Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  You say that I’ve done exactly what the terrorists want, he began. Do you know what they want? Does anybody? Do they? I’ve read that they hate our freedoms and our way of life, but I wonder if they love our way of life and hate themselves for loving it and us for having it. So they kill themselves and us …

  He paused again and saw, through the kitchen window, an Anna’s hummingbird dipping its beak into the feeder hung from a back porch rafter. It flew off, so swiftly it seemed to have dissolved. He took out a second sheet and scribbled a paragraph defending his move west, then addressed her unasked-for advice.

  I admire those people you wrote me about, the ones who keep soldiering on, who are involved in this memorial business and so on. But I don’t think one ought to be built. Memorials are always pretty, tidy walkways and monuments and flowers, and they kind of create an amnesia. You forget how horrible and disgusting it was. There were people jumping out of 8oth-story windows to escape the flames. Think about that. It was so awful up there that jumping a thousand feet was the better way to go. You know what happens to a body when it hits the pavement from 80 floors up? It explodes. Like a water-filled balloon, except it isn’t filled with water. If New York is going to build a memorial, then they should have photographs of that on the walls, so then we’ll all remember that this is what happens when faith becomes fanaticism and fanaticism becomes nihilism, this is what human beings can do to each other.

  After reading over what he’d written, he stared out the window. With no idea what to say next, he signed off, Love, Dad. He stamped and addressed the envelope and sank into another morbid remembrance.

  Morgan had been close to Amanda, regarding her more as an older sister than as a stepmother, and it was she who’d insisted they put up a missing-person flier, not because she thought there was any hope that Mandy had survived but because it would be an act of solidarity with all those who’d lost someone that day. She scanned Amanda’s photograph into her computer and ran off copies and persuaded Castle to join her. He saw no sense in it, but he was then in an almost hypnotic state, without a will of his own, liable to do just about anything anybody told him to do, and so he rode the train into the city with Morgan and pinned the fliers to the bulletin board in Grand Central. They took the subway downtown, where a noxious stench lingered from the still-smoldering wound blocks away and the scent of wreaths laid beside a fire station mingled with it, and to this day he could not smell flowers without recalling that other odor, resembling the stink of a burning landfill. Pale dust and ash lay thick on some streets, and their feet left prints in the dust as they traipsed along, posting Mandy’s picture on lampposts and on trees in Thompson Park and on the walls of fire-houses and hospitals. The same photograph that stood framed on his desk at home was staring back at him from among the thousands of other fliers, that mournful wallpaper of New York City in the days following the attack, faces and names and pleas … HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN … IF YOU KNOW THE WHEREABOUTS OF THIS WOMAN … Prayers, really, each one representing some family clinging to an illusion that mom, dad, sister, brother, lover, husband, wife had not been cremated or buried under a mountain of concrete and powdered glass and melted steel but was lying in a trauma ward somewhere, or wandering about not knowing his or her name. Castle was overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. MISSING 9/11/01. AMANDA F. CASTLE. SHE IS 5’10“ TALL AND 155 POUNDS, AUBURN HAIR, GREEN EYES. ANYONE WHO KNOWS OF HER WHEREABOUTS, PLEASE CONTACT … Christ, it read like a poster for a lost cat.

  “Terminado,” Elena said, startling him. “Feenish.” He turned to her, and she asked, motioning at Morgan’s e-mail, “¿Son malas noticias?”

  It took him a moment to translate the question, and then he realized that his eyes were glistening.

  “No. No bad news … No malas noticias … It’s … es…”

  She clasped his hand and held it firmly, sympathetically, telling him, through the language of her touch, that she understood what “it” was. Of course she did. This woman who’d lost two of her five children was no stranger to sorrow. Castle looked into the copper disk of her face, at the black hair veined with gray. Her kindness moved him. She let him go. As he rose to dress before driving her back, she motioned at the coffeepot. He nodded. She poured herself a cup and settled into a chair. Her way of letting him know that she was in no hurry; she would wait while he cleaned himself up.

  When he emerged from the bathroom, showered and shaved, she said, “Mucho mejor,” much better, and then spoke to him in an earnest voice, but her meaning eluded him. He asked her to repeat what she’d said, más despacio—more slowly. This she did, enunciating each word as if speaking to a small child.

  “Lo siento,” he said, still unable to understand her. “No entiendo.”

  Elena threw her stout arms up in frustration. They went outside to his car just as Monica drove in.

  “Got back early,” she called. “I can take her.” She gave Castle an approving glance. “Big improvement. The grizzled-prospector look didn’t become you.”

  Elena spoke to her.

  “There was something she was trying to tell you?” Monica asked him.

  “I think so.”

  “She wants me to translate.”

  Castle heard the Mexican woman utter to Monica the same words she had to him: Cuando perdí mis hijos, cuidé mi sentimiento en vez de ellos.

  “I’m not sure if I’ve got it right. Something like this: ‘When I lost my children, I took care of my sadness instead of them.’” Monica shrugged. “I’m not quite sure what she means.”

  Nor was Castle—the phrase was almost as opaque in English as it had been in Spanish.

  The riddle teased him as he drove into Patagonia to mail his letter. After he’d checked his post office box, crammed with bills and junk mail, he leashed Sam and walked her past the clinic, then the marshal’s office and the town jail, a windowless concrete box built by the WPA during the Depression, then across Third Avenue to the broad parkway that had been a roadbed for the Southern Pacific back in the days when Patagonia had been a mining town and cow town. The last big mine had shut down more than forty years ago. Since then Patagonia had reinvented itself, though it hadn’t settled on a clear identity. It was a little bit of an artists’ colony, a little bit of a tourist town, and a little bit of a redoubt for aging hippies and other eccentrics who preferred backwaters to the mainstream; a little bit of a cow town still, rusty horse trailers parked on side streets, worn saddles draped over the porch rails of moored double-wides; and more than a little bit of a Mexican pueblo, home to Mendozas and Sánchezes and Garcías, from whose tin-roofed houses radios blared brassy Norteño ballads over the yips of mongrel dogs scuffling in dusty yards. He walked to the edge of town, where he saw two Coues whitetails browsing and a javelina rooting in a mesquite forest, then turned and headed back toward the post office and his car. A couple of dirt-caked pickups were parked in front of the Wagon Wheel Saloon, and a crowd of bird watchers had assembled around a van near the Stage Stop Hotel. The newspaper vending machines in front of the hotel had been emptied, all but one, its display window framing an Arizona Daily Star. He bought the paper. The front page cried war news. BOMBS OVER BAGHDAD. A hundred thousand American troops were storming up the Euphrates Valley from Kuwait, with no need for documentation, their guns and tanks sufficing as visas. The notion of the United States Army as a horde of illegal aliens grimly amused Castle.

  His grumbling stomach—he hadn’t eaten all day, had in fact eaten very little during his prolonged funk—drew him across Naugle Avenue to Santos’s café. He sat down under the awning outside, tethered Sam to a table leg, and ordered menudo and tortillas and tried to read the paper. It reminded him of why he avoided the news. Shock and awe. Cruise missiles. A tank battle with Hussein’s Republican Guard. The delirium of war, all the blind violence of the world. The vast and bloody spectacle unfolding in Iraq reduced his own troubles to the microscopic; but the Olympian perspective did not release him from them, any more than a cripple
d ant’s awareness of its insignificance, were an ant a conscious being, would relieve it of its suffering. When I lost my children, I took care of my sadness instead of them. He had the feeling that he’d heard that phrase, or one like it, before. The waitress brought his steaming menudo, the warm tortillas wrapped in cloth, and then he remembered. He hadn’t heard it—he’d read it in Seneca’s letter to Marcia. You hug and embrace the sorrow you have kept alive in place of your son. The language was more elegant, but the idea was the same, proving that you did not have to be a brilliant philosopher to know a thing or two about life, about the maimed heart and its perverse inclination to aggravate its wounds.

  There, eating menudo in a border-town café, Castle experienced a sudden illumination. He had always regarded his sorrow as a force outside himself, not subject to his will; indeed, his will often seemed subject to it. And that was true in its earlier stages. Only now, because of a few words spoken by a simple Mexican woman, did it occur to him that he had since nurtured and strengthened his misery by taking a morbid pleasure in it. The dream, the apparition, whatever it was, had been the fabrication of his own unhappy mind; and when presented with the possibility of relief, that mind had fiendishly concocted the means to sustain its agonies. His grief had fed on itself; it had become a habit.

  The question was, how to break it? He’d proven he was no candidate for formal therapy. He would have to be his own counselor. He paid the check, and taking up Sam’s leash, he walked back to his car. As he climbed in, his glance fell on his cell phone, in a tray beside the floor shift. He didn’t decide to check his voice mail; he was compelled to do it. There were two messages, the first a hang-up, the second from Tessa: “Hello, Gil. Just wanted to talk. I’ve been welded to the TV since Bush’s announcement, and I … Give me a call if you get the chance.” She spoke with a casualness that was so artificial, it called attention to the distress it was meant to conceal. He could hear in her voice her dread of a future visit from a man in an army uniform. She didn’t want to talk to someone, she needed to. She needed him.

  Her phone rang seven or eight times before she answered.

  “Tess, it’s Gil. I just got—”

  “Oh, hi! Hi!” she interrupted.

  “You sound out of breath.”

  “Ran in from outside. I was cleaning out the tackroom. Trying to stay busy.”

  “I got your message.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry I’d called so late. It was after midnight.”

  “I mean I just picked it up. Didn’t check my messages till now. Still feel like talking?”

  “Sure. Sure.”

  Here was a reason to live—to be at her side, to ease her fears if he could, to be a friend.

  “I’m in town,” he said. “I could stop by on my way back, if that’s okay.”

  “I’d like that, Gil. I’d like that very much.”

  11

  YVONNE’S DRIVER, also foreman of the Tres Encinos ranch, stopped the Land Cruiser where the road ended, on a ridge overlooking a canyon shaded by sycamores. Like ghosts, she thought. The white-barked trees looked like ghosts. Ghosts were very much on her mind, spirits from the past. She could feel their presence.

  “This is as far it goes on the north,” Jiménez said, and with a brown, gnarled finger pointed at a barbed-wire fence about a kilometer away. “Allí está la frontera. Beyond it is the United States.”

  Hours of banging down ranch roads more suited to horses or burros than to motor vehicles had given Yvonne a sore back and made her a little irritable. “What else would be beyond it? Europe?”

  “Señora?”

  “A joke. Let us go on.”

  “Go on where?”

  “To the border. I want to go right up to it,” she said in a voice that closed off all possibility of discussion.

  Unacquainted with her imperious ways, Jiménez argued that La Señora Menéndez couldn’t see any more from there than she could from here, and besides, there was no more road.

  “We will walk.” She turned to the passengers in the backseat: her bodyguards, Marco and Heraclio, and sitting between them, her son, Julián. Skinny, wearing a rose-colored shirt, he looked like a flamingo flanked by two well-fed vultures. “Is everybody up for a little walk?”

  Of course they were. They would be up for anything she wanted to do.

  She removed a plastic freezer bag from her purse, stuffed it into her pants pocket, and got out of the car. It was a temperate morning, perfect for a stroll, but the cattle trail leading down into the canyon was rocky, and Julián had trouble negotiating it in his cowboy boots, the red and white boots with knifepoint toes she had told him not to wear. “Only a maricón would dare to be seen in such boots,” she’d taunted, but he ignored her. Yvonne was shod in sturdy walking shoes and clad in Levi’s, a denim shirt, and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Not a fashionable outfit, but it was practical and created the image she wished to project: the ranchera, out inspecting her new property. On paper rancho Los Tres Encinos did not belong to her. The sale had been completed weeks ago between its former owner and her cousin, a real estate broker in Douglas. Later he sold half of it to La Morita Enterprises, S.A., and later still, the other half to San Pedro Properties, S.A. The officers of the two front companies were her two elder sisters and their husbands. The complicated transactions were necessary to hide from nosy investigators the identity of the true owner—Yvonne herself. She had put up the money for the back-to-back purchases, thus giving it a double scrubbing.

  With Jiménez in front, the group tramped through the canyon. Marco and Heraclio, each armed with a .40-caliber automatic pistol, prowled beside Yvonne, watchful and assured, like the predators they were. Julián cursed the rocks scuffing his pretty boots.

  “Is there some purpose to this, Mother?” he asked, petulantly.

  “I never do anything for the hell of it, you know that.”

  They came to the border fence, which was in disrepair. A bullet-sieved metal sign hung from the top wire: U.S. GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. DO NOT MOLEST UNDER PENALTY OF LAW. Nearby an old concrete monument rose into the branches of an Emory oak. The plaque at its base was weather-worn, but its words were still legible: BOUNDARY OF THE UNITED STATES. TREATY OF 1853. REESTABLISHED BY TREATIES OF 1882--89.

  “Ridiculous,” Yvonne said.

  “What is?” Jiménez asked.

  “Do you see any difference between that over there and this over here? There is nothing in the land to tell you, here is Mexico, here is the United States. The whole idea of a border seems to me ridiculous.”

  “Perhaps that is so,” Jiménez remarked. “All the same, it is there.”

  She regarded the foreman, a typical Sonoran vaquero—muscles like twisted hemp, a simple mind, which wasn’t the same thing as being simpleminded, a good, strong, honest face. She liked the face. She liked him. She hoped it never would be necessary to have him killed.

  “That ranch on the other side is called the San Ignacio, is it not?” she asked, though she knew its name. She’d heard it most of her life. The ghosts lived there.

  Jiménez nodded. “We share the fence line. Almost twenty kilometers.”

  “What can you tell me about your American neighbors?”

  “Their name is Erskine,” he answered, pronouncing it Airskeen.

  Yvonne knew that. “What can you tell me about them besides that?”

  “Not much. I do not know them. The boss does. He talks to them.”

  “About what?”

  “Sometimes their cattle wander onto our land. They call the boss and ask him to gather the strays and drive them back to the line. Sometimes our cattle wander onto their land. The boss telephones them and asks them to return the favor, and they do. It is easy to tell which belongs to who. Their cattle are black, ours white.” He gestured toward a far hillside, where Charolais cows stood out in the yellow grass like plaster statues. “The boss says it is important to be good neighbors.”

  “Let us develop good habits,” Yvonne said. “He i
s no longer the boss.”

  “Claro, señora.”

  “Listen. I’m going to give you my first instructions as la nueva jefa. From now on there will be no more doing favors for those people over there. If we find their cattle on this rancho, we keep them. Understood?”

  Jiménez hooked his thumbs into his belt and cleared his throat. “Sí, señora.”

  “The party starts soon. It would be good if the hostess showed up,” said Julián.

  She looked at him, slouched against a sycamore, arms folded across his narrow chest, an insolent smile on his face.

  “You come with me,” she commanded. Then to Marco and Heraclio: “Pull these apart so I can pass through.”

  While Marco pressed his foot on a low wire, Heraclio tugged the strand above it, creating a gap that Yvonne, bending low and turning sideways, stepped through onto the soil of the United States. It wasn’t as daring an act as it appeared. She’d been born in the U.S. and had lived there till she was twelve, when her mother remarried and moved back to Mexico.

  Julián hesitated on the other side of the fence. “What do you think you are doing?”

  “Get some balls, mi hijo, and come over here with me.”

  There was enough Latino macho in him to accept the challenge. “This is stupid. What if La Migra shows up?” He pointed at the tread-marks in the rough drag road that ran along the American side of the boundary. “They patrol here all the time.”

  “I show them this,” said Yvonne, plucking her U.S. passport from a back pocket of her jeans.

  “And me? What do I show them?”

  “Turn around and show them your ass.”

  She crossed the drag road, went on a few yards more, and ground her heels into the dirt, ground them hard, making deep impressions. “There. I have planted my flag.”

  Julián responded to this declaration with a bewildered squint.