Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  Tibbets and Ben were each awarded seventy-five hundred dollars for the captures of Ramsey, Santos, and Quiroga, and here I must applaud them. They agreed to keep half their share and to put the other half in trust for the Palmers’ daughter, Catherine. The bank where they put the money survived the Great Depression, and Catherine used it to pay for her college education. You’re damn right I applaud them, and her, too.

  Talk about a story having legs—this one was a centipede. On September 30, eight hours before he was to be hanged, Quiroga was granted a stay of execution by the governor. The Mexican consul general in Phoenix had sent him a letter stating that the question of Quiroga’s citizenship had not been properly investigated. Until it was resolved, Arizona had no right to execute him. The governor kicked the ball to the state supreme court. This peculiar turn of events was the first story I covered for the Star. I phoned Ben for his reaction, and I remember that conversation word for word.

  He said, “You want my official reaction or what I really think?”

  “What you really think.”

  “All right, but I’d better not see it in your newspaper.”

  “In that case, give me both.”

  “Officially, I am confident that once they look at the evidence, the court will see that Quiroga is an American citizen and do the right thing. Unofficially, when me and Curt cornered those two SOBs in that box, we agreed that if a one of them so much as twitched an eyebrow in a way we didn’t like, we’d shoot ’em both. Well, they didn’t twitch, so we didn’t shoot, and right now, I am damn sorry we didn’t.”

  In the end the supreme court ruled in favor of Quiroga’s U.S. citizenship. The superior court set a new execution date—November 18, 1922.

  Ben and Tibbets were invited to the hanging, and I got authorization from the warden to cover it. The gallows were at the end of a corridor on death row. Led by two guards, Quiroga walked in, calm and composed. He’d confessed to a priest and received the last rites of the Church, so I guess he was confident that his bloodstained soul was going to get to heaven after all. I watched him comb his hair and mustache with his fingers before a guard dropped a black hood over his head. Then the noose was tightened, the trap was sprung, and Manuel Quiroga was dead.

  It’s not a pretty thing to see a man hanged, even one like him. As we filed out, all in a somber mood, I asked Ben if he had any comments. He merely shook his head.

  The execution made the front pages of every paper in the state. The Republican organization of Santa Cruz County appealed to Ben to run for sheriff. It would be no contest. Hell, he could have run for U.S. Senator, and it would have been no contest. But he declined. He put it to me like this: “I’ve got no interest in kissing babies’ cheeks or grown-ups’ behinds.”

  And I applaud him for that, too.

  19

  CASTLE SAT on his front porch in the warmth of late morning, reading De vita beata.

  All that the universe obliges us to suffer must be borne with high courage, Seneca said to him from across the gulf of time. This is the sacred obligation by which we are bound—to submit to the human lot and not be disquieted by those things we have no power to avoid.

  He laid the book on his lap. The universe obliges us to suffer? What kind of universe is that? he asked himself. Really, it didn’t oblige you to do anything. It didn’t care if you suffered or not, didn’t care a whit for your hopes or dreads, your pains or pleasures. Suffering had no objective meaning, hidden away in the void but perceivable through the telescope of philosophy or faith. Its only meaning was what the sufferer chose to give it, and if he could not find a reason, why then, it had no meaning whatsoever. He wasn’t in the right mood for the Roman’s stern remedies; maybe he’d gone from being a stoic to a hedonist, dwelling on the sensations of making love to Tessa by the shrine in the mountains.

  Afterward they found the owls, perched on an oak branch in the seclusion of the upper canyon. One looked at Castle and Tessa as they stalked toward the tree. Its round dark eyes stared out from a face shaped like an apple cut down the middle, the feathers on its white-barred breast stirred in a breeze eddying down the canyon walls. Tessa smiled and squeezed his arm, whispering, “We’re so lucky.” Luck—maybe. To be with her and to see the birds in that setting was more like grace.

  Sally’s truck, banging like a junk wagon, snapped him out of his trance. He could see her through the spattered windshield, her small head with its Coke-bottle glasses pitched forward over the wheel. Hay bales were stacked in the bed. She was going to pick up Castle before heading out to feed more of her pets, a half-dozen corriente steers that Blaine had described as “so old they’d be in a nursing home if they was people.” Castle had promised Blaine he’d talk to her about her estate, and with her eightieth birthday just days away, now was as good a time as any.

  The steers were pastured on a leased quarter section beyond the northernmost boundary of the San Ignacio’s deeded land. Sally’s driving was cause for anxiety. She would brake when it wasn’t necessary and fail to when it was, as when she rounded a curve too fast and nearly ran off the road. Castle offered to take the wheel.

  “Don’t get nervous. I could drive this road blindfolded,” she said.

  With her eyesight, she practically was.

  They passed through a wire gate and into sun-burnt hills and parklike stands of trees. A sign at the roadside bore the silhouette of a cow and the words OPEN RANGE to warn motorists that they might find cattle on the road.

  “I do like that,” said Sally. “Open range. Was a time when there weren’t so damn many fences in this valley. Reminded me of where I grew up in western New Mexico. No fences anywhere. The high lonesome.”

  And she reminisced about her childhood and her father and neighboring ranchers gathering their stock in the fall, sometimes a thousand head or more, and driving them over the Continental Divide and across the Plains of St. Augustine to the railhead at Magdalena. Her mother would drive the chuck wagon on some trips, and Sally and her brothers—she was the youngest of four children—were pulled out of school to go along, she in the wagon, her brothers riding herd with the men.

  “My earliest memory is of when I was five years old, settin beside my ma and all those cattle flowing like a river. Lord, that was a thing to see.”

  She stopped the truck on a rise and gave the horn three long blasts. “My boys are well trained. They’ll be coming along presently. There were wells every ten miles or so on the Magdalena Trail. You couldn’t move cattle much further in a day. The whole trip took maybe ten days. When we got to Magdalena, the hands would go into town to do what cowboys always done at the end of a drive.” A laugh. “Found out when I was older that on the trips when my ma did not drive the wagon, Pa went in to visit the ladies, too. Seen them steers yet?”

  Castle shook his head. She honked the horn again.

  “Few years ago me and Blaine and Monica took a trip up there. I wanted to see our old place. Nothing much left but a fallen-down windmill and a few corral boards. Then we got out on the highway and visited the Plains and saw these great big white dishes out there, must have been two dozen of ’em. Radio telescopes, Blaine told me. Said astronomers used ’em to send signals way the hell out into the universe. He had some name for ’em I do not recall.”

  “The Very Large Array,” Castle said.

  “That’s it. Well now, looking at those things out there on what used to be the Magdalena Trail made me feel like I was a thousand years old. Could not believe I had rode the wagons crost those Plains of Saint Augustine when I was a kid and had lived long enough to see those thingamajigs sending signals to Lord knows where.”

  This seemed to provide an opening to the topic Castle wanted to bring up, but he could not think of a graceful way to get into it.

  The corrientes appeared, ambling, almost hobbling over a hill, stringy-muscled steers with spotted hides and curved, widespread horns, direct descendants of the first cattle brought to the New World, living relics, a bit like Sally
herself.

  “Used to be roping steers in the rodeo,” she said. “Bought ’em for a song when their careers were over. Them Mexican cattle are like Mexicans, real survivors, but there ain’t much nourishment in this dry grass, and they need their mama to feed ’em.”

  Calling “Whooo-whooo-whooo! Come and get it or forget it!” she climbed out, dropped the tailgate, and with a nimbleness that amazed Castle, boosted herself into the bed, arthritic knees be damned. He jumped in after her, and they shoved the bales out and dragged them off the road.

  “Christ, Sally, you do this by yourself?” asked Castle, sitting alongside her on the tailgate and watching the corrientes munching the green feed.

  “Sure. Way I see it, I’m like a fella lost in a blizzard. If I don’t keep moving, I’ll freeze up and be dead in no time.”

  “Eighty and still going strong,” he said cheerfully.

  “Come from good stock both sides. Why, my ma had me when she was forty-two years old. She was born the year Billy the Kid got shot and lived on to see President Kennedy get shot.”

  Castle thought this an unusual way to describe a life span. “Good stock, all right, but … well, you never know … look, I don’t want to keep any secrets from you. Blaine’s been talking to me about—”

  “What’s gone to happen when I kick the bucket,” she interrupted, sparing him the awkwardness of introducing the subject. “Reckon he told you about this trust idea.”

  “He did. And I think it’s a good one.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Why?”

  “How Blaine explained it, I’d have to turn things over to a trustee. I will be damned if I’m gone to let some banker or lawyer I don’t know, and who don’t know no more about cows than I do about banking or the law, run things for me.”

  Her resistance, her stubbornness, were palpable, radiating from her like heat from a stove.

  “You might listen to my advice,” he said firmly. “I did this kind of thing for a living, and I made a good one.”

  “Thought you was a stockbroker.”

  “A financial consultant. A senior financial consultant. I managed money for clients who had a lot of it, and the ones who made more were the ones who listened. It wouldn’t be fair to Blaine and Monica to leave them with a tax liability that—”

  She tapped his knee and threw up her chin. “You think I’m being unfair?”

  “Shortsighted,” he answered. “A trust wouldn’t cut you out of the picture. You can stipulate how your property is to be used, how you want your affairs to be run in the agreement. While you’re alive and after you’re gone.”

  She measured him with a long look. “That so? Blaine didn’t say nothin’ about that.”

  “You’d have to talk an expert about the details, but yeah, it is so.”

  Sally carefully lowered her feet to the ground, took a few steps forward, and stood looking at her steers, nuzzling the bales. Then she spun on her heels and marched back to plant herself in front of her nephew, her piercing blue eyes raised toward him. “Suppose I was to set up this agreement, and suppose I named you to be the trustee. What would you say to that, smarty-pants?”

  Taken aback, Castle had nothing to say.

  “If I was to go ahead, I’d want to keep it in the family. I’d rather it be you than some fella I don’t know from Adam.”

  And, he thought, such an arrangement would make it easier for her to remain in the driver’s seat. She could influence him in a way she could not her hypothetical banker or lawyer. He knew what he would have to do as a trustee—handle accounting, distribute Sally’s income—and because her estate consisted of land and cattle, he would in practice manage her share of the ranch. Given his ignorance about raising livestock, that meant he would have to consult her on every major decision. He would be subject to her wishes, to her not-inconsiderable will. Did he want to entangle himself in all that? He foresaw many opportunities for pitfalls, for conflicts and arguments.

  “I don’t know anything about cows, either,” he said, demurring.

  “If you were smart enough to make yourself a Wall Street big shot, you’re smart enough to learn, and I could teach you.”

  “I’d have to give it some thought.”

  “You do that, and I’ll do the same. That’s a fair trade.”

  Ben Erskine

  There is a sequel to Tim Forbes’s tale; to learn of it we must once again take imaginary flight from our time and place.

  In Mexico, Quiroga’s legend grows. More corridos about him are composed. The songs are sung in cantinas and around vaquero campfires. One ballad depicts George Ramsey as the true killer who swears to lies to save his own skin. Another sings of Quiroga’s bold escape from custody and ends with him on the gallows, shouting defiance to the gringos: “Now spring the trap and slake your thirst for Mexican blood!”

  Ben is aware of these sentiments. He knows the corridos have the power to rouse hearts to action. He expects retaliation. In April of 1923, when Ida is eight months gone with their second child, a courier arrives at the sheriff’s office and delivers a typewritten note addressed to Ben. It is from the Tucson District Office of the U.S. Customs Service:

  Dear Friend:

  We have it from reliable informants that an American living in Mexico, one William Sykes, has been offered $500 to bump you off. Sykes has been reported to be in Cananea and is supposed to be dickering for more money. If we find out more, we will let you know. Forewarned is forearmed.

  (Signed) Allen McDermott, Chief Customs Officer.

  Ben has never heard of Sykes. He walks down to the Western Union office and wires T.J. Babcock, asking him to find out what he can. Then he starts for home in the new Model T pickup he has bought with six hundred dollars of the reward money.

  The thirty-mile journey from Nogales to the IB-Bar takes an hour and a half. In twilight he pulls through the high wooden gateway in which the ranch’s name and brand are carved. Australian heelers scamper across the yard to greet him. Martín Mendoza is shoeing a horse in the corral, smoke drifts from the kitchen stovepipe poking through the tin roof, kerosene lamps glow in the windows. All is well. He pauses to gaze with satisfaction at his homestead—the rock wall enclosing the yard, the house with its wraparound porch and the half-finished addition that will be a bedroom for his son, Frank, when the new baby comes along, the two spring-fed ponds, the windmill that rises like a giant steel flower. In one more year he will have proved up, and all this and the section of land will be his. He savors the prospect, but a troubling thought spoils his enjoyment: Ida is isolated out here, as isolated and vulnerable as Meg Palmer had been in her ghost-town post office. Martín is out on the range most of the day while Ben is at his job. He has taught Ida how to shoot, but he questions if she would pull a trigger in self-defense. There is an innocence about her, an invincible conviction that a little good lives in the worst of men, and that would cause her to hesitate, and hesitation could be fatal.

  She comes to the door, her belly swollen under a floral print dress, her strong, square face cupped by her dark hair, which she has bobbed, flapper-style. Frank wriggles between her and the door frame and toddles toward Ben, small arms outstretched. “Fadda home!” he cries. Ben picks him up and rubs his head, and a fierce protectiveness balloons in his heart. There is nothing he would not do to keep this woman and this boy from harm. If Ida believes that some good is in the worst, he knows there is some evil in the best.

  Over stew and biscuits he and Martín talk cattle—Martín has found a few cows with pink-eye—and then discuss another home improvement project; installing a gasoline pump to the windmill and laying pipe to the house to provide running water. Right now Ida must haul water for cooking, bathing, and washing clothes, and Ben is worried about the effect the heavy work will have on her, this late in her pregnancy. This concern, however, is at the moment superseded by another. He turns to her and says: “I’m thinking we ought to move to town. We could rent a house.”

  “Wha
t for?”

  “It’ll be easier on you.”

  “What about this place?”

  “Martín could look after it. I’ll be a gentleman rancher.”

  Ida rises to gather the dirty dishes. “I’m managing all right,” she affirms, though a weariness in her voice suggests otherwise.

  The dishes are placed in a metal basin; hot water is tapped from the water jacket attached to the stove. She washes, he dries, observing that her hands, though she is only twenty-four, are raw and cracked. Outside it is getting cold—the ranch is at 5,600 feet and nights are frigid even in the spring—but the stove coals make the kitchen almost uncomfortably warm. Martín goes out to the porch for a cigarette; Ida dislikes the smell of tobacco smoke. Ben stacks the dishes in a cabinet.

  “It might be dangerous for you out here.”

  “That’s nothing new.”

  He tells her about the warning from the customs officer.

  She is shocked, holding onto her belly. “Somebody’s out to get you?”

  “It looks that way,” he says.

  That Sunday Ben and Martín are roofing the addition, setting rafters that extend outward more than a foot to make an eave and keep rain from eroding the adobe brick walls. The dogs start barking. Ben looks down and sees a figure standing by the ranch gate, a man in a suit. He calls that he’s had car trouble. Before he can stop her, Ida comes out of the house and tells the stranger that the dogs won’t bite. As he strides into the yard, Ben flies down the ladder, snatches his pistol from the bedroom, and jams it in his waistband, pulling his shirttails out to hide the gun. In the yard Ida tells him that the visitor’s car has broken down. He is baby-faced, probably no older than she. His suit and shoes are worn, his shirt could use washing. Ben surmises that the stranger’s youth and shabby appearance have beguiled his wife. He doesn’t look like a hired killer.