Depth of Winter

by Craig Johnson

  I looked up through my memories—the kid on the end with all the tattoos was staring at me. “Hey, Poppy, how you doin’?”

  It was dark, but I could see the number 155 under his do-rag and the words KNIGHT TEMPLAR at his throat. “I’m good. You?”

  He glanced at his friends and shook his head. “I’m confused . . . Um, did you think this was a cowboy bar?”

  I adjusted my hat. “I’m just waiting on a friend.”

  He spoke again as the others snickered. “I mean, I don’t see John Travolta or no plastic bull in here.”

  I turned the beer on the napkin. “I’m having a kind of rough day. . . .”

  “Me too, I was sittin’ here having a few drinks with my friends and suddenly this cowboy comes in like he owns the place.”

  I thought I saw a few flashes of metal under their table, and my hand drifted to the bag at my side.

  “I think maybe you should go sit at the bar like a good little cowboy.”

  I was losing my patience but figured a gunfight was likely to end with me once again in the hands of the El Paso Police Department and subsequently the FBI. “Look, guys . . .”

  “Guys?” He glanced at the others. “We look like guys to you?”

  I was silent.

  “Oh, I get it. You’re looking for guys. Well, you got the wrong bar for that, my friend. You’re looking for the Tool Box around the corner—that’s more your kind of place.”

  I sighed and slowly began unzipping the bag and feeling for my Colt. “I just want to drink my beer.”

  He slid from the green Naugahyde, and I watched as his hand snaked to the waistband of his elaborately stitched jeans. “No, I think maybe you should go suck on a longneck somewhere else. Get it, Poppy?”

  It was at that point that a great deal of sound and fury came from the front of the establishment, and Buck Guzmán slung open the door. He strolled by the bartender, snagging the beer he held out for him before continuing toward us, still singing. “He’s in the jailhouse now, he’s in the jailhouse now. Well I told him once or twice, to stop playin’ cards and a-shootin’ them dice. He’s in the jailhouse now!”

  Stopping between the booths, he looked at the young men, especially the tattooed one standing in front of him and then at me as he pointed with the bottle. “I thought I told you that booth.”

  “It was occupied.”

  Pivoting, Buck drew a thumb across his beltline, pulling back his canvas jacket and exposing his basket-weave gun belt along with the massive, stainless S&W Model 19-5. He cocked his head at them. “What the hell are you wetback pendejos doing in my booth?”

  As quick as a flock of roadrunners, the corner emptied, and they climbed over each other as they hurried for the door without looking back. Guzmán turned and grinned, his teeth shining, touched with the gold inlays that were a specialty of the dentists from down Mexico way, the gold US Customs and Border Protection badge in plain view.

  He chugged his beer, his Adam’s apple bobbing as the bottle quickly emptied. Gesturing toward the bartender, he shouted, “Juan Carlos, dos cervezas, por favor!” Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he sat across from me, cocked his head to one side and belched. “United States Border Patrol, puttin’ the panic in Hispanic since 1924.”

  2

  “Took my clothes off—there’s hardly anything that’ll put pause in a lawman quicker than some naked guy wavin’ his taquito in their face.” He shrugged. “Thirty-three years on the job, I’ve had enough of ’em waved at me.”

  I watched as Buck drifted through a turn in the road, billowing dry red dirt like an angry cloud behind us as we headed southeast. “I thought you and Dillinger were more burrito size.”

  “Well, we are, but I can’t let those federal boys get too good of a look at it ’cause they might want to haul it back to DC and try and fold it in two and put it in a quart-sized pickle jar at the Smithsonian or somethin’.” Guzmán sipped one of the beers from the Yeti cooler that sat on the floorboards of the sparklingly new GMC three-quarter ton. “You sure you don’t want a beer? You gotta keep hydrated down here.”

  Glancing to the right, I kept looking for some landmark that might show me where my country ended and another began. “No thanks.”

  “Dry territory where you’re headed—so hot and dry there a grass widow wouldn’t take root.” He took another swallow. “Told those federal boys I was borrowing your shower but that I hadn’t seen you, even though your damn truck was parked right outside.”

  “They’re not going to let me go back over.”

  “Oh, hell, gettin’ into Mexico is no problem, it’s trying to get out that’s a little tough.” He gestured with his beer. “Have one.”

  “No thanks.”

  He eyed me. “You’re kind of a serious feller, aren’t you?”

  “Lately.”

  “McGroder says they took your daughter.”

  I watched the sun dropping to the west and was stunned by the colors that were so different from my part of the high plains, the purples and yellows fading to ochre like an old bruise. “Yep.”

  There was a long pause before he spoke again. “Somebody’s got to say it.”

  “Don’t.”

  He nodded and drove on in silence for a while before turning to the right and slowing the big truck.

  “What?”

  “Running lights, where there really shouldn’t be any.” He kept slowing down and edged to the side of the road as one of the trucks, pointed in the other direction, pulled up beside us. “Put your hat over your face like you’re takin’ a nap.”

  I did as he instructed and waited as he killed his engine and the whir of his window became the only sound. “What the hell are you silly bastards out here doin’?”

  A younger voice answered as another man laughed. “Snipe hunting. How ’bout you, Captain?”

  “Oh, havin’ a beer and enjoying the cool of the evening.”

  “Looks like your buddy might’ve had one too many.”

  “Yeah, he’s a lightweight from over in San Angelo. Hey, no shit, you guys out here whistlin’ around with just your running lights on and you’re gonna have a head-on with some drunk.”

  “Like you?” There was a pause. “They’ve got all of us out here hunting for some sheriff from Wyoming; I don’t know what it is he’s supposed to have done, but they brought in two extra shifts to look for him—sounds like one bad hombre.”

  “Oh, I don’t know . . . Sometimes those federales can’t see the monkeys for the palm trees.” Guzmán hit the ignition on his truck and left them with a final warning in a different tone of voice. “Turn your headlights on before you run over some poor unfortunate.”

  There was a chorus. “Yes, sir.”

  His final words squeezed out as the window came up. “Nobody wants that paperwork.”

  They laughed and pulled out as I raised my hat a bit. “Safe to come out?”

  He threw the lever in gear and roared away. “Boy, they want you bad.”

  “McGroder’s going to know I’m with you after the scene at the Gardner.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you think those guys will report you being out here?”

  “Those men work for me, and if they don’t want to be checkin’ peckers at the lowest bordello in southern Juárez, they better not be tellin’ anybody where I am anytime soon—especially the F. B. of I.”

  I glanced at the clock on his dash. “Am I going to make it?”

  “Oh, yeah. My man will get you to mass on time.” He grunted. “He’s pretty serious about his religion, to the point of carving crosses in his cartridges.”

  Guzmán took an old dirt road, swerved right, and we pulled to a stop. Shutting down the motor and opening his door, he climbed out and dragged a vintage Dallas Cowboys gym bag from behind the seat. I pulled out my duffel,
and we walked through a few scrub oaks and bushes scattered with trash to the end of a tall fence as the last rays of the sun disappeared below the desert floor. “Where are we?”

  “You see that swale into the creek down there?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s Mexico, and as you might’ve noticed, the fence ends twenty feet that way.” He turned to look at me and pointed. “And it doesn’t pick up again for another quarter of a mile that way.”

  “So, it’s not contiguous?”

  He laughed, bumping the gym bag against his leg. “Hardly. Some places it’s I-beams twenty feet tall, some places a single strand of barbed wire, and in others it’s like this—nothing.”

  I stared out into the darkness, looking at the faint, greenish glow to our right that looked like some special effect from a bad fifties science-fiction movie.

  “Juárez—the streetlights look green because of a lower voltage.”

  I nodded.

  He shook his head. “Stupidest idea I’ve heard in my life.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A wall. Hell, almost fifty percent of the illegals in this country arrive by plane; they get a work visa or a tourist one and then they just stay.” He walked to the edge of the small bluff. “They been shooting the drugs over the wall with T-shirt cannons, using remote-control planes, digging tunnels. . . .” He took a few more steps, still looking at the lights. “The cartels and assassins I’d just as soon shoot on sight, but I can understand the immigrants. Most of these poor people are just looking for a little hope, a chance at a better life picking lettuce twelve hours a day at less than minimum wage—now how can you hold that against ’em?”

  I said nothing.

  “Found a nine-year-old girl about three-quarters of a mile from here.” He gestured behind us. “Leg swole up like a salt-cured ham where she’d got hit by a big diamondback and then to add insult to injury, the damn thing curled up next to her to stay warm and sleep through the night.”

  “She live?”

  He huffed a laugh. “No, and neither did the buzz worm once I got done with him.” He glanced toward the green lights on the horizon. “Hell, my family came from Mexico.”

  “When?”

  “February 3, 1848, when we brought Texas with us—five generations in this country and Spain before that.” He laughed. “Now, don’t be too put off by my man.”

  I glanced around. “He’s here?”

  “Oh, yeah, watching us right now. I can guarantee it.” He turned toward me and dropped his voice. “He’s part Apache and part Tarahumara, a tribe known to be some of the best long-distance runners in the world, at least when they’re not obliterated on corn beer.”

  “I’m not going to have to run, am I?”

  “I wouldn’t rule it out, but I’m betting if there’s a fast way to get from A to Z anywhere in Mexico, he knows it.” Buck took a few steps forward and peered into the semidarkness. “Besides, he’s got other talents.”

  “Like what?”

  “Let’s hope you don’t have to find out.” He pointed into Old Mexico. “He’s there.”

  It was as if he simply appeared. I’d been looking across the creek only seconds before and he hadn’t been there, but an instant later, he was. Standing quietly amid the rushes and a few cattails, a thin young man stood with a vintage rifle cupped in both hands, a weapon almost as long as he was with a braided piece of rope as a sling.

  His hair was very thick and long, pretty much covering his face; he was dressed simply—huaraches, canvas pants, and an orange T-shirt with a cotton poncho to guard against the thin chill in the air.

  “C’mon, I’ll walk you over.”

  He started off, and I followed. “Are you sure there’s nobody else around?”

  “Nope, but he is.”

  We walked across the slope and then picked a few flat rocks to ford the three-inch deep creek, and in a few minutes we were standing in front of the skinny young man. “Walt, meet Isidro.”

  “Does he have a last name?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  I extended a hand to the wiry young man. “Walt Longmire.”

  His strong hands stayed wrapped around the M1C Garand that looked like it had seen lots of better days. Etched in the wood of the stock with what had probably been a horseshoe nail was a single word—EPITAFIO.

  “He doesn’t talk much, but he can do bird calls like you never heard.” Buck glanced back at me. “What’s the state bird of Wyoming?”

  “What?”

  “The state bird of Wyoming, what is it?”

  I took a moment to readjust my head. “Um, western meadowlark.”

  With Guzmán holding a hand out in presentation, the young man raised his head and in one of the most exact replications of a western meadowlark call, he trilled the end and looked at me.

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “Maybe.” Buck smiled and then stepped to the side and spoke in hushed tones to the kid, finally pointing toward me. As far as I could tell, the Indian nodded his head once.

  Guzmán slid the gym bag into the crook of Isidro’s elbow, reached over and squeezed my shoulder. “I wish I felt better about where you’re headed and who you’re goin’ up against, but at least you’ve got a good team to die with.”

  “Thanks.”

  He stiffened. “I’m not kidding. They’re gonna kill you, and the guy that does it will probably still have the smile on his face from saying buenas noches.” His eyes searched for mine. “I know you said not to mention this, but . . .”

  “Then don’t.”

  He shook his head and stripped the bag from his arm. “It’s a suicide mission, that’s what you’re on.”

  I nodded and tried to smile. “Wish me luck.”

  “I’ll do better than that.” He held out the bag with the Dallas Cowboys football helmet printed on the side. “Trade me.”

  Curious, I handed him my duffel and took the bag and unzipped it, and it was filled with handguns in differing states of condition. “What the hell is this?”

  “Collateral. The Seer said the two of you are gonna use the old gun trader ruse, and in that case you’re gonna need guns to trade.” He slipped the strap of my duffel up onto his shoulder, but in an act of kindness drew out the Bierce biography and handed it to me. “You’re not going to need a change of underwear or a toothbrush where you’re going, but a book is always handy.”

  I took it and then tilted the vinyl bag and started counting. “There must be ten guns in here.”

  “A singular haul for a weekday in El Paso but don’t get caught with ’em in Juárez or it’s ten years in a Mexican prison.” He reached over and tapped a bulging, zippered compartment at the end. “There’s a little ammo for some of ’em along with something else in there in case things get really hairy.” I began reaching for the zipper tab, but he brushed my hand away. “Later, if you need ’em.” He looked around and palmed me a tarnished but hefty set of brass knuckles.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Just in case somebody takes all those guns away from you, or you need a little stealth. I figure you’re big enough that if you hit somebody with those, it’ll kill ’em.”

  “I’m not looking to kill anybody.”

  “Whoa, hold up there, hoss.” He dipped his head, looking under the brim of my hat. “You better be ready to kill anybody that comes at you. There ain’t no court of law over there where you’re going, not even the bullshit law they got in Mexico City. It’s the real-deal Wild West where you’re headin’, and the only law they’ve got is survival of the meanest son of a bitch standing. You got me?”

  I nodded.

  “That Las Bandejas country is the home of some of the worst drug cartels in Mexico, and that fella Bidarte waltzed in there a little over a year ago and carved himself a piece
of the kingdom. He’s badder than they are, and I didn’t even know there was such a thing.” He smoothed his mustache with a wide hand. “I can’t think of anything worse than having somebody I care about in the hands of a creature like that. I’m gonna give you a piece of advice to go along with those guns and knucks. Don’t trust anybody, not the police, not the military, nobody. They are rabid animals, and you’ve got to be ready to put them down in an instant if you’re gonna get back what’s yours.”

  I slid the strap onto my shoulder and thrust my hand out to him this time. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “Come back in one piece, and then you can buy the beer.”

  “I’ll come up with something better than that.” When I turned, the wiry kid had already started off at a brisk walk along a path heading to Juárez. Hurrying to catch up, I glanced back and could see Guzmán waving to me like a ship he would never see again.

  * * *

  —

  Isidro was walking, but it was the fastest walking I’d ever attempted, and after a while I was lightly jogging just to keep him in sight. There were thorn bushes on all sides of the path, a little higher than my head, but after a while the bushes left off and we were on a dirt road that I could see led into the sprawling outskirts of Juárez.

  I was glad the sun had gone down, but I was willing to bet that it was still a good eighty degrees. I was starting to get winded when I saw Isidro wrapping his rifle in the woven cotton poncho he’d been wearing. He was standing on the broken curb of the first sidewalk we’d seen, his expression impossible to read.

  “How much further is it?”

  He remained silent and looked up the street to where a spectacularly painted bus sat idling with about thirty advertisements for dentists plastered on the sides. He gestured toward it.

  The door was closed, but when he knocked on it, it opened, and we were treated to the driver, who looked like he must have been sleeping, extending his hand for the fares. Not sure how much we needed, I gave him two pesos, which seemed to satisfy him, and Isidro and I took a seat about halfway back.