Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  The machine gun stopped firing for a few seconds, I reckon it had jammed, and Ben called out for me, so I ran over to him. He said, “Come with us!” Then him and Francisco and a few of Francisco’s compadres made a dash for the church, and I followed. Ben and Francisco sure did know that town like the backs of their hands. They led us—there wasn’t but six of us all told—down a little street back of the church, then turned up another street, then another one, and the next thing I knew, we were jammed up tight against the wall of the courthouse, facing the back of the bandstand. Meantime that infernal gun had got to firing again, and there was so much shooting over to the federal barracks, I thought the bullets was gone to knock the building down. Ben told us to open up on the bandstand with everything we had, and we did. We couldn’t see nothing but the outline of it, but you would have thought we’d hit them gunners just by accident. We didn’t, and they turned their gun around and let loose at us, which is just what Ben had in mind. He wanted them to think the whole outfit had circled around to their rear. Ynez figured out what was going on, and as soon as that gun had been swung around, we could hear that high voice of hers crying out, “¡Adelante compañeros!” And the men with her stormed the bandstand and killed the gunners point-blank and captured the machine gun.

  That was not the end of the battle, no, sir. It went on till first light. We held about half the pueblo, and Díaz’s soldiers held the other half, a stalemate kind of. Ben kept yelling to our men to fire at the enemy’s muzzle flashes and then move and fire again. Come dawn, his eyes were like a crazy man’s. We were all like crazy people, and little by little we got the upper hand. The shooting stopped for good, and there was dead men just about everywhere, the barracks walls was all chewed up, and in one place where about ten federals lay in a heap, blood was running down the street like it had rained blood. El Agave’s company had got hit hard—about half of them was dead or wounded. Ynez’s company lost maybe ten. The townsfolk was all hunkered down in their casitas.

  The colonel climbed up to the church bell tower to get a better look at things with his field glasses, and called down that some of the federals was getting away, heading north. He come running down and told Ynez that he would hold the town with what was left of the first company and that her company was to pursue the retreating troops and cut ’em down. We hotfooted it back to the horses, mounted up, and started after ’em. By that time they were out of sight. It took us a while to pick up their trail, but once we did, they was easy to follow, on account of most was a-horseback and left a lot of sign. Ben and a few Yaqui scouts done the tracking, and Ben was as good at it as those Indians. The federal troops were making for the border. Some of ’em was already across it, most likely—Santa Cruz was just about an hour’s ride south of it. The way Ynez figured it, they knew the U.S. of A. was backing Díaz and was sending soldiers to the border, so they calculated they’d be safe once they got over the line. She said we’d chase them right into the United States if we had to. And I said, “Whoa! Hold on there! What if the American troops had got there and we run into ’em?” And Ynez said that we’d fight them, too, like a band of tatter-ass Mexican insurrectos taking on the United States Army wasn’t no big deal.

  This woman, I thought to myself, is as crazy as a rat trapped in an outhouse, and you know, the crazier she got, the more in love with her I got. But I looked at Ben and said, “We can’t go shooting at American soldiers. If they catch us, they’ll hang us for sure.” Ben said back, “T.J., we have thrown in with these people. They’re our people now.” Ben was like that. He had his own personal code, and he was set to follow it even if it meant getting into a fight with the soldiers of his own country.

  We caught up with the federals who were afoot one or two or three at a time. They’d thrown their rifles away, and they’d put their hands up, and the revolucionarios shot them down, no questions asked. Me and Ben took no part in that, but we didn’t do nothing to stop it neither.

  We rode on. The border these days isn’t much to look at, and there was even less of it then. Most times a fella couldn’t tell what country he was in, but pretty soon Ben and me knew we were in the U.S. of A. on account of we recognized the lay of the land. We was in the foothills of the Huachuca Mountains and not too far from Fort Huachuca, where there’d been soldiers since in the days of the Apache Wars. Ben told that to Ynez, and I guess she had second thoughts about tangling with the gringo army because she passed the word that if we ran into any more of the retreating federals, there was to be no shooting guns. She told the Yaquis to finish them with their bows and arrows. Which is what they done. We come across a horse been rid to death, and the rider was running half a mile ahead, and the Yaquis made a pincushion out of him. And the next one and the one after that. They were gone to run out of arrows that way, so what they did was to pull them out by the arrowhead if the arrow went straight through, and most of the arrows shot from them long bows did just that.

  I reckon the Yaquis killed a good half dozen, and I was sickened by it and told Ynez, Goddammit, this ain’t war, this here is cold-blooded murder. She said that I was now in my own country and was free to ride away if I was so bothered by it. Well, you know what? I could not leave her side, and another thing—I wasn’t entirely sure that that rattle snake of a Mexican witch-woman would not have shot me in the back for a deserter.

  I hadn’t seen the worst. We caught up with two soldiers still ahorseback. The Yaquis ran after them, shooting their arrows on the run, and managed to stick the horses, and you know, being a cowhand, that bothered me more than seeing men shot the same way. The Indians was fixing to shoot the two soldiers, but Ynez stopped them. We rode them down and surrounded them, and Ynez told a couple of our men to tie them up. One was an officer, a lieutenant I think, and the other one was a sergeant. I figured that my telling Ynez that it was all coldblooded murder had got to her conscience, if she had one, and she was gone to take them prisoner and at least give them a fair trial before shooting them. The both of them were right surprised and confused to hear a gal giving the orders. The lieutenant, a young fella, looked like he had mostly Spanish blood—he had light hair and blue eyes and fair skin. And he was scared to about dirtying his britches when Ynez looked down at him and the sergeant and said, “You bastards murdered my husband.” Of course she meant that bastards like them had done the murdering. Anyway, that was her idea of a fair trial.

  Next thing, a couple of our men knocked them cold with rifle butts. Then the Yaquis piled dry bear grass on top of them and dead branches on top of the grass and lit a fire. That woke them up, and they started to screaming—I still have bad dreams about that, me, looking eighty in the eye, and I can still hear those screams in my sleep sometimes. They rolled out from under the brush piles, both on fire, and the smell—well, I will spare you that. In a second there was no screams, just the black bodies twitching funnylike. Oh, my Lord, the little-shots of Mexico had been treated like dogs, and now they were biting back, and then some. “Basta,” said Ynez, and turned her horse, and with the smoke rising up behind us, we rode on back into Old Mexico.

  By the time we got back to Santa Cruz, we were just about asleep in our saddles. Colonel Bracamonte had rousted the scared townspeople out of their houses and told them they was now liberated, and then put them to work to burying the dead, which I reckon did not make them feel all that liberated. Ynez gave him a full report of our doings, and he was happy to beat the band about capturing the machine gun. He come walking over to where Ben and me and Francisco were flopped down in the plaza and promoted the three of us on the spot. He made Ben a lieutenant and said he was second in command of the company, and he made sergeants out of me and Francisco. So there we were, Teniente Erskine and Sargento Babcock, but if Bracamonte had made me a full-blown general, I could not have cared less—all I wanted was something to eat and a good ten hours’ sleep.

  We rode with the Red Sash Battalion for another three months I think it was, anyhow until the Revolution was over. I ought to say
, till we thought it was over. There was fighting and trouble in Mexico for another twenty years before things got settled down. My memory is not as good about those three months like it is about those first three days—everything is kind of jumbled up—but I know we was plumb wore out from riding and fighting and killing. We took railway junctions and garrisons and towns all through Sonora. We liberated a few more haciendas from the hacendados, and after each fight we got bigger than we was before, what with federal troops deserting and joining up. We didn’t have to worry about what generals call supply lines because we’d take whatever we needed—guns from the garrisons, food and liquor from the haciendas or from the stores in a town—the stores that was owned by Spaniards or folks loyal to Díaz. In the end, the battalion could muster around three hundred men—and a few women, too, soldaderas like Ynez, gals with big gold earrings and bandoliers crissy-crossed on their hefty bosoms.

  Oh Lord, the things we done, the things we seen! Every now and then we’d come across hanged men swinging from cottonwoods, the bodies dried up and blackened, like scarecrows, but they didn’t all scare the crows. One time we saw three fellas a-swinging from a tree in the distance, and as we got closer, Ben said, “They’re still alive,” on account of they was moving around. When we got closer still, we seen that it was ravens doing the moving, covered the bodies head to boot, looked like they was dressed in black feathers with all those ravens hanging on to ’em and pecking out bits and pieces. And I never will forget seeing a coyote cross our path with what looked like a broken tree branch in its jaws and it turned out to be a human arm. These are gruesome things to tell, but that’s the way it was. Not much glory in it, and as far as the gold went, Ben and me still had the same Yankee dollars we rode in with, and not a lot of those neither. Soldiers of fortune with no fortune, that was us.

  You know, seeing and doing the things we done made me harder, and I reckon Ben got even harder than when he started off. But Ynez got softer, strange to say. She fought like hell when there was fighting to be done, but there wasn’t no more of that other stuff. She’d come to be longer on mercy than on justice. After one of those battles, the mad went out of her sad-mad look. Ynez come up to me and said, “Babcock, I have done terrible things.” And I said that all of us had, but it was like she didn’t hear me. “For the love of my husband, I have condemned my soul to hell.” This was real Mexican kind of talk. But she went to a padre in one pueblo while he was burying dead folks and confessed her sins. That rattlesnake woman had done defanged herself, all that vengeance poison was gone out of her. By her lights, her soul done been cleansed of murder and she aimed to keep it that way.

  Thinking back on those times, there’s two stories about Ben that stick in my mind. First off, he got promoted to captain. This is how it happened. One night after we’d routed federals from a railroad depot, he woke me up with the toe of his boot. “T.J., something’s wrong,” he said in a real low voice. I looked around and saw our men asleep, and all I heard was a little crackling from the dying campfires and snoring and the sound of a rock or two getting kicked by the picketed horses as they moved about. “Ain’t nothing wrong,” I told Ben, but he insisted there was, said he could feel there was some danger out there. Now, there is something I didn’t tell you about Ben. He claimed to have supernatural powers. Said it ran in the family. Some grandmother or auntie of his could talk to the spirits of dead people, and when he was a kid in school, he wrote down a date in his copybook for no reason—a date that was a couple of months in the future. Well, when that date come around, the grandmother or auntie who had conversations with the departed died herself. Even though I wasn’t a scientific fella, I did not believe in that spooky stuff. Anyway, I told Ben that if he was so all-fired sure something was wrong, he’d best wake up Ynez and tell her, which is what he done. Ynez had pretty much the same reaction as me, but once an idea got into Ben’s head you could not pry it out with a crowbar, and he saddled up his horse and rode out.

  Wasn’t five minutes later I heard a gunshot and jumped out of my bedroll. The whole company was awake now. There came a regular fusillade and Ben galloping back shouting like that Paul Revere fella that the federals were right behind him. The enemy charged right into us, a-yelling and a-shooting like hell wouldn’t have it. Horses broke their ties and went running right into that confused mess of men fighting each other hand to hand. You almost couldn’t tell who was who, and I think some of our men shot each other. Worst fight I’d been in, but we outnumbered the counterattacking federals two to one and got the upper hand. I’d say we killed more than half of them and captured the rest.

  The old Ynez would have executed the prisoners right then and there, but this was the new Ynez and she gave them a choice—she could leave them to the mercies of the desert or they could join us. They didn’t have no trouble making up their minds. Fact was, one of the prisoners told us, the whole reason they’d tried a sneak attack was because they’d found themselves out in the wasteland with no food and water and figured to surprise us and take our supplies and our horses.

  Ynez told Ben that he was a hero of the Revolution and that the next time he got a feeling something was wrong, she sure would pay attention to him. When Bracamonte learned what Ben had done, he promoted him to capitán and put him in command of the other company. The fella he replaced, El Agave—he was called that because he’d as soon stick you as look at you and had a big thirst for mescal—was damn mad.

  The way I heard it, he still had some of the mescal he’d looted from a cantina, got drunk, and said they would be having snowball fights in hell before he took orders from a gringo, that he was more of a man than any gringo, and was gone to prove it. Ben was setting on a stoop with Francisco, cleaning his Luger, when El Agave walked up the street calling him a cabrón and some other such things and that he was there to settle who was the better man. Ben was real calm and, with that cockeyed grin on his face, said that he’d be glad to oblige El Agave, just give him a minute to put his pistol back together. El Agave told him to go to hell or some such and drew down on him. Drunk as he was, he would have had a hard time hitting the ground with his hat, but one bullet threw dust into Ben’s face, and he rolled away, a-hollering. Then there was another shot, and when Ben looked up, El Agave was laying dead in the street and Bracamonte standing over him with his pistol out. Ben collected his wits and said muchas gracias to the colonel and that he was in debt to him for saving his life. Bracamonte said back that maybe Ben could repay him someday, but for now to think no more about it.

  Well, the day did come, a long time later, for Ben to return the favor, but that is a story for another time.

  This incident I have just told you about happened in June of 1911. A few days later the colonel went into Hermosillo for a powwow with some other revolutionary leaders. When he come back, he announced that President Díaz had done quit and gone into exile and Francisco Madero had entered Mexico City to take over the country. We had won the damn war! The boys shot their guns into the air and whooped and hollered. The jefe of the town threw a fiesta, and it went on half the night.

  That night I throwed caution to the winds and told Ynez that I didn’t give a damn if she was my commanding officer, I was gone to kiss her like a man who meant it, and I picked her up and did just that. Wasn’t I surprised when she kissed me back! And then said she wasn’t my commanding officer anymore. “Are you gone to marry me or what?” I asked. Damn if she didn’t say, “Sí, Babcock.” I let out a real loud cowboy yip and kissed her again and kind of let my hands wander into forbidden territory. She stopped me and said there was to be no fooling around till we was married, and there was another condition: I would have to agree to live with her in Mexico; she intended to stay and help build a new country. What with the waste and destruction that war had brought down—like it had been omened by the comet—building a new Mexico was gone to be a tall order. But that was okay with me. Truth to tell, if Ynez wanted to live on the moon, I would have gone there.

  A co
uple days later we got official word by telegraph that we was to be demobilized. It was kind of a sad day saying adiós to our compadres. Ben looked down at the mouth. He said, “T.J., I’m not sure what I’m gone to do now.” I said that maybe he could throw back in with his brother. He didn’t say nothing, just shook his head real slow like, but I knew what he meant. After fighting in the Revolution, punching cows would be pretty tame, and him, only twenty-one and a capitán, it would be hard to play second fiddle to Jeff. So then I suggested that he stay in Mexico and give me and Ynez a hand in the building of the new Mexico. Now, I didn’t have a shade of a notion what that meant, or how to go about it, I just liked the way it sounded. Anyway, Ben shook his head again. Next day he rode off back across the line, and I was sorry to see him go, thinking we’d never see each other again. That did not turn out to be the case.

  3

  THESE PEOPLE CAN DRIVE you nuts,” Monica said in an undertone. It was a Saturday, and she was off from her teaching job at the Patagonia grammar school. She, Aunt Sally, and Castle were sitting in the cluttered kitchen of the main house while Miguel slept under a blanket on the living room sofa. “They break down your fences and break your heart, and you don’t know what the hell to do about them.”