The Devils Highway: A True Story by Luis Alberto Urrea Read Free Book Online Page A

so wrong. Some of the illegals had walked over sixty-five miles—a couple of them fell in sight of the freeway.
    All you can do, Kenny Smith said, is cut sign, cut sign, cut sign.
    The sign tells the story.
    The sign never lies.
    And the whole investigation became a series of drag-cuts. It started after they had found all the dead—fourteen men; after they had saved the rest—twelve more. The footprints wrote the story. And after the footprints ran out, it was a trail of whispered stories and paper sheets. It was the big die-off, the largest death-event in border history.
    Everybody wanted to know what happened, how it happened. The old boys of Wellton were forever changed by it. The media started calling the dead the Yuma 14. National stories focused on the Devil’s Highway as a great metaphor for the horrors of the trail. But the agents who saw it all simply refer to it as “what happened.” As in: what happened in May, or what happened in the desert. Nothing fancy.
    Somebody had to follow the tracks. They told the story. They went down into Mexico, back in time, and ahead into pauper’s graves. Before the Yuma 14, there were the smugglers. Before the smugglers, there was the Border Patrol. Before the Border Patrol, there was the border conflict. Before them all was Desolation itself.
    These are the things they carried.
    John Doe # 36: red underpants, mesquite beans stuck to his skin.
    John Doe # 37: no effects.
    John Doe # 38: green socks.
    John Doe # 39: a belt buckle with a fighting cock inlaid, one wallet in the right front pocket of his jeans.
    John Doe # 40: no effects.
    John Doe # 41: fake silver watch, six Mexican coins, one comb, a belt buckle with a spur inlaid, four pills in a foil strip—possibly Advil, or allergy gelcaps.
    John Doe # 42: Furor Jeans, “had a colored piece of paper” in pocket.
    John Doe # 43: green handkerchief, pocket mirror in right front pocket.
    John Doe # 44: Mexican bills in back pocket, a letter in right front pocket, a brown wallet in left front pocket.
    John Doe # 45: no record.
    John Doe # 46: no record.
    John Doe # 47: no effects; one tattoo: “Maria.”
    John Doe # 48: Converse knockoff basketball shoes.
    John Doe # 49: a photo ID of some sort, apparently illegible.
    They came to the broken place of the world, and taken all together, they did not have enough items to fill a carry-on bag.
    Wellton’s Officer Friendly, a Latino who looks Italian, bristles at calling them the Yuma 14. “If anything, they’re the Wellton 14,” he says. “We found them. Yuma didn’t do shit.” In Tucson, however, they’re considered to be the Tucson 14.
    The confusion comes easy. The group entered the United States in Tucson sector, and they were headed for a Tucson sector pickup spot. They just happened to have died in the Yuma sector by accident. Walkers are identified by sector, not station, so the Wellton crew was erased from the headlines. Thus Yuma was forever enshrined as the rescuer of the survivors and the collector of the dead.
    There were other claims, too. Coming into the game a little late, Mexico declared the Yuma 14 as folk heroes: after all, Mexico loves a martyr, perhaps as much as it dislikes confronting the catastrophic political malfeasance that forced the walkers to flee their homes and bake to death in the western desert. Human rights activists claimed them, too: Our fourteen murdered brothers! Journalists took them as the hottest story (no pun intended) in many years.
    Officer Friendly considered all this a steaming pile of Bravo-Sierra.
    They were not only Wellton’s bodies, he points out, but there were twenty-six of them, not fourteen. “They’re the Wellton 26,” he says. “All of them are victims, even the live ones. And they’re mine.”
    Nobody wanted them when they were alive, and now look—everybody wants to own them.
    Their paperwork got processed through Tucson, as well. The dead were given back to Mexico’s care through the auspices of the