River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  She turned down the long dirt driveway that had led to their house. From the gate, she could already see it hadn’t fared well in the intervening years. The adobe walls surrounding the yard had fallen over, the windows broken out, the bricks faded and chipped. A hole in the green, pitched roof might have been made by a meteorite or a small explosion or simple neglect.

  She stopped the car. “I don’t want to see any more, Byrd. Do you?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Not here. You’re right, it’s just too fuckin’ sad.”

  Without another word, she turned around on the dirt lane and headed back to River Road. Their day of touring wasn’t over, not by a long shot. They had more important places to visit, and only one day in which to see them.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  After they left the old McCall farm, the place where Wade had met Molly and, shortly thereafter, Byrd—the two people who would become his lifelong best friends—they drove out of town, still heading south on River Road, the Rio Grande always there to the right.

  They passed the site of the carnival where Wade had spent a summer evening with Jenna Blair, the year they were both fifteen. He had won her three stuffed animals and was rewarded with his first French kiss and his first bare breast (under the blouse and bra, but flesh against his hand anyway, her nipple spiking against his palm). Earlier, they’d eaten enough corn dogs and pizza, cotton candy and churros to revolt a legion of vegans. When they found a quiet place behind some of the carnies’ trailers and the kissing had started, everything else had been forgotten. They had made out for an hour before Jenna’s older sister found them and told them Jenna was in trouble for breaking curfew. Wade had gone to bed that night unable to sleep for hours, his head spinning, his lips and tongue and teeth and hands tingling with the memories of all they had done.

  Two months later, Byrd had gone to the Permian Basin Fair in Odessa with Jenna, won six prizes, and was even been invited to put his hand inside Jenna’s unsnapped jeans. Byrd, a year older than Wade, had been experienced enough to know he’d better not take advantage of the opportunity until Jenna was of legal age because, as he explained to Wade the next day, once he revved up her engines there wouldn’t be any stopping her.

  That had been the summer before, though…

  “Do you want to swing by your old place, Wade?” Molly asked. They were approaching the McHenry Road turnoff, which would take them directly to the old frame house he had lived in, hard by the river, a few miles away from the McCall farm.

  “No thanks.” He didn’t have to think about it. He never wanted to see that house again. Nothing happy had started there, nothing good. Not like Byrd and Molly’s place, where he’d spotted Molly from his second-hand Stingray bike with its raised handlebars and banana seat.

  Anyway, he understood where they were really headed. They all did, even though none of them had spoken it aloud. They’d agreed to go to Malo Duro, or Palo Duro, but what they meant was they were going to Smuggler’s Canyon. That had been the centerpiece of their lives, hadn’t it? Not school, not the Mercantile or the BBQ Shack. It had always been Smuggler’s Canyon that mattered.

  Soon, he could see it ahead, a buff rock outcropping that stood out against the sturdy, tall mesquite trees lining the riverbank there, mostly green though beginning to lose their leaves for the winter. These particular trees, almost impossible to cut down in the days before chain saws, had given Palo Duro its name. Smuggler’s Canyon had damn near snatched away its respectability.

  There had been no legal border crossing for miles around, but that didn’t mean the border wasn’t crossed. At Smuggler’s Canyon, the river had been a passageway for longer than the international border had existed. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the Gadsden Purchase of 1852 had officially determined the border between the U.S. and Mexico—before that, this had all been Mexico—but to those who crossed at the canyon, those treaties were scraps of paper with little significance. The river was narrow there, the channel closed in by the granite outcroppings thrust up through the limestone beds. The mesquite trees were convenient to tie boats to. And the limestone formations on what became the U.S. side offered ideal hiding places, caves and cliffs and hidey-holes that a smuggler or two or ten could duck into until the law lost interest.

  Every parent in Palo Duro told his or her kids to keep away from Smuggler’s Canyon. There are illegals there all the time, they said. Drug smugglers. Criminals.

  Of course, this just spurred every kid in Palo Duro to get over there at the first possible opportunity. Most of them quickly lost interest, since the threat of the border patrol or the county sheriff made it a bad place for beer parties, and there were thousands of square miles of West Texas more welcoming.

  Wade, Byrd, and Molly had fallen in love with the place. They’d been fascinated by its whispered history, the tales of smugglers and thieves, the fact that raiding Apache warriors had hidden out in the canyon, chased there not only by white soldiers but by Comanche war parties. The rock art had gripped their imaginations and they’d spent hour after hour studying it, imagining what it might have meant.

  They had explored many of its caves, and made one with a natural chimney for campfire smoke into a kind of secret clubhouse. They’d stashed snacks in surplus store ammo cans, comics, books and magazines (even burying, in a side cavern, Playboys and Penthouses that they only looked at when Molly wasn’t along). They’d meet there on summer mornings and spend the whole day in the canyon, exploring, talking, reading, swimming in the river. On a portable boom box they played cassette tapes: Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, Springsteen, Joe Jackson, John Cougar, U2, the Clash, the Police, Elvis Costello. At dusk on summer evenings, bats flowed from the upper reaches like smoke from a wildfire, and one year a pair of bald eagles built a nest in the rocks overhead and fished in the river in the late afternoons.

  Occasionally they did see illegal immigrants swim across the river, which though shallow for much of its length, was relatively deep here because the canyon walls forced it into such a narrow channel. At those times, they ducked into their cave and stayed quiet until the groups had moved on.

  Wade watched now as Molly turned onto the dirt track that led to the rocky outcropping. Everything in Palo Duro had changed; this looked just the same. On the way, some of the open land had been carved into farms since the old days, and irrigation canals drew more of the water and majesty from the river. But once they passed over the last of those, all was as it had ever been. Nature had weathered these rocks, but not visibly in his lifetime. Wind and rain and sun sculpted them, and like all sculpture, they experienced minute changes over the years that made each moment spent with them all the more valuable. He had been a kid among these rocks, and in many ways he had become a man among them. They would always, always, hold a special place in his heart.

  * * *

  Wade’s father had been a cruel man. Like all abusers, Brent Scheiner beat his wife and son at the slightest provocation—a bad grade, a dropped fly ball in a little league game, an icebox without beer in it or a table without dinner on it. Excuses and justifications, never reasons. Even as a young boy Wade had understood that there were never reasons for such abuse.

  Dad convinced himself that he had reasons aplenty. His wife was no good, she kept a filthy house and she slept around with other men and she couldn’t cook worth a damn, and he had only married her because he felt sorry for her in the first place. Then she up and got pregnant, just to trap him into staying, no doubt. So he stayed. “He don’t know no better,” was her attempt at an explanation, the few times Wade had pressed for one. “It’s how he was raised up, and how he’s lived all his whole life. He don’t mean nothing by it, it’s just his way.” Wade’s paternal grandparents had both died before he was born, so he had no way of knowing how likely her story was.

  They had lived in Dripping Springs then. Gateway to the Hill Country, according to the big sign at the edge of town. Dad had worked as a ranch hand and then, afterward he
almost cut his knee off (and oh, yes, that gave him plenty of excuses to throw punches, because it hurt when the weather changed or when it was humid or when he bumped it, for the rest of his life, and if you got in his way then, God help you), at Dripping Springs Feed & Seed, which was where he met nineteen-year-old Gloria Parton.

  She’d been a cute blonde, in the pictures Wade had seen of his mother in her younger days, slender but without the breasts of Dolly Parton, to whom she was not even distantly related. This had been another topic of occasional disagreement between his parents, usually after Brent had downed a few and maybe flipped through a stroke book—he had a stash of them in his workroom, which was where Wade stole the ones he took to the cave. He would start to grope and pinch his wife, and if Gloria Parton Scheiner dared complain, because, for instance, she was making dinner or because Wade was standing right there, Dad would start in on the fact that he had expected her breasts to keep growing, so she wouldn’t embarrass the Parton name. Wade had never been certain if Dolly Parton’s breasts had been natural or surgically augmented, but he wasn’t about to suggest to his mother that she consider surgery, because the expenditure of that kind of money would have resulted in just as many beatings as were incited by the relative flatness of her chest.

  Wade grew to hate the tenor of their voices as they rose toward inevitable violence, the flat sound of his father’s first slap against his mother’s cheek and her sharp intake of breath, then her almost silent weeping as the beating continued. He hated her for letting it continue almost as much as he hated the old man for starting it in the first place.

  Once Wade reached adolescence, he became an acceptable alternate target, and by the time he was thirteen the childhood spankings and slaps had graduated into brawls. Dad was muscular and wiry, all torso and huge arms and shoulders on bandy little legs, and it was easy for him to beat the crap out of a frightened kid.

  They had to move from Dripping Springs during his thirteenth year. Dad won the town’s annual Knights of Columbus Big Gun Raffle, buying a dozen chances for two bucks each and collecting, at the end of it, a Remington bolt action “Varmint Special” rifle. He’d owned guns his whole life, of course, but never a brand-new one. He took to shooting it from the front porch of their house outside of town, aiming at anything that moved and a few things that didn’t. One neighbor complained when two of his dogs went missing—shot, he believed, by Brent Scheiner. Then the milkman complained about the bullet hole in his milk truck. That had brought the law to the Scheiner home, and when Dad pulled a gun on a sheriff’s deputy, he earned himself a couple months in lockup.

  Wade remembered those two months as the best of his early life. It was just he and his mom, and they were more relaxed and happy than they’d ever been. They toured around the region doing things Dad had never wanted to, heading into Austin and San Antonio, swimming in the Guadalupe River, dining in Fredericksburg and Kerrville and Bandera.

  But the county let Wade’s father go soon enough. When he got home, he was even meaner than before. Mean and scared at the same time. He began to insist that people were out to get him, and he never left the house without a gun or two. When he went into town, people crossed the street to avoid him. He lost his job at the Feed & Seed. Wade’s teachers started calling the house to ask about Wade’s frequent black eyes and broken bones, which increased his dad’s paranoia.

  Unable to get hired on anywhere, believing—not without merit—that everyone in town hated him, Brent Scheiner packed up his frightened family and all their belongings and moved out of Dripping Springs. A guy he had once worked as a ranch hand with told him about an opportunity in Palo Duro, working on a cotton farm, and Dad got the job.

  Wade met Molly, then Byrd, which was good.

  But his father dropped deeper down the spiral of drink and fear and self-loathing that made him abusive. He kept his guns out of sight, passing as a regular guy at work, for a while, but when he came home, he needed someone to pound on. More and more often, as the years went by and he got bigger, that was Wade.

  Only that all came to an end the year Byrd turned seventeen and filled out. He worked out with weights at school, joined the varsity football team (which didn’t last; Byrd was never a guy who participated well in team sports), and although he was never tall, he was built, cut, and strong.

  * * *

  “We’re here.” Molly said, bringing the SUV to a sliding stop on the gravel circle that served as parking for Smuggler’s Canyon at the rocks. There was another vehicle, a maroon Kia Sportage, parked there, with a foil windshield shade, but its occupants were nowhere in sight. As always, a single plastic outhouse stood at the edge of the parking area with a rock-based trash can beside it.

  “Smuggler’s Canyon,” Byrd said. “Who’s got the tittie mags?”

  “I thought you didn’t do those anymore,” Wade said.

  “I thought maybe I’d get wood, for nostalgia’s sake.”

  “Byrd,” Molly said. “That’s something I really don’t need to hear.”

  “Just cover your ears and pretend you never knew,” Byrd said.

  “I might just do that.”

  They opened their doors at the same time—Byrd was a little slower getting out than the others—then they all stood on the gravel and breathed in the smell of the river, wet and dry at the same time, and the peppery aroma of the dusty rock. “That smell,” Wade said.

  “Takes you back,” Byrd said.

  “That it does, brother,” Wade said. “Way, way back.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  For all Wade knew, his mom really did sleep around. Gloria Parton Scheiner never worked more than part-time—at a grocery store in Dripping Springs, and as a cashier at the Lou’s Hardware two afternoons a week in Palo Duro. But she always seemed to have a few bucks in her purse, despite her husband’s efforts to keep her utterly dependent on him. And there were times she went out during the day to “run errands,” coming home with no bags or evident purchases, but a smile on her face. As a kid, he didn’t think much of it. As an adult, he suspected she was seeking comfort in the arms of others because her husband was such a monstrous asshole.

  If so, he could hardly blame her.

  The events that changed Wade’s life really began, he remembered, during the summer vacation of his sixteenth year.

  The day was hot, the kind of dripping hot it gets when the humidity builds but the summer storm season hasn’t set in yet. He had been to El Paso with his mom, where she let him buy a bunch of new comics, the cyberpunk science-fiction novel Neuromancer by William Gibson, and the new Joe Jackson album. He bought it on vinyl, and would record it on a cassette later to take to the canyon. As soon as he got home, he called Byrd and invited him over to check out his haul.

  Twenty minutes later, Byrd was there and they were in his room—really, the garage of their small house, converted into a bedroom—drinking Cokes and listening to side one of the record. Byrd lay on the shag carpeting (gold, brown, and black threads creating a pattern that revealed almost no stains) engrossed in a Conan comic. His dark brown hair was long in those days, always hanging down in his eyes, and he tossed his head to move it. Wade’s hair, blond and thick, was kept in a shorter cut, because the old man didn’t like it in his face and to Wade it wasn’t worth getting beat up over.

  Byrd put the comic down and rummaged through the rest of the stack. “How come there are chicks in the X-Men?” he asked. “That don’t make any sense. Shouldn’t it be X-People or somethin’?”

  Wade was about to respond when the front door banged open and slammed shut, causing a vibration that could be felt throughout the house. “Crap,” Wade said. “The old man’s home early.”

  Byrd just shrugged. It took a lot to make him nervous, Wade had noticed. Especially since he’d made the football team. He seemed to take life in stride, no matter what it threw at him. His new status at school hadn’t turned him into some kind of jerk, which Wade had briefly feared it might. Byrd still liked comics and fantasy and
hanging with Wade and sometimes Molly down at the canyon, just as he always had.

  Wade had his license already, but no working vehicle. He was rebuilding a 1968 Camaro his mom’s brother had left him in his will, a document that otherwise detailed only debts unpaid and promises unkept. It would be a sweet ride when it was done, but that summer it was a long way from done. Byrd had a ’77 Chevy pickup, but its engine had seized up toward the end of the school year, and he hadn’t raised enough money to replace it yet. So while Byrd was seventeen and Wade was sixteen, they were both on bikes again for the duration of the summer. The shared hardship kept them close during a time when their lives were changing in other significant ways.

  “Yeah, only he sounds pissed,” Wade said. “He’s not usually home this early, so something must’ve happened.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Maybe we should get out of here. Go down to the cave, or maybe your place.”

  “Okay,” Byrd said. He had already started reading about the mutant superheroes.

  Wade knew that Byrd knew his dad beat him up. It wasn’t something they talked about, although they had danced around it a few times. He just didn’t see the point of involving his friends in what was strictly a family problem.

  Besides, if the old man discovered that he’d told outsiders, the next beating would be worse than the last.

  They had to go through the house to get out, since the big garage door had been sealed shut in the room conversion. By then, Dad and Mom were engaged in a screaming match. He was interrogating her about their shopping expedition, which he characterized as “throwin’ my fuckin’ money away on fuckin’ bullshit!”