It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (19 page)

“On the weekends and whenever,” I told him, “growing up, my father would always take me out here. All around here. Up to Uvalde even, sometimes.”

“You keep doing that,” he said.

“What?”

“‘Father.’ Instead of ‘Dad.’”

“And?”

He shrugged it away. “Uvalde,” he said. “Kind of getting far from the river, yeah?”

“It was ...” I smiled, like I was embarrassed about this. “He had this knife, with like a silver handle, and turquoise in it. He lost it out here on patrol one week. It was a sentimental knife, I guess.”

What I didn’t say was that he did it mostly just to drive around on the state gas card, show me things. Train me to be like him. The Ranger wasn’t listening anyway.

The civilian car had been a tan Chevette, probably born the same year I was. It was moving back along the ridge, had probably seen our lightbar silhouetted against the clear sky.

“Davey,” the Ranger said, like he was a scuba diving biologist, just taking note of another seahorse. The most common kind.

“I know which gate he’ll have to use,” I said.

The Ranger considered this but finally shrugged it away, his thick arms crossed over the wheel now so he could lean forward, ease up as close to the burned-out flares as possible. “I think somebody does hate me, yeah,” he confessed.

On the ground between the flares, like an offering, was a dead dog. A dead something, anyway — coyote, giant fox, you couldn’t really tell. A cross between a giant fox and a small greyhound, maybe. Except it didn’t have any hair. And its ears were satellite dishes. Chances are you’ve seen pictures of it by now, so I probably don’t need to explain. It was in all the tabloids, and even made the Austin and San Antonio papers. That was all later, though. And stupid. We put our sunglasses on and walked around it.

“What is it?” I said.

“Either mange or some kind of joke,” the Ranger said, then nodded to the still-retreating Chevette. “Or, if you listen to him, chupacabra.” He flared his eyes for that last part.

I watched a pair of buzzards way to the north. They were just coasting, riding a smell. Coming here even, maybe. By the time I turned back around, the Ranger was moving back to the truck.

“So your dad ever find his knife?” he asked. “Your
father
, I mean,” he added, all pleased with himself.

“It’s a big pasture,” I told him, walking sideways away from the dog, so I could keep watching it.

“Probably more high traffic than you want, too,” the Ranger said, his voice softer, so I’d know it wasn’t an insult.

“Yeah,” I said, not disagreeing. “We also watched the pawn shops.”

On the way into town, a road I was showing the Ranger as a gift — it didn’t have gates, just cattleguards — I finally asked if my father had received any calls in his motel room. So the Ranger would know I was still the grieving daughter, I just stared straight ahead.

We went like this for maybe two miles, until I was starting to doubt if he’d even heard me, but then he rolled a can of dip from his shirt pocket, packed it on his wrist five identical times, a tobacco metronome, and said, “One, yeah. The desk clerk would tell you the same thing.”

I digested this, understood what he was saying.

“How about we just say he did tell me?” I offered, because nothing on the border is simple.

“Like anybody’s even going to ask.”

“Like anybody’s going to know to ask,” I corrected.

He shrugged a heavy shoulder, agreed. “It wouldn’t matter, though. Can’t get anything from a broke payphone.”

When it seemed he wanted to tell me something else, I finally did look over to his face, just for a flash. It was about confirmation.

“Any other phone activity,” he said, talking slow and deliberate, guiding his spit cup to his mouth, “you’d probably have to ask somebody in the local office, yeah?”

If you haven’t figured it out yet, this Ranger, I’m not saying his name on purpose. I don’t even think he was officially on the dog case, had just been dealing with some rancher’s complaints about trespassers.

‘Any other phone activity,’ though. He’d been telling me something, as much as he could. It didn’t have to do with the Jomar, either, I was pretty sure.

The working theory about what happened to my father at the time was that it was payback from one of the thousands of illegals he’d had dealings with over the years. Or one of their family members. So, tens of thousands, yeah.

Like Sanchez had said, Mexico’s Catholic. With a vengeance.

Except there were just so, so many more ways to prop the gate open at the border than killing a senior, decorated officer. If anything, that would just give everybody itchy trigger fingers. And, even if it wasn’t about that, was just about him, Refugio Romo, something he’d done in the wayback — to come into town to do a thing like this, and then to take a whole week doing it?

It didn’t make sense.

If you wanted to kill a border cop, all you had to do was lay out in the pasture, dial your scope into some obvious duffel bag or something you’ve hooked on a fence post, and wait. By the time anybody drifts out to see if this officer’s radio’s broke or what, you’re gone, back across the river, or to your day job or wherever, your rifle dropped down some uncapped well.

This had been more personal.

For some reason I kept wanting it all to wrap back around to the silver-handled knife. Not that I was romantic or anything, don’t get me wrong. I mean, even now I can see that if it had all been about the knife, then that would just be a cheap way of keeping him alive for a week or two longer before pulling the plug, letting his story flatline.

Never mind that that knife was never out there.

God.

In my property box, along with the rest of my stuff you’ll find that double-laminated picture of me at six years old. It’s not supposed to be there. But then neither am I, I know. According to the State of Texas, I’m still on bereavement leave even now. Because my father hasn’t been buried yet. Go deeper than that, and I’m probably still supposed to be down in Mexico, last name Garza, trying to catch a bus up to Juarez to work in the factories.

If not for that picture, that’s where I would be, I’m sure.

I was seven when the tall border cop with the important mustache found me, lowered himself down to my level, and said he had been looking for me for a long time. That he had something to show me. The picture. I remember my face, prickling.

According to him, he’d been with my real dad in Texas right at the end, after the accident, and my real dad had given him this picture, told him this was the most important little girl in the world, and that she deserved everything, and to find her, save her, keep her safe forever.

A fairy tale, yeah. But my face, it’s still prickling.

I went with him, sure, and it wasn’t even any kind of illegal traffic when he drove me across the bridge, because I was born American. It probably even looked like he was saving me.

And he was. That’s the thing.

You want to know why he carried that picture in his sweatband like he did? It was so, wherever he was, he could take his hat off, look into it and see me, know the world was a good place. What he called me was his million dollar girl, his princess.

Growing up, you never expect that you might come to hate yourself, just for having lived. That you might feel guilty. But that’s not why I did what I did last week, either. I did it for him, for my real dad.

This is that story.

Where I am now in it is the fifth day after my second father died. I’m standing in the viewing room at the morgue. It’s not like in the motel room, where there was a burned smell in the air. Now I’m having to look through a video monitor. It’s crackly.

“Because of the radiation?” I ask the orderly, my chaperone.

“That’s just it,” the orderly tells me. “He’s clean now.”

The monitor pops and fizzles.

“Of anything we can detect, anyway,” he adds.

I stand there for ten more minutes, until the feed decays to nothing.

Over lunch, a girl who works the switchboards part-time smoked an amazing fourteen cigarettes and explained through her veil of smoke that, the week before my father — “before the tragedy” — there’d been a call bouncing around from monitor to monitor. A post-it note with Refugio’s name at the top, and a number, and a question mark.

“And he got it, then?” I said.

“Who?”

“Refugio.”

“Your dad, yeah. I guess. I can’t work more than thirty-four hours a week, y’know?”

“And the Rangers know about this?”

“It was from a payphone, dear.”

Of course. I paid for our meal, thanked her, then went outside and coughed in the heat until my lungs were clean, my eyes not watery. The reason they only let her go part-time was because the state of Texas didn’t want to be responsible for her health care.

She didn’t have the payphone number anymore, though. But, if it had been the same as the one that had been used to call my father at the Jomar, then it would have been news, I was pretty sure. And anyway, according to that unnamed Ranger, that particular payphone was broken. Not that they were going to give me the number for it either way.

But I’m not stupid. It took me all of twenty-minutes to find it.

All I had to do was park at the Jomar, walk to my father’s room, then turn, study Del Rio for any payphone bubbles or booths with a clear line on me.

There were four: at the gas station by the first bay, a booth in the parking lot of the old grocery store, and one hung outside another hotel. The fourth was about five doors down from where I was standing. I walked to it, picked up the receiver. The dial tone was so strong and insistent I flinched a little.

After that I went to the rest of them, got a clean dial tone at the gas station, a sputtery one at the other hotel — so the Jomar had that going for it, anyway — and nothing from the one in the parking lot of the grocery store. It was the last one I would have guessed, too. It was out in the open. To get to it, you’d have to walk across fifty feet of open asphalt, even coming from the road.

But this was it.

I could tell because the change case had been keyed open instead of pried, then left swinging. The Rangers had processed the quarters for prints, and they’d left behind the adhesive backings for the lift-kits they carried in their glove compartments. For the receiver, the scratched glass, all of it probably.