It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (11 page)

“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 that’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.”

“Kind of figured that.”

“Well then?”

“Three now, four later.”

“How about for your horse?’

This made him laugh. He took his hat off, ran his hand through his hair.

“That’s just for not seeing you, man.”

“Well then, we might have to reach an agreement here.”

He crossed his hands on the pommel, shrugged with his shoulders and his eyebrows both. Behind him the buzzards were drifting through the sky. I shook my head again, looked ahead, to Uvalde, and agreed to meet him in a week at a bar down toward Carrizo Springs, a stack of cash in an envelope.

But still, his horse wasn’t for sale, period. For five hundred dollars more, though, he’d let me use the phone in the bunkhouse, if I kept it short and didn’t bleed everywhere.

A little after one o’clock, he swung back around to the stock tank to pick me up. He was in a truck now, a different one than I’d seen.

“Thought you said lunch,” I said, climbing in my side.

“Everybody’s there at lunch,” he said back, grinding us into gear. His saddle was in the back of the truck, the skirt sweated all the way through. On the dash was an old bag of sunflower seeds. I didn’t ask if I could have them, just started eating, shells and all.

“How far out are we?” I asked.

“What, you a squirrel, too?” he said, leaning over the wheel the way guys do when they’re getting paid by the hour. In addition to my being a mule.

“How far to the house?” I said, trying to chew everything I’d stuffed into my mouth.

“Thirty minutes,” he said, nodding north and east. “Why? You on medicine or something?”

“Just getting my bearings.”

He laughed to himself about me and pulled some old clothes from behind the seat. I took them and asked the question with my eyes.

“Nobody’s going to see you,” he said. “But just in case.”

I changed as he drove, buttoned the shirt over the warm bandoleer. The boots even fit.

“They’re on sale this week,” the hand said. “Hundred even.”

“Deal of the year,” I said, trying to flex my toes.

“So what are those, really?” he said, about the canisters.

“Late,” I said, and then we were there, nosed up to the back porch of a long, narrow bunkhouse. The hand looked to me, to the bunkhouse, then ferreted the keys out of the ignition.

“I’m going to the house,” he said. “It’ll probably be better if you’re not here when I get back.” He was talking Spanish again.

I looked all around.

He directed me back down the road we’d come in on. “Over to the north’s a draw. It leads down to the pens. Nobody’s there right now.”

I nodded, understood what he was saying: that that was the place to stay, until whoever I was calling came.

“How far?” I said.

“Not even a mile.”

“I need to dial anything special to get out?” I said, hooking my chin to the idea of the bunkhouse phone.

He shook his head no, added, “And don’t take anything.”

“You know where I’ll be.”

“Exactly.”

With that he tipped his hat and backed away, leaned into the walk-up to the main house to report on whatever he’d been doing all morning. I watched him until he was gone but didn’t chance stepping around the bunkhouse to follow him all the way. Because I didn’t want to get spotted, yeah, but more because I had maybe eight hours left to deliver the canisters.

I shook my head no as I dialed the numbers, then leaned against the wall the phone was on, stared all the way down it. The light gave out before the room ended. This was a bunkhouse for thirty cowboys, but there were only six beds in use. The other way, behind me, was an added-in kitchen, from after the rancher’s wife quit cooking for everybody, probably.

On the stove was a pan one of the other hands had boiled noodles in for lunch. Half of them were still there, cold. I pulled the pan to me, starting fingering the noodles in, and then Manuel was on the line, waiting for me to say something. It was the only number I had memorized, beside my own: the pharmacy.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s me.”

He laughed about this. I could see him sitting on his stool in the stockroom.

“Refill?” he said.

“Yeah,” I told him, “but later. Listen, though, first. Just let me finish. I’ve got a proposition for you.”

On his end, Manuel was just breathing. Which is to say listening.

“I’ve got some money stashed up in Piedras Negras to pay for this. But it has to happen now. Ten minutes ago, really. Yesterday’d be better, even.”

“How much?” Manuel said, with me already.

“Fifteen.”

“Make it twenty.”

“You don’t even know what it is yet.”

“Just on principle.”

I swallowed a mouthful of noodles, said, “You’ve still got those cousins in Ciudad Acuna, yeah?”

The pens were just where the hand had told me they were. And they were just like all the other pens in the world: the fences and gates up on packed mounds of dirt, at least in comparison to the wallowed-out places a hundred years of cattle had been pushed through. There was an old wooden windmill, too, with a concrete tank and chipped trough. I didn’t need it anymore, though. From the bunkhouse refrigerator, I had a sackful of cokes and three sandwiches. When most of them were gone, I occupied myself peeling skin from my burned shoulders, arranging it on the board I’d been using as a plate. From the grey trees between me and the main house, a big horned owl was either watching me or sleeping with its eyes open.

I tried to make my skin look like a snake shed, but my breath kept moving it.

By four, I heard my ride coming.

Fifty miles away, even, people were probably stopping, cocking their heads over to the sound.

Manuel’s cousin was driving a dune buggy. Not just a converted bug, either, but a full Baja-looking frame, complete with stickers and chrome you’d have to be able to see for miles, even by starlight. And the exhaust, it was pointing straight up, for all the world to hear. No muffler.

The cousin slid sideways to a stop, raised his goggles to me, shrugged.

“Uvalde, señor?” he said.

He was being funny.

Behind his seat, strapped in with the kind of metal you use to hang mufflers, was a pony-keg-as-gas tank. The engine sounded like it was running on methanol, maybe, if not just straight nitrous. Manuel’s cousin patted the black leather bucket seat beside him and I grinned as if this hurt, climbed down into it.

“Uvalde,” I said, nodding, and he smiled and jammed the shifter back hard, the sand paddles spraying an unnecessary roostertail behind us, the two runners up front going weightless for a few feet. I was paying twenty thousand dollars for this.

Provided Manuel wasn’t just going to take the whole ammo box.

Part of the deal had been payment in full, whether I made it back this time or not. Which came down to payment now. I didn’t have any choice, though, and, obvious as Manuel’s cousin was here, it was him or nothing. And he was fast. I had no complaints there.

At the first fence, he reached behind my seat, handed me the bolt cutters, and I snapped the barbed wire apart. The first of six sets of it for us, and he’d probably cut three or four more just getting to me, so that we made a line, I was sure. From Del Rio to Uvalde. Or even as deep as Ciudad Acuna.