Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  Damn if a week or so later, the colonel—I still called him that even though he was a general now—didn’t show up at our casita in person. He offered me employment, but not the kind I was expecting.

  It was like this: Obregón was fixing to do battle with Villa, who everybody thought was damn near unbeatable, and had put the colonel in charge of raising and training a battalion of Yaqui Indians. You know, them Yaquis was the hardest-fighting Indians in Mexico and maybe anywhere, only ones who had whipped the Spaniards way back in the olden times, and even the A-patch could not lay claim to that. Now some of ’em was still running around with bows and arrows, and Villa had him machine guns and German cannons.

  So Bracamonte sat me down in our little house close by the copper mine. He still had that big crow’s-wing mustache and them eyes like diamond drill bits. He told me he’d made contact with a fella he called a “munitions supplier” in Arizona, fella with some sort of Dutch-like name I can’t remember. This Dutchman had told the colonel he’d laid hands on surplus U.S. Army rifles and ammo that he’d be glad to sell, payment in gold or Yankee dollars. Bracamonte had the gold and two problems—how to get it to the Dutchman and how to get the rifles into Mexico. In times gone by the second problem wouldn’t have been one—the Yaqui had been smuggling one thing or another across the border ever since there was a border, but now U.S. Cavalry patrols was all along it, trying to put a stop to gunrunning into Old Mexico.

  The colonel told me he needed a gringo to be his agent in the U.S. of A., a gringo he could trust. This here agent was to deliver the gold to the Dutchman, make sure Bracamonte was getting what he paid for, and then give the Yaqui a hand in moving the goods past the cavalry patrols. He wanted me to be the agent, and if I could pull it off, I’d get paid in gold too, 10 percent of the five thousand dollars he was going to pay the Dutchman. Five hundred bucks was a considerable lot in 1915, a damn fortune in Mexico. But I had no idea how I was going to go about the job, knew I would need help, and reckoned Ben would be the one to give it. Him and me had been in touch off and on, so I asked the colonel if he remembered Capitán Erskine and would he trust him like he did me? And he said, “Por supuesto.” And I said that I wanted to cut him in because I couldn’t handle a job like this all by my lonesome. He thought a minute and then said that was a good idea and, just in case Ben balked, to remind him of the debt he owed, and that if he threw in and everything went okay, he could consider it paid in full. Then he bored into me with the diamond bits and told me not to forget that I had a pregnant wife in Cananea. I got his drift. Reckon Bracamonte’s trust had its limits.

  I took the train to Nogales. Had me two six-shooters under my coat and a change of underwear and socks and fifteen pounds of gold ingots in an old-time carpet bag. Didn’t even think of crossing the line in the regular way. Waited till dark and sneaked over on foot. Took another train to Patagonia, where I inquired about Ben’s whereabouts and found out he was living up on his brother’s ranch. Next day I got a ride there from a friend of Jeff’s in a Model A Ford—first time I’d ever rid in an automobile.

  Old Jeff had prospered and had built up the San Ignacio ranch and had got married to a gal name of Lilly and built him a little house and was fixing to build a bigger one. The three of us had us a reunion, and later on I took Ben outside and told him what was up and asked if he could lend a hand. Told him what I was getting paid for it, but I could offer him only ten percent of my ten percent on account of I was now pa to two children and there was no work to be had south of the line. Ben didn’t care about the money, he never did. Jumped right on it, said he owed one to the colonel, so I didn’t even have to mention that. Best part was, it turned out him and a Mexican was partnered rounding up wild cattle and that for a spell they’d worked the country west of Nogales, where the Old Yaqui Trail, the main smuggling route, run through. This Mexican was part Yaqui and knew that country like the back of his hand, Ben said. I was kind of shy about letting a third party in, but Ben was insistent, and it turned out he was right to be.

  I borrowed a horse from Jeff. Ben naturally didn’t tell him what we was up to. Said we’d got a job to gather some loose stock and that we’d be back in a couple of weeks. So we delivered the gold to the Dutchman. He ran a general store near to the Indian mission at Xavier del Bac, and had the merchandise stored in a root cellar under his barn—a hundred Springfields, a Colt machine gun, and a damn wagonload of ammunition. The Mexican—Mendoza was his name—had some family at the mission, and they pitched in to put a pack train together. Took a couple days to round enough mules to carry all that hardware. There was about twenty-odd Yaqui to guard it, all of ’em afoot, on account of the Yaqui not being horse Indians.

  The three of us were a-horseback. Our job was to ride out ahead and scout for cavalry patrols and camps and to warn the Indians in case we saw any. Didn’t have much distance to cover, fifty, sixty miles, but moving at night and with them slow-walking mules, it took us a while. Three nights, if I remember right. Dawn of the third day, me and Ben and Mendoza crossed trails with a patrol, them colored troopers called Buffalo Soldiers. Their officer, a white fella looked like he’d got out of West Point the day before, asked us what we were doing there, and Ben told him, “Looking for wild cattle, and did you see any?” The shavetail shook his head and asked us if we had seen anything of a suspicious nature, like Yaqui smugglers. Well, that patrol was heading up a canyon toward where the pack train was laid up for the day, so Ben told him that we’d seen a whole bunch of contrabandistas over to Ruby, which was a good ten, twelve miles west of where our boys was. That lieutenant thanked us and trotted off on a wild-goose chase. We had a good laugh at the boy’s expense. Truth to tell, it was kind of exciting, damn near romantic. We was genuine renegades, helping Indians get away from the U.S. Cavalry!

  Crossed the border that night and was in Bracamonte’s camp by noon the next day. Yaqui all over the place, learning how to drill. Come to find out later that their battalion turned the tide at the great battle of Celaya, where Obregón gave that old bandito Villa his first real defeat. Anyhow, the colonel was right pleased with our work. Gave us each un gran abrazo and handed me a sack full of gold in little ingots. I gave fifty dollars’ worth to Ben, and he gave half of his to Mendoza. We stuck around for another week, giving the colonel a hand at showing the Indians how to shoot Springfields and machine guns. So that was how we come to lay hands on the gold we was promised in the recruitment poster four years before and Ben come to paying his debt.

  Him and me and the colonel was to cross trails again a whole lot later on, when Ben come to be in Bracamonte’s debt a second time and had to pay him back. I can’t talk about that right now. I am hoarse from all the yakking I’ve done so far and have got to see a doctor tomorrow about my many infirmities.

  13

  A WEEK HAD PASSED since Castle and Tessa ended their lives of celibacy—hers had been longer than his. They found the renewed pleasures of physical love so delightful that they repeated their first night’s performance twice more, making a ritual of it. They danced—dancing was sex with your clothes on, she said—before racing to the bedroom, a disaster area because it was also her studio, and they made love washed in the fumes of oil paints, varnish, and turpentine. He detected those odors clinging to him faintly as, whistling to himself, he washed the breakfast dishes in his cabin’s stained sink.

  He heard his aunt’s 1973 Chevy pickup pull into his drive, its clicking valve tappets and rattling fenders as identifiable as a bird call. Before he could get to the front door, Sally bustled through it without knocking. Her appearance jolted him. Her hair coiffed into a tidy bun, her makeup on, she wore in place of her standard bag-lady outfit a white blouse, a tan skirt with slash pockets tipped by embroidered triangles, and low-heeled pumps.

  “I need you to drive me to Florence,” she announced, dispensing with the formality of a polite greeting. “If I was to drive myself up there in that junker of mine, Blaine would pitch such a fit, I’d have to
take a belt to him to shut him up.”

  “Florence is …?”

  “About eighty miles north of Tucson. They’re holding Miguel up there in some kind of detention place for illegal aliens. I aim to visit him. See how he’s getting on.”

  “What brought this on?” Castle asked. Miguel Espinoza had receded far back into his mind.

  “It’ll take us three hours to get there. Let’s go. I’ll explain on the way.”

  There was no denying her when she was in command mode. He got his wallet and keys, supplied Sam with food and water, and they started off.

  Sally said that her old friend Danny Rodriguez, the Santa Cruz County sheriff, had been out to the ranch a few days ago, asking if she might be willing to sell a couple of good horses for his back-country search-and-rescue squad. She had a bay and a dun that she could part with for the right price. While he was looking them over, she asked how the murder investigation was coming along. No new leads, Rodriguez told her. Meanwhile the sole eyewitness had been transferred to protective custody in Florence, because of overcrowding in the county jail.

  “After Danny left—we couldn’t come to terms on the horses, by the by—I got to thinking about Miguel, locked up in a foreign country a thousand miles from his wife and kids. I own that I’ve got a soft spot for him, did from the day he showed up here. So I called the sheriff to find out how I could pay Miguel a call. Seemed to me the Good Lord was telling me that I should visit him and find out if there’s anything I can do for him.”

  It was odd to hear her assert that she was responding to a summons from heaven. She wasn’t a churchgoer and was more likely than not to invoke the Lord’s name in vain, as she did when Castle reminded her to fasten her seat belt and she reached up for the buckle, wincing and muttering, “Goddamn arthritis in this shoulder.”

  She then pulled a sheet of paper out of her purse. “This place they’re holding him is called the Department of Homeland Security Special Processing Center. A fancy name for a jail. It says here that visiting hours are from nine till three and that female visitors can’t wear provocative clothes. Ha! I could walk in there naked as a newborn and I wouldn’t provoke the horniest fella they got in the place.”

  They descended from the valley down the sinuous road to Patagonia. Two Border Patrol trucks rolled by, the dust hovering like a thin pink-tinged mist. Within half an hour they were on the state highway, heading toward the Sonoita crossroads.

  “Blaine thinks I’m crazy for doing this,” Sally said. “That boy is changing in his old age.”

  “Oh? He seems the same to me.”

  “You haven’t known him good enough to see the difference. He ain’t lighthearted like he used to be. Always cracking jokes. That part of him reminds me of his dad. Oh, how Frank could make me laugh. He had a way of seeing the humorous side of things. It’s what got him through the war. Blaine has a goodly touch of that in him, but the last little while, he’s started to sull up a lot, and that part reminds me of his granddad.”

  “You mean Ben or your father?”

  “Ben. He’d get like that. Quiet in a way that made you feel that if somebody did something he didn’t like or said the wrong thing, something bad was gone to happen, and there were times when something did. Ben Erskine was not a man you wanted to fool with.”

  “Blaine told me once that Ben was tried for shooting a man,” Castle said, hoping to encourage her to open up about his mysterious grandfather. “I can’t say I know much more than that. My mother never breathed a word about it.”

  “Probably because she was ashamed of it,” Sally began. “Fella he shot, Rafael Quinn, everybody called him Rafe for short. It come out at the trial that Rafe shot first, and he found out that if you was to shoot at Ben Erskine, you had better not miss, and he missed. Ben shot him dead as Julius Caesar. The jury acquitted him, on grounds it was self-defense.” She paused. “But some folks did not see it that way. Mexicans mostly, but some white folks, too. They said Ben didn’t need to kill him.”

  “Why, if it was self-defense?”

  “Rafe was Irish and Mexican, which ain’t the best combination for a peaceable nature, and he did not have one. But if you let him spout off, he’d cool down. Ben didn’t let him. Rafe and him had words, what about I do not recall, and the next thing anyone knew, they was blazing at each other.”

  Sally then fell silent and did not speak again until they were approaching the crossroads.

  “That’s where it happened, nineteen fifty-one,” she said, pointing out the window toward the right side of the road, in the general direction of a convenience store, a gas station, and a restaurant called the Steak Out. “The Sonoita shipping pens used to be there. Long gone now. The newspapers said it was the last Old West gunfight in Arizona.”

  This sketchy account left Castle yearning for more. The phrase last Old West gunfight threw a cloak of the remote, mythic past over the episode; yet it had happened in his lifetime. At the crossroads he turned onto Highway 83, an asphalt cord dangling off the interstate, twenty-five miles to the north. Poppies sprouted here and there, daubs of mellow gold in the vast khaki Sonoita grasslands, rolling away toward the stark Whetstone Mountains.

  “So was my mother one of the people who thought Ben didn’t have to do it?” he asked.

  “Can’t say. Do know she was mortified, seeing her dad on trial for second-degree murder. Things between them hadn’t been right for some time.”

  “Why?”

  Sally bent forward and massaged her knees. “More’n an hour in a car, and my joints need a lube job. Uncle Jeff used to say your granddad could carry a grudge like a pack mule, and that was true.”

  “He had a grudge against my mother?”

  “She’d run off with your pa during the war. I hope she told you about that. That she eloped.”

  “She did, but I—”

  “The thing about Ben,” Sally rolled on, “is that you never knew what would put you on the wrong side of him and what wouldn’t. He was unpredictable. I recollect an incident between him and another rancher, this would have been a year or so after Frank and me got married, when some of Ben’s cattle drifted onto the other rancher’s land. This fella was a quarrelsome man. He phoned Ben and told him to come get his cows, but when Ben didn’t show up fast enough to suit him, he roped a calf and dragged it back onto San Ignacio land. Killed the poor little thing. Ben got him to pay for the calf, but it took some doing. Now you would think a man like Ben would come down like God’s own wrath on a fella who done him a serious wrong. But later on, when the rancher fella got hurt in an auto accident just before spring branding, Ben visited him in the hospital, and then got some hands together and gathered the fella’s calves and branded ’em for him. That man could forgive when he was of a mind to, but what put him in a forgiving mind and what didn’t, nobody could puzzle out, Ben least of all, I’ll bet.”

  “So I take it he didn’t forgive my mother for eloping?”

  “Didn’t speak to her nor your pa neither from the day they run off to the day Grace showed up for his trial. Seven years.”

  Castle whistled. Given his own mild temperament, maintaining an antagonism for that long toward one’s own daughter struck him as an incredible emotional feat.

  “The funny thing was, up until she eloped, Ben treated her like she was Queen of the May,” his aunt said. “Wasn’t hard on her like he was on my Frank.”

  “Because he expected more of his son?”

  “Couldn’t say. I do know that no matter what Frank done, he always come up short in Ben’s eyes. Frank was a top hand by the time he was sixteen, won prizes in junior rodeos, got good grades in school, and was a helluva fine ballplayer. Never was enough for old Ben. Like if Frank pitched a winning game, Ben would want to know how come he didn’t pitch a no-hitter. That sorta thing. The war changed all that. Frank volunteered for the paratroops, probably to prove something to his pa, and come home from France with his medals, and Ben was so proud of him he gave him the saber and unif
orm the Mexicans had given to him.”

  Castle blinked. “Saber? Uniform?”

  “Ben fought in the Mexican Revolution. He was a captain or colonel or some such.”

  His grandfather, a soldier of fortune. He’d learned more about the man in the last half hour than he had in his entire life. “What can you tell me about that?”

  “Don’t know anything about it except that he had this uniform with fancy gold braid and the saber. My Frank was excited as a little kid at Christmas to get them because of what they meant—him and Ben was now on equal footing. That’s how things were after the war. Frank had come way up in his pa’s estimation, and Grace had come down.”

  Castle caught a note in this commentary: her description of Frank’s excitement carried a hint of disapproval—of Ben for being such a demanding father, of Frank for being so avid to win his esteem.

  He cruised off Highway 83 and joined the traffic streaming down the 1-10 freeway toward downtown Tucson, its office towers rising in the distance through a faint brownish reef of smog. Off to the right, silhouetted against the Santa Catalina Mountains, a jet fighter swooped in to land at Davis Monthan, the air force base sprawling out into the deserts east of the city.