Crossers

by Philip Caputo

  Castle asked what that was all about.

  “A lesson in ett-ee-cut,” answered his cousin. “You don’t never ride out ahead of the cow boss. An old-time vaquero would of known that before he was out of diapers. These new ones don’t know better.”

  They rode on for another mile, halting in a basin where Blaine gave out assignments: his neighbor and the two cowboys to take the right wing, gathering the pastures along the Mexican border; he, Monica, and Gerardo would take the middle; Tessa, McIntyre, and Castle the left. They were all to rendezvous in the basin, then drive the herd to the pastures near the shipping corrals for branding the next day.

  “Tessa, you’ll be in charge. Should be sixty head up in there. Show my cuzzy how it’s done.”

  Tack creaked and jiggled, and the horses’ legs swished in the tall grass, speckled by the mustard-colored flowers of camphor weed. In single file, Tessa leading and Castle behind on Comanche, they followed a ridgeline above a canyon a quarter mile wide at its mouth. Yellowhead crows perched on the fence wire flew off in clouds at the riders’ approach. They eased their horses down to the canyon floor, split by an arroyo, through which a ribbon of water flowed, trickling over rock dams to form shining pools. A splendid buck antelope, hide like rubbed leather, burst from its bed, jumped the arroyo, and sprinted up the ridge without breaking stride. A dozen Angus cows with calves rested ahead, the cows with bright green tags dangling from their ears. Tessa advised Castle not to get too close or the calves would think he was part of the herd and follow him instead of their mothers. She was all business and looked it in a denim shirt, a sweat-stained hat, and scratched chaps. A flash of lust distracted Castle nonetheless, for she sat her horse like a show rider, her erect posture exaggerating the swell of her breasts, which needed no exaggerating, her hips, thighs, and bent knees forming a snaky curve.

  She approached the herd at a slow walk, Castle on one side, McIntyre on the other. The cows heaved off their knees and immediately began to bawl for their calves, and each one seemed to know the sound of its mother’s voice, though they all sounded alike to the human ear.

  A short distance farther on, in an almost treeless meadow, another twenty head grazed. Leaving Castle to trail the first twelve, Tessa and McIntyre rode off, slapping their coiled lariats, and collected the animals. One cow bolted, her bull calf running after her. Tessa checked her, but the calf panicked and continued its flight. She shook out a loop and made a toss, the loop dropping over the little bull’s neck as neatly as a ring over a stake. Tessa dallied; the calf flipped onto its side, then scrambled to its feet, shaken but unhurt. The chase, the throw, the capture had been all one fluid movement, and thrilling to see. Castle’s heart swelled; it felt like a blossom, opening up.

  They chased cows off ridges and out of gullies, through wooded side canyons and across hillside meadows. Delinquents attempted to escape, fleeing into tight defiles from which the Christian cowboy dislodged them with un-Christian epithets. On his own Castle ran down four miscreants, two with calves, two without, turned them, and brought them in, flushed from the exhilarating pursuit, pleased with himself for accomplishing the feat without supervision.

  They pushed the herd at an easy pace to avoid overheating the calves—it was now past midmorning and well over ninety degrees—and stopped at the canyon mouth, riding in slow circles until the animals settled down, a milling mass, heads and backs haloed by flies. After making a count, they concluded they were short three head. McIntyre said he’d seen them in a side canyon. Tessa said she would hold herd while he looked for the strays. Castle volunteered to ride along.

  “Thought you’d be a tad butt-sore by now,” said McIntyre as they backtracked at a quick walk.

  “I am, but this doesn’t feel like work.”

  “Cowboying ain’t work—it’s a disease. Best job in the world, except when you’re out here in a thunderstorm or it’s twelve above with a norther slappin’ your face.” McIntyre ducked under a low branch. “There one of ’em is.”

  He motioned at a patch of black showing through the trees, where the side canyon met the main canyon. But the cow didn’t move, and when they drew closer, they saw why: it was a black plastic tarp, partly camouflaged with cut tree branches, thrown over marijuana bales stacked like hay.

  McIntyre looked around nervously, stood in the stirrups, and called out, “¡Buscamos ganado y nada más!” He hesitated a beat, then yelled again. “¡Buscamos ganado y nada más!”

  “What’s that?” asked Castle quietly.

  “Tellin’ ’em we’re lookin for cattle and nothin’ else. Don’t want ’em to think we’re law, or what’d be worse, bajadores lookin’ to rip off their load.”

  “They’re here? They’re around?”

  “Watchin’ us right now, I’d bet, and make another bet at least one of ’em is carryin an assault rifle. Ain’t gonna let a load this big get stole. Must be twenty bales, a thousand keys. Probably waitin’ for a vehicle to make the pickup.”

  “Do we keep looking or get the hell out of here?”

  McIntyre crossed his hands over the saddle horn. “The mules won’t make no trouble for us, long as they know we ain’t gonna make none for them.”

  They entered the side canyon, turning their heads back and forth, wary of surprising the drug runners. The landscape had changed; that is, Castle’s view of it had, his imagination populating the underbrush and oak stands with smugglers watching his every move. Yet anger simmered under his uneasiness. Who the hell did these traffickers think they were to use his land—yes, it was his now—as a warehouse for their goods? He was not, as he might have been in the past, inclined to forgive those who had trespassed against him. He was beginning to think like Blaine.

  They found the three strays and moved them to the herd by a different route, agreeing that the smugglers might not tolerate their passing by a second time. McIntyre asked, “Say, Gil, how many joints do you figure you could roll out of a thousand keys?”

  Castle’s skill wasn’t at a level where he could herd cows, talk, and do arithmetic in his head at the same time, but he gave it a try. “Depends on how many grams to a joint. Say two. A thousand grams to a kilo, so that would make five hundred per kilo, times a thousand.” He paused, picturing the zeroes. “Half a million.”

  The cowboy whistled through his teeth. “And that’s just one load. I mean, who is smokin’ all this shit?”

  After rejoining Tessa, they pushed their sixty head to the basin and held there until the others came in. The neighboring rancher, recognizable at a distance by his flame-red bandanna, appeared first, riding point over the basin’s southern rim. The cattle behind him appeared as a solid river of black, surging down the shallow slope; startled meadow-larks burst out of the grass in front of the herd. Blaine and Gerardo rode one flank, Monica and the Anglo hand the other, and the Mexican who didn’t know his manners rode drag, a kerchief pulled over his mouth and nose. Castle thought it a grand sight.

  Blaine rode over to Tessa and asked for a count. “They look good, don’t they?” he said of the cattle, hemmed into the basin by the riders. “Gone to make some fine four-to-five-year-old cows.”

  Castle hated to spoil his mood with news of his discovery.

  Blaine mopped his face. “Where?”

  “Maybe a quarter mile up the canyon, on the north side.”

  The queer, oblique smile veered across his cousin’s face. “Know what our grandpa would of done? Set fire to that stash, and when the dopers come out of the bushes to put it out, shot every one of the fuckin’ bastards.”

  “That was then, and now is now,” said Castle, a little irritated by the John Wayne theatrics. “And anyway, I didn’t have a match.”

  “Yeah, and heck, Blaine,” McIntyre said, “if you was to light up that much dope, everybody downwind for twenty miles would be stoned all day.”

  Castle laughed with Tessa. Blaine wasn’t in a humorous frame of mind. “We’ve got to move this whole bunch through two gates, cuzzy. That ca
n be easy sometimes, and sometimes it’s like tryin’ to shove a wet noodle up a bobcat’s ass. Watch for a cow wants to bolt. Keep off to the side, so you can see how she turns her head. That way you’ll know what she wants to do before she does.”

  The point rider seemed to tow the herd out of the basin single-handed. Mother cows again lowed to their young, and the calves squealed in response; the hands prodded stragglers with whistles and cries of “Yah! Yah!” The procession plodded across a muddy ciénaga, and then the pasture burned in the range fire and funneled into the first of the gates, bumping and jostling.

  Following instructions, Castle kept his eyes on one young cow that showed signs of making a break for it. She was lagging behind, casting glances toward a creekbed. Before he could react, she took off at a dead run, her calf trotting after her on spindly legs. He spurred Comanche and chased her into the creek, where she veered abruptly. He went to turn the pinto, but inadvertently pulled back on the reins while jabbing with his spurs, leaving the horse totally confused.

  Tessa rode up to him. “Give him his head,” she said. “He knows better than you do.”

  Cow and calf were scampering down the creek. Castle slacked the reins and cued Comanche into a high lope. The cow spun to run away at a right angle to her original path, but Comanche, sensing her intent, quickly stopped her. When she whirled in the opposite direction, Tessa was there to cut her off. She was an obstinate, ill-tempered animal, for as they started to push her out of the creek, she jumped it and scrambled up the other side, almost trampling her calf.

  Tessa flew at her, and leaning over in the saddle, she smacked her haunch with her coiled rope. “You dumb bitch! You almost stomped your kid!” Another smack. “You want to run, I’ll run you! I’ll run you till you drop!”

  The lashing with rope and tongue tamed the obdurate cow. She fell into a docile walk.

  Sweating, winded, Castle caught up. “That’s a side to you I haven’t seen, Tess.”

  Her face glowed from the exertion and the burst of temper. She drew a breath, about to speak, then thought better of it and looked at him, her lips parted.

  They trailed the misbehaving cow and her calf back to the herd, which passed through the second gate without incident. Ahead, facing a road, were the steel rails and posts of the pens where the branding would take place. In the pasture the thirsty cattle ambled to a dirt tank, crowding it, like wild animals around a water hole. Plovers sprang from the grass-tufted banks, screeching alarms. Gerardo and McIntyre remained behind to watch the herd, while the others rode back to ranch headquarters by way of the old Spanish trace. Rain squalls drew across the face of the Huachucas and the light that tinged them had an almost unearthly glow.

  “So did you learn anything, Mr. Nuclear Physicist?” Blaine asked, sitting his horse in a cowboy slouch, dried sweat rimming the armpits of his shirt.

  “Think so.”

  “He learned that he isn’t smarter than a good cow horse,” Tessa said.

  “Uh-huh. Well, you done all right for somebody who don’t know his butt from a bucket.”

  Coming from Blaine, this was high praise, and Castle grinned. He’d had the time of his life.

  THAT NIGHT he woke up in the house on Oenoke Ridge and gazed at Amanda as she slept. She was a beautiful sleeper, her extravagant auburn hair spread over the pillow, her face serene. He bent over to kiss her, and her eyes opened wide. It was actually a little frightening, the way her eyes snapped open, like doll’s eyes, and then they were making love, Mandy’s arms encircling him, her strong legs locked over the small of his back, tighter and tighter, and she began to crush the breath out of him. He tried to call her name but could make only a strangled, inarticulate cry. He felt himself to be in the embrace not of his Mandy but of some powerful being, coiled around him like a python. He clutched her limbs and with a superhuman effort broke their grip, the sudden release producing a triumphant relief as intense as the constriction had been. It was almost rapturous.

  His alarm buzzed him into consciousness. He sat up, wrapped in the tangled bedsheets, and looked at Sam, white in the darkness of the room. The glowing numerals of his clock read four A.M. He was to be at the branding corrals at five. He was fully awake, yes, and yet the rapturous feeling did not dissipate as he swung out of bed, washed his face, dressed, and let Sam out to relieve herself; as he slugged down a cup of reheated coffee and stepped outside and stood under the paling sky to see Pegasus and Andromeda fading in the southwest. Driving to the corrals, he pondered the meaning of the dream. Three possibilities: in restless sleep, he’d become bound in the bedsheets and his subconscious created a dream of release. Or, the mystical explanation, it signified that Amanda had let him go. Or, the one he preferred, it was he who had let her go, in a final liberation from the clench of the past. A new love, a new happiness, a whole new life—he was free to embrace it all.

  28

  WHEN CASTLE ARRIVED at the corrals, the dawn looked like a forest fire blazing on the rim of the mountains. Blaine and Gerardo were with the herd, Tessa and Monica leaning against the rails, a regular pair of old-time cowgirls in their bandannas and high-peaked, dust-powdered hats. An array of branding irons lay atop a stove made from a rusty steel drum, with an acetylene tank and a pile of mesquite branches beside it. This wasn’t the occasion to tell Tessa about his unusual dream, eager as he was to do it. She was all business, as she’d been yesterday, and so was Monica. They showed him the equipment: two sets of branding irons, one for heifers, the other for bull calves; a plierslike emasculator to make steers of the bulls; an ear notcher, which resembled a paper punch; and two syringe guns with graduated scales on the tubes, one to vaccinate the animals against bovine distemper, one against respiratory diseases. He was to do the inoculations, which required the least skill. Tessa would brand, and Monica would notch the ears and castrate, a task, she joked, that she tried not to enjoy too much.

  She held a small bottle upside down and drew a milky liquid into one of the needles. It was to be injected into the fleshy flap at the top of a calf’s foreleg. The second, filled with a clear fluid, was poked into the neck.

  “Don’t be shy, jab it right in,” Monica instructed. “And don’t mix them up. What I do”—she was speaking now as to one of her third graders—“is to hold the distemper in my right hand and the other one in my left and say to myself, ‘right, leg, left, neck.’”

  McIntyre drove in, pulling a horse trailer, followed by the neighbor and his cowhands. He and McIntyre mounted up and stationed themselves in a pen next to the corral. The cowboys, who would start the day as flankers, remained afoot. Monica tossed the mesquite into the brander and lit the acetylene torch under the wood. It made a low, compressed roaring, and then Tessa shoved the irons into the fire. Squinting against the new sun, Castle saw Blaine and Gerardo gathering the herd. Some minutes later they pushed the cattle into the holding pen, and the enchanting stillness of the morning was broken by a terrific din, punctuated by the yells of the mounted crew. They were cutting out half the cows to make it easier to rope, Tessa explained, raising her voice. “They keep half in so the calves don’t completely freak out.”

  It began a little after six. Lariats twirled above the churning mass of beef, then flew from the riders’ hands. Blaine and Gerardo pulled two calves into the corral while Blaine’s neighbor and McIntyre blocked the mothers from chasing after their abducted young. The Anglo cowboy, who looked as though he didn’t weigh much more than the heifer he wrestled to the ground, knelt on it as Gerardo nudged his horse forward to keep the rope taut. Monica leaped in to notch its ear; Castle, telling himself “right, leg, left, neck,” jabbed the syringes. Tessa came in behind him, positioned the iron over the hindquarters, and pressed it into the hide, the stench of singed hair and flesh rising with the smoke. Gerardo slipped his loop, and the caterwauling animal ran back into the pen. Castle hopped over to the second heifer, flanked by the Mexican cowboy, and botched the first inoculation, squirting the vaccine down the foreleg. “
Get another one, quick!” Monica yelled. He ran back, refilled the syringe, and was successful on his next try.

  By that time two more had been dragged in, a heifer and a bull. Castle winced in sympathy as Monica, kneeling on one knee, cut around its testicle with a jackknife, then snipped the tube with the emasculator. Blood flecked her chaps. Blaine rode in, towing another bull. Just as Tessa branded it, its mother broke into the corral and charged around in a maternal fury, knocking the Anglo cowboy into the rails and almost doing the same to Castle before Gerardo drove her out.

  The work went on for another hour. Castle fell into the rhythm of it, exulting in the speed, the coordination, the teamwork—branding was something of an athletic event. Dust and whirling ropes and a bedlam of bawling cattle. The sweet smell of flaming mesquite mixed in with the stink of manure and horseflesh and cowflesh and burned hide. Another hour. Ear notches and testicle cups piled up on a bench next to the brander. Cumulonimbus built mountains atop the mountains in the west, and lightning threaded the clouds. The air had weight, freighted with the humidity exported to the desert from the tropics, where the chubascos were born. The ground and roping crews traded places, Castle excepted. In furtherance of his education, Blaine promoted him to flanker, and he spent the third hour grappling with calves that writhed and kicked and thrashed. Before this experience he’d felt sorry for them, cute little Walt Disney creatures poked with needles, burned with irons, ears notched, balls cut off. After he got whacked in the knee and then knocked flat by a steer that twisted out of his arms, his sentiments were less benign.

  They were finished by eleven o’clock, and all of them were lacquered in sweat and dust. The livestock were released from the pen to wander back to the pasture. Castle had begun the day stiff and sore from yesterday’s gathering; now he felt as if he’d played a couple of quarters of football. Blaine’s congratulatory slap on the back soothed the aches in his aging body.