The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [36]
With so many hunters trying to catch Jesús, it’s a wonder he managed to get lost.
Jesús and Maradona went to work.
The boys stumbled off the bus in the blighted August sun of San Luis. They made their way to the Hotel Río Colorado, flogged by the brutal heat. Here, they took cheap rooms and waited for word from Chespiro.
Maradona knew the walking route—east of San Luis, where buses stopped at a restaurant near a Mexican army outpost—but Jesús didn’t. The restaurant was probably the famous El Saguaro truck stop, traditional jumping-off point for walkers heading north to Wellton, a scene from a B movie, one of the haunted diners full of Mexican vampires and masked wrestlers, the place revealed in the last shot of the film to be an ancient Chichimeca pyramid hidden in a sewage-crusted arroyo. From the front, it’s bad walls, white paint, a gas pump, and a soda cooler.
The Border Patrol seems to have a strange affection for its tawdriness. In Wellton Station, there are several framed shots of the joint in the chief’s office. Agents take visitors in there and point to the photos of cracked, dirty walls, and say things like “There’s Mecca.”
People stop here and rest in the heat for a minute, drink a soda, buy a beer, and hike away into the wilderness. The Yuma Desert, the Lechugilla Desert, the Mohawk Mountains, the Devil’s Highway all lie ahead. Mexican Route 2 runs at their backs. Beyond it, the black Pinacate. To the north, the bombing range. If they walk for two days, they can be at I-8.
Maradona walked Jesús down the pathways. Then, Chespiro sent the first load of illegals to San Luis. They had orders to find Jesús and Maradona at the Hotel Río Colorado.
Maradona and Jesús had already worked out their contacts with the long-haul Route 2 bus drivers. Now they hustled the illegals to the depot and boarded them onto the bus headed for Sonoita. The driver sold them a “special ticket,” since they weren’t going all the way—each man could ride his bus for fifty pesos, the money slipped into the driver’s pocket. He then drove them east, and when he made his scheduled stop at El Saguaro, he pushed the lot of them off and bade farewell. Maradona and Jesús hopped off the bus too, picked up gallon jugs of water, and together the group stepped into the United States.
At sunset, they shoved off, and the walk went well. It was about thirty miles to Wellton or Tacna. Maradona, the old pro, showed Jesús how to navigate by the mountains. They skirted the Copper Mountains, watched for Sheep Mountain, and followed Coyote Wash part of the way. They walked till dawn the first night, and they settled in to rest during the morning of the second day. It was hotter than anyone expected, and they were drinking too much, but Maradona didn’t worry—they’d be in sight of lights by nightfall. And they were. They saw the lights after dark, and they orienteered by the glow of the Mohawk radio towers and the vapor lamps of the Mohawk rest areas. They came up over the railroad tracks and hurried to the spigots of the bathrooms, the cool drinking fountains, the flush toilets. Those few with American coins could buy cold Cokes and Snickers bars at the vending machines. Mohawk rest area was already some kind of county fair for that first group. If they’d been Boy Scouts, Maradona and Jesús would have gotten merit badges.
They made it their practice to home in on “houses and towers” in the Wellton area. As they trudged toward the freeway, they passed