The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [17]
John Doe # 37: no effects.
John Doe # 38: green socks.
John Doe # 39: a belt buckle with a fighting cock inlaid, one wallet in the right front pocket of his jeans.
John Doe # 40: no effects.
John Doe # 41: fake silver watch, six Mexican coins, one comb, a belt buckle with a spur inlaid, four pills in a foil strip—possibly Advil, or allergy gelcaps.
John Doe # 42: Furor Jeans, “had a colored piece of paper” in pocket.
John Doe # 43: green handkerchief, pocket mirror in right front pocket.
John Doe # 44: Mexican bills in back pocket, a letter in right front pocket, a brown wallet in left front pocket.
John Doe # 45: no record.
John Doe # 46: no record.
John Doe # 47: no effects; one tattoo: “Maria.”
John Doe # 48: Converse knockoff basketball shoes.
John Doe # 49: a photo ID of some sort, apparently illegible.
They came to the broken place of the world, and taken all together, they did not have enough items to fill a carry-on bag.
Wellton’s Officer Friendly, a Latino who looks Italian, bristles at calling them the Yuma 14. “If anything, they’re the Wellton 14,” he says. “We found them. Yuma didn’t do shit.” In Tucson, however, they’re considered to be the Tucson 14.
The confusion comes easy. The group entered the United States in Tucson sector, and they were headed for a Tucson sector pickup spot. They just happened to have died in the Yuma sector by accident. Walkers are identified by sector, not station, so the Wellton crew was erased from the headlines. Thus Yuma was forever enshrined as the rescuer of the survivors and the collector of the dead.
There were other claims, too. Coming into the game a little late, Mexico declared the Yuma 14 as folk heroes: after all, Mexico loves a martyr, perhaps as much as it dislikes confronting the catastrophic political malfeasance that forced the walkers to flee their homes and bake to death in the western desert. Human rights activists claimed them, too: Our fourteen murdered brothers! Journalists took them as the hottest story (no pun intended) in many years.
Officer Friendly considered all this a steaming pile of Bravo-Sierra.
They were not only Wellton’s bodies, he points out, but there were twenty-six of them, not fourteen. “They’re the Wellton 26,” he says. “All of them are victims, even the live ones. And they’re mine.”
Nobody wanted them when they were alive, and now look—everybody wants to own them.
Their paperwork got processed through Tucson, as well. The dead were given back to Mexico’s care through the auspices of the consul’s offices in the borderland. The consul of Calexico flew home with the bodies, their first and last trip by airplane; and Tucson’s consul, Carlos Flores Vizcarra, collected the files. The death reports went to the groaning shelves of the Tucson consulate. It was all quite routine, with regular patterns, ruts, and observances.
When a fresh death report comes into the consulate building, the women of the consulate light votive candles. Each desk flickers with a small flame. If you didn’t know any better, you would think it was a religious observance.
The reports arrive from the officials, so many that it’s getting hard to file them. Shelves are stuffed with them, and piles of reports sometimes accumulate on the tabletops. The Yuma 14’s documents, like all of the death reports at the consulate, were tucked into accordion folders, cheap manila packets available in any Target or Kmart. The death packets are known as “archives,” and harvest season—May through July—is known as “death season.” It is then that lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, oranges, strawberries are all ready to be picked. Arkansas chickens are ready to be plucked. Cows are waiting in Iowa and Nebraska to be ground into hamburger, and grills are ready in McDonald’s and Burger King and Wendy’s and Taco Bell for the ground meat to be cooked. KFC is waiting for its Mexican-plucked, Mexican-slaughtered chickens to be fried by Mexicans. And the western desert is waiting, too—its temperatures soaring, a fryer in its own right.
OTM —Other Than Mexicans