“I know. Secret words and names, like Rana and Araña and Diablo. Little boys playing silly games. But when I dialed Rodolfo’s phone all those years ago, someone did answer, and you sent me Máximo. I thought it was magic, the stupid dreams of a stupid girl. But it wasn’t magic and it wasn’t a game. It was just you. And I’m no longer so stupid. Make the call.”
She’d already had Fox Uno unlock the phones and hold them up to her, scrolling through the call logs and the contact lists. In the sunlight they’d been hard to read, but it was clear enough both were empty. Either he’d been deleting them or there had never been anything there to begin with.
America knew better. There was someone else out there, somewhere.
She only had to force Fox Uno to call them.
“How is it that you think I have survived so long?”
“You’re not going to live through this morning if I don’t hear my mama or someone who knows where she is on the other end of one of those phones.”
Fox Uno shrugged, a futile gesture. “This is not the way. If you do this thing, you will kill her. You might kill us all.”
“Me? Men kill on your orders. Hundreds have lived and died on nothing more than your word, and now you have nothing to say to save yourself?”
“Yes, I killed men. But I bought and sold more, too many to count. Important men, untouchable, far more dangerous than me. I have survived so long only because I trusted so few of them.”
“Don’t you dare fucking talk to me about trust.”
“Listen to me,” Fox Uno said, almost calling her mija again, before catching himself. “Understand, these men will not let me be found alive. They cannot afford to let me live, not with the things I know. All their names, all their secrets. Yes, I am a murderer, a thousand times over, but it’s not the dead I will answer to.”
“You can’t protect my mama. You can’t save yourself. You’re weak, scared. Like the sheriff said, you are nothing.” A few moments before, she’d stepped back from him so he could pick the phones up off the ground, but she was still close enough that when she pointed the gun at his face—now—it touched his skin. “Just empty threats and emptier promises.”
He nodded, and it was clear to her that he was done arguing, defending himself. He held up a phone, the one in his right hand. The Blackphone.
“I am many, many things, but I am not a liar . . .”
He began pressing buttons from memory, but she stopped him with a sharp push of the gun against his chin.
“No,” she said. “The other one.”
He shook his head, and kept pushing buttons. “I will make this call, but no one will answer. A phone somewhere I do not know will ring, and a man I do not know will hear that ring, once, and know to go buy five phones from one of ten different stores. He will ride a bike, and pay for those phones in cash. If he does not do this thing, or if he takes longer than an hour, another man I do not know will kill the daughter, or mother, or father of the man on the bike.” Fox Uno shrugged. “This I do not know, either. The man on the bike will take this phone to another, who will drive it to a third, maybe a fourth. Eventually, it will end up in the hands of a man who, if he is not dead, too, will open all the brand-new phone packages. He will choose one and . . .” Fox Uno trailed off, then started again. “If all is well, he will call me.”
He then held out the phone in his left hand to her, the Mexican Telcel. When she had seen it that first night, it had reminded her of the phone her brother had once carried. The same one she used to summon Máximo. “When this one rings, answer it. Do not speak first. Someone on the other end will say a word. It will be one of three words. Each one is a color. White . . . red . . . green.” He smiled, those were the colors of the Mexican flag. “If you hear the first word, stop the call and wait five minutes and there will be a second call. If you hear the second word, stop the call immediately and toss the phone into the desert. It is useless to us. If you hear the third, then . . . we are fine.” Without asking her if it was okay, he slowly folded his legs and sat down in the dust. He took the Telcel and tossed it at her feet.
She remained standing, looking at the gun in her hand, and the phone down by her boots. “How long do we wait?”
He picked at a piece of grass, then another. “As long as it takes.” He studied her. “This is how it starts. One thing, then another, always one more thing. You are part of this now. There is an old, old saying: ‘One nail drives out another.’”
She relented and sat cross-legged from him. “Unless I ask you something, I want you to stay quiet.”
But he kept talking. “It has been a long walk. I will lie here in the sun and wait with you, Señora de la Santa Muerte. We will learn together whether I have told the truth.”
He stretched out in the dirt and covered his eyes with his arms.
“But we know in our hearts that neither of us are liars.”
* * *
—
AMERICA WAITED MORE THAN AN HOUR, the sun tracking higher above them, and watched the old man sleep and snore on the ground a few feet away from her.
A white-haired old man in his borrowed clothes, muddy and stained in cow shit. He could be her papa, come in after a long day of working the cattle ranches around Murfee, or the giant marijuana fields in Chihuahua owned by her uncle.
For a few moments, she was eighteen years old again . . . holding Rodolfo’s phone.
Holding Rodolfo’s gun.
Now her own.
Señora de la Santa Muerte.
* * *
—
THE PHONE RANG.
Fox Uno stirred when it did, rising up on his elbows. Faster than she’d imagined, so maybe he’d never been sleeping at all. He watched her closely, but said nothing.
He was just as curious as she was about what would happen when she answered it.
One nail drives another . . . Un clavo saca a otro clavo . . .
She finally put it to her ear, waited, and heard a single word.
She blinked once, twice, holding her breath.
“Mama?” she asked the following silence, and waited for a reply.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Mel couldn’t remember the last time Chris had worn a suit.
She’d bought him this one in Midland and had to drag him there to have it tailored. It was charcoal—a shade or two darker than that—and it fit well, but he said he looked like an undertaker in it. Despite the fancy bloodred tie she’d chosen.
The suit, and the tie, had cost too much money. They both knew it, but she’d done it anyway.
She focused on straightening the gold pin in his lapel, a small Big Bend County Sheriff’s Department star. Sheriff Ross had always worn one, and Chris had found boxes of them in the man’s desk. They were some of the only things Chris kept around after Ross’s funeral, and he’d let the deputies wear them or give them out at schools.
He always refused, but she put this one in now.
It shined sharply, from where she’d polished it bright on her hem, matching the one she had pinned to her dress.
Till Greer had already poked his head in to report he’d seen Bethel Turner heading over to the school in a charcoal-gray suit of his own, and a new Stetson the color of morning fog.
Chris had his Stetson Brimstone on the desk, the same one he’d owned since he’d taken over as sheriff, but he wasn’t committed to wearing it. Yet.
The debate was only thirty minutes away, and they were in Chris’s office, where he was reluctantly letting her fuss over him. She was brushing off his shoulders with her hand, brushing his neatly cut hair out of his eyes. She’d made him shave back at the house, and it had left his face raw, exposed. She counted them both lucky he hadn’t nicked himself, leaving bloody spots on ruddy skin roughened by the Big Bend’s wind and the sun. As she was about to get into the shower, she’d caught him staring at
himself in the mirror with a last bit of Barbasol on his chin, and tried to read his thoughts: that he looked way too young, way too thin, too frail. That he was pretending and playing dress-up, wearing a grown-up’s suit and another man’s badge and gun. Worst of all, that he didn’t even like the man he was looking at. To break those darker thoughts, she’d pulled him right into the shower with her and wrapped her arms around him and run hot water over them, hot enough to make them both gasp.
Only for her to gasp again, and again, when he entered her and breathed her name into her wet hair.
Later, getting dressed, he still hadn’t wanted to look at himself too long in their bedroom mirror, and driving over to the sheriff’s department, he’d tried not to catch his reflection in the truck’s windows.
All those damn, dark thoughts of his, and a few of her own that she needed to rid herself of.
Yesterday, when he was out of the house, she’d come across his papers in the kitchen, decided to glance through them quickly and see for herself the notes he’d made for the debate. Instead, she found the folder Joe Garrison had left. She had sat at their table for an hour and read far too much of it, all of Fox Uno’s horrors, and it had been far too hard to think about much else since then.
It had been a long damn drive for them both.
* * *
—
MEL FINALLY STOPPED AND STOOD BACK to take him in, all at once, as Jack—wrapped up in his car seat—watched them both with his big eyes. Vianey Ruiz had offered to watch the baby for the night, but Mel wanted him with her. She didn’t feel comfortable yet with anyone other than herself or Chris watching over their son.
“Jesus, babe, this is ridiculous. I look and feel ridiculous,” he complained.
“No, you look handsome. Professional. Serious.”
He held out his arms. “I look like the Grim Reaper.”
She laughed. “I’d still vote for you.”
“Well, there we go. One solid vote. Maybe I won’t lose this thing in a complete landslide.”
She crossed her arms and leaned against his desk. “You’re not going to lose, Sheriff Cherry. I have a good feeling about this.”
“I have all sorts of feelings, none of them good. Do you know I’ve never run for anything? Not student council president, nothing. I didn’t even run for this office the first time around. They handed it to me.”
She moved closer, took his smooth face in her hands. “Chris, they gave it to you because you were the only man worthy of it. You’re going to be fine tonight. It’s just like taking the football field. No one who’s ever come out of this shitty little town has ever thrown a football like you. No one.” And that was true. She’d watched him launch those balls heavenward at Baylor, then again out in the yard of his parents’ house in Murfee. The night he was shot, he’d thrown those balls so high they were probably still up there, never to come down. “And no one . . . no one . . . has ever cared as much about this shitty little town, and the people in it, as you do.”
She added, “And if they don’t see that, fuck ’em.”
He laughed. “Lady, you do have a mouth on you. Does your boyfriend know you talk like that?”
“My boyfriend has never complained about my mouth . . . ever . . .”
Chris was still smiling, ready to say something else smart, when the grin died on his face. He was suddenly serious again, glancing over her shoulder. She turned around and followed his stare to see Danny, America, and the newest deputy, Marco Lucero, standing outside his office, waiting.
“Are they here to drive you over?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
“No, it’s got to be something else.”
“Do you want me to stay?” But she knew the answer to that, too. She could read their faces . . . their thoughts . . . the way she had read Chris’s earlier. Whatever they wanted to say to him was serious and couldn’t wait. It had nothing to do with the debate, and probably everything to do with Fox Uno, that monster she’d read about. She didn’t want Chris more distracted than he already was, not now, but it was futile to be angry about it. There was nothing she could do anyway.
He was still the Big Bend County sheriff, and this debate—important or not—wouldn’t change that, at least not for today.
Not until they counted the votes.
He shook his head. “Go on now with Jack. Get a good seat, up front, with Javy Cruz or Vianey. Right where I can see you. I’ll find out what’s going on, and then I’ll get one of them to bring me over.”
She put a hand on his chest, right near the gold lapel pin. She tapped it with a finger. “Goddammit, don’t be late, Chris.”
He worked up a smile, and kissed her cheek, before bending down to kiss Jack on the top of his head.
“Babe, don’t worry. You can’t be late to your own hanging.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
The last time he had been inside this gym, people were cheering for him.
It was a pep rally, the last one of Chris’s senior year. An away game against Ozona, and after everyone left the gym whooping and hollering, they drove in a long convoy of school buses and pickup trucks with all their carefully rendered homemade signs jammed into windshields (not so different, he figured, from his reelection signs now scattered around town), and under the lights of that other school, he went on to throw three touchdowns. One of them, a forty-yarder that Nat Bulger caught one-handed in the back of the end zone, sweetly toe-tapping the chalk sideline. Chris could still remember the smell of the fresh-cut grass, the way the warm Texas sky got so easily lost behind the glow of the sodium lights, an infinite night. The salty smell of popcorn and the sour tang of diesel fuel and the whisper-gentle murmur of the crowd between plays. Even the slickness of sweat running down his arms and into his eyes, although he was somehow still able to see everything so clearly—the stitches on the ball spinning in the air, escaping his hand.
His dad, calling out his name.
The whole world laid out in front of him.
He had been heavier then, more solid. He didn’t want to use the word “stronger,” though, because he wasn’t sure that was fair, not even to himself. He wanted to believe that everything he had been through in the intervening years—Ross, the Earls—had made him strong enough, but all those days had taken their toll, too, and in all his time on the football field, playing in front of all those people beneath the bright lights, he’d never felt so exposed.
Not the way he did now in this gym.
Where he was now weightless, insubstantial.
Like everyone could see right through him.
* * *
—
HE WAS SWEATING THROUGH HIS NEW SUIT, ruining it, and had been for the last hour.
It had started right after he wrapped up his talk with Amé and the others in his office—after they told him what had happened between Fox Uno and Amé in the desert, and the stranger Marco had met at Earlys who’d been asking about her. It only got worse after he shook hands with Bethel Turner and took his chair to the right of the microphone, and the debate had gotten under way. A table had been set up in front of the chairs, right on the Big Bend Central logo on the center of the gym’s floor, and the moderators were there: Clancy Monroe from The Murfee Daily; Dave Wilcher, who owned the Monument Ranch; and Marion Dunham, assistant principal at Big Bend Central. They’d been taking turns asking questions, and he and Bethel had been taking turns walking over and standing at the microphone, giving their answers. It was a constant process of getting up and down, followed by a few awkward steps, that Chris imagined had been designed only to draw more attention to the limp in his leg. To torture him. Bethel had, in fact, dispensed with that bit of theater altogether. Instead of sitting in his seat, he had hitched one leg up on it, which had a way of making him look taller. Although Bethel wasn’t necessarily a short man to begin with—and Chris was over six feet—it still made Chris feel
like the former Ranger was towering over him. It was a bit of theater in its own way, and it did a good job of showing off the custom boots Bethel had bought at Heritage Boot Company in Austin—a variation of their Badland in Black—which even Chris had to admit looked damn sharp.
Awkward. Sweating and uncomfortable, that’s how Chris felt, and that was a good word for it. The whole debate felt that way, as if the town itself didn’t know what to do or think. There hadn’t been a “real” election, a real choice, in Big Bend County for decades, and it showed.
It wasn’t that it was going that bad. It just wasn’t going all that good. His opening statement had been shaky enough—again, awkward, like his labored steps to the microphone—and it amazed him that for someone who found it easy enough to write a thousand words, he could have so much trouble spitting out a few hundred.
The problem was, Chris couldn’t concentrate. Not on his prepared statement, or the questions that had followed, and not on the circled faces he could barely see on the risers around the gym—most of Murfee, many of whom had watched him out on the fields or in this very gym, all those years past. Mel had been forced to step out when Jack had woken up crying, and despite all the people he knew, he was now alone in her absence.
After all he’d been through, after everything those he’d cared about had suffered, this silly debate and whatever might happen after it was no more important than all those high school games he’d played, or that last pep rally before the Ozona game, which most people here had long forgotten. All those things that had once mattered to him—to Murfee—had been just more empty moments, ephemeral and fleeting.
Impossible to hold on to.
Escaping his hand, like every touchdown ball he’d ever thrown.
* * *
—
BETHEL LOOKED THE PART—tall in his suit and his Stetson. He was easily twenty years older than Chris, and the gray at his temple (just enough, not too much) gave him a certain seriousness. He cleanly answered questions about community policing and use of force and protecting ranches from the influx of illegals across the river. He talked tough about enforcing the laws, and getting more federal funding for the jail and hiring more deputies and getting them better training and strengthening Big Bend County’s relationship with other counties as well as the Texas Department of Public Safety.
This Side of Night Page 23