Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  “Migrants?” Castle guessed.

  Tessa sat down, her legs dangling over the ledge. Castle sat next to her.

  Sweat on her forehead and upper lip glistened in the sun, setting early over the rimrock to the west. In that light he noticed how the flaws in her looks—her prominent eyeteeth, her nose, which looked like the kind usually associated with English aristocracy—somehow neutralized each other so that the composite was beautiful.

  “You wouldn’t find something like this in boring old Connecticut, would you?” she asked lightheartedly. “Cocktails and golden retrievers and brie. Brie, for chrissake. I forbid you to even think of leaving here.”

  “I don’t have any immediate travel plans.”

  “Excellent. Have you been thinking things over?”

  “Sorting things out, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look, I didn’t expect to … You know, this soon. You’ll have to be patient with me.”

  “God, I hope I don’t come off like I’m pushing you. I just wouldn’t want to be a—a phase till you’ve gotten over it.” She stopped. “I’m not bad when it comes to putting things badly, either. I don’t suppose it’s something you do get over.”

  Her comment about being a phase was so close to Monica’s insight that he wondered if they’d spoken. “No,” he said, “but you learn to live with it, like you learn to live with a missing limb. You’re always aware of the absence, but you go on. I’ve come that far in the last six months. I’ve learned it’s possible to go on.”

  “There, you see. Coming out here has been good for you, for all the trouble.”

  “You’ve been good for me.”

  “It hasn’t been one-sided. I could go through this alone, but I wouldn’t want to.”

  The news from Iraq had not been good. Looting and rioting in Baghdad, roadside bombs, ambushes—testimony that the president’s declaration of victory, delivered last month from the deck of an aircraft carrier, had been premature.

  “Heard from Beth?” he asked.

  “An e-mail. She said it’s quiet where she is, and there are rumors her unit might be deployed back to Kuwait and then home. God, I hope that’s true. Everything about this is hard. Beth thinks we’re doing the right thing over there—I suppose she has to believe that—and I don’t, but I can’t tell her so.”

  “It would come between you.”

  “Yes. And I couldn’t bear anything coming between us.” Tessa turned to look at the shrine, where the candlelight flickered off the rough walls. “It’s strange, isn’t it? You wonder what makes this spot sacred and who carved that statue. It must have taken him a long time. Look at the detail, how beautifully it’s painted. It’s really quite magical.”

  “My aunt would say it’s spooky. She thinks the Catholic religion, or the way the Mexicans practice it, is spooky.”

  “A decidedly norteamericana way of looking at things.”

  On an impulse, she rose and ducked into the alcove, picked up a long, thin stick that was used to light the vigil candles, put it in the flame of one till it caught, then lit three that had gone out.

  “Just in case there’s something to the spookiness,” she said, backing out. “One for Beth, one for you, one for you and me.”

  He clasped both hands to the small of her back and drew her to him. She looked at him expectantly.

  “You’re not a phase,” he said. “You’re … I don’t know why it is that I can say almost anything to you except how I feel about you.”

  “Try.”

  “I need you. I’m in love with you.”

  She reached behind his head and pulled his face to hers and gave him the kiss of his life, long, ardent, and wanton, her tongue flicking the inside of his lips. He was speechless after she let him go, embraced her again, and kissed her as she had him. Both fell to their knees. She popped the buttons on his shirt, and lightly, softly fingered the hairs on his chest, then caressed the skin on his belly, her touch like feathers brushing his body. He felt her fumbling with his belt as she whispered, “And I need you, Gil. Now.”

  Suddenly, drawing away a little, she tugged her T-shirt over her head, her glorious breasts bursting out, an explosion of lush flesh. “The hell with owls. How about it, darling?”

  “Now? Here?”

  She threw a sidelong, mischievous glance at the statue of Virgin. “What? Do you think it would be sacrilegious?”

  “No.” He laughed, patting his hand on the ledge’s surface. “Uncomfortable.”

  “Don’t be dull,” she said, and quickly kicked off her tennis shoes and wriggled out of her jeans and panties. She lay back on her elbows, looking at him. “It’s wonderful. Smooth as marble.”

  He knelt between her legs and kissed her once more. “You astonish me.”

  “I’m going to do more than that.”

  18

  YVONNE’S SHIRT SMELLED as if it had been scorched under an iron, the sun burned through her hat, its brim so wide it looked as if she were wearing a straw umbrella, and the air seemed to be sucking the moisture right out of her body. A good thing she’d slathered her face and hands in lotion before venturing out into this furnace of an afternoon; at her age, a woman could not be too careful about her skin.

  She stood watching a bulldozer plow a path through the desert brush on a broad mesa. Workmen trudged behind it, piling up the brush for burning later on, while ahead others cut down mesquite trees with chainsaws and a backhoe ripped the stumps out of the ground. A pleasing sight, all this activity. The only idle ones were the squad of soldiers loaned by the regional comandante to guard the airstrip construction. They lolled around an army water tanker, heat waves shimmering off the metal.

  “How much longer?” she asked Julián, who stood beside her, squinting through sunglasses.

  “Two or three more days, I am told.”

  “Good. I talked to our partners on the telephone this morning. They expect to fly in a load next week.”

  “Come, I’ll show you something.”

  With Marco and Heraclio following, he brought her through the scrub to a long trench filled with plastic fuel drums. “We will store the merca here until it is ready to move.”

  “With the gasoline?”

  “No, Mother,” said Julián, patiently. “The fuel will be stored elsewhere. The coke goes here, in the barrels. We will cover this trench with steel matting and build a ramada over that to protect it from the heat.”

  He was in his executive mode, which also pleased her. “You think of everything.”

  Julián made a little bow. “Linares and Acevado are here. In the almacén, scared shitless.”

  “They should be. Let’s go and hear their excuses.”

  The warehouse where she cured and processed marijuana plants, an aluminum-sided structure that resembled a huge Quonset hut, was at the far end of the mesa. Inside, a crew was stripping and grading the leaves, another was compressing them into twenty-kilo bales in a trash compactor, and a third was wrapping the bales in burlap. You could get high from the smell alone. In one corner of the building was a small office where Julián kept his orderly records and accounts in binders. Cigarette smoke fogged the tiny room; butts were piled high in the ashtray. Linares and Acevado, sitting on folding chairs and puffing Marlboros, were scared all right. Yvonne could tolerate losing a load now and then, but the size of the one lost three days ago and La Migra’s trumpeting of the seizure in the American press exceeded the limits of her tolerance. The people she’d spoken to earlier had heard about it and brought it up in their conversation. The implication was clear: her Gulf Cartel partners might lose confidence if she couldn’t guarantee the security of their merca. Five hundred kilos of mota was one thing, five hundred of coke would be another altogether.

  Like naughty schoolboys in the principal’s office, the two men jumped up when Yvonne entered with Julián and her bodyguards. There was scarcely room for six people, and Acevado motioned to her to take his chair.

  “No, you sit
down,” she said in her prickliest voice. “Well, which one of you wants to go first?”

  They looked at each other. Linares, built like a bull, managed her lookouts on the American side; Acevado, a slender man with a saturnine face, was in charge of her runners. Both were experienced—they had worked for Carrasco before she persuaded them that changing employers was in their interests—and she read in their expressions the hope that their competence would be grounds for leniency.

  Acevado spoke first. “We were told it was clear, and it was. I crossed five burreros, and then five more. No problems. There was not no trouble until they got to the drop. La Migra was right there, waiting for them. A fucking ambush. Somebody snitched out the load, you ask me.”

  “I didn’t ask you.” She turned to Linares, who lit another cigarette. “Put that thing out! I can hardly breathe in here. How did your boys miss La Migra? They have scanners, they can listen in on the chotas’ radio traffic.”

  Linares shrugged his massive shoulders. “My guy got burned. They destroyed his radio and his binoculars. He was blind and deaf. He couldn’t know the fuckers were setting up an ambush.”

  “What guy is this?”

  “One of my gringos. I use them because, you know, they do not have no trouble understanding what the chotas are talking about on the radio.”

  She gestured to Heraclio to open the door to let the smoke out. “Chico,” she said quietly to Linares, “we are not talking small change here. We are talking a street value of eight hundred thousand. Your guy has all this shit—scanners, radios, binoculars, night-vision goggles. How did he not know that La Migra was coming after him?”

  Linares, looking confused, shook his head, which was as big as the rest of him, a monument of a head. “La Migra? It was the rancher who burned him. The rancher and two of his cowboys.”

  “The rancher,” Yvonne said under her breath. “Do you mean Erskine?”

  “Him.”

  “What was he doing there? That route is not on his ranch.”

  “It is land he leases from the government, for the purposes of grazing.”

  “Tell me more, Linares. Tell me everything you know.”

  He spread his hands as if making a plea. “All I can tell you is what my guy told me.”

  When he was finished, a sensation like the hot flashes of meno pause pulsed through her brain. She couldn’t think. Fighting to contain her rage, she moved to the air conditioner and, bending at the waist, washed her face in the frigid blasts. “And this gringo of yours, he let that asshole get away with it? He must have grapes for balls.”

  Marco and Heraclio laughed.

  “What was he to do?” Linares begged. “There were three of them with guns.”

  “You live in Patagonia. Do you know this Erskine?”

  “Only by sight.”

  “That’s good enough. He must not be allowed to get away with this. I expect you to educate him. I don’t care how you do it, so long as it is done.”

  “Señora, I—”

  “What’s the matter?” she interrupted. “You’re a big guy. Or do you also have grapes for balls?”

  “I was going to say I think we should let this pass. You know how it is en el otro lado. Erskine is a big ranchero over there, an important man. If something happens to him, it would bring much trouble. It would be bad for business.”

  “Bad for business. That sounds like Carrasco. You do not work for Carrasco now. Bad for business.” Controlling her temper wasn’t natural for Yvonne. It grew in proportion to her efforts to hold it in check, until the pressure became intolerable. She flew at Linares, shrieking, “Was what happened the other day good for business?” She slapped his face, hard enough to make her palm sting. “It is good for business to lose a load like that because that hijo de su chingada madre stuck his nose where it does not belong?”

  Linares rubbed his cheek. “No, of course not, but—”

  “But nothing! Break his arms, break his legs, kill him, but you see to it he never does nothing like that again. If he does, it will be a bad business for you. Do you require further explanation?”

  He shook his great head and flinched when she flung her arm, not to strike him again but to indicate the door. “I am finished with you two.”

  Acevado and Linares left, looking very relieved to have gotten off with no more than a scolding.

  JULIÁN DROVE HER back to the house, with Marco and Heraclio trailing close behind in their car. Although it was only five kilometers, the trip took half an hour over the rough ranch road, and the bone-jarring ride did little to lighten Yvonne’s humor. She was exhausted, having not slept more than four hours a night for the past month. Setting a frantic pace, she’d cut deals with jumpy American clients in motel rooms from Agua Prieta to Nogales, collected money, distributed mordida to her generals and colonels and American customs agents, lined up a construction crew for the airstrip, and all the while fought a sporadic war with Joaquín Carrasco.

  A war she’d begun when she’d ordered the assassinations of Carrasco’s minions in Santa Cruz, the two brothers who had been renting routes to Billy Cruz. Carrasco retaliated by hijacking one of her shipments and killing two of her best runners. She struck back, dispatching Marco and Heraclio to ambush four of Carrasco’s people in Puerto Peñasco, the resort town on the Sea of Cortez where he owned hotels and nightclubs. Her boys cut off the victims’ heads, stuffed them in burlap sacks, and walked into a club and rolled the trophies across the dance floor, an act that inspired terror in the tourists who frequented Puerto Peñasco. Carrasco’s hotels, she’d heard, were begging for guests, and the bands in his discos were playing to almost-empty houses. She was hitting the fat little shit in the wallet, where it hurt most. But she was paying a price. The strain, the lack of sleep were affecting her looks. Dark half moons cradled her eyes, her face was drawn, wrinkles were multiplying.

  “With your permission,” said Julián as they neared the house, “I think I should tell Linares to ignore what you told him to do.”

  “What? What? Are you crazy?”

  “He’s right. Harming Erskine would cause problems you do not need. Absolutely do not need.”

  “Those people have been the curse of my life,” she said, and smacked the dashboard. “Of my entire life! And now they do this!”

  “I know your mind. This gives you an excuse. If you put Erskine in the hospital or the morgue, you think it will even the score and hasten the day when you can take over that place.”

  “What if I do?”

  “Recall what I said some time ago. That this passion of yours could cloud your judgment? Pues, the clouds are rolling in.”

  They passed through the ranch gate. Three guards with AR-15s waved at them.

  “This would not be the same thing as taking care of a snitch,” Julián went on, to her annoyance. “Erskine is not in the business. If the chotas find out it was done on your orders, they will devote much attention to you.”

  “They would not find out a thing if it were done carefully.”

  “It is not worth the risk.” Julián parked the car and got out, and displaying some temper of his own, he slammed the door. “¡Escúchame! ¡No puedes resolver todos tus problemas por medio de la violencia! ¡Debes enfrentar este problema de una manera razonable!”

  “Violence has solved most of my problems,” she said.

  They went up the gravel path to the front door. More guards lazed about on lawn chairs, assault rifles in their laps.

  “It will not solve this one,” Julián said. “It will only bring new ones. Ten paciencia. You will have your chance to get even.”

  The house was dim and cool inside, the ferocious heat kept at bay by the shade trees, the thick walls. Yvonne removed her hat and sailed it across the room to a landing on a chair. “Está bien. I am tired enough not to be lectured by my own son. Está bien. Tell Linares to back off. Tell him, one panocha to another.”

  One cunt to another, thought Julián. What a mother I have been blessed
with. “I knew you would see reason,” he said pleasantly. “I want you to listen to something. Víctor has composed a corrido about you. It will make you feel better.”

  In the library, its bookshelves still vacant, she sat at the massive desk while Julián removed a DVD from a drawer, showing her the title on its paper sleeve: “Besos para mis enemigos,” por Víctor Castillo y Los Gallos de Oro—Kisses for My Enemies, by Víctor Castillo and the Golden Roosters. Leaning over her shoulder, he booted the laptop and inserted the disc.

  A photograph flashes on the screen—a policeman standing beside a shot-up truck, a dead man slumped at the wheel. A ragged drumbeat imitates the sound of gunfire as the photo fades into another showing a body sprawled on the street in a slick of blood, then a third of two men shot to death in a car, one lying in the front seat, the other in back, and the Golden Roosters begin to play a thumping, up-tempo Norteño polka, Castillo to sing …

  I know the barking of dogs,

  I know the jackals’ howl.

  Daughter of the ejido who rose from nothing

  To reign, queen of dark waters …

  A corpse under a scarlet-spattered sheet dissolves into the body of a young woman slouched in a car seat, sluttish pose, legs parted, breasts partly exposed, red tendrils pouring down her face from the hole in her forehead …

  These kisses I give to my enemies.

  They shout like serpents

  But I kiss them with all my heart …

  A police mug shot of a crew-cut young man. His name and nickname printed below, El Cholo, blends into the wide, smiling face of El Toro, into a handsome Indian with slightly slanted eyes, Chino, who becomes the face of El Chapo …

  I hear the dogs bark on the desert,

  The jackals mourn on bones,

  And the snakes still shouting

  From the ejido of my youth.

  I whisper to them with guns

  And press my lips to theirs …

  Two more faces, these of the Santa Cruz brothers, nicknamed Guerrero and El Colchón, overlap to a video of a hefty, mustachioed man seated on a floor, stripped to the waist, wrists handcuffed. A voice in the background speaks unintelligible words, and the man looks up and sideways as a pistol with a silencer thrusts at him from the edge of the frame and is pressed to his temple. Comes then a muffled crack, and his eyes roll back in his head, blood leaking from his nostrils and down one cheek as he slowly sinks, like a drunk who can no longer sit straight, sinks and at last falls backward into a wall. Quick fade to a photo of him at another time, looking straight into the camera, the horns and accordion and rattling drum playing the bouncy tune behind Víctor Castillo’s trilling voice …