Crossers (36 page)

Ben Erskine

There is a sequel to Tim Forbes’s tale; to learn of it we must once again take imaginary flight from our time and place.

In Mexico, Quiroga’s legend grows. More corridos about him are composed. The songs are sung in cantinas and around vaquero campfires. One ballad depicts George Ramsey as the true killer who swears to lies to save his own skin. Another sings of Quiroga’s bold escape from custody and ends with him on the gallows, shouting defiance to the gringos: “Now spring the trap and slake your thirst for Mexican blood!”

Ben is aware of these sentiments. He knows the corridos have the power to rouse hearts to action. He expects retaliation. In April of 1923, when Ida is eight months gone with their second child, a courier arrives at the sheriff’s office and delivers a typewritten note addressed to Ben. It is from the Tucson District Office of the U.S. Customs Service:

Dear Friend:

We have it from reliable informants that an American living in Mexico, one William Sykes, has been offered $500 to bump you off. Sykes has been reported to be in Cananea and is supposed to be dickering for more money. If we find out more, we will let you know. Forewarned is forearmed
.

(Signed) Allen McDermott, Chief Customs Officer
.

Ben has never heard of Sykes. He walks down to the Western Union office and wires T.J. Babcock, asking him to find out what he can. Then he starts for home in the new Model T pickup he has bought with six hundred dollars of the reward money.

The thirty-mile journey from Nogales to the IB-Bar takes an hour and a half. In twilight he pulls through the high wooden gateway in which the ranch’s name and brand are carved. Australian heelers scamper across the yard to greet him. Martín Mendoza is shoeing a horse in the corral, smoke drifts from the kitchen stovepipe poking through the tin roof, kerosene lamps glow in the windows. All is well. He pauses to gaze with satisfaction at his homestead—the rock wall enclosing the yard, the house with its wraparound porch and the half-finished addition that will be a bedroom for his son, Frank, when the new baby comes along, the two spring-fed ponds, the windmill that rises like a giant steel flower. In one more year he will have proved up, and all this and the section of land will be his. He savors the prospect, but a troubling thought spoils his enjoyment: Ida is isolated out here, as isolated and vulnerable as Meg Palmer had been in her ghost-town post office. Martín is out on the range most of the day while Ben is at his job. He has taught Ida how to shoot, but he questions if she would pull a trigger in self-defense. There is an innocence about her, an invincible conviction that a little good lives in the worst of men, and that would cause her to hesitate, and hesitation could be fatal.

She comes to the door, her belly swollen under a floral print dress, her strong, square face cupped by her dark hair, which she has bobbed, flapper-style. Frank wriggles between her and the door frame and toddles toward Ben, small arms outstretched. “Fadda home!” he cries. Ben picks him up and rubs his head, and a fierce protectiveness balloons in his heart. There is nothing he would not do to keep this woman and this boy from harm. If Ida believes that some good is in the worst, he knows there is some evil in the best.

Over stew and biscuits he and Martín talk cattle—Martín has found a few cows with pink-eye—and then discuss another home improvement project; installing a gasoline pump to the windmill and laying pipe to the house to provide running water. Right now Ida must haul water for cooking, bathing, and washing clothes, and Ben is worried about the effect the heavy work will have on her, this late in her pregnancy. This concern, however, is at the moment superseded by another. He turns to her and says: “I’m thinking we ought to move to town. We could rent a house.”

“What for?”

“It’ll be easier on you.”

“What about this place?”

“Martín could look after it. I’ll be a gentleman rancher.”

Ida rises to gather the dirty dishes. “I’m managing all right,” she affirms, though a weariness in her voice suggests otherwise.

The dishes are placed in a metal basin; hot water is tapped from the water jacket attached to the stove. She washes, he dries, observing that her hands, though she is only twenty-four, are raw and cracked. Outside it is getting cold—the ranch is at 5,600 feet and nights are frigid even in the spring—but the stove coals make the kitchen almost uncomfortably warm. Martín goes out to the porch for a cigarette; Ida dislikes the smell of tobacco smoke. Ben stacks the dishes in a cabinet.

“It might be dangerous for you out here.”

“That’s nothing new.”

He tells her about the warning from the customs officer.

She is shocked, holding onto her belly. “Somebody’s out to get you?”

“It looks that way,” he says.

That Sunday Ben and Martín are roofing the addition, setting rafters that extend outward more than a foot to make an eave and keep rain from eroding the adobe brick walls. The dogs start barking. Ben looks down and sees a figure standing by the ranch gate, a man in a suit. He calls that he’s had car trouble. Before he can stop her, Ida comes out of the house and tells the stranger that the dogs won’t bite. As he strides into the yard, Ben flies down the ladder, snatches his pistol from the bedroom, and jams it in his waistband, pulling his shirttails out to hide the gun. In the yard Ida tells him that the visitor’s car has broken down. He is baby-faced, probably no older than she. His suit and shoes are worn, his shirt could use washing. Ben surmises that the stranger’s youth and shabby appearance have beguiled his wife. He doesn’t look like a hired killer.

“I’ll take care of it. Go back in the house,” Ben says.

He doesn’t usually order her around, and she pauses.

“Go on, Ida,” he says in the same peremptory tone; then, as she leaves, he asks the young man what is the matter with his car. He replies that he doesn’t know, that it stalled on him at the bottom of the hill, and inquires if Ben could have a look at it. He shows no signs of nervousness; it’s possible he’s an honest traveler in distress.

Ben says, “I’ll see what I can do.”

He lags a half step behind the stranger as they walk down the road. At the top of the hill, he gazes at the car below, an old-model Ford with a canvas top, and notices something that doesn’t look right.

“Expecting rain?”

“How’s that?”

“Your bad-weather curtains are down.”

The young man brushes his sleeve. “Keeps the dust out. Some.”

Ben falls back another step, draws the pistol, and cracks the barrel over the stranger’s skull, dropping him, then pulls him into the brush at the roadside. The man regains consciousness in a minute or two, blood trickling from his wound to paint a spiderweb across his face. Ben stands over him, the Luger pointed at his head.

“You never killed anybody in your life, Sykes,” he says, and reads by the stranger’s expression of mingled terror and surprise that he hasn’t made a mistake in identification. “But whoever’s in that car did. A Mexican, I’ll guess. You got cut in for your looks. They figured I wouldn’t be suspicious of a gringo with peach fuzz on his cheeks. You decoy me to your broke-down car, your partner takes care of the rest.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

“If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead already.” He grabs Sykes by the lapels and pulls him to his feet. “You go tell your sidekick and whoever hired you that the next one doesn’t get any conversation. He gets shot on sight.”

He waits for Sykes to drive off before returning to the house. Ida is outside, feeding the chickens in the coop. “Get his car fixed?”

“I did,” Ben says as he goes inside to return the pistol to its drawer.

“What was wrong with it?” she asks when he comes back out.

“Nothin’ much.”

She observes that he has tucked his shirt back into his trousers. She may be an innocent, but she is not an idiot. “Nothing wrong at all, I’ll bet.”

He doesn’t reply and glances toward Martín, pounding nails into a rafter.

“I shouldn’t have …,” Ida starts. “He looked so young and—”

“I know. Next time somebody comes calling, you let me answer the door.”

“I don’t want to move into town, but I will if you think it’s best.”

“I do. You’ll have running water, electricity, a telephone, the works.”

She pauses, standing there behind the chicken wire, a sack of ground corn in her hand. “It would make things easier on me if you quit.”

“That wouldn’t stop them from coming. Not now.”

No, not now, for this is his fate, to pursue and be pursued. The law he had sworn to uphold, the law codified in books, lies lightly on the border, where the law of vengeance takes precedence. It has always been so; it will never be otherwise.

The couple rent a bungalow on Beck Street in Nogales, near the courthouse and a couple of blocks from the Southern Pacific tracks. There, aided by a Mexican midwife, Ida gives birth to a daughter, Grace, on May 21, 1923. The family occupy this address for almost seven years, spending frequent weekends at the ranch, the daily management of which is left in the Mendozas’ capable hands.

As far as physical comforts go, Ida’s life in town is much improved; in other respects, she continues to endure the peculiar hardships of being married to Benjamin Erskine. He is often gone for two or three days at a time, chasing criminals and bootleggers, for Prohibition is in effect, and the Mexican contrabandistas who used to smuggle liquor out of the United States are now earning a brisk livelihood smuggling it in, often with the connivance of American customs officers. Two or three of Ben’s exploits are written up in pulp detective magazines, under such purple headlines as TWO-GUN LAW (although Ben carries only one, a .38 police special). One story recounts his arrest of a bank embezzler who fled into Mexico; another the capture of a burglar who’d almost beaten his victim, an elderly woman, to death. The publicity spreads his fame far beyond the confines of Santa Cruz County. He enjoys the spotlight as much as he relishes his perilous lawman’s life; and having solved so many crimes, having survived so many dangers, he begins to think of himself as a favored of the gods, as bulletproof, so to speak. He comes to believe in his own legend.

Perhaps that explains why he takes risks beyond those inherent in his work. He again jumps into the treacherous mire of Mexican politics. Mystery men appear at his door at odd hours and in hurried whispers summon him to take part in some intrigue. He packs his valise and disappears, sometimes for hours, sometimes for a day or two, leaving his family to wonder if they will ever see him alive again. That Ida does not protest astonishes her friends, her sister, and her brother-in-law. It’s possible that she believes he’s been called away on official business or at any rate persuades herself that he has been, much as the wife of an unfaithful husband convinces herself that he really is working late.

How a full-time deputy sheriff manages to take periodic leaves of absence to play soldier of fortune must remain one of the unsolved mysteries of Ben’s life. Likewise his activities in Mexico. There is no record of them, with one exception. In late 1929 an old bill comes due, the payment of which ends Ben’s law enforcement career.

20

B
Y EARLY
J
ULY
unremitting heat forces those who dwell in the gated enclaves of Tucson and Phoenix into early morning tee-times and then to confinement in the air-conditioned insulation of their faux-adobe homes. But for those whose livelihoods are in thrall to the weather, that vanishing tribe of farmers and cattlemen, early July on the Sonoran Desert is the time when they begin to search for clouds—not the wan wisps of spring but fat cumulus sailing up from the south like fleets of fluffy blimps. These herald the black thunder-heads pregnant with moisture from the Gulf of Mexico or the Sea of Cortez that build up over the mountains and break the yearly drought. People stare at the radar maps on television, watching for distant storms driving northward; they pay close attention to weather reports on the radio; they resort to more primitive methods of prediction, like sniffing the air for hints of dampness or testing the wind with their fingertips for a change in direction from west to south or east. The longer they wait, the more anxious they become. By now the grasses are as dry as strips of old newspaper, the oak leaves are brittle, the dust an inch thick on ranch roads. Cattle crowd the water trough; lean deer congregate on the banks of the few perennial streams; at night coyotes wail disconsolately under star-filled, niggardly skies. Every sentient being is on edge, anticipating the promised rains that will revive the world.

With that hope in mind, Blaine hired Tim McIntyre, the born-again cowboy, to help him and Gerardo gather the stock on the ranch’s allotment and move them into the valley whose grass, God and meteorology willing, would soon look as green as Pennsylvania. The seven-mile drive took most of the day. When they reached the pasture, they found that the new fence, erected with so much effort, had again been cut in two places, and that more piles of migrant garbage has been strewn in the draw. They repaired the breaks and returned to the house well after dark. Blaine, Monica reported to Castle, fell into bed too tired to wash or eat and too angry to speak.

A worse calamity occurred three days later, when a range fire charred a thousand acres in another pasture on the San Ignacio’s boundary with Mexico. The first sign of it, in the early morning, was a string of smoke dangling on the horizon; within half an hour flames whipped by a stiff breeze could be seen from ranch headquarters. This was an all-hands-on-deck emergency, for fifty cows and calves were grazing there. Blaine, Gerardo, Monica, and Castle raced to the fire, pulling four horses in a trailer, and found the cattle stampeding from the conflagration, some jumping fences, some crashing into them, mad-eyed and bawling. Mounting up, they galloped alongside the panicked herd, trying to direct it through a gate. When that proved futile, Blaine jumped from the saddle, cut a hole in the fence with wire cutters, and was nearly trampled when the animals broke for the opening. The fire leaped a dry wash and roared on under a pall black as oil. The riders could feel its heat on the backs of their necks as they turned away from it to push the herd for a mile, up over a shaggy ridge into a dirt tank, where at last they settled down.

Volunteer firefighters from Patagonia sped down the road west of the tank, sirens and Klaxons sending up an urban blare. A pumper truck from Nogales arrived, and a Forest Service helicopter dumped chemicals on the blaze; but it was finally doused by a massive thunder-head that had risen over the San Antonios, then leaned northward, like a falling tower. The sky darkened, and the first rains of the season fell, not in drops but in dense globules that stung the skin, that struck the parched earth almost with the force of hailstones. The storm was brief but intense, an orgasm of rain, and after it had passed, the tang of wet grass mingled with the odor of wet ashes. Drenched, the soot and sweat washed from his face, Castle trailed the others back toward the pasture, pulling up when they reached the ragged line where the fire’s advance had been halted. Before them stretched a swath of smoldering earth that resembled an undulating parking lot newly paved with hot asphalt. Not all the cattle had escaped. The charred carcasses of two calves threw off a stench of singed meat and guts. Down the fence line a cow had apparently charged headlong into the barbed wire, become entangled, and in her frenzied attempts to get free, garrotted herself. Her rolling and thrashing had knocked the wires flat, allowing her calf to flee to safety. It stood not far off, a little bull, bawling for her. It was as if she had sacrificed herself.

“Y todavía más mala suerte,” Gerardo mumbled, meaning Miguel, Miguel the Jonah.

In high boots turned down at the tops and a long fireman’s coat, the Patagonia fire chief shambled up to Blaine. “It’s out, but we’ll stick around for a while case it gets to goin’ again. Looks like some crossers started it. Found a campsite and a few of these.” He held up in a gloved hand a blackened sterno can. “Probably left one or two burnin’, and that was all it took.”

Blaine touched his hat and looked at the dead calves, the strangled cow, and the motherless bull, and said nothing.

A
FTER THE FIRE
Castle settled back into his old routine of hiking with his dog, reading, and bird watching. Sometimes he pitched in with whatever chores Sally had assigned Miguel and practiced his Spanish while Miguel practiced his English. Two or three evenings a week he went over to Tessa’s for dinner. They would dance to Ella Fitzgerald afterward, or go outside with her
Peterson’s Field Guide to the Stars and Planets
and seek to identify constellations and star clusters. These were moments of deep joy to him, just the two of them beneath the great vault of the heavens; and yet a dissatisfaction had crept into him. He felt that he was merely passing time rather than living a life. He wanted to do something but couldn’t think of what. He mulled his aunt’s proposition. Serving as her trustee might give him some sense of purpose, but he procrastinated making a decision, chary of the complications. He had grown used to his autonomy, to the simplicity of his solitude.

One day after the water heater in his cabin sprang a leak, flooding his bathroom, he, Miguel, and Blaine traveled to the Ace Hardware in Sierra Vista to pick up a new one. Blaine’s array of skills included plumbing, and he would know which kind of heater to buy, the right fittings and lengths of copper flex. He guided Castle on a shortcut down Forest Service roads that brought them through the back gate to Fort Huachuca and finally into Sierra Vista. It was a prosaic trip, a mundane errand, until, rounding a fishhook bend on their return, Castle nearly rear-ended a battered delivery van, disabled in the middle of the narrow road with a flat tire. A skinny Mexican stood off to the side, the spare propped against his legs, while another man, blond and powerfully built, loosened the lugs on the flat. Both jumped when Castle hit the brakes, his Suburban slewing to a halt barely two yards short of the van. He lowered the window and said they should have pulled off to change the tire.

“Nowhere to pull off,” said the light-haired man, pointing the lug wrench at the manzanita and junipers choking both sides of the road. He looked like a tough character, an inch or two above six feet, with wide sloping shoulders, sinewy arms, and a mashed nose, but his voice had an adolescent timbre.

“Can’t get around you for the same reason,” Castle said irritably.

“If you wait a few minutes, we’ll get this done.”

He finished loosening the lugs, then wiggled the jack under the rear axle. When he bent over to pump the jack handle, the butt of a pistol popped out from a hip pocket of his jeans. That was not alarming in itself—a lot of people in southern Arizona carried guns; but when added to the other elements of the equation—two young men, a banged-up van on a lonely backcountry road—there were grounds to suspect criminal activity. Blaine pulled a ballpoint from his shirt pocket and wrote the van’s license number on his palm.

“Señor Gil. Vámonos,” Miguel said from the backseat.

Castle saw that he’d broken into a sweat, though the air-conditioning was on full power. The pistol must have spooked him. “No es posible. Espérate un momentito.”

“Be interestin’ to see what’s inside that van,” Blaine murmured.

Nothing was inside, as they saw when the blond opened the rear doors and tossed the jack and the flat tire into the cargo compartment. As he eased the van to the roadside, giving Castle just enough room to pass, his underfed, dark-complected companion sauntered up to the passenger side of the Suburban and motioned for a cigarette. Blaine gave him one; then, with more gestures, he begged a light.

“Next he’ll ask me to smoke it for him.”

The Mexican craned his head through the window to light the cigarette, his glance sliding toward Miguel, who made a jerky movement, as if he’d touched a live wire.

“Gracias,” said the Mexican, and climbed into the van. With a wave, the other man signaled Castle to go around him. As he did, Blaine said, “Hold up a sec;” then to the van’s driver: “Don’t follow us. Quarter mile up, you’ll come to a locked gate. Private property the other side. Mine. And no public access.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Sure is. I’ve got your tag numbers, so if I find that lock busted, I’ll know where to start lookin’.”

“That’s a helluva thing to say, bro,” said the blond man, sounding injured.

“Only makin’ things clear.”

Before his cousin provoked another confrontation, Castle put the car in gear.

They had gone a mile or so when several loose thoughts lined up in his mind and tumbled into place, like the wheels in a slot machine. He stopped suddenly and turned to look at Miguel. “That was him, wasn’t it?” he asked, tension in his voice.

Miguel, who was trying, with only partial success, not to appear frightened, shook his head. “No comprendo.”

“El hombre con …” What the hell was the word for blond?
Amarillo
, yellow, would do. “El hombre con cabello amarillo … That was him?”

Miguel stammered that he still did not understand.

“Ask him if he recognized those guys back there,” Castle said to Blaine. “Ask him if the blond guy was the one who killed his friends.”

“Cuzzy, what the hell—”

“Miguel’s been ready to piss his pants for the last fifteen minutes. Remember what he told us? That he and his friends were driven to the border by a skinny Mexican they nicknamed Pencil? That the guy who shot Héctor and Reynaldo was a big gringo with blond hair?”

“Yeah. Now you mention, yeah.”

“Ask him.”

This Blaine did, twice; and the second time, after a silence, Miguel answered softly, “Sí. Es el mismo.”

L
IEUTENANT
S
OTO
, the detective responsible for the case, was a slender man with sleek black hair and skin the color of old ivory. At his desk in the sheriff’s department, he showed Miguel several mug shots, none of which resembled the men they had seen. Miguel looked relieved.

“Let’s talk to the boss, maybe he’s got some ideas,” Soto said, and brought them into Rodriguez’s office.

The sheriff listened to the story, impatiently drumming his fingers on his desk. “You said the blond-haired guy had a broken nose,” he asked Castle.

“I don’t know if it was broken. Mashed—you know, askew.”

“Askew? I like that. Askew. How was it
askew?”

“Bent off to the side.”

More drumming. Rodriguez’s wedding ring clacked on the wood. Then he rolled his chair to a computer, tapped the keyboard, and spent two or three minutes scrolling through a list of some kind. When he found what he was looking for, he phoned a records clerk and requested an arrest file, reading the number from off the screen.

“It’ll be a minute,” he said, settling back, and gazed at Castle. “You sure do like playing cops and robbers.”

Castle shrugged, unsure what to make of the remark. Blaine stood near a wall, an elbow propped on top of a file cabinet. Soto was seated next to Miguel, who stared at the floor, anxiously squeezing his baseball cap. He had to be thinking about the threat made to his wife months ago. At this point he probably wished he had been deported, sent home to Oaxaca, released from the manacles of his knowledge.

A female deputy appeared, deposited a file folder on the sheriff’s desk, and left. Rodriguez pulled a photograph from the folder, glanced at it, and passed it to Miguel. Castle and Blaine moved to look over his shoulder and saw that it was the same man. Rodriguez covered the name on the mug shot and said, “No prompting. He’s the witness.”

Hunched over, frowning, chewing on his lip, Miguel studied the photo for what felt like a full minute before passing it back to the sheriff.

“¿Es este el hombre qúe vió matar a Héctor Valenzuela y Reynaldo Guzmán?” Rodriguez asked.

“Sí, es él,” replied Miguel, who underwent a sudden transformation. His grimace faded, he stopped biting his lip, and he straightened his shoulders. “Yo lo vi dispararles con la pistola.” Extending his arm, he pulled an imaginary trigger. “¡Boom! ¡Boom! Así. Primero Héctor y luego Reynaldo. ¡Boom! ¡Boom!”

“¿Estás seguro?”

“¡Sí! ¡Sí! Estoy seguero. El hombre en la foto es el que mató a mis amigos.”

Castle was amazed by the change in Miguel. He seemed to have come to terms, to have resigned himself to his situation, and to have found in the resignation the resolve to see the thing through.

The sheriff questioned him some more—Castle could not follow the conversation—then gave the case file to Soto. “How about that, Mke? Looks like we’ve got a suspect. Miguel said he would identify him at a lineup. Let’s get a warrant and issue a BOL. Anything on the license tags?”

“The van’s registered to a guy in Phoenix,” Soto replied. “Nothing on him, but I’ll ask Phoenix to check.”

Rodriguez turned to Blaine and Castle. “Did you get a look at the piece he was carrying?”

“Just the grips,” answered Blaine. “A semiauto of some kind.”

“Ballistics tests show the slugs came from a forty-caliber, probably a Ruger. Don’t know for sure. Slugs were pretty damaged. If we pop this guy, I’d sure love to get my hands on his pistol. What we’ve got now in the way of forensic evidence is one step above pure shit.”