The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [68]
Morales adds: “We were walking like robots.”
They could not bury their dead. There is some evidence they didn’t know who was dead, since they were all falling and fainting, and those who were awake didn’t always know what they were seeing.
They walked three, perhaps four miles farther. Men collapsed. It looked like more deaths were inevitable. Five of them decided to go ahead and see what they could find. Perhaps they’d find Mendez. Or the way. Anything.
“Wait for us,” they said, but some of the men were already unconscious, and nobody really said anything to them.
Wait. Hell, they’d already waited.
“When we got sick,” José Bautista says, “there was no shade. So I crawled up to hide in the rocks. One of the boys went crazy and started jumping up and down. He started screaming, ‘Mama! Mama! I don’t want to die!’ He ran up to a big cactus and started smashing his face against it. I don’t know what his name was.”
Nahum and his companions were hiding in the trees.
A voice carried on the still air, crying, “Mother, save me!”
Mario González Manzano and his brother Isidro, far ahead on their attempt to find rescue, watched their brother walk away, in search of escape.
“Somebody said the freeway was right there, right over the hills,” he said. “They lied.”
Isidro and Mario were in luck: they found some prickly pears—tuna in Spanish. “We ate the tunas to stay alive,” Mario says.
The liquid in the cactus fruits spared him. He would only see dead bodies when he got to a Border Patrol truck and saw them stacked inside.
The sign of the dead could be ghastly and haunting. One of the men tore off his shirt and tried to bury himself. The hither thither he left all around him showed violent kicking and arm flailing, as if he were swimming. He managed to get the top half of his torso buried in the ground, where he either smothered or passed out. The relentless heat baked him, literally cooking him in the ground. His face bloated and came loose from the bones, tender as barbecued pork.
Reymundo Jr. collapsed in his father’s arms. Reymundo Sr. held him as he died. Shook him, cried over him. He called for help, but the only thing that might have helped his son was water.
When Reymundo died and slid from his father’s arms, his father lurched away into the desert, away from the trees, crying out in despair. Some of the men said he took the American money he had saved for their trip and tore it into small bits.
Julian Ambros Malaga was also said to have torn up his money. His brother-in-law, Rafael Temich, after being prodded by Julian to walk and save himself, was helpless to save him. “That’s when he took out his money and started tearing it apart. And he took off alone and I also was demented. I was demented. I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t carry him. Then he threw himself into the sunlight, and that’s where he stayed.”
Old Reymundo also threw himself into the sunlight. He was shouting and crying and throwing money into the air, and he walked until he fell, trying to swim in the dirt as if he’d fallen into a cool stream.
Nobody knows the name of the man who took off all his clothes. It was madness, surely. He removed his slacks, folded them, and put them on the ground. Then he took off his underwear, laid it neatly on the pants. He removed his shirt and undershirt and squared them away with the pants. As if he didn’t want to leave a mess. His shoes had the socks tucked in them. They were placed on the clothes to keep them from blowing away.
He lay on his back and stared into the sun until he died.
Later, Kenny Smith, from Wellton Station, said, “This poor guy just crossed his ankles and went to sleep.”
Nahum Landa’s testimony reads like modern poetry:
We were in the trees, trying to hide from the sun.
And they would yell to me, there’s a guy dead over here. And there’s a guy dead over here.
There must have been thirty of us out there, and twenty of us died.
By Monday we were all dead.
I was hiding under that tree.
Out there, I saw