The spring of that year was especially trying for Tessa McBride. There were the usual woes of running a ranch—a mountain lion killed two of her calves, a well pump burned out—but it was the war that strained her nerves. About a week after the first bombs fell, Castle went with her to buy a new pump at a hardware store in Sierra Vista, a patulous hodgepodge of malls and subdivisions littering the desert near Fort Huachuca. Traffic was stalled near the junction of Highway 90 and the road to the main gate while a convoy of trucks and Humvees painted desert tan rolled out of the base, bound for an airfield somewhere and deployment to Iraq. The rumbling military vehicles, the unsmiling soldiers behind the wheels in their black berets and camouflage uniforms charged the air with a certain drama; universal history was rattling Arizona hinterlands that had scarcely felt the tremors of 9/11. Waiting for the convoy to pass, Castle noticed a stone monument with a plaque bearing a relief of a mounted cavalryman and the words FORT HUACHUCA—1877. Behind it, constructed of the same river rock, stood a small building that looked as if it dated back to the fort’s beginnings as an outpost during the Apache Wars. A sign out front declared that it was now a WIDOWS’ SUPPORT CENTER.
“I’ll bet that’s going to be a busy place pretty soon,” Tessa said. She lowered her window and shouted to the two military policemen directing traffic, “What about parents?” When they didn’t respond, she blew the horn to get their attention. “Hey! Do you have a support center for parents?”
One of the soldiers, wearing an armband with the letters MP sewn on it, sauntered over like a highway patrolman who has nabbed a speeder. “What’s the trouble, ma’am?”
“No trouble. You have a support center for widows. I want to know if you’ve got one for parents.”
The MP scowled. “If you want any information, you can see the base information officer, ma’am. You can get a visitor’s pass at the main gate.”
“I don’t want a visitor’s pass!” Tessa said. Her voice had a quavering, fragile sound. “If my daughter gets killed over there, can I count on counseling from the army, or do I just get left with a coffin and a flag?”
“Tess, what the hell are you doing?” said Castle, a little alarmed. He had never seen her behave this way.
“I can’t answer that,” the MP replied. “I suggest you contact the base information officer.”
The tail end of the convoy had meanwhile gone past, and the other soldier was signaling civilian traffic to come ahead. The car behind Tessa’s pickup honked its horn; then the driver pulled out into the left lane and shot by.
“You’ll have to move your vehicle. You’re blocking the road, ma’am,” said the MP, putting an edge on the last word to let her know that his reservoir of patience was draining fast.
“I will do that, but only because you’re so damn polite. And thanks for being so extremely helpful.”
“What the hell were you busting his chops for?” asked Castle as they drove on. “He’s only a soldier like Beth. A kid.”
“A robot is what he is,” Tessa snapped. “‘You will have to move your vehicle, ma’am. Your vee-hick-el.’” She seemed to find her unreasonableness gratifying. “Why couldn’t he have said ‘truck’? What’s wrong with ‘truck’?”
Castle sat beside her almost every night for the next two weeks. He would drive to the Crown A around five in the afternoon, they would eat dinner—she cooked, he cleaned up—and then they’d begin their vigil in front of the TV. Sitting on the couch with space between them, like an old married couple, they followed the progress of the Third Infantry Division (the unit to which Beth’s supply battalion was attached) as it battered its way toward Baghdad. They became familiar with places they’d never heard of before, Najaf and Nasiriyah and Karbala, and they got an education in the sectarian rivalries of Islam.
“Exactly what the hell makes a Shiite a Shiite and a Sunni a Sunni?” Tessa asked one night. “And why do they hate each other?”
Castle didn’t know; he supposed it was for the same reason Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland hated each other, that is to say, for no good reason at all.
They were watching CNN when the early reports came in that an American supply convoy had been ambushed. Several soldiers killed; several more, including two women, missing in action. She flew into her bedroom and flew out again, clutching one of Beth’s letters. The return address bore the name and number of her daughter’s battalion. “What unit were they from?” she shouted at the TV. A reporter, against a background of mud-walled huts and date palm trees, was giving further details … Eleven confirmed dead, five missing, the two women believed to have been captured by the Iraqi army … Names withheld pending notification of next of kin … “Then tell us the goddamn unit!” Tessa hollered, then switched to CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, yelling the same question. She turned to Beth’s basic training photograph. “What did you have to join the fucking army for? If you had your shit together, you’d still be in school.”
She did not come back to herself until, a day or two later, the female soldiers were identified as Privates First Class Jessica Lynch and Lori Piestewa. Lynch had been rescued from an Iraqi hospital by Special Forces; Piestewa, a Hopi Indian from Arizona, had died of her wounds. Tessa hugged Castle and cried out thanks that Beth was all right, her joy and gratitude immediately producing guilt. That poor girl’s family. Christ, what right did she have to be so happy?
One April afternoon they took a break from war-watching to treat a cow with a prolapsed uterus. Castle acted as a kind of surgeon’s assistant for Tessa and Tim McIntyre, who held a lidocaine syringe in one hand, a long curved needle and cotton string in the other. McIntyre prodded the cow, trailed by its three-day-old calf, into a steel headstall in one of Tessa’s corrals. She called for the syringe, instructing Castle to stand aside when she jabbed the needle into the animal’s haunches—there was a danger of getting kicked or sprayed with cowshit. Neither of these mishaps occurred.
“My dad told me that my granddad used to do this out on the range with a Coke bottle,” McIntyre said while they waited for the anesthetic to take effect. “He’d carry one of them sixteen-ounce bottles in his saddlebag, along with a carpet needle and kitchen twine. Come across a prolapsed cow, he’d shove the uterus back in with the bottle, then he’d stitch her up.”
“What happened to the Coke bottle?” asked Tessa, intrigued by this novel method.
“Oh, he’d leave it in there. It stopped the uterus from poppin’ out again.”
“I imagine it would stop a bull from getting in,” said Tessa.
McIntyre blushed and looked down at his scruffy boots. He was a devout born-again Christian; a bumper sticker on his truck proclaimed his membership in an organization called Cowboys for Christ. “Never thought of it that way,” he said, “but I suppose that is true.”
The cow’s tail had stopped switching, indicating that her backside had been numbed. McIntyre slipped on a long latex glove and, with his fist, pushed the bulging uterus back into place, burying his arm nearly up to the elbow. Castle grimaced when he withdrew it, the glove glistening with slime, flecked with blood. Tessa took the needle and thread—it was as thick as a big-game fishing line—and began to suture the cow’s vaginal opening. She’d done two stitches when the extension phone in the stable rang. She jerked her head up and gave the stable a wary look, as if an intruder might be hiding there.
“Finish up,” she said, handing the needle to McIntyre.
She was crying when she returned, threw herself at Castle, and embraced him. “It was her! Beth! Calling from Baghdad.” She kissed him full on the lips; then, to show she was merely expressing her happiness, she kissed McIntyre in the same way. Castle thought his might have lasted a second longer than the cowboy’s. “Her outfit is at the Baghdad airport,” Tessa went on. “Can you imagine? Getting a phone call way out here from way over there? Somebody hooked up a sat phone. She couldn’t talk for long, less than a minute. But she’s okay. Never even had a close call. Oh, how wonderful to hear
her voice!”
And to hear Tessa, you would have thought the war was over. For all practical purposes it was—Baghdad had been captured, Saddam had fled, his statue had been toppled. Castle looked into Tessa’s eyes, conscious that he’d made a long inner journey in the past month, a journey that was only halfway complete; yet he’d come far enough to share in her joy. He offered to take her to dinner to celebrate. He did not tell her that they would be celebrating more than the news of Beth’s deliverance. He didn’t know how to put it into words; or rather he did know, but he considered them words better thought than spoken: She needed him, he needed her, and in that mutuality he’d found the key to breaking his habit of seeing himself as the victim of an inexpressible tragedy.
They went to Elvira’s on the Sonoran side of Nogales. Dressed in another of her rodeo-queen outfits—snug pants, a fringed vest over a pearl-button shirt, a jaunty flat-brimmed hat—she drew stares from the taxi drivers congregated on International Street. It is the custom at Elvira’s to serve free shots of tequila before dinner. Tessa knocked hers back in the accepted fashion, sucking on a slice of lime, licking salt off her hand, then downing the shot in one gulp. Castle felt slightly dizzy, looking at the sheen of the lime juice on her red lips, at the tip of her tongue, flicking over the salt in the web of her hand.
They ordered margaritas with dinner and toasted Beth. Thereafter, over his chicken mole and her shrimp in garlic and butter sauce, they spoke of things other than the war, for the first time in weeks. Light stuff at first. Movies they’d seen or wanted to see. Their favorite albums. Then Tessa said that she was struggling to put her ranch into the black. Castle understood nothing about raising cattle but knew profit and loss, and suggested she build a Web site advertising her grass-fed beef. Combine it with a direct-mail campaign to independent meat markets in Tucson. He had the impression that she was captivated by the ranching way of life and paid little attention to the business end of things. Advising her on such matters gratified him; he thought it showed her that although he could not rope a calf, mend a fence, or heal a prolapsed uterus, he was nevertheless a strong and competent male.
Having drunk two margaritas at dinner on top of the tequila she slugged down before, she swayed when they stood to leave and grasped the back of a chair to steady herself.
“Christ, I’m smashed.”
“You don’t sound like it.”
“Hasn’t affected my speech, but motor control is slipping. I’m going to have to hang on to you.”
Outside he threw an arm around her shoulders, and she slipped hers around his waist and clutched his belt, leaning into him as they walked back to the pedestrian crossing. The streetlights were on, and neon signs blazed the names of cheap hotels and border bars. The cab drivers stared at her again.
“They won’t think I’m drunk,” she said with a tease in her voice. “They’ll think we’re in love.”
They had to let go of each other at the port of entry. Tessa had recovered somewhat and got through the customs line without a stumble. On the other side they resumed walking arm in arm, up the Terrace Street ramp, then up Crawford to the lot where he’d parked.
“Made it,” Tessa said, slumping into her seat. “I wish to say that you’ve been wonderful, putting up with my hysterics.”
“If one of my girls was over there, I’d be hysterical myself.”
“Do you suppose it would be less scary if it were a son instead of a daughter?”
“That’s not supposed to make a difference anymore.”
“Yeah, except that it does.”
He pulled out of the lot and turned onto South Grand, passing the old city hall. Tessa asked, “So do you think we could be?”
“Could be what?”
“What we looked like on the walk back.”
An intoxication that had nothing to do with tequila rushed into his skull. Instantly, she reached over and pressed two fingers to his lips.
“Don’t answer. That wasn’t fair of me,” she said. “It’s the tequila talking. Just want you to know that I am. Which puts you under no obligation.”
• • •
HE WALKED HER to her door, under the numberless stars of a sky unsullied by smog or city glow. She asked, “Would you care for another dance, Mr. Castle?” They went inside. She switched on a light, put the Ella Fitzgerald CD in the player, and then turned the light off. Dancing in the dark to those Gershwin tunes, those incongruous urban melodies rising on Ella’s spellbinding voice, ablated his self-consciousness, his usual reserve. He held her close and spun her around without bumping into a thing. He felt masterful. The kiss he gave her, on the second dance, was as timid as a fourteen-year-old’s. Her response was fervent, encouraging him to try again. Her body went limp in surrender, though not passive surrender. They fell on the couch, she on top of him, tugging at the buttons on his shirt. He fumbled with the snaps on hers, and then she knelt upright, stripped to the waist, and bowed, her breasts tumbling to his lips. He took one into his mouth, suckling while she held his head. They broke apart and finished undressing. Neither spoke, aware that one word would break the spell; they would see each other as ridiculous, a man of nearly fifty-seven and a woman of forty-five tearing at belt buckles and zippers, kicking off shoes, pulling off socks like frenzied adolescents. When their naked bodies came together again, Castle was lanced by the fear that he would suffer a mortifying failure. He imagined Tessa stroking his arm while she murmured that it was all right, darling, it happens to every man once in a while. He was ecstatic to discover that she would not have to offer any such soothing reassurance. They lay side by side, not talking, feeling serene. Tessa playfully ruffled his thinning hair, tweaked his ear. “Will your dog suffer if you spend the night?” she asked. “I damn sure will if you don’t.”
The next morning, as he drove home, Castle recalled overhearing an intimate conversation between his female partners at Harriman-Cutler. They were saying, in effect, that a man and woman could not be friends because the wild beast of sexual intercourse inevitably leaped between them, leaving them no choice but to part or become lovers. They’d spoken as if desire were the enemy of friendship. Nonsense, he thought now. There could be no real communion between men and women without it. In the moment of orgasm, they became one flesh, one soul, all distinctions between the carnal and the spiritual as meaningless as gravity is to a bird.
The road from her ranch to the San Ignacio ran level most of the way, except for one point where it climbed a gentle rise. He parked there and looked across the valley, reaching as an inland sea reaches to the shores of its bounding mountain ranges. Far away, over Mexico, a dying range fire made the only blot on the morning sky. A hawk gyred above the heaves and falls of the land, stitched by the frail, green thread of the cottonwoods bordering the Santa Cruz River. He caught movement in that direction and saw a herd of Sonoran pronghorns, prancing toward the river and its pledge of water. Despite the road, the fences, and the glint of a ranch house’s tin roof here and there, he imagined that the Spanish missionaries who had crossed into the San Rafael four hundred years ago would find much that was familiar. The West. She had been plundered and abused and disfigured for centuries. It seemed wondrous that places like this still existed, that any of the West’s old enchantment remained, that hers could still be the geography of promise, the landscape of hope. Mirages, perhaps, exerting the charm of the vague, the illusory; and yet Castle saw in the vista before him the chance that he would soon break his shackles to the past and overthrow the tyrant that had oppressed him nearly every waking hour. Tessa had awakened him to this possibility, Tessa and the land. Was it a chimera? It almost made no difference. The chance, glimmering on the horizon, the chance was enough.
BEN ERSKINE
Transcript 3—T.J. Babcock
Ynez and me had settled in Cananea, in a little casita next door to her mother’s place. Pretty quick I become the father of a baby boy, Roberto. Like I said before, Ynez was just a hair over five foot tall, but she was s
trong for her size and … vigorous, if you know what I mean. Flat wore me out. Roberto was still suckling on her tit when she got pregnant again and we had another boy. We named him Candelario, after our old comandante. By this time, it was 1915, and things in Mexico had gone all to hell. First off Madero got overthrown and then assassinated by a counterrevolutionary, General Huerta. A whole passel of generals rose up against him—Villa, Zapata, Carranza, Obregón—and sent him off into exile. Then they fell to fighting among each other, with Carranza and Obregón joining together in the north against Villa and Zapata in the south. Full-bore, flat-out civil war. Armed bands running all over the countryside, some of them nothing more than bandit gangs.
In between having babies, Ynez worked on some committee that looked out for the miners in Cananea, kind of like a labor union. She made a few pesos at that and I made a few, cowboying on the ranchos near town. But as the war got worse and worse, work got harder and harder to find. Ynez was finding out that building a new Mexico was damn near impossible; might as well try to build a house in the middle of an earthquake. Long and the short of it was, about the only way you could make a living was to join one of the armies. You know, each one of them traveled with its own printing presses and issued its own money—there was Zapatista pesos and Carranzista pesos and so forth and so on. Obregón was el supremo in Sonora, so I figured to enlist with him. Found out through our old compañero, Francisco Montoya, that Colonel Bracamonte was now a brigadier general under Obregón. I wrote to him and said I was all set to join up, and where do I sign?
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