Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  “I’m not getting something,” Castle said. “A drug smuggler gave an immigrant smuggler permission? What’s that all about?”

  His cousin removed his hat and wiped the sweatband. “The narco-traffickers own the routes. They say what moves where because they’ve got the money and the guns.”

  He turned to Gerardo and passed on Morales’s intelligence, to which Gerardo made a long reply.

  “Sí, es verdad,” Blaine said, then looked at Castle. “Gerardo thinks that the coyote who ditched those kids has got no more soul than the four-legged kind, and he didn’t lose it, he sold it. He reminded me of an old saying the Mexicans have got, that God locked up the devil in a cave by the Rio Grande, but that he gets out sometimes on a swing slung between the mountains. Could be he’s swung over our way.” He looked out over the valley. “This is pretty country where some damn ugly things happen, Gil. Maybe that was always true, but there’s some-thin’ here now that didn’t used to be here.”

  They mounted up and continued to ride the fence, down into a ravine of rose-colored gravel and rock, up over a hill, down into another ravine, and up again. At the top they paused to rest the horses. Below, the San Rafael spread to the hazy lift of the Patagonias. From this height, the valley looked like an undulating plain, all of a piece, distance concealing its countless canyons, gulches, gullies, draws.

  Something here that didn’t used to be here. The phrase hung in Castle’s mind. The borderlands were open and full of light, but their enchanting face concealed a darker, more complicated landscape, as distance eclipsed the valley’s shadowed labyrinth, in which ugly things happened. The migrants massacred the night before Miguel’s companions were murdered. How did you commit such an act if you hadn’t made a bargain with your soul? And how—his thoughts now ranging beyond this part of the world—did you tape a bomb belt to your waist and blow yourself up in a crowded restaurant in Tel Aviv? What power granted you the power to fly airplanes full of people into buildings full of people? Whatever was here that didn’t used to be here was everywhere. There was no sanctuary. The devil’s swing had carried him very far from his cave on the Rio Grande.

  It was late in the afternoon when they found a pasture gate wide open and fresh four-wheeler tracks leading through it.

  “Somebody can’t read,” Blaine said, tapping a metal sign that read PLEASE CLOSE GATE. “Let’s see if we can’t teach him how.”

  They followed the tracks for about a quarter of a mile and came upon the quad, parked under a tree. It was painted in hunter’s camouflage; a dry cell battery case was in the cargo carrier, fastened with bungee cord.

  “Wouldn’t be a hunter this time of year,” Blaine said.

  Then Gerardo sat up straight in the saddle and said, “Escuche”—listen.

  “Punto uno … Punto … Read … Clear … Hold up …” A voice, carried to their ears by a downdraft of cooling air, came from up on a steep, brushy ridge in front of them…. “One’s coming … Stay low …”

  Blaine brought a finger to his lips and signaled to dismount. “Think we’ve got something more than a bozo out for a spin in the country,” he whispered. “I want to find out who that is, what he’s up to.”

  His eyes were suddenly bright as dimes with an eager, predatory glint.

  “Think that’s a good idea?” Castle said.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “Remember what Miguel told us way back when? The killer was driving a quad.”

  “Cuzzy, everyone in this county owns a quad. I own a quad. Let’s go.”

  When, sweating and out of breath from the climb, they topped the ridge, they could hear the voice clearly. “Have they crossed yet? Okay, está bien. Tell them to wait.” A pause. “I’ll tell you when it’s clear.”

  Blaine leading in a stalker’s crouch, they filed through a manzanita jungle that ended in a clearing with an aerial photographer’s view of the valley, the border, and a not-inconsiderable slice of Mexico. Ten yards away a man in a camouflage shirt sat with his back to them as he scanned with binoculars, tracking the movement of a vehicle on a road far below and a mile away. A white vehicle, Castle saw with his naked eye. Probably a Border Patrol truck. The man lowered the binoculars and brought a handheld radio to his lips.

  “¿Punto uno? Punto dos. Another one’s coming. Viene otro mapista. Right … okay, he’s passed. Tell them to cross … go hard … ¿Comprende? Duro adelante …”

  Blaine walked out into the clearing and shouted, “And who might you be?”

  The man dropped the radio, sprang to his feet, and spun around, blinking at a trio who must have looked like extras in a western—chaps, spurs, and pistols. He was a scrawny six-footer, with tousled brown hair and a pale, blotchy face.

  “I asked who you might be. I know you can talk. Just heard you having a conversation.”

  The man collected himself, and with a grin that displayed several missing teeth, he held out his hand. “Idaho Jim.”

  Blaine squinted at him. “Think I’ve seen you around town.”

  “Which town would that be?”

  “Patagonia. You’re one of those meth-heads lives over on Roadrunner Lane.”

  Idaho Jim dropped his hand but held his smile. “Think I’ve seen you, too. You’re Blaine Erskine, aren’t you?”

  “What’re you doing here?”

  “Bird watching,” answered Idaho Jim, touching the binoculars hung around his stalk of a neck.

  “Seen any?”

  “A peregrine falcon.”

  “Did you? My cousin over here”—he motioned at Castle—“is a bird watcher. Why don’t you tell him what a peregrine falcon looks like?”

  “It’s got wings and feathers.”

  “And you’ve got a sense of humor, Idaho.” Blaine bent down and picked up the radio and a sheet of white cardboard covered in acetate. He read the writing on it aloud. “Santa Cruz County Sheriff … U.S. Border Patrol … Cochise County Sheriff. Do all bird watchers carry lists of law enforcement radio frequencies?”

  “You’re sounding like a dude who’s carrying a badge himself. Are you?”

  “Nope. But I’ve heard from a friend who does that some narco-bitch name of Menéndez has given the green light to a coyote name of Cruz to cross aliens right through my ranch. Which one are you scouting for?”

  Idaho Jim said nothing. Blaine cupped his bony shoulders with sham friendliness. He was toying with the man and, Castle thought, enjoying it a little too much. With a sudden movement, he snatched the binoculars and jerked Idaho Jim’s head forward with the strap, popping it loose. “I’ll be taking these and that fancy radio. Now get your skinny meth-head ass out of here.”

  “This is public land,” protested Idaho Jim, defending his rights as a citizen. “You can’t tell me or anybody to get off.”

  He had more nerve than Castle, at first look, would have given him credit for.

  “You’re gone to do three things,” Blaine said. “You’re gone to go back to your quad and drive on out of here. Then you’ll close the gate behind you, like somebody who was brought up right. Then you’re never gone to set foot on my ranch again.”

  “Know something? You ought not to fuck around, because it’s not just me you’re fucking with.”

  Blaine smashed him in the face, then hit him twice in the gut, and as Idaho Jim fell forward, he grabbed his collar and flung him facedown to the ground. “Fuckin’ around? You think I’m fuckin’ around, you mudsuckin’ piece of shit?” Stepping back, he kicked the man in the ribs. Idaho Jim yelped and clutched his side. Blaine brought his boot heel down hard on the small of his back, drawing another yelp, then leaped on him. Seizing his hair in his left hand, he yanked his head back, drew the Luger with his right, and pressed the muzzle to Idaho Jim’s temple. “I’ll show you fuckin’ around.”

  Immobilized till then—Blaine’s fury had been as swift and stunning as a blind-side collision—Castle grabbed his cousin around the waist and with all his strength pulled him off. Blaine twis
ted to get free. Castle tightened his grip, afraid the pistol would accidentally discharge. “That’s enough! Put it down!” They swayed back and forth, as if in a weird dance. Gerardo jumped in and wrested the Luger from Blaine’s hand.

  Blaine quit struggling. “Let go, Gil. I’m all right now.”

  “You sure?” His heart racing, Castle released him.

  “¿Punto dos? Punto uno … Hey, you there man?” a voice on the radio squawked in a Mexican accent.

  Blaine picked it up and snarled into the mouthpiece, “Hey, cabrón. Punto Dos is off the fuckin’ air!”

  He threw the radio to the ground, hefted a rock the size of a bowling ball, and smashed the radio to bits, then did the same to the binoculars.

  Idaho Jim had raised himself to all fours. “I’m all right, but I ain’t gone to stay all right if that mudsucker don’t get out of my sight,” Blaine said.

  He had been doing battle, in his own mind, not with the devil who’d escaped from his far-off cave but with one of the devil’s minions, whom Castle now helped get to his feet.

  “Can you walk?”

  His blemished face smudged with dirt, a palm to his bleeding mouth, Idaho Jim nodded.

  “You should do that,” Castle said. “Walk out of here right now.”

  17

  WHEN IT WAS ALL OVER, he stood there, looking at me and Gerardo, like … like he just realized what he’d almost done.”

  Castle had finished telling Tessa about Blaine’s outburst, really more a fit of temporary insanity.

  She frowned. “You don’t think he really meant to kill the guy?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Castle admitted. “I think he would have if I hadn’t pulled him off.” The remark sounded a bit self-serving, so he amended it. “Well, he might have.”

  They were walking down an old mining road through a canyon in the Patagonia Mountains, looking for a pair of Mexican spotted owls that one of Monica’s fellow teachers, an obsessive bird watcher, had located.

  As upsetting as the encounter with Idaho Jim had been, it had merely diverted Castle from the emptiness he’d felt in Tessa’s absence. He had to make amends for his ignorant remark. Unsure of how best to go about this, he’d consulted Monica, who, now that school had let out for the summer, was around during the day. He’d found her in the office, toting up the ranch accounts with a calculator.

  After hearing the details of their quarrel, she professed to be disappointed in him. “You all but called her a tramp,” she scolded, shaking her head. “I know what you’ve been going through, she knows, but frankly, I think you’re a jerk for talking trash like that.”

  In lame self-defense, he said that he had apologized immediately.

  “You tell a woman you’ve been sleeping with, who you’ve been confiding in, that you think all she wants is to fuck and forget you, and then you say you’re sorry? Please.” She stopped and gave him an inquiring look. “Are you in love with her?”

  The question stymied him.

  “Well, are you?”

  He swallowed. “Yes.”

  “Have you told her?”

  “No.”

  “Then try thinking about her instead of your own tortured self. You’re making love to her, you’re telling her all about yourself, but maybe she’s thinking that you’re using her. She’s a milestone on your road to recovery, and when you get there, it’ll be adiós, Tessa.”

  “I would never—,” he started to protest.

  Monica raised a sun-cracked hand. “That’s it for advice to the lovelorn. I’ve got work to do. Flowers are traditional, and you’re a traditional kind of guy. Try that, and call me in the morning.”

  He ordered a bouquet of yellow roses from a florist in Nogales and added a few Arizona poppies that he picked himself—he thought they would provide a more personal touch—and wrote a letter of apology that babbled on for three pages, was reduced to one on the first revision, and after several more, to two sentences: “I have never been sorrier for anything I’ve ever said or done than I am for what I said to you. I must, must see you again.” He drove past her ranch a few times before he saw her pickup missing from the driveway. Pulling in, he walked quickly to her front door, carrying the flowers wrapped in cellophane and tied with ribbon and with his note attached, and dropped them off, his skin tingling.

  He had to wait for what seemed an agonizingly long time for her reply. She gave it in person, driving up to his cabin as he sat on the front porch, brushing knots out of Samantha’s fur. The sight of her, climbing out of her truck with a package under her arm, brought on a clamor of excitement, expectation, dread, and curiosity. Her hair was pinned up under a kerchief, and she was wearing a spattered denim shirt outside her jeans, its tails knotted around her waist. She gave him a stiff, tentative wave. He waved back and smelled paint and varnish as she climbed the steps. Without saying anything, she handed him the package. It had a brown paper wrapper and was about the size and weight of a serving tray.

  “To say thanks for the flowers and the note,” she said finally.

  He tore off the wrapper and saw the painting he’d admired, of the ruined homestead, in a rustic oak frame. She had transformed it, creating a dusky, brownish sky in which the sun shone with a bronze Turneresque light.

  “I thought that by taking the blue out of the sky I saved it,” she said. “I hope you still like it.”

  “I love it.”

  Turning it over, he noticed a three-by-five card folded over the wire hanger, its ends taped with Scotch tape. He looked at her inquisitively. She signaled him, with a gesture, to open the card. On the inside she’d written, in the calligraphy of a wedding announcement, “I must, must see you, too.”

  “Ah, Tess, I—” He moved toward her. She bowed her head a little, holding her palms up. “Not just yet, Gil. I only wanted you to know that I forgive you, and I hope you forgive me.”

  “For what?” he asked.

  “For …” She hesitated. “That thing I said, about competing with a ghost. That was a little stupid.”

  Quickly, she turned to leave. He asked where she was going. Home, she answered. She had a lot of things to do, things she’d neglected in order to complete the painting.

  “Since both of us must, must see each other,” he said, “when do we see each other next?”

  “Name it.”

  He invited her to look for the owls later that afternoon.

  He’d stayed off the subjects of their quarrel and the confused state of his heart. Talking about Blaine’s explosion seemed the safer topic. After he’d described the incident, she mentioned that a Border Patrol friend had told her the traffickers had lookouts all over the place.

  “They have codes and scanners, very sophisticated, almost like a military operation,” she added. “For all we know, one of them is watching us right now.”

  Castle’s gaze followed her hand as she pointed to a slab jutting a thousand feet above. The Patagonias were not nearly as high as the Huachucas or the Santa Ritas, but their abrupt slopes, topped by soaring red-rock buttes, lent them a dramatic, formidable look. Here and there the entrance to an abandoned mine gaped in a mountainside, marked by a sign warning travelers to stay out in English and Spanish. DANGER! ¡PELIGROSO! Like the Apaches, miners and prospectors were long gone, the last mine having shut down in the 1950s; but the mountains hadn’t reverted to an unpeopled wilderness. In places lay tin cans with Mexican labels, strips of polypropylene cord, a discarded jacket or pair of trousers. The convoluted canyons and defiles were designed for smugglers.

  “Sometimes I wonder if I made a mistake, coming out here,” he said.

  She touched his arm. “I hope it hasn’t been entirely a mistake.”

  “All right. Poor choice of words. I’m getting to be like Blaine—always saying the wrong thing.”

  “Did you have some other place in mind?”

  “No. I guess there’s more trouble here than I bargained for.”

  “Sounds like your cousin is making some of tha
t trouble, more than he needs to.”

  That was his opinion as well, yet he felt compelled to defend Blaine. “He’s only protecting what’s his. He wants to run his ranch without people knocking holes in fences and draining water tanks and scouting for drug runners. You know, I felt like smacking that character myself. I felt good about it when Blaine did.”

  “Would you have stuck a gun in his head and threatened to kill him?”

  “No.”

  “That’s where Blaine crossed the line. Sometimes I think he thinks it’s still eighteen eighty out here. Sometimes I think he wishes it were.”

  They walked slowly along in a comfortable silence, occasionally stopping to sweep the trees with binoculars. The altitude, the deep shade cast by the pines, and the time of day—it was five in the afternoon—tamed the ferocity of the sun.

  “Okay, Mr. Birdologist, what’s that?” she asked when a bird flew across their path to light on the trunk of a pine. Castle trained his binoculars on it and, noting the sandy brown head, announced, “Arizona woodpecker.”

  Tessa consulted her Sibley’s. “Says here it’s uncommon. How wonderful.” Then, as the woodpecker flitted off and she tried to track its flight with her binoculars, she said, “Gil, look at that.”

  The mouth of a cave yawned some thirty or forty feet above the road. Beside it, carved into the rock, was a relief of the Virgin, her robes painted in blue and white. A shrine of some sort. They climbed a steep path that running water had worn into the rock, streaked with the bluish green of copper deposits, and stepped onto a ledge in front of the entrance to the cave, which was really an alcove some six feet deep and slightly less high. Inside, vigil candles flickered in little glass jars; scapulars, a small wooden rosary, and few other amulets lay on the floor. The folds of the Virgin’s clothing and the features on her face had been carved by skilled hands, and the paint on the frieze had been touched up.

  “It’s still being used,” Tessa said in a hushed voice. “Who would be coming way out here to light those candles?”