This Side of Night

by J. Todd Scott

  So many had made promises in the dark in front of Juan Abrego Carrión. Men had died trying to keep them. More had died failing.

  The bus driver.

  Two nights ago there had been an attack on two buses of normalistas in Ojinaga. It was still unclear how many had been killed or injured, although a few seconds of cell phone video had already surfaced and now the whole world was watching, listening, waiting. Hundreds of federales had flown in from Mexico City, as well as forces from the Secretaría de Marina. Children had been shot in the street, so el presidente was constantly on TV promising that something would be done this time, and perhaps, this time, he thought he spoke the truth, although promises would not make this thing go away. No threats would ever make those videos disappear or return those children who had vanished.

  No one knew who had ordered the attack, but Juan Abrego suspected who was supposed to answer for it.

  No one knew . . . except maybe for this man, this bus driver tied to the chair. There had been two buses and two drivers and somehow this one had walked away unhurt, smart enough to abandon his bus moments before the shooting began.

  There had been cell phone calls back and forth. This man had been warned.

  Although Juan Abrego had long ago learned there was a limit to what any one man could truly promise and deliver to him, there was no limit to what he could learn with enough money, terror, and time, and a willingness to use all three.

  It was important also that not only children but students had been the targets, for Juan Abrego had once dreamed of being a teacher. He and Nemesio had been normalistas like those in Ojinaga, and he did not believe this attack was a coincidence, because he did not believe in such things. It had been a lesson for him alone.

  A declaration of war.

  He bent down in front of the bus driver, feeling not only age in his knees but something worse: he’d been sick for months now and had said nothing to anyone, although Gualterio suspected. His legs trembled and his arms were weak and there was a dull pain all the way to his groin, but he wanted, needed, to look this man in the eye.

  He coughed, spit, and Gualterio, in respect, looked away.

  “I’m going to ask you questions, my friend. Many, many questions. And you are going to answer them all. Not because you want to, or because you believe you will live when I’m done, because you will not, and it is important that you know that. I will not give you that false hope. If you answer truthfully, quickly, you will die honorably. Your wife and your two daughters will never lack for anything again. I will see to that. They will be able to say your name proudly. But if you lie or deny, if you try to protect those who did this thing, then you will die painfully. I will have these men here rape and kill your wife, the mother of your children. Then your oldest daughter will be whored out on the streets in Culiacán, and your youngest will be sold to another man I know in Camargo, to do as he wishes. He is a pervertido. He makes movies, I think. Horrible, horrible movies that decent men cannot stomach. These are not threats or promises, but simple truths. The only truth. Do you believe me?”

  The bus driver started crying, whining like an old dog, but nodded. His whole body shook as if electric current ran through it, and he pissed himself again. It was a high, ripe scent. Agrio. Juan Abrego had seen this all before. Terror now held the man close in her skeletal arms, whispering in his ears, saying things Juan Abrego did not have to.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  The bus driver shook his head, squeezing his eyes tight.

  “Yes, yes, you do. Pretending otherwise will not change this. It cannot. Open your eyes and say my name. I cannot yet take your tongue, but I can make you use it. And I will.”

  Gualterio stirred next to him, ready to step forward and force the man to comply. He’d seen all this before as well, but many of the others in the barn had not. They knew El Patrón only as an old man, confined often to his chair; prone to falling asleep in the late-afternoon shadows of the hottest days. A man who enjoyed telenovelas and his Zita’s dancing. Perhaps they mocked him behind his back. Maybe one of them thought to betray him.

  This display was as much for those men as the one tied to the chair. Juan Abrego was now the teacher he’d once dreamed of being, and this was his lesson.

  The bus driver finally opened his eyes, took a deep, deep breath. “You are Fox Uno.”

  Juan Abrego shook his head, although the man was not wrong. It was a silly name, given to him long ago, the way they now called Martino Tiburón; the way Gualterio had always been known as Oso Ocho. Such things stayed alive mainly in the press, in the narcocorridos. Many people believed “Fox Uno” had no true meaning now and that such a person no longer existed. Only the name itself lived on, carrying an immense weight . . . an impossible burden.

  Fox Uno was little more than a horrible dream, un espantajo—a terror. Something to frighten children.

  And when Juan Abrego remembered the boy he had once been, the boy he had left in his father’s fields decades ago, he could almost believe that, too.

  “No, I am Death, my friend . . .”

  After the bus driver finally answered all his questions—after he was broken and all his secrets poured out—Juan Abrego would strangle him to death with his bare hands. Fox Uno’s hands. Those same hands he was afraid would dirty Zita’s dress and that he dreamed were permanently stained in blood. He would then have Gualterio help him with the guiso, putting the body in the burning barrel, where it would fold in on itself and melt and stink so bad that the barn itself would never be rid of it. He might later decide to give his horses away, or cut them loose to run free, and burn all the buildings here, never to return to Cuchillo Negro. But before all that, he wanted every man in this barn to watch him kill this bus driver and stare into the barrel until the body was only embers and ash and grease. No matter how long it took. He wanted them to learn this lesson well, and never, ever forget it.

  Juan Abrego Carrión, better known as Fox Uno—leader of the Nemesio cartel—picked up the hammer from the horse blanket.

  He weighed it up and down, turning the clawed end toward the driver’s face.

  His hand was old, but it did not shake now.

  Yo soy la Muerte.

  I am Death.

  PART ONE

  RÍO BRAVO

  ONE

  It started with two eggs and an iron skillet, and went downhill from there.

  * * *

  —

  TAKE-OUT PEERED THROUGH THE BROKEN GLASS, his face a watery blur. If he recognized Danny Ford, it wasn’t immediately obvious to either man. Danny watched Take-Out’s eyes watching him, searching him up and down and all over before they disappeared again.

  Blink, blink, and they were gone.

  That was the thing about a place as small as Murfee, Texas, and as large as Big Bend County: everyone kind of knew everyone else, so the question wasn’t whether Take-Out knew Danny, it was whether he remembered him. And Danny was counting on a lifetime of Take-Out scorching his brain with about every pill and powder known to man that his memory wasn’t worth a damn anyway. Sketchy at best, as full of holes as his trailer.

  The flimsy door wasn’t opening though, which wasn’t a good sign. Or maybe it didn’t mean a goddamn thing at all.

  Take-Out—Eddy Lee Rabbit—was notoriously paranoid.

  “Open the fuck up, I’m not standing here all damn day . . .” Danny called out to the closed door, measuring the distance between it and the top porch step, sliding back and to the side, so if Eddy was in a fighting mood, Danny would have some room to operate. He wanted to put his cold hands in his pockets, but needed them free, too. It was early September and the Big Bend was cool in the mornings until the sun cleared the mountains to heat things up, and that was just as true down here in the canyon by the river. The trailer was still painted in the long shadows that stretched all the way down to the water that Danny coul
dn’t see, where the giant cane and salt cedars—the tamarisks—grew wild and big and blocked his sight. He’d read somewhere that neither were native to the area, having escaped domestic cultivation in the 1800s, but since then the sprawling plants and athel trees had almost taken over the riverways, stealing all the land’s water and salt. That didn’t make them much different from a lot of other things in the Big Bend: men like Take-Out who weren’t native either and who’d moved in to claim their piece of it. There were groups of people called “tammywhackers” who spent their summers pulling the invaders out by their roots, trying to clear and reclaim the riverbanks and waterways, but to Danny’s unpracticed eye, it looked like they were losing the battle.

  At least they were trying, like he was here trying, with Eddy Lee Rabbit.

  The old single-wide was worth about five hundred dollars, with a two-million-dollar view. Bits of junk gleamed here and there: old bikes and cans and beer bottles and engine blocks and rusty pieces of rebar that were out here for no reason at all. An old refrigerator. But it commanded the flats of Delcia Canyon, with desert stretching into the distance and river gorge walls rising south to the horizon; dark striations of sandstone, quartz, and gypsum that changed color with the season and the sun.

  Across the desert floor, after the recent rains that had swollen the river for three days, Danny could pick out more splashes of color: bloodred ocotillo, the yellow of desert marigold, white and purple Texas sage, and the sunset fruit of the prickly pear—the tuna. Most people dismissed the desert as a dry, desperate place. Colorless and lifeless. He’d learned that it was neither.

  Although Danny Ford wasn’t a native either, that didn’t mean he hadn’t come to love the Big Bend and the Chihuahuan Desert in all its moods and seasons, even if he didn’t always understand them.

  Maybe Eddy loved it, too, in his own way. Maybe.

  Danny was about to hammer on the door when it opened, revealing Eddy with something in his hand. Not a Colt .380 or a Buck Woodsman or a Louisville Slugger—all plausible options—but just an old iron skillet, like Danny’s mom used to own back in Sweetwater. Eddy was forking what appeared to be scrambled eggs out of it—eggs and chorizo—and keeping the door open with a scabbed knee. He was shirtless, his dirty, thin hair shadowing his eyes, calmly eating his goddamn breakfast.

  King of his castle.

  But . . . those eyes were bright, too bright, bouncing up and down and all around . . . popping . . . barely staying still in his skull. He’d been on a meth bender and his skin shone with its acid sweat.

  “It’s too goddamn early, so what the fuck you want?” Eddy asked around a mouthful of eggs and chorizo.

  Danny hadn’t woken Take-Out up, not even close. He’d probably already been awake for a couple of days.

  Eddy Lee Rabbit, aka Take-Out, was forty-one years old, and supposedly named after the Eddie Rabbitt, the famous songwriter and singer. Eddy had grown up around Floydada, drifting southward after high school before finally washing up in the Big Bend ten or fifteen years ago. Take-Out had come by his nickname honestly—he was the drive-thru-window guy, selling his first bag of weed out of a Beto’s Taco Shop along with three street tacos. He then moved on to coke, heroin, meth, pills; like he moved on to Arby’s, Wendy’s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. You just had to wait for his shift and know what to ask for when you pulled up to the window to get your order.

  He’d wrap it in some napkins and slip it in with some extra ketchup or honey barbecue sauce.

  Eddy was arrested twice for drug distribution, dividing his time between the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Preston Smith and James Lynaugh units. Neither stint had been very long, but the facts laid out at both sentencings all but guaranteed he’d never work at another Big Bend fast-food restaurant again.

  That’s when Eddy started selling out of his own place down by the river, and from the look of it now, using a hell of a lot more than he was selling. It was all pretty much the same as before, though. You called or stopped by to place your order and took it with you when you left, because Eddy Lee Rabbit never tripped with his dope—he never delivered and never would.

  Small-time, small-town stuff.

  And if that’s all there was to it, Deputy Danny Ford of the Big Bend County Sheriff’s Department might have left Eddy alone out here in Delcia Canyon. Sheriff Chris Cherry knew Eddy’s local history well enough not to want to hang a third arrest around his neck, so he’d given the word to all his deputies to leave him be.

  But unfortunately for Eddy, that wasn’t all of it.

  Not according to Charity Mumford, Eddy’s on-again, off-again girlfriend. Last weekend they’d been off-again, real off, after Eddy had spun a cue ball upside her head. He’d thrown it at her from across the trailer, and afterward she’d driven herself—still a bloody mess, needing stitches—up to the urgent care in Murfee, where they referred her instead to the Hancock Hill Medical Center, since it was clear she was still very high and screaming her damn head off the whole time. All about Eddy. The sheriff sent Deputy America Reynosa to Hancock Hill to figure out what all the fuss was about, and that’s when Charity had started going on and on about the Mexicans.

  All about Eddy and his goddamn motherfuckin’ Mexicans . . . so that Eddy’s small-time “stuff” suddenly didn’t sound so small anymore.

  It sounded damn serious.

  The next morning, after Charity had come down a bit—and figured out what she’d done—she’d refused to discuss it again. More than that, she took it all back. Said she got hurt falling against her car, and claimed she’d made the rest of it up; it was all tweaker bullshit. The sheriff didn’t want to get a warrant based on the shaky word of a recanting meth addict—maybe the stuff about Eddy was bullshit—but the twelve stitches across Charity’s scalp were not, and the sheriff couldn’t ignore those. He had America take Charity over to the family crisis center in Artesia, and finally relented and told Danny and Amé to take a long, hard look at Eddy Rabbit.

  To get inside his trailer.

  And that was how Danny found himself now standing in cool morning shadows on Take-Out’s porch, watching him eat eggs without a care in the world.

  “I got an order . . . I need something . . . an eight-ball. Speed. You got it?”

  Eddy held his fork in his mouth a long, long time, balanced there without his hands, clenched in his bad teeth. When he finally took it out, he did it in one smooth, slow motion.

  Other wheels, though, were turning furiously behind those already spinning, too-bright eyes.

  “That ain’t me no more, brother. I don’t do that. Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

  Danny shrugged, spit. “C’mon, that’s not what I heard.”

  “Says who? That man’s a goddamn liar.”

  “Who said it was a man?”

  “Really? Interestin’ . . .” Eddy took another mouthful of eggs, the same slow fork routine as before, like he was afraid if he moved too fast his head would fall off and roll around on the ground between them.

  Fucking tweakers. Danny wasn’t unsympathetic to whatever pain or problems or life’s fuck-ups drove someone like Charity or Eddy to start getting high in the first place, but he had zero tolerance for the consequences, since he was the one who had to deal with them. When tweakers were using, they only saw the world through the holes that shit had burned through their brains, like circles cut into a bedsheet for a little kid dressing up as a ghost for Halloween. Their whole world turned into these brightly colored fragments that didn’t quite fit together anymore, all light and sound and fury. A silver spinning ball above an empty dance floor. It made everything magical or mysterious to them, or worse, dangerous.

  It also made them unpredictable, because even they didn’t know what they were going to do next. Looking out through the ragged holes that circled the world, they just couldn’t see that far ahead.

  Not th
at he couldn’t sympathize with that, either. Ever since his run-in with a skinhead piece of shit named Jesse Earl, Danny had suffered lingering trouble with his own vision. Only his left eye, where Jesse had hit him again and again with the butt of an old Ruger Nighthawk. Danny had kept the eye (and a vicious scar as a souvenir), but it was like there was an electrical short in there somewhere, his sight coming and going. It would start at the edge of his peripheral vision, something dark and furious coming at him with great speed, followed by a squall of gray static and a sharp pain, before correcting itself. A light switch flipping off and on again fast inside his head, disorienting, a bit scary. But so far it had affected only that one eye, and he’d gotten used to it. Or rather, he’d learned how to ignore it. Sometimes he’d go two months without an episode, then he might have two in a day. After his surgery and recovery, and long after he was tired of dealing with doctors, he’d decided not to say anything about it, and he hadn’t told the sheriff or Amé, both of whom would have made it a big deal. A serious deal.

  To Danny, it was just another problem to manage, one of life’s little fuck-ups, and something he was willing to accept.

  Like Eddy Rabbit—it was just the way he saw the world now.

  Danny glanced past Eddy’s shoulder, trying to gauge whether the other man was alone in the trailer. He couldn’t see anything, hear anything except a radio, playing some music in there somewhere. He couldn’t make out the song.

  “Look, I’m not here to fuck with you. This is business. All business. I talked to Cody at the Comanche, and Mike over there, too. You know Mikey, right? He damn well knows you.”

  The Comanche was Murfee’s cattle auction, and faceless guys came and went through there all the time, grabbing seasonal work. And everyone, everywhere, knew a Michael or a Mike or a Mikey . . .