The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [16]
When the truck goes by on the drag, the Oscar sends a message to base. Base radios: “Oscar 21? Oscar 21?” The cutter answers, and he’s cleared. If base doesn’t clear him at his Oscar, he’ll call home. “Base, did you catch an Oscar just now?”
Oscar 25 follows Oscar 21; Oscar 35 follows Oscar 25. If a cutter vanishes between Oscar 25 and Oscar 35, they know something might be wrong. They go to look for him. If an Oscar bleeps and no cutter is nearby, they know somebody done snuck into the country.
Often the drag will have what Kenny Smith calls “hither thither.” Hither thither is a scrabble of pebbles and twigs and dirt on the clean face of the drag. It’s knocked from the tiny berms that the tire drags raise on either side of the road, and they tell you that someone tried to hop over. You look out beyond hither thither for true sign.
Signcutters know most walkers pass between 11:00 at night and 3:00 the next morning. They can tell how old a track is by its sharpness—even in the desert, dirt holds some humidity, and it is this humidity that defines the track’s edges. As a track ages, it dries, and as it dries, its edges soften. Bug-sign is created when small creatures begin to scurry about just before dawn. Often, this hour is the only comfortable moment of the day, and in a burst of breakfast exuberance, lizards, rats, and insects set off in a willy-nilly marathon.
If bug-sign crosses over a walker’s footprint, the cutter knows the walker has passed nearer to midnight than to dawn. If, however, the footstep flattens the bug-sign, the cutter knows the walker has recently passed, and is in the immediate area, and is probably in trouble. The sun is up, the temperature is rising, and the day will only get more brutal.
When the cutter sees criss-crossing sign on the drag, he radios another unit. That agent drives to the next drag north and cuts. If he finds sign, he calls the first unit to leapfrog north to the next drag. He cuts it. Sooner or later, the sign runs out, and they have the walkers boxed in between them.
It’s when the walkers get far off the drags that all the trouble starts.
Mike F.’s walkers were not only off the drag, they were off the map.
Kenny Smith was working the trailer trash radio, sending more and more units on the Banzai Run. Everybody was heading out there, every truck that could move. They were even thinking of sending out the water-buffaloes, the big water-tank trucks in the fleet. It was a mad scramble as they raced the heat.
From Vidrios Drag, the signcutters started back into the wasteland, cutting, cutting. They started finding corpses. They read the ground and found, after an amazingly long haul, where the journey had all gone so wrong. Some of the illegals had walked over sixty-five miles—a couple of them fell in sight of the freeway.
All you can do, Kenny Smith said, is cut sign, cut sign, cut sign.
The sign tells the story.
The sign never lies.
And the whole investigation became a series of drag-cuts. It started after they had found all the dead—fourteen men; after they had saved the rest—twelve more. The footprints wrote the story. And after the footprints ran out, it was a trail of whispered stories and paper sheets. It was the big die-off, the largest death-event in border history.
Everybody wanted to know what happened, how it happened. The old boys of Wellton were forever changed by it. The media started calling the dead the Yuma 14. National stories focused on the Devil’s Highway as a great metaphor for the horrors of the trail. But the agents who saw it all simply refer to it as “what happened.” As in: what happened in May, or what happened in the desert. Nothing fancy.
Somebody had to follow the tracks. They told the story. They went down into Mexico, back in time, and ahead into pauper’s graves. Before the Yuma 14, there were the smugglers. Before the smugglers, there was the Border Patrol. Before the Border Patrol, there was the border conflict. Before them all was Desolation itself.
These are the things they carried.
John Doe # 36: red underpants, mesquite