Inside, the room was set up like a thousand others: a wallowed-out queen bed taking up most of the floor. Opposite it and offset a little toward the door, a dresser with a bolted-down television set. Under the window, an air conditioner. On the opposite wall, a vanity, and the door to the bathroom.
“Why am I here?” I said. My voice was small. I was a little girl again.
Dr. Carter took my hand. I let him and then almost shook away just as fast. Through the bones of his arm and wrist, I could tell he was humming something. I could feel it the way you can when a cat you’re holdings winds up to a strong purr.
He stretched his lips out like he’d been caught. “Sorry. Usually it only shows on dictation. I’ve got choir in — well. Tonight.” I looked to him, as if for more. “It’s nothing inappropriate,” he added. “The tune.”
He was afraid he’d offended me. It’s what you say to a person who’s in a delicate frame of mind. It made me study the room some more, see the boots sticking out from the other side of the dresser.
This is the part where I identify my father’s body. That’s where I’m starting.
Only — I couldn’t.
Dr. Carter squeezed my hand tighter, maybe hummed a bit louder. To drown out the smell, maybe. Somehow. I pulled my hand back, churched it with my other one over my mouth and nose.
In the movies, this is what all the girls do, right before they start screaming. They also kind of curve their bodies away from whatever they’ve just walked up on. This is what it felt like, too: like I was in a movie.
Because this couldn’t really be happening.
Instead of identifying my father’s body, I identified his boots. You’d think a person who’s been kept inside, in air conditioning, out of the sun, just dead, he’d be pretty recognizable. But the air conditioner wasn’t working in that unit.
As for the boots, they were the only ones I’d ever seen him in. They were black, lace-up, vaguely military but shined and polished and abused for so many years that they were really just these thick socks that he tied on, and swore by.
Supposedly, the number of illegals he’d run down in those boots was into the thousands. He said they were going to go into the border patrol hall of fame someday, whenever they built one. Except that he wanted to be buried in them. His solution was a plexiglass casket in a special wing.
As a girl, him talking like that had scared me, but I understand now that he was just getting me ready for this motel room as best he could. Because he knew it was coming, I suppose. Or something like it. Carry around enough guilt, you find yourself scratching out your epigraph on stray napkins in donut shops.
That was my father.
He was sitting against the wall on the other side of the dresser like he’d been hiding from somebody sitting on the bed. Or talking to someone, maybe.
The reason they needed me to make the identification was that most of the skin had been burned from his face and arms. In places you could see where the blood had cauterized a blackish purple. His hair, which he’d been proud of never losing, it was only there in patches.
I wouldn’t have recognized him, I don’t think. I closed my eyes, opened them back.
“How long?” I said.
“I was supposed to be there five minutes ago,” the coroner said absently, glancing down at his watch.
I turned to face him. It was like he was talking a language I’d never even heard, much less understood.
But then it came: choir practice. Hymns. That other world.
“Him, I mean,” I said, nodding down.
The coroner smiled with the corners of his eyes. Had he been joking? Was he laughing at himself now, inside, or was this part of some disarming technique they taught at coroner school?
“Before I can release any information,” he said. “I need you to confirm his identity.”
“He’s my — you know. He’s my father, right? That’s why I’m here.”
When the coroner just stared at me, I cocked my head, started to shrug, then got it: “The deceased. Yeah. Okay. His name is Refugio. Romo like me. Is that it?”
“Thank you. It’s just that —”
“I’m white. Check.”
“According to his liver, he expired within the last twelve hours.”
“No, I mean … How long did it take?”
Even now, after everything I’ve seen, I can’t imagine how a person can go from a murder scene like that and right into some carpet-walled back room of a church, everyone’s voices lifted in some holy falsetto. Maybe there’s an eye-wash station back by the preacher’s office or something. If so, then Sanchez was right: I needed to get myself to a church.
As for how long it took, the coroner didn’t want to commit to anything before the autopsy. According to what he could be sure of, though, my father had checked himself in seven days ago, paid in advance, and the room was a single.
I was sitting at the foot of the bed now. I looked up to the coroner.
He shrugged, pooched his lips out in something like defeat, and finally said, “It took a while. Maybe all week. I’m sorry.”
I nodded, had kind of known that already, I suppose.
“Tox screen’s going to come back with something, though,” the coroner assured me. “There’s no ligature marks, see? That suggests the restraints were chemical. Which is good. Maybe he didn’t even feel any of it.”
He was wrong. My father’s blood was going to come back clean. He’d felt every minute of the last week of his life.
I nodded, accidentally saw myself in the mirror as everybody out in the parking lot was about to. When I brought my hand up from the comforter to run my hair out of my face, my fingers trailed flakes. The comforter was coming apart, like it had been microwaved.
“Omar Inn …” I said to myself, and flicked the dry pieces of fabric away. I’d spent some of prom night here, in the room down by where the ice machine used to be.
“Excuse me?” the coroner said.
I flinched, had somehow forgotten he was there, I think. It took me a moment to focus in on him again.
“How …” I started, then swallowed, started over: “How did you know to call me?”
“So you are a cop …” the coroner grinned, wedging his file folder up under his arm so he could slide an envelope up from his rear pocket. “His wallet was gone of course, but this was in the sweatband of his hat.”
He handed me the envelope and I scanned for the old felt hat, tie-dyed with sweat, the edges of the brim curled up from drying in the sun a thousand times. It was on the nightstand, under the lamp. Where he always left it, so it could be the first thing he ducked into when he woke.
I knew what was in the envelope, but waited for the coroner to excuse himself before I angled it open, to look inside. A wallet-sized, twice-laminated picture of me, at six years old.
I let the envelope snap shut again.
Sanchez found me at my trailer the next morning. He’d driven all night, probably. Meaning neither of us had slept. He took his hat off when he stepped down from his truck, and I looked away. His wife’s name is Gwen. I don’t like her, but I don’t dislike her either.
“How’d Piedras Negras go, then?” I said.
He settled himself into the other chair on the porch.
“How does every investigation go down there?” he said, hissing a laugh.
It was the usual comeback. I handed him my cup of coffee and he drank, and I went back to watching the pasture.
The truth of us, I guess, is that I was young when he first started coming home with my father, and things happen, stupid things, but the world makes you pay, too. It makes everybody involved pay, really. He turned out to be my first commanding officer, sure. But I could say one word to my father and Sanchez’s career would hit a … well. Not a wall, but a tall, unclimbable fence, anyway. It’s what every border cop is terrified of.
Instead of evening things out, all this did was leave us — I don’t know. Too even, I guess. There are stupider
situations, I’m sure, but most of them are on television.
We passed my coffee back and forth until it was gone.
“You hadn’t talked to him the whole week?” Sanchez finally said, then looked up at me, one of my coasters balanced between all his fingers, like that was what he was really concentrating on here.
“Guess you call your father every day after work, right?” I said, a little bit singsong.
“I’m just saying.”
“I already told the Rangers — I answered all their questions.”
I sipped at my empty cup.
“Did you see him?” I asked, then.
“You don’t know?” he said back.
“What?”
“Somebody had a counter in their truck. It squealed a bit, then quit working.”
“A Geiger counter, you mean?”
“No, Laurie. An abacus.”
“You’ve been talking to Manual too much, I think. He’s corrupted you.”
“Then you do know him.”
“Zaragoza wasn’t big back then.”
“As opposed to now, yeah. Speaking of … when you were a kid. I hear you lifted some evidence from the scene. A picture?”
“It’s not theirs.”
Sanchez shook his head about this, like I was a hopeless case. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m the corrupt one.”
I rubbed my face, breathed in.
“We were talking about a Geiger counter, I think,” I tried.
“Like for radiation.”
“I know, yeah. But, I mean … it was the Omar, right? You really think that place is up to code?” I laughed a little, cupped my cup in both hands. “It’s probably for the best, sterility-wise. Maybe a federal program, even.”
Sanchez smiled, was staring into the pasture so hard it made me want to look.
“You know what it means, though,” he said. “They’re not going to release his body for a while.”
“It’s evidence.”
“I guess, yeah. But listen. I’m — I just wanted to say that … do you know what bereavement leave is?”
I didn’t answer.
“There’s a clause,” he went on. “It’s either for three working days or until the first working day after the funeral.”
“Paid?”
“Paid, yeah.”
He was looking up at me now, to see if I was following here.
“This a sting?” I said, only half in play. Maybe three-quarters.
“It’s just the way it’s written. If your dad isn’t released for two weeks, then the funeral can’t be before then. Or — think of it this way. Refugio probably had at least two weeks vacation coming, right?”
“Why are you doing this?” I said.
“Keep you off the air for a while. Maybe we can get something done, finally.”
I was staring at the side of his face now.
“They sent you out there, didn’t they?” I said.
“They?”
“They don’t want me interfering. Is this policy, for when a law enforcement officer is killed in the line of duty, and his closest relative has a badge?”
“I’m just trying to do something nice for you here. Sorry. Should have known better, I guess.”
For maybe ten seconds we just sat there.
“No strings?” I finally asked.
Sanchez smiled with his eyes. I pulled my feet up into the chair, signed the forms.
From the door of his truck, Sanchez asked me what I was going to do with all this time, then?
“Grieve,” I said back. “Isn’t that what it’s for?”
It’s quiet enough out at my trailer that you never have to raise your voice.
“After that, though,” Sanchez said.
It was an invitation, I think. Now that my father was out of the picture, I couldn’t threaten Sanchez’s career. And of course he was saying all this with a smile, his hand hooked over the top of his door, his eyebrows raised, waiting. I shook my head no to him, looked purposely away, so I could start the day over.
The next morning my father’s teeth blew up the forensic x-ray machine the DPS had in their rv. I wouldn’t have known, except that the machine pulled enough juice that to even get it to fire they had to send a trooper around front to start the rv, keep it revved until all the film had been shot. Or, to be more specific, I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t been using my state-sanctioned bereavement time to nose around the investigation.
At a quarter shy of lunch, I was standing in the parking lot of the courthouse, asking a Texas Ranger if they had any more questions they needed to ask me. We both looked over to the rv when the engine started climbing. Trash that was in the gutter by the exhaust drifted up, as if curious, and a little bit afraid. The sound, when it came, was exactly like a dry, heavy piece of metal hitting a wide concrete floor.
“That’d be my father,” I said.
The Ranger smiled, touched the brim of his hat. It was a nervous thing with him. I think he liked the way it made his arm hide his face.
“So what do they got you working on?” I asked.
He shrugged, said, “You know anything about dogs?” Because he didn’t know what to do with me, maybe, he let me ride with him out north of town, into the open pastures.
“You do something wrong?” I said, holding onto the armrest. “I thought we were the only ones who went out here, I mean.”
The Ranger smiled, jerked his truck around a sudden refrigerator. From a rise, I was able to make out a civilian car maybe a half mile up.
“That’s where we’re going?” I said, nodding ahead.
The Ranger scooped the dip from his mouth, trailed it out the window.
“Over to your left here,” I directed, “about fifty yards — there.”
It was an old rut-road that ran a few feet east of a ridgeline. My father had told me that roads like this, they were usually game trails that had been packed down enough over the centuries that the early ranchers’ old Model A’s had been able to hook one of their narrow tires in it, not go slipsliding down. Ranches now didn’t use them much, though, because in the late afternoon they were in shadow, and the ridge cut off your view of a whole side of the pasture.
That was kind of the idea for the mule deer, though.
“Guess you do come out here a lot,” the Ranger said, stepping his truck down into the comfortable ruts, able to drive now with just one hand.
“On the weekends and whenever,” I told him, “growing up, my father would always take me out here. All around here. Up to Uvalde even, sometimes.”
“You keep doing that,” he said.
“What?”
“‘Father.’ Instead of ‘Dad.’”
“And?”
He shrugged it away. “Uvalde,” he said. “Kind of getting far from the river, yeah?”
“It was …” I smiled, like I was embarrassed about this. “He had this knife, with like a silver handle, and turquoise in it. He lost it out here on patrol one week. It was a sentimental knife, I guess.”
What I didn’t say was that he did it mostly just to drive around on the state gas card, show me things. Train me to be like him. The Ranger wasn’t listening anyway.
The civilian car had been a tan Chevette, probably born the same year I was. It was moving back along the ridge, had probably seen our lightbar silhouetted against the clear sky.
“Davey,” the Ranger said, like he was a scuba diving biologist, just taking note of another seahorse. The most common kind.
“I know which gate he’ll have to use,” I said.
The Ranger considered this but finally shrugged it away, his thick arms crossed over the wheel now so he could lean forward, ease up as close to the burned-out flares as possible. “I think somebody does hate me, yeah,” he confessed.
On the ground between the flares, like an offering, was a dead dog. A dead something, anyway — coyote, giant fox, you couldn’t really tell. A cross between a giant fox and a small greyhound, maybe. Except it didn’
t have any hair. And its ears were satellite dishes. Chances are you’ve seen pictures of it by now, so I probably don’t need to explain. It was in all the tabloids, and even made the Austin and San Antonio papers. That was all later, though. And stupid. We put our sunglasses on and walked around it.
“What is it?” I said.
“Either mange or some kind of joke,” the Ranger said, then nodded to the still-retreating Chevette. “Or, if you listen to him, chupacabra.” He flared his eyes for that last part.
I watched a pair of buzzards way to the north. They were just coasting, riding a smell. Coming here even, maybe. By the time I turned back around, the Ranger was moving back to the truck.
“So your dad ever find his knife?” he asked. “Your father, I mean,” he added, all pleased with himself.
“It’s a big pasture,” I told him, walking sideways away from the dog, so I could keep watching it.
“Probably more high traffic than you want, too,” the Ranger said, his voice softer, so I’d know it wasn’t an insult.
“Yeah,” I said, not disagreeing. “We also watched the pawn shops.”
On the way into town, a road I was showing the Ranger as a gift — it didn’t have gates, just cattleguards — I finally asked if my father had received any calls in his motel room. So the Ranger would know I was still the grieving daughter, I just stared straight ahead.
We went like this for maybe two miles, until I was starting to doubt if he’d even heard me, but then he rolled a can of dip from his shirt pocket, packed it on his wrist five identical times, a tobacco metronome, and said, “One, yeah. The desk clerk would tell you the same thing.”
I digested this, understood what he was saying.
“How about we just say he did tell me?” I offered, because nothing on the border is simple.
“Like anybody’s even going to ask.”
“Like anybody’s going to know to ask,” I corrected.
He shrugged a heavy shoulder, agreed. “It wouldn’t matter, though. Can’t get anything from a broke payphone.”
It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles Page 11