The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [40]
A night or so before the run, they were whisked across the street from the San Antonio to a ramshackle rooming house known as La Casa de los Huespedes. It was supposed to be a two-story building, but the owners had never gotten around to finishing the top floor, which had become an open tarpaper space handy for hanging laundry. It also lent itself to service as a lookout post. This safe house was the province of El Negro. Although he reserved it for them, his clients paid for the privilege of sleeping there. The manager, Nelly Muñoz, charged them each fifty pesos per day. The groups were always between fifteen and twenty people in size. These loads came through three times in a good week —easy money for Nelly.
The short hotel stay was apparently the last hoop the walkers had to jump through. It was a favorite nightmare of the Coyotes that the Migra’s black-clad BORTAC monsters would come out of the sky on ropes, infrared goggles glowing horribly in the night. Sometimes El Negro, in an absurd bit of spy-game paranoia, would appear suddenly and quietly order the walkers to rush to Nelly’s and hide, there to await further orders. Then he would hurry off in his pickup, casting glances all around lest he be found out. As if anybody in Sonoita cared.
The Saturday before the fatal walk began, Mendez and Maradona had taken a group across the Devil’s Highway. It was a long, arduous walk, but it was uneventful. They crossed the Quitobaquito Hills, heading north, then they cut west and approached Ajo. They stuck to high ground, baffling the Migra’s drag system. By walking high, they could only be spotted by cutters scanning with optics, or by Migra overflights. The planes were easy enough to evade. This ground was so rough and crooked that all you had to do was squat under a paloverde or a mesquite, or hug a creosote. Mexican skin, from the air, is hard to tell apart from the ground. Knowing this, pilots often just fly in circles looking for telltale points of white. Bones. The bones come right out of hiding, as if the dead feel there is nothing left to lose.
The walkers made it over Bluebird Pass, and they could see Ajo as a small cluster of lights in the unmitigated dark velvet of 1:00 A.M. It always seemed like madness to the clients that the guides were pressing past Ajo—they could see roads and gas stations and stoplights, they could practically smell the hot dogs and beer. But the guias knew better. Ajo was just a sign they were cutting.
They got past town, and hours later they arrived at a water tank beside a paved roadway. This nameless outpost was the El Negro gang’s chosen rendezvous. There, the group rested and drank as they waited for the pickup. But instead of their own driver appearing, a Border Patrol truck found them. Maradona managed to escape with one pollo, running into the scrub. The two men went on to Phoenix. Mendez and his group of twelve were apprehended.
One of the Border Patrol guys saw that Mendez had a rabbit tattoo on his arm.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“What?”
“The rabbit.”
“The tattoo?”
“Yes, the tattoo. What does the rabbit tattoo signify?”
“Nothing.”
“Gang sign?”
“No.”
“Is it some kind of Coyote code?”
“It’s a rabbit. I like rabbits.”
If the Migra had realized who they had in the holding pen, the Yuma 14 might be alive today. But somehow, Mendez wasn’t recognized. They were looking for Jesús Lopez Ramos from San Luis, not some Rabbit Mendez of Sonoita.
Another disturbing element of this bust was the water tank itself. Once it had been discovered by the Border Patrol, it was compromised. Forever after, the lifesaving water stop would represent a game of roulette.
Among these arrested walkers were three brothers from the state of Guerrero. Mario González Manzano, Efraín González Manzano and Isidro González Manzano were from a small village near Chilpancingo called Villagrande. Their family home did not have telephone service. They had gone to the Coyote’s men in Guerrero, south of Mexico City, and sought passage to the north. There wasn’t enough money