When it seemed he wanted to tell me something else, I finally did look over to his face, just for a flash. It was about confirmation.
“Any other phone activity,” he said, talking slow and deliberate, guiding his spit cup to his mouth, “you’d probably have to ask somebody in the local office, yeah?”
If you haven’t figured it out yet, this Ranger, I’m not saying his name on purpose. I don’t even think he was officially on the dog case, had just been dealing with some rancher’s complaints about trespassers.
‘Any other phone activity,’ though. He’d been telling me something, as much as he could. It didn’t have to do with the Jomar, either, I was pretty sure.
The working theory about what happened to my father at the time was that it was payback from one of the thousands of illegals he’d had dealings with over the years. Or one of their family members. So, tens of thousands, yeah.
Like Sanchez had said, Mexico’s Catholic. With a vengeance.
Except there were just so, so many more ways to prop the gate open at the border than killing a senior, decorated officer. If anything, that would just give everybody itchy trigger fingers. And, even if it wasn’t about that, was just about him, Refugio Romo, something he’d done in the wayback — to come into town to do a thing like this, and then to take a whole week doing it?
It didn’t make sense.
If you wanted to kill a border cop, all you had to do was lay out in the pasture, dial your scope into some obvious duffel bag or something you’ve hooked on a fence post, and wait. By the time anybody drifts out to see if this officer’s radio’s broke or what, you’re gone, back across the river, or to your day job or wherever, your rifle dropped down some uncapped well.
This had been more personal.
For some reason I kept wanting it all to wrap back around to the silver-handled knife. Not that I was romantic or anything, don’t get me wrong. I mean, even now I can see that if it had all been about the knife, then that would just be a cheap way of keeping him alive for a week or two longer before pulling the plug, letting his story flatline.
Never mind that that knife was never out there.
God.
In my property box, along with the rest of my stuff you’ll find that double-laminated picture of me at six years old. It’s not supposed to be there. But then neither am I, I know. According to the State of Texas, I’m still on bereavement leave even now. Because my father hasn’t been buried yet. Go deeper than that, and I’m probably still supposed to be down in Mexico, last name Garza, trying to catch a bus up to Juarez to work in the factories.
If not for that picture, that’s where I would be, I’m sure.
I was seven when the tall border cop with the important mustache found me, lowered himself down to my level, and said he had been looking for me for a long time. That he had something to show me. The picture. I remember my face, prickling.
According to him, he’d been with my real dad in Texas right at the end, after the accident, and my real dad had given him this picture, told him this was the most important little girl in the world, and that she deserved everything, and to find her, save her, keep her safe forever.
A fairy tale, yeah. But my face, it’s still prickling.
I went with him, sure, and it wasn’t even any kind of illegal traffic when he drove me across the bridge, because I was born American. It probably even looked like he was saving me.
And he was. That’s the thing.
You want to know why he carried that picture in his sweatband like he did? It was so, wherever he was, he could take his hat off, look into it and see me, know the world was a good place. What he called me was his million dollar girl, his princess.
Growing up, you never expect that you might come to hate yourself, just for having lived. That you might feel guilty. But that’s not why I did what I did last week, either. I did it for him, for my real dad.
This is that story.
Where I am now in it is the fifth day after my second father died. I’m standing in the viewing room at the morgue. It’s not like in the motel room, where there was a burned smell in the air. Now I’m having to look through a video monitor. It’s crackly.
“Because of the radiation?” I ask the orderly, my chaperone.
“That’s just it,” the orderly tells me. “He’s clean now.”
The monitor pops and fizzles.
“Of anything we can detect, anyway,” he adds.
I stand there for ten more minutes, until the feed decays to nothing.
Over lunch, a girl who works the switchboards part-time smoked an amazing fourteen cigarettes and explained through her veil of smoke that, the week before my father — “before the tragedy” — there’d been a call bouncing around from monitor to monitor. A post-it note with Refugio’s name at the top, and a number, and a question mark.
“And he got it, then?” I said.
“Who?”
“Refugio.”
“Your dad, yeah. I guess. I can’t work more than thirty-four hours a week, y’know?”
“And the Rangers know about this?”
“It was from a payphone, dear.”
Of course. I paid for our meal, thanked her, then went outside and coughed in the heat until my lungs were clean, my eyes not watery. The reason they only let her go part-time was because the state of Texas didn’t want to be responsible for her health care.
She didn’t have the payphone number anymore, though. But, if it had been the same as the one that had been used to call my father at the Jomar, then it would have been news, I was pretty sure. And anyway, according to that unnamed Ranger, that particular payphone was broken. Not that they were going to give me the number for it either way.
But I’m not stupid. It took me all of twenty-minutes to find it.
All I had to do was park at the Jomar, walk to my father’s room, then turn, study Del Rio for any payphone bubbles or booths with a clear line on me.
There were four: at the gas station by the first bay, a booth in the parking lot of the old grocery store, and one hung outside another hotel. The fourth was about five doors down from where I was standing. I walked to it, picked up the receiver. The dial tone was so strong and insistent I flinched a little.
After that I went to the rest of them, got a clean dial tone at the gas station, a sputtery one at the other hotel — so the Jomar had that going for it, anyway — and nothing from the one in the parking lot of the grocery store. It was the last one I would have guessed, too. It was out in the open. To get to it, you’d have to walk across fifty feet of open asphalt, even coming from the road.
But this was it.
I could tell because the change case had been keyed open instead of pried, then left swinging. The Rangers had processed the quarters for prints, and they’d left behind the adhesive backings for the lift-kits they carried in their glove compartments. For the receiver, the scratched glass, all of it probably.
They weren’t stupid either.
I picked up the receiver again, held it to my ear, and watched the door to my father’s room, then turned when a truck nosed up behind me. It was Sanchez.
I pretended to be saying goodbye as he walked up, then looked around to him. He reached past me, fingered the cable of the receiver. It was loose, hanging. Torn, not cut. I’d just done it. It was that weak, somehow. That didn’t change the fact that he’d busted me.
I bit my lower lip, leaned back against the inside of the booth.
“You checking up on me?” I said, no sunglasses to hide my eyes.
“Hungry?” he said back.
I wasn’t, but went anyway.
As I climbed into the passenger side of Sanchez’s truck — he had to come around, unlock it — he whisked flakes of blue and silver from the back of my shirt. It was the advertising decals from the phone booth.
“Pinche sun,” he said, shutting my door either like this was a date or like I was his prisoner.
“Yeah,” I said, “the sun
,” but was looking past the phone booth, too, to the Jomar. It wavered in the heat like it wasn’t even real.
Over chips and burritos in a place that didn’t cater to cops, Sanchez asked me what did I think I was doing here?
His uniform shirt was keeping the tables all around us empty.
We could talk, I mean. None of this was accidental.
“What, you want me to sit out at my trailer all day?” I said back to him.
“If you want to come back, you can. Sometimes it’s easier to work.” Sanchez guided a dripping chip to his mouth. “I’m not the bad guy here,” he said.
“Then you are here to say they sent you, right?”
“Not everybody knows you’re on leave, officer. So they think that when you come around asking questions, it’s in an official capacity, not a personal one.”
I studied a painting on the wall. It was of a sombrero. Beside it on the wall was a real sombrero. I couldn’t tell if this was meant to be a joke or not. Probably not.
And Sanchez was still talking: “… how about this, then? Whatever you want to know, ask me. If I know the answer, I’ll tell you, and can save us all a lot of embarrassment.”
“Anything?”
“Regarding the case,” he amended, smiling with the right side of his face. “The homicide.”
“Then you can’t solve the mystery of the chupacabra?” I said, hooking my head north.
“It’s a coyote. I saw it.”
“Well then. Okay. Have the Rangers made any headway about who called the room?”
“Just that the call was made.”
“And the other call?”
“Other call?”
“It was a message for him. From before.”
“I’ll ask.”
I studied Sanchez for about twenty seconds, here.
“You knew him,” I said. “What do you think went down here last week?”
He broke eye contact, leaned back in his chair.
“I’m with the Rangers on this,” he said. His voice was too level, though. Too controlled.
“Then it’s anybody with dark skin and a grudge.”
“What else is there to think?”
I just stared at him, finally shrugged. “You haven’t told me anything yet I didn’t already know,” I said. “I think you’re supposed to give me a reason here to ask you instead of everybody else. Or did I misunderstand?”
Sanchez smiled, let it build it into a sort of laugh.
“Romo Romo Romo …” he said.
“And the chupacabra doesn’t count,” I told him.
He came back to me, his eyes flat, then leaned forward, both his hands together on the table, his plate to the side.
“A version of what the Rangers think, then. How’s that? So … what I think, I think, is that it’s not really about somebody he busted, if you know what I mean. Unofficially.”
I looked away, did. It was about somebody my father hadn’t busted. Someone he’d been paid not to bust. I’d known this for as long as I could remember. To his credit, though, he’d never tried to include me, Refugio.
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
He shoveled another chip in, chewed it for too long.
“If I tell you,” he said. “Then will you not come into town again, after today?”
“Ever?”
“Until this is over.”
“What about the funeral?”
“Just that.”
I shrugged sure, like it would be that easy, staying away. Maybe I’d been going to do that exact thing anyway. Sanchez knew I was lying, of course. But he was showing off some, too.
“The Rangers are backing off,” he whispered. “Getting their case files all bundled up in same-size boxes.”
“They’re giving up?”
“He was one of us, Romo. C’mon. No, they’re not giving up. But why do you put all your stuff in boxes in the middle of an open investigation?”
I thought about it, thought about it, and finally looked up to him: “Because it’s being taken away from them …”
Bingo.
“Who has more jurisdiction than them, though?” I asked, then answered it myself: “The feds.”
Sanchez sat back, satisfied with himself. I sat back too, my eyes hot.
“DEA or ATF?” I said, nearly whispering, I think.
“Try again,” Sanchez said back just as quiet.
I closed my eyes, opened them. The FBI was swooping in. I looked up to Sanchez, my face as blank as I could make it.
“You know this, but he wasn’t burned with a — with a flame,” he said, leaning forward again, so only the chips could hear him. “It was … they don’t know for sure. But there’s been word for a while.”
“Word?”
“That somebody’s trying to build a device.”
A bomb.
Which of my fathers was Sanchez talking about?
That my real dad was a criminal was no secret. It was part of the fairy tale, even. But then of course I didn’t always know it was a fairy tale. Sometimes it’s good just to be a kid. Things don’t get so complicated.
Sure, yeah, the first time you call the guy who isn’t your dad ‘Dad,’ it feels like a betrayal and something cracks inside you that you can never really get back, but — it’s like with languages. When you’re young, you can do amazing things without even thinking about it. Insulate whole parts of your mind, so that they don’t mess with eating dinner, with going to school, with all the thousand other things you need to do to just be a normal kid.
This isn’t to say I was pretending all the time either, though.
Instead, what I did was start calling my real dad just ‘Dodd,’ inside. Like a secret. I justified it because it had been an old joke between the two of us. So, calling him Dodd, it was maybe even better than Dad. More like something a real daughter would do.
And it’s not like I forgot him or anything. I wasn’t a baby when he left, I mean. If he’d stayed around, yeah, I wouldn’t remember it all as clear as I do. But he didn’t. So all I had left were those first few years, to play over and over, so that, years and years later, eating in some diner, I’d get caught wholly off-guard when some tall, half-smiling guy would stand to leave, then turn in the doorway to razz the waitress about something.
For some reason that always goes right to the center of me, makes me feel warm and cold at the same time. What I don’t have a lot of, though, are memories of us up here, in Texas.
According to the records I had my father — Refugio — look up for me when I was fifteen, those memories are probably from our last little whirlwind tour of Texas. Our long goodbye after the bank that killed my mother. I only have one clear memory of her, though. No sound, just her …
But no.
I don’t have enough of her to share. Sorry. And you don’t need to know about her to understand all this, anyway. All you need to do is believe that what her and my real dad had stumbled into together, it was the kind of good and perfect and right that the world hates and is jealous of, and will align itself against until it’s got the two of them framed in a doorway they never really meant to be in, a half-moon of badges waiting for them out there in the heat.
So, okay. I kind of lied about not being a romantic.
Really, it’s the default setting for you, when you’ve lost both your parents so young. You go so long without telling anybody what you really want that — that what you really want becomes its own little place inside that you retreat to when the world’s not perfect enough.
For me, that first year back in Texas, that was pretty much every day.
First, because Texas was supposed to be like I remembered it — green, with different music playing — and second, because back then I had the fantasy that I was a hostage, that I was being ransomed, held as insurance, something like that. And the person who was going to save me, it was my real dad. Of course.
But then after dinner one night Refugio told me I was old enough to know th
e truth, maybe. Yeah? Here I nodded. I must have. It wasn’t an honest nod, though.
My real dad had been a smuggler, Refugio said, leaning forward out of his recliner, his voice soft and even like an apology. My dad had taken the survival training his American government had paid for and then used it against the government, to carry in illegal goods. Not just, say, replacement piano keys made of contraband ivory, either, but real and true drugs — heavy duty, duty-free narcotics, as the plainclothes guys call it. This meant his employers were the worst kind of people. They routinely, just as a matter of business, killed their employees and buried them in holes out in the desert. And anybody else who got in the way, too. And they weren’t always dead when they buried them either.
As my father told me this, I just sat there, my face slack. Because of the drug bosses, I think. Not because it was news, my real dad being an outlaw. I mean, I still even had some of the phone numbers from back then memorized. My real dad never knew I did it, but I did, because I knew what he was doing, in the vague sense. Why it was a night job instead of a day job. My idea back then was that knowing the important phone numbers would give me some kind of power when it came down to it. That I was going to be able to trade those numbers for my real dad someday.
Like I said, I was a little girl. But then came the part I didn’t know.
According to Refugio, my real dad had been enough of a big-time smuggler that he was Refugio’s whole job. Every day he woke up and thought about how he was going to catch Dodd that day.
It went on like this for two years, he said. A big cat-and-mouse game on the border. At the end of it, because he couldn’t help it, Refugio even started to respect my real dad. Think of him as more of a brother than an enemy. Just a brother he’d had a big fight with a long time ago. Now he was chasing after him, trying to say he was sorry, maybe even save him from himself. Every day.
But my real dad didn’t know any of this. To him, Refugio was just this one impossible border cop who wouldn’t give up, who was making his smuggling job so, so hard.
What Refugio thought, he told me, was that my dad was probably thinking about getting out. Retiring. Too many times he’d come too close to getting caught, and — Refugio wasn’t sure back then, but it always seemed like the reason Dodd was so good was because he was desperate. Not to do a good job, but to get back to me, in Mexico.
It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles Page 12