Crossers (11 page)

The war—that was the Grand Canyon yawning between him and Castle. In past visits to the ranch—there had been only two—they had argued about it, Castle maintaining that it had been senseless, Blaine that it hadn’t been and could have been won “if they didn’t make us fight with one hand tied behind our backs;” but their difference of opinion was beside the point. Lately Castle had begun to think that Vietnam had put steel into his cousin’s soul as well as into his flesh, had trained him to confront almost any situation and master it. To expect the unexpected, the sudden ambush, the booby trap in the trail. Castle wondered if he’d missed out on something, some excruciating ordeal that might have left him better equipped to cope with the one great disaster of his life.

When Blaine woke him, Miguel sprang up with a startled look on his round face. He threw off the blanket and swung his short legs to the floor and pitched forward, as if he were about to run out the door. Then, seeing the familiar faces of Castle and Monica, he relaxed somewhat, though his glance darted back and forth like a captive animal’s before it settled on Blaine.

“Mi esposo,” Monica said by way of introduction.

Miguel nodded. Blaine set the soup bowl atop the issue of
Western Horseman
on the coffee table and gestured for him to eat. He drained the bowl in about half a minute.

“Mucho gusto, gracias.”

“De nada,” Blaine said, and sat in a cracked leather armchair and asked Miguel to describe what had happened to him. Miguel answered with short, choppy phrases that Blaine interrupted with more questions. This went on for some time, Miguel becoming more and more agitated, his lips quivering.

Blaine looked at Monica and said he couldn’t follow the rambling, disjointed story. Neither could she, and suggested that Gerardo and Elena might get Miguel to make sense.

Blaine left and returned shortly with the couple. Miguel settled down. It might have been the presence of fellow Hispanics that calmed him, but Castle thought it was the profound serenity that emanated from both people and enveloped everyone near them. Gerardo was about fifty years old, a man economical in speech, five eight at the tallest, narrow-hipped and thick-chested, with spare features that recalled portraits of the conquistadors. His graceful carriage, endowed by a life on horseback and by work demanding agility and balance, was complemented by an inner poise that came from knowing who and what he was, the who and the what wrapped up in a single word,
vaquero
. This composure impressed Castle because it was so unlike the manner of the frantic multitaskers he’d worked with in New York, answering e-mails and talking to clients at the same time, shouting into cell phones as they scuttled herky-jerky through the noisy, crowded, artificial canyons of their vertical world. Gerardo seemed to have absorbed the desert’s stillness into his very cells; his silences were a language unto themselves, speaking of the impermanence of all things human and the eternity of the arroyos, the mesas, and distant blue mountains.

Like a lot of long-married couples, he and Elena had grown to resemble each other, though the resemblance wasn’t in their looks. She was darker, more Indian in appearance, and her short, stout figure, communicating both comfort and a barrellike durability, had none of her husband’s athletic grace. She was also a great talker, but she shared his air of equanimity, hers arising from piety rather than from daily contact with the natural world. She said a rosary every day to the Virgin of Guadalupe, crossed herself whenever she heard bad news, and except in severe weather, drove the twenty rough miles to Patagonia to attend Sunday Mass at St. Theresa’s. An old grief showed in her small, black eyes even when she laughed, its marks embedded there like the glyphs the ancient Hohokam had etched into the desert rocks. She’d lost two of her five children—disease claimed a daughter in infancy, an auto accident took a son in his teens—and yet sorrow had not mastered her. She’d achieved an acceptance that was not resignation, and she’d done it without the ministrations of a therapist. Castle yearned to know what Elena’s secret was. Like her husband, she seemed to possess a way of knowing and understanding that had vanished from the modern world. It was certainly beyond him, for all his education.

Elena nestled beside Miguel on the sofa, placed a hand on his knee, and murmured to him in a motherly tone. Whatever she said, it drew a faint, tentative smile from him. Gerardo took a tobacco pouch and papers out of his pocket and rolled a cigarette for him, which he inhaled as greedily as he’d drunk Castle’s water and devoured Monica’s soup. Then, prodded by a few questions from the couple, he began his story again. Castle couldn’t tell if this version was more coherent than the previous one. At one point Miguel took out his wallet and showed photographs—of his family, Castle assumed—and then produced a small plastic bag containing a few papers, presumably documents to corroborate some point he was making. A few minutes later his voice rose to a high pitch, cracked, and broke into sobs. Elena whispered, “Pobre hombre,” poor man, and put an arm around his shoulders.

Composing himself, Miguel resumed his account. It took quite a while. Castle’s attention wandered until he became aware of a silence in the room. Miguel was finished. His listeners looked at one another. Sally, shaking her head, said, “Lordy, lordy,” then Blaine declared, “We’re gone to have to call the sheriff and Border Patrol.” He glanced at Gerardo to second the motion, which Gerardo did with a bob of his head.

Apparently Miguel understood some English; he folded his small hands in supplication and pleaded, “¡No La Migra! No Border Patrol! ¡Por favor!”

Blaine went to the phone in the kitchen. Castle asked Monica, “What’s going on?”

“You heard, he’s calling the cops.” Her tone implied that she wished there were an alternative.

“Can’t somebody tell him that the Border Patrol will drop him off on the other side and he can give it another try?” Castle suggested. “That’s what you told me they do, right?”

“Not this time around,” Sally said. “Looks like we’ve got us two men murdered on our land and the witness in our house.”

That seized Castle’s full attention.
“What?
What happened?”

“It would be easier to tell you what didn’t,” Monica replied.

His full name was Miguel Espinoza, she began, he was thirty years old and had owned a small produce-exporting business that went belly-up because of 9/11: an entire year’s crop rotted on the tarmac waiting for U.S. airspace to reopen. (Another casualty, thought Castle. How far the shock waves reached!) Miguel scraped by, peddling in vegetable markets, doing odd jobs, and earning barely enough to feed his wife and four children. A month ago he was approached by a recruiter assembling a group of workers for a meatpacker in Kansas; Miguel could join them if he could come up with the fee—fifteen hundred dollars, to be paid to the coyote when he got to the border. The sum was stunning to a man of Miguel’s means, and he hardly knew where Kansas was except that it was in the United States, but the job, the recruiter promised, paid nine dollars an hour, more than he earned in a day in the markets of Oaxaca. He sold his old car, borrowed from friends, and was soon on his way.

With several others he traveled northward in a bus to Hermosillo, befriending two other Oaxaca men who had been hired to work in the same meatpacking factory, Héctor and Reynaldo. Between Hermosillo and Cananea, where they were to meet their coyote, the Moses who would lead them into the promised land, the bus was waylaid by
bajadores
—bandits—who took turns raping the women and relieved the men of their cash and watches and whatever else they had of value. So Miguel, Héctor, and Reynaldo arrived in Cananea with only the clothes on their backs and a few changes of socks and underwear in their
mochilas
, their backpacks.

They were stashed in a hostel on a side street. When their coyote, a fat man wearing a ring on every finger, came for them, they had to tell him that they had been robbed of all their money. What an unfortunate thing! Maybe they knew someone who could wire them more? They did not. Very unfortunate! Of course, he could not take them
al otro lado
—to the other side—for nothing. But he was a man of compassion, he would try to help them. They were to wait for him, and under no circumstances were they to leave the hostel.

Late in the afternoon the coyote returned with a young man as skinny as he himself was fat. They were led outside. God was smiling on them, said the coyote. They were young and strong, so they could be of assistance to his friend, who was experiencing a sudden emergency If they did as his friend asked, which was to carry some marijuana over the border, their debt would be paid. Héctor and Reynaldo agreed immediately; Miguel was frightened and balked at first, but after coming so far through so many troubles, he decided to take the risk.

That night they found themselves riding in the back of a pickup truck with three marijuana bales wrapped in burlap. The skinny man—Héctor had nicknamed him el Lápiz, The Pencil—was driving. A group of migrants—
pollos
, The Pencil called them—were in a van some distance ahead. At the border a
pollero
—a chicken herder—would walk them into the United States. After they were on their way, The Pencil would lead Miguel, Héctor, and Reynaldo down the trail, keeping a safe distance behind the migrants. If La Migra agents were patrolling the area or waiting up the trail, they would be decoyed by the pollos and their pollero, and the three men and The Pencil would slip through unnoticed. The Pencil would guide them to a road and then summon another man with his cell phone. This man would take delivery of the drugs and drive Miguel and his friends to a safe house in the city of Tucson. From there they would be given transport to the meatpacking factory in Kansas.

El Lápiz concluded his instructions with a warning. They were not to lose the load, or to get any crazy ideas about making off with it. The fat man knew where their families lived … No more need be said. All of this thoroughly terrified Miguel, but there was no going back.

He had yet to see the worst, Monica said.

The truck came to a sudden stop. Up ahead they saw that the migrants’ van had also stopped. Someone yelled,
“¡Judicial!”
They knew what that meant—the Mexican federal police. They heard more shouts, then many gunshots. The Pencil stomped on the gas and sped away in reverse. In the darkness he misjudged the road and backed into a ditch, nearly rolling the truck over. He jumped out, crying, “Get the hell out! It’s not federales! It’s bandits! They’ll kill us!” Miguel and his companions piled out of the truck as their guide ran off in a panic. Abandoned, the three men didn’t know where they were or what to do. “Grab the bales!” Héctor said. “We must run!” But run where? “North, you idiots, and that star points north!” He stabbed a finger at the sky, but Miguel could not see what star he meant.

They shouldered the bales and fled. It was freezing cold, but the walking warmed them. By daybreak they were among low, tree-covered hills beneath high mountains capped in snow. When the day grew warm enough for sleep, they hid in the woods and rested. In the afternoon they resumed their trek, Héctor keeping direction by the sun. Each bale felt like a hundred kilos instead of twenty. They wanted to throw them away but remembered The Pencil’s warnings. They drank dirty water pooled in rocky niches of the arroyos and walked until they were stumbling like drunks.

Finally they came to a road—not much of a road, just two tracks beside a broad wash overgrown with high brush. This must be it, Héctor declared, pointing at tire marks. The man in the car must be driving up and down, looking for them. All they had to do now was wait for him to come by. Miguel and Reynaldo weren’t so sure—to them, it seemed as if Héctor believed it was so because he hoped it was so.

They piled brush atop the bales in case La Migra showed up, then concealed themselves in the tall weeds in the wash. The bad water he’d drunk had given Miguel diarrhea. Shy about relieving himself in front of his companions, he went to the far side of the wash and squatted. Just as he did, he heard a vehicle approaching. My God, Héctor had been right. When Miguel rose halfway up, he saw a peculiar conveyance—it resembled a small tractor except that it had four wheels instead of three—moving slowly down the road. The driver was looking at the ground rather than ahead. Héctor jumped out of the weeds and flagged it down. The driver climbed off and began to speak to him. Miguel was about to pull his pants up to rejoin his friends when the diarrhea pains shot through his belly again and drove him back into a squat. He believed that God caused those pains to come at that moment because God, for His own reasons—who can truly know the mind of God?—had willed that he should live and his compañeros die. As he emptied his bowels, he heard Héctor call out and saw the stranger pull a gun from under his jacket. There came a sharp crack, and Reynaldo fell. Two more gunshots quickly followed, and Héctor dropped.

Miguel flung himself down and cowered in the underbrush, his pants around his ankles and his heart pounding. After some minutes passed, he dared to raise his head and observed the stranger walking through the wash, the pistol in his hand. Miguel got a good look at him. He was tall and well built and bare-headed, a
güero
—a blond—but Miguel couldn’t tell if he was a gringo or a fair-haired Mexican. Miguel ducked back down, curling up to make himself as small as possible. More minutes passed. He heard the vehicle drive off. Still he lay, afraid to move. He lay there until dusk, and then he found the courage to get up and see what had happened. Héctor’s and Reynaldo’s bodies lay near each other, Reynaldo with a bullet hole in his head, Héctor with blood all over his chest. The brush pile had been torn apart and the marijuana bales were gone.

He ran, ran blindly into the hills until he could run no more, but he kept moving, stumbling and falling in the darkness, weeping for his wife and children, cursing the smuggler who’d promised him a job in Kansas, cursing himself for leaving Oaxaca, then weeping again because the load had been lost and now bad men would come to his house to kill his family … It was for this that God allowed him to live?