It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (16 page)

I was crying, yeah.

The rabbit paced me, always just past my feet.

When I stopped, then, he just stared at me, as if deciding. I’m not sure how long we sat across from each other like that. Maybe we were waiting for him to digest that second jackal, or maybe we were waiting for night to fall, I don’t know. Time had ceased to pass for me. The whole world was that rabbit’s eyes, never looking away from me for even an instant, so that I lost myself in them, didn’t realize until too late that the reason they were so large was that his nose was against my chest.

I brought my knee up into his sternum with a dull thud and then it was started.

His teeth tore into my shoulder, ripped me to the left and then back to the right just as fast, and then his hind feet pedaled around, to claw the tops of my thighs, and my stomach. When I was spread out into the thin layer of dust, and not fighting back anymore, the rabbit slow-hopped away a few feet, and situated himself under the smears of blue light.

He was watching them, too, the smears of blue light. Feeding off them. The veins and capillaries in his ears glowed the same color. About dawn, I think, I rose from the concrete. My stomach and shoulder were still torn open, but the blood had congealed, and the wounds were warm, healing.

The rabbit looked back around his body to me, showed his teeth, and lost his footing, trying to get to me. This time I was ready, though. As he opened its mouth to take my face in his teeth, I snaked my left arm around to his tall ear, wrenched his head down and around. Enough for me to get his thick neck in the crook of my arm.

After that it was just a matter of holding on.

Because the rabbit’s massive yellow teeth had scraped across my face, I couldn’t see anything, but I knew not to let go. At some point I realized that the sounds coming out my broken mouth now, they were words. I was saying I was sorry.

To the rabbit I was choking, yeah, but also to the rabbits in the yard, each standing back on their haunches, their radar ears painting this picture for them in too much detail. Their god was screaming for air, gouging great furrows in the slick concrete of the warehouse they’d never been in, because it was sacred. After this, the jackals were going to decimate the yard.

I was a man, though. I knew that now. I was man, and didn’t care.

Finally, the rabbit I was holding onto relaxed. I knew it was dead because it became heavier, and its muscles, they were creaking against each other, as if there was some vital lubrication missing now.

It was life.

I buried my face in the soft fur, and cried long enough that the hair dried into the wound my face was, and, pulling away, I opened it again, the blood stringing between us.

Over the next day or two, when, out of guilt, I’d decided to be the new protector, I would learn that the blue smears through the air, they were only still there because no sunlight had been in the warehouse. And the smears themselves, they had a taste, to me. I was drawn to them.

What had happened was someone had come back to this warehouse a few months ago. And they’d been carrying some of the black rock. That was what had woken me — called to me.

The cartel never knew it, but the black rock the Mayans had found, it was the kind of alive that didn’t want to be broken up. It didn’t really think, or resist pain or any of that. It just simply liked being together. It felt like home.

The whole time I’ve been back, though, I haven’t seen that blue smear again. It could have been a fluke, even. Maybe a grain or two got melted into a belt buckle setting or something. Hopefully not, though. Who knows what that guy’s kids would look like.

I asked Larkin just now if that was funny. That he didn’t answer was a good thing. For him.

Because I didn’t have any clothes, and because the rabbit dead on the floor had been my god, I stripped his skin off, used it to bandage my own. And then, because I had a taste for it now, I ate as many of his organs as I could scoop out. His muscle was too tough, though, and for some reason trying to tear it with just my fingers, it felt like sacrilege. But the kidneys and heart and liver, they were enough.

I held them down, too, started to understand that, in a way, while I’d been infecting this yard of rabbits, mutating them into what they were now, my memories had leeched into them too, somehow, into the simple, instinctual stories that coursed through their veins, so that, though my body was dead all those years, I’d lived on still, in generations of blind litters.

Eating the biggest of them then, the biggest piece of myself, it was cannibalism, yeah, but it had to happen. Because I had snugged its head down over mine, maybe it was even double-cannibalism, I don’t know.

It’s not like I haven’t paid for it, though.

My face and head had been hurt bad enough that — it should be obvious. Or maybe you’ve heard, or seen pictures that you thought had been doctored by the tabloids, or caught something impossible in the sweep of your headlights, that was gone when you looked again.

Call it a skin graft. My shadow on the wall here, it’s got these two tall ears. Which is to say I’m in Hell.

It’s not as lonely as you’d think, though.

Sometimes, alone in a pasture, I’ll even forget for a few steps what I’ve become, and just nod along, happy. But then, like always, it all comes rushing back.

At first, in the warehouse, the memories were thick enough, and coming so fast and all-at-once, that I had seizures, I think. Each time I’d wake, I’d pull myself over to the rabbit, and make myself eat more and more and more, until the flies were too thick and crunched between my teeth, their delicate wings sticking to the roof of my mouth.

I was Dodd again.

Walking up out of the pasture and into Uvalde, the bandoleer slung across my sunburned shoulder, new blisters on my heel from boots that weren’t mine, my whole life spread before me. Taken away. I fell to my knees, swallowed it all down, everything I’d missed. Which, I mean — that’s a lie, of course.

But I did stand again anyway. Into what I’d been made into.

I was in an abandoned warehouse in Piedras Negras. It was — I didn’t know what year it was. But clothes don’t rot overnight. I’d figure all that out, though. And, though I couldn’t reach Walford anymore, I did know how to find Larkin anyway, I was pretty sure. And ... and: tucked into a seam in the backside of the bandoleer, where the stitching had started to come apart.

I pushed my blunt, blackened fingers in, pulled out the shiny corner of a chip bag.

In it, folded probably twenty times, a yellow piece of paper.

Refugio’s phone number. His office extension.

I smiled.

In the yard, spaced around the rolls of wire, were the jackals. The massacre was over. If part of me had still been in the rabbits, then it was in the jackals now. Their mouths were bloody like mine. And, instead of raising their hackles, they were wagging their tails through the dirt.

For a long time we just looked at each other, and finally I nodded, swept past them, some of my new cape bunched in my right hand. I think I felt like a king, maybe. What I’d done was fight through death, take a god’s heart in my hand. That was just the beginning, though.

I turned my face north, to Texas, and didn’t blink.

Without looking back, I just started walking there, my teeth set, my breath deeper than it needed to be, and I would have tried to cross like that, I know, stood against all the border cops America could muster, their small rifles blowing pieces of me into the air, my loyal jackals snarling and snapping at the water, but the ferris wheel stopped me.

The only sound was memory.

For the first time in fifteen years, then, I said my daughter’s name — Laurie — and, like she was going to be up there waiting for me, I started climbing the wheel, some of the struts crumbling under my hand. My cape tore off on one of them but I kept climbing, and, when I finally got to the top, sat in the gondola and closed my eyes, I swear I could feel her hand on my leg after all these years.

She was telling me to keep her safe. That she trusted me to keep her safe.

If you think it was any black rock from space that brought me back to this world, then — I don’t know. You haven’t been listening, I don’t think.

It was her.

Laurie

I don’t know where to start with this, really. When I had to identify my father’s body? Or should I be seven again, down in Mexico? Or is it the tower you’re looking for here, like everybody else? Or the lake?

God.

Give me a form, please. I’m used to forms, I’m the queen bitch goddess of forms. And turn down the lights, maybe. Stop watching me from the other side of the glass. Give me a fucking ball point pen instead of this loud-ass pencil.

It doesn’t matter, though.

I want to start over now, please.

This is not a statement, and this is not a confession. Let me skip a line so there’s no confusion:

This is draft number one of my allocution, should an allocution become necessary. So it doesn’t really exist yet, or, if it does, it’s in that little cranny of the law called ‘attorney-client privilege,’ and should be invisible to you.

And no, it’s not my idea.

If I had it my way, somebody would be chaining their bumper to the front of this holding unit right now, and squinting their eyes as they pulled away. Or angels, yeah: trumpets would be playing and angels would be floating down to get me, and would be flipping you off with their long and perfect middle fingers as they winged me out of here.

My attorney says he can’t be party to anything like that, though. He’s a lot more interested in being prepared for the worst. That way, I guess, everything kind of looks like a victory.

I don’t know.

Anyway, the way an allocution can work, he says, if it’s good and honest and convincing and perfect and says all the incriminating stuff you couldn’t say before, like you’re unloading all your sins, placing yourself on the mercy of the court, is that it can have some direct, positive bearing on sentencing. It’s like a big, long excuse for why you did it.

This is why he’s my new best friend — the way he thinks he has to dumb things down for me. This isn’t about him, though. It’s about what happened. In my words, not all the newspapers’.

The truth, yeah.

And my attorney, he’s right about one thing anyway: after reading this, no honest judge in his right mind could ever send me to Huntsville.

I might even get a promotion.

My name is Laurie Romo. It’s Spanish, I know.

You should hear my attorney say it, like he’s trying to impress me with his three semesters of foreign language. Down below the border, he’d be worse than a joke. He’d be a mark. Hey, you mind carrying this across the bridge when you go back? The only thing better than a good mule is a stupid ass. But he’s not where this starts, he’s where it ends.

I guess where it starts is when Sanchez called me in. That’s Gabriel Sanchez, not Hector Sanchez from the Marfa sector. Just ‘Sanchez’ to me, though — nothing first name and romantic. Not that he hasn’t tried. But don’t worry, I’m not trying to pull him down with me here. To say it another way: if he ever tried to harass me, then we would have settled it then and there, meaning it’s all over and done with now, if it ever even happened. So it doesn’t matter anymore. To me, anyway. You’d have to ask him if you want to know anything else, though.

As for our professional relationship, Sanchez was my commanding officer then, yes. In spite of anything else, I still had to call him ‘sir’ over the air.

“They need you there by six, it sounds like,” he said.

“It’s my night on, though.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s my night on,
sir
.”

“I’ll move somebody, don’t worry.”

I looked out over my hood at a stand of dead trees I was pretty sure I’d seen a lighter or match in earlier. More than once I’ve found a party of walkers out in the sun, dead, their water bottles sucked dry but one or two chest pockets square with a pack of cigarettes. Like, if they were already sneaking themselves in, they might as well bring a pack of untaxed smokes with them, right?

We’re not exactly battling an international team of chess players down here.

That’s not to say it isn’t a game, though. Just that the complicated moves, they all happen above the board, not out in the hills. And you never even see them directly, at least not at my pay grade. Instead, I’ll just be over at a certain commanding officer’s house for the Fourth, his wife not smiling at me, and in his garage will be, say, two motorcycles, and a shiny new wave runner.

But I’m not saying anything. Even if I was, it’d just be speculation.

As for the facts, I did go in that afternoon, even though Sanchez wouldn’t tell me what it was all about.

“Surprise birthday party?” I tried, cranking my truck over.

“Just be there,” he said, and signed off.

That he didn’t make me call him sir should have been my first indication of what I was about to walk into, I suppose. Not that I would have done anything different, understand. If an allocution is supposed to be about regret, or if regret is some important part of the legal definition of guilt, then I pray this never gets that far.

I showed up at the Jomar motel just after six. I’ve never asked why it’s called that — Jomar. Somebody’s name, I guess.

The neon was just lighting up. At least in the places the glass wasn’t broken.

Of course you may know it as the ‘omar Inn,’ yeah. I mean, if Del Rio’s your number one vacation destination, but you only have forty dollars to spend for the week and don’t care about air conditioning or lice or noises from the parking lot all night. According to people at the store down the street from it, one girl even got pregnant from sleeping in one of the beds by herself, naked. That kind of place.

Me, I hadn’t been there since high school, back when it was just economical instead of run-down. What I was doing there now, I had no idea. Aside from that every other law enforcement officer for two hundred miles was on-scene already, slurping coffee and shaking their heads. Maybe Sanchez had been telling the truth: it was a party.

I parked down at the gas station, locked my truck, and walked in.

If they needed me, I figured, it was probably because whatever big thing had gone down, it somehow involved illegals. One of them had said my name, or I’d shown up on one of their sheets, or they were talking a really specific dialect of white girl Spanish, something like that.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The reason they needed me there by six, it turned out to be because the coroner on duty that night led a choir practice at six-fifteen. He was waiting on me, though. Everybody was.

I had an identification to make.

I tried to fake a smile as the crowd of badges parted for me but my smile felt rounded off, all muscle, nothing real.

God, I didn’t think it would still get to me like this, either.

I’m sorry. This isn’t where it starts.

When Sanchez called me that afternoon, he’d been far enough away that they’d had to patch him through the switchboard, leapfrog his voice up over the border. He was working a breaking and entering with the locals in Piedras Negras. Preventive maintenance? It made no sense. This is most of what he said before telling me to be at the Jomar by six:

“The owner says he knows who did this to him.”

“Did what?”

“He’s this pharmacist. You should see this place now. I mean goddamn.”

“I don’t understand. Don’t we usually wait until they’re at least close to the border?”

“He says he knows who did this because of what was stolen, Laurie.”

“Okay. Drugs. Money. Big mystery there, Gabriel. I can’t imagine who would want that. Especially in Mexico. Isn’t it all Catholic down there or something?”

“You should try it some time.”

“What?”

“Church. That’s not why I’m calling, though. Didn’t you grow up down in Zaragoza or one of these little shit towns?”

I didn’t answer. He probably had my personnel file open on the seat beside him, in his shiny metal notebook.

He went on:

“That’s where this guy originally set up shop. Zaragoza.”

“Very interesting, sir. Thank you for the update.” It was the least sarcastic response I could come up with.

Sanchez laughed a barely tolerant laugh through the static about it, which, when you’re talking on the radio, isn’t the same as doing it in conversation. Over the air, because you have to hold the button down to broadcast yourself, it’s a lot more intentional.

“He says it’s some old-time smuggler who did this to his place, Agent Romo. Interested yet?”

I took my thumb from the button, breathed in, through my teeth.

“And do you want to know what he stole? Apparently this pharmacist guy, he kept his cash in some old ammo box or something.”

I breathed out my nose, in thanks.