Crossers by Philip Caputo Page B

“Lie down, Sam.”
    The dog responded neither to the reassurance nor to the command, rumbling at whatever had disturbed her, coyote or javelina, maybe something more dangerous, like a bear or mountain lion. Then she started barking, which she did only when a two-legged stranger approached the house. Castle went to the door and called, “Who’s there? Anyone there?” He hadn’t heard a car drive up. Someone on foot, and out here on a frigid January night could only be a mojado —a wetback, a gross misnomer in a land where the rivers ran dry ten months of the year—or a burrero , as the drug runners were called. Blaine and Monica had warned him that the valley was a highway for contraband people and narcotics. He waited for whoever or whatever was out there to pass on, but as Sam kept barking, he threw on his coat, got a spotlight, and to stop the dog from bolting outside, opened the door just enough to allow himself through. No wind and no moon, and the brighter stars—Sirius, Rigel, Aldebaran—looked close enough to touch. His breath plumed in the cold. It surprised him, how cold winter nights could be on the high desert, as cold as the New England he’d left barely more than two weeks ago. He swept the light over his car and the rock-walled shed that housed the well-pump and generator, pointed it into the pool of solid blackness made by the clustering oaks. Seeing nothing, he circled around and shined the lantern at the ridge behind the house. The beam caught a fleeting patch of white, and a moment later he heard branches cracking as a large animal moved through the trees. It must have been a deer flagging its tail in flight. He stood listening for a few seconds. The silence was total, the sort of silence he imagined prevailed on some dead planet.
    Inside, her alarm over, Sam had returned to her fleece bed beside the stove. She raised her eyes to him as he hung his coat on a wall peg near the door.
    “Since when? Since when did you start barking at deer?”
    Castle pulled another log from the firewood tub and tossed it into the stove, then settled back into his chair to resume reading. Seneca’s Ad Marciam de consolatione . The Loeb Classical Library edition, in the red covers, with the Latin text facing the English translation. He’d sent away for these books so he could read Seneca in the original in an attempt to reacquaint himself with the Latin he’d studied at Hotchkiss but had long since forgotten. The mental discipline of translating was good for him, stopped him from thinking on his bad nights. Tonight was that kind of night.
    No, there was nothing out here to bid memories, but they came anyway, striking without warning. Earlier he’d been grilling the quail he’d shot that day on an old stone barbecue pit he’d repaired with the help of Gerardo Murrieta, the ranch’s full-time cowboy. He’d hunted with Sam two hours in the morning, another two in the afternoon, and came home with five birds in his game vest. He got a mesquite fire going, and while the wood burned down to coals, he cleaned and plucked the quail and stuffed sage into their cavities and brushed the skin with a mixture of garlic and olive oil before placing them on the grill. As he drew in the scent of sizzling meat, his eye reached out to the tin roofs and the windmill of ranch headquarters, on a flat below him, and beyond to the bare cottonwoods fringing the Santa Cruz River, and then across the breadth of the San Rafael, the pale winter grass almost white in the dusk and speckled by the red and black hides of grazing cattle.
    As he was turning the birds, Amanda stepped out of the shower and embraced him from behind and nibbled the back of his head and neck and both shoulders. There, by the smoking grill in the desert twilight, Castle could hear her husky voice and feel her wet lips on his skin. Of all his memories, this was the most frequent and the most vivid, too vivid to be called a memory; a reexperiencing, rather, and it