She was right about it all. But I told her it meant nothing because she was there, right next to me. The word happy was hardly appropriate, so I said, ‘I’d forgotten what being alive was actually like.’
‘Till you got shot?’
‘If you hadn’t hit his arm that bullet was going into my chest.’
We sat holding each other for some time. Kay cried into my chest softly. I gritted my teeth to clench my own tears. Through the windscreen I watched specks of birds wheel on that great sky, black birds like flakes of ash riding the heat of the fire that bore them. I watched the mirrors, too. Holding Kay tighter each time a car approached, thinking of how quickly I could pull away if Segur appeared. We stayed like that longer than we should have. If he’d doubled back it was an obvious side road to take, but we were both drained from the morning, the jilted husband with a gun at our door. A part of me wanted him to drive up right now, put a single bullet through both our hearts so that there would be nothing to break us in two, nothing for him to take, or for me to lose.
Kay or Jenni.
A part of me had blocked Jenni from my thoughts. Only when I paused did I recall that I had a life, a fiancée, a good job, cats and a house. It all seemed so removed from where we sat clutching one another, even the sun looked small in the vast blue. I scanned the misshapen horizon for cars, for him. In the bleached distance a red tractor laboured across a colourless field. A red tractor like a toy I’d once had and lost. A toy given to me by my mother for being good when my sister was born.
I pulled my phone from my pocket, put my thumb to the power button but didn’t press it.
When Kay lifted herself from my chest to kiss me, when she grabbed the back of my head so hard it hurt, I dropped the phone back in my pocket.
‘We should get rid of the car,’ she said. ‘Get a ticket out of here.’
I criss-crossed those dusty farm roads back towards Corpus Christi. When we saw the downtown towers I turned back on to the highway.
‘If we can’t get a bus tonight, that means we have to stay here,’ said Kay, nervously checking the mirrors.
‘It’s not a big enough town for that.’
She knew what I meant. It wouldn’t take much to track us down to one of the motels.
‘What are the options?’
I pulled over to the side of the road. Trucks buffeted and rocked the car as they whooshed past. A trailer filled with cattle, and then four piston-thumping Harley-Davidsons thrummed by before I said, ‘Fuck it,’ and swung back on to the highway.
Neither of us wanted to sit out the night waiting for a door to be kicked in.
TWO BLOCKS FROM THE bus station I parked the car at the back of a shopping mall and waited while Kay went into the pharmacy. I argued that I should be going with her but she pointed out that the blood had seeped through the cloth and stained my shoes.
When I thought about Jenni again it seemed I was imagining a life I’d never lived. That world was so disconnected from the visceral circumstance of sitting in a hire car with a gouged palm. And I was too distracted by the fear that Kay was out of my sight to focus on anything beyond a mesh fence in a car lot, only lifting the bandage from my hand to see the streak mark of a bullet meant to kill. I wanted to call Jenni, say something. But even my phone seemed an alien piece of technology, unnecessary when I could lean across and kiss the woman I needed.
Jenni would soon be wounded, too. I dared to think that much.
Then Kay came back and tenderly unwrapped the stained piece of hem, already sticking on the exposed flesh, before blotting the caked blood away with an antiseptic wipe. She smiled, for the first time since that morning. ‘Now it’s my turn to play nurse, return the favour.’
‘How long ago does that seem?’
‘Last week. Or about ten years ago.’ She kissed my cheek. ‘Tomorrow.’
She picked bits of thread from the wound, then bound my hand. A mother tending her son, nurse and soldier. She tore off a strip of tape and fixed the bandage. I inspected her work, the neat dressing.
‘All good?’
‘I’ll live.’
‘Maybe,’ she said sarcastically. ‘If riding a Greyhound bus doesn’t kill you.’
I locked the car, took the half-full holdall, lighter by the clothes we’d left in the motel room, and walked the two blocks to the station. I carried the bag in my good hand and rested my damaged one over Kay’s shoulder.
Inside the terminus a rackety standing fan swung across the waiting room. The caged blades whirred in the corner of the hall beneath a mounted TV playing an episode of The Simpsons. Kay looked up at the departures board and saw that we had an hour to wait. I turned and studied the other passengers sitting in plastic bucket seats or flopped over cases on the floor. Families beside homeless and drug addicts. Clinically obese with walking frames. A woman wheeling her own breathing apparatus. This America riding the buses, the poor and the damned, without healthcare or a car. All watched over by a skinny security guard who stood nearly seven feet tall and swooped on a young black man taking sips from a bottle of malt liquor pulled from his jacket.
‘Outside. How many times I have to tell you.’
The guard had him by his collar and picked him from the floor as if he were laundry.
I studied the indifference of the waiting passengers, those who’d just come in to watch the TV and feel the waft of the fan. The security guard came back through the door and stood tall at the entrance, scanning the hall for another body to throw out.
‘We should wait somewhere else,’ I suggested. ‘A station is an obvious spot.’
‘I guess so. But I doubt he’s ever been on a Greyhound. The thought of a bus wouldn’t even cross his mind.’
We were the only souls venturing the sidewalk, and so conspicuous that a black and white patrol car slowed and the officer took a good look at our faces before driving on.
‘What would Chris say to that highway cop?’ I asked. ‘Make up some bullshit story to get us picked up?’
Kay bit her lip, looked worried. ‘He likes to do things himself.’
‘Two, three hours and we’re gone.’ I pulled her closer, kissed that scarred eyebrow, her cheek.
We went into an old-fashioned diner presided over by a potbellied man with tattooed forearms and a dirty apron who couldn’t fathom what I was saying when I asked for water.
‘What kinda speaking is that?’
I told him I was from England.
‘Welcome to Texas.’ He shook my hand. ‘Helluva way from home.’
I eventually communicated my order, slid next to Kay. Around the diner men slouched and napped in chairs with local papers and books on military history. One man dozed with a dog-eared True Tales of the American West splayed across his lap.
Then over coffee at a Formica table, on a cracked leather booth seat, Kay quietly cried and nothing I could say or do consoled her until she suddenly grabbed a napkin, wiped her nose, and said, ‘What the fuck am I crying for?’
I was still shaking from the fight, the highway cop and Segur. But when she said this I calmed, saw my hand was steady on the cup.
She reached up and grabbed my chin, smiled and joked, ‘We’re immortal, didn’t you know that?’
There and then, in that tatty diner, a bag of luggage between us, two tickets to Laredo in my wallet, Kay in my arms, I nearly believed we were.
WE WALKED BACK TO the terminal, thankful to see the bus to Laredo idling in the bay. I looked about for Segur. So did Kay. Then we stepped aboard, joined Mexican and American passengers, a young serviceman in his desert fatigues, and a string-thin woman in her fifties who had no luggage but a plastic bag which she’d occasionally vomit into.
‘Shit,’ said Kay, standing up and giving the woman her bottle of water. When she sat back down next to me she said, ‘There’s a life I could’ve lived.’
The Greyhound pulled from the station. Ten minutes out of town we overtook two white deportation buses. Mothers with babies. Men sleepin
g with caps pulled over their faces. I looked carefully as we went past, as if for some reason I might recognize someone, feeling the odd sensation that I might see another version of me on another bus.
To the south thudded a Border Patrol helicopter. A mosquito outline harrying God knows who across the shimmering sand.
Kay leant against my jacket, wadded between the tinted window and the seat. I was afraid when she slept, left alone with my thoughts. When she woke with a jolt she told me about her dream. ‘Well, it was something that actually happened in San Francisco, this Cuban guy I knew, a dealer.’ She rubbed her eyes, looked at the other passengers. ‘I was right there when a guy walked up and shot him in the side of the head. On the street. His skull came away in pieces.’
I asked what she did.
‘I ran the other way.’
‘Was that the dream?’
Kay looked from the bus window to the scruffy outskirts of Laredo, gas stations and wrecking yards, hangar-sized warehouses. ‘But it was Chris.’
I put my hand behind her neck, rubbed her shoulders. ‘Just a dream. It was bound to be a bad one after this morning.’
‘I know, I know,’ she said. ‘And this,’ she added, meaning the two of us with nothing but each other, ‘this is more than that.’ She kissed me, held the back of my head with both hands. ‘The closest I’ve come to this sensation, this buzz, was kicking heroin. Suddenly you can smell flowers and grass. See colours and taste your food. Feel again.’
I looked down the aisle out of the bus windscreen. I could see office buildings, hotels and a casino. And across the Rio Grande the biggest flag I’ve ever laid eyes on, the red, white and green totem of Mexico, strung from a pole taller than any building on the horizon.
THE SUN HAD NEARLY set by the time we arrived in Laredo. Yet the blue sky held the light, a royal blue. Even the most mundane of buildings seemed to glow. A run-down bowling alley and a liquor store. The Sahara Inn, where we got off, deciding it was smarter to alight before the bus station.
‘He either turned down to Brownsville,’ I guessed, ‘or gambled we were coming here. A fifty-fifty chance.’
‘Would he really have driven here?’ wondered Kay. ‘And wait for us?’
I didn’t reply. But thought I knew enough about him to decide that he was the kind of man who would.
I would have.
In the air-conditioned reception a polite Mexican concierge drew us a map to the border bridge, and then came to the door and pointed out the road we should take at the junction.
‘Gracias, señor,’ said Kay. ‘Gracias.’
We walked round the hotel swimming pool, a palm tree oasis in the middle of the car park, before heading down the street and turning left at the bodega as instructed.
‘We hardly need directions with that giant flag billowing.’
As we caught a glimpse of the rippling banner, a drunken tramp came staggering across the road, arms stretched out from a dirty overcoat, swinging stiffly like an Egyptian mummy sprung from a tomb. I stepped in front of Kay and he stopped just short of her. Filthy-bearded, chest naked beneath the overcoat, the man held out his hands. He looked as though biblical revelations should howl from his mouth, verses from the Old Testament of pestilence and infanticide, adultery.
‘Vamanos,’ he shouted, casting his hand as if brushing us down the street. ‘Vamanos, vamanos.’
He stumbled from the sidewalk. Cars and trucks honked. I told him to stay off the road and the man slowly backed away, still holding out his hands, repeating, ‘Vamanos, vamanos, vamanos.’
We hurried, glancing around, nervous of every car that slowed or even stopped for a red light.
‘Why’s it so busy?’ I asked Kay as we approached the city centre, crowds of Mexicans flooding from a huge mall on the approach to the border crossing.
‘Day after Thanksgiving, biggest shopping day of the year.’
Families, fathers carrying bags, children carrying boxed toys, the women walking and talking with one another, trudged to the turnstile entrance of the International Bridge, a concrete and steel span that sailed high over the Rio Grande below.
‘This is it,’ said Kay, looking around, probably wondering if Segur had made it to Laredo or not.
We were in the line for tickets to cross. ‘This isn’t the customs, is it?’
‘This is the toll. Mexican immigration is the other side.’
I studied the policeman and the two Homeland Security officials flanking him who stood by the turnstile talking among themselves and barely noticing who was passing from one country to another.
‘I didn’t think it would be as easy as this.’
‘Knock on wood.’
I kissed her cheek, shuffled forward with the returning Mexican shoppers and bought two tickets to walk the bridge.
‘Don’t be nervous,’ whispered Kay as we went past the armed officials at the gate.
‘I am,’ I answered, pushing through the clunking turnstile. ‘But more of making all this worth it for you.’
And for me.
Kay gripped my good hand. We shuffled with the crowds, hemmed in by the eight-foot mesh railing designed to stop anyone, illegal immigrants, betrothed men accompanying wives running from husbands, changing their minds and diving into the river. Cars on the road were gridlocked, radios pumping, children fighting in back seats. I saw no other white people until the Mexican customs gate.
‘No,’ said Kay, pulling me back. ‘No.’
He was standing beside a Mexican official wearing a uniform with tassels on the shoulder.
Segur.
We could see his bandaged head beneath the cowboy hat. And he could see us, stopping, shunting the foot traffic behind us.
‘Fuck.’
‘He’s slipped them some money.’
‘We have to go back,’ I said. ‘Can we?’
Kay had already decided we could, tugging at my sleeve, pulling us both against the returning shoppers and knocking into bags as we barged along.
I turned and saw Segur wading through the crowds as a man might charge up a flooded river.
‘He’s coming.’
Confused faces parted as we hurried against the flow. At the turnstile Kay said to the gate official, ‘We forgot his inhaler,’ and without a question we were waved through, running once we were on the concourse and past the ticket desk.
Perhaps Segur didn’t have his excuse ready, because when I looked back again he was arguing with the cop, pointing past the turnstile.
‘Bastard,’ screamed Kay, taking us down to a parking lot beneath the bridge.
‘This isn’t good,’ I warned her, noting the lack of people around. ‘We should have stayed up there.’
‘Fuck that,’ cursed Kay. ‘Fuck him.’
She pulled me from the lot to the park that ran along the river front. A white Border Patrol jeep was parked facing Mexico. On the opposite bank boys swung from tree branches and splashed down into the swift waters below, to be carried by the current before swimming back to the bank. The braver ones taunted the Border Patrol by swimming out to the middle and waving.
‘Keep walking,’ said Kay, looking to see if he was still coming.
‘He’s on the stairs.’ I could see his hat descending to the lot we’d just cut across.
‘Crazy fuck.’
‘We should stay around the Border agents,’ I suggested. ‘He won’t try anything here.’
Kay shook her head. ‘You saw him back there. He’s gone.’
Maybe she was right. I couldn’t convince her otherwise. I was hardly going to let her go while I waited for Segur and reasoned with him, talked calm into a man who’d already fired a gun at my chest.
We hurried on, past Mexican families having picnics, past another Border Patrol watching the river. From the park we passed into a neighbourhood where stray dogs wandered the streets and broken fences cordoned each yard from the other. Yards where women hung washing and men sat drinking cans of beer while enjoying the specta
cular sunset.
‘Buenas tardes,’ I nodded, trying to look less like a fleeing couple than we were. When no cars came we ran, when we saw people we walked.
Kay was breathless. ‘We must have made some distance on him.’
We both looked back down the block.
‘I can’t see him,’ said Kay. ‘Can you?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Maybe he was at the end of the street. I couldn’t see clearly in the haze of dusk.
‘Up here.’ Kay pointed. ‘We’ll get back to the main road and jump in a taxi.’
We followed the road across a rail track. Into another neighbourhood that was as ramshackle as the last one.
‘Is this road going anywhere?’ I asked.
‘Shit.’
We stopped by a row of houses, built against spiked iron railings that had been bent and twisted to be climbed. Before one of the neater homes sat a man in a fold-out chair reading a copy of Newsweek. He saw us and stared.
‘Hey there,’ said Kay, glancing back to see if Segur was about before turning to the man. ‘We were hoping that we could walk along the river.’
The man shut his magazine and stood. ‘I only just moved here myself. But I know this fence cordons off a kind of buffer zone. Not that it stops the Mexicans.’
‘They come across here?’
‘Pass through my yard like coyotes every night.’ He gestured to the back of his house. ‘And I’ve only been here a week.’
I looked to the fence, saw a section where a railing had been torn out. Then I looked back to the corner and saw Segur walking towards us. Calmly. A figment of nightmare come true. When Kay saw him, too, she thanked the man and without speaking we made the same decision.
‘Hey,’ he shouted as we ran through his yard. ‘That’s trespassing.’
We could see tall grass beyond the iron railings. We slipped between the bars like children skipping school. Kay snagged her top. We followed a worn dirt path littered with burrito wrappers and soda cans, plastic bottles.
The Hummingbird and the Bear Page 19