by J P S Brown
"Yes," Che Che said. "The Superior beer disappeared after you two dammed it up and drank it all."
Vogel and Kane only grinned at him.
"When were you in Rio Alamos last?" Kane asked.
"Four months ago," Che Che said.
"And this beer has lasted you and your friends all this time?"
"I don’t make friends of beer drinkers, except you three. I brought twelve cases, and these are the first eight bottles I’ve taken out of the cartons." He opened two bottles apiece for his friends, then opened two for himself.
Kane looked at melting grains of ice on the shoulders of his bottles.
"How do you make ice, Che Che?"
"I bought a generator and an ice maker and packed them here on mules. Tonight, you’ll have electric light when you read, Nino Jim."
"Where do you and Juanita and the children sleep? You have three children or four?"
"We have three. We sleep in the kitchen with the woodstove."
"Where are your cots?"
"We don’t use them. When I lived here all those years with don Juanito, I learned to sleep on the floor. I like it better than a cot and Juanita and the children like it now."
"Why is that?" Kane said. "It’s an awful way for a man to get his rest."
"Don Juanito said that nobody sneaks up on a man who sleeps on the ground."
"Yes, and I’ve heard that only men of guilty conscience sleep alone on beds of rocks," Vogel said to Kane.
"That’s right. Do you still sleep on a bed of rocks, Nino?" Che Che asked.
They referred to Kane’s habit of sprinkling the sheets of his camp bed with gravel before he crawled in between them. He also always slept alone. He had slept very few entire nights with Adelita in their forty years together.
"Will you put gravel in your bed tonight?" Vogel asked.
"No, I didn’t last night at the Lupinos and not tonight."
"Why not?"
"I need to sleep sound. I don’t think anything will try to slip up on me in the night with you people on every side of me. I’m too weak and lazy to jump up and fight if anything tries get me anyway. I might as well lie still and let them cut my throat."
Kane’s three friends laughed.
Vogel rode with Kane to the airstrip the next morning to see him off and to lead Gato back to the hacienda. As always, he looked at Kane as though he thought it might be for the last time. He watched Kane from the time they left the hacienda until Kane rolled away from him in the airplane. When Little Buck lifted off the end of the runway and Kane turned down Arroyo Hondo, he looked back and Vogel was still standing where he’d left him with their horses at the head of the runway. The sentimental old thing always stayed for a last look at Kane until he flew out of sight, but he never waved.
An hour later, Kane landed at the airport on the edge of Rio Alamos. He had learned to pilot an airplane at that airport and at the same time learned to dodge buzzards. The first slaughterhouse of Rio Alamos had been on the edge of that airport, and its scraps of meat, bones, and offal were piled outside. Flocks of black, naked-headed vultures had feasted there, then taken flight to digest their cargo high on stoops of cool breeze. Kane had never chopped one up in his prop, but he still could not help but watch for them.
A haze of dust hung close over the town, as it had for the fifty years that Kane had known it. Most of the streets were paved now too. Its people called it Polvojoa, Dustywater. Most of the buildings had been painted in bright colors but had begun to take on thick layers of dust every hour since the paint dried. Its universal color was adobe that did not wash off anymore when it rained. When Kane first settled in the region, it enjoyed a hundred inches of rain a year, but no rain of the quantity the region needed to thrive had visited it for twenty years. Vogel’s wife Alicia picked Kane up in her sedan, and after he left orders with the airport attendant to top off Little Buck's tanks with gasoline, she took him home. Alicia was Adelita’s sister. Kane wanted to visit for only an hour, then go on to Nogales, but she would not have it. She and her daughter Mari had prepared a feast for him.
"How come you’re so glad to see me this time?" Kane asked Alicia. "You’ve never been nice to me and my compadre Juan before when we came down from the Sierra."
"You’re both old now. I have Juan to myself. You almost got away from me when you fell off that horse, so I’m glad to have you backthis time."
"I didn’t fall off; he fell on me."
"Well, whatever happened when you tried to die. When you two were young, nobody wanted you. When you came down from the Sierra together I paid men to keep you away. Now that you are old, I don’t mind having you around. My Juan comes straight home and goes to bed early now. I waited him out, and he’s finally all mine."
She winked at Kane. In their youth Kane and Vogel had celebrated their return to town from the Sierra for a week or two before they went home. From the time they were in their twenties until their sixties, they had never understood why all their wives could think about was having them home, why they spent all their time trying to make them come home. Kane guessed he ought to be happy that Alicia could finally have her husband home. That would make it so his compadre would probably go to heaven. He wished Adelita was here to see the change in Vogel. Kane still did not care about being home all the time, although he knew he would if Adelita was still there.
"I wasn’t in the Sierra long enough to celebrate my return to this town this time," Kane said. "Only two days. I have to get on to the 7X as soon as I can anyway."
"Yes, but I have much to thank you for. You were gone from here for a year and a half and my marido, my spouse, finally discovered that he had a house. He likes his house now."
"I can’t understand that."
”So, you have to stay with us awhile. I’ll find you another wife. You need rest and food. You are thin as a ghost, Jim.”
"No, we have a horse race to run in six weeks. I’m going home to get Cody Joe and Dolly Ann so they can come back with me and help get the horse ready."
"Ay, carajo, here we go again. Ali Lupino was here yesterday and told us about the race. With you and Juan, if it’s not whorehouses, it’s a horse wreck, or a horse race. When will you learn to live in quietude and stop taking risks? Don’t you know that horse races only lose money and make enemies?"
"My horse Gato is going to win Vogel and Kane a hundred thousand dolares grandes," Kane said. He explained the terms of the matched race.
"That reminds me. When will my husband do something about his cough?"
"He says it will cure itself."
"Ali Lupino is worried about it. He stopped here on his way to Tucson especially to tell me that my husband’s lungs need to be examined and a biopsy taken."
"Oh, now Ali comes to blab to Juan’s family? Who the chingado does he think he is, the Red Cross?"
"Yes, he’s the Red Cross, and Juan’s having a physical examination. He can just go to the United States with you the next time you go."
Alicia, Mari, and other Vogel family women were waiting for him at the house and would have liked to harangue Kane about Vogel all evening, but after supper he went away and took a shower, climbed into clean sheets in his room, and listened to them from there. He liked the sound of their voices after they lowered them so he could rest, and he slept well.
He rose early and left Alicia’s house to have coffee in the kitchen of the Restaurant Teresita. Kane’s and Vogel’s old friend Teresita Rojo, the owner, had been the mistress of a famous revolutionary general. She gave Kane an embrace and looked into his eyes to see if he might have gone daft since she last saw him but said nothing about the horse fall. He took off in Little Buck to Nogales before sunup.
As Kane flew the three and a half hours to his 7X ranch on the border, he wondered what new catastrophe might have befallen it in only two days. Lately, all anyone could expect on a border ranch was conflict. Criminals used his trails to smuggle people and narcotics in and out of the country. The Mexican governme
nt seemed to want the whole business to escalate so that Americans would learn a lesson about being too rich and generous. What other lesson they might want Americans to learn he did not know, but the Mexican resident said that the border problem was all the fault of the Americans.
Border patrol, customs, and immigration services worked honorably and hard to stop illegal traffic, but a bunch of impatient citizens who had never lived near the border had formed a private militia to show them how America should be defended. Theirs was an ordinary people’s fear of snakes. For every hundred snakes, perhaps ninety-nine are good, and one is poisonous or can swallow somebody. The ninety-nine good snakes take the rap for the bad one and get their heads stomped on because of this ordinary common fear. For every hundred illegal immigrants that cross, one is a killer, or smuggles hard drugs, or preys on his poor fellows who cross the border in search of jobs. One in a hundred is a viper, so the militia straps pistols on its hips and comes to the border to play John Wayne and see who it can shoot.
The militia was the outfit that most caused Kane concern about his position on the border. If one of them ever used a popgun on some poor immigrant, Kane’s home and livestock could become the bull’s-eye in a border shooting war.
Illegal border traffic had undoubtedly become a dangerous flood. No longer did it consist only of honest people in search of work. Criminals from all parts of the world came hidden inside the hordes of honest workers. A gang of organized criminals that called itself Los Lobos had begun to guide high-paying illegals into the United States. They also preyed on the border crossers, smuggled hard dope, and trafficked in kidnapped women and children.
Thirty minutes from the Nogales border in Little Buck, Kane radioed the international airport so he could have a customs inspector on hand when he landed, then he began his descent. He would do some work in his office in Nogales and buy groceries before he flew on to the 7X. As Kane prepared to land in Nogales, Cody Joe and Dolly Ann Kane drove into the yard of the 7X ranch in Cody Joe’s pickup, a day sooner than expected.
"Pappy’ll be surprised," Dolly Ann said as she unloaded a sack of groceries and carried it to the house. The youngsters called their grandfather Jim Kane "Pappy."
"He’d have to be here to be surprised," Cody Joe said. "He told me on the phone that he would not start back from Rio Alamos until today."
"I want to ride today. I’ve waited more than a month to ride."
"Well, Pappy doesn’t want us to ride unless he or the Lion goes with us," Cody Joe said. "Too much new stuff going on."
"What new stuff?"
"When I told him we were coming, he said that he’d found a woman’s knapsack by Aliso Springs. Inside he found a pair of lady’s shoes, a dress, underwear, other personal stuff, and a plane ticket from Tucson to Baltimore."
"What happened to the woman?"
"No woman. No sign of her. She’d been taken, or something. Neither Pappy or the Lion could tell from the tracks what happened to her, because she left the backpack by the trail that is most used by those people."
"I think it will be all right if you and I ride together. He only meant that he doesn’t want us to ride alone."
"His orders are for us not to ride if he or the Lion aren’t here."
"Now, what’s the good of you being a marine with combat training if you aren’t bodyguard enough for your own little sister? I'm telling you, as proud as Pappy is of you being a marine, he won’t get mad if you take me out for a two-hour ride."
Eighteen-year-old Cody Joe was on thirty-day leave after months of Fleet Marine Force combat infantry training. Sixteen-year-old Dolly Ann was in her senior year at a Tucson high school. Dolly Ann steered her brother to the corrals. Her horse, a mare named Quarter Moon, and Cody’s horse Chance were in the main corral with a pile of hay. "See, they’ve even caught our horses up," she said.
"I see they’re up. I don’t see anything that says Pappy will like it if he flies in and finds that we’ve disobeyed his orders."
"Look, let’s do this: I’ll make sandwiches and fill a couple of water jugs. We’ll ride out and help illegals who need food and water. I feel sorry for those people. They get turned loose by their coyote guides and told that Tucson is just over the next hill. Then they wander two or three days without food or water. They could die here, Cody. It’s happened on other border outfits. How would you like that? We both want to ride, so let’s see if we can be a little help to those poor people."
"Yes, and the next thing you’ll do is give them a ride to Tucson, get caught, thrown in the brig, and you won’t get out until you’re an old hag."
"No, I won't. Pappy’d kill me."
They went in the house and Dolly Ann made ham and cheese and peanut butter and honey sandwiches and filled two plastic jugs with water. They carried it all to the corral and caught and saddled their horses. Cody Joe did not try to dissuade her. She had made up her mind to ride, so he had to go with her. If he let her go alone, he would be in a lot more trouble. He never said much. He did not like to talk, and he sure did not like to repeat himself to his sister. He mounted his horse and carried the water jugs in a gunnysack that he hung on his saddle horn. Dolly Ann carried the sandwiches the same way and they rode south toward Manzanita Mountain and the border.
Kane landed on the 7X’s dirt strip an hour before sundown. He saw Cody Joe’s pickup in the yard. He taxied into the wire corral that kept the livestock off his airplane, parked it, and tied it down, then walked up to the yard.
He knew his grandchildren had gone somewhere or they would have driven the quarter mile to pick him up at the strip. He saw that their saddles and bridles were gone. He picked up their tracks at the corral gate. He saw that the Lion had ridden north alone. The youngsters had gone south. His worry made him get his old bones moving. His bones did not care about his worry, because they dragged at him and tried to hold him back.
He saddled his horse Mike, led him out and mounted, and his carcass became young enough again. He saw that his grandchildren had taken the Manzanita trail along a high ridge, so he took an easier trail that paralleled it to make better time. He caught up to them as they stopped for five people on the trail, a half mile away.
Dolly Ann’s yellow hair was tied in a ponytail under the brim of an old, sweaty Stetson hat. In the lead, she had ridden around a bend and come face to face with three men and two women on foot. She stopped Quarter Moon in the narrow trail and greeted them. The women and two of the men only gave her blank looks, as though she might only be a tree in their way. The man in the lead grinned and took hold of Quarter Moon’s rein.
"Are any of you hungry or thirsty?” Dolly Ann asked in Spanish. The people only stared at her.
The man who held Quarter Moon answered in English. "You’ve brought us something to eat?" he asked. "Do you live here? What’s your name?"
"I have sandwiches for you, and my brother has water," Dolly Ann said. The leader handed the sandwiches to the next man, ignored Cody Joe, and did not release Dolly Ann’s horse. The man behind the leader held the gunnysack with the sandwiches, but did not look inside.
"Let me ride your horse, while my friends eat," the leader said.
Cody Joe studied the people. The wiry leader wore a mustache trimmed to a thin line along his upper lip. He wore camouflaged U.S. Army utilities with the trousers bloused at the tops of the boots. His watch looked expensive. His shirt lay open to the second button and gold chains adorned his chest. Cody Joe figured him to be the coyote guide of the other four people.
The four people were not dressed for a long hike. One of the women only wore thin-soled loafers.
"Mister, let go of my horse," Dolly Ann said.
"Where’s the water?" the guide asked without looking away from Dolly Ann’s face. "Tell your brother to come up here."
Dolly Ann turned to look at Cody Joe. The guide took hold of the bottom of her stirrup, held her foot in it, and tried to lift her out of her seat to dump her off the other side of the horse.
Cody Joe spurred Chance and rode up beside Quarter Moon, broadsided the man with Chance’s shoulder, and knocked him away from Dolly Ann’s stirrup. He offered the gunnysack that contained two full gallons of water to the man as he stumbled backward. The man caught himself, straightened, and reached for it. Cody Joe gave the gunnysack an overhand swing and brought its contents down on the man’s head, ran Chance over the top of him, turned Chance and Quarter Moon around, and led Dolly Ann back down the trail at a gallop.
Kane watched the whole event and thought he recognized the man under Cody Joe’s horse as Güero Rodriguez, a bastard son of Eliazer Vogel, Fatima’s deceased husband. Güero was a special friend of Rafa Lupino’s and had gone to the same schools as his four Lupino half brothers. Kane had known for a long time that Rodriguez used the 7X’s trails to guide illegals into the United States. Kane met him on the trails from time to time. Because he was the son of a Vogel, Kane allowed it. Kane caught a movement in the corner of his eye and saw Andres "the Lion" Cañez wave to him from his same side of the ravine. They rode to meet one another.
"Did you see what happened over there?" Kane asked the Lion.
"I did," the Lion said.
”Who is that holding his head, the one Cody Joe ran over with his horse?"
"Did you see that too? It looked like Cody Joe smeared him all over the trail after he knocked him down. What did he knock him down with?"
"I think the boy is carrying water in a gunnysack. I didn’t think the man he ran over would get up. Who is he? Is that Güero Rodriguez?"
"That’s who it is. He uses this trail sometimes."
"Well, he just shit in his mess kit with us," Kane said. "I’ve looked the other way and let him alone, because he’s related to Vogel and the Lupinos, but that’s all over now. Let’s ride over there and have a talk with that gentleman."
Kane and the Lion were sure Güero had not seen them, absorbed as he had been with the youngsters. They crossed the ravine and waited for him. They could hear him talk for a long time before they saw him. Just before he came in sight, he said in English, "I’ll see young Miss Kane again. I can get a lot of money for a long-legged blonde like that."