Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  “Esta es. Mira.” Pointing at a word printed under the name of the distiller: REPOSADO. It means, as Ben has learned from his previous trips, that the tequila has been aged a long time and is of the highest quality.

  “¿Cuánto es?”

  “Dos.”

  Before leaving, Uncle Joshua instructed him to bargain, but Ben is more than anxious to be on his way and dips into his pocket without argument.

  “Bueno,” Esteban says, palming the two silver dollars. “Oye. Sálgate por aquí.” He gestures at the back door, then adds with a twitch of his head, “El borracho.”

  “Hasta luego.”

  Walking around to the front, Ben stuffs the jug into a saddlebag, mounts up, and starts down the street at a trot. Gringuito. Cabroncito. What was he picking on me for? he asks himself. What did I do to him? The sheer unreasonableness of the Mexican’s hostility agitates and frightens him as much as the hostility itself.

  A wind has sprung up in advance of the thunderstorm building to the south. A dust devil twirls crazily ahead, seeming to lead Ben out of Santa Cruz before it spins itself out. At a wash a herd of thirsty corrientes blocks his way. He urges Maggie on and whoops to clear a path through the jostling mass of pale hides and high, curved horns. Maggie plods up the opposite bank, and Ben rides on toward the border, once more at a brisk walk. He hasn’t gone far when he hears rapid hoofbeats behind him. He knows who it is even before he turns to see him, mounted on the sorrel at a full gallop. Ben’s thought is, He wants to steal my horse! Maggie, as startled as he by the oncoming rider, lunges forward. Ben kicks her hard and slacks the reins, and she takes off, neck outstretched, mane flying. He doesn’t dare turn to see if the vaquero is gaining, and doesn’t need to. He can tell by the sound that he is. In a few seconds the sorrel is alongside, its nose half a length behind Maggie’s, the Mexican brandishing a ramal braided to his reins. An observer watching from afar would think the two riders were high-spirited cowhands, running a race.

  “¡A ver qué tan hombrecito eres!” the Mexican yells, leaning over as he cracks Maggie’s haunch with the ramal.

  Thinking that some predator is attacking her from behind, which is in fact the case, the mare whirls off the road, kicking with both back legs at the same time, the violent movement nearly pitching Ben over her neck and jerking his feet from the stirrups. He manages to hold his seat but cannot get his stirrups back as Maggie twists and bucks. He cannot believe he’s still on, but because he’s been riding since age four, he knows he won’t be for long, knows further that he had better bail before he’s thrown. He lands hard, his legs crumple from the impact, and he rolls two or three times through the grass and over the rocks the grass conceals.

  The wind knocked out of him, his ribs bruised, he lies there for several moments, staring at a harrier circling high above. When he realizes that he hasn’t broken any bones, he sits up and sees Maggie some ten or twenty yards away, ground-tied by the reins hanging from her neck. She seems to be looking at him apologetically. Ben wants to say, “Got nothin to feel bad about, wasn’t your fault,” but he can’t speak. His tongue and throat feel as if they’re coated with sand.

  He gets to his feet and then notices the sorrel standing under an empty saddle some distance away, near the old mine tailings. The gringo-hater lies sprawled in the middle of the road, motionless. His horse must have reared when Maggie kicked, Ben thinks, and being so drunk, he couldn’t hold his seat. Hope his neck is broke.

  What he should do now is ride home as fast as the mare can carry him, but that is not what he does. Leading Maggie by the reins, he approaches the prone figure as a hunter would a fallen bear or mountain lion, uncertain if it’s dead or merely wounded. The wind blows harder, lightning rives a plum-colored cloud advancing northward.

  The Mexican appears to be dead, an arm flung over his chest, eyes half open, mustache matted with the blood trickling from his nostrils; but then he makes a sound—it’s something between a sigh and a snore—and Ben notices the big chest rising, falling, rising. What if this crazy horse thief revives and comes after him as he rides homeward?

  Fear rises again in Ben’s throat, and he hates this drunken vaquero for making him afraid. He kneels behind his tormentor’s head and bends low, draws his knife, and with one swift stroke he opens in the Mexican’s throat a second mouth that vomits blood over his hand and shirt.

  The man’s legs thrash, digging the Spanish spurs into the ground; he wheezes and gurgles, and when the arm on his chest flops to the ground with a spastic movement, Ben jumps aside. Trembling, he stares at the body, now still, and at the scarlet grin arcing almost ear to ear in the brown throat. A thrill of conquest shudders through him—he feels like a David standing over the slain Goliath. And yet he can’t believe he’s done what he’s done. It now seems as though the knife drew itself and of its own will slashed into living flesh.

  He wipes the blade in the grass, then scours his hand and shirt with dirt from the road. The dead man’s horse still stands near the mine tailings. Nearby Maggie grazes on succulent tufts of blue grama. The harrier glides low, seeking prey. The thunderstorm rolls on, passing to the west, while the sky directly overhead is clear. Nothing much has changed except Ben Erskine.

  A calm descends upon this Ben who is no longer the Ben he’d been and can never be again. The trembling stops. His mind is cold and clear and thinks ahead. Some traveler is bound to come upon the body and fly into Santa Cruz with the news that a man with his throat cut lies in the middle of the road. The report will reach the ears of the local law. Possibly Esteban and the two customers will tell them about what happened in the cantina. Of course, by the time the rurales ride out to look for him, he will be back in Lochiel, beyond their reach. But can he take that chance? His instincts tell him to hide the body now, while there is no one around. The problem is, where can he hide it out here in all this open country? He can’t drag it very far—the Mexican must weigh more than two hundred pounds. Then he looks toward the dead man’s horse and the mine tailings, cascading down the slopes of the low hills.

  He approaches the sorrel carefully, removes the riata from the saddle, and returns to the road. He cinches the loop over the Mexican’s ankles, giving the rope a few extra turns for good measure, then wraps the opposite end around his saddle horn and remounts Maggie. The smell of blood makes the pinto nervous. Ben settles her down, and she has no trouble pulling the corpse over the open ground and up one of the hills. Ben halts there, unties the riata from the saddle horn and, after some tugging and shoving that soaks him in sweat, rolls the body into a mine shaft. Trailing the rope still bound to its ankles, it tumbles straight down fifteen or twenty feet to land on its side, the legs bent against the side of the hole, which isn’t much wider than the Mexican is tall. Was tall. Ben scrambles down to unsaddle the sorrel and take off its reins and headstall. That done, he sends the horse away with a loud yell and a slap on the rump. Lugging the tack uphill works up more sweat. He tosses it into the pit with its former owner. A ver qué tan hombrecito eres. The Mexican’s last words. Let’s see what you have, little man. Reckon you found out, you horse-thievin’ son of a bitch. Ben mounts up and starts for the border and Lochiel, spurring the pinto into a racehorse’s run. It’s as though he’s in flight, though no one pursues him.

  Joshua Pittman is in his office, studying a case he is to hear tomorrow: a dispute between two stockmen over water rights. He’s had trouble concentrating. Ben should have returned an hour ago. His anxiety eases when he hears, through the open window, hoof clops out back and the squeal of the gate swinging open. He goes out to the porch, and there is Ben, leading his horse into the yard. Maggie is lathered, blown out.

  “What took you so long? You’re too young to have been dancing with the señoritas.”

  Ben makes no reply, takes the jug out of a saddlebag and, with a skittering, sidelong glance of his pale gray eyes, hands it to his uncle.

  “I’d better cool Maggie down before I put her up,” Ben declares, stil
l with that evasive look, his voice subdued.

  Joshua sets the jug down and leans against a post. “Don’t want to put yourself up wet either,” he remarks, gesturing at his nephew’s sweat-stained, dirt-spattered shirt. “Whatever held you up, you sure did come home in a hurry it looks like.”

  “Knew we was late.”

  “Were late. You’ve had eight years of schooling.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ben goes to his horse, tugs the latigo to loosen the girth, and walks the mare around the yard, passing into and out of the cottonwood’s lengthening shadow, mottled by the late-afternoon light shooting through the branches. His head is bent contemplatively; the fingers of his free hand open and close, as if he’s molding an invisible lump of clay.

  The Justice steps off the porch. “Run into trouble?”

  Ben halts and makes a vague movement with his head.

  “That a yes?”

  Ben nods.

  “Well, what kind of trouble?”

  “Somebody tried to steal my horse.”

  Joshua flinches. He’d expected to hear that it was mild trouble, boy trouble, like a run-in with some rough kids. “Who was it?”

  “A Messikin.”

  “Stands to reason it was a Mexican, you being in Mexico at the time.”

  This droll comment is intended to ease Ben’s agitation, but it has the opposite effect. Looking at his uncle squarely for the first time since his return, he snaps in response, “What do you reckon? That he come up to me and said, ‘Howdeedo, my name is Pablo and I’m here to steal your horse?’”

  “Don’t get sassy.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. It’s just that … You know that hunting trip I went on last fall with my friends? When we saw the mountain lion a-sneakin’ up on our packhorse and shot it? This Messikin scared me more’n that lion did. Never been so scared. I still am—some.”

  Ben’s lips quiver as he speaks, and Joshua draws closer to him, raising a hand to give his shoulder a reassuring squeeze; but the movement is immediately checked by the peculiar expression in the boy’s eyes. There is no fright in them, and not much boy either. They seem somehow older and harder.

  “There’s nothing to be scared of now. Doubt that Mexican is going to come here after your horse.”

  “Ain’t no doubt about it,” Ben affirms, the harshness of his tone matching his look. “He was chasin’ me and tried to make Maggie throw me so he could take her. But he was the one got throwed. Busted his neck, I think. He’s dead, Uncle Josh.”

  Startled, Joshua does not say anything. He then notices something that startles him more: he’d mistaken the nature of the reddish brown blemishes spattered across the front of Ben’s shirt and on the right sleeve.

  “What’s this?” he asks, rubbing a large blot on the cuff.

  “That?” Ben says with a quick look. “I reckon it’s dirt.”

  Cupping the boy’s elbow in his hand, Joshua guides him to the porch, sits down on the stoop, and motions Ben to sit beside him. “Maggie can wait. You’ve got a lot to tell me, and I had better hear it. I had better hear it all.”

  • • •

  That night Ben sleeps fitfully, troubled by strange dreams. There is a mystical streak in the family, which he has inherited. He wakes, sits up, and sees his father standing at the foot of his bed, the beloved father wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a leather vest with his ranger’s badge pinned to it, a Winchester Model 94 at his side. Tom Erskine tells him he is a good boy, there is nothing to worry about, nothing to fear. “Go to sleep, son,” he whispers, and Ben does, undisturbed by any more bad dreams.

  While he sleeps, the Justice records the confession in his diary, a clothbound ledger with a leather spine. (He is a faithful diarist, and after his death in 1928, his journals will find their way into the Arizona Historical Society’s Tucson archives, where they will be read by a descendant many decades later.) Most of the entries, written in the clear hand of one trained in old-fashioned penmanship, take up a page at most and concern events in town, or observations on the weather, or the particulars of an interesting court case. A few reveal Joshua’s deepest thoughts and feelings—his loneliness, his desire to meet a woman who will evict his longing for Gabriela.

  The entry for August 8, 1903, covers five full pages and is less legible, with words crossed out and rewritten in the spaces between the lines. Joshua maintains a dispassionate tone in the first three pages, which describe the incident. While the hurried scrawl communicates emotional turmoil, the straitjacketed language reads like a police report or a dictated deposition. The sole exception is this sentence: “When his assailant showed signs of life, Ben, thinking he would come to and resume pursuit, unsheathed his knife and cut the man’s throat.” The last four words are underscored: cut the man’s throat.

  What follows are Joshua’s reactions to what he’s heard. He begins with a bit of self-recrimination, mentioning how dangerous the border was in those days, with bandits and renegades ranging freely on both sides. To send a thirteen-year-old across the line, alone and for such a frivolous purpose, was a dereliction of his duties as the boy’s guardian. The fact that Ben had not met with trouble on previous trips had made Joshua complacent. “It could have been Ben lying out there with a broken neck or worse,” he continues. “The thought makes my soul tremble.”

  But as his commentary goes on, it becomes evident that what might have happened did not disturb him nearly so much as what did. He describes the Mexican as “a common thug who doubtless needed killing;” but he regrets with all his being that his nephew had to be the one to do it. He judges, moreover, that Ben did not need to kill him. The man of the law cannot escape drawing that conclusion, though he does not state it plainly. He writes that at Ben’s age he would have fled as soon as he saw that his attacker had been knocked unconscious; that he would have lacked the cold-blooded nerve to slash the man’s throat and the presence of mind, like a seasoned criminal’s, to dispose of the corpse.

  Joshua Pittman is a man of the western frontier, raised in west Texas during the Comanche wars. He’s seen something of greed and violence and the miscreant passions to which all men are heir; but the diary makes it plain that his nephew has presented him with something he’s not encountered before, something he cannot quite grasp but that nonetheless expands his notions of what is possible. A boy goes off on a mundane errand and returns a blood-splattered killer. How can that be? Where is Providence to allow such a thing to happen? He is like a man who has been changed by a new and powerful perception. Scribbling by the light of a kerosene lantern, he pauses, pressing the tip of the pen’s wooden shaft to his cheek as he ponders how to express this new perception and incorporate it into the realm of his experience. Unable to find the language, he reads over what he’s written, and that is when he strikes a bold line under the words “cut the man’s throat.”

  He then digresses into a brief reminiscence of his father, Caleb Pittman, a twice-wounded Confederate veteran who, bearing a wagonload of bitterness and belligerence, left Georgia to ranger in Texas and kill Comanches with as much zest as he had Yankees. Indeed, Pittman family lore is filled with tales of hard-shell ancestors fighting Indians and whites and, when they ran out of natural enemies, each other. Could there have been something in young Ben’s blood that had lain dormant until its awaited hour came, the pupa cracked, and the creature was born, there on that dusty road to Santa Cruz?

  The Justice stops himself from further indulgence in such pointless speculations and concludes: “It is a terrible thing to kill a man, even when it is justified. A few hours ago, I would not have believed someone Ben’s age would have it in him to do what he did in the way he did it. Ben himself could not have known until the deed was accomplished. I do not know how this discovery will affect him.”

  That question will be answered in later years.

  Transcript 1 of an oral history compiled for the Arizona

  Historical Society. The subject, T. J. Babcock, 78, was

 
interviewed at his home in Springdale, Arizona, on

  April 6–8, 1966.

  I have lived longer than I deserve. Been shot at and missed and shit on and hit, if you’ll pardon the language, but am still on the right side of the ground and looking age eighty square in the eye.

  I have seen a great many changes too, and I cannot keep up with them anymore. I was born in Bisbee, Arizona, just two years after they captured Geronimo, and as a boy, I knew fellas, Mexicans and Americans, who had been in scrapes with the A-patch, but only last year I was down to Phoenix and saw a jet airliner taking off.

  There is no name to go with the J that is my middle initial. My ma and pa, in what must have been a fit of insanity, named me Thaddeus but didn’t give me a middle name. I got made fun of a lot, so I started to call myself T, but that didn’t sound quite right, so I added the J, and all who have known me since know me as T.J.

  My pa, who had a normal name, Mike, worked in the copper mine in Bisbee. When I was about three or four, he moved us down to Mexico, to Cananea, because he got a foreman’s job there with the Consolidated Copper Company, then owned by the famous Colonel Greene, who I don’t think ever was a colonel. I grew up in Mexico, went to school there, and by the time I was twelve or thereabouts, I was more Mexican than American, could speak and read and write Spanish better than I could English. If it wasn’t for this fella my ma hired to school me in my native lingo, I probably couldn’t speak it right to this day.

  The book part of my education ended when I was fourteen, much to my parents’ disappointment, and I too became an employee of Colonel Greene, but not in the mine. I wanted nothing to do with mine work. The colonel owned a big ranch—it was called the RO. Worked it for some time, then I signed on as a hand with its San Rafael division, just across the border in Arizona. It was the vaquero’s life for me.

  Now, as it is Ben Erskine you want to hear about, I will skip over a few years and tell you how I come to meet him and how him and me rode off together to fight in the Revolution in Mexico. It went like this: the San Rafael raised registered Herefords for the purposes of breeding. Running registered cattle is a whole lot different than running ordinary range cattle, especially the way it I learned how to do it down in Mexico. Hell, them cows was half wild. Along about 1910, I up and quit. The foreman didn’t like me, and I liked him even less. Said he was interested in scientific cattle breeding, and I reckon he reckoned my way of doing things wasn’t scientific enough for his tastes, so I saddled up and rode off, which is a cowboy’s right. Cowboys don’t ask permission from no one, including scientists.