Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  He went to the kitchen and poured himself a scotch, measuring its depth with three fingers laid against the glass. Then he returned to his chair and his Seneca, and fell asleep, the book open on his lap. Sam, licking his arm, woke him at two A.M. He got into his long underwear and went to bed.

  RISING AT SEVEN, he put on fur-lined slippers and a wool robe and hopped down the path to the shed and turned on the generator. A heavy frost lay on the grass, and the whole valley glittered in the morning sunlight. The outside thermometer read twenty-two degrees. It was no more than fifty inside, the fire having died during the night. He built a new one, then stood rubbing his hands over the cast-iron stove. His father, a passionate outdoorsman and an admirer of Teddy Roosevelt, would have approved of these rigors. Like TR, Dr. Castle feared that privilege bred pansies and took his son on hunting, fishing, and camping expeditions in the Adirondacks from an early age. He’d also signed him up, in the summer of Gil’s fourteenth year, for boxing lessons at an inner-city gym in Bridgeport. From June to August, Castle banged the heavy bag and the speed bag and sparred with black and Hispanic boys, who taught him what it was like to get hit and to bleed. He was an athletic kid with quick reflexes, but he proved to be an indifferent fighter, mostly because he was reluctant to hit back. He was more adept with a rod and gun. By the time he finished Hotchkiss, he could cast a fly sixty feet to a rising trout and was outshooting his father and his cronies on the skeet range at the venerable Campfire Club in Chappaqua. On a Christmas vacation, at a hunting camp in upstate New York, he bagged his first deer, a six-point buck. One shot at a hundred yards.

  His hands warmed, Castle put coffee on the propane range. While it brewed, he fetched his boots and brush pants from the bedroom and got dressed in front of the stove, now throwing off waves of heat. The coffeepot, a vintage percolator with fire-blackened enameled sides, filled the room with its aroma. He poured a mug full and sat at the table, reflecting on the peculiarity of his ending up here, in the cabin his great-uncle built when Arizona was still a territory. Had he come to dwell in a place like this involuntarily, he would have been seen as a man who’d fallen from a pinnacle of success, the victim of a financial collapse, of alcoholism or drug addiction. But he’d chosen to live here, and he liked the bare-bones simplicity of it. The main room was maybe twelve by eighteen feet, the kitchen at one end, the sitting area at the other, furnished with a couple of old armchairs over which ratty cowhides had been draped. The bedroom was just large enough to accommodate a double bed, a small dresser, and an ancient Mexican armoire, the several colors it had worn over the years showing through the chips in its present coat of aquamarine. The bathroom, added on when indoor plumbing came to the ranch, was no bigger than a closet and equipped with fixtures—a rust-streaked pedestal sink, a metal shower stall, a toilet with a wooden seat and flush tank—that belonged in a museum.

  Finished with his coffee, he took last night’s dinner dishes from the drying rack and stacked them in the cupboard, then made his bed in a fashion that would have passed a boot-camp inspection. Order was critical; if he let this place become a mess, he himself might begin to delaminate. He buckled a beeper collar to Sam’s neck, uncased his twenty-gauge Beretta, and went outside. As he was about to open the cargo door of his dust-filmed Suburban, he caught his imperfect reflection in the rear window and was startled to see that the face staring back at him was a replica of his father’s in his sixties, the stubble on his jaw sparkling with silver. Recalling the time he had let himself go, alarming his daughters, he reminded himself to shave when he got back.

  He opened the cargo door, and as he retrieved his stained hunting vest from the interior, Sam jumped in, immediately settling herself on her sheepskin bed.

  “Out,” he said, tugging her collar. The dog looked at him, confused. “C’mon, out. We’re sticking close to home today.”

  She leaped to the ground. He turned on the beeper and set off, climbing the ridge behind the house. Sam was over it well ahead of him, the two-tone ranging beep growing fainter as she ran down the far side. At the top he paused to catch his breath and take in the intimidating vastness of the country. A narrow arroyo ditched the canyon below, while in the distance, beyond cinnamon-brown foothills dotted with dark green oaks and junipers, the Huachucas rose to nearly ten thousand feet, their upper slopes darkened by dense pine forests and their peaks covered in snow, as if some fragment of the Colorado Rockies had broken off and drifted into the southwest. His eye followed the mountains in their fall toward Mexico, where a desert plateau reached to a horizon as ruler-straight as the horizon on a tranquil sea, except for a cone-shaped mountain, rising far away in Sonora.

  The collar’s point-beep went off, steady and insistent. Sam had found birds. He couldn’t see her, but she sounded fairly close. He sidestepped down the ridge toward the arroyo, stumbling on the rocks and shale camouflaged by the knee-high grass. Last night’s sadness had faded, and yet this thought—If there is a God in heaven, and if He sheds his awful grace, He will cause me to trip and fall this moment and the gun to go off and make an end—streaked into Castle’s mind. It streaked out when he spotted Sam, on a hard point under an oak tree, her white coat shining in the broken light, her neck outstretched and nose low to the ground, her tail extended like a feathered lance. It was a sight he’d beheld countless times, and it never ceased to thrill him. In the quivering tension between her instinct to pounce and her breeding to hold fast, there was a beauty that made him feel he could go on after all. This was why he hunted with her—she got him through the day.

  The birds Sam was pointing were Mearns’ quail, a species that held so tight, a hunter practically had to step on them to put them in the air. Castle approached slowly, the gun in his crooked elbow. He’d decided not to shoot these quail. Shooting them would somehow spoil the magic. He was two feet behind Sam when a male and female broke cover, flying away in a V. Sam flinched but stayed put.

  “Good girl,” he said softly. “More in there, eh?”

  He took a few steps and stood alongside the dog. The covey exploded almost from underfoot, a land mine of feathers and beating wings. One bird slapped his hat brim as it took off, the others flushed in every direction, the sudden change from silent arrest to swift and noisy motion simply breathtaking. Castle fired twice into the air, to give Sam the impression that he’d shot and missed. He didn’t want her to think that all her effort had been wasted.

  Immediately she bounded off, circling to find the singles and doubles from the broken covey. Partway up the ridge, where a couple of birds had flown, she stopped as if she’d hit a wall. She did not strike a point but merely stood still, staring into a manzanita thicket.

  “What’ve you got?” he said, walking toward her.

  Something moved in the thicket, a dark shape. Thinking it might be a javelina, he put the gun in his shoulder and thumbed the safety. A boar javelina could disembowel a dog with its tusks.

  “Get away from there, Sam. Sam! Come!”

  She didn’t move. When he was five or ten yards away, Castle heard a low groan, almost human. He crept closer—and made a quick jump backward when he saw a man lying amid the tangled, reddish branches of the manzanita, a young, brown-faced man with matted black hair wearing sneakers, dirt-smeared khaki jeans, and a dark blue padded jacket. As Castle parted the branches with his gun barrel, he raised his head and let out a hoarse cry: “¡No! ¡Por Dios! ¡No!” The Mexican was shivering. His filthy clothes and the burrs and grass stuck in his hair indicated that he’d spent the night out here. A wonder he hadn’t frozen to death.

  Always trust your dog, Castle thought. This must have been the intruder Sam had barked at last night. He broke the gun and unloaded it and showed the man the two shells before putting them in his pocket. “It’s okay. Don’t be afraid.”

  Though he’d seen border crossers before at a distance, huddled wretchedly at roadsides, waiting under the watchful gazes of the Border Patrol agents for the big buses marked DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND
SECURITY to take them to the station for processing and deportation, this was the first one he’d encountered face-to-face. He wasn’t sure what to do.

  “Agua,” the man whispered. “¿Tiene agua? Por favor.”

  Castle pulled a water bottle from out of the game pocket in the back of his vest and, kneeling down, put the bottle to the man’s mouth. He seized it with both hands and gulped, water dribbling down his chin.

  “Gracias, señor.”

  “Can you walk?” How the hell did you say it in Spanish? “Like this.” He spread two fingers and moved them back and forth. “Comprende?”

  The Mexican looked at him quizzically. “¿Usted … americano?”

  That was easy enough. Castle nodded.

  “¿Estoy en los Estados Unidos?”

  “I don’t understand. No comprendo.”

  “Esto …” The man patted the ground with his hand, then waved it in a semicircle. “¿Estados Unidos? Yewnayta Stays?”

  “Okay. Yes. Sí. This is the United States. Sí.”

  “Gracias a Dios.” He locked his hands and raised them toward the sky. “Gracias a Dios,” he repeated, then clutched Castle’s arms in tears. “Y usted también, señor. Gracias, mil gracias.”

  The display of gratitude moved Castle and somehow embarrassed him. “Can you walk?” Again, he mimicked walking with his fingers.

  The man tried to stand but couldn’t until Castle clasped him under his arms and pulled him to his feet. He took a couple of steps, then dropped to his knees. “No lo puedo. No más caminar.”

  That must be it. Caminar. Walk. The Mexican was no more than five feet four or five but was heavyset.

  “What’s your name?” Castle pointed at him. “You. Name. Uh … Cómo … Cómo …”

  “Miguel. Me llamo Miguel.”

  “Okay, Miguel. We have to get you to some help. Uh … necesario … caminar, necesario. I can’t carry you over this—” he gestured at the steep ridge. “¿Comprende?”

  “Sí.”

  Castle got him up again, and draping Miguel’s arm over his shoulders, his own arm around Miguel’s waist, started to climb.

  Ben Erskine

  Transcript 2—T.J. Babcock

  We left at sunup on a warm, windy day in the spring of the year 1911. The grass was still winter yellow, but the cottonwoods along the Santa Cruz were budding out. Ben was wearing that German pistol, even though Álvarez had shot off most of the bullets in it and Ben didn’t have any to replace them. He had his six-gun in his saddlebag and a Winchester Model 94 in his saddle scabbard. His pa’s old rifle, he said. I was armed in a like way, and the both of us were pretty excited. It was a fine day, and we was a-goin to war for gold and glory and the little-shots of Old Mexico!

  Álvarez’s hacienda was only about ten miles south of the line, and we got there before noon. We rode up to a low rise and could see it below us and a little ways off, in some cottonwoods beside a dry wash. The place looked like one of those old Spanish missions—there was the main house and a chapel and some outbuildings, with an adobe wall all around. A lot of horses were picketed outside the wall, and smoke from campfires was curling up through the trees and bending back and stretching out in the wind like horsetails. In a minute, a band of revolucionarios come loping out of the trees, maybe a dozen. They were dressed in every which way, and all of them were armed to the teeth with every kind of pistol and Mauser and Winchester, with the bullets in their bandoliers like rows of brass teeth. The one thing that was the same was this red sash each one had around his waist. They was a right colorful group, I will tell you that. And you could see by the way they rode, easy and relaxed, like each man and his horse wasn’t a horse and man but one thing, that they’d been vaqueros before they were revolucionarios, or maybe banditos, or maybe both.

  They pulled up a few yards in front of us, and I can’t say they looked welcoming. Their jefe, a light-skinned fella with a nose like an eagle’s beak and eyes like an eagle, you know, real alert but with nothing behind them, eased on up to us. He said in this soft voice—you almost couldn’t hear him but it gave you a chill, that softness—“¿Quiénes son ustedes? ¿Por qué ustedes están aquí?”

  Ben took out that recruiting paper and held it out to him, but he didn’t move a finger, just stared, so then Ben said, “Somos americanos, y estamos aquí para luchar por Pancho Villa y la revolución.”

  The jefe didn’t say nothing for maybe five seconds, and then he started to laugh. Thought he was gone to split a seam, and them others laughing right along, and when they got done having a good time, he asked for our guns and said, “Vengan conmigo,” in that quiet voice that made it feel like the temperature had gone down thirty degrees.

  We was brought into a big room where we found out that the fella we thought was the jefe wasn’t. The real chief was standing behind a big desk with two other men, looking at a map that covered the desk like a tablecloth. He was tall for a Mexican, pretty close to mine and Ben’s height, and he had a big black mustache that swooped out like he had crow’s wings pasted under his nose, and he was wearing a regular sort of uniform with brass buttons and all and a Sam Brown belt and holster with one of them Luger pistols. We stood there for a long time, while he talked with his compadres and looked at that map, and then he dismissed the two men and looked us up and down and introduced himself as Colonel Candelario Bracamonte, comandante of El Batallón de la Banda Roja, meaning the Red Sash Battalion.

  Next thing, he said, in passable English—he was an educated man—that he wasn’t sure if he should enlist us or have us shot as gringo spies. He said that President Taft had ordered twenty thousand American troops to the border because the Americans wanted Díaz to stay in power to make Mexico safe for them to do business in. So maybe Ben and me was scouts for this army President Taft was sending.

  Then he changed his tune. Said he’d heard that we’d taken part in the liberation of Rancho Santa Barbara and Hacienda Álvarez. We nodded like we was bobbing for apples, didn’t say a word that all we’d come down to do was rustle cattle. Long and the short of it was, the colonel believed us and told the fella we’d thought was the jefe to give us back our rifles and pistols and to enroll us in the company of Capitán Ybarra. He grinned a little and told us we’d find Capitán Ybarra an interesting commanding officer.

  We found out what he meant when we went out into the courtyard to get signed up. Capitán Ybarra was Capitán Ynez Ybarra, what the revolucionarios called a soldadera, a lady soldier. There was a lot of them in the Revolution, but Ben and me didn’t know that then, and we couldn’t think what to make of her, with her long Indian skirt and cavalry boots and a pistola and a gunbelt that looked like it was made out of bullets. She couldn’t have been more than twenty years old and two inches over five foot. Her hair was coal black and tumbled down to her waist under a stiff, wide-brimmed hat—it reminded me of the hats the mission padres wore. The thing you noticed right off was her face, not because she was beautiful because she wasn’t. I don’t mean she was ugly, just not beautiful, with this dark mestizo skin and a Yaqui’s hawklike nose. The saddest face I’d ever seen, her mouth turned down so you thought she was gone to start crying and this sorrowfulness in her black eyes, but a special kind of sorrowfulness—there was a fire behind it you could see if you looked close, kind of like a candle flame burning behind a window shade. What that face did to you if you were a man was to make you want to touch it real soft like and to be afraid of touching it at the same time, like maybe she’d bite your finger off.

  For old T.J. Babcock it was love at first sight.

  I will tell you, it is right distracting to find yourself in love with your new commanding officer, but I won’t get into that, at least not for now.

  Ynez gave us the once-over and asked if we was surprised that their capitán was a woman, and Ben answered that we were, and she said she could ride, shoot, and fight as good as any man, and Ben said we did not doubt she could, and she said she would not allow no man to be in her outfit who
couldn’t ride and shoot as good as her. Francisco, who was standing nearby, vouched that we was muy hombres, and Ynez said she wanted to see for herself and told us to follow her. She went out the courtyard, and watching that gal walk, her shoulders throwed back, her skirt swishing around her boots with their spurs, and her hips swinging under the skirt, I fell deeper in love, and deeper yet after she’d saddled this little bay mare and jumped onto its back like she was spring-loaded.

  Ben and me mounted up, and we rode out of the cottonwoods easy like, Ynez with a quirt between her teeth, and when we was out in the open she put quirt and spurs to that mare and took off across the desert fast as a jockey in the stretch. Ben and me had one helluva time keeping up with her. She was making straight for a clump of mesquite, with us galloping alongside her. For a second it looked like she was gone to ride right through them thorny trees, but when she was maybe a yard short, she turned that mare on a dime and spun around them and then ran for another clump a ways away and did the same thing. It was like the barrel races you see in rodeos.