The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [47]
Reymundo Sr. helped Reymundo Jr. He climbed beside his son, urging him ahead, telling him to be strong, they only had a few miles to walk. He smiled when the other guys razzed him: Junior was going to be carrying him pretty soon. Cabrones. Reymundo’s brooding brother-in-law, Nahum Landa, no doubt kept his own counsel as he strode into the dusk. He would turn black in the night, invisible except for his eyes and teeth. Reymundo paid scant attention to him, however. His main interest was his son.
Andale, m’ijo. Come on, Son.
Allí voy, ’apá. I’m coming, Dad.
Though it was bad form to complain—machos took discomfort with aplomb—the men did grumble a little. Mendez, though, was no fool. The surest way to beat La Migra was to keep to the high country. No four-wheel drive on earth could cut a drag on a mountain slope or a sheer cliff wall. The peaks and deep ravines were excellent cover, too. Nobody could see them, not even the air spotters. And no Border Patrol unit would bother hiking around hunting them. Their only worries were the passes, where the trucks could drive up. Let the clients complain all they wanted. They climbed.
Night fell.
They topped the hill and dropped into the blue-shadowed valley. Climbed again. On top, Mendez pointed out a red-tipped peak, catching the last light of sunset. “That’s the hill,” he said. “The second desert is beyond it. We walk through it, and they pick us up.” The boys were plopped on the ground, spitting and drinking and murmuring. Ah! There it was! This isn’t so bad! Ain’t nothin’! They patted each other, laughed. Mendez, like some tractor, geared up and marched away. “Don’t rest,” he said. “Walk.”
Mendez was giving orders to men older than himself. To fathers, grandfathers. The only one younger than him was Reymundo Jr. Even Santos and Lauro, his stooges, were older than him. All he had going for him was his experience.
They were southeast of Ajo. They marched north, and then northeast for ten miles, climbing and dropping, keeping up a good clip. Mendez was a pro—he stormed along, saying little. Later, the survivors would say he gave up speaking altogether. Memories would become deeply unreliable, but they all remembered Mendez, and then Lauro and Santos, whistling in place of conversation. Mendez’s loud notes sounded oddly flat against the great landscape. It was a strange scene from some magical novel, the walkers transformed by nightfall into something like birds.
One of the boys, already tired of the Coyotes and their imperious orders, whistled chinga-tu-madre (shave-and-a-haircut). Those who heard it laughed.
As they walked, they started to lose themselves. Their accounts of the following days fade into a strange twilight of pain. Names are forgotten. Locations are nebulous, at best, since none of them, not even the Coyotes, even knew where they were. Nameless mountains loomed over them, nameless stars burned mutely overhead, nameless demons gibbered from the nameless canyons.
All ahead of them, beyond Bluebird Pass.
Mendez didn’t know it was called Bluebird. He was leading them into a blank map with landmarks etched in transient memory, known by obtuse Coyote descriptions like “The First Desert,” “The Second Desert,” “The Low Pass,” “The High Pass.” “The Ajo Lights,” “The Highway Water Tank.” Bluebird was twenty miles north of El Papalote as the crow flies. But even the crow staggered across that land, taking small detours, unable to ever travel in a straight line.
Their path formed a wide