This made him laugh, the pistol jouncing more than I liked. What I liked less, though, was him telling me about that now-missing twenty-seven thousand. It wasn’t the kind of thing you tell somebody you’re about to release, I mean.
“Buforditis …” I said, still trying to play the game.
Refugio smiled, then narrowed his eyes, as if hearing something. “No— no, it was Walford. It doesn’t have the same ring, ‘Walforditis.’ You think?”
I didn’t answer.
He had everything he wanted now, and nothing to lose. He cocked the hammer back, pressed the barrel harder through my hair, so I could tell that what he was doing was straightening his arm. Because he didn’t want to get any brains on his face.
“They’ll come looking for those rocks,” I said, focusing everything I had on his boots.
“Martians?” he said.
“Worse.”
“What could be —?”
“Walford. He was my contact.”
For maybe thirty seconds then, nothing, from either of us. Just me, breathing deeper than I meant to, and him, gears turning in his head.
“You only know his name from me,” he said at last.
I was ready. “Snakeskin boots?” I asked back. “Real bad sunburn on his neck?”
Refugio breathed in, blew it back out.
“Then that means you’re next,” he told me. “They’re cleaning up as they go, yeah?”
“They must have found out about the cut he took,” I said. “Or maybe he was late, I don’t know. Like I’m going to be.”
This made that final gear turn over in Refugio’s head: he didn’t have to pull the trigger at all. I was already dead. I stared at him, nodded so he’d know I was giving this to him, a gift.
In the truck twenty minutes later, the gun in his right hand, still angled at me, he said, “I thought ‘lunar rocks’ was the new word for crack or something.”
In the bed of the truck, bouncing around, were the canisters, just loose. And my boots. And the pack. My water was there too, though Refugio had uncapped each bottle, spit a grainy brown line into it, then screwed the lid back on.
We were taking the ridgelines back south, to Del Rio. I wasn’t asking why.
Refugio’s truck sputtered and coughed with each incline, finally died twice, didn’t want to start again. He blamed it on watered-down gas, and then on the state of Texas, and then on me.
I didn’t say anything.
The second time he came back to the cab, the ether can still in his right hand, he caught me looking at the keys in the ignition.
“You should have,” he said.
When we finally got to the blacktop that led into town, Refugio stopped, drummed the dashboard like a rimshot.
“Well,” he said. “I can say one of two things here, right? Either don’t let me catch you again, or — I don’t know. Next time call ahead.” He looked over to me, to gauge my reaction. “Which do you think I should ask? I mean, you know, if they let you have a next time.”
I swallowed, studied his dashboard, then, moving slow so I wouldn’t get shot, I took a pen from the ashtray, a page from the legal pad between us, and looked up to him for his private line.
He smiled, scribbled down a mouthful of numbers for me, then got out his side at the same time I got out of mine. I started collecting all the canisters, and my water, but when I reached for my pack, he pulled it across to him.
“Almost forgot,” he said, “you guys like to sew stuff into secret little pockets, right?”
“I only had that twenty-six hundred,” I said.
Refugio nodded, said he knew, then cut my backpack to shreds anyway, looked at it from both sides. “And now I really know,” he said, not really laughing so much anymore.
I cradled all twelve canisters to me somehow, dropped the water behind me, then reached in for my boots. But Refugio was shaking his head no again.
“You can’t —” I said.
But he could, and was.
I closed my eyes, turned my head, then opened my eyes back, away from Refugio.
“You never answered my question,” I said. “You just happened to be walking around right where I was?”
“I wasn’t looking for you,” he said like an apology, leaning over the bed of his truck now, his pistol dangling down into it, “Mosely — this would-be Granger Mosely, owns that pasture you were in? He called in, said I had some dead wets stinking up his place.”
I looked up to his face.
“How would he know that?”
“Because he didn’t have any cattle in that pasture,” Refugio shrugged, pushing away from the bed, holstering his pistol, then, at the last moment, nodding up to the sky for me, where we’d been. Floating in wide, lazy circles were two buzzards. Refugio smiled, a new glitter in his eyes now.
“Maybe they know something we don’t, yeah?” he said, then winked and was gone.
Because he might have still thought I was going south, I waited until dusk to start walking.
It didn’t take thirty minutes for my right foot to start bleeding. Even wrapped in the torn-off bottoms of my pants, with pieces of my shirt tying them on.
At the second hour, not even halfway to dusk yet, the canisters clinking in a tied-off sleeve, I drank the first of the three bottles of water I had left, closing my eyes to the stringy brown spit still swirling inside. Now Refugio was in me, part of me. We were bound. It’s what he’d wanted, I knew. Put him out here like this, though, see what he’d do.
Thinking on that was the main thing that kept me going. And Laurie. My picture of her was still at my last camp, probably. In the tangled branches of that poisoned bush.
At the third hour, I finally found the fenceline I knew was there. Beside it, the ruts worn into the pasture by the rancher’s trucks. Cowboys still rode the fences, yeah, but they had air conditioning now, and pictures of their girlfriends tucked in front of the speedometer.
I wasn’t there to flag one of them down, though. If there were no cattle in this pasture, then there was no reason to ease through at watering time and count heads, or check for holes in the barbed wire.
What I was there for was the smooth, packed dirt of the outside rut. And because, who knows why, on nearly every fence line I’d ever seen, if you walked it long enough, you’d find a boot upended on a post. Usually not near a gate or anything, like where you’d hang a coyote or rattlesnake, but just out in the middle of nowhere.
If I was lucky, that boot would be a size twelve. And then there would be another.
The world owed me that, at least.
Every right footprint I left was smudged with blood. Come night, a coyote would be licking it and looking ahead, its ears tuned to my breathing. And my buzzard situation hadn’t improved any, either.
I pushed on, cussing Refugio at first but then cussing Lem as well, for having that idea about that bank in Ft. Stockton in the first place.
It was supposed to be a pushover. That had been his word. One job, then retire. Who wouldn’t have said maybe, and then, over the course of a week, why not? I had a wife to provide for, a daughter to raise.
Never mind that Lem had been one of Tanya’s friends in the first place. The only one not in jail yet.
Thinking of Ft. Stockton got Laurie in my head again, though, alone in Mexico. So I tried not to think at all.
By six, I was breathing hard, not walking with any grace whatsoever. Shambling, shuffling, stumbling sometimes. The routine I’d come up with was, every thirty-third post to stop, lean against it, and count the canisters. Because I wasn’t going to hobble all the way to Uvalde just to get shot for shorting the cargo.
And, much as I hated Refugio, at least now I could blame the case and the number nine canister on him. I might even be a hero for not giving up, like any sane person would have.
Except, then, if they did like me, they might want to use me again.
If that happened, I’d nod like I had for Refugio, that yeah, this was the start of
something good. But then I’d fade deeper into Mexico, with Laurie. Change both our names, our hair. Never speak English again.
It was part of the deal I was making — what I was offering to trade for if I could just make it all the way to Uvalde, on time.
By dusk, the last time I could see my backtrail, I was leaving two bloody footprints, and still hadn’t even made up the ground Refugio had driven me back over. Around midnight, the coyotes padded in.
I pictured them trotting alongside, their black lips curved into hungry grins, their eyes half-lidded, because they had all night here. What it made me think of was the guy, trapped by Indians or whatever, who, when they told him they were going to stretch his skin over a canoe frame, took up a fork and stabbed himself all over.
It carried me for a few more miles. For that I thanked the coyotes.
Dawn found me holding onto the top of a fencepost with both hands.
If you’re alone out in the middle of nothing, the sun coming up can have an almost powdery quality. Like the light sifting down across everything, it’s gritty. Like if you opened your mouth it would sift between your teeth, and crunch. Like snow, though, it can drift over you as well. Make it easy to lie down.
I had a schedule to keep, though.
For the last few miles, I hadn’t even been able to afford the luxury of crossing to each fencepost, to check for the boot I knew was going to be there. Instead I told myself it would be too small, that I didn’t have anything to cut the toe off with.
At some point I’d lost the bloody right rag around my right foot, and then heard the coyotes fighting over it behind me. I threw them the other one as well.
In the tied-off sleeve with the canisters, I still had Refugio’s number, folded smaller and smaller. If I made it through this, I had suspicions I might be calling ahead, yeah. To give him his cut of the next job. Everything he’d earned.
Like it was a big cork, then, the sun just bobbed up the way it does down here, so that — what it’s like is that the night, all of that darkness out across everything, it all seeps toward you, gathers in your shadow.
You don’t believe me, come stand down here all alone sometime.
For ten minutes, then — I was calling this my night’s sleep — I studied the ridgelines, waiting for that lens flash I knew was either going to be Refugio or whoever he’d alerted that there was somebody trying to cross this pasture.
There was nothing, though. Just the buzzards, back, patient.
I counted the canisters again and trudged on, finally realized that the texture of the rut under my raw feet had changed. There were little ridges, left behind from truck tires. That they were still standing meant this had been Refugio.
He’d taken this way out? Doubled back after he’d coasted down the hill toward Del Rio in a sputtering truck? I studied the pasture some more, finally shrugged. Had to keep moving.
At lunch, what would have been lunch but was instead a second bottle of spit-in water, I found what Refugio had left me: an old leather bandoleer. The kind Pancho Villa wore across his chest, for cartridges. Except this one was military-issue, from a surplus store probably. And not fitted for fingerlong rimfire cartridges, but the kind of grenades you shot from under the barrel of your rifle, if your rifle’s fitted-out right.
They were the perfect size for the canisters.
I snugged each of them in along with pieces of the sleeve to make sure the fit was tight. For an accidental moment, I almost thanked Refugio in my head. Except that I hated him.
An hour later, I found the place he’d turned off into the scrub. I studied where he might have been going for too long, probably, but finally just shook my head no, kept to my ruts.
Thirty minutes later, though, shaking my head no, that this was stupid, I cut across to intercept his tracks. Because, if he’d left me what I was wearing now, then maybe he’d left some water or my boots or something farther on. Like, at my camp.
The hot skin in my cheek was an ulcer now.
I flipped the buzzards off and wove myself deeper into the pasture, trying to watch the ground and the horizon both, one for cactus or broken bottles, the other for windshields or horsemen. I cut across Refugio’s tire tracks a quarter mile out, followed them around a rise to my camp.
The netting was still there, half-hanging from the black bush. No boots, though, but two bottles of water, an envelope fluttering under one of them. I unfolded the yellow piece of paper inside.
There were no words, just a sticker peeled off a glass bottle Refugio probably had in his glove compartment: the skull and crossbones that meant poison. Under it, the word strychnine.
It was what the ranchers would dust a calf with, if they’d had to put it down. It wouldn’t kill all the coyotes who ate from it, but it’d kill a few of them anyway.
I squatted down, studied each bottle before I swirled the water up, to check for particulate matter drifting down. There was no difference, though. In smell, either. Not to me, at least. But one of them was bad, I knew. Not both, just one.
I shook my head, stood too fast. Refugio was probably watching from somewhere. Had maybe even called in sick for this.
In the clear, flat spot where he’d first dumped the canisters were all my silver nitrate sticks. They were stuck in the ground now by the handle. From directly above, they formed two eyes and a smile. The dirt under them was balled up in a splatter pattern I knew, too. Refugio had stuck them in the ground like birthday candles, then pissed on them. What this meant was that he was old enough to remember what they were, where they went.
I collected them anyway, and both bottles of water, and angled back across the pasture for the fenceline, the rut road I needed.
At noon, my back blistering, my sweat slowing down, I finally found what I’d been waiting for: a boot. It was too big, even. I stuffed the toe with grass then used a rock to knock the staples from a fence stake — not the post, used to hold it down, but just one of the skinny ones that keep the wire from sagging.
It was my cane at first, but then, with the netting for a bag, it was the hobo stick I carried my water in.
Uvalde was maybe four days away, and I had maybe three to get there.
By the time my shadow had flipped around so that I was stepping into it, I was singing to myself, the way I had in my head for that first bank job, so I could pretend this was all just a movie, and that I was the outlaw hero, that the audience was cheering for me. The only time I stopped before dark was to look back to the idea of my camp, where I’d somehow forgot to look for Laurie’s picture.
“I’m sorry,” I said out loud to her, and then caught one of the coyotes.
He was just watching me, panting.
“Come on, big boy,” I told him, and kept walking.
That night, my third water bottle gone, just one clean one and one poisoned left, I collapsed against a fencepost, had to close my eyes some. The idea was that, like this, only my frontside was vulnerable if the coyotes came yipping and snatching in, their yellow eyes open all the way now. If not, then they’d just be taking bites out of my back, through the rusted strands of barbed wire.
I wondered if I’d notice.
What I should have dreamed of, I know, was of walking, all my demons haunting me, or of being out in the ocean, treading undrinkable water, sharks circling, circling. Or that I was in that bank doorway with Tanya again, or that I was just sitting on the couch doing nothing with Laurie, or that I ate all the moon rocks, I don’t know.
I just slept, though. Like I was dead.
If I dreamed of anything, it was that I had some bear or mountain lion scent-in-a-bottle with me. The coyotes wouldn’t be drawing close then. I did think about food some, I suppose, but I would have traded any hamburger then just for a left boot. Size whatever. And maybe a sombrero, or a lady’s parasol.
Even now, fifteen years later, when all that stuff doesn’t matter to me so much like it used to, I still find myself ducking for shade. Maybe it’s just to hide, though. The
way, when your hair’s long and you’re in a convenience store, you kind of duck away from the black camera up in the corner.
It can’t really hurt you, doesn’t even care about you really, but still. That’s the way I am now. Nothing’s going to change that, either.
I have a radio now anyway. I know it looks funny, the earbuds rising all the way to my ears — for obvious reasons, headphones don’t cut it anymore — but, I mean, with me, that’ll kind of be the last thing you look at too.
What I tell myself is that Frankenstein’s monster, if he’d had access to music and disc jockeys and news updates and weather reports and over-the-air trivia games and ‘Rest of the Stories’ and all that, if he could have just plugged into it, then he probably would have.
The trick is, of course, I don’t even need batteries. It’s not that great a trick, though, really.
If I could somehow send a dream back in time to myself — sleeping against that fencepost — now that might be a trick I’d trade certain things for. As it was, though, I either dreamed of nothing or didn’t remember it when I woke. If I had to guess, I’d guess my arm was probably twitching every now and then, or I was talking to somebody. The reason I say that is that the coyotes never moved in to test me.
When I came to, not confused about where I was at all, they were still a good thirty feet out. If I looked beside where one was, I could just make out its outline. To them, I was giant rabbit. The biggest mole they’d ever lucked onto.
They had to drink, too, though.
For maybe thirty minutes, I studied on this, then nodded, double-checked my thinking. It was good, I was pretty sure. And I was so thirsty.
Using the weather-rounded end of my hobo stick, I dug out a hole in the rut. A bowl, about cereal size. The dirt was packed enough that I was able to smooth the sides down. It would hold water for a few minutes, anyway. Not just drink it straight down like the loose stuff out in the pasture.
“All righty,” I called out to the coyotes, then tipped a little water from one of the jugs into the hole and eased down to the next fencepost.
It took one of the coyotes about four minutes to gather enough balls to stick his nose into the hole. I didn’t say anything, just watched. He started drinking. As soon as he had a mouthful or two of it up, another coyote eased in, nudged him out of the way to lap up the rest, its eyes watching me the whole time.
It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles Page 5