Maybe writers know writers without being introduced. Each spring I try to make a pilgrimage back to the southwest and one place I like to go to is Cochise County, Ariz. It is the least touched land of the sprawling cities that ate up all the farmland, ranches, citrus orchards and feedlots I knew as a boy. I visited Benson, Ariz., a sleepy town on the almost always dry San Pedro River that runs north—one of the few rivers in this continent that flows north for 100 miles. Astraddle Interstate 10, this was a stage stop on the Butterfield Stages lines, the same ones rattled down through northwest Arkansas, Fayetteville to Fort Smith and then across the Arkansas River and south to Fort Worth to end up in San Francisco.
Another primary town I visit is Tombstone, “The Town Too Tough to Die.” It is 30 miles south of Benson and it thrives on the legend, books and movie about Wyatt Earp. You drive south of the OK Corral over the Mule Shoe Mountains through a quarter mile highway tunnel to see Bisbee and the long shutdown Phelps-Dodge Lavender Pit copper mine. There is a mine tour you can take but I’d rather walk through all the shops that wind up a deep canyon in the fashion of Eureka Springs without trees.
Low and behold this whiskered cowboy with his bowed legs and salt and pepper beard was collecting parking fees from all day parkers in the city lot and I struck a conversation. I told him I missed the old man who wrote one book and sold it in his one book bookstore.
He laughed and told me he had “one” book too. I told him I wanted to see it after I surveyed the shops. He said he grew up outside Carrizozo, N.M. I told him I had driven through there two days earlier and knew a little about the remote town.
Alberto Lucero’s people came to that region over 300 years ago. They were miners, farmers, cowboys, ranchers and not the least survivors. He grew up in a family without a car who during the WW II, lived in a small adobe house, with coal oil lights and water drawn from a well. He and his brother rode many miles on their horses to simply watch cars go by on the highway. Then they would get into a fist-fight over whether it was a Cadillac or a Studebaker. They had plenty of time. Not many cars came by.
He can tell you many warm stories about his youth herding sheep, cutting fire wood and riding bulls. Forced to leave the remote village at 14 when his father died to become a wood cutter to support his family, he writes about how he learned about the good and bad men on the road. His book tells the life and the legends of the Mexican people in that region from the coyote to their own “Faulk Monster.”
Inside the covers are also lessons he learned in life. He told these stories and some talented friends helped him make it come out of the print, so you savor every word like he is talking in your ear. His translation of all Mexican terms is thoughtful and well done for the gringo like me. If you want a copy of “Lucero’s New Mexico” let me know and I'd be happy to put you in touch with him.
After some book swapping I left Lucero reading my Spur Winning novel "The Horse Creek Incident” in the warm March sun. Once in a while you bump into a person you click with like you knew each other on a roundup, at a rodeo, or working cattle some time in the past and hope it isn’t too long until you see each other again.
Western novelist Dusty Richards and his wife Pat live on Beaver Lake in northwest Arkansas. For more information about his books, call 1-866-532-1960 or email him at [email protected].
