The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [57]
One of the men later said, “We’d climb a mountain, and there would be another mountain on top of it.”
Another: “They told us to keep going forward, but where were we going to go?”
Mendez was savvy enough to know what the walkers—and perhaps his Coyote partners—did not: if the group didn’t get back to Ajo, they would die. His frustration was immense, and it was terrifying. Like hundreds of doomed wanderers before him, he had the tragic understanding that some form of deliverance was just beyond his reach.
He didn’t want to die, and a large part of his later defense focused on his efforts to lead the group to safety. His accusers would use the same exact testimony to prove he attempted to kill all of them. It is commonly believed by the Border Patrol that he was trying to save himself. The other men just followed.
They walked about three miles in a straight line, until the land and Mendez’s trend toward the left veered them west again. Each rest stop wearied them further as the sun and the soil burned them from above and below. Santos, the chubby Coyote, was far behind Mendez, pushing the stragglers.
By midmorning, they were getting giddy with exhaustion. Even Mendez seems to have gotten confused. His trail wandered deeper west until it suddenly jerked eastward again. He next led them on a zigzag that took them directly northeast for two miles. He clearly thought a canyon ahead would dump them out in the flat land, and he’d be in sight of the familiar peaks beyond the town.
The group, by this point, had no real integrity as a unit. They were tired, thirsty, confused, afraid. They spread out in a lazy scraggly line, some of them staggering and wandering so far behind they didn’t even see their comrades. If not for the gulleys where they walked, the land funneling them into the Coyotes’ tracks, they might have drifted away into the wasteland and died that day. But they trudged on, sinking deeper into their own miseries as they penetrated deeper into the Growler range. Those who rested, ironically enough, had it harder than those who walked without stopping. It took the resting walkers longer to cover the same distance. Longer struggle in the sun, exhausting rushes to catch up.
José Antonio Bautista: “Wherever my uncle Nahum Landa was going, that’s where I was going. We were going there, to the same place. I didn’t know where I was going.”
Then Mendez entered the gap.
He might have thought he’d gotten to Charlie Bell Pass, which would have spilled him through the Growlers, south of Childs Mountain. He could have headed dead east from Charlie Bell and walked into downtown Ajo and ordered a beer. He had already missed Bluebird Pass. And he had failed to enter a small opening called Temporal Pass. Temporal and Charlie Bell were his last chances to cut back to safety.
But this gap would prove, again, to be a dead end, a nameless indentation in the back range of the Growlers that looked for all intents and purposes like the right pass—a nameless arroyo spilled west out of the canyon, and to the east, Chico Shunie Arroyo had roots in the other side of the high ridge. He was only about five miles off.
Not knowing this, Mendez led the group east, into the new canyon, and they started to hurry a bit, sure that he had finally broken through. Water. Beer. Shade. A ride.