River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “Juárez? Are you sure about that? I don’t have a lot of scratch on me…”

  “My treat, soldier. You know what I say, nothing’s too good for a man in uniform. My car’s just outside, if you’re ready to leave here and have some real fun.”

  The soldier remained unconvinced. “Maybe I should be getting back to base…”

  “Owen,” Truly said, grabbing the man’s arm. “It’s just a little harmless fun. Take a look at the ladies. If there’s nobody you like, then I’ll drive you back, no harm done. But if someone tickles your fancy, I’m buying.”

  Owen tried to refuse again, but by that point he’d had too much to drink to make a strong case. Truly left some cash on the table, showing Owen a big roll as he did so, and he steered the young, drunken soldier out to the parking lot where his rented Crown Vic waited.

  Owen dozed off on the drive from Las Cruces to El Paso. He didn’t miss much. Even in the dark, Truly knew when they passed the massive stockyards at Mesquite, by the sudden, rich stench of what must have been millions of pounds of manure. The road was smooth and dark, then they crossed into Texas, and the lights of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez grayed the night sky.

  Not wanting to drive across the border, especially since he had alcohol on his breath, if precious little of it in his blood, Truly parked on the American side of the Santa Fe Street bridge. Owen’s nap had sobered him up slightly, and the adventure ahead worked to subdue his mood even more. He went back to his taciturn ways, and his pace was brisk.

  Truly paid the bridge fee of thirty-five cents for each of them, and they began the long walk up the high, arching span to Mexico. Even at this hour, with a cold wind whipping across it, the bridge was crowded with cars and pedestrians. Below, lights from the U.S. side washed over the concrete riverbanks, illuminating anti-American graffiti. Young men stood below the bridge with paper funnels and drink cups, calling for the crossers to throw down coins for them to catch. Closer to the Mexican side of the bridge, vendors worked the lined-up cars, washing windshields with filthy rags, selling pirated DVDs, cheap necklaces, yellow bobble-head chicks, and other tawdry goods.

  Owen started to laugh. “Chickens?” he said when he saw a man carrying an open box of the bobble-heads. “Why would anyone want to buy a toy chicken from these people?”

  Truly couldn’t come up with an answer to that, and Owen chuckled nervously the rest of the way across the bridge.

  For Truly, Juárez always seemed to vibrate at a different frequency than anywhere else, especially at night. Darkness drew a curtain over the extreme poverty of the city, where thousands—if not tens of thousands—worked at American-owned maquiladoras for five dollars a day, in a place where the cost of living was eighty to ninety percent as high as on the other side of the river. At night the grunge and smog and tears and blood were hidden. In the colored lights, even the whores working the clubs and corners on Ugarte and Mariscal looked fresh and lively. Neon and incandescent displays glowed bright. The music wafting from nightclubs and car windows and apartments had its own special beat. Even the kids carrying baskets of churros for sale on Avenida Benito Juárez and the women clustered outside the offices of discount doctors were more colorful than in other border towns. Truly half expected to see the zoot-suited pachucos and movie stars of Juárez’s glory days mingling on the sidewalks or sitting, cradling heads in their hands, along crumbling curbs with drunken gringos and unemployed migrants from Mexico’s interior. He had never been able to determine why it was, but every trip here seemed like a journey to a strange and occasionally wonderful planet.

  A cabdriver with four teeth—one of them covered in gold—took them to a club called The Pink Lady, on Altamirano, in a taxi that reeked of tobacco and dead animal. The driver told them that his dog had died three days before, but he hadn’t figured out where to bury her yet so she was still in the trunk, wrapped in a towel. He didn’t want to bury her in the deserts on the outskirts of town, he said, because that’s where foreign murderers had dumped the bodies of all the girls and women they had killed, and it seemed disrespectful. He loved his dog and wanted her to have better company in death than a bunch of mutilated murder victims.

  The Pink Lady was jammed with tourists and strippers in what seemed like equal numbers. After a few false starts, Owen chose a woman he liked, a woman called Lourdes. She had smoky eyes and thick, lustrous hair and about thirty extra pounds on her frame. Her smile appeared genuine and she brushed Owen’s neck with gentle hands, and he looked like he had fallen deeply in love. Truly paid for a handful of dances, then accepted her offer to take Owen to a private room and show him a good time. Truly handed her some cash, promising more when she brought the young soldier back. This occurred forty minutes later, by which time a wide smile creased Owen’s narrow face.

  “You liked that,” Truly said, after he paid Lourdes off and refused, for the second time, a turn of his own.

  “What’s not to like?”

  “I told you,” Truly said. “World class.”

  On the way back over the bridge—only thirty cents from this side, paid to a toll machine instead of a human being—the young soldier whistled softly, hands in his pockets. Halfway over, the international boundary line was marked, and there was a recessed area in the wire-enclosed bridge. Truly pulled Owen over. “Here’s the actual border,” he said. “Right below our feet, in the middle of the river. You can stand in two countries at once.”

  Owen did just that, still grinning happily. “That’s pretty cool.”

  “Listen,” Truly said, now that he had the soldier in the mood he wanted. “I just remembered something maybe you can help me with.”

  “Help you?”

  “That’s right. And help your government.”

  “I guess so, then. What do you need?”

  Truly drew a photo of Vance Brewer from his coat pocket. “Do you know this man? He’s a captain, named Brewer.”

  In the faint light, Owen studied the photo carefully. He looked at Truly then back at the picture. His allegiances were divided, which was a good sign. If they hadn’t been, it would have meant he didn’t recognize Brewer, and this whole excursion would have been a loss. Or at least a draw—he’d be able to use Owen to get introduced to other soldiers from the post, who might know Brewer. But it’d be easier if he struck the jackpot from the start.

  “Well?” he asked after a while. Wind fluttered the photo, almost snatching it from his hands.

  “He looks familiar,” Owen said. “I think I’ve seen him around?”

  “Around where? Las Cruces? White Sands?”

  “White Sands. The base.”

  “Know anything else about him?”

  “Not really. I guess…I guess when I’ve seen him, it’s usually been around Victorio Peak. Way in the back country there.”

  “What’s out there?”

  “Just, you know, they’ve got different buildings all over the range, to test different systems, I guess. I don’t know what they do out there. I’ve had to drive over there a few times, and that’s where I remember seeing this guy, I think. He has one of those faces, you know? That chin, that nose. Kind of guy you don’t forget.”

  Truly put the photo away. “Yeah, you don’t forget him. Come on, Owen. We should be getting you back.”

  * * *

  Brewer paced around the little room. The old man was testing his patience. For two days now, all he had drawn were representations of Indian pictographs. Faces, hunters, animals, warriors on horseback, even elaborate battle scenes. But mostly masks, the same ones, over and over. Big eyes, hooked noses, clown mouths. Or crosses for eyes and narrow slits for mouths. One was cross-eyed, with its mouth making a surprised O.

  Often, over the years, the old man’s drawings had been hard to interpret. Sometimes not so hard, sometimes as plain as if he’d taken a photograph of whatever was on his petrified little mind. But this…Brewer wasn’t at all sure what it meant.

  He didn’t like not being sure. Uncertainty w
as a weakness he preferred to exploit when he found it in others.

  He watched the man scratch out a couple more, just like the rest. Papers fluttered to the floor when they were full, and the pencil flew over the next page in the pad. Finally, Brewer stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind him.

  Not that the old man would ever know…

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Wade sat in his hotel room and scratched his skin. It itched everywhere. He was sure the itching was made worse by his worry, his constant obsession over what he seemed to be turning into.

  Dwelling on it wasn’t helpful, but he couldn’t stop himself. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw images of the murders—the pair downtown, the boys near the border, the young woman in her own backyard—like partially remembered movies projected on the insides of his eyelids. Guilt sat heavily on him, a crushing weight. Every time someone looked at him, he imagined they were seeing the blackness of his soul, judging him and finding him guilty. He had wanted to confess to Molly, but when he was face-to-face with her, he couldn’t do it. He was afraid to see Byrd. For the first time since arriving in El Paso, he didn’t spend most of the day with his friend.

  Instead, he stayed in his room at the Hilton, with daytime TV swallowing his brain cells whole. Every televised voice declared his murderous deeds to the world, but at least it drowned out the nearly constant chatter of electrical currents and vehicle tires and breezes rattling autumn leaves, all of which spoke to him in that language he almost understood.

  He wasn’t sure which symptom of insanity was worse: the murders he had committed without conscious knowledge, the paranoid certainty that everyone else in the world knew about them, or the continuous sense that he was being whispered to.

  To calm his shattered mind, he catalogued rivers. It had always worked before. Selway, Snake, Sun, San Juan, San Pedro, Sandy, Salmon, Shoshone, Salt, St. Mary, Swan…

  The litany did relax him, and his mind drifted, like a boat eddying out after a run through some especially gnarly Class IV whitewater. He couldn’t remember how many times he and Byrd had done just that, finding a smooth eddy and letting the boat drift while their hearts slowed after the adrenaline rush of the rapids, maybe cracking open some beers and letting their clothes dry because mist and spray had soaked them to the skin.

  The year after the events at Smuggler’s Canyon had been a bad one for the three friends. They didn’t talk much—to each other especially, but really, to anyone. Wade felt like he had died, too. Each morning he woke up expecting to be back in his old world, but that world was gone. Months passed in a kind of waking dream, full of bad grades and worse relationships. By year’s end, his hopes of an Ivy League education were dashed, and he felt lucky to get into UTEP.

  It wasn’t until halfway through the next summer, after new friends had introduced Byrd to river running and Byrd persuaded Wade to join them on a trip on the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico, that he felt alive again. They put in near Arroyo Hondo, and Wade has been anxious going into Powerline, his first rapid. But by the time they had run it—as noisy and spine-shattering as riding on top of a runaway freight train—he had been exhilarated, and he looked forward to the upcoming rapids wearing a grin so wide it hurt.

  He and Byrd reconnected on that trip, and the river linked Wade to the rest of his life. Together they learned the world of fluid dynamics, of fast water, the vocabulary of haystacks and highsides, Sportyaks and standing waves, grease bombs and river games. Byrd took to wearing Patagonia shorts and Teva sandals and a ball cap from the State Bridge Lodge with an assortment of T-shirts he picked up around the West, most of which looked a decade old after the first run or two. He dropped out of UTEP, which he’d largely been attending just to escape Palo Duro anyway, and took to the river rat life full-time.

  Rivers, Wade would always believe, returned them both from the dead. The boatman who rowed them back across the River Styx was legendary river guide Norm Nevills, or maybe it was Ken Sleight or Clair Quist. Wade had met none of them, but they were the gods other boatmen worshipped, and they could run the Styx in high water or low. Katie Lee sang the anti-dirge that accompanied rebirth. Byrd’s resurrection, in turn, saved Molly’s life.

  There had been a dark hole at Byrd’s center after that summer, which showed itself in times when Byrd faced difficulty off the water. They’d all had dark sides, but Byrd’s had been the deepest and the coldest, a great melancholy that could only be chased away in a dory or a kayak or a rubber raft. Each of them faced it, he suspected, in the early hours of morning, at those dark morning hours when everything seems bleakest, and it interfered with every aspect of their lives, their careers, especially their relationships with other people. Of the three of them, only Byrd had even tried marriage, but from the start Wade thought that was a phony attempt, an effort to fool whatever forces ruled Byrd’s life into thinking that he had moved on, left the darkness behind. His wife had seen through it, soon enough. The darkness was at his core and couldn’t be covered by an artificial patch of light.

  When Wade’s cell phone rang, it startled him so much that he jumped in his chair.

  Hands shaking, he snatched it off the dresser, flipped it open. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Wade?”

  The woman’s voice was unfamiliar. A police detective? “Yes,” he said tentatively.

  “Hi, this is Ginny Tupper. We met at Smuggler’s Canyon site yesterday. You jumped my car.”

  “Sure,” he said, relaxing once she had identified herself. “How’s it running now?”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “I really appreciate the rescue.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Listen, this is going to sound nuts, but I was wondering if I could meet you someplace, to talk. It’s about something you said, about growing up in Palo Duro. It’s kind of important, maybe. I’m here in El Paso.”

  “Sure, I guess.” He’d already met with one woman today, Molly, and the whole experience, being out in public, feeling the gazes of strangers boring through his soul, had been almost too much to bear. “I don’t want you to think I’m being overly forward, but would you mind coming to my hotel room? So we can talk in private?”

  “That would be great. Private, I mean. Don’t worry, I won’t assume that you’ll be overtaken by lust. Or that I will.”

  Wade told her where the hotel was, and his room number, and then sat down to continue trying to stave off the madness he was sure waited for him to drop his guard again. After he had disconnected he wondered if unimagined rage, not lust, would overtake him, and if Ginny would be safe in his presence.

  She knocked on his door eighteen minutes later.

  “Come on in,” he said, opening it after a quick glance through the peephole. He was surprised at how attractive she was, in a thoroughly unconventional way. Her blue eyes were alert and hinted at intelligence, her smile genuinely friendly, her frizz of red hair like a celebration. Instead of a purse, she wore a backpack slung over one shoulder. “I’m glad the car’s okay.”

  “I was just lame,” she said. “But the battery’s not that old, so it held the charge fine.”

  He gestured toward the room’s round table, which had two chairs tucked beneath it. “Want to sit? We can order drinks or something from room service, if you want. Are you hungry?”

  “Some tap water would be great.”

  “That I can do.” He took the paper cap off one of the motel glasses, carried it into the bathroom, filled it up. He had already used one in there, so he poured more water into that one and carried them both back. Ginny had shed her jacket and made herself comfortable at the table. Her jacket and backpack were next to the bed, and from the backpack she had taken an old, worn manila envelope.

  “Thanks, Wade,” she said when he put a glass down in front of her. “I mean, thanks for everything. It seems like you keep doing me favors.”

  “I haven’t done much yet.” He sat down across from her.

  “Only saved me from a long, lon
ely hike. And here I am, showing up on your doorstep and asking for more.”

  “I’m pretty much on sabbatical, so I have plenty of time. What is it about Palo Duro you’re interested in?”

  “Not Palo Duro so much as Smuggler’s Canyon.”

  An alarm bell went off in Wade’s head. The last place on Earth he wanted to answer questions about was Smuggler’s Canyon. He had already agreed, though. If he sent her away now, it would make her suspicious.

  “What about it?”

  She opened the envelope, the kind tied shut with a short length of twine, and spilled faded photographs onto the tabletop. “These are pictures of my father,” she said. “Taken at various fieldwork camps, over the years, mostly. Some my mom took.” She tugged one away from the others with a fingertip, twirled it to face Wade. A stooped, smiling old man with thinning gray hair and black plastic-framed glasses squatted beside a little redheaded girl who was blowing out five candles on a birthday cake. “That’s me, with him.”

  “That’s adorable,” Wade said.

  “Thanks. These were all taken more than twenty-one years ago, before he disappeared. I think I mentioned, he used to be fascinated—you might even say obsessed—with Smuggler’s Canyon, and as far as anyone knows, that’s where he vanished.”

  Wade held on to the edge of the table to keep the world from spinning out from under his feet. Twenty-one years ago would have been the year before his father had…dissolved. If Ginny’s father went into that same glowing pool, his disappearance would be explained, to a point. But he couldn’t tell Ginny about the pool. “It was a…a dangerous place in those days,” he said, trying to come up with a legitimate-sounding reason. “At least, that’s what our folks always told us. There were real smugglers crossing the river there. Drug runners, criminals. We hid in caves, sometimes, if we heard people around, so I don’t know if the stories were true. For all I know, we might have been hiding from your father.”