Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  “This ranch is going to be mine,” Yvonne said. “I am going to buy it.”

  “I didn’t know it was for sale.”

  “It isn’t, but it will be. You and I are going to talk about the future.”

  “No, we are not. Not here. We are not going to talk about anything, the two of us standing here like a couple of mojados waiting for a ride.”

  It pleased her when he stood up to her; pleased her that when she got out of the business, as she intended to someday, she could turn it over to him, assured that he would have the strength of mind not to screw it up. She reached out and stroked the hair on his temple, red hair like hers, the color inherited from her father, the father who would have loved her, given her presents on her birthday, and been kind and gentle to her always. Had he lived, she would have been spared the things her stepfather had done to her because there would have been no stepfather.

  “You are right,” she said to Julián. “This is not the appropriate place. But one thing before we go.”

  With a hard kick, she gouged a hole in the ground, in the ground stained with sin and blood, the blood of her lost father. She kicked and kicked till she’d dug up a small mound of loose soil, then pulled out the freezer bag and handed it to her son. “Fill this with that. We are going to scatter the dirt on Abuela’s grave the next time we visit. It will make her happy in heaven.”

  “I had a feeling this was about her,” Julián muttered. “If she is in heaven, she cannot be happier than she is now. That is what a priest would tell you.”

  “We are far from any priests, mi hijo. Now do as I ask.”

  Julián, grumbling that she never asked, she only gave orders, squatted down and scooped the dirt into the bag.

  THE RANCH HOUSE, corrals, and outbuildings were clustered in a grove of álamos watered by a ciénaga. A rock dam slabbed across the ciénaga formed a duck pond behind the house, overlooked by a low hill atop which three ancient oaks—hence the ranch’s name—grew in a straight line, like trees in an orchard. A pretty spot, thought Yvonne, returning from her tour. More important, it was secure. Anyone who tried to get to her here would have a hard time of it; and once she’d cultivated the allegiance of the local inhabitants, a campaign she was beginning with today’s fiesta, she would have plenty of informants to alert her to intruders well ahead of time. Human radar stations, an early warning system. Boredom would be the only problem. Rural life never had suited her temperament; she’d had a bellyful of it when she was a girl. She liked a good time. She liked to dance. She liked to hold court in the crowded bars and discos that the Menéndez organization owned in Agua Prieta, Naco, and Cananea. Sure, when things got too dull, she could always escape to her Agua Prieta town house or to her villa in Zihuatanejo, with its spectacular ocean view; but the fact was, she would be spending most of her time on the ranch, at least until she’d consolidated her hold on the routes through the San Rafael Valley. Its maze of hidden canyons and side canyons had been pathways for one kind of contraband or another for as long as anyone could remember—liquor during Prohibition; tires, gasoline, and other rationed commodities during the Second World War; today marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines. Joaquín Carrasco, that fat little shit, regarded these pathways as his exclusively. Soon she would disabuse him of that illusion. She now owned ten thousand hectares of his territory, a wedge she was going to drive into the very heart of his operations. “Grabbing market share” was how Julián had put it, in the lingo he’d picked up in business school in the United States. Whatever you called it, it was going to be a difficult and dangerous undertaking, but now that she’d formed an alliance with the Gulf Cartel, she would have the power to pull it off: the manpower, the financial power, and the firepower, to which she could add the power of her own ruthless reputation. Inspire terror in ally and adversary alike; that was the key to maintaining loyalty within and to overcoming enemies from without.

  Preparations for the fiesta were well under way. The Norteño band she’d hired—Víctor Castillo and the Golden Roosters—were tuning their instruments. Burly men in straw cowboy hats were setting up picnic tables in the front yard or hauling coolers of beer from a pickup truck. A half dozen of Yvonne’s pistoleros, gathered around a firepit with a few local-boy vaqueros, were guzzling cans of Tecate and going to bed with rosamaría, the pungent smell of their joints mingling with the savory scent of carnitas bubbling over the fire in a copper vat.

  “Getting a head start?” Yvonne called, striding toward the house, Julián beside her.

  “¡Sí!” answered one of her boys. “And nobody will be able to catch us!”

  Through the laughter, she overheard one young vaquero ask another, “¿Es esa vieja la nueva jefa?” She hesitated, tempted to tell the cowboy, “Yes, I am the new boss, and who the hell are you to call me an old woman?” She thought better of it and went inside.

  The house dated back to the 1920s, built of thick adobe walls, its casement windows cutting the sunlight into squares that lay atop the tiles of glazed clay. The click of Julián’s boot heels echoed in the parlor; like the other rooms, it was almost empty. Except for a few pieces, the previous owner had taken his furniture with him—family heirlooms, he’d said.

  “Wait for me in the study,” she told Julián, then entered her bedroom, where a huge canopy bed stood under a beamed ceiling four meters high. The thought crossed her mind that she would like to fuck somebody on its starched white sheets, shrouded by its filmy white curtains, but she couldn’t think of any attractive candidates. Considering the ravishments she’d endured from her stepfather and the perversities her husband had subjected her to, it astonished her that she was still capable of sexual desire.

  Dámaso García and Fermín Menéndez—two sick pendejos. Of all the deaths she was responsible for, those were the only ones that had given her any pleasure. She had arranged for others to rid her of Fermín—it was as much a business affair as it was personal—but she had killed her stepfather with her own hands when she was sixteen. They were living on a wretched ejido then, where Dámaso grew squash and melons, working occasional shifts at the big copper mine in Cananea to supplement his income, much of which went to beer and bacanora. Just the three of them—he, Rosario, and Yvonne. Her sisters had left home two years before, running off with the first men who were halfway nice to them to get away from Dámaso. Thereafter Yvonne became the sole object of his unholy attentions. He was a fairly normal man when sober, a monster when drunk. He drank quite a lot, so Yvonne and her mother were more acquainted with the monster. One winter afternoon, after he’d visited her bed the previous night, she was helping him split mesquite for firewood. Strong and tall, taller than most girls her age (it was said she got her height from her part-Irish father), she was doing all the work because Dámaso had sunk into the remorse that almost always descended on him after he’d beaten Rosario or gratified himself with her daughter. He sat on the ground near the woodpile, swearing he was sorry for what he’d done, pledging never to do it again, to quit drinking, to go to confession and beg God’s forgiveness.

  Yvonne found his meaningless repentances more contemptible than the acts that had provoked them. If a man was to behave like a monster, better that he be a monster all the time and not feel bad about it afterward. On that afternoon he put on a greater show of contrition than usual, breaking into sobs and lowering his head to his uplifted knees after she said, “God may forgive you, but I never will.” Years later she would think that if he had not dropped his head in that manner, as if offering himself for sacrifice, she might not have struck. But he did and she did, swinging the ax into the back of his neck with the force and accuracy of an executioner, nearly decapitating him. Then with great calm (even now she remembered how calm she’d been) she went into the house and announced to her mother, “Dámaso is dead. I killed him.”

  Rosario ran into the yard and stared at the corpse and the blood, an immense amount of it, for a long time without speaking a word. Finally she clasped Yvonne’s hand
and said, “God did not bless me with a son, but He gave me one daughter with a man’s heart.” Yvonne was feeling the first twinges of panic. “I am going to have to run away or go to prison,” she cried. “You will do neither one,” said Rosario. “We have got to get rid of the body. The ax, too. Come on, we have a lot to do.”

  They wrapped Dámaso’s body in a tarp, managed to load him into the bed of the rattletrap truck that carried his squash and melons to market, and drove far out into the desert, where Yvonne hacked out a shallow grave with the ax. His head had come off on the bumpy ride. They buried it with the body, threw in the ax, and covered the grave. “We will leave the truck out here,” Rosario said. “We are going to say that Dámaso got very drunk and drove away, never to be seen again.”

  On the long walk back to the ejido, Yvonne sobbed, still fearing that her only choice was flight or prison. Why, she asked Rosario, why in the name of God had she married such a horrible man? “All those years I raised you and your sisters alone. I was tired of it. Then Dámaso came along. How was I to know he would be the way he was?” They walked on, following the tire tracks when they could. “You know, it is those gringos who are to blame. They killed your father and left me alone. They are the guilty ones.” It wasn’t the first time Yvonne had heard about the gringos who’d murdered her father. Actually, only one gringo, but Rosario always spoke as if the killer’s whole family had been in on it.

  They got home at twilight, parched and exhausted. “Remember, mi hija, the story is, Dámaso abandoned us. We are going to have to move to town and find work, it is going to be tough, but now …” She embraced her daughter; there was a solidarity between them, the solidarity of conspirators, and she did not have to finish the sentence because Yvonne knew—now they were free.

  How strong, how clearheaded her mother had been then, Yvonne reflected, shedding her dusty clothes. And how small and frail at the end. The cancer had reduced Rosario, never a big woman, to the size of a child; and she seemed to grow smaller each time Yvonne visited her, there in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Tucson. Sometimes she expected to walk into that room and find nothing left of her mother but an empty hospital gown and a dent in the pillow.

  She ejected the memory from her mind and stepped into the bathroom to shower. A sidelong glance in the full-length mirror on the door moved her to face herself straight on. A vieja, was she? Not a bad figure for a woman of fifty-two. Some sag in the tits, some thickening in the waist, and—turning to look over her shoulder—some flabbiness in the ass and thighs, but not bad all in all. Her height was an advantage, equitably distributing the few excess kilos she carried. She focused on her face and decided that it wasn’t bad, either. Its worst flaw were the tiny pits, remnants of adolescent acne, cratering her cheeks; but a light brush of powder and rouge took care of those.

  The fiesta had started by the time she finished dressing and putting on her makeup. Loud voices, the bray of horns, and the high, warbling cries of the Golden Roosters came from outside. Through the bedroom window she saw the cabs of pickup trucks poking above the low wall enclosing the backyard. Also two army Humvees, with machine guns mounted on their roofs. Most of her guests were neighboring rancheros and ranch hands, or townspeople from Santa Cruz and San Lazaro; but she’d also invited the comandante of the local military zone. He had been recommended by a general, a personal friend. Carrasco had federal and state cops in his hip pocket; she had a general and a whole squad of colonels, as well the commander of the Agua Prieta garrison. Maintaining good relations with the army was critical to her operations: rural defense forces guarded her marijuana plantations; soldiers provided security for her shipments. The mordida amounted to many thousands a month but was worth every peso.

  When she entered the study, she found Julián sitting at the desk, a virtual mesa of walnut that easily accommodated a desktop computer, a laptop, a printer, two telephones, and a fax machine. He was drinking a can of soda. Julián did not touch alcohol, and he never used product. That was what had fucked up his father, among other things. Fermín had been addicted to Marlboros laced with crack.

  “¡Muy mota!” he said, admiring his mother’s outfit—a two-tone western shirt, cream across the shoulders, the rest emerald green; cream-colored pants with a silver concho belt; a pair of lizard-skin boots; and a silver and obsidian necklace with matching earrings. The shirt complemented her green eyes and the jewelry made a nice contrast with her hair.

  “It is hardly elegant,” she sniffed. “A black cocktail dress would be elegant.”

  “In a rustic way, it is. You are the rustically elegant ranchera.”

  She winced as he swiveled the high-backed leather chair to one side and crossed his legs in an effeminate way, one pointy boot tapping the air. “Don’t sit like that,” she said.

  He uncrossed his legs and spread them apart and grabbed his crotch. “Manly enough for you?”

  She overlooked his impudence. They were, after all, a team. The union of her ruthlessness and cunning with his organizational talents had transformed the Menéndez organization—or the Agua Prieta Cartel, as the chotas called it—from a joke into a disciplined and efficient enterprise. If he was a maricón, at least he was a smart one, upon whom an expensive education had not been wasted. “This is a business, and it’s time we started running it like one,” Julián had declared not long after his father’s death, an event as liberating for him as it had been for her. Fermín was a peasant and a tyrant who had imposed on the cartel a despotism of outmoded methods better suited to running a corner grocery than a multimillion-dollar industry. Among his many other idiocies, he’d kept all the family profits in just two banks, both in Douglas. One seizure warrant from the FBI or U.S. Customs, and the Menéndezes would have been broke.

  With the help of American and Mexican lawyers, Julián had distributed the accounts to twenty banks and investment firms throughout the United States and Mexico. He established the straw companies through which profits were washed in land deals and legitimate businesses from car washes to discos to restaurants. He’d computerized records—where the mota had been grown, the weight of each load and who it had been assigned to, and the amount of mordida and to whom it was paid (a roster that included U.S. Customs agents at the Douglas port of entry). Fermín had kept such information on scraps of paper or in his head, and since his crack habit had further shrunk his head’s naturally limited capacity, it was easy for disloyal people to rip him off or snitch out a shipment and get away with it. Yvonne often thought that she could have put up with his sexual perversions if he hadn’t been so stupid, or with his stupidities if he hadn’t been so perverse. The two together were intolerable. When Fermín turned down an offer from the Gulf Cartel to partner up in shipping Colombian coke through Agua Prieta—he wanted nothing to do with Colombians—Yvonne saw her opportunity. She got word to the Gulf boss, who was running his affairs from his cell in Palomas prison, that if he would rid her of Fermín, he would have a deal.

  After she took over, the thieves and snitches thought they could get away with even more from her than they had from her late husband. Because of her sex, of course. She ended that misconception forever with the now-famous “Pond of Death” incident. Housecleaning, after all, was woman’s work. Yvonne herself had phoned the police with the “anonymous” tip that led them to the water hole. She wanted the bodies to be discovered and all the tabloid headlines the discovery could grab. It was important to set an example right away.

  “You wanted to talk about the future,” Julián said. “No time like the present.”

  Yvonne stood looking out the window, her back to him. Ghosts. “You know, I was thinking about the past when I was getting ready. About Abuela. How small she looked. Small. Small. Small. She could not have weighed more than thirty kilos.”

  Julián sighed. His mother spoke in subdued tones, as she always did when the subject was Rosario. Though he welcomed these gentle contours of voice, a pleasing contrast to her normal sharps and flats, he was sick of he
aring about his sanctified grandmother, dead for six months. “Let us not indulge in nostalgia,” he said. “The past is gone.”

  “The hell it is!” she shot back, sounding more like herself, each word as piercing as a thorn. Looking at her tall figure from behind, crowned by red hair, he thought of an ocotillo wand in the spring, with its scarlet blossoms, its setaceous stalk. He said nothing.

  Nor did Yvonne, gazing at the pond. Ducks swam on the polished surface mirroring the álamos trees, the tussocks of golden sacoton girdling its shores. Superimposed on this scene, like her reflection in the window, was an image of Rosario the day before she died, caged by the guardrails on the bed, skull as hairless as a stone, skin almost translucent, like wax paper except for the bruising. One skeletal hand was almost blue, and that hand had risen slowly toward Yvonne, risen slowly, as if the IV tube stuck in her wrist were heavy as a fire hose. Yet it gripped her hand with amazing strength.

  “It will not be long now,” Rosario rasped. “You are going to do something, mi hija?”

  “Yes, Mamá.”

  “Tell me what you are going to do.”

  “I will when it is done,” Yvonne answered, though she had no idea what action she was going to take. She did now, but not then.

  “I pray to live to see it. Those people did very well for themselves while we suffered.”

  All those love songs, Yvonne thought. All those love poems. All that drivel about love the priests preached at Sunday Mass. Why didn’t someone compose a song, a poem, or a sermon about hate? Hate was stronger than love. Hate had kept her mother alive longer than the doctors had predicted. It had coursed through her veins for half a century. Like mercury, it had poisoned the milk in her breasts, and on that hot and bitter drink Yvonne had suckled. Sometimes it seemed as though she, the daughter with a man’s heart, had known from infancy that she was destined to be the instrument of her mother’s revenge.

  Rosario relaxed her fingers. The bloodless hand fell to the bed, causing the drip bottle to jiggle on its metal stand. “You have the power to act now,” she said in a hollow whisper. “It took you a long time to get it, but now you have it. Make use of it. Cuanto antes mejor—the sooner the better.”