The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [32]
The guía that time was a twenty-five-year-old former Mexican field worker named Alfredo Alvarez Coronado. He was paid by “an organization” that gave him the cut-rate salary of three hundred dollars per load. Our man Mendez would have scoffed at that minimum-wage paycheck, but Alfredo Alvarez said he earned so little in Mexico—a hundred pesos a day (about ten dollars)—that the pollero work was a windfall. One walk, one month’s salary.
Alfredo’s walkers had been charged between thirteen hundred and fifteen hundred dollars a head for the hike-and-ride. The drivers in this particular gang were suspected of at least eight other dangerous wrong-way drives on California freeways. Thirty-one of the illegals from the crash ended up in the hospital. It can be fairly assumed that the “organization” that lured them across did not volunteer to pay these hospital bills.
Unfortunate third-class passengers who can’t afford a ride on a car seat are locked in the trunk. Some of them are actually strapped to the engine blocks. In the trade, these rides are known as “coffin-loads.”
I want you to know that since my childhood my parents have always been of very low economical resources. My parents had to make great efforts just to feed us each day. I was forced to leave school because they didn’t have enough economic means to send all four of us children to school. So I decided to leave my family and look for work, and make good money to help my family make ends meet and buy them a house, since they don’t own their own home. I worked legitimately at a factory making roof tiles in Nogales, Sonora. The wages were truly very low, and that was my reason for getting involved in the smuggling business.
It didn’t take long for El Negro’s agents to find Mendez—he was exactly like the walkers he would later lead. Poor, alone, looking for a better life, willing to do what it takes. Like them, he was recruited. Like them, he was welcome to die for the Cercas brothers. There were many more waiting to take his place. There were so many more of him that he didn’t even exist.
Mendez and the walkers didn’t know they were invisible: on the Devil’s Highway, you had to almost die for anybody to notice your face.
5
Jesús Walks Among Us
In the sheriff’s department videos, the survivors’ faces are almost black against the stark white hospital pillows. The camera zooms in close to them. Their features are overwhelmed by the glare. They’re nearly invisible in the brutal light.
They wear ridiculous flowered hospital gowns. Many have oxygen hoses plugged into their noses. They are all still weak. Some have IV bottles leaking saline into their veins. A few of them have lips so swollen and cracked that they can barely talk. They hold wadded cloths to their mouths to catch the drool that keeps leaking out. During one interview, a nurse bursts in and says, “We need urine.” The man looks down at her and nods, then tries to keep talking as she collects his fluids.
They’re in shock. They can’t spell their own names. They can’t spell the names of the villages and ranches they came from. They look to the deputies, as if the Americans can help them remember the letters. They don’t know what day it is. They don’t know the name of where they were. When they mention Sonoita, they call it “Sonorita,” or Little Sonora.
“Do you know which direction you traveled?” the sheriff asks one man.
He thinks for a moment, then nods.
“Yes. I remember,” he says.
He gestures straight ahead with one hand.
“That way,” he says.
Do you know who the Coyotes are?
“I don’t know who they are.”
Are they here in the hospital?
(Looking around.) “Are they here in the hospital?”
Okay. When you crossed from Sonoita, who was leading you?
“I don’t know who was leading us.”
How much did you pay?
“I didn’t pay anything to anybody.”
Oh, sure, they brought you for free.
(Looks away.) “Uhhh … well … you know. It was handled by the legendary Negro. It was probably paid by my brother.”
Is he here?
“My brother’s here?”
Did he cross with you?
“My brother?