Crossers Page 29

  So we rode very fast to the line, but after we got across, we reined our horses and talked about what to do next. We felt very bad, leaving Benjamín like that.

  Then we saw riders coming toward us from the south. In one more minute we saw that they were Don Diego’s vaqueros and they were leading two horses—Don Diego’s and Spirit. Don Diego was walking behind them with Benjamín, who had his special pistol—the Luger automatic—stuck in the back of Don Diego’s head. We could not speak. We thought that maybe we were seeing a vision.

  Benjamín pushed Don Diego across the border, into the hands of Parker and Bond. He told them to hold on to Don Diego. Then, with his pistol aimed at the vaqueros, he went to the saddlebags on Spirit and took our guns from them and gave them back to us. He had recovered his gun and our guns! We were even more amazed. Then Benjamín grabbed Don Diego and pushed him down to his hands and knees and kicked him in the butt, you know, like he would kick a dog. He kicked him twice. He kicked him over the border, back into Mexico, and said that Don Diego should go back to where he came from. Parker and Bond were laughing. Don Diego stood up, very angry, and he called to his vaqueros, “Shoot him! Kill him!” But the vaqueros’ guns were in their holsters, and we had ours pointed at them, and there was nothing they could do. Don Diego mounted his horse and looked at Benjamín and said, “You are going to die for this.” Then he rode away with his men.

  We rode toward the ranch. Parker and Bond laughed some more. They shook Benjamín’s hand, they slapped his back, they asked him how he had worked this magic. How had he, the captive, become the captor? Benjamín did not explain, he wished to keep his magic secret. Me, I was not laughing. I had a bad feeling. Don Diego was more than a ranchero, he was an hacendado, a man of great dignity. I thought Benjamín should have been happy to have won back his liberty. For him to kick Don Diego in the butt, to disgrace him and humiliate him before the very eyes of his men, that was going too far. On the ride home I whispered to Benjamín, “He means what he says. He will try to kill you.” Do you know what he said to me? “I know.” That was all. “I know.”

  One day two men on horseback came to the ranch, old friends of Benjamín’s. They had fought with him in the Revolution. They came to him with a warning—Don Diego had offered a big reward to anyone who killed him. Two hundred and fifty dollars. In those times Mexico was full of desperate men who would have killed anyone for a few pesos.

  The following days were difficult. They were most difficult for our women. La señora Ida was carrying a child, and so was Lourdes. She was angry with Benjamín and with me, too. “You were no better than the thieves who stole our cattle,” she said. “You will be lucky if God does not punish you.” We ate dinner together almost every night, the four of us, and I remember many nights when the ranch dogs started barking and Benjamín would place his Luger on the dining table, and we blew out the lamps and sat quietly in the dark, listening for footsteps, for the sound of horses’ hooves.

  Now the thing I swore not to tell. This happened on a very hot day in September, after the squalls were finished. Benjamín and me had to go out and move some cattle from grazing land he rented from the government. We were going to move the cattle closer to a water hole. We rode down a road through country that was very good country for an ambush—a lot of hills and woods and arroyos and canyons. Both of us were on the lookout. It was very still, no wind, and the only sound we could hear were the calls of the Mexican jays. We listened for other sounds, you know, a man’s cough, or the snorting of a horse, or rustling in the brush. And we looked side to side into the trees for something that should not be there, like the shining of a rifle barrel in the sun.

  We came to the top of a hill. Not too far ahead, on the road, we saw two mounted men approaching us. Benjamín pulled Spirit off the road and dismounted and drew his Winchester from the scabbard on his saddle. He did this very quickly and signaled me to come with him, and I did. We climbed up a big rock that looked over the road. We laid down there. I had my pistol out. We could see the riders, but they could not see us. They came closer—Mexicans, wearing straw hats and sandals and dirty white shirts. A big man and a small one. The big man rode in front, with a shotgun across the pommel of his saddle. The small man was not armed and rode a burro and led another with heavy sacks roped to its packsaddle.

  I returned my pistol to the holster and said in a low voice, “Peons. They are not assassins.”

  Benjamín whispered to me that maybe they were assassins who were trying to look like peons.

  Pretty soon the big man on the horse was right below us. Benjamín jumped up and aimed the Winchester and shouted, “Halt! Hands up!” The big man was startled, as who would not be who finds himself on a lonely road and a man pointing a rifle at him from above? I think he thought we were bandits. He jerked his head around and yelled to the smaller one, “My son, watch out!” I do not know if Benjamín heard that. I know I did. When he did that, he turned around in the saddle, his shotgun slipped from the pommel and he went to grab it to keep it from falling to the ground, and that was when Benjamín shot him.

  All of this happened, you understand, very fast. The big man fell from the horse, and his foot got caught in the stirrup, and the frightened horse ran very fast into the woods, dragging him. At the same time the small man dropped his lead rope and turned his burro to flee. Quickly, very, very quickly, Benjamín worked the lever of his rifle and shot him in the back, and he fell, and the riding burro and the pack burro both went crazy, bucking and jumping. One ran off in one direction, the pack burro in another direction. It crashed into a tree, it was so crazy, and the sacks came off and spilled the things inside.

  “Let us make sure they are finished!” Benjamín said to me, and we climbed off the rock and followed the blood trail of the big man into the woods. We found him lying on the rocks of an arroyo not too far away. His horse had bucked his foot from the stirrup and had run away somewhere. Benjamín threw a rock at the big man to make sure he was dead. He was. There was a bullet hole in his shoulder, but the thing that killed him was his galloping horse dragging him over the rocks. His face and head were all smashed up, like somebody had beat him with a club. It was a terrible thing to see.

  We ran back to the road to look at the small man. He, too, was dead. The bullet had gone right through him, made a big hole in his chest coming out. We saw that when we turned him over, and that he was not a small man but only a boy. Maybe thirteen, maybe fourteen. And that was when I knew I had heard correctly when I heard the big man call out, “My son!” I went over to see what had come out of the sacks on the pack burro. I found bags of tobacco and whiskey and beer bottles packed in straw, and I cried out, “Ayyy, Benjamín, they are not assassins, like I told you. They are smugglers. Smugglers and nothing more.”

  Yes, that was all, and small-timers, too, a father and his son making some extra money smuggling whiskey and tobacco into Mexico. You see, in those times, before alcohol was forbidden in the United States, Mexicans would buy it in the United States and bring it into Mexico because whiskey, and tobacco, too, had big taxes on them.

  “If they are smugglers,” Benjamín asked me, “why were they riding north with the contraband?” I answered him, “I don’t know. How can I know? But they cannot be assassins.”

  I remember Benjamín going down on one knee, holding his rifle, and looking at the dead boy. He looked at him for a long time without saying nothing. I do not know what he was thinking. I did know what I was thinking, that my friend had murdered these two peons and that I was at his side when he did. I had fear of my own thoughts.

  After a time Benjamín stood up and said he was sorry that this must happen. If he had known it was only a boy, he would not have shot him. If the big man had not gone for his shotgun, he would not have shot him. Me, I was not sure the big man had reached for the shotgun, and even if he had, what was Benjamín to expect, jumping up like that aiming a rifle at a man on a lonely road? But what did any of that matter?

  Benja
mín said we must bury them, and we did. Ghosts and bones! We dragged the boy to where his father lay in the arroyo, and we piled rocks on top of them. It took a long time. We buried the shotgun and the contraband, too, because, I think, Benjamín worried that someone might find them and ask questions. In those days, you know, gringos often got away with killing Mexicans, but because he had shot a little boy in the back, I think Benjamín feared he would not get away with it.

  He said he was not going to speak of this to nobody, not even to his wife, Ida. And I was not to say nothing to nobody. He made me swear it. I will always remember how he looked at me—his eyes were gray and hard, like the metal of a gun. I was to take, you know, an oath, and I did, because I could not betray my friend, and for another reason. I was like Lourdes. I was a little afraid of him.

  15

  THE TRIBULATIONS THAT WERE to afflict the San Ignacio, the bad luck of Gerardo’s foreboding (though not all of it, as would be discovered, was blind bad luck) began on a warm, windy day in June. Castle, still eager to show Blaine that he was willing to pitch in with the ranch’s dirty work, had volunteered to help rebuild a fence in a remote pasture. It had been torn apart, apparently by illegal aliens, and an irrigation pipe had been cut, draining a storage tank dry. As Blaine planned to graze cattle in that pasture later on, to fatten them on the succulent grass that would sprout with the summer monsoons, the repairs had to be done now.

  Right after dawn Castle set off on foot for the main house, walking Sam on lead; on lead because the weather had turned hot enough to wake up the rattlesnakes. Gerardo had recently shot a four-foot-long Mojave near the horse corrals. Impatient to run and hunt, as always, Sam strained at the leash, towing her master along at better than four miles an hour. At that pace, he was the picture of a fit middle-aged male, enjoying a brisk walk; but the frown that cut a vertical ditch in his forehead indicated that something was on his mind. And there was. He and Tessa had had their first quarrel.

  Two nights earlier they had gone to dinner and the movies in Tucson. Too tired to make the long drive home, they had checked in to a motel off the freeway. The anodyne anonymity of their room was oddly exciting; it aroused them into the abandoned lovemaking of romantic desperadoes snatching a night together. In the morning, as he checked out, he picked up a newspaper at the front desk. When he noticed the date—June 12—the night’s lingering joys and pleasures curdled into shame.

  He was withdrawn on the return trip, and he could not shake off his sullen mood. When they arrived at her place, troubled by the change in him, Tessa asked what was the matter.

  “Nothing,” he’d answered. What else could he say?

  “Nothing? One minute you can’t get enough of me, the next you hardly say a word for sixty miles.”

  “Look, I can’t explain it to myself,” he said, annoyed with her for asking for an explanation, and with himself for his inability to offer one. “Yesterday was her birthday. I didn’t even realize it till I picked up the paper in the motel. She would have been forty-four.”

  Tessa sat with her hand on the door handle and sighed. “And you’re not feeling quite right about last night, are you? It felt like a dirty weekend. It felt like adultery.”

  “A dirty weekend? Adultery?” he echoed. “No, no, it wasn’t that.” He wasn’t able to go on; the accuracy of her intuition—not quite a bull’s-eye but close enough—left him tongue-tied.

  “Know what?” said Tessa, not without anger. “I am not going to be in the ridiculous position of competing with a ghost.”

  “For chrissake, Tess, that’s off base.”

  “I don’t think so.” She got out of the car and stood looking at him through the open door. “I thought you had things sorted out. I guess you don’t. You need more time, and I’m giving it to you.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you know what. Call me when you’ve got it figured out.”

  He thought that she was being unreasonable, insensitive to his situation. Did she really believe a man who’d lost his wife in such a manner would get over it in less than two years? “I get it,” he said, losing his temper. “You’ve been waiting for an excuse like this. Drive ’em crazy and drop ’em, you said that about yourself. Fuck ’em and forget ’em.” Instantly, he regretted his words and apologized; but it was like firing a gun and then trying to recall the bullet.

  “I ought to slap your face!”

  Then she slammed the door and stomped off toward her front door.

  Now, walking along, he pictured her abundant hair and the pinpoints glinting in her irises, like amber chips in brown earth; he heard her contralto voice in its various modes—frank, tender, flip—and knew life would be bleak without her. But he was wary of the happiness Tessa brought him. He’d written to Morgan and Justine last month, telling them about his new relationship. He’d thought then that he was seeking their approval, which he got in a letter from Morgan—no e-mail, but a real letter in her loopy schoolgirl’s hand—expressing their delight, their hope to come out to Arizona soon and meet Tessa. But he wondered now if he’d secretly wanted their disapproval, to confirm that the voice in his own head, the voice that objected to love, that rebuked happiness, was the one he should listen to.

  Sam jerked him out of these cloudy reflections, lunging toward the oak-shaded arroyo beside the road. She fell into a hard point. A Mearns’ pair burst from under a skein of fallen branches, the hen streaking off to the left, the cock quartering away into the trees beyond the arroyo. Sam started to dash in the direction of the hen’s flight. Castle checked her when he saw a rattler basking on a rock not five yards away. He tugged the dog back onto the road, his heart pounding.

  Road and arroyo wound down to the grassy flat that contained the cheerful clutter of ranch headquarters, considerably less cluttered since he and Miguel had cleaned up the backyard, hauling truckloads of junk to the Patagonia landfill. His mood improved—the scare had been somehow therapeutic—he called out a “Good morning” to Sally, who was tossing supplement from a canvas morral to her geriatric pets.

  “Mornin’, Gil,” she replied from behind the rough-board corral.

  “Saw a rattler on my way down, about the size of the one Gerardo killed.”

  She shrugged; rattlesnakes were so common this time of year, he might as well have told her he’d seen a squirrel.

  “Didn’t stick around to see if it was a Mojave or a diamondback.”

  “A Mojave is greenish, a d-back is more brown. Either one would ruin your day.” She walked off with her morral, summoning her animals to “come and get it or forget it.”

  Castle released Sam to run around with Blaine’s Australian heelers in the backyard, enclosed by chicken wire fastened to rough oak posts. In the middle of the yard the rusted remains of a Model-T truck sat on its rims like an iron sculpture. It was the one piece of scrap that had not been hauled away, partly because it was too big, mostly because Blaine would not part with it. It had been their grandfather’s first truck, which made it a treasured heirloom. Looking at the corroded antique, the tidy yard, the dogs chasing each other, a feeling of pride overtook Castle, though he had no stake in this ranch beyond the little bit of sweat equity he’d put into it. He’d made a discovery at his cabin. A chunk of plaster had flaked off a corner of an outer wall, exposing the adobe brick. A name and date, J. B. ERSKINE—1912, had been inscribed on one, probably with a finger or a stick before the mud had hardened. He’d been told the cabin had been the original homestead, but to see the archaeological proof gave him a quiet thrill. Knowing that the same walls that had sheltered his ancestors now sheltered him gave him a sense of continuity, of belonging. The two-room adobe was no longer a provisional hideout; it was home.

  “How’d you get here?” Blaine said, coming out of the house.

  “I walked, for the exercise.”

  Blaine took off his hat, ruffled the rooster’s crest atop his head, and snorted. Walking was no way to get anywhere so long as a horse or pickup was handy; walki
ng for exercise was beyond pointless.

  “Well, if that’s what you want, you’ll get your fill today,” Blaine said.

  Miguel, supervised by a scowling Gerardo, was loading Blaine’s Ford with gear: doughnuts of barbed wire resembling steel crowns of thorn, flexible irrigation pipe, bundles of T-posts, and two post drivers. He was struggling with one of the drivers, so Castle helped him lift it into the truck. It consisted of a solid piece of cast iron with short handles attached, tapering down to a tube about a yard long. It must have weighed forty or fifty pounds.

  They piled in, Miguel riding outside in the bed, Gerardo in the front seat, Castle in the rear, which closely resembled the interior of a Dumpster—tools, plastic bags, work gloves, a shovel, stained Carhartt coats stiffened from dried sweat.

  Blaine lowered the window and called to his mother that they were leaving.

  “Figured you’d got in the truck to go somewheres,” Sally answered back, shambling out of the corral.

  “Count on her to make some smart-mouth remark no matter what the occasion,” Blaine grumbled as they started off, the Ford with its worn shocks rocking down a rough road like a small boat in heavy seas. “Look at her, feedin’ those damn animals in her PJs and bathrobe. That longhorn is the most pampered bovine ever to walk on four legs. Got the run of the place, not afraid of man nor horse, no sir, no respect at all. The whole reason she paid good money for that son of a bitch was because it reminded her of the old days of the open range. She can be mean as a female rattler with PMS, but she’s got her sentimental side. If the longhorn ain’t, that Mexican in back is the living proof.”

  Castle said nothing. Miguel was living proof that he also had his sentimental side.

  “Her eightieth birthday is comin up the end of the month,” Blaine went on. “I need your advice, Gil. More’n that, I need your help with something.”