The Territory: A Novel

by Tricia Fields

  As Josie was cresting a hill sloping into a patchy field of prairie grass and mesquite, her eyes were drawn to her home ahead. Its pink stucco walls glowed each night at sunset. The house was a simple rectangle with a deep front porch held aloft by hand-hewn pecan timbers. Two low-slung chairs, one for her neighbor, Dell Seapus, and one for her, faced the panoramic view of the endless Chihuahuan Desert that stretched out beyond the Rio and deep into Mexico. Behind her house, the Chimiso Peak, a rocky crag in the midst of the Chinati Mountain range, was visible.

  Chester, a brown and tan bloodhound, lay on the porch in front of her door, head on his front paws, his ears draped across the floor like a head scarf. Josie knew he would not raise his head until she stood in front of him, hand outstretched to scratch behind his velvet ears. She smiled, rolled her windows up, and shut the jeep off. She’d asked Dell to stop in and feed the dog last night while she was away from home. Dell would never admit it, but he loved the dog as much as Josie did.

  She unlocked the front door and followed the hound inside to a living room painted a buttery yellow and filled with rustic Southwestern furniture, Navajo Indian blankets, and more benches and chairs that Dell had carved from fallen cedar and pecan trees off his ten-thousand-acre ranch. The seventy-year-old bachelor’s ranch was tucked into the foothills behind her house. Josie had come to know Dell shortly after joining the police department nine years ago. He had been robbed at gunpoint in his barn, where two horse thieves had loaded five of Dell’s prized Appaloosas onto a trailer and taken off. After a four-week investigation, Josie tracked the men to New Mexico and returned the horses unharmed. Her detective work had established her as a first-rate cop in town and won her a loyal friend in Dell.

  Josie had spent quite a bit of time at Dell’s ranch over the course of the investigation and fell in love with the desert. Dell deeded her ten acres of land on the front end of his property, and she built her home with the trust money she had received as a child when her father was killed in a line-of-duty accident. She moved from Indiana at the age of twenty-four to escape her mother and begin a new life. A year after moving to Artemis, she moved into the first place that had ever felt like home to her. Dell claimed to always have her back, and she did not doubt him.

  Josie unstrapped her uniform belt and hung it on a hook just inside her pantry door, stuck a bag of popcorn in the microwave for dinner, and walked back to the house’s only bedroom, barely large enough to hold her queen-sized bed, dresser, and nightstand. She hung her uniform and bulletproof vest in the closet, then dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. She exhaled deeply, rubbing the small of her back, and looked at her empty bed, the white sheets and cotton blanket in a jumble. Her thoughts strayed to Dillon Reese, but she turned and left the room, unwilling to wander down that lonely road.

  Josie laid her watch on the bathroom counter and noticed her tired eyes in the mirror. Her skin had the permanent tan of a desert dweller, and fine wrinkles radiated from the corners of her eyes from too many hours squinting into the bright afternoon light. She didn’t consider herself vain, although the lines around her eyes bothered her occasionally. She wondered if she had enough to show in her life for the age that had started to accumulate on her face. When Josie was growing up, her mom had often told her she might be pretty if she would smile once in a while. She envied others who smiled often and laughed easily. She wished she could loosen up, laugh at simple things, and see the humor in life. She had tried to develop that trait in herself through the years, but she had found there were few things more uncomfortable than forced laughter.

  In the kitchen, she poured a double shot of warm bourbon, dumped salt into a microwaved popcorn bag, and slumped into the couch. After two hours of CNN had done little to still her racing thoughts, she washed down two sleeping pills with another shot of bourbon and hoped her brain would grow numb by ten o’clock. She desperately needed a good night’s sleep. When the phone rang and she didn’t recognize the number on the caller ID, she picked it up.

  “Great god a’mighty, you’re a hard one to track down.”

  Josie knew the voice immediately, and in a split second considered begging off as a wrong number.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “I’m fine, not that it means anything to you.”

  Josie listened to her mother inhale deeply on a cigarette, and sadness settled over her like a bad dream she couldn’t shake.

  “You ever planning on calling me again?”

  “Our phone calls don’t work out so well,” Josie said.

  After Josie left Indiana nine years ago, she had called her mom twice a year—once at Christmas and once for her mom’s birthday—until two years ago. Their last conversation had ended in a terrible fight, and Josie quit calling. This was the first time her mother had made the call. Josie figured she needed something.

  “The operator. She said this area code was Texas. You still living out there?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What city you living in?”

  Josie closed her eyes and drank, thankful for the heat in her throat. She pictured her mother as she’d seen her last, the night Josie bailed her out of jail on a public intoxication charge. She had gotten drunk and physical with the bartender at the Holiday Inn lounge. Josie had paid the bond, then watched her mother stagger out from lockup, her head down, not from shame, but because she was too drunk and tired to hold it level. Her long red hair had been a wild tangled mess, and she wore a miniskirt and halter top that revealed too much sunbaked skin.

  “I’m living in West Texas. You still in the old house?” Josie asked.

  “It’s falling in around me, but I’m still here. Nowhere else to go.”

  Josie’s mom lived in a small bungalow with a postage stamp–sized lot. Josie figured she had done little to maintain the house, and if she didn’t currently have a man around to take care of her, she was in trouble, either physically or financially.

  “I’ve been looking for my long-lost daughter for years. I finally tracked you down, and I aim to visit. That’s why I’m calling.”

  Her words slurred together, and Josie could only hope her mother would lose the phone number before she was sober enough to use it again.

  “How about Aunt Jean? Is she still in town?”

  “Nope. She got married and moved to Florida.”

  Beverly gave a rambling update on the few distant family members she still spoke to.

  “Are you working anywhere?” Josie asked.

  There was silence.

  Josie’s mother had no pride. She was a pro at manipulating men: neighbors, teachers, preachers, gas station attendants, anyone who could help her through her current predicament. In her prime, she had been a good-looking woman who could fabricate charm or despair at will. While Josie was growing up, life in their Indiana town was built on lies and deceit: her mother did whatever was necessary, aside from a nine-to-five job, to get food on the table and the rent paid before the eviction notice arrived in the mail. Josie wondered, with her mother turning fifty-five, if she struggled now to stay afloat.

  “There’s no work to be had. Jobs are all dried up. You got work out there an old woman could get?”

  Josie’s stomach knotted. “Unemployment’s worse out here. There’s no work to find.”

  “You going to invite me down for a visit, or do I have to invite myself?”

  She hesitated, tried to come up with a decent excuse, and gave up. “Now isn’t a great time.”

  “You don’t visit in how long? Now you can’t be bothered to see me when I need you?” Her words were getting louder.

  “You know it will end in a fight. You might as well save yourself the money and the grief.”

  “You don’t want to invite me? That’s fine, Josie Jean. But you are my daughter, and I aim to find you. I got the area code. How hard can it be to track down a policewoman named Josie Gray in Texas?”

  The line went dead.

  * * *

  Josie woke w
ith a terrible headache brought on by sleeping pills that hadn’t done their job and bourbon that had made the room spin. She stumbled out of bed to shut off the second alarm clock on the dresser and cursed all the way to the shower. She put her uniform on and, at the small table in her kitchen, doused a bowl of canned fruit cocktail with Tabasco sauce. An old Mexican man told her years ago that hot sauce for breakfast burned off the toxins from alcohol the night before, and she had bought into the theory. She had begun to crave the burn in the small of her stomach, and while she figured her stomach lining was disintegrating, she didn’t care enough to change her habits.

  The fifteen-minute drive to Artemis did not improve her mood. The traffic, normally nonexistent in the dead-end border town, was backed up at the one stoplight. A small group of people was gathered around the ten-foot-high set of bleachers in back of the courthouse. Mayor Moss had them erected when he came to office ten years ago. He liked to gather community members once a month for a Rally Round the Square. It was his opportunity to boast about his service and ensure reelection. Roughly twenty people had gathered this morning, and Josie wondered what Moss had done to gather a group so quickly and so early. She watched him approach the bleachers holding a portable microphone.

  Josie parked her car in the chief’s reserved spot in front of the Artemis Police Department. She started to head inside to tell Dispatcher Lou Hagerty that she would be a few minutes late until she saw Lou walking across the road to stand with the crowd.

  Josie spotted Sheriff Martínez’s brown sheriff’s uniform standing twenty feet away from the bleachers and the gathering townspeople, and she walked over to stand beside him. “What’s going on?”

  He turned to face her, and she noticed a light stubble of beard on his jaw and the bags under his eyes. He had black hair and a mustache and what Josie thought of as cop’s eyes.

  “How the hell should I know? We’re just supposed to protect this town. Why should Moss bother to fill us in?”

  They turned to watch the mayor’s performance. Moss wore Wrangler jeans, a plaid shirt, bolo tie, and fancy stitched cowboy boots that had cost a good seven hundred dollars and would never see a field or a cow.

  For the next thirty minutes, the mayor discussed the horrors of the day prior and the fact that he was organizing an investigative team to tackle the problems on the border, as if what they were facing could be reduced to a checklist, a prioritized to-do list. Josie felt her neck and face flush hot with anger.

  “You know anything about this team?” Martínez asked Josie.

  “Nothing.”

  “In closing,” Moss was saying, “I want each and every one of you to rest assured that I will do everything humanly possible to stop these criminals from further terrorizing our town. This will stop on my watch.”

  There was a smattering of polite applause, and then a few pockets of people formed to rehash the speech before rushing to work. Old Man Collier appeared out of nowhere, his face puckered, and planted himself in front of Josie. He craned his neck up in an awkward position and stooped so far forward that his head barely reached Josie’s chest.

  “My hard-earned tax dollars are paying your salaries. And what good’s it doing me? I got Mexicans in my backyard shooting up my doctor’s office. And the only one seems to care about this is Mayor Moss. Why’s that?”

  “I wasn’t hired to make speeches. I was hired to fight crime. That’s exactly what the sheriff and I spent our day doing yesterday, Mr. Collier.”

  “You didn’t do a very good job, did you?”

  “We don’t have much control over who comes into town. We just have to deal with the aftermath,” Josie said, surprised at her patience.

  “You got control.” He pointed a finger to the gun at her side. “Start using that thing before they use ’em on us. Border Patrol won’t stand guard, then you do it. You two candy asses need to buck up and raise a little hell’s what I think.” He raised a hand as if swatting at a fly and turned and left.

  * * *

  Josie walked into the department before Lou returned to her desk. She was not in the mood for pleasantries or small talk. In the back of the department, she took the stairs to the office she shared with Otto and Marta and unlocked the wooden door, flipped the fluorescent lights on, and listened to their familiar buzz. After filling up the coffeepot from the sink in the back of the office, she filled the coffeemaker and sat down at her desk to flip through phone messages and e-mails, prioritizing which needed an immediate response or could be saved for later, which could be forwarded on to someone else or better yet just deleted.

  Josie spent the next hour online and on the phone, tracking down more details of the Medrano cartel and La Bestia. It was grim reading. The people of Mexico appeared to be cowering behind locked doors while the gangbangers skulked around the same street corners where vendors used to peddle fruit and trinkets. She’d been in law enforcement long enough to know that criminal trends were incredibly hard to reverse for the long term. How to get the control back into the hands of the authorities?

  At nine o’clock, still trying to block recurring visions of the mayor from her mind, she lay a one-inch white binder in the middle of her desk. In black Magic Marker, someone had written the words THE GUNNERS, and the slogan, FORGET 911—DIAL .357. She and Otto had seized the notebook from Red’s house as evidence. She had found it on top of a desk in a small, messy office just off his kitchen. The first page of the notebook read, “The policies and procedures of The Gunners: Authored by Red Goff.” Approximately twenty pages followed, organized by tabs with labels: POLICY, CASE STUDIES, STATE LAW, FED. LAW, REPEALS, and INVENTORY.

  Josie flipped to the first tab, titled POLICY, and read through the mission statement, “… to uphold the Second Amendment at all costs. To fight for both conceal and carry in the State of Texas. And, most importantly, to keep the women and children of Artemis safe in their own homes.” After the mission statement were six pages of poorly written, rambling policy followed by the INVENTORY tab, which proved more interesting. It listed 263 guns, most titled to Red Goff. The guns ranged from a $250 handgun to a $4,000 Colt M4 Commando and a $5,000 shotgun from the former USSR. Each gun on the list included the owner, purchase price, date of purchase, and a serial number. It was a big break. At least they had something to work with in tracking down the guns. At first glance, she figured the collection was worth at least $175,000. Red was a forklift operator at a small manufacturing plant on the outskirts of town. His pay was probably worse than hers, so how could he afford bulletproof glass and the guns to accompany it?

  A final section in the notebook was separated from the rest by a red sheet of paper with the words FRIEND OR FOE handwritten in block capital letters. A skull and crossbones had been drawn with a black marker under the title. Following were two pages labeled “Foe,” with forty-seven names written in differing handwriting. Number fourteen was her name. Sheriff Martínez was nineteen. She quickly identified two other state law enforcement officers on the list and then scanned the rest. She recognized at least half the names. Most were either affiliated with government or were well-known local liberals. Josie wondered what Bloster’s motivation was with the Gunners. It wasn’t unusual to collect guns; it was unusual, however, to view the people who were elected and hired to protect you as the enemy. Hack Bloster’s own boss was on the short list.

  The last sheet in the book had the word “Friends” written across the top. She felt like she was in grade school again. Eighteen names, including Fallow’s and Bloster’s, were listed. She and Otto would begin interviews that afternoon.

  Josie’s phone buzzed and she picked it up.

  “Sauly Magson called,” Lou said. “Says he’s found a dead cow in the Rio. Says it’s hung up in a logjam outside his house.”

  “Tell him to call Parks and Wildlife.”

  “He claims its belly is packed full of cocaine.”

  * * *

  In 1976, Macon Drench purchased Artemis, Texas, the first of thre
e ghost towns at the end of Farm Road 170 along the Rio Grande, for ten thousand dollars. Drench was an oil baron from Houston, disillusioned with the money and excesses in the city, and in search of a place to live connected to the land. He spent twenty million dollars of his own fortune and installed sewage and water lines, bartered with the phone and electric companies to stretch lines to a town that barely existed, outfitted a police department, built one pole barn to house the first grocery store, and another to serve as the town bank. Working with a city planner from Houston, he designed a central square and laid the downtown area in a grid with main streets leading strategically to major geological formations: the Chinati Mountains north of town and the Rio Grande and Mexico a direct route south. River Road, running parallel to the Rio Grande, was the only marked road that led directly into Artemis, and that was the appeal for Drench and most of the residents.

  By 1985, Artemis had more than 1,500 residents. Drench invited family and friends to settle the area, promising nothing but a new experience. Word spread and a unique group of adventurers turned land most thought uninhabitable into a thriving community. Judicious use of water and organized supply runs had made the town a home for people running away from, or running to a new, life.

  Sauly Magson was one of the original founders of Artemis. He was a scrawny bald man who typically wore a blue bandanna tied around his neck, a pair of grimy jean shorts, and nothing else. Most of the businesses in town ignored the No shirt, no shoes, no service rule with Sauly. When he had to wear shoes, he wore a pair of leather thongs that provided no more protection than the soles of his own feet. Sauly liked the psychedelics and spent much of his time in a state of wonder at the world around him, but he was as kindhearted as anyone Josie had ever met.

  Sauly grew up in northern New Mexico, near the Taos Pueblo Indians in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Josie knew little about him other than that he ran away from home as a teenager and roamed New Mexico until 1976, when he met Drench. Sauly helped settle the area and was known locally as one of the willful independents that turned a windblown speck along the Mexican border into a town.