“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.
• • •
MIGUEL 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 o
f 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.
The painting was finished in two weeks. The pale brown walls shone like wet sand, and the blue on the door and window frames mimicked the color of the Arizona sky. The sight of the house changed Blaine’s feelings toward his new employee. “Looks like it was just built,” he said with some exaggeration. “Damn good job. Hell, with the outside lookin’ like this, can’t have the inside lookin’ like it does, so he might as well do it.”
But Gerardo continued to maintain a distance, hardly exchanging more than a buenos días or a buenas tardes with Miguel. Castle often reflected on Gerardo’s comment and once thought he grasped its meaning. It was a moment on another trip to the Western Union. A man hurriedly wheeling a shopping cart laden with groceries and a screaming child—the Western Union was in the Safeway—accidentally crashed into Miguel, almost knocking him down. The howling kid had put the reckless cart-pusher in a bad temper. Instead of apologizing, he snarled, “Watch where you’re going!” Castle stepped in and said, “You should watch where you’re going,” and came close to getting into a fistfight, which he would have lost—the man was twenty years younger and as many pounds heavier than he. With the altercation over, Miguel looked silently at Castle as he rubbed his ribs. It was then that Castle saw him through the hard, unsentimental eyes of the old vaquero. Miguel was a natural-born victim. Hadn’t he said as much himself? “All my life my luck has been bad.” A peculiar kind of bad luck, though, a contagious bad luck. He had a sweet, sad, hapless quality that elicited tender feelings in people like Castle and Sally at the same time that it provoked, indeed, seemed to invite, the blind cruelty in the world to strike him; and because that cruelty was indiscriminate, it was as likely to fall on others—Héctor and Reynaldo came immediately to mind—as on him.
This perception no sooner came to Castle than he dismissed it as nonsense, hoodoo, what his aunt would have called spooky thinking. Later, when Gerardo’s presentiment proved accurate, he would wonder if it was a mistake to trust his reason over his instincts. Miguel was not responsible for the events that took place on the San Ignacio that summer, no more than he’d been responsible for the deaths of his friends; yet such an uncanny occurrence of misfortunes followed his arrival that he seemed to be their cause. It was as though his mere presence had summoned a malice—the senseless malice Castle sought to evade—to come in, come in.
Ben Erskine
Transcript of interview with Martín Mendoza, 75,
conducted at Mr. Mendoza’s residence in Patagonia,
Arizona, on August 30, 1966. This transcript has
been translated from the Spanish by the AHS.
Ghosts and bones.
That is what I think of when I think of that old ranch, the IB-Bar. Don Benjamín put the bones in the ground, and sometimes their ghosts, you know, walked around. I think soon my bones will be in the ground, too, but they will be next to the bones of my wife and I will be happy there, so my ghost will not walk around. Do you hear how I speak? A lot of people like my voice, they say it sounds like the voice of one who speaks on the radio. A doctor has told me that I have in my throat a cancer, from too many cigars, and it is this cancer that will soon put my bones in the ground. Many of them are broken. I was a vaquero from the time I was a boy. Bad horses have thrown me. Bad cows have smashed me against the boards of corrals.
I was Don Benjamín’s good friend. We rode together for many years, more than twenty. We captured wild bulls in the mountains. We captured the gray horse, the one he called Spirit. We took guns into Mexico for the Yaqui. I have Yaqui blood, you know. My mother was Yaqui, and her father, my grandfather, was a very fine deer dancer, a pure Yaqui, what is called Yoeme, a man with magic in his heart. You know, in this world there are people with magic in their hearts and people with disturbances in their hearts.
I do not know what was in Benjamín’s heart. He was a gringo, and their hearts are difficult to know. My wife Lourdes was a little afraid of him. Sometimes she told me, “There is a devil in that man.” She said she could see it, this demon she could feel it. I thought she was being foolish. Then, one day, maybe I saw this devil with my own eyes.
So now I will tell a secret. I have been the guardian of this secret for a very long time. I had sworn to Benjamín I would never tell it, but he is dead now ten years, so I do not think his soul will be angry with me.
I think it was in the year 1919. It was in the summer, a good summer when a great many squalls blew in from the southwest and brought rain that was badly needed. A good
summer, yes, but a bad time. There was war in Mexico, and bandits and rebels crossed the border all the time to make raids on ranches for horses, for cattle, whatever they could steal. Benjamín and me, we never went anywhere without our pistols and rifles. We had loaded Winchesters in our houses and taught our wives to shoot them for when we were not there.
So one day we were looking for some missing cattle, me and Benjamín and two young gringo vaqueros who worked for his hermano, for Señor Jeffrey. Parker and Bond, yes, I remember their names. We discovered that these cattle were stolen and taken into Mexico. We followed their trail into Mexico. A big rain fell and washed out the trail, and after the rain stopped, Benjamín said we must keep looking, so we did. Pretty quick we saw a herd of Herefords, which were like ours. We rode over to inspect the brands, and we discovered that they did not belong to us. Benjamín, he said, “It makes no difference, we will take these cattle.” I told him that this was not a good idea, but he did not listen. I had heard stories from him that long before he and Señor Jeffrey had taken Mexican cattle and had got away with it. Maybe he thought he would again.
But he did not. We were rounding up the cows when we were surprised by the owner and two of his vaqueros. We were so busy gathering the cattle that we did not see them ride up with their pistols drawn. They took our guns from us, and the owner—he was called Diego Puerta—asked who was our boss, and Benjamín said that he was. Don Diego said that me and Parker and Bond were free to go, but that Benjamín must come with him to explain himself to the rurales. We said no, we will stay with our boss, to do anything else would be, you know, very cowardly. But Don Benjamín, he was no coward, no, he was very brave. He said to us that there was no need for us to risk ourselves, and that we should do as Don Diego said and ride back to the border and report to Señor Jeffrey that he was arrested. This was, as I have said to you, very brave because the rurales would throw him in jail for a long time and maybe even hang him.
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