Crossers Page 18

  Félix padded in a few minutes later, jacket buttoned in the middle. He took a stool at the end of the bar, ordered a drink that he was careful not to touch, then swung sideways and pretended to watch the TV while he studied his quarry—a nice touch. He was planning it out, figuring where to place himself, rehearsing the action in his mind. That was essential, to see it happening before it happened. Then Félix went to the bathroom to put the latex surgical glove on his shooting hand. His jacket was unbuttoned when he came out, and now it would have to be all speed and training and experience before anyone noticed the gun butt protruding from his waistband. He covered the room in four or five smooth strides, eyes fixed on his targets with what The Professor knew would be extreme tunnel vision. Félix could not allow himself to see anything but those two men, could not allow himself to be aware of anything else.

  He was about six feet from the table when he called out in a friendly voice, “Oye! Vicente!” and as Cruz looked up to squint at this stranger greeting him: “¡Sabe por qué estoy aquí!—You know why I am here!” In the same moment, with a flowing, almost balletic movement of his arm, he drew the Colt and fired twice into Cruz, then turned the gun left to right, firing twice more into the pistolero. A .45-caliber semiautomatic makes a terrific noise in an enclosed space, and the sound and the swiftness of the action had had the shock effect The Professor had counted on—nobody had time to react. The customers were fastened to their seats, as still as figures in a freeze frame, as Félix backed away from the table, then pirouetted through the arch into the dining room.

  The freeze frame twitched back into motion. Billy and the other survivors from Vicente’s table tipped it over as they went to his aid, the bottles shattering on the floor. Several customers fled, probably because they wanted no dealings with the police, whom the bartender, over a waitress’s screams, was phoning in panicky Spanglish. “¡Hola! Hello! Nine eleven! Shooting aquí! Restaurante Tehuantepec! Tehuantepec restaurant! ¡Sí! Yes! Grand Avenue! A shooting!” The Professor pushed through a knot of stunned onlookers to make sure Cruz was dead. He was—slumped in the corner, head to one side, the wall behind and above him smeared with blood, bone chips, parts of his brain. The pistolero had taken both shots through the chest.

  On the sidewalk outside three or four people stood around the Colt that Félix had dropped when he had no more use for it. They looked at the weapon in a kind of awestruck state, as if it were some holy object. Félix was not in sight, on the road by now. He would abandon the car downtown—in the unlikely event that somebody had made the plates—cross back into Mexico on foot, and give Gloria a call. He’d certainly earned his bonus. Two shots to the head. The Professor would not have risked it, would have aimed for the body, a surer thing—but if the pupil is not greater than the teacher, then the teacher has failed.

  He heard the mad gulping of police and ambulance sirens as he drove out onto Mariposa and headed south. A green sign over the highway read: MEXICO 2KM. When he passed through the gate, flipping his federal police ID to the Mexican customs guard, he dialed the Santa Clara on his mobile. Carrasco answered.

  “Hola,” The Professor said. “This is your cook. The pig has been roasted.”

  8

  CASTLE LOATHED all country-western music except the old-time stuff that he’d listened to while pulling all-nighters in college, signals from stations in Gatlinburg and Jackson and Fayetteville ricocheting off the ionosphere into his room at Princeton—Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, or Waylon Jennings lamenting faithless hearts, bad roads, hard times, and sinners longing for salvation. Raucous and rowdy or mournful and plaintive, those songs had the authenticity of lived experience. But the modern tunes, rooted in the suburbs and shopping mall instead of the cotton fields and the prison yard, all sounded alike to him, full of fabricated emotions and as predictable and standardized as a room in a Days Inn or the front page of USA Today. Hard to sing about hard times when you’re living in a cul-de-sac and a McDonald’s Happy Meal is a five-minute drive away; and now that the backwoods revival tents had been replaced by megachurches whose media-savvy ministers preached Redemption Lite to their consumers, no sinner need feel the longing to be saved, or for that matter, feel like a sinner at all.

  So he was encouraged when the Double Sixes—Rick Erskine on vocals and lead guitar, backed up by an electric bass, a drummer, a keyboardist, and a horn player—jumped out onto the stage garbed in white shirts and rumpled black linen suits, without a cowboy hat on a single head. The opening number began with the horn riffing a Mexican theme that was suddenly silenced by harsh, dissonant chords from Rick’s guitar, the keyboardist and the drummer leaping in over a bluesy baseline. “High Speed Chase,” it was called, a kind of epic in the vein of “Pancho and Lefty,” about doper desperadoes in flight from the Border Patrol. It set the tone for the songs that followed. Not a whiff of sentimentality in any of them, with thoughtful lyrics, too thoughtful for the major labels, which probably accounted for the band’s confinement to provincial popularity. They sang of modern-day outlaws, not in a Wild West that had never died but in a West that had been tamed and then reverted to a new and more toxic wildness—narcs and narcosnitches, shady gringos looking to score in Mexico, blood and money and blood money, the crackle of drug-war bullets, crooked cops with straight teeth as white as migrants’ skulls grinning under the saguaros—the feral West straight out of this morning’s editions of the

  ARIZONA DAILY STAR

  Serving Tucson since 1877 • WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2003

  Two Killed in Gangland-Style Shooting in Nogales

  By Ramon Alvarez and Melinda Norris

  NOGALES—A modest restaurant in this border city was the scene Thursday night of a shooting that left two men dead and that one Nogales police officer described as “something right out of ‘The Godfather.’” The victims were identified as …

  The paper had been lying on the backseat when Blaine and Monica picked him up, and Castle, even with his news-phobia, was drawn to it with the same lurid fascination that compels motorists to gawk at an ugly accident. The Mariposa Mall was behind the Walgreens where he’d filled his Ambien prescription the other week. That a locale so commonplace had been the setting for a “gangland-style” assassination jarred his sense of the expected. Such events were supposed to occur in moody Italian joints on side streets in Brooklyn or New Jersey, not in a Mexican seafood restaurant in a down-at-the-heels shopping mall in a middling-size Arizona town. Maybe he needed to revise his mantra to: anything at any moment anywhere. He’d begun to ask himself if he’d chosen the wrong place for a refuge. Maybe he should have gone all the way, to a Tibetan lamasery, a cabin in the Alaskan bush.

  The shooting was all they’d talked about on the ride into Tucson. Castle had looked out the window at the theatrical sunset reddening the clouds over the Santa Ritas and thought of Miguel, cringing in his own waste as he watched his two friends shot down in cold blood. In these borderlands beauty cohabited with violence—Blaine and Gerardo’s world of cattle and horses and operatic landscapes, the parallel world of drug lords and coyotes and murder.

  IN THE DARK AGES before cineplexes, the Rialto had been a movie theater, its interior ornamented to resemble the opera houses of a still-earlier epoch in entertainment. As part of a campaign, not entirely successful, to revivify Tucson’s tired downtown, it had been converted into a concert hall, one that catered to the young and the fit, for the seats on the lobby floor had been removed, requiring the audience to stand throughout the performance. The more sedentary had to go to the balcony. This was where Castle sat with Tessa, Blaine, and Monica, far enough from the stage not to be totally deafened by the refrigerator-size speakers. Below, the audience, mostly undergraduates judging from the names of colleges emblazoned on their sweatshirts and jackets, stood in a kind of rapture, swaying to the music, singing along on the choruses, whooping, hollering, holding overhead cigarette lighters or cell phone cameras, whose bright screens made electronic fires amid the lighters’ flames
.

  The music was disturbing, but not in the unpleasant way the news story had been disturbing. As listening to the blues cured the blues, listening to Rick’s music—Monica called the genre “desert rock”—somehow eased Castle’s disquiet. Despite himself, he was having a good time. The massed youth beneath him made him feel younger and their high spirits raised his; yet he was aware that he would not be enjoying himself half as much if Tessa were not beside him. She had exchanged her rodeo-queen outfit of the other night for something more urban—a satiny, cream-colored blouse, loose-fitting trousers with an autumn leaf pattern, and a pair of low-heeled beige pumps. Conversation was impossible, sound waves from the giant speakers penetrated skin, vibrated internal organs. Tessa tilted her head toward Castle’s ear to say, “They’re very good!” He nodded and rubbed his sleeve, the nearness of her lips bringing on a sudden, pleasurable chill.

  At the break they went backstage to meet the band. A scrawny kid the last time Castle had seen him, Rick Erskine was now a towering young man, an inch taller than his father and, fortunately, heir to Monica’s looks. He embraced her and shook hands with Blaine, then with Castle.

  “Dad told me you were staying at the place. Good to see you again.” There was an uncomfortable pause. Shy, like many musicians when off stage, Rick brushed his long, light hair with his fingers. He knew about Amanda’s death, of course, but he seemed unsure of what to say, or if he should say anything. Castle rescued him by asking where the band had been touring.

  “Everywhere from El Paso to San Diego,” he answered. “Next month it’ll be Puerto Peñasco.”

  That fishing village, on the Sea of Cortez, had become the spring-break destination for southwestern colleges.

  “He packs ’em in down there,” said Blaine enthusiastically. Castle would not have thought his hard-bitten cousin would be so pleased to have a singer and songwriter for a son—he would have wanted Rick to carry on with ranching, or to go into some practical line of work, say mine engineering, like his grandfather.

  The performance concluded with an antiwar song. It wasn’t as overt as the pacifist anthems of the sixties, and the overamplified lyrics were hard to make out, but the message was clear enough and wrenched cheers from the throats of the audience. Blaine cheered right along with them, seemingly oblivious to the tune’s sentiments, which, if they’d been expressed in plain conversation, would have provoked one of his truculent speeches.

  At the end of the set Tessa remained in her seat while Blaine, Monica, and Castle rose to applaud; then, realizing that this might be mistaken for displeasure, she stood and joined in, albeit without much spirit. No exceptional degree of perception was needed to know that the last song had carried her far away, to another desert, where the engines of war cast their long shadows. She scarcely spoke during the drive home. Castle and she sat an arm’s length apart, but as the pickup jounced down the dirt road to her place, he, as timorous as a high school kid on a first date, reached across the space between them and clasped her hand. He told himself that this gesture was meant to reassure her that he understood why she was so removed, that she could count on him if she needed someone to talk to. There was more to it, of course, but he wasn’t ready to face the truth of his desire. He was happy to feel her return the pressure, a brief squeeze that communicated thanks, and perhaps something else.

  When Blaine stopped at her front gate, she snatched her hand away and climbed out before Castle could ask to see her in.

  “Good night, everyone,” she said brusquely. “And thanks. I had a good time.”

  With her jacket tossed over her shoulders, Tessa strode up the path to her door, a silhouette in the darkness until a motion-sensitive spotlight above the door flashed on, and in its glare the orange and russet leaves printed on her billowy trousers seemed to swirl about her legs, to swirl and tumble, like real leaves stirred by a breeze.

  Ben Erskine

  Transcript 1 of interview conducted for the Arizona Historical

  Society with Jeffrey Erskine. The interview took place at

  Mr. Erskine’s ranch, the San Ignacio, on May 6, 1966.

  My brother was loved and admired by a lot of folks on both sides of the border, for good reason. He was also feared and hated, likewise for good reason. Most of the ones who feared and hated him were riffraff, but some were decent people, like Mae Wilcox. Her and her husband owned a small ranch near to ours, and Mae had forbidden her kids to play with Ben’s because her boy, when he wasn’t but fifteen, sassed Ben and Ben would not accept his apology when he offered it later on, and in fact never spoke a word to that boy for the rest of his life. The whole notion of Christian forgiveness was as foreign to him as eating carrots is to a wolf. The man could carry a grudge like a pack mule. Generally speaking, it didn’t take much to get on Ben’s wrong side, and once you were there, you stayed there—unless you threatened him or his. In that case, you wound up on the wrong side of the ground. He killed his first man when he was only thirteen. This happened when our mother kicked him out of the house and sent him to live for a spell with her older brother in Lochiel. A Mexican had pulled a knife on him and tried to steal his horse, but somehow or other Ben wrestled the knife out of his hands and stabbed him to death. That’s the story I heard from our uncle Josh. Ben himself wouldn’t talk about it.

  Another story: in ’05 Ben and me had found work in the Pride of the West mine in the Patagonia Mountains, near to the towns of Washington Camp and Duquesne. There was a whole lot of mines operating in that area in those days, and the two towns must have had at least a thousand people in each one of them. Nothing much left to them now. The Pride of the West was one of the big operations, copper and silver mostly, a shaft mine, and it was damn hard work busting hard rock four hundred feet underground ten hours a day, six days a week, in a tunnel you could barely stand up straight in.

  We had fetched up there because our mother, Hattie, had pulled up stakes from Tucson and moved out to California with our stepfather, and the both of them had made it clear without saying so that we would not be welcome to travel with them. Our mother was a peculiar woman, not what most folks would think of when you say the word mother. But the main problem was Ben and our stepdad—Rudy Hollister was his name. They were always at each other’s throats. Rudy was a nice enough fella, but Ben hated him for stepping into our dad’s boots, or trying to. Our dad had been a territorial ranger and died from a horse kick back in ’01. Like I was saying, Ben hated Rudy, and no matter how nice you might be, you can be hated just so long before you start to hate back.

  So when the Southern Pacific railroad—that was Rudy’s employer—gave him a promotion and a transfer to San Diego, he saw his chance to get shed of Ben. Our mother, well, she was not overflowing with affection for me, but she come to be at Ben’s throat, too, and was just as happy as Rudy to get away from him. And Ben was glad to be rid of her. So when Hattie and Rudy stepped on the train for California, the two of us stayed behind in Arizona. We got jobs in the mine and moved into a boardinghouse the mine company had built in Washington Camp. The way I felt about things, and still do, all these sixty years later, was that Hattie was like a she-wolf, leaving her young behind to slink off with her new mate. She had turned Ben and me into orphans, which I state as fact without feeling sorry for myself, nor for Ben neither.

  Even when I was seventeen, I had my sights set on becoming a cattleman. My brother and I had worked cattle on school vacations on ranches outside Tucson, and we were the both us damn good with a rope and could ride as well as the next man. The mine paid decent wages, and I saved every dime I could to one day buy me a few head and make a start.

  Well, I have wandered off the point. I was fixing to tell you how Ben never could tolerate an insult or any man ever getting the better of him. I have told you that hard-rock mining as it was practiced a long time ago was damn hard work. One day Ben, who was skinny like our dad, considerably skinnier than me, hell, he was skinny enough that some folks said he could take a shower in a
shotgun barrel without his elbows touching the sides, hurt his back shoveling waste rock into an ore car. Now, in the days before the socialists come along with their labor unions, a miner who hurt himself was out of work and out of luck. But the supervisor had taken a liking to Ben and, when he found out Ben had gone to two years of high school and could read, write, and do sums, gave him a job in the payroll office.

  It came to pass that on a day in ’06 one miner, a big fella called Brophy got drunk and, in the paymaster’s office, accused Ben of crediting him less hours than he’d put in, which made him come up two bucks short in his pay envelope. The paymaster checked the figures and told Brophy to pipe down, that his hours was calculated by the timekeeper, not by Ben, and that if Brophy had an argument, he should take it up with the timekeeper. Way I heard it, Brophy said something like, “Like hell, that scrawny snot-nose is what done it!” My brother, not being one to let a challenge go unanswered or to allow someone else to fight his battles for him, said that Brophy could not count two plus two when sober, much less in his present condition, and for that wisecrack he got knocked cold by a punch to the jaw.

  If you consider that Ben was sixteen and maybe a hundred forty pounds with his boots on and the miner was a grown man a good sixty pounds heavier, it was no disgrace, but that night in our bunks in the boardinghouse, he told me that he’d been called a cheat and been sucker-punched and could not permit it to pass unavenged. There was a blacksmith in camp, name of McNamara. He’d been a professional prizefighter in Ireland, and when he came to America, he’d hoboed from one western mining town to another and earned lunch money by walking into saloons and declaring that he could whip any man in the place. Take into account that his opponents were not scienced and almost always intoxicated, the man never did go hungry.