It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles

by Stephen Graham Jones

  I twisted the lid off the container I’d let them drink from, and held a mouthful of water for a long time. It was perfect. Better than that, because these were coyotes who had to have been sick with strychnine before, so knew how it smelled, it was clean, too.

  The second bottle I left on one of the thicker fenceposts, wiped down and shiny. With the sun behind it, it would draw border cops from miles away. Maybe even Refugio.

  “Drink up,” I said to the idea of him, and moved on, only limping a little.

  Up north, I’d guess, all the Canadian-American smugglers probably get all these nice little moments where they can kick back and watch the aurora borealis, painting the snow.

  Down here, what you get is the sky so black and heavy it feels like felt. Used to, I thought all the fast stars I saw streaking around were aliens, but then somebody told me they were satellites. I still like to see them.

  With Refugio’s water in me, and one of the sticks in my mouth — I’d cleaned it with a handful of sand — I made a few more miles that night, then found an overhang of rock I’d used before, spent the heat of the morning there.

  The buzzards settled down about a hundred yards out, holding their wings up for probably ten seconds after they landed, as if the ground were hot or something, and they weren’t committed to it yet. Really it was probably just their chest muscles contracting, after having been stretched open so long.

  If I’d have had a .22, I’d have plunked each of them in the head, then eaten them raw, carp that they were, and wore their feathers for a cape.

  I’d be a legend then, yeah.

  But I didn’t have a .22. And legends, they’re always already dead or are heading for a big gunfight of some kind. So I was content, I suppose. As I could be, anyway, with no money, no food, no more water. One boot. Maybe half the world’s supply of lunar material piled between my feet. A daughter two hundred miles away, in another country.

  It was probably a good thing I didn’t have a gun.

  I woke some time later, unaware I’d even been asleep. It was like I’d just blinked, and the slideshow the pasture was had advanced to the next frame. But then I saw what had opened my eyes, crawling like a bug across the brown: a rancher’s truck. It was cruising along the fence, dragging a plume of dirt. Moving from gate to gate, I guessed. Because he was going too fast to be looking for a lost heifer or scoping the buzzards.

  I didn’t flick an eyebrow, just let him slip past.

  In a perfect world he’d have been pulling a flat trailer of hay, and I’d have been able to hide under the tarp for as long as he was going my way. Maybe longer, to wherever he parked the rest of the trucks. As it was, I just waited for his dust to settle, fell in behind him.

  An hour shy of dark, I came to that gate he’d been headed for, and, just for the ritual of it, opened it to walk through, then shut it behind me. On top of it I balanced the stump of the silver nitrate stick I’d been chewing on all afternoon, so that it would fall onto the boots of whoever opened it next.

  Usually, I’d never leave any sign that I’d been in a place.

  Now, though, I don’t know. You get sentimental with your trash when you’re not so sure you’ve got a lot more to leave. For that brief, what-the-hell instant when the cowboy or pumper or whoever was looking down at this out-of-place stick, I’d be alive again.

  Twenty minutes into the new pasture, of course, I wanted to go back for the stick, because it was a sign of defeat. But in two days, it might all come down to forty minutes. I let the stick stay, pushed on, left Refugio’s empty bottle broken against a rock.

  Soon enough the only thing warm on me was my back and shoulders and neck, and the canisters. Their metal casing had soaked up the heat of the day, was giving it back to me now. I counted them with my fingers as I walked. With the client rep dead now, each one of them was worth nearly thirteen thousand dollars.

  That would buy me boots for the rest of my life.

  For a few steps then I walked backwards, to make sure my coyote escorts were still with me, skulking through the bushes and bear grass. They were. I saluted them with two fingers, shook my head with something like wonder, or disgust — was there a difference anymore? — then turned around, tried to make all the time I could on bloody feet and no calories.

  By dawn I’d covered eight miles, I guessed, and was breathing hard.

  This time I couldn’t sit down, though. I was to the point that, if I stopped, even to lean on something, I was probably going to fall asleep, be dead to the world for twelve hours. Which would take care of the rest of my life as well.

  So I stumbled on, no fenceposts anymore, sucking more sticks than I knew I should, and a few hours into it tried cracking a cactus open for the juice, but just got spines. I ate the meat of it anyway. It was damp, stringy, tasted green. I ate another then, and another, and didn’t throw them up for maybe twenty minutes.

  It was hard to stand again after that. I tried to talk myself up, forward. It worked for a while, until I started hearing something else under my voice. It wasn’t me.

  Over the next rise, cows were lowing about something.

  I swallowed, which hurt, and stepped from the road, crept to the rise, and lay down to look over. There were maybe sixty head. They were eating sweetcake probably left by the rancher I’d seen. The way they were milling around, they’d just found it, too. After making sure the rancher wasn’t around, I waded into the shit-smeared rumps, reached into the cake for the chunks of molasses I knew were going to be there.

  As a kid, I’d seen dogs rush the steers in their pens to get the molasses. Now I understood.

  When the cows tried to nose in with their heavy heads, I beat on them with the side of my fist like a chimpanzee, and kept eating. It was sugar instead of meat, yeah, when meat was what I really needed — something marbled white with fat — but even with a two-by-four, I doubt I could have brought one of those cows down that night. And if I’d tried for one of the calves, the mommas would have hooked me under the ribs, flung me over her back, into the herd.

  Now, of course, it’s different.

  I just look at them and they flare their nostrils and back away. Like everything else. This was before I died, though. When I still could die.

  I ate the cake until I couldn’t eat anymore, and then I stood, nodded once to the cows, and went on down the road. I threw it all up an hour later, and cried, I think, stringing my stomach juices away from my mouth, out of my nose. And then I counted the canisters, wiped my eyes, took off again, for Uvalde.

  Tonight would be the night the coyotes had been waiting for, I knew.

  Dusk came this time while I wasn’t looking. It was just suddenly dark again. Another blink. And, like I expected, with the night came the coyotes. They weren’t nipping at me yet, but they were closer than before. They’d saved me from the rat-poison water just because they didn’t want my meat to go bad.

  I laughed about this, stumbled to a knee, then stood again fast, like launching off the blocks at a trackmeet. I couldn’t start running, though. Not because a coyote can run forever, and will, but because I had maybe fifty yards in me at most. Then something was going to pop behind my eyes.

  It was going to pop anyway, I knew. But not yet. Not until Uvalde.

  At some point I’d dropped my fence stake. At another point I turned, slung my one boot back at the coyotes. It tasted like blood, and the salt of dried sweat, from when I’d still been sweating. It kept them occupied for maybe ten minutes.

  Soon enough I realized I wasn’t walking in the ruts anymore either.

  This is what dying was like, I knew. It’s not all at once, but a thousand small cuts, on top of each other. I threaded another silver nitrate stick up from my pocket, cashed it against my cheek. It was perfect, even if it tasted like the piss of the man who’d killed me.

  I smiled to myself, fell forward again, to my raw fingertips, and then couldn’t get my balance back, staggered into an accidental, downhill run. The coyotes fell in al
ongside me, loping easy, their tongues lolling out, the saliva stringing off because dinner was close.

  Suddenly, out of nowhere, dry fingers were reaching for me from all sides — trees. I pushed through, fighting them, and they delivered me to older, less forgiving trees, which pinballed me forward, pulling at my bandoleer and at the burned skin of my right shoulder until I finally fell forward into open air again.

  I had too much momentum to stop, crashed over a concrete trough, into a wallowed out place that was still damp with piss and shit. Stock tanks. This was a pasture with cattle. I was at some old stock tanks. Above me, silhouetted against the stars, a windmill, turning slow, its rod creaking up and down.

  One of the grinning coyotes stepped out into the hoof-packed dirt. I nodded to it, my head loose on my neck, then turned, monkeyed up the four foot concrete tank that fed the trough, tipped forward face first into it.

  The water was warm on top and cool underneath, and it was everything good in the world. The surface was coated with bugs that danced away from me in waves. Under that surface, spinachy strings of algae were reaching up just far enough so as not to get burned by the midday sun, when the water magnified it.

  The algae caressed my back as I floated, and drank, and maybe even smiled. In the middle, for some reason, were the rusted remains of an old barrel or tub. If I floated just right, the lip of the barrel would wedge against my back, keep my head above water.

  Just before I either fell asleep or drowned — I wasn’t sure, then — I realized that the bandoleer Refugio had left for me, and the rat poison water, it meant that he’d known all along I wasn’t going south.

  Out in the darkness, the coyotes were drinking from the trough, snapping at each other. Roosting in the black trees, probably, the buzzards.

  I was a world away, though.

  This is the part where I finally talk about Tanya, I know. Except I don’t want to.

  I’ve never even seen where her family buried her. Outside Austin, I’m pretty sure, where she grew up. Maybe in one of those hill country cemeteries you see from the road, the weathered gravestones pushing up through a coat of yellow flowers like a natural formation. The ground in those places is rock, and thick with cactus, all the trees clogged with mistletoe.

  Still, that’s where I always imagined she’d be.

  Her headstone won’t say anything about me, though. We were married, yeah, but, because she had warrants, she never got her license changed, or did any of the name change stuff you probably have to do, and a ring was always something I was going to buy her after the next job, so who knows. Her family might not even have any idea about me, or Laurie. To them I might just be an accomplice, the one who got away.

  When Lem came through that first year, heading for Argentina or some perfect place without extradition, I’d asked him about her.

  “You think I went and saw her in the hospital, man?” he’d said, laughing in spite of how shot up he was.

  I’d stared at him for a long moment then. As far as I knew, she’d died in that first hail of bullets. But they’d kept her alive for a while. She never would have said my name to them, I know. It wasn’t even a question. What is a question is if she ever woke up, looked around for me.

  In the papers I never could find in Mexico back then, I know her cause of death would have been gunshot wounds. That was one way to look at it. The other way was a lot more romantic.

  But she would have wanted it like I did it, I’m pretty sure. Better that I run for at least a few years with Laurie than stand there in cuffs and leg irons and watch her die, Laurie in the custody of the state forever. Tanya wouldn’t have wanted her to grow up like that. To follow in Tanya’s own footsteps, pretty much. Have no choice but to.

  The facts of us are that we met in the parking lot of a Safeway. I lay under her truck and tapped the starter with the tie-rod handle of a hammer I’d welded, and then she bought me a drive-through milkshake as thanks, and if there’s any other way to fall in love, I don’t know about it.

  At the time of our last bank job together, I was twenty-eight and she was twenty-seven, and Laurie was almost four.

  Sometimes still, walking along the shaded lee of a brick building, I’ll remember holding Tanya’s hand, as if I could possibly guide her around all the trash on the sidewalk, and I’ll apologize to her, for losing Laurie like I have.

  But she can’t see me like this, either, Laurie.

  If she’s anything like her mom, I mean, she wouldn’t care, and would hug me and hold my hand and not leave for hours, even when I begged her to. And if she’s like me inside, I don’t know. Hopefully she’s not.

  If it matters, Larkin just died, I’m pretty sure. There was nothing ugly about it. It was just like a lamp, turning off. You’d think there’d be something different about the eyes, but, in the first few minutes anyway, there’s not really. I know because he’s my third, now.

  Instead of listening to any of the noises his body’s about to start making, I just turned the radio in my ears up. All the songs are new to me. It’s a new world I live in now.

  Except some of us still remember the things that came before. The old gods. I’ve become one of them, I think.

  Or something.

  That next morning, an hour into the day maybe, I woke to a man on horseback slapping my water with the tips of his reins.

  He was Mexican, a cowboy, a ranch hand. Just watching me, his expression somehow both bored and amused.

  “You’re alive,” he said in Spanish.

  I stood, the water rushing down me, the green spinach clinging.

  “I wouldn’t have known you were there,” he said, patting his horse on the neck, “except my boy here wouldn’t drink from the bowl.”

  The trough. I looked past him. About fifty yards out was a wall of cattle, come in for their morning drink but stopped because I was there, polluting their water.

  They had that good of noses? Or, really: I smelled that bad?

  “I’m not dead,” I said.

  “I know,” the cowboy said, in English, like he was showing off. “And you’re not Mexican, either.”

  I shrugged like he had me then, yeah. And understood that this was why the situation was funny to him. It was a reversal — the white guy was the wet. Dripping, even.

  “You just out for a swim, yeah?” he said, his horse prancing around sideways from me.

  I stared at the cattle for a measured handful of seconds.

  “What are you going to believe here?” I finally asked, then settled my eyes back on him.

  He smiled a little.

  “That ordnance?” he said, about the canisters bandoleered across my chest, draped now with moss.

  “Suppositories,” I said, trying to play the game here. Or keep up at least. “Where am I?”

  The hand stared at me and then, with his teeth, peeled some skin up from his lip, turned his head to spit it out. All without ever looking away from me.

  “Let’s fast forward some,” he said. “I’ve got stuff needs doing before lunch, here.”

  I nodded, sat back onto the submerged barrel. So long as I didn’t get out of the water, he wouldn’t know I didn’t have any boots. It would help in the coming negotiations, I was pretty sure.

  “Fast forward then,” I said. “You work for Granger Mosely. He pays you — what? Seven-fifty a month?”

  “Twelve hundred. Plus room and board.”

  He was lying, prepping his side of the negotiating table too, but I smiled anyway, rubbed a bug or something from the side of my nose. “It’s not enough,” I shrugged, like this were the most obvious thing in Texas. “Unless you … what’s the good word? Supplement? Moonlight?”

  The hand was still just staring at me. No doubt he had a pistol in one of his saddlebags.

  “This is a proposition then?” he said. “Like — like marriage. You want me to get in bed with you?”

  “Let’s keep our clothes on if we can. But no, I’m not asking you to bend over here, if t
hat’s the question. I’m just … I guess it depends, really. Let me start over. You knew Sebby, right?”

  This heated his eyes up a bit. He danced his horse up so its head was out over the water. It still wouldn’t drink, though.

  “Why do you say that?” he hissed.

  “No reason. Just — I liked him. And he was smart, Sebby was. Smart enough to, y’know, maybe suggest somebody get work on a certain ranch. It would make things easier down the road. And nobody’d be getting hurt, even. Just people finding work, families staying together, all that.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Man. That’s a shame, yeah?”

  “I don’t see any families, either.”

  We stared at each other for maybe forty seconds, then. Finally he wheeled his horse around, whistled sharp for the cattle. They just moaned back.

  I was smiling now.

  He reined his horse back around, hard.

  “I don’t know any Sebby,” he said, low and in Spanish again, like the windmill might be trying to listen here. “Not for two months, I don’t know any Sebby.”

  Exactly. Two straight-money paychecks, with nothing on top.

  “Nobody does anymore,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows to me, to be sure he was hearing this right.

  I nodded, shrugged.

  “Consider me the new Sebby,” I said.

  “And why would I want to do that?”

  “Why were you doing it before?”

  He shook his head, leaned down to cup a mouthful of water up to his mouth.

  “Three hundred per,” he said.

  “Per head?” I said, incredulous.

  “Per crossing.”

  Better. Still, though, I couldn’t let myself smile.

  “I’ll go three,” I said, my lips purposely thin.

  “Cash,” the hand said.

  “That might be a problem this trip.”