Isabel Lopez McGuinn was daintily perched on the seat of her rocking chair when her grandson, Tyler, kissed her on the cheek and told her he loved her. Isabel knew in her heart that Tyler truly meant it, as he had each and every one of the thousands of times he'd told her that over the last forty years. Isabel shook her head in wonder as his lanky frame strode out of the room. Had it really been forty years? She sighed; yes, it most definitely had been that long. Time seemed to pass much faster when you were almost ninety. Isabel smiled to herself as she leaned back into the padded rocker. The years had certainly flown by, but Ty had made them all worth living.
Isabel had raised Tyler from infancy when his natural mother died shortly after he was born. However, the bond she shared with her grandson was special even beyond that, because she was the only person in the world who knew how unique his existence was. That was because, according to the journals of Tyler's great-great grandfather Tyler Ringo McGuinn, her grandson was living his second time in the modern world. A world which was subtly different from Ty Ringo's accounts of the one in which her grandson had first lived. According to Ty Ringo's last journal, the differences were a direct result of changes he'd made to make the world a safer and better place. According to Grandfather Ty, he'd walked a tightrope to keep from doing anything that might write his future self out of existence. As it was, he'd delayed Tyler's arrival in this time by decades.
As she thought about that, Isabel once again considered telling the story to Tyler and letting him read his ancestor's journals. Would Tyler believe her story and the journals? That was the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Isabel herself had long ago shed her doubts about the veracity of the journals; too much of what Ty Ringo predicted had come true to believe otherwise. She put the question of telling him aside, put on her reading glasses and picked up the romance novel she was reading. She smiled anew as she thought about how Tyler teased her for her choice of reading materials. When he was tormenting her, he called her Izzy.
"Why don't you go out and pick up some cowboy, Izzy, instead of reading about it all the time?" He would ask.
"I would, if I could find one who can keep up with me," she'd answer.
She loved that he still teased her and didn't treat her as if her age made her decrepit. In fact, Tyler told her just last week that he couldn't wait to dance with her at her ninetieth birthday party next month. She was looking forward to that, also. Why not? Since according to her doctor, she was the most hale and hearty octogenarian he'd ever treated.
Isabel was broken out of her wool gathering when Lupe Martinez, a distant niece, her personal assistant and long time friend, walked into the parlor with a fresh cup of tea for both of them. Lupe had been with her for more than twenty-five years, and was as close to Isabel as a daughter. The women exchanged greetings and Lupe took a seat on the couch, setting her tea cup and saucer carefully on the end table.
"What are you thinking about so deeply, Abuela?" Lupe asked.
"I was fretting about Tyler again. It's been two years since Cora Leigh died, and he is still mourning as if it happened yesterday. That is not what the dear girl wanted, and I was thinking that he needs to get on with his life," Isabel replied.
Lupe nodded, picked up her cup, and took a small sip of the citrus-tinged Lady Grey tea.
"I agree Isabel; he is much too young to give up on the rest of his life. It is frustrating, because he will have a good couple of days that elevate our hopes for him, only to crash back down into depression again."
Isabel reached over and gave her old friend's hand an affectionate squeeze. She knew that Lupe loved Tyler almost as much as she did. She had hired Lupe when the young woman graduated from college. Tyler was fifteen when Lupe started working for her, and the young man was immediately smitten with the attractive older woman. Isabel had to chuckle at those memories, because Lopez women always affected McGuinn men that way. Of course that attraction had worked both ways for the last five generations of the family, and Isabel was well aware of it when she hired Lupe. As she expected, Lupe soon became Tyler's mentor in matters between men and women.
Tyler made no bones about the love he felt for Lupe, even after he was married. He did not love her with the burning intensity he shared with Cora Leigh; rather it was an enduring, comfortable friendship that stood the test of time. Cora Leigh knew all about Tyler and Lupe, because Tyler had told her of the relationship early on. Cora knew her husband was absolutely faithful from the day they started dating, so she had no problems with the friendship between Ty and Lupe. As a matter of fact, once Cora Leigh's cancer had become terminal, she had extracted a promise from Lupe to help Tyler overcome his grief. Isabel knew that Lupe took Tyler into her bed again six months after his wife's untimely death, trying to do just that.
The two women thought it was unhealthy that Tyler never left the ranch. At first they thought that throwing himself into running the huge spread was therapeutic, but it didn't take them long to realize that he was working himself into a hermit's early grave. Isabel would move Heaven and Earth before she let that happen.
Since the ranch wasn't distraction enough, she had recently contacted a young woman named Anna Felina Cardenas, the daughter of her second cousin on her mother's side of the family. Anna was fifteen years younger than Tyler, and an internationally famous fashion model known by the single name 'Felina'. Her modeling moniker and middle name was a modern spelling of the name of her great-great aunt, Feleena Montoya-McGuinn. Only family still called her Anna. Anna recently divorced her Latin heartthrob, race car driving second husband. Now that Anna was divorced from that egotistical ass Juan-Pedro, she had happily accepted the invitation.
Isabel smiled at the thought of the tall and curvaceous young woman being around the ranch. Anna was a Lopez, so the sparks were going to fly between her and Tyler, no matter how hard he tried to ignore her.
The desert was rapidly giving up the heat it had accumulated from the merciless West Texas sun as Tyler McGuinn reined in his horse and slid out of the saddle. He lit on the ground under a forty foot tall Honey Mesquite tree that sat at the top of a small mesa. The old tree was a nuisance because it sucked water out of the earth that grass could be using, but Cora Leigh had loved the damned thing, so he had let it alone. Cora Leigh and he had picnicked under the old tree often, and had occasionally stolen out there at night to make love under the stars. Those sweet memories made the present defilement of the tree and the area around it even more odious.
The trash strewn ground and the remnants of a cooking fire were enough to set Tyler's jaw. However, it was the dozen pairs of panties festooning the old tree that made him grind his teeth together in rage. The panties were a symbol that Cora Leigh's beloved old mesquite was now a 'rape tree'; a place where the Coyotes extracted an extra payment from the youngest and prettiest of the women they were smuggling across the border.
Ty walked around the tree, kicking the discarded clothing, trash and personal care items into piles. Tomorrow he'd send a crew out here to clean the place up and haul off the refuse. Not that it would do a lot of good, because once the Coyotes had marked the place, they were sure to return to it. His only option now was to post guards here to intercept the Coyotes. Pulling guard duty was only a temporary fix, because his cowboys were not keen on doing that. Ty could not blame them for how they felt, after all, if they wanted a career in law enforcement, they wouldn't be wrangling horses and cows.
Tyler stood still after making a lap around the tree and tried to make some sense of the jetsam and flotsam that marked the illegals' passage across his ranch. He couldn't for the life of him figure out where all the clothing and other junk came from. It was as if the border jumpers had left Mexico with a steamer trunk each. He was broken out of his reverie when his horse snorted and dropped her head over his shoulder so he would pet her and maybe give her a treat. Tyler smiled indulgently at her antics and scratched her nose.
His horse was one of the reasons for which the huge, sprawling Ranch of the Angels was famous. She was a Melosa Quarter horse, a breed established by his ancestors here and in Wyoming over a hundred years ago. The horse's official name was a mouthful of breeders' grandiloquent gobbledygook confirming her bloodline, but Cora Leigh had hung the moniker of 'Lola' on her. Cora Leigh said the sorrel mare was so spoiled she was reminded of the song, 'Whatever Lola Wants Lola Gets'.
Ty smiled when he thought about that day six years ago when Cora Leigh gave Lola her name, just as he smiled anytime he reminisced about Cora Leigh. She still had the ability to bring him joy, even though she'd been with her maker for more two years now. Unfortunately, she also had the ability to make him cry like a baby. Her death, the result of a fast moving, relentless and virulent cancer, had ripped his heart from his chest.
Tyler sighed and walked around the tree so he could look to the north. From his vantage point on the small knoll, he could faintly see the reason the ranch was so popular with the Coyotes. Interstate 510 ran east-west through the northern edge of his property; in almost the center of that stretch, it intersected with I-655, which ran north from El Paso, thru New Mexico, and on to Denver. From his ranch, the smugglers could dispatch their human cargo in any direction. The McGuinn family donated the land for the highways in exchange for the government creating a cattle tunnel under both roadways every four miles, and an exit off the cloverleaf interchange.
The Interstate exit led to the McGuinn Truckstop, the largest, finest and busiest truckstop in the country. McGuinn's Truckstop sold McGuinn Petroleum products that were pumped from McGuinn oil wells and processed by the McGuinn Refinery over in Galveston. The refinery was the most modern in the United States, and produced the cleanest fuels on the market.
In the two years since the death of his wife, the flow of poor souls crossing his ranch looking for a better life had become a veritable flood. He had sympathized with the illegals' plight; hell, he still did for that matter. However, his sympathy was tempered now with the realization of the damage the hordes of border crossers were doing to his beloved Ranch of the Angels. Destroyed sections of fence, slaughtered cattle and tons of garbage were almost nightly occurrences. He also realized that what he was experiencing was being repeated up and down the Border States as the illegals swarmed into the United States. Beyond the damage to his property, loomed the fiscal and social damage the twelve to fifteen million illegal Mexican aliens were doing to the entire country.
Eight months ago, Ty had finally taken his problem to the federal government. He received a rude awakening when the man from the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection listened to him politely, then told him he was at the wrong agency.
"Mister McGuinn, our agents are all forward deployed along the border. Since your ranch is not situated on the Rio Grande, you should be speaking with the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement."
Tyler disagreed.
"Parts of my ranch are within a mile of the border, why can't you widen the zone you patrol, particularly if it meant catching more illegals?"
The man gave him a smug smile and a typical bureaucratic answer.
"Washington decides our interdiction area, Mister McGuinn, so my hands are tied. If a subject succeeds in crossing the border undetected, he or she is no longer attempting to illegally enter the United States; they have in fact already done so and are no longer in our jurisdiction."
Ty was beyond baffled when he learned that the nearest ICE field offices were located in Colorado, Utah and Oklahoma. Nor could he comprehend that, while the ICE was responsible for rounding up illegal aliens in the United States, that mission was mostly an adjunct to their role as an anti-terrorism investigative agency. The bottom line was that, while everyone he talked to expressed sympathy with his plight, no one was willing to help him solve the problem. Even the McGuinns' considerable political clout didn't help with the current administration in Washington. After six months of ramming his head into a bureaucratic wall, Tyler decided that he'd had enough. From that day forward, he vowed to enforce the no trespassing signs that were posted in two languages, every hundred feet along his fence line.
Tyler took action to safeguard his property in the tradition of the independent western rancher. He didn't hire armed guards or private security personnel. Instead, he roamed the ranch during the night four or five times a week, looking for trespassers, and escorting any he found off his land, back in the direction from which they came. Tyler called the sheriff's office each time he found a group, but his calls were seldom acted upon. The El Paso County Sheriff had personally told him that he didn't have enough officers on patrol at night to process the number of illegal aliens Ty intercepted.
The one occasion in which the sheriff's office responded in force was when Ty intercepted twelve young Mexican men, each carrying a backpack chock full of uncut cocaine. The sheriff was happy to keep Ty's name out of it, and claim credit for capturing the one hundred and eighty kilos of nose candy. Unfortunately, just because Ty's involvement wasn't public knowledge, it was known to the smuggling ring that owned the cocaine. The drug lord's smarmy lawyer had that information within five minutes of the first interview. Their knowledge set in motion a chain of events that made the El Paso Salt Wars look like a Sunday school picnic.
While Ty was riding his fence line in the stillness after midnight, Isabel was preparing for bed and thinking about her grandson...
Tyler was a typical boy and had a normal childhood. Although he was a bit introverted growing up, he was one of those rare individuals who were just as content with his own company as he was with other people. That is not to say that he was a loner by any stretch of the imagination; he was simply a person comfortable in his own skin. Isabel thought that her Tyler must have been much like his previous twentieth century self, namely a man who was born out of his time. The difference in how the two turned out was in the guidance she provided him, based on the insight she'd received reading his other incarnation's journals.
Thanks to Isabel's guidance, Tyler turned out differently this time through. Instead of dropping out of college, he excelled as both a student and as an ROTC Cadet. He graduated with a degree in business management and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Texas National Guard. Tyler requested branch assignment as an Army Intelligence Officer. Because he was bi-cultural as well as bi-lingual his request was approved and he was sent to the Intel Officers Basic Course. He excelled in the basic course and was selected for follow-on training as an intelligence field agent.
When Tyler returned to El Paso after his training, Isabel asked him to accompany her on a trip to Mobile, Alabama, while she visited some distant relatives of his grandfather and her late husband, David McGuinn. Isabel had made a point of staying in contact with the Sikes family at the request of the original Tyler McGuinn. As a result, she and Naomi Sikes, the grandniece of Belle Sikes McGuinn, had become life long friends. Isabel and Naomi schemed to introduce Ty to Naomi's granddaughter, Cora Leigh, and both women were very happy when the couple fell instantly head over heels in love.
Cora Leigh was an associate professor at the University of Alabama, so Ty enrolled there in the MBA program. The pair moved into an off campus apartment together and were married the next June. Time had held its original path for Cora Leigh, in that she was the same age in this life as she had been in Ty's former one; she was twenty nine. Tyler however, was twenty-five instead of forty, the age he had been when the pair met his first time through.
The following September, Tyler's unit was called to active duty and deployed to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. Tyler worked long hours on the planning of the invasions of Kuwait and Iraq. When the invasion jumped off, Ty was attached to Texas National Guard Mechanized Infantry Battalion as an interrogator.
Tyler received his master degree in May of 1992, he and Cora Leigh moved from Alabama back to Ty's hometown of El Paso, and both of them started working for the McGuinn Corporation. Of course, money was no problem for either of them, as they were from wealthy families and both had large trust funds. Even though money wasn't a problem, they both were surprisingly modest in the way they lived. They bought a nice but not ostentatious house in a gated community and settled down to a life of wedded bliss. They also had strong work ethics and both rapidly advanced in their careers.
Although they were both successful in their work, neither of them had the total commitment to the company that Tyler's older brother, Raymond Junior (RJ) had. RJ was president and CEO of the privately held company, and lived and breathed McGuinn. On the other hand, Tyler and Cora Leigh lived and breathed for each other. They were also crazy about the ranch he grew up on and spent as much time as possible there. Of course another attraction of the ranch was his beloved Abuela. Cora Leigh and Isabel also got along famously.
Ty's thirtieth and Raymond's fortieth birthday parties were held as a joint event at the ranch one summer weekend in 1995. At the party, Isabel presented RJ with sixty percent ownership of the McGuinn Corporation, and she gifted Tyler with the deed to the Ranch of the Angels.
As Isabel had hoped, Ty and Cora Leigh resigned their positions with the corporation, sold their house in town, and took up residence in the ranch's grand hacienda. Under the young couple's stewardship, the ranch thrived and expanded until it presently encompassed over sixty thousand acres they owned outright, and twenty thousand they leased from the state of New Mexico. More than five thousand acres of the ranch were irrigated and planted in corn, oats, and grass for silage. The ranch ran approximately five thousand head of cattle, close to two hundred horses, and even a couple of dozen mules. Although they didn't need the money, Cora Leigh and Tyler had been proud when the ranch started turning a profit. Quarterly auctions of five hundred head of cattle and twenty horses provided a nice income.
The truck stop was making money hand over fist, and had recouped their initial investment in only two and a half years. The huge complex became somewhat of a tourist attraction for families weary from the road, and had grown accordingly. In a truly ironic twist, Cora Leigh talked Tyler into building a replica of an old west town on the site, and leased it to the Sage Brush Wild West Show. The show's manager was an attractive older woman who had once been the show's female star. In another life, she'd also been Tyler's third wife, Grace; in this life she was the widow of the show's original owner.
Isabel reveled in the happiness of her grandson and his wife. She had never seen two people more in love. Her only disappointment was that Cora Leigh was unable to conceive. Isabel would have loved to have children running around the house again. Isabel fell into a dreamless sleep shortly after one in the morning. Her last thought before slumber overtook her was an ardent hope that Anna could somehow lift Tyler out of his funk.