River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (21 page)

Other properties were abandoned, their fields fallow, vast stretches of bare earth. Some were thick with weeds; others had been so farmed out, toasted with chemicals and overuse, that nothing would grow anymore.

“God,” Byrd said when they reached Palo Duro’s “downtown” at the intersection of Palo Duro Road and River Road. A few buildings flanked the corner in every direction. Most were vacant: the bank, the barbershop (supports for its once cheerful red, white, and blue pole holding nothing but a couple of blown leaves), Betty’s Night Owl Saloon, Irene’s Cantina. Two adobe walls of Lou’s Hardware had crumbled under the weight of weather and time, although the painted sign could still be read through a patina of rust and dirt, above what remained of the door.

Weeds choked the sidewalk around these buildings, even threatening to overrun the businesses that were still operating. The post office was open, and a car was parked in front of it. Next door was the firehouse, its big door open and the single fire engine visible in the gloom. Willie’s Laundromat was empty but obviously remained a going concern. Across the street from it was Jo’s Burgers Pizza Ribs. “Didn’t that used to be something else?” Molly asked. The sign was newer than most of the others in town, the paint job fresher, glass intact in the windows.

“It was that liquor store. The Bottle Shop,” Byrd said.

“That’s right!” Wade said. “My dad used to spend more money there than we did on groceries.”

Molly turned left onto River Road, named because it ran parallel to the Rio Grande. From the road, one could get occasional glimpses of the river, fringed with trees in spots, beyond the farms and ranches. Mexico lay on the other side, but Palo Duro had never had a legal port of entry. Fort Hancock was the nearest.

A rangy, dun-colored coyote stood in the middle of the street, its ribs showing clearly through short fur, staring them down for a moment before darting between two buildings and out of sight.

To the right they saw more shut-down, crumbling businesses. The route took them past the Palo Duro Mercantile, which looked like it had closed its doors a hundred years ago. But when she was growing up, Molly had loved wandering its aisles, looking at toys and housewares, clothing and household appliances. Byrd had worked there a couple of summers. Through the Mercantile, her dad had bought a tractor once. Now it was gone, seemingly blown away by the west Texas wind like most of the town.

She opened her window and took a deep breath. The town’s odor was different than she remembered. The Mercantile had had a bakery attached, so especially on still winter mornings the fragrance of fresh breads and doughnuts and cakes had hung heavily on the air. The humidity of the Laundromat had leaked out into the street, back in those days, but today it was cool and odorless.

Beside the Mercantile was the BBQ Shack—also closed—its big screened porch covered with sheets of plywood, which were layered with graffiti and pocked by bullet holes. That place had always smelled like cooking fires and burning meat and spilled beer, and on warm autumn nights you could usually find much of the town sitting at the rough wooden picnic tables on the porch listening to Hank Jr. or Waylon or George Strait on the jukebox in the corner. Colored Christmas lights hung on the inside walls all year long. Bugs dashed themselves against the screens, moths fluttered unsteadily against the lights, and cool breezes wafted the aromas of ribs and chicken and corn and burgers out to the gravel parking lot. The teenagers usually sat at a table of their own, laughing and swearing, sneaking out for smokes now and again, while their parents did more or less the same thing. The Mercantile and the BBQ Shack had been the town’s social centers, and now both were history.

After that, they hit empty farmland again. The houses they could see from the road were wrecks, tumbling back into the land. The scene wrenched Molly’s heart. She had known families who had lived in these houses—she had gone to school with their children. She remembered riding her bike along this road—maybe headed to the Mercantile for some candy or a soda, maybe to the post office to pick up mail—and waving to people working their fields or sitting on front porches. Now they were gone. Palo Duro had become a ghost town.

When they reached the school complex, tears stung her eyes and she pulled the SUV off the road. Both school buildings, elementary and high school, were boarded up. Their brick walls looked as substantial as ever, but the covered windows (and those without covers, glass smashed out of them) destroyed this impression, leaving instead a sense of promises unfulfilled and dreams dashed. The lawns, athletic fields, and playgrounds were overgrown, the absence of children’s cries of joy, of tennis shoes on the grass, of backpacks and lunchboxes thrown aside for playtime was palpable.

“Fuck, look at that,” Byrd said quietly. “It’s just…a shell.”

“There’s hardly any population left to sustain it,” Wade said. “All those empty houses we’ve seen? I wonder where the kids go to school, though. The ones that are left. Fort Hancock? Sierra Blanca, maybe?”

“Either one’s a long haul,” Molly said. “It’s hard to imagine how it got this bad. I mean, I know, I know how these things go. But this was a real town once, you know?”

“I seem to have a vague memory of that,” Byrd said.

Molly put the vehicle in gear again. “I hope coming here wasn’t a bad idea,” she said.

“It’s not that awful, Moll,” Byrd said, using a nickname for her that he rarely employed in recent years. “It’s not like it’s a surprise or anything. Rural flight and all. For the first time in history, more human beings live in cities than in rural areas.”

“I
get
that, Byrd,” Molly snapped. “I’m just articulating an emotional response, not writing a fucking thesis.” As soon as the words escaped her lips, she regretted them. Byrd would be the first to insist that people treat him like anyone else, not to handle him with kid gloves. Although she had tried to live up to his wishes, guilt still wracked her whenever she lost her patience with him. “Sorry,” she said. She pulled the Xterra back onto the road. Not a single vehicle had passed while they’d sat outside the school.

“Next stop, Downerville, USA,” Byrd said.

He was right. Molly and Byrd had lived on a farm property adjacent to the school. She could see it already, the fields as vacant as the school buildings, pushing up no vegetation to block the view. No matter what shape it was in, it wouldn’t be what it once was. It wouldn’t be the happy home where she had grown up.

Byrd had been away at UTEP when the foreclosure happened. The cotton crop had been bad for three years running—drought, insects, you name it. Her folks had borrowed to the hilt, and then those grim days came when they couldn’t buy food
and
pay the bills. Then they couldn’t do either. Finally, they had to pack up both pickup trucks and leave behind everything they couldn’t carry. The bank had already staked auction signs around the property. Molly cried for three days before they moved, visiting her friends (those who hadn’t already been foreclosed themselves), choosing what she could take and what had to be abandoned.

Byrd drove down from El Paso to help with the move, but he had been away during what she considered the worst of it, the months of uncertainty, the constant phone calls from creditors, the mailbox full of dunning notices, the questions her classmates asked about rumors they’d heard.

Within a year after winding up in a mobile home park on the northeast side of El Paso, their father was dead. Two years later—Molly had just started at UTEP, living at “home,” in the doublewide, to save dorm money—their mother followed him. Byrd had always been Molly’s rock; now he was all she had in the world. She couldn’t imagine the shape of a life without him in it.

She turned down the long dirt driveway that had led to their house. From the gate, she could already see it hadn’t fared well in the intervening years. The adobe walls surrounding the yard had fallen over, the windows broken out, the bricks faded and chipped. A hole in the green, pitched roof might have been made by a meteorite or a small explosion or simple neglect.

She stopped the car. “I don’t want to see any more, Byrd. Do you?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not here. You’re right, it’s just too fuckin’ sad.”

Without another word, she turned around on the dirt lane and headed back to River Road. Their day of touring wasn’t over, not by a long shot. They had more important places to visit, and only one day in which to see them.

TWENTY-FOUR

After they left the old McCall farm, the place where Wade had met Molly and, shortly thereafter, Byrd—the two people who would become his lifelong best friends—they drove out of town, still heading south on River Road, the Rio Grande always there to the right.

They passed the site of the carnival where Wade had spent a summer evening with Jenna Blair, the year they were both fifteen. He had won her three stuffed animals and was rewarded with his first French kiss and his first bare breast (under the blouse and bra, but flesh against his hand anyway, her nipple spiking against his palm). Earlier, they’d eaten enough corn dogs and pizza, cotton candy and churros to revolt a legion of vegans. When they found a quiet place behind some of the carnies’ trailers and the kissing had started, everything else had been forgotten. They had made out for an hour before Jenna’s older sister found them and told them Jenna was in trouble for breaking curfew. Wade had gone to bed that night unable to sleep for hours, his head spinning, his lips and tongue and teeth and hands tingling with the memories of all they had done.

Two months later, Byrd had gone to the Permian Basin Fair in Odessa with Jenna, won six prizes, and was even been invited to put his hand inside Jenna’s unsnapped jeans. Byrd, a year older than Wade, had been experienced enough to know he’d better not take advantage of the opportunity until Jenna was of legal age because, as he explained to Wade the next day, once he revved up her engines there wouldn’t be any stopping her.

That had been the summer before, though…

“Do you want to swing by your old place, Wade?” Molly asked. They were approaching the McHenry Road turnoff, which would take them directly to the old frame house he had lived in, hard by the river, a few miles away from the McCall farm.

“No thanks.” He didn’t have to think about it. He never wanted to see that house again. Nothing happy had started there, nothing good. Not like Byrd and Molly’s place, where he’d spotted Molly from his second-hand Stingray bike with its raised handlebars and banana seat.

Anyway, he understood where they were really headed. They all did, even though none of them had spoken it aloud. They’d agreed to go to Malo Duro, or Palo Duro, but what they meant was they were going to Smuggler’s Canyon. That had been the centerpiece of their lives, hadn’t it? Not school, not the Mercantile or the BBQ Shack. It had always been Smuggler’s Canyon that mattered.

Soon, he could see it ahead, a buff rock outcropping that stood out against the sturdy, tall mesquite trees lining the riverbank there, mostly green though beginning to lose their leaves for the winter. These particular trees, almost impossible to cut down in the days before chain saws, had given Palo Duro its name. Smuggler’s Canyon had damn near snatched away its respectability.

There had been no legal border crossing for miles around, but that didn’t mean the border wasn’t crossed. At Smuggler’s Canyon, the river had been a passageway for longer than the international border had existed. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the Gadsden Purchase of 1852 had officially determined the border between the U.S. and Mexico—before that, this had all been Mexico—but to those who crossed at the canyon, those treaties were scraps of paper with little significance. The river was narrow there, the channel closed in by the granite outcroppings thrust up through the limestone beds. The mesquite trees were convenient to tie boats to. And the limestone formations on what became the U.S. side offered ideal hiding places, caves and cliffs and hidey-holes that a smuggler or two or ten could duck into until the law lost interest.

Every parent in Palo Duro told his or her kids to keep away from Smuggler’s Canyon. There are illegals there all the time, they said. Drug smugglers. Criminals.

Of course, this just spurred every kid in Palo Duro to get over there at the first possible opportunity. Most of them quickly lost interest, since the threat of the border patrol or the county sheriff made it a bad place for beer parties, and there were thousands of square miles of West Texas more welcoming.

Wade, Byrd, and Molly had fallen in love with the place. They’d been fascinated by its whispered history, the tales of smugglers and thieves, the fact that raiding Apache warriors had hidden out in the canyon, chased there not only by white soldiers but by Comanche war parties. The rock art had gripped their imaginations and they’d spent hour after hour studying it, imagining what it might have meant.

They had explored many of its caves, and made one with a natural chimney for campfire smoke into a kind of secret clubhouse. They’d stashed snacks in surplus store ammo cans, comics, books and magazines (even burying, in a side cavern,
Playboys
and
Penthouses
that they only looked at when Molly wasn’t along). They’d meet there on summer mornings and spend the whole day in the canyon, exploring, talking, reading, swimming in the river. On a portable boom box they played cassette tapes: Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, Springsteen, Joe Jackson, John Cougar, U2, the Clash, the Police, Elvis Costello. At dusk on summer evenings, bats flowed from the upper reaches like smoke from a wildfire, and one year a pair of bald eagles built a nest in the rocks overhead and fished in the river in the late afternoons.