by Dan Darling
“Lights? Filters?” She stood on her tiptoes, examining the packs in the rack that hung from the ceiling.
“Give me whatever’s easiest for you to reach,” I said.
She took a pack out, lay it on the counter, and punched her fingers at the register. “I wish I had your height advantage. It’s hard being short.”
“My height is a mixed blessing.”
Outside, I walked to the edge of the forest behind the station and lit up. I indulged in some light coughing. Birds tweeted nearby and grey squirrels scampered among the twigs and pine cones and scrambled their clawed feet up the trees. I closed my eyes, held the smoke in my lungs, and felt the pocket of heat hover inside me. I pretended that the birds were not birds at all and that the squirrels were not squirrels at all. I pretended they were animals who by their very nature, by some unknown innate complexity woven into them, were my friends. I envisioned a forest full of them. When I opened my eyes and blew the smoke from between my lips, the world was still the world and the squirrels remained simple squirrels, but I felt different.
On my way back to my truck, pain stabbed me in the foot. I grabbed the pay phone to steady myself and looked at the bottom of my shoe. I pulled a goat head from my sole, the thorny nutlet of devil’s weed, a European species that had infested the Southwest during colonial times. The nuts resembled goat’s heads with two upturned thorns and sat on the ground like caltrops, ready to ambush any living thing that stepped on them. The one in my shoe was abnormally large and nasty.
A circus flyer clung to the side of the pay phone, the same outfit I’d been seeing signs for since the birds died. It read “Have a Galloping Good Time at the Gamut Circus,” and featured a robust normal on a robust horse. This circus had some impressive poster hanging operation. In another age, I would’ve been consigned to a circus, a freak in a cage for every village bumpkin to pay a nickel to gawk at. I wondered if my new blood-sucking friends would get as sweet on circus abnormals as they had on me.
I ran the goat head thorn between my fingers and glowered at the circus poster. The route of Operation Velvet Ant glowed in my memory; it trailed right by where the circus would set up. A scheme was forming in my belly, in that deep place where evil breeds.
I plugged some silver into the machine and dialed Tony.
“Digame,” he said. Spanish. I tried not to let it throw me off.
“We need to meet. I hit the jackpot.”
“What kind of prize money are we talking?”
“The whole pot. I got exactly what you asked me to.”
“That was fast.” His voice tightened. “Too fast.”
“I’m in up to my neck,” I said. “John White has a special obsession for owning my life.”
“You didn’t meet him, did you?”
“I’m done gossiping on the phone. Where and when.”
“1421 Bridge Street. It’s a doctor’s office. No bugs. Two hours.” The phone went dead.
I swaddled the goat head in my wallet and went back into the gas station.
The girl turned from restocking candy bars. “You’re back.”
I pointed to a rack of prepaid phones. “Those work right away?”
“You give me nineteen ninety-five plus tax and you’re good to go.”
I paid her. She handed me the phone. I ripped it open right on the counter and pushed the power button. She showed me how to call a number and enter an activation code. She tossed my garbage in a bin and made sure I remembered my receipt on my way out. I wanted to high-five her. I had a plan.
I called the zoo and got through to Abbey.
“I want to get further into your personal debt,” I said.
“Interest on my debt compounds daily. What do you need?”
“Something shady.”
“Does it have to do with orange dust?”
“Assuredly,” I said.
“Will it get me another meeting with that bat-devil?”
“It’s related.”
“I can’t stop thinking about him. I want to be his best friend.”
“Do this thing for me.”
“Give me the details.”
“I need you to follow a guy. Covertly. Tell me where he goes. I’ll trail you by a few blocks. This is part of unraveling the web I’m tangled up in.”
She let the line sit in silence for a few seconds. The birds chirped. The squirrels scrabbled and squeaked at each other. A new world sat lurking behind it all, ready to burst forth and obliterate the reality that we humans had become so comfortable with.
“I’ve never followed anyone. You want me to do this now?” she asked.
“I’ll need you to meet me in about two hours,” I said.
“I’ll be there in an hour and forty-five.”
I took it easy on the drive back to the city, following the route along the western foot of the mountains and then Alameda all the way to the river and across. I drove south on Coors Boulevard, past the interstate and into the winding old neighborhoods straddling the river where I’d grown up. The streets huddled with crumbling houses shouldering into each other for space. Entire blocks of dirt lots lay overgrown with desert thorns and spawning the frames of rusted-out cars. I took the back streets to subject myself to poverty and hopelessness. I let the dilapidated neighborhoods tell me the story I wanted to hear of a world full of tragedy, waste, and despair.
The doctor’s office told part of that story. It sat a quarter mile east of the river, couched between a bail bondsman’s office and a check-cashing place, behind a McDonald’s where the great white clown sat laughing over his piles of cash. I walked into the doctor’s lobby and a dozen senior citizens looked at me like I was the angel of death come to herd them across the barrier between worlds. Most of them dangled tarnished crucifixes around their wrinkled brown necks, and a few of the men wore the vaquero hats from older, simpler times. I loomed over the plump receptionist in pink scrubs and a nametag that read Gabriela. She scurried around the counter and ushered me into a room with a stool on wheels, an examination bed, and jars of tongue depressors, cotton balls, and gauze. I sat on the bed. The paper crinkled under me. I tried not to think of all the visits I’d made to similar poor people doctors during my childhood. I tried not to remember the way my father would sit and stare at the floor as the doctor recorded my height, drew my blood, held his tape measure up to my lengthening bones. Instead, I focused on the poster of the cute white kitten and the adorable brown puppy dog getting along so well despite their racial differences.
I was on the verge of tearing the poster down and crushing it into a cosmic singularity between my palms when Tony opened the door and slipped silently into the room. He wore his usual gumshoe get up, but his pants held some creases and his shirt was damp and rumpled.
“You look like hell,” I said.
“I haven’t slept since Birdmageddon.”
“Being a geriatrician and private dick must take it out of a guy.”
“This is the practice of an ally.” He fell atop the rolling stool with the posture of a stunted noodle and drooped his head. “We hold meetings here.” He pointed to the ceiling and walls. “Nobody bugs a doctor’s office.” He laced his fingers together with his elbows on his knees and tilted his head up at me. “Now spill.”
I’d been calculating how much to tell him, and in the end decided to open the floodgates. I told him about the wheels of pain, the torture chairs, the white-supremacist training the chupacabras were undergoing. I saved Operation Velvet Ant for last. When I was done, Tony looked like he’d been through a harrowing ordeal. I felt bad for him, but I tried not to let it cloud my judgment.
“This is―I don’t have words. God help us.”
“God’s keeping out of this one. It’s up to us humans.”
He took his fedora off and held it in his hands. His hair was limp and tired. “Just to make sure I’m getting this: they’re going to unleash their whole army of racist chupacabras on the southern border.”
“Th
ey’re like heat-seeking missiles, only they’re alive and they want to suck your blood. I’ve seen them in action.”
He ran his fingers through a few handfuls of hair and sweat before putting his hat back on. “I’ve gotta make some calls.”
“This border crossing blitz, it’s a real thing?”
Tony hesitated.
“What else do I have to do? You can trust me.”
He shrugged. “I guess I can. It was a real thing. Looks like we better call it off unless we want the desert to turn into a horror movie.”
“Don’t call it off,” I said.
“Por dios, why wouldn’t we?”
“I have a plan.”
“No plan can change this equation. The odds are stacked against us. The only thing we had on our side was surprise.”
“That’s exactly right,” I said. “And you still have it. They don’t know that you know about Operation Velvet Ant. I have a way to blow this whole thing up, but good.”
“It can’t hurt to hear you out, I suppose,” he muttered.
“They’re sending everything south in a huge convoy. I say, we ambush it.”
“We’re not a militia,” Tony said. “They’d massacre us. Plus, most of the Good Friends are peace types.”
“You don’t ambush them with weapons.” I pulled the thorn from my wallet and held it up between my fingers. “You attack them with this.”
“A goat head.”
“Make a bunch of these only ten times as big and forged in iron. I’ll send you a signal when the convoy’s ready to leave. You dump these in the road right in front of it, and you’ll cripple the whole thing. Do it when they’re moving fast, and you’ll pile their parade into a junk heap. By the time they recover, the Good Friends should be able to get all the migrants safely into the hiding.”
“That’s a hell of a messy solution,” he said. “In a pile up, some of those monsters will break loose.”
“It’ll get everything out in the open.”
“You want to use a disaster to avert a disaster.”
“You can have one big, concentrated disaster that takes these chupacabras from behind closed doors and shows them to the world, or you can continue to have a series of small disasters. And they’ll only get worse.”
“I’m beginning to see things your way.”
I handed him a sketch I’d made of the route Velvet Ant’s caravan would take through Albuquerque. I drew an X on I-25 in the southern fringes of the city. “That’s the spot. Need me to draw up schematics for your metal workers?”
He waved his hand, still studying the caravan route. “No need. I get the idea.” He straightened up and stuck out his hand. “We’ll get started right away. I’ll pass your plan on to my people; I’m guessing they’ll go for it once they’ve heard about everything you’ve seen. I gotta say: you’ve surpassed my expectations.”
I shook his hand as if we’d made a pact. It was another small lie.
I waited in my truck until he’d left the parking lot. He made a left turn and drove down Bridge Street. Abbey’s little Volkswagen beetle pulled out behind him. I waited for them to vanish before I followed. I held the cell phone in one hand and steered with the other. The device was minuscule. When landlines ceased to exist, I’d be stuck in a world of instruments too tiny for my fingers to operate. Every step of progress moved the world further away from my touch.
The phone lit up after a block or two east.
“Take I-25 south,” Abbey said once I’d answered.
“Gotcha,” I said.
She hung up.
Once on I-25, I drove past the Gibson exit and the special ramps they’d made to connect the Albuquerque Sunport―the cute name someone had come up with to get tourists to swoon over our airport.
The phone rang again.
“Get off at Rio Bravo,” she said.
I pulled off and found Abbey’s car parked on the shoulder before the stoplight. I drove up behind her and got out. A driver saw me and got so distracted he had to slam on his brakes to keep from running the red light. Rubber screamed in agony.
“You lost him,” I said.
She smiled. “You don’t know it, but we’re still following him.”
I looked around. All I saw was New Mexican dirt, asphalt, and a few hayseeds with drooping jaws. “Did you put a tracking device on his car?”
She grinned bigger. “Better. I know where he’s going.”
“Educate me,” I said.
“I looked over his car in the parking lot while you two were inside. His tire treads had feathers in them. A few loose ones were stuck up in his undercarriage.”
“Great,” I said. “More birds.”
“These feathers were unusual.” She held up a tuft of white and gray fluff. I inspected it and got nowhere. “Ostrich feathers.”
“Where do you drive to get ostrich feathers in your tires?”
She held up a palm-sized machine that looked like a cross between a computer and a cell phone. “I ran it through my smart phone. There are five ostrich ranches in the state of New Mexico. Four are pretty far away. One is about twenty miles south of Albuquerque.” She pushed the screen of her computer-phone up toward my face. It showed me a route highlighted in pink that led from Albuquerque to a patch of desert east of the river. “All you have to do is follow this map. Want to borrow it?”
I logged the thing into my knowledge of the cities, rivers, valleys, and mountains. “Got it.”
“Are you going there now?”
“Yep,” I said. “Alone.”
“I didn’t ask to go with you.” Her face was a brick. I’d never seen it like that before.
“You’re done with this. I’m glad―and jealous.”
She touched me on the arm. “Be careful, friend.”
I left my truck in the weeds. Barbed wire stretched between rough wooden posts spaced regularly as far as the eye could see, fencing in acres upon acres of wiry grasses, cacti, low trees, and tough shrub. I stepped over it and crept through the jagged desert terrain. Between watching for rattlesnakes and steering around prickly pear, I kept my eyes peeled for livestock. Finally, a herd appeared a few hundred feet to my left, seven feet tall and erect on two feet, marching, their knees high in the air. They snaked their long necks to nip at the soil and then sent them skyward to survey the horizon. Their bodies were puffs of black and dark brown with white tail feathers. It was an ostrich ranch, alright. They’d sprung up in New Mexico and West Texas to feed the baby boomers, who lusted for lean meat.
Eventually, I came upon the ranch house. I moved closer and crouched behind a squat cypress. The house was appropriately sprawling, with decks that spanned the entire west and south walls. Pens and barns stood to the south within a perimeter of corrals, some empty, others housing the birds with their puzzled faces and jerking necks. Crazy Patty rode a monstrous horse by the side of the road. She wore a Stetson weathered by sun and dust and wind, cowboy boots with steel-barbed stirrups, leather chaps shiny from wear, and a white button up shirt. Her wheat hair hung in coarse spirals around her shoulders and she squinted through crow’s feet as hard and resolute as any gunslinger. She and Tony in his gumshoe suit and fedora looked like movie extras who’d ended up on the wrong set together.
I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I had no lip reading skills. But Tony passed over the map I’d given him, and I could only assume he was relating my plan. Tony’s mouth moved and his hands flapped around. The woman held the map and said nothing. Her face looked carved from bare rock.
A pickup appeared on a road that wound around the back of the ranch house. It jerked to a halt near Tony and the woman. A crew of half a dozen brown-skinned guys in vaquero hats and work boots leapt down from the bed, and another disembarked from driver’s seat. A little white guy in a baseball cap and knock-off aviators emerged from the passenger’s side door. It took me a minute to recognize that the clean-shaven face which had worn a mustache for twenty years belonged to Spartacus Rex, my bes
t friend. The skin across his upper lip was pale and soft. He looked twice as handsome without it. He also looked ten years older.
The sun set behind me. A front of clouds eased in from the east. They’d block the stars and make it a good night for sneaking around. I backpedaled into the brush and leaned against the trunk of an elm that bore the black jag of a lightning strike. A tree was like a person. Its wounds never fully healed.
After dark, I made my way around the ranch house. An orchestra of crickets fell away under my feet and rose again behind me. I snapped twigs and crunched sand despite my best efforts to be silent. The earth dropped in a gentle slope to a bunkhouse that sat partially hidden in a grove of cottonwoods. I moved among them like a rogue trunk emancipated from roots and boughs. An outhouse stood a dozen paces down slope from the bunkhouse. I stood in the night shadows, prepared to ambush a man I’d once called brother. If I’d had a six-gun in each fist, we would have been reenacting the quintessential New Mexican bromance.
A few brown men emerged from the bunkhouse and made their delicate journeys to and from the outhouse. Rex came out after all the lights had vanished from the bunkhouse windows. Charcoal clouds hung across the sky from east to west, the moon a white blur behind their shroud.
Once he closed the outhouse door, I took long careful strides across the ground. He cleared his throat. His belt jangled and urine dribbled into the septic mush half a dozen feet below the earth. I lurked outside the door and listened to him zip up his fly.
He opened the door and almost fell backward into the toilet.
“Jesus man,” he hissed. It was weird seeing him speak through lips instead of a mustache. “Crazy Patty’ll shoot you if she sees you out here.”
“Nobody’ll know I’m here unless you keep yelling about it.”
He looked over his shoulder and pushed me back toward the cottonwood grove. We found an obscure pocket of shadow to whisper in. “How did you find me?”
“By accident. My hobby is ostrich poaching.”