I just stared at the gunfight.
“Eight hundred new miles on your truck,” he said, like he was just noting it. “As opposed to your log, I mean.”
I stopped drying my hair long enough to do the math, think of an excuse maybe. It’s what an amateur does every time, I know.
“I told you,” I said, no eye contact. “Bereavement.”
“You weren’t out at your place.”
“I went to my mother’s … to where she’s buried, is that okay?”
Sanchez narrowed his eyes about this, said, “Your mother?”
“She died before — before Mexico.”
Sanchez was still just staring at me.
“Manuel never knew her,” I added, then went back to the bathroom, brushed my hair out with an Ace comb then braided it wet, all the way down to the tips.
This time when I came back to the living room, the television was off. Sanchez was standing at the screen door, coffee in hand. He was staring out at the street. Probably because he’d just seen a western and felt like a sheriff.
“I never knew,” he said. “Your mother.”
“I go up there to — to tell her important things,” I said. The pause was manufactured of course, but perfect. My mother would have approved. Sanchez nodded, drank from his cup.
“You should think about locking a door,” he said, tapping the screen open to show how easy it had been for him to get in. “FBI says somebody was after your dad specifically.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And they’re probably still looking for him, too. Or his couch.”
Sanchez shook his head.
“I’m just saying,” he said. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Guess that makes two of us.”
Sanchez turned around, handed his empty cup to me in farewell and started to duck out but stopped, as if just remembering. “Oh yeah,” he said, “regulations and all. You know using state vehicles for personal use can be prosecuted, right?”
I just stared at him.
His truck was fitted with a tow kit, for his jet skis. He tipped his hat, smiled his way out, and only stopped when I called to him from the porch.
“What time’s the funeral?”
“Shit,” he said, hiding behind his door again, one hand already on the wheel, to leverage him in, “forgot to tell you. Looks like the feds are going to need to hold onto him for a little while longer.” He shrugged one shoulder, as if he was the victim here. “Week, two? Something like this, who knows …”
I focused past him, to a bicycle laid over on a lawn. It had been mown around two, maybe three times. Sanchez said something else to me but I wasn’t listening to him anymore, was just waiting for him to be gone.
Ten minutes later the western he’d been watching started over. I turned it off, stood from the couch, and, on his advice, locked the door but then got caught there, watching my hand on the deadbolt. Why would anybody still be interested in my father’s place?
Had that been what Sanchez had let slip? Was the FBI letting him read their reports?
For the next two hours I sifted through the house, starting with the file boxes in my old bedroom, as they were the most recent, but moving on to the kitchen drawers, the garage, the attic, and, finally, my father’s bedroom. In his sock drawer, way at the back, was the silver knife with the turquoise-inlaid handle.
I held it for exactly thirty seconds, like the sacred object it was, then wrapped it back in its crisp new bandana and walked out of the house, the door open behind me.
Because the tabloids that week couldn’t all use the same name, Jack the Rabbit was also Frankenbunny and Bunnyhead and Doc and Peter and I don’t know what-all else. Parked at the curb in front of Dave’s house in Ozona, not a Mexican for blocks, I read through all of them. If I smiled, it wasn’t in pleasure. Not even amusement.
The whole time, Dave’s mom was a pair of fingers holding back a living room curtain. The fingers were at about wheelchair level.
I tried not to watch the black space behind them, skimmed the other stories in the tabloids but kept coming back to the Frankenbunny version. It wasn’t front page material but was sensational enough that the tabloid people had gone to their photo archives and pulled up Thumper, and the white rabbit from Alice, and a man-sized rabbit shadow from some black and white movie, and then some news-looking photo — real, untouched news — of a guy holding a rabbit up by the hind legs. The rabbit was sixty-two pounds, flop-eared and British. The caption was that, to a rabbit that size, everybody probably looked like a carrot, right?
Except my father — I was calling him Refugio by then, when I could remember to — had just been cooked, not eaten.
I don’t know.
In the Bunnyhead article, the drawing of the detective working the case had a coyote head and a magnifying glass. He was the source for the article. The canine grin was supposed to protect his identity.
I crumpled the page up, pushed it into the floorboard, then crumpled the rest up as well, kicked them as far down as I could. It’s not satisfying, though, paper. But if I put my boot to the truck instead, I’d have to write the damage up, deal with Sanchez’s patient, double-edged questions.
Maybe I’d tell him I’d been questioning a large cartoon rabbit, whose left hind foot twitched each time he tried to lie. That was how the dash got all cracked. Sir.
For the first time in maybe a day, I let myself smile, but then I saw what I should have been seeing already: sitting in the backseat of an LTD about six houses ahead was the hazy silhouette of a pair of rabbit ears. Leading up to them, the shoulders of a man. Slowly, the head turned back to look at me, then the LTD eased away from the curb, the rabbit head watching me until its driver rounded the corner.
My heart was thumping. That’s a joke, yeah.
If it’s considered private use to chase chauffeured rabbits through the streets of Ozona in the daytime, then lock me up. But that’s not the way it turned out.
And no, I’m not breaking any confidentiality agreement by writing this next part down. That’s not to say you’re going to believe it either, though. Some things you never talk about because they make you look crazy and paranoid.
Which was the point, I’d guess.
It did happen, though.
Where the LTD finally put on the brakes was about four miles outside town, behind another LTD that had been sitting there. Moving slow so there was no way I could miss it, the rabbit in the backseat stood from the car, swept the rabbit ear headband from his head and ran his other hand through his hair, like the band had itched.
Other than that, he was standard issue FBI. Just a bit more smiley than usual. A glint in his eye that, looking back now, I think was probably there because he’d puppetmastered some of the tabloid stories. They were the best way to keep people from taking a thing seriously. Putting the ears on for him, it would have been like stepping into the story he’d made up. I’d probably smile too.
I rolled past him, my border patrol tires immune to the ditch, and pulled up even with the LTD I’d been led to. I thumbed my passenger window down to talk to the agent in the backseat. Evidently that wasn’t secure enough for him, though. He said something to whoever was sitting beside him — my truck was too tall for me to get an angle — tapped the driver on the shoulder then climbed out of his car, stepped up into the cab with me, rubbing his hands together like he was ready, yes.
“Drive,” he said, hooking his chin forward.
It took him all of three-tenths of a mile to reach under my dash with a pair of clippers, snip the power to my radio. I looked over to him about this.
“You could have just unscrewed the mike,” I told him, holding it up so he could see the long nut at the base of the cable.
“This way’s more thorough,” he said.
“What are we doing here?”
“We’re letting me ask the questions, that’s what.”
“Is this about —”
“Yes,” he said, “and n
o,” then produced a rainbow-colored film envelope from his suit jacket, fanned the photos out on the seat between us.
They were the shots Dave had taken in Sealy. The storage unit. Martin S. Larkin.
Now my heart really was thumping.
“The charges we could make stick here kind of, y’know, boggle the brain, wouldn’t you say, Officer Romo?”
I wanted to play dumb, ask who took those, where were they taken — I wasn’t in any of them, anyway — but, too, he probably had my prints from the stainless steel interior of the Frito truck, my description from the diner, my heel impressions from the cemetery, my mileage from Sanchez. I’d been stupid, I knew. But that was just because I didn’t feel like I’d been doing anything that wrong.
“And that’s just the beginning …” the agent added, fanning the photos out wider, so the envelope they’d been in got important.
In block letters, with an address, was Sandoval, David.
“It’s not his fault,” I said.
“Of course it’s not,” the agent said back, then smiled a little more. “It’s nobody’s fault. Oh, too, you do know that, by following a man-rabbit out here, you confirmed certain things for us, right?”
“You, too,” I told him.
“Clarify.”
“If I wasn’t on the right track, you wouldn’t be here.”
He laughed, riffled the photos back into their sleeve.
“Every track is the right track down here, Laurie Romo. It’s all connected.”
“Then what are you here for, instead of out there catching him?”
“You tell me.”
Like reciting, I said, “Either you want to warn me off, or you’re about to break regulation and tell me all the particulars of this bomb you’re chasing.” I thumbed out one of the pictures, held it up for him. “Let me read this, maybe.” It was the spiral that had been under Larkin.
The agent shrugged that he was impressed.
“We assumed you’d already read it.”
“You’re trying to get me to say I was there.”
He hissed a laugh through his teeth. “Say you had to make a prediction now,” he said. “Am I going to break regulation, pull an amateur with personal motivations into an international investigation with truly global implications, or am I going to tell you just to concern yourself with certain funeral arrangements, let the government do its job?”
“Can I turn around now?” I asked, my eyes in the rearview, my lips pursed so I wouldn’t say anything too smart.
The agent shrugged a sure. I wheeled the truck slow and wide from ditch to ditch, started heading back to the LTDs.
“Let me … um, clarify if I can here,” I led off.
“Please do.”
“If I don’t back off, you turn these pictures over to the state authorities, and it’s bye-bye Laurie Dodd you crime-scene tamperer, justice obstructer, trespasser, all that?”
The LTDs were waiting for us about a quarter mile up.
“Well, twenty years ago, yeah, maybe,” the agent said. “Things these days, though, they’re a lot more … oblique, you could say.”
To show what he meant, he nodded ahead of us. The rear passenger door of the front LTD was swinging open. The side I hadn’t been able to see. From it, falling into the empty road, Dave. They’d put the bunny ear headband on him.
“If, facing charges, you give a deposition about federal coercement,” the agent beside me said, shrugging as if this was just the way the world was, “some fringe newspaper might actually pick it up. If he goes on the record about conspiracies though, well …”
I looked over at him, my foot on the brake now.
“That’s not playing very nice,” I said.
“Yeah, well, what we’re dealing with’s not very nice, Officer Romo,” the agent said, like that’s the name he wanted to stick, then stepped down while we were still rolling, jogged himself down to a fast walk, never looked back.
On the dash he’d left a shiny new pair of electrician’s pliers and a sealed blister pack of crimps. To fix my radio. The two LTDs backed out in tandem, turned around, disappeared. Federal choreography. I was officially impressed.
In their wake Dave stood up, peeled the ears from his head, and, when I eased the truck up for him, he shied away, started running for the pasture like bees were after him. He didn’t make it over the fence, though. And it wasn’t any better on the other side anyway.
I idled my truck and walked over, trying not to see the way he was shaking, then finally just told him the only thing I could that would bring him back: that I knew where another chupacabra was. That I’d seen it. Slowly, Dave looked up to me, to see if I was lying. I nodded that I wasn’t, then touched his shoulder, left my hand there.
An hour later we were heading east again, the FBI’s pliers in my glove compartment, my radio still dead.
“Misanthropes,” I said out loud, a few miles closer to Austin.
“Pirates,” Dave said back, unable not to grin.
And no, we didn’t have the rifle yet. That was still days away.
Three nights later, Hell Bunny debuted on the Bastrop six o’clock news. It was the beginning of the end.
I was sitting at a counter alone, waiting on a cheeseburger with jalapeños that were going to cost fifteen cents each. Dave was supposed to be in the bathroom taking a sink bath, but I knew he was back at the dumpster checking messages on his cell phone, maybe dictating some story into his voice mail. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust me, I don’t think, but — since the FBI, he hadn’t been the same. Sitting behind the tinted windows of that federal LTD, it had broken something in him that I’d guess had been broken once already, years ago, and he’d only just been holding together.
He was seeing them everywhere now is what I’m saying. Suits, ties, sunglasses. Satellites. If you asked him, he’d tell you he hadn’t slept any since Ozona, but he had, his face pressed up against the side glass of my truck. What we were doing was coasting the back roads for chupacabra. Because the pigs had drawn it in once, Dave had a wooden call of some sort that he blew through my bullhorn.
If I hadn’t had a lightbar on top of my cab, we would have been hauled in, I know, and I wouldn’t be here now. But we’re not here to talk about what if.
For me, trolling 71 for chupacabra was just a holding pattern, until my dad surfaced again. My dad with the rabbit ears. Who was dead and gone, and now carrying a nuclear device. I’d tried to explain it to Dave but he’d just stared at my mouth, as if suddenly unsure, like he was checking to see if the way my lips were moving really matched the words he was hearing. He wasn’t used to people speaking his language, I don’t think, and didn’t trust it coming from someone else.
Maybe that’s what he was muttering into his voice mail back at the dumpster — a long suicide note to his mom, about how he was hitched up with this crazy girl who thought she had a zombie for a dad. That he never meant to get involved. That all he wanted was one more clear shot of a chupacabra, to make up for the chemotherapied dog he’d wasted a roll on outside Del Rio. He’d showed them to me along with the second set from Sealy.
“How —?” I’d asked, looking at the same set of pictures the FBI had.
Dave had smiled, shrugged. He’d been prepared for the FBI for a long time, he said. He always ordered double-prints on a separate ticket, then had them mailed to a post office box at the radio station, one not in his name.
Looking at the shadow of the rabbit on that cinderblock wall was when I’d tried to tell him about my real dad. It probably didn’t sound any better there than it will in court. Because things like that don’t happen.
If there was any other way to explain it, though, then please believe me, I would. And no, in spite of what my attorney says we could do, I’m not going to ride some insanity plea here. What I’m trying to do, really, is make it all not insane.
Which brings us back to Hell Bunny, I guess.
The clip was exactly nine seconds long.
&n
bsp; In it, in slow motion, Hell Bunny lunges through the doors of a convenience store in Bastrop, grabs a spiral off the school supply endcap, then backs out, trying to hide his face from the clerk. His ears were taller than the sleeve of his jacket, though. And then it was over.
Beside me, Dave was just standing there, his face not wet from the sink. And yeah, if we had this footage for court, it would be more than a little bit helpful, I know.
As far as my attorney can find, though, it only ever ran once, fed into a live broadcast that’s itself already been recorded over. Apparently the next time the station tried to run it, they finally found it under some derelict coffee cup. It was a novelty one, designed never to spill in the car. Its magnetic base was perfect for some dashboards.
Dropped into the coffee, too, were about fifty dollars of hearing aid batteries, and a handful of lithium camera ones, too. Just to be sure. Evidently the coffee conducted their cumulative electricity, gave the magnet under them a bit more charge, enough to erase the tape from front to back.
Granted, for the electricity to reach the base there would have to have been a hole drilled somewhere, maybe even a wire in the plastic, but I’m sure whoever accidentally set that cup there was proficient enough with the principles of electromagnetism to know that. The only real question is whether that coffee drinker was wearing a headband that day or not. That he was smiling goes without saying.
They shouldn’t have even let it run at all, though. Because of it, I knew, next time, to take the spiral with me.
We weren’t the first ones to converge on that convenience store in Bastrop that night. The parking lot was full. We were the only ones to start walking the marshy pastures around it, though, our flashlight beams swimming with bugs.
The clerk who had been working the night of the big spiral theft didn’t know anything. He’d been in the bathroom. It was why they didn’t even find the footage until eight days after it happened. They were looking for a beer run or something, and chanced on a giant rabbit — just the kind of comedy segment the news always wants, as, in comparison, it makes them look more human, I suppose.
As for the trees around the convenience store, they were hopeless. We had no system, were just going on stupid luck, like always.
It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles Page 16