The Carrion Birds

by Urban Waite

  Ray walked north through the desert. He carried with him his collection of guns. The clothes he’d worn the night before were caked in mud, the shoes he’d taken off Sanchez dusted in a chalky sediment.

  He walked until his feet felt stiff as stone beneath him. The sun above risen into the sky. High billowy clouds floated for hours in the same position, while the first tendrils of heat began to play across the desert underbrush. He found large banks of land cut away from the desert by the rains, the deadfall and underbrush of the mountains, miles away, brought down into the lowlands and strung out along the banks. He knew he and Sanchez would never have made it in the Bronco. The land too treacherous and pocked to go on by anything but foot or horse.

  Miles in he came within sight of a road, but found no comfort in that gray slip of pavement along the valley floor. He watched the silver reflection of the sun work over the aluminum car bodies as they moved before him.

  He turned away and followed the mountains to the east, not wanting to rejoin the world just yet, not ready to face the questions he knew would soon follow.

  He was pretty sure the road he had seen would take him out of there. It would take him between the mountains to the north and those to the east. He walked on, feeling his shirt begin to stick to his back with sweat. He thought many times of losing the rifle, but he wouldn’t give it up. Holding it like some talisman of the past.

  There was little he could do but head north. He would have to call Memo at some point, to tell him about Sanchez and what had happened out at the old Sullivan house. There was no good way to tell it and he went on thinking his situation through and wondering how he was going to get to Las Cruces with no shelter, water, or food.

  Several times he came to wire cattle fences. He passed through private land and into public BLM land, then back again. He found depressions filled with rainwater. Much of the brown liquid already evaporated and the remaining water clouded in manure and buzzing with flies. He was dehydrated. Mad with thirst, but still he wouldn’t drink from them.

  He passed through land where cows stood and stared at him, working their sullen jaws before looking away again. He saw a coyote from a mile out and he raised the rifle and sighted it through the scope but didn’t pull the trigger. The long bouncing step of the coyote, sticking close to the base of the mountains, then disappearing behind a hill. In the heat he surprised a bedded-down herd of antelope that went hopping over fences and soon were gone.

  In the distance he saw the rusted scaffolding of forgotten wells standing up against the background of the Hermanos Range. The ocher-black skeletons he still recalled the names of. The Dean Garner, the Jack Freal, and the Oleg Stanovich now crested on the horizon. Landowners who had long since passed and for whom only a grave or well, rusted with time, existed to preserve their memory.

  His own history now thrown in much the same as these men. His father’s wells dry and all that it had meant for him and Marianne. And all that would result because of it. Ray out of work and their mortgage adding up, many months past due. Everyone around them scrambling for the jobs that were left. Marianne bouncing Billy on her hip, telling Ray every day that they would make it, that there would be more work. But he could see that there wouldn’t and he had known already that he was as done with the oil business as it was with him.

  A wish in his heart that he could go back in time and do it all again, but do it differently, starting again from the day they came out of the judge’s quarters and stood on the courthouse steps, newly married. The honeymoon they would take on the Sea of Cortez, eating fish tacos and walking the streets of the small towns still ahead of them.

  Tired and wasted with the years that had come and gone, he crossed the road thirty minutes later, his clothes still caked with all they had seen and done the night before. Not one car in either direction. Columns of light shining down from above, where the sun had found cover behind a thin grouping of clouds.

  He came to the ranch sooner than he’d expected and he knelt in the dirt at the edge of the property, catching his breath.

  For thirty minutes he lay there looking the place over, fighting back thirst and hunger. As he watched, the wind came, carrying with it a low cloud of dust that ran along the ground toward the house, a small iron wind chime singing a solitary tune.

  He rose and went cautiously on. It had been a long time since he’d been here. It was a risk—the life he’d once lived here unrecognizable from the life he lived now.

  Knowing he needed shelter, his clothes torn and stained with blood. He needed a place to hide away for just a day or so. There was little else he could do. He stumbled on, his feet scraping over rock and brush, his tired hands losing their grip on the rifle. He came to the stairs and pulled himself up along the railing.

  Ray rapped twice on the wood frame of the screen door, waited, then rapped again. He went to the window and looked in, cupping his hands to the glass. He was just about to go around to the back when he heard the door latch give. When the door fell back on its hinges, Ray already had his hand around the screen door, pulling it open. The woman inside offered only the slightest of gasps as he put out his foot to catch the door before she could close it. “Hello, Claire,” Ray said, looking past her now into the living room. “Is Tom around?”

  There’s all kinds of casings out there,” Kelly said to Eli. They sat in his office, one floor up from her own in the courthouse. “There’s tire tracks to at least three different cars.”

  He stared at her for a moment then broke away, dropping his gaze to the desk.

  “What’s strange,” Kelly continued, “is that there’s virtually nothing inside the house. No casings, I mean. You hear me, Mayor?”

  Eli gave her a solemn nod, then looked away again, moving his eyes to the window of his office. He’d been quiet for several minutes now. As if Kelly wasn’t even there and wasn’t telling him what was going on just outside his own town.

  Kelly knew Eli didn’t want to have anything to do with this. If it were up to him he’d probably just leave those bodies out there in the sun till their own gases bloated them big as beach balls. Elections were coming up. There were no jobs, no work—people leaving the town every week. And now there was this. There was a lot at stake. Kelly knew what he was thinking just by looking at the man. How he avoided her eyes, listening to what she had to say, but listening like he could just let it all roll past him without doing a thing about it or making any kind of choice.

  “Whoever they were after was a good shot. A real professional—no mistakes.” Kelly paused. “I think it’s time we called in some help, Mayor.”

  Eli stirred in his seat, his eyes on her now, sizing her up. “That’s all you have to go on?”

  “It was a war zone. We won’t really know till the ballistics report comes back from Las Cruces.”

  “How many gunmen are you talking about here?” His eyes fixed on her now, steady and waiting for her reply.

  “I can’t say for sure. We’re thinking they meant to surprise someone out there. We’re guessing it was this assassin from the hospital yesterday.”

  “Do we know yet who these men are?”

  “None of them are in the system,” Kelly said. “We’re checking with the Mexican authorities now.”

  “And the truck you found?”

  “The bench was slit open—down the middle—and the stuffing pulled out.”

  “You didn’t find anything?”

  “No.”


  “Who’s it registered to?”

  “Registered to a Jake Burnham.”

  “You know him?”

  “He’s one of the old boys we have here in town. No answer at his place when we went by, nothing really, just this truck.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Still waiting.”

  “Can we keep this quiet?”

  “I think we’re past that, Mayor.”

  He was back to avoiding her now, his eyes turned away. A long pause and then he got up and walked to the window, where, she knew, down below in the street there were news vans waiting to talk with him. “I’m asking you now for a personal favor, Edna. Don’t do this to me.”

  Out the window there was a high blue sky. The clouds from the night gone away and passed on into Texas.

  Kelly watched him, and when he didn’t turn back, kept looking out the window, she said, “Tom is saying there’s too much missing. He thinks we’ll find some bullet-riddled cars if we start looking.”

  Eli turned only slightly at the mention of the old sheriff’s name. Kelly couldn’t tell how he’d taken it.

  “I told you I didn’t want him involved with this.”

  “I had to.”

  “Is that why you’ve come in here? Is that why you’re telling me this?” Eli turned away from the window and came back to the desk. He sat heavily in the chair, looking at her.

  “I came here because it’s my job to tell you.”

  “Tom Herrera isn’t the law anymore. You get that? You understand what I’m saying to you?”

  Kelly was considering it. She’d been thinking about Tom for a while now and she knew if Eli had had his way ten years ago, Tom would be locked up right now. Only he wasn’t, and Kelly had had a lot to do with that. Maybe too much, but it was something she’d taken on her shoulders a long time ago. Most of all, she knew Eli wasn’t going to help her now, and she needed help.

  “You find any drugs?” Eli asked.

  “No.”

  “Money?”

  “No.”

  “There’s no reason for anyone else to get involved in this thing then, is there?”

  Kelly waited for him to say more and when he didn’t, she said, “This could just be the start of a real problem.”

  “You don’t think it’s finished, then?”

  “I think it’s time we called someone. We can’t keep this to ourselves. Four bodies in two days is a lot to account for.”

  “We can handle it.”

  “No,” Kelly said. “We can’t.”

  Eli looked as if he wanted to say something, but then didn’t.

  “We need to get a plane or a helicopter, and we need to get it in here soon,” Kelly said. “There’s three other cars out there somewhere and a whole lot of desert to cover.”

  “Who are you going to call?”

  “DEA or Border Patrol, whoever can get something in the air.”

  “They’re going to be all over this,” Eli said, his voice giving it all away.

  “It can’t be helped,” Kelly said. “None of us can, not anymore.”

  Outside, the sun felt warm and thick on Dario’s skin as he stepped down off the porch to stand in the light. He carried with him a dish towel and as he stood, surveying the surroundings, he toweled his hands down and watched as the blood came off onto the material.

  Up the valley he could make out the aged oaks, barren of leaves, the branches pointing upward into the air like skeletal hands. In the end there was nothing he could have done for Gus. And he didn’t really think the man had feared death until it had been upon him, those last painful breaths of air before his lungs stopped moving and the hiss of wind went out of his lips.

  Now, Dario would wait. He would hold his ground, go back to the bar and wait for what he knew would eventually come. The anxiety he looked forward to, growing in his heart with each hour, wondering when Gus would be found. And then what would become of the anger that would follow.

  Behind him the men were coming out of the house just as he had a minute before. The sun strong on their faces and their eyes sliding, almost reptilian, as they came off the porch, looking from side to side down the valley.

  When they’d gone past him and moved on to the cars, Dario took from his pocket the small prescription bottle and placed it on the last step of the porch. Raymond Lamar’s name faced out toward whoever might find it first.

  With the day’s work ahead of him he turned and met Medina by their car. Dario knew he would be moving on soon enough, but for now he would wait. He would finish what needed doing—he would try to make the most of it—before he was shipped off to the next town, where life would go on for him the same as it always had.

  Within five minutes of leaving Eli’s office, Kelly was on the phone with the Border Patrol. Through her open office door she saw Pierce listening to her as she explained the situation. When she was done she depressed the switch hook and waited for the tone.

  Not a damn thing to do but wait. She called over to Tom’s place, but got no answer. In the morning, looking over the house, they’d paced out the gunfight, Tom asking about any .308s she might have found, and Kelly had nothing to tell him.

  She put her gun belt on and then her hat. “Fuck it,” she said. Moving around the desk toward the office door.

  “Fuck what?” Pierce said.

  “It.” Kelly passed Pierce where he sat. She didn’t know quite what she was going to do yet, but she was done depending on Eli, on Tom, on everybody who might know something and said nothing. “Radio me if anything happens,” she told Pierce.

  Outside, the rainstorm had gone by hours before in the night, and the sky hung motionless above, clear and blue. Weather reports saying it was only the first band of rain expected for the region. All of it coming in from the West Coast. California soaked with it. Storm drains overflowing and all of it running right back down into the Pacific.

  She walked to her cruiser, watching the glint of the sun on the metal and the dust all over the body. Nothing seemed clear to her in the way it had once been. The town seeming to tip away from Kelly as the sun rolled away above in the sky. Last night’s rain coming like a flood, leaving disaster in its wake—all of it crowded in upon her and the thought in her head that it would be nice if that was all she had to deal with.

  Tom scooped the last of the eggs off his plate, paid the bill, and then walked outside to where his truck sat in the parking lot of the Lucky Strike Diner. He’d left the Sullivan house feeling wound up, unsure of what to do next. He knew his father and Deacon would be expecting him by now, waiting on him to come up the long road and start the day’s work. But he wasn’t ready just yet. He couldn’t shake the frozen images of those men laid out in front of the Sullivan house. All the blood washed away in the rain from that body thirty feet from the porch, like the man had just been dropped from the sky.

  He glanced at his watch, a quarter past eleven. Three hours late for work already. With his finger he depressed the hook on the pay phone, listened for the tone, and then dialed the number. When he got Deacon’s wife on the phone, she said Deacon was outside with the cattle, and Tom told her he’d overslept, and would be by as soon as he could.

  Claire’s Volkswagen was still in front of his house when he pulled up. The little Beetle just sitting there like it had the day before. He needed to grab his gear for the day and get going. No time for this, he thought, as he opened his own truck door, waiting as Jeanie found
a foothold. No clouds left in the sky and a painting of mud on the body of the Volkswagen behind the wheels. The sound of the pigs in their pen, heard through the wire fence, and the smell of their manure in the midday air.

  He closed his truck door and went up the porch stairs. By the time he had the front door open, he knew something wasn’t right. Jeanie making a low grumbling sound in the back of her throat as Tom let the door swing open on its own weight. Claire there on the far cushion of his couch and his cousin, Ray, sitting in the old lounge chair.

  On the coffee table, peeking from beneath the magazine in front of Ray, the long barrel of a hunting rifle, and close by what looked to be a Ruger handgun. Claire gave Tom a desperate look but didn’t say anything. Tom’s attention not completely on her, but on what Ray was going to do and why he was here in Tom’s house after all these years. Though Tom could guess.

  “That rifle take a .308 cartridge, Ray?”

  Ray leaned forward and pushed the magazine away so that the wooden stock of the gun could be seen. “I believe it does,” he said. “Go on and close that door, Tom. Leave the dog outside for a bit, would you?”

  Tom pushed Jeanie out and closed the door. He could still hear the dog making that low growling sound outside, followed close by a series of barks. Turning to face Ray again, he said, “You’re not in the best shape, Ray. You’re looking like maybe you had a hell of a night and maybe not that good a morning.”

  The clothes Ray wore were dried a reddish-brown tint from the desert. One sleeve missing from his shirt, and a set of ill-fitting shoes pushed up on his feet. “You all right, Claire?” Tom asked, turning now to face Claire where she was watching him from her side of the couch. Tom with no idea how long the two of them had been here like this, but willing to guess it had been a while and that the mayor and the rest of the staff would be wondering where Claire was at this point, just as Deacon was wondering about him.