Crossers (44 page)

Ben Erskine

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

125 Scott’s Cove Rd
.
Darien, Conn
.          
November 14, 1966
 

Arizona Historical Society
929
E. 2nd St
.
Tucson, Arizona

Gentlemen:

You asked in your letter of Nov. 3 for my reminiscences and observations about my father, specifically if I could add anything to the “scandal” involving his departure from the sheriff’s department. I was only 7 going on 8 when it happened. I do remember our mother, Ida, telling my brother and me that we would be moving out to the ranch full-time because Father was no longer a deputy sheriff. The only explanation she gave was that he had quit over some undefined falling out with the then-sheriff, Edwin Cox. It wasn’t until I was in college that I learned the truth, and even then accidentally. I was home on Christmas vacation, helping my mother clean out a closet, when I came across an article in a Mexican newspaper my parents had saved. I was fluent in Spanish and read it. This was probably the article you alluded to in your letter. I don’t know what happened to it. Needless to say, I was pretty upset that my parents had lied to my brother Frank and me
.

I confess that I have mixed feelings about my father. Not too
long ago, as I was preparing a reading list for the senior English honors course I teach, I came across a comment D. H. Lawrence made about Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” The first person I thought of was my father. Hard and stoical he was, and although he had a lot of friends, there was some part of him that was shut off to the world, even from his family. And I must admit he was a killer. (How painful it is to write that.) I heard one story that he had shot a Mexican horse thief when he was a teenager. I’ve also heard that he may have put as many as a dozen men in their graves. Some of these killings were justified, and some were, well, questionable
.

To cite one example, my father was mentioned prominently in a history of the U.S. Border Patrol that was published shortly after his death. To summarize, in 1938 he was serving as a county ranger in Santa Cruz County—a kind of part-time police officer. He was friends with a Border Patrol agent, Lee MacLeod. It seemed that he and my father had arrested a certain Mexican smuggler a number of times, but he was always released after a few days or weeks in jail. MacLeod and my father decided to get rid of this nuisance by ambushing him out in the Huachuca Mountains. They figured the body would never be found in that wild country, and that if it was, no one would know who shot him
.

So what you have here are two law enforcement officers conspiring to murder a suspect. There is no other way I can put it. But the tables got turned. The smuggler ambushed MacLeod when he was alone on horse patrol. MacLeod crawled to a nearby ranch and lived long enough to identify his assailant. My father tracked the killer down and found him sitting at his campfire. Could have been a scene from a western. There was a modern wrinkle—he was smoking marijuana. The way the book described it, my father followed the smell like a bloodhound, sneaked up on the stoned smuggler, and shot him dead right there
.

I have no idea how the author got this information. Nor can I
verify its accuracy. Ben was, still is, a mythic figure, the subject of much lore, from which you can’t always tease fact from fiction
.

Assuming the story was true, I have a hard time reconciling that Ben Erskine with the father I knew. How clearly I recall him, after a tough day of branding or mending fences, planting a cactus garden in our front yard to make it more presentable, or caring for sick calves with almost maternal tenderness, or peeking into our rooms to make sure we were doing our homework. One memory that remains particularly vivid is of a stormy summer night after we’d moved out to the ranch permanently. I woke up crying to my parents that I needed to go to the toilet. A hard rain clattered against the tin roof, accompanied by loud peals of thunder and flashes of lightning. In his nightshirt, carrying an umbrella in one hand and holding my hand in the other, Father escorted me down the rickety boardwalk to the privy
.

There came a deafening, terrifying crash as the whole yard lit up in a blaze of bluish white light. Lightning had struck the windmill. Father picked me up, he held me tight, and said, “It’s all right, Grace.” Then he set me down and opened the privy door. I don’t know why this moment sticks in my mind. Possibly because, trembling though I was, I felt so secure in his arms
.

I also have a hard time reconciling that Ben with the Ben in the Mexican newspaper. That he took money for turning those two men over to their executioners makes it all the more difficult to accept. It was something a common bounty hunter would have done
.

Even during the Great Depression, we had our homestead free and clear and enough to eat. But the IB-Bar could barely sustain itself; cattle prices collapsed with the rest of the economy, and drought made things worse. My father told Martín Mendoza, our full-time cowboy, that he could no longer pay him a steady wage and suggested that he might be better off seeking other employment. Martín, however, figured that things were just as rough elsewhere and stayed on. We became one big family, the
Erskines and the Mendozas, struggling to make a go of it in the dry foothills of the Huachuca Mountains
.

In the way of children, Frank and I were unaware of our parents’ financial worries. We were, though, conscious of another sort of anxiety, the nature and origins of which were a mystery to us at the time. We didn’t know that Pedroza and López’s allies in Mexico wanted to even the score with my father. At night, whenever an automobile or wagon or horse was heard coming up the road, my parents would sit up alert as watchdogs. If we kids happened to be making noise, they would tell us, “Hush up. Listen.” Then as the car or wagon or horse passed on by, “It’s all right, it’s nothing.” Those words became a mantra in our household. “Hush up … Listen … It’s all right, it’s nothing.”

The day came when it wasn’t all right, when it was a lot more than nothing, and I will never forget it. It was a humid Sunday evening in 1931. Our family and the Mendozas were canning poblano peppers in the kitchen. Ida and Lourdes pan-roasted the peppers, then rinsed them in cold water, while the Mendozas’ toddler played on the floor. Frank and I and the Mendozas’ older child peeled the crisped skins, and Ben and Martín sterilized Mason jars in a pot of boiling water. It was a domestic scene that could have been a Depression-era magazine cover, except for one thing—both men were wearing pistols. They were never unarmed except when they were in bed
.

The ranch dogs outside barked in alarm, the grown-ups stopped talking and listened briefly. A pack of coyotes yipped close by. Work and conversation resumed; we figured the coyotes had disturbed the dogs. My mother told my father that the rinse water needed changing, and he and Martín went outside to fill the buckets with fresh water
.

I did not see all of what happened. I heard about it later from Martín. He saw someone leap up from behind the berm surrounding the pond next to the windmill, and he threw himself to the ground at the same moment a gun flashed twice. The bullets smacked into the back of the house. My father and Martín fired back. The gunman fell behind the berm. Martín yelled, “We
got him!” and ran toward him to make sure. The gunman had only been slightly wounded. He sprang to his feet and grappled with Martín, trying to wrest Martín’s gun, because he’d dropped his own. At that instant a second gunman, crouched behind the rock wall enclosing the yard, fired a rifle. My father whirled and shot back and saw him slump over the wall. Then the gunman wrestling with Martín broke free and sprinted for the house
.

Inside, we were all lying on the kitchen floor, petrified. Lourdes was under the kitchen table, shielding her children with her ample body. Frank wailed, “Has Father been hurt?” From outside we heard my father holler, “Douse the lights! Lock the doors!” Lourdes scuttled out from under the table to snuff the lanterns as my mother ran to the door; but she was able to hook only the screen door before the gunman grabbed it and tried to tear it off the hinges. I can still see him, just before Lourdes put out the last lamp—a man with a huge, round, hairy face like a bearded melon and gold-crowned front teeth that made him look even more hideous. My mother seemed paralyzed by the sight. I was screaming. So were the Mendozas’ kids. With her bare hands, Lourdes snatched the pot of boiling water from off the stove and flung it through the screen into the man’s face. Scalded, howling like no creature I had ever heard, he staggered backward. That was when my father shot him through the temple from only two or three feet away. The way Martín described it, he raised his pistol and fired as calmly as if he were at a target range
.

Inside, we heard the shot and the thud of a body falling onto the porch. For an awful moment I thought my father had been killed; then he called, “Is everybody all right?” My mother was transfixed, staring at the door like a blind woman. Ben appeared on the other side, and commanded us to stay inside and keep the doors locked till he and Martín made sure there weren’t more attackers. Ida recovered from her paralysis and moved Frank and me into a corner, telling us in a shaky voice to stay put. After a while, we heard the Model T’s motor kick over and the truck rattle off. Frank asked, “Where are they going?” Ida replied, “Never you mind!” They were, of course, carting the bodies
away. She relit the lamps and thanked Lourdes for her courage and rubbed her blistered hands with butter. My brother wanted to know if the men were robbers, and our mother answered, yes, robbers, but that we were safe now
.

I did not feel at all safe until Father and Martín returned. Uttering praises to God, Lourdes embraced her husband. But Ida, her head cocked to one side, looked at Ben the way you look at a stranger you think you know but can’t quite place. Frank and I wanted to hug him, but something checked us, and we too stood staring at him. The mantle of the killer still clung to him, like the dirt and burrs clinging to his clothes. It was a kind of repulsive force that held us at a distance
.

First he said, “It’s taken care of.” Our mother nodded. Then he said, “I’m sorry you and the kids had to … I am sorry this had to happen.”

As I remember it, she was silent for a time. I can’t speculate as to what she might have been thinking. But I did hear her say, finally, “It didn’t have to happen.”

I hope this account helps you in your project. If you need any further information, you know how to contact me
.

Sincerely yours
,

Grace Castle

30

T
HE
M
INUTEMEN ARRIVED
at the San Ignacio at the beginning of September in a convoy of SUVs. They set up camp under the ramada in the ranch’s alfalfa field and soon had it looking like a command post in Iraq: cots and sleeping bags lined up on one side, a mural-size relief map propped against a post, and a radio receiver on a makeshift table. Outside, an American flag flew above a yellow banner on which a rattlesnake coiled above the motto “Don’t Tread on Me.”

Blaine had summoned the vigilantes for a thirty-day “operation” over Castle’s and Monica’s objections. They did not want a crowd of armed strangers wandering around, but he had declared war on the coyotes and drug runners and illegal aliens. “Don’t need no Iraq nor Afghanistan neither,” he’d said. “Got us a fight right here.” Castle was prepared to dislike the guest-guardians—the very word
vigilante
conjured images of gun-toting rednecks, gaunt night riders hot to hang a Mexican from the nearest tree. The only part of this picture that proved accurate was the gun-toting part—they all carried sidearms; otherwise, the thirteen men and two women were of Castle’s age and older and in less than peak physical condition. A few probably had Medicare cards in their wallets: retirees bored with golf and gated communities, looking for adventure on the border. One or two spoke darkly of wetbacks and greasers and beaners, invaders polluting their America, but the rest played the role of earnest Concerned Citizen. By day they cleaned up the trash deposited by migrant bands or sat on lawn chairs, peering into Mexico through binoculars. By night they looked through night-vision goggles or patrolled in their SUVs. If they spotted border crossers, they did not rush in with blazing guns and hangman’s nooses but called the Border Patrol. All in all they were a tolerable bunch, some even likable. And Castle was forced to admit that their presence made a difference; the traffic through the ranch dropped from a torrent to a trickle.

It wasn’t the Minutemen who worried him; it was his cousin. None who’d seen those bodies flung from the van like rags from a basket would ever forget it, but Blaine was consumed by it. The plates of his inner geology had shifted, a crack had opened in his personality; its subterranean aspects, which had previously shown only glimpses of themselves, bulged to the surface. He dug his old combat uniform out of a trunk—tiger-stripe camouflage with a Special Forces patch sewn on one shoulder—and wore it on forays with the vigilantes, carrying his hunting rifle, a scoped .30-06, in addition to the Luger, his face darkened with shoe polish. He took a vacation from ranch work and spent hours at the vigilante headquarters, planning sorties, studying maps, joshing as he might have with his old A-team thirty-odd years ago. His speech grew peppered with martial jargon: avenues of approach; NDP (for night-defensive position); OP (for observation post); fields of fire. This metamorphosis disturbed Monica. “It’s almost like he’s back
there
,” she’d said to Castle one day. “It’s like he’s enjoying this.”

One afternoon Castle drove out to the ranch’s alfalfa farm with Gerardo to learn how to operate the baler. After the lesson, he fell into a conversation with the Minutemen’s leader, an intense, crew-cut man in his forties, easily the youngest of the whole crew.

“I had a talk with Blaine this morning, and maybe you should, too,” the Minuteman said. “That guy is getting a little spooky. What happened was, he was out with two of my guys and they spotted some crossers hotfooting it on a ridgeline a couple hundred yards away. Couldn’t tell if they were wets or mules. So one of my guys radios me to radio the Border Patrol, and while he’s giving me the GPS coordinates, Blaine opens up with his rifle. Puts four, five rounds in front of them. I guess he’s a pretty good shot, but at that range all it would’ve taken was a flinch, and we’d have a dead one to explain. We’d be in the shit. We’re just trying to help you out. Don’t want trouble like that. We don’t want to get put in a bad light.”

This cautious, public-relations-minded remark sounded odd coming from a vigilante, but then his band of paunchy senior citizens weren’t really vigilantes. Castle related the episode to Monica, and that evening, in the living room of the main house, they pleaded with Blaine to settle down before somebody got hurt or worse. “Now, don’t neither of you start givin’ me advice I don’t ask for,” he said, the skewed smile bending his thin lips. Right then, sitting under the photograph of Ben Erskine wearing that same mirthless smirk as he raised his hat from the back of a rearing horse, Blaine looked like his grandfather’s reincarnation.

C
ASTLE HAD HEARD
from his daughters, having written them about his going into partnership on the ranch. Morgan, acting as spokeswoman for both, as usual, replied that she and Justine were sad to hear that his move to Arizona was now permanent, but they were also pleased that he was rebuilding his life. It appeared that he had at last achieved “closure.” This whole notion of “closure,” he thought, rose from a culture so marinated in television that it had come to see life as a miniseries, each episode resolved in an hour, and so on to the next.

As September 11 approached, fearing a relapse, he studiously avoided watching TV, listening to the radio, or looking at the newspapers. On the tenth he asked Monica if he could use her phone to order flowers. Was he making up for another quarrel with Tessa? she asked. No, he was sending them to Amanda’s parents in Boston. “I want them to know I’m thinking of them,” he said. It was only after he’d wired the flowers that he realized he’d spoken her name aloud for the first time in two years. The next day he treated himself with postoperative delicacy, testing his emotional pulse. It was more or less normal.

Toward the end of the month Sheriff Rodriguez called to say Miguel’s visa extension had been approved. No, he’d added in answer to a question from Castle, there had been no further word on Cruz’s whereabouts. The MexFeds had assured him that they were on the lookout, but he had his doubts. The Mexican cops were busy either fighting the drug cartels or working for them or both. Whatever the case, they were hunting big game, and Billy Cruz was a rabbit.

When Castle passed the news on to Miguel, he snorted and shrugged and said, “No le hace”—it makes no difference. His courage was not to be rewarded with a swift, conclusive end to his ordeal; he was to go on in a twilight of waiting, attended by the fear that Cruz or his cohorts would harm his wife and children. Soon it would be a year since he had left Oaxaca, and his luck was still bad. Castle grew impatient with him. His luck could have been a lot worse—he could have suffered Héctor and Reynaldo’s fate. To console himself, Miguel began to scratch out a vegetable garden behind his Airstream trailer. This was not the time to plant; the summer rains had surrendered to the arid autumn. But he stayed at it with peasant doggedness, hoeing rows for corn, beans, and squash, planting seeds, hauling water by hand, spreading fertilizer. He said he wanted to see something grow.

B
ETH
M
C
B
RIDE
came home toward the end of the month, and an excited Tessa drove to Fort Bliss to welcome her, but without Castle. It was Beth herself who had asked to see her mother alone, after learning that Tessa had planned to bring him. Mother and soldier-daughter stayed at a motel in El Paso, had dinner downtown, and went to a music festival.

“I organized the whole thing, like a tour director,” Tessa told Castle the day after her return. They were dancing in her living room. There was an odd note in her voice, a forced gaiety, a brittleness. “On Sunday I planned for us to take one of those trolley tours to Juárez, and Beth said, ‘Shit, no! I just want to sleep on a clean bed and not have to do one fucking thing.’ Her language had gotten pretty rough, but what can you expect?”

They swayed to the bittersweet “But Not for Me.” Castle was feeling a little ashamed of himself. He hadn’t seen his girls for nine months and had no excuse for the separation beyond his self-imposed removal. Ashamed, too, that Morgan and Jussie had been able to live their lives and get on with their careers while Beth risked bombs and IEDs on the broken roads of Iraq.

“So she slept,” Tessa went on. “Slept till noon, and … and …” Suddenly she stopped talking, stopped dancing, and began to sob.

“Tess, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“Does something have to be wrong for me to cry?”

“You mean you’re crying from happiness that she’s back?”

“No! For chrissake, I want a drink.”

She pulled away from him and went to a cupboard and poured two straight tequilas and handed one to him. She flopped onto the sofa, drank off half the glass, and then wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. It was trembling.

Castle sat beside her and held her. “What happened?”

“It’s more what didn’t happen,” she said, regaining her composure. “All we did was hang around the motel pool, and we didn’t talk much. It was like she had no idea what to say to me and I didn’t know what to say to her. I wondered if she’d seen some things she never told me about. She seemed so far away, lying there right next to me. There’s always been a certain space between us, but this time it felt like an ocean. So I took her to dinner again that night, to a lovely, elegant old hotel in downtown El Paso, and we sat through the whole meal like—like—you’ve seen them—old married couples who have learned to despise each other and sit there three feet from each other but it might as well be three miles. Beth drank like I’d never seen her drink, one glass of wine after another, till she’d polished off a bottle all by herself. Finally, I asked her, ‘You wanted to see me alone. Is there was anything you need to talk about?’ And she said, in this cold voice, ‘Not a goddamn thing you’d ever understand.’ And I shot back, ‘Well, try me.’ She just waved her hand and looked around the dining room, and then she said, loud enough to turn heads from the tables near us, ‘Everybody in this fucking country sure is having a good time.’ I got angry and reminded her that she wasn’t in a mess hall, and she looked at me …” Tessa’s voice broke. “Looked at me like she’d never seen me before. We went back to the motel and to bed without saying good night, and she was just as icy the next morning. That was yesterday. I almost couldn’t make the drive home, I was so angry and so sad.”

I’m glad I wasn’t there, Castle thought, and then scolded himself for being selfish.

Tessa finished her drink. “I thought I’d got myself back together, but I guess not. I’ve got this horrible, horrible feeling that I’m losing her.”

“You’re not going to lose her,” Castle assured her. “She needs time to decompress, a period of reentry.” This sounded fatuous even to his own ears, as though Beth, like Justine, had just finished a tough year at law school.

The next number on the CD, “Lady Be Good,” was too bouncy, too out of phase with the conversation. Tessa jumped up and shut the CD player off and sat down again, folding her legs under her. “The whole day today I’ve been seeing myself ten, twenty years from now, sitting in this room alone, my daughter estranged from me.” She shivered at this bleak picture. “It’s an irrational, maybe a hysterical thought, but …”

“But you’re not going to be sitting here alone ten years from now,” he interrupted. “Or twenty years from now. I’ll be here. I’ll always be here.”

“Darling, please don’t say that. You don’t know what might happen.”

“Then put it like this—as long as I’ve got a pulse, I’ll be here. I know that. We can go to City Hall tomorrow and have the state of Arizona put an official seal on it.”

The declaration stunned him as much as it did her. She clutched his arm and shook him gently. “My God. I don’t need that. I don’t need any seal. I need you.”

“You’ve got me.” He rose and turned the CD player on. Ella was singing “Someone from Somewhere.” “One more dance?” he asked, clasping her hands and pulling her to her feet.