Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  What did surprise Castle was that he had spoken his heart to a woman he scarcely knew. He regretted it; it created an awkwardness, erected a barrier between them.

  “I don’t know that I could bear a loss like that,” she said. “I admire you for … for going on.”

  “Well, don’t. There’s nothing to admire. If I had a choice, I’d take it.”

  He stopped himself before confessing that he’d attempted suicide, or rather had attempted an attempt.

  “Some times we’re living through,” she said. “I’ve got a daughter in Kuwait. In the army. If we go into Iraq, and it damn well looks like we will, she’ll be one of the first. Having a daughter go to war was something I couldn’t imagine.”

  “A daughter,” he murmured, his thoughts springing to Morgan and Justine. “An army nurse?”

  “Nurse? I wish. Beth is with the Third Infantry Division, drives a truck in a supply battalion.” And Beth, she offered, had always been restless, had been doing poorly at Southern Cal, and in the middle of her sophomore year, dropped out, and enlisted. “At this stage of my life, I figured I’d be thinking about boyfriends and planning a wedding.”

  Castle said nothing. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. He watched the wind rippling the grass, listened to it shaking the leaves above them.

  “She’s all I’ve got. She’s it. I remember my grandmother telling me that when my dad was in North Africa, her heart would stop every time she heard a car pull into the drive. She would think that she was going to open the door and see an army chaplain standing there with a telegram. Well, I hope it won’t be my turn now. Waiting for an army chaplain to show up and tell me my baby girl has been killed.”

  Here, he thought, was someone who could anticipate disaster. That didn’t necessarily mean the blow would be softened, should it come. Now it was he who reached out to her, the movement awkward and tentative. He allowed his hand to fall lightly on her upraised knee. The contact felt strange and somehow wrong; and yet he did not remove his hand.

  “It’ll be all right,” he said, though he had no reason to make this optimistic prophecy.

  “I pray she does. No, I don’t. Haven’t got much in the way of religion. Elena said she would do my praying for me. Say a rosary for Beth every day.”

  They didn’t speak for a while, locked in their private thoughts. Then, to get off the somber line of conversation, he said: “Elena will be cooking the quail tonight. You’ll be there?”

  “Didn’t get an invitation.”

  He stood and reached behind his back to pat the birds in his game pocket. “We’ve got sixteen. Two apiece with two left over. Enough with a side dish.”

  She looked up at him with a slightly amused expression. “Is that an invitation?”

  “I guess it is,” he answered. “Yes.”

  THEY ATE AT A PICNIC TABLE on the porch of the main house by the light of a Coleman lantern hung from a beam, warmed by the coals in the outdoor fireplace over which Elena had grilled the birds, slathered in garlic butter and stuffed with roasted serrano peppers. Monica arranged the seating so Castle was beside Tessa, who had changed out of her field clothes into an buckskin jacket over a embroidered black shirt and a pair of western-cut trousers that flattered her taut hips and slim legs. Her hair, cascading over her shoulders from under a black Stetson, shone in the lantern light. She threw off an intense sexuality, as some women do in their late forties, early fifties—a kind of vivid autumnal bloom before winter sets in. He complimented her on the outfit, and she smiled, raising a hand to her lips to mask her protruding eyeteeth.

  “It’s my rodeo-queen getup,” she said. “A tourist’s idea of what a cowgirl should look like.”

  He wasn’t sure if that meant he was a tourist, but he considered it prudent not to ask. For most of the meal the conversation flew around subjects he wasn’t familiar with, horses and cattle prices and ranch work in general. When those were exhausted, Monica asked Tessa if she’d heard from her daughter. Lines formed on Tessa’s tanned forehead. Beth had sent an e-mail the other day, and while there were things she was censored from saying, it looked like her supply outfit would soon be rolling into Iraq.

  Sally mentioned the headlines she’d seen in the papers—the signals brigade based at Fort Huachuca had also received orders for the Persian Gulf. “Let’s hope they get it over with quick, and all of them and your girl get home safe,” she said.

  With a nod, Tessa acknowledged these sentiments and looked to Blaine, apparently expecting to hear a similar expression of neighborly concern from him.

  Instead, he issued a declaration: “It’s about damn time. About damn time we took it to ’em. After Pearl Harbor, we didn’t sit on our thumbs before we did something about it.”

  Castle observed that something had been done, that it had been taken to them in Afghanistan.

  “That was more like a warm-up,” Blaine said.

  “A warm-up?” asked Tessa. And then in response to Blaine’s quizzical squint: “If Beth has to risk her life, I want it to be for a good reason.”

  “Takin’ out Saddam seems a good reason to me.”

  “I’m not sure it is. I wish I could be, but I’m not.”

  “Well, you’ve got to be. If the balloon goes up, you’re gone to have to be behind your girl, one hundred percent.”

  “Do you suppose I won’t be?” Tessa asked angrily. “I’ll support her, but I don’t have to be a cheerleader for a war.”

  “Makes no sense to support her and not support what she’s bein’ sent to do.”

  “Well, I guess that’s another example of consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds.”

  “You’re not sayin’ I’ve got a small mind, are you, Tess?” Blaine’s semijocular tone was undermined by the belligerent look on his lank, sunburned face.

  “No. I am saying that I don’t have one.”

  Monica cast a reproachful look at her husband. “You might think differently if Rick was there.”

  “The hell I would,” Blaine said. “We’ve got to take it to ’em, and it can’t be like it was in Vietnam, the troops riskin’ their lives over there and a mob of fuckin’ dopeheads protestin’ over here.”

  “Don’t you use that F-word that I can hear it,” Sally said. “I hate that word.”

  “You don’t exactly talk like you sing in a church choir, y’know. And besides, it’s ain’t a word you never heard before.”

  “And that’s why I hate it.”

  “Blaine, you don’t really mean that someone who’s got questions about this is a dope-smoking hippie, do you?” Tessa interjected, with mock incredulity.

  “We can’t afford the bullshit that went on back in Vietnam days, that’s my meaning.”

  Castle heard in this dispute loud echoes of the sour arguments he and Blaine had waged years ago. His instincts told him that Tessa’s doubts about this war, should it come, made more sense than Blaine’s certainties.

  “All Tessa is saying is that we ought to think twice before jumping into this thing with both feet,” he ventured cautiously.

  Blaine slapped the table with his palm, and in the Coleman’s glare, his expression turned malignant, much as it had earlier in the day, when he’d confronted the drug mules. “I’ll be goddamned. I will be goddamned. What in the hell is wrong with you, cuzzy?”

  “Wrong with me?” asked Castle, stunned that his comment, which he had thought was as reasonable and inoffensive as a soft-boiled egg, had provoked such a violent reaction.

  “I’d of thought that if anybody would want to take it to ’em, it would be you,” Blaine snarled with a thrust of his jaw. “If it had been my wife, I would have—”

  “Blaine, please …,” Monica said, nudging his ribs with her elbow. She looked at Castle, pleading with him to overlook her husband’s obtuse remark.

  But he could not overlook it. To bring Mandy into this was inexcusable. “If you’re so hot for this war, why don’t you reenlist?” he said, resentment heating his
face. “If I wanted to take it to ’em, I’d do it myself. I wouldn’t expect a bunch of nineteen- and twenty-year-old kids to settle scores for me. I never wanted revenge anyway. Might as well try to get revenge on an earthquake or a hurricane, that’s the way I feel about it. If you think that means there’s something wrong with me, I guess that’s your privilege.”

  At another, withering look from Monica, Blaine turned sheepish. “Well, all right, I should of watched my words. I didn’t mean nothin’ personal by it.”

  Except that it had been personal. Because, Castle suspected, his cousin had a personal, emotional stake in the forthcoming martial enterprise. Something seemed to be gnawing at Blaine, maybe a bitterness lingering from his own lost war, maybe the frustrations of running a border ranch—all the problems he could do nothing about, like drug smugglers. Maybe Saddam Hussein had become, to his mind, a substitute for everything that was wrong in his world but would somehow be set to rights by a mighty American host blitzing up the Euphrates. A vicarious triumph would be his, the way a football fan stands straighter and puffs out his chest and feels better all around when his team wins.

  An uncomfortable quiet had fallen over the table. The mossy axiom, never discuss politics or religion at social gatherings, had proven true. Everybody was searching for a way back to the conviviality that had prevailed not ten minutes ago. Monica found one at last. Their son’s southwestern tour would wind up in Tucson this Friday night—a gig at the Rialto Theater, which, Castle gathered by the emphasis she placed on the name, was a prestigious venue. Blaine and Monica then began a tag-team disquisition on Rick’s musical career. She was keen to affirm that his group, the Double Sixes—named after the now-vanished highway Route 66, was a true indie band. Independent, Blaine elaborated, from the Nashville mafia. And from sleazy booking agents and record company hustlers, Monica added with an emphatic nod that sent ripples through her hair. By touring a lot—Rick was almost constantly on the road—the band had won a certain regional fame, a kind of cult following, college kids, mostly. Their debut CD, just out, could be their big breakthrough, Blaine crowed. However it went, the Double Sixes were going places, just a question of time; hell, these boys were musical outlaws, like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in the old days, and it took time for outlaws to get accepted …

  “They’ll be playing tracks from the CD,” Monica said. “We’ve got complimentary tickets. Why don’t you two join us?” She looked at Castle and Tessa, as if they were a couple. This was disconcerting. Was she matchmaking? Tessa stammered that she wasn’t sure … a young crowd … She would feel out of place, like a chaperone … She turned to Castle with an inquisitive expression, but he couldn’t read what her question was. Sure, he would be happy to go, he said to Monica. He hadn’t seen Rick since he was in, what? Eighth grade?

  Tessa said, “Well, in that case, I’ll go, too. I could use a night out, I suppose.”

  When the evening was over, he walked her to her car. Orion glittered in the south, the Dog Star at its heel as brilliant as an airplane’s landing light. Still accustomed to the sparsely starred skies of the urbanized East, he momentarily mistook the Milky Way, arcing horizon to horizon, for a wispy cloud. Tessa got behind the wheel and said, before closing the door, “I hope you didn’t mind.”

  An emotion he couldn’t name was moving through him, filtering into the tips of his fingers. “Mind?”

  “Me accepting the invitation.”

  “No. Why should I?”

  “The way Monica put it … I thought maybe you felt like you are being pushed into something … What I mean is … I want you to know that I’m not … Oh, shit—” She shook her head at her verbal fumbling. “See you Friday night.”

  She drove off. Castle stood alone and watched the taillights recede into the darkness with a feeling absent so long he hadn’t recognized it at first—anticipation.

  7

  WITHIN SIGHT of the high steel fence dividing Nogales, Sonora, from Nogales, Arizona, its Mexican side decorated with graffiti—“Borders are scars on the face of the earth”—and with white crosses commemorating migrants who now gazed upon the face of the Virgin, some murdered by bandits, most by the desert, roughly a block from the port of entry where cars backed up for half a mile waited to cross into El Norte while day-tripping tourists and documented Mexicans went through pedestrian turnstiles in both directions past Indian women begging with their ragged children, the returning Mexicans lugging plastic bags from Wal-Mart and Safeway and discount stores, the departing tourists bargain-rate treasures from the emporiums on Avenida Obregón—Zapotec rugs, copper chairs, ceramic washbasins, wood carvings, belts, jackets, straw hats, religious icons—in the middle of Calle Juárez near the enterprises that flourished in every border town from Matamoros to Tijuana—cheap hotels, currency exchanges, farmacias mostly patronized by aging gringos seeking half-price medications for their many ailments—The Professor sat in the St. Regis bar, nursing a Dos Equis as waiters in white shirts and black aprons served customers seated at round tables on straight-backed chairs, a stereo played Norteño ballads, and five muted TVs broadcast various sporting events—a soccer match, a Lakers game, highlights from last week’s Super Bowl, in which The Professor had won a thousand dollars from his comandante.

  Five TVs, four tuned to U.S. channels, the old love-hate, thought El Profesor, waiting for Gloria to show up. We (he was mindful that the pronoun was somewhat ambiguous in his case) love all things American—the sports, the jobs, the Yankee dollars, the cars, the Big Macs and Supersize Coca-Colas; and we hate all things American—the arrogance, the crazed energy of the place—but we are slowly taking back with demographics what was stolen from us with the gun a century and a half ago. California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas belonged to us before the Battle of Chapultepec and the Gadsden Purchase, and Santa Fe was founded years before those bung-in-the-butt Pilgrims ever saw Plymouth Rock, so it is only fitting and just that Mexico, pitiable Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States, as Díaz famously said, should return in a bloodless invasion. No guns, no cannons, just numbers. And we are winning! All over the U.S.A., in hotels, airports, supermarkets, train stations, and hospitals you saw signs in English and Spanish; you dialed toll-free numbers and heard recorded voices say, “For English, press one or stay on the line. Para español, marque el número dos.” Did you hear such instructions in Korean? Chinese? Vetnamese? Swahili? Not that Jesús and María staggering behind their coyote with hopes of making beds in a Holiday Inn or cutting lawns in Pennsylvania are thinking, Well, here we are, reconquistadores erasing with our feet the artificial line the gringos drew on maps. They were unconscious agents of history, pushed northward by poverty, by the desire for stuff, or if they already had stuff, by the desire for more of it. Yet there were conscious agents like himself who saw this irresistible human flood for what it was, la reconquista.

  Years ago, when he was with the DEA, he’d confiscated bricks of cocaine in Texas with these words stamped on their wrappers: THIS IS OUR WAR ON THE NORTH AMERICANS. Were drugs a legitimate weapon in la reconquista? Of course they were. If gringo society was so fucked up that it produced multitudes of crackheads, heroin junkies, coke snorters, and dope smokers, why shouldn’t Mexicans give the Americans what they wanted and profit handsomely in the process? In pueblos all over Sonora new streetlights burned on newly paved streets; water flowed from faucets in houses that had previously relied on bucket wells or backyard standpipes. The electricity and the water and the asphalt came from Carrasco. He’d bought irrigation equipment and new tractors and fertilizer for the campesinos, and the beneficiaries of his largesse repaid him with their allegiance, serving as his informants and supplying him with madrinas to do menial tasks, with mules to drive or carry his products. He was their padrino, Don Joaquín. The Professor considered himself a man with a social conscience, and it pleased him, when he made his rounds of the countryside, to see the improvements in the people’s lives and to know he’d had a hand in it.
Yes, with every needle poked into an arm in L.A. or Phoenix or Chicago, with every joint smoked and crack pipe lit, the people in Carrasco’s field of operations lived a little better. And this, too, was fitting and just.

  But more than material benefits excused the narco-trafficking. He recalled a conversation that took place in Hermosillo, in the office of a certain Sonoran legislator. Present were his comandante, Victor Zaragoza, Carrasco, and himself, Capitán Bonham. It seemed that the politician, to whose reelection campaign Carrasco had contributed large sums, was having second thoughts about holding up his end of the bargain, which was to keep state and federal prosecutors from hindering Carrasco’s activities. People were talking, complained the legislator, people were gossiping that he was in bed with a drug lord. “Well, you are!” Carrasco said, laughing. He was seated on a sofa, his big chest straining the snap buttons of his cowboy shirt and his belly bulging over a hand-tooled belt with a silver buckle the size of a coffee saucer. “These people speak the truth, and you know, a famous Roman emperor named Marcus Aurelius once said that no man need fear the truth.”

  Hearing a man who hadn’t finished high school quote Marcus Aurelius appeared to fluster the politician; he saw then, if he hadn’t before, that he wasn’t dealing with a babo. He protested that he wasn’t afraid, merely concerned. For Joaquín! Not for himself! Pressures might be put on him by people he could not ignore. Not that he and Joaquín should sever ties, but perhaps a little distancing would be in order. Carrasco listened politely and said nothing. True, the legislator went on, this business was a very good business, and true, so long as the Americans had an insatiable appetite for drugs, there was no way to stop it, but … “Just this past Sunday, the bishop said Mass, and his sermon was about narcotics trafficking, and he said there could be no moral justification for it, and he was looking right at me when he said it!”