I was in Nogales—on the Sonoran side—spending the last of my money on the señoritas—when I met Jeffrey Erskine. He was having a beer in the bar of the hotel I was staying at. We got to talking, and Jeff mentioned that he was buying some steers in Mexico. Him and his brother, Ben, were running a rawhide steer operation across the line. You might not be acquainted with that term, rawhiding. It’s not used anymore because nobody rawhides anymore. It means raising cattle on as low overhead as you can get away with. No buildings or barns, no machinery or windmills, just a corral or two, a few horses, and your stock. Most rawhiders were fellas getting started in the cattle business, they ran their cattle on leased land, and usually it was steers instead of cow-calf. Raising steers was speculative, a little like playing the stock market, I guess. You could make good money fast by buying steers cheap, then fattening them up, keeping your eye on prices, and when you figured they’d fetch top dollar, you would sell, and then buy another bunch for as low as you could find, usually in Mexico, where things was cheaper.
And that pretty much describes Jeff’s operation. He had ten sections under lease up in the San Rafael Valley, east of the ranch that had the same name. I was impressed with him right off. He was just past six foot, and pretty well put together, but that wasn’t what impressed me. He was the same age as me, but you know how there’s some people who seem like they were born forty years old? That was Jeff—a serious fella. He wore this mustache, reddish gold, that added to his—well, I reckon you would call it his maturity. Now, humility never has been one of my strong suits, so I asked him if he could use a top hand because I was one.
Jeff didn’t say nothing for a spell; don’t think he could take a leak without pondering aforehand. Then he said he already had a top hand in his brother. The only trouble was, his brother had a habit of going off on what Jeff called “adventures” without a word of warning. So, sure he could use a top hand, but all he could promise was a cot in a tent and chuck, and this top hand would have to do some cooking and cleaning up.
So I threw in. Had nothing better to do. We lived right hard, I will tell you that. This tent they had was a canvas wall tent Jeff had got from the soldiers over to Fort Huachuca. It had a little stove for heat, and it was pitched at the head of a draw a little ways west of the Huachuca Mountains. We had us a fly where we did the cooking, and it was beans and hash and tortillas and coffee seven days a week. Never forget the first meal I ate there. Ben had put a pot of beans on the fire in the morning, but he forgot to put the lid on it. When we come back after riding all day, I was so hungry I could have eaten the back end out of a wooden horse and dug right in. Crunchiest damn beans I’d ever put my mouth to, and when I got the hollow filled up, I wondered what was making those beans so crunchy like, and investigated the pot and saw it was grasshoppers, big ones—this was summertime. Them hoppers flew into the pot while we were gone and baked themselves. I about threw up, and Ben laughed, and Jeff, who was a book-reading man, said that over to Europe folks considered grasshoppers a delicacy and dipped them in chocolate and ate them like they was candy.
I was impressed with Ben right off the bat, but in a different way than with his brother. He was skinnier and light on his feet, but he was one helluva man with a horse or with a rope. And there was something watchful about him, like he was expecting someone to jump him any second, but it wasn’t a scared kind of watchfulness. He was relaxed and coiled up at the same time. You got the impression that if somebody did jump him, the one who did the jumping was gone to come out second best. Ben had a funny way of smiling, too. One end of his mouth would go way up and the other end way down, and I saw later on that if he smiled at you like that, well, you had better talk fast or shoot fast.
I told you Jeff was a book reader. Most of the books were about cattle breeding. He was taking a correspondence course from some agricultural college somewhere, and every now and then he would ride over to the post office in Lochiel and pick up these books they sent him, and he even took the tests and mailed them back. Like I said, a serious man.
That year of 1910 was the year of the big comet, Halley’s. It was pinned up there in the sky like a carnation made of fire. On full moon nights, with that comet shining up there, you almost thought it was daylight. Truth to tell, I didn’t know what a comet was till Jeff explained it. Said that one come from way out in the universe somewhere and was traveling, oh, hell, I can’t remember how fast he said, maybe a million miles an hour. I remember asking him, What do you mean, a million miles an hour? I been looking at that thing for a week and it ain’t moved an inch. But I took his word for it.
The reason I’m talking about that comet is the trip we took into Mexico in the fall to buy more steers. We’d got a herd together in the corrals over to Naco and were fixing to drive them to our range the next day. We overheard some vaqueros talking about the comet, that the big extra light in the sky got the cattle fidgety, and they said that it was un mal agüero, a bad omen, that it meant war and death were a-coming. It was real spooky talk. They were saying that they’d heard about pillars of fire in the middle of the country. I come to find out a long time later that it was a volcano that blew up, but to them vaqueros, who was about as unscientific as anybody can get, it was another omen. The days of Díaz were over, there was a fella named Madero who was gone to take power and give the land to the people, but there would be a lot of war and death and famine and disease first. Lord they was talking like folks out of Bible days. It had been up to me, we would have cleared out right then.
So the Revolution got started, and I thought the revolucionarios were right. The rich folks in Mexico and the big-shot foreigners like Colonel Greene had pretty much treated ordinary folks like dogs, and now the dogs was biting back. Jeff and me had some right lively conversations about that. He said the revolucionarios weren’t like ours, George Washington and all, but were socialists, and that made them dangerous. He explained to me what a socialist was, and the way he explained it, I agreed that a socialist wasn’t anybody I would care to associate with. But I didn’t think the Mexicans fighting Díaz were like that. They wanted a fair shake was all, and I sure couldn’t fault any man for that. Ben didn’t have much to say on this subject. He never was one for talking, but I got the idea that he saw things like I did. He would not tolerate nobody trying to push him around, and didn’t think any man had a right to push another man around.
I know one thing—the Revolution made it tough for Jeff to buy Mexican steers. Pancho Villa and his like had run the hacendados off their ranches or hung ’em or shot ’em, and there wasn’t nobody to do business with. Jeff was having a helluva time finding steers at the right price on the American side of the line, and that was putting a crimp in his plans, which were to start to making himself a cattle baron.
It was me who come up with the solution. If it was true that the hacendados had been run off or shot or hung, then their cattle must be a-wandering around with no one to look after them, meaning we didn’t have to go through the formality of buying them. We’d just take them. Couldn’t get ’em no cheaper than that, could you? Jeff and Ben thought it was a fine idea, Ben on account of he was getting bored punching cattle and was looking for some action. Jeff saw the sense of it from a business angle.
Back in those days it was common for Mexicans to cross the line and steal cattle from us gringos—and it was common for gringos to return the favor. It was a kind of game. We didn’t think of it as rustling, and the Mexicans didn’t neither. Of course, if you was the one getting rustled, then you saw it different.
Two of the ten sections Jeff had leased was right on the border, and that’s where we crossed. The rancho grande on the other side was called the Santa Barbara, and it must’ve run halfway down to Mexico City. It was owned by a Spaniard name of Álvarez, and owing to the fact that the revolucionarios hated Spaniards more than anybody else, we reckoned he’d been one of the first run off, shot, or hung. The big comet was gone from the sky by this time, but we had us a full moon. We
rounded up, I think it was fifty-odd head without a hitch and drove them across and built a fire for our running irons and put our brand to ’em.
It was so damn easy, we tried it again the next night, while we still had a moon. We’d gathered up maybe twenty of these corriente steers when the Spaniard showed up with a few of his vaqueros and caught us red-handed. So there was one hacendado who hadn’t been run off, shot, or hung, and wasn’t we surprised! Asked us, polite like, what we thought we was a-doing, and Jeff said that some of our cattle had got away and we were sorting out ours from his. I had to translate that to the Spanish fella. Álvarez pulled a pistol and about stuck it in Jeff’s face and told Jeff that if we didn’t clear out muy pronto, we’d leave our bones there in Old Mexico. Before I could translate that, Ben drew his six-gun and stuck it in Álvarez’s ear and said that his bones was gone to be laying right next to ours if he didn’t put that pistol away. It was a peculiar-looking pistol, a kind I’d never seen before.
There I was on my horse, figuring the vaqueros was gone to open up any second, but Álvarez was between them and Ben, and I thought they didn’t shoot because they were afraid of hitting their boss. Turned out that wasn’t the case. They were afraid of hitting Ben! Right in the middle of that good old-fashioned Mexican standoff, one of the vaqueros called out, “¡Hola Ben! ¡Soy yo, Francisco!” Found out later on that Ben and this Francisco had become compadres on one of Ben’s trips into Sonora a while before—one of them “adventures” Jeff said he went on. Well, Francisco said to go ahead and take the cattle from that hijo de puta of a Spaniard. That kind of distracted Álvarez. He turned in the saddle to see which one of his vaqueros had called him a son of a bitch, and Ben took advantage and cracked him up the side of the head with the barrel of his six-gun, but he didn’t hit him hard enough to knock him out, and Álvarez pulled the trigger of that peculiar pistol. Must have shot four, five rounds quicker than I can say it. He’d shot in the direction of his own men, but I can’t say if it was on purpose or accidental. He didn’t hit a one of them, and then that Francisco fella shot him off his horse, and the other vaqueros plugged him while he was on the ground, and that was the end of the trail for Don Álvarez.
All of it happened in maybe five seconds, and I was right scared and confused. That was the first man I’d ever seen killed before my eyes. Now the cattle had scattered from all the gunfire, and damn if the vaqueros didn’t help us gather them back up. Jeff was kind of troubled how we came to be in possession of them, and I said to him that I reckoned now we was socialists, too. He didn’t think that was too funny. Francisco was telling us what a son of a bitch Álvarez was, treated his vaqueros and their families like they was scum, and that they’d been looking for a chance to get rid of him and we gave it to them. Ben had helped himself to the Spaniard’s pistol, as he no longer had use for it, and told me it was a German Luger, an automatic. Francisco said that now that him and his boys had killed a hacendado, they had better join up with the revolucionarios, and he thought that we ought to join up with them. We didn’t say nothing, but as we was riding back, the wind blew this piece of paper front of my horse, and the horse shied and dumped me right out the saddle. Wasn’t hurt, just kind of embarrassed, and I picked up that paper when we got back to the U.S. of A. side of the line, and by the light of the branding fire, I saw that it said in English, “Attention Gringos! Come south of the border to fight with Pancho Villa for gold and glory! Railroaders, dynamiters, machine gunners wanted.” It was a damn recruiting poster for the Revolution.
Me and Ben got to doing some heavy talking. It went something like this: in all that big country, what were the chances that a piece of paper should blow right in front of my horse? It could not have been a coincidence. There must’ve been a purpose to it. We found out what that was a few days later, when we heard that the revolucionarios had taken over Álvarez’s hacienda. Ben and me decided that we had been given a sign and that we oughta ride down there and see what was going on and join up. What we knew about machine guns and dynamite and railroading wouldn’t have filled a shot glass, but we figured, what the hell. Jeff wasn’t mad. Guess he was used to Ben taking off on adventures, and I think he was glad to be shed of me on account of my socialistic ideas.
1
ON A RAW NOVEMBER AFTERNOON when low-lying clouds made Lower Manhattan seem more claustral than usual, Gil Castle left his office early to make a five o’clock appointment with his counselor at the House of Hope. In the lobby of his building, he buttoned the collar of his trench coat, took a twist out of the belt before buckling it, aligned the buckle with the flap, then stepped out into the noise and jostle of the capital of capitalism, walking briskly down Exchange Street to catch the subway for Grand Central and the 3:17 express to Stamford. Half an inch under six feet, with graying black hair combed back in a style reminiscent of a 1940s movie actor, a trim build, and mahogany brown eyes flanking a thin raptor’s nose that lent to his face the patrician severity of a Florentine prince, he made a pleasing impression on most people but his looks lacked the voltage to draw second glances from women. And in fact Castle didn’t draw any as he weaved through the pedestrian crowds; he would not have been aware of them even if he had. Since Amanda’s death, he had become sexually inert, dead to desire and, beyond that, to the desire for desire.
Shoulders hunched against the damp wind’s bite, one hand jammed in his coat pocket, briefcase swinging from the other, he marched on toward the Exchange Street station. The faint rumble of subway trains rising through sidewalk vents, the rush of heating plants blowing exhaust on rooftops, the sounds of traffic and countless feet treading pavement fused into one sound: the hum of the New York financial district, whose frantic busyness had once energized him, now stirred up a surly resentment. He recalled the commentaries he’d heard and read after 9/11. The day when everything changed forever. We will never be the same again. People seemed to really believe that bullshit, to want it to be so, as if they’d been yearning for some great and terrible event to tear them from their empty pursuit of stuff and the money to buy it, from their trivial amusements, their shallow celebrity worship, their love of titillating scandals, Monica Lewinsky blowing the president in the Oval Office. But the bustle through which he passed, young men and women scurrying by with iPod buds pinned to their ears, babbling into cell phones, signified that the cataclysm that was supposed to have changed everything had changed nothing, except for the families of those slaughtered on that exquisite morning. And for the soldiers fighting and dying in Afghanistan. Otherwise New York and America had moved on. It was important in America to move on, to avoid living in the past. That, Castle supposed, made him somewhat un-American. He could not help but live in the past; it clung to him like a second skin.
His sour discontent extended to his forthcoming appointment with Ms. Hartley, his counselor or therapist or whatever she was. Her platitudes and banalities, which her mellow Lauren Bacall voice wrapped in a cloak of profundity, grated on him. Nevertheless he was going to see her, partly out of habit—he’d been attending two sessions a week for some eight or nine months, one alone with her, one with a group—and partly to keep his two daughters at bay. After the disaster Jay Strauss, head of his firm’s retail division, had told him to take some time off to “get yourself back together.” Morgan and Justine had become alarmed by his behavior during his leave. This sociable father of theirs, this neatnik who always tied a perfect Windsor knot and never wore the same suit twice in a row, had turned into a minor-league Howard Hughes, secluding himself in his house, going without shaving or showering for days on end, letting his hair grow long. To their minds, his unhygienic reclusiveness was evidence that far from getting himself together, he was coming further apart. Clearly an intervention was warranted.
It was Morgan, the elder and a devout believer in the nostrums of the therapeutic culture, who had found the House of Hope on the Internet. This clinic that offered counseling to the bereaved was just what he needed, she said. He had to realize that
he wasn’t alone; by sharing his suffering, he would relieve it. He’d resisted her urgings to sign up. He could not think Amanda’s name without breaking into tears; to utter it aloud to a stranger was unimaginable. Even the name of the place sounded ridiculous—the House of Hope, like you went there for hope as you might go to IHOP for pancakes. Morgan, however, was used to having her way; she’d always been like that, and her job as a literary publicist—importuning reluctant newspaper editors to interview her authors, bookstore managers to set up readings and signings—had honed the trait. She roped her sister into her campaign. Jussie was in her second year at Columbia Law and employed reasoned arguments to reinforce Morgan’s strident nagging. The sibling tag-team at last pummeled him into submission. How odd. His girls had become the parents, he the child.
The thirtyish Ms. Hartley was kind and earnest and much given to the cant of her profession: healing and closure and the grieving process, as if grief were something like digestion. Castle was sure she had never known grief from the inside, never felt its iron grip. Most of her advice was useless, like her suggestion that he cut his leave of absence short and return to work. She assured him that reestablishing familiar routines would do him a world of good. It did not. Nor did the presence of others in his group who had lost spouses make him feel less alone, any more than his own presence made them feel less alone. He’d discovered that deep sorrow, like bone pain, is profoundly isolating. It won’t allow itself to be shared. For that matter, he did not want to share it in the hope of achieving what Ms. Hartley said was his ultimate goal—acceptance. Why should he accept the senseless murder of his wife by a gang of homicidal zealots?
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