Crossers (27 page)

A sparkle enlivened Sally’s eyes as she looked at Castle. An almost telepathic communication passed between them—a sentiment rather than a thought that they were being called to effect a second rescue, that they could no more abandon Miguel now than when Castle first found him.

“What if he didn’t disappear?” she asked, turning to the sheriff. “What if he got a job right here in Santa Cruz County and you knew where to find him if you had to?”

“What are you getting at?”

“There’s a whole lot that needs doing around the ranch that’s not getting done. Enough odd jobs to keep a man busy for a good while.”

Rodriguez waited to absorb her comment before speaking again. “You’d hire Espinoza as your handyman?”

“Sure. If it was okay with him, and if you got this permit for him. Like you said, that little fella is only gonna try again if gets pitched back over the line, so what’s the sense in it?”

A pained expression soured Rodriguez’s genial face. Joining his thumb to his index and middle fingers, he rubbed a spot above the bridge of his nose. “It would be up to the feds whether to issue the permit. I’d have to convince them that we’re getting somewhere on the investigation, that the interests of justice wouldn’t be served if Miguel was deported. Meaning I’d have to do some heavy shading on the truth.”

She dismissed the procedural problems with flaps of her wrinkled hands. “Now you listen to me, Danny boy, I know you know how to cut corners. Comes to illegals, you’ve got two, three of your Mexican relations living right here in Nogales who scraped their backs on barbed wire, but they’re legal now, and they didn’t get to be that way because they pledged allegiance to the flag.”

“Careful, you don’t know half of what you think you know,” the sheriff said. “The bottom line is, my department isn’t a day-labor agency for illegal aliens.” He stood and adjusted the clip holding his black tie to his tan uniform shirt. “Now I’ve got a meeting with the county manager in ten minutes.”

“If you just give this a little consideration, I’ll consider cutting you a deal on the dun and the bay.”

To Castle, the blandishment almost smacked of a transaction in a slave market—trading horses for a human being—but he could not raise finicky objections now.

Rodriguez put on a look of indignation that was not entirely convincing. “Sally, right now I almost could charge you with attempted bribery.”

“Oh hell, bribery,” she sniffed as he opened the door for her. “I was just offering to do a favor for a friend.”

“See what I can do,” the sheriff said under his breath.

•  •  •

M
IGUEL WAS DELIVERED
to the San Ignacio like a UPS package the next weekend. On the day he arrived Blaine and Monica were in Douglas for a meeting of the Border Ranchers Association, and Castle was with Sally in the kitchen of the main house. A knock at the door interrupted them. Sally answered. A dark-complected young man who had the look of a cop but wore civilian clothes stood outside, Miguel beside him, carrying a flight bag. “Here he is,” the young man said, and drove away without another word.

The story Miguel gave was this: after giving his videotaped testimony, he was taken to a courtroom in the jail for a hearing, issued a temporary visa, and to his joy, set free. Or almost free. He was driven in a caged wagon to the county jail in Nogales, where a policeman, a jefe (this must have been Rodriguez himself) informed him that a job was waiting at the rancho San Ignacio, reminded him that his permit was valid for only three months, and warned him to stay put or he would find himself locked up again. Miguel had nothing but the clothes on his back, his visa, a change of socks and underwear, and a toothbrush in the flight bag, but he considered himself a fortunate man, for once. He was five feet four inches and 150 pounds of gratitude, and he embraced his benefactors.

Rodriguez appeared the following day, pulling a stock trailer behind his pickup. He said he would like another look at the horses, and after he’d taken one, he made an offer. Sally accepted it without further discussion. The dun and the bay were loaded into the trailer. Only then did the sheriff acknowledge Miguel’s presence—she had already put him to work pruning her mulberry trees.

“I’ll lay odds that that wet takes off on you first chance he gets,” Rodriguez said.

“You’re on, Danny.” As he drove away, she turned to Castle with a triumphant look. “Didn’t I say he knew how to cut corners?”

And that was how Miguel Espinoza became an employee of the San Ignacio Cattle Company. Sally started him at a salary of eight hundred a month and put him up, rent free, in a small Airstream trailer parked behind Gerardo and Elena’s house. It served as bunkhouse for itinerant cowhands during the branding and roundup seasons. Elena was happy with her new neighbor—it would be nice to have someone else to talk to—but her husband was displeased, very much displeased. He insisted that the trailer be moved someplace else, the farther from his house the better. “¿Por qué?” asked Sally. “Está bien donde está.” Meaning, Castle gathered, that she thought the trailer was fine where it was. Gerardo would not say why he wanted it moved, but remained adamant. He was perhaps the only person around capable of defying Sally’s wishes. With his help, Castle hitched the Airstream to his Suburban and towed it to a shady, level spot a short distance from his cabin. Gerardo shook his head and said, “No. Este lugar no es bueno. Ahora está muy cerca a tu casa.” Castle’s Spanish having slightly improved, he understood that the trailer’s new location also did not meet with his approval, that it was too close to Castle’s dwelling. “No comprendo,” Castle said. “What’s the matter?” Tipping his hat back, Gerardo gave him an earnest look. “Hágame caso, Señor Gil. Este mojado trae la mala suerte.” Aside from his name and the Mexican slang for wetback—mojado—Castle understood nothing. In any event, he was not going to haul the Airstream all over looking for a site that met Gerardo’s specifications, whatever those were. “It’s okay here,” he said. “¿Comprende? Está bien aquí.” The vaquero shrugged, as if to say,
Whatever you want
, and Castle backed the trailer in.

When he returned to the main house, Sally was interrogating her new hire. Had he ever done house painting before? Oh, yes. After his produce business had gone bankrupt, he’d done many small jobs to make ends meet. She assigned him to begin scraping the blistered window frames and outside woodwork; then she and Castle went to Nogales to buy primer, paint, rollers, and brushes. On the way, he mentioned the words Gerardo had spoken to him—he was pretty sure he recalled them correctly—and asked for a translation.

“He was telling you to heed his words that the wetback brings bad luck,” she said.

“What the hell did he mean by that?”

“Ask him. Been around Mexicans all my life, Gil, and one thing I learned is that they don’t think the same as us. It’s the Catholic Church and all that Indian blood.”

“What would the Catholic Church have to do with it?”

“It’s a spooky religion. You mix it with lots of Indian blood, and you get folks who think spooky.”

At Home Depot, through her thick eyeglasses, Sally peered at color charts for an hour before she settled on the right shade of light brown for the exterior walls, the right tone of blue for the window frames and trim. By the time she and Castle returned, in the late afternoon, Miguel had finished scraping and sanding the front windows down to bare wood and was hard at work on the side.

“Now look at that!” Sally marveled. “It had been a gringo, he’d call it a day and be having a beer. Where did that nonsense about lazy Mexicans ever get started? Never seen a one of ’em didn’t work his tail off.”

When Blaine and Monica got back from Douglas on Sunday afternoon, Miguel was painting the fascia boards under the front porch and Castle was in the cramped office off the living room, going over the books with his aunt to determine if the ranch could afford even so meager a salary as she’d offered. It could, just barely—Monica had not been exaggerating months ago, when she’d described the San Ignacio’s profit margin as being “thin as a credit card.” Outside they heard Blaine’s truck pull into the yard and him exclaim, “What the hell is this!” Sally sighed and said, “Well, here we go,” and went into the living room, Castle following her. They hadn’t mentioned their meeting with the sheriff, because they hadn’t thought anything would come of it; so Blaine and Monica were completely surprised to find Miguel on the premises.

“Welcome back,” Sally said as her son and daughter-in-law came in and set their suitcases down. “How’d things go in Douglas?”

“Fine,” Blaine replied, frowning. “Ma, that Mexican outside, that’s—”

“It is. Sit down. A lot has gone on the past couple of days.”

Blaine clomped across the tile floor and sank into the long leather sofa. Monica sat next to him. Sally remained on her feet, apparently to hold the advantage, as she explained how the ranch’s payroll had been increased by one.

“You sold two horses for half their worth and hired that wet without talkin’ to me first?” he railed. “Goddammit, Ma, you haven’t made one good business decision in the last ten years, but this beats ’em all.”

“Don’t you lecture me!” she retaliated, wagging a finger in a parody of a scolding schoolmarm.

“All right, you two, don’t start,” Monica said. “Sally, Blaine is right. You should have consulted us first.” She turned to Castle and chastised him for not saying anything. “It’s like you two were intriguing behind our backs.”

He wished he could vanish. He was little more than a guest here and had no right to meddle in the ranch’s business affairs.

“Eight hundred a month for a handyman we don’t need, an illegal to boot,” Blaine carried on.

“For the time being, he’s legal. And I’ll remind you that your bosom amigo, Gerardo, wasn’t legal when he came here, wasn’t till that amnesty back in ’eighty-six. And eight hundred a month is only half what we’d pay a regular ranch hand. Far as my business sense goes, I’ve seen a dozen families sell out since I’ve been running this place, and we’re still here.”

“We wouldn’t be if I had left it all up to you.”

“Now, you listen to me. I still pay the piper around here, and I call the tune. Me and Gil have had a look at the accounts, and we can afford him.”

Blaine turned to, or, rather,
on
his cousin. “Seems to me you’ve got a lot of time on your hands. You could of done this beautification project free of charge, or is that kinda work beneath you?”

Eight hundred a month, he thought. The part of his portfolio he’d kept for himself earned four hundred
a day
every day from dividends and interest alone. Ignoring his cousin’s jibe, he said he would help out with Miguel’s wages.

Blaine laughed sarcastically. “Damn generous of you, Mr. Deep Pockets. Know what I’m of a mind to do? Fire that little son of a bitch and drive him to the border myself and toss his wetback ass over the fence back into Mexico.”

“Oh, Blaine!” Monica said. “Stop that! You sound like a trailer-park redneck. Look, how about I mix a batch of margaritas, and we can all have a drink and talk this over like civilized people.”

“I
am
a goddamn redneck and I don’t want a margarita!” He stomped into the kitchen, where he pulled a Tecate from the refrigerator. Returning to the sofa, he ripped the top off the can and guzzled, smacking his lips. “There we go—beer is what us rednecks drink. Too bad it ain’t a Bud Light. Tell you what, cuzzy—”

“You can stop that cuzzy stuff,” Castle said in a level voice.

“All right, then,
Gil
. Gil, you are gone to do more than help out with our handyman’s wages. You’ll pay all of ’em.”

The next day, taking to heart Blaine’s remarks about hard manual labor being beneath him, Castle pitched in, wielding a paintbrush alongside Miguel. It made for a charming picture, one that touched the egalitarian regions of his nature: the migrant and the onetime senior vice president of the fourth-largest investment firm on earth, working side by side in the hot sun. That evening he invited Miguel to dinner in his cabin, where he cooked a can of beans and a few quail left over in the freezer. The two men began instructing each other in their native languages. ¿Cómo se dice frijoles en inglés?
Beans
. ¿Cómo se llama esto en español?—pointing at Sam, lying on her bed in front of the stove—
perro
. En inglés,
dog
. ¿Cómo se llama esto?—holding up a fork—
tenedor
.

The next day, with the aid of a dictionary and a phrase book, Castle learned the names of Miguel’s children, that the vegetables he’d exported had come off an uncle’s farm, and that until his flight to the United States, he had never been farther than a few miles from Oaxaca. Castle attempted to relate some of his own biography, but his Spanish was too primitive for such a complicated story. All Miguel got out of it was that his American companion had been widowed, and for that he was sorry. It wasn’t good for a man to be alone. A friendship grew between them, or as much friendship as there could be between two men who could barely communicate.

Castle had arranged for eight hundred dollars to be automatically transferred from his account to the San Ignacio’s bank in Tucson each month. At the end of his first week on the job, Sally paid Miguel two hundred, then Castle drove him to a Western Union in Nogales so he could wire money to his wife.

Afterward he had dinner with Tessa at her place. He’d seen her regularly since his trip to Florence and had kept her abreast of each episode in the ongoing series that was Miguel Espinoza. She remarked that he was going a bit overboard: he’d practically made Miguel his ward. Was it really necessary to chauffeur him all the way to Nogales? He answered that he probably would not have done any of it had it not been for her—she had liberated him, she’d opened the door through which he had stepped back into the world, into
life
. But her remark got him thinking. Am I going to these lengths for my own benefit as much as for his? Well, so what if he was? There was such a thing as selfish altruism.