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

by Stephen Graham Jones

  We gave up after an hour and-a-half. Dave was sure he’d seen a chupacabra — evidently he can tell their eyeshine from a raccoon’s — but he saw them every time I got more than about thirty feet from him, too, and it was going to take more than that for me to pull my truck out into the mud.

  “Well?” I said to him, finally.

  We were standing in a pool of our own light. Dave shrugged. There were more of the faithful out in the trees now, the convenience store’s battery rack empty.

  “When’s the funeral?” Dave asked.

  I watched a woman fall in the darkness, struggle up.

  “When’s the next show?” I asked back.

  Dave didn’t answer, just chewed his cheek.

  “You know they’re just pretending?” he told me, about all the people who’d followed us out into the darkness.

  I pretended I did know that, yeah. Because the FBI has that kind of manpower. But who knows.

  I touched Dave’s shoulder to tell him it was time to go and we turned, started weaving our way back to the neon sign of the convenience store. Beside us and off about thirty yards, the woman I’d watched fall stumbled again, then came up screaming. All the lights gathered on her.

  What she had was a dead something. It was bloody and stiff and smelled, but she wouldn’t let it go. Dave looked at it and then away, fast.

  It was a rabbit head.

  Mask, I corrected myself. A hood with ears, and caked around the eyes with blood. I stepped forward, pulled it up to see better, the woman’s arm coming up as well.

  “Excuse me?” she said, jerking the mask back.

  I directed my light into her face, cocked my head behind it.

  “Official business,” I told her.

  Laughter rippled through the crowd that had gathered. I cast my light around. The faithful were holding up their own fake badges and phony IDs. They glittered in the moonlight.

  “Allow me,” Dave said, affecting a humble, amused sort of authority, and stepped forward, between me and the stumbling woman. When his negotiations started to go upwards of twenty minutes and involve sightings so delicate and obscure that no one could possibly object to them, I turned, slogged back to the coffee machine in the store.

  Ten minutes after that, Dave climbed into the passenger seat beside me.

  “Go,” he said, his face serious.

  I did, west on 71.

  In his lap was the mask. What he’d traded was the roll of film of the Del Rio dog. Only he’d told them it was just up the road, and was the real thing. We led the caravan for six miles maybe, then, at Dave’s cue, I clicked my headlights off and put my foot all the way into this escape plan.

  By dawn we were deep into Austin, bellied up to a table at the Magnolia Café. On the patio, of course. Because of the smell. In his lap, twined deep in his fingers, was the thing Dave had been waiting for all his life. Proof.

  Though technically it should have been mine, I didn’t try to take it away. Hell Bunny was real. Long live Hell Bunny.

  Neither of us could eat.

  That afternoon, after spending four hours at a comic book store with one of Dave’s listeners — his word was ‘contact’ — we wound up following ourselves up and down Congress. At least that’s what it felt like. The truck one block ahead of us was a Border Patrol job like mine. It was funny, almost. All the people who had stepped behind telephone poles and trees when the first truck passed would just be sticking their heads out again when I passed.

  What was funny was watching them try to slick their hair back, lick their lips, act exceedingly normal.

  While I drove, Dave laid sideways on the passenger side floorboard, trying to rewire my radio so we could eavesdrop on the truck we were following. It never happened, though. After making a complicated, backtracking grid from the interstate to Congress, driving slow along all the sidewalks — was he looking for somebody? — the truck finally headed east on Fifth, going too fast to see anybody.

  I followed as best I could, lost the truck a few times, then managed to find it again. With Border Patrol skills, yeah: all the Mexicans caught out in the open would still be android-walking on whatever road the truck had just taken. Legal or not, I mean. According to my — to Refugio, it used to be a real problem, even. Where the state could sell their retired DPS and city cars at auction after they’d stripped the light kits off, they found that the Border Patrol trucks were different. Even without lights, they were still pale green. So, aside from restaurant and club owners complaining that certain customers’ trucks could shut down business for a whole afternoon, the high school crowd started getting ahold of the trucks, too. The big fun then was to screech across the tracks, slide into some dirt yard while laying on the horn.

  Until somebody got themselves shot, yeah.

  But that’s how all the stories end in Texas. Even this one.

  Where the Border Patrol truck finally stopped was the pound. It nosed up right alongside another, one that had somebody already standing beside it, his straw hat cocked back on his head, his right foot up on his non-standard running board.

  Sanchez.

  The grid was for me.

  I eased past holding my breath, but Sanchez had already seen me. He held up his radio until I couldn’t see him anymore. From a carport deep in residential, we watched the other truck cruise by once, but he was just going on the same luck we’d been using in Bastrop.

  It made me wonder how close we’d been, there.

  That night we slept at Dave’s contact’s place. It was a twelve-year old’s room that had spilled out across a whole house. It smelled like cheetos and lotion. My truck was parked in the back yard, a tarp thrown over it, a hole punched through it for my antenna. To escape the sticky sweet smoke of the living room, I ducked into the sweatbath my cab was now and fixed my radio for longer than I needed to, then finally started calling Sanchez up every fifteen minutes.

  After an hour and-a-half, he answered.

  It didn’t mean it took him that long to hear me, just that it was a power trip, me saying his name over the air like that. Like it was me that needed him here. The first thing he told me was that I was driving stolen property. I told him it was more of a test drive, really. I’d have it back on the lot soon. Everybody was listening, of course.

  “Where are you?”

  “In sixth grade, I think.”

  “Say again?”

  “Forget it. When’s the service?”

  “What are you doing here, Romo?”

  “You were there.”

  “Where?”

  “The Omar.”

  “And you think you can do more than the … the guys with ties?”

  “They’re interested in materials, not people.”

  “This isn’t going to bring him back, Romo.”

  “I stayed out of Del Rio.”

  “More like Del Rio’s a lot bigger than any of us thought.”

  “Yeah, well.” I held the button down, looked across my tarped bed at the lights of Austin. One of them would be Sanchez.

  “Let’s not do this here,” he said.

  “I’m close.”

  “I’m not asking you to … to surrender or anything.”

  There it was, then. ‘Surrender.’ It was what you asked a fugitive to do.

  “How do I know it’s not a trap?”

  “I brought you a change of clothes.”

  In the living room, Dave and his contact were using tweezers and probes and ultraviolet lightbulbs on the rabbit mask. It was going to be the tabloid story of the decade. Where the rabbit skin ended, a different kind of skin took over.

  “They’re looking for you, Romo,” Sanchez said then, not even in any kind of code. “That’s where they were that — that Sealy night.”

  “How do I know they’re not sitting beside you right now?”

  “I —”

  He had nothing, though.

  “The punter,” he said then, slurring it enough so that if you didn’t know him, he
could be saying anything. “Just us.”

  I breathed in, exhaled, said it with my eyes closed: “Quíen?”

  “When … when your shift used to go over that month of the Senator’s birthday.”

  ‘Senator’ was what he called Warrant, the only guy newer than me. His birthday had been in March, when I’d been working nights. We all knew it because we’d had to cover his shifts while he tried to sober up. So what he was saying was six in the morning. Where he was saying was the bridge. ‘Punter’ was Sanchez for ‘il puente,’ from some time in his high school when a legendary friend had kicked a football all the way from America to Mexico. It had just been full of air, but, Sanchez always told us like a lesson, there could have been anything in that ball, right? Not all games were innocent.

  I clicked off and said it to myself: six, the bridge.

  We could watch the early morning granola crowd kayak across Town Lake, their plastic paddles dipping silently into the water, their fiberglass hulls surging forward.

  That night I slept in the utility — it was the only room that smelled even partially sanitary — the dryer drowning out Dave’s breathless monologue. My watch beeped me awake at four-thirty, and I was gone without him, coasting downhill with my windows open. But I wasn’t stupid.

  Instead of the bridge, I went to where Sanchez had been. The pound.

  They opened at seven. I was walking the runs by a quarter after, until an attendant saw me, cued into the uniform shirt I’d washed the night before and led me all the way to the end. She had a dewy Dr. Pepper fresh from the coke machine in her hand, and offered me a drink. I shook my head no, but that was a lie. I would have paid twenty dollars for one drink from that can.

  Waiting in the final pen, with a buffer of empty runs around it, was a chupacabra. It was bloodying itself, trying to get through the wire at the attendant.

  “It’s dying,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “Autopsy’s this afternoon.”

  I nodded, watched the dog, the chupacabra. Its missing hair made its nose seem more narrow, its ears larger. Its skin was cracked in a way I knew, its eyes rimmed with blood in a way I didn’t want to know about.

  “Thank you,” I told the attendant. When the silence got too thick for her she backed off a couple of runs. As she did, the chupacabra settled down. Just sat there. I looked back to her but her eyes were saucers.

  “Good boy,” I said into the pen, almost singsong, then stepped forward, placing myself between the chupacabra and the attendant. The chupacabra didn’t explode, just edged forward, its ears flush against its skull.

  “There there …” I told it, placing the back of my hand to the wire of the cage. Its nose was warm against my skin, its tail fanning the slick concrete. Behind me, the attendant’s radio buzzed to life, her voice muffled and nervous in it. It didn’t matter.

  “You know me, don’t you?” I whispered through the wire. My scent, anyway. That I got from my dad. My real dad. When it was over I was smiling, just at the corners of my mouth. It was a little girl smile. I could feel it.

  “Thank you,” I told the attendant again, brushing past her, leaving before the rest of them could get there. There was no doubt now.

  By noon the chupacabra would be dead on a table, the light above it sputtering from the radiation. I never told Dave about it, either. It wasn’t because of him, but because of me.

  For a moment, my back to the attendant, I’d closed my eyes, let that dog’s nose become my dad’s hand. It was a touch I’d been waiting fifteen years for. Now all that was left was to find him. To save him from himself, yeah.

  I was a long way from the Jomar.

  That afternoon, trolling south Austin in Dave’s contact’s antique Datsun, we saw our first Hell Bunny shirt.

  If there were shirts, then there would be campaign buttons, and bumper stickers.

  This was Austin after all.

  I pretended to know what to do with this new development, eased us down another random block. We weren’t just going to see him walking into a coffee shop, though. Without any resources, any breaking news, any really bad leaks or rogue agents at the FBI, we were lost, nowhere. Within five miles of him probably, but it might as well be the whole state.

  But — would he even remember me? I mean, it had been fifteen years already. And there were phones everywhere.

  We had to keep moving. Driving, not thinking. According to Dave, his contact’s phone had been tapped last night, and there were just way too many cars in the neighborhood with up-to-date inspection stickers and fresh new tags, and we had to allow that every plumber’s van was automatically lined with technology, all of it focused on Dave.

  My truck was in a paid parking garage up by the convention center. We could have painted it, but that would be defacing state property, as much as admitting it was stolen. And a tarp would only make people want to look under it. Real pirates would have known what to do, probably. As it was, we were still just coasting on luck, trying to stretch it as long as we could.

  If I’d made it to the bridge, had that talk with Sanchez, I could have found out how he’d known to look for me in Austin. Instead of Houston or San Antonio or Piedras Negras. But I could guess. If he was reading the FBI field reports like I figured he was, and their investigation was leading them here, then that’s where I’d be as well. And if I wasn’t, it didn’t matter, as I couldn’t be messing anything up.

  It was a compliment, really. He thought I was as good as the FBI. And important enough to assign two trucks to. It was better I’d stood him up, though.

  He’d never believe that my real dad was back, or trust that he’d had to do what he’d done to Refugio. Worse, he’d tell it to everybody. In his words, which, yeah, they’d be pretty much mine, but with long, meaningful pauses inserted. Not that any of that was telling us whether we should go right or left at whatever light we were at. Nothing was.

  Soon enough Dave fell into a pout.

  At first I didn’t pick up on it, but then I realized he wasn’t muttering anymore about how this rabbit mask was going to change the world, make everybody see it as it was, the way he’d known it was for years. And it wasn’t that kind of silence he fell into sometimes, where I could tell he was trying hard to pretend he’d never had a rabbit ear headband fitted down over him. With his index finger and thumb he was ratting some of the rabbit fur together then smoothing it back down. Over and over.

  “A little social grooming?” I said, faking a smile.

  He stopped. I reached for the radio but he was already interrupting: “Why are we still here?”

  It was a good question.

  “Because he’s here,” I said.

  “And we know this how?”

  “It’s …” I started. “He was coming up 71, right?”

  It sounded like an excuse, even to me. But I couldn’t tell him about the pound, either. Not this late in the day. And anyway, the dogs, the chupacabras — they were just the indicators, the breadcrumbs, the seagulls tracking the shark.

  Dave did his eyebrows and patted his side of the car like it was a horse and we drove nowhere for the rest of the afternoon, one clove after another trailing smoke up from the ashtray. They were incense sticks against the mask. Because it smelled exactly like roadkill. I tried not to think about it, then did anyway.

  Without the mask, what would my dad look like? Had he just been wearing it to hide who he was, or was he injured? Was that why it was all bloody? Where do you even find a mask like that?

  Why a rabbit?

  The kind of investigation we were on was the kind where you had to go fast all the time, or else risk stopping to think about what you were doing. I almost wanted to call Sanchez, make up some excuse for the bridge. Or get on the news somehow, so my dad could see me, know I was out here looking for him.

  But then everybody would see me.

  Beside me, where I wasn’t supposed to hear, Dave was curled around his cell again, talking to his mom. Apologizing
. Something about the pharmacy, and the air conditioner. When he hung up I licked my lips to get the words right and asked him if he needed a bus. It took him a moment to get his words right as well.

  “What about this?” The mask.

  I made a slow right, the whole Datsun shuddering from the downshift.

  “Take it,” I told him, flashing my eyes over. “Just don’t let them put it in some museum, okay?”

  Dave smiled, hid it by looking out the window.

  “He’s real,” he said then, in the voice that unsettled me. It wasn’t like it wasn’t him or anything soap opera like that, it was something in the delivery. I could tell by the way he talked, all wistful and dreamy, that he was staking everything on what he’d just said. That it was the new center his life was going to be revolving around.

  From here, this room, where I can look at myself in the big mirror any time I want to, any time I don’t want to, I understand why it unsettled me, I think, him using that voice for the mask. It wasn’t that I cared for him. That’s just the way I want to remember it. The good version. In it, he’s tragic, I’m kind of heroic, and everything’s inevitable.

  There’s something under that, though. Jealousy. It was my dad he was trying to make his own.

  “You should have known him fifteen years ago,” I said, grinding up into his contact’s driveway.

  Dave heard something in my voice too, I guess. He didn’t say anything back. Inside the house he walked around wiping his prints off everything, and adding more to certain comic books he considered borrowing.

  I sat in a metal folding chair by the kitchen table and watched him — he really was twelve years old — then found myself counting numbers on the old telephone beside me. It was the heavy institutional kind like Refugio had always had in his office, with the number pad on the base instead of the handset. Like I used to do then, waiting all afternoon in his office, I started launching my eyes from number to number, faster and faster. It was just a game.

  Like Sanchez was always trying to tell us, though, not all games are innocent. I breathed in sharp when I realized the number I was dialing. It was the last one I’d given to my dad before he left. The one I used to pretend was going to save me from the office my kidnapper had locked me in. My face flushed, my eyes went hot, and I picked up the phone.