The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [78]
Heriberto Baldillo’s cactus punctures didn’t hurt. Lorenzo Ortiz Hernandez wore brown pants. Reyno Bartolo wore green socks to match his green pants. Mario Castillo Fernandez had his favorite silver rooster belt buckle. Enrique Landeros’s teeth were broken, but they no longer bothered him. Julian Ambros Malaga still had his colored piece of paper in his pocket that nobody would ever read. Claudio Alejandro Marin had a small mirror in his pocket, and if he could have, he would have checked his hair one last time. Arnulfo Baldilla had a letter in his pants pocket—he had carried it through the entire ordeal, and now it was safely stored away. They’d had to call a booth in Cuautepec and hope somebody who knew Edgar Martinez would answer. Abraham Morales took the long truck drive with no name—he would lie in a drawer for a month, waiting for somebody to recognize him. Efraín Manzano loved a girl named Maria, and her name was inked into the skin on his arm. Lauro rode, forlorn and anonymous, forever lost. No one would ever figure out his true name, and after a futile search for next of kin, he would go into the soil of the potter’s field in Tucson nameless, there to lie, forgotten.
They were close, after what they’d been through. For a brief time, they were all together. It was a silent reunion as they lay in a row, almost touching.
The dead men were loose now. Their feet bobbled when the carts bumped into each other as they were lined up, like they were tapping their feet, or waking up. Most of their eyes were open. Small sounds escaped from a couple of the bodies as gases moved through them. Almost sighs. Rustlings in their bags. If you listened, you could hear them whispering.
We’re going home.
16
Home
The living men had a restless night, full of bad dreams. But their exhaustion overwhelmed them. One by one, they fell asleep. Crisp sheets. Pillows.
Presidente Vicente Fox sent as his representative the poet Juan Hernandez. He had a pointy beard, and he was the first Mexican chief of Migratory Affairs. The men looked up at him as he was photographed talking to them. He told them they were heroes of the republic. They weren’t used to meeting poets.
The guards watched over Mendez with the tenderness of law enforcement agents who have hold of valuable prey. He lay in the bed, staring into the dark. He knew his life was already over. He was only nineteen, almost as young as Reymundo Jr. No prayer, no mental screams to his mother, to Maradona, or to his Celia in Sonoita, could save him now.
He’d gone down like a macho. He didn’t give up anything or anyone. He told them how he’d fallen, how poor old Lauro had fallen. He was helpful in those parts of the story because that’s what he was like—helpful. He wanted somebody to see that he was a good guy. Maybe, you know, he’d done something bad, but he was not bad. He almost died! Trying to save these poor guys! He didn’t want to hurt anybody, but nobody believed him.
When they pushed him about his associates, about El Negro and Chespiro, about Don Moi and El Moreno, he shut his mouth. They couldn’t sweat him, no matter what they did. Hey, they were gringos—no way were they going to do the kind of things to him the Mexican cops and the Federales would have done. Every Mexican gangster knows this—Los Yunaites is the land of human rights, three squares, trials, lawyers. Nobody has pliers or drowning tubs like the Judiciales. Or the Mexican army, with its dank underground cells and its bare electric wires. Gringos could not make Mendez confess. It wasn’t going to happen. He was a gangster, and he was going to show them what he was made of. And he knew that El Negro would know, somehow, everything he said. Sixty-seven Altar Street was easy to find. His Celia would be lying there in her white panties, fanning herself in the heat, when they came for her. They’d take her out into the desert, or to someone’s garage. They’d make sure Mendez knew exactly what had