The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [22]
Men came home from the United States in cars. Some even had the latest models—new Dodge Ram trucks, bright red, booming Eminem on their CD players. Business-minded fellows could load up at a Texas Goodwill and sell the stuff for twice the price back home. They had their trunks and back seats full of old TVs, radios, clothes, toys. Even guys driving rust-bomb old Datsuns had stuffed them with Care Bears and Walkmen, skate-boards and bags of panties. People would spend months’ worth of savings on a small used television or Christmas bike, selling for cheaper than the new stuff in the unapproachable Mexican department stores. These fellows offered handshake financing, too: they were, after all, cousins and neighbors and uncles and boyfriends. They kept elaborate accounts in their heads, paid off a few pesos, or a meal, at a time. When the drivers had sold all their wares, they put the old cars on the market, too.
Castoff and donated clothing could be sold in the segunda, a rolling flea market set up at each wanderer’s house. Some hard workers picked trash at the border’s garbage dumps, fixed the castoffs, and resold them at the segundas back home. It was a rural black market.
They built cement block additions to their tumbledown houses, added aluminum to the thatch roofs. New clothes were signs of great success: satellite dishes, air conditioners, boom boxes, guns, cattle, televisions, coffeemakers, PCs, pigs. Some even got telephones. It was unheard of. Villages all over Mexico were suddenly slotting into the Internet, watching CNN. Families came back with babies who were supposedly American citizens.
The neighbors of these adventure-capitalists watched and wanted. Their children were dying. Dengue fever had made its way up from the Amazon. Malaria was spreading again, and it was worse than before—this new black blood malaria. Corruption, political violence, indigenous revolution in the south. People in Veracruz were looking north, as inevitably as the rains came and the mosquitoes bit.
Enter Don Moi, recruiter for the northern Coyotes.
Don Moi García drove around Veracruz in his big American car, smoking his American cigarettes, patting his Mexican belly that everyone suspected was full of American cheeseburgers. Don Moi was a walking ad for the good life.
Don Moi was trustworthy—the gold watch and the prefix “Don,” or Sir, even Sire, took care of that. But he was also a local, living in Tlapacoyan. People knew him—they’d seen him for years, doing his business. He was the godfather of kids, the compadre of their parents, a tío, one of the uncles, a neighbor. He was gray-haired. A man, as they said, of substance.
They didn’t want to say he was fat, but he had a great solid belly. People could tell the old man was enjoying a comfortable life. That panza of his got him plenty of business. Hungry men wanted guts like his.
Uncle Moi.
He drove into the highlands, cutting through jungle and terraced, jewel-bright farmland. He had an exotic cell phone, and he murmured into it, talking to mysterious people in El Norte. He made himself available at restaurants, in cantinas. He could be found wherever men gathered for a cup of coffee with raw cane syrup and goat milk in each cup.
Don Moi was a fixer for the shadowy Coyotes of Sonora, a Robin Hood figure to the muchachos of Veracruz. A benevolent outlaw with a bushy mustache. And, like all gangsters, he had accumulated a certain place of honor. Many of the poor mothers and fathers who called him “Don” were older than he. Almost nobody called him by his birth name, Moises. Like royalty, he had taken on a title.
In North America, the myth tends west: the cowboys, the Indians, the frontier, the wild lands, the bears and wolves and gold mines and vast ranches were in the west. But in Mexico, a country narrow at bottom and wide at the top, the myth ran