It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (32 page)

The night after the day the FBI blew my dad’s heart all over a living room in Mount Bonnell, I was standing at a counter, paying for my ten thousandth cup of coffee since the Jomar. The clerk had just asked me if I was okay but I hadn’t answered him.

Either he’d seen my fingers, trembling around the dollar I’d just given him, or he’d cued into the gauze my other hand was taped in. It was a cut. The FBI agent I’d hit had been wearing glasses. After that, they didn’t let me connect anymore, but passed me back across the lawn, to my truck.

What I did then I’m neither proud nor ashamed of.

Standing on my toolbox, crying, I threw everything in my bed at them, and then everything from my toolbox, and then everything I could pull from my cab — clipboard, rearview mirror, a plastic cup — but none of it made it far enough.

I wanted them to take me in, needed them to take me in, but they wouldn’t. Finally I just slumped in the passenger seat, watched them file into the house one by one, leaving me alone, free to go. Or, free from federal charges, anyway. Sanchez would be another matter, I knew.

For maybe ten more minutes I sat in my truck, and then the ambulance pulled in behind me. It wasn’t to save anybody, I knew, but to transport bodies. The way I could tell was that it was old, one of the ones with a van front end instead of a truck.

I popped my emergency brake, rolled forward, didn’t want to have to hear a gurney roll past. Technically, I wasn’t avoiding arrest either. They didn’t want me.

What I did with the rest of that day, I’m not exactly sure. Just drove from place to place. One of them was Dave’s contact’s house. Another was the warehouse with the wire rolls. It was surrounded by emergency vehicles and news vans, and two Border Patrol trucks.

I slowed down to just go ahead and get it the hell over with, surrender like Sanchez wanted, but let myself go to the convenience store first, for one last cup of coffee. The night clerk was glad for the company, I think. What he was watching on his black and white set was a news bulletin.

The report was a sculpted woman standing in headlights. She was by some road. She was talking about my dad. Not by name, but as the “Mount Bonnell Disturbance.”

Instead of her words, I heard what I’d been telling myself the last however-many hours: that I’d killed him. Sure, Sanchez hadn’t had enough manpower to cover nine different addresses, but the FBI did. Either that or they’d known to follow me to the right one. Either way, by going there, framing him in the doorway like that, I’d killed him. After all these years.

Maybe this was how Dave had felt in the back of the LTD that day. A kind of numbness around the soul.

As to what the reporter was really saying, I had no idea.

“Seen this part yet?” the clerk was saying from somewhere, muting her with the remote.

I turned to him slow, like I was drugged, or we were both underwater.

“What?”

“It’s been running since I came on,” he said, shrugging.

“Turn it up,” I told him.

“This is the best part,” he smiled, the volume bars climbing.

Behind the reporter, past the SWAT teams and emergency vehicles and other news teams, was a retired ambulance. The kind with a van front. It was lying on its side, injured. The back door kicked open.

According to the reporter, the only voice in the world for me anymore, the ambulance had been delivering two of the victims from last night’s Mount Bonnell Disturbance from the city storage unit to the federal one when — they didn’t know, exactly. But it seemed to be connected to the “Sixth Street Situation,” which the news previewed: a sea of people, all wearing rabbit ears, balancing beer in cans, because all the bars had closed hours ago. A riot. For Hell Bunny. Because he was alive.

I dropped my coffee all over the magazines, pushed away from the counter.

I was breathing too hard, too deep.

“Yeah,” the clerk said, slapping his hand on the counter and leaving it there. “Nobody messes with Hell Bunny, right?”

My mouth moved, but I couldn’t seem to get anything out. I took the remote, went up a few channels. The other news was the same thing but closer, following the mounted police through the crowds, the reporter trying hard to stay in-frame. Evidently the suspect had last been seen in a two-block radius, and seemed to be going for the bridge at Congress, maybe. To cross the river one last time.

That’s how I knew it was my dad, yeah.

“What,” the clerk said. “You know this Hell Bunny or somesh —?”

I was already gone. Running.

In 1966, a student with a rifle climbed the tower at the University of Texas and held the city of Austin hostage for an hour-and-a-half. Last week, as you know, I climbed that tower too.

The only thing Austin, Texas is more scared of than something like my dad is history, repeating itself.

My first shot was at dawn. It punched through the windshield of a car parked way over on 23rd. Nobody noticed. My next two went into a fire hydrant, until it geysered. And then people started looking up, and then, slowly, too slow for me, the police swarming Sixth Street were retasked, and the news copters banked high and hard, came back to me, to what I was doing, round after round, aiming so carefully, spacing my shots so as to give him as much time as I could.

The way I imagine it, when the police started peeling away from him he stopped for a second and looked up, smiled. Except not all of them left, of course. Even one is enough, I suppose.

I’d do it again, though. As many times as it took. And this time I’d bring a whole case of ammo, and go all day, until the barrel melted. But this time, I only had enough bullets to make it until lunch. It was Sanchez who finally talked me down.

He said the only thing that could make me stop dry firing his precious .308. That they’d finally got him, trying to cross the water. That it was over. It could have been a lie, though.

I had them use a firetruck ladder to deliver a television to me, and the whole city watched me hunch over that screen.

Sanchez hadn’t lied. It was all there, from every angle, on a national broadcast. Instead of trying to walk across, Hell Bunny had commandeered a couple’s kayak and tried to row to south Austin. For the first few strokes, too, the water’s so smooth before the little yellow boat, like he’s really going to make it.

Because there was too much news coming out that morning, some of it had been garbled. The established fact was that someone in a rabbit costume was shouldering a hostage across town, using that hostage as a shield. It was the only explanation for why he hadn’t been shot yet.

But I was in the news, too, in the tower.

Evidently, one of the times an editor flipped feeds, he’d left the banner at the bottom of the screen the same. My name. For a few minutes just after seven o’clock, I became Hell Bunny’s hostage for the national audience. That’s the only explanation I have for what happened anyway.

What everybody who was watching me watch that broadcast up in the tower couldn’t see was that I had my hands over my mouth. I didn’t know whether to scream or smile. Just like the report was saying, Hell Bunny was in that little yellow boat. You could tell because of the big crusty rabbit head.

Dave. Alone in the tower that day, I said his name aloud, touched the screen. He’d seen the news. That Hell Bunny had me. And it had stirred something in him, and he’d come back somehow. To — I don’t know. Explain to him who I was?

If anybody could have talked to the real Hell Bunny, though, it would be another person with giant ears.

I don’t know. It’s what I like to think, anyway.

That and that Dave, when that slug caught him in the back, was smiling, complete. Not afraid at all. What I told Sanchez when he pulled me down was nothing.

“What?” he said, taking my hand to help me through the door at the bottom of the tower, my hands already cuffed five times over.

I shook my head no, nothing.

It took them two days to dredge up the body of David Sandoval, of Ozona, Texas. Like a real pirate, he’d been buried at sea. How long I’ll love him is forever, I think. That one photograph I cut out of all the dead chupacabra, what I’ve done to it, for Dave, is draw a small heart underneath, where the credit should go. He’d understand.

As for the other two photographs, I left them in the paper. They don’t matter, see.

In the one I saved, what the photographer’s done is lower herself down for a better angle on the chupacabra, so that, past them, you can see the slick brown rock they’re curled up on, and, right at the left edge of the picture, a hint of still water.

It’s Wimberley, where my dad grew up. Jacob’s Well.

This is what happened: thanks to Dave, my dad made it across that water like he always did, and carried and dragged Lem Marsh by night through Barton Springs and out 290, his chupacabras ghosting through the brush around him. His time was over, he knew.

He’d seen — he’d seen his wife in a porchlight vision, right before the bullets slammed into him, and knew she was waiting for him, now that what he’d come back to do was done. His only problem was that he couldn’t die.

So he went to the one place he knew would take him, Jacob’s Well, and he stood on the slick brown rocks for a long while, holding Lem Marsh, his old best friend, the chupacabra nipping and whining around him, and maybe he remembered standing there with me, even. He did, yes. Right at the end his hand opened and closed around the memory of mine, and then he nodded, looked back in that way he has, and stepped into the calm water, and went down and down and down forever, until not even the sunlight could touch him, all the way to Edwards Aquifer, and if you haven’t figured out yet how smart my lawyer is to have got me to write this all down in a tablet with a big red Private at the top, then you probably don’t know what a mistrial is either.

It’s what happens when you tell the city of Austin about the rabbit content of their drinking water. Information you couldn’t possibly have had, except by reading this. So, yeah, this is it, the end.

Fuck you.

I’m going to see my dad now.

Author’s Note

The first night I stayed gone, seventh or eighth grade, where we slept mostly was Jacob’s Well. There were high-schoolers there with a little .22 pistol, and this huge giant turtle looking up at us from the water, and just this endless field of stars, and I was trying to get comfortable under them all on this shelf of rock, not having much luck, and then, fifteen years later, doing a reading in Houston for my first novel, somebody gave me a flyer talking about the dangers of border crossings, and Dodd just kind of looked up from under his shelf of rock in Mexico, like he was coming up here again. I’d just written a werewolf novel set over in Ozona, so I gave Del Rio to Dodd and Laurie, let them come up through the area codes I knew, places I’d sat with goats that had been pulled down by dogs, places I’d climbed trees to see if the mistletoe was really poison or not. Places I’d chased deer into the cactus, places I’d buried snakes, places I’d carried five-gallon buckets full to the top with horny toads. Pastures I’d seen these small parachutes drifting down into, before I even knew what getting stuff across the border was about. Storage units I’d painted for weeks. Convenience stores I’d lived in. Old broke-down houses I’d found in the middle of nowhere, with elaborate floorplans drawn on the walls with fresh blue ink, and little X’s there that were guards, walking. I’m still in all those places. Thanks to Chris Matney for reminding me, and to Kate Garrick, my agent, for keeping everything straight, and to Paul Tremblay, for some last-minute help with the complicated, complicated math, and to Tommy Bates and Ryan Myers, for help with parts of Austin I’d forgot, and to Ito Romo, for a pass over this from somebody who knows the bridges, and to Robert McKee, for telling that canoe joke so well, and to Matt Groening, for making the eared folk walk, talk, and hurt, and to Brenda Mills, always my first reader, and to Christopher O’Riley,
Del Rio
’s last, and mostly thank you to my daughter, just born when I wrote this, and to my wife, for giving me that perfect little girl.

About the Author

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of
Demon Theory, The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti, Ledfeather,
and a few more, with
The Ones That Got Away
(horror stories) coming soon. His work has been included in
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Best Horror of the Year vol.2
, and
The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror
, and has been a finalist for
The Shirley Jackson Award
, the
International Horror Guild Award
, and the
Black Quill
. Jones grew up in West Texas, Ph.D’d at Florida State University, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.