Crossers (35 page)

I was there covering it all. If you suffer from too many benign illusions about human nature, a mob will cure you. I looked at Mexicans on one side of the street shouting for Ben’s blood and at Anglo-Saxons on the other side shouting for Quiroga’s, and what I saw were two troops of baboons. Lassiter showed up in his car with two deputies and shoved Quiroga inside, and I imagine there was one criminal damn happy to see the inside of a jail.

The trials started in July. George Ramsey pleaded guilty to the murder of Oliver Palmer and agreed to testify against Quiroga. The quid for that quo was a life sentence. Plácido Santos pled not guilty to armed robbery and accessory to murder, was convicted, and also got life. Quiroga’s trial lasted over two weeks. His lawyer conjured up a couple of alibi witnesses who claimed they’d seen the defendant in Sonora on the day of the crime, but their testimony was blown to pieces by Ramsey’s. Dorothy Killian took the stand and described what had been done to Meg, and when the prosecutor asked her to identify the man who’d murdered and mutilated her sister-in-law, she pointed at Quiroga and said, “That’s him right there.” The jury was out for less than half an hour. Guilty on all counts, without recommendation for mercy. The judge accepted that recommendation when Quiroga came up for sentencing two weeks later. “Manuel Quiroga, I sentence you to be hanged by the neck till dead, this sentence to be carried out on October 30, 1922.”

Of all our vain hopes, I guess the vainest is the hope that reason will prevail over emotion. In spite of evidence to the contrary, a lot of Mexicans clung to the belief that Quiroga was innocent, that he was a Mexican citizen abducted by the gringos, the victim of a frame-up, and so on. A corrido was composed to that effect. A swarm of his worshipers gathered around the courthouse and sang the corrido on the day he and Plácido were to be transferred from the county jail to the state penitentiary at Florence. Lassiter had to call for a detachment of soldiers from Camp Little to break up the mob. He also decided it would be safer to make the transfer at night. At about ten o’clock—this would have been in late August, early September—he and a deputy, Bill Wilson, shackled Quiroga and Plácido together and put them in the back of Lassiter’s car. Ben was supposed to accompany the sheriff on the drive to Florence, but he begged off. He had a wife and kid, and he’d just found out that his wife was pregnant again. He’d spent so little time with her in the past several months he thought it best to go home, now that the drama was over. So Wilson went in his place. And that saved his life.

This is what happened. Somehow, some way, one of Quiroga’s adoring fans had smuggled a pipe wrench into Lassiter’s car. About thirty miles up the Nogales-Tucson road, Quiroga picked up the wrench with his free hand and smashed Wilson in the back of the head—Wilson was driving. With the car out of control, Lassiter drew his gun and turned around, and Quiroga struck him in the temple; then he and Plácido, still handcuffed together, leaped out. The car careened into a ditch, crushing Wilson against the steering wheel and throwing Lassiter out. A rancher found the wreck early the next morning, both men dead.

Somebody told me it was the biggest manhunt ever in the whole Southwest. Five hundred deputies, county rangers, and deputized ranchers scoured the desert on horseback for days. Even a few Apache scouts from Fort Huachuca joined in. The Old West revived once again, but with a modern touch—a U.S. Army biplane looked from the air.

Even with an airplane and bloodhounds and an entire army in on the search, I was sure Ben and Tibbets would be the ones to find the fugitives. They led a group of six deputies, and I got the okay to ride along with them. I had never seen Ben so—well, “grim” and “determined” don’t describe the half of it. He had a kind of terrible resolve. He’d been fond of Lassiter.

The posse started where Quiroga and Plácido had jumped out of the car—their footprints were clear in the dust. Two sets of tracks, side by side—the fugitives were still handcuffed to each other. The morning of the third day Tibbets spotted blood on a clump of Spanish bayonet, and it was still sticky. A little farther on we came to a shack by an abandoned mine, and there Ben picked up a bloodstained file. With their shackles cut, the outlaws could travel faster. That they had come so far through such harsh country in hundred-degree heat cuffed together was astonishing. “Right tough boys, they just might make it into Mexico,” Tibbets said, sounding as if he’d acquired a begrudging respect for them. Not so Ben. He said, “I’ll follow them to goddamn Brazil if I have to, and you are welcome to come along, or not.”

We trailed them for a while longer to a box canyon, with an almost sheer rock wall rising at its head. “They’re in there, laying up for the day,” Ben whispered, then ordered us to dismount and tie our horses. Two deputies were sent up the ridge on one side, two more to the opposite ridge. The remaining two were to block the canyon’s mouth while Ben and Tibbets went in. You know how quiet it is on the desert at midday? You swear you can hear your blood gurgling through your veins. I sang the Harvard fight song to myself. Couldn’t get it out of my head.
Hit the line for Harvard, for Harvard wins today. We will show the sons of Eli that the Crimson still holds sway …
At the crack of two quick shots—that was the signal—we rushed in. Near the head of the canyon, in the shadow of the rock wall, Ben and Tibbets stood holding their pistols on Quiroga and Plácido. The bracelets of the filed handcuffs dangled from their wrists. A new pair joined them together once again. Their clothes had been shredded by cactus and thorns, their arms were slashed, their lips were swollen to the size of hot dogs, and they were raving from thirst and exhaustion.

They were given water, which was as much clemency as Ben and Tibbets intended to show them. “You two walked arm in arm for fifty damn miles, you can walk a little further,” Ben told them. A while later, under heavy guard, they were whisked off to Florence, Plácido for the rest of his life, Quiroga to keep his appointment with the hangman. He’d confessed to killing Lassiter and Wilson, even bragged about it.

And so I got another big scoop, another raise, and a few days later, a job offer from the
Daily Star
for twice what I was making at the
Herald
. I was reluctant to accept it, out of loyalty to Childs. He was a gentleman in his own crusty way. “If you don’t take it,” he said, “I’ll fire you for being an idiot.”

Tibbets and Ben were each awarded seventy-five hundred dollars for the captures of Ramsey, Santos, and Quiroga, and here I must applaud them. They agreed to keep half their share and to put the other half in trust for the Palmers’ daughter, Catherine. The bank where they put the money survived the Great Depression, and Catherine used it to pay for her college education. You’re damn right I applaud them, and her, too.

Talk about a story having legs—this one was a centipede. On September 30, eight hours before he was to be hanged, Quiroga was granted a stay of execution by the governor. The Mexican consul general in Phoenix had sent him a letter stating that the question of Quiroga’s citizenship had not been properly investigated. Until it was resolved, Arizona had no right to execute him. The governor kicked the ball to the state supreme court. This peculiar turn of events was the first story I covered for the
Star
. I phoned Ben for his reaction, and I remember that conversation word for word.

He said, “You want my official reaction or what I really think?”

“What you really think.”

“All right, but I’d better not see it in your newspaper.”

“In that case, give me both.”

“Officially, I am confident that once they look at the evidence, the court will see that Quiroga is an American citizen and do the right thing. Unofficially, when me and Curt cornered those two SOBs in that box, we agreed that if a one of them so much as twitched an eyebrow in a way we didn’t like, we’d shoot ’em both. Well, they didn’t twitch, so we didn’t shoot, and right now, I am damn sorry we didn’t.”

In the end the supreme court ruled in favor of Quiroga’s U.S. citizenship. The superior court set a new execution date—November 18, 1922.

Ben and Tibbets were invited to the hanging, and I got authorization from the warden to cover it. The gallows were at the end of a corridor on death row. Led by two guards, Quiroga walked in, calm and composed. He’d confessed to a priest and received the last rites of the Church, so I guess he was confident that his bloodstained soul was going to get to heaven after all. I watched him comb his hair and mustache with his fingers before a guard dropped a black hood over his head. Then the noose was tightened, the trap was sprung, and Manuel Quiroga was dead.

It’s not a pretty thing to see a man hanged, even one like him. As we filed out, all in a somber mood, I asked Ben if he had any comments. He merely shook his head.

The execution made the front pages of every paper in the state. The Republican organization of Santa Cruz County appealed to Ben to run for sheriff. It would be no contest. Hell, he could have run for U.S. Senator, and it would have been no contest. But he declined. He put it to me like this: “I’ve got no interest in kissing babies’ cheeks or grown-ups’ behinds.”

And I applaud him for that, too.

19

C
ASTLE SAT
on his front porch in the warmth of late morning, reading
De vita beata
.

All that the universe obliges us to suffer must be borne with high courage
, Seneca said to him from across the gulf of time.
This is the sacred obligation by which we are bound—to submit to the human lot and not be disquieted by those things we have no power to avoid
.

He laid the book on his lap. The universe obliges us to suffer? What kind of universe is that? he asked himself. Really, it didn’t oblige you to do anything. It didn’t care if you suffered or not, didn’t care a whit for your hopes or dreads, your pains or pleasures. Suffering had no objective meaning, hidden away in the void but perceivable through the telescope of philosophy or faith. Its only meaning was what the sufferer chose to give it, and if he could not find a reason, why then, it had no meaning whatsoever. He wasn’t in the right mood for the Roman’s stern remedies; maybe he’d gone from being a stoic to a hedonist, dwelling on the sensations of making love to Tessa by the shrine in the mountains.

Afterward they found the owls, perched on an oak branch in the seclusion of the upper canyon. One looked at Castle and Tessa as they stalked toward the tree. Its round dark eyes stared out from a face shaped like an apple cut down the middle, the feathers on its white-barred breast stirred in a breeze eddying down the canyon walls. Tessa smiled and squeezed his arm, whispering, “We’re so lucky.” Luck—maybe. To be with her and to see the birds in that setting was more like grace.

Sally’s truck, banging like a junk wagon, snapped him out of his trance. He could see her through the spattered windshield, her small head with its Coke-bottle glasses pitched forward over the wheel. Hay bales were stacked in the bed. She was going to pick up Castle before heading out to feed more of her pets, a half-dozen corriente steers that Blaine had described as “so old they’d be in a nursing home if they was people.” Castle had promised Blaine he’d talk to her about her estate, and with her eightieth birthday just days away, now was as good a time as any.

The steers were pastured on a leased quarter section beyond the northernmost boundary of the San Ignacio’s deeded land. Sally’s driving was cause for anxiety. She would brake when it wasn’t necessary and fail to when it was, as when she rounded a curve too fast and nearly ran off the road. Castle offered to take the wheel.

“Don’t get nervous. I could drive this road blindfolded,” she said.

With her eyesight, she practically was.

They passed through a wire gate and into sun-burnt hills and parklike stands of trees. A sign at the roadside bore the silhouette of a cow and the words
OPEN RANGE
to warn motorists that they might find cattle on the road.

“I do like that,” said Sally. “Open range. Was a time when there weren’t so damn many fences in this valley. Reminded me of where I grew up in western New Mexico. No fences anywhere. The high lonesome.”

And she reminisced about her childhood and her father and neighboring ranchers gathering their stock in the fall, sometimes a thousand head or more, and driving them over the Continental Divide and across the Plains of St. Augustine to the railhead at Magdalena. Her mother would drive the chuck wagon on some trips, and Sally and her brothers—she was the youngest of four children—were pulled out of school to go along, she in the wagon, her brothers riding herd with the men.

“My earliest memory is of when I was five years old, settin beside my ma and all those cattle flowing like a river. Lord, that was a thing to see.”

She stopped the truck on a rise and gave the horn three long blasts. “My boys are well trained. They’ll be coming along presently. There were wells every ten miles or so on the Magdalena Trail. You couldn’t move cattle much further in a day. The whole trip took maybe ten days. When we got to Magdalena, the hands would go into town to do what cowboys always done at the end of a drive.” A laugh. “Found out when I was older that on the trips when my ma did not drive the wagon, Pa went in to visit the ladies, too. Seen them steers yet?”

Castle shook his head. She honked the horn again.

“Few years ago me and Blaine and Monica took a trip up there. I wanted to see our old place. Nothing much left but a fallen-down windmill and a few corral boards. Then we got out on the highway and visited the Plains and saw these great big white dishes out there, must have been two dozen of ’em. Radio telescopes, Blaine told me. Said astronomers used ’em to send signals way the hell out into the universe. He had some name for ’em I do not recall.”

“The Very Large Array,” Castle said.

“That’s it. Well now, looking at those things out there on what used to be the Magdalena Trail made me feel like I was a thousand years old. Could not believe I had rode the wagons crost those Plains of Saint Augustine when I was a kid and had lived long enough to see those thingamajigs sending signals to Lord knows where.”

This seemed to provide an opening to the topic Castle wanted to bring up, but he could not think of a graceful way to get into it.

The corrientes appeared, ambling, almost hobbling over a hill, stringy-muscled steers with spotted hides and curved, widespread horns, direct descendants of the first cattle brought to the New World, living relics, a bit like Sally herself.

“Used to be roping steers in the rodeo,” she said. “Bought ’em for a song when their careers were over. Them Mexican cattle are like Mexicans, real survivors, but there ain’t much nourishment in this dry grass, and they need their mama to feed ’em.”

Calling “Whooo-whooo-whooo! Come and get it or forget it!” she climbed out, dropped the tailgate, and with a nimbleness that amazed Castle, boosted herself into the bed, arthritic knees be damned. He jumped in after her, and they shoved the bales out and dragged them off the road.

“Christ, Sally, you do this by yourself?” asked Castle, sitting alongside her on the tailgate and watching the corrientes munching the green feed.

“Sure. Way I see it, I’m like a fella lost in a blizzard. If I don’t keep moving, I’ll freeze up and be dead in no time.”

“Eighty and still going strong,” he said cheerfully.

“Come from good stock both sides. Why, my ma had me when she was forty-two years old. She was born the year Billy the Kid got shot and lived on to see President Kennedy get shot.”

Castle thought this an unusual way to describe a life span. “Good stock, all right, but … well, you never know … look, I don’t want to keep any secrets from you. Blaine’s been talking to me about—”

“What’s gone to happen when I kick the bucket,” she interrupted, sparing him the awkwardness of introducing the subject. “Reckon he told you about this trust idea.”

“He did. And I think it’s a good one.”

“I don’t.”

“Why?”

“How Blaine explained it, I’d have to turn things over to a trustee. I will be damned if I’m gone to let some banker or lawyer I don’t know, and who don’t know no more about cows than I do about banking or the law, run things for me.”

Her resistance, her stubbornness, were palpable, radiating from her like heat from a stove.

“You might listen to my advice,” he said firmly. “I did this kind of thing for a living, and I made a good one.”

“Thought you was a stockbroker.”

“A financial consultant. A
senior
financial consultant. I managed money for clients who had a lot of it, and the ones who made more were the ones who listened. It wouldn’t be fair to Blaine and Monica to leave them with a tax liability that—”

She tapped his knee and threw up her chin. “You think I’m being unfair?”

“Shortsighted,” he answered. “A trust wouldn’t cut you out of the picture. You can stipulate how your property is to be used, how you want your affairs to be run in the agreement. While you’re alive and after you’re gone.”

She measured him with a long look. “That so? Blaine didn’t say nothin’ about that.”

“You’d have to talk an expert about the details, but yeah, it is so.”

Sally carefully lowered her feet to the ground, took a few steps forward, and stood looking at her steers, nuzzling the bales. Then she spun on her heels and marched back to plant herself in front of her nephew, her piercing blue eyes raised toward him. “Suppose I was to set up this agreement, and suppose I named you to be the trustee. What would you say to that, smarty-pants?”

Taken aback, Castle had nothing to say.

“If I was to go ahead, I’d want to keep it in the family. I’d rather it be you than some fella I don’t know from Adam.”

And, he thought, such an arrangement would make it easier for her to remain in the driver’s seat. She could influence him in a way she could not her hypothetical banker or lawyer. He knew what he would have to do as a trustee—handle accounting, distribute Sally’s income—and because her estate consisted of land and cattle, he would in practice manage her share of the ranch. Given his ignorance about raising livestock, that meant he would have to consult her on every major decision. He would be subject to her wishes, to her not-inconsiderable will. Did he want to entangle himself in all that? He foresaw many opportunities for pitfalls, for conflicts and arguments.

“I don’t know anything about cows, either,” he said, demurring.

“If you were smart enough to make yourself a Wall Street big shot, you’re smart enough to learn, and I could teach you.”

“I’d have to give it some thought.”

“You do that, and I’ll do the same. That’s a fair trade.”