This Side of Night

by J. Todd Scott

  As would the bajadores, thieves and murderers who preyed on anyone they could catch.

  Maps were expensive, but guides—los coyotes—cost even more. For a handsome fee, they promised you safe passage not only over the river, but to the cities on the other side: Houston and Dallas and Chicago and New York. Places that meant nothing to Chayo, places so far away they might have been la luna. He’d heard all about the men and women and children who’d hiked through the desert only to find themselves crushed into small airless cars and vans, driven to houses where they waited for days or sometimes weeks to be moved on. Sometimes more money would be demanded of their families, and sometimes a woman or child was taken away in the middle of the night anyway, never to be seen again.

  Like Chayo’s fellow normalistas.

  Chayo understood that he and Neva could not be found, could not be caught. Not now. As far as anyone knew, they were already dead. They’d been taken away in the middle of the night, and everything they might know about their attackers, the men in the police cars and uniforms, had disappeared with them. It would be worse for them and, more important, their families, if they were caught now. They had to get across the border.

  Chayo had no money for a map or for los coyotes.

  He would have to be both.

  * * *

  —

  ON AMADOR’S COMPUTER, the old one he kept in the candy store, Chayo was able to search up a map of the area around Barranco Azul and Tabaloapa. It wasn’t much, and it didn’t show him the truly safe trails or passages, or anything important at all, but it gave some direction, some shape, to his plan. He wrote down a list of towns within a few days of the river on the americano side: Presidio, Terlingua, Redford, Nathan, Dryden . . . He didn’t think he could get Neva all the way to Houston or Dallas, places she’d talked about before, but she and Batista had familia over the river . . . somewhere . . . and if he could get her that far, it was a start. If they traveled at night to escape the day’s brutal heat, if he read the shadows and stars as he’d done since he was a little boy on his papa’s farm, if . . . well, there were a thousand ifs, but only this one choice. This one chance. Amador had tracked down some of the things he’d asked for: oranges and plastic water jugs and rope and muslin cloths to tie around their shoes and their faces; a small knife, some aloe cream and bandages and needle and thread. Also a small hemp pack for each of them, where Carmelita had hidden some tightly rolled tortillas and a handful of chamoy candy, and Chayo had smiled at that . . . almost cried.

  He didn’t know if any of it was enough, but it was all they had.

  Later, he handed Neva his list of American towns and a pencil, told her to circle the one where her familia lived. She studied it for a long time, her wounded mouth and the stitches across her face trembling, tears at the tight corners of her eyes. At night when she slept, clenching her teeth in her sleep, her wounds wept, too; bloody tears all their own, and every morning Chayo wiped them away with his shirt. He did it again now, as she finally leaned forward and added another town to his list.

  He watched over her shoulder. Like those other places, it didn’t mean anything to him. He may have heard its name once or twice, but he knew nothing about it other than it was where Neva wanted to go, and that was all that mattered.

  He studied it, said it out loud, committing it to memory.

  Murfee.

  Then he took the paper and tore it into small pieces, tossed them on the candle Carmelita had lit for them, and went to pack their bags.

  TWENTY

  Danny bought the girl Zita an ice cream and sat with her at one of the small tables beneath an umbrella in front of the store. He and Amé came here every now and then, and she always ordered the same thing: a single-scoop strawberry cone. She liked it well enough, but said it wasn’t as good as the paletas of her youth. She claimed that Vic Ortiz, who worked at the jail, had managed a small paletería many years before, and made a point of stocking her favorite, mango con chili. Amé said he used to drive over to Ojinaga once or twice a week to buy the paletas for his store, bringing them back in cardboard boxes packed with ice. It was hard to imagine the dark-eyed and quiet Vic—forever drinking one of his cups of strong black coffee and reading the paper in the jail office—selling popsicles to kids, but she swore it was true. It was harder still to imagine Amé herself as that little girl, like Zita.

  Zita had ordered a strawberry cone, too, and Danny didn’t know what to make of that, if anything at all.

  Across the street, the sheriff and Amé and the man claiming to be her uncle walked beneath a row of lemon trees, their images reflected over and over again in the windows of the stores that lined Main Street. They were out in the open, casual, and the uncle in his faded chinos and flannel shirt and straw hat looked no different from any of the other older Mexicans who lived and worked around Murfee or the Big Bend. He could be Vic Ortiz or Javy Cruz or anyone at all, and maybe that was the point. If the old man was worried about being seen, he didn’t show it. He moved slow, though, with a slight limp, and Danny wondered how and when he’d gotten that injury—a consequence of the life he’d lived and the things he’d done. The sheriff suffered the same damaged walk, not only from his old football injury, but from the shooting at the Far Six that had nearly killed him. Now he was walking beside the very man who may have ordered it.

  At this distance, they could be mirror images of each other—more hazy reflections lost in the windows around them.

  Danny shook his head, turning back to the girl next to him.

  “Do you like it? The ice cream?” He raised his own uneaten vanilla cone, struggling for the word for “ice cream” he’d heard Amé use before. “Um, helado. Helado?”

  Zita smiled, nodded, but didn’t answer. She didn’t understand any more English than he did Spanish, which he supposed made them perfect companions right now.

  Neither of them really knew what the hell was going on.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The face meant nothing to Chris.

  He’d never seen it on any wanted posters or in any High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area—HIDTA—intel reports, or the occasional bulletin he got from the El Paso Intelligence Center. The folder Garrison had given him didn’t include any recent pictures, either; only grainy photos many years old. This man could have been anyone.

  Or no one.

  Still, Chris had imagined he’d be more like Sheriff Ross. It was as if he’d expected the man to have some dark aura, some twinned shadow . . . something. Something ominous. While the former sheriff had always appeared to bend the very light around him—bend everything around him so that he was always the center of it—this man wasn’t like that. His hands had a slight shake and his voice was quiet and he moved slowly, carefully. Maybe it was an act, maybe it wasn’t—Chris hadn’t decided yet—but he wasn’t intimidating or threatening, at least not in any overt way. He was calm, deferential. If Chris didn’t know better, he’d say Fox Uno—if that’s who he was—had the demeanor and pallor of a very sick man, something Chris had experienced firsthand when his own mother had passed from cancer. For months, she’d carried her body in the same careful way, as though afraid that if she moved too fast or tried to do too much, she might wake the disease. Anger it.

  The only thing this man did share with Ross was the eyes, a certain sharpened hardness in them you saw only when you caught them at the right angle and in the right light, when he thought you weren’t looking. He didn’t try to hide those eyes behind sunglasses, and his thin hat did nothing to shield them. But as they stepped in and out of the shadows and sun along Main Street’s sidewalk, he never blinked—not once—even as the hot light hit those eyes again and again. It lit them up, made them shine like steel, like sunlight on a rifle muzzle, and that was enough to remind Chris just how dangerous this man could be.

  “You tried to have me killed,” Chris said. It wasn’t a question, simply a statement. As true as
the sun rising and setting.

  The old man disagreed. “I did not. That was your Sheriff Ross, I think.”

  His English was heavily accented and little used, but it was passable.

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “It does not matter what you or I believe. That is all done now. It is the past. Like your sheriff.” Fox Uno stopped, hands behind him, looking into a store window. It was Murfee’s only bookstore, new and used with some rare collectibles, and Chris had spent hours there with his father as a kid. Most of the books in the display now looked dusty, showing cracked leather spines. There was a handful of faded and well-thumbed paperbacks piled together, and Chris could read the cover of one of them, a reprint of The Light of Western Stars by Zane Grey. “But if you must know, he tried to steal from both of us, Señor Cherry.”

  “And you also expect me . . . us”—Chris glanced over to Amé, who so far had stood rigid and mostly quiet at Fox Uno’s other shoulder—“to believe you had nothing to do with that bus attack in Ojinaga?”

  “I did not. But again, what does it matter? Here, now?”

  “It matters because you’re running from what’s happening over there, and God knows what other past crimes. I should be arresting you, here and now, and ending all this.”

  “Yet you do not. I have committed no crimes here, Señor Cherry. If I am not the man I say I am, then I’ve done nothing wrong. If I am, what can you prove?”

  “There are others . . .” Chris started, but stopped when Fox Uno raised a callused hand.

  “Ah, sí, Las Tres Letras. What you call the DEA?” Fox Uno said the letters slowly, disdainfully. “Once they decide who I am, it will not matter anymore.”

  Chris shook his head. “You come here, threaten my deputy, demand her help . . .”

  “I did not threaten. I did not demand. I explained to her the way things are, the way they must be. She understands this. You do not. You cannot. Es la familia.”

  Chris let his voice rise, leaning in close so others on the street wouldn’t hear him. “Don’t fucking talk to me about family. We’re her family. You? You’re just a sick old man who showed up one night claiming to be someone that mattered.”

  Fox Uno turned and said something to Amé in Spanish, something far too fast for Chris to catch. Fox Uno fixed Chris with those hard eyes of his, eyes that could will away the sunlight, but he was smiling. “I was wrong then, perhaps you do understand. You will do this for her, for me, because she is familia. Somos todos familia.”

  Fox Uno started to walk again, turning his back to the bookstore. “I need only a few days. Men will come, with money, new documents. Important things I had to leave behind in my haste, now that I cannot return to México. I will make a call every day until they are here. That call will keep her madre, mi hermana, hidden and safe, because as long as I live, men must still fear me. They must obey me. But if I cannot make this call, if I disappear . . .” Fox Uno didn’t finish the thought, and didn’t have to. “When Zita and I are gone, you will never see us again.”

  “As long as you’re alive, that means others might come for you, too. Someone will be hunting you, right?” Chris asked.

  Before Fox Uno could answer, Amé finally spoke up. “The girl, Zita, too? She will leave with you?”

  “Por supuesto, ella es mi hija.” Fox Uno smiled at Amé. “You can come with us, if you wish.”

  Amé nodded. “Then let me take you wherever you need to go, both of you. Tell your men I will bring you to them,” she said. “No one has to come here.”

  “Not happening, ever,” Chris said, crossing in front of Fox Uno and putting a hand on the old man’s chest, stopping him, feeling his heartbeat. It was slow and steady, unconcerned. Human. Chris used to think Sheriff Ross didn’t have a heartbeat at all. “I’m not letting her do that. If you try to leave the Big Bend with her, I’ll have marked units parked at every highway, farm road, and cattle path. Everyone I know with a badge and a gun for three states.” Chris stared Fox Uno down. “There have to be other people here who can help you, hide you. Someone else who can give you whatever the hell you need. You’ve never had any trouble conducting business on this side of the border before.”

  “Esto es verdad. But this is not, as you say, before. This is now. No sé en quién confiar, sin duda usted entiende.” I do not know whom to trust. You certainly understand that.

  “I do . . . yet you’ve somehow decided you can trust us. Me and Amé?” Chris said it all in Spanish. It wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough.

  Fox Uno smiled again. “I thought you might know the language. You are very clever, Señor Cherry. Pero no, I trust only her.” He pointed at Amé. “She has never failed me.”

  When Fox Uno said that, Amé’s eyes flashed with anger. Chris wasn’t sure what the old man meant, but he didn’t like the sound of it, and neither did she.

  “Don’t suggest I’ve ever helped you,” she said in Spanish, spitting the words at his feet.

  They stood that way for what felt like a long time, sharp points of a triangle, each staring at the other.

  Chris asked, “What do you know about five bodies we discovered on the river? Young men, basically kids. Drug mules. You show up a day after we found them. That’s a hell of a coincidence, right? Do you understand that word in English? Are you going to tell me you had nothing to do with that?”

  Fox Uno shrugged. “Who can say? There’s much violence on the river now. These men may have worked for me or not. Again, it does not matter.” The old man stared at Chris with eyes as hard and sharp as knife edges, flashing as Amé’s had done only moments before. “Yo soy la Muerte.”

  “Right, Fox Uno, the great and terrible. We know all about you. But pull back the curtain, and what are you really? What’s left of you now?” Chris gestured at the street, at people passing them without a second glance. “Here, in my town, you’re nothing at all. Don’t dare threaten me. Not here.”

  Fox Uno said nothing.

  Chris tapped Fox Uno on the chest. “If we do this, you really are gone for good. And you’ll put an end to this bloody little war of yours in the Big Bend, on both sides of the river. You’re done with Amé and Murfee, do you hear me? Forever. If you come here again or try to talk to her or contact her in any way, you’re not going to have to worry about running anymore. I swear to you, I will kill you myself.”

  For emphasis, and to be sure he was clear, Chris said it again in Spanish: “Te mataré.”

  Fox Uno laughed. “Then that will make us both murderers, ¿si? We are not so different, you and I.” And for a second time, he said something in Spanish way too fast and low to Amé, before stepping past Chris to start across the street, to where Zita and Danny were sitting watching them. He left Chris’s hand hanging in the air, pushing back against nothing.

  As the old man moved carefully across the sunlit street, Chris let him go. Instead, he turned back to Amé. “What did he say?”

  She hesitated before answering. “He said he likes you, but you sound like Sheriff Ross. He knows now why the sheriff wanted you dead.”

  Then she also crossed the street, to where Fox Uno, Danny, and Zita were waiting with ice cream.

  TWENTY-TWO

  She smelled smoke sometimes.

  Maybe it was because she used to be a smoker—unfiltered Camels—although she gave that up when she learned she was pregnant with Jack. But that smell was still there for her and always would be: in her clothes, in her skin . . . in her memories.

  Like growing up around the oil fields with her daddy. The heavy and sooty sky above the rigs, the whole world gray and black, and his own skin, too.

  Like the night Murfee burned and Buck Emmett died, where she’d stood outside Earlys and caught that first bit of flame on the wind. It had made her search the night, staring into the dark, trying to find it.

  A warning.

 
Or maybe it was the Big Bend itself.

  Maybe in all the desert and scrub and unbounded emptiness, there was always something burning out there, somewhere.

  * * *

  —

  MEL WAS THINKING ABOUT SMOKE as Chris finished telling her about the old man and the girl.

  She’d been nursing Jack when Chris came in—a feeling of closeness or completeness that as a woman she had no words to describe, that a man would never truly understand anyway—and the baby was asleep now. She had the bedroom window cracked open and Jack cradled soft and quiet in her arms, and all she could think about was smoke.

  There on the wind, blowing through the window. Faint and then gone again. A campfire somewhere far off.

  She prayed that’s all it was.

  “Tell me how I’m supposed to feel about this, Chris. Tell me and I’ll do my best to convince you that’s how I really feel.”

  Chris stood in the door of their bedroom, arms crossed. He hadn’t yet come to sit next to her and Jack on the bed.

  “You think I’m wrong.”

  She admired how he still wanted to make everything a question of right and wrong, as if there was ever a way to do that so neat and clean. Ben had never believed that, and the two men had always argued about it. Sheriff Ross had definitely not believed that, and it nearly cost Chris his life. Yet here he was again, trying to make the case, even if it meant being on the wrong side of it this time.

  That’s what she thought.

  “It’s foolish. It’s dangerous. This man’s a threat to Amé and this town. He’s a threat to you, to your career . . .”