The Devil's Highway Read Online Free PDF Page B

that seemed both sorrowful and peaceful at the same time, a landscape that history was made on, a history both real and imagined, and replayed in endless variation in the films, novels and songs of the popular imagination. This was cowboy and Indian country, where the history of America’s violent adolescence had been played out.
    If El Paso is the jewel of West Texas, it is accompanied by many scattered satellite diadems, strewn as they are across the dusty plains. Towns like Fort Hancock, Morning Glory, Horizon City, Van Horn and Valentine, too numerous to count in passing. They dot the landscape like tiny pearls strewn out across the vast carpet of the Texan frontier. As I drove southeast from El Paso to Van Horn, I passed through those desert towns, each with its own history, peculiarities, its own pace and way of doing things, Though I was certainly a Southerner myself, the different look and feel of the country served to remind me that I was a visitor far from home.
    I had been out west before, though not to Texas. My previous trip had been to Arizona, and the extreme edge of West Texas held many similarities. There was the legendary landscape, the surreal beauty of the desert that surrounded you; the sleepy little towns, and, always, the vastness of the sky and the looming majesty of the distant mountains.
    I pulled off Highway 10 at a rest stop for gas and refreshments. It was an old-fashioned looking place, a low building with one small window by the register and an ice cooler and soda machine out front. A man in well-worn coveralls and a cap with a Texas Longhorns logo came out and asked me if I needed some gas. I said that I did, and he then proceeded to pump it for me.  
    “I didn’t think anyone did that anymore,” I commented.
    He smiled when I spoke, giving me the once-over, instantly and obviously assessing me and deciding that I was from somewhere else. “Some of us still like to do things the old-fashioned way out here.”
    A man that had lived here all of his life must know things, I figured, so I asked him, “Say, have you ever heard of some kind of militia compound around here?”
    He nodded. “I think I’ve heard rumors of something like that, maybe a ways to the south of here. But if you’re a tourist, mister, you probably shouldn’t go out there. I hear that they have machine guns, and shoot up old cars for fun.”
    I thanked him and paid him. I wondered if he was telling me in a delicate way that black people shouldn’t go out there. You never know. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
    I considered Brad’s arrival to the area. When Brad Caldwell had hit town, he would have been coming in from the other side, as he came by car, and hadn’t bypassed the town by air, as I had. Van Horn wasn’t that big, so I figured that any young kid driving in alone on this lonely stretch of Highway 10 would have been noted by someone. So I set out across town to find that someone. As it turned out, there were several.
    Highway 10 passed through Van Horn, an endless line of eighteen wheelers roaring through on its wide lanes, blowing through on their long hauls from one unknown place to the other, doing their bit to keep the great wheel of American commerce turning. Beneath the underpass, uncaring kids rode their bikes or skateboards and listened to their iPods.
    If a traveler comes limping in off the desert, east of Van Horn, a vast plume of desert dust billowing behind him, the first thing he sees is the East Broadway Exit. On the left side of the off ramp there’s a service station; on the other, a friendly, low building with a sign that announced that it was the home of Rose’s Cantina and Travel Stop, Open 24 Hours.
    I checked at the service station first. If Brad had driven in, the last town of any size that he had passed was Saragosa, about seventy-five miles behind him on that lost highway. He’d have been ready for a rest, I bet, and knowing what I knew of Brad, a beer or two. But first he might