It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (6 page)

Like a doctor could fix me.

I don’t need surgeons, I need a
priest
. Though a scientist with a working time machine would probably do the trick as well. Then I could go back, stay with Laurie, or go back even farther, push her mother out of the bank ahead of me, instead of being brave and going first.

All that did was show them where to settle their crosshairs.

Except, of course, I was steps ahead of there by the time they actually did settle. Steps ahead, and still holding her hand.

When I ran to Mexico, yeah, I was running from warrants and all-points-bulletins and a series of bad decisions and friends always calling for all the wrong reasons. At least that’s what it said on the news.

What I was really doing, though, was still moving away from that bank door as fast as I could. Holding onto the only piece of Tanya I had left, anymore: Laurie. And thirty-eight thousand cash, in a bag.

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 up. 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.