The Carrion Birds

by Urban Waite

  Ray paused as they came to the porch, an orange prescription bottle there on the first step. Bending, Ray took it up and looked at it, the dosage written in clear print along the side but the name concealed beneath Ray’s fingers.

  Tom heard his cousin curse under his breath and then watched as Ray slipped the bottle into his pants pocket.

  “You not telling me something?” Tom asked, his voice low.

  With his right hand, Ray had brought up the Ruger from his belt and he was looking to the house. “You know when the curtain comes down at the end of the show, and you get that sick feeling that life—real life—is waiting for you outside?” Ray said. “I have that feeling now and there’s nothing I can do to stop it from crawling all over me.”

  Tom didn’t like the feel of it at all and he went up the stairs with Ray next to him on the steps, the rifle strapped over Ray’s back and the Ruger held close at his side. That bottle on the porch had meant something to Ray, but Tom couldn’t say what. Ray moving up the stairs now like he was expecting trouble inside.

  “Wait here,” Ray said. With the gun raised toward the door he gestured for Tom to get the screen.

  Tom reached a hand out and pulled the door open, the wide desert behind them and Jeanie now out in the dust at the bottom of the porch, standing stiff-legged looking up at him.

  A passage of time working over Tom that he couldn’t identify. Jeanie and Claire waiting for him on the stairs while Ray went inside. Nothing for Tom to do but stand there hoping for some signal from Ray. Nothing about it feeling right, and a loud keening soon heard from within, abrupt in the silence.

  When Tom found Ray, his cousin stood across the room, a rough splatter of blood on the wall and Gus slumped forward in one of his living room chairs. The face a mash of blood and bone, skin cracked like a spiderweb across the old man’s face, where the nose had been smashed in at its center. The only thing to tell Tom he was looking at Gus the wedding ring that he still wore on his finger.

  Deputy Hastings stood three feet away from the open door of the Bronco, looking in on the dead man in the seat. “No footprints leading away?” he asked.

  “You heard that rain last night,” Kelly said. “Pierce and I drove out here and didn’t even see a tire track till we were a hundred feet out.”

  “And this one?” Hastings said, still looking at the gut-shot man in the passenger seat.

  “No ID, no wallet, nothing,” Kelly said. “We won’t know who he is till we can get him into the morgue and run his prints.”

  “It doesn’t make much sense, does it, Sheriff?”

  “A man sitting gut-shot in the middle of the desert with his shoes missing, no it doesn’t.”

  “None of this scares you?” Hastings asked.

  “Scares the shit out of me,” Kelly said, turning to look back at her cruiser, where Pierce sat inside on the radio, guiding the ambulance that would take the body back to the morgue. “We don’t have the resources for this.”

  “You talked to the mayor though, didn’t you? Didn’t he tell you to go ahead with whatever you needed to do?”

  “Not in those words exactly.”

  “At times I wish I didn’t have this job,” Hastings said.

  “Let me guess,” Kelly said. “This is one of those times.” From a little ways out she caught the sound of tires running up over the desert and the creak of springs. Turning, she saw the ambulance come into view. “You still have Agent Tollville’s number over at the DEA?” she asked.

  “Tollville? We haven’t talked to him in a while now. Not since the mayor brought him down to look at what happened to Angela Lopez.”

  “He used to be a friend of Tom’s. I doubt they are anymore, but they used to be friends. He might be willing to help us out.”

  The ambulance pulled up and the medics jumped out, both Hastings and Kelly watching them as they gathered their gear. “What about the drugs?”

  Kelly smiled. “You mean the fact that there aren’t any?”

  “Something like that.”

  “If it gets the DEA down here I’ll fill bags with baking soda if I have to,” Kelly said, grinning now and waiting for the medics.

  It came on Tom strongly, all in one sweeping movement, his legs carrying him out the door onto the porch, where he gagged and coughed, feeling his own bile bitter at the back of his throat. Gus dead and Billy missing.

  He ran a hand beneath his lips, wiping at the saliva on his chin, his knees bent down onto the wood of the porch and Ray still inside with Gus. No sign of Billy anywhere Tom had looked and a desire now to find both his father and the boy. The world had slid away from Tom in that moment, all of it teetering toward the edge and then going over. No feel for it anymore.

  Getting to his feet, he stumbled down the stairs, Jeanie now beside him and Claire up out of the car. Without saying anything he rounded the house looking for his father. Three times he called his father’s name, waiting each time for a response that never came.

  When he reached the little apartment where he’d grown up, and where his father still lived, he could see where the window nearest the door had been broken out. The door stood slightly open and there was a darkness within that Tom didn’t know what to do with.

  He called his father’s name twice more, letting his voice move ahead through the rooms before he, too, came to them, opening closets and checking behind doors. Tom only loosely aware of Claire as he searched, her voice coming to him out of the midday light from outside, her silhouette there in the doorway as he stumbled back toward her.

  An intensity to the look she gave him reached down inside and scraped against the muscles of his chest. Tom with no words yet to answer her as she asked him again and again what was wrong, what he’d seen inside Gus’s place, and where Luis was. He put his hands to his knees and dry-heaved several more times, the sun felt on his back as it hit his shirt and he fought to get air into his lungs.

  It was a while before he was able to form the words, and he watched her face turn pale with the news.

  “What about Billy?” she wanted to know.

  He didn’t have an answer and he ran his hands up through his hair, pulling against the skin of his temples before letting his hands drop again. There had been a lot of blood inside Gus’s living room. More than Tom had thought possible for one man.

  Ray was only moderately aware of the hacking of his cousin outside, choking at the air. Ray felt a pulse of blood in his veins that spread like a stain through his chest and swelled at his throat. It had been a long time since he’d allowed himself to feel this way and he was aware now of the anger surging inside him, threatening to break through.

  His father there in the chair, the blood on the floor where it had run from his body and collected in a pool.

  So much blood already. Everywhere.

  Ray took a step back. He hadn’t yet allowed himself to move, but he did now, feeling the muscles in his legs come unlocked. A pain all down his chest, all the way to his feet as he moved away, his eyes still on his father. Not since his wife had been taken from him had he felt this way. Like an axe had been hefted into the heartwood of his life and the tender golden flesh beneath exposed.

  He turned and ran his eyes around the room. The place just as he’d remembered it. Nothing changed from when he was a child here to the days he’d had with his own son crawling around on the living room floor. Gus and him sitting back as they watched the boy move in erratic lines across
the carpet. So much gone and a pain held deep in his chest.

  When his breath came back to him, it came in a surge—all at once—like someone surfacing from the depths into air. His lungs hungry for the world above and his pupils dilated black and wide, as if coming into light from a great darkness. He fell back with a hand held out for support on the fireplace behind. The flash of memory shifting across his vision like a slide reel, image after image from a life now completely lost to him. His wife standing on the courthouse steps, the birth of their child, their first night in the new house outside of Coronado, the call of sirens before the knock came on his door, the wreckage of his wife’s car and the black scrape of tires across asphalt that would never make sense to him.

  Where was Billy? A desperate need to know now rose all the way through him. Where was his son?

  He slumped to the floor. Every bad thing that had ever happened in this town to anyone he loved—his father, his wife, his child, even Tom—was his fault alone.

  Kelly kept staring at her hat where it lay on the office desk. Hastings sitting on the other side, waiting to hear what she had to say, and Pierce gone along to the morgue with the medics. In her hand she held the report that had come in via fax from the authorities down south. Every one of the men they’d found out at the Sullivan house that morning had some sort of record down in Mexico. Violent crimes. Two of them recently released from a jail in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. At the top of the sheet, Hastings had scrawled the number for the DEA office up in Albuquerque.

  She’d put her hat there on the desk when she’d come into the office and now she couldn’t stop looking at it. Flat brimmed and wide. Her own sweat stained into the material. The hat not that different from Hastings’s, only the tassels around the brim enough to distinguish it as the sheriff’s hat and not one of her deputies’. She felt worn down—frustrated by all that had happened and all that she’d been unable to prevent.

  “No time like the present,” Hastings said, looking at the phone on her desk.

  “No, I suppose not.” Kelly picked up the phone. She was still waiting to hear back from Pierce at the morgue, waiting to hear who the man was they’d found in the Bronco, and while she waited, she thought she might as well get on with it.

  When the secretary at the DEA picked up, Kelly identified herself and said, “I’m not sure how much Agent Tollville may have already heard about us down here in Coronado, but I’m calling because I’d like his help regarding what we’ve found so far.”

  Kelly waited while the secretary put her on hold. With the mouthpiece covered, she asked Hastings to give her some time alone.

  After he’d gone she looked at her hat still sitting there in front of her. With the back of her hand she swiped at it and watched as it fell to the floor out of sight. When Agent Tollville came on the line, she began to explain the situation.

  It was Jeanie who found Luis and Billy twenty minutes later, their clothes soaked in the same mud that Tom had seen coated all over Ray that morning. The desert grime dried into the material. Luis with his arm around the boy, holding him close to his chest, and the boy shivering slightly even with the sun directly over them. Luis’s eyes, dust-swollen in their sockets, looked back at Tom with an erratic twitch that seemed to skitter from Tom to Claire and then back toward the house.

  “I saw them,” Luis said. “We were inside when they came, Billy in his room and me sleeping on the couch. Gus woke us and told us to go out through the kitchen as fast as we could. We’ve been here ever since.” He was leaning now with his back to the rock, the last bit of shade on his face, while his legs lay splayed out before him in the roasting sun.

  “Come on, Dad,” Tom said, reaching a hand down first to pick Billy up off the ground. “Come with us, it’s going to be all right now, it’s just us.”

  Luis shrugged his son off and pushed himself closer into the rock, bringing his legs up with him. Eighty-one years old, he looked frail and small, with his eyes darting all over the desert.

  “Who did you see?” Claire asked. She dropped down to Luis’s level, resting on her haunches as she spoke.

  “I thought you were them,” Luis said. “When I saw you come down that road, I thought you were them again, come back for us.”

  With his hands, Billy told them about the light from the house and how Luis had kept them hidden all through the night and into the morning.

  “Come on, Dad,” Tom said again. He signed to Billy, “Can you help me with him?” Then to his father, “It’s safe now, it’s us. There’s no reason to be scared, not anymore.”

  Luis fixed Tom with his gaze, looking up at him as if for the first time. “I heard the shot, I never even went back,” Luis said. “You saw what they did to Gus?”

  Tom didn’t want to say it in front of Billy and he turned away so that the boy wouldn’t read his lips. “He’s dead, Dad.”

  “I can’t go back there,” Luis said. He began to repeat the words like a mantra, speaking not to them but past them to the world.

  Tom looked to Claire. “Take Billy,” he said. “I’ll get my father up.”

  Tom waited while Claire led Billy away, and then he reached down and dragged his father to his feet. Tom was surprised at how thin his father’s arms had become, the muscle tight beneath the skin, the skin itself, felt through the shirt he wore, loose on his bones.

  With his hand behind Luis, they walked back toward the outbuildings, Claire ahead of them with Billy. Outside, beyond Gus’s house, Ray was waiting for them. The gun now tucked away in his belt again and the rifle strapped across his back. Up ahead he saw the boy flinch as he saw his father, no idea if Billy recognized him at all. A lot of time had passed and the pictures on the mantel were the only real connection between them anymore.

  Claire led Billy into Luis’s place. Luis didn’t even seem to register Ray as they approached, and Tom brought Luis into his apartment and laid him down on the bed, waiting over his father till the old man turned away to the wall and stayed that way long enough for Tom to know he wouldn’t turn back any time soon.

  “He saw them?” Ray asked. He was standing in the doorway looking in on Tom where he sat at the edge of his father’s bed. Claire stood a few feet behind, a blanket thrown over Billy’s shoulders and Claire’s hands rubbing warmth onto the boy’s back.

  “He saw them,” Tom said. “But he’s not going to talk about it, at least not now.” Tom looked from Ray to Billy, trying to see if the boy understood.

  “And the boy?” Ray asked.

  “You know he couldn’t have heard anything. Luis was protecting him through the night. He didn’t hear a thing, and he doesn’t know anything more than what we can see for ourselves.”

  Tom watched to see how his cousin had taken it. Ray’s father was dead inside the house, and there was nothing Tom could say to change that. There was only dealing with where they were now and what they would do. He watched Ray for a moment more, long enough for Ray to lean his weight into the doorframe, slump-backed, with his head searching the ceiling above.

  “Luis is in shock, Ray,” Claire said. “He probably has pneumonia from being out all night in the rain.” She stopped and worked her hands together, the dirt rolling from her palms as she pressed them together. “I’m sorry about what happened to your father,” she said, almost as an afterthought, though Tom knew her well enough to know it wasn’t. “I didn’t know him well but I understand from Tom that he was good to both of you.”

  Ray n
odded. He was looking now toward Billy, and then when he saw Tom’s eyes on him, he turned back to Luis. “How is he?”

  “He’ll get better,” Tom said. “They both will. They need some time and they need some rest, but they’ll get better.”

  “I never thought it would go this far,” Ray said.

  “I know,” Tom replied.

  Tom had never thought life could ever be like this. But it was, and they stood apart from each other for a long while in the silence that followed until Ray shifted, turning back toward the house, and said, “You’ll help me bury him, won’t you?”

  You know any of those boys?” Kelly asked. She was sitting in the passenger seat of Hastings’s patrol car, watching as an old Buick with Mexican plates went past and parked around the corner behind Dario’s bar.

  Kelly watched the men begin to appear from the side street, filing out onto Main.

  “New recruits for one of the wells?” Hastings guessed.

  “No,” Kelly said, “I really don’t think that’s the way this town is headed.” She looked around toward the courthouse up the street and their office in the basement. “How long since we called Tollville?” Kelly asked.

  “Can’t be more than half an hour,” Hastings said.

  They sat in the patrol car, Hastings behind the wheel and Kelly in the passenger seat, watching as the men went in through the front door. The last of them paused outside to light a cigarette, shading his face for a moment with his cupped hands.

  “They don’t look like any locals I’ve seen,” Hastings said.

  “Reinforcements,” Kelly said.

  “I’ll be glad when Tollville shows.”