Just driving slow down the main street in Uvalde, then, every third Mexican suddenly falling into the kind of lockstep that meant they were walking normal, that there was no reason for me to flare my brakelights, I earned every gallon, and probably built up enough credit to get me to Ozona and back, Crazy Dave in tow, to show me the Uvalde chupacabra.
Except I’m not stupid. That would be a seven-hour round trip.
What I did instead was skirt Uvalde in my truck until dark, looking for some road flares burning down, maybe a flag or a trail of pilgrims. When I didn’t find anything but coyotes nailed to fences, left-behind steers, and one tow-headed donkey I cupped water in my hands for, I tuned Crazy Dave’s station in. He wasn’t on for a few hours yet, but this was the DJ who led up to him anyway, and always pretended in obvious ways not to know their place on the band was getting pirated afterhours. I figured him and Dave had gone to high school together or something.
Once he dropped into a triple-play set, I pulled up to a payphone, called him.
“Crazy Dave?”
“More like Sane Roger, but thanks. I think.”
“I was just wanting to, y’know, make a donation.”
“‘Fill his till?’”
It was the way Dave always said it.
“This is where I call, right?”
“Listen, I can’t — how about this. His last name, it might rhyme with ‘handoval.’”
“He’s Mexican?”
“Why? You La Migra? Anyway, don’t call until after ten. His, um, landlady knocks off right after the early news.”
I thanked Sane Roger, dialed up Dispatch, had them run a name for me, get back with a confirmation on the phone number. ‘Unauthorized use of state resources,’ yeah. I don’t care. It’s not like I could call up the sheriff’s office in Uvalde, I mean. If I did, and word got back to Del Rio about it, Sanchez would know that I was just following the letter of what he’d wanted me to do, not the spirit. So it had to be Dave.
I left a message on his machine at five after ten, and he called me back a half hour later. The first thing he asked was if I was a cop? From the way I paused, I think he knew.
And, because I was the only human on either side of the border not to have a cell phone with me, I didn’t have any caller ID to nab him with, and I didn’t want to wake his mom, get him in trouble. So I could either circle Uvalde some more, or sit there by the payphone and pray, or wait for the next issue of Weekly World News. Or give up, yeah.
As it turned out, it didn’t matter which I chose.
When I eased down to the convenience store for a coke, my windows down so I’d hear the phone ring, a pair of yellow headlights glowed on, fell in behind me. Crazy Dave edged up beside me at the fountain drinks.
“Mr. Sandoval,” I said, pretending my lid was more complicated than it really was. “I know it’s not just some dog that had cancer.”
Crazy Dave swallowed, fidgeted, and I bought him a coke.
In the parking lot, leaning against the grill guard of my border patrol truck, one of us white, one Mexican, neither with handcuffs on, we talked chupacabra. What they might really be, why they liked goats so much. Whether they were mammal or reptile, alien or demon.
It was a test, to see if I was worthy to see one in the flesh. By the time our cokes were down to ice, I was.
Crazy Dave wouldn’t ride with me yet, though. He was like a dog that, after being beaten every day, has finally just gone to live in the pasture. What I was doing in Uvalde that night was trying to lead him back under the porchlight, back to the world of people.
Maybe the better way to say it is that he was a true radio personality. He didn’t belong in a room with real people, but on the air, with listeners, who wouldn’t see how unpiratical he looked in real life. I don’t mean to be mean to him here, though. But I’m not supposed to be lying, either. And this probably won’t make it to open court anyway.
All that’s going to matter there are the facts.
It sounds like I’m giving up, though, doesn’t it?
Let me start this again.
The Uvalde chupacabra was a litter mate of the Del Rio chupacabra. Enough that I had to ask Dave if he’d maybe just moved the one from down there.
He gave a dismissive little snort. I was profaning a sacred place, as far as he was concerned. The problem, though, was that this was no chupacabra.
If I’d had a Geiger counter in my toolbox, I could have shown him. The dog-thing was unusual, yes, didn’t look fitted for down here, really. Like a show dog or some other kind of high dollar, overbred import. But the hair, that was easy to explain: prolonged exposure to radiation.
I knelt down, reached into the thing’s mouth with my bare fingers and shook one of the incisors. It was loose, a classic sign. I stood, didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say.
“There’s going to be more,” I finally tried.
“More what?” Dave asked back.
“Bread crumbs.” I looked at him then, all dramatic like the movies. “You doing your show tonight?”
He shrugged, squinched his face up.
“It’s something,” he said about the chupacabra, and there was a little bit of whine in his voice.
Because my battery was stronger, it was my headlights that were on for us.
“Well then,” Dave said, ducking away to his dark Chevette, his three and-a-half-hour drive back to Ozona.
“Wait,” I called, but he didn’t. He lowered himself into his front seat, pulled the door closed, and cranked the window down.
“Don’t tell anybody,” he said, about the chupacabra. He was talking about that week — he didn’t want to get scooped. I don’t think it matters anymore, though.
Of that chupacabra, his pictures are all that’s left now. Any of a hundred things could have happened to it, too: the SPCA tagged it infectious and had it cremated, the sheriff’s office buried it to keep the unwanted from loitering up their county, the coyotes dragged it off, the aliens came back for it, the government trucked it out to Area 51, it got up and trotted away, or, most likely, some hand working that pasture found it, threw it into the back of his truck, and, because it would take most of the afternoon, keep him from fence-mending or whatever, he carried it back to the main house. Meaning, ten or twenty years from now, you’ll step into some living room down here, the kind with tables made from longhorn horns and coat hooks welded from horse shoes, and there against some wall will be Dave’s chupacabra, mounted on both hind legs, probably. A joke.
Not that I’d want to stand in that living room after the lights were off, either.
Or — I would, really, but just to remember Dave the way he was that night in Uvalde. I almost let him pull away, I mean. If that had happened, I never would have known that he wasn’t in Uvalde for me, that he’d just been looping through, on the way to another story. And I never would have known that some pirates can be heroes, too.
So, if you’re hearing this, Dave Sandoval, thank you, and I’m sorry. But I know you wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. This is what I said that got him to stop grinding his starter: “That Jack the Rabbit guy?”
Silence. Dave’s finger and thumb still cocked on his ignition key.
I shrugged, looked over the pitted roof of the mostly brown Chevette.
“I think he killed my father,” I said, then lowered my eyes, didn’t let Dave look away.
Thirty miles out of Uvalde, Dave said that he wasn’t going to get back to Ozona in time for the Misanthrope Morning Show. I told him it didn’t matter. I had the real thing here in the truck already.
He smiled and then grimaced, pretended to watch something out his window. I’d just called him a misanthrope. Still pretending to watch whatever was out there, he said, “It’s just some guy in a big mask, y’know?”
“Jack, you mean?”
Yes.
Where we were going was to get pictures or interviews related to a tip he’d got on The Landlubber’s Line — his mom’s answeri
ng machine.
At the time, I was pretty sure it was a scam, that he’d just told me this pertained to my father’s murder to get me to foot the gas bill — to get the state of Texas to, okay — but, too, I was counting it as part of my bereavement stuff. Some undocumented stage of grief. My mother was supposed to be buried in Sealy’s the thing. I’d never seen her grave. For all the obvious reasons, I suppose. The one maybe not so obvious was that it was one of the places I still remembered a little, from our long goodbye when I was four, maybe even three, and I didn’t want it to have changed.
It was a place where things were still possible, I guess.
After the bank job fell apart, my real dad had taken us there, to Sealy. Not because my mom’s parents would take us in, and not because he wanted to leave me on their doorstep, but because — and I just think this, from the way he kept standing in certain places, like he was listening — because he thought that what him and my mom had had, it was strong enough that she was just going to step out from behind some tree, or float down from the sky on a foil balloon. Once he even spun a merry-go-round that he must have remembered, then watched it until it stopped. Like, the next time it came around, or the next, she was going to be there hanging on, smiling, telling him not so fast, the tips of her long hair skating across the gravel and cigarette butts.
It never happened, though. Because this is the real world, the one where shot people stay shot, dead people stay dead. Or it was, anyway.
The other place we went on the way to Mexico was the other place he’d grown up, after Beaumont. Wimberley, just south of here, down toward San Marcos. It was all mosquitoes and green water and houses built of rock halfway up their walls, then wood. The two things I remember most clearly are about twenty sheep running in a ditch, terrified of something I couldn’t see, and Jacob’s Well. It’s just a natural spring back in the trees, with beer bottles balanced all around it, their labels old enough that, if you drop them into the water, the paper floats back up in shreds. But not the bottle. Because Jacob’s Well has no bottom, the bottle never comes back up.
Standing on the slick rock over that water, my real dad held my hand the whole time, and then we left, and then the rest of my life so far happened, except — and maybe I just say this now, I don’t know — it never felt quite as real as waiting for my mother to be sitting on the merry-go-round, or my real dad, keeping me from falling into a hole that went forever.
Like I’ve been trying to say, we’re oysters, shining little pieces of dirt into the most useless, important things.
I can’t believe I’m even writing it down here.
It’s not just Sealy that starts it all again for me, though.
Just east of San Antonio, more cars on the loop than I thought made any kind of sense at two in the morning, we stopped for refills on our cokes, and, not on a whim at all — I’d been practicing it in my head for nearly an hour — I passed the envelope over to Dave. It was the one the coroner had given me, the evidence I’d stolen. The picture of me my father had carried for all those years.
Dave pursed his lips and took it.
“Why?” he said.
“You need to know why I’m doing this.”
“No I don’t,” he said, trying to give the envelope back.
“I was five then,” I said, not taking it, just pointing to it with my eyes.
“Really, I —”
“He carried that with him for fifteen years. It was his treasure, he said. Jack the — whoever. He didn’t know that about him.”
“And?”
“And I did. Do. He deserved better.”
Dave shook his head like he was already regretting this, but shook the picture out anyway as I waited for the ice screw to give me a couple more cubes. It just kept turning. Finally I realized Dave was standing there, doing nothing.
“Sure this is the right one?” he said when I turned around, and I followed his eyes down to the picture he was holding.
It wasn’t me.
I took it from him and spun away as politely as I could, cupping the picture with my body.
It was my real dad. A cut-out from an old Polaroid. In it, he was standing in some dark room, over an aluminum case with specimen tubes lined inside.
On the backside, me at six years old.
I’d only ever seen it in Refugio’s hat, like a secret. Just the front, never the back. Because it was his treasure.
I pressed it between my palms, held my hands together and looked over them, at the rack of chips.
“Double laminated,” I said out loud.
Dave didn’t ask. It made sense, now. Refugio, letting me look into his hat, had explained to me that he’d laminated it twice in the machine at the office, for if he sweated. He didn’t want to ruin the picture. It wasn’t a lie, either, I don’t guess.
But the real truth was that the original one of me had already been in a laminate sleeve. What the other layer did was hold them together, make them front and back.
Why, though?
Standing in that convenience store outside San Antonio, Dave filling my coke behind me, letting the fizz die down so he could get a few more drinks in, I had no idea, and wouldn’t, until a couple of days ago.
My attorney is a thorough attorney, though.
What he did with that picture was copy it and send it to every border patrol station in Texas, until somebody remembered it enough for him to track it down. What it is is a Polaroid of a Polaroid, and it had been found on a man who’d collapsed trying to walk across the bridge at Del Rio. A white man with a sketchy record, cause of death unknown, but, as somebody had written on the report, ‘pretty damn effective nevertheless.’
According to that same cursory report, this Clancy F. Walford had also suffered severe, ‘bubbly’ burns over a good 60 percent of his body. The back side, mostly, from the scalp to the hips. The only reason the Polaroid of the Polaroid had survived was that it had been in his front pocket.
Evidently, my father hadn’t lifted the Polaroid at the scene, but months later.
The fax my attorney showed me has Refugio’s scrawly signature there by his badge number, checking out Clancy F. Walford’s property envelope. The date is three weeks to the day before he found me in Mexico.
It’s probably best I didn’t know any of this that night. If I had, I probably would have told Dave to just forget it, that it didn’t matter. That Refugio deserved whatever rabbit he got. I was stupid, though, still on a mission.
Two hours later, that mission parked us up against the chain link of a storage unit in my mother’s girlhood town.
Like I’d been afraid of, Sealy didn’t match my memory of it. It was like everywhere else now. The only thing about to come floating down out of the sky was one of the sad balloons the car lot a quarter mile down had tried to train a spotlight on.
On the service road we’d edged around one patrol car, its parking lights on.
“Guard,” Dave said, like this was all just another night for him. His face was glowing blue on one side from his cell phone. As it rang he lowered it a bit, asked me where mine was? I shrugged the question off, studied the storage unit before us some more.
The truth was my cell was charging on the kitchen counter at my trailer. Overcharging, probably. If I’d brought it with me, though, then Sanchez could have tricked me into answering somehow, and asked me questions I wouldn’t be ready for, or told me the funeral was tomorrow, come home. And anyway, I like pay phones. It makes me the caller, not the one having to answer pages. And it’s not like I don’t have a two-way under my dash, a bullwhip antenna standing up from the center of my toolbox. Just that it’s for official business only.
As you can tell, I spend a lot of time worrying about what’s personal, what’s work.
But maybe that’s natural, when you’re like me and have two dead fathers, one a cop, one a criminal. The more disappointed you become in one, the more you try to mold yourself after the other, pretend that smuggling and larceny is in the gen
es.
So of course I fell in with a pirate.
Inside of twenty minutes, Dave’s tip had us past the guard, into the yard of the storage units. The way he did it was one of his regular listeners — the anonymous caller, I was pretty sure — drove a Frito truck from snack machine to snack machine for a living. As Sealy was the center of his territory, of course he had two units side by side, and, unless the Sealy PD wanted empty snack machines across the land, he could come and go as he pleased, pretty much. So long as he promised not to call any radio personalities or anything. Or something like that.
Anyway, he let us ride in the back of his truck, foil packages glittering all around us, then took the long way around to his two units, dropping us off in the process.
The storage unit of interest was supposed to be in the low 200’s.
Because there was only one guard, though, the door wasn’t open, so we had to rattle each lock. Finally, at 234, I shook one that let go of its long curved arm. It was just supposed to look locked. So the guard out at the service road wouldn’t have to chaperone visitors in and out.
Dave pulled the door open as quietly as he could — it sounded like the thunder you hear at high school plays — and I suddenly felt guilty for having brought this to my mother’s hometown.
Behind two crossbars of police tape was a version of that room at the Jomar. Only worse.
Against one wall, more boiled than burned, was a man in what had been slacks.
Slowly, as if having to process my senses one by one now, I became aware that Dave’s hand was clamped around my forearm. I didn’t pull it away, needed an anchor the same as he did.
“Jack was here,” I whispered, because we didn’t know any other name to call him then.
Dave nodded once, swallowed, then raised his camera, bathed the unit silver, his shots spaced wide over the next two minutes. It was some kind of respect, I think. Or just plain awe.
It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles Page 14