Crossers (43 page)

Following instructions, Castle kept his eyes on one young cow that showed signs of making a break for it. She was lagging behind, casting glances toward a creekbed. Before he could react, she took off at a dead run, her calf trotting after her on spindly legs. He spurred Comanche and chased her into the creek, where she veered abruptly. He went to turn the pinto, but inadvertently pulled back on the reins while jabbing with his spurs, leaving the horse totally confused.

Tessa rode up to him. “Give him his head,” she said. “He knows better than you do.”

Cow and calf were scampering down the creek. Castle slacked the reins and cued Comanche into a high lope. The cow spun to run away at a right angle to her original path, but Comanche, sensing her intent, quickly stopped her. When she whirled in the opposite direction, Tessa was there to cut her off. She was an obstinate, ill-tempered animal, for as they started to push her out of the creek, she jumped it and scrambled up the other side, almost trampling her calf.

Tessa flew at her, and leaning over in the saddle, she smacked her haunch with her coiled rope. “You dumb bitch! You almost stomped your kid!” Another smack. “You want to run, I’ll run you! I’ll run you till you drop!”

The lashing with rope and tongue tamed the obdurate cow. She fell into a docile walk.

Sweating, winded, Castle caught up. “That’s a side to you I haven’t seen, Tess.”

Her face glowed from the exertion and the burst of temper. She drew a breath, about to speak, then thought better of it and looked at him, her lips parted.

They trailed the misbehaving cow and her calf back to the herd, which passed through the second gate without incident. Ahead, facing a road, were the steel rails and posts of the pens where the branding would take place. In the pasture the thirsty cattle ambled to a dirt tank, crowding it, like wild animals around a water hole. Plovers sprang from the grass-tufted banks, screeching alarms. Gerardo and McIntyre remained behind to watch the herd, while the others rode back to ranch headquarters by way of the old Spanish trace. Rain squalls drew across the face of the Huachucas and the light that tinged them had an almost unearthly glow.

“So did you learn anything, Mr. Nuclear Physicist?” Blaine asked, sitting his horse in a cowboy slouch, dried sweat rimming the armpits of his shirt.

“Think so.”

“He learned that he isn’t smarter than a good cow horse,” Tessa said.

“Uh-huh. Well, you done all right for somebody who don’t know his butt from a bucket.”

Coming from Blaine, this was high praise, and Castle grinned. He’d had the time of his life.

T
HAT NIGHT
he woke up in the house on Oenoke Ridge and gazed at Amanda as she slept. She was a beautiful sleeper, her extravagant auburn hair spread over the pillow, her face serene. He bent over to kiss her, and her eyes opened wide. It was actually a little frightening, the way her eyes snapped open, like doll’s eyes, and then they were making love, Mandy’s arms encircling him, her strong legs locked over the small of his back, tighter and tighter, and she began to crush the breath out of him. He tried to call her name but could make only a strangled, inarticulate cry. He felt himself to be in the embrace not of his Mandy but of some powerful being, coiled around him like a python. He clutched her limbs and with a superhuman effort broke their grip, the sudden release producing a triumphant relief as intense as the constriction had been. It was almost rapturous.

His alarm buzzed him into consciousness. He sat up, wrapped in the tangled bedsheets, and looked at Sam, white in the darkness of the room. The glowing numerals of his clock read four
A.M.
He was to be at the branding corrals at five. He was fully awake, yes, and yet the rapturous feeling did not dissipate as he swung out of bed, washed his face, dressed, and let Sam out to relieve herself; as he slugged down a cup of reheated coffee and stepped outside and stood under the paling sky to see Pegasus and Andromeda fading in the southwest. Driving to the corrals, he pondered the meaning of the dream. Three possibilities: in restless sleep, he’d become bound in the bedsheets and his subconscious created a dream of release. Or, the mystical explanation, it signified that Amanda had let him go. Or, the one he preferred, it was he who had let her go, in a final liberation from the clench of the past. A new love, a new happiness, a whole new life—he was free to embrace it all.

28

W
HEN
C
ASTLE ARRIVED
at the corrals, the dawn looked like a forest fire blazing on the rim of the mountains. Blaine and Gerardo were with the herd, Tessa and Monica leaning against the rails, a regular pair of old-time cowgirls in their bandannas and high-peaked, dust-powdered hats. An array of branding irons lay atop a stove made from a rusty steel drum, with an acetylene tank and a pile of mesquite branches beside it. This wasn’t the occasion to tell Tessa about his unusual dream, eager as he was to do it. She was all business, as she’d been yesterday, and so was Monica. They showed him the equipment: two sets of branding irons, one for heifers, the other for bull calves; a plierslike emasculator to make steers of the bulls; an ear notcher, which resembled a paper punch; and two syringe guns with graduated scales on the tubes, one to vaccinate the animals against bovine distemper, one against respiratory diseases. He was to do the inoculations, which required the least skill. Tessa would brand, and Monica would notch the ears and castrate, a task, she joked, that she tried not to enjoy too much.

She held a small bottle upside down and drew a milky liquid into one of the needles. It was to be injected into the fleshy flap at the top of a calf’s foreleg. The second, filled with a clear fluid, was poked into the neck.

“Don’t be shy, jab it right in,” Monica instructed. “And don’t mix them up. What I do”—she was speaking now as to one of her third graders—“is to hold the distemper in my right hand and the other one in my left and say to myself, ‘right, leg, left, neck.’”

McIntyre drove in, pulling a horse trailer, followed by the neighbor and his cowhands. He and McIntyre mounted up and stationed themselves in a pen next to the corral. The cowboys, who would start the day as flankers, remained afoot. Monica tossed the mesquite into the brander and lit the acetylene torch under the wood. It made a low, compressed roaring, and then Tessa shoved the irons into the fire. Squinting against the new sun, Castle saw Blaine and Gerardo gathering the herd. Some minutes later they pushed the cattle into the holding pen, and the enchanting stillness of the morning was broken by a terrific din, punctuated by the yells of the mounted crew. They were cutting out half the cows to make it easier to rope, Tessa explained, raising her voice. “They keep half in so the calves don’t completely freak out.”

It began a little after six. Lariats twirled above the churning mass of beef, then flew from the riders’ hands. Blaine and Gerardo pulled two calves into the corral while Blaine’s neighbor and McIntyre blocked the mothers from chasing after their abducted young. The Anglo cowboy, who looked as though he didn’t weigh much more than the heifer he wrestled to the ground, knelt on it as Gerardo nudged his horse forward to keep the rope taut. Monica leaped in to notch its ear; Castle, telling himself “right, leg, left, neck,” jabbed the syringes. Tessa came in behind him, positioned the iron over the hindquarters, and pressed it into the hide, the stench of singed hair and flesh rising with the smoke. Gerardo slipped his loop, and the caterwauling animal ran back into the pen. Castle hopped over to the second heifer, flanked by the Mexican cowboy, and botched the first inoculation, squirting the vaccine down the foreleg. “Get another one, quick!” Monica yelled. He ran back, refilled the syringe, and was successful on his next try.

By that time two more had been dragged in, a heifer and a bull. Castle winced in sympathy as Monica, kneeling on one knee, cut around its testicle with a jackknife, then snipped the tube with the emasculator. Blood flecked her chaps. Blaine rode in, towing another bull. Just as Tessa branded it, its mother broke into the corral and charged around in a maternal fury, knocking the Anglo cowboy into the rails and almost doing the same to Castle before Gerardo drove her out.

The work went on for another hour. Castle fell into the rhythm of it, exulting in the speed, the coordination, the teamwork—branding was something of an athletic event. Dust and whirling ropes and a bedlam of bawling cattle. The sweet smell of flaming mesquite mixed in with the stink of manure and horseflesh and cowflesh and burned hide. Another hour. Ear notches and testicle cups piled up on a bench next to the brander. Cumulonimbus built mountains atop the mountains in the west, and lightning threaded the clouds. The air had weight, freighted with the humidity exported to the desert from the tropics, where the chubascos were born. The ground and roping crews traded places, Castle excepted. In furtherance of his education, Blaine promoted him to flanker, and he spent the third hour grappling with calves that writhed and kicked and thrashed. Before this experience he’d felt sorry for them, cute little Walt Disney creatures poked with needles, burned with irons, ears notched, balls cut off. After he got whacked in the knee and then knocked flat by a steer that twisted out of his arms, his sentiments were less benign.

They were finished by eleven o’clock, and all of them were lacquered in sweat and dust. The livestock were released from the pen to wander back to the pasture. Castle had begun the day stiff and sore from yesterday’s gathering; now he felt as if he’d played a couple of quarters of football. Blaine’s congratulatory slap on the back soothed the aches in his aging body.

They counted the triangular ear notches and the furry cups. Seventy-seven steers, eighty-nine heifers. One hundred eighty cows had calved in the spring, so the count of a hundred and sixty-six represented a 90 percent survival rate.

“Pretty good,” Blaine declared. He sharpened a long mesquite stick, skewered a dozen testicles, and roasted them over the coals glowing in the brander. “We’ll be havin’ lunch at the house—these Rocky Mountain oysters are horsey-dervees.”

Castle plucked one from the skewer, bit down, and gulped the gristly morsel. His cousin passed the kebab to Monica and Tessa, who abstained, then to the neighbor and his cowboys, who chomped them with relish. Gerardo and McIntyre, still in the saddle, were moving a few cows and calves that had drifted onto the road.

That was how Castle would remember the scene: the two mounted men, he and the others slouched against the corral, munching the oysters, the cattle on the road. He would remember that they all saw the van come flying over a rise in the road perhaps a hundred yards away. It sailed into the air like a stunt car, landed hard, blowing its front tires, and sped on, slewing on its rims. He would remember the pulsing lights of the pursuing Border Patrol wagon and everyone shouting to Gerardo and McIntyre to get out of the way and the two riders jabbing with their spurs and the horses leaping a culvert at the roadside and the cow and calf spinning around in panic to jump into the path of the oncoming van. It struck both almost at once. The calf, flipped into the air, crashed into the windshield; the cow was flung sideways, the lower half of a back leg severed at the joint. He would remember the shriek of shattering glass, the thud of metal on meat, and the van’s side and rear doors busting open to spew bodies, bodies that turned acrobatic twists and midair somersaults, that flew with outspread arms like high divers. He would remember seizing Tessa by the waist and tossing her into the middle of the corral as the van tipped over and skidded toward them on its side before it careened into the rails with a sickening crunch.

His memories of the aftermath would forever be disjointed, a series of video clips out of sequence. A helicopter landing to evacuate the injured. Ambulances. A man staggering about, making spastic movements and uttering unintelligible sounds, a fist-size chunk missing from his skull, exposing part of his brain. A dead boy spread-eagled in the flooded culvert, his still eyes staring up through the water. Cries and moans. The horrible bellows of the injured cow. Gerardo limping, for his horse had bucked him off at the moment of the collision. A Border Patrolman reporting the statistics to the Sonoita station on his car radio—twenty-two migrants packed into the van, five killed, nine critically hurt. Blaine standing over the cow. The crack of his pistol.

29

W
HILE
Y
VONNE SAT
in the grandstands waiting for the second race to begin, The Professor stood in line at the mutual windows. The instructions, passed to him through Billy Cruz, had been precise: he was to appear at the window marked “Large Teller” before the second race and place a certain advance bet. Someone would then tell him what to do next. He thought the Cochise County racetrack and fairgrounds a curious site for his introductory meeting with Yvonne, and he found the hugger-mugger arrangements a bit comic. The location was a favorable sign, however. She had almost as many cops and politicians on her payroll in Douglas as she did next door in Agua Prieta. She felt comfortable here, which suggested that luring her to the American side to do a deal, when the time came, would not be difficult.

He stepped up to the window and said, “Quinella on five and eight in the second.”

As he took his ticket, a young man with sandy red hair, leaning against a post and reading a program, approached him. “Señor Carrington?” he asked, with a pronounced rolling of
r’
s.

The Professor nodded.

“Julián Menéndez,” said the young man. “This way, please.”

They were immediately joined by a black-haired primate wearing an embroidered shirt outside his pants. He and Julián guided The Professor to the stands, where Yvonne was seated on a vinyl pillow, across from the finish line and beside another pistolero, even heftier than the first. She wore fashionable sunglasses, a tight pair of midcalf canary yellow pants, and a black tank top exposing thin, fair, faintly freckled arms. She looked better than she did in photographs—the red hair not quite the worm’s nest he’d seen in the pictures, and the taut body attractive enough to keep a thirty-five-year-old like Cruz interested, though Billy had other motivations in securing her affections—but her appearance was disappointing nonetheless. The Queen of Agua Prieta, author of massacres and of her husband’s assassination, ought to be either stunningly glamorous or fascinatingly grotesque. Yvonne could have been almost any woman over fifty who’d kept her figure. Christ, she looked almost suburban in those yellow pants.

Except for the briefest glance, she did not acknowledge The Professor as he sat down. She studied the sheet for the second race, a thoroughbred maiden, three furlongs and seventy, half the track. On the far side the horses entered the starting gate. The announcer called, “And they’re off!” Spectators rose from their seats, groaning or cheering. Yvonne followed the race through opera glasses, waving her curled-up program, shouting, “¡Ándale ocho!” A voice irritating to The Professor’s ear yet pleasant to the touch—a feeling of smoothly sanded wood. “¡Ándale Sassy Prince!” Rounding the last turn, Sassy Prince had the rail and was leading the five horse, La Corona Blanca, with the rest of the field well behind. La Corona Blanca closed in the stretch but didn’t have enough and finished second. “Bravo, Sassy Prince!” exclaimed Yvonne and sat down. “So I won the daily double.” Her son and guardians offered sycophantic applause.

“And you?” she asked, turning to The Professor for the first time. She spoke in accentless English and addressed him as if they were old friends. “How did you do?”

“Five and eight were my quinella picks.”

She looked at the tote board. “Then let us go collect.”

They went downstairs to the windows and cashed their tickets. Sassy Prince paid off $980 on Yvonne’s wager. She bet the entire amount on a horse called Cholla Tango to win the last race of the day.

“I own her. We’ll have a look at her.”

Passing a beer tent where a Norteño band was playing, they went to a roped-off holding pen, in which trainers were walking their horses before a crowd of onlookers—dark-skinned men in straw cowboy hats, light-skinned men in snappy Stetsons, several young women in sprayed-on Levi’s, sexy in a trailer-trash sort of way. Yvonne herself was not without her erotic appeal—the allure of danger, he supposed. An excellent ass for a woman her age, shown off to best effect by the tight pants.

“That’s her,” said Yvonne, indicating a jet black thoroughbred filly. “I bought her a month ago. A three-year-old. She won her first race in Tucson, five and a half furlongs. This is her first run at six.”

The Professor checked his program. “Its says here the owner is an Alex Daoud.”

“The owner of record. Do you play the horses much, Carrington?”

“No.”

“I have a system. I bet the colors of the jockey’s silks. They give me a hunch, you know? I bet Sassy Prince to win because the colors said that was what would happen. My son calls that ‘magical thinking,’ but a lot of times, the magic works.”

“Colors you can hear,” he said. “Makes sense to me. I can smell colors.”

“How interesting. Let us take a walk.”

She slipped her arm into his, an intimacy that surprised him who was seldom surprised by anything. They strolled through the fairgrounds like a couple, Yvonne asking him cunning questions about his time in prison with Cruz. He’d anticipated that she would test him and had quizzed Cruz at length and was fairly sure that he knew more about her lover’s incarceration than she did. He decided to chum the waters, saying that he was eager to make up for lost time in prison. A year ago Cruz’s uncle Vicente had put him in touch with Carrasco, and he’d been buying from him, but—

“Carrasco?” she interrupted. “He’s old and fat. A fat little old man and finished.”

“That’s why I’m here. I’m looking to line up a heavy hitter in Phoenix. He wants quantities Carrasco can’t deliver.”

She stopped walking in front of the mechanical bull concession, which presently had no riders, its operator lounging on a chair with a magazine. Yvonne didn’t know what to make of Carrington. She approved of his appearance. So many of her customers looked like what they were, sleazy criminals, but the clean-shaven Carrington with his handsome if forgettable face could have passed for an insurance agent except for his blue eyes, which were very piercing, almost impossible to look into for more than a second. Her hunch, what Julián might have called “magical thinking,” was that he could be a steady, reliable client. Yet there was something a little odd about him, a little off. She couldn’t say what it was.

“You know, you don’t sound like a gringo. The way you talk. Your accent.”

A sharp ear, thought The Professor. He had learned that when manufacturing a tapestry of lies, it was often wise to weave in as many threads of truth as possible, so long as you remembered which was which. “My father was English, my mother Mexican, and I went to school in the States.”

“So you speak Spanish?”

He made an open circle with thumb and forefinger. “Un poco. Enough to get by.”

Just then a bugle call sounded, from inside her purse. She noticed his puzzled look and smiled. “My mobile’s ring-tone.”

“‘El Degüello,’” he said. “Santa Anna played it before he stormed the Alamo.”

“Now, how did you know that?”

“I read a lot of history. Maybe you’ll want to get that.”

“The call can wait.” She took his arm once more, moving away from the mechanical bull and its idle operator. “You’re more important. What do you have in mind?”

“Bridal dresses,” he answered, using a common metaphor. “Vestidas de novias. Sample material to start. A key.”

Her mobile rang again. Aggravated, she answered. It was Clemente, her real estate cousin. Más tarde, she said. She was having a meeting.

“It is about the San Ignacio,” Clemente replied.

Cupping the phone, she asked Carrington to excuse her a moment, and walked off a few steps, pressing a hand to her ear against the noise from the grandstands. The taxes had been paid; the property was no longer for sale, Clemente went on. The listing broker had told him herself. He then called the ranch to confirm and spoke to a woman, the daughter-in-law of the old woman. Yes, it was true. Off the market. He’d informed her that he had a buyer willing to make an offer on the whole place, but she said they weren’t interested.

Yvonne was stunned. How, she asked, how could those people, those cowboys, come up with so much money in such a short time? Clemente had wondered that himself and had made discreet inquiries, discovering that someone, a friend or relative of the Erskines, some rich guy, had paid their tax liability. He could try to find out more if Yvonne wished … You do that! she commanded. He should find out all he could. She would speak to him later.

She snapped the mobile shut. That fucking family! The curse of her life. It was almost as if they’d known of her plans and desires and had deliberately thwarted them, merely to torment her more. Agitated thoughts collided in her mind, so filled with clarity only a few minutes ago.

“Please wait a few minutes,” she said to Carrington, and went to the ladies’ room, under the grandstands. Sitting in a stall, she took out her vial and miniature spoon and administered two bumps. She was now using an eighth a day to keep her mental scaffolding from collapsing. Julián had been nagging her—you’re getting just like him, he’d chided, meaning Fermín. Like snorting powder was the same thing as smoking crack. That pest. If he would find a woman and get her pregnant, he’d have something to do besides monitor his mother’s habits. What had she done to deserve an only son who would rather play the trumpet than screw a woman? But he was right. She should quit. She had, as a matter of fact, been planning to take a holiday in Zihuatanejo and get off the stuff, then maybe fly to New York to do some shopping. Not now, with Clemente’s news. Now she would have to work harder, which would mean more of this shit. Two more snorts. No one could blame her if her addiction deepened. It would be the fault of those people. Her composure and self-assurance began to return, and she walked out with her most regal stride.

“Bad news?” Carrington asked.

She whisked the air. “A real estate deal. It fell through … never mind. You wanted a sample dress. All right. I can arrange delivery. Where? When?”

The Professor caught the pressured, too-rapid speech and noticed her swipe her nose with the back of her hand. How about that? Yvonne using product. Would that work to his advantage or disadvantage? “We haven’t talked price,” he said.

“Seventeen.”

“Standard wholesale. Joaquín charges ten.”

“Sure he does!” she said, an octave too loudly. “Shit product for a shit price! Let’s get out of this fucking sun.”

They retired to the bar tent and ordered two beers. It was nearly empty, the band was on a break, and he trusted Yvonne would keep her voice down.

“What happened with your real estate deal?” he asked. You never knew, in these things, what scrap of information might prove useful in the future.

“A ranch I want to buy … really, it’s none of your business. Escúchame, Carrington. I don’t like one-night stands. I’m interested only in long-term relationships.”

“So am I.” Why not? He thought. Why not a teaser? “The guy I’m trying to line up”—he flashed the spread fingers of both hands twice to signify twenty-kilo shipments—“on a steady basis, maybe once a week.”

Yvonne’s expression brightened—she fairly gleamed. He all but saw the numbers glowing on her mental calculator. A possible sixteen million a year wholesale. Hell, in a couple of years she could buy the Pyramid of the Sun.

“All right. Fifteen for the dress.”

“That’ll do.”

The notes of “Call to Post” drifted from the track. Yvonne looked at her watch. “That should be the seventh. My filly runs in the next. Put a hundred on her to win, Carrington. I
know
she’s going to win.”

“The colors of the silks?”

“And other reasons.”