a little racehorse of adrenaline that clobbers through her body. (279)

▪ She doesn’t even need to leave the desert now because the satisfaction of standing here shooting is all she needs for the rest of her life. (357)

Multi-liners

▪ They tried to insulate themselves from the ugliness of the narco violence because they couldn’t handle it. A free press was the last line of defense, he said, the only thing left standing between the people of Mexico and complete annihilation. (34)

▪ He knows this because Luca has perfect direction the way some prodigies have perfect pitch. He was born with it, an intrinsic sense of his position on the globe, like a human GPS, pinging his way through the universe. (49)

▪ “Actually, I don’t think it can be melodramatic enough. I don’t think words exist that can sufficiently capture the atrocity of what’s happening here.” (122)

▪ He was a vicious mass murderer who mistook himself for a gentleman. A thug who fancied himself a poet. (146)

▪ “Some had babies taken right out of their arms. I thought those women would lose their minds. They didn’t even know where their children were—some of them were too young to talk, too young to remember their names.” (308-9)

La Bestia

There are no long-distance passenger trains in Mexico, so as a last resort, Lydia studies the freight trains the Central American migrants ride across the length of the country. All the way from Chiapas to Chihuahua, they cling to the tops of the cars. The train has earned the name La Bestia because that journey is a mission of terror in every way imaginable. Violence and kidnapping are endemic along the tracks, and apart from the criminal dangers, migrants are also maimed or killed every day when they fall from the tops of the trains. Only the poorest and most destitute of people attempt to travel this way. (76-7)

Lorenzo

Maybe he raped the wrong woman. Or stole money from one of his jefes. Or maybe he murdered so gleefully that his depravity turned him into a liability. Maybe he’s running too. Or maybe none of these things are true. Perhaps he hadn’t left Los Jardineros at all, and he really is here only for her.

Whatever the case, Lydia feels shriveled by Lorenzo’s presence. He’s a menace, sitting beside her, and now the threat feels urgent again. It’s all around her. She breathes it, and it’s the same as ever: senseless, confusing, categorically terrifying. Javier feels as close as the day she first confronted him in the bookshop. (179)

Hiding from the patrol

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. (333)

Stacy Willingham. A Flicker in the Dark. Ebook download from TPL. USA: Minotaur Books, 2021.

There’s an unsubstantiated rumour that psychologists and psychiatrists go into the profession because they have big personal issues. It’s certainly the case with Chloe Davis whose father had turned her life into a nightmare. The man who had once embodied safety and security in her childhood is now in prison, confessed killer of six teenage girls in their small home town. Chloe’s present counselling practice is in Baton Rouge, where she is planning to marry her fiancé, Daniel Briggs. She deals with the beck-and-call of being constantly available for her patients. Alas, two teenage girls go missing one after the other, bedevilling Chloe with bitter memories, conflicting emotions, fear and anxiety, increasing her dubious use of prescription drugs. But she desperately wants to know who and how and why—despite both Daniel and her brother Cooper advising her not to get involved. When the bodies are found she realizes a connection; one girl had been a first-time patient with her.

Reluctantly, she joins forces secretly with newspaper reporter Aaron Jansen to investigate as much as they can. The author’s strategy to cast suspicion on Daniel is quite transparent. Chloe becomes progressively more jittery and paranoid that someone is targeting her but she’s way offbeat in accusing a grief-stricken father, Bert Rhodes; the cops dismiss her theory. Despite her considerable burden of notorious family history, it’s hard to empathize 100% with Chloe – she’s a snoop, she ignores her traumatized mother, she conceals her drug usage. There are some minor credibility gaps in the story along with an occasional air of author-reaching-too-hard* but the best part is a very effective twisty ending.

* Bringing the reader to a screeching halt: “The air is warm and damp like a boiled-egg burp ...” (352) — memorable for the wrong reason, IMO.

Chloe herself

▪ My pharmacy is my lifeline. I know it’s wrong to write prescriptions that don’t need to be written; more than wrong, it’s illegal. (76)

▪ “This is not an interview. This is me telling you to stop harassing my family.” (149)

▪ Was he warning me? Does he know that I know? (277)

▪ It seems wrong that this is the way I’m meeting my would-be future mother-in-law. (320)

▪ How could I have forgotten it? How could I have forgotten my phone? (361)

▪ “There’s an undercover cop outside,” I lie. (374)

Said to Chloe

▪ “You’re afraid of the dark. Shit, you’re afraid of everything.” (45)

▪ “Copycats murder because they’re obsessed with another murderer,” Aaron continued, placing his arms on the table and leaning in. (163)

▪ “Whether you like it or not, you’re involved.” (210)

▪ “This seems to be a pattern with you—injecting yourself into conflicts that don’t concern you, trying to solve the mystery and be the hero.” (304)

David Heska Wanbli Weiden. Winter Counts. Ebook download from TPL. USA: Ecco / HarperCollins Publishers, 2020.

Virgil Wounded Horse acts as a vigilante on the Lakota Rosebud Reservation, meting out justice when the law fails his community. And the prevailing federal law fails them a lot. Mostly he dispenses the strong-arm variety, like cracking a few heads open. Virgil’s sense of righting wrongs is strong, although he eschews traditional Native teachings. Living alone, he took in his nephew Nathan when his sister Sybil died in a car crash. One of the local councillors, Ben Short Bear, hires Virgil to hunt for Rick Crow who is supplying the Rez with weed, and probably with heroin. Drug usage amidst poverty and bleak hopes, especially among children, is increasing. Virgil’s ex-girlfriend Marie, Ben’s daughter, insists on accompanying him to Denver for her own reasons. But their mission is interrupted when Nathan is found overdosed on heroin, later known to be laced with fentanyl. Virgil is stunned; Nathan almost dies.

Marie, and Virgil’s pal Tommy, represent the resurgence of Native values and activism. Virgil remains skeptical in that area, resuming his hunt for Rick and whoever supplies him with the Mexican black tar, as it’s called. A chef called Lack Strongbow comes to Rosebud to promote his Native-based culinary art, capturing Marie’s interest. The action piles on when a barely recovered Nathan is arrested for possession of a huge amount of drugs found in his school locker. He might have a reprieve if he allows a federal task force to use him as bait to catch the real criminals. Full of cultural references and rituals, the story underlines the faith that we are all related. And so, despite their differences, Virgil and Marie grow closer (“You two gonna light the campfire again?”).

Bits

▪ Winter counts were the calendar system used by the Lakota, but they weren’t like modern ones. (16)

▪ “That asshole is selling heroin here, killed a kid. Don’t you want to shut that down?” (27)

▪ The weight of my failures—all of them―felt like a shroud wrapped around me. (44)

▪ I wondered what it was like to live without that weight on your shoulders, the weight of the murdered ancestors, the stolen land, the abused children, the burden every Native person carries.

▪ She believed that you could reason with thugs, get them to change their ways with words. I knew better. (83)

▪ Jealousy bloomed in my gut like a bout of food poisoning. (109)

▪ “Nathan has to wear the wire and buy the drugs. They made it clear, that’s nonnegotiable.” (173)

▪ “Thunder Beings off in the distance. Think the spirits might water the grass tonight.” (175)

▪ “You know, it’s like I’m not Indian enough for the full bloods, but too Native for the white kids. I don’t fit in nowhere.” (229)

▪ “I was hoping you’d finish him off, but it looks like you’re not the tough guy everyone thinks you are.” (303)