The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [77]
The dead bodies, dense and dark, were zipped into bags and delivered to the loading docks. They were shipped to Tucson because in Tucson, the medical examiners had their labs. Rita Vargas joined them. Fourteen dead men on their long drive through the desert. They took up a lot of room, and they weighed a lot. They could be set on vertical racks like big loaves of bread, since they were dead. Still, it took more than one vehicle to move them.
What a lot of bother. This kind of fuss didn’t sit well with working men from Veracruz. They didn’t like handouts from anybody, and they would have walked back to Tucson and the border if they could have. This flashing of lights, slamming of doors, driving in convoys—it was unseemly.
The vehicles were cool, especially after their terrible days in the sun. The ride was smooth, speedy. The procession of vehicles sped out of Yuma and headed east, out through the mountains and down into the Mohawk Valley. They passed under the silent Wellton Station, where the battered trucks and flat-tire SUVs were still limping in. They flew past the Mohawk rest area, where other walkers no doubt observed their passing from the shadows without knowing who they were. Distant Migra helicopters and small planes flew search patterns, looking like small black birds. The spot where Lauro died and Mendez fell was not five miles from the fourteen as they floated over the road.
It was relaxed. They got to lie on their backs the whole way. No sun hit them. The insides of the bags were fairly pleasant, since there were no major bloody wounds to make them slick or sticky. The smell was already getting nasty, but the heavy rubber kept it from escaping and being humiliating. Mexicans can’t bear to be embarrassed by such things as bad smells coming from their bodies. These men had been impeccable in their grooming, as humble men from the interior almost always prove to be.
They went through the small barrier of the ABC mountains, and they skirted the northern edge of the bombing range. Thirty-five miles away, the Devil’s Highway baked and coughed up its dust devils. They went along I-8 as if they were in a dream, one of those strange flying dreams, silent and cold. They skirted the north end of the Granites, where they had died. And they cut down onto I-10, their original destination, north of the Papago lands, north of Ajo, cutting across the top of the Growlers. The vehicles made good time on the freeway. The entire trip that had killed them was a matter of a couple of hours now.
The cost of using the vehicles, the drivers, the crews, the gas, was more than they could have earned in a month. But there was no worry now, no thought. Just rest. Down, past Picacho Peak, past Rooster Cogburn’s ostrich farm, past the half-hidden CIA jetport and the ruins of a big development in the sand. Sewage treatment ponds cast up brown shit-fountains as if they were saluting them. Traffic parted. Tucson glittered and glimmered. Weird urban statues filled the town: Pancho Villa, a half-buried satellite dish with bronze vultures on it, a giant Gila monster in a traffic island. Out in the far end of town, the eerie airplane graveyard, where hundreds of bombers and jet fighters, helicopters and transports, waited forever on the gravel, home of ghosts and black widows, moaning in the desert wind. Down into town, down the ramp into the coroner’s building, down the cement walkways into the cold rooms.
Reymundo Sr. would likely have preferred to have been in the same bag as his boy, but they were kept apart. Reymundo Jr. was alone, lost and small inside the bag, almost swimming in all that black rubber space, sliding around as they drove,