The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [74]
The overwhelming flow of panicky radio calls had been picked up by scanners all over the southland. The scanners started to attract reporters. TV crews sped to Yuma from central Arizona and California, newspaper stringers and borderland beat reporters hustled to the medical center. It was lights and mikes, notebooks and flashbulbs. Television vans raised their satellite dishes. Press credentials flashed in the sun. The hustle and jiggle overtook the parking lot of the medical clinic. Signcutters suddenly became perimeter security experts.
“We’re famous,” somebody said.
Gringos giving orders—one of the boys thought this was the funniest thing he’d ever seen in his damned life. His arms were full of bloody cactus punctures, and his balding head was burned bright red. But Jesus Christ! He was alive! It was so funny, he couldn’t stop giggling. And these cops! These ridiculous cops strutting around. He could have wet himself, they were making him laugh so much. He wiped and wiped the blood that started seeping out of his wounds the more he drank. Pinches gringos! “We’re all fucking dead!” he told the cops. “We all died!” He burst out laughing. Showed them the blood. “Death!” It was the best laugh he’d ever had.
The boys were coming in: Rafael Temich, Nahum Landa. They were hydrated and made comfortable. The helicopter racket came through the walls. They stared dully as IV needles were stuck in their veins. As they drank, they started to be able to urinate again, and women held strange little pitchers to the ends of their penises and collected the dark fluid and whisked it away to peer at it in stark rooms. The men were still so stunned by the walk that they weren’t able to completely process this unexpected North American development: white women clutching their privates.
Cops stared at them, tried to intimidate them with badges and big chests. Officers who spoke Spanish, some better than others, glared down at them. They set up video cameras on tripods and held clipboards. They had big guns on their belts. Mustaches. Pens. It was all dreamy and stupid. Cops didn’t scare anybody. Some of the survivors resented the questions. Some of them were still insane from the walk. Some, like Nahum, went opaque and shifty, not sure what they should say. How much could they share? Any reasonably tough guy from Mexico knew that you were nebulous with cops, and you didn’t rat out your associates. Besides, who were these big men? More Migra? Would they deport everybody? Nahum kept his eyes hooded and answered their questions with quiet evasion, with maddeningly impressionistic answers.
“It was the guy with the forelock,” he said. “The rooster hair. He left us.”
Some of the boys in beds nearby glanced at each other. Everybody was listening to everybody else. Nahum set the course for some of the younger guys: he wasn’t going to crack. They wouldn’t crack, either. But he sure as hell was going to finger Mendez. Nobody was going to stand up for that asshole. They wanted to help. They wanted to know who was alive. And they were afraid to know who had died. Everything in their lives was chaos and fear. They had only been in the norte for less than two weeks. They still didn’t know where they were, didn’t know what “Yuma” was—Mexican or American—didn’t know if they were going to jail or being deported or if El Negro and Chespiro would hunt down their wives and mothers and kill them.
The beds were comfortable, though. The AC was cool. The Jell-O was tasty. If only the cops would go away and let them get some sleep, things would be a lot better.
But the cops weren’t going away.
“Tell us about the rooster guy.”
They called him Mendez.
“Did the rooster guy threaten you?”
No.
“Were there any sexual improprieties, any violent acts?”
Sex! No.
“What’s the name of the guy with the red