The Devil's Highway: A True Story

by Luis Alberto Urrea

the nature of desert death is such that forensic evidence is quickly obliterated. The body mummifies. In one of the million ironies of the desert, those who die of thirst become waterproof. Their fingers turn to stiff leather, and the prints are unreadable. On the day the consulate reopens the files of the Yuma 14, they have four bodies undergoing hydration at the coroner’s lab. A new corpse, Juan Doe # 78, is cooling in their company. The coroners pump fluids into their reluctant tissue, sometimes for days, to try to plump up the desiccated skin enough to raise a usable print.

Perhaps he could build a better house. Add a room. Send the children to school in good pants, with new backpacks, known as mochilas. Maybe he could buy Irma new furniture. The rumors said he could get to Florida, where it was warm like home. Pick oranges. How bad could that be? He liked oranges. He wasn’t afraid to work. He added his name to the list.

Half of them were dead men, they just didn’t know it yet.

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.

In the desert, we are all illegal aliens.

However long it takes you to die, you will pass through six known stages of heat death, or hyperthermia, and they are the same for everyone. It doesn’t matter what language you speak, or what color your skin. Whether you speed through these stages, or linger at each, hyperthermia will express itself in six ways.

The stages are: Heat Stress, Heat Fatigue, Heat Syncope, Heat Cramps, Heat Exhaustion, and Heat Stroke.

The people most at risk from hyperthermia are the elderly. That’s why Midwestern heat waves feature dead Chicago retirees by the score. But the wicked genius of Desolation is that it makes even...

Sooner or later, you understand that you have to drink your own urine.

Come morning, it would be time to die.

I will never forget the sadness in my nephew’s eyes when he looked at me, shedding tears, and I was unable to do anything except to tell him not to die.”

Edgar had worked with Reymundo at the Coke plant. Perhaps it was Reymundo who put the idea of the walk in his head. Edgar had been paid eight dollars a day to wash and stack returned bottles. When he could augment this salary with picking coffee beans, he made four dollars a day on his days off.

Rafael Temich González was a quiet twenty-eight-year-old corn farmer from Apixtla. He looked severe, almost Aztec or Maya in his features. But he had an easy smile and was quick to laugh. He had good manners, and he talked with his hands: when asked a question he didn’t know the answer to, he’d put his hand before his mouth, palm out, and shrug, “I don’t know.”

Rafael lived in a thatch-roofed home on a dirt road. You had to be careful in these grass and palm frond houses—scorpions and killer banana spiders could fall out of the fronds. Huge tropical roaches and beetles fell on you in your sleep like warm rain in some of the infested homes. Small lizards—cachorras—ran the walls, licking up the mosquitoes and slower bugs.

In this hut, Rafael took care of an extended family. Along with his wife and year-old daughter, he supported his mother, two sisters, and their four daughter...

He had gone on ahead of the rest of them, trying to get to relatives in the Carolinas. He took a bus to Mexico City, and another bus to Altar. There, he called his brother in North Carolina, then tried to get a Coyote. “But nobody wanted to take us. So we went on to Sonoita.” His brother recommended El Negro, and...

Six o’clock in the morning took ten hours to become seven o’clock.

A week later, it was eight o’clock.

Their mouths were as dry as the soles of their feet: their tongues were hard and dense and did not want to bend. They sucked and sucked at the insides of their mouths, but they couldn’t raise any spit.

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.

The Border Patrol, enacting a long-standing federal plan, tried to palm the survivors off on the hospital in Yuma without arresting them. If an illegal was brought in and turned over for lifesaving purposes, and the Migra had not officially arrested the culprit, the bill immediately was the hospital’s problem. If the clients were prisoners, the government had to pay for their health care. It was not uncommon for illegals to rehydrate, catch a nap, eat some hospital food, then walk out the doors and into the United States. Migra-as-Coyote. But it saved the government money. Seventy-seven hospitals throughout the American Southwest were losing about $190 million in unpaid bills, and tens of millions of these could be attributed to medical attention for illegals, including those dropped off by the Border Patrol.

A survey conducted by Florida’s MGT of America, a consulting firm, estimated that illegals made up 23 percent of unpaid bills in the Southwest’s ER’s and care centers. Twenty-three percent might seem like a moderate percentage of the cost—after all, that means that 77 percent of the bills are unpaid by good Americans. Still, elder care, certain emergency services, and long-term care for American citizens were forced to shut down all over Arizona as the toll mounted.

A successful new human smuggling tactic that rendered maximum profits became this: guiding a woman and her children to the line and snatching the kids at the last second and dragging them back to Mexico. Mom would endure some beatings if she raised a fuss—even maiming. But she wasn’t killed; it was more remunerative to avoid killing or crippling her. She had to work to buy them back, you see.

A recalcitrant mother would fall in line if the smugglers put guns to her children’s heads. Once these men owned her children, she would work herself to death to send them money against the day she could get them back. Every week, in some motel, in the back of some burger joint, in some brothel or in some field, a woman is weeping in a horror we cannot comprehend because we aren’t listening. After all, she’s “illegal.” Not even human.

God bless him. And God bless the dead. And God bless those who rescue the living—be it with water, a blanket, or a truck. Have mercy, all of you.