It Came From Del Rio
Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles
Stephen Graham Jones
Trapdoor Books Lyons, Colorado
Copyright ©2010 Trapdoor Books
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotation in a review.
Trapdoor Books is an imprint of Trapdoor Publishing.
First Edition.
Discovered by Franz Weller
Edited by Jami Carpenter
Author Photo by Gary Isaacs
Design by Sue Campbell
Cover illustration by Ryan “Ry” Shiu, www.ry_spirit.deviantart.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cataloging in Publication Data available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-9365000-0-0 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 978-1-9365000-1-7 (trade paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-9365000-2-4 (e-book)
ISBN-10: 1-9365000-0-0 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1-9365000-1-9 (trade paperback)
ISBN-10: 1-9365000-2-7 (e-book)
P.O. Box 1989
Lyons, Colorado 80540-1989
www.trapdoorbooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
“Dodd”
“Laurie”
“Author’s Note”
“About the Author”
for Kinsey girl
and for Jory Gray
Devil made me do it the first time
second time I done it on my own
— Waylon Jennings
Dodd
Call me Dodd. That’s what I used to tell my clients, in the bars and alleys and dives I called my office. And they liked it, that I was that kind of professional. It made me a good investment — made them good investors, smart businessmen. And, taking into consideration that they were using my services instead of some hack, some suicide waiting to happen, maybe they were doing good business. Because I always delivered, no matter what. But the joke was on them, too: Dodd’s my real name.
It’s the same as, during a bank job, say, leaving a fake mustache by the curb. The cop who finds it, he’s going to narrow his eyes and say into his radio that everyone needs to be on the lookout for some criminal type who’s got a smooth upper lip. Because, if they catch up with me in the next few days — three weeks, in my case, to get it to fill in properly — then there’s no way I could be hiding behind a mustache. Unless I already had one, was just holding that fake one in the cuff of my sleeve.
That’s how Dodd works.
It’s not short for anything either, though when my daughter Laurie was learning to talk, she didn’t understand the difference between Dodd and Dad.
It was all good and funny.
We were living in Mexico then. On cash.
Dad, Dodd.
There’s another way to mispronounce it, too.
A couple of years after she learned to talk, when our sequentially-numbered bills were running low, meaning I was gone at night more and more, I came home with the sun one morning to find a napkin on the bar between the kitchen and the dining room. Laurie’d been using it as a coaster, pretending she had a mom, maybe, who’d get onto her for leaving rings of water around the house. I don’t know.
On the napkin, anyway, top left and at an angle, my name, as if she’d been taking down a phone message. Only, instead, she’d started doodling:
Dodd
Dad
Did
Dud
Which is four of the vowels, yeah. She’d started to write the fifth, but then, seeing the end of it, stopped. Standing there in the kitchen that morning, it was funny, an accident, a sick joke.
She should have just kept writing.
If she had, maybe this all would have fallen out differently. Maybe the ink in this pen wouldn’t be bubbling out onto the back of my hand.
Dead.
If she’d just written that out, it could have kickstarted all my superstitions, rung all my alarm bells. Kept me from calling the number she’d jotted down at the other corner of the napkin.
A job.
That’s all it was supposed to be.
But if that were true, a whole hell of a lot more people would still be alive. Including me.
Let me back up a bit, though, start in Mexico with me at that breakfast bar between the kitchen and the dining room, Laurie sleeping in her room at the other end of the house, unaware that I was home, that I was about to be leaving again, that I was already looking north to the border, sizing it up once again.
Don’t.
It’s what I want to say to myself, there.
But I’m already reaching for the phone.
As apology to Laurie that next morning, I cooked up all the eggs in the refrigerator. Because this was Mexico, some of them were fertilized, had bloody yolks. I separated them out, washed them down the sink.
She wandered in just as I was pouring them from the pan to the plates.
“Sunshine,” I said, sitting down in my place.
She hadn’t looked up to me yet, was still rubbing sleep from her eyes.
“Maria been over?” I asked.
She did her no-eye-contact nod, meaning she didn’t want to get Maria in trouble. Maria was the daughter of the family who lived next door. Nights I had to be gone, Maria slept on the couch, played big sister. Or was supposed to.
“So?” I asked.
Laurie squinted out the window, panned back to me like I was the last thing in the room.
“Somebody called,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, chewing, hooking my head over to the counter, where the napkin had been, “thought that was for … what was it? Dud?”
Finally, she smiled, started in on her eggs.
“The cable’s out again,” she said.
“I’ll talk to Raymond.”
“School starts in —”
“I know. C’mon, what do you think I am?”
She didn’t answer.
Dad. Dud.
“I’ll get something regular by then,” I told her, shrugging like this was the most obvious fact in the world. “But, I mean, this kind of money, you know I can’t turn it down, dollface.”
“I don’t like these ones,” she said.
“The guy on the phone?” I asked back, too sudden I know. I tried to lean back into my chair. “He say something to you, L?”
Laurie shook her head no.
“It wasn’t a guy,” she said.
I pulled my top lip in, tried to focus on her, relisten to what she was saying. When I’d called half an hour ago, a guy, a white guy with an Austin area code, had answered, given me the specifics.
“It was a girl, then,” I said.
“She knew my name.”
“What?”
There was no more, though. Just that. And it wasn’t so much a threat as a negotiating tactic. I knew because I’d used it myself in bars, hustling pool. What you do is, while lining up your shot, say to whoever you’re playing that you like their truck — what, is that a ’72 clip up under the front, yeah?
What they’ll say back is no, it’s not theirs. They’re driving that Monte Carlo with the wire wheels and the twenty-two layers of clear coat. At which point you nod, snap your ball against some unlikely series of rails to win the game, and say Yeah, that Mon
te Carlo. Sharp ride. What’s a paintjob like that go for, anyway?
The message they get is that now you know what they drive.
This is what these clients were telling me: that, if, upon delivery, I made up some story about having to grease the border guys or buy a car off a lot or whatever, then, hey, they knew I had a daughter, yeah? Cute little girl named Laurie, about three hundred miles away?
It also meant I couldn’t turn down this job.
Whether they were moving stuff in ziploc bags or a pallet of anvils, I was going to have to strap it onto my back, mule it up by starlight. Maybe I really would get a regular job after this, I told myself. One that didn’t ransom my kid to get me to show up.
First, though, one more crossing.
But before that, like every time, a walk down to the pharmacist.
Manuel was waiting for me in the storeroom. His regular customers, we all knew not to ring the bell, make him stand up in the heat of the day.
“Already?” he said, dragging the word out so that what he was really saying was that he was talking American especially for me. Because Spanish was too good, was something I didn’t deserve.
“Manny Manny Manny …” I said, running my fingertips along a row of bottles at eye-level.
“How many?”
“No small talk? ‘How you doing, Dodd?’ ‘Fine, man. Muy ass bien.’ ‘Your health?’ ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’”
“Your health, Dodd?”
“Yeah.”
In the fifties — and I just heard this on the radio once, so probably don’t have any of the names right, if this even was the fifties — there was some trumpet player or another. One of the big ones. Or maybe it was saxophone. Parker, Davis, I don’t know. Jazz. Elevator music. It doesn’t matter. What does is that he shot a truly ungodly amount of heroin. Like, day-in, day-out. Never a dull moment. Trick was, though, he didn’t shoot it for all the usual reasons. For him, it was pain management. Real pain. For years and years before making it big, ever since he was a barefoot kid, he’d been a real and true butterscotch junkie. Meaning he always had one in his mouth. And of course it rotted his teeth all to hell, left him in all kinds of pain, the kind that only some morphine derivative could take the edge off of.
The reason that stuck when I heard it was that it was like the DJ was talking about me.
Ever since I was a kid myself, in Beaumont, there was never a week I didn’t have some ulcer in my mouth. Canker sore. Little white volcanoes of pain. And there was no way to avoid them. Sure, if I didn’t drink any cokes, or eat any ketchup or chocolate, or get any little cuts in my gums from Doritos or from picking out popcorn, or have any stress of any kind, I’d have less ulcers. Not none, but less. So I was cursed, and knew it, and just went along knowing it until, one day in the dentist’s chair — he counted nine ulcers — this dentist says that when he was a kid, these had never been a problem. As best I could with my mouth clamped open, I’d asked why. His answer — he had to talk loud, over the whine of the drill — was that the pharmacists back then all had zinc nitrate sticks. Looked like the punks you get for July 4th. All you had to do was touch one of those bad boys to your sore, and it cauterized it, man. Fixed it right up.
But of course, because they worked so well, they went out of fashion, even went on some list of things not done anymore. Not illegal, just not respectable; evidently burning a burn isn’t good, twentieth century medicine. Meaning, so long as I lived in America, my mouth was going to hurt.
So, yeah, maybe this is why I let the security cameras in that last bank get a clear picture of my face, to paste all over the news.
For me, Mexico wasn’t just a hiding place, a place to start over, but the land of milk and zinc nitrate sticks.
As soon as we settled in under our new names, the first thing I did was introduce myself to Manuel, who shrugged, said yeah, he’d have to make up a batch special, but if I wanted to pay?
I did.
And they were perfect.
Like that dentist said, all it is is burning a burn, which, I mean, you don’t treat a gunshot with another gunshot, I know, or gonorrhea with more gonorrhea. But the way it feels, it’s like those sticks are straws, sucking the hurt out of me, and I don’t care if it’s right or not.
Like that trumpet player, I play my best music when I’m feeling no pain. Coke, ketchup, chocolate — I can mix it in a bowl if I want, bake it in a pie.
Never mind that the week Manuel went up to Laredo to visit relatives, I broke into his pharmacy, pawed through all his notes until I found his aunt’s number, who knew the cousins’ numbers in Laredo, who knew the ex-girlfriend Manuel was shacked up with.
What I paid him that time, it was enough for a year. But worth it.
The only bad thing was that, because he was charging me so much, they started to feel like heroin or something. So, without even meaning to, I started rationing them out, denying myself for forty-eight hours at a time, just to prove I could, then hiding from Laurie in the bathroom, my eyes rolled back into my head, a stick sizzling in my mouth.
Which is dramatic, but you get the idea.
So, yeah, chocolate and all that, it was nothing to me anymore. With Manuel down the street, I was Superman.
Except for stress. The kind that comes from snaking across the border with ten to twenty years’ worth of whatever in my pack, horses and trucks and planes circling all around me. That kind of stress could still light my mouth up, make it hard for me even to drink what little water I had.
“Another job, yeah?” Manuel said, pawing on the shelf behind him for the container I knew so well.
“The last one,” I said, passing the cash with one hand, taking the sticks with the other.
He laughed about this, stuffed the cash into his money jar.
“What?” I said, half out the door already.
He shook his head — no, nothing — then unmuted the American soap opera he had wound up on tape, let it play.
On the way home, in the bathroom of a bar, I allowed myself one stick, just as a preventative measure, but then stayed in there long enough that the clerk sent somebody back to chase me out.
We started to get into a fight by the magazine rack, but I was feeling too good by then, and started laughing instead, and, as apology, bought five dollars of chocolate, washed it down with a glass-bottle coke that was so perfect it made my eyes water.
Of all the last things I could have said to Laurie, what I ended up with was that if Raymond came over to fix the cable, she wasn’t supposed to let him in unless Maria was there.
“Why?” she said.
“No reason,” I said back.
“Could Maria beat him up, then?”
I looked away, my lower lip pulled into my mouth. It’s not easy, being a dad.
Maria was in the other room, already on the phone, the cord wrapped twice around her waist, four or five times around her index finger. Talking in a Spanish so fast and coded that I could never understand it.
“Just a kiss,” I said, leaning down to Laurie.
She laughed, shook her head, but kissed me on the cheek, hugged my neck, and asked when I was coming back?
Soon, I told her, my pack already slung over my shoulder.
It’s probably what she thinks of now, when she thinks of me. Maybe I was even backlit by the doorway or something, like a painting or a movie.
I don’t know.
Laurie.
Of all the things I’m thankful for — all three of them, maybe, and that’s counting that I don’t have to worry about mouth ulcers twice — one is that she can’t see me like I am now. What I’ve become, what I’m doing.
It’s all for the best, though. These are the kinds of things you say to yourself. It’s all for the best, and this is how it had to be.
Except —
On the far wall, I can see my shadow.
In the corner, a man named Larkin. He’s balled up, crying, terrified.
I would be too.
T
he meet was in the flats just outside Piedras Negras. It’s all different now, but back then it was like a movie set: just past a fence that only stood for about two hundred feet, there was an abandoned ferris wheel, like one day it had finally just not been worth packing back onto the truck again. And all around, just out of pistol range, these dogs that didn’t look at all like dogs, or even starved-down coyotes. Jackals, maybe, from what I’ve seen on nature shows. They probably didn’t go forty pounds, but were wiry, and moved like ghosts, one of them always watching me.
Maybe the circus had left them, too, like the ferris wheel. Or, more likely, their momma had chewed through her rope, run off into the scrub, whelped a litter of fifteen, raised them on grasshoppers and cigarette butts and heat.
What made it all really like a movie was that the client pulled up in a dusty old El Dorado, wearing a sweated-through polyester suit, white of course, a brown shirt underneath with a wingtip collar that touched each of his shoulders.
I ran my hand over the long front fender, eased up to him.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Call me Dodd,” I told him, smiling just enough for him to know I was lying.
“Need my name?” he said, heaving himself up from the front seat, studying me.
“Just your money.”
He laughed and slammed the door, causing all the dogs’ ears to stand up like radar dishes for an instant.
“You’re not late,” he said, impressed maybe, wiping a stained handkerchief across his forehead, then looking into it the way some people will look at tea leaves.
“Early either,” I shrugged, just an everyday fact. “People say when, I’m there then, yeah?”
He nodded, accepted this. What I didn’t ask him was how he had Laurie’s name. That’s not how the game’s played. He hooked his head over to a warehouse. I looked around, followed.
“So you’re military,” he said.
This was part of the interview.
“Honorable discharge,” I did my best to mutter.
The trick with being ex-military is you have to have a bad attitude about it, or else you just danced through, didn’t learn anything.
“Special forces?” he tried.
I nodded like it didn’t matter, looked around again to the dogs.
“So what’s the cargo?” I said.
It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles Page 1