Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  “Enough,” Castle said.

  She stood and began to clear the dishes. He insisted that he clean up.

  “It’s a deal,” she said. “I’d rather muck out a horse stall than do dishes—as you can see.” She motioned at the dirty plates stacked by the sink.

  While he rinsed them before placing them in the dishwasher, and scrubbed the chili sauce ringing the pot, she went into the living room and put a CD in the player. He heard Ella Fitzgerald singing “Shall We Dance,” the tune and Ella’s voice sounding anomalously urban in an Arizona ranch house, each of whose windows framed a Charles Russell landscape; tune and voice also evoked a sharp nostalgic pang, a wholly unexpected longing to be out of here and back east, in a noisy Manhattan bar with a martini in front of him and Mandy beside him.

  “Shall we?”

  He put the scrub brush down and turned to see Tessa with her hand held out to him.

  “Dance?” he asked.

  “You know how, don’t you?”

  “Sure. I’m actually pretty good.”

  “Well, then …”

  “What about your knee?”

  “All loosened up. C’mon.”

  Four hours of playing cowboy had stiffened his middle-age back and legs; he felt unsure of himself for other reasons. What was he to make of her invitation? Was she flirting? Overcoming his inhibitions, he took her left hand, placed his right arm around her back, and led her around in a foxtrot.

  “Well, by God, you are good,” she said.

  “Miss Covington’s dance class in eighth grade.”

  And when Ella segued into the bittersweet “But Not for Me,” he held Tessa as he had his partners at Miss Covington’s—at a chaste distance. This wasn’t easy—avoiding the touch of those Ride of the Valkyries breasts of hers almost required a full extension of his arm. They continued to “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” the two of them smelling of horse sweat and saddle leather, dancing to Gershwin in the San Rafael Valley.

  “So did your experience with your first wife sour you on women?”

  “It never soured me. Made me a little cautious was all.”

  “I was damn sour on men for a good ten years.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Not that I was celibate. Anything but. I became a good old-fashioned vamp. Beat the hell out of men in the only way I knew how. Drive ’em crazy and then drop ’em. It’s no wonder Beth got a little screwed up.”

  They were back to soul baring, and hers was getting a little too bare for him. Her candor puzzled him. Maybe she’d succumbed to the modern American tendency, which he deplored, to be Up Front About Everything, a confessionalism fostered by those awful daytime talk shows, people blabbing their innermost secrets into living rooms all over the country. The other possibility was that Tessa was lonely and needed someone to talk to.

  “So when I started to sweeten up again,” she continued, “I discovered that seventy-five percent of the men were spoken for, and the twenty-five percent who weren’t, weren’t for a good reason.”

  He asked, “And that’s what drove you out here?”

  “I’d been wanting to make the change for a while, but I had to wait till Beth started college,” she answered. “She would have hated living here. We’d kept this place in the family after Dad died. Hired a guy to manage it. He was running it into the ground, and Mom and my brothers wanted to sell it. But I convinced them to let me run it, and if I couldn’t make it profitable, at least I’d stop it from losing money. So here I am, a hermit.”

  “Makes two of us, I guess.”

  The next tune was “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” With his hand pressed to the small of her back, feeling the warmth of her through her shirt, they two-stepped across the floor between the fireplace and the sofa. “Does it ever get it to you, the isolation?”

  “Sometimes. Nights, mostly. But I’m up at five and in bed by nine, so I don’t have that much night to get through. A couple of my friends in Patagonia think I’m a little cuckoo, living out here by myself. The smuggling, the drug running.”

  “It doesn’t worry you?”

  “The drug runners will leave you alone if you leave them alone, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. It’s the one time that’s the problem—that’s all it would take. One bad guy.”

  “Like the guy who shot Miguel’s friends.”

  “Miguel? Oh yeah, Miguel. The one you rescued. A lot of these drug mules, you know, snort coke or spray epinephrine into their noses. A boost to help them hump their loads. So you get some eighteen-year-old punk who’s buzzed, scared of running into Border Patrol. He’s hungry, he’s thirsty, he sees this lonely ranch house … I keep a twelve-gauge riot gun in my bedroom, just in case.”

  “Well, I don’t think you’re cuckoo. I think you’re a brave woman.”

  Letting go of his left hand, she snapped her fingers and tossed her head one side to the other, so that her hair flew wildly, teasingly past her face. “That’s me all right! ¡Muy valiente!”

  After they’d danced five numbers in a row, her knee began to bother her, and they stopped. She poured two mugs of coffee, and they sat down, facing the kiva fireplace that gave off a breath of charred oak and mesquite.

  “And does the isolation ever get to you?” she asked.

  “Sure. But there’s my aunt, Blaine and Monica, Gerardo and Elena. Call me a semihermit.”

  “You must miss your girls.”

  “I do. But it’s better than …”

  Better than being back there, he thought.

  Tessa, sitting with her sore leg propped on the coffee table, raised the mug to her lips and held it there briefly, looking at him intensely. “Are you able to keep your mind off … What I mean is, are you able to keep yourself occupied? You can’t possibly hunt all day, and now the season is over anyway.”

  “I go on long hikes, long enough to tire me out so I can sleep. Do a bit of bird watching. Sometimes I’ll run Sam just to watch her point—she doesn’t know the season’s over.” He shrugged. How aimless and idle this all must seem to her. “And I read a lot.”

  “What do you read?”

  “Philosophy.”

  “You’re kidding! Are we talking Plato and Aristotle or Deepak Chopra?”

  “The Greek and Roman stoics. Seneca mostly.”

  “Seneca. I’m afraid you’ve got me there.”

  “He wrote back in the time of Nero. Reading him helps me live with it,” he said, aware that he was lowering his guard. “That’s all I want—to learn how to live with it. I don’t expect to get over it.”

  From the pained look Tessa bestowed on him, he worried that he might have sounded as if he were pleading for her pity. That hadn’t been his intention—a good thing, because she didn’t give him any.

  “Don’t go slamming the door on yourself like that. You do get over things, even the worst.”

  “Seneca thought of suicide,” he said, not listening to her. “He was so sickly when he was young that he thought of doing away with himself. The only thing that stopped him was worry that his father couldn’t bear the loss. That rings so true. So true. It was like he was talking to me.” He was silent for a beat, then added in an undertone, “Like he was talking about me.”

  Tessa frowned, mystified as to where he was going with this digression. Then he disclosed the secret occulted in his heart for months. He told her everything, from his pilgrimage to Ground Zero to the moment he realized he could not pull the trigger and why he could not: fear of extinction, the greater fear of what his suicide would have done to his daughters.

  Tessa said nothing, her forehead creased. He couldn’t tell if she was as astonished to hear his confession as he’d been to make it, or if she was mortified for him, as if, on a reckless impulse, he had stripped himself to bare some ugly surgical scar. He searched her face, and her expression softening, he knew instinctively that if she had not tried to kill herself, she had at one time given it serious consideration; knew further that here was someone he
could speak to about anything, without regret, without fear of censure.

  “You’re the only one who knows anything about this,” he said.

  She nodded in silent consent to keep his secret as he’d consented to keep hers, and with that gesture, she cemented their bond.

  “Gil, doesn’t it tell you something?” she asked. “Doesn’t it tell you something that you couldn’t go through with it?”

  He shook his head. The only lesson his failure had taught was that, despairing of despair itself, he had merely commuted his self-execution to a life sentence.

  “You couldn’t pull that trigger because you cared about your girls. You cared about yourself. You’re not as dead inside as you think you are. You have people to live for, you have something to live for.”

  In this commentary he heard an unfortunate echo of Ms. Hartley, but at least it had come, this time, from someone who had suffered a loss. Whatever loss it is that rape inflicts—of faith, of trust, of self-respect.

  10

  THEY SAW each other off and on for the next month. They went riding or walking on her ranch and danced again in her living room to Ella and Ellington. They met once by accident at the post office in Patagonia and had lunch at Santos’s café, then did some bird watching at the preserve outside of town, where Castle, playing Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle, schooled her in identification of the songbirds that had begun their northward journeys from Mexico. She called them “border crossers with wings,” and he liked that image of free creatures soaring above man’s boundaries.

  One morning as the cottonwoods were greening up, he sat with her at the north end of the valley and watched her paint the ruins of a homestead—a romantic subject, she said, that she hoped to render unromantically. Whatever that meant. She set up her portable easel and began to sketch the broken walls, the collapsed roof, the chunks of adobe brick scattered in the grass. Samantha and Klaus were with them, running off in ever wider circles. She’d begun to apply paint to the sketch when the dogs disappeared and did not respond to his calls. He went to look for them, and found them a quarter of an hour later, pointing a covey of quail. After flushing the birds, he leashed the dogs and walked them back. Tessa, frowning at her canvas, did not seem to notice his return. He looked at the painting and marveled at how well she was capturing her subject without slavishly reproducing it.

  “You’ve got it,” he said.

  “Got what?”

  “The lonesomeness, the desolation …”

  “Yeah, I did. That’s exactly what I don’t want to get. The abandoned homestead out on the lone prairie.” She clamped the tip of the brush between her teeth. “Somebody told me once that there are no unpoetic subjects, only unpoetic poets. Ditto, I suppose, for painters, but dammit, some things you just can’t do anything with. They’re inherently sentimental.”

  “Not ugly enough for you?”

  She laughed.

  “Sentimental or not, I like it,” he said. “It’s damn good.”

  “Sold,” she said.

  When he returned to his cabin later that afternoon, Castle found its seclusion less than congenial. He sat down to read Seneca but couldn’t concentrate, remembering the pleasure he’d found in watching Tessa as she sat under the small umbrella attached to the easel, her hands making swift, sure strokes. He thought about the secrets they’d entrusted to each other. How incredible. He hadn’t been looking for a friend and confidante, but he’d found one.

  Restless, he put the book down and paced the room. Sam, claws clicking on the worn wooden floor, followed as if she were leashed to him. The dog stopped and seemed to gaze at him bewildered when, Ella Fitzgerald singing in his head, Castle took Tessa’s hand, put his arm around her waist, and fell into a slow, gliding two-step. In this make-believe he did not hold her at a discreet distance but drew her close. Although he did not have a strong imagination, the melody playing in his mind swung him into a fantasy vivid enough to stir physical sensations—Tessa’s cheek pressed to his, her lush breasts crushed against him. He grew light-headed, and this lightness, this buoyancy, flowed throughout his body. He felt that he was almost floating, dancing on the legs of a man half his age. He was like someone under the spell of a powerful narcotic, for as he twirled from corner to corner, he was aware of the absence of the anguish that had tormented him for the past year and a half. Was it possible that he, whose emotional range had been restricted to sorrow and fear, was experiencing not the mere cessation of pain but happiness? Was it possible he was falling in love?

  Suddenly Ella’s voice fell silent, and he stopped dancing. Falling in love? he asked himself as he stood by the stove, looking at the ash powdering its apron. He couldn’t be. If his mourning could be eased this soon after Amanda’s death, it could not have been as deep as he’d thought; and if that was so, his love for her could not have been as profound as he believed. That violated his view of himself as a man who’d suffered a near-mortal wound, from which recovery lay far in the future, if there was to be any recovery at all; a serious man who had so loved his wife that her death had foreclosed, for years to come, any chance of knowing love again. This happiness he felt, or thought he felt, must be illusory, like his imaginary dance partner, the opposite of phantom pain—phantom relief. Real or not, he didn’t trust it. He hadn’t earned it. Every martyr treasures his torment to some degree, and Castle, in his own eyes a martyr to the world’s madness and to love, treasured his. He almost missed it.

  Mandy returned it to him very early the next morning; he saw her clearly, standing at his bedside in the black pantsuit she’d worn the day she’d taken the shuttle to Boston. Her hair was pinned up, with two wisps dangling past her ears, exactly as it had been then, the last time he’d seen her alive. The last time he’d seen her, period. A flame of wild joy shot up in him like a gas jet. “Take care, darling, take care,” she said, and then vanished, leaving him kneeling on the bed, his arms outstretched, as if he’d been reaching out to embrace her. The joyous flame guttered out.

  He woke with a start, stumbled into the bathroom, flipped on the light switch, turned on the tap, and splashed cold water on his face. The dream had been so real, limning Amanda in every detail, that he almost believed he’d actually seen her, or her ghost. Long ago Grace had told him and his sister that a mystical streak ran in her family. A great-aunt of hers had been a medium. Grace herself claimed that her mother visited her often after her death. Had the vision of Mandy been a hallucination? Some trick that misfiring neurons performed in the shadows of semislumber? All neat and scientific. Still, he wasn’t convinced. She had, for chrissake, spoken to him. But whether he’d experienced a dream, a hallucination, or an actual haunting, he wanted only to see her again.

  Grief is a chronic malaria of the heart, periods of remission alternating with spasms of relapse. For the next three days he saw no one and did almost nothing, lying in bed till late morning. He could well have remained there all day if it hadn’t been for Sam, whose whines and whimpers to be let out or fed roused him from his immobility. He neglected himself, reverting to the disheveled recluse who had so alarmed Morgan and Justine.

  On the fourth day Monica dropped Elena off at his cabin. She cleaned it every Saturday. Both women looked in mild shock at the figure who answered the door—grizzled, unkempt, still in his bathrobe at ten in the morning.

  “I’ve got shopping to do in Nogales,” Monica said as Elena waddled to the shed for the mop, broom, and vacuum cleaner. “I won’t be done before she is. Could you drive her back?”

  Castle didn’t see why the woman couldn’t walk—it was only a mile—but agreed to drive her.

  “And a delivery from your electronic postal service.” Monica handed him an e-mail from Morgan. He’d asked his girls to write him letters, but they regarded that means of communication as primitive as smoke signals and continued to e-mail him in care of the San Ignacio’s address.

  Monica squinted at him, and he thought he saw her wrinkle her nose; after three days with
out so much as a sponge bath, he must be pretty ripe. “Are you okay, Gil? Nobody’s seen you for days.”

  “A little under the weather.”

  “Tessa said she’s phoned you a few times, but no luck.”

  “I left my cell in the car,” he said dully. “It’s a dead zone out here.”

  “Then use our landline. Give her a ring. She’s something of a nervous wreck.”

  There was a momentary silence before he asked if anything was the matter.

  “She hasn’t heard from Beth. That’s to be expected. Still, it’s tough on her.” Monica saw the puzzlement on his face. “You haven’t heard?”

  “Heard?”

  “We’ve bombed Baghdad and invaded Iraq.”

  “What? When?”

  “Bush announced it last night. Blaine is about ready to reenlist,” she added, sprinkling the remark with a dash of sarcasm. “Says we’re going to win this one, and he’d like to be there when we do. Call Tessa. I’ve got to run.”

  He brewed coffee and then sat at the kitchen table to read Morgan’s message, which she must have written before the president’s declaration; otherwise, it would have contained an antiwar tirade. She began by offering news about herself—she’d been put in charge of a marketing campaign for a hot new commercial novel, a “genre buster” combining the occult with a detective story. And about the family—last week, Anne and Peter had treated her and Justine to brunch at their country club in Redding. His absence was felt by all. This led her to repeat the comments she’d made before his departure from Connecticut—that he was doing what the terrorists wanted. Some families of the victims had formed a group to advise a committee that was choosing a design for a 9/11 memorial. He should come back and join them. What a wonderful way to honor Amanda’s memory! That piece of unsolicited counsel shot a ray of irritation through the dense overcast of Castle’s mood.

  While Elena, a ball of sanitizing energy, swept and dusted, he got a writing pad and pen from a drawer and sat down to reply. He thanked Morgan for taking the time to write, congratulated her on her new responsibility, remarked that she’d made a few observations he needed to respond to, and then paused, considering how he ought to respond.