It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (9 page)

I collected them anyway, and both bottles of water, and angled back across the pasture for the fenceline, the rut road I needed.

At noon, my back blistering, my sweat slowing down, I finally found what I’d been waiting for: a boot. It was too big, even. I stuffed the toe with grass then used a rock to knock the staples from a fence stake — not the post, used to hold it down, but just one of the skinny ones that keep the wire from sagging.

It was my cane at first, but then, with the netting for a bag, it was the hobo stick I carried my water in.

Uvalde was maybe four days away, and I had maybe three to get there.

By the time my shadow had flipped around so that I was stepping into it, I was singing to myself, the way I had in my head for that first bank job, so I could pretend this was all just a movie, and that I was the outlaw hero, that the audience was cheering for me. The only time I stopped before dark was to look back to the idea of my camp, where I’d somehow forgot to look for Laurie’s picture.

“I’m sorry,” I said out loud to her, and then caught one of the coyotes.

He was just watching me, panting.

“Come on, big boy,” I told him, and kept walking.

That night, my third water bottle gone, just one clean one and one poisoned left, I collapsed against a fencepost, had to close my eyes some. The idea was that, like this, only my frontside was vulnerable if the coyotes came yipping and snatching in, their yellow eyes open all the way now. If not, then they’d just be taking bites out of my back, through the rusted strands of barbed wire.

I wondered if I’d notice.

What I should have dreamed of, I know, was of walking, all my demons haunting me, or of being out in the ocean, treading undrinkable water, sharks circling, circling. Or that I was in that bank doorway with Tanya again, or that I was just sitting on the couch doing nothing with Laurie, or that I ate all the moon rocks, I don’t know.

I just slept, though. Like I was dead.

If I dreamed of anything, it was that I had some bear or mountain lion scent-in-a-bottle with me. The coyotes wouldn’t be drawing close then. I did think about food some, I suppose, but I would have traded any hamburger then just for a left boot. Size whatever. And maybe a sombrero, or a lady’s parasol.

Even now, fifteen years later, when all that stuff doesn’t matter to me so much like it used to, I still find myself ducking for shade. Maybe it’s just to hide, though. The way, when your hair’s long and you’re in a convenience store, you kind of duck away from the black camera up in the corner.

It can’t really hurt you, doesn’t even care about you really, but still. That’s the way I am now. Nothing’s going to change that, either.

I have a radio now anyway. I know it looks funny, the earbuds rising all the way to my ears — for obvious reasons, headphones don’t cut it anymore — but, I mean, with me, that’ll kind of be the last thing you look at too.

What I tell myself is that Frankenstein’s monster, if he’d had access to music and disc jockeys and news updates and weather reports and over-the-air trivia games and ‘Rest of the Stories’ and all that, if he could have just plugged into it, then he probably would have.

The trick is, of course, I don’t even need batteries. It’s not that great a trick, though, really.

If I could somehow send a dream back in time to myself — sleeping against that fencepost — now that might be a trick I’d trade certain things for. As it was, though, I either dreamed of nothing or didn’t remember it when I woke. If I had to guess, I’d guess my arm was probably twitching every now and then, or I was talking to somebody. The reason I say that is that the coyotes never moved in to test me.

When I came to, not confused about where I was at all, they were still a good thirty feet out. If I looked beside where one was, I could just make out its outline. To them, I was giant rabbit. The biggest mole they’d ever lucked onto.

They had to drink, too, though.

For maybe thirty minutes, I studied on this, then nodded, double-checked my thinking. It was good, I was pretty sure. And I was so thirsty.

Using the weather-rounded end of my hobo stick, I dug out a hole in the rut. A bowl, about cereal size. The dirt was packed enough that I was able to smooth the sides down. It would hold water for a few minutes, anyway. Not just drink it straight down like the loose stuff out in the pasture.

“All righty,” I called out to the coyotes, then tipped a little water from one of the jugs into the hole and eased down to the next fencepost.

It took one of the coyotes about four minutes to gather enough balls to stick his nose into the hole. I didn’t say anything, just watched. He started drinking. As soon as he had a mouthful or two of it up, another coyote eased in, nudged him out of the way to lap up the rest, its eyes watching me the whole time.

I twisted the lid off the container I’d let them drink from, and held a mouthful of water for a long time. It was perfect. Better than that, because these were coyotes who had to have been sick with strychnine before, so knew how it smelled, it was clean, too.

The second bottle I left on one of the thicker fenceposts, wiped down and shiny. With the sun behind it, it would draw border cops from miles away. Maybe even Refugio.

“Drink up,” I said to the idea of him, and moved on, only limping a little.

Up north, I’d guess, all the Canadian-American smugglers probably get all these nice little moments where they can kick back and watch the aurora borealis, painting the snow.

Down here, what you get is the sky so black and heavy it feels like felt. Used to, I thought all the fast stars I saw streaking around were aliens, but then somebody told me they were satellites. I still like to see them.

With Refugio’s water in me, and one of the sticks in my mouth — I’d cleaned it with a handful of sand — I made a few more miles that night, then found an overhang of rock I’d used before, spent the heat of the morning there.

The buzzards settled down about a hundred yards out, holding their wings up for probably ten seconds after they landed, as if the ground were hot or something, and they weren’t committed to it yet. Really it was probably just their chest muscles contracting, after having been stretched open so long.

If I’d have had a .22, I’d have plunked each of them in the head, then eaten them raw, carp that they were, and wore their feathers for a cape.

I’d be a legend then, yeah.

But I didn’t have a .22. And legends, they’re always already dead or are heading for a big gunfight of some kind. So I was content, I suppose. As I could be, anyway, with no money, no food, no more water. One boot. Maybe half the world’s supply of lunar material piled between my feet. A daughter two hundred miles away, in another country.

It was probably a good thing I didn’t have a gun.

I woke some time later, unaware I’d even been asleep. It was like I’d just blinked, and the slideshow the pasture was had advanced to the next frame. But then I saw what had opened my eyes, crawling like a bug across the brown: a rancher’s truck. It was cruising along the fence, dragging a plume of dirt. Moving from gate to gate, I guessed. Because he was going too fast to be looking for a lost heifer or scoping the buzzards.

I didn’t flick an eyebrow, just let him slip past.

In a perfect world he’d have been pulling a flat trailer of hay, and I’d have been able to hide under the tarp for as long as he was going my way. Maybe longer, to wherever he parked the rest of the trucks. As it was, I just waited for his dust to settle, fell in behind him.

An hour shy of dark, I came to that gate he’d been headed for, and, just for the ritual of it, opened it to walk through, then shut it behind me. On top of it I balanced the stump of the silver nitrate stick I’d been chewing on all afternoon, so that it would fall onto the boots of whoever opened it next.

Usually, I’d never leave any sign that I’d been in a place.

Now, though, I don’t know. You get sentimental with your trash when you’re not so sure you’ve got a lot more to leave. For that brief, what-the-hell instant when the cowboy or pumper or whoever was looking down at this out-of-place stick, I’d be alive again.

Twenty minutes into the new pasture, of course, I wanted to go back for the stick, because it was a sign of defeat. But in two days, it might all come down to forty minutes. I let the stick stay, pushed on, left Refugio’s empty bottle broken against a rock.

Soon enough the only thing warm on me was my back and shoulders and neck, and the canisters. Their metal casing had soaked up the heat of the day, was giving it back to me now. I counted them with my fingers as I walked. With the client rep dead now, each one of them was worth nearly thirteen thousand dollars.

That would buy me boots for the rest of my life.

For a few steps then I walked backwards, to make sure my coyote escorts were still with me, skulking through the bushes and bear grass. They were. I saluted them with two fingers, shook my head with something like wonder, or disgust — was there a difference anymore? — then turned around, tried to make all the time I could on bloody feet and no calories.

By dawn I’d covered eight miles, I guessed, and was breathing hard.

This time I couldn’t sit down, though. I was to the point that, if I stopped, even to lean on something, I was probably going to fall asleep, be dead to the world for twelve hours. Which would take care of the rest of my life as well.

So I stumbled on, no fenceposts anymore, sucking more sticks than I knew I should, and a few hours into it tried cracking a cactus open for the juice, but just got spines. I ate the meat of it anyway. It was damp, stringy, tasted green. I ate another then, and another, and didn’t throw them up for maybe twenty minutes.

It was hard to stand again after that. I tried to talk myself up, forward. It worked for a while, until I started hearing something else under my voice. It wasn’t me.