The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [38]
Jesús and Maradona trudged across Sonoita and took rooms in the Hotel San Antonio. Chespiro had paid for them in advance. He kept a whole section of the hotel rented out for his recent arrivals, the Coyote’s chicken coop. They settled in and waited for the call, which came soon enough.
A Mexican budget border hotel is not to be confused with a Super 8 or a Ho-Jo’s. The rooms are tatty, and the carpets, if they exist, are worn. The beds are cheap and occasionally feature little black periods and semicolons that reveal themselves to be hungry bedbugs. No cable. No room service. The bathroom at the end of the hall is all tiles, and the toilet is often in the corner of the shower, and the whole thing can be swamped out with a dirty mop. Oaxacas and Marias clean the floors. The toilets won’t swallow toilet paper, so the bathrooms feature aromatic white-washed tin buckets full of tainted rosettes. The locks are busted. Home sweet home.
El Negro came for the boys and set them on the path with their teachers, a little fat man known as Santos, and a badtoothed scrapper known as Lauro. These were not their real names. Later, Jesús claimed he didn’t ever know anyone’s real names.
The new smuggling route was as treacherous as the old. Yuma sector Border Patrol agents will tell you they patrol the deadliest landscape on earth; Tucson sector Border Patrol agents will tell you they do. It’s a peculiarity of Arizona—the worse it is, the prouder they get. Kings of Nowhere, they each want to claim the crown. To El Negro’s boys, it was just more damn desert.
Where before, they were expected to maneuver north from San Luis to Wellton, or Tacna, or even Dateland (home of the World-Famous Date Milkshake), this new walk was at least thirty-five, and even sixty-five miles long, depending on whether they were headed for Highway 85 or the big freeway beyond. If they walked straight along the cut trail laid down for them by El Negro’s scouts, they could get there in two days, three at the outside. The detours possible to them extended for several million acres.
The few place names they knew were eerie to them. They were in a strange Indian language Jesús didn’t recognize. Gu Vo, Schuchali, Hickiwan. It was the Dark Continent.
The land was also rougher here, crumpled and spiked with peaks and mounts. Great wads of landscape reared up all around the path. The Growler Mountains, Mount Ajo, the Bates Mountains, the Granite Mountains, the Puerto Blanco Mountains, Díaz Spire, Twin Peaks, the Sonoyta Mountains, the Cipriano Hills, Growler Canyon, Scarface Mountain, the John the Baptist Mountains, the aptly named Diablo Mountains.
It’s a naturalist’s dreamscape. For the illegals, it’s a litany of doom. The poems on the map read like a dirge. A haunted cowboy ballad:
Chico Shunie Wash,
Tepee Butte,
Locomotive Rock,
Gunsight Wash,
Pozo Redondo,
Copper Canyon,
Black Mountain,
Pinnacle Peak,
Camelback.
That’s a busy piece of real estate. If God could take an iron to it and flatten out all the creases, there would be a plain the size of west Texas. And in all that land, there were only a couple of tinajas, or natural water tanks, and a very few hidden wells.
Pinacate Lava Flow,
Tordillo Mountain,
Pinta Playa,
Cholla Pass,
Saguaro Gap,
Alamo Wash,
Gunsight Hills,
Burro Gap,
Gu Vo Hills,
Montezuma’s Head.
If they cut east and climbed the Diablos, then went up Estes Canyon, they might have found Bull Pasture Spring. Water tanks hide on the south side of the Puerto Blancos, and on the north slope they might have found Red Tanks Well. Going northwest up Growler Canyon, they might have found Daniells Well, or north of that, over old Scarface and below the Lime Hill mine, they might have found Bandeja Well. It’s a hard slog, even if you’re a veteran signcutter, and you know where the water is. You need a U.S. Geological Survey topographical map. The Coyotes, when they had them, drew maps on notebook paper with Bic pens. Their routes were inferred from freeway maps and road atlases.