The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [44]
Sellers hawk their wares as ice cream carts jangle by with their little bells and the newspaper man hollers and the corn-cob man trundles along shouting and the weirder salesmen of obscure items parade through: goat-cheek tacos, broiled tripe, and tejuino—fermented maize Indian brew. Old-timers say tejuino is fermented by taking a chunk of human shit and wrapping it in a cloth and letting it fester in the mashed corn.
Dogs bark. Old buses gulp and grind through the gears. Beat pickups with loose tailpipes roar. Kids yell. Even roosters crow down among the tattered banana trees of that blue-and-white house where the blacktop ends. Pop! Pop! Pop! Some pendejo is already setting off firecrackers. Either that, or some drunk is shooting his wife.
The street is already hot. Man, it was eighty-nine degrees all night. Mendez feels bad—he’s already sweaty. He takes his morning crap, trying to get his bowels empty so he doesn’t have to worry about it on the trail—hard to keep the pollos in line when they’ve seen you squat in a bush. He opens the window and sits and looks out at the deceptive green of the back yards of Sonoita. Calculates his profits. Perhaps, for a moment, he dreams of far Guadalajara, and his mother hoping he will someday build her a home.
He’s not scared, not anymore. But he’s always apprehensive. And it’s a pain in the ass, this hiking in the desert. You’d be stupid not to worry about the walk.
Bids farewell to his woman.
Steps outside, works his baseball cap down over his rockero forelock, slips on his shades.
Sonoita smells like bad fruit and sewage. Blue clouds of exhaust leak from the dying cars. He walks down to Maradona’s and pounds on the door. No answer. What the hell? He calls out a few friendly insults—Oye, huevón! Pinche buey! Orale, pendejo! Levántate, cabrón.
But Maradona’s apparently gone. Either that, or he’s so drunk Mendez can’t wake him. Damn! Door’s locked. Windows too dark and grimy to see through.
Mendez will always wonder what happened to his homeboy. Having started his pollero career in Nogales, Maradona has regularly walked the pathways to the east and west of Tucson. He’s the one who really knows the Ajo route. Mendez hits the celly and tells El Negro that Maradona, that puto, isn’t in. El Negro can’t be happy about that. Woe to Maradona when El Negro has a chat with him.
All right, El Negro says. I’ll handle it. I’ll call Santos and Lauro.
Oh, no, not those losers.
It says a lot about Maradona that he has to be replaced by two other polleros.
Mendez was going to get a ride from Maradona, too. Chingado! He grabs a blue-and-white barrio bus and heads downtown.
The walkers were stirring at Nelly’s. Most of them didn’t know each other. The small family groups stuck together. They ate what breakfast Nelly had thrown together for their fifty pesos. Most of them were used to lighter fare than what the norteños ate; an egg or two, a corn tortilla, some fruit. You could always knock down a mango or a papaya, but you couldn’t always afford fried beans. Half of them were dead men, they just didn’t know it yet.
Unexpectedly, Mendez and his henchmen appeared. The guys from Guerrero knew Mendez from the failed trip last week. They didn’t know these other two Coyotes, Santos and Lauro. Santos was fat, hardly a fit hiker. And Lauro was skinny, with curly hair and bad front teeth. He had the requisite bandido ’stache. The other two gangsters were clean-shaven. The Guerrero boys nodded to Mendez.
“Hey,” he said, “get over to the store and buy water. You’ll need water for the trip.”
“How much?” one asked.
“Enough,” he said. To another, he said, “A bottle.”
They hustled out into the sun.
“Meet me at the bus station,” he said. “Be there by eleven.”
The gangsters went one way, and the pollos the other. They went around the corner, to the small store. They bought candies and chocolates and wicked salted prunes called “saladitos” and sweetened chile paste