Damage Control (2 page)

“THANK YOU SO MUCH, MR. CAMPBELL,” CLAIRE NEWMARK SAID AS
the disgruntled speaker returned to his seat. As head of the Cochise County Board of Supervisors, Claire was chairing that Friday morning’s meeting. “Do you have anything to say in response, Sheriff Brady?”

Joanna snapped awake. One of the things about being a sleep-deprived working mother meant that she could fall asleep anywhere—in front of her computer, at her desk, in church, and definitely in front of the TV set on those rare occasions when she actually tried to watch a show. In this case, she had dozed off during a Board of Supervisors Friday morning meeting.

Randy Campbell was one of Joanna’s constituents. A prominent local rancher, Campbell was also one of Joanna’s most vociferous
critics. He had come to the Board of Supervisors meeting that morning armed with his usual litany of complaints.

Joanna had considerable sympathy for the man. His ranch, located on Border Road just east of Bisbee Junction, was also border-crossing central for illegal immigrants. Campbell’s house had been broken into on numerous occasions. His wife and children had been held at gunpoint and threatened by armed robbers who had taken the time to load several television sets and power tools into Randy’s pickup truck before driving off in it. His fences had been cut, letting his livestock loose. Once outside the fence, his daughter’s prizewinning bull had been hit and killed by a passing Border Patrol vehicle.

So even though Joanna may have allowed herself to doze during the course of Randy Campbell’s tirade, she knew what he had said—almost by heart—because she had heard it all before.

“Thank you, Madame Chairman,” Joanna said, rising to her feet. “And thank you, too, Mr. Campbell. I appreciate the fact that you’re willing to bring your concerns to the attention of this board and also into the public arena. I live in a rural setting myself. Although we haven’t had the same number of incidents Mr. Campbell has had, our property, too, has been damaged by illegal crossers.

“The problem is this. We’re dealing with something that is well beyond the scope of my department to handle. We’ve done our best to increase patrols in Mr. Campbell’s area. Because of that, we’ve also managed to decrease our response time. But the truth is, the border-enforcement problem is a national issue. It requires a national solution as opposed to a local one. Our mission is to handle criminal complaints, and we do that to the best of our ability, but that ability is limited by both budgetary and personnel considerations.

“There are eighty miles of international border inside Cochise County. That’s a lot of territory to cover. It’s also a lot of crime to cover. My department does the best it can, and I’m sure Border Patrol and Homeland Security are doing the best they can to interdict illegal entrants. No one agency caused this, and no one agency can fix it. Thank you.”

Randy Campbell was still glowering at her as Joanna resumed her seat. The public-comment part of the meeting had come at the very end of the day’s agenda. A few minutes later, as Joanna walked toward her car in the parking lot, Claire Newmark fell into step beside her.

“Sorry to have to let him dump on you like that,” Claire said. “But you just stood for reelection. Mine is coming up. If I hadn’t given him a forum, he’d come looking for me next. I figured you could handle him, and you did. Very nicely, as a matter of fact. It sounded a little like a stump speech, but not too much. Way to go.”

The exchange caught Joanna by surprise. She had gradually come to understand that although the office of sheriff was theoretically nonpartisan, it was definitely not nonpolitical. Everything Joanna did or didn’t do was grist for someone’s mill, and this was no exception. What she hadn’t realized, however, was that somehow the political climate in Cochise County had changed. There was now an established old-girls network capable of wielding its own particular brand of power. To Joanna Brady’s astonishment, she was in a position to reap some of the benefits of that unexpected sea change.

“Thanks,” she said.

With that, Joanna headed back to her office at the Cochise County Justice Center. She’d had her weekly ordeal by bureaucracy.
Now it was time to go do battle with her other daily headache—paperwork. Crime fighting was supposed to be her main focus. Too bad it took so many dead trees to do it.

Alfred Beasley had pretty much of a death grip on the steering wheel of the decrepit old Buick as he nursed it up the steep winding mountain road toward Montezuma Pass. He and Martha had bought the Buick new, fifteen years earlier. At the time they made the purchase, they had also discussed the very real possibility that this would be their last new vehicle—that this final Regal would be their “toes-up” Buick. Back then they hadn’t expected it would last nearly as long as it had. Of course, they hadn’t really thought they’d make it this far, either. Martha had just turned ninety-one and Alfred himself was eighty-eight. She’d outlived her parents by forty years; Alfred had surpassed his by almost as many.

Throughout their long marriage, they had always loved road trips, and this one was no exception. Martha had insisted that they do Montezuma Pass at the bottom of the Huachuca Mountains “one last time,” as she said, and they were doing it, come hell or high water—and not necessarily in that order. The rains had come two days late—on the sixth of July rather than the fourth. Once they were off the paved road and onto gravel, there were places where there were already washouts. In one spot a small boulder had fallen onto the road. Afraid the Buick would high-center if Alfred tried going over it, he carefully steered around it, praying that no one would come barreling downhill toward them when their left rear tire—far more worn than it
should have been—was within mere inches of going over the edge. Alfred breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief once they were back on the right-hand side of the narrow road. No matter what else was going on with him, at least he could still drive.

By the time they were around the boulder and the tight hairpin curve that followed, Alfred looked in the rearview mirror and counted at least four cars lined up behind him. A hot little sports car of some kind was right on his bumper. Behind that was a Jeep Cherokee, followed by a pair of behemoth pickups. No doubt the last two were four-wheel-drive numbers—Tundras or Dakotas or some other tough-sounding name.

Too bad,
Alfred thought.
You’re not going up this damned mountain any faster than we are, so take an old cold tater and wait.

Martha sat beside him, quiet and unperturbed. That was the way she’d ridden with him for all these sixty-nine years—seventy next month. She seemed to be keeping watch on the passing scenery out the window—the scrubby pines, the red-hued dirt, the ragged burned-dry grass—but he didn’t know how much she was actually seeing. Macular degeneration had robbed her of much of her sight, but certainly not all of it. There was enough vision left to her that she still read Alfred the riot act whenever he tried clearing the table without first cleaning his plate.

“That’s what I like about this spot,” Martha said at last. “The sky’s always so blue up here.”

And that was true. Far off to the east, somewhere over New Mexico, stood a tiny fringe of white cumulus clouds. No doubt those would build up during the day, rising higher and higher. By late afternoon they’d tower overhead and would probably grow into another fierce monsoon storm, but for now the sky above the Huachuca Mountains was a vast expanse of brilliant blue.

“Yes,” Alfred agreed.

They both knew that Alfred was totally color-blind. He wouldn’t have known blue from green if it had come up and slapped him in the face. But Alfred Beasley was no dummy, either. After all these years he was smart enough to know that if Martha said something was blue, he agreed completely, no questions asked.

The sign back at the highway had said it was three miles from the turnoff to the viewpoint. To Alfred’s way of thinking, today this seemed like a very long three miles. By the time they turned into the parking lot and stopped in the first handicapped space, the needle on the Buick’s temperature gauge was hovering right at the H. Alfred let go of the steering wheel and turned off the key. “Well, Buttercup,” he said. “Here we are.”

It took several minutes for him to wrestle her wheelchair out of the backseat. At home Martha could get around on a walker for short distances, but outside the house they used the chair. There were times Alfred could have used a walker himself. Pushing Martha’s chair gave him the benefit of a walker without having to admit to his wife that he maybe needed one.

Alfred was relieved to see that the nearest picnic table—only a matter of a few feet from the parking lot—was still unoccupied. Once he had Martha in her chair and the picnic hamper on her lap, he made straight for that. The path was steeper than he would have thought, but he made it, wondering as he went if, when it came time to leave, he would be strong enough to push her back up the hill to the car.

He parked Martha’s chair at the end of the table, set the brake, and then settled down on the end of the bench to watch while she took charge of setting out forenoon coffee. First came the red-
and-white-checked oilcloth tablecloth. It was old and almost frayed through in spots, but it still worked. Then came the stainless-steel thermos they’d bought for three bucks at a Kiwanis rummage sale. After that came the paper napkins and the school cast-off cups and plates.

Martha had spent twenty years cooking and dishing out food in the high school cafeteria. When the school had unloaded its old, indestructible plastic dishes, Martha had dragged a set home. By then, years of hot water and detergent had scrubbed away the shiny surface. Now they boasted a matte finish. Martha claimed they were pink. As far as Alfred was concerned, they were no particular color at all.

Once the dishes were set out, it was time for their midmorning treat. Once a week, at Safeway, they bought a package of eight sweet rolls which Martha would put into individual Tupperware containers so she could dole them out one at a time, one day at a time, with an extra half apiece on Sunday. She did so now, bringing out the roll she’d brought along in the hamper. Placing it on one of the two plates, she felt with her fingers and then carefully divided the roll in half with the paring knife she kept in the hamper for just that purpose. Then, after placing one half of the roll on the other plate, she set that one in front of Alfred and turned her attention to pouring coffee.

Watching Martha as she concentrated somewhat shakily on her self-appointed tasks, Alfred couldn’t help being struck by how much he still loved her and by how lucky they were to be still together. Most of their couple friends were gone now. Only a few widows remained. Alfred was pretty much the last of the Mohicans when it came to the men. When he had met Martha working in that diner in Omaha back in 1934, he was a cocky
seventeen-year-old and she a dark-eyed beauty of twenty. At the time those three years had seemed like an insurmountable obstacle. Now those critical three years were just a drop in the bucket. They didn’t mean anything.

“Are you just going to sit there daydreaming and let your coffee get cold?” Martha demanded.

The coffee was cooling rapidly because, compared with the hot valley floor, the mountain was downright chilly. At sixty-five hundred feet, the midmorning sun wasn’t nearly as warm on this July day as one would have thought, and Alfred was glad they both had sweaters. Once they finished their roll and coffee, Martha reached into the hamper again and pulled out a tattered brown book and handed it over to him.
The Treasury of the Familiar,
its frayed cover now held together with duct tape, had been the one book, other than the Bible, that Martha had owned when they married. And they still read from both volumes on a daily basis, in the mornings though. Not in the afternoons. These days Alfred wasn’t good for much in the afternoons.

“What would you like me to read today, Buttercup?” Alfred asked.

“The Song of Hiawatha,”
she said. That was the one he turned to, although the book opened to that page pretty much on its own. The poem was Martha’s particular favorite. She had learned it when she was in sixth grade in Kearney, Nebraska, and could still recite most of it by heart. Alfred had read it to her so often that he almost had it memorized as well. Eventually, though, Albert noticed that Martha’s mind had wandered. She was no longer repeating the familiar words along with him.

Alfred closed the book. “What is it?” he asked.

“We’ve been really lucky,” Martha said, pouring second cups
of coffee. He marveled that she could still see well enough to do that without spilling any.

“Yes,” he agreed. “I was thinking that very thing a few minutes ago.”

“What about the girls?” she asked. “Will they ever be friends?”

Their two daughters had had a falling-out in high school when they’d both been interested in the same boy—a Bisbee High School bad boy who hadn’t married either one of them. But the bad blood between the two sisters, Sandra Louise and Samantha Ann, had stuck. They still didn’t speak—couldn’t come to the same holiday celebrations. Their estrangement was going on forty years now. Alfred knew that no matter how hard Martha tried to fix it, their daughters’ continuing feud was the one stark failure in his wife’s life—the one intractable problem that no amount of prayer or effort or hard work had been able to solve.

Alfred could have said, “Of course. They’ll grow out of it.” But it was too late for that kind of empty-headed crap. “I doubt it,” he said. “They’re both too set in their ways.”

“Is it time?” Martha asked a little later.

Alfred straightened and nodded. “Pretty much,” he said.

Just then a young woman in hiking attire approached the table. “Excuse me,” she said in heavily accented English. “I am watching you. You remind me of my grandparents in Germany—Bernkastel. Would you mind so much if I took your picture?”

“Why on earth would you want to do that?” Martha asked.

“To help me remember them,” the young woman said.