by Jim Nesbitt
She wrapped her arms around her ex-husband’s neck, pulling him to her so hard that he staggered. She hugged him fiercely, burying her face into his neck, then whispering into his ear.
“You take good care of yourself, fat boy, and come back and see me. Last night was a downpayment. I’ll lie to the law dogs and whoever else comes knockin’ on the door.”
“Likely, it’ll be law. But I want you down the road in case it ain’t. These boys won’t be playin’ footsie and won’t care about hurtin’ you to get to me. I don’t want to have to worry about that.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t think. For once in your damn life, do somethin’ someone tells you to and quit lookin’ it in the mouth for false teeth. Goddam, you’re like a mule from hell.”
“Yeah, but you had fun ridin’ this mule, didn’t you?”
“You know I did. But will you do me just one more favor that has nothin’ to do with bumpin’ uglies? Will you get the hell over to a friend’s house for a few days? At least until we get set up and gone? You can’t tell me you don’t have an ex-boyfriend stashed around here someplace.”
She leaned back in his arms and arched an eyebrow.
“Not funny, Eee Eee. Not even from you. Now get the hell gone. I’ll do the same. I’ve got a girlfriend or two stashed around here someplace.”
She stuck her tongue in his ear and stroked the front of his jeans until she could grip some hardness.
“You take care of ol’ John Henry here. And that girl. I kinda like her now.”
“Her? She takes care of herself and me. That’s our deal. Now, cut it out or I’ll have to drape you across that saddle again.”
He grinned at the memory and scratched a place on his neck where Juanita had gnawed up a hickie. Carla Sue caught the grin and deadpanned disgust.
“Shit, Big ‘Un, we’ll have to get you a rabies shot, now. And somethin’ to wipe off the grin -- you’ll catch a mouthful of flies if you don’t close her up.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Jee-zus. We’re gonna have to get your ashes hauled more often. Makes you real agreeable. What’s the plan -- shoot on down to the border from here? We could make Del Rio in about four hours.”
“Nah, we can’t cowboy it. They’ll be lookin’ for us at all the crossings, even with this new rig. We need to set it up, and to do that we need to lay low for a day or so.”
“What you got in mind?”
“Old boy I know runs a crop dustin’ service down near Mercedes. Dabbles in some contraband now and again. He could get us across.”
“How do you know him?”
“Did some divorce work for him a few years back. Took some snaps that saved some of his money from the stovette he was dumping.”
“Flagrante delicto, I take it.”
“You bet. A lawyer up my way, a deputy sheriff down her way, a few others in between. Bonus for your boy here.”
“Glad to see you love your job. Why don’t we just blow on down to Mercedes? That’s where they make those boots, isn’t it?”
“What are you, some damn snowbird tourista? Hell, yes they make a boot down there -- damn good one, too. But that’ll have to keep until your next kill-a-scumbag tour.”
“Glad to see you got your smartass back. Thought Juanita might’ve snipped it off at the roots. Look, slick, I gotta tell you I don’t like sittin’ round someplace so you can drag some other somebody I don’t know in on our deal. Bad enough we got one of your ex-wives in on it.”
“I got her to get gone.”
“You don’t get it, do you? We got a real small window to hit gettin’ across the border before some law grabs us or one of T-Roy’s special friends decides we’d look better with a shitload of lead in our hides. Now, why don’t we just get the hell down that way and over the river?”
“I get it fine. You want over the river real quiet like so T-Roy’s watchers won’t be alerted, you get a pro to slip you across. You don’t sashay down there and boom across the International Bridge. Might as well send the sumbitch a postcard.”
“Well, who the fuck is this Mercedes guy besides a pilot? Would he fly us across?”
“Maybe. Whatever’s best.”
“That still don’t tell me who he is.”
“Fella named Lefty. Old enough to be your grandad. Flew bombers in the big war, the one you read about in all them history books up in North Dallas. Flies crop dusters on this side of the river, some under-the-radar runs from the other side. Ain’t been caught yet. Doubt he ever will be.”
“You speak highly of him, but hero worship don’t cut much with me when my ass is on the line. Just why in god’s name should I trust this flyboy? He lives down on the border. He flies dope. What keeps him from sellin’ our asses to T-Roy himself?”
“One thing.”
“What?”
Burch tapped a Lucky out of a fresh pack, fired it with his Zippo and closed the lid with a sharp, short snap.
“What, dammit?”
“Wynn Moore -- Lefty’s his brother.”
“Who’s Wynn Moore?”
“Pretty dumb question from a white girl who pulled a Colt on me one time.”
Chapter 23
The doublewide was set on the lee side of a hill, rusty and dented, with the limbs of cottonwoods tangled around all sides but the front, where a dusty yard opened on one side of the dirt and gravel road that struggled up a steep grade after crossing a broad, rocky wash.
From a small, screened-in deck off the front door, you could see the wash -- a thin sheet now, a muddy torrent in spring -- and where the road climbed out of the water, across and over the next hill, back down the long and winding twenty miles to the nearest crossroads that had gall enough to call itself a town.
Twenty yards above the trailer, the gravel ran out and the road became a narrow trail with high cut banks, thigh-deep gullies and shifting soil. It was slow going, but the only way to get to the low-slung opening of a cave with thousands of whirring winged bodies and the strong and constant smell of urine.
Burch first came here with Juanita, just before her daddy died and lost most of the ranch, except for the hundred acres where the trailer sat, about a quarter mile away from the sixth-largest bat cave in the world. In spring, when the bat pups were just learning to fly, it was a wild place to visit.
The young bats were perfecting their flying skills and just learning how to use their sonar. They weren’t very graceful and their avoidance system just wasn’t up to the level of their parents, even in daylight. As often as not, they would slam into a visitor and tumble to the floor, stunned but quick to recover.
Above your head was a brown and pulsing mass of bats, the adults clinging to the pocked rock roof, the pups clinging to the parents. If you got real close, mom or pop would lean toward you and open their mouths in a silent scream, their eyes red and malevolent. You heard no sound, but their sonar was giving them the azimuth and range of your intrusion.
To walk into the cave you had to wear Wellingtons and a respirator, the kind painters use when spraying coats of candy-apple lacquer on a car. Tons of guano spilled across the floor of the cave in huge and shifting dunes that looked like brown sugar and smelled like the lining of every urinal between here and Grand Central Station.
Saying the smell was vile was missing two-thirds of the point of these mounds of bat shit. Crunchy underfoot, the guano dunes made a respirator a complete necessity because the urine fumes were concentrated enough to instantly sear the lungs of anyone who didn’t wear one.
And if that didn’t get the bare-lunged visitor, the rich amount of airborne fungi that thrived in the cave would. Juanita told him of a professor studying the bats one summer: he set up a video camera in the cave, came out and stripped off his boots and respirator, then saw that he forgot to connect a cable to the camera. He ducked back in
without his respirator. He spent the next six weeks in the hospital with inflamed lungs and nasal passages and a fungal infection that nearly killed him.
You wore old clothes when visiting the cave, duds you didn’t care about because the fumes would penetrate every fiber and refuse to come out after repeated washings. You washed yourself with strong lye soap and shampooed your hair two or three times to get out the smell.
Juanita did all this once or twice a week. Not to see the bats. They were an interesting sideshow that always held her attention. But her main interest was in the flesh-eating beetles that prowled through the brown piles of guano, swarming over the halt and the lame that fell from the ceilings.
She brought road kill to the cave -- squirrels, armadillos, snakes, even the occasional cow or horse carcass left by a rancher who lost some stock and knew of her artistic needs. She put the carcasses in a small pen with a locked top. There, the beetles would strip flesh from bone, leaving only gristle and the need to use a wire brush and some Clorox.
Then she worked the magic that made her a minor celebrity -- wiring snake vertebrae to the bones of an armadillo tail, making a chair out of the leg bones of a deer and a cow, making a lamp from the skull of a horse and the thigh bone of a steer.
Folk art, she called it. Gruesome bullshit was his call. But then again, she started this routine after she left him. So it wasn’t his problem and damn little of his business. And like somebody once said, everybody has to have a gimmick. Trust Juanita to find a truly twisted one.
“Sweet Jesus, Big `Un, she drags those carcasses in here?”
“You bet. Right to that pen over there.”
“Man, whoever said this was fun?”
“She does it for art and profit, not fun. You saw the price tags.”
“If she can get that kind of money for bones, imagine what she could do selling desert up around Phoenix. You ought to marry her again and set her on the right path.”
“I don’t think I can keep the pace anymore.”
“She says different. She says you wore her out.”
“She’s kind.”
“You know better.”
They were standing near the entrance, pulling on rubber Wellingtons. A tall white-plastic bucket held a tangle of respirators; the college boys forgot to bring them back to the trailer before they left. There was rain water in the bottom of the bucket. Burch was surprised some night critters hadn’t scooted off in the brush with such bounty.
Evening was coming on. Earlier that day, Burch drove the pickup to the nearest country store with a pay phone out front. He shot a call to Juanita’s. No answer. Good. He contacted Lefty Moore.
Moore would pick them up the next night, out at a small dirt strip near Segovia, less than an hour south of where they were. An hour or so later, and they’d set down at another dirt strip near Ebanito on the Mex side of the line. Lefty kept a rickety sedan locked inside a battered shed down there for those times when he wanted to hell around some border bars and brothels.
They’d fly down in Lefty’s Maule, a yowling, high-winged plane built in Moultrie, Georgia, and able to leap out of barns and shoeboxes and take to the air in the shortest of takeoff distances. It was the perfect plane for hedge-hopping and border dodging.
Ten grand gave them the ride and the car. Burch liked the fact he was setting all this up with money Carla Sue had siphoned from Ross and T-Roy. Clear skies were in the forecast. And a full moon. Which was good and bad.
On his way back, Burch kept doubling back on his track, looking for tails. He drove forty miles out of his way to check the roads on the other side of the cave and the trailer. After parking the pickup, he walked through the front door and scooted out the back of the doublewide, scooping up the submachine gun with one hand, tucking a spare clip in his belt with the other.
He crept through the brush until he topped the ridge where he could cross the trail without being seen from the road or the hill on the other side of the wash. Then he circled back to a high point in the brush where he could see the road, the trail, the cave and the roof of the doublewide. He sat there most of the afternoon, sweating in the shade, watching for something he hoped wouldn’t come.
It didn’t.
Carla Sue stayed inside, fighting the silent, searing heat that was making her stir-crazy, cleaning the two semi-autos, the revolver and a Remington pump she found propped next to the stove. The solvent made her dizzy. Standing with her nose against a window screen, breathing hot air, didn’t help.
As the sun went down, a grit-laced breeze came up -- better than still heat but not by much. Burch came back to the trailer. She needed to take a walk. The bats were beginning to stir.
They ducked out the back, picking their way through the brush the same way Burch did alone a few hours earlier.
“Damn, I’m glad to get out of that doublewide. Sweet Jesus, I don’t see how anybody could stand to live in one of those things, Big ‘Un. I mean to tell you, that gun solvent gave me visions of being swole up and havin’ a bunch of brats hanging on me all day.”
“Some hallucination. I’d be worried about the brats -- havin’ some pistol packer for a mama. Might shoot ‘em dead for dumpin’ in their diapers.”
“Right.”
She punched his shoulder, then shot him one of her cold looks with those startled blue eyes.
“You weren’t sleepin’ out there this afternoon? Nothin’s out there, right?”
“Just jackrabbits and thin cattle. Bats back this way.”
“You’re sure.”
“Unless they chopper in here or appear out of thin air, we’re all by our lonesome out here.”
“Good to hear. I still don’t like this.”
“Just another day, slick.”
He led her up over the ridgeline. She looked back once, then shrugged her shoulders and focused on his beefy frame, moving fast in the gathering darkness despite the hitch in his gait.
Across the wash, hidden in brush on the opposite ridge, a man in a mesh balaclava swept the trailer with a Starscope. Behind him, around the bend in rocky ranch track through the scrub brush, a sheriff’s department Bronco pulled out from the place where it was kept hidden during the day’s searing heat -- a dirt trail to a back range that was choked with thorny undergrowth and blocked by a rusty gate and a cattle guard.
A small straw-haired man with a weightlifter’s build and a CAR-15 strapped across his chest got out of the Bronco and wrapped an earth-colored mesh scarf around his face and hair, tucking its ends into a gray-black battle tunic. He walked up to the man with the Starscope.
“What you got, Ray-boy? Any movement?”
A sharp, short hiss from the balaclava.
“Tole you not to call me Ray-boy, ‘member asshole?”
“We still sensitive, are we? Well, pardon me all to hell and back, motherfucker.”
It didn’t take anything for the blood to get up and the words to get sharp between Stevie Mack Lloyd and Ray McCrary. They grew up on ranches twelve miles apart, were the only friends each other’d had as children and challenged each other each and every day they crossed paths -- from marbles and football to fistfights, beer chugging and women.
When Stevie Mack caught Ray reaching up the skirt of his girlfriend in a crowded ice house in Austin, he broke a full pitcher of Shiner bock across his best friend’s skull. When Stevie Mack dealt himself a third ace during a game of Mexican stud held in the back of Steinholtz’s general store, Ray declared his displeasure at his friend’s attempt to deal seconds by yanking his chair out from underneath him and smashing it across his back.
Now they were deputies, bucking for rank, racing each other through SWAT training, beating on each other in sparring sessions monitored warily by a Korean karate master named Park Sung Rhee, maintaining a running argument whether they were on stakeout or in roll call.
Ray
could feel Stevie Mack’s tension, his rising anger at the quick shot and his refusal to answer the question. He let the silence build, sweeping the trailer and the ridgeline opposite with the Starscope. He knew Stevie Mack was boiling and knew he would rather eat a fresh cow patty than ask him again. He swept the Starscope again, then put it down and lifted the skirt of the balaclava to spit out a thick stream of Red Man.
“Nada.”
“How you know they ain’t left?”
“One pickup. Right there. One way out. This way.”
“They could walk out?”
“Why? They ain’t been spooked.”
“Hell, you’re so damn fiddle-fucked you could scare ‘em off and never know it. You know you can’t hunt deer worth a shit. Why the sergeant let you tag along on this lookout all day is bee-yond me.”
“Meanin’ you could do it alone.”
“One riot, one Ranger.”
“One fuckoff, one fuckup, more like it.”
A dust-covered LTD rolled up slowly and fell in line behind the Bronco. Both vehicles sat about 150 yards from the bend in the track and a line-of-sight view of the trailer.
Three men got out of the LTD -- two in suits, one in uniform. The bright moonlight made the track at their feet look like pressed oatmeal, gray and clumped with lumps of rock. The light made dark colors black, light colors gray and bright colors a ghostly, did-I-see-that white.
A woman sat handcuffed in the back of the LTD. Half of her face was in shadow. Moonlight caught an unruly wave of black curls and a set jawline that told everyone that she was pissed off at most of the whole world.
“These are the Houston boys. They want to do this soft. Brought the man’s wife along to sweet talk him. She don’t look like she will but we’ll bring her along. Gag her. We’ll use that deer track above where the track crosses that wash. Stevie Mack, you take the point.”