Axel scrabbles over the passenger seat and unfolds its back and hunches behind it as the spotlight fixes on them again, though less brightly. The riflefire continues but now fewer rounds hit the van, and then the shooting stops.
“Wooo! Out of the fucker’s range!” Cacho says, and turns on the headlights. Through the beating wipers they see the road bend just ahead. The back window’s an opaque mesh of starbursts.
“Not for long,” Axel says. In the side mirrors they see the headlights of vehicles emerging from the prison. Coming after them.
Then the van’s into the road bend and out of the pursuers’ view.
24
They talk fast. The little van’s no match for the prison vehicles that will come around the bend in a minute and barrel up to them shooting from the windows and maybe blowing out their tires and maybe their brains and the road runs west for about a mile before turning north to Sanderson where for goddamn sure there’s gonna be cop cars parked across the road and cops waiting with shotguns but the Rio Grande’s only four or five miles south and the whole region’s full of little ranch roads and horse trails and the thing to do is take one of those to the river or close enough to it to get out and hotfoot it the rest of the way and cross over to Mexico and if a tire gives out before then they’ll just have to hoof it farther to the Rio and … there’s a side road going north … but they need one to southward and need it right fucking now before the chasers see them make the turn and there’s nothing showing up ahead and … there’s a south turn!
Cacho hits the brakes and Axel braces himself against the dashboard as the van loses traction, its rear wheels drifting to the left, and Cacho cuts the front wheels into the slide and the van’s back end swings the other way. They skid across the road and past the side road junction and off the pavement and go bucking over rough ground and then fishtailing in mud. Through the driver’s window Axel sees headlights starting to come around the bend—and then the lights vanish as Cacho gets the van on the ranch road and into the flanking cover of creosote brush and mesquite trees.
It’s one of those common ranch byways that are less road than old stock trail, most of them so narrow that whenever oncoming vehicles meet one of them has to pull over partway into the scrub to grant the other passage. On roads like this thirty miles an hour can feel like sixty, and like so many such roads used chiefly by ponderous vehicles with all-terrain tires it has been permanently rutted to a washboard surface. The van jars without pause as it winds through the mesquites and around one stony outcrop after another, raising small wakes in the water sheeting the rigid ruts, the steering wheel reverberating and jerking from side to side under Cacho’s tight grip. They keep checking their side mirrors for chasers.
“Even if they didn’t see us make the turn they’ll know we took it when they don’t spot us ahead of them on the main road,” Axel says, still breathless. “At least one of them’ll come behind us, the others’ll probably try to cut us off by other trails. Whatever they’re driving’s a lot faster than this thing and can handle these roads better, and a lot of the hacks know this country pretty good.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Cacho says. “But whatever they’re driving’s way bigger than this and can’t take the curves as good. The river’s anyway only two, three miles now, skip, hop, and jump. We’ll get there and cross over before they catch up.”
“Cross over how?”
“Somehow. Hell, there’s ferries and shit, ain’t there? There’s ferries all up and down the Rio, everybody knows that.”
“Yeah, right. You know where any of them are? I don’t know where any are!”
“Somewhere, that’s where! We’ll find one! We don’t, we’ll swim it.”
“Swim it? Tarzan couldn’t swim it in this storm!”
“We’ll get across somehow, man. God loves us!”
Axel feels a tremor in his hands, suddenly conscious of being scared in a way only a free man can be.
Cacho gets the phone out of his shirt and says, “Take the wheel!”
Axel leans over and grips the wheel with both hands and it’s like taking hold of a small angry beast by its horns. The van jerks left and right and Cacho says, “Damn, man, don’t crash us!!” He presses a button and stares at the phone. Then presses another, stares again, and says, “Fuck!”
“Nothing?” Axel says.
“Nothing!” He turns the phone off and stuffs it back in his breast pocket and takes the wheel again.
They turn off the headlights to be harder to detect. In this dimmer light of looming mesquites it’s also harder to see the trail but they can see it well enough, and the continuing lightning helps. Axel doubts the little van can take such a bashing for long before breaking down. It’s a wonder the tires have held up. Cacho turns on the dashboard light, and its low glow allows them to read the compass, which rotates one way and the other, eastward, then westward as the trail snakes, but holds on a generally southbound heading.
They round another curve and now the trail runs straight and they pick up speed, shuddering, rattling, splashing. Cacho looks at his side mirror and says, “Here they come.”
Axel’s mirror shows a watery glare of the high-standing headlights of some large bulky vehicle moving up behind them. Now the trail curves to the right and through a rock passage and the chaser’s lights disappear from the mirror. Cacho turns on the headlights and they glare against another rock wall less than ten yards ahead and just past a leftward curve. Cacho taps the brakes and cuts the wheel and they skim into the turn and hit the rock—Axel bonking his head on the window, the panel door buckling inward. They carom across the trail and the left-side wheels slip into a shallow ditch and the van tilts leftward even as it keeps going forward and it feels like they’re going to capsize but then the ditch ends and they bump upright and roll on.
Cacho whoops and says, “God damn, this thing can take a lick!”
“Lucky we didn’t bust a wheel.”
“That’s us, old-timer—lucky up the ass!” He lets out a maniacal grito.
Because the chasers are running with their lights, Axel figures they’ll see that last turn sooner than Cacho did and be able to keep from hitting the rock, but it’ll still slow them down a bit.
They pass through two more sets of tight weaves around rocky outcrops and then the mesquite growth on their right gives way to a rail fence and a breadth of open land with the dark shapes of cattle standing in the gray rain. But it’s another straight stretch here and the trail is still rutted and the chaser’s going to cut the distance on them pretty quick. The compass is reading due south. The lightning is still forking bright, the thunder still explosive.
Ahead and off to the right behind the ongoing fence is a two-story building with lighted windows. The rancher’s house. The front door light comes on, illuminating a covered porch that runs the length of the house. A pair of dogs that had been sheltering on it bound down the steps and come yowling toward the fence. The front door opens and a man steps out.
Their back window brightens with the chaser’s headlights and Cacho again switches off theirs. They’re coming fast. The trail ahead bends rightward at the end of the fence.
They hear gunshots.
“They can’t hit nothing, bouncing on this road,” Cacho says.
But they both hunker lower.
They skid into the turn, stones clattering on the van’s underside, and again lose the chaser’s lights and Cacho once more turns on the van’s. The trail again straightens and the fence still runs beside them. They’re looking for the next southward turn. Then see it just ahead where the scrub line bends.
“Yes!” Cacho says. “We make that turn and if the road keeps winding we can keep our distance from them till we get to—”
“If it’s a straightaway they’ll catch up.”
“No. We’ll pull off into the scrub and plow through it as far as this heap’ll take us, then hop out and run for the river. They come after us with flashlights they’ll be easy targets. I’ll pop t
hem all.”
Axel cuts a look at him. In the dashboard light the kid’s profile seems carved of black stone. Then he looks to his right and in the side glow of the porch light sees the man running toward the fence, waving his arms. He barely hears the man’s rain-muted shouts and can’t make out what he’s saying.
The chaser’s lights reappear. Cacho cuts off the van’s. The shooter fires twice without hitting them.
Cacho makes the south turn, the van’s bumper whacking aside a small wooden sign, and loses sight of the chaser once more. The road now runs straight ahead and is vaguely visible and he leaves the lights off.
“What’d it say?” Axel says. “Something Creek Bridge?”
“What?”
“The sign,” Axel says. “There’s a bridge ahead … a creek!”
“Creek? Man, we best cross it before we bail! Good thing you saw it.”
The chaser comes around the turn and again begins gaining on them. The shooter fires and fires, the reports getting louder, most of the rounds now hitting the hatchback. A round comes through the back window and ricochets off the frame of Axel’s seat and whunks into the dashboard.
“They’re gonna be up our ass in a minute!” he says.
They see an upcoming bend around a rock rise to the right. Cacho taps the brakes and goes into the turn and behind the rock cover. They’re midway into the bend when the chaser vehicle rounds back into view, its lights swelling.
“Fuck it,” Cacho says, and turns on the headlights. He speeds up as the curve begins to straighten. “Where’s the bridge?”
And there it is, not twenty feet ahead … what’s left of it. A few feet of guard railing and planked deck projecting over a surging current of black water that has overrun its banks and torn away the rest of the bridge.
Cacho stomps the brakes and the van slides into a quarterturn and smashes through the remnant railing and hits the water at a nose-first, sideways tilt, the windshield going under and the headlight glow presenting an eerie green vision of the stony bottom passing under them—and then the van surfaces and rolls upright and the current whisks it away in a slow spin as the engine spasms and dies and the headlights quit.
Behind them an oversized pickup truck slews off the wrecked bridge in a half-spin and plunges rearward into the water. Its front end swings toward them and wobbles from side to side, but the truck seems held fast, its rear half entirely submerged and the front end sinking forward, the water already halfway up the cab windows, the headlight beams wavering, then shorting out.
“Die, fuckers!” Cacho yells as the van is swept around a bend and they lose sight of the truck. Then he says to Axel, “This ain’t no creek! It’s a river! The Rio! We’re there, man! That’s Mexico! All we—”
“No it’s not,” Axel says. “Nearest bridge to Mexico’s a hundred miles off at Del Rio. It’s a creek!”
“This big-ass?”
“Flash flood like this, they can swell up big as rivers. Besides, we were heading south, and this water’s running to the right. Rio Grande runs the other way. This creek’ll take us to it, though, if we stay afloat.”
Water trickles in through torn seals in the buckled panel door, through bullet holes in the sides and rear glass. But with the windows shut the van remains buoyant, revolving slowly as the current speeds it into the rainy twilight, and Axel has a fleet remembrance of riding an inner tube down the Guadalupe River when he was a boy.
25
The thunder and lightning begin to lessen but the rain persists, drilling on the van roof, its runoff cascading from banks fifty feet apart in some places and hardly more than fifteen in others. The heavy air smells of creosote. The van swishes through a series of meanders, slinging from one side of the creek to the other, here and there skimming past piles of brushy debris bunched and bobbing along the creek sides. Now they enter a tighter progression of bends where the water runs even faster. They twirl from bank to bank, scraping on its rocky washouts and mowing through inundated brush, rebounding off rows of exposed tree roots where bank sides have been washed away.
“You sure we’re headed for the river?” Cacho says.
“All creeks run to it. We’ll get—”
The hatchback window bursts inward in a spray of glass and the van is arrested so abruptly it snaps their heads back—the window pierced by a fallen tree limb that has jammed up into the headliner and stuffs the cargo space with a crush of smaller, leafy branches. With its other end wedged tight in a tangle of tree roots extending a few feet into the water from the base of a collapsed bank, the limb keeps its hold on the van even as the current wrenches the skewered vehicle around to face mostly downstream and rocks the van up and down, its left rear side scraping the row of roots.
“Out your door!” Axel yells. “Climb up to higher ground!” His own side of the van is at an upstream angle and he knows he wouldn’t be able to open the door against the force of the current if he tried.
Cacho shoulders open his lee-side door and water swamps the floor to their seats. He steps out onto the row of roots and starts treading carefully toward the largest knots of them where the base of the limb is caught and the root growth can be scaled to the top of the six- or seven-foot bank wall lined with leaning trees. Axel scrambles over the console and follows him.
But then Cacho stops and turns, stepping around Axel and sidling back to the van, saying something Axel doesn’t catch over the noise of the current and the splattering rain.
“What?” Axel says.
“The gun! Fell out!”
Cacho hunches into the half-sunken van and begins probing the water all around the driver’s side. The jouncing limb is creaking louder under the vehicle’s increasing water weight.
“Forget it!” Axel shouts. “Come on!”
He hears yells from upstream.
He turns and scans the upstream creek bend and in the next flash of lightning sees somebody clinging to a float of some sort. A man, crying for help. He lets out a long yowl as the meander’s current bears him very fast toward the pinioned van.
The man slams into the hatchback door, losing the piece of planking he’d been holding to but able to grab onto the limb where it’s joined to the window. There’s only about six feet of limb between him and its attachment to the bank roots, but he’s on the outward side of the limb and the current has his legs and he can’t pull himself out of its tow, he can only hold fast.
“Help me! Jesus! Hellllp!”
Axel hurries to the limb and uses the smaller branches for handholds as he wades to within reach of the man’s hands. Even though the water is only up to his hips and he’s only in the current’s periphery, he can feel its proximate strength and he’s afraid to get any closer. Another step forward and the water might pull his legs out and trap him under the limb or haul him away.
“Take hold!” he says, reaching out to grip the man’s wrist.
The man locks onto his with both hands. “Don’t let go!” the man pleads. “Don’t let me go!”
Rain running into his eyes, Axel leans backward and tugs hard on the man’s arm, dragging him against the creek’s tow. In slow gradations he backs up along the limb and into shallower water, having to stoop more and more as he does, the man working his arms around the lesser branches without letting go of Axel’s wrist. It’s a matter of only a few feet, but the effort is strenuous. Axel is in water almost down to his knees when the man manages to extricate his legs from the current and get his footing. Then roughly breaks free of Axel’s hold.
Off balance, Axel stumbles backward but stays upright. He sees the man putting a hand to his pocket and then apprehends that it’s not a pocket, it’s a hip holster, and the man’s drawing a gun. Chaser, he thinks. Made it out of the truck. A shimmer of lightning exposes the man’s CO uniform as he points a revolver at Axel with both hands, cocks the hammer, and wheezes, “Got you … dickwad.”
A gun blasts and the man staggers sideways and fires a round into the brush at the same time that another
gunshot swats his head aside and he spins halfway around and pitches face-first into the water. The splash heaves him outward and the current takes him under.
Crouched beside the half-submerged van door, Cacho lowers the Glock and stands up. He comes over beside Axel and turns the pistol in his hand as if to offer him a better look at it. “Forget this, you said?”
“Cancel that request,” Axel says. He has twice seen men stabbed dead, has seen a man beaten to death by fists and feet and has seen one throttled, but this was his first witness to a killing by firearm. It crosses his mind this was not the kid’s first kill.
“Heard the hollering and talk and I’m looking and looking for this and finally find it and I see the dude pointing a piece at you and looking like he meant to use it. Nice shooting, huh? I mean, hardly no time to aim, this lousy light and all?”
“Very commendable.”
Cacho tucks the pistol in his waistband, his grin vivid in the dimness. “Yeah, that’s it. Commendable!”
At which moment and with a loud tearing sound, the anchoring limb rips free of the roots and—still jammed in the hatchback, and before they can even think to react—swings around on the van’s outward veer into the current and rakes both of them into the creek.
26
Underwater and face up beneath the limb, clinging to it as it tows him behind the van, Axel is sure he’ll drown if he lets go and sure he’ll drown if he doesn’t. Then the limb rises with a roll of the van and his head surfaces and he’s gulping air.
“Oh man … thought we …!” Cacho says, gasping hard, clinging to the limb, not an arm’s length from him. “Oh man …”
The Ways of Wolfe Page 8