South of Evil

by Brian Dunford

“What does that mean?”

  “Tell them they don’t need to hide. Make sure they are seen.”

  “Why?” asked Eduardo.

  “I want to keep them on the back roads if I can.”

  He took his map from the truck. He looked to the Russian.

  “How fast can you get to here?” Strauss said, pointing. The Russian shrugged.

  “Are you talking to me or to him?” Ordo demanded.

  “I’m talking to whoever is driving,” said Strauss, though it wasn’t true. He tapped the map with his finger.

  “Get up there as fast as you can. Take your men. We’ll block them in.”

  They all made for their cars, and the engines burst loudly to life.

  “Does Jefe have them already?” Eduardo asked. He was nervous but sincere.

  “I don’t think so. I sent them away for a reason. If we are lucky, we will find them pushing an old broken pickup truck down the road.”

  “Then we’ll have to deal with them ourselves.”

  “I thought you wanted to?” Strauss asked.

  Eduardo swallowed.

  “I don’t want to enter a gunfight that we might not win in a landslide.”

  Strauss pointed at the boy. He was already in the back, his rifle pointed to the sky.

  “This is why I brought him,” he said.

  Guillermo approached. No one had told him to come out, but he had heard the engines and seen the mud flying. He looked disturbed.

  “What is this place?” he asked.

  “This is Senora Uto’s home.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “No.”

  “There were dogs back there. They were all dead. They were stacked up on one another. The dogs had been cut open.”

  Strauss patted him on the shoulder and told him to get back in the truck. Guillermo put the machine gun away and did as he was told.

  “Who is she?” Eduardo asked when no one else was listening.

  “She is Nahautl,” replied Strauss.

  “What in the world is that?” asked Eduardo.

  “The Nahautl were the people who were here before you and me.”

  Strauss saw that the stern woman had emerged from the house. The door was open behind her. She was motionless and watching. He opened the thermos and poured the coffee on to the ground.

  “Clever old woman,” he said.

  ***

  The engine took long slow belabored breaths, choking on its own smoke. The truck heaved along, and no matter how hard Curtis pressed, it wasn’t going faster.

  When there was so much smoke pouring from the engine that Curtis couldn’t see the road, he pulled over and opened the hood. It burned his fingers. The engine smelled of rubber and chemicals.

  Virgil hobbled along from his side.

  “Look at that,” he said.

  Two tiny holes stood out clear in the thin metal, and with daylight poured through them. Virgil tried to trace with his finger where they had ended up in the engine. He was quickly lost.

  “They bounce around,” said Curtis.

  “Yeah,” said Virgil. “I noticed.”

  They were in clear flat country. There were short tough trees and some grass, but no hills. Otherwise, the ground was brown and burnt with flecks of green here and there.

  “How much more can we get out of this truck?” Virgil asked.

  “Five minutes? An hour? Do you want to break down in the middle of Laredo with this on the back?”

  Curtis stepped backward, but he stared down the damaged truck. He stared at it like an enemy, as if this truck were responsible for everything that had gone wrong.

  “You want to explain to a bunch of starving Mexicans waiting to cross the border why we have twenty million in cash and why it’s ours and not theirs? You want to explain to the cops up there that we understand them, but those other cops, the crooked ones who tried to kill us in Monterrey, those guys are no good? By the way, let us walk over the border. Can you help us carry some of these coolers? Don’t look inside.

  “And another thing. Don’t ask why my nose is broken, or why my friend here looks like he got shot. Or why we don’t have any passports. It’s no big deal. Trust me. I’m an accountant with the IRS.”

  For a moment, Virgil thought he was going to see an explosion, the hood being slammed, the grill being kicked, glass being broken. He expected the events of the last two days had finally taken their toll. Instead, Curtis walked off the road and into the grass. He walked out until the grass covered his knees. He walked until his pants blended with the ground below, and the only thing that stood out in the landscape was his ridiculous yellow shirt with the tiny hula girls all over it.

  Virgil had expected screaming and yelling, but the further Curtis walked, the more sure he became that it wasn’t coming. He looked up and down the road. It was empty, but it wouldn’t stay that way. He held his hands over his eyes, suspecting that Curtis’s mind was working.

  “Curtis,” he shouted. “What do you say? Let’s drive this thing until it dies. Then we’ll push this truck into a storage container in Laredo.”

  “No,” said Curtis, and from his tone, that was the end of the discussion. “I have a better idea.”

  ***

  Curtis reached for the seatbelt, but his hand grasped at air. He turned and found nothing where a seatbelt would have been.

  “Are you sure about this?” Virgil asked again.

  “This is the best idea I’ve ever had.”

  He put the car in drive and slowly drove up the road. The truck heaved and the engine stuttered, but it slow-rolled as needed. Curtis carefully inched it from the paving to the sand, and back on to the paving and onto the wrong side of the road. From there, he stared down the embankment.

  It wasn’t much of an embankment. It was really a small rise. The average jeep would have sailed over it, but the average jeep wasn’t leaking oil and didn’t have a bullet lost in its engine.

  He just had to clear the embankment.

  “Hundreds of miles of flat landscape and I have to find the one spot that rises up,” he said to himself.

  He turned on the radio. It was static, then more static, until he finally found music. It was loud Mexican country music. He turned the volume up as high as it would go.

  He hit the gas. It was ten or fifteen feet before the engine seemed to catch, and another twenty before he felt acceleration. Virgil was growing larger and larger. Finally, with speed, he veered over the middle lane, turned as sharply as he dared, then drove straight up the embankment and into the air. All four wheels left the ground.

  The coolers full of money became weightless for a second. He watched them lift in the rear view. It was for the faintest of moments. Then, it all crashed down to earth.

  The back window cracked loudly in his ear. There was an awful screeching of metal that sounded like the chassis breaking in half. The whole truck surged upward on the bounce, but the truck kept rolling.

  Virgil chased it through the desert. He hopped along on one foot, calling for Curtis to stop.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Did the money stay in?”

  “Yeah, it’s all still there. Will you stop?”

  “No. I’m afraid it won’t start again.”

  “I can’t get in if you don’t.”

  There was a smoke from the engine, and they drove no more than seven miles an hour. The load behind them had shifted, and it was moving. The ropes squealed, trying to hold it in place. The truck didn’t so much drive as it moved in a sustained bounce. He saw the dust flying from the edge of the road. “Are you sure you’re okay?” Virgil asked again.

  “I’ve never been better,” Curtis said.

  The road was behind them, and the highway was even further than that. They drove west into the desert.

  ***

  The engine died whimpering, huffing and puffing and pushing until it had nothing left. The land was silent, save for a light breeze. Virgil closing the door of the truck sounded
like a racket.

  “This is a good place to start,” said Curtis.

  “No more storage containers?” Virgil asked, knowing the answer. Curtis shook his head.

  The knots had been expertly tied. They were frustratingly tight.

  “Were you a sailor in another life?” Virgil asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “These knots are brutal. How did you learn to do this?”

  He thought of his father. He’d also had a boat. He had taught Curtis to how to handle rope as a kid.

  “Didn’t you tell me once that you hated boats?”

  “I did. I do. I spent time on the rope so I wouldn’t have to go out to sea.”

  The tarp came down loudly. They laid it out flat and finally saw the stacks of coolers for the first time in the light. They stood higher than the truck. Wind caught the tarp and blew it into the air.

  They held it down with rocks at the four corners. Virgil climbed painfully and slowly onto the truck. He took a cooler from the top and opened it. It was stacked with money. They were clean, fresh, virgin bills, in the sun for the first time. Virgil walked to the edge of the tailgate and dumped it all on the ground.

  “How much money was that?”

  “Don’t think about it,” Curtis said.

  The stack, when it was done, was unruly, spilling out of the corners and refusing to stay in one place. Just when he thought he had it, one stack would slip out the side, while four or five stacks jumped out the back. Virgil cut holes into the tarp. “Just slips,” Curtis said, looking over his shoulder while holding the pile in place. “The tarp has to hold.” The ropes that held it to the truck were threaded through, held, and then knotted to form great loops. The loops lay in the sand. Virgil folded the knife and put it back in his pocket. He coughed loudly. Then it was quiet.

  “This is what twenty million dollars looks like,” said Curtis, looking at the fat, blue, overflowing bundle before them.

  “This is what a new life looks like,” said Virgil.

  ***

  They each picked up one of the long loops of rope. Virgil watched Curtis sling it over his head and across his chest. He did the same, except it hurt when he did it.

  Virgil leaned into it and pulled. He heard the tarp crumple. He heard Curtis grunt. Then he felt movement, and he realized they were moving forward.

  The money was heavier than he ever thought money could be. It was just paper. Paper is the lightest thing in the world, second only to feathers. Anyone can move paper.

  “How far do you think we need to drag this?” he asked. He probably asked much too soon.

  “As far as we can,” said Curtis. “We’ll drag it as far as we can until we can find a landmark.”

  “And when we find a landmark?”

  “We bury it,” said Curtis.

  They pulled further. Virgil felt pain in his side. His head was beginning to throb. He pushed.

  “I think I left my shovel at home,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  “How are we going to dig this hole?”

  “With our hands,” said Curtis.

  Virgil stopped. He looked at the size of the bundle of money.

  “It’s going to take forever to dig that hole.”

  “Do you have someplace to be?”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we go home. I’ll come back in a few weeks and dig it up.”

  Virgil thought about it. It was like his thoughts were visible.

  “Once we bury the money, we’re free of it,” Curtis said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am. They’re looking for two men in a car heading North with a ton of cash. We’ll bury the money, and that won’t be us.”

  “What about the trail?”

  “This is drug money. There is no trail.”

  “Look,” said Virgil. He pointed. The truck was still visible, though a ways off in the distance. It wasn’t hard to find. The ground was still soft from the rain. He could see their footsteps. He could also see the wide, flat path the money had laid in the dirt. It started at the truck and led right to where they stood. It might as well have been an airport runway.

  “We don’t have much time. What should we do?” Virgil asked.

  Curtis leaned into his rope, making it clear that this conversation was over for now.

  “Pull,” he said.

  ***

  Eduardo had shouted for them to stop because he saw something in the desert. It turned out to be an old trash bag overflowing with food and dirty magazines. He felt ridiculous until Guillermo shouted for them to stop and jumped into the sand.

  “What is it?” Eduardo asked.

  “It’s nothing,” said Guillermo, climbing back. “My mistake.”

  “There is something there. I see it too.”

  “It is just trash. Let’s drive.”

  It looked familiar, but Eduardo couldn’t place it.

  “It’s a portable toilet,” said Strauss. “It’s tipped over on its side and blowing around on windy days.”

  They drove on down the road heading north, or as north as the road would take them. Outside, the temperature climbed, while Strauss turned up the air conditioner in little increments. The colder it was, the easier it was to stay awake. It was miles and miles of brown and green dotted land with little or nothing in between. When the boy shouted out, no one bounded out of the car or climbed onto the roof.

  The boy was still in the tail gunner position, facing the back, as the truck slowed. “What do you see?” Strauss asked, but the boy had already rolled out and was running down the road.

  Eduardo watched him in the side view mirror. The boy sprinted with passion, carrying the rifle in one hand. He watched as the boy stopped, studied what it was he had seen, and looked to his feet. Then the boy grabbed the rifle with both hands and brought it up to his shoulder.

  They were all out of the car and running. The boy was already climbing the embankment. He dropped to his stomach, peering over the rise, gun first. Strauss put his arms up and motioned for them all to get low.

  The boy cut a very low profile. Eduardo knew nothing of hunting or surviving in the wild, but even he could see that this boy did. His body loosened and moved in tiny unnoticeable steps, slithering up and over the rise until they could only see feet. Then those were gone too.

  “What did he see?” Eduardo asked.

  Strauss pointed to the mound of earth. It had been demolished. Something large had crashed into it. There were thick tire tracks in the dirt where it hadn’t been churned.

  “How do we know it’s them?” Eduardo asked.

  “Look where you are standing,” replied Strauss.

  He looked down and saw nothing except his expensive shoes. These shoes were never intended for the desert. Even prolonged periods of direct sunlight were discouraged. He thought about getting his feet into the shade, as if there was any.

  When he moved his foot, he saw that he was standing on a wet spot of oil.

  ***

  He felt the heat on the back of his neck. His clothes were wet. Sweat fell around his head, collected on his brow, and dripped drop by drop on to his glasses until he was effectively blind. He couldn’t see Virgil, but he could hear him. He sounded like he was in pain.

  He looked back at the load. It was twenty million dollars. How much did twenty million dollars weigh?

  “Nothing,” he said aloud. “It’s the lightest thing in the world.”

  He had hoped Virgil heard him. They would talk about the money and what they were going to do when they brought it home.

  But Virgil said nothing.

  ***

  Strauss held the glass to his eyes. The desert rose up for him. He scanned, but saw nothing except scorched brown earth and tough green plants.

  Strauss walked back to the truck and got the map. He studied it as he walked and didn’t especially like what he saw. He didn’t dislike it either.

  “Can you read a map?” he asked Guillermo. />
  “I’m from the slums of Juarez,” said Guillermo.

  “I can,” said Eduardo. He came over and squatted, his heel rising out of his loafers. He still wore his jacket.

  “You’re joking,” said Strauss.

  “I took a geography course in high school,” said Eduardo. “It included a portion on topography.”

  He pointed at the map. “We are here,” he said. The boy had discreetly joined them.

  “If they drove off into the desert, where are they most likely to come out?” asked Strauss.

  “These are just the marked roads,” said Eduardo.

  “And?”

  “There are bound to be many more, smaller, unmarked roads. We go around,” said Eduardo.

  Strauss hesitated.

  “But what?” asked Eduardo impatiently.

  “What if they didn’t make it through?”

  “What if they did? They’ll cruise right through another border station.”

  Strauss was thinking of oil.

  “But what if they broke down? What if they are still out there?” Strauss pointed toward the desert.

  “If we follow them and they did then they are gone,” said Eduardo.

  He was right. Eduardo Mendes was a fast learner. He could read maps, he could give orders, he could act like a spoiled prick, and he could see the angles.

  The boy was right behind him, but Strauss hadn’t noticed. There was an eagerness to him, but it wasn’t childlike. There was no innocence on him.

  “What would you be willing to do to find the man who killed your father?” Strauss asked.

  “Anything,” said the boy.

  Strauss looked into the desert.

  ***

  It was midafternoon when Virgil finally fell. Curtis was on a single-minded track, staring straight ahead, eyes cast to the ground, only occasionally looking up to the horizon. He kept pulling. He dragged the bundle right over Virgil.

  Virgil tried to stand, digging himself out from under the money. Curtis pulled him free.

  Sand had caked all over Virgil’s face. It was even on his eyelids.

  Curtis rifled through the bundle for the water. The money was in his way. There was so much of it, and now it was loose. He made Virgil drink. Then he made him put his head back, and he washed some of the dirt from his eyes.