The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [79]
There was nothing. Nothing. It was the bleakest night of his life, emptier even than the nights lost in the desert. At least out there, he could keep walking. But if he got up now, if his handcuffs would allow him to rise, the cops would shoot him down like a dog.
There was no angel for Jesús Lopez Ramos.
The raised bars of his hospital bed looked like the bars of a jail cell.
The Calexico consulate was authorized to pay for the analysis of each corpse. After the medical examiner had determined that they had, in fact, died of exposure and hyperthermia, after they’d confirmed there were no bullet wounds, knife wounds, signs of blunt trauma, sexual assault, the fourteen men were given back to her care. She had them hauled to the funeral home, where they received nominal prep work. The cost for each man was over a thousand dollars. Plus the cost of the coffins and the shipping trays. The death details had cost about twenty-five thousand dollars. And they still had to go home.
Vargas arranged for a jetliner to collect them. Aero Mexico rented the governor of Veracruz a 727 cargo jet, and it made a special dead-head flight to Tucson. Vargas stayed in a local hotel on her own credit card. In the morning, they collected the dead in another small flotilla of vehicles and quietly took them to the airfield.
It was May 31—a mere week since the men were collected by the cutters. Less than two weeks since they had left home with Don Moi. The procession of hearses cut through Tucson, and people saw them off—an outpouring of public grief that startled everyone there. Church leaders and their flocks, Chicanos, Mexican families, college students, Humane Borders activists and Derechos Humanos warriors, reporters, Anglos, cops, regular citizens—they stood in the heat and watched the twelve go by. Two remained behind, unidentified.
The newspapers reported a “lone bicyclist … near Reid Park” standing with his helmet in his hand, head bowed.
A Mexican man attending the procession with his family said, “We just feel for them, and we want to show them that they are not alone.”
Raquel Rubio Goldsmith, a tireless crusader for border reforms and more humane treatment of the undocumented: “There should be no such thing as an illegal person on this planet.”
The boys had never been in a parade.
Each coffin was hauled aboard the plane and secured. They formed a double row in the hold. Vargas was seated in the cockpit of the jet, on the jump seat. Told to keep quiet when they were taking off and landing, but that she could chat with the crew once they were in flight. She was advised to stay out of the cargo bay.
The flight took off without incident, and vectored east, then arced south, cutting over the mountains south of Tucson, crossing the border east of Nogales, closer to the Texas border. The wild landscape of northern Mexico fell away below them like a fractured plate of granite. Blue canyons and red deserts. Pines on the Sonoran and Chihuahuan peaks like black dots.
The dead were taking their first airplane trip. For a short time, they followed their old road trip in reverse, cutting down into the heart of Mexico. The plane skirted Mexico City and its great smoky plateau to the east. By the time they got far south, the sun was setting.
Rita Vargas caught her breath—the dark was spilling out of the mountains as the sun vanished in the west. The deep purple/blue shadows spread out on the water of the Caribe. The ocean was shadowy, yet at the same time, glowing. The massif of the Veracruz Mountains formed a wall that burned electric green on one side, and velvety black on the other. And below, the lights of the cities scattered and burned, white, yellow, white, looking like gems. Stars.
She still recalls it as one of the most beautiful sights she’d ever witnessed, as if the coast of Veracruz were somehow welcoming its sons home. It would have astounded the dead if they could have looked out the windows. Why would they ever have left such a beautiful home for the dry bones and spikes of the desert? If they could have seen