Call it a skin graft. My shadow on the wall here, it’s got these two tall ears. Which is to say I’m in Hell.
It’s not as lonely as you’d think, though.
Sometimes, alone in a pasture, I’ll even forget for a few steps what I’ve become, and just nod along, happy. But then, like always, it all comes rushing back.
At first, in the warehouse, the memories were thick enough, and coming so fast and all-at-once, that I had seizures, I think. Each time I’d wake, I’d pull myself over to the rabbit, and make myself eat more and more and more, until the flies were too thick and crunched between my teeth, their delicate wings sticking to the roof of my mouth.
I was Dodd again.
Walking up out of the pasture and into Uvalde, the bandoleer slung across my sunburned shoulder, new blisters on my heel from boots that weren’t mine, my whole life spread before me. Taken away. I fell to my knees, swallowed it all down, everything I’d missed. Which, I mean — that’s a lie, of course.
But I did stand again anyway. Into what I’d been made into.
I was in an abandoned warehouse in Piedras Negras. It was — I didn’t know what year it was. But clothes don’t rot overnight. I’d figure all that out, though. And, though I couldn’t reach Walford anymore, I did know how to find Larkin anyway, I was pretty sure. And … and: tucked into a seam in the backside of the bandoleer, where the stitching had started to come apart.
I pushed my blunt, blackened fingers in, pulled out the shiny corner of a chip bag.
In it, folded probably twenty times, a yellow piece of paper.
Refugio’s phone number. His office extension.
I smiled.
In the yard, spaced around the rolls of wire, were the jackals. The massacre was over. If part of me had still been in the rabbits, then it was in the jackals now. Their mouths were bloody like mine. And, instead of raising their hackles, they were wagging their tails through the dirt.
For a long time we just looked at each other, and finally I nodded, swept past them, some of my new cape bunched in my right hand. I think I felt like a king, maybe. What I’d done was fight through death, take a god’s heart in my hand. That was just the beginning, though.
I turned my face north, to Texas, and didn’t blink.
Without looking back, I just started walking there, my teeth set, my breath deeper than it needed to be, and I would have tried to cross like that, I know, stood against all the border cops America could muster, their small rifles blowing pieces of me into the air, my loyal jackals snarling and snapping at the water, but the ferris wheel stopped me.
The only sound was memory.
For the first time in fifteen years, then, I said my daughter’s name — Laurie — and, like she was going to be up there waiting for me, I started climbing the wheel, some of the struts crumbling under my hand. My cape tore off on one of them but I kept climbing, and, when I finally got to the top, sat in the gondola and closed my eyes, I swear I could feel her hand on my leg after all these years.
She was telling me to keep her safe. That she trusted me to keep her safe.
If you think it was any black rock from space that brought me back to this world, then — I don’t know. You haven’t been listening, I don’t think.
It was her.
Laurie
I don’t know where to start with this, really. When I had to identify my father’s body? Or should I be seven again, down in Mexico? Or is it the tower you’re looking for here, like everybody else? Or the lake?
God.
Give me a form, please. I’m used to forms, I’m the queen bitch goddess of forms. And turn down the lights, maybe. Stop watching me from the other side of the glass. Give me a fucking ball point pen instead of this loud-ass pencil.
It doesn’t matter, though.
I want to start over now, please.
This is not a statement, and this is not a confession. Let me skip a line so there’s no confusion:
This is draft number one of my allocution, should an allocution become necessary. So it doesn’t really exist yet, or, if it does, it’s in that little cranny of the law called ‘attorney-client privilege,’ and should be invisible to you.
And no, it’s not my idea.
If I had it my way, somebody would be chaining their bumper to the front of this holding unit right now, and squinting their eyes as they pulled away. Or angels, yeah: trumpets would be playing and angels would be floating down to get me, and would be flipping you off with their long and perfect middle fingers as they winged me out of here.
My attorney says he can’t be party to anything like that, though. He’s a lot more interested in being prepared for the worst. That way, I guess, everything kind of looks like a victory.
I don’t know.
Anyway, the way an allocution can work, he says, if it’s good and honest and convincing and perfect and says all the incriminating stuff you couldn’t say before, like you’re unloading all your sins, placing yourself on the mercy of the court, is that it can have some direct, positive bearing on sentencing. It’s like a big, long excuse for why you did it.
This is why he’s my new best friend — the way he thinks he has to dumb things down for me. This isn’t about him, though. It’s about what happened. In my words, not all the newspapers’.
The truth, yeah.
And my attorney, he’s right about one thing anyway: after reading this, no honest judge in his right mind could ever send me to Huntsville.
I might even get a promotion.
My name is Laurie Romo. It’s Spanish, I know.
You should hear my attorney say it, like he’s trying to impress me with his three semesters of foreign language. Down below the border, he’d be worse than a joke. He’d be a mark. Hey, you mind carrying this across the bridge when you go back? The only thing better than a good mule is a stupid ass. But he’s not where this starts, he’s where it ends.
I guess where it starts is when Sanchez called me in. That’s Gabriel Sanchez, not Hector Sanchez from the Marfa sector. Just ‘Sanchez’ to me, though — nothing first name and romantic. Not that he hasn’t tried. But don’t worry, I’m not trying to pull him down with me here. To say it another way: if he ever tried to harass me, then we would have settled it then and there, meaning it’s all over and done with now, if it ever even happened. So it doesn’t matter anymore. To me, anyway. You’d have to ask him if you want to know anything else, though.
As for our professional relationship, Sanchez was my commanding officer then, yes. In spite of anything else, I still had to call him ‘sir’ over the air.
“They need you there by six, it sounds like,” he said.
“It’s my night on, though.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s my night on, sir.”
“I’ll move somebody, don’t worry.”
I looked out over my hood at a stand of dead trees I was pretty sure I’d seen a lighter or match in earlier. More than once I’ve found a party of walkers out in the sun, dead, their water bottles sucked dry but one or two chest pockets square with a pack of cigarettes. Like, if they were already sneaking themselves in, they might as well bring a pack of untaxed smokes with them, right?
We’re not exactly battling an international team of chess players down here.
That’s not to say it isn’t a game, though. Just that the complicated moves, they all happen above the board, not out in the hills. And you never even see them directly, at least not at my pay grade. Instead, I’ll just be over at a certain commanding officer’s house for the Fourth, his wife not smiling at me, and in his garage will be, say, two motorcycles, and a shiny new wave runner.
But I’m not saying anything. Even if I was, it’d just be speculation.
As for the facts, I did go in that afternoon, even though Sanchez wouldn’t tell me what it was all about.
“Surprise birthday party?” I tried, cranking my truck over.
“Just be there,” he said, and signed off.
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That he didn’t make me call him sir should have been my first indication of what I was about to walk into, I suppose. Not that I would have done anything different, understand. If an allocution is supposed to be about regret, or if regret is some important part of the legal definition of guilt, then I pray this never gets that far.
I showed up at the Jomar motel just after six. I’ve never asked why it’s called that — Jomar. Somebody’s name, I guess.
The neon was just lighting up. At least in the places the glass wasn’t broken.
Of course you may know it as the ‘omar Inn,’ yeah. I mean, if Del Rio’s your number one vacation destination, but you only have forty dollars to spend for the week and don’t care about air conditioning or lice or noises from the parking lot all night. According to people at the store down the street from it, one girl even got pregnant from sleeping in one of the beds by herself, naked. That kind of place.
Me, I hadn’t been there since high school, back when it was just economical instead of run-down. What I was doing there now, I had no idea. Aside from that every other law enforcement officer for two hundred miles was on-scene already, slurping coffee and shaking their heads. Maybe Sanchez had been telling the truth: it was a party.
I parked down at the gas station, locked my truck, and walked in.
If they needed me, I figured, it was probably because whatever big thing had gone down, it somehow involved illegals. One of them had said my name, or I’d shown up on one of their sheets, or they were talking a really specific dialect of white girl Spanish, something like that.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The reason they needed me there by six, it turned out to be because the coroner on duty that night led a choir practice at six-fifteen. He was waiting on me, though. Everybody was.
I had an identification to make.
I tried to fake a smile as the crowd of badges parted for me but my smile felt rounded off, all muscle, nothing real.
God, I didn’t think it would still get to me like this, either.
I’m sorry. This isn’t where it starts.
When Sanchez called me that afternoon, he’d been far enough away that they’d had to patch him through the switchboard, leapfrog his voice up over the border. He was working a breaking and entering with the locals in Piedras Negras. Preventive maintenance? It made no sense. This is most of what he said before telling me to be at the Jomar by six:
“The owner says he knows who did this to him.”
“Did what?”
“He’s this pharmacist. You should see this place now. I mean goddamn.”
“I don’t understand. Don’t we usually wait until they’re at least close to the border?”
“He says he knows who did this because of what was stolen, Laurie.”
“Okay. Drugs. Money. Big mystery there, Gabriel. I can’t imagine who would want that. Especially in Mexico. Isn’t it all Catholic down there or something?”
“You should try it some time.”
“What?”
“Church. That’s not why I’m calling, though. Didn’t you grow up down in Zaragoza or one of these little shit towns?”
I didn’t answer. He probably had my personnel file open on the seat beside him, in his shiny metal notebook.
He went on:
“That’s where this guy originally set up shop. Zaragoza.”
“Very interesting, sir. Thank you for the update.” It was the least sarcastic response I could come up with.
Sanchez laughed a barely tolerant laugh through the static about it, which, when you’re talking on the radio, isn’t the same as doing it in conversation. Over the air, because you have to hold the button down to broadcast yourself, it’s a lot more intentional.
“He says it’s some old-time smuggler who did this to his place, Agent Romo. Interested yet?”
I took my thumb from the button, breathed in, through my teeth.
“And do you want to know what he stole? Apparently this pharmacist guy, he kept his cash in some old ammo box or something.”
I breathed out my nose, in thanks.
“I don’t know anything about any ammunition boxes, sir.”
“Do you know this pharmacist, though?”
“What if I do?”
“Well that would be a coincidence, wouldn’t it?”
“Let me guess. His name is Juan. Or Jorge. Or Manuel. And his last name has a z in it …”
“You do know him.”
“I get my prescriptions filled in town, sir. Here, America.”
“You haven’t even asked me why this would be a coincidence, Romo.”
“Listen, not to be rude here, sir. But unless you’ve got a new directive for me here, I’m glassing that little stand of chinaberry just past the old Maybelline sign.”
For a long time then, nothing. Then, finally:
“The one with the red lipstick?”
“Affirmative.”
“Somebody should just burn those trees down some time.”
“Is this an order, sir?”
Again the laugh, but this time he cut it off halfway through.
“Don’t guess you’re in your car, are you?”
“You called me. On the radio.”
He was asking because one of his favorite tricks to lure illegals up from some low place by the highway was to pretend your car had broken down. All you have to do is stand there with the hood up. After a few minutes, one of them will ease up at right angles, shrugging the whole way, his hair falling into his eyes.
When you can’t speak his Spanish, then he’ll wave his wife or sister or aunt up — it’s always a blood relation, like that’s going to be the thing that convinces you — and then, with her translating, he’ll use a water balloon and a beer can to get your car started. Or whatever else he can find in the ditch. And then he’ll probably hit you up for a ride.
What he’ll smell like is river sediment and cigarettes and sweat and sun and hope, so that it burns your eyes a little and you have to look away.
It’s not a trick I like.
“Just saying, Laurie. You should use what the good lord gave you, that’s all.”
I decided right then and there that, even if this group came out of the trees in a kick line, wearing glow-in-the-dark Virgin Mary shirts and Christmas light sombreros, I was going to let them pass. Maybe even buy them some fountain drinks.
“I can fix my own vehicle, sir.”
“Yeah, well. Catch a lot more flies with honey, y’know?”
“I’m doing just fine now, thanks.”
“You mean they’re —?”
“I think I’m attracting plenty of shit-eaters already, sir.”
Because this was being shuttled through the switchboard, everybody on our band had heard that. And we both knew it.
What followed was a long, deliberate silence. Just the crackling of distance.
“If I need to go down to Zaragoza, Agent Romo, I’ll let you know. Roger?”
“I’m sure it’s changed a lot, sir. But if you need me.”
“Not tonight, but thanks anyway.”
On purpose — and this is for the record — he said that with a cute little half-laugh, like an in-joke. He was playing for the audience, for everybody else out there on patrol.
He was still the boss, yes.
Alone in my cab, I made myself grin.
“Thank you, sir. I’ll just have to keep trying, I guess. Now, unless there’s anything else, tell Manual something nice from me, maybe —”
“So you do know him.”
“Or Juan, or Jorge …”
When he clicked off this time, I thought it was for good, but then he was back again:
“I’ll just tell him Laurie says hey, how’s that?”
“Wonderful. Thank you.”
“He does still remember you, you know.”
“He’s thinking of somebody else, I’m sure.”
“I don’t know. He seems —”
; “I think my crew’s about to rabbit here, sir. So, unless you’re retasking me —”
“Now that you mention it, Agent Romo. Evidently you’re needed over in Del Rio. Special request or something.”
I left him room to snicker, but he held back somehow.
“Del Rio, you say?”
“They need you there by six, it sounds like.”
And you know the rest of how it went.
I’d never seen a body in a closed room before. Or fresh.
On patrol, of course, I’d found my share, like everybody else. But out in the scrub, people turned to mummies in the space of a month. You could pretend you were on National Geographic or something, just exploring another tomb. Unless the coyotes had been at them already.
But we weren’t to touch them anyway, out in the field. Just call them in then take some pictures. Secure anything that might be about to blow away. Leave your headlights on all night if you have to, so the other trucks can find you. It’s not the best part of the job, but people do deserve a better burial. It’s not their fault, I mean.
If I were stuck in Mexico, I’d probably be building all manner of hang gliders and tunneling machines. If I hadn’t been seven, I mean.
But I don’t want to talk about that yet.
At the Jomar, the Omar Inn, I had been delivered to a door fluttering with police tape. That nobody was making eye contact with me was a bad thing, I knew.
“What happened?” I said to a trooper I knew by sight.
He pointed with his chin, into the room.
“What didn’t?” somebody said after I’d turned away.
Suddenly the coroner was ducking out of the room. Not because he was tall and spindly and haunted like you expect a mortician to be, but because there was some yellow tape strung across the doorway, about level with the peephole. Instead of some nineteenth century black suit, complete with puffy tie and blood-stained cuffs, he was wearing an old concert t-shirt.
“Ms. Romo,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Dr. Carter. Just Carter.”
I shook, took my hand back, and he led me under the tape.
Over the next few days, I hear, everybody who came into that room, or the two rooms on either side — there’s no second story at the Jomar — had to wear bunny suits, like astronauts. We were stupid, though. Or innocent. There’s not much difference, I don’t think.
It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles Page 10