Crossers (38 page)

I felt bad for my old colonel, but now Ben and me had troubles of our own. That picture was like a wanted poster, and friends told me folks was out to get me and might even kidnap Ynez and my kids and that it would be a smart idea if we relocated north of the border—way north. I could take another hour to tell you how hard Ynez fought the notion of leaving her country, but it had to be done. I got work as a foreman on a ranch up to Prescott, and we headed there, me, Ynez, and the kids.

On our way we stopped off to pay a call on Ben at the sheriff’s office. He knew he was in hot water. You see, a new government had taken over in 1930, first of the year, and the new presidente, fella the name of Ortiz Rubio, didn’t want a scandal on his hands and to have it look like he’d anything to do with the kidnapping of López and Pedroza, so he wrote a letter of protest to the governor of Arizona demanding that some action be taken against Ben. You know the old rule, shit rolls downhill, if you’ll pardon the expression. The governor passed the letter on to the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors.

A couple weeks later on, after we got settled on the new ranch, I telephoned Ben and found out that the board of supervisors had called the sheriff on the carpet, and then he called Ben on the carpet and asked him if he’d done what was said, and he told him that he did. Ben wasn’t the kind to weasel out of things. This sheriff, I forgot his name, told Ben to turn in his badge. On account of Ben’s fine record, he said he would keep the reason for it secret, something about Ben resigning for personal reasons. I remember I warned Ben that no matter what trouble he’d been in with his boss, he was in worse trouble with certain parties in Mexico. Friends of López and Pedroza probably knew where he lived and were going to come after him. He told me he had already figured that out and was prepared, and I did not doubt he was. Ben was always ready for trouble.

There you have it, except for one thing. My Ynez died in 1933, age of forty-one or so. The doc said it was a cancer of the breasts, but to my mind it was something else. There is a flower that blooms in the low desert at springtime, a white one that’s called a dune primrose. Pulling Ynez out of Mexico up to Prescott was like tearing one of them primroses out of the sand and trying to make it live in those cold, piney mountains. So I’d saved her from the prison but lost her anyways. I brought her body down to Cananea and hired a band to play “La Adelita” when we laid her to rest in her native ground. There is no more to say.

22

M
IGUEL WAITED
for news that Cruz had been arrested and a summons to identify him at a lineup. After four days passed without a word, Castle phoned Soto and asked what was up. It seemed that Cruz had vanished. He had been traced to an address in an unincorporated area outside Nogales, where he was living with a brother of his late uncle; but when Soto and a detachment of deputy sheriffs got there to arrest him, he was gone. Enthusiastic questioning had persuaded the man to disclose that Cruz was in Mexico “on business,” that is, assembling a group of illegals to smuggle into the United States. As far as Soto knew, Cruz was still there; someone—his relative or a friend—must have warned him that the police were looking for him. At any rate the Mexican authorities had been notified, a request for extradition issued. There was nothing more to be done except wait for the federales to pick him up and kick him back over the border. The detective did have some good news for Miguel—the “interests of justice” would be better served if he were to remain in the United States. The sheriff had asked Immigration to extend his temporary stay permit for another sixty days.

Hearing all this deflated Miguel. Identifying Cruz had been an act of moral courage; he could have pretended not to recognize the face in the photograph. He had been hoping that his bravery and honesty would be rewarded with an arrest, a trial, and a conclusive end to the nightmare he’d been living for more than six months. Now it was going to be prolonged, and the fact that he would get to be a legal resident for two more months did not cheer him.

Castle too felt let down. To keep Miguel, and himself, occupied, he decided to spruce up his cabin. Patch the stucco. Paint the place inside and out. Replace the junky furniture, which had neither the comforts of the modern nor the charm of the antique. Miguel proved expert at adobe plastering, troweling the stuff on so seamlessly, you couldn’t tell the new stucco from the old once the walls were painted.

They were putting the finishing touches on the outside when Tessa dropped by. She jumped out of the car, waving what appeared to be a letter, and did not seem to notice the cabin’s fresh exterior as she ran up to Castle and threw her arms around him. Beth was out of danger and coming home. Her unit had been withdrawn from Iraq and redeployed to Kuwait. From there it was to be sent back to its home base, Fort Bliss, Texas.

“I want to take you to lunch to celebrate, just like we did before.” She smiled broadly. “I’ll get blasted on margaritas and hold on to you to keep from falling.”

They left in her car after he’d washed up and changed into clean Levi’s and a polo shirt. The San Rafael, emerald green and speckled with gold and white flowers, could have been mistaken for a valley in Colorado in the springtime. Pillars of sunlight fell through the rain clouds gathering over the Patagonias, and as the clouds swept with the wind, the shafts moved with them, playing across the mountain slopes like hazy searchlights. In all this beauty Tessa saw the colors, the very forms of her happiness.

“Love it!” she exclaimed. “Love it here this time of year! Fort Bliss, is that perfect or what? It’s only a day’s drive from Tucson. I’m going to be there for the homecoming.”

“Which is when?”

“She didn’t say. I think that information is censored for now. I got the impression it won’t be too long. I’d like it if you came with me. I want you to meet Beth.”

“And I’d like to meet her—” He stopped as a picture composed itself in his mind: soldiers in desert camouflage marching past a crowd of spouses and parents, applauding and waving tiny American flags. He did not see himself in it. “Do you think that would be a good idea?” he asked.

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Seeing us together …”

“Meeting the new man in her mother’s life might be too much for her to deal with?” said Tessa, in a tone that scoffed at such a notion. “I’ve written her about you. Anyhow, she’s been through a war. I would think she can deal with almost anything.”

The reality was, Castle was more concerned with his own state of mind. Yes, he was in love with Tessa, but he wasn’t sure what would come of their relationship. To meet Beth would signify a commitment he wasn’t yet prepared to make, for he knew Amanda still had a claim on him. “Look, it might be better if you saw her first, by yourself. Get reacquainted. There’ll be plenty of time for me later on.”

“Fine,” Tessa responded.

He was disappointing her. He was disappointed in himself and his tepid sensibleness. When they drove through a compact, violent thunderstorm, he changed the subject, to that ultimate of banalities, the weather. He mentioned that five inches had fallen on the San Ignacio so far. Tessa, his Miss Manners about local etiquette, chided him. Owing to the patchy, capricious nature of the monsoons, one ranch could get only a trace of rain while its neighbor was blessed with a deluge. To say that your place had received an abundance was bragging, and that was as tacky as bragging about how much money you made. He salaamed and begged her pardon. She forgave him because she could afford to. Her rain gauge had measured a little over four inches; if that kept up, her place would get twenty inches by the end of the season, and her grass-fed cattle would be as sleek as any fattened in feedlots.

“How is Blaine?” she asked. “He should be happy with this rain.”

He was, Castle answered. But the migrant traffic was bedeviling him. The other day he found jerry cans of gasoline stashed in the brush—a smuggler’s fuel cache. Instead of dumping the gas, he’d ridden horseback all the way back to the house for a bag of sugar and poured it into the jerry cans and left them there.

Tessa made a clicking sound with her tongue.

“He says it’s a war between him and them,” Castle said. “He’s been talking about asking vigilantes to start patrolling the ranch. Sally and Monica have vetoed that. They don’t want a bunch of strangers with guns wandering around the place.”

“Don’t blame them,” Tessa said, peeling off the Duquesne road onto the Nogales highway. “And I don’t blame him either. And I don’t blame the Mexicans. Right over there, you’ve got people slaving away in maquiladoras for ten bucks a day.” She pointed down the highway toward the houses cluttering the hillsides on the Sonoran side of Nogales. “And all they have to do is crawl under a fence or jump a wall, and they’re making ten an hour sweeping floors at Wal-Mart. It’s a no-brainer. I’d do the same thing. But I’ve had my fences cut. A couple of years ago McIntyre caught an illegal trying to steal my truck. I feel for those people, and at the same time they flat piss me off, and I think that I ought not to be of two minds about it.”

“Life isn’t talk radio,” Castle said philosophically. “It’s okay to be ambivalent.”

They had lunch at La Roca. Tessa drank only one margarita and did not require support as they toured the shops on Avenida Obregón, looking for furniture for his redecoration project. Another storm accompanied them on the drive home. It was quick and sharp, a high wind shredded the clouds, and Tessa stopped at the pass beneath Mount Washington to gape at a double rainbow looped over the San Rafael and a full moon, distinct in the late afternoon sky, hovering between the shimmering arches.

“Sometimes it’s so beautiful I almost feel guilty living here.”

A pretty place where some ugly things happen
. Castle decided to tell Tessa about his recent adventure. “Rodriguez wanted us to keep quiet about it, but now that Cruz has gone south, I guess it’s all right.”

“Like we didn’t have enough going on around here. Oh Gil, you’ve done your bit. You will be careful from now on? Promise me you’ll be careful.”

He stroked the back of her neck, exposed by her upswept hair. It was an easy promise to make; he had everything, everything to live for.

“And all right,” he added. “We’ll go to Fort Bliss together.”

Tessa punched him lightly in the arm. “You’re getting better at this.”

She turned up the San Ignacio road. An ambulance was coming toward them, its roof lights pulsing, its siren off. Tessa swung to the side to give it room to pass, and it flew by as fast as conditions would allow, its tires flinging clods of mud. When they got to the main house, they rushed in and found Monica in the living room with Gerardo and Elena, whose eyes glistened as she fingered a rosary.

“What is it?” Castle asked, alarmed. “What happened?”

Monica stood and placed her hands on his shoulders. “It’s Sally. She went out to feed those steers of hers and ran off the road.”

“Oh, Christ. How bad is it?”

“Don’t know. Some sort of head injuries. She’s unconscious. They’re taking her to Holy Cross in Nogales. Blaine’s with her. He’s going to call when he knows something.”

Castle and Tessa sat down and joined Monica in a vigil by the telephone. Sally had gone out after lunch, Monica related, ignoring her pleas to stay home because the roads were in bad shape, coated with mud slick as black ice. When she failed to return after three hours, Monica called Blaine on his cell.

“He and Gerardo were out on another fence-mending job,” she went on. “It’s a miracle I got through. They dropped what they were doing and went to look for her and found her truck, nose down in a ditch. It looked like she’d missed a turn. She was over the wheel, bleeding from the forehead. Blaine called nine-one-one, but he was in a dead zone, and so he drove back here and got them on a landline. He wanted a helicopter, but they couldn’t get one up—it was raining like hell. So they sent the ambulance.”

They waited an hour; then Elena warmed up leftovers, and they sat around the kitchen table, eating and telling stories about Sally. Monica spoke of the times her willfulness had worked to good effect. Years ago she led a campaign to force the power and phone companies to put their lines underground in the San Rafael. “That’s why you don’t see telephone poles and electrical towers up here. She didn’t want them breaking up the view. And then she tried to talk our neighbors into taking down their fences, but she didn’t win that one. She never was comfortable in the modern world. She wanted this valley to look like the place where she grew up.”

“The Plains of Saint Augustine,” said Castle.

“Yes, there. God, she could be pigheaded, but if it wasn’t for her, this ranch wouldn’t still be in the family. She kept it going after Jeff died, just her and two old cowboys who’d worked for the San Ignacio for years.”

“Did she move here right after she lost her husband?” asked Tessa, shaking her head when Elena offered a second helping.

“Not long after. I don’t know much about Frank. They were kind of an odd couple from what I heard. Frank had a degree in mine engineering, and Sally didn’t get past eighth grade, if she got that far.”

After a silence—there was something obituary in these reminiscences—Castle said, “She must have loved him a helluva lot, she never remarried.” Then he glanced at Tessa, worried that she might think he was making an oblique reference to himself, which he wasn’t.

Monica looked at him, pale eyes widening. “You didn’t know?”

“What? She did?”

“When she was sixty. She’d robbed the cradle—he was fifty-five. He ran the feed store in Sonoita. Two months after the wedding she booted him out of the house and filed for divorce. Blaine and I couldn’t figure it out. They seemed to get along. ‘He couldn’t do it no more, and he kept that from me,’ Sally told us. We were floored. I asked her, ‘You mean that makes a difference at your age?’ and she said, ‘Damn right it does. Don’t expect it frequently, but I like to know it’s possible, and he should of let me know anyway.’”

They all laughed. The phone rang then, and for the next few minutes Monica paced the kitchen, wrapping and unwrapping the cord around her fingers, saying little beyond an occasional “All right … Yes … I see …”

She hung up and slumped against the kitchen counter. “She’s in a coma. They took CAT scans of her head. She’s got a skull fracture and a brain hemorrhage, a subdural brain hemorrhage is what they told Blaine. They’re going to evacuate her to Tucson tonight for an operation to relieve the pressure. Her chances aren’t good.”

She explained all this to Gerardo and Elena, who crossed herself. Monica was in tears. “I feel so responsible. I should have taken her car keys from her.”

Castle told her not to blame herself; if he knew his obstinate aunt, she would have hot-wired her truck.

The operation was performed the next morning at the University of Arizona hospital. Sally did not regain consciousness and died two days later, at ten-thirty in the evening.

She was buried in Black Oak Pioneer Cemetery on a hot, still, overcast day in the middle of July. The cemetery was in the Canelo Hills, a short distance down a gravel road leading off a two-lane blacktop. At the entrance, a wrought-iron gate hung between massive stone pillars; her casket was transferred from the hearse to a wagon rented from a dude ranch, for Sally had asked in her will to be carried to her grave in that manner. The team pulled the wagon slowly through the gate, mourners shuffling behind. Many of Castle’s maternal ancestors were tenanted in Black Oak, and as the funeral procession wended past their graves, he read names and dates and sometimes a one- or two-word biography etched into simple stone markers: a great-grandfather,

THOMAS ERSKINE—A
RIZONA
R
ANGER
—1859-1901

a great-great-uncle whose wife must have died in childbirth, all three lying together,

JOSHUA PITTMAN 1861–1928

and his wife,

GABRIELA FLORES PITTMAN 1873–1894,

and

BABY PITTMAN J
UNE
2, 1894—J
UNE
2, 1894;

his grandparents,

BENJAMIN ERSKINE—L
AWMAN
-R
ANCHER
1890–1956

and his wife,

IDA BARNES ERSKINE 1899–1951

and beside them,

JEFFREY ERSKINE—C
ATTLEMAN
1888–1967

and beside him,

LILLY ERSKINE 1891–1969

Like the name and date he’d found scratched into the adobe brick, the terse, stark memorials gave him a sense of connection to this land, to the history his mother had hidden from him.