It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles Read online

  The day after the crossing, my clothes already dry (if I in fact went across in a place deep enough to float me), I slept in a scraped-out hole in a pasture, some military surplus netting draped over me, my backpack my pillow.

  I was invisible, and had made it, was that much closer to payday. But still, I wasn’t unlacing my boots just yet either.

  By three, I was sitting on the east side of a rocky rise that would be shaded in another thirty minutes, and keep me until dark, when I could move again.

  For lunch I ate one of the MREs and buried the bag deep, so that, when the coyotes finally dragged it out into the open, I’d be miles away. I washed it down with two mouthfuls of water. The first I swallowed down hard and fast, to get that coolness inside me, but the second I held in my mouth until it was warm, just to prove to myself that I could. That I was going to make it. Again.

  Clipped to the right leg of my jeans, upside down so I’d see it each time I squatted down for shade, was a picture of Laurie from two years before. It was clipped so that I could brush it off if I needed to, scrape enough dirt over it that nobody would make any connections.

  She was my reminder, though. Every time I wanted to cash my water bottles all at once, until I threw up, or walk to some staked-out windmill or flag down a truck or keep to a fenceline or any of the hundred other ways to get caught, Laurie would be there, telling me to stick to the lonely places, Dad. For her. Please.

  It worked.

  I waited in the shade, rubbing a rotten place in my gums with a silver nitrate stick until it was fizzled out. Then, like I always did — this was my weakness, I knew, my signature — I stuck it handle-down into the dirt, like the prayer feathers the Navajo still left around watering holes sometimes.

  They were prayers for me, too, I guess.

  After my second stick, just to control myself, I unrolled the fourth canister from its toilet paper, unscrewed the lid. It was just a black, heavy rock. Or, not really rock, more like melted metal or something. Slag, maybe. But there was ore in there for sure. At the right angle, it would catch the sunlight.

  I cupped my body around it, kept it between me and the rock.

  Of all the stupid ways to get busted, inspecting your shiny cargo would have to be about the stupidest, I’d say. I wasn’t putting it back yet either, though.

  For the next forty minutes I scoured the few feet of shade I had, and even ventured out into the sun looking for a matching rock.

  I hadn’t decided yet to switch rocks on them or anything — and, thinking of Sebby Walker, snug in his roll of wire, I probably wouldn’t — but still, I mean, you don’t go into international smuggling because you’re particularly worried about ethics. And anyway, if I had a couple of similar rocks in my pocket, or the bottom of my pack, one of my empty bottles, even, then I could just say I was a collector, an American collector, looking for rocks to put in my rock polisher or something. I’d just run out of canisters, see?

  But, too — when I finally found another black rock that was almost as heavy, I closed my eyes and jumbled them all around in my hands, to see if I could still tell the difference. Four times out of five, I could.

  It wouldn’t be good enough for the clients, who could probably do this by smell if not memory, but a border cop, yeah, maybe. And, if I needed, I could always just sling one back out into the scrub, to prove that they were nothing to go to jail for. Just some stupid old rocks. From Earth.

  It might work.

  What I had working for me, too, was that this was America, and I was white under my Mexico tan, a sunbeaten kind of look that was characteristic of all the veterans-turned-hippies who lived along the border, either licensed to grow limited supplies of peyote for religious purposes or renewing their classified each month with Soldier of Fortune.

  Either way, I was legal, and, if asked, just out on a daytrip from Del Rio. I even had the doctored driver’s license to prove it, my number and birth date memorized and everything. Still, the fewer people I encountered, the better.

  After another hour of searching, I finally found another blackish rock, and then it was drawing close to dinner. Not that I had enough to be eating two meals a day, but, out on a job like this, dinner was more a ritual anyway.

  For twenty-five minutes, I sat still, like at a table, and thought of what I could eat, even said the names aloud, and then chewed and ate and swallowed until I would have been sick, and then I didn’t want anymore, was glad I didn’t have enough to spare.

  Just at dark, a green and white plane drifted south and west, all its lights off. All it scared up was a big mule deer that had been ducking the heat in a sandy wash. He lowered his haunches and pounded up past me, close enough that, when he snorted, seeing me, some of his misted snot settled on the back of my hand.

  I didn’t move.

  By then the plane was already gone, either toward the lights of Del Rio, if I was north of town, or away from it, if I was south.

  That night I covered ten miles and made three blacktop crossings, and the only mishap was halfway across one of them, when the strap on my backpack gave way, spilling the canisters across the asphalt. There were no cars or semis bearing down on me, though.

  I picked each canister up and lined them by number along a yellow stripe, then made myself count them three times, to be sure they were all there.

  They were.

  In a washed-out draw, dawn seeping in, I stole some of the fabric from the pack’s flap, fixed the strap as best I could, then pulled the netting over me again, caved some of the bank in over me, and slept like the mule deer had: with simple dreams, of food, and water, and nobody shooting at me.

  Before lunch the next day, more of my water gone than I meant, I cracked the number nine canister open. Just to see. It was dust, like a number four black rock that had been ground up fine. A breath of it swirled up into my eyes and nose and then I capped it off.

  At least they weren’t lying to me — number four wasn’t a decoy. I wasn’t carrying narcotics or microfiche, but geology. Lunar geology. Stellar geology.

  I kind of liked it.

  Before screwing the cap back down tight, I ground up a piece of half burned wood from some cowboy or hitchhiker’s campfire — no coyote, mule, or wetback would ever risk a fire, even this far in — sifted it down into number nine. As best I could, I tried to get about a third as much in as had blown out, just because ash would be so much lighter. What I had to remember now was to get gone from their Uvalde warehouse before they started weighing their precious samples. Just in case. Even if they offered me a ride instead of making me walk back to Del Rio.

  The longer I hung out in Uvalde, the more likely I’d have an accident, and they’d get their hundred thousand back. Another problem I had now was that the number four canister wasn’t the only one with its seal broken.

  I was ready for that, though: if asked, my answer would be that, after ditching the case (the trick is to confess to the small stuff), my pack broke, like it really had — see? And when it broke, the canisters all hit the ground, and there’d been a truck coming so I hadn’t been able to be careful, just scooped them all up, dove for the ditch. Then, just to check if it had broken or something, I backed the top off the number four canister, only to find that, by matchlight, I’d mistaken ‘9’ for ‘4.’

  It was an honest mistake.

  Walking away from my sandy bank at nightfall, I wondered if it was maybe the same kind of mistake Sebby Walker had made.

  Alone in the dark, it made me think things like I already had fifty thousand, right? What was to keep me from just burying the pack, fading into some new identity? Maybe even, as a token of peace, sending the client rep a postcard detailing where the pack was buried.

  It would be late, though, that would be the thing.

  And for some reason, that mattered.

  Just to allow for any mishaps — a bad ankle, a big police bonfire out in the pasture, alien abductions — I pushed through dawn, went until the sun was almost straight u
p. It was like getting two nights out of one. I was nearly halfway to Uvalde, I was pretty sure. If I’d had a bottle of anything other than stale water, I might have celebrated.

  As it was, I just sat in place for thirty minutes, committing each bush and rock and rise in the land to memory, so I could know right off, later, if anything had changed. Then I said goodnight to Laurie and rolled up under a poisoned bush, my head wrapped in the netting.

  The next time I opened my eyes, the sun had hardly moved, it looked like, but I’d been asleep long enough for my legs to stiffen up anyway.

  I sat up into the bush, which tangled the netting still wrapped around my head, and jerked away from it harder than I had to, finally just rolled from the bush and stood up fast, the netting tearing.

  “Like watching a cat try to get out of a bag,” a voice said, behind me. In Spanish.

  I closed my eyes, trying to place the man the voice went with.

  “And here I thought you never got caught,” he added.

  I shook my head, amused as well, and turned.

  Refugio. Officer Refugio.

  “Didn’t think they sent you out anymore,” I said, not looking to my pack, still tucked under the bush.

  “Even old horses need their exercise.”

  He was still speaking Spanish.

  The last time I’d seen him, we’d been in a wood-paneled real estate office, the movable kind, down toward Laredo. It had been an accident, too, us being in the same room at the same time. The clients then had been smart, though: they were paying both sides. One opened the gate, one walked through.

  It had been bad luck for Refugio, good luck for me. For nearly two years now, Refugio had been my fallback, the name I was going to say into the microphone in some interrogation room, so that, once they got hold of him, showed him my mug shot and told him that I wasn’t talking, he’d understand the deal I meant: get me out of this, and I keep on not saying anything.

  Only, now, here, he could wipe the board clean.

  “You coming or going?” he said.

  “Second leg,” I said, shrugging, looking vaguely south. “Return trip.”

  Refugio laughed, spit a brown line into the dirt and rubbed it in with the toe of his boot.

  “That’s why you didn’t leave any tracks to the north?”

  “I don’t leave tracks.”

  “Then there won’t be any to the south either, qué no?” He could make this last all day if he wanted.

  “I thought maybe you were a short-timer,” he said. “Or that you’d retired. Never thought it would come to this, I mean.” I cased his truck, half a section away, its exhaust muffled by the netting my head had been wrapped in. “You’re a ghost, I mean,” he said, in English now.

  “Thing about ghosts,” I said, because I had to try, “is that they don’t exist.”

  Instead of smiling about this, Refugio smoothed his thick, chollo moustache down. It was probably supposed to make him look like a Texas Ranger. Less Mexican, anyway. The gun on his hip was standard issue, auto .45. The leather catch was thumbed back. Of course.

  “Well what do you got, then?” he asked, finally.

  “What do you mean, what do I got?”

  “If you’re coming, you’re carrying something. If you’re leaving, then you’ve been paid.”

  I just stared at him.

  This was the same guy who’d been in that real estate office, yes. What he was talking was cuts, percentages, tariffs. We could walk away from this, different ways. Maybe.

  If I answered right, here.

  “A thousand,” I said, shrugging one shoulder, my eyes locked on his lips, for the flicker of a smile.

  Instead of a flicker, he grinned wide, pushed his taco hat back on his forehead.

  “I did some research on you … before,” he said. “Y’know, in case.”

  I wasn’t saying anything now. Knowing my face was one thing. Knowing my history, that was another thing completely.

  “Dodd Raines,” he recited. “Married once, one daughter, two years of community college, currently wanted for grand larceny, evading arrest, firing on —”

  “That’s somebody else.”

  Refugio raised his eyebrows to me, held them there.

  “Well then, Mr. Somebody Else, my question still stands. What are you carrying?”

  To show what he was talking about, he hooked his chin over to the bush I’d been sleeping under.

  “Just my pack,” I said. “Water, couple bags of chow. Some rocks for my—”

  “For your … ?”

  “Not for pay.”

  “Well then,” he said, making it to the bush in three steps, pulling the pack out with the toe of the boot he’d been using to rub spit into the dirt.

  To inspect its contents, he squatted down, his pistol snaked into his left hand, resting against his knee, angled in my general direction.

  I stayed back.

  Out here, there would be no witnesses, no tracks that couldn’t be swept over, no story that couldn’t be made to fit. He dumped my water, tools, silver nitrate, and about half the canisters out into the dirt. The canisters clinked against each other. Then he shook it more, for the rest of the canisters, then pulled out the light rope I carried, and ferreted the flashlight from the side pocket.

  “No radio,” he said. “That’s in your jacket, yeah? You were wearing headphones for that first bank job. Like you needed a … what? A soundtrack? Some theme music?”

  This was A-material to him.

  I still wasn’t saying anything.

  He stood with one of the canisters, shook it close to his ear. The rock inside clunked against the plastic insulation the canister was lined with.

  “Nothing narcotic here, is there?” he said.

  “Same as there wasn’t in Laredo,” I said.

  Refugio nodded to himself, as if he’d been expecting me to use that sooner or later, yeah. And then he twisted the cap off the tenth canister. Using one of my silver nitrate sticks like a monkey might, digging grubs from a rotten tree, he eased another black rock out.

  “Like I said,” I told him. “Just rocks.”

  “And you collected them … out here?” he said, opening his hand to the pasture.

  I nodded.

  “And you just … what? Shrunk-wrapped them, I guess? With all this shrink wrap you’ve got in your pack?”

  I scratched a spot just above my left ear.

  Refugio shrugged, spun the rock in the air and palmed it as if weighing it, then rolled it back into the canister, spun the cap back on.

  “Two,” he said.

  I narrowed my eyes, unsure.

  “Okay then,” he said, like this was all a game. “Three. In cash.”

  “Just tell me when.”

  “Now. And also you tell me what these rocks are. Or else I take them with me in my truck, sign them into the lab.”

  He was talking Spanish again. I wasn’t sure what this meant.

  I answered in English.

  “What if I don’t know?”

  “Then you’re not the professional you’re supposed to be, I’d say.”

  Scattered around in my pockets and right boot, I had a bit more than two thousand dollars. And was standing up in an American pasture in the daytime. The same way one traffic cop would stop to shoot the bull with another uniform who had somebody pulled over, it wouldn’t be too long until another border cop glassed us from ten miles away, eased over to get a better look.

  I’d seen it happen five times already, on different jobs. Watching from safe places in the rocks.

  “They’re rocks from the moon,” I said, just flat-out, no build-up.

  Since I didn’t have the full three thousand, I was going to have to make the other half of what I was paying him seem like more than it was.

  “Bullshit.”

  This in English.

  “Serious,” I said.

  “I’ve been to NASA,” he said, “there’s not nothing walking out of there.”
>
  “Well, some did, I guess. I don’t know how. Or when.”

  “There’s like twenty pounds of this stuff in all the world — I thought you went to college?”

  “They’re from the moon. That’s all I know.”

  “And you’re taking them across?” he said, nodding south.

  I didn’t say no. Refugio rolled the rock out again, studied it closer, finally breathed a laugh out his nose.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said then, while his smile was still lingering. “What are you doing down here?”

  Because he knew what I was asking — how had he caught me? — he answered the different question: “An upstanding American citizen name of — of … Buford? He died walking across the bridge, proper papers and everything. Nobody’s really sure which side he died on.”

  I shrugged, chewed my cheek where an ulcer was starting — I could always tell, because the skin there would be hot, like it was cooking up an infection — and said, “So you cut him in half, what?”

  “Not with my knife. His insides were” — he swirled his finger around, to show, then said it anyway: “Slush.”

  “I only have twenty-six hundred,” I said then. Coming sudden, in the middle of other things, was supposed to make it sound more like a confession. More true.

  Refugio eyeballed me.

  I held my arms out so he could search me. With his pistol to my temple, he did, and came up with exactly twenty-six hundred. What I was doing was building trust. I hoped.

  He stuffed the money into his chest pocket, right behind his badge.

  “You didn’t catch anything from that guy, did you now?” I said, leaning down to tie my boots.

  Refugio had his pistol to my head again.

  I stopped lacing.

  “Buforditis?” he said, smiling so that I could hear it. “Makes you drive your Cadillac sixty miles into Mexico, then walk out carrying fifty-thousand dollars?”

  I looked up to him, my heart beating in my throat. The client rep was dead.

  “Oops,” Refugio said then, real slow. “Did I say fifty? Think it was more like — what? Twenty-two and change, Americano?”