It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Later I would find that the reason the scene was undisturbed was that they were trying to get the coroner from Del Rio on-scene, and some of the FBI agents assigned to the Jomar/bomb-thing. Anything with an even half-similar m.o. was automatically falling into their laps. Which the four-and-a-half Sealy PD were probably none too sad about.

  Too — and this I found out from Sanchez, when he finally caught up with me in Austin — the reason the FBI was all night getting there was that they were trying to locate me. Just to rule me out as a suspect. Meaning it wasn’t helping any that I was doing my bereavement stuff in parts unknown. What it did was keep me on one of their lists nobody really wants to be on.

  But things happen for a reason sometimes.

  If I hadn’t been wanted for questioning, then what I’m being charged with here — nobody would have taken me so seriously, I don’t think. Only now they won’t believe me, that it was all a joke. Because of scenes like Sealy, I know.

  The only things that made it stand apart from the Jomar were a lantern against the opposite wall, a spiral notebook under the dead guy’s wrist, like he’d been writing and just keeled over, and, above him on tacks, a series of Polaroids of what had been done to him.

  Like with my father, it had taken nearly a week.

  Without thinking, I reached for the first Polaroid — I guess I thought it was going to tell me something about what had happened to my father at the Omar — but Dave stopped me.

  “We’re not here,” he said.

  I nodded, agreed, and, he took individual shots of each Polaroid for me. When he finally showed me the prints, each of them would have a portion of shadow on the concrete behind them, that seemed to bleed from picture to picture. What Dave would do with them was photocopy them, then cut the copies so they were continuous, like a panoramic setting.

  It was Jack the Rabbit again.

  In the lower corner of that panorama would be the spiral I didn’t pick up, the one that my attorney says isn’t on any of the FBI evidence lists.

  Except it was there. Believe me.

  Unlike us, of course.

  Because they would be evidence themselves, against Dave, he never even tried to run the pictures he shot that night. They were too real. Instead, two nights later he burned another roll on a third chupacabra that turned out to be just a dead dog. It was back near Del Rio.

  I don’t know.

  On the slow ride away from there, in the back of the Frito truck, we didn’t look at each other, me and Dave, and didn’t say much when he got on his bus for Ozona either. He did write his cell number onto the back of my hand like the sixth grade.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “It’s not over,” he said back, shrugging. “There’ll be more, right?”

  I hoped not.

  Bereavement’s a complicated thing.

  Instead of drifting to the cemetery like I’d promised myself, to leave one flower in place of a lifetime of them, I went to the diner, stared at the napkin dispenser. Behind the counter the two waitresses were talking about their kids. Apparently the seven-year-old was going to get his hide tanned for ruining his stepdad’s flashlight. Apparently he’d been using it to pin bullfrogs when the batteries had died.

  According to him, he shook it, trying to get enough juice for one more frog, and when it wouldn’t work, the Easter Bunny stepped from behind a tree, held his hand out for the light. The boy passed it over. In the Easter Bunny’s hand, the light glowed on, held its light long enough for the boy to get home.

  The punchline of course was that it was July.

  The waitresses laughed, and, when they looked over to me, holding my breath, gripping the table top, I turned away too fast, I know. My eyes were full of the morning, of the night.

  I was going to see my mother.

  On the way to the cemetery, all the questions I should have asked Dave crowded around:

  — This guy who’d killed my father, why, when he stepped into Granger Mosely’s stock tank, hadn’t he taken his boots off? The more I thought about it, the less it made sense. Unless he was the Michelangelo I’d heard about on Paul Harvey, who didn’t take his boots off because he’d had them on so long that the skin would come with the boots. Something like that. Except these boots had been just off the shelf, the tread crisp. Too, I supposed, if the guy had a rabbit head, maybe he had rabbit feet, too, and didn’t want to leave those kind of tracks. Never mind that this was the real world.

  — The tacks the Polaroids had been stuck to the wall with in the storage unit, had they been tempered steel? Thin little cement nails with thumb-push plastic heads? It didn’t make sense. The walls were cinderblock, the mortar between them as hard as the cinderblocks were. You could flake chips off with a tack, maybe, if you had the time, but, unless you drilled it beforehand or could somehow soften or melt or heat the mortar to make it at least spongy, I didn’t see how any tack could ever get seated enough to hold anything up against the wall. Except that they were, they had been. And they’d been pushed in so casual, the Polaroids not even in a straight line.

  — The guy who had been in the Polaroids, who was he? He’d gotten the same treatment as my father, I mean, so either Jack the Rabbit had hated him the same, or him and my father had done something together a long time back, which was only just now catching up with them. And, as the FBI and the Rangers weren’t on anybody’s trail already, I had to assume that it was payback for something the principals had all thought forgotten. Even now, though, my attorney can’t find any connection between them, or even with Clancy Walford from the bridge in Del Rio, who was from fifteen years before, which counted as long enough to have been forgotten about, I figured. If you wanted to, that is.

  Fifteen years was also how much time had passed since my real dad had died.

  I don’t know.

  I could have also asked Dave how he knew the bus schedules so well, I guess, or even how he knew what payphone went with what number in Uvalde, but, just from the little while I’d spent with him, it seemed he was big on conspiracy talk and paranormal sightings, not so big on personal details. At least not ones he couldn’t spin, like he did on the air.

  Anyway, all those questions went away the moment I saw the low stone wall of the cemetery.

  I let my foot off the accelerator for maybe twenty feet, hovered it over the brake then coasted through the old neighborhood around the cemetery instead. Who knows what I was telling myself then, either. That I’d missed the gate, that I needed to check the perimeter, that it was bad luck to just go right in, disrespectful to be so bold. Maybe it was that I wasn’t sure where the grave was going to be, and might be able to luck onto it from the truck, thus saving minutes of suddenly valuable time.

  All lies, of course. I was just scared.

  What I have of my mother, all I’ve ever had and have never told anybody about, is walking through an old kitchen with her. She’s holding my hand. Because there are no dishes or pans and only a big square hole instead of a refrigerator, I’m pretty sure this is a house we were looking to rent, or stay in.

  The way she looks is exactly like the girl my real dad fell in love with, exactly like the woman who, if she’d lived, would have kept us out of Mexico, kept my dad from muling unmentionables across the border, would have taught me to feather my hair on the sides like hers, so there would be yellowy old snapshots of us together, our hair dated and identical.

  The memory of that kitchen that we probably never even rented lasts no more than nine seconds, from where the linoleum starts in the doorway to the warped floor just past the refrigerator hole. I’ve gotten hours and hours out of it, though. Because my father, Refugio, was never married, I didn’t have to put walls up around that kitchen either, but could let her always be my only mom.

  So, what I was afraid of, I think, was that when she saw me standing over her grave, she would be disappointed. Not that I was a cop where she’d been a criminal, and not that I hadn’t held onto my real dad better, but that I’d learn
ed to do my hair at my girlfriends’ houses over the years, instead of at her vanity.

  What I imagined was that she would want to reach out, run a loose strand behind my ear, to bring my face out better. Which, I mean, I would shake all my hair into my face as I walked up, if that was the case. But I’m being stupid. Just the facts.

  Her headstone is six rows in from the east gate, four graves over from the path. It took a while to find her because there was no ‘Dodd’ in her name. And no, I wouldn’t be telling you any of this if it didn’t matter.

  This is maybe the most important part of any of it, really.

  For maybe two minutes I studied the beloved daughter, dear sister in the pink-flecked granite, resisted tracing it with my fingertip to make those brothers and sisters and grandparents real, and then I found myself watching some silk flowers two rows away. They were faded and ragged at the edges, and nosing into the sky like blind people wanting to feel the rain.

  I smiled a little bit, knew I was going to move those flowers, that my mother would have approved of that, stealing flowers, and then came back to the ground around her headstone, to see if the little brass fitting was there for the brass-looking vases some of the other graves had.

  It was. That wasn’t why I stopped breathing, though.

  Directly behind it, which is exactly beside the right part of the headstone, was a single stick, like a Fourth of July punk or punt or whatever they are. Its handle-end was stuck into the ground, so that its head kind of leaned against the stone in the most tender way possible, maybe the most tender way ever.

  Instead of screaming like my body wanted to, I swallowed once, blinked, then stood as naturally as I could, looking to see who was watching me.

  Nobody.

  I looked down to the stick again, to be sure.

  Silver nitrate.

  The last time I’d seen one of those sticks had been in our Mexico house. When Refugio walked in through the sliding glass door by the kitchen table, pulling it shut behind him like he lived there, I’d had all my real dad’s sticks lined up on the table. All the ones he’d forgot in the couch and by the sink and folded in magazines as bookmarks. Because he was going to need them when he came back.

  Passing the table, Refugio held his fingers over the sticks as if blessing them, and nodded, knew them, and that more than anything told me he hadn’t just found my picture out in some pasture, but had really and truly known my dad.

  As for the next few hours after the cemetery, I can honestly say I’m not sure what I did. It’s what happens when your world is changing shape, I think. At the end of it I was back at the low wall of the cemetery, looking across all the headstones. I didn’t even have to get out of my truck to see it, now.

  The silver nitrate stick, it had soaked up enough sunlight that it was almost glowing.

  I breathed a laugh out through my nose and looked away, to the two birdbaths on either side of the path. In one of them, the birds were splashing and drinking and playing. In the other — the one on the right side, that you might drag your fingers through if you were walking by — there were no birds.

  Before I left the cemetery and Sealy and what the prosecution will probably have already called my rational senses, I tipped that empty birdbath over, let the water drain into the pebble path. Because it was evidence.

  It’s what any good daughter would have done.

  That night Sanchez raised me on the radio. I mean, I was listening, anyway, each time he clicked on:

  — Romo, listen. I know you’re out there.

  — Call me.

  — The funeral is Friday.

  — I know what you’re doing.

  He wasn’t trying to guilt me into getting in touch with him, but embarrass me into it.

  It was going to take more than that, though.

  For two hours already, a full hour and forty-five minutes longer than I’d meant to, I’d been sitting in the ditch west of Sealy with the dome light on. What I was doing was studying the backside of Refugio’s laminated picture of me. My real dad. I was waiting for him to tell me something.

  From the shirt he was wearing, I could tell the Polaroid had been shot no more than two weeks before he went on his last job. Probably less. The shirt was a pearl snap denim, his favorite kind, but they faded fast as much as he wore them. In the picture, the shirt he had on wasn’t quite unwashed blue, but the part of the sleeves I couldn’t see more than likely still had a crease or two from being folded in the store.

  No matter how long I stared, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to see backwards through the camera, to Clancy Walford, and whoever had been standing behind him.

  Refugio? Why not, yeah.

  And now his funeral was Friday. Refugio, in his famous boots.

  I still had a good thirty-six hours before I needed to be back for it. From where I was, I could either keep making the straight line east, head into the lights of Houston, or I could tend back west, into country I knew.

  I picked west, finally. Not because it was more likely — if there was something big and criminal going on, then Houston was as good a place to start as any — but because if I got too far from Ozona, I wouldn’t be able to pick Crazy Dave out of the air.

  Before pulling back up onto the asphalt, I looked both ways twice then turned my blinker on. Ten miles later I was in the ditch again, studying the Polaroid. I was right about the shirt — it wasn’t faded — but why did it have to be from right before he left that last time? It could have been from a year before, or two years before.

  I tucked the picture into the map holder on the backside of my visor and climbed up onto the asphalt blind, a rig pulling livestock sweeping past so close that it left my hands shaking on the wheel, close enough that the driver stopped, walked the quarter mile back to me, his pigs screaming behind him.

  “You okay, ma’am?” he asked, not looking at me directly. “Officer?”

  I guess I was crying. It wasn’t about him, though. I nodded that yes, I was okay — obviously — and then pretended to be looking for something buried deep inside my metal clipboard. The driver walked backwards for a few steps, his hand to the brim of his hat, and then he nodded, jogged back to his pigs.

  Sometimes I love Texas, sure. Other times I just want to be alone, though, anonymous, nobody.

  By the time I got up to where the driver had been parked, his tail lights were hardly even red dots anymore but the diesel and manure were still in the air, coming through my vents. I powered both windows down, laughed to myself about how stupid this all was — my real dad was dead, the same as he had been for the last fifteen years — and a flash of motion pulled my eyes to the fence.

  Without even stopping to think about it, I knew that a pig had escaped the trailer, was running for the pasture, for freedom. And then, of course, I knew that what had really happened was what always happened: the screaming pigs had drawn the coyotes in.

  Except this was no coyote.

  I raised my hand to my face, for Dave’s cell phone number. What I was looking at was one of his chupacabras. Working the wheel of the truck slow, I tried to center my headlights on it. The chupacabra saw that smooth move coming, though. I got one eyeshine and then it was gone, like it had just slit the night open, stepped in.

  Like I had a phone to call Dave with anyway.

  It didn’t matter.

  What did was that I was going the right way.

  Ten miles later was the first sign for Austin.

  The name of the dead guy in the storage unit in Sealy was Martin S. Larkin. It was a cartoon character name, the way it rhymed. His cause of death was listed as suicide. Evidently he’d asphyxiated himself with some sort of chemicals, and then the heat last week had done the rest. There was no mention of the FBI, or of Del Rio.

  I pushed the newspaper away from me. It sloughed into the empty seat of the booth I was in.

  The whole night before, there had been no Misanthrope Morning Show. I’d drifted into Austin but had nothing to go on,
so just eased from light to light, finding coffee where I could. By lunch I knew I was looking in the wrong place. Five hours later I was back in Del Rio, sleepwalking through my father’s two bedroom house.

  Except for the file boxes stacked by my bed, my room was just like I’d left it. I threw away the Chinese food rotting in the fridge but the whole house still smelled like decay. To try and stay awake I turned on Wheel of Fortune, but the colors clicking across the screen knocked me out before the first solution.

  Knowing my luck, it was probably the answer to all my questions.

  When I came to, it was still light. At least that’s what I thought at first. Really, it was the next morning. On my father’s television set now, an old brown and white western. With the closed captions on, no volume. I followed it back to the remote control.

  Sanchez.

  He nodded once, never looked away from the screen. I stumbled into the bathroom, the kitchen, and finally settled onto the foot of my old bed, my head in my hands. Soon enough Sanchez was standing in the door.

  “What time’s the funeral, then?” I said, not looking up from the carpet. He handed me a cup of the coffee I’d started, didn’t answer.

  “Where you been, Romo?”

  It was my turn not to answer.

  “I’m not doing what you think I am,” I finally said.

  “And what do I think you’re doing?”

  We could have gone on like this all morning. Instead I went back to the bathroom, locked the door behind me and stood under the shower. My father’s shampoo smelled like medicine. Instead of using his razor by the sink for my legs, I broke open a new one. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to throw the one he’d been using away, though.

  Sanchez was still there when I came out, my hair in a faded green towel. His western was down to the final shoot-out. The closed captions were off now.

  “Feel better?” he asked, lifting his cup to me in greeting.

  “Shouldn’t you be out catching illegals?” I said back.

  “I could say the same.”

  “I’m on bereavement.”

  “Been meaning to say, you’re welcome for that, yeah.”