The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [19]
The women tell you that they go home with the smell on their skin, in their hair and clothing. Sometimes, when several packets have arrived in their office, they can’t wash it off, even hours later. A year after death, files still reek faintly of spoiled flesh. The incense of their death takes over the room.
So the women light candles.
Once their candles are lit, they bend to the task of trying to find the families back in Mexico so they can deliver their grim news. Many dead walkers come from places with no phones, homes with no addresses. The best the consulate can do is call the village phone booth and hope a passerby will answer. Or they track down the mayor of the nearest town, and he then either does or does not find the widows.
In the back office of the consulate, the chemical scent of jasmine, musk, vanilla, fights the smell of corruption. One of the secretaries utters the Mexican phrase for yuck. “Guácala.” It sounds like something you eat.
The chief of consular security waves her off.
He says, “When forensic evidence fails us, we are forced to register circumstantial evidence.”
Forensic evidence would consist of such things as fingerprints. But the nature of desert death is such that forensic evidence is quickly obliterated. The body mummifies. In one of the million ironies of the desert, those who die of thirst become waterproof. Their fingers turn to stiff leather, and the prints are unreadable. On the day the consulate reopens the files of the Yuma 14, they have four bodies undergoing hydration at the coroner’s lab. A new corpse, Juan Doe # 78, is cooling in their company. The coroners pump fluids into their reluctant tissue, sometimes for days, to try to plump up the desiccated skin enough to raise a usable print.
The chief’s excited. This CSI stuff is fun.
“Your boys,” he enthuses, “were only out there three days or so. They’re already turning to mummies, but they’re not so bad. You ought to see the ones who’ve been out there a week. Two weeks! Black as leather! And they crack open—red and brown stuff drips out all over the ground!” He pulls a face. “It’s a soup. It’s disgusting!”
Many of the dead have gold or gold-rimmed or missing teeth, and their photographs offer the final indignity: they have white rubber-clad fingers jammed in their mouths, pulling their lips apart in maniacal grimaces, to reveal these orthodontic details. For these few, it has to be the teeth; there is literally nothing else.
The bodies that are identified are ultimately processed by the Adair Funeral Home in Tucson. They are embalmed, then placed in a cloth-covered wooden casket. This undertaking costs $650. If they are to be flown home, the “air-tray” to hold the casket costs an extra $50. The Mexican consulates pay for the embalming, and other parties—sometimes the governments of the walkers’ home states—pay for the flights. For more than 80 percent of the dead, it is the most expensive gift they have ever gotten.
Those who are never identified are registered by the United States. Under their new government-bestowed number, they are interred in the potter’s field at the Ft. Lowell cemetery in Tucson. They each get a small marker with metal serial numbers. These Juan Doe burials cost Pima County $760 each.
What of others? What of the phantom walkers from the Wellton 26? Stories float among the survivors that three men walked away. Some call it the Wellton 30. One survivor still maintains there were seventy in the original group.
“They are gone,” the Mexican consul in Tucson says. “No, no.”
He looks out the window.
“You will never find them.”
He rests his hands on the desk and looks at them.
“Perhaps a scrap of clothing.”
He sighs.
“In the desert, Levis last longer than meat.”
Six coins and four pills, a green handkerchief.
The candles flicker.
Some of the Yuma 14/Wellton 26 spoke Spanish as a second language. It surprises people to learn that many of the “undocumented entrants” are indigenous. Think of the border struggle as an extension of the Indian Wars, the cavalry now chasing new Apaches and Comanches.