Crossers (19 page)

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

C
ASTLE 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.

I
N 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.

Ben talked this McNamara into teaching him to box. The lessons took place at night after work in the blacksmith’s shop. To build himself up, Ben lifted weights with barbells McNamara forged out of scrap iron. I went along to watch my ribby brother and this hefty Irishman stripped to the waist, all greased up in sweat and the sweat shining in the lantern while they sparred. The training went on for a long spell, more than a month, and that proved that Ben, who had a habit of skipping from one endeavor to another, could sure be of one mind when it came to getting even.

He was crafty, too. When he figured he was ready, he did not walk up to Brophy and challenge him to a fight; he waited until everything could be in his favor. It was on a Saturday afternoon, after the day shift, and Ben borrowed a horse from the blacksmith and rode over to the saloon where Brophy was tying one on. This saloon wasn’t like the ones in the westerns. It did have swinging doors, but it was otherwise a kind of giant tent, like a circus tent thrown over a wood platform. I went along to make sure my brother didn’t get himself killed.

Well, I need not have had any worries about that. All of a sudden Ben let out a wild yell, like an Apache war whoop, and jumped his horse up the steps and through the door and crashed smack-dab into Brophy. He was pretty drunk and you probably could have knocked him over by blowing on him, so you can imagine what happened when he had a head-on collision with a horse. Hit the floor like he’d been poleaxed. Ben jumped from the saddle on top of him and commenced to whale on him with everything he had. Managed to bust both hands and make Brophy so his mother would not have recognized him.

I don’t have a lot in the way of formal education. I, too, never graduated high school, quit in my last year, when my mother took off for California. But I put great stock in education and have tried to teach myself lessons I missed in school. I read a lot, and I recall reading an essay by a historian name of Frederick Jackson Turner. It was written in 1893 or around then, and it was Mr. Turner’s idea that the figures from the United States census of 1890 showed that no clear line could be drawn between the settled and the unsettled parts of the West. That was also the year of the Battle of Wounded Knee up in the Dakotas—the last of the Indian wars. In so many words, the frontier that had existed for more than three centuries was gone, and the old Wild West a thing of the past.

The reason I bring this up is, first of all, Ben was born in 1890, and second of all, the Wild West might have disappeared from Kansas and Colorado and such places, but it lived on down here in this border country for a good long time. Sure, the Apaches were whipped and penned up on reservations, but we had outlaws and rustlers and gunfighters raising hell in Arizona and New Mexico damn near into the 1920s. Pancho Villa got his start in life as a cattle rustler. The whole reason the Territorial Rangers were formed was to clean up Arizona so it would be respectable and fit for statehood, which as you know it didn’t get until 1912.

I am not off on a side trail, like you might think. You are not the first person to ask me about Ben, him being the legend he was, and so I have spent some time trying to figure his life out. I come back to the words a newspaper friend of Ben’s, Tim Forbes, spoke at Ben’s funeral ten years ago. He said something like “Benjamin Erskine was the last ember of the true Old West,” and that he was like the Old Testament Hebrews in his fierce, unbending beliefs because he grew up in a desert and lived among his herds and the harshness of nature, just like those Old Testament folks.

Of course, I grew up the same way in the same times, but Ben and I were completely different, like we weren’t born of the same man and woman. Ben was an adventurer, a soldier of fortune, and a lawman, and he put about twelve men in the ground—the ones he didn’t put in jail. I consider myself a businessman, and except for a couple schoolboy scuffles, I have never been in a fistfight. What made the difference was … well, I guess you’d have to call it fate. Ben was a lightning rod for trouble; sometimes he looked for it and sometimes it found him.

It was in ’07 that we got laid off from the mine. We didn’t know it then, but there had been financial panic way off in New York, and the prices of silver and copper had gone down the drain, so the mines cut back on production or shut down altogether. For about a year Ben and I were saddle bums, working ranches in Arizona and in Mexico. Then we teamed up with a vaquero name of Martín Mendoza capturing unbranded bulls. They were wild animals and were hard to find, hiding out in the brushiest, most remote country they could get into. The three of us spent days tracking ’em down in the mountains, and when we finally got one cornered, we’d ride in and rope him, taking turns heading and heeling. That Martín could throw a loop like I’d never seen a man throw one—his riata would shoot out from his hand like a rawhide snake. He hardly ever missed, which was a good thing, because if you did miss, you stood a fair chance of being charged and knocked off your horse by one of those bulls, and then he was likely to gore or stomp you to death.

It was dangerous, exciting work, but it wasn’t exciting enough for my brother, so for a spell he apprenticed himself out to a professional hunter that ranchers had hired to get rid of cattle-killing mountain lions. The hunter ran them down with a pack of dogs, big, rangy red-bones and like breeds, and Ben often said there was no sound to quicken your blood like their cries when in pursuit, unless it was the baying they made when they’d treed or cornered the lion. The hunter and Ben would ride hell for leather to catch up with the pack, and if the cougar decided to fight, they would come upon a scene of bloody mayhem, three or four dogs mauled or gutted, the others lunging in to snap at the cat’s hindquarters and the lion hissing and snarling and lashing out with its forepaws. That’s when Ben and his boss would dismount and wade in through those bloodied-up, howling dogs and finish the cougar with their revolvers.

It was said of Ben that he could have given an Apache lessons in tracking. He learned how from his days hunting wild bulls and mountain lions.

Along about 1910 I had saved enough money to buy a few head of corriente steers down in Mexico. Ben’s wildness did not extend to whiskey and women, the two things that empty a cowboy’s pockets the quickest, so he had saved up some himself and chipped in. I filed for a quarter section of rangeland up here in the San Rafael under the Homestead Act and leased another ten sections, and that was the start of the San Ignacio. We were old-time rawhiders and lived like rawhiders in a tent with a wood-burning stove and were in the saddle most every day. Fall of that year, we drove our first herd to market, pushing them to the railhead at Sonoita.

Ben and I had some differences—he had this habit of disappearing on me for days on end, riding down into Sonora for I don’t know what reasons. Spring of the next year he and a hand we had working for us, a T.J. Babcock, up and left me to go fight in the Mexican Revolution. To my mind, it was the screwiest thing any two gringos could do, but this Babcock had been raised mostly in Mexico, in Cananea, where they had that big miners’ strike in ’05. I think he picked up a lot of foreign ideas there, the man was practically a damn Red, and I believe he talked my brother into joining him and those revolutionary thugs like Pancho Villa. Ben was a man of few words, so I don’t know much about what he and Babcock did in the Revolution. If Babcock is still alive and you can track him down, you can ask him. I did gather, from the little my brother told me when he got back that summer, that he saw some right terrible things and was party to them besides.