A Border Dispute
Rod Miller
Rod Miller is a cowboy poet and new fiction writer who has had stories in both recent anthologies White Hats and Black Hats. This story is an impressive feat from any writer, let alone a fairly new one, as he tells the tale very effectively…in reverse.
The walls of the gorge lit up briefly in the lightning flash. Although it was but midafternoon, heavy clouds and high cliffs blocked enough light that it was dark as late evening along the river’s course in the canyon’s bottom.
Knowing it was a matter of minutes until the clouds burst, the man in the canoe started watching the walls for a place to put ashore.
Not that he minded getting wet. But the tons of water the storm was dumping on the desert were already pouring down feeder gorges and into the river, and the coming high and white water was more than he cared to tackle in a cheap open canoe. His cargo was much too valuable to risk. And so he scanned the shore as he slid along on the current.
Not that there was shore to speak of. But that was why he was on this stretch of the Rio Bravo—Rio Grande, the gringos called it. Smuggling drugs across the border wasn’t the cakewalk it once was, so the commerce was forced into ever more inventive avenues and isolated places.
The so-far-successful method that brought him here was simple. Get to a place on the Mexican side of the river where you can get yourself, your cargo, and a cheap canoe over the rim of one of many canyons downriver from the Big Bend country and float lazily downstream for a few days or even a week to reach another semi-accessible prearranged place on the American side, set the canoe adrift, and climb out of the canyon with the cargo.
So far, it had worked. The buffoons in the Border Patrol and the DEA idiots could not comprehend this offset fashion of fording the river and so concentrated on more conventional crossings. But, he feared, the Rinches—the derogatory border-Spanish term for the Texas Rangers—were wising up and he might soon have to come up with a new and equally devious plan or he could wind up in some Texas juzgado.
His eyes picked up a dark cleft in the cliff’s face just a few feet above the water. He backpaddled to slow and turn the canoe, pushed himself back upstream a few yards with a dozen deep strokes, then pivoted again and allowed the canoe to drift downstream as he used the paddle to force it against the wall.
When he again spied the slender opening he grasped jagged rock and stopped for a closer look. The canyon hereabouts was riddled with caves, but not many were accessible without serious climbing and he had neither the time nor inclination for that. So he sought shelter that was above the high-water mark and no higher.
This should do fine, he thought.
With a couple of lengths of bright yellow plastic braided rope he lashed the canoe securely fore and aft to rock outcroppings. He rummaged through one of the watertight plastic chests that filled the canoe and selected a blanket, a battery-powered fluorescent lantern, a water bottle, and a lunch sack full of cold tamales and tortilla-wrapped frijoles. He fashioned a makeshift sling from the blanket and with the food and lantern in its pouch scrambled the few feet up the cliff to the narrow opening.
Once through the crack, he sat back against the wall for a moment to catch his breath. As he sat, a thunder-clap rolled through the canyon shattering the sky, knocking the storm loose into the gorge. The sound of heavy raindrops splattering off rocks and pocking the river made him glad he was out of it.
Even in the dark he sensed the cave was a small one and sang a few lines of a favorite corrido to see if the echo agreed. It did.
The smuggler slid a few feet further into the mountain before unslinging the blanket. He set the lunch sack aside and stowed the lantern between his thighs and wrapped the blanket around his shoulders before punching the button to activate the lamp.
He did not realize how accustomed his eyes had become to the dim until he squinted in the painful glare of the light. A hand raised instinctively to shield his eyes. Then his vision cleared and an inadvertent gasp, nearly a scream, filled the cave when he saw what he saw.
Sitting next to him, no more than a foot away, was a rack of bones and stack of litter that had once been a man. Another skeleton lay on the floor nearby. The smuggler, whose line of work had occasioned his seeing no small number of dead bodies and even watching a goodly number who were alive become dead, was nevertheless startled and shocked and left temporarily lacking the ability to breathe.
Calderón died instantly in a powderflash and since he saw it coming it would be incorrect to say that he never knew what hit him. Another cliché often applied to such instances may, however, be true: He never felt a thing.
That cannot be said of the other man, Butts, whose death was both lingering and painful.
And although it violates the order of their dying, it is yet true that Calderón killed Butts, and then Butts killed Calderón.
The smuggler considered bolting the cave and braving the storm, but curiosity got the better of him once composure returned. He studied the bodies—corpses, skeletons—and wondered how they came to be dead in this out-of-the-way place.
It was clear they had been dead for a long time. A long, long time. Little remained in the way of flesh—the odd strip of jerky clinging here and there the only evidence that meat and skin once covered the bones.
Since the skeletons were largely intact, the place must be protected from predators, at least large ones. He assumed bugs and worms and rodents had done the scouring.
A sizable chunk of bone was missing from the upper forehead and top of the skull of the man seated beside him. The side of the head of the other man, the one curled on the floor next to the black smudge that must have once been a fire, was dented and cracked. That says something, he thought.
Butts knelt next to the small fire, kindled from rats’ nests and twigs and a few pieces of driftwood he’d collected from where they’d been lodged in the rocks near the cave’s entrance. The fire would never burn long enough to dry them, but the spindly flames provided a bit of light and took the edge off the chill.
It wouldn’t matter if they were still wet come morning, anyway, he thought, since it would be back in the river for the both of them until they could find a place on the left bank to climb out of the canyon. He fed the fire a few more twigs and turned toward Calderón in time to see the rock in the Mexican’s fist the instant before it smashed into his head with a dull crack like a stick of wood snapping underwater.
The blow rattled Butts to the soles of his boots, but as his eyes blurred and his ears buzzed and his brain bled, he managed to unholster his Colt and with the last remnant of strength in his arm and hand bring the weapon to bear and fire. Calderón, weak from the flight and the fight and the fall and the float, had barely managed to lift the rock, no bigger than the crown of his lost sombrero, for a second swipe at the fallen Butts when the heat of the muzzle blast withered his eyelashes and the bullet ripped a peso-sized chunk out of his head.
As soon as Butts fired the shot, the weight of the gun carried his hand to the cave floor and he instinctively curled into a fetal position. The noise inside his shattered head drowned out the sound of his whimpering. Pain squeezed at his skull and the blood poured both into his head and out of it, eventually washing away all awareness and finally life itself.
Not much left in the way of clothing, the drug runner noticed. Practically all the fabric, it appeared, had been unraveled and hauled away string by strand. Most likely, he thought, to line rodent nests. Dried and cracked remnants of leather boots remained. Rusted spurs said both had been horsemen.
Other metal objects survived. Corroded buckles and tarnished brass cartridges in a gun belt around the body on the floor. A rusty old revolver wrapped in finger bones. And, still surrounding the thin bones of the men’s wrists, a pair of handcuffs.
The cuffs linked the right wrist of the man leaning against the wall to the left wrist of the man on the ground. That, and the fact that the downed man held the gun, led the smuggler to the obvious conclusion that the one seated next to him had been the prisoner of the other.
But what the hell were they doing here, in this miserable cave in the bottom of a river gorge with no way out? As he mulled it over, his eye caught something else. There, wedged in the dust under a rib bone, was a dull metal disk. He wiggled it out of the dirt and brought it closer to the light.
He could see, after rubbing off a layer of grime, that it had once been a silver peso. But its face had been crudely hammered smooth and a series of wedges punched out to create the shape of a star within a circle, around which was stamped the words TEXAS RANGER.
Rinches! he realized. This dead pendejo was one of the Rinches!
Butts clung to the rocks with one hand while the other fist held a twisted handful of Calderón’s shirt collar. He was further encumbered by the Mexican’s heavy mochila, an oversized set of saddlebags slung over his shoulder. Both men sputtered and spat volumes of water back into the river where it belonged. Calderón had the worst of it, in turn hacking water from his lungs and spewing it from his stomach.
“Stay afloat, Calderón. I can’t keep you from drowning by myself.”
“Why don’t you just let go?”
“You ain’t getting off that easy, you thieving son of a bitch. I’ll watch you rot in a jail cell and enjoy every minute of it.”
The Mexican made a halfhearted attempt to tread water while the Ranger looked over the rocks above. The canyon walls were rough and jagged, nearly vertical. Caves and shelter rocks were visible in the cliffs, but he could not see a way to get to them. Then, just before casting off to float downriver and try again elsewhere, he spied a dark cleft in the rock a few yards upstream. Maybe, just maybe, he thought, it was within reach and might offer shelter from the coming night.
“Come on. Upstream,” Butts said.
“Qué? What do you want?”
“There,” the Ranger gasped, pointing out the cave. He hacked up and spit out another gob of slimy water. “Climb. Get out of this damn river.”
Butts pulled Calderón through the water and spun him toward the rocks. The Mexican clawed for holds, and between the two of them pushing and pulling, they reached the spot below the cave. The Ranger jerked upward on Calderón’s shirt, lifting him higher in the water.
“Up,” he said. “Arriba.”
The Mexican barely had the strength to struggle the few feet up the face, and it was almost more than Butts could do to pull himself along behind and prod the prisoner at the same time. As Calderón disappeared into the narrow crevice, the Ranger called out to him.
“Calderón!”
He waited a moment, stuck to the rock like a lizard, then called again, louder this time.
“Calderón! Poke your ugly face out that hole!”
The Mexican’s face slithered out the crack like a tortoise poking its head out of its shell.
“Qué?”
“Here. Grab these.”
Butts pulled as many sticks and twigs of driftwood as he could find out of the rocks and shoved them upward one at a time. Calderón took them and pushed them into the darkness behind him. Having scavenged all the wood at hand, Butts scrambled that last few feet up through the rocks and followed his prisoner into the cave. Before he even sat down, he clamped handcuffs around Calderón’s wrist and fastened the other end to his own.
“What the hell, man?” Calderón said. “You think I’m going somewhere?”
Butts did not reply, merely dropped to the ground in a heap of fatigue and sucked in a few ragged breaths.
“Unhook these bracelets. I don’t want to spend the night chained to no damn Ranger.”
“Shut up. It ain’t like you got any choice in the matter.”
“Where am I going to go? I been chased halfway across Tejas. I been beat up. Fell off a cliff. Nearly drowned. I ain’t got the strength to break wind and you think I’m going somewhere? Besides, you know I can’t hardly swim anyhow.”
Butts ignored Calderón. Or pretended to. He did not believe for a minute that the Mexican was anywhere near as bad off as he let on. Besides, the Ranger had experienced all the same troubles his prisoner had and doubted he himself had the strength to stop an attempted escape.
After a brief moment of blessed silence, the prisoner piped up again. “Hey, Ranger—what’s your name?”
“Butts.”
That drew a chuckle. “Butts? What kind of name is Butts?”
“My name. The one I got from my daddy. The only one I’ve got.”
“What, gringo, you don’t got a first name? Everybody just calls you Butts?”
“That. Or C.W.”
“Qué?”
“C.W. Them’s my initials. I go by C.W. Butts.”
“What’s that stand for, C and W?”
That drew a chuckle from the Ranger. “Clarence. Clarence Winthrop. Clarence Winthrop Butts.”
Calderón laughed. “Madre de Dios! No wonder you like C.W. How come you know my name?”
“Hell, you’re famous, Calderón. Either a hero of your people or the most hated man in West Texas, depending on who you ask. I’ve known your name these ten years since I been with the Rangers.”
A fruitless chase after the Mexican had, in fact, been the first assignment Butts was given as Ranger. Butts was detailed to the Rangers’ Frontier Battalion, which had but a few years earlier captured the notorious murderer John Wesley Hardin and killed the outlaw Sam Bass. The day of his enrollment in July of 1882, the tenderfoot Butts was sent out with a posse to chase down Calderón and his bandido gang after they had robbed an express shipment out near Marfa.
But the robbers won a long, hot miserable race across the desert and crossed the border before the Rangers could overtake them. Butts had spent a goodly portion of the intervening decade trying to stop the Calderón gang’s robberies and killings across West Texas, but the Rangers always seemed to be a day behind the bandits.
“I been on your tail now and again over all that time.”
Again Calderón laughed. “You must not of got too close, Butts, or I would know who you are.”
“Maybe so. You are a slippery little bastard, I’ll give you that.”
“Claro. But outsmarting gringos is no big thing. It has been an easy life, robbing those who stole our country. It is like—how do you say it?—taking candy from a baby. Beating you people is almost too easy.”
“That maybe was true once, but those days are over now. You make the same mistake my daddy said caused the Confederacy to come out in second place—thinking that winning battles is the same as winning a war.”
“What are you talking about, Butts? I have good English, but I do not understand what you say.”
“I’m saying you may have won some battles by getting away up till now. But now you’re mine, and that means you done lost the war.”
Both men sat quietly for a time; then Butts unslung the heavy saddlebags from his shoulder and tossed them back into the cave, where they lit with soggy clink. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he spied a wad of grass that had once been a nest for rats or mice and picked it apart into a small pile in front of him. Other similar wads were within easy reach and he retrieved a few of those and piled them nearby.
Finding a likely looking piece of rock, Butts next pulled his pistol from its holster and glanced the stone against the metal at the bottom of the grip to see if he could raise a spark. He could. Soon the dry grass sparkled and smoked and glowed and a few gentle breaths coaxed out a flame.
“Thank God for Samuel Colt,” Butts said, holstering his revolver as he added progressively larger twigs to the fire. He knew the fire would be short-lived. But he did not know that within minutes more than a fire would die in this cave.
Curious about the rest of the story, the smuggler hoisted up the lantern and cast his eyes into the dark corners of the little cave. At first he saw only evasive movements of rodents and insects hiding deeper in cracks and crannies, but in due course his eyes picked out a curled and cracked hunk of leather in the shadows.
Stepping gingerly to avoid splintering the bones on the floor, he followed the lamplight to the discovery and dragged the heavy bag away from the wall and into the cave’s center. It looked to be of the same vintage as the bodies and about as intact. It was, he decided, a mochila of the type he still saw used occasionally by the vaqueros of his homeland on the opposite shore. Smaller than a kyack for a packsaddle but bigger than the saddlebags of Texas cowboys, a mochila was cut to fit over a saddle horn and cover all or part of the seat. Pockets or pouches were sewn on the sides for carrying whatever the rider wanted to take along.
And what, exactly, the smuggler wondered, was this one carrying?
The mochila was dried out and some of the leather strings that stitched it together had rotted through. Parts of it were gnawed away. But the pouches still held whatever they had held. He shifted it around to get to one of the buckles to find out what, and as he tugged the strap to free the buckle prong, it broke in his hand. Peeking in through the lifted flap, he caught the dull glint of metal.
His heart skipped a beat and his lungs involuntarily gasped for air. In the exuberance that followed, he tore loose the other pocket flaps and shook free a trove of tarnished silver coins and glowing gold coins that clinked into a pile on the floor of the cave, followed by the dull thud of a quartet of shiny, good-as-new gold ingots.
Butts knew the bandit was his when he saw Calderón abandon his spent horse, leaving the broke-down animal quivering and dripping sweat and sucking wind at the rim of one of the many rocky canyons hereabouts that dropped into the bigger canyon of the Rio Grande.
From a distance, he watched the robber strip the mochila and head down the deepening gully afoot. Calderón attempted to spook the horse away, but the scrub had hit bottom and stood unfrightened, spraddle-legged with head sagging. The Ranger’s horse was also tired, but being accustomed to better feed, had held out just enough longer to run the Mexican mount into the ground.
Turning his horse in the downhill direction of the gully, Butts pushed hard along the rim for better than half a mile, figuring to get ahead of the bandit before dropping into the canyon for a surprise attack.
The plan worked. Concealed behind a rock outcrop at the side of the narrow draw, Butts watched for some minutes as Calderón hustled downhill, dodging boulders and scrambling over drop-offs into the shallow hollows at their bases where storm runoff would puddle and churn before heading again downhill to the next short fall.
Having been the object of the Ranger’s pursuit for several long hours and many hard miles, Calderón assumed Butts was still coming after him, so he spent as much time looking behind him as ahead. And so it was unnerving when Calderón turned from one such backward glance to find himself stood up by the barrel of a revolver mere inches from the end of his nose.
Too startled to react, the Mexican did not even breathe until Butts spoke.
“Don’t you move, you greaser son of a bitch, or I’ll shoot you dead sure as you’re born. Get them hands up, real slow.”
As Calderón complied, Butts pulled the bandit’s pistol from its high-riding, cross-draw holster and threw it into a jumble of rocks on the steep side of the canyon.
“Now sit down. Drop right straight down on that skinny butt of yours and don’t try anything cute.”
Keeping his pistol trained between the man’s eyes, Butts squatted before him and patted around for the knife he knew would be concealed in his boottops. He found it and tossed it away.
Butts then holstered his pistol and looked to where he had tucked a pair of handcuffs under his gun belt, his brief inattention prompting the prisoner to reach behind his head and slide a thin-bladed knife out of a scabbard concealed between his shoulder blades.
Calderón’s sudden movement caught the Ranger’s attention and he instinctively took a backward step. The resulting accident is the only thing that saved his life. Butts stumbled and tripped when his heel caught on a rock and he fell flat on his back. Unable to stem or shift the momentum of his thrust, the bandit’s blade sliced only desert air as he followed its path over the top of the fallen Butts, likewise stumbling and landing half in the dirt and rocks and half atop the lawman.
Quick as spit on a hot griddle, Calderón scrambled off Butts and to his feet and looked around desperately for the knife jarred loose in the fall. Butts saw it first, and grabbed it up from where it had landed almost in his hand. He flipped quickly to his knees and braced for the Mexican’s next attack, but Calderón instead turned and loped off downhill. The knife clattered in the rocks as Butts flung it away and took after him.
Even with the heavy mochila Calderón carried, Butts figured he must have a thirty-pound advantage over the outlaw, who while short and skinny was likewise wiry and cagey. And had it not been for dumb luck, he knew the Mexican’s knife would already have cut him to ribbons. So while his pursuit was vigorous, it was not without caution.
It took another accident to again stop the chase. An unfortunate step wedged Calderón’s foot between boulders, impeding his stride just enough to stretch him out facefirst among the muddle of rocks in the bed of the dry watercourse. Butts was upon him before he could recover, and with all the force the lawman and gravity could muster, Butts dropped a knee into the middle of the man’s back.
Rather than disabling the desperate bandit, the capture inspired him and Calderón flipped to his back and unleashed a vicious knee, which landed swift and square in the Ranger’s crotch, expelling his breath more effectively than the Ranger’s knee to the Mexican’s back had.
Calderón exploited his advantage by crabbing out from under the Ranger and landing another ferocious kick to his ribs. Butts automatically reached for his pistol as the blow rolled him, but could not accomplish the draw as he had affixed the safety strap over the gun’s hammer to secure it during the chase.
Now it was his turn to scramble out of the way on elbows and boot heels as the Mexican attempted to brain him with a rock. Again, Calderón’s momentum carried him to the ground, and again Butts took the opportunity to leap astraddle his back. He immediately grabbed Calderón by the wrist and wrenched his arm behind his back, forcing the hand painfully upward. Then, for good measure, he landed a few kidney punches.
The Ranger relaxed slightly when the Mexican sagged limp below him and again he reached for the manacles. In the instant he loosened his grip on Calderón’s wrist to replace it with the grip of a cuff, the bandit exploded upward and again scrambled out of his grasp and down the draw.
He did not get far, soon skidding to a stop. His next step would have carried him into empty air with nothing between him and the river below but a sheer drop of some thirty-five feet. Lacking the Mexican’s knowledge of their current situation, Butts did not stop as Calderón had, instead launching himself with a mighty leap, the force of which barely diminished as he wrapped his arms around the bandit and carried them both out into the chasm.
Although Calderón knew what was coming and so his scream came first, Butts soon overcame the disadvantage and his yell surpassed the Mexican’s on all counts—length, intensity, and the quality of the profanity. And he did not stop the scream until it was replaced in his mouth by river water.
The shock of the landing tore the pair apart and when Butts surfaced he saw that Calderón was in a bad way, his slight frame lacking the buoyancy to keep himself and the heavy mochila above water. Besides, the bandit evidently lacked swimming skills beyond the ability to thrash around enough to break the surface from time to time and gasp a breath as the river pushed them along downstream.
A few powerful strokes carried Butts across the current to where the Mexican floundered and he wrapped his arm around Calderón’s neck to hold his head above water. Calderón, of course, misinterpreted the action as another attack and objected violently. Butts increased pressure on the bandit’s throat to dampen his struggling and yelled into his ear instructions to hold still. Either fatigue or lack of oxygen or the Ranger’s yelling finally calmed Calderón, and he relaxed and allowed Butts to keep him afloat.
“Damn it, man, here I am trying to save your life and here you are trying to drown us both. You’re going to have to shed them saddlebags or they’ll drag you down.”
“Are you loco? This mochila is why I have been running from you and why you have been running after me. And now you want me to dump it in the river?”
“No, you fool. I’ll carry it. It won’t weigh me down near as much as it does you, you skinny little bastard. Give it over then we can figure how to get out of this damn river and back on dry land.”
Quarter eagles. Half eagles. Eagles. Double eagles. Spanish reals. Silver dollars. Gold dollars. Silver pesos. Other curious coins the smuggler had never seen nor heard of. But he knew enough to know that the metal the coins contained far exceeded their worth as minted currency.
And then there were the gold ingots, whose value he could not, dared not, even imagine.
He passed the time stacking, restacking, dividing, subdividing, combining, separating, shuffling the coins.
There were worse ways to pass a rainy night, he thought.
All the success Calderón had enjoyed eluding the Rangers over the years ended by sheer happenstance, one of those ugly coincidences life throws at one from time to time in order to keep one humble.
Butts and a couple of other Rangers happened to be laying over in the railroad town of Sanderson on a trip from Fort Stockton to Langtry. Word came down while the men were enjoying a rare hotel breakfast that a bandido gang had waylaid the morning eastbound a few miles outside of town and made off with a bank shipment—not a tremendous haul, but a significant one.
Even before their abandoned breakfasts had gone cold, the Rangers were armed and mounted and on the trail.
Calderón did not imagine that pursuit would come so quickly, so the Rangers surprised the bandits squatting around empty money sacks dividing the take for easier transport. Had they done so in concealment, it is likely the lawmen would have captured them then and there. But the Mexicans had stopped on a wide and dusty dry lake bed and so saw the Rangers coming from a good way off.
They quickly stuffed the loot back into bags, into pockets, into pouches, into saddlebags, into mochilas, even inside shirts and the crowns of sombreros and clambered aboard their horses and lit out across the flat. But the Rangers were better mounted and the gap between the three of them and the five bandits closed with every stride.
The pursued and pursuers started exchanging optimistic gunshots while still outside pistol range, and kept up the fire until the distance closed to effective range. Whether the Ranger riding next to Butts meant it or whether it was a fluke—a subject of much discussion in Ranger circles for years to come—the fact remains that he placed a bullet directly through the back of the neck of one of the retreating bandits, evening up the odds some by making it three after four.
Shortly after the bandit fell, the group split in two, with three staying together and the other striking off alone. Butts signaled the other two Rangers to continue after the group of three, knowing they could improvise in the likely event the bandits split up again later. He veered sharply southward following the lone rider. Already he sensed victory—sensed, at least, that the chances of catching the bandit were heavily in his favor. What his chances might be once he caught up with him he could not say.
Off the flats and onto more rugged terrain, the pace of the pursuit slowed. But still Calderón drove his mount furiously. He knew the river was ahead. And he knew it cut through one deep gorge after another through this country, most likely putting it and the border beyond reach. But if his horse held up, he knew the off chance that he would hit the river at a place he could cross was the only chance he had.
The rain had stopped sometime during the night and by midmorning the worst of the gullywasher had passed and the Rio Bravo was back to its normal flow.
He was nervous, tense, wound tighter than his usual state of alertness while at work. Which is to be expected, perhaps, given that yesterday’s unlikely events had made this far and away the biggest payload of his career—even if he jettisoned the contraband drugs. So even though the chances of someone in law enforcement spotting him on this rugged, lonely stretch of river were practically nil, the smuggler nonetheless kept a sharp eye on the cliffs above the left bank. He did not think he would spot a Border Patrol officer up there, or a DEA agent.
But those Rinches, he thought. Those damn Rinches. It’s hard to get the best of the Rinches.