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

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Because I was in Austin, it wouldn’t even be long distance.

  I had the first four numbers punched in before Dave caught me. It was the fastest I’d seen him move since the ditch in Ozona. But now he had a purpose. He dove across the living room, his palm aimed at the twin plungers, fingers spread wide. The table and everything that had been balanced on it collapsed, leaving me in my chair, the phone still in my hand, the line spiraling down into the wreckage.

  “It’s not clean,” Dave said like it was the most obvious thing in the world, then palmed his cell up from his belt, passed it to me.

  I nodded, only half there I guess, and dialed the number into his cell phone. It rang and rang, and somehow — this I have no clue about — I could hear it resounding on the other end, in some big empty place.

  “What?” Dave said, watching me closer than I really wanted him to.

  I shook my head no, and then the ringing stopped. Someone on the other end was listening.

  “Dad?” I whispered, my eyes closed now. Dave wasn’t the only one who was still twelve years old.

  On the way to the bus station we had to stop by the pound. Dave’s tabloid instincts had finally kicked in, started wondering why Sanchez had been there.

  I didn’t say anything, just made all the rights and lefts that would get us there, keeping to the small roads because we were in my truck again. I’d only agreed to coast by because if I didn’t, it would mean I knew what was there. And anyway, Sanchez and whoever had already been to this particular sideshow. They wouldn’t be there again.

  I was wrong.

  We pulled in from the blind side, my mind already made up to stay with the truck so the attendant wouldn’t recognize me, and there was another truck just like mine. Parked right beside it, another, with running boards. Sanchez.

  Because I’m an amateur, I chirped the tires, splashed coffee all over the dash. Dave’s face was expressionless, just totally slack. For maybe twenty seconds we just stared at the two trucks, then, slowly, became aware of a tall, long-haired attendant with a pushbroom. He was watching us.

  I nodded to myself that this was okay, this was good, and, wholly for that attendant, parked right alongside the two trucks it looked like I was supposed to be parking by. The attendant went back to his sweeping.

  “W-What —?” Dave stammered, the rabbit mask clutched hard to his chest.

  “It’s okay,” I said, turning the truck off, leaving the key in. My mind was racing. Not about why Sanchez was here again — I assume the chupacabras were turning out to be obviously from south of the border, somehow — more about the radio in his truck.

  Ever since the call this morning, I’d been trying to figure out how to get my hands on a good reverse directory. And praying that the number I’d called was listed. A radio not registered to me leapfrogged all that, though. A clean radio and a male voice. I looked over to Dave.

  “Been a while since you were on the air, yeah?” I said.

  Everything that happens to him after this, it’s my fault.

  Though I knew how to get at Sanchez’s hidden key — it was in a dummy trailer ball, caked with mud — I tried the other truck first. The driver’s door was locked, but the passenger side vent window was still cocked open. I snaked my arm in, jimmied the handle from all the wrong angles, and, finally, the right one. I pushed Dave in ahead of me, and kept my feet on the asphalt.

  He already knew all the codes, and had the number written in ink on the side of his hand, and his identification number was written on masking tape on the back of the aluminum clipboard case, and I’d promised him that this would be cake, that he was in no danger whatsoever. All he had to do now was dodge any small talk, act like he didn’t have time for it here.

  It would have gone fine and perfect if the front doors of the pound hadn’t swung open and shut right when he twisted the radio on. I melted back out the door, pushed it almost closed, and rolled under Sanchez’s truck, stared up at his rusted emergency brake cable. That there weren’t pounding footsteps yet meant that they hadn’t registered three trucks yet. As far as they were concerned, the one on the outside now was whoever Sanchez had dragged to Austin to look for me.

  Except then that truck started talking. I’d left my radio on.

  I shook my head no, no, please, but now Dave was using a set of ID numbers that had to be familiar to at least one person standing by the door. All noise in the parking lot stopped. Even the dogs inside weren’t barking.

  Like I’d told him, Dave didn’t stop for weather or location reports. He just asked for the address that went with the number.

  The pounding footsteps I’d been expecting never came, either. Instead there was just the slow crunch of gravel — three people, crossing the parking lot, one of them slanting off, to go make a call. The other two were saying something about my truck, suddenly there.

  Just before they got to Dave’s door — he was ducked down, had no idea — Dispatch got back with the address. I wrote it deep enough into my hand that blood mixed with the ink, and then closed my eyes.

  They pulled Dave out by his collar, threw him in front of the truck. The sun beating down all around. Me crying, I think. Now, I mean. It is all my fault.

  All I could see were legs and boots, but it was enough. They pulled Dave over to a section of the fence mostly hidden from the road and interrogated him. By the time I finally got around to them, Dave would be on his knees, his wrists cuffed in front of him. What his face would look like I’d have no idea, because they’d put the mask on him.

  The thing was, though, I don’t think he ever said my name. When he should have. When I would have wanted him to.

  But if he had, then they probably would have been watching for me, might have even heard me getting Sanchez’s key, opening his door, sliding the non-regulation rifle out from the leather scabbard behind the seat.

  I let it lead me around to them, and settled the barrel on the back of the Sanchez’s head. The other border guy was named Henderson. I knew him now. In his hand was a thermos lid. In the thermos lid was something thick and pink. It was also splashed onto Dave’s shirt, I could see now, and dabbed around the mouth of the mask.

  “It’s just Pepto,” he said, trying to smile, and I brought the gun over to him.

  I know now what they’d told Dave about the Pepto. That the cocktail they killed the dogs with, it was bright pink, so there would never be any accidents. It was all a joke to them.

  I motioned with the rifle for space and pulled Dave up by his handcuffs. He was dead weight. It wasn’t that he’d given up either, I don’t think. At least not on purpose. It was that he’d stepped over some internal ledge, fallen into himself. Crumbled away.

  “Your keys,” I said to Sanchez and Henderson, and they slid them over.

  “This isn’t good,” Sanchez told me, still smiling.

  “No shit,” I said back, then starting trying to pull Dave to my truck. He was too heavy, though, and not standing very well, not caring anymore.

  Sanchez, moving slow and obvious, helped, guided Dave into his seatbelt. Then, still very deliberate with his hands, he sat Dave’s cell phone up on the dashboard. I looked from him to it.

  “That’s how,” I said.

  “Momma’s boy,” Sanchez said back, patting Dave, then held his palm out, for me to hold off on my big escape here. Just for a moment. He was going to his truck. I followed him, still covering Henderson as well. Luckily the passenger door was already open.

  As Sanchez dug behind his seat, his voice fell into an easy lope. What he was talking about was Ghandi, the old story about one of his sandals falling off the back of a train, and how he threw the other off as well. When Sanchez stood again, it was to toss me a box of cartridges. For the rifle.

  “You’re trying to get me killed,” I said, catching them just because it was that or take them in the chest.

  “Looks like you’re doing a pretty god job of that yourself, Romo,” Sanchez said back. “I can’t say your
dad’d be proud.”

  “You don’t know what he’d be,” I said back, and it was complicated getting behind my wheel with the rifle, trying to cover two people, but I managed.

  Fifteen minutes later I was guiding Dave down into a bus seat, diesel in the air all around, his cuffs in my floorboard in the parking lot, the mask in a bag tied to his wrist. I’d tried to rub the pink off his shirt, too, but had just rubbed it in, really. He had no idea, though.

  Like I said, it’s my fault there’s no Misanthrope Morning Show anymore. My fault that there’s no more pirates.

  I’m sorry.

  The next scene you already know. It made the national news. Four dead, mutilated. Assailant unknown.

  The news hadn’t even heard about me yet, though.

  I waited until night, pulled the lightbar off my cab, and went to the address still scratched into my hand. That Sanchez wasn’t there already meant he hadn’t written down the street numbers Dispatch had read, and hadn’t thought to ask for them yet. She’d still have it in her logs, though.

  I didn’t have long.

  The address was out in what had been nowhere ten or twenty years ago. Now there were businesses sprouting up all around it, everything faced with local white rock. In contrast, the warehouse looked run-down, abandoned, from another time. Tucked in the yard beside it were huge rolls of rusted wire that somebody had probably meant to slip past chapter 11, but then been unable to sell.

  I walked among them, trailing my fingers across their metal, flakes of rust falling down behind me like rose petals. The side door was open, and I already had my flashlight. Inside was about half an acre of slick, pitted concrete, one long table, three file cabinets, an office with flimsy walls, and, in the rear corner, their hands tied behind them like they’d been brought in one by one, two dead men and one dead woman, their wallets open beside them, for purposes of identification.

  It was the Omar. It was Sealy. Over the course of a few days, they’d been cooked.

  I sat down in the metal chair my dad had sat in. It put him so close to the three people that he had to have almost been touching them. I didn’t tell them I was sorry, either. Whatever they’d done, it probably had something to do with my dad not coming home, and that was enough for me. There were no rabbit shadows burned into the wall this time. No comical footprints in the cement, no glow-in-the-dark teeth. Just dead people, killed people.

  After a few minutes I finally stood, was aiming for the door when it came to me: somebody had answered the phone. Could he still be here? I centered my light on the small office. It was empty but I went in anyway, then fell out. A dead man had answered the phone.

  Or, he was dead now anyway. And worse than the rest.

  Since his clothes were still holding together, I assumed he’d been the last one collected, the last one my dad had been able to find. I looked to him again, then away. Because there hadn’t been time to let the radiation seep into him, he’d been skinned instead. Just his face, his head.

  It hadn’t quite killed him, though. Not enough, anyway.

  I made myself look again. Told myself that if my dad could do it, I could see it. That that completed something. That I was his little girl. That I was his little girl again. It wasn’t easy, though. I’d never seen inside somebody’s face. And he’d crawled across the whole warehouse like that.

  The rest of him was easier — just a suit jacket, slacks. In his hand, the phone. Spilled beside him, so it was open on the floor, facing down, a spiral. I reached across, gathered it to me, and took the phone from him as well, hung it up. It was another way Sanchez could find this place: I’d called it on Dave’s phone.

  It didn’t matter anymore.

  Beside the phone was a radio. I looked to the dead man for permission, then twisted it on. For about eight seconds it tried to work, but had been too close to my dad for too long.

  I nodded, accepted this, then started to excuse myself from the dead man — you get superstitious around the just-dead — realized that there was no way he’d been able to cross the floor in time to answer a ringing phone. Not in the shape he was. What this meant was that he’d already been there.

  Trying to live.

  I looked to the phone again, lifted it slow to my ear and hit the redial button. The other end picked up on the first ring, dumped me into voice mail. Just a robot voice. I opted to page instead of leaving a message, and entered Dave’s cell as the number to call.

  Twenty seconds after I hung up, Dave’s phone whistled in my hand. I wrote down the caller ID number before clicking the green button.

  “What do you mean he’s coming for me?” a man was already saying at the other end.

  I smiled, wasn’t at all embarrassed about it.

  “Hell Bunny,” I said back in my own voice, then clicked off, looked to the side door, the only other light in the place except for me.

  Silhouetted in it was a chupacabra.

  He was just watching me, his ears huge.

  “Well come on already,” I told it, and it did, padding easy back to the corner, to feed in the darkness.

  I left him to it.

  Getting the address that went with the number was easy. All I had to do was call Sanchez on his cell. From Dave’s. A number he knew. He laughed when I told him what I wanted.

  “Turn yourself in, Romo. We’ll go easy. You were temporarily deranged.”

  “I’ll trade,” I told him. “I know where the next ones are.”

  “The next what?”

  “Crime scene.”

  This stopped him for a moment.

  “I don’t even have the whole number,” I lied.

  “Taking care of my sweetheart?” he said back.

  His .308 with the rosewood tip on the front of the stock, set off with ivory.

  “It’s in the truck,” I told him. “I left it down at the convention center. Keys are in it. Yours too.”

  “What are you driving now?”

  “Listen, if you want me to just call the FBI myself —”

  Which is how I got him to write down the first six digits of the seven I had. All I had to do then was dial my radio in, listen to the nine addresses Dispatch read back to him. Sanchez had filled the last digit in himself, starting at zero.

  I was the only one who knew which address was the right one, though.

  It was almost dawn.

  I eased my truck into neutral, coasted down out of the apartment complex parking lot I’d been in. At this point, not a single shot had been fired. If everybody wasn’t so stupid, it could have stayed that way, too.

  This is the part where I finally meet my real dad.

  The address that went with the phone number was up in Mount Bonnell — the rich part of Austin. I could see the whole city. In any other state, with houses like this, I’d be the only pick-up for miles.

  This was Texas, though.

  The only real difference between my truck and all the rest was that I had an immigration-green stripe on the side of mine. Otherwise I was an early morning gardener, or newspaper thrower, or car washer. Invisible to the movers and shakers.

  And yes, of course I’d read the spiral by then. It’s what I’d been in the apartment complex parking lot for, my dome light disconnected, my ashtray pulled out so I could lean over, read by that light.

  Or, read’s the wrong word, I guess.

  Instead of a story or a letter or an explanation, what my dad had drawn in, page after page, was the floor plan of our house in Mexico. It started out rough but got better as he went, and more furnished. On the counter he’d even drawn a small cup. It was holding a napkin down.

  I never knew he could draw, either. That he had that kind of patience, that kind of concentration. Page after page of it, like — it was like he talking to me. Which of course I would say, I know. But, of everybody in the world, nobody but me would ever remember those halls, nobody would care that the handle for the screen door was on the opposite side from the handle for the front door, which was w
hy we always just used the sliding door by the table.

  It was perfect.

  He’d gone farther, though, and that was why I’d been in the parking lot most of the night, starting my truck over and over so the battery wouldn’t die.

  In the last pages of the spiral, he’d started shading footprints into the carpet. His were the biggest, and had distinct heels, and then there were mine, smaller, shaped like sneakers. What kept me sitting there, though, were my mother’s footprints. They were all around ours, all over the house. Like she’d really been there.

  In the margin of the last page, erased now but I could still make it out, there was something written, finally. It was that he hoped she looked like her. I turned the page, held the spiral closed, then opened it again to be sure. The reason he’d erased it was underneath that, the part that had been erased first: ‘not me.’

  He hoped I looked like my mom, not like him.

  And no, you’ll never find that spiral.

  It’s made-up, really. I lied, I’m crazy. This is what this whole thing has done to me, made me start latching onto fake things, making them real.

  All the same, you’ll never find it.

  The address was a tall, tan house with a wide, rolling lawn. Because Dispatch hadn’t read the names that went the phone numbers, I had to back up to the mailbox, pry open the locked flap on front. Inside, on an upside down label the postman had probably left, was Marsh, Lem.

  I pushed the flap shut, rolled forward. Lem Marsh.

  It’s a name my attorney says I should know. The ‘Lem’ part anyway. He’s associated with my dad for two bank jobs. Including that last one. But then he lucked into enough cash in South America to scrub his record clean. It wasn’t drug money either, but something to do with mines. He had a silver cartel, I don’t know. Or Aztec gold.

  It doesn’t matter.

  What does is that his double-size front door was open.

  I killed my truck, ratcheted the emergency brake down and followed a line of trees up to the house, close enough that I could feel the refrigerated air washing across the warm grass of the lawn. Looking back to my truck to be sure I hadn’t left the visor light on or something stupider, I saw that the line of dark footprints I’d dragged into the dew were the only ones.