Crossers (30 page)

He backed the truck up to the fence, and they unloaded the wire, posts, and drivers.

“This is how it’s done,” he said, grabbing a driver by its handles. Grunting from the strain, he raised it, slipping the hollow end over the top of the stake, then let it drop, giving gravity a boost with a hard downward thrust of his arms. The iron core at the top end of the driver banged into the post, hammering it an inch or so into the ground. “All there is to it. Have at it.”

Castle grasped the handles and, bending his knees, heaved the monster upward until his quivering arms were extended almost straight out. He let it fall, giving it a shove at the same time, and steel rang on steel, and the post sank another inch.

“Five, six inches to go.” Blaine tapped Castle on the back of the neck. “We call post drivers crybabies, and now you see why. Ten minutes with one of those brings tears to a grown man’s eyes.”

Miguel and Gerardo started at one end of the canyon, Blaine and Castle at the other. They stayed at it all morning, spelling each other on the post drivers, cutting old wire, stringing new, pausing only to mop their faces or drink warm water from saddle canteens. No tears had come to Castle’s eyes, but he did shed blood and sweat, his arms clawed by the barbs, the sun a furnace burning with a directness and intensity unknown at more northerly latitudes. When the job was done, his shoulders were so sore, he felt as if he’d been doing bench presses for the past two or three hours; but the hard labor had banished the last remnants of the gloomy introspection that had plagued him earlier. Maybe I need more of this, he thought, looking with satisfaction at the fence, all set to rights, the new wire taut and glimmering in the fierce midday light.

They wolfed sandwiches, washing them down with cold beers from the cooler. After lunch Blaine fetched two boxes of plastic lawn bags from the truck and told Castle and Miguel to pick up the garbage while he and Gerardo mended the broken water line. The janitorial task wasn’t to be undertaken for aesthetic or sanitary purposes. Cattle would eat almost anything; a cow could choke to death trying to swallow a jacket, and the shards of a plastic water jug could tear her intestines.

“This shit pisses me off more’n the fence or the storage tank,” Blaine said in a bitter tone. “It’s like a mob broke into my house and trashed the place.”

Though Castle understood his cousin’s resentment—turning this pristine landscape into a garbage dump bespoke a carelessness that pissed him off, too—he found items in the litter that stirred his curiosity, even his compassion. A paperback book,
El diario de Anne Frank
, with a woman’s name written on the flyleaf. A well-tailored sport jacket, neatly folded, as if its owner expected to come back for it at any moment. These were not the possessions of poor, semiliterate, itinerant farm workers. What had driven them to turn themselves into human contraband, to be bootlegged across an imaginary line in the desert? Perhaps they saw what the settlers and fortune seekers had seen, crossing the Great Plains, what the Irish and Poles and Jews and Italians (like Castle’s own great-grandfather) had seen, shimmering beyond the western ocean: gold and land for the taking, yes, a chance to change one’s luck, yes, but more: a promise as wide as the continent, as boundless as the human imagination, that seemed to say,
Here all things are possible
. What things almost didn’t matter. To clarify them by naming them would be to vulgarize that sublime expectation, that ineffable dream in the minds of the awake. As that promise had beckoned the migrants of long ago westward, so had it called these northward. Were these thoughts more examples of sentimentality? Castle asked himself. Was he romanticizing? He couldn’t dismiss the possibility that the multitudes pouring out of the south were merely going where the dollars were and regarded America as nothing more than a vast employment agency. This much he was sure of—he wasn’t filling trash bags with clothes and shoes and backpacks but with the discarded pasts of people intent on remaking their lives. In that sense, he and they were citizens of the same country.

He didn’t dare express any of this to Blaine when, the repairs to the water line completed, he and Gerardo joined in the cleanup. Blaine’s mood had darkened, he was in no frame of mind to hear any suggestions that the trespassers who had vandalized his ranch might deserve some sympathy. He stomped on a water jug and murmured, more to himself than to Castle, “I’m tryin’ real hard not to hate the people who done this.” Then he fell into a wordless brooding and stayed there the rest of the afternoon. Castle recalled Sally’s description of their grandfather:
“He’d get quiet in a way that made you feel that if somebody did or said the wrong thing, something bad was gone to happen.”

16

W
HAT HAPPENED
the next day wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

Blaine and Gerardo decided to check the fences on the ranch’s grazing allotment in the Canelo Hills, rugged country corrugated by deep ravines. Castle tagged along. They drove out of headquarters before dawn, hauling three horses and a pack mule in a gooseneck trailer, and arrived at the allotment’s boundary at first light. The animals were taken out, saddled, and bridled, and Gerardo packed the fencing gear—wire, posts, and the dreaded post drivers—onto the mule’s back and covered it with a canvas tarp and secured the tarp with rope tied into diamond hitches. They mounted up and began to climb into the hills. Thin clouds glowed like filaments of molten brass over the Huachucas, a great, dark, fissured wall almost two miles high. Blaine rode his favorite mount, the black gelding called Tequila, Castle a gentle pinto with a fierce name—Comanche. Gerardo, bringing up the rear, was on a gray, leading the mule. All three carried pistols, Blaine his grandfather’s Luger, Gerardo his six-shooter, Castle his .357 Magnum. Blaine had insisted on the sidearms as defense against rattlesnakes and smugglers—pretty much one and the same to him. Castle had continued to practice with his revolver and was reasonably confident he could hit a rattler. As for smugglers …

The fence line climbed higher, out of the oak and juniper uplands, then cornered and ran north through tall forests of piñon and Chihuahua and Ponderosa pine so old they had been young trees when the Spanish were building missions in North America. A resinous scent perfumed the warm air, the horses’ hooves plodded on soft pine-needle loam. Blaine reined up and pointed across a canyon at a bear, ambling up a mountain meadow, its dense black fur rippling and shiny. If Castle hadn’t known he was only five miles from the Mexican border, he would have thought he was in Montana. The world was full of awful possibilities, yes, but they seemed remote up here on these high country slopes.

They crossed the canyon, then followed the fence line in its descent back into the uplands. Here and there, mother cows and calves grazed on the sparse hillsides. By noon they had ridden more than half the allotment’s boundary fence, found only one damaged section, repaired it, and came to a cattle guard on a narrow, rubble-strewn road, where they broke for lunch. Dismounting, Castle felt every mile of the eight they’d covered, his knees stiff, his thigh muscles sore. Gerardo strung a picket line between two trees, and they tied the horses and the mule to it, loosened the girths, and sat in the shade eating cold machaca wrapped in Elena’s tortillas, washed down with tepid water from their canteens. A wind had sprung up, a hot wind out of the south. Flies buzzed. A Gila woodpecker sailed down the road in erratic, bouncing flight, as if jerked by invisible strings. His hat off, Blaine leaned against a juniper and lit a cigarette—one of the natural tobacco cigarettes he thought were good for his health.

“Know I’ve been thinkin’?” he asked Castle.

“Haven’t got a clue.”

“The word
lariat
comes from the Spanish,
la reata
, and
buckaroo
was how the old-time Texas cowboys had come to pronounce
vaquero
.”

Puzzled by this etymological observation, Castle quizzed him with a look.

“Those Spaniards I was talkin’ about yesterday, the first vaqueros? There’s not much difference between the way they done things and the way I do ’em now. We’re into the twenty-first century, and I go a-horseback, I throw a loop on a stray, I burn a brand into a cow’s hide. I’m so far behind our own times, I couldn’t catch up if I was wearing rocket-propelled tennis shoes. I’m like those Amish farmers, except I don’t drive a buggy.”

Castle heard in Blaine’s commentary resignation to his fate as an anachronism—and pride in his outmoded craft. “The Spanish vaqueros didn’t carry cell phones,” he said, gesturing at the one on his cousin’s belt. “You’re not that far behind.”

“Nope, I don’t suppose—”

He was interrupted by a woman’s cry. “¡Señores! ¡Socorro!”

She was not a woman but a teenage girl, one of three, stumbling down the road in dirty jeans and sweaty T-shirts, windbreakers tied around their waists. Flecks of grass clung to their black hair, and their eyes were glassy and dull from exhaustion. The one who’d cried out, the shortest of the three, held out an empty tequila bottle. “Agua,” she pleaded, flopping on the ground. “Un poco de agua, por favor.”

Blaine gave her his saddle canteen. She gulped from it and passed it to her friends, and in no time it was empty, all two quarts. Gerardo spread a cloth containing the rest of the tortillas on the ground, as if he were a servant at an elegant picnic. The tortillas vanished almost as quickly as the water. The desperate look in the girls’ eyes faded—they were not going to die.

The short one, in hybridized Spanish and English, said her companions were sisters, she their cousin. They were trying to get to Denver, where a relative had found them jobs as motel maids. They had crossed the border two nights ago with twenty other migrants, farm workers accustomed to traveling rough country on foot. They were city girls from Hermosillo and had not been able to keep up. Their coyote deserted them with no food and only a little water in the tequila bottle. After wandering and sleeping in the wilderness for forty-eight hours, they’d come to this road and had been on it since this morning, hoping it led to a house or a town. Was there a house or town on this road?

No, replied Gerardo. None.

Blaine tried to call the Border Patrol on his cell, but this whole region was one vast dead zone.

“Those coyotes sure are wonderful people,” he said. “How the hell do you leave three kids out here without food or water, knowin’ they’ll probably die a slow death? Takes a real special kind of son of a bitch to do that.”

Castle said, “Yesterday, you were trying not to hate these people.”

“Go to hell, cuzzy.”

“So what do we do now?”

“Can’t take ’em with us and can’t leave ’em here, that’s all I know right now.”

Under the circumstances, the appearance of a Border Patrol truck, moving slowly up the road, seemed providential. Wearing sunglasses under his tan cowboy hat, the agent was leaning out the window, his eyes on the ground.

Blaine flagged him down. When he got out of the truck, they saw it was Morales, the Navaho tracker.

He looked at the girls. “Hey, Blaine. We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

“At least these ones are alive. Another day, and they wouldn’t of been.”

Morales questioned the trio briefly, then took them into custody, locking them in the back of his truck. They did not protest, deportation being the preferable alternative.

“We caught the bunch they were with last night,” he said. “They told us these three got left behind. Picked up their tracks this morning.”

“Catch the coyote?”

“Yeah. A guy we’ve caught before, and this time he’s going away for a while.”

“You oughta charge the son of a bitch with attempted murder.”

“Don’t I wish.” He removed his sunglasses, blew on them, and rubbed the lenses with a handkerchief. “I was going to stop by your place and pass on some info. This guy turned out to be a pretty good conversationalist. Told us that he’s chicken herding for a big operation. The mero mero is an American, name of Cruz. Cruz got permission to cross illegals through here.”

“Permission from who?” inquired Blaine. “Sure as shit didn’t get it from me.”

Morales laughed. “From the Menéndez family. The Agua Prieta Cartel. The boss is a woman who broke through the glass ceiling of the drug trade. Yvonne Menéndez. I thought you’d like to know what’s going on.”

“Obliged, John. I’d be more obliged if you people did something about it.”

“That’s not up to me.”

“So now we know something we didn’t know ten minutes ago,” said Blaine after Morales left with his prisoners. “Figured it was right peculiar to be crossin’ wets through here.”

“I’m not getting something,” Castle said. “A drug smuggler gave an immigrant smuggler
permission?
What’s that all about?”

His cousin removed his hat and wiped the sweatband. “The narco-traffickers own the routes. They say what moves where because they’ve got the money and the guns.”

He turned to Gerardo and passed on Morales’s intelligence, to which Gerardo made a long reply.

“Sí, es verdad,” Blaine said, then looked at Castle. “Gerardo thinks that the coyote who ditched those kids has got no more soul than the four-legged kind, and he didn’t lose it, he sold it. He reminded me of an old saying the Mexicans have got, that God locked up the devil in a cave by the Rio Grande, but that he gets out sometimes on a swing slung between the mountains. Could be he’s swung over our way.” He looked out over the valley. “This is pretty country where some damn ugly things happen, Gil. Maybe that was always true, but there’s some-thin’ here now that didn’t used to be here.”

They mounted up and continued to ride the fence, down into a ravine of rose-colored gravel and rock, up over a hill, down into another ravine, and up again. At the top they paused to rest the horses. Below, the San Rafael spread to the hazy lift of the Patagonias. From this height, the valley looked like an undulating plain, all of a piece, distance concealing its countless canyons, gulches, gullies, draws.

Something here that didn’t used to be here
. The phrase hung in Castle’s mind. The borderlands were open and full of light, but their enchanting face concealed a darker, more complicated landscape, as distance eclipsed the valley’s shadowed labyrinth, in which ugly things happened. The migrants massacred the night before Miguel’s companions were murdered. How did you commit such an act if you hadn’t made a bargain with your soul? And how—his thoughts now ranging beyond this part of the world—did you tape a bomb belt to your waist and blow yourself up in a crowded restaurant in Tel Aviv? What power granted you the power to fly airplanes full of people into buildings full of people? Whatever was here that didn’t used to be here was everywhere. There was no sanctuary. The devil’s swing had carried him very far from his cave on the Rio Grande.

It was late in the afternoon when they found a pasture gate wide open and fresh four-wheeler tracks leading through it.

“Somebody can’t read,” Blaine said, tapping a metal sign that read
PLEASE CLOSE GATE.
“Let’s see if we can’t teach him how.”

They followed the tracks for about a quarter of a mile and came upon the quad, parked under a tree. It was painted in hunter’s camouflage; a dry cell battery case was in the cargo carrier, fastened with bungee cord.

“Wouldn’t be a hunter this time of year,” Blaine said.

Then Gerardo sat up straight in the saddle and said,
“Escuche”
—listen.

“Punto uno … Punto … Read … Clear … Hold up …” A voice, carried to their ears by a downdraft of cooling air, came from up on a steep, brushy ridge in front of them…. “One’s coming … Stay low …”

Blaine brought a finger to his lips and signaled to dismount. “Think we’ve got something more than a bozo out for a spin in the country,” he whispered. “I want to find out who that is, what he’s up to.”

His eyes were suddenly bright as dimes with an eager, predatory glint.

“Think that’s a good idea?” Castle said.

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Remember what Miguel told us way back when? The killer was driving a quad.”

“Cuzzy, everyone in this county owns a quad.
I
own a quad. Let’s go.”

When, sweating and out of breath from the climb, they topped the ridge, they could hear the voice clearly. “Have they crossed yet? Okay, está bien. Tell them to wait.” A pause. “I’ll tell you when it’s clear.”

Blaine leading in a stalker’s crouch, they filed through a manzanita jungle that ended in a clearing with an aerial photographer’s view of the valley, the border, and a not-inconsiderable slice of Mexico. Ten yards away a man in a camouflage shirt sat with his back to them as he scanned with binoculars, tracking the movement of a vehicle on a road far below and a mile away. A white vehicle, Castle saw with his naked eye. Probably a Border Patrol truck. The man lowered the binoculars and brought a handheld radio to his lips.

“¿Punto uno? Punto dos. Another one’s coming. Viene otro mapista. Right … okay, he’s passed. Tell them to cross … go hard … ¿Comprende? Duro adelante …”

Blaine walked out into the clearing and shouted, “And who might you be?”

The man dropped the radio, sprang to his feet, and spun around, blinking at a trio who must have looked like extras in a western—chaps, spurs, and pistols. He was a scrawny six-footer, with tousled brown hair and a pale, blotchy face.

“I asked who you might be. I know you can talk. Just heard you having a conversation.”

The man collected himself, and with a grin that displayed several missing teeth, he held out his hand. “Idaho Jim.”

Blaine squinted at him. “Think I’ve seen you around town.”

“Which town would that be?”

“Patagonia. You’re one of those meth-heads lives over on Roadrunner Lane.”

Idaho Jim dropped his hand but held his smile. “Think I’ve seen you, too. You’re Blaine Erskine, aren’t you?”

“What’re you doing here?”

“Bird watching,” answered Idaho Jim, touching the binoculars hung around his stalk of a neck.

“Seen any?”

“A peregrine falcon.”

“Did you? My cousin over here”—he motioned at Castle—“is a bird watcher. Why don’t you tell him what a peregrine falcon looks like?”

“It’s got wings and feathers.”

“And you’ve got a sense of humor, Idaho.” Blaine bent down and picked up the radio and a sheet of white cardboard covered in acetate. He read the writing on it aloud. “Santa Cruz County Sheriff … U.S. Border Patrol … Cochise County Sheriff. Do all bird watchers carry lists of law enforcement radio frequencies?”

“You’re sounding like a dude who’s carrying a badge himself. Are you?”

“Nope. But I’ve heard from a friend who does that some narco-bitch name of Menéndez has given the green light to a coyote name of Cruz to cross aliens right through my ranch. Which one are you scouting for?”