It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (4 page)

“Well then.”

The rep eased the case around so he was holding it with both hands now, before him.

“Didn’t you ever want to be an astronaut, Dodd?”

“Thought it’d be a little more glamorous.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, already following his eyes out the door, “T minus ten hours, right?”

I smiled, and, before I left, toured the wire rolls again. In the far one, one of the ones brittle with rust, was a head of hair I was pretty sure was Sebby Walker’s. I shook my head, spit into the dirt, and walked out.

The rabbits just stared at me.

If I did get caught — and I wasn’t even allowing the possibility, because I was already banking on that other hundred and ten thousand — if I did get caught, what I had going for me was the lie that these were just rocks, officer. More than that, they weren’t in and of themselves illegal, like my usual cargo, but were only illegal because they were, I assumed, stolen.

Which is to say, if I hadn’t already dumped them, then I could argue that the paperwork required to write them up hadn’t even been commissioned yet, so it might be better just to take my cute little geologic samples, let me fade back into whatever mystery I’d stepped out from.

The only reason I was thinking so much about getting caught was that the clients didn’t just want me to lob the stuff across the river or magnet it to the tail of some private plane or any of that. Instead of meeting up with me in Del Rio, like sane people, they were insisting that I meet at some warehouse in Uvalde. It added nearly eighty miles to my trip. And they didn’t want to risk motor transportation. Meaning I was going to have to stick to the ridgelines, find water where I could. Sleep under the stars for maybe four days, hoof it across the baked earth at night, bats divebombing me, coyotes pacing me, grinning their blacklipped, patient grins.

My objection was that eighty miles for them, in a car all registered and inspected and insured and driven the speed limit by somebody with a clean record and white skin, it was a three-hour round-trip. As opposed to a hundred and fifty for me.

The rep’s objection to my objection was that each of those hundred and fifty was worth about a thousand dollars to me, yeah?

He made a good point.

Until then, though, I could ride in all the cars I wanted.

At a single-story pool joint in Piedras Negras, even though I’d kept three thousand out to buy whatever car I wanted, I won a lowridered LeMans in a series of pool games, and it even started the first time, like this was all meant to be.

From a wholesaler I knew on the way out of town, I bought some Army rations, the kind in bags — like the astronauts ate, yeah — then lined a styrofoam cooler with cool, bottled water. It was shipped in from Canada, the label said.

At the first stoplight I turned the first bottle up, drained it.

One of the main tricks with muling stuff north isn’t to load your pack down with water, but to get your body superhydrated before the trip, so that you can camel through the dry hours.

At least that’s how my body worked.

And, where the old time cowboys would roll pebbles in their mouths to keep the juices moving, or buttons from their shirts, or strings of leather fringe, I had my silver nitrate.

One thing I always wondered about getting busted was what the border cops would do with my sticks, if they found them on a patdown or whatever.

That they wouldn’t believe they were medicinal was a given; because I was engaged in illegal activities, then of course everything I did had to be illegal, the same way my mom used to be sure that all gay guys were of course pedophiles as well.

Probably it’d be some version of the story of this Cambodian I’d heard about on the radio, who biked across some border nearly every day, with a big, obvious bag slung across his shoulder. Every day, that same border cop would stop him, inspect his bag, but just find crumpled up newspapers. Old newspapers, that still smelled like fish. But he knew the guy was smuggling something. Twenty years later, then, the two meet in a bar, and the border cop buys the smuggler a drink, finally gets to ask him what he was sneaking across all the time back then?

“Bikes,” the guy says, smiling, making no eye contact, which was how I always thought my sticks could work, in a pinch — as decoy, giving me time to lose whatever I was really carrying.

Except, of course, if I’d ever even started to get pinched ... I don’t know. So far then, I’d never had a close call, wasn’t on any of the border cops’ dashboards, not as a mule anyway, and, while I told the clients it was skill, the mark of a professional, it had a lot more to do with luck, I knew. A lot more to do with nobody in lock-up on either side of the border trading my name or even the legend of me up for an extra meal, one more phone call, conjugal visit, whatever.

This was a big part of where the stress came into play, too. Why my mouth was always in a state of eruption; if somebody did say my name to a prosecuting attorney, the name they thought was fake, then that would be the beginning of the end. The moment they said my name, the vague shadow of a border cop would start dogging my backtrail. Then, as they gathered more evidence, zeroed in on me, that shadow would gain more and more substance, until he was a real cop standing over me, taking his chrome sunglasses off one ear at a time, immune to any of the images I’d be trying to push into his mind’s eye: Laurie, alone in the house for that first week, then part of another, until the Garzas next door take her in as one of their own, raise her with a different name.

And that was the happy version.

The other version involved Raymond sending one of his helpers to fix the cable, and that helper scooping Laurie up, disappearing south, selling her into the slums of Mexico City or Buenos Aires or somewhere worse, even more anonymous.

This is why I carried more silver nitrate than I really needed. Otherwise I would have developed bad habits. And now — I still don’t know, I guess.

What just happened to Larkin on the other side of the room was that the blackened skin of his forearm peeled off like a scab. It made him start crying, hyperventilating.

I smiled, looked away, because death is a personal thing. But then I thought of Laurie, too, out there somewhere still. The way I know she’s alive is that the sky’s still blue, birds still sing, and I don’t cry every moment of every day.

Not that I’ve heard from her, or about her.

But it’s best that way, too. If I do hear of her, I mean, then she can hear of me, too, and I don’t want that. Better that, for her, I just stay that guy who left for work one night, and then had some accident, didn’t come home. For fifteen years.

God.

Soon this’ll be over, anyway. Under the black scab that Larkin peeled up, his blood was sluggish, didn’t care. I reach down, touch the lantern, so he can know that I’m not looking away anymore.

On the way up from Piedras Negras, three thousand in cash distributed in my pockets and pack, a stick in my mouth like I was trying to eat the Fourth of July, the night suddenly slowed down around me. Not because of sirens in the rearview or something on the radio — the radio didn’t even work — but because, canted over in what passed for a ditch was the El Dorado from earlier.

I swallowed, dropped my stick out into the wind, then circled back after about five miles, eased alongside. The front seat was empty. And the glove compartment. And the dashboard. The trunk was unlatched, too.

The client rep had broken down, cleaned out his car, took off to make his meet with me. I touched my palm to the top of the Cadillac door and studied the night, as far as I could see into it.

He was gone. The pipes weren’t even warm anymore. By dawn, of course, they would be — hot, even — but that would just be because they’d be in some cargo truck or another, the only thing left on the El Dorado, its paint.

None of that mattered, though. I didn’t want the car. Could afford not to, even, for once.

Had the rep radioed ahead for a pickup, maybe? Hitched a ride? Walked on the craggly shoulder with a hundred thousand in one briefcase, moonrocks in the other?

You might as well paint a bullseye on your back.

Finally I shrugged one shoulder, climbed back into my car, and started again for Ciudad Acuna, going slower this time, in case the rep was still hoofing it. Not because I wanted to help, so much, but because part of me being on time and not wrapped in a thousand pounds of hogwire was somebody being there to look down at his watch, appreciate my punctuality.

It was his fault, I told myself, grubbing for another stick, a handful, and leaned into the accelerator. Just in case, I was going to make the meet a half hour early.

The client rep was waiting for me. Later I would learn his name was Walford. It fit, somehow.

For now, though, he was just the rep. And not in particularly good shape, either.

I breathed a laugh out through my nose, looked to the empty warehouse behind him. We were in the sister of the place in Piedras Negras, right down to the wire rolls in the abandoned yard.

The reason I had to look away to laugh was that the rep’s polyester suit was sweated through, and he was wearing an iced-down towel across the back of his neck. It was rolled up, white, from some hotel or another.

“Should have turned your collar up,” I said.

“What?”

“Your sunburn there. You were walking east and north in the late afternoon and there weren’t any clouds yesterday. The burn’ll probably bubble up. Wet some tea bags down, they’ll draw the heat out.”

He rubbed his mouth, shook his head.

“Was wondering if I’d beat you out of town or not,” he said.

I shrugged. What he’d just told me was that I hadn’t been followed, that my stash out in the desert was safe. Either that, or he didn’t want me to know I’d been followed, so was playing dumb. The way he was hurting, though, I doubted it.