by James Wade
“So, you’re gonna help me find that girl, or every speed freak in the county is gonna come crawling out of these bottoms with a mind to burn your whole world to the ground.
“And as a thank-you, since I don’t want your hard work to go unappreciated, I’ll give you Dakota Cade.”
“My ass.” The sheriff scoffed.
“You calling me a liar?”
“Even if you wanted to do something like that, how in the hell would you go about it? You’d end up dead, and I’d be in the same spot as if I didn’t help you. Maybe worse if that big bastard started running things.”
“I can handle him.”
“I’ll repeat: my ass. I saw what he did to that Nazi boy out in Redtown, back when you all had trouble up that way. I’ve never been scared a single day doing this job. But that day, the way we found that boy, I was terrified. Not just for my own life either. I was scared for the world entire, that something that evil was out there, with that sort of capacity for violence. And now here you set, telling me you’re going to throw a rope over it. I don’t think so, son.”
“You leave that to me, Sheriff,” John Curtis said, rising from his chair. “And don’t be afraid. This is my world, and nobody gets hurts unless I say so.”
“Well.”
The sheriff stood, doubtful, then another thought came to him.
“Since you’re here,” he said. “You ought to know them USDA boys have been up my ass about the goddamn dog fights. They been calling every other day, and now they’re getting ready to send a couple agents down here to look into things.”
“So?”
“So I need you to cool it with that shit for a while. Let the feds poke around, see there ain’t nothing going on, then you can start up again after they’re gone.”
John Curtis rubbed the back of his neck.
“No.”
“No?”
“If they’re coming down here, they won’t be satisfied to leave empty-handed. We’re gonna have to throw ’em a bone, so to speak.”
“How’s that?”
“Keep your phone on.”
The sheriff sighed.
“I just work for you, is that it? I’m to be ready whenever you call?”
John Curtis flashed a yellow-toothed grin.
He left the office and walked into the small lobby, such as it was, and the woman behind the desk stared up at him, her eyes a mix of fear and curiosity and, maybe, something more. He nodded and winked at her and opened the door and walked out.
John Curtis had made the bottom of the ramp when the sheriff opened the door. He took off his hat and held it just below his chest, as if in reverence to some unspoken tradition. He looked out at the pines and up at the storm clouds and, finally, at John Curtis.
“There’ll always be someone worse,” he said. “You ought to keep that in mind.”
He put his hat back on and turned and went inside and closed the door.
19
The hacienda outstretched in the foothills above the Chihuahuan desert where grew plants of creosote and sotol and yucca. The main house was surrounded by sumac and prickly pear and great adobe walls higher than the head of a horse. A stone patio ran the length of the house on its east side and there sat tables and chairs and chimineas, all of them empty.
In the courtyard bloomed aster, dahlia, and Mexican hat flowers. And at its center, a concrete fountain stood, with water surrounding a statue of the Virgin, her arms at her sides with both palms facing forward. She looked down at the water beneath her feet where splashed three yellow-eyed juncos, drinking and shaking the water from their feathers.
The house was connected to various smaller structures, a garage, a kitchen, guest lodging, and several storage buildings, and the wind whistled through the breezeways between each one.
Inside the main house three men sat in a parlor adorned with great bookcases and desks carved from mahogany. The ceiling stood twenty feet and on it was painted a battle scene from a hundred-year-old revolution. The men were attended by two middle-aged women in matching dresses who brought coffee and tea and a tray of fruits and cheese, pan de colotes and Mexican sweet bread.
The thin man sat on the leather sofa, his legs crossed at the knees, one brown ostrich boot hovering above the cherrywood coffee table. He sipped his coffee from an ivory cup and made notes in a small book and nodded occasionally when he felt the time was right.
The men across from him were his elders and they spoke slowly and he did not rush them. He wanted every detail. Some of what was said were facts, others opinions, and the thin man would hear them all. Would piece one to the other.
In the end, the men shook hands. More refreshment was offered, but declined. The thin man was handed an envelope and a cell phone, each of which he tucked away inside his jacket pocket.
“Vas a pasar la noche?” one of the older men asked.
“No. No te conozco.”
20
The plague of methamphetamine waxing and waning in correlation to the ease of supply, the vigilance of law, the economic markers of hope, the discovery and abandonment and rediscovery of god, the political relevance, the quality of the shit, the price of the shit, the cartel alliances, the ability to cross the border with a truckload of hominy cans full of product. And Frank and Lonnie, driving in the rain, the penultimate caretakers, making their rounds.
“Who you voting for?” Lonnie asked.
“Whoever John Curtis tells me to vote for,” Frank answered.
“Mighty American of you.”
“I suppose you got other ideas.”
“You know I do.”
“And I also suppose, to my own detriment, you’ll be wanting to share those ideas.”
“What sort of citizen would I be if I didn’t enlighten my fellow voters?” Lonnie asked.
“The less annoying kind, for starters.”
“Fine. Make your fun. But when the government sends duck boats full of soldiers down the river, I doubt you’ll be laughing.”
“I can’t believe I’m gonna ask this, but I’m gonna ask it anyway. Why would the government send soldiers to the bottoms?”
“Power move. Population control. Experiments and such.”
“Horse shit,” Frank said.
“That’s what they said in Germany.”
“And what soldiers are they gonna send? Every shit kicker who ain’t in the oil fields is in the damn military. You think a bunch of good ole boys are gonna turn on their own people?”
“Two possibilities. The first is that they’ll use foreign troops. Why do you think we’re so interested in training other countries’ militaries?”
“What’s the second?”
“Mind control.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Fine. Don’t listen.”
“I’m not.”
“Don’t.”
“I won’t. But, just out of curiosity, with the understanding that everything you’re saying is utter nonsense, who are you voting for in order to avoid this great Battle of the Neches?”
Lonnie looked down and shook his head.
“You’ve got a lot to learn,” he said.
“What?” Frank asked. “Why are you shaking your damn head?”
“I’m not voting for anybody,” Lonnie told him. “That’s how they get you. First it’s your information, then it’s jury duty, next thing you know there’s a bag over your head and somebody’s speaking Russian. And what’s worse, you’re understanding it.”
“It must be nice, being able to slide that needle in without worrying about having a brain to rot.”
“Fuck you very much,” Lonnie said. “Speaking of, let’s find a place to get high, all this rain is depressing me.”
“We’re supposed to be looking for the girl.”
“She’ll come crawli
ng back sooner or later. That’s too much of a load to carry.”
“I imagine she’s trying to get rid of it.”
“Shit. Who around here would do that? Word’s done got out. She ain’t got nowhere to go.”
“Well, I guess let’s go over to Fox Run and find us an empty apartment.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“And, hey, nothing about mind control or foreign invaders,” Frank said.
“Not a word.”
“I’m serious. I don’t want to think about that shit when I’m high.”
“That’s exactly what they want you to say.”
21
The dawn broke and brought forth a red fire sky and the trees rose up near black against its coming. A single barn owl stood sentry over the dying of the night, its heart-shaped face in motionless contemplation, its yellow glowing eyes overseeing the sunrise as if the creature itself needed some confirmation of the world’s return before it could take its leave. Finally, its fears momentarily quelled, the owl set off on pale white wings and swept low across the water and disappeared into the forested bottomlands to set about the resolution of some other inevitable worry.
“Where do you think he’s going?” the girl asked.
“Probably hunting a place to stay dry.”
“You think it’ll rain?”
“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailor’s warning.”
He looked at the girl.
“Means it’s gonna come a proper storm this afternoon,” he said.
“Well, then, we’d better get after it.”
The two of them spread apart ten yards and traipsed through the woods, sticking brass tacks into trees every twenty minutes or so to mark their progress. They said very little for the first two hours, and by nine o’clock it was hot and they made for the banks of the brown river where the trees grew wild and overtop one another, as if the water, through some mystic agency all its own, had called out to them the very secret whereby they might live forever. Each cycled season a revisiting of a promise long kept.
The sound of the falling rain had become such a part of the world that its absence was unsettling. The forest came alive in the interim, with red-throated lizards scurrying along through the mud, zipper spiders hanging new webs between trees, and katydids and crickets launching themselves through the high grass as if they’d been attached to a dozen hidden springboards.
The bears and cougars and wolves all gone from these lands, and races of men come thereafter and most of them gone as well, and the boy wondered about such things, and thought perhaps his people would be the next to disappear.
The boy closed one eye and squinted at the sky through the holes in a great canopy made up of shade oak and cypress leaves, and there hung a host of glow worms, suspended by a silk too fine to see. Further skyward, a redtail hawk screamed out some ancient and piercing cry of war, and the honeysuckle mixed with the smell of mud, and the water moved one way and the palmettos bent another, and the boy found a dry tract of sand and sat looking out at all these things and more. He looked out at the bale of Mississippi map turtles as they filed one after the other on a half-submerged log, and at the fox squirrels as they clung wayward to bending branches, and at a world too green to understand. A world full up with maidencane and switchgrass, and the sound of birds and the sound of water, and the wind came down to tousle the soft stem rush, and the Indian blanket flowers bloomed red and orange and bobbed heavy atop their thin stalks. The barnyard and brownseed grasses crawling ashore from amid the wading willow reeds, and all of the bottomlands mantled in such a state, and the boy gave thought to how any place else would not be this place, not be this color and this smell and this last bit of truthfulness.
The respite from the rain was short-lived as soon the clouds were full up again and looking to unload on the earth below. The plants and trees of the wetlands were heavy and saturated and overburdened, but still the rain came. The boy could hear it falling in the western woods, and it fell in rabble and swarm, and the boy put his hand in his pocket and touched his fingertips to the arrowhead. He listened to the sound of the rain as it closed the distance between, and he imagined a horde of warriors sweeping down into the river valley, riding their painted Spanish ponies and crying out in falsettoed voices that carried across the water and across the very piece of country he’d been born unto. And he thought about the people of this river, in those times and the times since, and he wondered if he’d been alive during any of them, could he have survived. Or maybe, could he have been something more than what he was.
They left out from the water on a different path than what they’d come, trekking up a shaded draw littered with pecans and pine needles, and climbing on all fours and grabbing branches for support. They stopped under the biggest tree, and the boy cracked a fallen nut and offered it up.
“You could like, be a nature guide or something,” the girl said.
“Guide for what?”
“I don’t know, just like, a fucking nature guide.”
“Alright.”
The pines rose up on either side of the tired mud path, like loyal sentries guarding a treasure too long lost. There, amid the short-leaf and loblollies, they followed the thin line of trail until it grew thinner still and gave way to a mangled thicket of greenbriar and thorns. The boy used a dull, rusted machete to cut a lead, but it was slow going. His shirt caught and tore and slowed him down. He took it off. The briars cut across his arms and chest in all directions. The girl stood at a distance with her arms crossed, doubtful.
“It wouldn’t be in there,” she said.
“Could be.”
“How would I have made it through there?”
“You were pretty tore up.”
“You’re wasting time.”
“I’m not the one complaining. Besides, if you know where it’s at, go on and get it for us.”
The girl shook her head, but followed the boy through the underbrush. They continued as straight as the nature of things would allow, until finally the thicket softened, opening into a natural ravine.
“Could’ve got washed down in this ditch,” the boy said.
“And swept away to the river,” the girl replied.
“Maybe.”
They slid down the mud slope and poked around near stagnant pools of mousy water. The rain began to fall harder.
“I guess we’re stuck in this shit,” she said.
“Maybe not. Look yonder.”
The car sat above the ditch, thirty yards further inland through the thicket, and it had long turned from its original color into a mesh of brown and coral corrosion, rust collecting in layers to mark the passage of time and oxidation.
It was a Plymouth, manufactured sometime soon after the Second World War, though neither of them knew such details—only that it was old. There were no tires and no headlights and only the back windows remained, and never had the boy seen something so out of place in the bottoms. The car looked as if it were waiting for some event which had never come to pass, and never would. As if the car had been there first, and it was the world what grew up around it.
“How in the hell did an old car end up this far back in the woods?”
“Couldn’t say. Maybe there used to be a road down here.”
“There hadn’t never been a road through here.” The girl scoffed. “Where the hell would it be going?”
“Where any road goes, I guess. From one place to another.”
“There’s probably a mess of snakes or wasps or something in there.”
“Maybe there’s a briefcase full of money.”
The girl shook her head.
“Right. Somebody went through all the trouble of pulling off the tires, but they left the million dollars in the back seat.”
The boy frowned.
“I’m just t
elling you right now,” the girl said, “I ain’t getting in that thing. I’d rather stay out here and drown.”
The girl pursed her lips and climbed across the molded seats and into the back. The boy had checked for reptiles and insects alike and found nothing save a spiderweb, which he took down with the machete. The girl sat awkward in the back seat, trying to touch as little as possible. She could hear the boy behind her trying to get the trunk open.
“It won’t open,” he said, spilling into the back seat, the girl shifting away from him as the rain peppered the roof and hood and the exposed front dash.
“That must be where the money is,” the girl chided him.
“We saw a video in school about how there was a car pulled up out of a lake somewhere, and it had a bunch of human bones still in the trunk.”
The girl cocked an eyebrow.
“It was in science class.” The boy shrugged.
“You like school?”
“It’s alright.”
“What’s your favorite class?”
“I don’t know. History, I guess.”
“You got a good teacher?”
“Not really. He coaches the baseball team. I don’t think he cares too much about the class.”
“They don’t have a real history teacher?”
“I like reading the textbook. Hearing about how things happened back then. It’s like, well, it’s like we’re connected to all of it. The people, the wars, everything. If any one of them had gone different, we wouldn’t be here.”
“Too bad it didn’t.”
“Maybe.”
“I hated school. Or I guess I hated the other kids at school. It seemed like they were all so happy or normal or, I don’t know. Something. Maybe I just never got over all the Donuts with Dad days where I was the only one sitting by myself.”