The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [50]
This guy walked alone the whole time. This guy walked with his brothers. This guy had his arm around his son some of the time: their tracks interwove and braided together as they wandered. This guy tried to eat a cactus.
Then there were his legs. Mendez’s left leg had just a little less thrust than his right. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. He thought he was going straight. North. But he angled just enough off plumb to head north-northwest as his right leg out-torqued his left.
Signcutters know one secret thing about walkers. They fall into a pattern and seldom break it. Whether it’s a mountain or a bush, the walker will cut either left or right and then he or she will tend to repeat this action over and over.
Mendez always cut to the left. Each time he skirted the objects in his path, he drifted west—to the left. Add to that small bit of field math the slight push of his right leg, and you begin to describe an arc. From north to north-northwest to northwest. Barring an interruption, Mendez could have walked in a full circle: west to southwest to south.
He veered.
Into the Growler Mountains, a savage little maze. His men followed. They tried to climb over the peaks and fell back. Then tried again and fell back again. Ajo’s lights were blotted out by the Growlers. They walked by stumbling in the pitch black. Spines. Chollas hooked into their flesh. Whip-slash branches cut their faces, stung their eyes.
Fifteen miles northwest.
If Mendez was worried, he didn’t admit it. He told them they had “just a few” miles left to walk. He let them stop. They fell to the ground, squatted, guzzled their water. It was Sunday morning. They had walked about forty miles, most of it in the dark.
Dawn was coming, and with it, a heat wave.
9
Killed by the Light
SUNDAY, MAY 20—6:00 A.M.
Dawn came gradually to the Sonoran Desert. With the light, the heat started to fill the land. The promise of fire awakened alien noises all around them. Cicadas went off like sirens. Quail in the arroyos made their ghostly whoops. Desert grasshoppers burst into the air with ratcheting machinery roars.
We’re lost.
No, we’re not.
Mendez says we’re not lost.
We are not lost. I know exactly where we are. Where are we?
We’re in the first desert.
The first desert?
There are three deserts. We’re in the first.
How far do we have to go?
Not far. It’s in the third desert. Just over those hills.
Those hills were the Growlers, where they had already been wandering. Now, Mendez judged that they had to climb over.
It was hardly cool. Temperatures had hovered in the low eighties all night. And the deep rock cuts where they had wandered had held the day’s heat and radiated all night. By 3:00 A.M. or so—the bug-sign hours—the heat had moved into space and the cool of the stones could set in. The rocks went from oven-hot to feeling about as warm as a human body. This would be the coolest moment for the walkers, though at the time it felt far from chilly. The next few nights would stall at ninety-four or ninety-five, and the days would explode into triple digits.
In the spring, on that Sunday morning, still between Easter and the start of summer, the sunrise was deceptively gentle in its first manifestations. Many mornings in the western desert start like this. An immense stillness, vast as the horizon, yet somehow flat, echoless, leaning against the ear like deafness. It was not as if the sounds of the world had been swallowed by the desert—it was as if the sounds of the world had somehow failed to enter the land.
Dawns offered an astonishment of birds. In the scrub and mesquite hollows, there were more songbirds than could be heard in the Rocky Mountains. Crows, sparrows, mockingbirds. The cactus wren