It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (26 page)

When I came to, it was still light. At least that’s what I thought at first. Really, it was the next morning. On my father’s television set now, an old brown and white western. With the closed captions on, no volume. I followed it back to the remote control.

Sanchez.

He nodded once, never looked away from the screen. I stumbled into the bathroom, the kitchen, and finally settled onto the foot of my old bed, my head in my hands. Soon enough Sanchez was standing in the door.

“What time’s the funeral, then?” I said, not looking up from the carpet. He handed me a cup of the coffee I’d started, didn’t answer.

“Where you been, Romo?”

It was my turn not to answer.

“I’m not doing what you think I am,” I finally said.

“And what do I think you’re doing?”

We could have gone on like this all morning. Instead I went back to the bathroom, locked the door behind me and stood under the shower. My father’s shampoo smelled like medicine. Instead of using his razor by the sink for my legs, I broke open a new one. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to throw the one he’d been using away, though.

Sanchez was still there when I came out, my hair in a faded green towel. His western was down to the final shoot-out. The closed captions were off now.

“Feel better?” he asked, lifting his cup to me in greeting.

“Shouldn’t you be out catching illegals?” I said back.

“I could say the same.”

“I’m on bereavement.”

“Been meaning to say, you’re welcome for that, yeah.”

I just stared at the gunfight.

“Eight hundred new miles on your truck,” he said, like he was just noting it. “As opposed to your log, I mean.”

I stopped drying my hair long enough to do the math, think of an excuse maybe. It’s what an amateur does every time, I know.

“I told you,” I said, no eye contact. “Bereavement.”

“You weren’t out at your place.”

“I went to my mother’s ... to where she’s buried, is that okay?”

Sanchez narrowed his eyes about this, said, “Your mother?”

“She died before — before Mexico.”

Sanchez was still just staring at me.

“Manuel never knew her,” I added, then went back to the bathroom, brushed my hair out with an Ace comb then braided it wet, all the way down to the tips.

This time when I came back to the living room, the television was off. Sanchez was standing at the screen door, coffee in hand. He was staring out at the street. Probably because he’d just seen a western and felt like a sheriff.

“I never knew,” he said. “Your mother.”

“I go up there to — to tell her important things,” I said. The pause was manufactured of course, but perfect. My mother would have approved. Sanchez nodded, drank from his cup.

“You should think about locking a door,” he said, tapping the screen open to show how easy it had been for him to get in. “FBI says somebody was after your dad specifically.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And they’re probably still looking for him, too. Or his couch.”

Sanchez shook his head.

“I’m just saying,” he said. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“Guess that makes two of us.”

Sanchez turned around, handed his empty cup to me in farewell and started to duck out but stopped, as if just remembering. “Oh yeah,” he said, “regulations and all. You know using state vehicles for personal use can be prosecuted, right?”

I just stared at him.

His truck was fitted with a tow kit, for his jet skis. He tipped his hat, smiled his way out, and only stopped when I called to him from the porch.

“What time’s the funeral?”

“Shit,” he said, hiding behind his door again, one hand already on the wheel, to leverage him in, “forgot to tell you. Looks like the feds are going to need to hold onto him for a little while longer.” He shrugged one shoulder, as if he was the victim here. “Week, two? Something like this, who knows
...”

I focused past him, to a bicycle laid over on a lawn. It had been mown around two, maybe three times. Sanchez said something else to me but I wasn’t listening to him anymore, was just waiting for him to be gone.

Ten minutes later the western he’d been watching started over. I turned it off, stood from the couch, and, on his advice, locked the door but then got caught there, watching my hand on the deadbolt. Why would anybody still be interested in my father’s place?

Had that been what Sanchez had let slip? Was the FBI letting him read their reports?

For the next two hours I sifted through the house, starting with the file boxes in my old bedroom, as they were the most recent, but moving on to the kitchen drawers, the garage, the attic, and, finally, my father’s bedroom. In his sock drawer, way at the back, was the silver knife with the turquoise-inlaid handle.

I held it for exactly thirty seconds, like the sacred object it was, then wrapped it back in its crisp new bandana and walked out of the house, the door open behind me.

Because the tabloids that week couldn’t all use the same name, Jack the Rabbit was also Frankenbunny and Bunnyhead and Doc and Peter and I don’t know what-all else. Parked at the curb in front of Dave’s house in Ozona, not a Mexican for blocks, I read through all of them. If I smiled, it wasn’t in pleasure. Not even amusement.

The whole time, Dave’s mom was a pair of fingers holding back a living room curtain. The fingers were at about wheelchair level.

I tried not to watch the black space behind them, skimmed the other stories in the tabloids but kept coming back to the Frankenbunny version. It wasn’t front page material but was sensational enough that the tabloid people had gone to their photo archives and pulled up Thumper, and the white rabbit from Alice, and a man-sized rabbit shadow from some black and white movie, and then some news-looking photo — real, untouched news — of a guy holding a rabbit up by the hind legs. The rabbit was sixty-two pounds, flop-eared and British. The caption was that, to a rabbit that size, everybody probably looked like a carrot, right?

Except my father — I was calling him Refugio by then, when I could remember to — had just been cooked, not eaten.

I don’t know.

In the Bunnyhead article, the drawing of the detective working the case had a coyote head and a magnifying glass. He was the source for the article. The canine grin was supposed to protect his identity.

I crumpled the page up, pushed it into the floorboard, then crumpled the rest up as well, kicked them as far down as I could. It’s not satisfying, though, paper. But if I put my boot to the truck instead, I’d have to write the damage up, deal with Sanchez’s patient, double-edged questions.

Maybe I’d tell him I’d been questioning a large cartoon rabbit, whose left hind foot twitched each time he tried to lie. That was how the dash got all cracked. Sir.

For the first time in maybe a day, I let myself smile, but then I saw what I should have been seeing already: sitting in the backseat of an LTD about six houses ahead was the hazy silhouette of a pair of rabbit ears. Leading up to them, the shoulders of a man. Slowly, the head turned back to look at me, then the LTD eased away from the curb, the rabbit head watching me until its driver rounded the corner.

My heart was thumping. That’s a joke, yeah.

If it’s considered private use to chase chauffeured rabbits through the streets of Ozona in the daytime, then lock me up. But that’s not the way it turned out.

And no, I’m not breaking any confidentiality agreement by writing this next part down. That’s not to say you’re going to believe it either, though. Some things you never talk about because they make you look crazy and paranoid.

Which was the point, I’d guess.

It did happen, though.

Where the LTD finally put on the brakes was about four miles outside town, behind another LTD that had been sitting there. Moving slow so there was no way I could miss it, the rabbit in the backseat stood from the car, swept the rabbit ear headband from his head and ran his other hand through his hair, like the band had itched.

Other than that, he was standard issue FBI. Just a bit more smiley than usual. A glint in his eye that, looking back now, I think was probably there because he’d puppetmastered some of the tabloid stories. They were the best way to keep people from taking a thing seriously. Putting the ears on for him, it would have been like stepping into the story he’d made up. I’d probably smile too.

I rolled past him, my border patrol tires immune to the ditch, and pulled up even with the LTD I’d been led to. I thumbed my passenger window down to talk to the agent in the backseat. Evidently that wasn’t secure enough for him, though. He said something to whoever was sitting beside him — my truck was too tall for me to get an angle — tapped the driver on the shoulder then climbed out of his car, stepped up into the cab with me, rubbing his hands together like he was ready, yes.

“Drive,” he said, hooking his chin forward.

It took him all of three-tenths of a mile to reach under my dash with a pair of clippers, snip the power to my radio. I looked over to him about this.

“You could have just unscrewed the mike,” I told him, holding it up so he could see the long nut at the base of the cable.

“This way’s more thorough,” he said.

“What are we doing here?”

“We’re letting me ask the questions, that’s what.”

“Is this about —”

“Yes,” he said, “and no,” then produced a rainbow-colored film envelope from his suit jacket, fanned the photos out on the seat between us.

They were the shots Dave had taken in Sealy. The storage unit. Martin S. Larkin.

Now my heart really was thumping.

“The charges we could make stick here kind of, y’know, boggle the brain, wouldn’t you say, Officer Romo?”

I wanted to play dumb, ask who took those, where were they taken — I wasn’t in any of them, anyway — but, too, he probably had my prints from the stainless steel interior of the Frito truck, my description from the diner, my heel impressions from the cemetery, my mileage from Sanchez. I’d been stupid, I knew. But that was just because I didn’t feel like I’d been doing anything that wrong.

“And that’s just the beginning
...”
the agent added, fanning the photos out wider, so the envelope they’d been in got important.

In block letters, with an address, was Sandoval, David.