Crossers (29 page)

15

T
HE TRIBULATIONS THAT WERE
to afflict the San Ignacio, the bad luck of Gerardo’s foreboding (though not all of it, as would be discovered, was blind bad luck) began on a warm, windy day in June. Castle, still eager to show Blaine that he was willing to pitch in with the ranch’s dirty work, had volunteered to help rebuild a fence in a remote pasture. It had been torn apart, apparently by illegal aliens, and an irrigation pipe had been cut, draining a storage tank dry. As Blaine planned to graze cattle in that pasture later on, to fatten them on the succulent grass that would sprout with the summer monsoons, the repairs had to be done now.

Right after dawn Castle set off on foot for the main house, walking Sam on lead; on lead because the weather had turned hot enough to wake up the rattlesnakes. Gerardo had recently shot a four-foot-long Mojave near the horse corrals. Impatient to run and hunt, as always, Sam strained at the leash, towing her master along at better than four miles an hour. At that pace, he was the picture of a fit middle-aged male, enjoying a brisk walk; but the frown that cut a vertical ditch in his forehead indicated that something was on his mind. And there was. He and Tessa had had their first quarrel.

Two nights earlier they had gone to dinner and the movies in Tucson. Too tired to make the long drive home, they had checked in to a motel off the freeway. The anodyne anonymity of their room was oddly exciting; it aroused them into the abandoned lovemaking of romantic desperadoes snatching a night together. In the morning, as he checked out, he picked up a newspaper at the front desk. When he noticed the date—June 12—the night’s lingering joys and pleasures curdled into shame.

He was withdrawn on the return trip, and he could not shake off his sullen mood. When they arrived at her place, troubled by the change in him, Tessa asked what was the matter.

“Nothing,” he’d answered. What else could he say?

“Nothing? One minute you can’t get enough of me, the next you hardly say a word for sixty miles.”

“Look, I can’t explain it to myself,” he said, annoyed with her for asking for an explanation, and with himself for his inability to offer one. “Yesterday was her birthday. I didn’t even realize it till I picked up the paper in the motel. She would have been forty-four.”

Tessa sat with her hand on the door handle and sighed. “And you’re not feeling quite right about last night, are you? It felt like a dirty weekend. It felt like adultery.”

“A dirty weekend?
Adultery?
” he echoed. “No, no, it wasn’t that.” He wasn’t able to go on; the accuracy of her intuition—not quite a bull’s-eye but close enough—left him tongue-tied.

“Know what?” said Tessa, not without anger. “I am not going to be in the ridiculous position of competing with a ghost.”

“For chrissake, Tess, that’s off base.”

“I don’t think so.” She got out of the car and stood looking at him through the open door. “I thought you had things sorted out. I guess you don’t. You need more time, and I’m giving it to you.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you know what. Call me when you’ve got it figured out.”

He thought that she was being unreasonable, insensitive to his situation. Did she really believe a man who’d lost his wife in such a manner would get over it in less than two years? “I get it,” he said, losing his temper. “You’ve been waiting for an excuse like this. Drive ’em crazy and drop ’em, you said that about yourself. Fuck ’em and forget ’em.” Instantly, he regretted his words and apologized; but it was like firing a gun and then trying to recall the bullet.

“I ought to slap your face!”

Then she slammed the door and stomped off toward her front door.

Now, walking along, he pictured her abundant hair and the pinpoints glinting in her irises, like amber chips in brown earth; he heard her contralto voice in its various modes—frank, tender, flip—and knew life would be bleak without her. But he was wary of the happiness Tessa brought him. He’d written to Morgan and Justine last month, telling them about his new relationship. He’d thought then that he was seeking their approval, which he got in a letter from Morgan—no e-mail, but a real letter in her loopy schoolgirl’s hand—expressing their delight, their hope to come out to Arizona soon and meet Tessa. But he wondered now if he’d secretly wanted their disapproval, to confirm that the voice in his own head, the voice that objected to love, that rebuked happiness, was the one he should listen to.

Sam jerked him out of these cloudy reflections, lunging toward the oak-shaded arroyo beside the road. She fell into a hard point. A Mearns’ pair burst from under a skein of fallen branches, the hen streaking off to the left, the cock quartering away into the trees beyond the arroyo. Sam started to dash in the direction of the hen’s flight. Castle checked her when he saw a rattler basking on a rock not five yards away. He tugged the dog back onto the road, his heart pounding.

Road and arroyo wound down to the grassy flat that contained the cheerful clutter of ranch headquarters, considerably less cluttered since he and Miguel had cleaned up the backyard, hauling truckloads of junk to the Patagonia landfill. His mood improved—the scare had been somehow therapeutic—he called out a “Good morning” to Sally, who was tossing supplement from a canvas morral to her geriatric pets.

“Mornin’, Gil,” she replied from behind the rough-board corral.

“Saw a rattler on my way down, about the size of the one Gerardo killed.”

She shrugged; rattlesnakes were so common this time of year, he might as well have told her he’d seen a squirrel.

“Didn’t stick around to see if it was a Mojave or a diamondback.”

“A Mojave is greenish, a d-back is more brown. Either one would ruin your day.” She walked off with her morral, summoning her animals to “come and get it or forget it.”

Castle released Sam to run around with Blaine’s Australian heelers in the backyard, enclosed by chicken wire fastened to rough oak posts. In the middle of the yard the rusted remains of a Model-T truck sat on its rims like an iron sculpture. It was the one piece of scrap that had not been hauled away, partly because it was too big, mostly because Blaine would not part with it. It had been their grandfather’s first truck, which made it a treasured heirloom. Looking at the corroded antique, the tidy yard, the dogs chasing each other, a feeling of pride overtook Castle, though he had no stake in this ranch beyond the little bit of sweat equity he’d put into it. He’d made a discovery at his cabin. A chunk of plaster had flaked off a corner of an outer wall, exposing the adobe brick. A name and date, J
. B. ERSKINE
—1912, had been inscribed on one, probably with a finger or a stick before the mud had hardened. He’d been told the cabin had been the original homestead, but to see the archaeological proof gave him a quiet thrill. Knowing that the same walls that had sheltered his ancestors now sheltered him gave him a sense of continuity, of belonging. The two-room adobe was no longer a provisional hideout; it was home.

“How’d you get here?” Blaine said, coming out of the house.

“I walked, for the exercise.”

Blaine took off his hat, ruffled the rooster’s crest atop his head, and snorted. Walking was no way to get anywhere so long as a horse or pickup was handy; walking for exercise was beyond pointless.

“Well, if that’s what you want, you’ll get your fill today,” Blaine said.

Miguel, supervised by a scowling Gerardo, was loading Blaine’s Ford with gear: doughnuts of barbed wire resembling steel crowns of thorn, flexible irrigation pipe, bundles of T-posts, and two post drivers. He was struggling with one of the drivers, so Castle helped him lift it into the truck. It consisted of a solid piece of cast iron with short handles attached, tapering down to a tube about a yard long. It must have weighed forty or fifty pounds.

They piled in, Miguel riding outside in the bed, Gerardo in the front seat, Castle in the rear, which closely resembled the interior of a Dumpster—tools, plastic bags, work gloves, a shovel, stained Carhartt coats stiffened from dried sweat.

Blaine lowered the window and called to his mother that they were leaving.

“Figured you’d got in the truck to go somewheres,” Sally answered back, shambling out of the corral.

“Count on her to make some smart-mouth remark no matter what the occasion,” Blaine grumbled as they started off, the Ford with its worn shocks rocking down a rough road like a small boat in heavy seas. “Look at her, feedin’ those damn animals in her PJs and bathrobe. That longhorn is the most pampered bovine ever to walk on four legs. Got the run of the place, not afraid of man nor horse, no sir, no respect at all. The whole reason she paid good money for that son of a bitch was because it reminded her of the old days of the open range. She can be mean as a female rattler with PMS, but she’s got her sentimental side. If the longhorn ain’t, that Mexican in back is the living proof.”

Castle said nothing. Miguel was living proof that he also had his sentimental side.

“Her eightieth birthday is comin up the end of the month,” Blaine went on. “I need your advice, Gil. More’n that, I need your help with something.”

“I’m listening,” Castle said. It was unprecedented for his cousin to ask his advice about anything.

“It’s like this. Ma owns half the ranch, and me and Monica the other half. We put the ranch into conservation easements about ten years ago, so it ain’t worth what it would be if we’d held on to development rights. Still and all, land values have gone up, and I figure her share would come in north of five million.”

“And you’d owe estate taxes on four million of that when she dies,” Castle said, guessing at Blaine’s line of thought.

“Which we ain’t got. We’d either have to borrow the money or sell it. Break up the ranch. And if we sold it, we’d owe capital gains on top of the estate taxes. I had a talk with a lawyer a while back, and he told me that he thought a trust would be a good idea. Ma would put her fifty percent in something he called a LIRT—”

“A living irrevocable trust, right,” said Castle, pleased to show his expertise.

“And that’s where I need your help. The way he explained it, Ma would turn things over to a trustee, who’d have a say in how they was run. You’d have an easier time convincing an airline pilot to turn his plane over to a passenger. Monica calls the old lady a control freak. I call her mule-stubborn and set in her ways. Hell, it took us more’n a year to talk her into the conservation easements. But I think if you talked to her—”

“Me?”

“She won’t listen to me. Thinks I’m an eighteen-year-old, and a dumb one besides.” Blaine paused to negotiate a difficult stretch of road, where foot-deep ruts ran like crooked rails alongside a rock-cobbled hump that would break an axle at any speed over three miles an hour. “But she respects you. Brags on you to her old-biddy friends. How she’s got this nephew who was a Wall Street big shot.”

Castle laughed. “That’s because she’s never met a real Wall Street big shot. I was pretty much a middle shot.”

“Whatever kind of shot you were, she might just listen to you. Takin’ care of this ranch is what gets me up in the morning. Don’t think I could get up without it.”

“‘Sung to the land,’” Castle said. “I think that’s how you put it.”

“It’s how that Aussie I knew in Vietnam put it. This is land with a history, damn straight it is. This road we’re on was an old Spanish trace that run from Chihuahua in Mexico all the way to San Diego. I saw it marked on a vellum map that must have been two hundred years old. Spaniards was runnin’ cattle here before there was a United States. I think about that and about Ben and Jeff homesteading this place and how they had to fight off rustlers and droughts and hung on in the Depression, and it’s like we don’t own it, it’s like we … well, I can’t think of the words.”

“Like it’s been entrusted to you?”

“That would be about right. It would damn near kill me to lose it or any part of it.”

And, Castle reflected, looking at the wind-brushed ranges, the oaks, the gyring hawks, he did not want to lose it either. “All right. I’ll talk to her, first chance I get.”

They drove on, not much faster than had the Spanish traders in their creaking oxcarts, swung off onto a two-track leading across a meadow of grama and red-stemmed hog potato, and stopped near a windmill at the mouth of a canyon. The storage tank stood close by, and the ground all around it had been turned into a small marsh, wet grass sparkling in the sunlight, ponds glimmering in the low spots. They climbed out and sloshed through the muck to the tank, which Blaine tapped twice with a rock, both taps producing a hollow ring.

“Son of a bitch,” he said in a low voice. “Gerardo wasn’t kiddin’. Bone dry. Five thousand gallons wasted, just wasted.” He picked up the black rubber pipe, roughly the thickness of a fire hose, that snaked from the tank to a round trough several yards away. “They wanted a drink, all they had to do was turn on the pump on the tank and then turn it off. Instead they cut the goddamn pipe.”

“Hay mucha basura—allí,” Gerardo said, motioning toward a wide draw.

They went to it, and looked down into a miniature landfill. Scattered up and down the draw were jackets, socks, trousers, gallon water jugs, men’s briefs and women’s panties, cosmetic kits, empty cigarette packages, combs, hairbrushes, candles, boots, tennis shoes, religious cards bearing pictures of the Virgin or of the Sacred Heart, dripping blood.

“This fuckin’ mess wasn’t left by one bunch,” Blaine said. “Somebody’s been runnin’ wetbacks through here, and that’s peculiar. Drug mules are what we usually get.” He picked up one of the cosmetic kits—it resembled a tiny paint box—and tossed it aside. “Nope, wasn’t drug mules who left this. Don’t know many who wear lipstick. Let’s get to the fence.”

It spanned the canyon for a distance of about fifty yards and had been knocked down completely in two places, while in other places wobbly stakes leaned, wires sagged or hung like barbed tendrils. Footprints were everywhere, footprints on footprints, and tire marks as well.

“See what happened, cuzzy? That draw yonder winds down to the border, about three miles away. The coyotes have been walkin’ ’em across the line and up the draw to here. The last bunch cut the pipe and changed clothes and washed up—that’s so they don’t look or smell like illegals when they get to wherever they’re goin’. Then they waited for their rides. The drivers made a couple of gates by smashin’ their trucks right through the fence. If I gotta choose between coyotes and drug mules, I’ll take the mules any day. They’ve got better manners, they ain’t messy. All right, we’ll have to string some new wire and replace or reset the T-posts, one end to the other.”