The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [42]
And into the bus terminal and the wait for the drive north. A cigarette. A Coke. A candy bar. A quick piss in the stinking troughs in the big rest rooms.
Buses headed north can catch Highway 57, through San Luis Potosí, or 15, that cuts across country to Guadalajara. Sooner or later, they get on 45, and this heads northwest to Ciudad Juárez. In the old days, before the Migra closed it down, El Paso/Juárez was a target destination. Now, they had to move west.
They saw many wonders as they traveled north. In some of their ancient beliefs, north was the direction of death. North was the home of winter, and the underworld could be found there. They went from jungle to rain forest to pine forest, from pines to plains, and from plains to desert and volcanos.
They gawked at the worms of snow on the highest peaks. They stared at the pine trees, the roadside deer. The big cities were no more amazing than the dry lands they entered, the maguey and burros of the heartland, the cacti and plains of the north. The ones who knew geography told the others where they were—the states with the strange names: Zacatecas, Chihuahua. They passed through a hundred towns, a scattering of cities. They crossed little rivers, watched a thousand beaten cafés and gas stations whip by, burned out hulks of ancient car wrecks, white crosses erected along the highway where their ancestral travelers had perished. The whole way was a ghost road, haunted by tattered spirits left on the thirsty ground: drivers thrown out windows, revolutionaries hung from cottonwoods or shot before walls, murdered women tossed in the scrub. Into the Sierra Madre Occidental, the opposite side of their continent.
It was a dream of speed for men who had not sped before. An avalanche of details and bafflements: army patrols in green trucks, dead donkeys bloated to the point of exploding beside the road, armadillos, empty broken white buildings, crippled children writhing in their chairs and taking the afternoon sun in small dust-smoked town squares. Walls whitewashed and painted blue, red, peach, green. A black freight train struggling toward Durango, seemingly covered in old oil, heavy as a mountain as it scraped down the rails.
Mexican towns full of Mexicans, so like them, yet so different from Veracruz.
Aguascalientes, but they saw no “hot water” anywhere. Victor Rosales, but who was he? Why did they name a town after him? Fresnillo, or the Little Ash Tree, whipped by, but they saw no fresnos beside the road. Or were they those distant trees?
Oye, buey, es ese un fresno?
Quién sabe.
Allí, cabrón. Ese árbol.
Cómo chingas, buey. No jodes.
No mames.
Ya pues, pendejo! No me vengas con pendejadas.
Fresnillos. Bésame el culillo.
Nahum looked out the window, silent. His seat companions shook their heads and went back to sleep. Don Moi didn’t like all the hilarity—he preferred to remain invisible. He never knew when the Mexican immigration police were cooperating with the gringos. He dreaded Federales and dark cells where the boot and the electric wire hooked to the testicles were the rule. Better to keep quiet and get the job done. High spirits were a bad precedent. This wasn’t a vacation.
They slept sitting up. Brothers leaned against brothers. The boy slept tucked against his father, his gray comic books in his lap. Loners leaned against the windows, pulled their billed caps over their eyes, and tried to nap, keeping their shoulder away from their snoring neighbors. The nude women in the