The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [31]
He wore his hair in a silly punk-rock style, cut short all around, with a red-dyed forelock hanging over his eye. He liked to flick it back over his head like an enemy’s scalp plopped on his skull. Some survivors said the hair was orange, or blond. To them, anything not black was blond.
They didn’t know his name, but they all remembered the ’do. Border Patrol agents still refer to him as “Rooster Boy.” A couple of months before the disaster, in one of his other border busts, a federal judge had officially deported Rooster Boy. Sadly for everyone, he came back again.
At the time of the last walk, he lived in a run-down white house in Sonoita with his girlfriend, Celia Lomas Mendez. The house was down at the end of the paved half of Altar Street, #67. He slept with her on a mattress and bedspring resting on the floor of a back room. Cement. Shadowy. The occasional palm tree rustled in the hot desert breeze.
Beyond the end of the paved part of Altar lived his best friend, Rodrigo Maradona, another guía. Rodrigo lived on a dirt and stone alley, but he was close to his pal. El Negro had provided them with cell phones. They’re all cybernauts, these polleros, instant-messaging and paging and celling each other like giddy teenyboppers in a shopping mall. They didn’t have proper plumbing, but they had da hook-up.
Our boy’s Mexican cellular number was 65-13- 85- 21.
His smuggling code name was “Mendez.” A romantic gesture in honor of his sweetheart. He still occasionally goes by his middle name, Antonio. Such was his idea of an alias. Antonio Lopez Ramos, aka Mendez.
He had another alias, too. His boyhood nickname among his friends was sometimes Chuy, the diminutive of “Jesús.”
This is his true name: Jesus.
Jesus led the walkers gathered by Moses into the desert called Desolation.
Jesus has the inevitable birthday of December 25.
By way of this letter, I ask forgiveness and pardon for what happened in the Arizona desert, because I really am sorry from the bottom of my heart for what happened and it honestly wasn’t my intention to lead those people to their deaths. Rather, my intention was to help them cross the border. But we never imagined the tragedy would happen.
But he did. He imagined it. It was no secret, this chance of death.
Every week, walkers are left to die by their guias. It is so common that it must be seen as a standard Coyote practice. A business move.
Wellton agents will tell you any number of heinous stories, as will the Mexican consular corps. Like the group jammed into a van that cut across the Devil’s Highway on a mad-dog cross-country run. Once in the United States, the van broke down. The walkers were at least thirty miles from the freeway. The driver told them it was an easy five-mile walk. Then he set the van on fire to keep it out of the hands of the Border Patrol. Said he was going to fetch a fresh van, and he’d be back to pick them up farther along the trail. He, of course, never returned. Many of the walkers died on that stroll. One of them was a pregnant nineteen-year-old woman.
In the summer of 2002, an idiot pollero driver with twenty-three pollos on board went the wrong way on Interstate 8 in California. Lights out. He was trying to avoid a Border Patrol checkpoint. His van crashed head-on into a Ford Explorer and sent it flying off an embankment, killing Larry Baca and nearly killing his fiancée. The hurtling van demolished four cars before finally stopping, twisted beyond description. This kind of smash-up bears a wry acronym among law enforcement wags: DWM (Driving While Mexican).
At least the driver of the van had the good taste to die for his sins. Four of his pollos also died—one of the dead was a Brazilian, and other Brazilians are believed to have been crammed into the van. Some reports list an astonishing thirty-three riders. (This brings to mind the hoary old joke: Q. Why did Santa Ana only take six thousand troops to the Alamo?