It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (31 page)

This was Texas, though.

The only real difference between my truck and all the rest was that I had an immigration-green stripe on the side of mine. Otherwise I was an early morning gardener, or newspaper thrower, or car washer. Invisible to the movers and shakers.

And yes, of course I’d read the spiral by then. It’s what I’d been in the apartment complex parking lot for, my dome light disconnected, my ashtray pulled out so I could lean over, read by that light.

Or, read’s the wrong word, I guess.

Instead of a story or a letter or an explanation, what my dad had drawn in, page after page, was the floor plan of our house in Mexico. It started out rough but got better as he went, and more furnished. On the counter he’d even drawn a small cup. It was holding a napkin down.

I never knew he could draw, either. That he had that kind of patience, that kind of concentration. Page after page of it, like — it was like he talking to me. Which of course I would say, I know. But, of everybody in the world, nobody but me would ever remember those halls, nobody would care that the handle for the screen door was on the opposite side from the handle for the front door, which was why we always just used the sliding door by the table.

It was perfect.

He’d gone farther, though, and that was why I’d been in the parking lot most of the night, starting my truck over and over so the battery wouldn’t die.

In the last pages of the spiral, he’d started shading footprints into the carpet. His were the biggest, and had distinct heels, and then there were mine, smaller, shaped like sneakers. What kept me sitting there, though, were my mother’s footprints. They were all around ours, all over the house. Like she’d really been there.

In the margin of the last page, erased now but I could still make it out, there was something written, finally. It was that he hoped she looked like her. I turned the page, held the spiral closed, then opened it again to be sure. The reason he’d erased it was underneath that, the part that had been erased first: ‘not me.’

He hoped I looked like my mom, not like him.

And no, you’ll never find that spiral.

It’s made-up, really. I lied, I’m crazy. This is what this whole thing has done to me, made me start latching onto fake things, making them real.

All the same, you’ll never find it.

The address was a tall, tan house with a wide, rolling lawn. Because Dispatch hadn’t read the names that went the phone numbers, I had to back up to the mailbox, pry open the locked flap on front. Inside, on an upside down label the postman had probably left, was Marsh, Lem.

I pushed the flap shut, rolled forward. Lem Marsh.

It’s a name my attorney says I should know. The ‘Lem’ part anyway. He’s associated with my dad for two bank jobs. Including that last one. But then he lucked into enough cash in South America to scrub his record clean. It wasn’t drug money either, but something to do with mines. He had a silver cartel, I don’t know. Or Aztec gold.

It doesn’t matter.

What does is that his double-size front door was open.

I killed my truck, ratcheted the emergency brake down and followed a line of trees up to the house, close enough that I could feel the refrigerated air washing across the warm grass of the lawn. Looking back to my truck to be sure I hadn’t left the visor light on or something stupider, I saw that the line of dark footprints I’d dragged into the dew were the only ones.

How long had that door been open?

I stared at it, told myself I was waiting for my eyes to adjust. That I wasn’t scared. That he would recognize me.

Through the open door, instead of the sound of vases breaking and wood cracking and frantic numbers being punched into a phone, there were two voices. Both were deep, and steady, and one of them, I was used to not understanding it. As a girl, I’d not understood it through the wall so many nights. I edged closer, flush enough with the house that the brick grabbed at the tips of my hair.

I stopped, gathered it over my shoulder. They were talking about some woman in a bank. And — not quite laughing, but chuckling, anyway. Like how had they ever been that stupid?

I leaned closer, my head over the porch now, and a security light buzzed on over me, my shadow suddenly crisp on the ground around me. Without even thinking about it, I closed my eyes. It was how I used to hide in hide and seek, my dad told me once.

Inside, nothing. They were listening.

I swallowed and it was loud in my ears. Finally one of them broke the silence: “So you understand then? It was all contract work, man. I never knew who the hell Shelly was hiring.”

Lem. Not because I recognized the voice, remembered it from childhood, but because his tone, it was all about false bravado. It was supposed to sell his excuse better. The way you talk when a man you killed sits down across from you one day, to reminisce.

“I fixed your leg, man,” my dad said back, just when I thought he wasn’t going to say anything else.

“And I owe you for that,” Lem said, weaker.

Another thing I could hear in his voice was how my dad looked, close up. The way I was picturing him in my head, he still had the rabbit head somehow, but was looking straight down into the rug, his ears dropping.

“She — your girl.”

“Shelly.”

“She knew her name, Lem. She knew exactly who she was calling. You needed somebody good and I was in the book, yeah? Tell me that’s all it was.”

“You were better than good.”

“But it was a one-way trip, man. You knew that, too.”

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Lem tried.

“It already is like this,” my dad said back, and then there was the fast, desperate shuffle of feet, the sound of a thin glass breaking, a shell being chambered, then a silence so thick that the security light above me even went back to sleep.

In the sudden darkness I was staring hard at nothing, trying to think who Shelly was, or could have been, but that all went away when the shotgun fired.

I fell back with everything except my body.

Now, from inside, there was just a deep ragged breathing. And then someone using a piece of furniture to pull himself up from the ground, it sounded like. Starting to breathe all at once, sudden, gasping.

My dad. The real one.

The shotgun clattered against expensive tile, Lem fell back down, or against something, and then, I don’t know. My dad hit him with a lamp or bookend, maybe. Hard enough to end their story once and for all. Because he knew the law was closing in, knew he didn’t have the luxury of a week to sit with him, I guess.

I would have waited, though. Not disturbed him. Just to be that close, I mean.

Slowly, so as not to rouse the security light, I balled my hands into fists. What I was doing was telling myself
now
over and over, for what felt like minutes.

Instead, my dad came to me, the security light flaring with his first step out onto the porch.

I didn’t scream, either. But it was an effort. He wasn’t wearing his face anymore, but somebody else’s, loose around the eyes and jaws. He’d pulled it over his head just like he’d done with the rabbit. It was him, though. Even after fifteen years, I knew. It was something about the way he stood in the doorway, half in, half out. A certain hesitation to his step or posture that I would know anywhere, I think. That I’ll know forever.

Over his shoulder was Lem, rolled into a rug and tied with some kind of electrical cord.

The front of my dad’s duster was ripped and smoking from the shotgun blast, his body seeping underneath, staining his right leg shiny black. But he was standing. Alive. And, more important, for a moment he seemed to forget what he looked like, I think, what he’d become. For a moment he was just Dodd, smiling a confused smile behind his mask, his off-hand rising as if to cup the side of my face.

What he said then, his voice slow like a question, like this couldn’t be happening, was “Tanya?” My mom.

I pursed my lips, swallowed, and didn’t look away from him.

“Where have you been?” I heard myself saying, and, if I had it to do all over again I’d say something different, I know. A thousand other things. But this was all we were going to get.

Instead of answering, my dad angled his head over the slightest bit, to see around me, and then six separate red dots clustered on his chest.

I opened my mouth to tell him the thousand other things I had, or just to scream, but the FBI slugs were already slamming through the air on either side of me, into my dad.

It blew him back through the door, into the living room.

And that was the last time I ever saw him.

Six days later — last week — the rest of the chupacabras would show up dead. Not killed, but woven together in a pile they probably remembered from their den. As far as I know, only three pictures of them made it into any kind of print. In it, they could just be sleeping.

Those pictures are uncredited, though, and undocumented, so nobody takes them seriously. They could be doctored and staged a hundred different ways, and even if the negatives had turned up, the radiation probably would have made the film look suspicious anyway. The light would have been wrong. There would have been a glow around them, indicative of tampering.

And no, Dave didn’t take those pictures.

For all I know, it was that lady we’d traded for the rabbit head. She finally found her real treasure, and carried it off in a series of trash bags, is out there with them right now, running from the government. That’s the way legends go, I mean. They’re not real if there’s a body to dissect.

But you know all this. Probably before I did, even.

I don’t even get the papers until the day after, and my attorney won’t bring me any tabloids. We’re supposed to be focused on the case, on my defense, not on Bigfoot. Not on Hell Bunny. Some days I just sit here as he talks, though.

Where I am is in a fairy tale. It starts in a convenience store.