The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [46]
“Los estados unidos, muchachos.”
That’s it? That’s the border? This is North America? It don’t look like much!
Their first walk in the United States lasted for five minutes.
They reached a hill, and Mendez said, “I have to go get the ride.”
Nobody ever knew why they had to take a ride. They thought they had just taken the ride. Why couldn’t they just start walking? It was never explained.
But he told them to wait, so they waited. Mendez walked down the dirt road and disappeared around a bend.
One of the Guerrero boys asked Santos, “How long do we walk?”
“We’ll walk all night tonight,” he told them. “Be there in the morning.”
Lauro was telling another, “We’ll walk two days, probably. You’ll get there in two days.”
“We’ll start walking about four,” Santos said.
“We get going around five, maybe six,” Lauro said.
Both of them said it was important to get started when the heat was starting to abate.
Santos announced: “Here comes the van.”
A primer-gray Dodge Ram van appeared. Later, survivors would say it was a Ford Bronco. Some of them would also insist that seventy men got in it. Magic realism.
Mendez jammed them in and El Moreno drove them around in the desert. It was a seriously uncomfortable ride. The van banged off-road shortly after leaving El Papalote. The men, sitting on each other, knocking heads, cracking chins off shoulders, were tossed around like laundry. Though the drive was reliably reported to have taken ninety minutes, their level of discomfort is indicated by their testimony that they drove for two, three, and four hours.
El Moreno did his surreptitious routine, sliding around lots of dust trails, ducking phantom helicopters under acacias and paloverdes, busting onto the Devil’s Highway and speeding back toward Sonoita. Finally, they arrived at a “big rock.” No shortage of big rocks, but they had apparently found the big rock that signaled the entry to the path to Ajo.
The van disgorged the walkers and sped back toward Mexico. They stood around for a moment as Mendez briefed them: they’d walk at night, just a couple hours, three hours max … maybe eight. And if for some reason they were surprised by morning, they’d settle in the creosote bushes to wait out the sun. Each of them was responsible for his own water. They held up their jugs like kids at show-and-tell. Mendez was the expert, after all. He repeated it was just a matter of hours to the pickup spot, something he would repeat like a litany during the entire walk. They’d be there by the second night for sure. Everything was under control. They were a little early, that’s all. But he was impatient and still a little irritated with Maradona. It was just one of those days. So, qué la chingada, let’s start now—we’ll get there quicker.
The tradition was to arrive at the big rock at three, then walk into the night. But they’d beat the clock. An extra hour or two of walking in triple-digit heat, guzzling water. Getting sick before sunset, but not knowing it.
Orale, Mendez told them. Let’s do it.
Their Pepsis were already warm.
Reymundo and his son, Nahum and his boys. Lorenzo Ortiz, Mario Castillo, Heriberto Baldillo, Efraín Manzano. Abraham Morales Hernandez in sweat pants and running shoes, one of the only guys ready for the marathon. The Guerrero boys, among them a young man named Hilario. Quiet men nobody had ever noticed, many of them nameless—unknown to Mendez, Lauro, or Santos.
They rounded the rock and slipped past a dying saguaro. Their feet crunched on the grit of the desert, and the plants began to tear at their arms and legs. They crossed onto the Devil’s Highway on foot. Mendez or Santos did the brush-out: scraped ocotillo and hedionda branches in the dirt to hide their tracks from the Border Patrol.
Don’t worry, Mendez promised. Nobody’s going to find us.
8
Bad Step at Bluebird
They walked straight