The Carrion Birds

by Urban Waite

  His relationship with his wife, Marianne, started long before he’d even come back. Before he’d set foot in the States again and taken work with his father. Marianne, small in stature, five foot four at the most, with pale translucent skin and sharp green eyes. In Ray’s memories her hair tied, dark and brown, behind her in the day, always hung loose at night for dinner. She was the sister of one of his old buddies from the war. They had stayed in contact after his buddy had passed, writing letters to each other, sending them from one world to the next. Those letters getting Ray through his last few months, writing to her almost as if he were a piece of the brother she had lost, an extension of the same man, with the same fears and shared experiences.

  Marianne and his son were the reason he’d started to work for Memo in the first place, wanting to provide for them as the oil went out of his father’s property. All of Coronado infused in some way by Marianne. His memory of her drifting by him like a wind, there and then gone again in its wanderings.

  Ray ran a hand up through his hair. He sat on the porch looking out at all he’d left and now had returned to. Burnham dead at his feet only hours before and the thought in his head that he hadn’t wanted to pull the trigger but that he had all the same because it was his job. It was what he was paid to do, and if it came to it, he knew he would do it again like he had done it so many times before.

  Behind, he heard the porch door open. Casting a glance over his shoulder, he saw Sanchez standing there, the tips of his white athletic shoes red as desert dust, and the black sweatshirt and jeans a size too large on his frame.

  “Done?” Ray asked.

  “I found a place for the bag inside one of the walls upstairs.”

  “Hidden?”

  Sanchez smirked, the look young and arrogant on his face. Raising his hand to take in the desert and heat-blurred shape of Coronado farther on, Sanchez said, “This place is falling apart. No one is going to be surprised if there is a little extra plaster on the floor.”

  Ray’s family had been one of the original oil families to populate the valley before all the big oil companies came through. Ray’s childhood caught somewhere between the boom and gradual bust. His mother a Mexican cook and his father, Gus, one of the richest private oilmen in the valley at the time. White haired even at a young age, with a crooked nose and the white skin that always burned too easily in the desert sun.

  All Ray could see of Coronado from the porch laid low across the horizon to the south. A town constructed out of memory, barely visible in the midday heat. But a town that Ray knew was there all the same. The wooden church with its black iron steeple, the brick courthouse where he’d been married, and the hospital where he’d been born, all of it in a line off Main, where the road ran south to north with grain and feed shops, restaurants, and bars. All of it, even in the years Ray had lived there, slowly creeping off the edge of the map. In twenty years he doubted it would even exist; a hundred years more and there would be nothing but foundations and a few iron fence posts.

  Most of it, even the house Ray and Sanchez had chosen, built during the first good years, when the oil rush had come through, before the larger companies began speculating on all the properties. Ray’s father had been one of the first into the area and Ray knew he was out there still, even now after the oil was gone and all those old properties, like those owned by the Sullivans or the Clarks or the Andersons, had been abandoned by the larger oil companies. Leaving carved-out farmhouses to dot the valley floor.

  “You going to make the call or should I?” Sanchez said.

  Ray stood, swiping the dust from his pants where it had accumulated. Over his top he wore the flannel shirt he’d put on the day before and the padded canvas jacket he had used to keep him warm through the night, waiting by the roadside for Burnham to come along. His short black hair, giving in to his age, showed white at the temples, his skin already worn from years of this work, and the years before when he’d worked oil himself.

  Even with the dust coming up off his clothes he knew he needed a washroom if he was going to make the call. He needed to clean himself up and make it look like he hadn’t been down in the dirt for an hour, digging a shallow grave. “I’ll make the call,” Ray said. “It should be me.”

  “He paged me again just a minute ago.”

  “Memo? How many times does that make?”

  “Six.”

  “Is he usually like this? Your uncle?”

  “I was an independent before this,” Sanchez said. “I told you how it is with me and him, he wants me to learn something from you. To see how a real professional works.”

  “Is that what he said?”

  Sanchez smiled, revealing a range of uneven teeth. “In a nutshell.”

  Ray knew he didn’t belong here. Not like this, not for this type of job again. But he’d taken the job to get home and here he was so close to the place he wanted to be. Ten years since he’d been this close to Coronado. His life here was gone now, his son Billy handicapped by the accident that killed his wife, now twelve years old and living with his grandfather. The car Marianne had driven that day smashed in on one side like it had been broadsided. Deliberately killed in order to hurt Ray. Nothing else around and the road going on toward the south, the wide double track of a truck tire painted into the cement where it had rammed her car from the road.

  Ray hadn’t wanted a life like that for his son; handicapped, his mother gone. Ray didn’t know how to care for a boy like that. A kid with troubles who’d never speak and had sat mutely in front of Ray for weeks, watching him as he’d made calls to his cousin Tom, hoping every day that he didn’t have to look at the boy anymore.

  Ten years had passed and Ray had spent that time working the areas around Las Cruces, even doing a few federal jobs out of Albuquerque, but this business with Burnham was something different. It was a grudge killing, working for Memo’s family again. The same people who’d gotten him caught up in this line of work to begin with. Only he hadn’t worked for them for years and he was starting to see why. The pressure of the job, the lack of preparation, and the stakes that much higher than he was used to this close to a place where people might recognize him.

  It was a lot of time for Ray to go missing, to abandon his own blood like that. But at the time he’d seen no other way and he’d run, distancing himself from everyone. Knowing there would be questions, and that those questions still waited for him to answer.

  He’d run because he’d set his cousin up. He’d wanted it evened up between him and the cartel, asking Tom to go over there and hurt that woman a little, the only cartel connection Ray could find. The only direct connection he could make to Marianne, the cartel to blame for what had happened to her and Ray filled with a hate there was little he could do to turn. Ray had wanted Tom to scare her, make her think he was going to take everything away from her. And then somehow, in the worst possible way, his cousin had.

  In all those years since, Ray had tried as best he could to forget about his own family’s place here in the valley, his father, his son, his uncle, his cousin. He’d tried to forget about what had been done to his wife, about his mute and deaf son, about the life they’d been building and the plans he’d had for them. How easily that plan had slipped out from under him. How easy it seemed for his life to slip from one thing into the other.

  He knew, too, that in this new life, there was an emptiness to his actions, a hopelessness that had come with his time away, carried along beside him like a parasite i
n the skin. Never to be satisfied in this world or the next, and that would keep him going until he might fill that hole, bored through from one side to the other. For which he felt, sitting there on the porch looking back at Coronado, he would never find fulfillment. It had made the killing of that old man in the hills outside town all the easier.

  The beep of the pager went off again and Sanchez unclipped it from his pocket and looked at the number.

  “Number seven,” Ray said.

  Sanchez slipped the pager backward into his pocket, showing the clip outside his pants. “Like I said, this is all a learning experience.”

  They’d taken Burnham’s truck with them, as well as their own Bronco, both trucks now parked out back of the Sullivan house. The town a thin gray line against the horizon ahead. The high steeple of the church on Main barely visible. Ray turned and fixed Sanchez for a good second or more, letting the younger man know he was serious. “What did I tell you up there on the road, before all of this happened? What did I tell you was the most important thing?”

  Sanchez shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his eyes skittering away from Ray like a schoolboy’s. “No mistakes,” he said.

  “Memo has paged us seven times,” Ray said. “You shot that boy, didn’t you? You saw him take the bullet and fall dead on the ground. That’s what you told me, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you said?”

  “I shot him,” Sanchez said, the muscles in his jaw held tight beneath the skin.

  Tom put down the picture he’d been looking at—an old photo from when Mark worked the wells outside Coronado, posing in his yellow foreman’s hard hat.

  “Did you have a good drive?” Heather asked again, her voice carrying in from the kitchen. “Did you run into any traffic?”

  “There was an accident just north of Coronado,” Tom said, moving from the living room into the kitchen, Elena sitting farther on toward the back of the kitchen, doing her homework at a small table. “I was able to talk to Edna for a bit and then it was an easy hour and a half or so to get up here.”

  “Nothing serious, I hope,” Heather said, as she cut chicken breasts. “Anyone we’d know?” The knife paused in her hand while she waited for an answer.

  Late-afternoon sun came in through the kitchen window as Tom thought over his response. He didn’t know if Mark and Heather had known the Deacons when they lived in Coronado. It wasn’t a very big place to begin with and he felt ashamed even after two years to tell Heather that he’d had to take work raising cattle while his own farm went on hiatus.

  At the other end of the kitchen Elena raised her head, waiting to hear what Tom had to say. Probably wanting to hear the gory details. The last time the girl had ever really paid attention to him was when she was seven years old and he’d bought her a stuffed cow for her birthday, one of those plush toys with a string dangling out the back. Heather, Mark, and Tom able to hear her anywhere in the house, pulling the string as a mechanical moo sound groaned out of the animal.

  “Nothing serious,” Tom said, watching as Elena went back to her homework. “Did you ever meet the Deacons?”

  “No,” Heather said, shaking her head. “If they weren’t in the oil business I don’t think we’d know them.”

  “Cattle,” Tom said. “They’re old neighbors of mine.”

  “The people your father started working for after Lamar’s oil went dry?”

  “Those are the ones,” Tom said.

  Heather finished with the chicken, scooping it up with the blade of her knife and putting it into a bowl.

  “Edna says hi, by the way.”

  “How is she? We haven’t heard from her in a while. She must be busy now that there’s only three of them in the department.”

  “Not her best day,” Tom said. “They’re all overworked. About five minutes after I left, a news van passed me on the road, heading toward the accident. I’m sure she wasn’t too happy about that.”

  “News van? I thought you said it wasn’t anything serious.”

  “You never know what qualifies as news these days,” Tom added, looking again to Elena.

  He didn’t really know why he even came anymore. Heather and Mark had made him the child’s godfather, but he had never wanted it, never thought it was appropriate after all that had happened. Maybe it would have been best for him to stay in Coronado, to never leave, to just keep on going on the course that had been chosen for him. Like Kelly said, he wasn’t the sheriff anymore, but there were still things that reminded him he’d been, like some vestigial tail left behind from another era.

  Heather asked Tom to get the tortillas out of the fridge. He brought them over and they stood at the counter, rolling the tortillas around the chicken. The silence thick between them till Heather asked Tom about the town, about everything that had changed since she’d seen him last, finally working her way around to asking about the woman he’d been seeing off and on for the past fifteen years or so. A secretary for the mayor’s office down at the courthouse, the woman’s name was Claire and she’d worked there since before Tom had been the sheriff.

  “We stopped seeing each other a month or so ago,” Tom said, the second-to-last tortilla in his hands on the scrubbed tile counter.

  “You two never could stay together for more than a month at a time.” Heather laughed. “She stop seeing you or you stop seeing her?”

  “I don’t know exactly, it just ended. It always ends this way and I expect it will end this way again. I think we just tired each other out.”

  “This thing between you two has been going off and on for a while. You didn’t think it would slow down for you at some point?”

  “Not this way,” Tom said. “The mayor caught her ear on something and instead of letting it go she tried to defend me, only he just wouldn’t let up. Claire said it was me or the job.”

  “That’s not right, Tom.”

  “I know it’s not right, but you expect her to quit her job over me, just because the mayor can’t keep his mouth shut? Me and Claire never had that solid a relationship to go on as it was.”

  Heather finished the last enchilada and placed it in the baking pan. “I always thought there was something happening with you and Edna anyway.” She laughed and shot Tom a sly grin.

  “No,” Tom said. “Too much history between us at this point, plus you know she got married a few years ago. I’m not that man, not ever.”

  Heather bumped him with her hip, saying, “Not even on the sly, Tom? Come on now.”

  He liked Heather a lot just for saying things like that. Just for giving him a hard time, and joking with him the way she did. It was hard to find people in Coronado who’d treat him like that these days. People who would joke around with him the way Kelly sometimes did, or even Claire, when she was talking to him.

  His heading north to see Elena had a lot to do with how Heather and Mark treated him. They were good people for Elena, regardless of Tom’s history with the girl. And he knew the simplest reason Heather and Mark were now Elena’s family was that they were home. After everything, they were the first people on the block to ask about the baby inside, coming out of their own house and taking the baby out of Kelly’s hands, keeping her till Protective Services could be called. Those few hours cementing their relationship with the baby, following up on her through the months, checking in with Elena’s foster care—asking about her family in Mexico, if anyone had come forward yet to claim the baby—even as they moved north to Las Cruces for
Mark’s new job. Eventually adopting the little girl when she was almost three years old.

  Mark came home about ten minutes later, the sweet corn smell of the enchiladas baking in the oven. It had been a long time since Tom had had a meal like it.

  “Will you drive back tonight?” Mark asked after Heather had excused herself to take Elena to one of her friends’ houses.

  Tom checked the time. It was still early, and the local evening news would come on in ten minutes or so. “Do you mind if I just stay to catch the news and then head out? I’d like to get on the road while there’s still some light.”

  “I don’t mind if you stay all night,” Mark said. “It’s nice to have another adult around. I don’t know if you noticed but Elena doesn’t exactly like to talk to us anymore.”

  Tom helped Mark clear the table, and when they were done, Mark brought out a couple beers and they settled in and turned the television on. Heather came home and sat with them as the news started up.

  The story about the shooting outside Coronado was the first one up, Kelly there on the side of the road looking harried and uncomfortable as she did her best to avoid the reporter’s questions.

  “I thought you said it wasn’t anything serious,” Heather said after the news cut back to the anchor in the studio.

  “It wasn’t,” Tom said. He was listening as the anchor took up the story, trying to make it into a report about illegals crossing the border.

  “What was all that about a boy getting shot, then?”

  Tom shook his head. “Not a good day for Edna.”

  The news had switched to the oil war going on all the way across the world, the night sky highlighted by the bright green tinge of bombs going off somewhere in the cityscape. The anchor finished, and then the camera swung over and the sports guy started talking about the local high school games.