Crossers (2 page)

“¿Tú comprendes, gringuito?”

He practically spits the contemptuous word “littlegringo.”

“Sí, comprendo,” Ben answers, offering his crooked grin to mask his unease. The Mexican makes it obvious, with a hard glare, that he doesn’t like that smile—to him, it looks insolent.

“¿Ese pinto es tuyo?” he asks, gesturing out a window that frames Maggie and one of the other horses.

Ben replies that the pinto is his.

“Parece fino.”

“Pues.”

“Me gusta tu caballo.” He pauses, squints, smiles without mirth, then stands up. Accustomed to Mexicans not much taller than himself, Ben is surprised by his height. Spurs clanking, he lurches to the bar and leans on it, inches away. The vaquero isn’t armed, but that isn’t much comfort. He’s as tall and powerfully built as Rudy Hollister.

“Sí, me gusta tu caballo,” he repeats, the vapors of his beer breath almost visible. “Pero no me gustan los gringos, y mucho menos los gringuitos.”

I like your horse, but I don’t like gringos, and little gringos even less
. A prickling rises up Ben’s arms, a tightness in his throat. He wants to bolt but doesn’t, sensing that any sudden move will only incite this ugly borracho. Just then Esteban emerges from the back room. He’s short, muscular, dressed in the white cotton shirt and trousers of a peon. But he’s no peon, he’s a barkeep in a border cantina, and he sizes up the situation in two seconds flat.

“¿Qué quiere, amigo?” he amiably asks the big man. “¿Otra cerveza o”—he places his hands on a drawer under the bar—“algo más?”

The drunk is not so drunk that he doesn’t understand the message of Esteban’s hidden hands: the “something else” he’s been offered isn’t drinkable. He snorts and replies, sure, he’ll have another beer. Esteban pulls one from a shelf. The vaquero grabs it, slams a few pesos on the bar, and weaves back to his table.

“Hola, Ben,” Esteban says. “¿Qué pasa? Cómo está tu tío?”

“Bien, pero con sed.”

“Oye.” Esteban leans forward and lowers his voice. “Me llegó lo bueno … Lo que le gusta a tu tío.”

The drunk nonetheless overhears. “¡Lo bueno! ¿Qué estoy to mando yo? ¿Del drenaje? Y al cabroncito le das lo bueno. Y tan joven para pistear.”

Esteban ignores him, then motions Ben to come with him.
Cabroncito
—little bastard. Ben again feels like running out. Instead he obeys the summons, ducks under the bar, and follows Esteban into the cramped, windowless storeroom that is as dark as a closet save for a single plane of light, slipping through a crack in the back door. Esteban burns a candle and removes from a shelf a glazed ceramic jug with its cork sealed in wax.

“Esta es. Mira.” Pointing at a word printed under the name of the distiller: REPOSADO. It means, as Ben has learned from his previous trips, that the tequila has been aged a long time and is of the highest quality.

“¿Cuánto es?”

“Dos.”

Before leaving, Uncle Joshua instructed him to bargain, but Ben is more than anxious to be on his way and dips into his pocket without argument.

“Bueno,” Esteban says, palming the two silver dollars. “Oye. Sálgate por aquí.” He gestures at the back door, then adds with a twitch of his head, “El borracho.”

“Hasta luego.”

Walking around to the front, Ben stuffs the jug into a saddlebag, mounts up, and starts down the street at a trot.
Gringuito. Cabroncito
. What was he picking on me for? he asks himself. What did I do to him? The sheer unreasonableness of the Mexican’s hostility agitates and frightens him as much as the hostility itself.

A wind has sprung up in advance of the thunderstorm building to the south. A dust devil twirls crazily ahead, seeming to lead Ben out of Santa Cruz before it spins itself out. At a wash a herd of thirsty corrientes blocks his way. He urges Maggie on and whoops to clear a path through the jostling mass of pale hides and high, curved horns. Maggie plods up the opposite bank, and Ben rides on toward the border, once more at a brisk walk. He hasn’t gone far when he hears rapid hoofbeats behind him. He knows who it is even before he turns to see him, mounted on the sorrel at a full gallop. Ben’s thought is, He wants to steal my horse! Maggie, as startled as he by the oncoming rider, lunges forward. Ben kicks her hard and slacks the reins, and she takes off, neck outstretched, mane flying. He doesn’t dare turn to see if the vaquero is gaining, and doesn’t need to. He can tell by the sound that he is. In a few seconds the sorrel is alongside, its nose half a length behind Maggie’s, the Mexican brandishing a ramal braided to his reins. An observer watching from afar would think the two riders were high-spirited cowhands, running a race.

“¡A ver qué tan hombrecito eres!” the Mexican yells, leaning over as he cracks Maggie’s haunch with the ramal.

Thinking that some predator is attacking her from behind, which is in fact the case, the mare whirls off the road, kicking with both back legs at the same time, the violent movement nearly pitching Ben over her neck and jerking his feet from the stirrups. He manages to hold his seat but cannot get his stirrups back as Maggie twists and bucks. He cannot believe he’s still on, but because he’s been riding since age four, he knows he won’t be for long, knows further that he had better bail before he’s thrown. He lands hard, his legs crumple from the impact, and he rolls two or three times through the grass and over the rocks the grass conceals.

The wind knocked out of him, his ribs bruised, he lies there for several moments, staring at a harrier circling high above. When he realizes that he hasn’t broken any bones, he sits up and sees Maggie some ten or twenty yards away, ground-tied by the reins hanging from her neck. She seems to be looking at him apologetically. Ben wants to say, “Got nothin to feel bad about, wasn’t your fault,” but he can’t speak. His tongue and throat feel as if they’re coated with sand.

He gets to his feet and then notices the sorrel standing under an empty saddle some distance away, near the old mine tailings. The gringo-hater lies sprawled in the middle of the road, motionless. His horse must have reared when Maggie kicked, Ben thinks, and being so drunk, he couldn’t hold his seat. Hope his neck is broke.

What he should do now is ride home as fast as the mare can carry him, but that is not what he does. Leading Maggie by the reins, he approaches the prone figure as a hunter would a fallen bear or mountain lion, uncertain if it’s dead or merely wounded. The wind blows harder, lightning rives a plum-colored cloud advancing northward.

The Mexican appears to be dead, an arm flung over his chest, eyes half open, mustache matted with the blood trickling from his nostrils; but then he makes a sound—it’s something between a sigh and a snore—and Ben notices the big chest rising, falling, rising. What if this crazy horse thief revives and comes after him as he rides homeward?

Fear rises again in Ben’s throat, and he hates this drunken vaquero for making him afraid. He kneels behind his tormentor’s head and bends low, draws his knife, and with one swift stroke he opens in the Mexican’s throat a second mouth that vomits blood over his hand and shirt.

The man’s legs thrash, digging the Spanish spurs into the ground; he wheezes and gurgles, and when the arm on his chest flops to the ground with a spastic movement, Ben jumps aside. Trembling, he stares at the body, now still, and at the scarlet grin arcing almost ear to ear in the brown throat. A thrill of conquest shudders through him—he feels like a David standing over the slain Goliath. And yet he can’t believe he’s done what he’s done. It now seems as though the knife drew itself and of its own will slashed into living flesh.

He wipes the blade in the grass, then scours his hand and shirt with dirt from the road. The dead man’s horse still stands near the mine tailings. Nearby Maggie grazes on succulent tufts of blue grama. The harrier glides low, seeking prey. The thunderstorm rolls on, passing to the west, while the sky directly overhead is clear. Nothing much has changed except Ben Erskine.

A calm descends upon this Ben who is no longer the Ben he’d been and can never be again. The trembling stops. His mind is cold and clear and thinks ahead. Some traveler is bound to come upon the body and fly into Santa Cruz with the news that a man with his throat cut lies in the middle of the road. The report will reach the ears of the local law. Possibly Esteban and the two customers will tell them about what happened in the cantina. Of course, by the time the rurales ride out to look for him, he will be back in Lochiel, beyond their reach. But can he take that chance? His instincts tell him to hide the body now, while there is no one around. The problem is, where can he hide it out here in all this open country? He can’t drag it very far—the Mexican must weigh more than two hundred pounds. Then he looks toward the dead man’s horse and the mine tailings, cascading down the slopes of the low hills.

He approaches the sorrel carefully, removes the riata from the saddle, and returns to the road. He cinches the loop over the Mexican’s ankles, giving the rope a few extra turns for good measure, then wraps the opposite end around his saddle horn and remounts Maggie. The smell of blood makes the pinto nervous. Ben settles her down, and she has no trouble pulling the corpse over the open ground and up one of the hills. Ben halts there, unties the riata from the saddle horn and, after some tugging and shoving that soaks him in sweat, rolls the body into a mine shaft. Trailing the rope still bound to its ankles, it tumbles straight down fifteen or twenty feet to land on its side, the legs bent against the side of the hole, which isn’t much wider than the Mexican is tall.
Was
tall. Ben scrambles down to unsaddle the sorrel and take off its reins and headstall. That done, he sends the horse away with a loud yell and a slap on the rump. Lugging the tack uphill works up more sweat. He tosses it into the pit with its former owner.
A ver qué tan hombrecito eres
. The Mexican’s last words.
Let’s see what you have, little man
. Reckon you found out, you horse-thievin’ son of a bitch. Ben mounts up and starts for the border and Lochiel, spurring the pinto into a racehorse’s run. It’s as though he’s in flight, though no one pursues him.

Joshua Pittman is in his office, studying a case he is to hear tomorrow: a dispute between two stockmen over water rights. He’s had trouble concentrating. Ben should have returned an hour ago. His anxiety eases when he hears, through the open window, hoof clops out back and the squeal of the gate swinging open. He goes out to the porch, and there is Ben, leading his horse into the yard. Maggie is lathered, blown out.

“What took you so long? You’re too young to have been dancing with the señoritas.”

Ben makes no reply, takes the jug out of a saddlebag and, with a skittering, sidelong glance of his pale gray eyes, hands it to his uncle.

“I’d better cool Maggie down before I put her up,” Ben declares, still with that evasive look, his voice subdued.

Joshua sets the jug down and leans against a post. “Don’t want to put yourself up wet either,” he remarks, gesturing at his nephew’s sweat-stained, dirt-spattered shirt. “Whatever held you up, you sure did come home in a hurry it looks like.”

“Knew we was late.”

“Were late. You’ve had eight years of schooling.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ben goes to his horse, tugs the latigo to loosen the girth, and walks the mare around the yard, passing into and out of the cottonwood’s lengthening shadow, mottled by the late-afternoon light shooting through the branches. His head is bent contemplatively; the fingers of his free hand open and close, as if he’s molding an invisible lump of clay.

The Justice steps off the porch. “Run into trouble?”

Ben halts and makes a vague movement with his head.

“That a yes?”

Ben nods.

“Well, what kind of trouble?”

“Somebody tried to steal my horse.”

Joshua flinches. He’d expected to hear that it was mild trouble, boy trouble, like a run-in with some rough kids. “Who was it?”

“A Messikin.”

“Stands to reason it was a Mexican, you being in Mexico at the time.”

This droll comment is intended to ease Ben’s agitation, but it has the opposite effect. Looking at his uncle squarely for the first time since his return, he snaps in response, “What do you reckon? That he come up to me and said, ‘Howdeedo, my name is Pablo and I’m here to steal your horse?’”

“Don’t get sassy.”

“I’m sorry, sir. It’s just that … You know that hunting trip I went on last fall with my friends? When we saw the mountain lion a-sneakin’ up on our packhorse and shot it? This Messikin scared me more’n that lion did. Never been so scared. I still am—some.”

Ben’s lips quiver as he speaks, and Joshua draws closer to him, raising a hand to give his shoulder a reassuring squeeze; but the movement is immediately checked by the peculiar expression in the boy’s eyes. There is no fright in them, and not much boy either. They seem somehow older and harder.

“There’s nothing to be scared of now. Doubt that Mexican is going to come here after your horse.”

“Ain’t no doubt about it,” Ben affirms, the harshness of his tone matching his look. “He was chasin’ me and tried to make Maggie throw me so he could take her. But he was the one got throwed. Busted his neck, I think. He’s dead, Uncle Josh.”