It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (24 page)

My attorney is a thorough attorney, though.

What he did with that picture was copy it and send it to every border patrol station in Texas, until somebody remembered it enough for him to track it down. What it is is a Polaroid of a Polaroid, and it had been found on a man who’d collapsed trying to walk across the bridge at Del Rio. A white man with a sketchy record, cause of death unknown, but, as somebody had written on the report, ‘pretty damn effective nevertheless.’

According to that same cursory report, this Clancy F. Walford had also suffered severe, ‘bubbly’ burns over a good 60 percent of his body. The back side, mostly, from the scalp to the hips. The only reason the Polaroid of the Polaroid had survived was that it had been in his front pocket.

Evidently, my father hadn’t lifted the Polaroid at the scene, but months later.

The fax my attorney showed me has Refugio’s scrawly signature there by his badge number, checking out Clancy F. Walford’s property envelope. The date is three weeks to the day before he found me in Mexico.

It’s probably best I didn’t know any of this that night. If I had, I probably would have told Dave to just forget it, that it didn’t matter. That Refugio deserved whatever rabbit he got. I was stupid, though, still on a mission.

Two hours later, that mission parked us up against the chain link of a storage unit in my mother’s girlhood town.

Like I’d been afraid of, Sealy didn’t match my memory of it. It was like everywhere else now. The only thing about to come floating down out of the sky was one of the sad balloons the car lot a quarter mile down had tried to train a spotlight on.

On the service road we’d edged around one patrol car, its parking lights on.

“Guard,” Dave said, like this was all just another night for him. His face was glowing blue on one side from his cell phone. As it rang he lowered it a bit, asked me where mine was? I shrugged the question off, studied the storage unit before us some more.

The truth was my cell was charging on the kitchen counter at my trailer. Overcharging, probably. If I’d brought it with me, though, then Sanchez could have tricked me into answering somehow, and asked me questions I wouldn’t be ready for, or told me the funeral was tomorrow, come home. And anyway, I like pay phones. It makes me the caller, not the one having to answer pages. And it’s not like I don’t have a two-way under my dash, a bullwhip antenna standing up from the center of my toolbox. Just that it’s for official business only.

As you can tell, I spend a lot of time worrying about what’s personal, what’s work.

But maybe that’s natural, when you’re like me and have two dead fathers, one a cop, one a criminal. The more disappointed you become in one, the more you try to mold yourself after the other, pretend that smuggling and larceny is in the genes.

So of course I fell in with a pirate.

Inside of twenty minutes, Dave’s tip had us past the guard, into the yard of the storage units. The way he did it was one of his regular listeners — the anonymous caller, I was pretty sure — drove a Frito truck from snack machine to snack machine for a living. As Sealy was the center of his territory, of course he had two units side by side, and, unless the Sealy PD wanted empty snack machines across the land, he could come and go as he pleased, pretty much. So long as he promised not to call any radio personalities or anything. Or something like that.

Anyway, he let us ride in the back of his truck, foil packages glittering all around us, then took the long way around to his two units, dropping us off in the process.

The storage unit of interest was supposed to be in the low 200’s.

Because there was only one guard, though, the door wasn’t open, so we had to rattle each lock. Finally, at 234, I shook one that let go of its long curved arm. It was just supposed to look locked. So the guard out at the service road wouldn’t have to chaperone visitors in and out.

Dave pulled the door open as quietly as he could — it sounded like the thunder you hear at high school plays — and I suddenly felt guilty for having brought this to my mother’s hometown.

Behind two crossbars of police tape was a version of that room at the Jomar. Only worse.

Against one wall, more boiled than burned, was a man in what had been slacks.

Slowly, as if having to process my senses one by one now, I became aware that Dave’s hand was clamped around my forearm. I didn’t pull it away, needed an anchor the same as he did.

“Jack was here,” I whispered, because we didn’t know any other name to call him then.

Dave nodded once, swallowed, then raised his camera, bathed the unit silver, his shots spaced wide over the next two minutes. It was some kind of respect, I think. Or just plain awe.

Later I would find that the reason the scene was undisturbed was that they were trying to get the coroner from Del Rio on-scene, and some of the FBI agents assigned to the Jomar/bomb-thing. Anything with an even half-similar m.o. was automatically falling into their laps. Which the four-and-a-half Sealy PD were probably none too sad about.

Too — and this I found out from Sanchez, when he finally caught up with me in Austin — the reason the FBI was all night getting there was that they were trying to locate me. Just to rule me out as a suspect. Meaning it wasn’t helping any that I was doing my bereavement stuff in parts unknown. What it did was keep me on one of their lists nobody really wants to be on.

But things happen for a reason sometimes.

If I hadn’t been wanted for questioning, then what I’m being charged with here — nobody would have taken me so seriously, I don’t think. Only now they won’t believe me, that it was all a joke. Because of scenes like Sealy, I know.

The only things that made it stand apart from the Jomar were a lantern against the opposite wall, a spiral notebook under the dead guy’s wrist, like he’d been writing and just keeled over, and, above him on tacks, a series of Polaroids of what had been done to him.

Like with my father, it had taken nearly a week.

Without thinking, I reached for the first Polaroid — I guess I thought it was going to tell me something about what had happened to my father at the Omar — but Dave stopped me.

“We’re not here,” he said.

I nodded, agreed, and, he took individual shots of each Polaroid for me. When he finally showed me the prints, each of them would have a portion of shadow on the concrete behind them, that seemed to bleed from picture to picture. What Dave would do with them was photocopy them, then cut the copies so they were continuous, like a panoramic setting.

It was Jack the Rabbit again.

In the lower corner of that panorama would be the spiral I didn’t pick up, the one that my attorney says isn’t on any of the FBI evidence lists.

Except it was there. Believe me.

Unlike us, of course.

Because they would be evidence themselves, against Dave, he never even tried to run the pictures he shot that night. They were too real. Instead, two nights later he burned another roll on a third chupacabra that turned out to be just a dead dog. It was back near Del Rio.

I don’t know.

On the slow ride away from there, in the back of the Frito truck, we didn’t look at each other, me and Dave, and didn’t say much when he got on his bus for Ozona either. He did write his cell number onto the back of my hand like the sixth grade.

“Thank you,” I said.

“It’s not over,” he said back, shrugging. “There’ll be more, right?”

I hoped not.

Bereavement’s a complicated thing.

Instead of drifting to the cemetery like I’d promised myself, to leave one flower in place of a lifetime of them, I went to the diner, stared at the napkin dispenser. Behind the counter the two waitresses were talking about their kids. Apparently the seven-year-old was going to get his hide tanned for ruining his stepdad’s flashlight. Apparently he’d been using it to pin bullfrogs when the batteries had died.

According to him, he shook it, trying to get enough juice for one more frog, and when it wouldn’t work, the Easter Bunny stepped from behind a tree, held his hand out for the light. The boy passed it over. In the Easter Bunny’s hand, the light glowed on, held its light long enough for the boy to get home.

The punchline of course was that it was July.

The waitresses laughed, and, when they looked over to me, holding my breath, gripping the table top, I turned away too fast, I know. My eyes were full of the morning, of the night.

I was going to see my mother.

On the way to the cemetery, all the questions I should have asked Dave crowded around:

— This guy who’d killed my father, why, when he stepped into Granger Mosely’s stock tank, hadn’t he taken his boots off? The more I thought about it, the less it made sense. Unless he was the Michelangelo I’d heard about on Paul Harvey, who didn’t take his boots off because he’d had them on so long that the skin would come with the boots. Something like that. Except these boots had been just off the shelf, the tread crisp. Too, I supposed, if the guy had a rabbit head, maybe he had rabbit
feet
, too, and didn’t want to leave those kind of tracks. Never mind that this was the real world.

— The tacks the Polaroids had been stuck to the wall with in the storage unit, had they been tempered steel? Thin little cement nails with thumb-push plastic heads? It didn’t make sense. The walls were cinderblock, the mortar between them as hard as the cinderblocks were. You could flake chips off with a tack, maybe, if you had the time, but, unless you drilled it beforehand or could somehow soften or melt or heat the mortar to make it at least spongy, I didn’t see how any tack could ever get seated enough to hold anything up against the wall. Except that they were, they had been. And they’d been pushed in so casual, the Polaroids not even in a straight line.

— The guy who had been in the Polaroids, who was he? He’d gotten the same treatment as my father, I mean, so either Jack the Rabbit had hated him the same, or him and my father had done something together a long time back, which was only just now catching up with them. And, as the FBI and the Rangers weren’t on anybody’s trail already, I had to assume that it was payback for something the principals had all thought forgotten. Even now, though, my attorney can’t find any connection between them, or even with Clancy Walford from the bridge in Del Rio, who was from fifteen years before, which counted as long enough to have been forgotten about, I figured. If you wanted to, that is.

Fifteen years was also how much time had passed since my real dad had died.

I don’t know.

I could have also asked Dave how he knew the bus schedules so well, I guess, or even how he knew what payphone went with what number in Uvalde, but, just from the little while I’d spent with him, it seemed he was big on conspiracy talk and paranormal sightings, not so big on personal details. At least not ones he couldn’t spin, like he did on the air.