The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [49]
Illuminating a group of nearly thirty walkers, however, and then letting them go, that wasn’t a game any Migra agent would enjoy. No report. No pursuit. No arrest. It simply was not reasonable to assume that this could happen.
Even the Evil Rogue Migra Agent scenario doesn’t make sense. An agent attempting to send the walkers to a grisly death, chortling wickedly the whole while, would assume that there would be a rescue attempt. He would know that the next Border Patrol sector would likely detect them, would know that the signcutters would backtrack them right to Bluebird, back to him. Even if they all died, their footprints would tell a story, and that story would ultimately lead them back to him. Besides, there was never a Border Patrol agent in history who would pass up the chance to bust a group of thirty walkers.
The only thing known for certain is that at 11:30, at Bluebird Pass, twenty miles south of Ajo, mystery lights panicked Mendez. Like the totemic rabbit tattooed on his arm, he bolted at record speed. His pollos followed. In their hurry, they dropped their bags, lost hats. They tripped and skinned knees. One of the Guerrero boys, Maximino Hilario, dropped his gallon jug in the scramble and didn’t have time to find it.
They scurried up a slope and squatted in the brush and the rocks and waited out the light beams. Ironically, it started to rain. They hunched their shoulders and endured the chill downpour. A few of them cursed the water. Some desert this was.
The lights were gone. The air was moist. Several of them decided the walk really wouldn’t be as bad as everybody said—it was, after all, raining already, they were halfway there, and they’d already escaped the Migra. They’d only been walking a couple of hours. Time for M&M’s.
“The highway’s right over the hill,” Mendez said.
It wasn’t.
AFTER MIDNIGHT.
They veered northwest in the dark. Mendez allowed few rest stops. No one knew what he was orienteering by—since the rain had started, the stars and moon were hidden behind cloud cover. Even with clouds breaking up, and the sky becoming partially visible, Mendez was hardly a master of the astrolabe. He wouldn’t have been able to tell the North Star from Venus.
They didn’t know that Mendez was in uncharted territory. He probably knew it, but seemed to think he could work out the puzzle of the landscape. Maybe he thought he was fooling everybody. They didn’t know where they were supposed to walk—they’d go where he told them to go. For all they could tell, they were about to drop into Dairy Queen for a milkshake. So he marched ahead, striding with great purpose.
Later, the signcutters read his tracks and called him Asshole.
The cutters know many things about a person by the nature of his tracks. They learned something about Mendez and his pollos in the days to come. Mendez always walked point, taking the lead as if he knew where he was going. The men shuffled and stumbled along behind him, wandering off path and straggling, but generally moving ahead. The scuffed fans of grit in their tracks suggested moans and curses, sighs and shouts and whispers. Their sign left a cut across the face of the desert like the grooves in an LP record. Their greatest hits were there, in order.
Thin scab of dried urine beside a brittlebush had the spatter sound and the sigh of relief etched in it like bug-sign. The knee scuff where a man fell, and the smeared tracks of the two companions who helped him up, carried echoes of their grunts, and their exhortations, and an embarrassed, muttered gracias. Empty candy wrappers in the bushes told which way the breeze blew, and carried the crunching of teeth and the smell of chocolate. Empty bottles talked of the growing crisis.
Once the trackers