The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [30]
Recently, a young woman was found dead beside I-8. Someone had dragged her out of the desert and left her like a bag of litter on the shoulder. It is entirely possible that she simply couldn’t manage the fast upload into the van and was left to stare at the stars as they drove away. One can imagine the tiresome complications of dealing with a dead or dying woman in Phoenix. The Coyotes are stone-cold pragmatists. Perhaps somebody kicked her out of the van. It was a big freeway—she still had a shot. By desert standards, it was a tender act.
The Cercas’s vans would hustle onto I-10 and deliver their loads to Phoenix, where the illegals would squat in safe houses guarded by gang-bangers until they could be shuffled off into wider America. Their United States travel was arranged by big brother Luis, King of the Freeway. All it took was a van, a truck, a car with a big back seat or a roomy trunk. A rear seat on a Trailways bus.
Luis, Daniel, El Negro, and El Moreno plied their trade in the vast reaches of the Cabeza Prieta wilderness. El Negro, El Moreno, and the Dark-Head Desert. It sounds like a Mexican translation of an H. P. Lovecraft story.
It will shock no one to learn that Don Moi was said to be yet another relative of the prolific Cercas family.
So this was their system:
The Cercas familia controlled the operation from Phoenix; fixers in other states procured jobs for a fee; Daniel recruited the polleros and the guias for transport of walkers to these jobs, and he oversaw the tides of money, and he made the complex arrangements for housing and transport; Don Moi recruited the walkers—his title was enganchador, or the hooker; El Negro enforced and organized the shady doings in Sonora; El Moreno supervised the transport to the launching pad, where the walkers stepped off on a forsaken piece of desert on the brink of El Camino del Diablo, and he sometimes drove.
At the bottom, there was the guía.
4
El Guía
Three guides led the Wellton 26 into the desert: one will forever remain anonymous, one is only known by a code name, and one became infamous in the borderland.
Guides are mostly tough boys who earn a hundred dollars a head every time they lead a group across the border. They never reveal their real names, so if they die, they are fated to lie in the potter’s fields of Tucson and Yuma. Each one has a code name, so the chickens cannot later identify him. And each one wears bad clothes so he blends in, should the group be apprehended. An army of border trash.
The three guides that walked the Wellton 26 have few things to their credit, but one was the fact that they did not feed their pollos any drugs. Guias now give their walkers cocaine to make them walk faster and longer. Of course, cocaine helps their hearts explode, too. If the guía has been paid in advance, he doesn’t care if you get to your toilet scrubbing job or not. It’s easier for him, frankly, if you drop and return to dust in the middle of the Devil’s Highway. In 2003, it was reported in the Arizona press that low-rent Coyotes were using a new chemical prod to speed up their walkers. It turns out that ephedra-based diet pills are cheaper, effective, and easily available. The apparent Coyote favorites are over-the-counter “fat burners.” A dose of eight pills at a time really gets them hustling.
The leader of the Wellton 26 group was a nineteen-year-old boy from Guadalajara.
If he hadn’t inadvertently killed his clients, he would have made about three thousand dollars from the walk, which he’d probably split with his two associates. It was the biggest group he’d guided. Most of them were smaller, parties of twelve or eighteen. Twelve, say, at $100 to $150 a head, five times a month.
He had trained and plied his trade in the Yuma area first, having commuted west from Nogales. He’d worked the drags out of Tinajas Altas Pass, and up around the ABC peaks where the Wellton signcutters patrolled. At some point in the past, he might