The Devils Highway: A True Story (16 page)

The temperature was ninety-five degrees in the shade.

Mendez didn’t appear.

One o’clock.

Coughing.

Some of them were fainting, melting on the burning gravel.

“I want to go home.”

Mendez didn’t appear.

A voice cried out: “I don’t want to die!”

Two o’clock.

Mendez didn’t appear.

“How long are we going to wait?”

It was obvious to some of them that Mendez was never coming back. A few of the boys didn’t want to hear it—if Mendez didn’t come back, then surely they were doomed. It might have been Nahum who told them if they didn’t walk then they were all guaranteed to die. Right there. It was their choice.

Julian Malaga turned to Rafael Temich, his brother-in-law.

“Rafael,” he said. “Look, this place is completely desolate. Where are we supposed to walk? We don’t know where we’re going. Let’s wait for the guides to come back.”

Rafael Temich says, “But of course, they didn’t come back.”

They agreed to stick together and walk north. All of them. It had to be north. Mendez had gone north, the bastard, and he was saving himself. They’d follow Mendez.

Once more, the men stood, and they walked.

José de Jesús Rodriguez: “They never came back. Those fuckers left us hanging in that incredible heat.”

Now the illegals were cutting for sign.

They walked. They walked. There was no other story: they walked.

They said cholla cactus looked like trees covered in spike balls.

The group started to break apart as the demons and angels started to sing. They could smell their own stench. It was embarrassing. It was frightening.

Nahum Landa Ortiz: “We kept walking. We were walking all day in that fucking desert, going under trees. That’s when they started dying. When we got to the trees.”

Men stumbled away toward illusions in the brutal light. Men thought they were home, walking into their front doors, hugging their wives, making love. Still, they walked. Men were swimming. Men were killing Mendez. Men were on the beach, collecting shells and watching their children splash. Their women stood naked before them, soft bellies, hands on ribs, breasts. Men hid their faces from a furious God. And they walked.

A voice was heard in the light-shatter, saying, “He’s going to die. Lay him down here and let him die. Keep walking.”

The desert, out of focus and suddenly terribly sharp, burst white and yellow in their eyes. It tilted. Elongated. It was at an impossible angle! It tipped up toward the sun, and if they didn’t crawl, they would slide right off it and fall forever. It made noise: THERE WERE ENGINES BENEATH THE DESERT. It made evil grinding noises, mechanical humming. No, it was insectile, the screech of hunger and derision. The devils were under the rocks, spitting insults. THE BLACK HEAD LAUGHED. I believe in God the father, creator of heaven and earth. No, it did not fucking laugh—it was a silent as a graveyard out there. Just the crunch and slide, crunch and slide, of endless hopeless footsteps. Hundreds of footsteps. Crunch. Slide. Gasping: that was the sound. Gasping and sobbing and coughing and heartbeats.
Canta y no llores!
The ragged breathing of those walking beside them made the men cringe. Stop to piss: piss in cupped hands, lick every hot smear of it from your fingers. If they weren’t trying to save themselves, they would piss in each others’ mouths. Sacrament. Communion. Oh God, in Thy dwelling place, hear our pleas. Hearts drumming, soft hammers inside them, dull fuzzy banging, faster and faster. Blessed Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death, amen.
El tuca-tucatucanazo!
WINGS ABOVE THEM. BLUE MEN. WHITE TEETH. NOTHING. EMPTY NOTHING EMPTY BONES EMPTY HEAT NOTHING BUT SUN EMPTY NOTHING.

And Mendez and Lauro walked. They were way ahead of the group, making good time. They had hope—if no one else had hope, they did. Go north, man. Go north. The freeway had to be right there. Right there! Water and a ride. It is possible they thought they’d find help for the lost walkers behind them.

But damn, those cabrones lagged! Trying to get that group moving, and moving fast, was impossible. The two of them, even sick, even dizzy, were moving like a race car compared to those slowpokes they left behind.

And why were they behind? Because they were dying. No question of that. It crossed their minds, it had to cross their minds: the walkers were going to be dead by the time they got help, if they got help. By the time they got to Mohawk, got drinks, caught a ride, phoned the Cercas gang, got help, went back. They’d all be dead. What was the point? Mendez and Lauro: they were prepared for the desert, and the walkers were not.

Did they debate it? Did Lauro urge Mendez to just walk away? Those guys called us assholes! We did all we could. Look at us—heroes! And if we get caught, then what? Jail? Prison? Deportation? For a bunch of dead guys?

“Keep walking,” Mendez said.

“I am walking,” said Lauro.

13

The Trees and the Sun

T
he men Mendez left behind walked. Five of them climbed a peak to look for lights. There, they saw a lone Migra truck patrolling in the far desert. They ran down the mountain, falling, scraping their hands, but there was no way to reach him.

They made it to some scraggly mesquites. It was a hurricane of sunlight, and like storm victims, the men hugged the hot trunks, clutched the trees to keep out of the killer sun, even tied themselves to the trees. Nahum remembers them going out, one man per tree, the group widening and dispersing as the men sought shade. Each alone, in the awful silence, hanging on with what little strength they had left. And then the gibbering and wailing began.

Francisco Morales: “I don’t remember exactly what the days were. But it was in those days, during those days, between Monday and Thursday? When it happened. Monday? Did they start to die on Monday?”

According to the Border Patrol, it had taken the men twelve hours to walk ten miles. They walked for what few miles they could before nightfall, Monday. Survivors report that about fifteen of the men had thorns in their feet. They had trouble walking, and they were having trouble dealing with the pain of their injuries. Some of the men tried to do healings on the feet of the injured.

With their last vestiges of reason, they decided to set a wild-fire. The area they were in had bountiful dried brush, dead grass, creosote, buffel grass, the occasional tumbleweed. They knew enough to remember they were either in, or near, a national park habitat of some sort. They didn’t know what it was, but they knew it meant Feds. They thought the little airplanes that maddeningly flickered in the distance might see the fire and call it in.

A couple of the boys were smokers. What they wouldn’t give for a cigarette now! A cigarette! With this dry mouth?
Estan locos
. Some could still muster up the energy to bitch and even make small jokes. And the smokers had their little plastic cigarette lighters.
Andale!
Hope was at hand.

Those who could, started to gather kindling.

Reymundo Jr. was desperately ill. He lay in the dirt, cold to the touch and moaning. Edgar Martinez, from Cuautepec, was sick, too. He stared at nothing. Abraham Morales Hernandez, in his black pants, was cooked half to death. His white tennis shoes were like two small ghosts in the scrub. He was fading in and out.

The strong ones got the brush piled up and clicked the lighters a couple of times.

“Come on, cabrón, light!”

A flicker. A flame. It started to burn.

They laughed.

The fire leaped up and out, and they scuttled back from it as it lit up the hillside. Sparks whirled into the sky, blended with the stars. It crackled. It was hot, the one thing they didn’t need. But they didn’t mind. It was immense and brilliant in the dark! A beacon!

They had saved themselves.

Nobody came.

By dawn, the fires were sputtering, the ash gave up thin ribbons of smoke. They waited. Waiting again. It was all suffering and waiting. Their whole lives.

No airplane veered toward them. No helicopter came. No Migra.

Nahum knew it then. The Guerrero boys knew it. Reymundo Barreda Sr. knew it. They were dead.

They secretly eyed each other, wondering who would be the first to fall. They prayed that they’d live. Or they prayed to die, as long as their brothers, nephews, uncles, sons might live.

TUESDAY, MAY 22.

It was the high spike of the heat wave. The temperatures burned up through the nineties with the sunrise. By midmorning, it was 100 degrees. By noon, 105. By two o’clock, it was 108 degrees.

They walked.

Nahum Landa Ortiz: “I didn’t watch the first ones die. Two died apart from us. They were behind us and I didn’t see them die.”

He says the guides took five men with them when they left. But they didn’t. The group was fracturing, and small cells were moving into the landscape on their own. Francisco Morales says, “We started throwing things away. We were going to die. We threw away the things in our pockets in despair.”

Edgar Martinez, who didn’t have a phone at home, who had to be reached if anyone called through the phone booth in Cuautepec, a village with the name “Hill of the Eagle,” middle name Adrian, nephew of José Isidro Colorado, in love with Claudia Reyes, son of Eugenio, stumbled. He righted himself and put out a hand and fell into a bush. He got to his knees, grimaced as if smiling. Perhaps he was ashamed to be falling. He was sixteen years old.

He reached a point registered on GPS coordinates as N. 32.21.85/W. 113.18.93.

He fell again. He closed his eyes. He didn’t rise. He lay there for the length of the next day, lost in a delirium no one can even imagine, burning and burning.

Not a mile from Edgar, Abraham Morales tripped and hit the ground. He crawled, rolled on his side, kicked. His eyes were red. He was at N. 32.21.85/W. 113.18.94.

Nobody seemed to know him, for when they finally came and collected his body, he would lie neither claimed nor identified for a month, alone on his icy drawer.

Francisco Morales: “I do not know who was dying or how many because I too was dying.”

José de Jesús Rodriguez: “That day, at three in the afternoon, I was dead. What time is it right now—it is four o’clock. Yes, I died. I was dead from three o’clock to four o’clock. I revived and came back from the dead at eleven o’clock at night.”

Morales adds: “We were walking like robots.”

They could not bury their dead. There is some evidence they didn’t know who was dead, since they were all falling and fainting, and those who were awake didn’t always know what they were seeing.

They walked three, perhaps four miles farther. Men collapsed. It looked like more deaths were inevitable. Five of them decided to go ahead and see what they could find. Perhaps they’d find Mendez. Or the way. Anything.

“Wait for us,” they said, but some of the men were already unconscious, and nobody really said anything to them.

Wait. Hell, they’d already waited.

“When we got sick,” José Bautista says, “there was no shade. So I crawled up to hide in the rocks. One of the boys went crazy and started jumping up and down. He started screaming, ‘Mama! Mama! I don’t want to die!’ He ran up to a big cactus and started smashing his face against it. I don’t know what his name was.”

Nahum and his companions were hiding in the trees.

A voice carried on the still air, crying, “Mother, save me!”

Mario González Manzano and his brother Isidro, far ahead on their attempt to find rescue, watched their brother walk away, in search of escape.

“Somebody said the freeway was right there, right over the hills,” he said. “They lied.”

Isidro and Mario were in luck: they found some prickly pears—
tuna
in Spanish. “We ate the tunas to stay alive,” Mario says.

The liquid in the cactus fruits spared him. He would only see dead bodies when he got to a Border Patrol truck and saw them stacked inside.

The sign of the dead could be ghastly and haunting. One of the men tore off his shirt and tried to bury himself. The hither thither he left all around him showed violent kicking and arm flailing, as if he were swimming. He managed to get the top half of his torso buried in the ground, where he either smothered or passed out. The relentless heat baked him, literally cooking him in the ground. His face bloated and came loose from the bones, tender as barbecued pork.

Reymundo Jr. collapsed in his father’s arms. Reymundo Sr. held him as he died. Shook him, cried over him. He called for help, but the only thing that might have helped his son was water.

When Reymundo died and slid from his father’s arms, his father lurched away into the desert, away from the trees, crying out in despair. Some of the men said he took the American money he had saved for their trip and tore it into small bits.

Julian Ambros Malaga was also said to have torn up his money. His brother-in-law, Rafael Temich, after being prodded by Julian to walk and save himself, was helpless to save him. “That’s when he took out his money and started tearing it apart. And he took off alone and I also was demented. I was demented. I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t carry him. Then he threw himself into the sunlight, and that’s where he stayed.”

Old Reymundo also threw himself into the sunlight. He was shouting and crying and throwing money into the air, and he walked until he fell, trying to swim in the dirt as if he’d fallen into a cool stream.

Nobody knows the name of the man who took off all his clothes. It was madness, surely. He removed his slacks, folded them, and put them on the ground. Then he took off his underwear, laid it neatly on the pants. He removed his shirt and undershirt and squared them away with the pants. As if he didn’t want to leave a mess. His shoes had the socks tucked in them. They were placed on the clothes to keep them from blowing away.

He lay on his back and stared into the sun until he died.

Later, Kenny Smith, from Wellton Station, said, “This poor guy just crossed his ankles and went to sleep.”

Nahum Landa’s testimony reads like modern poetry:

We were in the trees, trying to hide from the sun.

And they would yell to me, there’s a guy dead over here. And there’s a guy dead over here.

There must have been thirty of us out there, and twenty of us died.

By Monday we were all dead.

I was hiding under that tree.

Out there, I saw people in despair.

I saw them without water.

I don’t know why I survived.

Maybe it’s a miracle.

Some of them just died of desperation.

Some of them went insane.

Some of them lost their minds.

You could hear them screaming.

Some fell all alone.

I heard one guy screaming, daring the Border Patrol to come find him.

Stupid things like that.

He was desperate.

He started singing.

We were drinking urine.

We were ripping open cactus.

Some of the boys were saying you could cut the thirst with a cactus.

The majority of them died that day.

I was going to die this morning.

I have spines from these pinches cactuses all over me.