Crossers (4 page)
Authors: Philip Caputo
Tags: #Suspense, #Crime, #Fiction, #Literary, #Historical, #Suspense Fiction, #Sagas, #Action & Adventure, #Fiction - General, #Historical - General, #Widowers, #Drug Traffic, #Family secrets, #American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, #Widows, #Grief, #Arizona, #Mexican-American Border Region, #Ranches, #Caputo, #Philip - Prose & Criticism
So the Revolution got started, and I thought the revolucionarios were right. The rich folks in Mexico and the big-shot foreigners like Colonel Greene had pretty much treated ordinary folks like dogs, and now the dogs was biting back. Jeff and me had some right lively conversations about that. He said the revolucionarios weren’t like ours, George Washington and all, but were socialists, and that made them dangerous. He explained to me what a socialist was, and the way he explained it, I agreed that a socialist wasn’t anybody I would care to associate with. But I didn’t think the Mexicans fighting Díaz were like that. They wanted a fair shake was all, and I sure couldn’t fault any man for that. Ben didn’t have much to say on this subject. He never was one for talking, but I got the idea that he saw things like I did. He would not tolerate nobody trying to push him around, and didn’t think any man had a right to push another man around.
I know one thing—the Revolution made it tough for Jeff to buy Mexican steers. Pancho Villa and his like had run the hacendados off their ranches or hung ’em or shot ’em, and there wasn’t nobody to do business with. Jeff was having a helluva time finding steers at the right price on the American side of the line, and that was putting a crimp in his plans, which were to start to making himself a cattle baron.
It was me who come up with the solution. If it was true that the hacendados had been run off or shot or hung, then their cattle must be a-wandering around with no one to look after them, meaning we didn’t have to go through the formality of buying them. We’d just take them. Couldn’t get ’em no cheaper than that, could you? Jeff and Ben thought it was a fine idea, Ben on account of he was getting bored punching cattle and was looking for some action. Jeff saw the sense of it from a business angle.
Back in those days it was common for Mexicans to cross the line and steal cattle from us gringos—and it was common for gringos to return the favor. It was a kind of game. We didn’t think of it as rustling, and the Mexicans didn’t neither. Of course, if you was the one getting rustled, then you saw it different.
Two of the ten sections Jeff had leased was right on the border, and that’s where we crossed. The rancho grande on the other side was called the Santa Barbara, and it must’ve run halfway down to Mexico City. It was owned by a Spaniard name of Álvarez, and owing to the fact that the revolucionarios hated Spaniards more than anybody else, we reckoned he’d been one of the first run off, shot, or hung. The big comet was gone from the sky by this time, but we had us a full moon. We rounded up, I think it was fifty-odd head without a hitch and drove them across and built a fire for our running irons and put our brand to ’em.
It was so damn easy, we tried it again the next night, while we still had a moon. We’d gathered up maybe twenty of these corriente steers when the Spaniard showed up with a few of his vaqueros and caught us red-handed. So there was one hacendado who hadn’t been run off, shot, or hung, and wasn’t we surprised! Asked us, polite like, what we thought we was a-doing, and Jeff said that some of our cattle had got away and we were sorting out ours from his. I had to translate that to the Spanish fella. Álvarez pulled a pistol and about stuck it in Jeff’s face and told Jeff that if we didn’t clear out muy pronto, we’d leave our bones there in Old Mexico. Before I could translate that, Ben drew his six-gun and stuck it in Álvarez’s ear and said that his bones was gone to be laying right next to ours if he didn’t put that pistol away. It was a peculiar-looking pistol, a kind I’d never seen before.
There I was on my horse, figuring the vaqueros was gone to open up any second, but Álvarez was between them and Ben, and I thought they didn’t shoot because they were afraid of hitting their boss. Turned out that wasn’t the case. They were afraid of hitting Ben! Right in the middle of that good old-fashioned Mexican standoff, one of the vaqueros called out, “¡Hola Ben! ¡Soy yo, Francisco!” Found out later on that Ben and this Francisco had become compadres on one of Ben’s trips into Sonora a while before—one of them “adventures” Jeff said he went on. Well, Francisco said to go ahead and take the cattle from that hijo de puta of a Spaniard. That kind of distracted Álvarez. He turned in the saddle to see which one of his vaqueros had called him a son of a bitch, and Ben took advantage and cracked him up the side of the head with the barrel of his six-gun, but he didn’t hit him hard enough to knock him out, and Álvarez pulled the trigger of that peculiar pistol. Must have shot four, five rounds quicker than I can say it. He’d shot in the direction of his own men, but I can’t say if it was on purpose or accidental. He didn’t hit a one of them, and then that Francisco fella shot him off his horse, and the other vaqueros plugged him while he was on the ground, and that was the end of the trail for Don Álvarez.
All of it happened in maybe five seconds, and I was right scared and confused. That was the first man I’d ever seen killed before my eyes. Now the cattle had scattered from all the gunfire, and damn if the vaqueros didn’t help us gather them back up. Jeff was kind of troubled how we came to be in possession of them, and I said to him that I reckoned now we was socialists, too. He didn’t think that was too funny. Francisco was telling us what a son of a bitch Álvarez was, treated his vaqueros and their families like they was scum, and that they’d been looking for a chance to get rid of him and we gave it to them. Ben had helped himself to the Spaniard’s pistol, as he no longer had use for it, and told me it was a German Luger, an automatic. Francisco said that now that him and his boys had killed a hacendado, they had better join up with the revolucionarios, and he thought that we ought to join up with them. We didn’t say nothing, but as we was riding back, the wind blew this piece of paper front of my horse, and the horse shied and dumped me right out the saddle. Wasn’t hurt, just kind of embarrassed, and I picked up that paper when we got back to the U.S. of A. side of the line, and by the light of the branding fire, I saw that it said in English, “Attention Gringos! Come south of the border to fight with Pancho Villa for gold and glory! Railroaders, dynamiters, machine gunners wanted.” It was a damn recruiting poster for the Revolution.
Me and Ben got to doing some heavy talking. It went something like this: in all that big country, what were the chances that a piece of paper should blow right in front of my horse? It could not have been a coincidence. There must’ve been a purpose to it. We found out what that was a few days later, when we heard that the revolucionarios had taken over Álvarez’s hacienda. Ben and me decided that we had been given a sign and that we oughta ride down there and see what was going on and join up. What we knew about machine guns and dynamite and railroading wouldn’t have filled a shot glass, but we figured, what the hell. Jeff wasn’t mad. Guess he was used to Ben taking off on adventures, and I think he was glad to be shed of me on account of my socialistic ideas.
1
O
N A RAW
N
OVEMBER AFTERNOON
when low-lying clouds made Lower Manhattan seem more claustral than usual, Gil Castle left his office early to make a five o’clock appointment with his counselor at the House of Hope. In the lobby of his building, he buttoned the collar of his trench coat, took a twist out of the belt before buckling it, aligned the buckle with the flap, then stepped out into the noise and jostle of the capital of capitalism, walking briskly down Exchange Street to catch the subway for Grand Central and the 3:17 express to Stamford. Half an inch under six feet, with graying black hair combed back in a style reminiscent of a 1940s movie actor, a trim build, and mahogany brown eyes flanking a thin raptor’s nose that lent to his face the patrician severity of a Florentine prince, he made a pleasing impression on most people but his looks lacked the voltage to draw second glances from women. And in fact Castle didn’t draw any as he weaved through the pedestrian crowds; he would not have been aware of them even if he had. Since Amanda’s death, he had become sexually inert, dead to desire and, beyond that, to the desire for desire.
Shoulders hunched against the damp wind’s bite, one hand jammed in his coat pocket, briefcase swinging from the other, he marched on toward the Exchange Street station. The faint rumble of subway trains rising through sidewalk vents, the rush of heating plants blowing exhaust on rooftops, the sounds of traffic and countless feet treading pavement fused into one sound: the hum of the New York financial district, whose frantic busyness had once energized him, now stirred up a surly resentment. He recalled the commentaries he’d heard and read after 9/11. The day when everything changed forever.
We will never be the same again
. People seemed to really believe that bullshit, to want it to be so, as if they’d been yearning for some great and terrible event to tear them from their empty pursuit of stuff and the money to buy it, from their trivial amusements, their shallow celebrity worship, their love of titillating scandals, Monica Lewinsky blowing the president in the Oval Office. But the bustle through which he passed, young men and women scurrying by with iPod buds pinned to their ears, babbling into cell phones, signified that the cataclysm that was supposed to have changed everything had changed nothing, except for the families of those slaughtered on that exquisite morning. And for the soldiers fighting and dying in Afghanistan. Otherwise New York and America had moved on. It was important in America to move on, to avoid living in the past. That, Castle supposed, made him somewhat un-American. He could not help but live in the past; it clung to him like a second skin.
His sour discontent extended to his forthcoming appointment with Ms. Hartley, his counselor or therapist or whatever she was. Her platitudes and banalities, which her mellow Lauren Bacall voice wrapped in a cloak of profundity, grated on him. Nevertheless he was going to see her, partly out of habit—he’d been attending two sessions a week for some eight or nine months, one alone with her, one with a group—and partly to keep his two daughters at bay. After the disaster Jay Strauss, head of his firm’s retail division, had told him to take some time off to “get yourself back together.” Morgan and Justine had become alarmed by his behavior during his leave. This sociable father of theirs, this neatnik who always tied a perfect Windsor knot and never wore the same suit twice in a row, had turned into a minor-league Howard Hughes, secluding himself in his house, going without shaving or showering for days on end, letting his hair grow long. To their minds, his unhygienic reclusiveness was evidence that far from getting himself together, he was coming further apart. Clearly an intervention was warranted.
It was Morgan, the elder and a devout believer in the nostrums of the therapeutic culture, who had found the House of Hope on the Internet. This clinic that offered counseling to the bereaved was just what he needed, she said. He
had
to realize that he wasn’t alone; by sharing his suffering, he would relieve it. He’d resisted her urgings to sign up. He could not think Amanda’s name without breaking into tears; to utter it aloud to a stranger was unimaginable. Even the name of the place sounded ridiculous—the House of Hope, like you went there for hope as you might go to IHOP for pancakes. Morgan, however, was used to having her way; she’d always been like that, and her job as a literary publicist—importuning reluctant newspaper editors to interview her authors, bookstore managers to set up readings and signings—had honed the trait. She roped her sister into her campaign. Jussie was in her second year at Columbia Law and employed reasoned arguments to reinforce Morgan’s strident nagging. The sibling tag-team at last pummeled him into submission. How odd. His girls had become the parents, he the child.
The thirtyish Ms. Hartley was kind and earnest and much given to the cant of her profession: healing and closure and the grieving process, as if grief were something like digestion. Castle was sure she had never known grief from the inside, never felt its iron grip. Most of her advice was useless, like her suggestion that he cut his leave of absence short and return to work. She assured him that reestablishing familiar routines would do him a world of good. It did not. Nor did the presence of others in his group who had lost spouses make him feel less alone, any more than his own presence made them feel less alone. He’d discovered that deep sorrow, like bone pain, is profoundly isolating. It won’t allow itself to be shared. For that matter, he did not want to share it in the hope of achieving what Ms. Hartley said was his ultimate goal—acceptance. Why should he
accept
the senseless murder of his wife by a gang of homicidal zealots?
Maybe some wounds weren’t meant to heal. America seemed to have become a society dedicated to the proposition that no one should suffer, at least not for long. A Xanax in my tummy, and all’s right with the world. Castle had taken to reading the Roman stoics like Seneca and certain Greek tragedians like Aeschylus, whose voices spoke to him, across an ocean of time, with a thoughtfulness and a gravity utterly absent from Ms. Hartley’s psychobabble. And as in the November gloom he approached the Exchange Street station, a chorus from the
Oresteia
sang somberly in his mind’s ear.
He who learns must suffer. And even now in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God
. Suddenly, at the station’s mouth, the clammy subterranean air lofting up into his nostrils, he stopped and, without making a conscious decision, turned around and headed for Ground Zero. This was peculiar. Although HarrimanCutler’s offices were only a short distance from it, he always walked blocks out of his way to avoid setting eyes on it. Two months ago, during the observances of 9/11’s first anniversary, he made sure not to turn on the news. But now, for what reason he didn’t know, a compulsion like a magnetic force drew him to see and smell and touch the place where Amanda had been blown to atoms, also for a reason he didn’t know.
He climbed up to a platform and joined a crowd watching giant shovels take bites of debris and spew it, giant mouthful by giant mouthful, into dump trucks. Workers in hard hats and hazmat suits descended into an excavation deep as a stone quarry. Cutting torches flashed amid the wreckage, which by this time had taken on an orderly appearance. Gone were the smoking, jumbled mountains of melted steel and pulverized concrete he’d seen in photographs; gone as well the tall, jagged fragment of a tower’s facade that had thrust out of the ruins like a broken idol from some vanished civilization. How strange to see so much light pouring into these streets. It wasn’t a cheering light; it heightened the impression of a vast desolation, like the sun on an empty plain. What awful power had directed those nineteen men to wreak this calamity? His pastel Episcopalianism rejected the existence of the devil except as metaphor, yet the scene before him testified that real evil roamed the earth. Castle had studied the photographs of the hijackers in newspapers and newsmagazines, paying special attention to Muhammad Atta, the ringleader, the Egyptian engineer with the unsmiling mouth and hooded eyes. A sinister face, but no more sinister than the mug shot of an ordinary criminal, its lineaments offering no clue to the madness within. No, not madness. The attacks had been too well planned and executed to have been the work of lunatics. That was a new thing in Castle’s experience, and it was beyond grasp—an insane act perpetrated by sane minds.
He watched the workmen, he watched a team of dogs sniffing for remains in the mass grave of three thousand human beings. Mandy’s grave. Having been left without a body to bury had deepened the cruelty. Amanda hadn’t been killed, she’d been
annihilated
in that supernova of exploding jet fuel.
He left the platform, ducked under a sawhorse barricade, and strode over hoses and past pumps and grinding machinery toward a mound of rubble, an incongruous figure in his pinstripes and trench coat. Spotting a hard hat on the ground, he put it on, figuring to masquerade as a city official who had business there. With the furtive movements of a shoplifter, he plunged a hand into the mound and filled a coat pocket with dirt and ash, imagining, or pretending, that it contained some remnant of Amanda. Before someone saw through his paltry disguise, he walked away quickly, dropping the hard hat. He would place the contents of his pocket in an urn, like funeral ashes. Or maybe he would scatter them over Long Island Sound, where she’d loved to sail on summer weekends. It would provide a catharsis of sorts. Closure, in Ms. Hartley’s annoying argot.
The atmosphere from Ground Zero lingered as he walked back toward the subway. The air felt charged with menace, as before a thunderstorm. He’d made predictions throughout his career. The market was going to be bullish or bearish, this stock or mutual fund or commodity should be bought, sold, held. But nothing was predictable, was it? And if nothing was predictable, how was one to make sense of anything—or anyone? It was as if the fireballs of the exploding airliners had revealed a terrible truth previously hidden from him—his whole benign life and the faith it was founded on, that reason triumphs in the end, had been beautiful illusions.
As he rode the uptown train to Grand Central, paranoia overtook him. That dark-complected man in the doorway could be an Arab with a bomb or a gun concealed under his padded jacket. Why not? Anything at any moment. The policemen and National Guardsmen patrolling Grand Central did not reassure him. If some suicide bomber decided to blow himself up, right now at rush hour, they could not stop him. Beneath the zodiac on the terminal’s dome, painted stars on a painted sky, Castle dodged through the hurrying crowds toward the track for the Stamford train. He’d missed the 3:17 but was on time for the next express. An unshaven derelict approaching from the side—“Hey, got some spare change?”—so startled him that he almost broke into a run.
He walked down the platform, found a nearly empty car, and sat next to the window, alert and watchful, his back stiff, his knees locked, his briefcase on the seat beside him to deter unwanted company. Afraid of what? he wondered as more passengers entered the car. Of being blown up by some fanatic from the Arabian deserts? The terrorist who killed him would be doing him a favor. Of the unknown, the unpredictable? Yes, that. Of another strike that would take someone else dear to him? That, too. Morgan, sporty, competitive Morgan, slender Justine, her willowy frame belying her tough, lawyerly mind. To lose his daughters would be unendurable. Maybe he should talk to his girls, urge them to move someplace safer, insist on it. As the soldier who loses faith in his commander trembles before the enemy, so did Castle’s loss of faith in an understandable world bring on this queasy dread of the armies gathering even now in desert huts and city apartments and mountain villages to plot new outrages; the fevered armies delirious with visions of the paradise they would gain by killing themselves and hundreds or thousands of innocents who weren’t innocents in their eyes but infidels deserving of death.
Soon enough the car was packed. A stylishly dressed young woman stood in the aisle, glancing at the briefcase that occupied the empty seat, then at him. She looked safe enough. He put the case on his lap, and she sat down and pulled a book from her shoulder bag. It could just as easily have been a grenade or a canister of poison gas. What was wrong with the Metro-North railroad? Airline passengers were being screened and searched and wanded as never before, but rail commuters weren’t given even the most cursory once-over. Imagine releasing poison gas in a crowded car. It had happened once, in Japan he thought it was. Sarin gas, if he remembered right.
The train rolled through the underground darkness, then into the fading daylight and past the Westchester suburbs into Connecticut. As it approached Stamford, another frightening thought came to him: the stuff in his pocket was as likely to contain remains of the hijackers as anything of Amanda. He knocked his knees together, drummed the briefcase with his fingers, and even as he said to himself,
For chrissake, get a grip
, he stood up, crouching under the luggage rack, and muttered, “Excuse me,” to the young woman. She swung her legs aside, and he wriggled past her into the doorway. The train stopped, the doors snapped open. He got out. In the late-autumn dusk, several commuters on the platform threw quick, puzzled looks at the well-dressed fiftyish man dipping into his coat pocket and flinging dirt over the tracks, like someone scattering grass seed over a lawn. He felt embarrassed but relieved. He called the House of Hope and canceled his appointment with Ms. Hartley, then caught the train for New Canaan.
Half an hour later he pulled into his drive on Oenoke Ridge. For ten years, he and Amanda had shared the white frame colonial with black shutters and the plaque beside the front door declaring the name of its original owner, one Seth Raymond, and the year it was built, 1801. Its windows were darkened. He unlocked the door. As always, Amanda’s absence was a presence in itself. Samantha slightly deflected the blow, bolting inside through the dog door in back to prance around him, giddy, as if he’d been gone for a month. He petted her, thinking, They live outside of time; a few hours can seem like a month to a dog. The English setter trailed him to the hall closet, where he hung his coat, then to the bar in the den, where he knocked back a scotch to calm his nerves, then upstairs to the master bedroom, where he changed into jeans and a sweatshirt. He took a piss. “I went to …,” he said aloud as he came out of the bathroom. He was going to tell Mandy about his visit to Ground Zero. It wasn’t the first time he’d begun to speak to her before catching himself. There were times when he half-expected to see her.