The Devils Highway: A True Story (12 page)

They rounded the rock and slipped past a dying saguaro. Their feet crunched on the grit of the desert, and the plants began to tear at their arms and legs. They crossed onto the Devil’s Highway on foot. Mendez or Santos did the brush-out: scraped ocotillo and hedionda branches in the dirt to hide their tracks from the Border Patrol.

Don’t worry, Mendez promised. Nobody’s going to find us.

8

Bad Step at Bluebird

T
hey walked straight up a steep hill. Most of them were in good shape, but it was still brutal. The sand was deep enough that they slid back a half step for every step they climbed and it didn’t take long for their thighs to start burning. They were breathing heavily, though to do so this early in the walk seemed a terrible admission of weakness. The older men grimly bent to the task. The youngest didn’t even make sport of it. It was a trudge. Many of them breathed through their noses, refusing to gasp, as if not sucking in air would somehow fool the desert into believing they were ready for their ordeal.

Reymundo Sr. helped Reymundo Jr. He climbed beside his son, urging him ahead, telling him to be strong, they only had a few miles to walk. He smiled when the other guys razzed him: Junior was going to be carrying
him
pretty soon.
Cabrones
. Reymundo’s brooding brother-in-law, Nahum Landa, no doubt kept his own counsel as he strode into the dusk. He would turn black in the night, invisible except for his eyes and teeth. Reymundo paid scant attention to him, however. His main interest was his son.

Andale, m’ijo. Come on, Son.

Allí voy, ’apá. I’m coming, Dad.

Though it was bad form to complain—machos took discomfort with aplomb—the men did grumble a little. Mendez, though, was no fool. The surest way to beat La Migra was to keep to the high country. No four-wheel drive on earth could cut a drag on a mountain slope or a sheer cliff wall. The peaks and deep ravines were excellent cover, too. Nobody could see them, not even the air spotters. And no Border Patrol unit would bother hiking around hunting them. Their only worries were the passes, where the trucks could drive up. Let the clients complain all they wanted. They climbed.

Night fell.

They topped the hill and dropped into the blue-shadowed valley. Climbed again. On top, Mendez pointed out a red-tipped peak, catching the last light of sunset. “That’s the hill,” he said. “The second desert is beyond it. We walk through it, and they pick us up.” The boys were plopped on the ground, spitting and drinking and murmuring. Ah! There it was! This isn’t so bad! Ain’t nothin’! They patted each other, laughed. Mendez, like some tractor, geared up and marched away. “Don’t rest,” he said. “Walk.”

Mendez was giving orders to men older than himself. To fathers, grandfathers. The only one younger than him was Reymundo Jr. Even Santos and Lauro, his stooges, were older than him. All he had going for him was his experience.

They were southeast of Ajo. They marched north, and then northeast for ten miles, climbing and dropping, keeping up a good clip. Mendez was a pro—he stormed along, saying little. Later, the survivors would say he gave up speaking altogether. Memories would become deeply unreliable, but they all remembered Mendez, and then Lauro and Santos, whistling in place of conversation. Mendez’s loud notes sounded oddly flat against the great landscape. It was a strange scene from some magical novel, the walkers transformed by nightfall into something like birds.

One of the boys, already tired of the Coyotes and their imperious orders, whistled
chinga-tu-madre
(shave-and-a-haircut). Those who heard it laughed.

As they walked, they started to lose themselves. Their accounts of the following days fade into a strange twilight of pain. Names are forgotten. Locations are nebulous, at best, since none of them, not even the Coyotes, even knew where they were. Nameless mountains loomed over them, nameless stars burned mutely overhead, nameless demons gibbered from the nameless canyons.

All ahead of them, beyond Bluebird Pass.

Mendez didn’t know it was called Bluebird. He was leading them into a blank map with landmarks etched in transient memory, known by obtuse Coyote descriptions like “The First Desert,” “The Second Desert,” “The Low Pass,” “The High Pass.” “The Ajo Lights,” “The Highway Water Tank.” Bluebird was twenty miles north of El Papalote as the crow flies. But even the crow staggered across that land, taking small detours, unable to ever travel in a straight line.

Their path formed a wide curve that looks, on a map, almost elegant, as if drawn by a protractor. They swerved east, adding three or more miles to their walk. Five miles from Bluebird, they jagged east again, crossed a dead water course that, in time of monsoon rains, might be a foaming little river. But tonight, as the clouds covered the sky, it was a pale strip that made their feet slide and further taxed their calves and thighs.

Mendez had tried to skirt the old trails to avoid the Border Patrol till it was fairly late at night, keeping to high country for much of his walk. Once at Bluebird Pass, he would be able to vector in on the lights of Ajo and hop on Maradona’s tried-and-true walking path for the next two nights. He was firmly within the tradition, now: skirt Ajo on the west side, beat it up to the highway, and wait for the pickup at the mile marker.

Later, they would remember actually walking through Ajo. Some of them whispered that they passed through a city at night, walked among lights and abandoned buildings on the plain. Empty gas stations standing as if haunted under bright spotlights. “We walked among stores, dark houses.”

But this was impossible. This could only be their fevers talking—they never descended onto the town: they crept from crag to peak. And if they were in town, why would they not stop for water or shelter? What midnight mirage did they see? This phantasmagoric town of cold ghostly light and empty streets—where was it? One survivor said it was Phoenix. One of them thought it had no name.

11:30
P.M.

Mendez later claimed that it was all the Border Patrol’s fault. The Border Patrol said it was Mendez making up stories. The survivors still have no idea what happened. All they know is that suddenly they were scattered by light.

Mendez later claimed that the Border Patrol was lurking in the hills, waiting for them to come up to Bluebird Pass. It was an ambush, the spotlights like laser beam attacks in a space movie. The walkers stood like deer for a moment, their eyes bright red, their mouths open. They cursed. They shouted.

“La Migra!” Mendez yelled.

Perhaps it was only a Jeep of some sort, making its way up the pass, missing them entirely, but illuminating the hills with its headlights. Some agent out cutting for sign, rolling up the slope to see what was doing at Bluebird. Maybe looking to eat his midnight lunch out of the way.

Lights, nonetheless.

The men scrambled into the dark, running, they thought, for their lives. The lights, Mendez insisted, followed them, chased them into the wilds. And once they were running, whoever it was who lit them up killed the lights and drove away.

Of all the games played along the Devil’s Highway, the midnight light game of May 19 is the most mysterious. The Border Patrol’s report states: “Sat, May 19, 11:30
P.M.
Group arrived at this point and observed lights that they believed to be a Border Patrol Agent at Bluebird Pass.” That’s it.

But why would Mendez panic if he only thought he saw a Border Patrol agent? He had certainly ducked and hidden from scores of headlights in his career. There was no Border Patrol agent in the world who could make Mendez try to commit suicide—and running headlong into the desert was certainly a suicidal gesture. Mendez never explained further.

Was there a Migra truck climbing into the pass for a quick look? Or were other forces on the land? Were wetback-hunters out, spotlighting illegals for fun? Scattering them before the Border Patrol could get to them? So-called civilian border patrols occasionally launched themselves into these hills, but would they let the walkers go without an entertaining chase, or a satisfying few rounds popped off from a hunting rifle?

If not civilians, then it was the Feds.

Why would the Border Patrol illuminate a large group of walkers and not follow? The Border Patrol regularly spends whole days tracking a single foamer. It is not unimaginable that an agent might be tired, bored, near the end of a shift. He might light a group up and watch them run back to Mexico. Maybe he was scared, which is unlikely—La Migra, like the Coyotes, doesn’t waste a lot of time quivering in terror. But if the phantom spotlighter at Bluebird was afraid, he’d call in the cavalry, let the walkers deal with three or four hairy monsters out of Lukeville or Ajo, a couple of Park Service Cactus Cops who don’t worry about being culturally sensitive and nonconfrontational.

Illuminating a group of nearly thirty walkers, however, and then letting them go, that wasn’t a game any Migra agent would enjoy. No report. No pursuit. No arrest. It simply was not reasonable to assume that this could happen.

Even the Evil Rogue Migra Agent scenario doesn’t make sense. An agent attempting to send the walkers to a grisly death, chortling wickedly the whole while, would assume that there would be a rescue attempt. He would know that the next Border Patrol sector would likely detect them, would know that the signcutters would backtrack them right to Bluebird, back to him. Even if they all died, their footprints would tell a story, and that story would ultimately lead them back to him. Besides, there was never a Border Patrol agent in history who would pass up the chance to bust a group of thirty walkers.

The only thing known for certain is that at 11:30, at Bluebird Pass, twenty miles south of Ajo, mystery lights panicked Mendez. Like the totemic rabbit tattooed on his arm, he bolted at record speed. His pollos followed. In their hurry, they dropped their bags, lost hats. They tripped and skinned knees. One of the Guerrero boys, Maximino Hilario, dropped his gallon jug in the scramble and didn’t have time to find it.

They scurried up a slope and squatted in the brush and the rocks and waited out the light beams. Ironically, it started to rain. They hunched their shoulders and endured the chill downpour. A few of them cursed the water. Some desert this was.

The lights were gone. The air was moist. Several of them decided the walk really wouldn’t be as bad as everybody said—it was, after all, raining already, they were halfway there, and they’d already escaped the Migra. They’d only been walking a couple of hours. Time for M&M’s.

“The highway’s right over the hill,” Mendez said.

It wasn’t.

AFTER MIDNIGHT.

They veered northwest in the dark. Mendez allowed few rest stops. No one knew what he was orienteering by—since the rain had started, the stars and moon were hidden behind cloud cover. Even with clouds breaking up, and the sky becoming partially visible, Mendez was hardly a master of the astrolabe. He wouldn’t have been able to tell the North Star from Venus.

They didn’t know that Mendez was in uncharted territory. He probably knew it, but seemed to think he could work out the puzzle of the landscape. Maybe he thought he was fooling everybody. They didn’t know where they were supposed to walk—they’d go where he told them to go. For all they could tell, they were about to drop into Dairy Queen for a milkshake. So he marched ahead, striding with great purpose.

Later, the signcutters read his tracks and called him
Asshole
.

The cutters know many things about a person by the nature of his tracks. They learned something about Mendez and his pollos in the days to come. Mendez always walked point, taking the lead as if he knew where he was going. The men shuffled and stumbled along behind him, wandering off path and straggling, but generally moving ahead. The scuffed fans of grit in their tracks suggested moans and curses, sighs and shouts and whispers. Their sign left a cut across the face of the desert like the grooves in an LP record. Their greatest hits were there, in order.

Thin scab of dried urine beside a brittlebush had the spatter sound and the sigh of relief etched in it like bug-sign. The knee scuff where a man fell, and the smeared tracks of the two companions who helped him up, carried echoes of their grunts, and their exhortations, and an embarrassed, muttered gracias. Empty candy wrappers in the bushes told which way the breeze blew, and carried the crunching of teeth and the smell of chocolate. Empty bottles talked of the growing crisis.

Once the trackers got the tread marks of each shoe, they could follow the ever more delirious steps right up to the feet of each dead body. The sign told them much about each man. One thousand steps; fall, scramble; five hundred steps; lie down on the ground and stare at the sky; one thousand steps; sit, fall over, up on knees, crawl, fall, get up one last time.

This guy walked alone the whole time. This guy walked with his brothers. This guy had his arm around his son some of the time: their tracks interwove and braided together as they wandered. This guy tried to eat a cactus.

Then there were his legs. Mendez’s left leg had just a little less thrust than his right. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. He thought he was going straight. North. But he angled just enough off plumb to head north-northwest as his right leg out-torqued his left.

Signcutters know one secret thing about walkers. They fall into a pattern and seldom break it. Whether it’s a mountain or a bush, the walker will cut either left or right and then he or she will tend to repeat this action over and over.

Mendez always cut to the left. Each time he skirted the objects in his path, he drifted west—to the left. Add to that small bit of field math the slight push of his right leg, and you begin to describe an arc. From north to north-northwest to northwest. Barring an interruption, Mendez could have walked in a full circle: west to southwest to south.