The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [80]
The plane banked sharply, and Vargas felt the vertigo of watching the land rush at her through the windshield. And then they were on the ground. The engines were roaring as the plane braked, and they rolled ahead, turned, started to drive to the terminals. There, she saw the crowds.
Veracruz had already created a public relations mega-event out of the return of their martyred heroes.
The governor himself stood prominently before the seething public. Soldiers and cops held them back. Reporters—all levels of reporter—struggled to get to the head of the line. Famous television talking heads from Mexico City elbowed local newspaper photographers aside. Children held banners, flags. Bands played. Very photogenic.
Fourteen hearses and ambulances stood portentously in a long row, ready to take the heroes to their eternal rest.
When Rita Vargas stepped down the ladder, Governor Alemán began his speech.
“These were men pursuing a dream,” he cried.
Vargas tried to face the crowd, but the people surged in a kind of bloodlust or panic, and the metal barriers that the government had set up to separate them from the dead collapsed. It was a scene out of a deadly rock concert disaster—The Who Play Veracruz—and Vargas was knocked down and crushed beneath the weight of the shoving humans. Police and soldiers beat and shoved their way through the tangle of arms and necks to pry her loose from certain death. They dragged her out onto the tarmac, where she caught her breath and stood up, tried to gather herself and straighten her clothes. The governor was already making pronouncements. Commentators were already jabbering: America was to blame! The governor was sad, yet honored, to welcome back the sons of the state.
Vargas watched as each coffin was carried from the plane to great tumult. One by one, they were laid inside the waiting hearses. The doors slammed, and the cars peeled away and sped off, in a big hurry, into the night.
She asked to see the families. The Mexicans led her into a passenger lounge inside the main building. The government had arranged for a photogenic young woman to step forward for the cameras. Vargas was bemused. The grieving families were kept back while the young woman recited a prepared document.
Every moment of the arrival had been stage managed.
Tired, disgusted, Vargas withdrew to a hotel. But she couldn’t sleep. She wandered the room, lay on the bed, paced. Finally, she gave up and called for a taxi. She found a last-minute flight back to the United States.
Later, she calculated that the dead men’s flight alone had cost over sixty-eight thousand dollars.
“What if,” she asked, “somebody had simply invested that amount in their villages to begin with?”
The survivors began their ping-pong journey through the system. Mendez, mute and surly in the eyes of the cops, went to jail in Phoenix. He was parked in a six-by-nine cell. Hoots and curses, clangs and stench, industrial paint, steel, cement, slippers, jail suits, gang-bangers, bad food, noise, lightbulbs in iron cages. You crapped near your bunk and slept in your own smell. He watched black men, exotic creatures. Listened to the babbling of Inglés. Radios.
Gerald Williams, his defender, came to see him and started trying to construct a defense. Williams, a veteran of the public defender system, was a dapper African American. This no doubt was of great interest to Mendez.
But Mendez was still playing it all close to the vest. When the consular agents of the Mexican government arrived to interview him, he was unwilling to give them information. He stonewalled their questions. His only enthusiasm was when he asked them to contact his mother in Guadalajara.
His reticence did not endear him to the Mexicans—they did not find his mother for him.
Williams tried to construct a case. Small bits of the story came out. Celia, the bad night at Bluebird Pass, extremely reluctant acknowledgments that there was a guy named Negro, but everybody knew that. Still, Williams was eager for anything, any handle to get a