They crossed the river in silence. Once back on U.S. soil, John finally broke the question. “So what now, Mr. Ned?”
He wiped the tears, set his jaw, and pulled out a tightly wadded piece of paper from the right-hand side of his waistband. As John watched, Ned carefully unfolded the grimy square to reveal a crude, but detailed map drawn in thick pencil.
“He slipped this in beside my belly when I hugged him goodbye.”
It was a rough but fairly accurate drawing of Las Células, and the X marking Cody’s cell was smeared with a drop of blood.
“Like I told Cody. Tanampi humma.”
“What was that Mr. Ned?”
“It’s a Choctaw phrase. We’ll go to war red. Let’s get our guns.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
I thought Mr. Tom was fixin’ to beat our butts when he found us.
Well, he didn’t really find us. Pepper woke up on her side of the car when the sun came up and got bored, so she decided to listen to the transistor radio she hadn’t yet given back to Christine Berger. When she rolled the little on/off volume dial with her thumb, the car hit a bump and she spun it way too far.
The loud, tinny sound of Chuck Berry singing “Maybelline” nearly caused Mr. Tom to lose control of the car. We got shook up pretty good in the floorboard until he stopped the car on the shoulder.
He threw one arm over the back seat and twisted around. “What the hell are you two doing in here?”
Had I thought of those spooky eyes of his and how they’d pop out when he got mad, I wouldn’t have even given a second thought to stowing away in his car. Stowing away looked fun when The Three Stooges did it on that ocean freighter with the Russian guy smuggling watermelons, but that steaming man on the side of the highway scared the pee out of me.
Well, truthfully, I had to pee so bad I was about to bust anyway. I couldn’t decide whether to get out and unzip my pants while he yelled at us, or wait until he finished. He didn’t say another word, so I knew he was waiting for an answer.
We used the long cord stretched across the back seat to pull ourselves up. “Mr. Tom. I know you’re mad, but can it wait until I pee?”
“That ain’t fair,” Pepper argued. “I gotta pee just as bad as you, but I can’t just pop a squat here on the side of the road. You have to wait like I do until we get to a town or a station, or something.”
“I think I’ll leave you two right here and you can hitch a ride by yourselves.” Mr. Tom was madder’n a wet hen, and I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t do it.
“We just want to help Uncle Cody and Grandpa.”
“We won’t get in the way.” Pepper batted her eyes in a way that works for her most of the time. Mr. Tom’s own eyes trumped her Betty Boop look, and Pepper quickly examined the tangled quilts at our feet.
“What exactly do you think you can do?”
“Make calls, take notes, run errands?”
Instead of answering, Mr. Tom took out his pocket watch and checked the time. With a sigh, he returned it to his jeans. “Well, it’s a sure thing I don’t have time to take y’all back.”
He studied us on the side of that empty highway. For the first time I took stock of my surroundings through the window. The oaks were different than we had back home. They grew wide and low in the pastures. Cactus was thick in a nearby wash. Stringy old range cattle watched us through a tight bobwire fence on cedar posts.
It looked like they had a good crop of rocks to me, too.
Without expression, Mr. Bell faced the front. “There’s a town about five minutes away where y’all can pee, and me too, I reckon. I ought to leave y’all at the bus station. I don’t suppose you left a note or anything, right?”
“Nossir.”
“We’ll call your mama and daddy, Pepper, and Miss Becky for you, Top. You’ll tell them what you did, but I’ll take over from there.”
I examined the tops of my legs.
When he shifted into third gear, Mr. Tom spoke into the rearview mirror. “The only reason I don’t give you two a good belt whipping is I did something like this myself, when I was your age.”
We passed a wooden sign that said Cotulla when a rear tire blew on the hot highway. Neither of us was dumb enough to say anything. Once again, he pulled onto the shoulder and opened the trunk.
The spare was flat, and he slammed the lid.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I opened both doors and peed between them, shielded from the highway.
When I was finished, Pepper stared at the doors for a long minute. “Well, shit.”
I was surprised when Mr. Tom pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket and handed it to her. “Me and Top will just look back down this highway for a minute.”
He was right. We were wayyyy too far to turn back.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Las Células wasn’t visible from the motor court parking lot, but the Mexican fortress-like jail was all Ned and John had on their minds that afternoon. The hot sky was cloudless. Cicadas sang in the cottonwoods along the river. The air smelled of sewage, dust, onions, and diesel.
The owner frowned when Ned checked them in and John knew it was because even down in the Valley, white and black men didn’t room together. Money ruled though, and he reluctantly gave them a key.
John rested uncomfortably in one of the small chairs provided by the little motel while Ned made two collect calls back to Chisum. The first one nearly scared him to death and added another layer to a nearly smothering sense of dread.
Ned had a white-knuckled grip on the receiver. “Them two kids did what?”
He shook his head at John while Miss Becky explained. When she paused, Ned held his hand over the speaker. “You ain’t gonna believe this, John, them two little shits snuck into the back of the car Tom Bell borrowed from O.C., and by the time he found them, he said he was south of San Antonio.”
“Tom’s coming here?”
“That’s what Becky said.” He returned to his conversation. “Yeah, we talked to Cody. He’s in bad shape, but he’s alive.”
John heard Miss Becky’s tinny voice shout through the speaker. “Thank God!”
“We talked to them that have him, but the police down here are as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. We tried to buy him out, but they wouldn’t have none of it, so we’re gonna get him out the best way we know how.”
He didn’t want to, but figured Miss Becky had a right to know Guerrera’s plan. She was silent for a long time, and he thought she’d hung up. “You still there?”
“I’m here.”
“I don’t know no other way. Mama, they’ve been pretty rough on that boy.”
He heard her breathing, then a sharp intake breath. “Ned, the good lord gave us the sense to know what’s right and wrong. I don’t know no scripture that says you can’t save our own kin.”
“You know what you’re sayin’?”
“Get him back.”
“You know what I may have to do.”
“I know, but don’t you let them kill that boy, nor John, nor you. I couldn’t bear that.”
“All right. We’re stayin’ at The El Sombrero motor court.” He read off the phone number handwritten in the center of the dial. They talked quietly for several more minutes, and then he hung up.
John was waiting for him. “What did Tom say he was going to do with the kids?”
“He’s bringin’ ’em with him. Norma Faye is on the way to get Becky right now, and they’ll drive down here and get ’em.”
“What about James? Why don’t he come?”
“James and Ida Belle are both down with some sort of stomach bug. They been sick as dogs, and neither one can get out of bed. I swear, Becky needs to be over there taking care of them, but said she’d come get the kids.”
“James must be some sick to keep him off the road.”
&nbs
p; “He tried, but he couldn’t even drive to the house. He had to pull over twice in a mile to puke. The doctor came out and said that if they didn’t get any better, he’d put them in the hospital by dark. It’s a mess back there.”
“When it rains, it pours.”
“I know it. They’ll tell Tom where we are, if he checks back in. We’ll need to let the manager know they’re coming, so they can get in if we ain’t here.”
He made a second collect call, this time to Judge O.C. Rains in his office in the Chisum courthouse. Though the conversation was one-sided, the deputy knew the snowball was rolling.
There were no games this time. O.C. was anxiously waiting for the call and answered on the first ring.
“It’s Ned, O.C.” He listened for a long moment.
John rose, opened the blinds, and returned to his chair to look out on the playground and tiny swimming pool in the center of the horseshoe-shaped courtyard. Both were empty, so he watched the cars pass on the street.
“He told me they’re going to kill him tomorrow.”
As he listened, his face began to redden.
“Hell no, he didn’t say it out loud. The damn Federale Comandante, or Captain or whatever the hell he is was-a standing right there. Cody told me in Choctaw so the son of a bitch couldn’t understand.”
O.C.’s tinny voice wasn’t understandable. John rose and paced the room like a nervous cat. He pulled the switch to turn on the television sitting on a stand made of metal tubing. The picture tube still hadn’t warmed up by the time he crossed the room and punched a button to turn on the water cooler. It blew hot air for a time until the pump kicked in to wet the straw, finally giving some relief in the stifling room. The TV picture was starting to form when he sat back in the chair.
“O.C., I know the law as well as you, but we don’t have time for all that. The sonofabitch plans to move Cody deeper into Mexico in the morning, but the boy says they’re gonna kill him instead. I believe him. You should have seen his face. He’s beat black and blue, he ain’t et good in days, and I think we’re out of time.”
He told O.C. how the capitán stole the bail money. O.C.’s angry voice was louder at the news.
“Of course they’re crooked, and you know how I am about such things. You are too. I need to tell you what I intend to do, so somebody will know when it’s over. We have a plan to get him out, but it ain’t exactly legal. Hell, it ain’t legal a-tall! It’s barely on the right side of wrong.”
He spent the next several minutes outlining his plan and finally listened while O.C. talked. “Yeah, John’s with me on this.”
He listened some more. The fuzzy picture on the television was a soap opera, in Spanish, and John didn’t like to watch the stories even in American. He rose, twisted the dial in a series of loud chunks, and found another station. It too was fuzzy, so he fussed with the rabbit ears, trying to get a better signal.
“You can call whoever the hell you want, O.C., but it won’t do no good down here. This place is a regular Sodom and Gomorrah. You won’t believe what you can buy, and I think that’s how Cody found what he came for. He dug around and the connection leads to somebody in Chisum that I won’t say over the phone, because I don’t have any idea who’s listening, but I know what’s going on. Cody learned something, and it got him buried in this Mexican jail.”
On the television, Dick Van Dyke said something to Mary Tyler Moore in Spanish, but the laugh track was the same John recognized from back home. Disgusted and uneasy, he slapped the switch with the palm of his hand. The picture shrank to a pinpoint and then winked out. He returned to his chair and settled in with a sigh.
Their guns were scattered across the worn blue bedspread. John picked up a pump Browning twelve-gauge and quickly took it apart for cleaning, which gave him something to do while listening to Ned’s conversation.
“This might all go wrong, and I imagine it will, but I don’t know what else to do. If anybody asks, tell ’em we did what we thought was right, and that’s about all I can say.”
The air conditioner’s wheeze filled the silent room as O.C. talked.
“All right, then. One more thing. There’s some money buried in a quart fruit jar beside the northwest post of the kitchen porch. You might need it to…for us later. It oughta be enough to do the job. I don’t want to be a burden on anybody…shut up and listen! There’s another fruit jar buried on the south side of the bodark tree beside the chicken house. There’s enough in there to take care of Miss Becky and Top for a good long while.”
The timbre had changed in his voice, and in O.C.’s also, enough that John once again felt uneasy.
“All right then. Bye.”
Ned replaced the receiver and watched John clean the shotgun. “You don’t have to do this. I can do it myself.”
“No you cain’t. I doubt the two of us can do it together, but we’re family.”
Ned started to answer, then stopped. He swallowed a lump and wiped his nose. “And we’re lawmen, going up against lawmen.”
“They ain’t the law, Mr. Ned, not like we know it.”
“We’re gonna break the law. It’s tough for me to think about doing that…again.”
“There ain’t no other choice.”
Without conscious thought, Ned picked up a dented can of 3-in-1 Oil and a scrap of cloth tied onto a string. He squirted oil on the cloth, dropped the line through the short barrel of his .38 and pulled it through. “You stay on this side of the river. I’ll get Cody out and you wait with the car so we can make a quick getaway.”
“It’s easy to see why you on this side of the law, cause that idea won’t hold water.”
“I’m trying to keep you safe, John.”
“We’re going with your first plan, and don’t worry ’bout me. They’s one thing, though. What if them Meskins shoot at us?”
“Why, we shoot back, I reckon.”
“That’ll come as close as anything we can do to make us the same as them.”
The room was silent as they digested the implications of that statement. John’s face was blank, masking his unease despite the necessity of their plan.
Ned set his jaw and placed a drop of oil to run down on the hammer strut pin, then cocked it several times to lube the hinge. “When my granddaddy was a Texas Ranger, he crossed the border into the Oklahoma territories to bring back murderers and robbers. While he was there, he did what he had to do to stay alive. I believe we’ll do the same. This might not be right in the eyes of some, but to me, it’s the right thing to do. In my opinion, some folks just need killin’ for what they done, or are about to do to Cody.”
Chapter Forty
It was an hour before daylight when Ned and John drove back across the dark Rio Grande in a car they’d stolen from a bar down the street. Neither man wanted to drive Ned’s car across the border. They didn’t figure to get back with it in one piece, and besides, by Ned’s reasoning, anyone leaving their car in front of a bar all night deserved what he got.
Lit by harsh lights, a different Texas border guard waved them across the deserted bridge. It was a good thing, because they were driving a stolen car, and the back seat was full of guns covered with the now oil-stained bedspread snitched from the motel room.
John glanced past Ned through the open passenger window at the reflected lights on the mist-covered water below. His stomach tense with fear, John sighed as he accelerated across the bridge and onto Mexican soil. “That was easy enough.”
“It’ll probably be the easiest thing we’ll do all morning…look out!”
The big deputy slammed on the brakes to avoid running over two children who stepped off the dark Main Street sidewalk and into their lane. “These damn kids down here…” he stopped when he recognized the youngsters.
“Hola, señores!” Yolanda hurried around to the back seat and opened the door. She and George piled insid
e as if they were supposed to be there. When George felt something hard in the seat, he peeked under the bedspread. “What’s this?”
Instead of answering, John pulled to the curb and parked. Ned fumed. “What are you two doing here? Get out of this car and go home.”
George pulled the bedspread back. “Todeas estas armas!”
All these guns.
Frustrated and terrified they’d be noticed, Ned stretched over the seat and yanked the spread back over the guns. “What do y’all want?”
Yolanda shifted forward and sat on the edge of the back seat, like Pepper back home. “We’ve been waiting for you all night. I thought you’d be back a lot sooner than this.”
“How’d you know we’d be coming back?”
“Because you were,” she simply said. “You shouldn’t drive down that road. The policia are always watching for American cars when they get off the main streets. Turn here, and I will tell you where to safely park near Las Células.”
The men exchanged glances, and with a shrug, John shifted back into gear and eased into the ratty alley she indicated. Neither lawman would have entertained the idea of driving through the narrow aisle almost blocked with abandoned items and trash.
“Turn off your lights.” Yolanda hung even farther over the seat back.
“I can’t see to drive. It’s dark.”
“We’ll go slow. It isn’t far. Turn here.”
With abrupt directions, Yolanda guided them into a dismal neighborhood reminding John of his side of the Chisum tracks. She had him stop in front of a brightly painted house with a dirt yard. Somewhere not far away, a goat baaed for her missing kid. The sound came clearly through the open car windows.
“This is mi tia’s house.” She translated. “My aunt’s house. Your car will be safe here. Las Células is only two streets over, between those houses. No one will see you walking through there, and if they do, they won’t say anything if you don’t speak to them.”
The thin ribbon of a vaguely defined alley cut past rundown houses. It wasn’t inviting in the dark, and Ned wouldn’t have considered it in the daylight, unless he was armed. “All right, you kids get out of this car and wait in your aunt’s house. You have your money, and I thank you, but it’d be best if y’all stayed away from us now.”
The Right Side of Wrong Page 25