The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [61]
And here came Nahum Landa Ortiz. The Ortiz boys and the Hernandez boys and some of the other boys were related in the ten thousand ways men who come from small mountain villages are related. Nahum kept going. He never stopped going.
José Antonio Bautista, Nahum’s nephew, was furious. He hated Mendez for the trouble they were in. Later, he would say, “With enchantments and deceptions, they led us.”
Edgar Adrian Martinez was young, sixteen. He was from Cuautepec, and his girlfriend was named Claudia Reyes. He was walking for her as much for anybody else. His last words to Claudia had been, “I’ll work five years and come home and marry you.” His father said, “He said … ‘I just have to get there. I just have to get there.’ ”
Edgar walked with his uncle, José Isidro Colorado. His godfather, Victor Flores Badillo, walked beside them. As long as they were together, they were sure they could survive the ordeal. They reminded Edgar to think of Claudia.
Edgar had worked with Reymundo at the Coke plant. Perhaps it was Reymundo who put the idea of the walk in his head. Edgar had been paid eight dollars a day to wash and stack returned bottles. When he could augment this salary with picking coffee beans, he made four dollars a day on his days off.
He told his uncle, “I’m going to build Claudia a house.”
Mario Castillo was a twenty-five-year-old coffee and citrus plantation worker. It was a reasonable thing to imagine a job in Florida, picking more oranges. He was one of the few who had been in the United States illegally in the past. He had lived and worked in Galena, Illinois, for an eight-month stretch. But the pinche INS and the cabrones of the Migra found him out and shipped him home. Home! There was nothing at home.
His wife, Irma Vazquez Landa, was related to Nahum. She waited in Veracruz with two children. They were five and six. Mario dreamed of building them a house and breaking away somewhat from his parents’ help. If he could get a small house built, then he hoped to open a tiny bodega, a store where people could buy some of those Cokes the other boys bottled. Some cigarettes, lottery tickets, candy, stamps. Maybe a couple of those scary crime magazines.
Irma could make tortas for the lunch crowds.
He borrowed nineteen hundred dollars for the walk.
Claudio Marin and Heriberto Tapia and Javier Santillan walked with Lauro. Javier was falling behind. The heat was melting his brain. He was slowly going crazy, babbling weird things. They didn’t think he knew where he was or what they were doing.
Rafael Temich González was a quiet twenty-eight-year-old corn farmer from Apixtla. He looked severe, almost Aztec or Maya in his features. But he had an easy smile and was quick to laugh. He had good manners, and he talked with his hands: when asked a question he didn’t know the answer to, he’d put his hand before his mouth, palm out, and shrug, “I don’t know.”
Rafael lived in a thatch-roofed home on a dirt road. You had to be careful in these grass and palm frond houses—scorpions and killer banana spiders could fall out of the fronds. Huge tropical roaches and beetles fell on you in your sleep like warm rain in some of the infested homes. Small lizards—cachorras—ran the walls, licking up the mosquitoes and slower bugs.
In this hut, Rafael took care of an extended family. Along with his wife and year-old daughter, he supported his mother, two sisters, and their four daughters. All of them slept together in the house.
He had gone on ahead of the rest of them, trying to get to relatives in the Carolinas. He took a bus to Mexico City, and another bus to Altar. There, he called his brother in North Carolina, then tried to get a Coyote. “But nobody wanted to take us. So we went on to Sonoita.” His brother recommended El Negro, and El Negro’s safe