It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (2 page)

What I paid him that time, it was enough for a year. But worth it.

The only bad thing was that, because he was charging me so much, they started to feel like heroin or something. So, without even meaning to, I started rationing them out, denying myself for forty-eight hours at a time, just to prove I could, then hiding from Laurie in the bathroom, my eyes rolled back into my head, a stick sizzling in my mouth.

Which is dramatic, but you get the idea.

So, yeah, chocolate and all that, it was nothing to me anymore. With Manuel down the street, I was Superman.

Except for stress. The kind that comes from snaking across the border with ten to twenty years’ worth of whatever in my pack, horses and trucks and planes circling all around me. That kind of stress could still light my mouth up, make it hard for me even to drink what little water I had.

“Another job, yeah?” Manuel said, pawing on the shelf behind him for the container I knew so well.

“The last one,” I said, passing the cash with one hand, taking the sticks with the other.

He laughed about this, stuffed the cash into his money jar.

“What?” I said, half out the door already.

He shook his head — no, nothing — then unmuted the American soap opera he had wound up on tape, let it play.

On the way home, in the bathroom of a bar, I allowed myself one stick, just as a preventative measure, but then stayed in there long enough that the clerk sent somebody back to chase me out.

We started to get into a fight by the magazine rack, but I was feeling too good by then, and started laughing instead, and, as apology, bought five dollars of chocolate, washed it down with a glass-bottle coke that was so perfect it made my eyes water.

Of all the last things I could have said to Laurie, what I ended up with was that if Raymond came over to fix the cable, she wasn’t supposed to let him in unless Maria was there.

“Why?” she said.

“No reason,” I said back.

“Could Maria beat him up, then?”

I looked away, my lower lip pulled into my mouth. It’s not easy, being a dad.

Maria was in the other room, already on the phone, the cord wrapped twice around her waist, four or five times around her index finger. Talking in a Spanish so fast and coded that I could never understand it.

“Just a kiss,” I said, leaning down to Laurie.

She laughed, shook her head, but kissed me on the cheek, hugged my neck, and asked when I was coming back?

Soon, I told her, my pack already slung over my shoulder.

It’s probably what she thinks of now, when she thinks of me. Maybe I was even backlit by the doorway or something, like a painting or a movie.

I don’t know.

Laurie.

Of all the things I’m thankful for — all three of them, maybe, and that’s counting that I don’t have to worry about mouth ulcers twice — one is that she can’t see me like I am now. What I’ve become, what I’m doing.

It’s all for the best, though. These are the kinds of things you say to yourself. It’s all for the best, and this is how it had to be.

Except —

On the far wall, I can see my shadow.

In the corner, a man named Larkin. He’s balled up, crying, terrified.

I would be too.

The meet was in the flats just outside Piedras Negras. It’s all different now, but back then it was like a movie set: just past a fence that only stood for about two hundred feet, there was an abandoned ferris wheel, like one day it had finally just not been worth packing back onto the truck again. And all around, just out of pistol range, these dogs that didn’t look at all like dogs, or even starved-down coyotes. Jackals, maybe, from what I’ve seen on nature shows. They probably didn’t go forty pounds, but were wiry, and moved like ghosts, one of them always watching me.

Maybe the circus had left them, too, like the ferris wheel. Or, more likely, their momma had chewed through her rope, run off into the scrub, whelped a litter of fifteen, raised them on grasshoppers and cigarette butts and heat.

What made it all really like a movie was that the client pulled up in a dusty old El Dorado, wearing a sweated-through polyester suit, white of course, a brown shirt underneath with a wingtip collar that touched each of his shoulders.

I ran my hand over the long front fender, eased up to him.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Call me Dodd,” I told him, smiling just enough for him to know I was lying.

“Need my name?” he said, heaving himself up from the front seat, studying me.

“Just your money.”

He laughed and slammed the door, causing all the dogs’ ears to stand up like radar dishes for an instant.

“You’re not late,” he said, impressed maybe, wiping a stained handkerchief across his forehead, then looking into it the way some people will look at tea leaves.

“Early either,” I shrugged, just an everyday fact. “People say when, I’m there then, yeah?”

He nodded, accepted this. What I didn’t ask him was how he had Laurie’s name. That’s not how the game’s played. He hooked his head over to a warehouse. I looked around, followed.

“So you’re military,” he said.

This was part of the interview.

“Honorable discharge,” I did my best to mutter.

The trick with being ex-military is you have to have a bad attitude about it, or else you just danced through, didn’t learn anything.

“Special forces?” he tried.

I nodded like it didn’t matter, looked around again to the dogs.

“So what’s the cargo?” I said.

“In a bit,” he said, and then, instead of stepping through the half-open door of the warehouse, he stepped around to the fenced-in yard. The ground was just packed dirt. Spaced every few yards, some of them clumped together, were rolls of hogwire that each went about fourteen feet tall. They were in different states of rust, birds balanced on one or two. And then I saw the rabbits, and understood the dogs: in every bit of shade there was — and there wasn’t much — there was a rabbit. And they were all watching us, their eyes rolling like wet marbles.

“The dogs can’t dig them out, they den up in there,” I said, half of my face pulling up into an appreciative smile.

“Good,” the client said. “But that’s not all.”

I studied the yard again, trying to follow what he was getting at. All these abandoned rolls of wire. Maybe five thousand dollars’ worth, including delivery. Which — if these were what I was carrying, I was going to need a truck, and fog so thick you couldn’t even hear through it. An ocean to sigh that fog up for me.

But that wasn’t the feeling I was getting, either; there were too many machinations in place already for me to just be delivering some discount fencing.

The feeling I was getting, really, was like I was the new kid, standing in front of class, trying to figure out who I was going to have to fight, who I didn’t want to fight.

“I don’t —” I started, but then did; the yard smelled dead.

I stepped forward, into it, and, I mean, in the song-version of all this, if there was one, I’d be walking from one corner of Laurie’s napkin to the other now, from Dodd to that fifth variation.

Something was rotting here.

Slowly, conserving as much energy as possible, one of the rabbits stood, slow-hopped over to the fenceline, to peel the green from a leaf. Maybe dig up the pink root.

They wouldn’t be the smell, though. Any rabbit that the dogs got, they would eat. No, this was — maybe one of them had got jammed up in one of the rolls of wire somehow ... died?

But that would just be one rabbit.

Instinctively, I patted my back pocket, the long plastic tube I kept two sticks of silver nitrate in.

“Go on,” the client said, nodding ahead of me into the yard, and the way he was smiling, I didn’t like it.

There was nothing else to do, though. It wasn’t like there were going to be landmines or covered pits or snipers or anything.

I stepped out, my sunglasses hanging from my hand, my other forearm across my nose, and after a few steps found the source of the smell: inside one of the newer rolls of wire, in the part that, if it were toilet paper, would be the cardboard tube, was the body of a man.

To see him, I had to look at just the perfect angle. And even then, it was hard to tell.

I studied the rest of the rolls — fourteen — then turned back to the client, my right cheek sucked up against my molars.

“What was his problem?” I said.

The client smiled, looked away. “He was late.”

“You mean — making his delivery?”

The client shook his head no.

“He was late getting here,” he said, his face so pleasant, and I nodded, looked out to the yard again, so he couldn’t see my eyes.

“Like I told you,” I said. “You don’t have to worry about that with me.”

“I’m sure we won’t,” he told me, then held the broken door of the warehouse back, let me step in blind, my eyes not adjusting for probably thirty seconds, so that, for a bit, whatever was on the metal desk seemed to be hazy, glowing, like all the windows.

As it turned out, of course, it was what I was carrying north.

The first thing the client — the client’s representative, anyway — wanted to know was did I prefer to be paid by the job or by the ounce? It was a thing I’d never been asked. Usually I’d just say five large for getting the stuff across, then, depending on what I was carrying, from five to ten more. If it was a couple of kilos, say, then that told me who I was working for had more money to burn than somebody who just needed some Aztec artifact moved north.