Crossers
insightful
Once when I was so weak with amebic dysentery that all time not spent on the toilet was passed in bed, I found in my host’s house one book in a language I could read. It was one of those storm-tossed but ultimately upbeat women’s romances, a genre I had not yet sampled. I read it, then read it again and again, since there was nothing better to do. If I ever have the luxury of repeating such an experience, I hope to do so with a Philip Caputo book. For how many decades in how many used bookstores have I seen Horn of Africa standing steadfast, a Rock of Gibraltar compared with the mere boulders of Ken Follett and Sidney Sheldon? And only now, with a half-century of my life already over, have I finally learned whom to turn to for a good potboiler in my next wasting sickness!
The moral of “Crossers” is that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children, but not too much. (I will not give away the ending, but perhaps it would not be indiscreet to report that some good guys survive.) The setting is, mostly, the New Mexico-Arizona-Mexico borderlands.
Caputo has stenciled his villains out of the cheapest cardboard he could find. The character of Yvonne, queen of the city, the sadistic, nymphomaniacal, aging, addicted boss of a Mexican cartel, is about as convincing as Cruella De Vil. She snorts her “bumps of la puta blanca with a tiny gold spoon.” Caputo reports the details of her decadent menus and describes the “glow in her cheeks” when sex has left her feeling younger.
Where Caputo does succeed, and beautifully, is in portraying the conflicting feelings any thoughtful American has about illegal immigration. The San Ignacio ranch and its adjoining allotments constitute a rugged, wild stretch of the Old West, and the Anglo family who work it and consider it home would like to keep it more or less as it was. But transborder traffic flows through their property. Sometimes desperate girls, abandoned by their guides, come begging for water. Sometimes groups of crossers leave garbage and vandalize fences or water pipes. On one horrific occasion a van of illegals pursued by the Border Patrol comes crashing into a corral, killing or wounding many on board. What can one say about people who brave discomfort and extreme peril solely because, as one California Border Patrol officer once told me, “they do work most Americans won’t do”?
Blaine Erskine, paterfamilias of the San Ignacio, gets very, very tired indeed. His wife, Monica, remarks: “The wets” - wetbacks - “I guess I can put up with. But the coyotes and the drug mules - hideous people.” And it is the drug mules and their employers whose menacing actions impel Blaine toward behavior that seems obsessive even to the vigilantes patrolling the border. “I had a talk with Blaine this morning, and maybe you should, too,” one volunteer border guard tells a ranch visitor after Blaine fires warning shots dangerously close to some crossers. “That guy is getting a little spooky. . . . Couldn’t tell if they were wets or mules.” The eventual result is a feud between Blaine and the villainous Yvonne, who has set up shop just across the border fence.
Blaine himself is convincingly drawn. Like his dead grandfather Ben, whose ghost haunts the narrative, he can be described as “a man who had outlived his time, only he didn’t know it.” The same may be true of the San Ignacio ranch itself.
Most of what we know about Ben derives from oral history transcripts in the archives of the Arizona Historical Society - a clever framing device on Caputo’s part, allowing us to see Ben’s brave, reckless, defiant and above all violent personality through a number of lenses. Blaine admires Ben’s memory and is almost his reincarnation, right down to the coldly crooked smile that forebodes some punitive act. Caputo tells Ben’s story with power and verisimilitude. His portrayal of the ranchers and their extended family also rings very true. Once his wife is killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, he takes early retirement and accepts an offer to hole up on Blaine’s ranch while he tries to recover.
It is ultimately Gil’s moderation (not to mention his competence with an elephant gun out there on those financial veldts) that does the most to save the San Ignacio and the people on it. I would rather see the San Ignacio people save themselves.But the valuable quality Gil does represent is nuance. Unlike Blaine, he declines to applaud the Iraq war, feels uneasy about the growing Homeland Security detention apparatus, and hesitates to shoot at ambiguous Mexicans who lurk in odd corners of the ranch. Gil, and through him the author, seeks eerie equations between Al Qaeda and drug cartels like Yvonne’s, since both are terrorists. Once he even compares the American invasion of Iraq to the daily Mexican “invasions” of the United States border. You could have the book here.
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