Crossers (22 page)

“Lo siento,” he said, still unable to understand her. “No entiendo.”

Elena threw her stout arms up in frustration. They went outside to his car just as Monica drove in.

“Got back early,” she called. “I can take her.” She gave Castle an approving glance. “Big improvement. The grizzled-prospector look didn’t become you.”

Elena spoke to her.

“There was something she was trying to tell you?” Monica asked him.

“I think so.”

“She wants me to translate.”

Castle heard the Mexican woman utter to Monica the same words she had to him:
Cuando perdí mis hijos, cuidé mi sentimiento en vez de ellos
.

“I’m not sure if I’ve got it right. Something like this: ‘When I lost my children, I took care of my sadness instead of them.’” Monica shrugged. “I’m not quite sure what she means.”

Nor was Castle—the phrase was almost as opaque in English as it had been in Spanish.

The riddle teased him as he drove into Patagonia to mail his letter. After he’d checked his post office box, crammed with bills and junk mail, he leashed Sam and walked her past the clinic, then the marshal’s office and the town jail, a windowless concrete box built by the WPA during the Depression, then across Third Avenue to the broad parkway that had been a roadbed for the Southern Pacific back in the days when Patagonia had been a mining town and cow town. The last big mine had shut down more than forty years ago. Since then Patagonia had reinvented itself, though it hadn’t settled on a clear identity. It was a little bit of an artists’ colony, a little bit of a tourist town, and a little bit of a redoubt for aging hippies and other eccentrics who preferred backwaters to the mainstream; a little bit of a cow town still, rusty horse trailers parked on side streets, worn saddles draped over the porch rails of moored double-wides; and more than a little bit of a Mexican pueblo, home to Mendozas and Sánchezes and Garcías, from whose tin-roofed houses radios blared brassy Norteño ballads over the yips of mongrel dogs scuffling in dusty yards. He walked to the edge of town, where he saw two Coues whitetails browsing and a javelina rooting in a mesquite forest, then turned and headed back toward the post office and his car. A couple of dirt-caked pickups were parked in front of the Wagon Wheel Saloon, and a crowd of bird watchers had assembled around a van near the Stage Stop Hotel. The newspaper vending machines in front of the hotel had been emptied, all but one, its display window framing an
Arizona Daily Star
. He bought the paper. The front page cried war news.
BOMBS OVER BAGHDAD.
A hundred thousand American troops were storming up the Euphrates Valley from Kuwait, with no need for documentation, their guns and tanks sufficing as visas. The notion of the United States Army as a horde of illegal aliens grimly amused Castle.

His grumbling stomach—he hadn’t eaten all day, had in fact eaten very little during his prolonged funk—drew him across Naugle Avenue to Santos’s café. He sat down under the awning outside, tethered Sam to a table leg, and ordered menudo and tortillas and tried to read the paper. It reminded him of why he avoided the news. Shock and awe. Cruise missiles. A tank battle with Hussein’s Republican Guard. The delirium of war, all the blind violence of the world. The vast and bloody spectacle unfolding in Iraq reduced his own troubles to the microscopic; but the Olympian perspective did not release him from them, any more than a crippled ant’s awareness of its insignificance, were an ant a conscious being, would relieve it of its suffering.
When I lost my children, I took care of my sadness instead of them
. He had the feeling that he’d heard that phrase, or one like it, before. The waitress brought his steaming menudo, the warm tortillas wrapped in cloth, and then he remembered. He hadn’t heard it—he’d read it in Seneca’s letter to Marcia.
You hug and embrace the sorrow you have kept alive in place of your son
. The language was more elegant, but the idea was the same, proving that you did not have to be a brilliant philosopher to know a thing or two about life, about the maimed heart and its perverse inclination to aggravate its wounds.

There, eating menudo in a border-town café, Castle experienced a sudden illumination. He had always regarded his sorrow as a force outside himself, not subject to his will; indeed, his will often seemed subject to it. And that was true in its earlier stages. Only now, because of a few words spoken by a simple Mexican woman, did it occur to him that he had since nurtured and strengthened his misery by taking a morbid pleasure in it. The dream, the apparition, whatever it was, had been the fabrication of his own unhappy mind; and when presented with the possibility of relief, that mind had fiendishly concocted the means to sustain its agonies. His grief had fed on itself; it had become a habit.

The question was, how to break it? He’d proven he was no candidate for formal therapy. He would have to be his own counselor. He paid the check, and taking up Sam’s leash, he walked back to his car. As he climbed in, his glance fell on his cell phone, in a tray beside the floor shift. He didn’t decide to check his voice mail; he was compelled to do it. There were two messages, the first a hang-up, the second from Tessa:
“Hello, Gil. Just wanted to talk. I’ve been welded to the TV since Bush’s announcement, and I … Give me a call if you get the chance.”
She spoke with a casualness that was so artificial, it called attention to the distress it was meant to conceal. He could hear in her voice her dread of a future visit from a man in an army uniform. She didn’t want to talk to someone, she needed to. She needed
him
.

Her phone rang seven or eight times before she answered.

“Tess, it’s Gil. I just got—”

“Oh, hi! Hi!” she interrupted.

“You sound out of breath.”

“Ran in from outside. I was cleaning out the tackroom. Trying to stay busy.”

“I got your message.”

“Oh. I’m sorry I’d called so late. It was after midnight.”

“I mean I just picked it up. Didn’t check my messages till now. Still feel like talking?”

“Sure. Sure.”

Here was a reason to live—to be at her side, to ease her fears if he could, to be a friend.

“I’m in town,” he said. “I could stop by on my way back, if that’s okay.”

“I’d like that, Gil. I’d like that very much.”

11

Y
VONNE’S DRIVER
, also foreman of the Tres Encinos ranch, stopped the Land Cruiser where the road ended, on a ridge overlooking a canyon shaded by sycamores. Like ghosts, she thought. The white-barked trees looked like ghosts. Ghosts were very much on her mind, spirits from the past. She could feel their presence.

“This is as far it goes on the north,” Jiménez said, and with a brown, gnarled finger pointed at a barbed-wire fence about a kilometer away. “Allí está la frontera. Beyond it is the United States.”

Hours of banging down ranch roads more suited to horses or burros than to motor vehicles had given Yvonne a sore back and made her a little irritable. “What else would be beyond it? Europe?”

“Señora?”

“A joke. Let us go on.”

“Go on where?”

“To the border. I want to go right up to it,” she said in a voice that closed off all possibility of discussion.

Unacquainted with her imperious ways, Jiménez argued that La Señora Menéndez couldn’t see any more from there than she could from here, and besides, there was no more road.

“We will walk.” She turned to the passengers in the backseat: her bodyguards, Marco and Heraclio, and sitting between them, her son, Julián. Skinny, wearing a rose-colored shirt, he looked like a flamingo flanked by two well-fed vultures. “Is everybody up for a little walk?”

Of course they were. They would be up for anything she wanted to do.

She removed a plastic freezer bag from her purse, stuffed it into her pants pocket, and got out of the car. It was a temperate morning, perfect for a stroll, but the cattle trail leading down into the canyon was rocky, and Julián had trouble negotiating it in his cowboy boots, the red and white boots with knifepoint toes she had told him not to wear. “Only a maricón would dare to be seen in such boots,” she’d taunted, but he ignored her. Yvonne was shod in sturdy walking shoes and clad in Levi’s, a denim shirt, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Not a fashionable outfit, but it was practical and created the image she wished to project: the ranchera, out inspecting her new property. On paper rancho Los Tres Encinos did not belong to her. The sale had been completed weeks ago between its former owner and her cousin, a real estate broker in Douglas. Later he sold half of it to La Morita Enterprises, S.A., and later still, the other half to San Pedro Properties, S.A. The officers of the two front companies were her two elder sisters and their husbands. The complicated transactions were necessary to hide from nosy investigators the identity of the true owner—Yvonne herself. She had put up the money for the back-to-back purchases, thus giving it a double scrubbing.

With Jiménez in front, the group tramped through the canyon. Marco and Heraclio, each armed with a .40-caliber automatic pistol, prowled beside Yvonne, watchful and assured, like the predators they were. Julián cursed the rocks scuffing his pretty boots.

“Is there some purpose to this, Mother?” he asked, petulantly.

“I never do anything for the hell of it, you know that.”

They came to the border fence, which was in disrepair. A bullet-sieved metal sign hung from the top wire:
U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. DO NOT MOLEST UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.
Nearby an old concrete monument rose into the branches of an Emory oak. The plaque at its base was weather-worn, but its words were still legible:
BOUNDARY OF THE UNITED STATES. TREATY OF 1853
.
REESTABLISHED BY TREATIES OF 1882-
-89.

“Ridiculous,” Yvonne said.

“What is?” Jiménez asked.

“Do you see any difference between that over there and this over here? There is nothing in the land to tell you, here is Mexico, here is the United States. The whole idea of a border seems to me ridiculous.”

“Perhaps that is so,” Jiménez remarked. “All the same, it is there.”

She regarded the foreman, a typical Sonoran vaquero—muscles like twisted hemp, a simple mind, which wasn’t the same thing as being simpleminded, a good, strong, honest face. She liked the face. She liked him. She hoped it never would be necessary to have him killed.

“That ranch on the other side is called the San Ignacio, is it not?” she asked, though she knew its name. She’d heard it most of her life. The ghosts lived there.

Jiménez nodded. “We share the fence line. Almost twenty kilometers.”

“What can you tell me about your American neighbors?”

“Their name is Erskine,” he answered, pronouncing it
Airskeen
.

Yvonne knew that. “What can you tell me about them besides that?”

“Not much. I do not know them. The boss does. He talks to them.”

“About what?”

“Sometimes their cattle wander onto our land. They call the boss and ask him to gather the strays and drive them back to the line. Sometimes our cattle wander onto their land. The boss telephones them and asks them to return the favor, and they do. It is easy to tell which belongs to who. Their cattle are black, ours white.” He gestured toward a far hillside, where Charolais cows stood out in the yellow grass like plaster statues. “The boss says it is important to be good neighbors.”

“Let us develop good habits,” Yvonne said. “He is no longer the boss.”

“Claro, señora.”

“Listen. I’m going to give you my first instructions as la nueva jefa. From now on there will be no more doing favors for those people over there. If we find their cattle on this rancho, we keep them. Understood?”

Jiménez hooked his thumbs into his belt and cleared his throat. “Sí, señora.”

“The party starts soon. It would be good if the hostess showed up,” said Julián.

She looked at him, slouched against a sycamore, arms folded across his narrow chest, an insolent smile on his face.

“You come with me,” she commanded. Then to Marco and Heraclio: “Pull these apart so I can pass through.”

While Marco pressed his foot on a low wire, Heraclio tugged the strand above it, creating a gap that Yvonne, bending low and turning sideways, stepped through onto the soil of the United States. It wasn’t as daring an act as it appeared. She’d been born in the U.S. and had lived there till she was twelve, when her mother remarried and moved back to Mexico.

Julián hesitated on the other side of the fence. “What do you think you are doing?”

“Get some balls, mi hijo, and come over here with me.”

There was enough Latino macho in him to accept the challenge. “This is stupid. What if La Migra shows up?” He pointed at the tread-marks in the rough drag road that ran along the American side of the boundary. “They patrol here all the time.”

“I show them this,” said Yvonne, plucking her U.S. passport from a back pocket of her jeans.

“And me? What do I show them?”

“Turn around and show them your ass.”

She crossed the drag road, went on a few yards more, and ground her heels into the dirt, ground them hard, making deep impressions. “There. I have planted my flag.”

Julián responded to this declaration with a bewildered squint.

“This ranch is going to be mine,” Yvonne said. “I am going to buy it.”

“I didn’t know it was for sale.”

“It isn’t, but it will be. You and I are going to talk about the future.”

“No, we are not. Not here. We are not going to talk about anything, the two of us standing here like a couple of mojados waiting for a ride.”

It pleased her when he stood up to her; pleased her that when she got out of the business, as she intended to someday, she could turn it over to him, assured that he would have the strength of mind not to screw it up. She reached out and stroked the hair on his temple, red hair like hers, the color inherited from her father, the father who would have loved her, given her presents on her birthday, and been kind and gentle to her always. Had he lived, she would have been spared the things her stepfather had done to her because there would have been no stepfather.

“You are right,” she said to Julián. “This is not the appropriate place. But one thing before we go.”

With a hard kick, she gouged a hole in the ground, in the ground stained with sin and blood, the blood of her lost father. She kicked and kicked till she’d dug up a small mound of loose soil, then pulled out the freezer bag and handed it to her son. “Fill this with that. We are going to scatter the dirt on Abuela’s grave the next time we visit. It will make her happy in heaven.”

“I had a feeling this was about her,” Julián muttered. “If she is in heaven, she cannot be happier than she is now. That is what a priest would tell you.”

“We are far from any priests, mi hijo. Now do as I ask.”

Julián, grumbling that she never
asked
, she only gave orders, squatted down and scooped the dirt into the bag.

T
HE RANCH HOUSE
, corrals, and outbuildings were clustered in a grove of álamos watered by a ciénaga. A rock dam slabbed across the ciénaga formed a duck pond behind the house, overlooked by a low hill atop which three ancient oaks—hence the ranch’s name—grew in a straight line, like trees in an orchard. A pretty spot, thought Yvonne, returning from her tour. More important, it was secure. Anyone who tried to get to her here would have a hard time of it; and once she’d cultivated the allegiance of the local inhabitants, a campaign she was beginning with today’s fiesta, she would have plenty of informants to alert her to intruders well ahead of time. Human radar stations, an early warning system. Boredom would be the only problem. Rural life never had suited her temperament; she’d had a bellyful of it when she was a girl. She liked a good time. She liked to dance. She liked to hold court in the crowded bars and discos that the Menéndez organization owned in Agua Prieta, Naco, and Cananea. Sure, when things got too dull, she could always escape to her Agua Prieta town house or to her villa in Zihuatanejo, with its spectacular ocean view; but the fact was, she would be spending most of her time on the ranch, at least until she’d consolidated her hold on the routes through the San Rafael Valley. Its maze of hidden canyons and side canyons had been pathways for one kind of contraband or another for as long as anyone could remember—liquor during Prohibition; tires, gasoline, and other rationed commodities during the Second World War; today marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines. Joaquín Carrasco, that fat little shit, regarded these pathways as his exclusively. Soon she would disabuse him of that illusion. She now owned ten thousand hectares of his territory, a wedge she was going to drive into the very heart of his operations. “Grabbing market share” was how Julián had put it, in the lingo he’d picked up in business school in the United States. Whatever you called it, it was going to be a difficult and dangerous undertaking, but now that she’d formed an alliance with the Gulf Cartel, she would have the power to pull it off: the manpower, the financial power, and the firepower, to which she could add the power of her own ruthless reputation. Inspire terror in ally and adversary alike; that was the key to maintaining loyalty within and to overcoming enemies from without.

Preparations for the fiesta were well under way. The Norteño band she’d hired—Víctor Castillo and the Golden Roosters—were tuning their instruments. Burly men in straw cowboy hats were setting up picnic tables in the front yard or hauling coolers of beer from a pickup truck. A half dozen of Yvonne’s pistoleros, gathered around a firepit with a few local-boy vaqueros, were guzzling cans of Tecate and going to bed with rosamaría, the pungent smell of their joints mingling with the savory scent of carnitas bubbling over the fire in a copper vat.

“Getting a head start?” Yvonne called, striding toward the house, Julián beside her.

“¡Sí!” answered one of her boys. “And nobody will be able to catch us!”

Through the laughter, she overheard one young vaquero ask another, “¿Es esa vieja la nueva jefa?” She hesitated, tempted to tell the cowboy, “Yes, I am the new boss, and who the hell are you to call me an old woman?” She thought better of it and went inside.

The house dated back to the 1920s, built of thick adobe walls, its casement windows cutting the sunlight into squares that lay atop the tiles of glazed clay. The click of Julián’s boot heels echoed in the parlor; like the other rooms, it was almost empty. Except for a few pieces, the previous owner had taken his furniture with him—family heirlooms, he’d said.

“Wait for me in the study,” she told Julián, then entered her bedroom, where a huge canopy bed stood under a beamed ceiling four meters high. The thought crossed her mind that she would like to fuck somebody on its starched white sheets, shrouded by its filmy white curtains, but she couldn’t think of any attractive candidates. Considering the ravishments she’d endured from her stepfather and the perversities her husband had subjected her to, it astonished her that she was still capable of sexual desire.

Dámaso García and Fermín Menéndez—two sick pendejos. Of all the deaths she was responsible for, those were the only ones that had given her any pleasure. She had arranged for others to rid her of Fermín—it was as much a business affair as it was personal—but she had killed her stepfather with her own hands when she was sixteen. They were living on a wretched ejido then, where Dámaso grew squash and melons, working occasional shifts at the big copper mine in Cananea to supplement his income, much of which went to beer and bacanora. Just the three of them—he, Rosario, and Yvonne. Her sisters had left home two years before, running off with the first men who were halfway nice to them to get away from Dámaso. Thereafter Yvonne became the sole object of his unholy attentions. He was a fairly normal man when sober, a monster when drunk. He drank quite a lot, so Yvonne and her mother were more acquainted with the monster. One winter afternoon, after he’d visited her bed the previous night, she was helping him split mesquite for firewood. Strong and tall, taller than most girls her age (it was said she got her height from her part-Irish father), she was doing all the work because Dámaso had sunk into the remorse that almost always descended on him after he’d beaten Rosario or gratified himself with her daughter. He sat on the ground near the woodpile, swearing he was sorry for what he’d done, pledging never to do it again, to quit drinking, to go to confession and beg God’s forgiveness.