The Carrion Birds (8 page)

Ray leaned forward and rested his head on his
forearm, putting his weight onto the glass of the booth. He sucked at the
insides of his cheeks until he could feel the flesh between his teeth. He was
done with Memo. He knew it now. “I’m staying,” Ray said. “I’m not coming back
after this. I’ll send your nephew north with the dope and I’ll do what you’re
asking, but I’m done after this. I’ve spent too long hiding from the past. No
one will be looking for Burnham’s truck if your nephew goes now. If he leaves
now it will work and I’ll do what you’re asking of me and then I want my money
and I don’t want to hear from you again.”

“No,” Memo said. “I can’t trust my nephew. He’s
messed too much up already. I need you on this. I need you to finish this for
me. Keep my nephew’s pager and send him north, but don’t send him with the
drugs. I can’t trust him. I want you to hide the drugs and when you’re done with
everything I’ll send someone to pick them up.”

“I can do that,” Ray said. “But you hear me on
this, I’m not coming back.”

“If that’s what you want,” Memo said. “If that’s
what you think will solve this problem for you. But you should know it’s all on
you. If for some reason the drugs aren’t where you say they are, it’s all on
you.”

“You’ll get your dope,” Ray said. “You’d have it
today if you let me send it north with Sanchez.”

“You know just as well as I do that my nephew isn’t
right for this work. His balls are too big. Thinks he’ll run the business
someday. You’re untouched, you’ve never done a bit of time, and except for ten
years ago you’ve kept yourself clean. You’ve done a good job for us over the
years but staying there isn’t going to solve any of this. Coronado will never be
the same as it was when your wife was alive. It’s simply been too long to go
back.”

Ray unwrapped an antacid and put it into his mouth.
He knew Memo was right, nothing would ever be the same, though he hoped somehow
it would. He would send Sanchez north and he would stay.

“Antacids?” Memo asked. “All these years and you
still eat those things?”

“Heartburn,” Ray said.

“I told you to see a doctor about it.”

“I did.”

“He tell you to take antacids?”

“He told me a bunch of stuff, only I wasn’t
listening.”

“That’s not good,” Memo said. “That’s never good.
You should listen to what doctors tell you.”

“Why?”

“They’re usually trying to save your life.”

Ray looked across the parking lot at Sanchez
sitting there in the diner, then looked away, the pumice taste of the antacid
still on his tongue. Burnham had been right—everything had changed. None of it
was the way it used to be, and now Ray was stuck in this life, one leg thrown
over the fence that divided this new world from the old, knowing he should never
have come back to Coronado for this job.

“You ready to listen now?” Memo asked.

From his coat pocket Ray took out the small orange
prescription bottle with the pills the doctor at the VA had given him. Meant to
get him concentrated, to get his mind right and keep him in the present. To keep
his mind off all the ghosts that followed him around. Only the pills didn’t seem
to work, or maybe he’d just grown used to them, because nothing had felt right
for a very long time. “Yeah,” Ray said. “I’m listening.”

I
t was
early still when Tom crossed the Rio Grande on his way home, the passenger
window open for Jeanie, and the clay smell of the water below as he passed.

Perhaps it had been the accident on the road,
perhaps the newscast, perhaps Mark’s mention of the trouble years before. Tom
didn’t know for sure. But there it was, rooted into him, and now spun loose,
bobbing around through his insides. All of it heavy in his mind, big as a tree
pulled green and full from the bank and strangely alive as it went on down the
river.

The drive took him two hours. Not really aware of
where he was going until he arrived. Turning off the highway ten miles outside
of Coronado, he took the long dirt road west, watching the last of the sunlight
close out the cattle fence. The house looked just as it always did, pitched
somewhat crooked, with the wide frame of the place lit from within by lamplight.
The old staff houses he’d known as a child, off a ways from the main house,
melting little by little into the ground—boards rotted through, and the adobe
walls crumbling.

His only real reason for coming simply that he
didn’t want to go home. Tom rang the bell and waited. When the door opened Gus
stood there looking him over. “You see the news tonight?” Tom said.

Gus stood there behind the screen door looking out
at his nephew. “I saw it. I expect you want to come in and relive the good old
days, is that it?” He pushed the screen door open and held it for Tom.

The house had the old familiar smell he’d grown up
with—something of cooked meat and talcum powder—all of it bringing Tom back
decades. The old green wallpaper, the split-wood furniture, dust-covered
lampshades, and sun-stained curtains always pulled a quarter way across the
windows.

“My father around?” Tom said, after he’d come in
and sat in one of the armchairs in the living room.

“I haven’t seen him take off for the bar yet, so I
expect he’s still out back in his place if you want to go get him,” Gus said. He
was standing near the middle of the room, close to the fireplace, looking Tom
over where he sat.

“No,” Tom said. “I just thought I should ask. I see
enough of him now at work as it is.”

“Coffee?”

“If you have some.”

Waiting while Gus moved around in the kitchen, Tom
rose and took in the old pictures of Ray up above the mantel. Ray in his army
uniform, another of Tom and Ray as children out by one of the steel-framed oil
wells up the valley, a picture of Gus and his wife thirty years before. At the
end of the mantel, the most recent picture of Gus, Ray, and Marianne, twelve
years ago, pregnant then with their boy.

“Where’s Billy?” Tom asked.

“Go on into his room, he’s back there.”

Tom walked to the back hallway leading off the
living room and pushed open Billy’s door. The room had been Ray’s when they were
kids and Tom looked in on the same bed and dresser that had always been there
and the dioramas that now lined the walls, which Ray’s son, Billy, made of
exotic places. Shoe boxes everywhere with jungle scenes, tropical islands, and
remote villages built from bits of wire, painted newspaper, and construction
paper.

Billy was sitting on the bed cutting cardboard with
a pair of safety scissors, the half-made model of some new landscape taking
shape inside an old shoe box. “It looks good,” Tom said, letting the boy read
his lips, and then a moment later, using his hands, Tom signed, “You’re getting
good at these.”

“Thanks,” Billy signed, and then went back to his
cuttings. He was skinny and short for his age. A scar running up through his
black hair where the doctors had gone in to relieve the bleeding and the lasting
effect of the accident, a pair of hearing aids that Billy almost never wore.

Tom closed the door and went back out into the
living room. He took down one of the pictures and looked at his cousin’s face.
There had been days of discussions over what should be done with Billy, about
how Ray couldn’t deal with Marianne being gone. Tom driving over to Ray’s house
in those weeks after the accident and sitting around at the kitchen table,
watching Ray drink. Billy sitting there in his high chair, trying constantly to
take the bandage from his head, and the mute musings of a two-year-old boy that
the doctors said would never be normal.

“I know it’s wrong,” Ray said. “But I just can’t go
on like this anymore.” He was on his third beer and he gestured to the
medications laid out on the table, some for Billy and some for him.
Antidepressants and children’s antibiotics. “You know what I’m saying?”

Tom looked back at Billy where he sat, the plump
little fists now given up on removing his bandage and gone on to reaching for a
roll of medical tape on the table and a box of bandages.

“I want you to do something about this,” Ray said.
“I need you to do something about this.”

“You know I won’t.” Tom shook his head. Ray always
asking him the same thing every time they talked, wanting Tom to go by and scare
that Lopez woman, to chase her off. Tom just sitting there listening to Ray and
wanting out of there. The house smelling like antiseptic and rotting garbage.
Ray just letting it all go.

“I’m giving Billy up,” Ray said. “I’m taking him
over to my father’s for a little while. I can’t keep going on like this.”

“Going on like what?” Tom said. “You need to pull
it together. You can’t just take off.”

“The man I work for now offered to help. He says he
can help me with what happened to Marianne.”

“It’s a bad thing that happened to you, Ray. But we
don’t have anywhere to go with that. I want to help you but I just can’t go
knocking on the cartel’s door, pointing fingers. What happened to Marianne was
horrible, but you leaving, giving Billy up, it isn’t the answer.”

“At one time there was me,” Ray said. “And then
there was me, but there was a little less of me, you understand? I don’t know
how to get that piece back.”

“Jesus, Ray. It might not seem like it, but people
go through this stuff every day.”

“ ‘Every day it gets a little easier,’ ” Ray
mimicked, making his voice low and cruel. “I’ve heard that enough from the
doctors.”

“They’re telling it to you for a reason.”

“It doesn’t get easier, Tom. Not for me. What
happened to Marianne, that’s on me, that’s my fault. You understand? I shouldn’t
have started taking the work with this man, but I did and there’s no going back
in time. The cartel knows who I am now and I’m just trying to do what’s best for
everyone. What happened to Billy, that’s on me.” He finished the beer and put it
down on the table, the sound loud in the kitchen but Billy not noticing. Ray
picked up the bottle again and put it down hard, again and again, louder and
louder. Beside Tom, Billy never looked up and Ray threw the bottle across the
room, where it hit the wall and then fell to the floor without shattering. After
a time, he said, “I’m fucking losing it, Tom.”

“He’s a special-needs kid. That’s all. He’s still
yours. He’s still the same kid he was.”

“They’re telling me he’s going to need to go to a
special school,” Ray said. He wouldn’t look up at Tom. “He’s retarded. He’s
never going to be normal. You know that, Tom.”

Tom shook his head. The things Ray was saying
weren’t right, they weren’t Ray, but it was no good trying to talk to him about
it. They sat like that for a long time, till Tom picked the bottle off the floor
and they went into the living room and watched television. Billy sitting on
Tom’s lap and Ray drinking another beer.

The next day Tom would go over to Angela Lopez’s
house and shoot her point-blank. Knowing the whole time—as he went up those
stairs to her house—that what he was doing wouldn’t solve a thing. His own
inability to help Ray with his problems, to bring Marianne back and make
everything better. Tom had known it wouldn’t get any better, but he’d hoped all
the same that it would. So many years gone by now. All that time spent thinking
about what had happened and he’d never been able to figure out if he’d done it
on purpose or, as everyone said, if it was an accident.

When he called over to Ray’s soon after, there was
no response, and in the days that followed he’d learn that Ray had left Billy
with Gus and gone north.

Holding the picture in his hand now, ten years
later, Tom looked down on a face that hadn’t changed one bit from when he’d
known his cousin all those years before. Before everything that had happened,
before the Lamar wells had gone dry and the money had gone out of the family and
Ray had left his son in Gus’s care.

“You hear anything from Ray lately?” Tom asked,
raising his voice a little so it might carry into the kitchen.

“You know the answer to that just as sure as I do,”
Gus said.

Tom carried the picture over to the kitchen
doorway, where he watched Gus fill the pot with water, then walk back over and
fill the machine. “You ever feel like you were meant to do something else, Gus?”
Tom asked.

Gus waited, watching the coffee begin to percolate,
then turned to look at Tom where he stood in the doorway. “I’m too old for you
to be asking me something like that,” Gus said. “I’m stuck with whatever I’ve
already done. There’s no going back.”

“I went up and saw Elena today,” Tom said.

“Banner day for you, isn’t it?”

“I guess you could say that. I’ve certainly been
making my way down memory lane.”

“You want to go back?” Gus said, the water in the
machine falling dark into the pot. “Is that it? Do it all over again, have
yourself investigated again by the DEA because you took some advice from Ray
that really didn’t pan out. Is that what you want?”

“Honestly? Yes, sometimes I do. Sometimes I think I
could have come through this thing all right.”

Gus gave Tom a sad smile. “You only got off because
the judge went easy on you, Tom. I’m not saying what happened deserved the
punishments they were going after you for—I’m not saying that. But I do think
you should consider yourself lucky.” Gus poured the coffee and led him into the
living room again. “We have this conversation every couple years, don’t we?
Sometimes I think you come over here and you want to talk it out, but other
times, like tonight, I think I’m just standing in for Ray because he’s not
here.”

Tom took a sip of the coffee, hot and bitter as it
slid past his tongue. “Did I ever tell you I tried to track him down through a
friend in the DEA?”

“I didn’t think you had any friends left in the
DEA.”

“I don’t really,” Tom said. Telling Gus how Agent
Tollville was an old acquaintance who’d helped him out with some work in the
eighties, but whom he hadn’t talked much with since. When Tom called—a month
after Tollville had come down to testify at Tom’s hearing—Tollville had been
more than a little surprised.