The Carrion Birds

by Urban Waite

  The Carrion Birds

  Urban Waite

  Dedication

  For my mother,

  who showed me at a young age

  how to pick morels from the ashes

  Epigraphs

  I wish that road had bent another way.

  —DANIEL WOODRELL, Tomato Red

  How terrible for a person to know what he could have been. How he could have gone on. But instead having to live along being nothing, and know he is just going to die and that’s the end of it.

  —OAKLEY HALL, Warlock

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  New Mexico, Early 1990s

  Day 1

  Day 2

  Day 3

  Day 4

  Day 365

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Urban Waite

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  NEW MEXICO

  Early 1990s

  Day 1

  The phone woke Ray around three thirty in the morning. He lay there, eyes open. The neighboring trailer lights casting a soft orange glow through the overhead curtains and the smell of the night desert outside, ancient and scraped away, through the sliding glass window.

  Running a hand down his face, he could hear the phone still. Wasn’t this what he’d asked for? Wasn’t this to be expected? He bit at his lip, tasting the salt of dried sweat on his skin and feeling the pain as he rubbed at his cheeks and tried to bring some life back into his face.

  On the bedside table the phone was still ringing and he put his hand out, searching. A series of empty beer cans tumbled to the floor and he heard the soft patter of a can somewhere below that had been half-full.

  Too damn early.

  He pushed himself up in bed, bringing the phone to his lap, the receiver to his ear. He rested his back on the wall and waited.

  “You ready to have some fun?” Memo said.

  “Define ready.”

  Memo’s voice cracked and Ray imagined the smirk already formed on the man’s face. “I thought all you old guys woke before the sun came up.”

  “I’m not one of those ‘old guys,’ ” Ray said.

  “Relax,” Memo said. “It’s a compliment.”

  “Yeah? Define compliment.”

  “It’s going to be just like the old days,” Memo said.

  “I hope it isn’t.”

  The line went quiet for a moment, then Memo said, “I called to let you know the kid is on his way. Let’s let bygones be bygones.”

  Ray sounded out the syllables. “By-gones.”

  “Listen,” Memo said. “He’s my nephew and he looks up to you. He’s the future around here so try not to get him killed.” Memo’s nephew was Jim Sanchez. He was a kid to Ray, just out on parole after five years away. Ray with no real idea what to expect.

  “I never said I’d babysit.”

  “You also said you’d never work for us again.”

  “Things change.”

  “Yes, they do,” Memo said, then he hung up.

  Ray slid over and put the phone back on the bedside table. Life hadn’t worked out the way he’d planned it would. The only reason he’d agreed to work for Memo again was because the job was outside Coronado. It was his hometown, a place where he’d married, had a son, and raised a family. All that more than ten years ago, when he was in his late thirties. His life had changed so much since then, since he’d taken the job with Memo. The round bump just beginning to show on Marianne’s belly. No work anywhere in the valley and Ray with a real need to put some money away.

  Ten years and Ray hadn’t set foot in the place, hadn’t even called home in all that time. A twelve-year-old son down there who Ray feared wouldn’t even recognize him anymore. All this Ray had thought about when Memo called, offering him the job, offering Ray a reason to go home, even if Ray’s own reasons these last ten years had never been good enough. He owed Memo that at least. Ray had wanted this for so long and never knew how to do it, something so simple, a visit to see his son, a new life away from the violence of the last ten years. Memo at the source of it all.

  Memo had been a young man when Ray first met him. Thin and muscular with the square Mexican features that later, after his father’s death, began to round and cause Memo to appear as solid as a kitchen appliance, his head now bald along the top and shaved clean as metal around the sides and back.

  Ray had liked the father more than he liked the son, but it was Memo who had recognized the skill in Ray, and as Memo was promoted up, so too was he. Ray was good at what he did, hurting people who stood in the way of what Memo wanted. Enforcing the power of Memo’s family and making sure the drugs they imported always reached their destination. But Ray was careful, too, and he’d survived a long time by picking and choosing the jobs that came his way.

  Dark skinned, Ray had a shock of gray hair near each of his temples and the round Mexican head that had been passed down from his mother’s side, and that he’d grown used to seeing on his mother’s cousins and brothers as he’d grown up. With his hair cut short the definition of his jaw was more apparent, his features more pronounced where the coarse hair at his chin came through in a patchy beard.

  He raised his eyes to take in what he could of the room, small and clogged with cast-off clothing. The back of his throat raw with pain and tasting pure and simple as cleaning alcohol. The chalk-dry mouth that went along with his drinking. Seven little dwarves climbing around in the back of his head, ready to go to work, and just like that they did, rock chipping. Miniature picks raised overhead, pounding away at the back of his skull in unison, one after the other.

  From the nightstand he took a bottle of Tylenol. Cupped three of the pills in his hand and swallowed them dry, chasing them with an antacid, followed a second later by one of the ten-milligram pills the doctor at the VA had told him to take twice a day. The seven dwarves still chipping away at the back of his skull, singing a child’s song he could only now draw up out of memory, but that he’d once sung for his son. “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go.”

  Ray ran the water in the sink. The single bathroom light of a wall sconce shone yellow over his features. The mirror grown heavy with steam, obscuring the round face that looked back at him.

  He held a hand under the water, feeling the heat, and then he brought the water to his face, letting it drip off his chin into the sink basin. The throbbing in the back of his head receding, flowing back into him little by little, medicine working, as if the men in there had gone exploring down his brain stem.

  He’d decided as soon as Memo had told him about the job that it would be the last he would do. He was going home to Coronado. He was going home to see his son. The money he’d saved would get him through the first few years. He’d need to look for employment after that, perhaps even roughneck in the oil fields again, but until then it would be enough. This last job would help him with anything extra he needed.

  In the years he’d been away he’d kept himself thin, working away on the fat that appeared from time to time at the waist of his pants or in the thighs of his jeans. Rigorousl
y testing his muscles till the sweat beaded and dampened his clothing. Still he’d gained weight over the years since he’d left Coronado. What remained of the lean muscle appeared in the lines of his brow and the slip of his mouth as he worked his jaw in front of the mirror, lathering his face with shaving cream.

  He was careful with the razor. Each pull of the blade revealing the thin muddy brown of his skin, a mix of his father’s pink tones and the darker skin of his mother. The deep cast of his face swept away with the freshly shaven hair and his father’s thin, hawklike nose more prominent.

  Memo had said it was a shame what happened. Ray didn’t know what to say about it. Nothing he could say would make the past go away, bring Marianne back or cure his son, Billy. There wasn’t one thing Memo could do, Ray knew this, knew how it worked, how the past didn’t change but the future could.

  Far out in the trailer park Ray heard a dog begin to bark and then he heard the sound of gravel under tires. He checked his watch. He went to the kitchen window in time to see the man he assumed was Memo’s nephew, Sanchez, pull past in a Ford Bronco, brake lights coming on, dyeing the kitchen blinds red as desert grit.

  From the cabinet over the fridge he searched for the cracker box with his gun hidden inside. The cabinet high enough that he couldn’t see more than a few inches within and was forced to feel around in the darkness above, bringing out box after box and then shoving them aside. Little mementos of his former life hidden all over the trailer, tucked in beneath the bench seat in the living room, shoved beneath the bathroom sink, out of sight behind half-empty bottles of shampoo. All of them just small things—just what he’d thought he could take with him, what he thought he might want sometime down the road, but that he wanted nothing of now.

  He stood looking at a box of Billy’s playthings, knowing each and every item inside: a small plush toy, a plastic action figure, a rubber bathtub duck. Everything inside, and even the smooth worn feel of the box in his hand, a reminder of every reason he wanted out of this business and hoped he’d never have to do it again.

  This job was just a talk, Memo had said. Though Ray knew it would be more. It would always be more. And he knew, too, that he was out of time, and outside Memo’s nephew was waiting for him, waiting for him to come out of the trailer and do this job.

  Ray slid the toys back up into the cabinet. Finding the box of Ritz, Ray removed the clear plastic bag with the stale orange crackers inside and brought up the Ruger. The gun a dull metallic black, unreflective under the kitchen lights, pieced back together and cleaned after every use. He wrapped the pistol in his jacket before he heard the knock at the door.

  Sanchez stood there at the base of the trailer stairs, his breath clouded around him in the air. Ray pushed the door aside and walked out into the cold. He felt the air first, a dry forty degrees. Behind Sanchez in the trailer park half-light, the Bronco sat with the driver’s door left open and the thin drift of a Spanish music channel carried on the air. The only other constants the bark of the dog far off toward the park entrance and the shadowed bodies of the trailers like cast-off building blocks, scattered all down the slim gravel road. Not a one of them the same, scraped and dented from tenants who had come and gone and left their mark. Ray’s own trailer, an old Dalton, rented out from the park for fifty dollars a week, rested there behind him on wheels and cement blocks.

  Ray watched how the kid moved, looking up at Ray’s trailer like it was the first time he’d seen one and could hardly believe it. Like Memo, he was Mexican, a few inches taller than Ray, young and thickly muscled with his head shaved to the skin and a chin strap of black hair from one ear to the other. Wearing a hooded sweatshirt and white tennis shoes.

  “You the new blood?” Ray asked.

  The boy stared up at him, a smile sneaking across his face. “You the old?”

  A few hours later Ray leaned back in the Bronco’s seat. The darkness of the locust thicket wrapped all around, shadowing the shape of their vehicle from the dirt road in front of them. The drive down from Las Cruces on the interstate had been quiet. Twenty miles out Sanchez pulled over and let Ray drive. They headed south toward the Mexican border, down a road Ray hadn’t been on for ten years. Hardtop, cracked and filled with tar. Frozen in the high desert night and then warmed through again in the day. Hundred-foot cement sections bouncing steady as a heart beneath the springs. Scent of night flowers and dust in the cool desert air.

  Sitting there, Ray knew his life had been sliding away from under him for a long time and today seemed like it would be no exception. They’d driven almost two hours. At the end of it, after they’d pulled up off the valley highway and found the dirt road running high on the bluff, they sat watching as the sky slowly lightened in the east. No part of him wanting to be here and only the solitary hope he held on to that the job would be done soon enough, and with it the life he had followed for so long, for which there seemed to be no cure.

  There was a plan and he tried to think on this now. He’d grown up working for his father in the Coronado oil fields, his shoulders and arms carved from a daily routine that he continued still, doing push-ups on the floor till his heart ached and his lungs pumped a fluid heat through his bloodstream.

  “My uncle told me you retired,” Sanchez said. The slow tick of the engine in the morning air.

  “I stopped working for Memo,” Ray said. He watched Sanchez where he sat. The close cut of his hair outlining his thick eyebrows and muscled Mexican face. “I didn’t retire, I just don’t work for your uncle anymore.”

  “You’re working for him now, though, aren’t you?”

  “I have my own reasons,” Ray said.

  The Bronco had been stolen off a lot the night before and fitted with a flasher box, wired directly into the headlights. A spotlight bolted on just above the driver’s-side mirror, with a thin metal handle that reached through a rubber glove into the interior of the cab. Sanchez coming to get Ray in the night, before the sun ever crested the horizon. The younger man wearing only a baggy set of jeans and a black sweatshirt against the cold, the smell of tobacco and axle grease hanging thick around him.

  Ray in the waxed canvas jacket he always wore. The jacket padded to keep him warm. He wore a flannel shirt beneath, buttoned almost to the collar, and an old worn pair of jeans, stained from other jobs and other troubles, but worn regardless. The smell of sage and desert grit now floating up through the vents as they sat talking, their eyes held forward on the murk of the coming day. “I plan to move out of Las Cruces on this money,” Ray said.

  “Where?” Sanchez laughed. “Florida? You’re not that old and you should know you don’t retire from this line of work.” He brought out a small bag of tobacco and some papers.

  “This line of work?” Ray said.

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  Ray told him he did. He knew a lot about what Sanchez was talking about. Perhaps he knew too much. All he really wanted was a way out, and he’d had it ten years before. Only he hadn’t taken it the way he knew he should have. “You’ve been lucky,” Sanchez said, packing a cigarette.

  “I have,” Ray said, agreeing. “I’ve tried not to make mistakes.”

  “The way I hear it from my uncle it was an accident. But still, mistakes were made.”

  “Mistakes?” Ray said.

  “Your cousin,” Sanchez said. “He lost his job, didn’t he? He was the sheriff and he lost his job over what happened down here. Killing that cartel woman j
ust because you wouldn’t leave it alone.”

  Ray sat trying to remember exactly what he’d told his cousin Tom. What had he said? How had he put it to him? Ray’s wife, Marianne, dead and his son in there at the table with them, sitting in his high chair, while Ray and Tom sat talking to each other. Tom in his old cop browns, his hat thrown out on the table next to the half rack of beer Ray was drinking from. One after the other, like the coming day would never arrive and he didn’t want to remember what he was telling Tom to do.

  “You should have been the one down there,” Sanchez said. He finished rolling his cigarette and placed it on the dash, dipping his fingers back into the bag and beginning another almost in the same motion.

  “At the time I was trying not to shit in my own backyard. Coronado had its own problems; it didn’t need mine, too.”

  “Memo always said it ruined you, he said you started doing things your own way. Said you were in your prime.”

  “Is that how he put it?” Ray said. “That I was in my prime?”

  “Memo said you killed the Alvarez brothers in ’82.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Ray said.

  “I heard about what you did in Deming a few years later,” Sanchez went on. “I heard about what happened outside Las Cruces, about the farmhouse north of town. My uncle said you were—”

  “I’m not that man anymore,” Ray interrupted. He turned and looked at the half-finished cigarette in Sanchez’s hands, and then he looked up. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “And you heard all this when?”

  “I picked it up over time. I heard it from the family. I heard you did a lot of the work in the seventies, and that you went pro in the eighties.”