It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (14 page)

If you don’t keep your head tilted back, all the unaware people up in life, the real world, they’ll fall through into this too.

Maybe.

There’s no chance to think of any other way it might be, though, so you close your eyes as tight as you can, and open your throat, and hope you can maintain this position long enough for whatever’s supposed to happen to happen, and in this way fourteen years can pass. A blink of the eye, yeah, but it’s the way corpses blink.

And when you come back, you don’t know anything. It’s all been washed away, rounded off, dulled so much you can’t pick it up.

Larkin’s lucky, really. He gets to stay there, dead.

Some of us have to open our eyes again, though. When I did, all I could see was lines of brown. For probably two weeks, I watched it, not understanding, but then something stepped into all that wire, twitched its nose around in a way that probably made me smile an infant’s smile. Then, all I did was turn my head to follow where this moving thing was going. That such things existed in this world of brown lines was a miracle to me.

A month after that, I’d pulled myself far enough from the center of my roll of wire to push against the sides, fall out into the dirt. The rabbits sat back on their haunches, canted their ears over at me. I studied each of them in turn, then turned back to the roll of wire, tried to get back in.

It was all I knew.

Our first day in the storage unit together, Larkin finally slid this notebook back across the cement to me. He’d just used one page. This was after he’d remembered me, of course. When he thought he knew what I wanted, why I was there.

Written in big blocks letters like I was a child were five names, with addresses. Each of the addresses had question marks by them. Because they were from fifteen years ago. I understood, looked up to him.

He was nodding like we’d made a deal. The names were the people he’d worked with back then.

“The ones who gave you orders?” I said, the notebook loose by my knee.

We were sitting on opposite walls, like this was a secret clubhouse. Larkin nodded, kept nodding. I shook my head no, looked to the metal door.

“You would never have known their names,” I told him. “They were careful. Better than that.”

“I followed them,” he said then, whispering like he was still watching them go into their office buildings or suburban homes or wherever.

I came back to Larkin, studied him now.

“Why?” I finally asked.

“Because I like to know who I’m working for too.”

I raised the list again, had to turn my head a bit sideways to really see it like I wanted to in the unsteady light of the lantern.

“This is them, then?” I said.

“I don’t know, shit. They were who got sent to talk to me, anyway. I’m not making any promises here.”

“But you had these all in your head.”

“I was real good at Memory when I was a kid.”

“These people — that was forever ago.”

“What was your first girlfriend’s middle name?” he asked.

I smiled, shrugged. Said, “She kissed me.”

“Exactly,” Larkin said back. “They paid me twenty thousand dollars for a single day’s work.”

I kept smiling. It was too late for him to live by then, of course, but I tried to pick the lock with all his paperclips and tie pins anyway, and beat on the door with him, screamed for help.

At some point, though — probably when his skin started to crack and shift — he realized I was leading him on, just playing. It probably had something to do with the Polaroids I kept taking of him every twelve hours.

Whatever else you hear about me, don’t ever believe that I’m not a killer.

It’s what I came back for.

I don’t know how long I lived with the rabbits, as one of them. The seasons didn’t matter to me. Not that there’s much to go by in Piedras Negras. I ate roots and dirt and bugs, and usually threw it up an hour or two later. As far as I knew, there was nothing wrong with this.

If the warehouse had still been occupied, or close to a road, I would have been shot, I know. Just to figure out what I was. It was just the rabbits, though, and they accepted me more or less. I couldn’t fit down into their dens or warrens or whatever, but, in the yard anyway, they tolerated me. After a few days, they even quit watching me, just let me move among them on all fours. Sometimes even rested in my shadow.

I’m pretty sure that, back then, with the rabbits as my model, I moved as they did through the heat: with my feet together. It was ridiculous, I know.

It takes a long time to come back from the dead, though. You don’t just wake up and pick up where you left off. At least I didn’t.

Whenever I threw up, too, the rabbits would gather around me, wait to pick through the vomit for softened roots. It made me feel like part of something. This is an important part of living. It got to where I looked forward to my body rejecting what I’d put into it, would smile as I threw up, dry heave for more.

At dusk, for the few moments before complete darkness, sometimes the inside of the rabbits’ tall ears would catch a full glow of sorts. Like light was leaking out. I could have stayed there forever, I think.

In my calm moments, now, I sometimes go back there still, I mean. Sit myself against the side of that warehouse in my head and watch the rabbits stand against the sunset as if keeping watch, their ears glowing on.

Things were simple, then. I didn’t have a list of people to kill. But the world is what it is, too.

Some of the litters that were born under the wire, the babies would be all wrong — rabbits, but not. The other rabbits would move in then, and ravage the babies and the mother both. It’s just instinct. But sometimes, too, one of those babies would live for a few days. Pull itself under the wire and whimper with hunger, until I’d throw up on the wire, the strings of vomit going hand over hand down.

One of those times, one of the babies even started to grow, and grow, until I woke one morning to find its protective roll of wire nudged over. All that was left was a smudge of wet in the dirt. I tasted it, tried to remember the rabbit baby that was gone, forgot it for another few hours, I’m pretty sure.

Things were different now, though. For me. Instead of sitting against the warehouse, I sat against the fence opposite it. I was watching the open door. None of the rabbits ever went inside. Because I was a rabbit, I didn’t either.

Because I was a man, though, I watched that doorway, and sometimes looked through the fence, to the ferris wheel, creaking around in the wind.

Before we had to leave Texas, Tanya and me had smuggled Laurie up into one — there was a limit of two per gondola, or whatever they’re called — and my clearest memory of that now is the way Laurie was both smiling and clutching the leg of my jeans.

I like to think that, when I was a rabbit, I could still feel her hand, small and tiny and perfect. That, if my voice would have worked, I would have even said her name, maybe, and all the rabbits would have cupped their glowing ears to me, waiting for me to say it again.

Later I would learn that, for the first couple of years after I disappeared, Refugio asked to be reassigned to the Del Rio region. Because he had a good record, and Del Rio was a bad stretch of land, where experienced border cops were in short supply, his request was granted. He didn’t care about immigration or narcotics, though.

He was looking for me.

Finally he hooked up with the hand who’d given me a ride. For two hundred more dollars, the hand let Refugio ask questions, so long as it didn’t interfere with work. What the hand was doing then was building a new stock tank and trough, right beside the one I’d slept in, like a mirror image. Because the cattle still wouldn’t drink from mine. And Granger Mosely had had the water tested over and over, had even considered drilling a new well.

In the end, it was cheaper to just replace all the pipes, and the tank and trough. The cattle still blew into the water in disgust before finally drinking it, though. They knew. Refugio did too.

I’d intrigued him. My bandoleer of moon rocks. What would they be worth? As far he knew, I’d never delivered them — had never walked up out of the pasture he’d left me in. Granted, fences had been cut clear to Uvalde, but that had to be something different, because I was on foot.

He went to the pens at the end of the draw but didn’t find any of my coke cans or chip bags, or the board I’d arranged my dead skin on. For him, I was a ghost, moving a few months ahead of him. Taking all the same steps. But he wasn’t giving up, either.

Because what I had — he’d heard things. Very specific things. My moon rocks weren’t moon rocks.

Two years before, some graduate anthropology student had uncovered a mass of molten metal and rock deep underneath a Mayan ruin of some sort. Not a pyramid, like for worship, but more like the way you cap off a well.

There was nearly a thousand pounds of the stuff. And none of the tests they did on it made any sense — even the Geiger counter never gave the same reading twice. The backhoe that tried to pull it up stopped working, and the truck they tied to it, it threw a rod, and nobody’s watches or flashlights would stay working around it.

As near as the grad student could guess, it was an old meteorite, maybe. The find of a career, of a lifetime, he thought. He wasn’t far off.

Soon enough all the noise he was making drew the attention of certain farmers, the kind who carried AK-47s and wore night vision goggles. They moved in, interrogated him, and then made him part of the historic record he so loved.

And, when the properties of the metal rock were checked, it turned out to be even more than he’d said. In cartel-terms, if plutonium at the center of a bomb was dangerous, then this was hell on earth. Times twelve. They put it on the market by the milligram.