The Devil's Highway: A True Story

by Luis Alberto Urrea

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “The rabbit.”

  “The tattoo?”

  “Yes, the tattoo. What does the rabbit tattoo signify?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Gang sign?”

  “No.”

  “Is it some kind of Coyote code?”

  “It’s a rabbit. I like rabbits.”

  If the Migra had realized who they had in the holding pen, the Yuma 14 might be alive today. But somehow, Mendez wasn’t recognized. They were looking for Jesús Lopez Ramos from San Luis, not some Rabbit Mendez of Sonoita.

  Another disturbing element of this bust was the water tank itself. Once it had been discovered by the Border Patrol, it was compromised. Forever after, the lifesaving water stop would represent a game of roulette.

  Among these arrested walkers were three brothers from the state of Guerrero. Mario González Manzano, Efraín González Manzano and Isidro González Manzano were from a small village near Chilpancingo called Villagrande. Their family home did not have telephone service. They had gone to the Coyote’s men in Guerrero, south of Mexico City, and sought passage to the north. There wasn’t enough money in the family to take care of one brother, much less all three, and the elders, and the young ones.

  The Coyotes put them on a bus for Tijuana, where they were going to cross into San Diego. They were repeatedly foiled by Operation Gatekeeper. Pinche Migra! An associate had called Chespiro Cercas on the cell phone and made a case for them. They were good boys, hard workers. They deserved another shot at the border. Just to prove they were good boys, they’d all taken menial jobs in Baja California. They weren’t wasting a minute without earning something.

  Brothers were good, a working unit that the Cercas gang could control. Each brother could be threatened or hurt if need be. But if they worked well together, they’d be earning big. If they got into a yearly trip, they’d owe Chespiro money forever.

  Chespiro ordered that they be shipped to San Luis, and then—after that didn’t work out—they mounted the famous bus to Sonoita and tried again.

  Bus after bus after bus: they must have thought el Norte was nothing but bus lines.

  The brothers had been living in crap motel rooms for weeks, and now they’d been caught. They were angry. Enough was enough—they demanded yet another shot at it, and soon. El Negro, in an uncharacteristic spasm of humanitarianism, offered them the next walk—May 19—for their trouble.

  “Orale,” the brothers said.

  They shook hands.

  Back at the safe house, Nelly’s rooms were getting full. El Negro was looking to sign up thirty walkers for the trip. Thirty was some sort of magic limit to the Coyotes—few groups ever grew to that limit. There were practical reasons for this. Large groups were harder to control, and they were very hard to hide. The González brothers nodded and muttered hello and crammed themselves into the already stifling rooms of Nelly’s house of ghosts.

  Down in Veracruz, Don Moi and his boys were on their way.

  The walkers had left their towns in pickup trucks, or small regional buses.

  They gathered at the bus terminal and boarded the bus Don Moi had rented for them. A charter. They felt like millionaires.

  El Norte. It was a trip of over two thousand miles. The bus was long and fairly modern, a long-haul cruise liner with two toilets in the back, tandem drivers who traded off sleep shifts as they drove. These highway behemoths were known as “doce ruedas” because they were powered by twelve-wheel drives. The bodies of the big cruisers were split-level, with a set of steps behind the driver leading into the interior, a tinted sunroof above the seats. Behind the driver, there was a bench seat, where chatty passengers could sit sideways and talk as they stared out the vast front windshield. Reymundo Jr. spent time there, watching the landscape roll by.

  Poor people carried their own food on buses. Families boarded the bus with white paper packages of tortillas, small pots of beans, slabs of yellow cheese, candied yams and cactus—camotes and bisnagas. They made tortas of bolillo rolls and ham and chiles. These meals were often better than the food available in the roadside taco stands and in the dusty bus terminals along the way. Several of the Moi crew carried lunch bundles.

  Their few possessions were tucked overhead in the racks above their seats. They toyed with the reading lights and the recliner buttons. The toilets in the back were some of the first flushers some of them had used. Laughter. Some small prayers, muttered in discreet whispers, the sign of the cross ending in kissed crossed fingers. Journey mercies. Let us arrive safely. We need to get to the border. Help us get into the desert. Make us strong. It was more comfortable than the chairs in their homes, but the air conditioning was too cold.

  All roads lead to Tenochtitlán. Mexico City is the hub. The big roads converge here and disperse in all directions.

  The boys gawked as they approached the great city. Few of them had ever seen anything like this. The occult volcano, El Popo, rose in snowy splendor as the bus came down through pine-covered slopes that could have been in Colorado. The filthy high tide of pollution met the road in the mountains, and the orange mist moved among dying trees like fog. As they dropped into the overpopulated valley, El Popo was gradually erased from sight. The sky turned gold, and the light that hit the streets was brown. Endless grids of buildings spilled into the distance. Thousands of old green VWs, Mexico City’s taxis, jostled for position. Traffic jammed tight at intersections. They watched for the fabled UFOs of the city—los OVNIS—but it was too hazy to see the sky. They saw a great white roller coaster, known in Spanish as a Russian Mountain, beside the highway.

  And into the bus terminal and the wait for the drive north. A cigarette. A Coke. A candy bar. A quick piss in the stinking troughs in the big rest rooms.

  Buses headed north can catch Highway 57, through San Luis Potosí, or 15, that cuts across country to Guadalajara. Sooner or later, they get on 45, and this heads northwest to Ciudad Juárez. In the old days, before the Migra closed it down, El Paso/Juárez was a target destination. Now, they had to move west.

  They saw many wonders as they traveled north. In some of their ancient beliefs, north was the direction of death. North was the home of winter, and the underworld could be found there. They went from jungle to rain forest to pine forest, from pines to plains, and from plains to desert and volcanos.

  They gawked at the worms of snow on the highest peaks. They stared at the pine trees, the roadside deer. The big cities were no more amazing than the dry lands they entered, the maguey and burros of the heartland, the cacti and plains of the north. The ones who knew geography told the others where they were—the states with the strange names: Zacatecas, Chihuahua. They passed through a hundred towns, a scattering of cities. They crossed little rivers, watched a thousand beaten cafés and gas stations whip by, burned out hulks of ancient car wrecks, white crosses erected along the highway where their ancestral travelers had perished. The whole way was a ghost road, haunted by tattered spirits left on the thirsty ground: drivers thrown out windows, revolutionaries hung from cottonwoods or shot before walls, murdered women tossed in the scrub. Into the Sierra Madre Occidental, the opposite side of their continent.

  It was a dream of speed for men who had not sped before. An avalanche of details and bafflements: army patrols in green trucks, dead donkeys bloated to the point of exploding beside the road, armadillos, empty broken white buildings, crippled children writhing in their chairs and taking the afternoon sun in small dust-smoked town squares. Walls whitewashed and painted blue, red, peach, green. A black freight train struggling toward Durango, seemingly covered in old oil, heavy as a mountain as it scraped down the rails.

  Mexican towns full of Mexicans, so like them, yet so different from Veracruz.

  Aguascalientes, but they saw no “hot water” anywhere. Victor Rosales, but who was he? Why did they name a town after him? Fresnillo, or the Little Ash Tree, whipped by, but they saw no f
resnos beside the road. Or were they those distant trees?

  Oye, buey, es ese un fresno?

  Quién sabe.

  Allí, cabrón. Ese árbol.

  Cómo chingas, buey. No jodes.

  No mames.

  Ya pues, pendejo! No me vengas con pendejadas.

  Fresnillos. Bésame el culillo.

  Nahum looked out the window, silent. His seat companions shook their heads and went back to sleep. Don Moi didn’t like all the hilarity—he preferred to remain invisible. He never knew when the Mexican immigration police were cooperating with the gringos. He dreaded Federales and dark cells where the boot and the electric wire hooked to the testicles were the rule. Better to keep quiet and get the job done. High spirits were a bad precedent. This wasn’t a vacation.

  They slept sitting up. Brothers leaned against brothers. The boy slept tucked against his father, his gray comic books in his lap. Loners leaned against the windows, pulled their billed caps over their eyes, and tried to nap, keeping their shoulder away from their snoring neighbors. The nude women in the crumpled magazine splayed themselves and made promises no one could keep. In the Alarma! crime tabloid, pictures of dead illegals didn’t even make the front cover, unless they’d been dismembered by a train. They were inside, among the suicides and the human fingers found in bottles of salsa in border diners. They were so passé they didn’t even merit color.

  Cuencamé, Pedriceña, Dinamita—a town named after dynamite.

  There was nothing delicious in Delicias. Nombre de Dios, the Name of God, lay in the terrible outland.

  New languages began to assert themselves. Nahuatl was far behind them now. Strange Chichimeca names floated by: Meoqui, Julimes, Coyame.

  They saw a sign for a place called Cuchillo Parado, the Erect Knife. There was laughter over that in the bus.

  Nudge-nudge, is your knife erect?

  That’s not a knife, brother, that’s a machete.

  You may have a machete, my friend, but in my family we have Samurai swords!

  That thing? Where I come from, that’s a toothpick.

  Ciudad Juárez, large in Mexican myth, second only to Tijuana in their minds, the wetback’s promised land, was a sprawl of towers and dust, desert, and trains: nothing there, not a tree, it looked like, not a drop of water. The Rio Grande, known to them as El Río Bravo. Don Moi pointed out El Paso, Texas. Some dark peaks, more warehouses.

  Where?

  Across the river.

  That’s a river?

  They couldn’t see the Río Grande. They could see Mexican freight trains. Black mountains. And they could see the endlessly rushing traffic of I-10 on the American side. They didn’t know that this same freeway, far in the west, would be their ultimate destination.

  Weary, sleepy, some of them feeling sick from the bad food and the constant jiggling, they headed west. They were driving parallel to the Devil’s Highway, at times only yards from the U.S. border. It just looked like more Mexico.

  Agua Prieta, Cananea, Altar—where Don Moi made his call to Chespiro and was told to bring ’em on in to Sonoita—Caborca.

  Finally, they arrived in Sonoita. Heat and horns, street dogs and northern odors. Another sad dust-dry desert town. They were hustled off the bus and rushed to the motel. They fell about the dark rooms and slept fitfully. In the morning, the legendary Negro roused them and sent them scurrying to Nelly’s safe house. To wait. Be ready, they were told—we’ll come for you and you’ll have to jump. Nobody knew how long the preparations would take.

  Fifty pesos here. Fifty pesos there. They were just bleeding money.

  Don Moi didn’t make it to Nelly’s. By the time they wondered where he was, he was on the bus, heading home.

  7

  A Pepsi for the Apocalypse

  SATURDAY, MAY 19.

  It is easy to imagine Mendez’s morning. Oh, shit, the alarm clock’s going off too early. Six o’clock. Last night was Friday, party night. Dancing with Celia. Drinks. Cigarettes and laughter, up too late with the gang. Too late, too tipsy to make love.

  Saturday mornings suck.

  Headache.

  Mouth tastes foul.

  Celia is still in bed, her hair scattered over the pillow.

  On the radio, El Gran Silencio, singing “Los Chuntaros del Barrio.”

  A small lizard scuttles across the wall, one of the little desert geckos. Mendez scratches himself and gets up, puts on his ugly walking clothes, brushes his teeth, careful not to swallow the tainted city water. Pees in the low toilet, its water barely there from lack of pressure, the tin can in the corner full of wadded toilet paper. Digs around in Celia’s fridge for something to eat, stirs some instant coffee into boiling water. He’s always careful to boil it fully so he won’t get sick. Otherwise, it’s bottled water only, and that gets too expensive. And where’s that pinche Maradona? It’s seven, that lazy bastard. A tortilla heated on the blue flame of the stove, a smear of frijoles and salt.

  Water and gas come in old trucks that regularly clank down his street. The gas for the house comes from a whitewashed or silver tank sitting on a small cement pad out back. Several of the neighbors still have outhouses and use buckets and washbasins. It’s a noisy barrio—when the mailman comes, he blows a loud whistle to let them know he’s there. Traffic cops blow whistles. So do kids. Everybody’s blowing a pinche whistle.

  Sellers hawk their wares as ice cream carts jangle by with their little bells and the newspaper man hollers and the corn-cob man trundles along shouting and the weirder salesmen of obscure items parade through: goat-cheek tacos, broiled tripe, and tejuino—fermented maize Indian brew. Old-timers say tejuino is fermented by taking a chunk of human shit and wrapping it in a cloth and letting it fester in the mashed corn.

  Dogs bark. Old buses gulp and grind through the gears. Beat pickups with loose tailpipes roar. Kids yell. Even roosters crow down among the tattered banana trees of that blue-and-white house where the blacktop ends. Pop! Pop! Pop! Some pendejo is already setting off firecrackers. Either that, or some drunk is shooting his wife.

  The street is already hot. Man, it was eighty-nine degrees all night. Mendez feels bad—he’s already sweaty. He takes his morning crap, trying to get his bowels empty so he doesn’t have to worry about it on the trail—hard to keep the pollos in line when they’ve seen you squat in a bush. He opens the window and sits and looks out at the deceptive green of the back yards of Sonoita. Calculates his profits. Perhaps, for a moment, he dreams of far Guadalajara, and his mother hoping he will someday build her a home.

  He’s not scared, not anymore. But he’s always apprehensive. And it’s a pain in the ass, this hiking in the desert. You’d be stupid not to worry about the walk.

  Bids farewell to his woman.

  Steps outside, works his baseball cap down over his rockero forelock, slips on his shades.

  Sonoita smells like bad fruit and sewage. Blue clouds of exhaust leak from the dying cars. He walks down to Maradona’s and pounds on the door. No answer. What the hell? He calls out a few friendly insults—Oye, huevón! Pinche buey! Orale, pendejo! Levántate, cabrón.

  But Maradona’s apparently gone. Either that, or he’s so drunk Mendez can’t wake him. Damn! Door’s locked. Windows too dark and grimy to see through.

  Mendez will always wonder what happened to his homeboy. Having started his pollero career in Nogales, Maradona has regularly walked the pathways to the east and west of Tucson. He’s the one who really knows the Ajo route. Mendez hits the celly and tells El Negro that Maradona, that puto, isn’t in. El Negro can’t be happy about that. Woe to Maradona when El Negro has a chat with him.

  All right, El Negro says. I’ll handle it. I’ll call Santos and Lauro.

  Oh, no, not those losers.

  It says a lot about Maradona that he has to be replaced by two other polleros.

  Mendez was going to get a ride from Maradona, too. Chingado! He grabs a blue-and-white barrio bus and heads downtown.

  The walkers were s
tirring at Nelly’s. Most of them didn’t know each other. The small family groups stuck together. They ate what breakfast Nelly had thrown together for their fifty pesos. Most of them were used to lighter fare than what the norteños ate; an egg or two, a corn tortilla, some fruit. You could always knock down a mango or a papaya, but you couldn’t always afford fried beans. Half of them were dead men, they just didn’t know it yet.

  Unexpectedly, Mendez and his henchmen appeared. The guys from Guerrero knew Mendez from the failed trip last week. They didn’t know these other two Coyotes, Santos and Lauro. Santos was fat, hardly a fit hiker. And Lauro was skinny, with curly hair and bad front teeth. He had the requisite bandido ’stache. The other two gangsters were clean-shaven. The Guerrero boys nodded to Mendez.

  “Hey,” he said, “get over to the store and buy water. You’ll need water for the trip.”

  “How much?” one asked.

  “Enough,” he said. To another, he said, “A bottle.”

  They hustled out into the sun.

  “Meet me at the bus station,” he said. “Be there by eleven.”

  The gangsters went one way, and the pollos the other. They went around the corner, to the small store. They bought candies and chocolates and wicked salted prunes called “saladitos” and sweetened chile paste in stained plastic envelopes. They bought small water bottles and jugs. A few of them had cold Pepsis for breakfast, and they put bottles of Pepsi in the bags, thinking a nice cool soda would be just the ticket once they got into the desert.

  They moiled around. In small groups they wandered to “La Central,” the bus station, lines of travelers converging in noisy tumult. Children scattered, mothers scolded. Old men stood on crutches. A small girl could not hold her water any longer and peed on the floor, between her mother’s great bundles of clothing. The walkers stuck together, nervous and lost in this strange place. Outside, buses rumbled in their berths, destinations tattooed on their brows: TIJUANA, MAZATLAN, CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEX D.F. Voices blasted over the buzzing speaker system.

  “Attention, please. Gate five. Gate five.”