“Kind of figured that.”
“Well then?”
“Three now, four later.”
“How about for your horse?’
This made him laugh. He took his hat off, ran his hand through his hair.
“That’s just for not seeing you, man.”
“Well then, we might have to reach an agreement here.”
He crossed his hands on the pommel, shrugged with his shoulders and his eyebrows both. Behind him the buzzards were drifting through the sky. I shook my head again, looked ahead, to Uvalde, and agreed to meet him in a week at a bar down toward Carrizo Springs, a stack of cash in an envelope.
But still, his horse wasn’t for sale, period. For five hundred dollars more, though, he’d let me use the phone in the bunkhouse, if I kept it short and didn’t bleed everywhere.
A little after one o’clock, he swung back around to the stock tank to pick me up. He was in a truck now, a different one than I’d seen.
“Thought you said lunch,” I said, climbing in my side.
“Everybody’s there at lunch,” he said back, grinding us into gear. His saddle was in the back of the truck, the skirt sweated all the way through. On the dash was an old bag of sunflower seeds. I didn’t ask if I could have them, just started eating, shells and all.
“How far out are we?” I asked.
“What, you a squirrel, too?” he said, leaning over the wheel the way guys do when they’re getting paid by the hour. In addition to my being a mule.
“How far to the house?” I said, trying to chew everything I’d stuffed into my mouth.
“Thirty minutes,” he said, nodding north and east. “Why? You on medicine or something?”
“Just getting my bearings.”
He laughed to himself about me and pulled some old clothes from behind the seat. I took them and asked the question with my eyes.
“Nobody’s going to see you,” he said. “But just in case.”
I changed as he drove, buttoned the shirt over the warm bandoleer. The boots even fit.
“They’re on sale this week,” the hand said. “Hundred even.”
“Deal of the year,” I said, trying to flex my toes.
“So what are those, really?” he said, about the canisters.
“Late,” I said, and then we were there, nosed up to the back porch of a long, narrow bunkhouse. The hand looked to me, to the bunkhouse, then ferreted the keys out of the ignition.
“I’m going to the house,” he said. “It’ll probably be better if you’re not here when I get back.” He was talking Spanish again.
I looked all around.
He directed me back down the road we’d come in on. “Over to the north’s a draw. It leads down to the pens. Nobody’s there right now.”
I nodded, understood what he was saying: that that was the place to stay, until whoever I was calling came.
“How far?” I said.
“Not even a mile.”
“I need to dial anything special to get out?” I said, hooking my chin to the idea of the bunkhouse phone.
He shook his head no, added, “And don’t take anything.”
“You know where I’ll be.”
“Exactly.”
With that he tipped his hat and backed away, leaned into the walk-up to the main house to report on whatever he’d been doing all morning. I watched him until he was gone but didn’t chance stepping around the bunkhouse to follow him all the way. Because I didn’t want to get spotted, yeah, but more because I had maybe eight hours left to deliver the canisters.
I shook my head no as I dialed the numbers, then leaned against the wall the phone was on, stared all the way down it. The light gave out before the room ended. This was a bunkhouse for thirty cowboys, but there were only six beds in use. The other way, behind me, was an added-in kitchen, from after the rancher’s wife quit cooking for everybody, probably.
On the stove was a pan one of the other hands had boiled noodles in for lunch. Half of them were still there, cold. I pulled the pan to me, starting fingering the noodles in, and then Manuel was on the line, waiting for me to say something. It was the only number I had memorized, beside my own: the pharmacy.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s me.”
He laughed about this. I could see him sitting on his stool in the stockroom.
“Refill?” he said.
“Yeah,” I told him, “but later. Listen, though, first. Just let me finish. I’ve got a proposition for you.”
On his end, Manuel was just breathing. Which is to say listening.
“I’ve got some money stashed up in Piedras Negras to pay for this. But it has to happen now. Ten minutes ago, really. Yesterday’d be better, even.”
“How much?” Manuel said, with me already.
“Fifteen.”
“Make it twenty.”
“You don’t even know what it is yet.”
“Just on principle.”
I swallowed a mouthful of noodles, said, “You’ve still got those cousins in Ciudad Acuna, yeah?”
The pens were just where the hand had told me they were. And they were just like all the other pens in the world: the fences and gates up on packed mounds of dirt, at least in comparison to the wallowed-out places a hundred years of cattle had been pushed through. There was an old wooden windmill, too, with a concrete tank and chipped trough. I didn’t need it anymore, though. From the bunkhouse refrigerator, I had a sackful of cokes and three sandwiches. When most of them were gone, I occupied myself peeling skin from my burned shoulders, arranging it on the board I’d been using as a plate. From the grey trees between me and the main house, a big horned owl was either watching me or sleeping with its eyes open.
I tried to make my skin look like a snake shed, but my breath kept moving it.
By four, I heard my ride coming.
Fifty miles away, even, people were probably stopping, cocking their heads over to the sound.
Manuel’s cousin was driving a dune buggy. Not just a converted bug, either, but a full Baja-looking frame, complete with stickers and chrome you’d have to be able to see for miles, even by starlight. And the exhaust, it was pointing straight up, for all the world to hear. No muffler.
The cousin slid sideways to a stop, raised his goggles to me, shrugged.
“Uvalde, señor?” he said.
He was being funny.
Behind his seat, strapped in with the kind of metal you use to hang mufflers, was a pony-keg-as-gas tank. The engine sounded like it was running on methanol, maybe, if not just straight nitrous. Manuel’s cousin patted the black leather bucket seat beside him and I grinned as if this hurt, climbed down into it.
“Uvalde,” I said, nodding, and he smiled and jammed the shifter back hard, the sand paddles spraying an unnecessary roostertail behind us, the two runners up front going weightless for a few feet. I was paying twenty thousand dollars for this.
Provided Manuel wasn’t just going to take the whole ammo box.
Part of the deal had been payment in full, whether I made it back this time or not. Which came down to payment now. I didn’t have any choice, though, and, obvious as Manuel’s cousin was here, it was him or nothing. And he was fast. I had no complaints there.
At the first fence, he reached behind my seat, handed me the bolt cutters, and I snapped the barbed wire apart. The first of six sets of it for us, and he’d probably cut three or four more just getting to me, so that we made a line, I was sure. From Del Rio to Uvalde. Or even as deep as Ciudad Acuna.
I couldn’t worry about any of that then, though. What I had to do, mainly, was hold on, and keep counting the canisters warm against my chest. I was supposed to be at the other warehouse no later than dusk. Just to be sure, the client rep had informed me of the exact time the sun was going to duck under the edge of the earth.
At this rate, I’d have to find something to do until then. Maybe whittle a toothpick, push all the fillings back up into my teeth. At top speed, the buggy could stand u
p and run on the paddles. Getting up to speed, though, on the packed dirt of a pasture, it was like riding on square tires.
The cousin was oblivious to all of this. For twenty minutes he smiled, until his teeth were brown with dirt. If I could have seen his pupils, they probably would have been dollar signs. It was definitely time to get out of the business, I told myself. If I was having to depend on people like this for my life.
For nearly three years of crossings now, I’d seen a grand total of three people. This trip, though, it was like I’d sent out invitations a month in advance, and everybody came.
Looking back on it, of course I regret not calling Laurie from that bunkhouse like I should have. What I console myself with is that she probably would have been next door with Maria anyway. It was my last chance to talk to her, though, that’s the thing. To hear her voice when she still knew I was alive and nothing was wrong.
And, though I try to pretend that I thought it through, decided it wasn’t safe to leave my own number on any phone record, the truth of it is that I had my face in the cool light of refrigerator, was stuffing a bag with cokes. I didn’t even think of her, I mean.
So maybe I deserve all this.
Maybe this is what happens to dads like I was. They wind up in a locked storage unit with just a camping lantern for light, a man decomposing across the concrete floor, the single light bulb overhead wavering so that the shadow of their pen is more like smoke than anything else.
I don’t know.
Three days ago, when I asked Larkin if he remembered me, his honest answer was no. When you imagine your perfect revenge, that’s not the answer your enemy gives, usually.
So I had to explain, Larkin’s face slack with confusion — who? — and then I had to explain some more, and show him the picture, and finally I had to leave the storage unit, lock the door behind me, smoke a fast couple of cigarettes in the floodlight. Used to, of course, I knew I was going to need my lungs, so stayed away from smoking. Now, though, cancer’s the least of my concerns.
By the time I came back from my cigarettes, Larkin remembered me, was shaking his head no. And then there was all the usual stuff, which you do think about, the begging and pleading and apologies and deals — the four stages of being killed, I guess — and then he took this notebook from me, even, offered to write it all down, itemize his crimes and sign his name to them.
It didn’t quite make up for him not being just real sure how he was involved here, why he was dying. But it helped. I did expect him to last long enough to read some of this, though. To understand just a little. Not to make him feel any better. But it would have helped me, I think.
But then, I don’t know — how could he really understand the way it felt, to still be alive back then, at the end of a set of coincidences I wouldn’t even believe from a movie? Border cops and cowboys and cousins rising from the pasture as if they’d been waiting for me?
I’ll tell you. What it feels like is fate. Like you were meant to live, to make it through. Which is why I’m writing this, maybe. To understand what went wrong.
Five miles out of the last rise before Uvalde, the dune buggy crapped out. In the new silence, I looked over to Manuel’s cousin. He was touching everything, had no clue.
“That way, I guess?” I said, nodding ahead.
“Hour, hour and-a-half,” he said, biting his lip, looking over to the sun, his bored and blueprinted engine ticking down.
It was almost seven already. I had until 8:28.
“Well,” I said, and stood, leaving my bag of cokes and the water Manuel’s cousin had brought for me.
“Yeah,” the cousin said back, as apology maybe. Or a joke. That’s what the whole week was feeling like, really. There would be time to laugh later.
I slung the bandoleer over my shoulder, winced from the contact, and started walking again. Manuel’s cousin chased after me to give me a cap at least. I took it, adjusted it out, and pulled it down low over my eyes.
“Just keep going straight,” he called out.
I lifted my hand in thanks, wasn’t looking back anymore. I ran another silver nitrate stick into the right side of my mouth. The cokes I’d drunk were going to leave my mouth on fire, I knew. This was preventative. Also, my nerves were about as jangly as they got back then.
After forty-five minutes, I still couldn’t see Uvalde, but I was already finding brittle newspapers and chip bags caught in the scrub, so, like a sailor seeing driftwood, or a certain kind of bird, I knew I was close.
At one hour out, the first lights rolled into view. They’d turned on because the sun was going down. It made me breathe hard, step faster. The warehouse was supposed to be on this side of town, just off the main road. I wasn’t supposed to be able to miss it.
A few days ago, I might have believed that. Now, though, I let myself be drawn to the sound of radials on asphalt, so I could shadow the blacktop into town, be sure I didn’t pass the warehouse somehow.
My watch read 8:02.
I counted the canisters, nodded to myself. If the warehouse was where they’d said, I was going to make it, and this was all going to be over. I could regret paying twenty-thousand dollars for a twenty-minute ride later. When I was alive. With Laurie.
Just as I was pulling into Uvalde proper, where the buildings and lots were thick enough that I was going to have to walk on the shoulder in my cowboy clothes, I heard the dune buggy scream back to life.
Though it was too far to see directly, I could still track it. Each time it slammed up a rise, hellbent on catching some air, its bank of halogen light would glow on the underside of the musty clouds that had moved in. I’d been walking a day ahead of them, I guess.
Even my shoulders were unlucky.
I waved Manuel’s cousin away — more power to him, even — and skirted two more buildings before the warehouse was just suddenly there.
I knew it was the right place because there was a cabover eased alongside it, hooked under a flat of wire rolls, each of them chained down tight enough with new boomers that no DPS or border cop would be able to see what they had rolled in their middles.
Was the truck waiting for me?
8:18.
For two minutes, I stood there like somebody was painting my picture. At 8:21 I stepped into the painting.
Because it was dusk, my eyes didn’t have to adjust much to the inside of the warehouse. Watching a portable television at the only table in the half acre of swept concrete, my American contacts. One was in his fifties, paunchy, wearing a sport jacket. The other was mid-thirties, closer to my age. His hair was long in back, receding in front.
More client reps.
Maybe it was better that way, too. This seemed like the kind of operation where if I saw who signed the checks, they might have to poke my eyes out for me.
“Mr. Dodd,” the younger one said, stretching my name out. Quartering it. He was the used car salesman of the two. The talker.
What that told me was to watch the hands of the other one. I could get caught up listening to the first one then look up into a pistol. Except I was on time. And had all twelve canisters.
I laid the bandoleer down on the table, my eyes flicking over to the portable television. I was standing in the feed, evidently, between the rabbit ears and whatever station. The old rep turned it off.
“I’m on time,” I said, just so there could be no confusion. My voice was more defensive than I wanted.
The younger one picked the bandoleer up like you might a dead snake and ran his hand along its belly. Then he laughed through his nose, as if a joke had just occurred to him. But he kept it to himself, looked up to me instead.
Wedged under the television was a thick, overnight envelope. He pulled it out, showed me both sides of it so I could see it was unopened, then pulled a ragged line in the cardboard.
“Listen,” I said, “this is cute and all, but it’s been a long —”
He held his hand out for me to wait. I looked up to the standing thug to be sure. T
he standing thug just stared at me. It was like he was trying not to laugh, too.
“What?” I said to him.
“You,” he said back.
I let myself smile. Looked away. That I wasn’t standing on a dropcloth— or, in this case, a mat of unrolled wire — was a good thing.
Better was the duffel bag tucked under the table. It was cheap, a throwaway. The kind you begrudge somebody, when you don’t even want to have to be paying them in the first place. I told myself not to count the money until later. And not to do anything stupid now.
“Jimbo, Jimbo …” the talking guy said to the thug. “What are we going to do here, you think?”
The thug looked down to the talker about this, came back with, “Martin S. Larkin. Larkin Larkin Larkin …. You tell me.”
The talker hissed through his teeth, set the overnight envelope aside. One of the canisters had his attention for some reason. The number eight.
“How do I even know y’all are who you’re supposed to be?” I said, trying to pull him back to me. “I was expecting the other guy.”
The talker spun the cap off the canister he was holding, tilted the contents over to study them.
“Hunh,” he said. It was the first time he was seeing them.
I suddenly felt the need for a receipt.
“Look,” he said, holding the canister up to the thug.
“Yeah, real cool,” the thug said, not even really looking. Then he added, “Martin S. Larkin, of Sealy, Texas. Post office box —”
“All right already!” the talker said, slamming his palm down on the table.
I was pretty sure they were just ribbing each other. What scared me, of course, was what if they weren’t. I tried not to commit the name to memory, did anyway.
Larkin looked up to me. “The gentleman who attended you down there, his services aren’t needed up here on the legal side of things so much.”
“Then he’s still down there?”
“Why, he steal your wallet or something?”
This was funny to the thug. Larkin caught it too, started laughing as well, like he was finally bubbling over. I just stared at him, waiting, until the television snapped back on, all static.
“Shut that thing up,” Larkin said.
It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles Page 7