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“Snitch!” Billy protested, sitting up.

  “I’m not accusing you, chico. Only thinking out loud. Why would you snitch and risk losing that kind of money?”

  “That’s right. That’s exactly right.”

  And maybe it was, she thought, aware that she could be rationalizing. But not, she was pleased to say to her herself, entirely for emotional reasons. Billy would have a very constructive role to play in her plan. She’d refined it during the last couple of days but had so far kept it to herself. Now was the time to begin laying the groundwork, though she had no intention of revealing her entire scheme immediately. The people who were to carry it out would know only what they needed to know, no more.

  Now, in the living room, she picked up the remote and turned the TV off. The interview with Erskine was over. “He seemed very proud of himself, that pendejo.”

  Julián and Billy agreed. She rose from between them and took a chair facing them. “He owes us two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, don’t you think?”

  Julián shrugged. Billy was likewise noncommittal.

  “Well, he does, and we are going to collect.” She turned to Julián. “I want that ranch put under surveillance. I want to know how many people are there. I want to know their comings and goings. I want to know when they wake up and when they go to bed and when they shit. I want to know everything about them.”

  Julián started to speak. She motioned to him to keep quiet and looked at Billy. “You know your way around pretty well. The human map. Would it be difficult for you to guide some people in there at night?”

  He answered with a puzzled squint.

  She said, “That seems like a simple question.”

  “In where, exactly?” he asked. “It’s a big ranch.”

  “To the San Ignacio ranch house.”

  “No, it wouldn’t be hard. But I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to be crossing the line right now, day or night.”

  “It would please me if you did. It wouldn’t be for long. An hour or two at the most.” He made a movement with his shoulders and gazed at her attentively. He was eager to please her. Of course he was, after their previous conversation, when she insinuated that he might have informed on her. Nevertheless, she thought to provide him with extra incentive. “I believe you have some business you need taken care of over there. Suppose I told you that this business will be taken care of if you do as I ask. Then you would be free to come and go just like you used to.”

  “That would be good, sure.”

  Julián crossed his legs in the way she hated and tilted his head backward, squeezing his eyes half shut. “Mother, I know what—”

  “Shut up, mi hijo. You don’t know anything.”

  Ben Erskine

  In the archives of the Arizona Historical Society, photocopies of a trial transcript as thick as a blockbuster novel rest in a file box with an arrest report, an indictment, witness statements, depositions, and newspaper clippings. Reading through these documents, with some assistance from the imagination, powers us out of the present to a February morning in 1951.

  We see a fog of sparkling dust hovering above a corral, where Brahma-crosses with pendulous dewlaps, massive shoulders, and obstreperous dispositions bawl and bang against the planks. Four riders circle the jostling mass of muscle and horn—Ben; two cowboys, Alberto Hernández and Jim Tierney; and Caroline Burton, a friend visiting from Scottsdale.

  More than ten years have passed since Ben dissolved the IB-Bar and incorporated it into his brother’s San Ignacio Ranch. This minor empire has done well, but last summer’s monsoons were stingy, and the winter rains have been scarce. The dirt tanks are low, some are altogether dry, the range is in bad shape. Ben and Jeff have decided to lighten up by selling off some stock. The gathering began at dawn. Ben, Hernández, Tierney, and Caroline pushed the cattle out of the Huachucas and the Canelo Hills, then drove them down the road to the corral, with Ida riding drag in Ben’s Chevrolet pickup. Now they are waiting for the two trucks contracted to haul the livestock to the shipping pens in Sonoita, a settlement clustered around a crossroads and a spur line of the Southern Pacific. Not very long ago they would have driven the herd to the pens, camping out overnight; but in recent years more and more fences have begun to snake across the land, and the roads have been improved to handle heavy-duty trucks. Transporting them this way prevents weight loss, and every pound counts; yet Ben misses the old drives, the open range.

  A banged-up Dodge pickup towing a stock trailer arrives. It is driven by Rafael Quinn, a nearby rancher whom Ben has hired to haul any excess cattle. He turns off the road and stops by a wire gate and climbs out to open it. Hernández shouts above the lowing cows and steers, “Hey, Ben! He’s at the wrong gate!” Ben eases his horse out of the corral and rides over to Rafe to point out his mistake and direct him to the right gate.

  “You don’t remember which one to go to?” Ben jokes. “Must be getting forgetful in your old age.”

  “Must be,” Quinn laughs. He is close to Ben’s age, a rawboned six-footer of mixed Irish and Mexican descent, more Mexican than Irish, though his reddish hair and blue green eyes and freckled complexion suggest it’s the other way around. Glancing toward the corral, he motions at Caroline Burton. “Talking about old, I see you got an old lady workin’ with you. Who’s she?”

  “Friend of Jeff’s and Lilly’s. And she ain’t all that old.”

  Quinn flicks his eyebrows. His gaze swivels to Ida, standing beside the Chevy. “You got two old ladies. One old mare ain’t enough for you, eh?”

  Quinn is known for his vulgarities, and although Ben is accustomed to them, this one makes him bristle. “What kinda talk is that, Rafe?”

  “I was makin’ a joke.”

  “What would you think, I talked about your wife like that?”

  “You couldn’t,” Quinn replies, cackling. “Mine ain’t old.” Meaning his second wife. He suffered a double loss during the war, his son killed in the South Pacific, his first wife dying shortly thereafter—of a broken heart, it was said. He did not remain a childless widower for long, marrying at age fifty-two a Mexican girl of nineteen. She has already borne two children and is pregnant with a third. “One young one is worth two old ones for sure,” he says to Ben.

  “All right, that’s enough. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Just a joke, Ben.”

  “I do not see the humor in it.”

  The haulers have arrived, the trucks making a racket as they back up to the chutes.

  “You can’t take a joke? All I meant was”—Quinn spreads the palm of one hand and pounds its heel with the heel of the other—“how are your two old mares when it comes to that?”

  “You garbage-mouth son of a bitch!” Ben swings out of the saddle, with as much speed and suppleness as his aging body will permit, and jabs a finger into Quinn’s chest, jabs and jabs, like a woodpecker drilling a tree. “You’re on my land, and you don’t talk like that when you’re on my land!”

  “Reckon I can talk any way I damn well please anywhere,” Quinn replies.

  Although it is early afternoon, Ben can smell whiskey on Quinn’s breath. “Not here you can’t. I’ll find somebody else to haul. Get the hell out of here.”

  The crust on the tempers of both men is thin, and now Quinn’s cracks. “You can’t take a little joke, you go to hell!”

  “Clear out, goddamn you!”

  “Chinga tu madre,” Quinn curses, then gets into his pickup and backs out onto the road, the wheels spewing dirt as he speeds off.

  Ben remounts and returns to the corral. Hernández asks, “What fire is he goin’ to?” Ben doesn’t answer, too angry to speak.

  He remains angry all the while the cattle are loaded into the haulers’ trucks and as he follows them in the pickup, Ida and Caroline sitting beside him, Ida in the middle. His Winchester 30-30 rattles in the gun rack behind him. He casts a quick look at Ida, dressed for ranch work in jeans, a barn coat, and her favorite hat, which with its stiff brim a
nd high, indented peak resembles a scoutmaster’s hat. She turned fifty-one in December. There is gray in her hair now, and though she’s retained her trim figure, years of rough outdoor work have given her skin the texture of crumpled paper. The years have been hard on her. Ben knows he’s been hard on her, with his frequent absences, the dangers to which he’s exposed himself. Back in the thirties, after Ben lost his badge, she’d hoped he would devote himself to ranching full-time. She was dismayed when he joined the county rangers, without pay but with full powers to make arrests, for he could no more stay away from the life of pursuit, flight, and capture than a chain-smoker can stay away from cigarettes. He teamed up with customs agents to chase smugglers, one of whom got the drop on him in an unguarded moment and sent him to the hospital with a fractured skull. Ben had often said that no other woman could have stayed married to him for this long. The wife of his days for thirty-five years, he’s been faithful to her, and the idea that he would pound her like an old mare disgusts him. He cannot erase Rafe’s obscene gesture from his mind, nor the leer that accompanied it. His rage feeds on the image and on itself, a crown fire burning in his head that seems to suck the air from his lungs. He takes a washboard curve too fast and curses as the Chevy almost slews off the road.

  “What’s the matter?” Ida asks.

  “Nothin’.”

  “Don’t tell me ‘nothin’.’”

  “Me and Rafe had words is all.”

  “About what?”

  “Nothin’ I care to repeat.”

  At the stockyards, slatted red cattle cars are lined up behind an idling locomotive, its stack bleeding smoke into the air. The day is clear and chilly, and a sharp wind keens across the Sonoita grasslands, rising and falling toward the Mustang and Whetstone Mountains, miles away.

  “This is gonna take a while,” Otis Reed, the livestock inspector, says to Ida and Caroline. He motions at a small brick house a short distance beyond the tracks. “Why don’t you ladies make yourselves comfortable? My wife will make you a cup of coffee.”

  The women accept the invitation and leave.

  Ben now attends to the business of sale and shipment. While he leans over the hood of his pickup, doing the paperwork with Reed and the buyer, Hernández and Tierney unload the cattle and prod them into the chute and onto the weigh scales. Amid the noise—animals bellowing, hooves clattering on steel ramps, the idling locomotive’s hisses and low rumble—Reed records the weight and description of each cow and steer, and Ben signs the forms for brand self-inspection. The tedious routine dampens the fire in his brain but does not extinguish it. Two old mares. That sly leer.

  The work is almost done when, Rafe Quinn drives in hauling a few culls from another rancher’s herd. As the culls are unloaded from Quinn’s trailer, he spots Ben and walks toward him with quick, jerky strides. “Hey, where’s your two old mares? Still with you, or did you ship ’em out?”

  Ben knows he should let this go, but he doesn’t; he can’t. He goes up to the other man with the freckled face and taunting voice. “I don’t want to hear one more goddamn word out of you.”

  “You’ll hear plenty.”

  “Shut up!”

  “I don’t have to do nothing you tell me!”

  He pushes Ben, who pushes back. It’s a schoolboy shoving match between two old men and is almost comical until Ben takes a swing. The blow grazes Quinn’s skull, knocking his hat off. Instantly Ben throws the opposite arm. It’s more a swat than a punch, but it strikes Quinn’s temple with enough force to stagger him.

  “¡Cabrón! ¡Hijo de puta!” Quinn shouts, lapsing into Spanish in his fury. “I can’t take care of you this way, but I’m goin’ home for my gun, and I’ll take care of you that way.” He picks up his hat, smacks it against his thigh. “You wait right here.”

  And what does Ben say now? As the trial record will show, his exact words will be crucial to the prosecution’s case.

  Otis Reed will testify that he heard Ben say: “You go home and get your gun. I’ve got cattle to ship and I’ll be right here.”

  Hernández will testify that he heard: “I’ve got these cattle to load and I’ll be here till then. I don’t want any more trouble with you.”

  Tierney will testify that he heard: “Go home and get your gun. I don’t want any trouble with you. I’ve got cattle to ship and I’ll be here till then.”

  As Quinn, still cursing, climbs into his truck, Reed squints at Ben. “What was that all about? Thought you and Rafe was friends.”

  “Just an argument. It’s done with,” Ben says.

  “Said he’s goin’ to get a gun.”

  “Don’t think nothin’ of it. He won’t be back.”

  Reed will quote that remark in his statement to the sheriff. He will repeat it in his testimony, and it will be crucial to the defense.

  The two women return from their coffee break. Ben says nothing to them about the confrontation. They climb into the Chevy to get out of the wind while he, Reed, and the buyer finish the weighing and in spection. Tierney and Hernández begin to prod the cattle out of the pens into the railroad cars. Quinn’s Dodge, without trailer, races into the stockyards and stops suddenly. Quinn flings the door open and jumps out, a rifle in his hands.

  This sight douses Ben’s anger, and an icy calm descends. In him, there is no lag between thought and action; the motions of mind and body occur simultaneously as he reaches into the pickup’s cab to jerk his rifle from the rack, as he levers a round into the chamber while he sprints into the open to draw fire away from Ida and Caroline and other bystanders. His movements, supple, almost choreographed, are not those of a man approaching his sixty-first birthday. It’s as though the years have fallen off him in this crisis. He raises a hand and yells, “Don’t shoot, Rafe!”

  Quinn fires and misses, the bullet passing so close to Ben’s chest that he feels its shock wave. Falling to one knee to present a smaller target and steady his aim, he snaps off a shot that wings Quinn’s left arm. The impact spins Quinn around; he drops the rifle and ducks behind his car. Hernández, who is closest to him, sees him reach inside and snatch a revolver from off the front seat. “He’s got a pistol!” Hernández shouts. Ben’s view is blocked by the car. He puts a bullet through the side window to flush Quinn into the open. The tactic succeeds. Quinn leaps up and fires over the hood, missing again.

  Quinn dashes for the stock pens, which are made of stout planks spaced about a foot apart. Crouching behind the pens, he braces the pistol on a plank and fires a third time, the bullet striking the ground wide of its mark. Quinn is equatorial, all hot action and frantic movement; Ben is arctic, almost immobile, kneeling there in the dust. Now behold his wintry eye center the front sight post in the rear sight leaf, behold his finger quickly but smoothly pull the trigger.

  The bullet chips the upper plank and bites into Quinn’s chest, knocking him onto his back.

  The entire action has taken less than half a minute, and Ida has watched it unfold through the windshield of the Chevrolet. All she knows is that Ben and Quinn have had words. How did that come to this? When she saw her husband drop to one knee after Quinn’s first shot, she thought he’d been hit. She will later testify, “I was never so terrified in my life,” and considering what she’s been through in her life, that will be saying something.

  She and Caroline get out and run to the men crowded around Quinn, lying with his face to the sky and a blood-rimmed hole below his right collarbone. Ben stands over him, the Winchester hanging at his side—almost sixty-one and still a dangerous man.

  “I’m sorry this had to happen, Rafe,” he says, as if they had been acting out parts scripted long ago.

  Ida has heard those words like that before.

  Quinn is breathing in short, shallow gasps, and with each breath a roseate bubble swells and pops in his mouth. He whispers, “Gimme another bullet.”

  “I’ll do anything for you,” says Ben, “but not that.”

  “All over a little joke.”

 
Someone urges Quinn not to talk, an unnecessary exhortation. A bubble forms and breaks, his lips part and remain open, his eyes stop blinking.

  Text of a letter submitted to the AHS by Grace Erskine Castle.

  125 Scott’s Cove Rd.

  Darien, Conn.

  January 9, 1967

  Arizona Historical Society

  929 E. 2nd St.

  Tucson, Arizona

  Gentlemen:

  I’m writing in response to your most recent request for my impressions of, my reactions to, my father’s trial on second-degree murder charges.

  To tell you the truth, I feel peculiar writing to you, mostly because I’m telling you things about my father that I haven’t even told my children. It’s those mixed feelings I mentioned in my last letter. I’ve never been able to sort them out. And to be candid, I’ve been afraid that my son would end up hero-worshiping Ben, that he might see him as some kind of straight-shootin’, hard-ridin’ Old West swashbuckler and want to imitate him. That was the image a lot of young men had of him, like my nephew, Blaine Erskine.

  My father did many brave and honorable things in his life. But he also did some things that make me cringe—to this day. His shooting of Mr. Quinn was one of those things. I hope I can explain why.

  My mother had written and asked my brother and me to be at her side during the trial. It wasn’t a problem for Frank—he was a mining engineer in Bisbee—but I was here in Connecticut, had a four-year-old boy to look after, and had just found out I was pregnant again. And it was a three-day train trip to Tucson. It goes without saying that I wasn’t eager to see my father tried on a murder charge. And this, too: relations between us were very sour at that time.

  I bring this up because it gives a glimpse into Ben’s dark side. During the war my husband, Tony, and I eloped. He was a flight surgeon at the Army Air Corps base outside Tucson. We ran off when he got orders that he was being shipped overseas. Ben could not forgive me, he could not forgive Tony for failing to ask him for my hand. After our son was born in 1947, my mother took the train east to see her new grandson, and she came alone.