Crossers by Philip Caputo

Author:Philip Caputo
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction, Drug traffic, Widowers, Arizona, Action & Adventure, Historical - General, Ranches, Sagas, Mexican-American Border Region, Crime, Grief, Literary, Suspense, Historical, Fiction - General, American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, Suspense fiction, Family secrets, Widows, Philip - Prose & Criticism, Caputo
ISBN: 9780375411670
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2009-10-06T00:40:39.650000+00:00

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

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