Crossers (20 page)

I thought, or maybe it was hoped, that seeing and doing those things had got something out of his system, but if anything, he was more restless and thirsting for action than before. That man craved it like a drunk does his whiskey. He wasn’t of much help to me, running the ranch.

I don’t recall what year this was—sometime after I got married to Lilly in 1912 and built a little house for us—it’s just up the road from this one, still standing—that Ben got himself in a little trouble with the law. He captured a mustang, a blue roan stallion that had been running loose in the Huachucas and that had become like a famous outlaw because he gave the slip to every cowhand who tried to catch him. Ben and Martín spotted him one day and went after him. Martín’s throw missed—must have been the only time in his life he did miss. Ben’s did not. He brought the roan to the ranch, branded him, named him Spirit for his ghostly color and for his temperament, and broke him to the saddle.

There was a law on the books prohibiting the appropriation of maverick horses. They were considered public property and were to be turned over to the county court for auction. Word of Ben’s capture spread, and when the county attorney in Nogales heard of it, he issued a court order for Ben to surrender that horse.

No way was he going to. The prosecutor sent a mounted posse to take the animal. Ben got forewarned, I don’t know from who or how. He got Spirit out of the corral and waited for the posse up on an oak ridge. When he saw them, he rode out from hiding and waved his hat and let out a vaquero’s yell. The chase was on. He led the posse into the mountains where he and Spirit knew every canyon and trail. It was no contest, so he decided to make it one by taunting the posse. He’d ride to the crest of a hill and wait there in full view. When the posse got to within fifty yards or so, he’d spur Spirit into a run. The game went on for an entire morning, until the posse quit. Ben rode on for another thirty miles, to a ranch in the low desert country near Tucson, where he left Spirit in the care of a rancher we’d worked for years before. Then he hopped the next train heading south. About a month later, he retrieved the stallion and rode him back down here, proud as could be.

I mention these hijinks because they and other wild things he did went a long way into making his legend. Not that he was a legend like Wyatt Earp was, but he’d become a kind of hero to certain folks in Santa Cruz and Cochise and Pima counties. You see, Arizona had finally got admitted to the union—the curtain had come down on the hell-roaring territorial days. That was okay with most people, including myself—about time Arizona caught up with the twentieth century. But down here on the border, there were other people who weren’t so happy with progress and civilization. They felt life was getting to be a little too regulated, you know, like they were being fenced in, and somebody like Ben reminded them of the old days of the open range and doing what you damn well pleased and poking your thumb in the eye of the law. It’s passing strange when I think about it. Ben wasn’t yet twenty-five, he ought to have belonged to the future, not to a time gone by. It seemed to suit him, though, and he did his best to live up to the picture folks had of him.

Capturing wild horses and leading posses on breakneck chases, even that got to be too tame for him. In 1915 he up and disappeared on me again. Found out later that he and Mendoza and his old sidekick Babcock had joined up with Yaqui Indians running guns into Old Mexico. Mexico was a damn mess back then. One general would take power, then another general would overthrow him and be el presidente till another general threw him out. To go running guns into that madhouse seemed just crazy to me. I was getting worried that my kid brother was going to turn into one more border renegade and end up behind bars or dead. I recollect—it must have been in 1916—sitting him down and saying to him, “Ben, either you’re my partner in this ranch or you’re not. If you don’t want to be, say so, and I’ll buy you out. But if you are, then dammit, you’ve got to stick around and do the work and not go running off on these harebrained adventures.” Ben promised he’d be more steady, like a business partner should.

I had a talk with Lilly about him, and we decided to be matchmakers, calculating that if Ben met the right gal and took on the responsibilities of married life, he might be more reliable and live longer besides. I reckon we were sticking our noses where they didn’t belong. Still and all, we felt that it was our duty to nudge him, kind of, into a more regular life. It so happened that Lilly knew of a single young lady, Ida Barnes. She was seventeen, the only child of Merle and Ellen Barnes. They were middling-prosperous folks who ran a lumberyard and sawmill near to the town of Canelo. One day I drove the wagon over to their place to buy some boards I needed for a new corral, but really I wanted to see their daughter for myself and more or less to find out how things stood with her, you know, if she had her a boyfriend or fiancé.

When I drove up and hitched my team, I heard this female voice call to me from the yard, “Good day, sir. If you have business with my father, he is up in the mountains sawing timber with his crew, but my mother should be able to take care of you.” The voice was coming from above me, and there was Ida, sitting on a tree branch in a spotless white muslin dress and a straw hat. Her feet in high-button shoes were crossed at the ankles, and she was smiling to beat the band and looked relaxed, like she was sitting on a porch swing instead of a tree branch six, seven feet off the ground. I thanked her for her information and then asked her what she was doing up there, and she said she liked the view.

A while later, as I was loading up my wagon, the mailman rode in. Ida jumped right out of that tree and without so much as a stumble ran over to the mailman, asking if he had a letter for her. He did not. She was right disappointed. “You never bring any mail for me,” she said, like it was his fault. I thought that a gal who would climb a tree dressed like it was a Sunday and then jump to the ground light as a cat was just the gal for Ben. When I got home, I told him about Miss Barnes and said that she was hoping someone would write her a letter. I left it at that, hoping he would take the hint, and he did.

She wrote him back, and pretty soon he got an invitation to Sunday dinner. I’ll never forget how my brother looked when he drove off in our carriage, bathed and shaved and dressed to make an impression. Beaver-hide Stetson, corduroy jacket, starched white shirt, bandanna with a silver clasp, handmade Mexican boots. You add to his appearance his reputation as a dashing fella, which had gone before him, and you can see why he just bowled that impressionable young gal right over.

They courted all that summer and in September Ben proposed. Ida said yes but told him he would have to ask for her father’s approval. As the story has come down to me, Ben stopped by the following day and sat out on the front porch jawing about horses and cattle prices with Merle Barnes. Ida stood inside with her ear pressed to the door. There was a break in the conversation, and Ben asked, “What would you say if Ida and me got married?” in a way so offhanded the old man didn’t hear the question. Ben repeated it in the same casual way. “Reckon that would be all right,” Merle answered, and then him and my brother went back to talking about livestock.

So they got married a couple of weeks later, by a justice of the peace in Tucson. I’ll say this for Ben—he tried real hard to follow my advice to settle down and break himself to the saddle of marriage and family responsibilities. He got a job managing the store at the Yaqui reservation at Xavier del Bac, south of Tucson, and earned side money turning out bits, spurs, and horseshoes for sale. He even took a correspondence course to earn a high school degree.

But he wasn’t cut out for a life like that. Ida wrote Lilly a letter one time and mentioned that Ben had become subject to what she called “spells of cloudy weather.” Lilly and I knew what she meant—we’d seen those spells ourselves. Ben would sull up all of a sudden, and for no reason we could figure out, act like he was mad about something but wouldn’t say what, and then just as quick, he’d snap out of it. But we got the feeling from Ida’s letter that these storms were becoming more frequent. I’m no philosopher, sure as hell no psychologist, but I reckoned that Ben was trying to be somebody he wasn’t and it was getting to him. He looked up to me—I say that without bragging. He admired men who were even-tempered and thought things through and were steady of purpose, and he wanted to be that way himself. Hell’s bells, I wanted him to be that way. But he couldn’t be.

In 1917, after the U.S. got itself into the First World War, Ben declared that he was going to enlist. Said that with his battle experience in Mexico, he could be of valuable service to the army. Maybe so. But I wonder now if he was looking to jump the fence, I mean get away from a dull job and a way of life that fit him like a shirt two sizes too small. In the end Ida talked him out of joining up. She was pregnant—she would miscarry that child—and Ben, rightly so, I think, decided his place was at her side. I believe he always regretted not going to the war. In years to come I would hear him say that he felt he missed out on something terrible and grand.

What he did do was to become a cattleman in his own right. He quit the store job and filed a claim for a section of undeveloped land under the Homestead Act. If he proved up, the land would be his in five years. He named his place after Ida’s initials—the IB-Bar. It was at the foot of the Huachuca Mountains, which wasn’t ideal cattle country, full of tight canyons and steep hillsides, but it had a spring, which was a thing of value in our dry country. A tumbledown log cabin built by an early settler stood below the spring. Ben fixed it up, and Ida and he lived in it for a year or so. Then, on the slope of a south-facing ridge, low enough to be out of the wind but high enough to be safe from flooding in the summer monsoons, he built an adobe-brick house with my help and the help of his old partner, Martín Mendoza. Martín hired on and moved into the cabin with his wife, Lourdes. Ben dug a well, fenced the property, put up a corral and a barn. Ida planted a vegetable garden and ordered a new cast-iron stove with a warming oven and water-heating compartment from the Sears Roebuck catalog. It came by ox-drawn wagon from the train station in Nogales, along with a bed to replace the one Ben and Martín had built out of oak trees they’d cut down themselves. There they were, almost twenty years into this century, living like pioneers. Ida was happy. Just eighteen years old, and she had a place she could call her own.

And my brother? He wasn’t cut out to be a cattleman either, even though he was good at it. He worked that ranch off and on till ’38, when he sold out and incorporated the IB-Bar into the San Ignacio and once more became my partner. When I say “off and on,” I mean more off than on. He was a deputy sheriff for about ten of those years, and he continued to go soldier-of-fortuning down in Mexico. It was that craving of his for action, for danger. Just like he used to disappear on me for days and sometimes weeks, he did the same to Ida and their two kids, Frank and Grace. Because of the way he lived his life, there were all kinds of men who came after him, looking for revenge. One time he and Martín fought a gun battle with a pair of desperadoes right in the backyard, in full view of Ida and the children. Ida died early, you know, she was just shy of fifty-two years old, and there were some people, his own daughter was one and my Lilly another, who thought that the strain of living with a man like Ben was what killed her. Personally I think that’s nonsense, but I do know he put his family through an awful lot, and that if I’d been a woman, I would not have wanted to be married to my brother.

9

T
WO DAYS
after the concert Tessa invited Castle to ride with her and a day hand; they were going to move a bull to a new pasture. As he knew nothing about herding cattle and could be of no help whatsoever, might even be a hindrance, he assumed she’d extended the invitation because she wanted his company, which pleased and scared him at the same time. Actually, what scared him was the undeniable fact that he enjoyed her company, an enjoyment that struck him as inappropriate and possibly dangerous, threatening the stability of his solitude.

When he arrived at Tessa’s corral, he found that the hand, whose name was Tim McIntyre, had already saddled and bridled a horse for him. Though he was grateful to be spared the embarrassment of demonstrating his incompetence at tacking up, it was a greater embarrassment to have someone else do the job. McIntyre, a young, central-casting cowboy wearing spurs and thorn-scarred butterfly chaps, didn’t help matters, greeting him with the slightly disdainful look a wrangler would bestow on a dude ranch guest. Some of his masculine pride was restored when Tessa, who’d wrenched a knee yesterday, asked him to help her mount up. She wedged her left boot in the stirrup, he grasped her waist with both hands, and as he boosted her into the saddle, her thighs and hips brushed his chest, sending a thrill through him. He hadn’t felt anything like it for a very long time.

They rode out three abreast. It was a brilliant morning. A warm breeze out of Mexico whispered that spring was on the way, and in it the tall yellow grass on a nearby hill rippled like the fur of some great blond beast.

“I was more mad than sad,” Tessa said abruptly, as if she were picking up the thread of an earlier conversation. “Night before last,” she added into his perplexed silence, and he realized she was talking about the swift change in her mood at the end of the concert. “I couldn’t say anything to Blaine and Monica, so I just … withdrew.”

“No explanation required.”

Her baseball cap—more practical headgear on a windy day than a cowboy hat—was tilted back, and the sun fell full on her face as she turned to speak to him, igniting a sparkle of tiny gold flecks in her brown eyes. “If I thought it was
required
, I wouldn’t give it.”

“Okay, what were you mad at?”

“All those kids having such a great time. Rick having such a great time getting adored by his fans.
Me
having a good time.”

“And Beth over there,” Castle said.

“It didn’t feel right. And Blaine … the way he clapped at that protest song, after all that chest-thumping he did at dinner, all that bumper-sticker bullshit patriotism. Because it was his celebrity son singing it. It just pissed me off.”

She would have gone on, but just then McIntyre interrupted her. “He’ll be in there, saw him there yesterday,” he said, pointing at a canyon ahead, where a windmill’s blades fanned above a parklike stand of low oaks.

They rode single file into the canyon. The shadows of the trees so camouflaged the Angus that Castle didn’t see them until they stirred at the riders’ approach. The young bull, amid a herd of cows and calves, eyed them balefully.

“Hold up here,” Tessa said to Castle. “Tim and I will cut him out.” She paused for a beat and said, “If he runs in your direction, head him off.” This was a gesture on her part, and a kind one—she wanted him to feel he had a role to play.

She and McIntyre nudged their horses into the herd. The scene was bewitching—the black cattle milling in the dappled sunlight, the ballet of the two riders, weaving through the trees, the lightsome swing of Tessa’s chestnut hair as she turned her horse this way and that, deftly maneuvering the bull until he stood all alone. She kept an eye on him while McIntyre separated a cow from its calf, then pushed it toward the bull.

“Ready to go,” Tessa called.

Castle trotted up to her. The calf was bleating piteously for its mother.

“Why the cow?” he asked.

“A traveling companion. Cattle are herd animals. If he”—indicating the bull with a twitch of her head—“was alone, he’d be harder to move. One of these days I’ll join the modern age and buy some bull in a bottle.”

“Which is what?”

“Sperm. Artificial insemination. But for now my girls will have to get pregnant the old-fashioned way.”

Despite the cow’s presence, the bull proved difficult, lumbering off into clumps of trees, where he would stand stubbornly until McIntyre, ducking under low branches, got him moving again. A couple of times the cow tried to run back to her calf. On one of these occasions, Castle was closest to her, and he rode after her and turned her, earning approving nods from Tessa and McIntyre. Finally both animals settled down, and they proceeded at a slow walk along a fenceline atop a long ridge crowded with juniper and manzanita. The ridge sloped off gradually into open grasslands. The snows on the Huachucas, several miles eastward, had retreated with the warmer, drier weather; all that remained was a thin, broken white line at the very top.

“This is what we want, an easy pace,” Tessa said. “Don’t want the bull to get overheated. Hot bulls are hard to handle.”

“So it is said,” drawled McIntyre with a grin. Tessa laughed at her unintentional double entendre, and Castle laughed with her. It had been so long since he’d heard himself laugh that he almost didn’t recognize the sound of it.

They pushed down the ridge and into the open country, following another trail toward a fenced trough and windmill. A drug runners’ trail, McIntyre pointed out. “You can tell by the footprints and how straight it is,” he said. “Those mules don’t wander like cattle, make a beeline to their drop point. Reckon I would, too, humpin’ fifty pounds on my back.” Having imparted this bit of modern western fieldcraft, he motioned at a small herd of Angus that made dark spots on a hillside about a quarter of a mile away. “Cows’re yonder,” he said.

“All right, you gather them,” Tessa said. “Gil and I will pen the groom-to-be.”

As McIntyre struck off, Castle and Tessa drove the bull and his traveling companion toward the fence enclosing the windmill. To spare her stiff knee, he swung out of the saddle to open the gate, a typical Texas gate, with three strands of barbed wire stretched taut between the fence posts and locked by two wire loops, one around the top of the gatepost, one at the bottom. The tension was such that he could not pull the top loop free one-handed, so he dropped the reins to unfasten it with both hands. Just as he did, his horse turned and bolted. When Tessa shouted, “You son of a bitch!” he wasn’t sure if she was referring to him or his horse.

With a jab of her spurs, she took off after the runaway, which vanished for a second as it fled into a draw, then reappeared, lunging up the other side. Feeling more than ever the bungling tenderfoot, Castle watched the chase, his breath held. Pitched slightly forward in the saddle, her hair flying back from under her cap, Tessa raced alongside Castle’s horse until, winded from its gallop, it fell into a fast walk. Tessa slowed down, to avoid panicking him into another sprint for freedom, then leaned over, grabbed the loose reins, and jerked him to a halt. She led him back at an easy jog.

“Well, that was stimulating,” she said, looking at Castle reproachfully. “Next time …”

“I know. Hand the reins to you.” He gazed up at her. Her bosom heaved under her denim jacket, and there was a high color in her cheeks. “You were …” He hesitated. This was some woman. “You were a sight to see.”

He opened the gate while she held his horse; then they moved the bull into the pen with the cow.

“Keep an eye on them,” Tessa said, passing the reins back to him. “I’m going to give Tim a hand.”

She loped away through the wind-teased grass. Castle watched her for a moment or two, then made himself turn away, as if he’d stolen a glimpse of her while she undressed. Something like that. It wasn’t desire he felt, but the memory of desire, no, the
possibility
of desire. And that was what shamed him—Mandy hadn’t been dead two years.

After the bull was introduced to his new harem, they drove the cow back to her calf and returned to the house. Castle and Tessa unsaddled their horses and turned them out to graze. McIntyre loaded his into his trailer, declining an invitation to lunch—he had more work to do that afternoon at another ranch.

“I hope you’re not going to turn me down,” Tessa said to Castle.

He did not. The morning’s work had given him an appetite, and the fact was, the prospect of eating alone in his cabin depressed him. He followed her into a screened-in porch, where Klaus rose from his bed to greet his mistress. Inside the house, living room, dining room, and kitchen were combined under a gently peaked ceiling with log beams. Three high plank doors, bleached with age, led off a corridor, presumably to the bedrooms. Like Blaine and Monica’s, Tessa’s place was a mess, which she begged him to excuse. She hadn’t had a chance to straighten up and made a show of it, picking a sofa pillow from off the floor, tidying a Navaho blanket balled up on a chair. He suspected that she would not have straightened up even if she’d had the chance. When he’d come out to live on the San Ignacio, Blaine had noticed him looking askance at the general sloppiness of the place, and to set him straight, informed him that “you can tell a good rancher from a bad one by the condition of his fences and cattle, not by how pretty his house is.” Still, he hadn’t quite gotten used to the rural dweller’s carelessness about appearances, the cluttered living spaces, the junked automobiles and trailers and appliances littering the yards of even prosperous ranchers. He could not help but compare Tessa’s domestic disarray with Mandy’s fastidious housekeeping. Curiously, though, the comparison was not unfavorable. Now that he thought of it, there had been something a little sterile about the tidiness of the white-frame colonial on Oenoke Ridge, each room possessing the unlived-in look of a photograph in an interior decoration magazine. Thinking further, he recalled that Mandy’s rigid orderliness—a result of her spending so much of her life on sailboats, where every line had to be coiled just so—at times got on his nerves.

He gazed around while Tessa brewed coffee and reheated a chili she’d made the day before. Over the fireplace hung a large oil painting, done in photo-realist style. Brown tract houses as identical as army barracks crowded beneath a vast, flat, barren mound resembling a mesa. What appeared to be buzzards specked a dirty sky above the mound; a yellow bulldozer crawled up its face. Mountains shimmered in the background, barely visible. Looking more closely at the foreground, he made out a banner draped over a wall running the whole length of the painting. On the banner were the words “Vista Montaña—2&3 BR homes—Starting at 150K.”

“This is one of yours?”

Tessa came away from the stove and leaned her elbows on the counter dividing the kitchen from the rest of the room. “Yup. My masterpiece. Ugly as hell, isn’t it?”

“First time I ever heard an artist ask if her masterpiece is ugly.”

“That’s what makes it beautiful. That’s a real place, on the freeway going into Tucson. As you can see, there’s not much of a vista of the montañas. That hill in the middle distance is the Tucson landfill. But you couldn’t very well call a housing development
Vista Landfill
, could you?”

“One of your unsentimental landscapes.”

“I like to think I’ve invented a whole new subgenre. Subdivisionscape.”

She turned to the stove, ladled the chili into bowls, and set them with a plate of warm tortillas on a long table made of massive oak planks bound with cast iron bands. They sat across from each other and began to eat.

“How’s the chili?” she asked.

“You can ride, you can shoot, you can cook,” Castle replied.

Her cheeks flushed at the enumeration of her virtues; then, noticing him studying the family photos that stood on a bookshelf in easel frames, she volunteered that the older couple in one were her parents, the two towering young men who flanked her in another were her brothers—taken years ago, she said—and the smiling blond girl in cap and gown was Beth at her high school graduation.

“That other one is her after she finished basic training,” Tessa said. “Doesn’t look like the same girl, does it?”

No, it didn’t, and he supposed she wasn’t the same girl, staring sternly from under a black beret.

“You’re looking at the outcome of a mistake in judgment,” Tessa said. “The lovely outcome of an unlovely story.”

He paused and asked awkwardly, “Out of wedlock, you mean? That’s not so unlovely these days.”

“It is if you never wanted to have sex with the guy.”

He couldn’t think how to respond to that declaration and mumbled that it was none of his business.

But she chose to make it his business. It had happened in Scottsdale. She’d had too much to drink at a party after the Arabian horse show. The owner of the winning horse drove her back to her apartment. An older man, around forty, an eastern European immigrant with a string of expensive horses, a trophy wife, and three sports cars. Some Romanian or Ukrainian … rumored to be mixed up with the Russian mob in L.A.

“He was a big guy, but didn’t look or behave like a gangster,” Tessa went on, her jaw tightening. “Courtly, in a European way, you know? Walked me to the door, and then I did a dumb thing. Invited him inside. Don’t know what the hell I was thinking—the guy’s
wife
was at the party. I realized my mistake and asked him to leave, and he said, ‘You are going to offer me a drink and then you will say you are going to change into something more comfortable.’ Exactly like that. Like dialogue out of some old movie he’d seen. I told him I was going to do nothing of the kind and that he’d better get out, and that’s when he stopped being courtly.” She looked at Castle defiantly, as if challenging him to believe her. The golden flecks in her irises flashed. “I wanted to kill that son of a bitch,” she said, mercifully omitting a graphic description but with a ferocity accentuated by her wolfish eyeteeth. “My dad was a lawyer, and I knew how it would go if I went to the cops. When I found out I was pregnant, I made my own arrangements. If I’d been less well brought up, I probably would have blackmailed the bastard into paying for the abortion. Well, the time came, I went to the clinic, and I found out that I couldn’t go through with it. Could not do it. Quit my job, went home to California. My brothers wanted to shoot him, my dad was incensed, wanted me to file a complaint and take the bastard to court, but I begged him to drop it. All I wanted to do was forget it had happened. Not that I ever have. So I had Beth and got another job. Truth is, if it hadn’t been for Dad’s money, I probably would have wound up in a trailer park.”