Griffin's Story

by Steven Gould

  He stared at me, his brow wrinkled. “Kid, something really bad happened to you and yours but all I really know is that you’re in trouble. I meet people in trouble all the time. They’re undocumented workers, crossing. I’m not here to judge them, either. What Consuelo and I do is try and keep them from dying. Sometimes it’s just a little water, sometimes it’s major medical evac. But we don’t judge and we don’t involve the INS unless we have to.

  “I don’t know what’s best for you. I don’t know enough about what happened or why. You’re not dying—I don’t have to involve the county and the police. Don’t know if the cops would just take you back someplace where the people who did this could get at you again or if they even would want to get at you. So, I’m askin’ and I mean it: Should I tell the police about you?”

  I shook my head side to side, hard, and the scab on my neck tore and stung.

  “Well okay, then. I won’t.” Sam started to get up.

  Despite my best intentions, I said, “Why do you do this, helping the illegals, I mean?”

  “Someone’s gotta. I’ve been doing it for six years, since I found three dead men on the edge of my property. Consuelo, she lost her husband and teenage son east of here. Their coyote got them halfway across the worst of it and demanded more money before letting them into the truck, still out in the middle of nowhere. She got the story from a woman who didn’t have to walk—who didn’t die in the basin.”

  I licked my lips. “She had the cash?”

  “She offered a different form of payment.”

  I looked at him, puzzled.

  Sam said, “God, you’re young. You talk like you’re older so I keep forgetting. She offered sex for passage.”

  I felt my ears get hot.

  “How old are you, kid? Eleven, twelve?”

  “I’m nine.”

  Sam’s jaw dropped.

  “I’ll be ten next month,” I added.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I should talk to the police.”

  “You promised!”

  “No, I didn’t exactly promise.” He shook his head. “But I said I wouldn’t. I won’t, I guess.” He stood. “Consuelo! ¡Debemos ir!” He opened the passenger door on the truck. “You ride here. Consuelo is going to ride in the back and tend to Pablo.”

  “Can’t I wait here?”

  “Not coming back here. After we get Pablo into an ambulance, I’m heading back to my place.” He gestured toward the lowering sun. “Done for the day.”

  It took me almost as much time to get into the truck as it did for Consuelo and Sam to move Pablo and the stretcher into the back of the pickup, fold the tarp, and stow the camp chairs and ice chest.

  He drove pretty slow, because the road—well, calling it a road was reaching. Sometimes it disappeared completely and it felt like he was just driving blindly across the desert, but then the twin ruts would reappear. Other places, going up a grade or down, water had carved deeply into the ruts, and no matter how slowly he drove I was thrown hard against the seatbelt or bounced off the door.

  I looked around and saw Consuelo braced in the corner by the cab, shaded by her umbrella. The stretcher and Pablo were secured with straps but Consuelo kept one hand on his forehead, bracing his neck, I guess.

  After a half hour we topped a rise and stopped the truck. Sam took a radio mike off its bracket and switched the unit on. “We don’t get into range until here.” He depressed the transmit button. “Tom—it’s Sam Coulton. Got a Hispanic male, dehydrated, some trauma. Got beaten and robbed after crossing south of Bankhead Springs. Was two days without water.”

  The voice that answered was fuzzed with static, barely recognizable. “You need air evac?”

  Sam answered, “Nah. He was conscious when I found him. I’ve got him on IV fluids and we’re less than fifteen miles from Old Eighty. I can meet the ambulance at the Texaco near Desert Rose Ranch Road in about thirty minutes.”

  “I’ll call the sheriff’s office. Is he legal?”

  “Doubt it. Sheriff for the assault and the INS, if they want, but they might as well send someone to just meet the ambulance at Regional in El Centro.”

  “Okay—they’ll probably dispatch a unit to meet you at the Texaco. Anything else?”

  “Nah. Gotta get going if I’m gonna meet the ambulance. Thanks loads. Love to Maribel.”

  He hung the mike back on the dash and concentrated on his driving. I didn’t see how he expected to make fifteen miles in thirty minutes. We were doing much less than ten miles an hour because of the ruts and rocks, but we reached the plain below after five more uncomfortable minutes and turned onto a dirt road that was a highway by comparison. Sam sped up to fifty and we were up to the motorway in fifteen minutes.

  “Are those pajamas?” he asked.

  I was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, what I normally slept in. “Uh, yeah.”

  “So you were in bed? When it happened?”

  I turned away and looked out the window. It was less than a half mile down the road to a petrol station. To my back, he said, “Okay. I won’t press but you want to avoid the cops, make yourself scarce while I deal with the deputy, okay?” He pulled into the shade of the pump awning and began rooting under the seat. After a moment he came up with one plastic flip-flop but he had to get out of the car and crouch down before he finally snaked its mate out from under. He took a couple of dollars out of his wallet and handed them and the flip-flops to me. “Go wash up, then get yourself a soda, okay? Until we’re done with the EMS.”

  I was embarrassed. “Uh, thanks so much. I really—”

  “Thank me later. Deputy’s coming.” He jerked his chin and I saw a distant car way down the road. The roof glittered and I could believe it was a police car.

  I dropped the flip-flops onto the tarmac and put my feet in them. They were way too big but I shuffled my way into the store and, avoiding the eyes of the woman at the counter, I turned away from the counter to the loo.

  The men’s bathroom stank and I looked horrible in the mirror. My hair was matted and there were circles under my eyes. When I twisted around, painfully, the lower edge of my T-shirt was stained brown with a mixture of dirt and dried blood. Fortunately, the dirt made it look more like a particularly reddish mud rather than blood, otherwise, I suspect the clerk would’ve said something—or even called 911.

  I tried rinsing the blood out in the sink but it spread the stain over more of the shirt. I tried the soap dispenser but it was empty, and much as I needed to, I couldn’t make myself put the shirt back on. It was wet and filthy and even though there was gauze and tape over the gouge in my side, I didn’t want the thing near me.

  I dropped it on the edge of the sink and jumped.

  I thought it was a very sloppy jump at first—every drawer was out and dumped and the bed mattress flipped over and across the springs. Clothes on hangers were dumped on the floor of the closet. But they were still, not flying through the air. Someone else had caused the mess. I froze, listening.

  I wanted to hear something. I wanted to hear my father talking to Mum. The silence was oppressive, weighing down on me like a hot day. Then there was a click and a thud and a whirring sound and my heart beat like a hammer.

  Oh. It was the AC cycling on.

  I looked out into the hall. More things littered the floors—books, dishes. I began noticing the black powder, almost everywhere. Fingerprinting powder. There were holes in the walls, large, jagged, the edges sticking out, like something had been pulled from the room.

  There was masking tape on the floor in the living room, just like on TV, two taped outlines on the floor. And dried blood.

  I turned away—flinched away, really. Glancing out glass panes beside the door I saw yellow plastic ribbon stretched across the top of the stairway printed with CRIME SCENE: DO NOT ENTER.

  A police car sat at the curb, too, windows down. I couldn’t see if anyone was in the driver’s seat but there was a crackle after a bit and the sound of someone talking, s
cratchy, like a radio.

  Shite.

  I backed up from the doorway, then walked quickly back to my bedroom, the tape on my hip tugging painfully. I picked up a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, underwear, my track shoes, and socks. They’d swept most of the books from my bookshelf, but I found my passport and my hoard, three and a half months’ allowance, where I’d left them, stuffed between Treasure Island and Little Big on the bottom shelf.

  I turned to the wall for my sketches, but they were gone. They weren’t on the floor, either.

  There was a sound from the front, like steps on the stair, and I clutched my things to my chest and jumped.

  I was back in the Empty Quarter, by the paintball-splattered boulder, sand and dried grass swirling around me. I heard buzzing, flies returning to the dried blood where it had pooled on the ground. I thought about the bandits who’d attacked Pablo but there didn’t seem to be anybody around. I could see footsteps where Sam and Consuelo had carried me away.

  I climbed on a rock to change into the clean clothes, easing the pants over the bandages on my hip and brushing the sand off my feet to put on the socks and shoes. It took a moment to visualize the petrol station’s bathroom enough to jump back to it. It was the memory of the smell that finally did it. I stuffed the bloody clothes into the rubbish bin, beneath the used paper towels.

  When I exited, there was a guy waiting who glared at me. “Shook the door hard enough. What’s the matter, couldn’t get it open? Is that why you took so fucking long?” He shouldered past me into the bathroom without acknowledging my faint, embarrassed “Sorry.”

  The ambulance and the police were outside. The medical chaps were just easing Pablo off the canvas stretcher and onto the fancy ambulance gurney. Consuelo was watching the paramedics while Sam was just outside, by the store door, talking with a uniformed deputy.

  I went back to the refrigerated cabinets and picked out a large bottle of Gatorade, then got some potato crisps. American chips. That’s what I miss from England—all the different flavors of crisps. Roast beef and horseradish was my fave.

  I paid, using my money, and went out front, away from Sam and the deputy where there was a bench in the shade of the overhang. The Gatorade was good but the crisps were incredible, like my body was craving the salt. I almost went in and bought another bag, but though my mouth said yes my stomach said no. I settled back and sipped from the bottle.

  The deputy went back to his vehicle and brought back a map. Sam and he moved up the porch to spread it across the top of a rubbish can. Sam pointed out some specific location for him and I heard him say, “ … said there were three men. They spoke Spanish to him and each other. Could be a rival coyote gang—I’ve seen that happen.”

  “You see any vehicles?”

  Sam shook his head. “Only dust. You know, kicked up, but miles away. Normal. Nothing close enough to ID. And I was lookin’, too. Didn’t want to run into the assholes who did for Pablo.”

  “Hmm.” The deputy tilted back his hat and asked, “You run into anybody out there who wasn’t in a vehicle? Someone who just needed a little more water but kept walkin’?”

  Sam laughed. “Not today, Ken. The ones who do it right cross at night and hole up during the heat of the day. They may have seen me and Consuelo. I usually don’t see ’em at all unless they’re in a bad way.” He jerked his chin toward the ambulance.

  “Okay, then. You going back there?”

  “Not today. Goin’ home.”

  “Hmmm. Okay. I’ll put the word out to the state police and the border patrol. You run across anything suspicious, let us know, right?”

  “Right.”

  They shook hands and the deputy went back to his car and began talking on the radio.

  Sam glanced at me and started to go into the store then stopped. “Huh. There you are. Where’d you get those clothes?”

  I opened my mouth to tell him, but what could I say? Really?

  “I didn’t nick em.” I stood up and handed him the flip-flops and the two dollars he’d given me earlier. As he took them I dropped back onto the bench, hard, surprised. My knees had given out and it seemed the gas pumps were swaying in the wind. “Whoa.”

  “Dizzy, eh?” He looked at me a moment longer. “Gonna gas up. Don’t really need it but it’ll give the deputy time to move off. You just sit here, right? Wish I—oh, well. Just sit. Rest. You feel faint, put your head between your knees.”

  I nodded.

  He went back to the truck. They’d just finished putting Pablo in the back of the ambulance and Sam exchanged a few words with the paramedic before they closed up and drove off down the highway, lights flashing but no siren. I closed my eyes for a few seconds—I thought—then the truck was there, right in front of me.

  “Why don’t you lie down in back, Griff?”

  I wondered if I should go with them at all, but I didn’t know what else to do. The thought of lying down was good, really good. I nodded and he helped me climb over the tailgate and drop onto the canvas stretcher. He gave me a folded blanket to use as a pillow. “We’re headed west—cab should shade you, takes about forty-five minutes, all right?”

  “All right,” I said.

  He tucked the Gatorade between my arm and my side. I thought about drinking again, but it was too much effort.

  I don’t even remember him pulling out of the petrol station.

  THREE

  Burning Bridges

  Consuelo lived with Sam, but it was a strange relationship, almost as if she was his girl-of-all-work and he was her little boy. I mean, she cleaned and cooked and did laundry. But she also scolded him constantly, long bursts of rapid-fire Spanish to which he almost always answered, “¡Claro que sí!” At first I thought they were married, but she had her own little bedroom in the back with a wall of religious icons, saints, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus.

  They stayed at home the day after they’d found me but for the next four days after that, they loaded the truck up with the stretcher and medical supplies and bottled water and drove out.

  Consuelo would make me a lunch and show it to me before leaving. “Ahi te deje listo to lonche.” Then she would say, “Descanza y bebe mucha agua.” And she would mime drinking from a bottle.

  And I would say, “¡Claro que sí!”

  And Sam would laugh and she would start scolding him again.

  I did rest and drank mucha water the first day. And slept. It was very easy to sleep. I was tired but thinking about anything—well, about Mum and Dad—exhausted me. It was cry or sleep and sometimes both.

  The second day I walked around outside. It was an old adobe house in the middle of the desert, with weathered outbuildings for livestock and horses but they were long gone. The only remotely domesticated animals on the property were a few feral cats.

  “They keep having kittens but the coyotes keep their population down,” Sam’d told me. “My dad sold off most of the land in the fifties, when he went from ranching to running the co-op in town, but it’s been in the family since before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Wouldn’t be if they hadn’t married Anglos into the family, but that way the land grant stuck. Didn’t hurt that nobody really wanted this desert crap.”

  He said there were neighbors about a mile away, but nobody closer. “Water’s iffy. I’ve got a spring but most places around here you have to drill six hundred feet to get water.”

  I spent most of the time outside by the concrete tank that captured the spring. The runoff poured over a little notch in the edge and ran down into a gulley—I guess it would be called an arroyo. The little brook didn’t last long before it sank into the sandy bottom, but this wet section of the arroyo was a riot of green. Three large cottonwoods shaded the tank for most of the day and if I sat still I could count on seeing birds, jackrabbits, deer, and once Sam pointed at a track in the wet sand and said, “Desert bighorn. Very rare.”

  The third day I jumped to Balboa Park, on the southern edge near the aerospace museum, and crossed I-5 on the
Park Boulevard bridge to get to downtown and the public library on E street. It was a lot cooler in the city—near the ocean and all that—but I still had to rest often.

  Outside the library, from the plastic window of a newspaper vending machine, my face stared at me, like they’d put me in that metal box.

  BOY STILL MISSING AFTER SUSPECTED DRUG SLAYING.

  Drug slaying? I reached into my pocket to pull out quarters to buy the paper but it suddenly felt like every person on the street was staring at me. Instead I turned and entered the library, walked back to the men’s loo, and locked myself in a stall.

  Drug slaying? That didn’t make any sense.

  Thirty minutes later I peeked out the bathroom door but there wasn’t the swarm of police I expected. No one seemed interested in me at all so I worked my way back to periodicals and snagged the Union Tribune, then found a chair facing the corner. They’d used a picture from Mum’s desk that she took at the zoo three months earlier.

  Police still seek missing nine-year-old Griffin O’Conner (see photo) after finding both of his parents murdered in their Texas Street apartment Thursday night. DNA tests of blood found on the site are believed to be the boy’s and he is feared dead, but there has been no sign of the boy dead or alive since he was last seen at his karate class Thursday afternoon. Persons with information are urged to contact the police or Crime Stoppers at (888) 580-TIPS.

  Large quantities of cocaine found on the premises lead the police to believe that Robert and Hannah O’Conner, UK citizens, were involved in the smuggling and sale of drugs, and that the slaying was either the work of a rival gang or a drug deal gone bad.

  Utter rubbish. Mum didn’t even like it when Dad had more than one pint at a pub because she’d had alcoholics in her family. Why on earth would the police think—well, ’cause they found the cocaine. And the cocaine wasn’t there before, right?

  I felt this moment of doubt, a moment of world-twisting alienation, then shook my head. If there was cocaine in the apartment, then someone brought it with him, and no matter how many times you see that sort of thing on TV, I doubted it was the police. So it was the murderers, but why?