The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [43]
Cuencamé, Pedriceña, Dinamita—a town named after dynamite.
There was nothing delicious in Delicias. Nombre de Dios, the Name of God, lay in the terrible outland.
New languages began to assert themselves. Nahuatl was far behind them now. Strange Chichimeca names floated by: Meoqui, Julimes, Coyame.
They saw a sign for a place called Cuchillo Parado, the Erect Knife. There was laughter over that in the bus.
Nudge-nudge, is your knife erect?
That’s not a knife, brother, that’s a machete.
You may have a machete, my friend, but in my family we have Samurai swords!
That thing? Where I come from, that’s a toothpick.
Ciudad Juárez, large in Mexican myth, second only to Tijuana in their minds, the wetback’s promised land, was a sprawl of towers and dust, desert, and trains: nothing there, not a tree, it looked like, not a drop of water. The Rio Grande, known to them as El Río Bravo. Don Moi pointed out El Paso, Texas. Some dark peaks, more warehouses.
Where?
Across the river.
That’s a river?
They couldn’t see the Río Grande. They could see Mexican freight trains. Black mountains. And they could see the endlessly rushing traffic of I-10 on the American side. They didn’t know that this same freeway, far in the west, would be their ultimate destination.
Weary, sleepy, some of them feeling sick from the bad food and the constant jiggling, they headed west. They were driving parallel to the Devil’s Highway, at times only yards from the U.S. border. It just looked like more Mexico.
Agua Prieta, Cananea, Altar—where Don Moi made his call to Chespiro and was told to bring ’em on in to Sonoita—Caborca.
Finally, they arrived in Sonoita. Heat and horns, street dogs and northern odors. Another sad dust-dry desert town. They were hustled off the bus and rushed to the motel. They fell about the dark rooms and slept fitfully. In the morning, the legendary Negro roused them and sent them scurrying to Nelly’s safe house. To wait. Be ready, they were told—we’ll come for you and you’ll have to jump. Nobody knew how long the preparations would take.
Fifty pesos here. Fifty pesos there. They were just bleeding money.
Don Moi didn’t make it to Nelly’s. By the time they wondered where he was, he was on the bus, heading home.
7
A Pepsi for the Apocalypse
SATURDAY, MAY 19.
It is easy to imagine Mendez’s morning. Oh, shit, the alarm clock’s going off too early. Six o’clock. Last night was Friday, party night. Dancing with Celia. Drinks. Cigarettes and laughter, up too late with the gang. Too late, too tipsy to make love.
Saturday mornings suck.
Headache.
Mouth tastes foul.
Celia is still in bed, her hair scattered over the pillow.
On the radio, El Gran Silencio, singing “Los Chuntaros del Barrio.”
A small lizard scuttles across the wall, one of the little desert geckos. Mendez scratches himself and gets up, puts on his ugly walking clothes, brushes his teeth, careful not to swallow the tainted city water. Pees in the low toilet, its water barely there from lack of pressure, the tin can in the corner full of wadded toilet paper. Digs around in Celia’s fridge for something to eat, stirs some instant coffee into boiling water. He’s always careful to boil it fully so he won’t get sick. Otherwise, it’s bottled water only, and that gets too expensive. And where’s that pinche Maradona? It’s seven, that lazy bastard. A tortilla heated on the blue flame of the stove, a smear of frijoles and salt.
Water and gas come in old trucks that regularly clank down his street. The gas for the house comes from a whitewashed or silver tank sitting on a small cement pad out back. Several of the neighbors still have outhouses and use buckets and washbasins. It’s a noisy barrio—when the mailman