Crossers Page 9

  A lifetime on cattle ranches—she’d been raised on one before marrying into another—had made her look both older and younger than her age, fifty-one. Desert sun and wind had dug furrows into her strong, square face, accented by a straight nose and electric blue eyes, while her body, molded by years on horseback, years of pitching feed bales from pickup trucks and wrestling calves at branding time, belonged to a woman of thirty. She wasn’t shy about showing it off, as she was now, wearing Levi’s tight as leotards and a snug blouse unbuttoned at the top to disclose a glimpse of freckled cleavage.

  “How do you mean, drive you nuts?” Castle asked.

  “One minute they make you want to build the Great Wall of China on the border. The next minute you feel sorry for them and want to help them get to wherever they’re going,” Monica replied. “Some of these crossers have stories that make The Grapes of Wrath read like a comic book.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  Monica, who spoke Spanish fairly well, had engaged Miguel in a brief conversation before, still shivering, he collapsed on the kitchen floor. The hike over the ridge and the brief but bumpy ride in Castle’s car to ranch headquarters had sapped his last strength. He didn’t awaken even when they dragged him into the living room and lifted him onto the sofa. He lay so still that Castle, as Sally got a wool blanket from the closet, put an ear to his chest to make sure he had a heartbeat.

  “Not much,” Monica answered. “Said that we saved his life and that he’s from Oaxaca.”

  “That’s way south, ’bout a thousand miles,” Sally said. Long gray hair yanked back in a ponytail, garbed in a ratty terrycloth bathrobe over a cotton nightgown, she nonetheless managed to convey a regal impression, still the boss of the outfit at seventy-nine. “Who knows what this Miguel went through to get this far.”

  “When I found him, he thought I was going to shoot him,” Castle said. “Next thing, he asked if he was in the U.S. The poor guy had no idea. When I told him, yeah, he was in the United States, he thanked God all over the place and cried.”

  “That’s what I mean. Breaks your heart.” Like Castle’s mother, like a lot of ranch girls, Monica had been sent to boarding school when she was in her teens. It had leached the country from her accent, but some still seeped through, as in the way she’d said “Breaks your heart.” Brikes yore haart. “Tell him that story, Sally.”

  “Which one?”

  “About the wet Gerardo found last year.”

  Sally leaned forward, as if she were about to let him in on a secret. “Gerardo was out checking cattle on our lease. He come across a Mexican sitting all by himself under a tree next to a Forest Service road. Gerardo asked him what he was doing. Said he was waiting for someone to pick him up and drive him to Chicago. Said if his ride didn’t show up soon, he’d walk it, if Gerardo would give him directions. Well, Gerardo had to tell him that Chicago was about two thousand miles away. The Mexican just stared at him, then said that his coyote told him Chicago was two days’ walk north. More like two months, Gerardo said, and the Mexican started bawling like a baby. Gerardo set him on his horse, and they rode double back to here. We called the Border Patrol and told the Mexican not to worry. All the Border Patrol would do is drop him off on the other side, where he could hook up with another coyote and try again. Hope he made it. That’s a story with a happy ending, Gil. The other ones, well, you must’ve read about them.”

  “I try not to read the newspapers,” he said.

  “They freeze to death in the mountains, die of thirst in the desert. And all for what? A damn job on an asparagus farm or a landscaping crew.” Sally rested her chin on her wrinkled hands. “Wasn’t so bad ten years ago, but it’s a big business now, thousands pouring through.”

  “And that’s when you start wanting to build the Great Wall of China,” said Monica. “Have you had breakfast?”

  “I like to hunt on an empty stomach.”

  “Well, you ain’t hunting now,” Sally observed.

  Monica got out of her chair, her cowboy boots and long legs giving the impression that she was six feet tall. Like Amanda when she wore heels—Castle could not help make the comparison.

  “Huevos rancheros and frijoles okay?”

  “Don’t go through any trouble.”

  “No trouble.” She pulled a skillet from a rack hanging over the sink. “You might as well wait out here till Blaine and Gerardo get back. They should be along directly.”

  The two men had been buying feed in Sonoita when Monica called Blaine’s cell phone to tell him about Castle’s discovery. Monica brought him the eggs smothered in salsa, with the frijoles and a warm tortilla folded into a square. He began to eat.

  “More coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  She refilled his cup, poured two more for herself and Sally, and sat down. “The wets I guess I can put up with. But the coyotes and the drug mules—hideous people.”

  Sally said, “Banging at your door at three in the morning, demanding food and water. Ain’t polite about it, neither. Demanding, like we’re some all-night diner.” She gave a brittle, ironic laugh to indicate that these nocturnal calls had become so routine they could now only amuse her. “Reminds me of another story, the peanut butter sandwiches. Tell Gil about that one, Monica.”

  “One time I made peanut butter sandwiches for a gang of burreros, and Blaine went outside with the sandwiches stacked up in one hand and his gun in the other. Just in case. Not that you would want to shoot them. There’s maybe twenty, thirty people in this whole damn valley. You can bet the drug bosses know where each one of us lives. Make trouble for them, they’ll give it back to you in spades. How are the eggs?”

  “Fine. Thanks.”

  “The ranch west of us? Last year, drug runners opened up on the Border Patrol with assault rifles. We could hear it. Poor Blaine, he almost had a flashback to Vietnam.”

  Castle was shocked to hear that this peaceful-looking valley could be the scene of such an incident. “Christ,” he said. “It sounds like inner-city L.A.”

  “More like the days of Pancho Villa, except now the bad guys ride in Dodge Rams instead of on horses and bang away with AK-47s instead of Winchesters. I’ve got a gun right at my bedside,” Monica went on. “Blaine and Gerardo carry whenever they’re gathering or checking fences near the border. Cell phone on one hip, pistol on the other. The Wild West meets the twenty-first century. And now we’ve got vigilantes coming in, the Minutemen. All we need is for the Apaches to get riled up, and we’ll be right back where we started.”

  “So what happened with the peanut butter sandwiches?”

  She snickered. “A couple of weeks later we were out of town. When we got home, we found the house had been broken into and a bunch of steaks, from a beef we’d butchered, had been stolen from the freezer. We were pretty sure it was the same guys. Letting us know they didn’t much care for peanut butter and could break in and take whatever they wanted.”

  “Might have been you give ’em crunchy and they liked creamy,” Sally interjected.

  “Last night Sam started barking,” Castle said. “She always barks when people come near the house. It must have been Miguel. He must have seen the light in my window and was coming for help, but the barking scared him off.” He looked through the archway between the kitchen and the living room at the unconscious man. If a lost, hapless, half-dead migrant could come so close at night, then surely drug smugglers could barge right in, and they weren’t likely to be scared by a dog, not if they were carrying assault rifles. “Do you think I should get a gun?”

  “What do you hunt with? Rocks?” Sally asked with a smile.

  “A bird gun isn’t much of a gun.”

  He put his dish in the dishwasher and, while Monica straightened up the kitchen, went into the living room and sat down across from Miguel to wait for Blaine and Gerardo. A copy of Western Horseman did not hold his attention. Beside it Tucson magazine was open to a short back-page article about Blaine and Monica’s son, Rick Erski
ne, a country rock singer of regional fame. He was currently on an extended tour of the Southwest. Castle, who hadn’t seen him since he was a boy and still thought of him that way, was startled to look at a picture of a strikingly handsome twenty-four-year-old and to read that he was now a married man.

  He set the magazine down, allowing his eyes to roam the room with its thick adobe walls and oak-beamed ceiling, its pueblo-style fireplace flanked by photographs of Jeffrey and Benjamin Erskine. Jeff’s was a standard head shot that showed him wearing a brushy mustache and a suit and tie knotted to a celluloid collar. Ben’s picture dated back to the 1930s and could have been a movie poster for a cornball western. He was mounted on a rearing black horse adorned with a silver-studded breast collar and headstall, its white-stockinged forelegs pawing the air as Ben held the reins in one hand and raised his Stetson high with the other in a flamboyant salute, his mouth skewed into a cocky, crooked grin. Castle had a vague memory of attending his grandfather’s funeral when he was nine. Ben had been a man barnacled in legend, but beyond a few fragmentary stories, Castle knew little about him. For that matter, owing to his mother’s reticence about her family, he and his sister had grown up knowing almost as little about their western forebears as they did about their father’s ancestors in Italy. Grace had once described Castle’s grandmother, Ida, as a woman who was “either a saint or a doormat or maybe a little of both.” If she’d said more, he could not remember it. Her brother, Frank, who had come out of the war a decorated hero only to be killed several years later in a mine accident, had been “a brave and wonderful boy who was always trying to prove he was as much of a man as our father considered himself to be.” And of that father she’d scarcely uttered a word. Fifteen years ago, when Castle made his first trip to the San Ignacio, on the pretext of going bird hunting but in reality to make contact with his relatives, he’d heard a muddled story from Blaine that their grandfather had been tried for killing a man in a dispute, the origins of which were obscure. Upon his return to Connecticut, Castle asked his mother if any of it was true and why she’d kept it from him. “Your grandfather was a man who had outlived his time, only he didn’t know it,” Grace replied. He pressed her to explain that enigmatic comment, but all she said was, “Let’s say that I have conflicting feelings about him,” her tone making it clear that further inquiries would not be welcome.

  He was half lost in this reverie when, through a front window, he saw Blaine’s Ford 350, with the ranch’s name and brand, an S bisected by an I, painted on its doors and feed bales stacked in the bed, rattle into the side yard, which was a combined parking lot and junkyard for gooseneck stock trailers and several other trucks in varying states of usefulness. Gerardo drove on toward the horse corrals as Blaine crossed the yard with the slow, stiff walk that resulted from old rodeo injuries and numerous throws from the backs of spooked horses. Six feet two and about ten pounds on the bright side of emaciated, wearing a dirty brown cowboy hat and a tattered striped shirt, gloves stuffed into the back pocket of his jeans and a jackknife in a leather case on his belt, he was the picture of the working cattleman.

  He came in and took off his hat, uncovering a shock of wiry, reddish blond hair flecked with gray and rising straight up on top, like a rooster’s comb. He and Castle were the same age, but that was all they had in common besides their DNA. Even that wasn’t much in evidence as far as their appearances went. Castle favored his father’s side, Blaine the Erskines: a fine, sharp-ridged nose, faded gray eyes, and thin lips that, when he smiled, duplicated their grandfather’s odd grin.

  “That him?” Blaine asked, gesturing at Miguel.

  “No,” Monica answered. “That’s a Pizza Hut delivery boy taking a nap.”

  “It is my cross to bear to be married to a smart-mouth woman.” He turned to his cousin. “Congratulations. You caught your first illegal alien.”

  “I didn’t catch him. I found him. Actually, Sam found him.”

  “Some dog. She points Mexicans.”

  “He’s from Oaxaca,” Monica informed her husband.

  “There’s a boy come a long way,” he said with a lift of his pale eyebrows. “He’s been fed?”

  Monica shook her head. “He dropped almost the minute he came in.”

  “We’d best feed him somethin’. Somethin’ hot. He ain’t only starved, he’s probably got hypothermia, and you can die of that in the snap of a finger.”

  “I’ve got the split pea and ham from yesterday in the fridge.”

  “That’ll do. We don’t want an illegal dyin’ in our house. That happens, next thing we’ll have an ACLU lawyer accusin’ us of murderin’ the poor son of a bitch.”

  “Otherwise we’d let him die?” Monica glanced ironically at Castle. “Blaine would hate for anyone to think he has feelings for his fellow man.”

  “Oh hell, you know what I meant,” he said, and took the soup from the refrigerator and popped it into the microwave.

  Blaine had taken charge in his usual fashion. Castle—despite his accomplishments as an outdoorsman, his success on Wall Street, and a personal fortune that, before he’d given three-fourths of it away, could have bought the whole San Ignacio in cash—often felt, well, less manly in his cousin’s presence. Aside from the abilities to ride and rope one would expect in a rancher, Blaine was a fairly skilled carpenter, plumber, auto mechanic, and veterinarian because he had to be. When things broke down out here, phoning a repairman wasn’t an option. If a cow was having trouble giving birth or a horse went lame, he had to treat the animal himself. Castle’s handiness was pretty much limited to changing flats and lightbulbs, but more than his ineptness at manual tasks caused his feelings of inadequacy. In contrast to his own early life, Blaine’s had been hard. He was only four when he’d lost his father. Ben had taken him under his wing, but Blaine lost him too a few years later. At eighteen, after a troubled high school career—he would have been expelled if he hadn’t been the star pitcher for Patagonia High’s baseball team—he enlisted in the army and served two tours with the Special Forces in Vietnam, where he was wounded and won a Bronze Star.

  The war—that was the Grand Canyon yawning between him and Castle. In past visits to the ranch—there had been only two—they had argued about it, Castle maintaining that it had been senseless, Blaine that it hadn’t been and could have been won “if they didn’t make us fight with one hand tied behind our backs;” but their difference of opinion was beside the point. Lately Castle had begun to think that Vietnam had put steel into his cousin’s soul as well as into his flesh, had trained him to confront almost any situation and master it. To expect the unexpected, the sudden ambush, the booby trap in the trail. Castle wondered if he’d missed out on something, some excruciating ordeal that might have left him better equipped to cope with the one great disaster of his life.

  When Blaine woke him, Miguel sprang up with a startled look on his round face. He threw off the blanket and swung his short legs to the floor and pitched forward, as if he were about to run out the door. Then, seeing the familiar faces of Castle and Monica, he relaxed somewhat, though his glance darted back and forth like a captive animal’s before it settled on Blaine.

  “Mi esposo,” Monica said by way of introduction.

  Miguel nodded. Blaine set the soup bowl atop the issue of Western Horseman on the coffee table and gestured for him to eat. He drained the bowl in about half a minute.

  “Mucho gusto, gracias.”

  “De nada,” Blaine said, and sat in a cracked leather armchair and asked Miguel to describe what had happened to him. Miguel answered with short, choppy phrases that Blaine interrupted with more questions. This went on for some time, Miguel becoming more and more agitated, his lips quivering.

  Blaine looked at Monica and said he couldn’t follow the rambling, disjointed story. Neither could she, and suggested that Gerardo and Elena might get Miguel to make sense.

  Blaine left and returned shortly with the couple. Miguel settled down. It might have been the presence of fe
llow Hispanics that calmed him, but Castle thought it was the profound serenity that emanated from both people and enveloped everyone near them. Gerardo was about fifty years old, a man economical in speech, five eight at the tallest, narrow-hipped and thick-chested, with spare features that recalled portraits of the conquistadors. His graceful carriage, endowed by a life on horseback and by work demanding agility and balance, was complemented by an inner poise that came from knowing who and what he was, the who and the what wrapped up in a single word, vaquero. This composure impressed Castle because it was so unlike the manner of the frantic multitaskers he’d worked with in New York, answering e-mails and talking to clients at the same time, shouting into cell phones as they scuttled herky-jerky through the noisy, crowded, artificial canyons of their vertical world. Gerardo seemed to have absorbed the desert’s stillness into his very cells; his silences were a language unto themselves, speaking of the impermanence of all things human and the eternity of the arroyos, the mesas, and distant blue mountains.

  Like a lot of long-married couples, he and Elena had grown to resemble each other, though the resemblance wasn’t in their looks. She was darker, more Indian in appearance, and her short, stout figure, communicating both comfort and a barrellike durability, had none of her husband’s athletic grace. She was also a great talker, but she shared his air of equanimity, hers arising from piety rather than from daily contact with the natural world. She said a rosary every day to the Virgin of Guadalupe, crossed herself whenever she heard bad news, and except in severe weather, drove the twenty rough miles to Patagonia to attend Sunday Mass at St. Theresa’s. An old grief showed in her small, black eyes even when she laughed, its marks embedded there like the glyphs the ancient Hohokam had etched into the desert rocks. She’d lost two of her five children—disease claimed a daughter in infancy, an auto accident took a son in his teens—and yet sorrow had not mastered her. She’d achieved an acceptance that was not resignation, and she’d done it without the ministrations of a therapist. Castle yearned to know what Elena’s secret was. Like her husband, she seemed to possess a way of knowing and understanding that had vanished from the modern world. It was certainly beyond him, for all his education.