The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [58]
Mendez stood and stared at the wall of burning rock between him and the world.
Nobody looked at the occasional buzzard that eyed them with its infernal optimism.
Some of the boys were already running out of water. Hilario had been walking with none at all, begging sips off the others since he lost his gallon jug at Bluebird Pass. His friends in the Guerrero contingent, veterans of the last aborted journey, had thought to bring extra, and they’d hung on to every drop they could. Hilario got some of their water, but what about the rest of the men? Most of the Guerrero boys were blood relatives: they would have to care for each other. They already looked upon their walking companions and saw dead men. But did they have a duty to keep all of Veracruz alive?
The water in the plastic bottles Mendez carried was hot and drinking it was like drinking nothing at all—it was the same temperature as the furnace of burning air around him. He refused to give any of them a drink. If he went down, he insisted, they all went down. They thought he was selfish and cruel. He didn’t have time for their opinions. He stared at the mountains some more. Someone was crying.
He sank to the ground—it was hot enough to hurt.
“Let’s rest here,” he said.
They scattered, looking for shade of any kind. They fell among the rocks and creosote bushes. They crawled under the sketchy shadows under dry mesquites, and they moved around on the hot griddle of the earth as the rolling sun stole their shade every few minutes.
It was noon.
Mendez checked his watch.
He said, “Let’s rest till nightfall.”
No one knows if Santos or Lauro said anything.
“It’s just a few more miles,” Mendez told them, but they already understood that he was wrong.
SUNDAY, MAY 20—NIGHT. NINETY-FOUR DEGREES.
When the hell was it going to cool off?
They had decided to wait till midnight. But the hours had dragged. The dark had remained as hot as the day. Mendez gave up the wait and ordered them to their feet. They were wasting time.
Inexplicably, he made another sudden change, as much of a mystery as the wrong turn he took at Bluebird. He made a forty-five-degree turn to the left (as always, to the left) and marched straight southwest, in the opposite direction from his last march. On the Border Patrol maps, his path forms a perfect inverted V. This detour had cost them an extra four to five miles of walking.
Perhaps Mendez was thinking of breaking out of this detour and heading through Temporal Pass. By the time he’d marched for an hour or so, however, the arroyos and gullies dulled his mind. It was all walls. There was no break. He never turned back north.
His sign tells the story of the misfires inside his brain.
They followed the land, now tired enough to only want to flow downhill; nobody was about to climb anything after their failed mountaineering attempts. Desperation was growing. Reymundo and Reymundo Jr. ran out of water. Reymundo Jr.’s black pants had become a torture device, cooking his legs when he was exposed to the light. Father and son dropped their bottles on the trail.
Santos ran out of water. He was out of shape, gasping, cursing under his breath, more frightened than Lauro or Mendez. He wanted a drink. The Guerrero boys didn’t have enough to spare.
The group was like a machine breaking down, starting to shake itself apart.
Lorenzo Ortiz Hernandez, a friend of Nahum Landa’s, was sick already. He wanted nothing more than to lie down, but he forced himself ahead in the hope of a resting place. Julian Malaga was twenty-four, in good shape, but he was already slipping. His brother-in-law, Rafael Temich, urged him on. They comforted themselves with thoughts of Chamizal, in the Municipio de Huellapan, home—green leaves, clouds, fog, rain. Women. Rivers. Below them, the sea. They were heading toward the great Growler Wash, a dry watercourse that would mock them with its sandy bed. The only possible sources of water in this direction were all dry—Spains Well, White Well, Monreal Well.