Scavengers

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

According to the story that Paulita Saenz recounted, she never would have looked south that morning had the sink in the women’s bathroom not clogged. Paulita had run enough water to soak a sponge, and then saw the ugly puddle of soap scum, hair, and who knows what else as the sink refused to drain.

Unscrewing the big plastic lock rings of the sink trap was a simple job requiring no special tools and no particular knowledge of sophisticated plumbing. Paulita knew the trap, long neglected, was choked. With a sigh, she slid a pan under the trap, grunted loose the lock rings above and below the trap, and grimaced at the smell of the trapped, stagnant water as it cascaded into the pan. Long tendrils of hair nearly held the plumbing together, but eventually, Paulita managed to pull out the offending plug, her face screwed up in a puckered eeewww of disgust. She dug at the curtains of residue that hung from the now-exposed sink drain stub and wiped the elbow joints clean.

Reassembly took seconds, and she had closed her eyes and grunted with a dry rag wrapped around the lock rings, snugging them so they wouldn’t leak. With a sigh, she had pushed herself up off the floor, holding a pan containing a quart of bluish-brown water and a large, ugly, fragrant glob of caca asquerosa. The logical place to dispose of the cargo was out the side door that led to the courtyard between house and saloon.

From there, Paulita turned right, unlatching the garden gate. As the rough, weathered board gate swung open, Paulita was treated to a view south, the early morning sun lancing across the desert. She paused, bowl of watery gunk in hand, riveted by what she saw. Then she dropped the bowl, ran inside and called the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department.

***

Deputy Jackie Taber, off-duty when dispatch went on the air to locate an officer, had been methodically scouring the prairie around the grave site north of Maria, hoping to find a deformed bullet or another shell casing that might have hidden under a chamisa or cholla-something that had been missed in earlier searches. Sgt. Howard Bishop had just turned into the airport parking lot northwest of Posadas. Taber took the call, her Bronco airborne as often as not as she hurtled down the power line access road. She beat the undersheriff to the taberna by eight minutes.

“Stay here,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said, and Paulita Saenz stepped onto the flagstones of her patio and stood with her arms crossed, hugging herself like a small child waiting for a bus. Estelle followed Jackie Taber’s boot prints where the deputy had walked the hundred yards from the back of the Taberna Azul to the border fence, four strands of barbed wire that had seen better days. Stepping directly on the deputy’s prints, Estelle approached until she stood immediately behind Taber.

“No sign of anything?”

“Nothing,” Jackie said, and lowered the binoculars. She offered them to Estelle, who shook her head. “This is a good bet where they crossed,” she added. “Lots of boot prints, and you can see the scuffing in the dirt where they climbed over…or through.”

The border security separating New Mexico and Texas from old Mexico ran the gamut from nothing-where the Rio Grande provided a natural barrier of sorts-to impressive chain link with barbed wire topping in urban centers. Out in the country, however, where tourists didn’t need to be reminded which part of the desert belonged to whom, an aging barbed wire fence frequently served the purpose. At one time, a narrow dirt lane had been bladed along the border fence from one side of New Mexico to the other, but the lane served little purpose: no one drove east-west. It was north-south that interested most folks.

At formal ports of entry, the fence was bolstered by imposing block houses that protected American and Mexican customs officials from sunstroke. At the smaller crossings, like Columbus to Palomas or Regál to Tres Santos, traffic inched through a single lane, lined up for inspection.

The tiny village of Maria had never been lucky enough to warrant a crossing of its own. For one thing, the state highway that passed through Maria headed out of the village east toward Las Cruces, roughly paralleling the border rather than crossing it. In the other direction, State 61 veered north to Posadas.

Columbus, New Mexico, was matched on the Mexican side by Palomas, and westward, at the other end of the rumpled San Cristóbals, folks in Regál could see the lights of Tres Santos if they stood on the hill behind the water tank. Maria had no such sister village across the border.

The nearest pocket of population, Asunción, was tucked in a wonderfully shady little canyon some sixteen miles south of the border. Roads from Asunción led still farther south to Janos, east to Juarez, and even west to Agua Prieta. But south of Maria in Posadas County and the stretch of barbed wire that marked the border, the Chihuahuan desert stretched rumpled and desolate, marked only occasionally by a rough lane or two-track.

“Did you contact Mexican authorities?” Estelle asked.

“I did, but there’s a problem.” Jackie turned and nodded toward the saloon, and Paulita Saenz. “She saw a car, but doesn’t know what kind it is-not the year, not even the make. She thinks it was an older model station wagon. And at the distance, she didn’t recognize the two men who were with Eurelio.”

“Could it have been the Madrid brothers?”

“She just couldn’t tell. Apparently she didn’t have on her distance glasses,” Jackie said. “She was busy with the plumbing.” She shrugged. “I talked with a Mexican officer named Bernardo. Luis Bernardo? He’s a corporal in Asunción. Anyway, I told him that we’d be interested in anything he could do for us. I gave him a description of Eurelio.”

“It’s a place to start,” Estelle said. She turned and regarded the saloon.

Had there been a window in the back storage room of the Taberna Azul, Paulita Saenz could have peered out and seen the sun glinting off the barbed wire border fence. But a window would have been an attractive nuisance. The back, southern-facing wall of the saloon was solid, secure adobe from ground to vigas.

The west wall of the taberna once had sported a window with a beautiful, deep sill. The view of the San Cristóbal mountains had been breathtaking when the dawn washed them in rose and purple. Three break-ins through that window had prompted Monroy Saenz to block up the window and plaster it over to match the rest of the wall. On the inside of the patched wall, he’d painted a window with shutters thrown open to reveal a colorful garden beyond, complete with a vineyard and improbably huge purple grapes glistening in latex splendor. It was a cheerful, secure view that never changed, the grapes hanging forever ripe.

Estelle could remember, during a visit to the taberna with her great-uncle when she’d sat quietly, waiting for Reuben to finish his business. She had watched the grapes, trying to imagine the movement of the leaves in the breeze.

The single front window of the saloon, protected by a heavy wrought-iron grill, looked out on the front parking lot, State 61, and across the way, Wally Madrid’s gas station.

The Taberna Azul was a comfortable fortress. It was a place to sit in quiet darkness while the New Mexico sun baked the world outside, or the wind scoured it, or ambitious people blew themselves up trying to make a profit from it.

“She said her son went willingly, though…at least at the beginning,” Estelle said.

“Until the very last, apparently,” Jackie replied. “Then it turned into a tussle.”

Estelle nodded. “Let me talk to her again.”

Paulita Saenz was weeping and trying to hide the fact by wiping at her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse. She turned back toward the patio as Estelle approached, and the undersheriff heard a loud, heartfelt sigh from Paulita.

“Paulita, it’s one thing if Eurelio just jumped the fence and took off with friends-he probably does that all the time. That’s not what happened this morning?”

The woman wiped her eyes again with her sleeve and shook her head. She turned and tried to meet Estelle’s gaze, but couldn’t. “I saw them go over the fence,” she said. “Their car was parked just beyond, on the Mexican side, on that little cow path there.”

“I understand that. But what did you see, exactly? I really need to know.”

“Eurelio was walking ahead of them, and they were all talking. I could see their hands moving, you know? I guess they must have come across and walked to the back of the house to find my son. I was busy in the taberna. I didn’t hear them. I didn’t see them.”

And maybe it’s just as well that you didn’t, Estelle thought. “And then what happened?”

“I saw them hop the fence. And then they went to the car, and then I could hear their voices. Eurelio opened the passenger door in front and just as he turned to get in, one of the men hit him in the back of the head. I saw him do that.” Paulita’s voice quavered.

“With his fist, or did he have something in his hand?”

“I couldn’t tell for sure.” Paulita held out her right hand, palm spread with her fingers pointing up. She patted the heel of her hand. “It looked like this.” And she punched sharply forward with her hand. “That’s what I think. Eurelio, he turned then, and they struggled. Then he went down inside the car.”

“Did your son fall?”

“I couldn’t tell if he fell, or what,” Paulita said.

“But it looked to you that he’d changed his mind about getting in the car?”

She nodded. “And the one man slammed the door on him. Then one of them got in to drive and the other got in the back.”

“And you never saw any weapons?”

Paulita shook her head.

“Did they ever look back and see you?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“And show me again what direction they went.” Paulita pointed toward the southwest. “Toward Asunción, then?”

“Maybe. Maybe anywhere.”

“It was a four-door sedan?”

“It was one of those huge old station wagons,” Paulita said. “The kind with the roof rack on top.”

“Deputy Taber said that you didn’t see what model it was.”

“Well, I remembered some. That’s what it was. Just about the same color as the dust.”

“Sort of a yellowish tan?”

“That’s right. And big.”

“And a station wagon.”

“That’s right.”

“Did you ever have a chance to see the front of the car?”

“Yes, I saw the front. It was parked sort of angled toward the fence, you know. Yes, I could see the front.”

“Would you recognize the front of it if we showed you a picture?”

“I think I might,” Paulita said. “I remember the hood, you know. It was really long. A big old boat. The front fenders were really sharp. Creased on the top. They looked like cheeks.”

Estelle glanced at Paulita with amusement. The woman had progressed from knowing nothing to a pretty comprehensive description. Jackie Taber approached, and Estelle turned to her. “I’d like you to run Mrs. Saenz up to the office and have her look through the Motor Manuals to identify the car that she’s talking about. It sounds like one of those ‘seventies model Ford wagons-those beasts with the hood about a football field long. See if that’s the one.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But what about my son?” Paulita Saenz said.

“We have the Mexican authorities looking for him,” Estelle said. “We’re limited on what we can do on this end, Paulita. Until we have some word from them.” She saw the look of desolation on the woman’s face. “They don’t have much of a head start.”

“In that country you don’t need much of a head start,” Paulita said.

“We’ll add the vehicle description to what we’ve already told them. If they have an officer in the area, they might be able to do some good.” The words were hollow, and Estelle knew it. With a state policeman for every thousand square miles, capture in Mexico was more often the result of betrayal and ambush rather than simple pursuit.

Paulita’s gaze traveled out to the fence and beyond, into the bleak reaches of the Chihuahuan desert.

“What sort of trouble is he in?” Estelle asked.

“I wish I could tell you.”

“It wasn’t the Madrids? Benny and Isidro?”

“It could have been. And it could have been somebody else. They had heavy coats on, and with the hats and everything, it was hard to tell. It might have been, though. One of them…I thought he moved kind of like Benny when they were going over the fence.”

“Was that the one who hit Eurelio, or was it the other one?”

“The other one.”

Estelle turned and looked toward Mexico. Eurelio had been turned loose by Judge Hobart early that morning. He obviously hadn’t gone home and cleaned up for another workday with Posadas Electric Cooperative.

“Somebody knew your son was home, Mrs. Saenz. Less than three hours after he was released from our custody, you saw him bailing over the fence. Did you talk with him this morning? After he got home?”

Paulita shook her head. “He just said that he didn’t want to discuss anything about it. He gets mad, you know. And then I can’t talk to him.”

“Somebody’s talkin’ to him now,” Jackie Taber said, and Estelle saw Paulita Saenz flinch.