The Devil's Highway: A True Story

by Luis Alberto Urrea

Tohono O’Odham poet Ofelia Zepeda has pointed out that rosaries and Hail Marys don’t work out here. “You need a new kind of prayers,” she says, “to negotiate with this land.”

Chupacabras

YES! Finally! Somebody wrote it correctly!

The millennium has added a further danger: all wild bees in southern Arizona, naturalists report, are now Africanized. As if the desert felt it hadn’t made its point, it added killer bees.

So true. Everything is out to hurt you in the desert and the frickin' bees are everywhere.

Besides, conquistadores were notoriously short on joie de vivre.

Just to make sure the Mexicans got the point, Quelele let it be known that his favorite snack was dead Mexican.

Cops tend to assess a situation at first glance—people are always up to something. In the desert, they were often involved in some form of dying.

Cutters read the land like a text. They search the manuscript of the ground for irregularities in its narration. They know the plots and the images by heart. They can see where the punctuation goes. They are landscape grammarians, got the Ph.D. in reading dirt.

Like them, he was recruited. Like them, he was welcome to die for the Cercas brothers. There were many more waiting to take his place. There were so many more of him that he didn’t even exist.