It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (29 page)

That afternoon, trolling south Austin in Dave’s contact’s antique Datsun, we saw our first Hell Bunny shirt.

If there were shirts, then there would be campaign buttons, and bumper stickers.

This was Austin after all.

I pretended to know what to do with this new development, eased us down another random block. We weren’t just going to see him walking into a coffee shop, though. Without any resources, any breaking news, any really bad leaks or rogue agents at the FBI, we were lost, nowhere. Within five miles of him probably, but it might as well be the whole state.

But — would he even remember me? I mean, it had been fifteen years already. And there were phones everywhere.

We had to keep moving. Driving, not thinking. According to Dave, his contact’s phone had been tapped last night, and there were just way too many cars in the neighborhood with up-to-date inspection stickers and fresh new tags, and we had to allow that every plumber’s van was automatically lined with technology, all of it focused on Dave.

My truck was in a paid parking garage up by the convention center. We could have painted it, but that would be defacing state property, as much as admitting it was stolen. And a tarp would only make people want to look under it. Real pirates would have known what to do, probably. As it was, we were still just coasting on luck, trying to stretch it as long as we could.

If I’d made it to the bridge, had that talk with Sanchez, I could have found out how he’d known to look for me in Austin. Instead of Houston or San Antonio or Piedras Negras. But I could guess. If he was reading the FBI field reports like I figured he was, and their investigation was leading them here, then that’s where I’d be as well. And if I wasn’t, it didn’t matter, as I couldn’t be messing anything up.

It was a compliment, really. He thought I was as good as the FBI. And important enough to assign two trucks to. It was better I’d stood him up, though.

He’d never believe that my real dad was back, or trust that he’d had to do what he’d done to Refugio. Worse, he’d tell it to everybody. In his words, which, yeah, they’d be pretty much mine, but with long, meaningful pauses inserted. Not that any of that was telling us whether we should go right or left at whatever light we were at. Nothing was.

Soon enough Dave fell into a pout.

At first I didn’t pick up on it, but then I realized he wasn’t muttering anymore about how this rabbit mask was going to change the world, make everybody see it as it was, the way he’d known it was for years. And it wasn’t that kind of silence he fell into sometimes, where I could tell he was trying hard to pretend he’d never had a rabbit ear headband fitted down over him. With his index finger and thumb he was ratting some of the rabbit fur together then smoothing it back down. Over and over.

“A little social grooming?” I said, faking a smile.

He stopped. I reached for the radio but he was already interrupting: “Why are we still here?”

It was a good question.

“Because he’s here,” I said.

“And we know this how?”

“It’s
...”
I started. “He was coming up 71, right?”

It sounded like an excuse, even to me. But I couldn’t tell him about the pound, either. Not this late in the day. And anyway, the dogs, the chupacabras — they were just the indicators, the breadcrumbs, the seagulls tracking the shark.

Dave did his eyebrows and patted his side of the car like it was a horse and we drove nowhere for the rest of the afternoon, one clove after another trailing smoke up from the ashtray. They were incense sticks against the mask. Because it smelled exactly like roadkill. I tried not to think about it, then did anyway.

Without the mask, what would my dad look like? Had he just been wearing it to hide who he was, or was he injured? Was that why it was all bloody? Where do you even find a mask like that?

Why a rabbit?

The kind of investigation we were on was the kind where you had to go fast all the time, or else risk stopping to think about what you were doing. I almost wanted to call Sanchez, make up some excuse for the bridge. Or get on the news somehow, so my dad could see me, know I was out here looking for him.

But then everybody would see me.

Beside me, where I wasn’t supposed to hear, Dave was curled around his cell again, talking to his mom. Apologizing. Something about the pharmacy, and the air conditioner. When he hung up I licked my lips to get the words right and asked him if he needed a bus. It took him a moment to get his words right as well.

“What about this?” The mask.

I made a slow right, the whole Datsun shuddering from the downshift.

“Take it,” I told him, flashing my eyes over. “Just don’t let them put it in some museum, okay?”

Dave smiled, hid it by looking out the window.

“He’s real,” he said then, in the voice that unsettled me. It wasn’t like it wasn’t him or anything soap opera like that, it was something in the delivery. I could tell by the way he talked, all wistful and dreamy, that he was staking everything on what he’d just said. That it was the new center his life was going to be revolving around.

From here, this room, where I can look at myself in the big mirror any time I want to, any time I don’t want to, I understand why it unsettled me, I think, him using that voice for the mask. It wasn’t that I cared for him. That’s just the way I want to remember it. The good version. In it, he’s tragic, I’m kind of heroic, and everything’s inevitable.

There’s something under that, though. Jealousy. It was my dad he was trying to make his own.

“You should have known him fifteen years ago,” I said, grinding up into his contact’s driveway.

Dave heard something in my voice too, I guess. He didn’t say anything back. Inside the house he walked around wiping his prints off everything, and adding more to certain comic books he considered borrowing.

I sat in a metal folding chair by the kitchen table and watched him — he really was twelve years old — then found myself counting numbers on the old telephone beside me. It was the heavy institutional kind like Refugio had always had in his office, with the number pad on the base instead of the handset. Like I used to do then, waiting all afternoon in his office, I started launching my eyes from number to number, faster and faster. It was just a game.

Like Sanchez was always trying to tell us, though, not all games are innocent. I breathed in sharp when I realized the number I was dialing. It was the last one I’d given to my dad before he left. The one I used to pretend was going to save me from the office my kidnapper had locked me in. My face flushed, my eyes went hot, and I picked up the phone.

Because I was in Austin, it wouldn’t even be long distance.

I had the first four numbers punched in before Dave caught me. It was the fastest I’d seen him move since the ditch in Ozona. But now he had a purpose. He dove across the living room, his palm aimed at the twin plungers, fingers spread wide. The table and everything that had been balanced on it collapsed, leaving me in my chair, the phone still in my hand, the line spiraling down into the wreckage.

“It’s not clean,” Dave said like it was the most obvious thing in the world, then palmed his cell up from his belt, passed it to me.

I nodded, only half there I guess, and dialed the number into his cell phone. It rang and rang, and somehow — this I have no clue about — I could hear it resounding on the other end, in some big empty place.

“What?” Dave said, watching me closer than I really wanted him to.

I shook my head no, and then the ringing stopped. Someone on the other end was listening.

“Dad?” I whispered, my eyes closed now. Dave wasn’t the only one who was still twelve years old.

On the way to the bus station we had to stop by the pound. Dave’s tabloid instincts had finally kicked in, started wondering why Sanchez had been there.

I didn’t say anything, just made all the rights and lefts that would get us there, keeping to the small roads because we were in my truck again. I’d only agreed to coast by because if I didn’t, it would mean I knew what was there. And anyway, Sanchez and whoever had already been to this particular sideshow. They wouldn’t be there again.

I was wrong.

We pulled in from the blind side, my mind already made up to stay with the truck so the attendant wouldn’t recognize me, and there was another truck just like mine. Parked right beside it, another, with running boards. Sanchez.

Because I’m an amateur, I chirped the tires, splashed coffee all over the dash. Dave’s face was expressionless, just totally slack. For maybe twenty seconds we just stared at the two trucks, then, slowly, became aware of a tall, long-haired attendant with a pushbroom. He was watching us.

I nodded to myself that this was okay, this was good, and, wholly for that attendant, parked right alongside the two trucks it looked like I was supposed to be parking by. The attendant went back to his sweeping.

“W-What —?” Dave stammered, the rabbit mask clutched hard to his chest.

“It’s okay,” I said, turning the truck off, leaving the key in. My mind was racing. Not about why Sanchez was here again — I assume the chupacabras were turning out to be obviously from south of the border, somehow — more about the radio in his truck.

Ever since the call this morning, I’d been trying to figure out how to get my hands on a good reverse directory. And praying that the number I’d called was listed. A radio not registered to me leapfrogged all that, though. A clean radio and a male voice. I looked over to Dave.

“Been a while since you were on the air, yeah?” I said.

Everything that happens to him after this, it’s my fault.

Though I knew how to get at Sanchez’s hidden key — it was in a dummy trailer ball, caked with mud — I tried the other truck first. The driver’s door was locked, but the passenger side vent window was still cocked open. I snaked my arm in, jimmied the handle from all the wrong angles, and, finally, the right one. I pushed Dave in ahead of me, and kept my feet on the asphalt.

He already knew all the codes, and had the number written in ink on the side of his hand, and his identification number was written on masking tape on the back of the aluminum clipboard case, and I’d promised him that this would be cake, that he was in no danger whatsoever. All he had to do now was dodge any small talk, act like he didn’t have time for it here.

It would have gone fine and perfect if the front doors of the pound hadn’t swung open and shut right when he twisted the radio on. I melted back out the door, pushed it almost closed, and rolled under Sanchez’s truck, stared up at his rusted emergency brake cable. That there weren’t pounding footsteps yet meant that they hadn’t registered three trucks yet. As far as they were concerned, the one on the outside now was whoever Sanchez had dragged to Austin to look for me.

Except then that truck started talking. I’d left my radio on.

I shook my head no, no, please, but now Dave was using a set of ID numbers that had to be familiar to at least one person standing by the door. All noise in the parking lot stopped. Even the dogs inside weren’t barking.

Like I’d told him, Dave didn’t stop for weather or location reports. He just asked for the address that went with the number.

The pounding footsteps I’d been expecting never came, either. Instead there was just the slow crunch of gravel — three people, crossing the parking lot, one of them slanting off, to go make a call. The other two were saying something about my truck, suddenly there.

Just before they got to Dave’s door — he was ducked down, had no idea — Dispatch got back with the address. I wrote it deep enough into my hand that blood mixed with the ink, and then closed my eyes.