The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [75]
Don’t know his name. Mendez.
“Is the guy here? The rooster boy?”
I don’t know. Is he here? I think he’s over there.
And they all looked down the way. Mendez. Oh yes, they said. He’s here. He’s down at the end of the ward. In that bed. That’s the guy with the hair.
And the sheriffs, smelling their prey, gradually made their way to him, recording each survivor as they went, building their case as they closed the distance between them and him. Every few minutes of tape brought Mendez closer to a life in prison.
Rita Vargas arrived in Yuma and started caring for the men. She observed the police interrogations, making sure the survivors knew their rights. She hounded the Mexican pols on her cell phone, called Tucson and told them to get ready for bodies—many bodies. She shook Migra hands and Marine pilots’ hands. She comforted brothers and nephews and godsons. If she could have teleported from room to room, hall to hall, officer to officer, and corpse to corpse, life would have been simpler.
The boys in the beds were all under arrest, so their medical bills were at least no longer in play. The Border Patrol posted a guard on each room, and the guards stood watch the entire time. There wasn’t much to be done for the walkers, once the questions had been asked and the reporters banned and the governments of Veracruz and Hidalgo notified. These boys were going to be pumped full of water and antibiotics and saline solution, and then they were going to Phoenix, to some holding cells, somewhere, but they were not going back to Mexico. Not yet. They might get the ol’ Migra bus ride to Nogales or Sonoita, kicked off at Lukeville crossing with a stern finger-wag, but not yet. No, we had something cooking here. We had Rooster Boy, and he’d killed—well, nobody knew yet how many he’d killed. But the dude was clearly some kind of Coyote Charlie Manson. He was a monster. He was the ur-Coyote shitheel we’d been hunting for thirty years, the killer of walkers, the smuggler punk. And he’d killed his last freaking load of tonks, that was for goddamned sure, and we had rooms full of wits! We had bed after bed full of witnesses for the prosecution. This was Arizona, man. He wasn’t going to get off with a slap on the wrist in Arizona! Lil’ Rooster Boy was going to be deep fried and served up. One of the Yuma sector cutters said, “He shoulda stayed home.”
So the tonks were going to lie there nice and cool, eating macaroni and Hamburger Helper, sipping OJ and slurping pudding. Then they were going to get in nice big BP trucks and sing their songs. The survivors were suddenly paid professional narrators. At the beginning of their federal jobs, they were paid in room and board. They got cheap shoes and pants. T-shirts. As they sang, they learned they could get job advancement. Even a substantial raise. Like all good bards, they embellished and expanded their narratives. As long as they told their stories, they stayed. As long as they stayed, they had a chance to stay longer. Soon, they would surely earn money.
It was the new millennium’s edition of the American Dream.
Paul K. Charlton, the United States attorney for the District of Arizona, was going to take Mendez down. In documents after document in the matter of United States of America v. Jesús Lopez Ramos, he righteously flayed Rooster Boy.
“First, the very attempt by the defendant to guide a group of twenty or more individuals through a remote area of desert, on foot, at a time when temperatures were greater than 100 degrees, is, in and of itself, a reckless act. The defendant had been apprehended on seven prior occasions in this area with groups of people. ( … ) Six of those apprehensions occurred during ‘summer’ months, so the defendant was familiar with the area and aware of the potential for soaring temperatures. The defendant’s past apprehensions at various locations in this particular area support a finding that he knew of the vastness of this desert area. On the other hand, the victims knew only what the defendant and his co-conspirators told them: that the walk would