The Devil's Highway Quotes

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Any halfway clever devil would decorate the highway to Hell as beautiful as possible.

The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed. The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions. It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway. Coaches and buckas had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.

The desert was the apotheosis of all deserts, huge, standing to the sky for what looked like eternity in all directions. It was white and blinding and waterless and without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon and the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death. An occasional tombstone sign pointed the way, for once the drifted track that cut its way through the thick crust of alkali had been a highway. Coaches and buckas had followed it. The world had moved on since then. The world had emptied.

Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily Bronte or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence. But certainly it never got itself on paper. When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. […]any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

If it was the Border Patrol’s job to apprehend lawbreakers, it was equally their duty to save the lost and the dying.

Numbers never lie, after all: they simply tell different stories depending on the math of the tellers.

It is easier to cross a burning bridge with God than a safe highway with the Devil.

If only Mexico paid their workers a decent wage.

From the beginning, the highway has always lacked grace-those who worship desert gods know them to favor retribution over the tender dove of forgiveness. In Desolation, doves are at the bottom of the food chain. 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.

wonder, if we in the U.S. stopped buying cocaine and stopped selling heavy weapons across the border, what would happen then? So easy to talk about them. What does it mean when they are also us?

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.

What we take from granted in the United States as being Mexican, to those from southern Mexico, is almost completely foreign. Rural Mexicans don't have the spare money to drown their food in melted cheese. They don't smother their food in mounds of sour cream. Who would pay for it? They have never seen "nachos." In some regions of the south, they eat soup with bananas; some tribal folks not far from Veracruz eat termite tacos; turkey, when there are turkeys, is not filled with "stuffing"―but with dry pineapples, papaya, pecans. Meat is killed behind the house, or it is bought, dripping and flyblown, off a wooden plank in the village market. They eat cheeks, ears, feet, tails, lips, fried blood, intestines filled with curdled milk. Southerners grew up eating corn tortillas, and they never varied in their diet. You find them eating food the Aztecs once ate. Flour tortillas, burritos, chimichangas―it's foreign food to them, invented on the border. They were alliens before they ever crossed the line.

Spring is on the way; summer is on the way; storms are on the way; wars are on the way; sorrow and happiness are on the way; they are all on the way, they are coming! Everything is on the way! Life is a highway; while we are moving on the way, all else is coming towards us! Devil is on the way; angel is on the way! Stay firm on the way!

The border remains a fluid, mutating, stubbornly troubling, enthusiastically lethal region. Perhaps it’s not a region at all. Maybe it’s just an idea nobody can agree on. A conversation that never ends, even when it becomes an argument and all participants kick over the table and spill their drinks and stomp out of the room. I was born there.

A border cop confessed: “I have a rule now. If it don’t speak English, shoot it.

Everybody loves Jesus Christ, they just don’t know what to do with Jesus Garcia.

In the desert, we are all illegal aliens.

The media only cares about the Yuma 14 because of the large numbers. But this tragedy goes on every day. It never stops. If only one person dies out there, it is exactly the same horror story.

conservative pundits try to get their constituents to believe the American Taxpayer, that mythical and handy beast, is funding lifesaving towers foisted on them by the lily-livered INS, which, by the way, allowed hijackers to blow up New York.

Rita Vargas caught her breath—the dark was spilling out of the mountains as the sun vanished in the west. The deep purple/blue shadows spread out on the water of the Caribe. The ocean was shadowy, yet at the same time, glowing. The massif green on one side, and velvety black on the other. And below, the lights of the cities scattered and burned, white, yellow, white, looking like gems. Stars. She still recalls it as one of the most beautiful sights she'd ever witnessed, as if the coast of Veracruz were somehow welcoming its sons home. It would have astounded the dead if the could have looked out the windows. Why would they ever have left such a beautiful home for the dry bones and spikes of the desert? If they could have seen what she saw, they might have stayed home.

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.

Getting bodies,” in Border Patrol lingo, didn’t necessarily mean collecting corpses. Bodies were living people. “Bodies” was one of the many names for them. Illegal aliens, dying of thirst more often than not, are called “wets” by agents. “Five wets” might have slipped out. “Wets” are also called “tonks,” but the Border Patrol tries hard to keep that bon mot from civilians. It’s a nasty habit in the ranks. Only a fellow border cop could appreciate the humor of calling people a name based on the stark sound of a flashlight breaking over a human head.

Of course, the illegals have always been called names other than human--wetback, taco-bender. (A Mexican worker said: "If I am a wetback because I crossed a river to get here, what are you, who crossed an entire ocean?') In politically correct times, "illegal alien" was deemed gauche, so "undocumented worker" came into favor. Now, however, the term preferred by the Arizona press is "undocumented entrant." As if the United States were a militarized beauty pageant. Maye it is.

Aztlán (“The Place of the Reeds”) was the traditional home of the Aztecs, a possibly mythical motherland from which the tribe ventured forth on a one-hundred-year walk. It was a land to the north of Mexico City. Chicanos recognize Aztlán as being in the American southwest, and it came to represent the stomping ground of “La Chicanada,” or the entirety of the Hispanic west. The Aztecs (Mexica, pronounced “Meshica,” hence, “Chicano”) walked south, out of the deserts, on their way to what would become Mexico City. They apparently walked across the Devil’s Highway on their way home.

If, when you say whiskey, you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacles of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degredation and despair, shame and helplessness and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it with all my power. But if, when you say whiskey, you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the stuff that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty morning; if you mean the drink that enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies and heartbreaks and sorrows, if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm, to build highways, hospitals, and schools, then certainly I am in favor of it.

two Florida Highway Patrol cars and a third, black car pulled up in front of the house, and several white men emerged, among them the deputies Campbell and Yates. “Where is the guy that was with you last night?” Yates asked Shepherd, and what began with that question led to the beatings he and Irvin endured on the deserted clay road outside of Groveland. “They must have beat us about a half hour,” Shepherd told the lawyers, who were at once riveted and appalled by his testimony. After the beating, he and Irvin were shoved back into the patrol car. Irvin’s shirt was drenched in blood, and when he reached his hand up to his head he felt “a big chunk knocked out of it.” A patrolman told them to scoot up to the edge of the seat so their blood wouldn’t drip onto the upholstery.

MAY 7 IN THE NAME OF MY SON YOU WILL DRY UP THE SEAS OF DEMONIC POWER DO NOT FEAR the sea or the demonic spirits that dwell there, for I am the One who commands the sea and its streams to run dry. I will turn rivers into a wilderness, and the watersprings into dry ground. I will cause the dry land to spring forth into watersprings and make a place for you to dwell. I have come to cause waters to burst forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert. The parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water. My highway of holiness shall be there, and you will walk on My road, for you are My redeemed child. Everlasting joy will be on your head, and you will find joy and gladness as all your sorrow and sighing flee away. PSALM 107:35–37; ISAIAH 35:6–10 Prayer Declaration Father, You have dried up the rivers and seas that the enemy brought into my life to bring me to destruction. You have opened the waters of the deep and destroyed the enemy’s threats against me. You have established Your highway of holiness and have set my feet upon it. I will be found there, and I will walk with You in joy and gladness as Your ransomed child.

The onset of catastrophe is not signaled by the sense of falling through the dark to an accidental death: everything, including a catastrophe, has a moment-by-moment structure - a structure that is beyond measurement or comprehension, one that is maddeningly complex or must be conceived in quite another manner, in which the degree of complexity can be articulated only in terms of images that seem impossible to conjure - visible only if time has slowed down to the point that we see the world as indifferent owing to the available circumstances and having doomed preconditions that arrive at a perfect universal conclusion, if only because they are composed of individual intentions - because the moment is the result of unconscious choices, because a key doesn't automatically fit into the ignition, because we do not start into third gear and move down to second but we start in second and move into third, rolling down the hill then turning onto a highway above the village, because the distance before us is like looking down a tunnel, because the greenery on the boughs still smells of morning dew, because of the death of a dog and someone's badly executed maneuver when turning left, that is to say because of one choice or another, of more choices and still more choices ad infinitum, those maddening had-we-but-known choices impossible to conceptualize because the situation we find ourselves in is complicated, determined by something that is in the nature of neither God nor the devil, something whose ways are impenetrable to us and are doomed to remain so because chance is simply a matter of choosing, but the result of that which might have happened anyway.

By the authority of God Almighty, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and of the holy canons, and of the undefiled Virgin Mary, mother and patroness of our Saviour, and of all the celestial virtues, angels, archangels, thrones, dominions, powers, cherubins and seraphins, and of all the holy patriarchs, prophets, and of all the apostles and evangelists, and of the holy innocents, who in the sight of the Holy Lamb, are found worthy to sing the new song of the holy martyrs and holy confessors, and of the holy virgins, and of all the saints together, with the holy and elect of God, may he be damn'd. We excommunicate, and anathematize him, and from the thresholds of the holy church of God Almighty we sequester him, that he may be tormented, disposed, and delivered over with Dathan and Abiram, and with those who say unto the Lord God, Depart from us, we desire none of thy ways. And as fire is quenched with water, so let the light of him be put out for evermore, unless it shall repent him' and make satisfaction. Amen. May the Father who created man, curse him. May the Son who suffered for us curse him. May the Holy Ghost, who was given to us in baptism, curse him May the holy cross which Christ, for our salvation triumphing over his enemies, ascended, curse him. May the holy and eternal Virgin Mary, mother of God, curse him. May St. Michael, the advocate of holy souls, curse him. May all the angels and archangels, principalities and powers, and all the heavenly armies, curse him. [Our armies swore terribly in Flanders, cried my uncle Toby,---but nothing to this.---For my own part I could not have a heart to curse my dog so.] May St. John the Pre-cursor, and St. John the Baptist, and St. Peter and St. Paul, and St. Andrew, and all other Christ's apostles, together curse him. And may the rest of his disciples and four evangelists, who by their preaching converted the universal world, and may the holy and wonderful company of martyrs and confessors who by their holy works are found pleasing to God Almighty, curse him. May the holy choir of the holy virgins, who for the honor of Christ have despised the things of the world, damn him May all the saints, who from the beginning of the world to everlasting ages are found to be beloved of God, damn him May the heavens and earth, and all the holy things remaining therein, damn him. May he be damn'd wherever he be---whether in the house or the stables, the garden or the field, or the highway, or in the path, or in the wood, or in the water, or in the church. May he be cursed in living, in dying. May he be cursed in eating and drinking, in being hungry, in being thirsty, in fasting, in sleeping, in slumbering, in walking, in standing, in sitting, in lying, in working, in resting, in pissing, in shitting, and in blood-letting! May he be cursed in all the faculties of his body! May he be cursed inwardly and outwardly! May he be cursed in the hair of his head! May he be cursed in his brains, and in his vertex, in his temples, in his forehead, in his ears, in his eye-brows, in his cheeks, in his jaw-bones, in his nostrils, in his fore-teeth and grinders, in his lips, in his throat, in his shoulders, in his wrists, in his arms, in his hands, in his fingers! May he be damn'd in his mouth, in his breast, in his heart and purtenance, down to the very stomach! May he be cursed in his reins, and in his groin, in his thighs, in his genitals, and in his hips, and in his knees, his legs, and feet, and toe-nails! May he be cursed in all the joints and articulations of the members, from the top of his head to the sole of his foot! May there be no soundness in him! May the son of the living God, with all the glory of his Majesty and may heaven, with all the powers which move therein, rise up against him, curse and damn him, unless he repent and make satisfaction! Amen. I declare, quoth my uncle Toby, my heart would not let me curse the devil himself with so much bitterness!

Julian wore his favorite good-luck red-striped soccer jersey. He was planning to make money to build cement walls for his mother's house. He was recently married, and he and his wife were expecting a child that October. His father said Julian had promised to "always behave with respect," and that he would do nothing to cost his father his feelings of pride. He had a note from his bridge in his pocket.

FEBRUARY 18 HUMILITY AND SUBMISSION TO ME WILL PROTECT YOU I HAVE HEARD the desire of the humble, and I will prepare your heart and cause My ear to hear. I am great and mighty in power, and I will lift up the humble. But I will cast the wicked down to the ground. The highway of the upright avoids evil, and those who guard their ways preserve their lives. Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. But how much better it is to be lowly in spirit, for I will instruct the humble in the way they should go. I will prosper them and bless the one who trusts only in Me. You who are younger, submit yourselves to your elders, and clothe yourselves with humility toward one another. For I will oppose the proud, but I will show favor to the humble. Humble yourself under My mighty hand, and I will lift you up in due time. ISAIAH 57:15; PSALMS 10:17–18; 147:5–6; 1 PETER 5:5–6 Prayer Declaration Father, in humility and submission I stand before You. I have prepared my heart to do Your will and have strengthened my spirit to follow after Your ways. Cover me with Your protection, for I have submitted myself to You, to Your Word, and to Your Holy Spirit.

Dead in Their Tracks by John Annerino

the first sections of the Border Fence went up in San Diego sector—the contractor used undocumented workers to build it.

Mexican right-wing talk radio wants a fence built on their southern border to keep out those damned Hondurans and Salvadorans and Guatemalans. I heard a radio host in Guadalajara decry these “aliens.” It seems Hondurans want to take Mexican jobs. Want to steal health care, get an education. They don’t share the proper language, and they carry disease and lower the standard of living and want to steal social security benefits. Rushito Limbortinez in the house!

Audiences for ten years have been startled to learn that the federal law that makes these humans illegal isn’t even on the criminal books. You can look it up for yourself, since no TV or radio host is going to waste a segment explaining the actual law to you. Right or left. Felony? Nope. Misdemeanor? Sorry, but no.

Experts can’t give a definitive schedule of doom. Your own death is largely dictated by factors outside of your control, and beyond accurate prediction. Your own fitness is a factor, your genetics. Gender doesn’t seem to affect your chances much. Women are far from being the “weaker” sex. They survive as long as men, and often survive longer. Hydration before the event might buy you time, same with shade, a hat, rest. How much, however, remains unknown. All sources say you will die in a period of time that can vary from hours to days.

There should be no such thing as an illegal person on this planet.

Later, she calculated that the dead men’s flight alone had cost over sixty-eight thousand dollars. “What if,” she asked, “somebody had simply invested that amount in their villages to begin with?

The first illegal immigrants to be hunted down in Desolation by the earliest form of the Border Patrol were Chinese. In the 1800s, American railroad barons needed cheap skilled labor to help "tame our continent." Mexico's Chinese hordes could be hired for cheap, even at cut rates. Job opened, word went out, the illegals came north. Sound familiar? Americans panicked at the "yellowing" of America. A force known as the Mounted Chinese Exclusionary Police took to the dusty wasteland. They chased the "coolies" And deported them.

About the Phones Closing my car door, you always say - Watch for deer and text when you get home. I want to, I do, but I will forget. Time moves and I forget. - Look I am trying, I am, but it's not the kind of thing that trying solves. Once on the side of a highway, a cop told me about dragging a full grown buck out the windshield of a wrecked car all by himself. About the sounds it made, Like the devil learning what regret feels like. About the woman it kicked to death in the driver's seat. The phone call he had to make to her grown daughter after whose first question was, Did the deer survive? Different cop, different time, different highway. Said she keeps her phone on silent then spoke about securing the crime scene in that classroom in Blacksburg where one student shot all the others. Every single one of them had a cell phone, she said, and for hours after every single one rang and rang or vibrated across the floor in the same slow way that blood pools. No one was allowed to answer, no one, so instead the phones rang all night until batteries were empty, voicemails full of a thousand Call me when you get this so I know you're okays. Turns out time moves the way blood does. Batteries too. Runs out like a startled deer across a road. - Listen I am trying to find a way to tell you this. There are things that trying solves but this is not one of them.

In fact, the towers are built, raised, maintained, and paid for out-of-pocket by those bleeding-heart liberals, the Border Patrol agents themselves.

To the timid traveler, fresh from the sedimentary levels of the lowlands, these highways, however picturesque and grand, seem terribly forbidding — cold, dead, gloomy gashes in the bones of the mountains, and of all Nature’s ways the ones to be most cautiously avoided. Yet they are full of the finest and most telling examples of Nature’s love; and though hard to travel, none are safer. For they lead through regions that lie far above the ordinary haunts of the devil, and of the pestilence that walks in darkness. True, there are innumerable places where the careless step will be the last step; and a rock falling from the cliffs may crush without warning like lightning from the sky; but what then? Accidents in the mountains are less common than in the lowlands, and these mountain mansions are decent, delightful, even divine, places to die in, compared with the doleful chambers of civilization. Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain-passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action. Even the sick should try these so-called dangerous passes, because for every unfortunate they kill, they cure a thousand.

They couldn’t sweat him, no matter what they did. Hey, they were gringos—no way were they going to do the kind of things to him the Mexican cops and the Federales would have done. Every Mexican gangster knows this—Los Yunaites is the land of human rights,

[...] his friends were all a bunch of poor cunts and his mother was a fool who still believed her man was coming back one day, a fucking fool who pretended she didn’t know that Brando’s dad had another family over in Palogacho and only sent them money each month because he felt guilty for having tossed them out like rubbish bags, as if we were pieces of shit, Mum, wake the fuck up: what’s the point in all that praying, what good does it do if you can’t even see straight, if you can’t see what everyone else does, you stupid, stupid woman! But she would just lock herself in her room and chant her litanies, almost shouting them to block out Brando’s raging and bashing against her door, the kicking and thumping that he would have happily aimed at her rotten mug, to see if that way she’d get it through her thick skull, to see if she’d just die and fuck off once and for all to her motherfucking promised land and stop banging on at him with her prayers and her sermons, her moaning and snivelling, all that: Lord, what have I done to deserve this child? Where’s my darling boy, my sweet, dear little Brando? How could you allow the devil to enter him, Lord? The devil doesn’t exist, he’d shout back, or your shitty God, and his mother would let out an anguished wail followed by more prayers, intoned with even greater intensity, even greater devotion, to make up for her son’s blasphemes, before Brando stormed off to the bathroom, where he’d stand before the mirror and stare at the reflection of his face until it looked like his black pupils, together with his equally black irises, had dilated so wide that they covered the entire surface of the mirror, a forbidding darkness cloaking everything: a darkness devoid of even the solace of the incandescent fires of hell; a desolate, dead darkness, a void from which nothing and no one could ever rescue him: not the wide-open mouths of the poofs who approached him in the clubs on the highway, not his nocturnal escapades in search of dog orgies, not even the memory of what he and Luismi had done, not even that [...]

Yes. Mankind can’t endure the thought that the world was born by chance, by mistake, just because four brainless atoms bumped into one another on a slippery highway. So a cosmic plot has to be found—God, angels, devils. Synarchy performs the same function on a lesser scale.

If the North American continent was broad ("high, wide, and lonesome"), then Mexico was tall. High, narrow, and lonesome. Europeans conquering North America hustled west, where the open land lay. And the Europeans settling Mexico hustled north. Where the open land was. Immigration, the drive northward, is a white phenomenon. White Europeans conceived of and launched El Norte mania, just as white Europeans inhabiting the United States today bemoan it.

The border remains a fluid, mutating, stubbornly troubling, enthusiastically lethal region. Perhaps it's not a region at all. Maybe it's just an idea nobody can agree on. A conversation that never ends, even when it becomes an argument and all participants kick over the table and spill their drinks and stomp out of the room.

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.

Curled time It was the moment of last reckoning, The last moment for time and life as well, Because for long life had been meandering, Along the highways of time, until they all crashed and fell, They fell into the self terminating moments of time, For time no longer found a reason to tarry in this world, It had lost its melody, its symphony, and its every happy rhyme, Thus forcing time to create moments that always flowed in formations curled, Always moving back to where they began, Thereby cancelling every prospect of future, With future dead, the present too died and moments of time no longer ran, Because there was no present to stand on, no future to go to, and ah the time’s torture, To live in this curled formation, Where every moment ended the moment it began, Time existed but it had lost its original sensation, Now that present didn't exist , future had no existence at all; I wondered whose was this plan, Not the Sky, not the Earth, not the Sun and not at all the Moon, They all existed in their orbits like before, So who could be this senseless goon, Who forced time to lead a curled path, where only past existed now and rest it was forced to ignore, Life existed like a past memory, Where nothing new took place, It was like a devil’s ceremony, Whee the guest of honour was expected to be the grace, And can there be a worst oxymoron than this, Where the devil romances the grace, And when the devil approached her with the desire to kiss, Grace fled into the curled formation of time and thus began the eternal race, Where grace is at the front tip of these curled moments of time, The hungry Devil is chasing her in the last moment riding this curl, Grace who is keen not to commit this crime, Keeps running, as if on the fast moving rollet of life it were a forcefully cast pearl, Where the pearl wants to stop, to feel the moments passing by, But the rollet of life moves relentlessly in the time’s curl, And the pearl turns dizzy when the speed is too high, But the thought about the devil forces it to stay within this endless whirl.

God and heaven were down there on the ground, in the gardens, in the forests, in the parks, on the seashores, on the lakes, and riding the highways, going somewhere! Hell was right here, where I was, shadowing me persistently, trying to do me in, and make me into what the grandmother thought I was—the Devil's issue.

For a while, the Mexican government offered the walkers survival kits with water and snacks, but the uproar from the United States put a stop to that.

And it’s beautiful. Edward Abbey, the celebrated iconoclast and writer, loved the place. He chose to be buried there, illegally, among the illegal Mexicans he despised.

There was nothing delicious in Delicias

The gringos and the missionaries and even the government representatives from Mexico City told them to stop procreating. It was simple: too many mouths caused hunger. But the Pope ordered them to continue being fertile—even condoms were wicked.

Come, the Devil’s Highway awaits.

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 towards 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 silent as a graveyard out there. Just the crunch and slide, crunch and slide, of endless hopeless footsteps. Hundreds of footsteps.

Looks like we found it." John said. "Where are we?" As far as Link could tell, there was nothing to find. John pointed up at the white signs at the intersection that read 61 and 49, and Liv checked her selonometer as if they weren't standing in the middle of nowhere. "Are those numbers supposed to mean something to us?" Floyd asked. "We're at the intersection of Highways 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi," John said. Sampson shook his head. " I feel like an idiot. Any guitar player worth his strings knows about this place. It's where Robert Johnson made a deal with the Devil." Floyd's eyes widened. "Seriously? We're at the crossroads?" John nodded. "The one and only." Liv glanced at John. "I'm assuming this is an American thing?" He put his arm around her. "Yeah, sorry. It's an old rock and roll myth- at least as far as mortals are concerned. In the 1930s, a blues musician named Robert Johnson disappeared for a couple of weeks. According to the story, he brought his guitar right here to this crossroads-" Link jumped in. "Then he traded his soul to become the most famous blues guitarist in history." Sampson tugged on his leather pants, which weren't the best choice in the Mississippi heat. "Totally a fair trade, as far as I'm concerned." "Thought the same thing myself," a man's voice called out from behind them. Link wheeled around. A young man wearing a wrinkled white shirt, a black jacket, and a Panama hat stood on the side of the road with a three-legged black Labrador. There was a weariness in the man's eyes of someone much older. A battered guitar hung from a strap slung around his back.

In these settings, his guitar was forbidden, even though in his own head the blues and gospel were like concurrent, even complementary streams. His father looked at the blues with contempt: The “devil’s music,” he called it. Many of the churchgoing adults “looked down on it, they didn’t want you to touch it,” Roebuck recalled. But in his own mind, he saw more similarities than differences between the two styles: “A Christian should sing God’s praises, but there are some things that some people call a sin that I don’t see as such. Singing the blues is telling a story, and it’s telling a true story. You take all those [blues] guys, they’re talking about a woman. They’re talking about experience—that’s all it is.

Jillian Ramsay, PhD, was driving a panel van without air-conditioning through an area known as the Devil’s Armpit. She wished that was an exaggeration, or a misprint on the map. But there it was, in bold print on the highway sign, “You are entering the Devil’s Armpit.