They counted the triangular ear notches and the furry cups. Seventy-seven steers, eighty-nine heifers. One hundred eighty cows had calved in the spring, so the count of a hundred and sixty-six represented a 90 percent survival rate.
“Pretty good,” Blaine declared. He sharpened a long mesquite stick, skewered a dozen testicles, and roasted them over the coals glowing in the brander. “We’ll be havin’ lunch at the house—these Rocky Mountain oysters are horsey-dervees.”
Castle plucked one from the skewer, bit down, and gulped the gristly morsel. His cousin passed the kebab to Monica and Tessa, who abstained, then to the neighbor and his cowboys, who chomped them with relish. Gerardo and McIntyre, still in the saddle, were moving a few cows and calves that had drifted onto the road.
That was how Castle would remember the scene: the two mounted men, he and the others slouched against the corral, munching the oysters, the cattle on the road. He would remember that they all saw the van come flying over a rise in the road perhaps a hundred yards away. It sailed into the air like a stunt car, landed hard, blowing its front tires, and sped on, slewing on its rims. He would remember the pulsing lights of the pursuing Border Patrol wagon and everyone shouting to Gerardo and McIntyre to get out of the way and the two riders jabbing with their spurs and the horses leaping a culvert at the roadside and the cow and calf spinning around in panic to jump into the path of the oncoming van. It struck both almost at once. The calf, flipped into the air, crashed into the windshield; the cow was flung sideways, the lower half of a back leg severed at the joint. He would remember the shriek of shattering glass, the thud of metal on meat, and the van’s side and rear doors busting open to spew bodies, bodies that turned acrobatic twists and midair somersaults, that flew with outspread arms like high divers. He would remember seizing Tessa by the waist and tossing her into the middle of the corral as the van tipped over and skidded toward them on its side before it careened into the rails with a sickening crunch.
His memories of the aftermath would forever be disjointed, a series of video clips out of sequence. A helicopter landing to evacuate the injured. Ambulances. A man staggering about, making spastic movements and uttering unintelligible sounds, a fist-size chunk missing from his skull, exposing part of his brain. A dead boy spread-eagled in the flooded culvert, his still eyes staring up through the water. Cries and moans. The horrible bellows of the injured cow. Gerardo limping, for his horse had bucked him off at the moment of the collision. A Border Patrolman reporting the statistics to the Sonoita station on his car radio—twenty-two migrants packed into the van, five killed, nine critically hurt. Blaine standing over the cow. The crack of his pistol.
29
WHILE YVONNE SAT in the grandstands waiting for the second race to begin, The Professor stood in line at the mutual windows. The instructions, passed to him through Billy Cruz, had been precise: he was to appear at the window marked “Large Teller” before the second race and place a certain advance bet. Someone would then tell him what to do next. He thought the Cochise County racetrack and fairgrounds a curious site for his introductory meeting with Yvonne, and he found the hugger-mugger arrangements a bit comic. The location was a favorable sign, however. She had almost as many cops and politicians on her payroll in Douglas as she did next door in Agua Prieta. She felt comfortable here, which suggested that luring her to the American side to do a deal, when the time came, would not be difficult.
He stepped up to the window and said, “Quinella on five and eight in the second.”
As he took his ticket, a young man with sandy red hair, leaning against a post and reading a program, approached him. “Señor Carrington?” he asked, with a pronounced rolling of r’s.
The Professor nodded.
“Julián Menéndez,” said the young man. “This way, please.”
They were immediately joined by a black-haired primate wearing an embroidered shirt outside his pants. He and Julián guided The Professor to the stands, where Yvonne was seated on a vinyl pillow, across from the finish line and beside another pistolero, even heftier than the first. She wore fashionable sunglasses, a tight pair of midcalf canary yellow pants, and a black tank top exposing thin, fair, faintly freckled arms. She looked better than she did in photographs—the red hair not quite the worm’s nest he’d seen in the pictures, and the taut body attractive enough to keep a thirty-five-year-old like Cruz interested, though Billy had other motivations in securing her affections—but her appearance was disappointing nonetheless. The Queen of Agua Prieta, author of massacres and of her husband’s assassination, ought to be either stunningly glamorous or fascinatingly grotesque. Yvonne could have been almost any woman over fifty who’d kept her figure. Christ, she looked almost suburban in those yellow pants.
Except for the briefest glance, she did not acknowledge The Professor as he sat down. She studied the sheet for the second race, a thoroughbred maiden, three furlongs and seventy, half the track. On the far side the horses entered the starting gate. The announcer called, “And they’re off!” Spectators rose from their seats, groaning or cheering. Yvonne followed the race through opera glasses, waving her curled-up program, shouting, “¡Ándale ocho!” A voice irritating to The Professor’s ear yet pleasant to the touch—a feeling of smoothly sanded wood. “¡Ándale Sassy Prince!” Rounding the last turn, Sassy Prince had the rail and was leading the five horse, La Corona Blanca, with the rest of the field well behind. La Corona Blanca closed in the stretch but didn’t have enough and finished second. “Bravo, Sassy Prince!” exclaimed Yvonne and sat down. “So I won the daily double.” Her son and guardians offered sycophantic applause.
“And you?” she asked, turning to The Professor for the first time. She spoke in accentless English and addressed him as if they were old friends. “How did you do?”
“Five and eight were my quinella picks.”
She looked at the tote board. “Then let us go collect.”
They went downstairs to the windows and cashed their tickets. Sassy Prince paid off $980 on Yvonne’s wager. She bet the entire amount on a horse called Cholla Tango to win the last race of the day.
“I own her. We’ll have a look at her.”
Passing a beer tent where a Norteño band was playing, they went to a roped-off holding pen, in which trainers were walking their horses before a crowd of onlookers—dark-skinned men in straw cowboy hats, light-skinned men in snappy Stetsons, several young women in sprayed-on Levi’s, sexy in a trailer-trash sort of way. Yvonne herself was not without her erotic appeal—the allure of danger, he supposed. An excellent ass for a woman her age, shown off to best effect by the tight pants.
“That’s her,” said Yvonne, indicating a jet black thoroughbred filly. “I bought her a month ago. A three-year-old. She won her first race in Tucson, five and a half furlongs. This is her first run at six.”
The Professor checked his program. “Its says here the owner is an Alex Daoud.”
“The owner of record. Do you play the horses much, Carrington?”
“No.”
“I have a system. I bet the colors of the jockey’s silks. They give me a hunch, you know? I bet Sassy Prince to win because the colors said that was what would happen. My son calls that ‘magical thinking,’ but a lot of times, the magic works.”
“Colors you can hear,” he said. “Makes sense to me. I can smell colors.”
“How interesting. Let us take a walk.”
She slipped her arm into his, an intimacy that surprised him who was seldom surprised by anything. They strolled through the fairgrounds like a couple, Yvonne asking him cunning questions about his time in prison with Cruz. He’d anticipated that she would test him and had quizzed Cruz at length and was fairly sure that he knew more about her lover’s incarceration than she did. He decided to chum the waters, saying that he was eager to make up for lost time in prison. A year ago Cruz’s uncle Vicente had put him in touch with Carrasco, and he’d been buying from him, but—
“Carrasco?” she inte
rrupted. “He’s old and fat. A fat little old man and finished.”
“That’s why I’m here. I’m looking to line up a heavy hitter in Phoenix. He wants quantities Carrasco can’t deliver.”
She stopped walking in front of the mechanical bull concession, which presently had no riders, its operator lounging on a chair with a magazine. Yvonne didn’t know what to make of Carrington. She approved of his appearance. So many of her customers looked like what they were, sleazy criminals, but the clean-shaven Carrington with his handsome if forgettable face could have passed for an insurance agent except for his blue eyes, which were very piercing, almost impossible to look into for more than a second. Her hunch, what Julián might have called “magical thinking,” was that he could be a steady, reliable client. Yet there was something a little odd about him, a little off. She couldn’t say what it was.
“You know, you don’t sound like a gringo. The way you talk. Your accent.”
A sharp ear, thought The Professor. He had learned that when manufacturing a tapestry of lies, it was often wise to weave in as many threads of truth as possible, so long as you remembered which was which. “My father was English, my mother Mexican, and I went to school in the States.”
“So you speak Spanish?”
He made an open circle with thumb and forefinger. “Un poco. Enough to get by.”
Just then a bugle call sounded, from inside her purse. She noticed his puzzled look and smiled. “My mobile’s ring-tone.”
“‘El Degüello,’” he said. “Santa Anna played it before he stormed the Alamo.”
“Now, how did you know that?”
“I read a lot of history. Maybe you’ll want to get that.”
“The call can wait.” She took his arm once more, moving away from the mechanical bull and its idle operator. “You’re more important. What do you have in mind?”
“Bridal dresses,” he answered, using a common metaphor. “Vestidas de novias. Sample material to start. A key.”
Her mobile rang again. Aggravated, she answered. It was Clemente, her real estate cousin. Más tarde, she said. She was having a meeting.
“It is about the San Ignacio,” Clemente replied.
Cupping the phone, she asked Carrington to excuse her a moment, and walked off a few steps, pressing a hand to her ear against the noise from the grandstands. The taxes had been paid; the property was no longer for sale, Clemente went on. The listing broker had told him herself. He then called the ranch to confirm and spoke to a woman, the daughter-in-law of the old woman. Yes, it was true. Off the market. He’d informed her that he had a buyer willing to make an offer on the whole place, but she said they weren’t interested.
Yvonne was stunned. How, she asked, how could those people, those cowboys, come up with so much money in such a short time? Clemente had wondered that himself and had made discreet inquiries, discovering that someone, a friend or relative of the Erskines, some rich guy, had paid their tax liability. He could try to find out more if Yvonne wished … You do that! she commanded. He should find out all he could. She would speak to him later.
She snapped the mobile shut. That fucking family! The curse of her life. It was almost as if they’d known of her plans and desires and had deliberately thwarted them, merely to torment her more. Agitated thoughts collided in her mind, so filled with clarity only a few minutes ago.
“Please wait a few minutes,” she said to Carrington, and went to the ladies’ room, under the grandstands. Sitting in a stall, she took out her vial and miniature spoon and administered two bumps. She was now using an eighth a day to keep her mental scaffolding from collapsing. Julián had been nagging her—you’re getting just like him, he’d chided, meaning Fermín. Like snorting powder was the same thing as smoking crack. That pest. If he would find a woman and get her pregnant, he’d have something to do besides monitor his mother’s habits. What had she done to deserve an only son who would rather play the trumpet than screw a woman? But he was right. She should quit. She had, as a matter of fact, been planning to take a holiday in Zihuatanejo and get off the stuff, then maybe fly to New York to do some shopping. Not now, with Clemente’s news. Now she would have to work harder, which would mean more of this shit. Two more snorts. No one could blame her if her addiction deepened. It would be the fault of those people. Her composure and self-assurance began to return, and she walked out with her most regal stride.
“Bad news?” Carrington asked.
She whisked the air. “A real estate deal. It fell through … never mind. You wanted a sample dress. All right. I can arrange delivery. Where? When?”
The Professor caught the pressured, too-rapid speech and noticed her swipe her nose with the back of her hand. How about that? Yvonne using product. Would that work to his advantage or disadvantage? “We haven’t talked price,” he said.
“Seventeen.”
“Standard wholesale. Joaquín charges ten.”
“Sure he does!” she said, an octave too loudly. “Shit product for a shit price! Let’s get out of this fucking sun.”
They retired to the bar tent and ordered two beers. It was nearly empty, the band was on a break, and he trusted Yvonne would keep her voice down.
“What happened with your real estate deal?” he asked. You never knew, in these things, what scrap of information might prove useful in the future.
“A ranch I want to buy … really, it’s none of your business. Escúchame, Carrington. I don’t like one-night stands. I’m interested only in long-term relationships.”
“So am I.” Why not? He thought. Why not a teaser? “The guy I’m trying to line up”—he flashed the spread fingers of both hands twice to signify twenty-kilo shipments—“on a steady basis, maybe once a week.”
Yvonne’s expression brightened—she fairly gleamed. He all but saw the numbers glowing on her mental calculator. A possible sixteen million a year wholesale. Hell, in a couple of years she could buy the Pyramid of the Sun.
“All right. Fifteen for the dress.”
“That’ll do.”
The notes of “Call to Post” drifted from the track. Yvonne looked at her watch. “That should be the seventh. My filly runs in the next. Put a hundred on her to win, Carrington. I know she’s going to win.”
“The colors of the silks?”
“And other reasons.”
Ben Erskine
Text of a letter submitted to the AHS by
Grace Erskine Castle, daughter of Benjamin Erskine.
125 Scott’s Cove Rd.
Darien, Conn.
November 14, 1966
Arizona Historical Society
929 E. 2nd St.
Tucson, Arizona
Gentlemen:
You asked in your letter of Nov. 3 for my reminiscences and observations about my father, specifically if I could add anything to the “scandal” involving his departure from the sheriff’s department. I was only 7 going on 8 when it happened. I do remember our mother, Ida, telling my brother and me that we would be moving out to the ranch full-time because Father was no longer a deputy sheriff. The only explanation she gave was that he had quit over some undefined falling out with the then-sheriff, Edwin Cox. It wasn’t until I was in college that I learned the truth, and even then accidentally. I was home on Christmas vacation, helping my mother clean out a closet, when I came across an article in a Mexican newspaper my parents had saved. I was fluent in Spanish and read it. This was probably the article you alluded to in your letter. I don’t know what happened to it. Needless to say, I was pretty upset that my parents had lied to my brother Frank and me.
I confess that I have mixed feelings about my father. Not too long ago, as I was preparing a reading list for the senior English honors course I teach, I came across a comment D. H. Lawrence made about Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” The first person I thought of was my father. Hard and stoical he was, and although he had a lot of friends, there was
some part of him that was shut off to the world, even from his family. And I must admit he was a killer. (How painful it is to write that.) I heard one story that he had shot a Mexican horse thief when he was a teenager. I’ve also heard that he may have put as many as a dozen men in their graves. Some of these killings were justified, and some were, well, questionable.
To cite one example, my father was mentioned prominently in a history of the U.S. Border Patrol that was published shortly after his death. To summarize, in 1938 he was serving as a county ranger in Santa Cruz County—a kind of part-time police officer. He was friends with a Border Patrol agent, Lee MacLeod. It seemed that he and my father had arrested a certain Mexican smuggler a number of times, but he was always released after a few days or weeks in jail. MacLeod and my father decided to get rid of this nuisance by ambushing him out in the Huachuca Mountains. They figured the body would never be found in that wild country, and that if it was, no one would know who shot him.
So what you have here are two law enforcement officers conspiring to murder a suspect. There is no other way I can put it. But the tables got turned. The smuggler ambushed MacLeod when he was alone on horse patrol. MacLeod crawled to a nearby ranch and lived long enough to identify his assailant. My father tracked the killer down and found him sitting at his campfire. Could have been a scene from a western. There was a modern wrinkle—he was smoking marijuana. The way the book described it, my father followed the smell like a bloodhound, sneaked up on the stoned smuggler, and shot him dead right there.
I have no idea how the author got this information. Nor can I verify its accuracy. Ben was, still is, a mythic figure, the subject of much lore, from which you can’t always tease fact from fiction.
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