The Carrion Birds

by Urban Waite

  “Why would there be a shovel?” Ray said, refusing to believe what he was hearing.

  Sanchez didn’t seem to register what Ray had said. He was already moving away toward the edge of the road and the high thicket of locust, with the rifle in his hand.

  Ray raised his voice; loud enough that Sanchez couldn’t ignore him. “Why would there be a shovel in the back of the Bronco?”

  “For messes,” Sanchez said over his shoulder, taking the bank feet first, sliding down till he came out on the wash.

  The truth was that as soon as he’d seen Burnham, Ray had known this would be the way it would go. There never was going to be a talk on the side of the road. He’d pushed that all away now. He’d pushed it deep down inside of him along with everything else.

  All Memo’s talk had been just an excuse, a way of getting him here so that he could do what he did best, what he hated to do, and what he’d thought he was done with. They weren’t there for a simple shakedown. They were there to get rid of the competition. Now he watched Sanchez go, disappear into the brush with the rifle held out in front of him like some sort of divining rod, chasing down Gil’s path.

  Ray turned and looked at Burnham’s truck. Both doors hung open and the light from the flashers pulsed over everything. The old man lying in the shadows at the edge of the road. His body thrown out along the ditch, turned over on his back, the air in his chest barely moving his lungs, still alive. Blood pooling slowly beneath him in the dirt. It’s a terrible way to die, Ray thought, buckshot like that.

  Ray knew this man. He’d known him almost his whole life and he crouched next to Burnham and watched the old man’s wet eyes begin to cloud over. The slow labor of Burnham’s breath ticking away at Ray’s feet as the focus went out of his face. Ray shifted to one knee, watching Burnham where he’d landed after being blown a yard off his feet, little gurgling sounds coming up out of his throat. Buckshot all down the right side, he held one of his hands tight to his body, trying to hold back the blood. And with the other he gripped the earth near his hip as if he might lose his hold and spin loose.

  The old man must have been nearing his seventies. Blood showing on his face where the wound in his cheek leaked a deep ruby color into the white of his beard, his face tight with the pain as he tried to move and the skin of his forehead drawn white and clean as fresh paper.

  Burnham closed his wet eyes and then opened them again in a slow blink. “Times have changed,” the old man said, blood on his lips where he’d put them together to speak.

  “Times are the same, viejo, it’s just you that has changed.”

  Burnham looked up and found a focus. Ray knew the man recognized him, knew it just as surely as he knew his own face in the mirror. They were kin in some strange way, connected by who they were and what they did, and it was a sickening realization. Somehow through all this, years before, Ray had thought perhaps their relationship would end just the way it was now. There were no surprises and nothing to spare Ray from the future he had imagined all those years before.

  Ray didn’t know how long the old man had been working this area, but it was over now. From the pocket of his shirt Ray removed his pack of antacids. Resting his weight on the one knee, he chewed at the bitter pill while the old man lay dying on the ground.

  “Times have changed,” the man said again. “You think they haven’t, but they have. You’re old enough. You should know it.”

  Ray didn’t want to be like this man, not at all. He stood, trying to put some space between them, but watching the old man the whole while. In his hand he held the shotgun loose in his palm, the chalk taste of the antacid in his mouth. With one hand on the stock of the gun, he fished the spare shells from his jeans pocket and began to load them into the belly.

  “All this used to be open country,” Burnham said. “Just like you can still find some places down south. Now it’s all parceled up and sold off and you can’t go anywhere without someone knowing.” Burnham leaned his head to the left and spat blood into the dirt, then turned his head back up so he could see Ray. The ball of shot that had caught him in the cheek looked deep and dark as a well in the man’s face. “I used to ride all over this land with my family, with my brother and my father, but that’s all gone now, you understand?”

  The pool of blood beneath the man, an outline in the dirt, was gradually expanding. His eyes drooped once, then again. Ray let him speak, let him get it out. It was what Ray knew he’d want when the time came for him, when he had his final say and tried to make right with the world. When he tried to tell how he’d gotten down this path, and how he regretted it every day, but didn’t know how to turn back.

  The old man coughed and blood erupted out the side of his cheek. He leaned his head to the side and spat again. Then turned back and fixed Ray like the conversation was ongoing and the man had merely paused to allow Ray the chance to speak. “We used to rustle cattle when the land was open and you could run them all the way down to Mexico and not see a soul.” His wet eyes closed and then opened. “I suppose I put myself in this mess.” He paused again, looking up at Ray. “I recognize you, you know? Gus’s kid. I always wondered where you’d gone and I guess now I know. You still work for Memo, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know he’s playing crooked with all of us? I worked for his father, too. A long time ago, before you even came around, but Memo is something different. He doesn’t respect the old ways—doesn’t respect anything anymore.” He stopped to gather his breath before going on again, pink spittle showing in the corners of his mouth. “There used to be rules for this sort of thing. Memo’s father knew them, but it’s not like it used to be, not anymore.”

  “Is that why you went over?” Ray said. “Is that why you started working for the southerners?” Ray stood there looking down. The shotgun waiting and ready at his side. He knew this man, but it didn’t matter. None of it did anymore. He would do the job no matter what the man said. It didn’t matter.

  “Things have changed,” Burnham said. “Go on, I’m ready. I’ve been ready a long time and just not known it. Go on now.”

  Ray raised the shotgun a few inches from where it hung in his hand. He put the barrel to the man’s heart. “Viejo,” he said, “they don’t make them like you anymore.” And then he pulled the trigger.

  Ray looked up from the dead man at his feet and watched the wind come down through the branches and then go away again. The lights on the Bronco still on, still flashing, leaving a pale indentation over the land, skewing the fall of the morning light, letting it spread thin over everything in a ghostly shade not of this world.

  When he looked down at the man laid out beneath him, he knew that it might well have been him. What Burnham had said was probably true: the rules had changed—there were no more rules. He could see that now. Perhaps he’d known it all along. Perhaps he’d been the one to change them. It wasn’t hard to see. It had been a mistake to take the job. He’d never wanted this again, not this.

  He turned from the man and went to the door Gil had left standing open. Burnham’s hat sitting there on the dust-stained floor. The dope somewhere beneath the seat, nothing left to do but get it up out of the bench and take it to Memo. The thought in his head that he was done with this business, that—standing there with the dead man behind him and another on the run—he was exposed once again, just as he’d been ten years before.

  He brought out a knife from his back pocket. Leaning into the cab he stuck the
tip into the bench and ran it across the fabric. Tufts of white padding came forward through the cut. Beneath, he saw a red and black gym bag with the shape of the bricks visible through the fabric. Inside he knew he would find the brown kilos of heroin.

  He put the knife aside and pulled the bag up out of the bench cushion, and set it on the seat. With the zipper undone he saw there were twelve bricks of heroin, all of them the color of molasses.

  In the ten years since he’d lost Marianne, he’d tried to get out of this business more times than he could remember, painting houses in the summers or filling in on a construction crew when there was work. None of it paying anything close to what Memo would pay him for this job. But it had been safe. And no one would die for twelve bricks of heroin.

  He was burying the old man when he heard the rifle shot far off in the valley like distant artillery. Ray knew one way or another it was done now, and that the younger man who had been riding shotgun with Burnham was dead, and that the job he and Sanchez had set out to do would soon be over.

  The ambulance came up over the rise behind them. The dog spinning around on the seat as Tomás Herrera pulled his truck to the side of the highway. The sound of the siren flowing by in one complete sweep, followed only seconds later by one of the county cruisers doing about eighty on the narrow double lane. Both gone down the road as swift as they’d come up behind, leaving his truck rocking lightly on its springs. The flat desert the only thing to be seen out the cab windows, the dirt wash off to the side of the pavement where the rains came a handful of times a year, and the dried-up arroyos farther on toward the wind-scraped peaks of the Hermanos Range. The ambulance and cruiser gone by now, far enough along the highway that they were distinguished from all around as only a muted pulsing of light in the distance. His dog, Jeanie, stood stiff pawed on the bench seat, barking after the two emergency vehicles as they went north up the highway.

  Pulling back onto the road, he felt his foot a little heavier on the pedal. The old truck engine laboring with the speed, clucking after the ambulance and cruiser like a bird in heat, a trail of smoke behind them—visible in the rearview as the truck burned through oil and gas, going on down the road.

  Up ahead, a mile farther along, the accident came into view, a big-bodied pickup truck turned partway across the centerline. The ambulance pulled in beside it and the wavering flicker of lights from three county cruisers parked alongside. Deputy Pete Hastings—a man Tom had trained fifteen years before—shuttling cars around a blocked-off section of road.

  He hadn’t said much to any of these old colleagues in the years since he’d left the department, not more than to pass a few words of conversation on the street. Every time he ran into any of them, whether he was in town to pick up feed for his hogs or running errands for the Deacon family, Tom acted polite enough, trying as best he could to get himself away as soon as possible, feigning some urgent appointment. All the while fearing they saw right through him, felt the hollowness inside him as he shook their hands.

  Tom was a big man, he’d always been bigger than most, six foot four with wide shoulders. That hollowness inside him too much at times to bear, while at other times, in the early years when he’d first left the department, it had been shame that had filled him, compacted with guilt, layered one on top of the other all the way up through him to the thick black hair he wore close around his oblong head. He’d known people to call him handsome before but he’d never truly believed them. His jaw rounded all the way from ear to ear, hung low like a newborn’s fat-featured face. No matter how skinny Tom ever got he always maintained the same jaw, covered now with a peppering of black and white hair he could no longer stop from showing.

  People had liked him. They’d always liked him and it was the reason he thought, at times, he’d been elected for a job he’d never truly believed he’d receive. Mexican as he was in a town filled up with white oil barons and Texans brought west to work the oil fields, he was a bit of a loner. It was the reason he still felt uncomfortable walking the streets of Coronado and the reason he’d eventually thrown in with his own family, or gone up against his own kind—depending how one saw it—in a bid for the town’s approval. Only it hadn’t gone the way he’d hoped and he’d lost his job, as well as a piece of himself, in the process.

  He waited now in the line of traffic built up around the accident. A big-bodied truck he could only partially see, blocking half the road. His eyes resting on it for a long time, stirring up some recognition as he waited his turn for the deputy to wave him past.

  Straightening up in the seat, anticipating his turn, he checked himself in the mirror. On his face the two-day growth of his beard, coarse along his cheeks, showed the slow untangling of his former self. A little more weight in his belly now, and the feeling that he was living a life that he’d never expected.

  The deputy waved his hand and Tom moved forward. Almost the same height as Tom but twice as thin, Deputy Hastings was blond with a hard round belly and the sallow skin of an inpatient waiting on some vital transfusion. A distant cousin of Sheriff Kelly’s, he was the oldest in the department now, one of the few left after the layoffs had come down from the mayor’s office.

  Tom slowed the truck and, with his arm out the window, asked the deputy what happened.

  “Can’t say,” Hastings said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, ‘Can’t say.’ ”

  “Really, Pete?”

  “On this one, Tom, I can’t.”

  Up ahead, Tom saw the ambulance parked near a blue Ford Super Duty, the bubble lights over the ambulance still flashing. Through the small side windows he watched the two paramedics working on someone inside. He looked back at the big Ford and knew for certain now that it was the same truck he saw every day at his work. “Clint Deacon get into some sort of accident?”

  Deacon’s truck sat at an angle across the road, no glass on the cement, not much of anything. “He’s a friend of mine,” Tom said. “A neighbor.” He’d worked for Deacon for two years now, staking fence posts and herding cattle. Tom’s father, Luis, putting him on when the money had run out of Tom’s hog business. But still he preferred to call Deacon a neighbor rather than his boss. Something shameful now attached to this distinction, that Tom had once been the county sheriff, then a successful farmer himself, but now was just another laborer like his father.

  A car honked behind Tom. Looking over his shoulder he recognized one of the roughnecks he saw from time to time when he went for drinks with his father. The man honked again and Hastings waved him past.

  Tom waited for the oil worker to pull around and then went on, “Look, Pete, that ambulance went by me in a hurry. I’m just asking.”

  “I can’t, Tom.”

  A hundred feet up the road, Tom saw Sheriff Edna Kelly walk out from behind one of the cruisers, remove her hat, and wipe the sweat from her forehead with a small white handkerchief.

  Ignoring the deputy, Tom raised his hand and hollered a greeting. Kelly looked up, and when she recognized Tom, she motioned for Hastings to let him through.

  Kelly had once been his deputy. She was athletic in build with a runner’s thighs and the broad, rounded shoulders of a girl who had grown up doing farm work.

  “Tomás Herrera,” Kelly said after he’d drawn his truck up next to where she stood. His name pulled long in mock disbelief. “You know you can’t be here.”

  Tom shrugged. “I was just driving by.”

  Jean
ie moved over across the bench seat and put her head out the window, looking for a hand from Kelly. The old mutt a gift from Kelly all those years before when Tom had been asked to step down from his position as sheriff so that Kelly could take over.

  Kelly let Jeanie get her scent before petting her. “What are you really doing here?” Kelly asked, standing beside his truck looking in, a nervous edge to her voice that carried with it the slightest hint of warning.

  Tom pulled the dog back from the window, feeling the old girl fight him for only a moment before settling in on her side of the bench. “Nothing, Edna. Just passing through on my way north.”

  Kelly waited a moment, perhaps wanting him to say more, and when nothing came, she said, “I can’t have you here. Not after everything.” The words were hard, but the voice was soft. A lot of history between the two of them and Tom wanted to believe it counted for something. He wanted to believe that maybe Kelly didn’t mind his being here as much as she was saying.

  Still, Tom felt scolded. At thirty-six, she was more than a decade younger than him, wearing the star he used to wear. The blond hair he’d always felt an attraction for when she’d been his deputy now kept up under her hat in a ponytail. All of her seemed new to him, like she’d never been the person he’d known before. The stress and pressures of the job showing on her face where new seams had formed in the skin, intensified now by whatever she’d just walked away from.

  “I’m not here to step on any toes,” Tom said, reassuring her. “You know I’m helping out Deacon these days, trying to make a little extra money to get my hog farm back on the level. I saw the truck. I just thought—”

  “Clint is fine,” Kelly said, cutting in. She gave a sideways look toward Deacon’s Ford. “You can see him up there in Pierce’s car.”

  Tom put a hand over his eyes to shade them from the sun. Up the road Clint Deacon was sitting in the back of one of the cruisers with the door open. The young deputy Tom had seen around town recently standing just beyond taking a statement from him. “I didn’t mean to press you,” he said, trying to be apologetic.