Crossers Page 30

  “I’m listening,” Castle said. It was unprecedented for his cousin to ask his advice about anything.

  “It’s like this. Ma owns half the ranch, and me and Monica the other half. We put the ranch into conservation easements about ten years ago, so it ain’t worth what it would be if we’d held on to development rights. Still and all, land values have gone up, and I figure her share would come in north of five million.”

  “And you’d owe estate taxes on four million of that when she dies,” Castle said, guessing at Blaine’s line of thought.

  “Which we ain’t got. We’d either have to borrow the money or sell it. Break up the ranch. And if we sold it, we’d owe capital gains on top of the estate taxes. I had a talk with a lawyer a while back, and he told me that he thought a trust would be a good idea. Ma would put her fifty percent in something he called a LIRT—”

  “A living irrevocable trust, right,” said Castle, pleased to show his expertise.

  “And that’s where I need your help. The way he explained it, Ma would turn things over to a trustee, who’d have a say in how they was run. You’d have an easier time convincing an airline pilot to turn his plane over to a passenger. Monica calls the old lady a control freak. I call her mule-stubborn and set in her ways. Hell, it took us more’n a year to talk her into the conservation easements. But I think if you talked to her—”

  “Me?”

  “She won’t listen to me. Thinks I’m an eighteen-year-old, and a dumb one besides.” Blaine paused to negotiate a difficult stretch of road, where foot-deep ruts ran like crooked rails alongside a rock-cobbled hump that would break an axle at any speed over three miles an hour. “But she respects you. Brags on you to her old-biddy friends. How she’s got this nephew who was a Wall Street big shot.”

  Castle laughed. “That’s because she’s never met a real Wall Street big shot. I was pretty much a middle shot.”

  “Whatever kind of shot you were, she might just listen to you. Takin’ care of this ranch is what gets me up in the morning. Don’t think I could get up without it.”

  “‘Sung to the land,’” Castle said. “I think that’s how you put it.”

  “It’s how that Aussie I knew in Vietnam put it. This is land with a history, damn straight it is. This road we’re on was an old Spanish trace that run from Chihuahua in Mexico all the way to San Diego. I saw it marked on a vellum map that must have been two hundred years old. Spaniards was runnin’ cattle here before there was a United States. I think about that and about Ben and Jeff homesteading this place and how they had to fight off rustlers and droughts and hung on in the Depression, and it’s like we don’t own it, it’s like we … well, I can’t think of the words.”

  “Like it’s been entrusted to you?”

  “That would be about right. It would damn near kill me to lose it or any part of it.”

  And, Castle reflected, looking at the wind-brushed ranges, the oaks, the gyring hawks, he did not want to lose it either. “All right. I’ll talk to her, first chance I get.”

  They drove on, not much faster than had the Spanish traders in their creaking oxcarts, swung off onto a two-track leading across a meadow of grama and red-stemmed hog potato, and stopped near a windmill at the mouth of a canyon. The storage tank stood close by, and the ground all around it had been turned into a small marsh, wet grass sparkling in the sunlight, ponds glimmering in the low spots. They climbed out and sloshed through the muck to the tank, which Blaine tapped twice with a rock, both taps producing a hollow ring.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said in a low voice. “Gerardo wasn’t kiddin’. Bone dry. Five thousand gallons wasted, just wasted.” He picked up the black rubber pipe, roughly the thickness of a fire hose, that snaked from the tank to a round trough several yards away. “They wanted a drink, all they had to do was turn on the pump on the tank and then turn it off. Instead they cut the goddamn pipe.”

  “Hay mucha basura—allí,” Gerardo said, motioning toward a wide draw.

  They went to it, and looked down into a miniature landfill. Scattered up and down the draw were jackets, socks, trousers, gallon water jugs, men’s briefs and women’s panties, cosmetic kits, empty cigarette packages, combs, hairbrushes, candles, boots, tennis shoes, religious cards bearing pictures of the Virgin or of the Sacred Heart, dripping blood.

  “This fuckin’ mess wasn’t left by one bunch,” Blaine said. “Somebody’s been runnin’ wetbacks through here, and that’s peculiar. Drug mules are what we usually get.” He picked up one of the cosmetic kits—it resembled a tiny paint box—and tossed it aside. “Nope, wasn’t drug mules who left this. Don’t know many who wear lipstick. Let’s get to the fence.”

  It spanned the canyon for a distance of about fifty yards and had been knocked down completely in two places, while in other places wobbly stakes leaned, wires sagged or hung like barbed tendrils. Footprints were everywhere, footprints on footprints, and tire marks as well.

  “See what happened, cuzzy? That draw yonder winds down to the border, about three miles away. The coyotes have been walkin’ ’em across the line and up the draw to here. The last bunch cut the pipe and changed clothes and washed up—that’s so they don’t look or smell like illegals when they get to wherever they’re goin’. Then they waited for their rides. The drivers made a couple of gates by smashin’ their trucks right through the fence. If I gotta choose between coyotes and drug mules, I’ll take the mules any day. They’ve got better manners, they ain’t messy. All right, we’ll have to string some new wire and replace or reset the T-posts, one end to the other.”

  He backed the truck up to the fence, and they unloaded the wire, posts, and drivers.

  “This is how it’s done,” he said, grabbing a driver by its handles. Grunting from the strain, he raised it, slipping the hollow end over the top of the stake, then let it drop, giving gravity a boost with a hard downward thrust of his arms. The iron core at the top end of the driver banged into the post, hammering it an inch or so into the ground. “All there is to it. Have at it.”

  Castle grasped the handles and, bending his knees, heaved the monster upward until his quivering arms were extended almost straight out. He let it fall, giving it a shove at the same time, and steel rang on steel, and the post sank another inch.

  “Five, six inches to go.” Blaine tapped Castle on the back of the neck. “We call post drivers crybabies, and now you see why. Ten minutes with one of those brings tears to a grown man’s eyes.”

  Miguel and Gerardo started at one end of the canyon, Blaine and Castle at the other. They stayed at it all morning, spelling each other on the post drivers, cutting old wire, stringing new, pausing only to mop their faces or drink warm water from saddle canteens. No tears had come to Castle’s eyes, but he did shed blood and sweat, his arms clawed by the barbs, the sun a furnace burning with a directness and intensity unknown at more northerly latitudes. When the job was done, his shoulders were so sore, he felt as if he’d been doing bench presses for the past two or three hours; but the hard labor had banished the last remnants of the gloomy introspection that had plagued him earlier. Maybe I need more of this, he thought, looking with satisfaction at the fence, all set to rights, the new wire taut and glimmering in the fierce midday light.

  They wolfed sandwiches, washing them down with cold beers from the cooler. After lunch Blaine fetched two boxes of plastic lawn bags from the truck and told Castle and Miguel to pick up the garbage while he and Gerardo mended the broken water line. The janitorial task wasn’t to be undertaken for aesthetic or sanitary purposes. Cattle would eat almost anything; a cow could choke to death trying to swallow a jacket, and the shards of a plastic water jug could tear her intestines.

  “This shit pisses me off more’n the fence or the storage tank,” Blaine said in a bitter tone. “It’s like a mob broke into my house and trashed the place.”

  Though Castle understood his cousin’s resentment—turning this pristine landscape into a garbage dump bespoke a carelessness that pi
ssed him off, too—he found items in the litter that stirred his curiosity, even his compassion. A paperback book, El diario de Anne Frank, with a woman’s name written on the flyleaf. A well-tailored sport jacket, neatly folded, as if its owner expected to come back for it at any moment. These were not the possessions of poor, semiliterate, itinerant farm workers. What had driven them to turn themselves into human contraband, to be bootlegged across an imaginary line in the desert? Perhaps they saw what the settlers and fortune seekers had seen, crossing the Great Plains, what the Irish and Poles and Jews and Italians (like Castle’s own great-grandfather) had seen, shimmering beyond the western ocean: gold and land for the taking, yes, a chance to change one’s luck, yes, but more: a promise as wide as the continent, as boundless as the human imagination, that seemed to say, Here all things are possible. What things almost didn’t matter. To clarify them by naming them would be to vulgarize that sublime expectation, that ineffable dream in the minds of the awake. As that promise had beckoned the migrants of long ago westward, so had it called these northward. Were these thoughts more examples of sentimentality? Castle asked himself. Was he romanticizing? He couldn’t dismiss the possibility that the multitudes pouring out of the south were merely going where the dollars were and regarded America as nothing more than a vast employment agency. This much he was sure of—he wasn’t filling trash bags with clothes and shoes and backpacks but with the discarded pasts of people intent on remaking their lives. In that sense, he and they were citizens of the same country.

  He didn’t dare express any of this to Blaine when, the repairs to the water line completed, he and Gerardo joined in the cleanup. Blaine’s mood had darkened, he was in no frame of mind to hear any suggestions that the trespassers who had vandalized his ranch might deserve some sympathy. He stomped on a water jug and murmured, more to himself than to Castle, “I’m tryin’ real hard not to hate the people who done this.” Then he fell into a wordless brooding and stayed there the rest of the afternoon. Castle recalled Sally’s description of their grandfather: “He’d get quiet in a way that made you feel that if somebody did or said the wrong thing, something bad was gone to happen.”

  16

  WHAT HAPPENED the next day wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

  Blaine and Gerardo decided to check the fences on the ranch’s grazing allotment in the Canelo Hills, rugged country corrugated by deep ravines. Castle tagged along. They drove out of headquarters before dawn, hauling three horses and a pack mule in a gooseneck trailer, and arrived at the allotment’s boundary at first light. The animals were taken out, saddled, and bridled, and Gerardo packed the fencing gear—wire, posts, and the dreaded post drivers—onto the mule’s back and covered it with a canvas tarp and secured the tarp with rope tied into diamond hitches. They mounted up and began to climb into the hills. Thin clouds glowed like filaments of molten brass over the Huachucas, a great, dark, fissured wall almost two miles high. Blaine rode his favorite mount, the black gelding called Tequila, Castle a gentle pinto with a fierce name—Comanche. Gerardo, bringing up the rear, was on a gray, leading the mule. All three carried pistols, Blaine his grandfather’s Luger, Gerardo his six-shooter, Castle his .357 Magnum. Blaine had insisted on the sidearms as defense against rattlesnakes and smugglers—pretty much one and the same to him. Castle had continued to practice with his revolver and was reasonably confident he could hit a rattler. As for smugglers …

  The fence line climbed higher, out of the oak and juniper uplands, then cornered and ran north through tall forests of piñon and Chihuahua and Ponderosa pine so old they had been young trees when the Spanish were building missions in North America. A resinous scent perfumed the warm air, the horses’ hooves plodded on soft pine-needle loam. Blaine reined up and pointed across a canyon at a bear, ambling up a mountain meadow, its dense black fur rippling and shiny. If Castle hadn’t known he was only five miles from the Mexican border, he would have thought he was in Montana. The world was full of awful possibilities, yes, but they seemed remote up here on these high country slopes.

  They crossed the canyon, then followed the fence line in its descent back into the uplands. Here and there, mother cows and calves grazed on the sparse hillsides. By noon they had ridden more than half the allotment’s boundary fence, found only one damaged section, repaired it, and came to a cattle guard on a narrow, rubble-strewn road, where they broke for lunch. Dismounting, Castle felt every mile of the eight they’d covered, his knees stiff, his thigh muscles sore. Gerardo strung a picket line between two trees, and they tied the horses and the mule to it, loosened the girths, and sat in the shade eating cold machaca wrapped in Elena’s tortillas, washed down with tepid water from their canteens. A wind had sprung up, a hot wind out of the south. Flies buzzed. A Gila woodpecker sailed down the road in erratic, bouncing flight, as if jerked by invisible strings. His hat off, Blaine leaned against a juniper and lit a cigarette—one of the natural tobacco cigarettes he thought were good for his health.

  “Know I’ve been thinkin’?” he asked Castle.

  “Haven’t got a clue.”

  “The word lariat comes from the Spanish, la reata, and buckaroo was how the old-time Texas cowboys had come to pronounce vaquero.”

  Puzzled by this etymological observation, Castle quizzed him with a look.

  “Those Spaniards I was talkin’ about yesterday, the first vaqueros? There’s not much difference between the way they done things and the way I do ’em now. We’re into the twenty-first century, and I go a-horseback, I throw a loop on a stray, I burn a brand into a cow’s hide. I’m so far behind our own times, I couldn’t catch up if I was wearing rocket-propelled tennis shoes. I’m like those Amish farmers, except I don’t drive a buggy.”

  Castle heard in Blaine’s commentary resignation to his fate as an anachronism—and pride in his outmoded craft. “The Spanish vaqueros didn’t carry cell phones,” he said, gesturing at the one on his cousin’s belt. “You’re not that far behind.”

  “Nope, I don’t suppose—”

  He was interrupted by a woman’s cry. “¡Señores! ¡Socorro!”

  She was not a woman but a teenage girl, one of three, stumbling down the road in dirty jeans and sweaty T-shirts, windbreakers tied around their waists. Flecks of grass clung to their black hair, and their eyes were glassy and dull from exhaustion. The one who’d cried out, the shortest of the three, held out an empty tequila bottle. “Agua,” she pleaded, flopping on the ground. “Un poco de agua, por favor.”

  Blaine gave her his saddle canteen. She gulped from it and passed it to her friends, and in no time it was empty, all two quarts. Gerardo spread a cloth containing the rest of the tortillas on the ground, as if he were a servant at an elegant picnic. The tortillas vanished almost as quickly as the water. The desperate look in the girls’ eyes faded—they were not going to die.

  The short one, in hybridized Spanish and English, said her companions were sisters, she their cousin. They were trying to get to Denver, where a relative had found them jobs as motel maids. They had crossed the border two nights ago with twenty other migrants, farm workers accustomed to traveling rough country on foot. They were city girls from Hermosillo and had not been able to keep up. Their coyote deserted them with no food and only a little water in the tequila bottle. After wandering and sleeping in the wilderness for forty-eight hours, they’d come to this road and had been on it since this morning, hoping it led to a house or a town. Was there a house or town on this road?

  No, replied Gerardo. None.

  Blaine tried to call the Border Patrol on his cell, but this whole region was one vast dead zone.

  “Those coyotes sure are wonderful people,” he said. “How the hell do you leave three kids out here without food or water, knowin’ they’ll probably die a slow death? Takes a real special kind of son of a bitch to do that.”

  Castle said, “Yesterday, you were trying not to hate these people.”

  “Go to hell, cuzzy.”

  “So what do we do n
ow?”

  “Can’t take ’em with us and can’t leave ’em here, that’s all I know right now.”

  Under the circumstances, the appearance of a Border Patrol truck, moving slowly up the road, seemed providential. Wearing sunglasses under his tan cowboy hat, the agent was leaning out the window, his eyes on the ground.

  Blaine flagged him down. When he got out of the truck, they saw it was Morales, the Navaho tracker.

  He looked at the girls. “Hey, Blaine. We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

  “At least these ones are alive. Another day, and they wouldn’t of been.”

  Morales questioned the trio briefly, then took them into custody, locking them in the back of his truck. They did not protest, deportation being the preferable alternative.

  “We caught the bunch they were with last night,” he said. “They told us these three got left behind. Picked up their tracks this morning.”

  “Catch the coyote?”

  “Yeah. A guy we’ve caught before, and this time he’s going away for a while.”

  “You oughta charge the son of a bitch with attempted murder.”

  “Don’t I wish.” He removed his sunglasses, blew on them, and rubbed the lenses with a handkerchief. “I was going to stop by your place and pass on some info. This guy turned out to be a pretty good conversationalist. Told us that he’s chicken herding for a big operation. The mero mero is an American, name of Cruz. Cruz got permission to cross illegals through here.”

  “Permission from who?” inquired Blaine. “Sure as shit didn’t get it from me.”

  Morales laughed. “From the Menéndez family. The Agua Prieta Cartel. The boss is a woman who broke through the glass ceiling of the drug trade. Yvonne Menéndez. I thought you’d like to know what’s going on.”

  “Obliged, John. I’d be more obliged if you people did something about it.”

  “That’s not up to me.”

  “So now we know something we didn’t know ten minutes ago,” said Blaine after Morales left with his prisoners. “Figured it was right peculiar to be crossin’ wets through here.”