The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [41]
The Coyotes put them on a bus for Tijuana, where they were going to cross into San Diego. They were repeatedly foiled by Operation Gatekeeper. Pinche Migra! An associate had called Chespiro Cercas on the cell phone and made a case for them. They were good boys, hard workers. They deserved another shot at the border. Just to prove they were good boys, they’d all taken menial jobs in Baja California. They weren’t wasting a minute without earning something.
Brothers were good, a working unit that the Cercas gang could control. Each brother could be threatened or hurt if need be. But if they worked well together, they’d be earning big. If they got into a yearly trip, they’d owe Chespiro money forever.
Chespiro ordered that they be shipped to San Luis, and then—after that didn’t work out—they mounted the famous bus to Sonoita and tried again.
Bus after bus after bus: they must have thought el Norte was nothing but bus lines.
The brothers had been living in crap motel rooms for weeks, and now they’d been caught. They were angry. Enough was enough—they demanded yet another shot at it, and soon. El Negro, in an uncharacteristic spasm of humanitarianism, offered them the next walk—May 19—for their trouble.
“Orale,” the brothers said.
They shook hands.
Back at the safe house, Nelly’s rooms were getting full. El Negro was looking to sign up thirty walkers for the trip. Thirty was some sort of magic limit to the Coyotes—few groups ever grew to that limit. There were practical reasons for this. Large groups were harder to control, and they were very hard to hide. The González brothers nodded and muttered hello and crammed themselves into the already stifling rooms of Nelly’s house of ghosts.
Down in Veracruz, Don Moi and his boys were on their way.
The walkers had left their towns in pickup trucks, or small regional buses.
They gathered at the bus terminal and boarded the bus Don Moi had rented for them. A charter. They felt like millionaires.
El Norte. It was a trip of over two thousand miles. The bus was long and fairly modern, a long-haul cruise liner with two toilets in the back, tandem drivers who traded off sleep shifts as they drove. These highway behemoths were known as “doce ruedas” because they were powered by twelve-wheel drives. The bodies of the big cruisers were split-level, with a set of steps behind the driver leading into the interior, a tinted sunroof above the seats. Behind the driver, there was a bench seat, where chatty passengers could sit sideways and talk as they stared out the vast front windshield. Reymundo Jr. spent time there, watching the landscape roll by.
Poor people carried their own food on buses. Families boarded the bus with white paper packages of tortillas, small pots of beans, slabs of yellow cheese, candied yams and cactus—camotes and bisnagas. They made tortas of bolillo rolls and ham and chiles. These meals were often better than the food available in the roadside taco stands and in the dusty bus terminals along the way. Several of the Moi crew carried lunch bundles.
Their few possessions were tucked overhead in the racks above their seats. They toyed with the reading lights and the recliner buttons. The toilets in the back were some of the first flushers some of them had used. Laughter. Some small prayers, muttered in discreet whispers, the sign of the cross ending in kissed crossed fingers. Journey mercies. Let us arrive safely. We need to get to the border. Help us get into the desert. Make us strong. It was more comfortable than the chairs in their homes, but the air conditioning was too cold.
All roads lead to Tenochtitlán. Mexico City is the hub. The big roads converge here and disperse in all directions.
The boys gawked as they approached the great city. Few of them had ever seen anything like this. The occult volcano, El Popo, rose in snowy splendor as the bus came down through pine-covered slopes that could have been in Colorado. The filthy high tide of pollution met