The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [67]
With their last vestiges of reason, they decided to set a wild-fire. The area they were in had bountiful dried brush, dead grass, creosote, buffel grass, the occasional tumbleweed. They knew enough to remember they were either in, or near, a national park habitat of some sort. They didn’t know what it was, but they knew it meant Feds. They thought the little airplanes that maddeningly flickered in the distance might see the fire and call it in.
A couple of the boys were smokers. What they wouldn’t give for a cigarette now! A cigarette! With this dry mouth? Estan locos. Some could still muster up the energy to bitch and even make small jokes. And the smokers had their little plastic cigarette lighters. Andale! Hope was at hand.
Those who could, started to gather kindling.
Reymundo Jr. was desperately ill. He lay in the dirt, cold to the touch and moaning. Edgar Martinez, from Cuautepec, was sick, too. He stared at nothing. Abraham Morales Hernandez, in his black pants, was cooked half to death. His white tennis shoes were like two small ghosts in the scrub. He was fading in and out.
The strong ones got the brush piled up and clicked the lighters a couple of times.
“Come on, cabrón, light!”
A flicker. A flame. It started to burn.
They laughed.
The fire leaped up and out, and they scuttled back from it as it lit up the hillside. Sparks whirled into the sky, blended with the stars. It crackled. It was hot, the one thing they didn’t need. But they didn’t mind. It was immense and brilliant in the dark! A beacon!
They had saved themselves.
Nobody came.
By dawn, the fires were sputtering, the ash gave up thin ribbons of smoke. They waited. Waiting again. It was all suffering and waiting. Their whole lives.
No airplane veered toward them. No helicopter came. No Migra.
Nahum knew it then. The Guerrero boys knew it. Reymundo Barreda Sr. knew it. They were dead.
They secretly eyed each other, wondering who would be the first to fall. They prayed that they’d live. Or they prayed to die, as long as their brothers, nephews, uncles, sons might live.
TUESDAY, MAY 22.
It was the high spike of the heat wave. The temperatures burned up through the nineties with the sunrise. By midmorning, it was 100 degrees. By noon, 105. By two o’clock, it was 108 degrees.
They walked.
Nahum Landa Ortiz: “I didn’t watch the first ones die. Two died apart from us. They were behind us and I didn’t see them die.”
He says the guides took five men with them when they left. But they didn’t. The group was fracturing, and small cells were moving into the landscape on their own. Francisco Morales says, “We started throwing things away. We were going to die. We threw away the things in our pockets in despair.”
Edgar Martinez, who didn’t have a phone at home, who had to be reached if anyone called through the phone booth in Cuautepec, a village with the name “Hill of the Eagle,” middle name Adrian, nephew of José Isidro Colorado, in love with Claudia Reyes, son of Eugenio, stumbled. He righted himself and put out a hand and fell into a bush. He got to his knees, grimaced as if smiling. Perhaps he was ashamed to be falling. He was sixteen years old.
He reached a point registered on GPS coordinates as N. 32.21.85/W. 113.18.93.
He fell again. He closed his eyes. He didn’t rise. He lay there for the length of the next day, lost in a delirium no one can even imagine, burning and burning.
Not a mile from Edgar, Abraham Morales tripped and hit the ground. He crawled, rolled on his side, kicked. His eyes were red. He was at N. 32.21.85/W. 113.18.94.
Nobody seemed to know him, for when they finally came and collected his body, he would lie neither claimed nor identified for a month, alone on his icy drawer.
Francisco Morales: “I do not know who was dying or how many because I too was dying.”
José de Jesús Rodriguez: “That day, at three in the afternoon, I was dead. What time is it right now—it is four o’clock. Yes, I died. I was dead from three o’clock