It Came From Del Rio

It Came From Del Rio Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles Stephen Graham Jones Trapdoor Books

Lyons, Colorado

Copyright ©2010 Trapdoor Books All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotation in a review. Trapdoor Books is an imprint of Trapdoor Publishing. First Edition. Discovered by Franz Weller Edited by Jami Carpenter Author Photo by Gary Isaacs Design by Sue Campbell Cover illustration by Ryan “Ry” Shiu, www.ry_spirit.deviantart.com This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cataloging in Publication Data available. ISBN-13: 978-1-9365000-0-0 (hardcover) ISBN-13: 978-1-9365000-1-7 (trade paperback) ISBN-13: 978-1-9365000-2-4 (e-book) ISBN-10: 1-9365000-0-0 (hardcover) ISBN-10: 1-9365000-1-9 (trade paperback) ISBN-10: 1-9365000-2-7 (e-book)

P.O. Box 1989 Lyons, Colorado 80540-1989 www.trapdoorbooks.com Printed in the United States of America

Contents “Dodd” “Laurie” “Author’s Note” “About the Author”

for Kinsey girl and for Jory Gray

Devil made me do it the first time second time I done it on my own — Waylon Jennings

Dodd

Call me Dodd. That’s what I used to tell my clients, in the bars and alleys and dives I called my office. And they liked it, that I was that kind of professional. It made me a good investment — made them good investors, smart businessmen. And, taking into consideration that they were using my services instead of some hack, some suicide waiting to happen, maybe they were doing good business. Because I always delivered, no matter what. But the joke was on them, too: Dodd’s my real name. It’s the same as, during a bank job, say, leaving a fake mustache by the curb. The cop who finds it, he’s going to narrow his eyes and say into his radio that everyone needs to be on the lookout for some criminal type who’s got a smooth upper lip. Because, if they catch up with me in the next few days — three weeks, in my case, to get it to fill in properly — then there’s no way I could be hiding behind a mustache. Unless I already had one, was just holding that fake one in the cuff of my sleeve. That’s how Dodd works. It’s not short for anything either, though when my daughter Laurie was learning to talk, she didn’t understand the difference between Dodd and Dad. It was all good and funny. We were living in Mexico then. On cash. Dad, Dodd. There’s another way to mispronounce it, too. A couple of years after she learned to talk, when our sequentially-numbered bills were running low, meaning I was gone at night more and more, I came home with the sun one morning to find a napkin on the bar between the kitchen and the dining room. Laurie’d been using it as a coaster, pretending she had a mom, maybe, who’d get onto her for leaving rings of water around the house. I don’t know. On the napkin, anyway, top left and at an angle, my name, as if she’d been taking down a phone message. Only, instead, she’d started doodling: Dodd Dad Did Dud Which is four of the vowels, yeah. She’d started to write the fifth, but then, seeing the end of it, stopped. Standing there in the kitchen that morning, it was funny, an accident, a sick joke. She should have just kept writing. If she had, maybe this all would have fallen out differently. Maybe the ink in this pen wouldn’t be bubbling out onto the back of my hand. Dead. If she’d just written that out, it could have kickstarted all my superstitions, rung all my alarm bells. Kept me from calling the number she’d jotted down at the other corner of the napkin. A job. That’s all it was supposed to be.

But if that were true, a whole hell of a lot more people would still be alive. Including me. Let me back up a bit, though, start in Mexico with me at that breakfast bar between the kitchen and the dining room, Laurie sleeping in her room at the other end of the house, unaware that I was home, that I was about to be leaving again, that I was already looking north to the border, sizing it up once again. Don’t. It’s what I want to say to myself, there. But I’m already reaching for the phone.

As apology to Laurie that next morning, I cooked up all the eggs in the refrigerator. Because this was Mexico, some of them were fertilized, had bloody yolks. I separated them out, washed them down the sink. She wandered in just as I was pouring them from the pan to the plates. “Sunshine,” I said, sitting down in my place. She hadn’t looked up to me yet, was still rubbing sleep from her eyes. “Maria been over?” I asked. She did her no-eye-contact nod, meaning she didn’t want to get Maria in trouble. Maria was the daughter of the family who lived next door. Nights I had to be gone, Maria slept on the couch, played big sister. Or was supposed to. “So?” I asked. Laurie squinted out the window, panned back to me like I was the last thing in the room. “Somebody called,” she said. “Oh,” I said, chewing, hooking my head over to the counter, where the napkin had been, “thought that was for ... what was it? Dud?” Finally, she smiled, started in on her eggs. “The cable’s out again,” she said. “I’ll talk to Raymond.” “School starts in —” “I know. C’mon, what do you think I am?” She didn’t answer. Dad. Dud. “I’ll get something regular by then,” I told her, shrugging like this was the most obvious fact in the world. “But, I mean, this kind of money, you know I can’t turn it down, dollface.” “I don’t like these ones,” she said. “The guy on the phone?” I asked back, too sudden I know. I tried to lean back into my chair. “He say something to you, L?” Laurie shook her head no. “It wasn’t a guy,” she said. I pulled my top lip in, tried to focus on her, relisten to what she was saying. When I’d called half an hour ago, a guy, a white guy with an Austin area code, had answered, given me the specifics.

“It was a girl, then,” I said. “She knew my name.” “What?” There was no more, though. Just that. And it wasn’t so much a threat as a negotiating tactic. I knew because I’d used it myself in bars, hustling pool. What you do is, while lining up your shot, say to whoever you’re playing that you like their truck — what, is that a ’72 clip up under the front, yeah? What they’ll say back is no, it’s not theirs. They’re driving that Monte Carlo with the wire wheels and the twenty-two layers of clear coat. At which point you nod, snap your ball against some unlikely series of rails to win the game, and say Yeah, that Monte Carlo. Sharp ride. What’s a paintjob like that go for, anyway? The message they get is that now you know what they drive. This is what these clients were telling me: that, if, upon delivery, I made up some story about having to grease the border guys or buy a car off a lot or whatever, then, hey, they knew I had a daughter, yeah? Cute little girl named Laurie, about three hundred miles away? It also meant I couldn’t turn down this job. Whether they were moving stuff in ziploc bags or a pallet of anvils, I was going to have to strap it onto my back, mule it up by starlight. Maybe I really would get a regular job after this, I told myself. One that didn’t ransom my kid to get me to show up. First, though, one more crossing. But before that, like every time, a walk down to the pharmacist.

Manuel was waiting for me in the storeroom. His regular customers, we all knew not to ring the bell, make him stand up in the heat of the day. “Already?” he said, dragging the word out so that what he was really saying was that he was talking American especially for me. Because Spanish was too good, was something I didn’t deserve. “Manny Manny Manny ...” I said, running my fingertips along a row of bottles at eye-level. “How many?” “No small talk? ‘How you doing, Dodd?’ ‘Fine, man. Muy ass bien.’ ‘Your health?’ ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’” “Your health, Dodd?” “Yeah.” In the fifties — and I just heard this on the radio once, so probably don’t have any of the names right, if this even was the fifties — there was some trumpet player or another. One of the big ones. Or maybe it was saxophone. Parker, Davis, I don’t know. Jazz. Elevator music. It doesn’t matter. What does is that he shot a truly ungodly amount of heroin. Like, day-in, day-out. Never a dull moment. Trick was, though, he didn’t shoot it for all the usual reasons. For him, it was pain management. Real pain. For years and years before making it big, ever since he was a barefoot kid, he’d been a real and true butterscotch junkie. Meaning he always had one in his mouth. And of course it rotted his teeth all to hell, left him in all kinds of pain, the kind that only some morphine derivative

could take the edge off of. The reason that stuck when I heard it was that it was like the DJ was talking about me. Ever since I was a kid myself, in Beaumont, there was never a week I didn’t have some ulcer in my mouth. Canker sore. Little white volcanoes of pain. And there was no way to avoid them. Sure, if I didn’t drink any cokes, or eat any ketchup or chocolate, or get any little cuts in my gums from Doritos or from picking out popcorn, or have any stress of any kind, I’d have less ulcers. Not none, but less. So I was cursed, and knew it, and just went along knowing it until, one day in the dentist’s chair — he counted nine ulcers — this dentist says that when he was a kid, these had never been a problem. As best I could with my mouth clamped open, I’d asked why. His answer — he had to talk loud, over the whine of the drill — was that the pharmacists back then all had zinc nitrate sticks. Looked like the punks you get for July 4th. All you had to do was touch one of those bad boys to your sore, and it cauterized it, man. Fixed it right up. But of course, because they worked so well, they went out of fashion, even went on some list of things not done anymore. Not illegal, just not respectable; evidently burning a burn isn’t good, twentieth century medicine. Meaning, so long as I lived in America, my mouth was going to hurt. So, yeah, maybe this is why I let the security cameras in that last bank get a clear picture of my face, to paste all over the news. For me, Mexico wasn’t just a hiding place, a place to start over, but the land of milk and zinc nitrate sticks. As soon as we settled in under our new names, the first thing I did was introduce myself to Manuel, who shrugged, said yeah, he’d have to make up a batch special, but if I wanted to pay? I did. And they were perfect. Like that dentist said, all it is is burning a burn, which, I mean, you don’t treat a gunshot with another gunshot, I know, or gonorrhea with more gonorrhea. But the way it feels, it’s like those sticks are straws, sucking the hurt out of me, and I don’t care if it’s right or not. Like that trumpet player, I play my best music when I’m feeling no pain. Coke, ketchup, chocolate — I can mix it in a bowl if I want, bake it in a pie. Never mind that the week Manuel went up to Laredo to visit relatives, I broke into his pharmacy, pawed through all his notes until I found his aunt’s number, who knew the cousins’ numbers in Laredo, who knew the ex-girlfriend Manuel was shacked up with. What I paid him that time, it was enough for a year. But worth it. The only bad thing was that, because he was charging me so much, they started to feel like heroin or something. So, without even meaning to, I started rationing them out, denying myself for forty-eight hours at a time, just to prove I could, then hiding from Laurie in the bathroom, my eyes rolled back into my head, a stick sizzling in my mouth. Which is dramatic, but you get the idea. So, yeah, chocolate and all that, it was nothing to me anymore. With Manuel down the street, I was Superman. Except for stress. The kind that comes from snaking across the border with ten to

twenty years’ worth of whatever in my pack, horses and trucks and planes circling all around me. That kind of stress could still light my mouth up, make it hard for me even to drink what little water I had. “Another job, yeah?” Manuel said, pawing on the shelf behind him for the container I knew so well. “The last one,” I said, passing the cash with one hand, taking the sticks with the other. He laughed about this, stuffed the cash into his money jar. “What?” I said, half out the door already. He shook his head — no, nothing — then unmuted the American soap opera he had wound up on tape, let it play. On the way home, in the bathroom of a bar, I allowed myself one stick, just as a preventative measure, but then stayed in there long enough that the clerk sent somebody back to chase me out. We started to get into a fight by the magazine rack, but I was feeling too good by then, and started laughing instead, and, as apology, bought five dollars of chocolate, washed it down with a glass-bottle coke that was so perfect it made my eyes water.

Of all the last things I could have said to Laurie, what I ended up with was that if Raymond came over to fix the cable, she wasn’t supposed to let him in unless Maria was there. “Why?” she said. “No reason,” I said back. “Could Maria beat him up, then?” I looked away, my lower lip pulled into my mouth. It’s not easy, being a dad. Maria was in the other room, already on the phone, the cord wrapped twice around her waist, four or five times around her index finger. Talking in a Spanish so fast and coded that I could never understand it. “Just a kiss,” I said, leaning down to Laurie. She laughed, shook her head, but kissed me on the cheek, hugged my neck, and asked when I was coming back? Soon, I told her, my pack already slung over my shoulder. It’s probably what she thinks of now, when she thinks of me. Maybe I was even backlit by the doorway or something, like a painting or a movie. I don’t know. Laurie. Of all the things I’m thankful for — all three of them, maybe, and that’s counting that I don’t have to worry about mouth ulcers twice — one is that she can’t see me like I am now. What I’ve become, what I’m doing. It’s all for the best, though. These are the kinds of things you say to yourself. It’s all for the best, and this is how it had to be. Except — On the far wall, I can see my shadow. In the corner, a man named Larkin. He’s balled up, crying, terrified.

I would be too.

The meet was in the flats just outside Piedras Negras. It’s all different now, but back then it was like a movie set: just past a fence that only stood for about two hundred feet, there was an abandoned ferris wheel, like one day it had finally just not been worth packing back onto the truck again. And all around, just out of pistol range, these dogs that didn’t look at all like dogs, or even starved-down coyotes. Jackals, maybe, from what I’ve seen on nature shows. They probably didn’t go forty pounds, but were wiry, and moved like ghosts, one of them always watching me. Maybe the circus had left them, too, like the ferris wheel. Or, more likely, their momma had chewed through her rope, run off into the scrub, whelped a litter of fifteen, raised them on grasshoppers and cigarette butts and heat. What made it all really like a movie was that the client pulled up in a dusty old El Dorado, wearing a sweated-through polyester suit, white of course, a brown shirt underneath with a wingtip collar that touched each of his shoulders. I ran my hand over the long front fender, eased up to him. “Yeah?” he said. “Call me Dodd,” I told him, smiling just enough for him to know I was lying. “Need my name?” he said, heaving himself up from the front seat, studying me. “Just your money.” He laughed and slammed the door, causing all the dogs’ ears to stand up like radar dishes for an instant. “You’re not late,” he said, impressed maybe, wiping a stained handkerchief across his forehead, then looking into it the way some people will look at tea leaves. “Early either,” I shrugged, just an everyday fact. “People say when, I’m there then, yeah?” He nodded, accepted this. What I didn’t ask him was how he had Laurie’s name. That’s not how the game’s played. He hooked his head over to a warehouse. I looked around, followed. “So you’re military,” he said. This was part of the interview. “Honorable discharge,” I did my best to mutter. The trick with being ex-military is you have to have a bad attitude about it, or else you just danced through, didn’t learn anything. “Special forces?” he tried. I nodded like it didn’t matter, looked around again to the dogs. “So what’s the cargo?” I said. “In a bit,” he said, and then, instead of stepping through the half-open door of the warehouse, he stepped around to the fenced-in yard. The ground was just packed dirt. Spaced every few yards, some of them clumped together, were rolls of hogwire that each went about fourteen feet tall. They were in different states of rust, birds balanced on one or two. And then I saw the rabbits, and understood the dogs: in every bit of shade there was — and there wasn’t much — there was a rabbit. And they were all watching us, their eyes rolling like wet marbles.

“The dogs can’t dig them out, they den up in there,” I said, half of my face pulling up into an appreciative smile. “Good,” the client said. “But that’s not all.” I studied the yard again, trying to follow what he was getting at. All these abandoned rolls of wire. Maybe five thousand dollars’ worth, including delivery. Which — if these were what I was carrying, I was going to need a truck, and fog so thick you couldn’t even hear through it. An ocean to sigh that fog up for me. But that wasn’t the feeling I was getting, either; there were too many machinations in place already for me to just be delivering some discount fencing. The feeling I was getting, really, was like I was the new kid, standing in front of class, trying to figure out who I was going to have to fight, who I didn’t want to fight. “I don’t —” I started, but then did; the yard smelled dead. I stepped forward, into it, and, I mean, in the song-version of all this, if there was one, I’d be walking from one corner of Laurie’s napkin to the other now, from Dodd to that fifth variation. Something was rotting here. Slowly, conserving as much energy as possible, one of the rabbits stood, slowhopped over to the fenceline, to peel the green from a leaf. Maybe dig up the pink root. They wouldn’t be the smell, though. Any rabbit that the dogs got, they would eat. No, this was — maybe one of them had got jammed up in one of the rolls of wire somehow ... died? But that would just be one rabbit. Instinctively, I patted my back pocket, the long plastic tube I kept two sticks of silver nitrate in. “Go on,” the client said, nodding ahead of me into the yard, and the way he was smiling, I didn’t like it. There was nothing else to do, though. It wasn’t like there were going to be landmines or covered pits or snipers or anything. I stepped out, my sunglasses hanging from my hand, my other forearm across my nose, and after a few steps found the source of the smell: inside one of the newer rolls of wire, in the part that, if it were toilet paper, would be the cardboard tube, was the body of a man. To see him, I had to look at just the perfect angle. And even then, it was hard to tell. I studied the rest of the rolls — fourteen — then turned back to the client, my right cheek sucked up against my molars. “What was his problem?” I said. The client smiled, looked away. “He was late.” “You mean — making his delivery?” The client shook his head no. “He was late getting here,” he said, his face so pleasant, and I nodded, looked out to the yard again, so he couldn’t see my eyes. “Like I told you,” I said. “You don’t have to worry about that with me.” “I’m sure we won’t,” he told me, then held the broken door of the warehouse back, let me step in blind, my eyes not adjusting for probably thirty seconds, so that, for a

bit, whatever was on the metal desk seemed to be hazy, glowing, like all the windows. As it turned out, of course, it was what I was carrying north.

The first thing the client — the client’s representative, anyway — wanted to know was did I prefer to be paid by the job or by the ounce? It was a thing I’d never been asked. Usually I’d just say five large for getting the stuff across, then, depending on what I was carrying, from five to ten more. If it was a couple of kilos, say, then that told me who I was working for had more money to burn than somebody who just needed some Aztec artifact moved north. Not that, alone in the desert, I hadn’t drilled into that ancient artifact, found the two kilos I was pretty sure were there. It wasn’t about weight, though. What I told the clients was that it was about how much time I’d be doing if I got caught in a spotlight, couldn’t ditch the cargo. A thousand dollars for each year, roughly. The bad thing for them, of course, was that, because I was already a fugitive, I could get caught carrying baggies of sugar and still do twenty-five to life. But they didn’t come for me because I was cheap. They came to me because I was good. Maybe even, in 1986, the best. Not counting Sebby Walker, anyway, with his horse trained to lie down on command. But Sebby was a coyote, not a mule. His cargo was people, whole families sometimes, all the way out to cousins. You’d never catch me at the head of a line like that, though. It was just asking to get picked up. And, I mean, it’s not the people’s fault, it’s just that, if you’ve got a string of heads ten long, then you’re already visible, right? You might as well drape a paper dragon across all of you as umbrella, so at least you’ll be cool until the border cops show up. And anyway, Sebby, on this side he was a hero, but in South Texas, he was a slave trader. The people he sneaked up, by the time he got them there they were so close to dead that they’d get into whatever cattle truck or van he had lined up. Word was, he got two hundred for men, up to one-fifty for women. And that anything like a soul that he’d ever had, it was gone years ago. Which isn’t to say the stuff I carry north could be mailed through the post office. But that’s just business. If it wasn’t me, it’d be somebody else, and if it wasn’t somebody else, then another person would step in. This time, though, I was thinking that maybe I was that other person, stepping in. As to why being perfectly on time mattered so much, I had no idea, just figured they ran that kind of operation. For a moment, I considered the possibility that I was delivering an ostrich egg or something, that would hatch on me if I wasn’t fast enough. Except, of course, that was stupid. Never mind that it wasn’t far off. “So?” the client’s rep said, pulling me back to the warehouse. On the table by the steel briefcase was a bathroom scale, one of the high-dollar jobs. Did I want to go by the job, or by the ounce?

I had no idea, but figured it had to be a trick of some kind. Like that Egyptian guy — probably Miles Davis or Charlie Parker too, for all I know — who, when the king or pharaoh or whoever asked him if he wanted this hill of gold or that box of rubies, he said he’d rather have some corn. Only paid out in a special way, on a chessboard: put one kernel on the first square, then double it each time, until each square was filled. A trick question, yeah. That Egyptian broke the bank. “Weight,” I said, and the client rep smiled, nodded, started to unlatch the case. “I’ll be carrying that too, won’t I?” I said. For a second, his eyes unfocused in thought, but then he shrugged, latched it back. “You don’t want to know what it is?” “It’s something you don’t want to risk putting under your backseat,” I said, my fingertips to the case now — it wasn’t aluminum, was ... what? “Something that’ll put me on the front page of the Austin Chronicle. Stop me if I’m lying, here.” The rep just smiled a bit. “All that matters to me is how much that bad boy weighs,” I finished. He nodded, balanced the case up on the scale, then pushed down on it an extra three or four pounds, looked up to me again. “This was my idea, y’know? Weighing it out?” The air between us was all static, and things said with no words. But we understood each other. “Ten percent,” I said, just whispering in case the place was wired, and scraping my boot on the rough concrete, too, under my words. Hopefully on top of them. It wasn’t the DEA I was worried about. It was whoever he was representing. I was offering ten percent off the top if he’d lean down just a touch more. “Thinking more like twice that,” the rep said back, shrugging, leaning down a pound or two heavier just to show he could. “How much are we talking per ounce?” “Five hundred’s as high as I’m authorized to go.” “Make it seven and a half.” He laughed through his nose, said, “Five.” “Can’t do it for less than six, I’m afraid.” If that scale hadn’t been new, we’d have been able to hear that spring creaking for a few seconds there. “Half now, half there,” he finally said. “And my cut’s on this side.” I pretending to be weighing this as well. Stared at the scale long enough that he leaned down another couple of pounds — twenty-thousand dollars, better than fifteen of them mine. It was hard not to smile. “Twenty-five percent,” I said, like the money was nothing, was everyday. “And, when I make it back, you tell me who I’m working for here.” “You won’t be able to find me.” “Well then you’ll be getting a bargain, won’t you?” He looked away, to a window, then down to the scale again. Nodded. Twenty-two pounds and change. And we were rounding up, of course.

The client rep gave me the rest of the day to do what I wanted to with what I had left of fifty percent of the job, after his quarter off the top, that cut being mostly what he’d leaned onto the scale. So, fifty-three-thousand, give or take. The score of a lifetime. He had it ready in large, unsequential bills — this was Mexico — and that should have told me a thing or two, I suppose. But fifty thousand. It wasn’t enough to buy me out of my trouble up in America, but it would be enough to keep me from having lied to Laurie: I really could retire after this. Especially now that I knew something about managing money. When we’d first showed up down here, Laurie still in diapers, practically, I’d had thirty-eight thousand. Which I thought would be enough. But then there was just so much to buy: first, fifteen percent taken off the top, to wash the money as much as it needed washing, even for Mexico. Next, new identities for me and her, and then private school and a car with air conditioning — a legal car, at that — and then paying off the independent contractor who’d shown up, scratching the side of his head with the brass bead on his chrome pistol, and then, the very next day after the bounty hunter, Lem, on the run from the Texas Rangers, his leg shot to rags. It was twelve hundred to get him sewn up, then another eight to get him back on the road, with the sincere promise never to come back. And then just living, day-to-day. Cable, phone, electricity. Manuel the friendly neighborhood pharmacist. Now that we were set up, though, me and Laurie, this fifty-three thousand, with twice that waiting on delivery — no client rep getting his cut of that — it’d see her through high school and even college, probably, if she wanted to go. I carried the money in an old ammo box, and held it with both hands, and walked all over Piedras Negras until I was sure I wasn’t being followed, and then I walked straight out into the desert, committing each fencepost and hill and rock on the way to memory, so I could find this place again, and then I took the money out and wrapped it in plastic baggies and put it back in the box and buried it armdeep, where nobody would look, and peed over the tamped-down dirt, so it would make a crust, not look like something had been hidden there. By the time I got back to town it was dusk and I was hungry, but it didn’t matter. By three in the morning, I was supposed to be outside Ciudad Acuna, to pick up the briefcase. Part of the deal was that I had to walk it across. It didn’t matter where I crossed — they didn’t need to know my business (the client rep’s words) — but they didn’t want me calling up a friend, trying to drive this across the bridge, anything like that. I’d told the rep that I didn’t do that, and he’d shrugged, and I’d shrugged, and then I’d asked him why couldn’t I? His answer was that my cargo, there had to be zero point zero chance of it getting seized. Less than that. At which point I told him what the hell, maybe I would like to look in that briefcase. He smiled with his eyes, like he’d been waiting for this. Inside the briefcase, packed in molded grey foam, were twelve stainless steel

canisters. Without meaning to, I stopped breathing, didn’t want to get infected. The rep smiled with his mouth, shook his head no, then palmed up the canister marked 4. “You don’t have to,” I told him. “It’s best you know,” he said back, and broke the plastic seal, screwed the lid off, upended the canister. What was inside clunked out onto the table. It wasn’t diamonds and it wasn’t some test tube and it wasn’t microfilm. “A rock?” I said, reaching for it. He stopped me. “Yeah,” he said. “A rock. Eight rocks, actually. And some dust.” I narrowed my eyes, studied the canisters. “The rocks are decoy for the product?” I said, shrugging to make it true. “The dust is just dust, Mr. Dodd.” “Just Dodd.” “But if it gets seized, it’s not something my employers will be able to regain by ... by traditional means.” “Evidence rooms aren’t thrift marts, yeah?” I told him, studying the rock from a different angle. Was it laced with something, some rare ore, maybe? “If that’s where this sample would be going,” the rep said, then lobbed the rock to me. I didn’t have time not to catch it. “It’s warm,” I said, unsure. “And heavy?” Yeah. Too heavy. “It’s not used to this gravity,” the rep said, taking it back from me, wiping it clean with his handkerchief, sliding it back into the canister. I smiled, got it: the reason these wouldn’t be getting logged into any evidence room is that they were from the moon. The most expensive few ounces of anything, anywhere. “And just so you know,” he added, “the market for this is rather ... exclusive.” “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going to cut and run on you.” “I’m just saying.” “You don’t have to.” He put the canister back in its molded foam cradle, relatched the briefcase. “No later than three,” he said, hefting it up. “I’ll be there.” “And — I know I don’t have to say this either, Mr. Dodd. But, now, number four is the only one with the seal broken. Just so we’re clear.” “And if something happens?” “Something?” “The law. Always have a contingency. So is mine to dump these, let them mix in with the other rocks and dirt, or you want I should just hand them over?” The rep stared at me like I was from the moon as well.

“Just don’t let something happen, Mr. Dodd.” “I’m just saying. It’s not something I want.” “Good. Because it’s not something we tolerate.” “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. “So you gonna go back, collect the Caddy?” He waved it off, turned to the case, the reason we were here. “I think it was this Mexican water,” he said, clicking the case open. “Minerals clogged the radiator up. Either that or God hates me.” “It overheated?” “What, are you a mechanic too?” “Sometimes you have to be.” “Yeah, well,” he said, spinning the open case around to me. “I got other rats to be killing today than that damn car, know what I mean?” Fifty thousand in his front pocket, more like. I looked down to the case. It was the same as in Piedras Negras. “Smile,” the rep said then, and I looked up into his Polaroid, flashing. He peeled the film out, set it aside to develop. “What’s that?” I said. “It’ll be waiting for you in Uvalde,” he said. “Only copy. Just to confirm that there are twelve containers here. These twelve.” “Who you been working with, to get this paranoid?” “You think it’s me?” he said, pushing his blunt tongue through his teeth in some gesture that was lost on me. I closed the case, let him lock it with the key, then tuck the key into his pocket. “You’re serious?” I asked, about the key, the lock. “Like a woman in a shoe store.” “How am I supposed to ... What if I get —?” “Don’t.” Now we were just staring each other down. “Say I need to, like, bluff my way through something. I mean, cops’ panties get all wadded the hell up, they can’t look into some briefcase I’ve just told them doesn’t have anything in it they’d be interested in.”

“Like I said. Don’t involve the law.” “I wouldn’t really be doing it on purpose, see.” “One more thing,” he said then. “What? Want me to go barefoot? I’m supposed to wear a safety vest? Carry a red balloon?” “Nothing like that,” he shrugged, then leaned forward — with the key, I thought. It was the only reason I didn’t flinch away in time. That and that his hands were quicker than his belly or his suit suggested. What he had was a pair of cuffs. They snapped around my right wrist, and he clicked them down tight. On the other end of them, a thick cable, maybe three feet long. “Bullshit,” I told him, but he was already cuffing the other end of the cable to the handle of the case. We were just staring at each other again. “I can get this cut,” I said. “If you think that’s worthy use of your time,” he said back. “You are on something of a schedule, I believe.” I studied the case. Closed my eyes, opened them slow, to the pistol I knew he was going to have leveled on me, to keep me from strangling him with this new cable, beating his face in with the case. “Who are these people?” I asked, finally. “You don’t want to know,” the rep said, already backing away, rubbing his neck with the towel one last time then slinging the towel down. “I will tell you this, though. They don’t take too awful well to being disappointed. Even by a minute or two.” I lifted my right hand, the metal case clunking over on the table. “They’re not exactly fitting me for success, here.” “You haven’t been paying attention, Mr. Dodd. What that does” — the cable — “it guarantees success.” I made myself smile, looked away. Said it in my head over and over: fifty thousand, fifty thousand. Times three. “Oh yeah,” the rep called out then, from the door, “Odale says you’ve got a pretty mean bank shot, yeah?” To show what he meant, he leaned over an imaginary pool table, lined up on the missing cue. The game last night. The car I’d won. I didn’t say anything, just watched him back out, start the old Impala he was driving now. Odale probably had a whole stable of them. The engine was strong, untroubled, but the rep started it with too much pedal, like he expected it to give him grief. I lifted the case again, shook my head. On the way out I stopped to kick over the rep’s neck towel. Instead of cubed ice slinging across the slick concrete like I’d expected, there was dark blood. It was soaked through the outer layer, all the way to the mushy cold center. How long had he walked yesterday? I shrugged, found a different door out, and ended up skirting the fence of the abandoned yard, my face buried in the crook of my left arm. There were no rabbits.

For a hundred dollar bill, the guys at the tire shop down the street were happy to clip the cuffs. They were real police issue, meaning we had to get the vice involved, but still, it was stupid. The clients had to know it was the first thing I’d do, and it wouldn’t take me five hours, either. Not in a border town. Not for a smuggler. Too late, then, I looked up to the tire guys, suddenly sure one of them was Odale, or Odale’s brother or cousin, and that this hundred of mine he had now was just on top of whatever else he was already getting. I should have gone to the second tire place I saw, not the first. Not that there was anything to do about it now. I held the cable up in thanks, dropped it in the greasy trash barrel, and slouched and squinted out into the sun. That there was some game being played here, I was sure. It was obvious, like they even wanted me to know. No matter how I tried, though, I couldn’t make it out. Behind a gas station lined with all manner of taxis, I felt all over the case for a radio rig of some kind. The idea of being tracked, this close to stepping out into no man’s land, I couldn’t shake it. If New Orleans was the Big Easy, then Mexico was the Big Empty. It could swallow you whole if you took even one wrong step, if you trusted even one wrong person. If you didn’t make yourself double-check every last detail. Not out in the street, though. Instead of the first motel I saw, I picked the fourth, then paid two weeks in advance, just on the chance that, when I stumbled back, I might need to crash immediately, not talk to any fourteen-year-old clerks about one bed or two. With the light tools I carried in my pack for dealing with fences and gates and whatever else, I opened the case. Not from the top, but by backing the hinge rivets out of their slots then wedging the screwdriver in, cracking the case like an oyster, shining my flashlight down along the foam and containers to the backside of the latches, to see if they were wired to show I’d tampered. They weren’t, so I went ahead and popped them, lifted the top of the case off. Inside, nestled in their dense foam, the twelve little stainless steel canisters, like metal test tubes, or big CO2 cartridges, or tiny little thermoses. The only one not baked into a thin film of hard plastic was the fourth one. I lifted it, shook it, finally screwed the top off again. Just the same rock as it had been in the warehouse. Its weight to the gram surely in some notebook. To the tenth of a gram. I lined all twelve up on the air conditioner then peeled the foam up, looking for the transmitter I knew had to be there. It wasn’t. And it wasn’t in the tubing of the handle and it wasn’t sandwiched between the inner and outer walls of the case, which came apart easy, like the case was old, and it wasn’t in the foam itself, which I shredded over the trashcan then dumped into the toilet to soak. I sat back on the bed then, just studied the canisters. It still didn’t make any sense. For a hundred and fifty thousand, though — a new life — maybe it didn’t need to. Just for the feel of it, I took what was supposed to be the last shower of the week

and came out into the thick heat of the bedroom. At first I thought it was just in comparison to the cold shower, but then finally figured out that it was because the air conditioner had conked out. I stared at it. Ten more minutes was all I’d needed from it. Just a few more breaths of refrigerated air. But my week was started, I supposed; I already had the cargo in hand. I was in transit, some stopwatch up in Texas ticking my seconds away. “Hundred grand,” I said aloud, as reminder. What was waiting for me up there. It worked. Before leaving, the pack slung over my shoulder, the canisters each carefully wrapped in toilet paper, I called the front desk, asked them to get the air conditioner working again, por favor. What the clerk told me back was that it was brand new. I looked at it, turned the dial again, held the phone down to the sick noise. When I pulled the phone back up, the clerk was asking me when was a good time. “Anytime over the next six days,” I said, then kept walking south and east, out of town.

Because this isn’t a suicide note — more of a record, I suppose, if anything — I’m not writing down the next twelve hours, except to say they were routine: I waded across the river at one of my usual places. Or I swam, yeah. Or both, plus a clear plastic kayak I had to inflate by mouth, rebury in Texas. I got across, I’m saying, and if it cost eight hundred in folded bills, with the guarantee of four more, then nobody’s the wiser. The reason I can’t be more specific is that Larkin here, he’s almost gone, is just a husk of the businessman he once was. After him, then, there’s only one left, and then it might just come to pass that I need to cross back into Mexico, at one of my old places. Instead of just walking across the bridge like any other American, yeah. It’s not just my history with banks that’s keeping me from doing that, either, or all the fugitive years since then, and it’s not so much what I’m doing right now — I’m the last person anybody should be suspecting — it’s that, even under the cover of night, there’ll be floodlights and flashlights when I have to declare my intent. At that point, of course, things will deteriorate rapidly, and there won’t just be an international incident, but an event that’ll probably get picked up by whatever tabloids are still around as well. And I don’t need that kind of attention, don’t want any recognition for what I’m doing, what I’ve been through. Like Ambrose Bierce, I just want to walk into the Chihuahuan desert, disappear. Or wherever he was. I’m not telling Larkin any of this, though. After asking him the same question I asked all his associates — Remember me? — I haven’t told him anything, or listened to all his claims about family, his offers of cash, of reconstructive surgery, whatever I want. 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 veteransturned-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. 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?” This made him laugh, the pistol jouncing more than I liked. What I liked less, though, was him telling me about that now-missing twenty-seven thousand. It wasn’t the kind of thing you tell somebody you’re about to release, I mean. “Buforditis ...” I said, still trying to play the game. Refugio smiled, then narrowed his eyes, as if hearing something. “No— no, it was Walford. It doesn’t have the same ring, ‘Walforditis.’ You think?” I didn’t answer. He had everything he wanted now, and nothing to lose. He cocked the hammer back, pressed the barrel harder through my hair, so I could tell that what he was doing was straightening his arm. Because he didn’t want to get any brains on his face. “They’ll come looking for those rocks,” I said, focusing everything I had on his boots. “Martians?” he said. “Worse.” “What could be —?” “Walford. He was my contact.” For maybe thirty seconds then, nothing, from either of us. Just me, breathing deeper than I meant to, and him, gears turning in his head. “You only know his name from me,” he said at last. I was ready. “Snakeskin boots?” I asked back. “Real bad sunburn on his neck?”

Refugio breathed in, blew it back out. “Then that means you’re next,” he told me. “They’re cleaning up as they go, yeah?” “They must have found out about the cut he took,” I said. “Or maybe he was late, I don’t know. Like I’m going to be.” This made that final gear turn over in Refugio’s head: he didn’t have to pull the trigger at all. I was already dead. I stared at him, nodded so he’d know I was giving this to him, a gift. In the truck twenty minutes later, the gun in his right hand, still angled at me, he said, “I thought ‘lunar rocks’ was the new word for crack or something.” In the bed of the truck, bouncing around, were the canisters, just loose. And my boots. And the pack. My water was there too, though Refugio had uncapped each bottle, spit a grainy brown line into it, then screwed the lid back on. We were taking the ridgelines back south, to Del Rio. I wasn’t asking why. Refugio’s truck sputtered and coughed with each incline, finally died twice, didn’t want to start again. He blamed it on watered-down gas, and then on the state of Texas, and then on me. I didn’t say anything. The second time he came back to the cab, the ether can still in his right hand, he caught me looking at the keys in the ignition. “You should have,” he said. When we finally got to the blacktop that led into town, Refugio stopped, drummed the dashboard like a rimshot. “Well,” he said. “I can say one of two things here, right? Either don’t let me catch you again, or — I don’t know. Next time call ahead.” He looked over to me, to gauge my reaction. “Which do you think I should ask? I mean, you know, if they let you have a next time.” I swallowed, studied his dashboard, then, moving slow so I wouldn’t get shot, I took a pen from the ashtray, a page from the legal pad between us, and looked up to him for his private line. He smiled, scribbled down a mouthful of numbers for me, then got out his side at the same time I got out of mine. I started collecting all the canisters, and my water, but when I reached for my pack, he pulled it across to him. “Almost forgot,” he said, “you guys like to sew stuff into secret little pockets, right?” “I only had that twenty-six hundred,” I said. Refugio nodded, said he knew, then cut my backpack to shreds anyway, looked at it from both sides. “And now I really know,” he said, not really laughing so much anymore. I cradled all twelve canisters to me somehow, dropped the water behind me, then reached in for my boots. But Refugio was shaking his head no again. “You can’t —” I said. But he could, and was. I closed my eyes, turned my head, then opened my eyes back, away from Refugio. “You never answered my question,” I said. “You just happened to be walking

around right where I was?” “I wasn’t looking for you,” he said like an apology, leaning over the bed of his truck now, his pistol dangling down into it, “Mosely — this would-be Granger Mosely, owns that pasture you were in? He called in, said I had some dead wets stinking up his place.” I looked up to his face. “How would he know that?” “Because he didn’t have any cattle in that pasture,” Refugio shrugged, pushing away from the bed, holstering his pistol, then, at the last moment, nodding up to the sky for me, where we’d been. Floating in wide, lazy circles were two buzzards. Refugio smiled, a new glitter in his eyes now. “Maybe they know something we don’t, yeah?” he said, then winked and was gone. Because he might have still thought I was going south, I waited until dusk to start walking.

It didn’t take thirty minutes for my right foot to start bleeding. Even wrapped in the torn-off bottoms of my pants, with pieces of my shirt tying them on. At the second hour, not even halfway to dusk yet, the canisters clinking in a tiedoff sleeve, I drank the first of the three bottles of water I had left, closing my eyes to the stringy brown spit still swirling inside. Now Refugio was in me, part of me. We were bound. It’s what he’d wanted, I knew. Put him out here like this, though, see what he’d do. Thinking on that was the main thing that kept me going. And Laurie. My picture of her was still at my last camp, probably. In the tangled branches of that poisoned bush. At the third hour, I finally found the fenceline I knew was there. Beside it, the ruts worn into the pasture by the rancher’s trucks. Cowboys still rode the fences, yeah, but they had air conditioning now, and pictures of their girlfriends tucked in front of the speedometer. I wasn’t there to flag one of them down, though. If there were no cattle in this pasture, then there was no reason to ease through at watering time and count heads, or check for holes in the barbed wire. What I was there for was the smooth, packed dirt of the outside rut. And because, who knows why, on nearly every fence line I’d ever seen, if you walked it long enough, you’d find a boot upended on a post. Usually not near a gate or anything, like where you’d hang a coyote or rattlesnake, but just out in the middle of nowhere. If I was lucky, that boot would be a size twelve. And then there would be another. The world owed me that, at least. Every right footprint I left was smudged with blood. Come night, a coyote would be licking it and looking ahead, its ears tuned to my breathing. And my buzzard situation hadn’t improved any, either. I pushed on, cussing Refugio at first but then cussing Lem as well, for having that idea about that bank in Ft. Stockton in the first place. It was supposed to be a pushover. That had been his word. One job, then retire.

Who wouldn’t have said maybe, and then, over the course of a week, why not? I had a wife to provide for, a daughter to raise. Never mind that Lem had been one of Tanya’s friends in the first place. The only one not in jail yet. Thinking of Ft. Stockton got Laurie in my head again, though, alone in Mexico. So I tried not to think at all. By six, I was breathing hard, not walking with any grace whatsoever. Shambling, shuffling, stumbling sometimes. The routine I’d come up with was, every thirty-third post to stop, lean against it, and count the canisters. Because I wasn’t going to hobble all the way to Uvalde just to get shot for shorting the cargo. And, much as I hated Refugio, at least now I could blame the case and the number nine canister on him. I might even be a hero for not giving up, like any sane person would have. Except, then, if they did like me, they might want to use me again. If that happened, I’d nod like I had for Refugio, that yeah, this was the start of something good. But then I’d fade deeper into Mexico, with Laurie. Change both our names, our hair. Never speak English again. It was part of the deal I was making — what I was offering to trade for if I could just make it all the way to Uvalde, on time. By dusk, the last time I could see my backtrail, I was leaving two bloody footprints, and still hadn’t even made up the ground Refugio had driven me back over. Around midnight, the coyotes padded in. I pictured them trotting alongside, their black lips curved into hungry grins, their eyes half-lidded, because they had all night here. What it made me think of was the guy, trapped by Indians or whatever, who, when they told him they were going to stretch his skin over a canoe frame, took up a fork and stabbed himself all over. It carried me for a few more miles. For that I thanked the coyotes.

Dawn found me holding onto the top of a fencepost with both hands. If you’re alone out in the middle of nothing, the sun coming up can have an almost powdery quality. Like the light sifting down across everything, it’s gritty. Like if you opened your mouth it would sift between your teeth, and crunch. Like snow, though, it can drift over you as well. Make it easy to lie down. I had a schedule to keep, though. For the last few miles, I hadn’t even been able to afford the luxury of crossing to each fencepost, to check for the boot I knew was going to be there. Instead I told myself it would be too small, that I didn’t have anything to cut the toe off with. At some point I’d lost the bloody right rag around my right foot, and then heard the coyotes fighting over it behind me. I threw them the other one as well. In the tied-off sleeve with the canisters, I still had Refugio’s number, folded smaller and smaller. If I made it through this, I had suspicions I might be calling ahead, yeah. To give him his cut of the next job. Everything he’d earned. Like it was a big cork, then, the sun just bobbed up the way it does down here, so that — what it’s like is that the night, all of that darkness out across everything, it all

seeps toward you, gathers in your shadow. You don’t believe me, come stand down here all alone sometime. For ten minutes, then — I was calling this my night’s sleep — I studied the ridgelines, waiting for that lens flash I knew was either going to be Refugio or whoever he’d alerted that there was somebody trying to cross this pasture. There was nothing, though. Just the buzzards, back, patient. I counted the canisters again and trudged on, finally realized that the texture of the rut under my raw feet had changed. There were little ridges, left behind from truck tires. That they were still standing meant this had been Refugio. He’d taken this way out? Doubled back after he’d coasted down the hill toward Del Rio in a sputtering truck? I studied the pasture some more, finally shrugged. Had to keep moving. At lunch, what would have been lunch but was instead a second bottle of spit-in water, I found what Refugio had left me: an old leather bandoleer. The kind Pancho Villa wore across his chest, for cartridges. Except this one was military-issue, from a surplus store probably. And not fitted for fingerlong rimfire cartridges, but the kind of grenades you shot from under the barrel of your rifle, if your rifle’s fitted-out right. They were the perfect size for the canisters. I snugged each of them in along with pieces of the sleeve to make sure the fit was tight. For an accidental moment, I almost thanked Refugio in my head. Except that I hated him. An hour later, I found the place he’d turned off into the scrub. I studied where he might have been going for too long, probably, but finally just shook my head no, kept to my ruts. Thirty minutes later, though, shaking my head no, that this was stupid, I cut across to intercept his tracks. Because, if he’d left me what I was wearing now, then maybe he’d left some water or my boots or something farther on. Like, at my camp. The hot skin in my cheek was an ulcer now. I flipped the buzzards off and wove myself deeper into the pasture, trying to watch the ground and the horizon both, one for cactus or broken bottles, the other for windshields or horsemen. I cut across Refugio’s tire tracks a quarter mile out, followed them around a rise to my camp. The netting was still there, half-hanging from the black bush. No boots, though, but two bottles of water, an envelope fluttering under one of them. I unfolded the yellow piece of paper inside. There were no words, just a sticker peeled off a glass bottle Refugio probably had in his glove compartment: the skull and crossbones that meant poison. Under it, the word strychnine. It was what the ranchers would dust a calf with, if they’d had to put it down. It wouldn’t kill all the coyotes who ate from it, but it’d kill a few of them anyway. I squatted down, studied each bottle before I swirled the water up, to check for particulate matter drifting down. There was no difference, though. In smell, either. Not to me, at least. But one of them was bad, I knew. Not both, just one. I shook my head, stood too fast. Refugio was probably watching from somewhere. Had maybe even called in sick for this.

In the clear, flat spot where he’d first dumped the canisters were all my silver nitrate sticks. They were stuck in the ground now by the handle. From directly above, they formed two eyes and a smile. The dirt under them was balled up in a splatter pattern I knew, too. Refugio had stuck them in the ground like birthday candles, then pissed on them. What this meant was that he was old enough to remember what they were, where they went. I collected them anyway, and both bottles of water, and angled back across the pasture for the fenceline, the rut road I needed. At noon, my back blistering, my sweat slowing down, I finally found what I’d been waiting for: a boot. It was too big, even. I stuffed the toe with grass then used a rock to knock the staples from a fence stake — not the post, used to hold it down, but just one of the skinny ones that keep the wire from sagging. It was my cane at first, but then, with the netting for a bag, it was the hobo stick I carried my water in. Uvalde was maybe four days away, and I had maybe three to get there. By the time my shadow had flipped around so that I was stepping into it, I was singing to myself, the way I had in my head for that first bank job, so I could pretend this was all just a movie, and that I was the outlaw hero, that the audience was cheering for me. The only time I stopped before dark was to look back to the idea of my camp, where I’d somehow forgot to look for Laurie’s picture. “I’m sorry,” I said out loud to her, and then caught one of the coyotes. He was just watching me, panting. “Come on, big boy,” I told him, and kept walking.

That night, my third water bottle gone, just one clean one and one poisoned left, I collapsed against a fencepost, had to close my eyes some. The idea was that, like this, only my frontside was vulnerable if the coyotes came yipping and snatching in, their yellow eyes open all the way now. If not, then they’d just be taking bites out of my back, through the rusted strands of barbed wire. I wondered if I’d notice. What I should have dreamed of, I know, was of walking, all my demons haunting me, or of being out in the ocean, treading undrinkable water, sharks circling, circling. Or that I was in that bank doorway with Tanya again, or that I was just sitting on the couch doing nothing with Laurie, or that I ate all the moon rocks, I don’t know. I just slept, though. Like I was dead. If I dreamed of anything, it was that I had some bear or mountain lion scent-in-abottle with me. The coyotes wouldn’t be drawing close then. I did think about food some, I suppose, but I would have traded any hamburger then just for a left boot. Size whatever. And maybe a sombrero, or a lady’s parasol. Even now, fifteen years later, when all that stuff doesn’t matter to me so much like it used to, I still find myself ducking for shade. Maybe it’s just to hide, though. The way, when your hair’s long and you’re in a convenience store, you kind of duck away from the black camera up in the corner. It can’t really hurt you, doesn’t even care about you really, but still. That’s the way

I am now. Nothing’s going to change that, either. I have a radio now anyway. I know it looks funny, the earbuds rising all the way to my ears — for obvious reasons, headphones don’t cut it anymore — but, I mean, with me, that’ll kind of be the last thing you look at too. What I tell myself is that Frankenstein’s monster, if he’d had access to music and disc jockeys and news updates and weather reports and over-the-air trivia games and ‘Rest of the Stories’ and all that, if he could have just plugged into it, then he probably would have. The trick is, of course, I don’t even need batteries. It’s not that great a trick, though, really. If I could somehow send a dream back in time to myself — sleeping against that fencepost — now that might be a trick I’d trade certain things for. As it was, though, I either dreamed of nothing or didn’t remember it when I woke. If I had to guess, I’d guess my arm was probably twitching every now and then, or I was talking to somebody. The reason I say that is that the coyotes never moved in to test me. When I came to, not confused about where I was at all, they were still a good thirty feet out. If I looked beside where one was, I could just make out its outline. To them, I was giant rabbit. The biggest mole they’d ever lucked onto. They had to drink, too, though. For maybe thirty minutes, I studied on this, then nodded, double-checked my thinking. It was good, I was pretty sure. And I was so thirsty. Using the weather-rounded end of my hobo stick, I dug out a hole in the rut. A bowl, about cereal size. The dirt was packed enough that I was able to smooth the sides down. It would hold water for a few minutes, anyway. Not just drink it straight down like the loose stuff out in the pasture. “All righty,” I called out to the coyotes, then tipped a little water from one of the jugs into the hole and eased down to the next fencepost. It took one of the coyotes about four minutes to gather enough balls to stick his nose into the hole. I didn’t say anything, just watched. He started drinking. As soon as he had a mouthful or two of it up, another coyote eased in, nudged him out of the way to lap up the rest, its eyes watching me the whole time. I twisted the lid off the container I’d let them drink from, and held a mouthful of water for a long time. It was perfect. Better than that, because these were coyotes who had to have been sick with strychnine before, so knew how it smelled, it was clean, too. The second bottle I left on one of the thicker fenceposts, wiped down and shiny. With the sun behind it, it would draw border cops from miles away. Maybe even Refugio. “Drink up,” I said to the idea of him, and moved on, only limping a little.

Up north, I’d guess, all the Canadian-American smugglers probably get all these nice little moments where they can kick back and watch the aurora borealis, painting the snow. Down here, what you get is the sky so black and heavy it feels like felt. Used to, I thought all the fast stars I saw streaking around were aliens, but then somebody told me they were satellites. I still like to see them.

With Refugio’s water in me, and one of the sticks in my mouth — I’d cleaned it with a handful of sand — I made a few more miles that night, then found an overhang of rock I’d used before, spent the heat of the morning there. The buzzards settled down about a hundred yards out, holding their wings up for probably ten seconds after they landed, as if the ground were hot or something, and they weren’t committed to it yet. Really it was probably just their chest muscles contracting, after having been stretched open so long. If I’d have had a .22, I’d have plunked each of them in the head, then eaten them raw, carp that they were, and wore their feathers for a cape. I’d be a legend then, yeah. But I didn’t have a .22. And legends, they’re always already dead or are heading for a big gunfight of some kind. So I was content, I suppose. As I could be, anyway, with no money, no food, no more water. One boot. Maybe half the world’s supply of lunar material piled between my feet. A daughter two hundred miles away, in another country. It was probably a good thing I didn’t have a gun.

I woke some time later, unaware I’d even been asleep. It was like I’d just blinked, and the slideshow the pasture was had advanced to the next frame. But then I saw what had opened my eyes, crawling like a bug across the brown: a rancher’s truck. It was cruising along the fence, dragging a plume of dirt. Moving from gate to gate, I guessed. Because he was going too fast to be looking for a lost heifer or scoping the buzzards. I didn’t flick an eyebrow, just let him slip past. In a perfect world he’d have been pulling a flat trailer of hay, and I’d have been able to hide under the tarp for as long as he was going my way. Maybe longer, to wherever he parked the rest of the trucks. As it was, I just waited for his dust to settle, fell in behind him. An hour shy of dark, I came to that gate he’d been headed for, and, just for the ritual of it, opened it to walk through, then shut it behind me. On top of it I balanced the stump of the silver nitrate stick I’d been chewing on all afternoon, so that it would fall onto the boots of whoever opened it next. Usually, I’d never leave any sign that I’d been in a place. Now, though, I don’t know. You get sentimental with your trash when you’re not so sure you’ve got a lot more to leave. For that brief, what-the-hell instant when the cowboy or pumper or whoever was looking down at this out-of-place stick, I’d be alive again. Twenty minutes into the new pasture, of course, I wanted to go back for the stick, because it was a sign of defeat. But in two days, it might all come down to forty minutes. I let the stick stay, pushed on, left Refugio’s empty bottle broken against a rock. Soon enough the only thing warm on me was my back and shoulders and neck, and the canisters. Their metal casing had soaked up the heat of the day, was giving it back to me now. I counted them with my fingers as I walked. With the client rep dead now, each one of them was worth nearly thirteen thousand dollars. That would buy me boots for the rest of my life. For a few steps then I walked backwards, to make sure my coyote escorts were

still with me, skulking through the bushes and bear grass. They were. I saluted them with two fingers, shook my head with something like wonder, or disgust — was there a difference anymore? — then turned around, tried to make all the time I could on bloody feet and no calories. By dawn I’d covered eight miles, I guessed, and was breathing hard. This time I couldn’t sit down, though. I was to the point that, if I stopped, even to lean on something, I was probably going to fall asleep, be dead to the world for twelve hours. Which would take care of the rest of my life as well. So I stumbled on, no fenceposts anymore, sucking more sticks than I knew I should, and a few hours into it tried cracking a cactus open for the juice, but just got spines. I ate the meat of it anyway. It was damp, stringy, tasted green. I ate another then, and another, and didn’t throw them up for maybe twenty minutes. It was hard to stand again after that. I tried to talk myself up, forward. It worked for a while, until I started hearing something else under my voice. It wasn’t me. Over the next rise, cows were lowing about something. I swallowed, which hurt, and stepped from the road, crept to the rise, and lay down to look over. There were maybe sixty head. They were eating sweetcake probably left by the rancher I’d seen. The way they were milling around, they’d just found it, too. After making sure the rancher wasn’t around, I waded into the shit-smeared rumps, reached into the cake for the chunks of molasses I knew were going to be there. As a kid, I’d seen dogs rush the steers in their pens to get the molasses. Now I understood. When the cows tried to nose in with their heavy heads, I beat on them with the side of my fist like a chimpanzee, and kept eating. It was sugar instead of meat, yeah, when meat was what I really needed — something marbled white with fat — but even with a two-by-four, I doubt I could have brought one of those cows down that night. And if I’d tried for one of the calves, the mommas would have hooked me under the ribs, flung me over her back, into the herd. Now, of course, it’s different. I just look at them and they flare their nostrils and back away. Like everything else. This was before I died, though. When I still could die. I ate the cake until I couldn’t eat anymore, and then I stood, nodded once to the cows, and went on down the road. I threw it all up an hour later, and cried, I think, stringing my stomach juices away from my mouth, out of my nose. And then I counted the canisters, wiped my eyes, took off again, for Uvalde. Tonight would be the night the coyotes had been waiting for, I knew.

Dusk came this time while I wasn’t looking. It was just suddenly dark again. Another blink. And, like I expected, with the night came the coyotes. They weren’t nipping at me yet, but they were closer than before. They’d saved me from the rat-poison water just because they didn’t want my meat to go bad. I laughed about this, stumbled to a knee, then stood again fast, like launching off the blocks at a trackmeet. I couldn’t start running, though. Not because a coyote can run forever, and will, but because I had maybe fifty yards in me at most. Then something was

going to pop behind my eyes. It was going to pop anyway, I knew. But not yet. Not until Uvalde. At some point I’d dropped my fence stake. At another point I turned, slung my one boot back at the coyotes. It tasted like blood, and the salt of dried sweat, from when I’d still been sweating. It kept them occupied for maybe ten minutes. Soon enough I realized I wasn’t walking in the ruts anymore either. This is what dying was like, I knew. It’s not all at once, but a thousand small cuts, on top of each other. I threaded another silver nitrate stick up from my pocket, cashed it against my cheek. It was perfect, even if it tasted like the piss of the man who’d killed me. I smiled to myself, fell forward again, to my raw fingertips, and then couldn’t get my balance back, staggered into an accidental, downhill run. The coyotes fell in alongside me, loping easy, their tongues lolling out, the saliva stringing off because dinner was close. Suddenly, out of nowhere, dry fingers were reaching for me from all sides — trees. I pushed through, fighting them, and they delivered me to older, less forgiving trees, which pinballed me forward, pulling at my bandoleer and at the burned skin of my right shoulder until I finally fell forward into open air again. I had too much momentum to stop, crashed over a concrete trough, into a wallowed out place that was still damp with piss and shit. Stock tanks. This was a pasture with cattle. I was at some old stock tanks. Above me, silhouetted against the stars, a windmill, turning slow, its rod creaking up and down. One of the grinning coyotes stepped out into the hoof-packed dirt. I nodded to it, my head loose on my neck, then turned, monkeyed up the four foot concrete tank that fed the trough, tipped forward face first into it. The water was warm on top and cool underneath, and it was everything good in the world. The surface was coated with bugs that danced away from me in waves. Under that surface, spinachy strings of algae were reaching up just far enough so as not to get burned by the midday sun, when the water magnified it. The algae caressed my back as I floated, and drank, and maybe even smiled. In the middle, for some reason, were the rusted remains of an old barrel or tub. If I floated just right, the lip of the barrel would wedge against my back, keep my head above water. Just before I either fell asleep or drowned — I wasn’t sure, then — I realized that the bandoleer Refugio had left for me, and the rat poison water, it meant that he’d known all along I wasn’t going south. Out in the darkness, the coyotes were drinking from the trough, snapping at each other. Roosting in the black trees, probably, the buzzards. I was a world away, though.

This is the part where I finally talk about Tanya, I know. Except I don’t want to. I’ve never even seen where her family buried her. Outside Austin, I’m pretty sure, where she grew up. Maybe in one of those hill country cemeteries you see from the road, the weathered gravestones pushing up through a coat of yellow flowers like a natural formation. The ground in those places is rock, and thick with cactus, all the trees clogged

with mistletoe. Still, that’s where I always imagined she’d be. Her headstone won’t say anything about me, though. We were married, yeah, but, because she had warrants, she never got her license changed, or did any of the name change stuff you probably have to do, and a ring was always something I was going to buy her after the next job, so who knows. Her family might not even have any idea about me, or Laurie. To them I might just be an accomplice, the one who got away. When Lem came through that first year, heading for Argentina or some perfect place without extradition, I’d asked him about her. “You think I went and saw her in the hospital, man?” he’d said, laughing in spite of how shot up he was. I’d stared at him for a long moment then. As far as I knew, she’d died in that first hail of bullets. But they’d kept her alive for a while. She never would have said my name to them, I know. It wasn’t even a question. What is a question is if she ever woke up, looked around for me. In the papers I never could find in Mexico back then, I know her cause of death would have been gunshot wounds. That was one way to look at it. The other way was a lot more romantic. But she would have wanted it like I did it, I’m pretty sure. Better that I run for at least a few years with Laurie than stand there in cuffs and leg irons and watch her die, Laurie in the custody of the state forever. Tanya wouldn’t have wanted her to grow up like that. To follow in Tanya’s own footsteps, pretty much. Have no choice but to. The facts of us are that we met in the parking lot of a Safeway. I lay under her truck and tapped the starter with the tie-rod handle of a hammer I’d welded, and then she bought me a drive-through milkshake as thanks, and if there’s any other way to fall in love, I don’t know about it. At the time of our last bank job together, I was twenty-eight and she was twentyseven, and Laurie was almost four. Sometimes still, walking along the shaded lee of a brick building, I’ll remember holding Tanya’s hand, as if I could possibly guide her around all the trash on the sidewalk, and I’ll apologize to her, for losing Laurie like I have. But she can’t see me like this, either, Laurie. If she’s anything like her mom, I mean, she wouldn’t care, and would hug me and hold my hand and not leave for hours, even when I begged her to. And if she’s like me inside, I don’t know. Hopefully she’s not. If it matters, Larkin just died, I’m pretty sure. There was nothing ugly about it. It was just like a lamp, turning off. You’d think there’d be something different about the eyes, but, in the first few minutes anyway, there’s not really. I know because he’s my third, now. Instead of listening to any of the noises his body’s about to start making, I just turned the radio in my ears up. All the songs are new to me. It’s a new world I live in now. Except some of us still remember the things that came before. The old gods. I’ve become one of them, I think. Or something.

That next morning, an hour into the day maybe, I woke to a man on horseback slapping my water with the tips of his reins. He was Mexican, a cowboy, a ranch hand. Just watching me, his expression somehow both bored and amused. “You’re alive,” he said in Spanish. I stood, the water rushing down me, the green spinach clinging. “I wouldn’t have known you were there,” he said, patting his horse on the neck, “except my boy here wouldn’t drink from the bowl.” The trough. I looked past him. About fifty yards out was a wall of cattle, come in for their morning drink but stopped because I was there, polluting their water. They had that good of noses? Or, really: I smelled that bad? “I’m not dead,” I said. “I know,” the cowboy said, in English, like he was showing off. “And you’re not Mexican, either.” I shrugged like he had me then, yeah. And understood that this was why the situation was funny to him. It was a reversal — the white guy was the wet. Dripping, even. “You just out for a swim, yeah?” he said, his horse prancing around sideways from me. I stared at the cattle for a measured handful of seconds. “What are you going to believe here?” I finally asked, then settled my eyes back on him. He smiled a little. “That ordnance?” he said, about the canisters bandoleered across my chest, draped now with moss. “Suppositories,” I said, trying to play the game here. Or keep up at least. “Where am I?” The hand stared at me and then, with his teeth, peeled some skin up from his lip, turned his head to spit it out. All without ever looking away from me. “Let’s fast forward some,” he said. “I’ve got stuff needs doing before lunch, here.” I nodded, sat back onto the submerged barrel. So long as I didn’t get out of the water, he wouldn’t know I didn’t have any boots. It would help in the coming negotiations, I was pretty sure. “Fast forward then,” I said. “You work for Granger Mosely. He pays you — what? Seven-fifty a month?” “Twelve hundred. Plus room and board.” He was lying, prepping his side of the negotiating table too, but I smiled anyway, rubbed a bug or something from the side of my nose. “It’s not enough,” I shrugged, like this were the most obvious thing in Texas. “Unless you ... what’s the good word? Supplement? Moonlight?” The hand was still just staring at me. No doubt he had a pistol in one of his saddlebags. “This is a proposition then?” he said. “Like — like marriage. You want me to get

in bed with you?” “Let’s keep our clothes on if we can. But no, I’m not asking you to bend over here, if that’s the question. I’m just ... I guess it depends, really. Let me start over. You knew Sebby, right?” This heated his eyes up a bit. He danced his horse up so its head was out over the water. It still wouldn’t drink, though. “Why do you say that?” he hissed. “No reason. Just — I liked him. And he was smart, Sebby was. Smart enough to, y’know, maybe suggest somebody get work on a certain ranch. It would make things easier down the road. And nobody’d be getting hurt, even. Just people finding work, families staying together, all that.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Man. That’s a shame, yeah?” “I don’t see any families, either.” We stared at each other for maybe forty seconds, then. Finally he wheeled his horse around, whistled sharp for the cattle. They just moaned back. I was smiling now. He reined his horse back around, hard. “I don’t know any Sebby,” he said, low and in Spanish again, like the windmill might be trying to listen here. “Not for two months, I don’t know any Sebby.” Exactly. Two straight-money paychecks, with nothing on top. “Nobody does anymore,” I said. He raised his eyebrows to me, to be sure he was hearing this right. I nodded, shrugged. “Consider me the new Sebby,” I said. “And why would I want to do that?” “Why were you doing it before?” He shook his head, leaned down to cup a mouthful of water up to his mouth. “Three hundred per,” he said. “Per head?” I said, incredulous. “Per crossing.” Better. Still, though, I couldn’t let myself smile. “I’ll go three,” I said, my lips purposely thin. “Cash,” the hand said. “That might be a problem this trip.” “Kind of figured that.” “Well then?” “Three now, four later.” “How about for your horse?’ This made him laugh. He took his hat off, ran his hand through his hair. “That’s just for not seeing you, man.” “Well then, we might have to reach an agreement here.” He crossed his hands on the pommel, shrugged with his shoulders and his eyebrows both. Behind him the buzzards were drifting through the sky. I shook my head again, looked ahead, to Uvalde, and agreed to meet him in a week at a bar down toward

Carrizo Springs, a stack of cash in an envelope. But still, his horse wasn’t for sale, period. For five hundred dollars more, though, he’d let me use the phone in the bunkhouse, if I kept it short and didn’t bleed everywhere.

A little after one o’clock, he swung back around to the stock tank to pick me up. He was in a truck now, a different one than I’d seen. “Thought you said lunch,” I said, climbing in my side. “Everybody’s there at lunch,” he said back, grinding us into gear. His saddle was in the back of the truck, the skirt sweated all the way through. On the dash was an old bag of sunflower seeds. I didn’t ask if I could have them, just started eating, shells and all. “How far out are we?” I asked. “What, you a squirrel, too?” he said, leaning over the wheel the way guys do when they’re getting paid by the hour. In addition to my being a mule. “How far to the house?” I said, trying to chew everything I’d stuffed into my mouth. “Thirty minutes,” he said, nodding north and east. “Why? You on medicine or something?” “Just getting my bearings.” He laughed to himself about me and pulled some old clothes from behind the seat. I took them and asked the question with my eyes. “Nobody’s going to see you,” he said. “But just in case.” I changed as he drove, buttoned the shirt over the warm bandoleer. The boots even fit. “They’re on sale this week,” the hand said. “Hundred even.” “Deal of the year,” I said, trying to flex my toes. “So what are those, really?” he said, about the canisters. “Late,” I said, and then we were there, nosed up to the back porch of a long, narrow bunkhouse. The hand looked to me, to the bunkhouse, then ferreted the keys out of the ignition. “I’m going to the house,” he said. “It’ll probably be better if you’re not here when I get back.” He was talking Spanish again. I looked all around. He directed me back down the road we’d come in on. “Over to the north’s a draw. It leads down to the pens. Nobody’s there right now.” I nodded, understood what he was saying: that that was the place to stay, until whoever I was calling came. “How far?” I said. “Not even a mile.” “I need to dial anything special to get out?” I said, hooking my chin to the idea of the bunkhouse phone. He shook his head no, added, “And don’t take anything.” “You know where I’ll be.” “Exactly.” With that he tipped his hat and backed away, leaned into the walk-up to the main

house to report on whatever he’d been doing all morning. I watched him until he was gone but didn’t chance stepping around the bunkhouse to follow him all the way. Because I didn’t want to get spotted, yeah, but more because I had maybe eight hours left to deliver the canisters. I shook my head no as I dialed the numbers, then leaned against the wall the phone was on, stared all the way down it. The light gave out before the room ended. This was a bunkhouse for thirty cowboys, but there were only six beds in use. The other way, behind me, was an added-in kitchen, from after the rancher’s wife quit cooking for everybody, probably. On the stove was a pan one of the other hands had boiled noodles in for lunch. Half of them were still there, cold. I pulled the pan to me, starting fingering the noodles in, and then Manuel was on the line, waiting for me to say something. It was the only number I had memorized, beside my own: the pharmacy. “Hey,” I said. “It’s me.” He laughed about this. I could see him sitting on his stool in the stockroom. “Refill?” he said. “Yeah,” I told him, “but later. Listen, though, first. Just let me finish. I’ve got a proposition for you.” On his end, Manuel was just breathing. Which is to say listening. “I’ve got some money stashed up in Piedras Negras to pay for this. But it has to happen now. Ten minutes ago, really. Yesterday’d be better, even.” “How much?” Manuel said, with me already. “Fifteen.” “Make it twenty.” “You don’t even know what it is yet.” “Just on principle.” I swallowed a mouthful of noodles, said, “You’ve still got those cousins in Ciudad Acuna, yeah?”

The pens were just where the hand had told me they were. And they were just like all the other pens in the world: the fences and gates up on packed mounds of dirt, at least in comparison to the wallowed-out places a hundred years of cattle had been pushed through. There was an old wooden windmill, too, with a concrete tank and chipped trough. I didn’t need it anymore, though. From the bunkhouse refrigerator, I had a sackful of cokes and three sandwiches. When most of them were gone, I occupied myself peeling skin from my burned shoulders, arranging it on the board I’d been using as a plate. From the grey trees between me and the main house, a big horned owl was either watching me or sleeping with its eyes open. I tried to make my skin look like a snake shed, but my breath kept moving it. By four, I heard my ride coming. Fifty miles away, even, people were probably stopping, cocking their heads over to the sound. Manuel’s cousin was driving a dune buggy. Not just a converted bug, either, but a full Baja-looking frame, complete with stickers and chrome you’d have to be able to see

for miles, even by starlight. And the exhaust, it was pointing straight up, for all the world to hear. No muffler. The cousin slid sideways to a stop, raised his goggles to me, shrugged. “Uvalde, señor?” he said. He was being funny. Behind his seat, strapped in with the kind of metal you use to hang mufflers, was a pony-keg-as-gas tank. The engine sounded like it was running on methanol, maybe, if not just straight nitrous. Manuel’s cousin patted the black leather bucket seat beside him and I grinned as if this hurt, climbed down into it. “Uvalde,” I said, nodding, and he smiled and jammed the shifter back hard, the sand paddles spraying an unnecessary roostertail behind us, the two runners up front going weightless for a few feet. I was paying twenty thousand dollars for this. Provided Manuel wasn’t just going to take the whole ammo box. Part of the deal had been payment in full, whether I made it back this time or not. Which came down to payment now. I didn’t have any choice, though, and, obvious as Manuel’s cousin was here, it was him or nothing. And he was fast. I had no complaints there. At the first fence, he reached behind my seat, handed me the bolt cutters, and I snapped the barbed wire apart. The first of six sets of it for us, and he’d probably cut three or four more just getting to me, so that we made a line, I was sure. From Del Rio to Uvalde. Or even as deep as Ciudad Acuna. I couldn’t worry about any of that then, though. What I had to do, mainly, was hold on, and keep counting the canisters warm against my chest. I was supposed to be at the other warehouse no later than dusk. Just to be sure, the client rep had informed me of the exact time the sun was going to duck under the edge of the earth. At this rate, I’d have to find something to do until then. Maybe whittle a toothpick, push all the fillings back up into my teeth. At top speed, the buggy could stand up and run on the paddles. Getting up to speed, though, on the packed dirt of a pasture, it was like riding on square tires. The cousin was oblivious to all of this. For twenty minutes he smiled, until his teeth were brown with dirt. If I could have seen his pupils, they probably would have been dollar signs. It was definitely time to get out of the business, I told myself. If I was having to depend on people like this for my life. For nearly three years of crossings now, I’d seen a grand total of three people. This trip, though, it was like I’d sent out invitations a month in advance, and everybody came. Looking back on it, of course I regret not calling Laurie from that bunkhouse like I should have. What I console myself with is that she probably would have been next door with Maria anyway. It was my last chance to talk to her, though, that’s the thing. To hear her voice when she still knew I was alive and nothing was wrong. And, though I try to pretend that I thought it through, decided it wasn’t safe to leave my own number on any phone record, the truth of it is that I had my face in the cool light of refrigerator, was stuffing a bag with cokes. I didn’t even think of her, I mean. So maybe I deserve all this. Maybe this is what happens to dads like I was. They wind up in a locked storage

unit with just a camping lantern for light, a man decomposing across the concrete floor, the single light bulb overhead wavering so that the shadow of their pen is more like smoke than anything else. I don’t know. Three days ago, when I asked Larkin if he remembered me, his honest answer was no. When you imagine your perfect revenge, that’s not the answer your enemy gives, usually. So I had to explain, Larkin’s face slack with confusion — who? — and then I had to explain some more, and show him the picture, and finally I had to leave the storage unit, lock the door behind me, smoke a fast couple of cigarettes in the floodlight. Used to, of course, I knew I was going to need my lungs, so stayed away from smoking. Now, though, cancer’s the least of my concerns. By the time I came back from my cigarettes, Larkin remembered me, was shaking his head no. And then there was all the usual stuff, which you do think about, the begging and pleading and apologies and deals — the four stages of being killed, I guess — and then he took this notebook from me, even, offered to write it all down, itemize his crimes and sign his name to them. It didn’t quite make up for him not being just real sure how he was involved here, why he was dying. But it helped. I did expect him to last long enough to read some of this, though. To understand just a little. Not to make him feel any better. But it would have helped me, I think. But then, I don’t know — how could he really understand the way it felt, to still be alive back then, at the end of a set of coincidences I wouldn’t even believe from a movie? Border cops and cowboys and cousins rising from the pasture as if they’d been waiting for me? I’ll tell you. What it feels like is fate. Like you were meant to live, to make it through. Which is why I’m writing this, maybe. To understand what went wrong.

Five miles out of the last rise before Uvalde, the dune buggy crapped out. In the new silence, I looked over to Manuel’s cousin. He was touching everything, had no clue. “That way, I guess?” I said, nodding ahead. “Hour, hour and-a-half,” he said, biting his lip, looking over to the sun, his bored and blueprinted engine ticking down. It was almost seven already. I had until 8:28. “Well,” I said, and stood, leaving my bag of cokes and the water Manuel’s cousin had brought for me. “Yeah,” the cousin said back, as apology maybe. Or a joke. That’s what the whole week was feeling like, really. There would be time to laugh later. I slung the bandoleer over my shoulder, winced from the contact, and started walking again. Manuel’s cousin chased after me to give me a cap at least. I took it, adjusted it out, and pulled it down low over my eyes. “Just keep going straight,” he called out. I lifted my hand in thanks, wasn’t looking back anymore. I ran another silver nitrate stick into the right side of my mouth. The cokes I’d drunk were going to leave my

mouth on fire, I knew. This was preventative. Also, my nerves were about as jangly as they got back then. After forty-five minutes, I still couldn’t see Uvalde, but I was already finding brittle newspapers and chip bags caught in the scrub, so, like a sailor seeing driftwood, or a certain kind of bird, I knew I was close. At one hour out, the first lights rolled into view. They’d turned on because the sun was going down. It made me breathe hard, step faster. The warehouse was supposed to be on this side of town, just off the main road. I wasn’t supposed to be able to miss it. A few days ago, I might have believed that. Now, though, I let myself be drawn to the sound of radials on asphalt, so I could shadow the blacktop into town, be sure I didn’t pass the warehouse somehow. My watch read 8:02. I counted the canisters, nodded to myself. If the warehouse was where they’d said, I was going to make it, and this was all going to be over. I could regret paying twentythousand dollars for a twenty-minute ride later. When I was alive. With Laurie. Just as I was pulling into Uvalde proper, where the buildings and lots were thick enough that I was going to have to walk on the shoulder in my cowboy clothes, I heard the dune buggy scream back to life. Though it was too far to see directly, I could still track it. Each time it slammed up a rise, hellbent on catching some air, its bank of halogen light would glow on the underside of the musty clouds that had moved in. I’d been walking a day ahead of them, I guess. Even my shoulders were unlucky. I waved Manuel’s cousin away — more power to him, even — and skirted two more buildings before the warehouse was just suddenly there. I knew it was the right place because there was a cabover eased alongside it, hooked under a flat of wire rolls, each of them chained down tight enough with new boomers that no DPS or border cop would be able to see what they had rolled in their middles. Was the truck waiting for me? 8:18. For two minutes, I stood there like somebody was painting my picture. At 8:21 I stepped into the painting.

Because it was dusk, my eyes didn’t have to adjust much to the inside of the warehouse. Watching a portable television at the only table in the half acre of swept concrete, my American contacts. One was in his fifties, paunchy, wearing a sport jacket. The other was mid-thirties, closer to my age. His hair was long in back, receding in front. More client reps. Maybe it was better that way, too. This seemed like the kind of operation where if I saw who signed the checks, they might have to poke my eyes out for me. “Mr. Dodd,” the younger one said, stretching my name out. Quartering it. He was the used car salesman of the two. The talker. What that told me was to watch the hands of the other one. I could get caught up

listening to the first one then look up into a pistol. Except I was on time. And had all twelve canisters. I laid the bandoleer down on the table, my eyes flicking over to the portable television. I was standing in the feed, evidently, between the rabbit ears and whatever station. The old rep turned it off. “I’m on time,” I said, just so there could be no confusion. My voice was more defensive than I wanted. The younger one picked the bandoleer up like you might a dead snake and ran his hand along its belly. Then he laughed through his nose, as if a joke had just occurred to him. But he kept it to himself, looked up to me instead. Wedged under the television was a thick, overnight envelope. He pulled it out, showed me both sides of it so I could see it was unopened, then pulled a ragged line in the cardboard. “Listen,” I said, “this is cute and all, but it’s been a long —” He held his hand out for me to wait. I looked up to the standing thug to be sure. The standing thug just stared at me. It was like he was trying not to laugh, too. “What?” I said to him. “You,” he said back. I let myself smile. Looked away. That I wasn’t standing on a dropcloth— or, in this case, a mat of unrolled wire — was a good thing. Better was the duffel bag tucked under the table. It was cheap, a throwaway. The kind you begrudge somebody, when you don’t even want to have to be paying them in the first place. I told myself not to count the money until later. And not to do anything stupid now. “Jimbo, Jimbo ...” the talking guy said to the thug. “What are we going to do here, you think?” The thug looked down to the talker about this, came back with, “Martin S. Larkin. Larkin Larkin Larkin .... You tell me.” The talker hissed through his teeth, set the overnight envelope aside. One of the canisters had his attention for some reason. The number eight. “How do I even know y’all are who you’re supposed to be?” I said, trying to pull him back to me. “I was expecting the other guy.” The talker spun the cap off the canister he was holding, tilted the contents over to study them. “Hunh,” he said. It was the first time he was seeing them. I suddenly felt the need for a receipt. “Look,” he said, holding the canister up to the thug. “Yeah, real cool,” the thug said, not even really looking. Then he added, “Martin S. Larkin, of Sealy, Texas. Post office box —” “All right already!” the talker said, slamming his palm down on the table. I was pretty sure they were just ribbing each other. What scared me, of course, was what if they weren’t. I tried not to commit the name to memory, did anyway. Larkin looked up to me. “The gentleman who attended you down there, his services aren’t needed up here on the legal side of things so much.” “Then he’s still down there?”

“Why, he steal your wallet or something?” This was funny to the thug. Larkin caught it too, started laughing as well, like he was finally bubbling over. I just stared at him, waiting, until the television snapped back on, all static. “Shut that thing up,” Larkin said. The thug unfolded his arm from inside his sports jacket, shot the screen once. Just a single fluid motion, but then he held the pistol in place long enough for the blue smoke to drift up, get tangled in his breath. We were all a little deaf now. I swallowed hard to pop my ears, and when I unsquinted my eyes, Larkin had a Polaroid camera aimed at me. He snapped it, the flashbulb blinding me, and, though I thought this was tactical, nobody started shooting me. When I could see again, Larkin was fanning the snapshot dry. “There,” he said, nodding down to the overnight envelope. Slowly, I took it, squeezed it open, shook out what was inside. It was the Polaroid of me the client rep had shot in Piedras Negras. To confirm the state of the canisters. But this shot, the one Larkin had just taken — the canisters wouldn’t even be in it. He handed it to me. “It fucked up,” I said, faking a smile. In the still-developing picture, I was surrounded by a nimbus of light. Like I was glowing. I looked to the Piedras Negras shot. There I was — just me, as usual. But the glow — the case. In the Piedras Negras picture, it was the case that had caught the light wrong. In the same, wrong way. I looked up to Larkin. He pursed his lips, nodded. “We had to find somebody with a reputation for punctuality,” he said, overpronouncing the last word, as if it weren’t his. “I don’t understand,” I told him. “Listen, if I can just get my money, I can —” “The contents of that case, that that case was specifically designed to shield, to contain — that case you did who knows what with ... Let’s just say you couldn’t have been late. If you were, it would never have got here.” I studied the bandoleer for a long time then. What was he saying? “It’s poison, you mean?” I was thinking of the cattle, not coming in for water. Of how the canisters had held the heat of the sun all night. Of how my backpack had rotted. “You could say it’s poison, yeah,” Larkin said, then shrugged, lifted his head in some prearranged cue. Through the thin soles of my new boots, I tried to grip the concrete, brace myself for whatever was coming, but again, it wasn’t gunfire. The thug was just turning off the lights. “What is this?” I said, and it was like my voice, in the darkness, was larger, deeper. I could hear myself in it in some way I usually couldn’t, like listening to yourself on a tape recorder. “This is ultraviolet, now,” Larkin said, and flipped on a light he had plugged in somewhere. The blue bulb didn’t hurt my eyes at all. It was soft, even. Nice. “Pretty,” the thug said then.

“What?” I said, and looked behind me at first, but then, balancing myself to turn, my peripheral vision caught the skin on the top of my hand. It was glowing. Like the Polaroid had said. Larkin started laughing louder than before, left the light on for another twenty seconds. Long enough for me to see that all my skin was like that. “Didn’t know it’d be this cool,” he said up to the thug. The thug grunted, flipped the lights back on. Now he did have a pistol trained on me, was angling his head over to look down along the barrel. Like I was a bug. In the years to come, I’d never be able to track him down. But, too, he was just a gun. It was somebody else’s finger on the trigger. “Here,” Larkin said, and I turned to him in time to see the duffel bag, arcing toward me. I had no choice but to catch it. It was why I was there, I mean, and what I’d been waiting for. More than that, it was just instinct. I wrapped my left arm around the cash, held it to me, and then my right leg exploded, the air behind me misting red. “There,” Larkin said as I fell, “paid,” and the thug shot me again, in the other leg, and then he was standing over me. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Larkin said, suddenly beside him. “You were good, Dodd. If we could use you again — if anybody could — we would, in a heartbeat. But, as you can see, man, I think you’re just about all used up here ...” With that, the thug shot me somewhere in the chest, and the arm, and maybe the face. I wasn’t even hearing the gun anymore, though, but had retreated inside my head, back to my last good camp, where Laurie’s picture was caught against a branch, fluttering, fluttering, then blowing away.

The way to find an empty storage unit is to walk along all the doors of some part of the storage complex they can’t see from the front office. Don’t worry about the cameras. They’re dummies. And the other renters don’t care about you, are probably stacking bodies like cordwood in their units anyway. If it helps, you can act like you’re counting, trying to find a certain door. It won’t be a lie, either. It’s just the counting that’s an act — you’re not really looking at the numbers, but the locks. What you want is a unit that’s being held hostage, that’s being ransomed for the last two or three or four month’s rent. A door that has a second padlock piggybacking on the latch. If you’re lucky, this piggyback padlock will have been spray-painted orange, or maybe whatever color the trim of the complex is — some paint they had left over. If it’s not painted, then just note the number of that unit, keep walking until you find another that’s been double-locked. All you have to do then is compare the two locks from this unit to the two locks from the last unit. What you should have are four locks total, but only three kinds of lock. The two that are similar are the house locks, because the management buys them in bulk. After that, just start walking again until you find a unit single-locked with a house lock. This is your lady in waiting, your empty unit. Just clip the lock and replace it with your own. I have this down to an art because motel rooms have become difficult for me. And it’s not because I don’t carry a major credit card. When I got to town seven days ago, the first place I came was Aardvark AAA

Sealy Storage. The three A’s, instead of being a guarantee of quality, are probably just to avoid the initials the place would have without them: A.S.S. There’s no fence with a keypad gate on wheels, just rows and rows of eight-by-ten units, where the walls are cinderblock and the doors thick enough for my purposes. Once I had my room, then, all that was left was finding Larkin, Martin S. We drove in his Impala until the headlights dimmed and the radio display glowed down. He had to stand on the brakes to get the car stopped. “That’d be my fault,” I told him. “Sorry.” I dragged him out, walked the last four miles behind him, his mouth covered with clear tape so nobody would know anything. There was no reason to hide the car. Nobody was going to find us, and, if my prints are even the same, they’d have been purged from the system years and years ago. I forced the keys into his hand, made him open the door. The unit is 234. It’s an easy number to remember. Call it luck. “There’s a lantern in the corner,” I told him. He stumbled over, peeled the plastic off the lantern, thumbed the batteries in, and we had light enough for me to close the door. So he’d be sure to see, I padlocked the latch I’d set into the backside of the door, then broke the small key off in the lock, tossed the round head over to him. It bounced off his arm, made a small noise on the floor. “Martin S. Larkin,” I said, to remind him, and then, just as the new lantern started to gutter out, I smiled for him. “I know where you’re going,” I said, way back in my throat like I’d practiced. “I know because I’ve been there.” The only sound, his heart, slapping the backside of his chest. I pretended I could hear it, anyway.

Death isn’t like you think it is. Or maybe it’s different for everybody. Or it could be that even trying to remember it warps the experience. Because all I have really are pictures and words to remember it with. Sound too, I suppose, but that’s always accidental. Like, walking as close as I can to some building, I might hear some guy back by the dumpster muttering to himself in his sleep, and for half a step the alley will be familiar, though I’ve never been there before. It’s hard to explain. That alley, it’s not like it’s a version of another alley in wherever I was. It’s more like the way it shaped itself around that drunk’s broken dreams for a moment, the way it’s absorbing the things he regrets having said to his children, it’s like it’s feeding. And that’s the familiar part. If I had to describe what being dead was like for me, it was like being at the bottom of a huge factory, with all the machines made from some bulbous kind of metal. Organic, almost. Pulsing. Alive but dumb, if that makes any sense. But all focused on me in a way that I know the machines don’t hate me, they love me, they need me — without me strapped down to my place on my back underneath them all, they would be nothing. What they’re doing to me, too, it’s a kindness of sorts. Instead of letting me die, each and every instant they’re pumping a massive amount of thick, cold fluid through me.

Not just through my veins, but, like, in my mouth, with my jaws stretched all the way open. The whole place is dependent upon the highest amount possible being pushed through me, too, so that all I can hear — all I ever heard for what turned out to be fourteen years — is a deep thrumming. One I never got used to, not like the way we no longer hear the blood in our necks. This was different. There was an urgency to it that your own heart can’t provide, I don’t think. A loud whispering that never hits any real rhythm. And you can’t sleep like that, and you can’t think, and as high up as you look there are just more cavernous pipes and massive, impossible things turning slowly, each cycling the fluid down and down and down, into you, fast enough that you have to hang your head off the back of the stone bed, to give the fluid a straighter path into you, through you. It was all I knew. No demons, no fire, no clouds or angels or family members, no dogs you had as a kid, no first bicycle rides. Not for me, anyway. I don’t know. Looking back on it for flashes, each time a drunk coughs in the dark or whatever, I think it wouldn’t have been so bad if I could have just maybe taken something from here with me. A picture of Laurie, I mean, or Tanya. Either of those could have got me across any number of years. Just the memory of the picture, even. But that dull, cold fluid rushing through you. It’s coming so fast, so constant, that you never even have a chance to think, to dredge up anything you might still have inside. Soon all you know is that you’ve got to keep your head tilted back. So, yeah, the gag reflex — that’s one thing you take, I guess. You don’t want to choke. And you can still see, in a way, and feel something like tears rimming out the corners of your eyes, but it’s not crying anymore. It’s just the natural state of things, the only way you’ve ever been. Without you, the whole place would come crumbling down. And everything on top of it too. If you don’t keep your head tilted back, all the unaware people up in life, the real world, they’ll fall through into this too. Maybe. There’s no chance to think of any other way it might be, though, so you close your eyes as tight as you can, and open your throat, and hope you can maintain this position long enough for whatever’s supposed to happen to happen, and in this way fourteen years can pass. A blink of the eye, yeah, but it’s the way corpses blink. And when you come back, you don’t know anything. It’s all been washed away, rounded off, dulled so much you can’t pick it up. Larkin’s lucky, really. He gets to stay there, dead. Some of us have to open our eyes again, though. When I did, all I could see was lines of brown. For probably two weeks, I watched it, not understanding, but then something stepped into all that wire, twitched its nose around in a way that probably made me smile an infant’s smile. Then, all I did was turn my head to follow where this moving thing was going. That such things existed in this world of brown lines was a

miracle to me. A month after that, I’d pulled myself far enough from the center of my roll of wire to push against the sides, fall out into the dirt. The rabbits sat back on their haunches, canted their ears over at me. I studied each of them in turn, then turned back to the roll of wire, tried to get back in. It was all I knew.

Our first day in the storage unit together, Larkin finally slid this notebook back across the cement to me. He’d just used one page. This was after he’d remembered me, of course. When he thought he knew what I wanted, why I was there. Written in big blocks letters like I was a child were five names, with addresses. Each of the addresses had question marks by them. Because they were from fifteen years ago. I understood, looked up to him. He was nodding like we’d made a deal. The names were the people he’d worked with back then. “The ones who gave you orders?” I said, the notebook loose by my knee. We were sitting on opposite walls, like this was a secret clubhouse. Larkin nodded, kept nodding. I shook my head no, looked to the metal door. “You would never have known their names,” I told him. “They were careful. Better than that.” “I followed them,” he said then, whispering like he was still watching them go into their office buildings or suburban homes or wherever. I came back to Larkin, studied him now. “Why?” I finally asked. “Because I like to know who I’m working for too.” I raised the list again, had to turn my head a bit sideways to really see it like I wanted to in the unsteady light of the lantern. “This is them, then?” I said. “I don’t know, shit. They were who got sent to talk to me, anyway. I’m not making any promises here.” “But you had these all in your head.” “I was real good at Memory when I was a kid.” “These people — that was forever ago.” “What was your first girlfriend’s middle name?” he asked. I smiled, shrugged. Said, “She kissed me.” “Exactly,” Larkin said back. “They paid me twenty thousand dollars for a single day’s work.” I kept smiling. It was too late for him to live by then, of course, but I tried to pick the lock with all his paperclips and tie pins anyway, and beat on the door with him, screamed for help. At some point, though — probably when his skin started to crack and shift — he realized I was leading him on, just playing. It probably had something to do with the Polaroids I kept taking of him every twelve hours. Whatever else you hear about me, don’t ever believe that I’m not a killer.

It’s what I came back for.

I don’t know how long I lived with the rabbits, as one of them. The seasons didn’t matter to me. Not that there’s much to go by in Piedras Negras. I ate roots and dirt and bugs, and usually threw it up an hour or two later. As far as I knew, there was nothing wrong with this. If the warehouse had still been occupied, or close to a road, I would have been shot, I know. Just to figure out what I was. It was just the rabbits, though, and they accepted me more or less. I couldn’t fit down into their dens or warrens or whatever, but, in the yard anyway, they tolerated me. After a few days, they even quit watching me, just let me move among them on all fours. Sometimes even rested in my shadow. I’m pretty sure that, back then, with the rabbits as my model, I moved as they did through the heat: with my feet together. It was ridiculous, I know. It takes a long time to come back from the dead, though. You don’t just wake up and pick up where you left off. At least I didn’t. Whenever I threw up, too, the rabbits would gather around me, wait to pick through the vomit for softened roots. It made me feel like part of something. This is an important part of living. It got to where I looked forward to my body rejecting what I’d put into it, would smile as I threw up, dry heave for more. At dusk, for the few moments before complete darkness, sometimes the inside of the rabbits’ tall ears would catch a full glow of sorts. Like light was leaking out. I could have stayed there forever, I think. In my calm moments, now, I sometimes go back there still, I mean. Sit myself against the side of that warehouse in my head and watch the rabbits stand against the sunset as if keeping watch, their ears glowing on. Things were simple, then. I didn’t have a list of people to kill. But the world is what it is, too. Some of the litters that were born under the wire, the babies would be all wrong — rabbits, but not. The other rabbits would move in then, and ravage the babies and the mother both. It’s just instinct. But sometimes, too, one of those babies would live for a few days. Pull itself under the wire and whimper with hunger, until I’d throw up on the wire, the strings of vomit going hand over hand down. One of those times, one of the babies even started to grow, and grow, until I woke one morning to find its protective roll of wire nudged over. All that was left was a smudge of wet in the dirt. I tasted it, tried to remember the rabbit baby that was gone, forgot it for another few hours, I’m pretty sure. Things were different now, though. For me. Instead of sitting against the warehouse, I sat against the fence opposite it. I was watching the open door. None of the rabbits ever went inside. Because I was a rabbit, I didn’t either. Because I was a man, though, I watched that doorway, and sometimes looked through the fence, to the ferris wheel, creaking around in the wind. Before we had to leave Texas, Tanya and me had smuggled Laurie up into one — there was a limit of two per gondola, or whatever they’re called — and my clearest memory of that now is the way Laurie was both smiling and clutching the leg of my jeans.

I like to think that, when I was a rabbit, I could still feel her hand, small and tiny and perfect. That, if my voice would have worked, I would have even said her name, maybe, and all the rabbits would have cupped their glowing ears to me, waiting for me to say it again.

Later I would learn that, for the first couple of years after I disappeared, Refugio asked to be reassigned to the Del Rio region. Because he had a good record, and Del Rio was a bad stretch of land, where experienced border cops were in short supply, his request was granted. He didn’t care about immigration or narcotics, though. He was looking for me. Finally he hooked up with the hand who’d given me a ride. For two hundred more dollars, the hand let Refugio ask questions, so long as it didn’t interfere with work. What the hand was doing then was building a new stock tank and trough, right beside the one I’d slept in, like a mirror image. Because the cattle still wouldn’t drink from mine. And Granger Mosely had had the water tested over and over, had even considered drilling a new well. In the end, it was cheaper to just replace all the pipes, and the tank and trough. The cattle still blew into the water in disgust before finally drinking it, though. They knew. Refugio did too. I’d intrigued him. My bandoleer of moon rocks. What would they be worth? As far he knew, I’d never delivered them — had never walked up out of the pasture he’d left me in. Granted, fences had been cut clear to Uvalde, but that had to be something different, because I was on foot. He went to the pens at the end of the draw but didn’t find any of my coke cans or chip bags, or the board I’d arranged my dead skin on. For him, I was a ghost, moving a few months ahead of him. Taking all the same steps. But he wasn’t giving up, either. Because what I had — he’d heard things. Very specific things. My moon rocks weren’t moon rocks. Two years before, some graduate anthropology student had uncovered a mass of molten metal and rock deep underneath a Mayan ruin of some sort. Not a pyramid, like for worship, but more like the way you cap off a well. There was nearly a thousand pounds of the stuff. And none of the tests they did on it made any sense — even the Geiger counter never gave the same reading twice. The backhoe that tried to pull it up stopped working, and the truck they tied to it, it threw a rod, and nobody’s watches or flashlights would stay working around it. As near as the grad student could guess, it was an old meteorite, maybe. The find of a career, of a lifetime, he thought. He wasn’t far off. Soon enough all the noise he was making drew the attention of certain farmers, the kind who carried AK-47s and wore night vision goggles. They moved in, interrogated him, and then made him part of the historic record he so loved. And, when the properties of the metal rock were checked, it turned out to be even more than he’d said. In cartel-terms, if plutonium at the center of a bomb was dangerous, then this was hell on earth. Times twelve. They put it on the market by the milligram. What I’d been muling north, then, was the first shipment of the new empire.

They’d given me the new world in a case, and paid me to carry it into America. It had to be by foot, too, because, in amounts more than an ounce, nothing mechanical would keep working around it. The reason it had to be carried by somebody disposable but punctual was because it killed whoever was around it. In a very specific timeframe. Evidently, the canisters I’d had were the only shield that even somewhat slowed down the radiation, or fumes, or microbes, or whatever. They were a silver-aluminum alloy. Like the case. Just thick enough for me to make it to Uvalde. What they never planned on, though, was a mule who’d sucked on enough sticks of silver nitrate that it had probably accumulated in my glands. It didn’t make me immune, but it made me different, let the stuff slow-cook its way into my DNA or something. All Refugio knew, though, was what his informant had told him: I’d walked into the night with millions of dollars, and never walked out. Meaning the canisters were still out there, a few feet from my sun-bleached bones. And, for twenty-six hundred dollars, he’d given them up. It kept Refugio up at night, rolled him out of bed before dawn, made him arrange the disappearance of that informant, so he wouldn’t tell anybody else who happened to bust him. Over the next few months, then, and for the first time in years, Refugio did his daily patrol like he was supposed to. What he was doing was catching all the coyotes and mules who’d stepped in to take the place of Sebby and me. Not to process them, but to tell them about the get-out-of-jail-free card he was offering for word of any skeleton they chanced on out in the scrub. He was looking in the wrong place, though. By then, the canisters were who knows where, and me, I was rolled into a couple thousand pounds of wire on the other side of the border. Not alive yet — I have no idea how many times I rotted to bones over those fourteen years, and grew back — but not as dead as I should have been either. Just waiting, I guess. For what — to understand that, I was going to have to step into that warehouse in Piedras Negras again. And that’s not something any sane rabbit was going to do.

For months after I pulled myself from my wire casket, I don’t think I had any thoughts. Not human thoughts. Or the kind I have now, anyway. And it could have been weeks, even, I suppose. Time passes differently, living like I was. The days smear together into one single kind of ideal day. You wake one morning, and it’s no different than the last morning, really, and so you go to the same corners for grass or weeds or roots, you see the same things from the same angles. If there’s a birth, then it’s probably not so different from the last birth. If I’d ever seen another person, a human, I might have made the connections faster — their legs would have been a version of my legs. Sure, I’d have been scared of the way they walked upright, far from the ground, and didn’t seem to be trying to smell everything, but sometimes that’s what you need to jar yourself awake.

What jarred me, finally, were the jackals, the ones that had been whelped out in the scrub when the mother ran off from the carnival. There were more of them now, and they probably ranged far, their territory not concerned with national borders or city limits. Part of their territory was the yard I lived in. In all my time there, though, they’d never come into the warehouse. I’d seen them out on the flats, of course, loping to or from food, but they were just motion to watch, like a bird or a lizard or a low cloud. I didn’t connect them to my impulse to run, to hide, in spite of how the other rabbits would stand on their haunches and watch them pass, as if just being sure that the terms of some ancient treaty were being observed. They were. But treaties are only good until hunger sets in. Until you’ve got something the other side wants. What we had, in the middle of what was probably a drought, was flesh. I was sitting against the fence when it happened. First one of the rabbits sat up, its ears directed out the gate, and then another stood, and then another. This is maybe the way the Mayans watched a fireball burrow through their sky five or ten thousand years ago. Our fireball was two jackals, tongues lolling, black lips set into grins that part of me still remembered from Granger Mosely’s long pasture, I think. They were just loping in, like nothing at all was wrong with this. When the first of us ducked underground, they lowered their bellies and started pulling the earth toward them. For long seconds they wouldn’t even touch the ground, and then it would just be a puff of dust and they were floating again. I watched them for longer than I should have. They were slipping through the gate before I even realized they were a threat, and in the space of a heartbeat had one of us thrown up into the air, screaming. It was the worst sound I’d ever heard. And then the massacre really began — all the rabbits that hadn’t dived underground yet. The jackals crushed their skulls then shook the life from the small bodies, tearing through the fur with their teeth, too hungry to wait. The whole time, I just sat there, stone. What was happening was that my world was ending. It made me breathe hard, maybe even forget a little bit how to breathe. But, too, the carnage before me — it wasn’t as unfamiliar as it should have been. Instead, it was like a stencil laid on old memories. It was giving the random images in my head form, shape, structure. And then it was over. I opened my mouth to, I don’t know, make a sound, maybe — mourn my family? — but the jackals, they were slinking back against the fence now. Standing half-in, half-out of the door to the warehouse was one of the babies who had crawled into that darkness years ago, and lived. He was the size of a large dog, and rangy, his nose twitching, eyes flat black. My chest warmed. With love, I think. He was our hero, our protector. Faster than I could even follow, he was on the closest jackal, taking its snout

under his incisors, then rolling sideways with the jackal, so his hind legs could pull its guts out. They splashed on my face. Beside me now, caught in the chainlink of the fence, a rabbit that hadn’t been digested yet. I’d watched her give birth a few weeks ago. She’d even let me touch her once, with the side of my hand, but then had hopped off, as if pretending this had never happened. The second jackal tried to make it through the gate, its tail tucked under, but our hero, our protector, our god, he buried his large teeth into the base of the jackal’s spine, pulled it back into the yard. Though the jackal was still alive, he didn’t drop it, but stood there for a few moments, staring out toward the ferris wheel, letting the jackal scream. Only when the message had been sent did it slowhop back into its warehouse, the jackal in tow, thrashing slower and slower. Maybe an hour after that, I stood against the fence, my legs wobbly. I had to set my fingers in the chain link to balance. And in the chain link, still, was the undigested rabbit who had let me touch her once. I brought my hand back to my face, turned it over, even smelled it, smudging my nose and lips dark red. Without thinking, I licked my lips clean, and smiled, my whole face warm now. Next I licked my hand, and then lowered myself to my knees, to pick the meat from the fence with my teeth. When I stood again, the rabbits of the yard were watching me, as if disappointed. I nodded to them, a gesture I didn’t even know I had, and pushed off from the fence on unsteady legs, made it to the first wire roll, then the second, and then mine. Deep in the center of it, as far as I could reach, were the pieces I still had left of my life: a duffel bag packed with two Uvalde phonebooks; the bandoleer; a handful of silver nitrate sticks; and my clothes, rotten on the side the sun had been able to reach, musty on the other side, from straining my fluids of decomposition. But mine. I held them all to my chest, then stepped into the pants as much as I could. I remembered how the bandoleer fit, too. This time when I turned around, the rabbits flattened their ears down along their backs, set their wide hind feet in the dirt. I understood. I threw up some into the back of my throat, but was able to swallow it back down. When I could see again, too, I stepped out into the open, without anything to hold onto, and then lurched to the warehouse headfirst, felt my way to the open doorway. I was making a sound in my throat, I remember, but don’t know what I might have been trying to say. On the way to the door, I found a piece of rebar about waist high. I carried it inside with me.

The reason I’m staying with Larkin for an extra day now is to be sure he’s not like me. Because, really, I have no idea how this works. I mean, the rabbits got all messed up just from being in the same yard with me, and I was dead then, not even trying. Larkin, his dose has been a lot more intense. For the last few hours of it, something had happened to his tongue, I think. Or his throat. All he could do was creak. I kind of liked it.

It was more than he gave me, I mean. And, if the Texas Rangers were to bust down the door, my only real crime would be being alive, I suppose. Because the storage unit isn’t even registered in my name, who’s to say who’s the captor, who’s the captive. What’s really beautiful is that I haven’t even touched him. I don’t have to. Stand close enough to me these days, and you start to cook from the inside out. My clothes don’t last long, sure — skin either — but neither does anybody else. Not that any of this would stop the Rangers from blasting holes in me, just for the way my shadow would look in their flashlights. It would kill me for a while, yeah. As long as they didn’t mount my head on their office wall, though, I’d be back. Given enough cool nights, I’m pretty sure I can come back from just about anything. I mean — after walking into that empty warehouse in Piedras Negras, guns are nothing. Because I didn’t have enough balance for my eyes adjust to the darkness, I just lurched through. It was cool inside. That was a new sensation. And — I had no idea this wasn’t the way every dark space was — there were blue-tinged tracers of light smearing through, at about waist height. I wanted to touch that light, but in my dim way, I understood that that was going to have to wait. Standing before me, his maw bloody, was my god. He was growling. And I’d like to say that I used my rebar like a sword that day, defended myself like a man instead of animal. But the truth is that the rebar clattered to the floor. I backed away, fell to the concrete, and didn’t get up, just pushed myself back into a spiderwebbed corner. I was crying, yeah. The rabbit paced me, always just past my feet. When I stopped, then, he just stared at me, as if deciding. I’m not sure how long we sat across from each other like that. Maybe we were waiting for him to digest that second jackal, or maybe we were waiting for night to fall, I don’t know. Time had ceased to pass for me. The whole world was that rabbit’s eyes, never looking away from me for even an instant, so that I lost myself in them, didn’t realize until too late that the reason they were so large was that his nose was against my chest. I brought my knee up into his sternum with a dull thud and then it was started. His teeth tore into my shoulder, ripped me to the left and then back to the right just as fast, and then his hind feet pedaled around, to claw the tops of my thighs, and my stomach. When I was spread out into the thin layer of dust, and not fighting back anymore, the rabbit slow-hopped away a few feet, and situated himself under the smears of blue light. He was watching them, too, the smears of blue light. Feeding off them. The veins and capillaries in his ears glowed the same color. About dawn, I think, I rose from the concrete. My stomach and shoulder were still torn open, but the blood had congealed, and the wounds were warm, healing. The rabbit looked back around his body to me, showed his teeth, and lost his footing, trying to get to me. This time I was ready, though. As he opened its mouth to take my face in his teeth, I snaked my left arm around to his tall ear, wrenched his head down and around. Enough for me to get his thick neck in the crook of my arm.

After that it was just a matter of holding on. Because the rabbit’s massive yellow teeth had scraped across my face, I couldn’t see anything, but I knew not to let go. At some point I realized that the sounds coming out my broken mouth now, they were words. I was saying I was sorry. To the rabbit I was choking, yeah, but also to the rabbits in the yard, each standing back on their haunches, their radar ears painting this picture for them in too much detail. Their god was screaming for air, gouging great furrows in the slick concrete of the warehouse they’d never been in, because it was sacred. After this, the jackals were going to decimate the yard. I was a man, though. I knew that now. I was man, and didn’t care. Finally, the rabbit I was holding onto relaxed. I knew it was dead because it became heavier, and its muscles, they were creaking against each other, as if there was some vital lubrication missing now. It was life. I buried my face in the soft fur, and cried long enough that the hair dried into the wound my face was, and, pulling away, I opened it again, the blood stringing between us. Over the next day or two, when, out of guilt, I’d decided to be the new protector, I would learn that the blue smears through the air, they were only still there because no sunlight had been in the warehouse. And the smears themselves, they had a taste, to me. I was drawn to them. What had happened was someone had come back to this warehouse a few months ago. And they’d been carrying some of the black rock. That was what had woken me — called to me. The cartel never knew it, but the black rock the Mayans had found, it was the kind of alive that didn’t want to be broken up. It didn’t really think, or resist pain or any of that. It just simply liked being together. It felt like home. The whole time I’ve been back, though, I haven’t seen that blue smear again. It could have been a fluke, even. Maybe a grain or two got melted into a belt buckle setting or something. Hopefully not, though. Who knows what that guy’s kids would look like. I asked Larkin just now if that was funny. That he didn’t answer was a good thing. For him.

Because I didn’t have any clothes, and because the rabbit dead on the floor had been my god, I stripped his skin off, used it to bandage my own. And then, because I had a taste for it now, I ate as many of his organs as I could scoop out. His muscle was too tough, though, and for some reason trying to tear it with just my fingers, it felt like sacrilege. But the kidneys and heart and liver, they were enough. I held them down, too, started to understand that, in a way, while I’d been infecting this yard of rabbits, mutating them into what they were now, my memories had leeched into them too, somehow, into the simple, instinctual stories that coursed through their veins, so that, though my body was dead all those years, I’d lived on still, in generations of blind litters. Eating the biggest of them then, the biggest piece of myself, it was cannibalism, yeah, but it had to happen. Because I had snugged its head down over mine, maybe it was

even double-cannibalism, I don’t know. It’s not like I haven’t paid for it, though. My face and head had been hurt bad enough that — it should be obvious. Or maybe you’ve heard, or seen pictures that you thought had been doctored by the tabloids, or caught something impossible in the sweep of your headlights, that was gone when you looked again. Call it a skin graft. My shadow on the wall here, it’s got these two tall ears. Which is to say I’m in Hell. It’s not as lonely as you’d think, though. Sometimes, alone in a pasture, I’ll even forget for a few steps what I’ve become, and just nod along, happy. But then, like always, it all comes rushing back. At first, in the warehouse, the memories were thick enough, and coming so fast and all-at-once, that I had seizures, I think. Each time I’d wake, I’d pull myself over to the rabbit, and make myself eat more and more and more, until the flies were too thick and crunched between my teeth, their delicate wings sticking to the roof of my mouth. I was Dodd again. Walking up out of the pasture and into Uvalde, the bandoleer slung across my sunburned shoulder, new blisters on my heel from boots that weren’t mine, my whole life spread before me. Taken away. I fell to my knees, swallowed it all down, everything I’d missed. Which, I mean — that’s a lie, of course. But I did stand again anyway. Into what I’d been made into. I was in an abandoned warehouse in Piedras Negras. It was — I didn’t know what year it was. But clothes don’t rot overnight. I’d figure all that out, though. And, though I couldn’t reach Walford anymore, I did know how to find Larkin anyway, I was pretty sure. And ... and: tucked into a seam in the backside of the bandoleer, where the stitching had started to come apart. I pushed my blunt, blackened fingers in, pulled out the shiny corner of a chip bag. In it, folded probably twenty times, a yellow piece of paper. Refugio’s phone number. His office extension. I smiled. In the yard, spaced around the rolls of wire, were the jackals. The massacre was over. If part of me had still been in the rabbits, then it was in the jackals now. Their mouths were bloody like mine. And, instead of raising their hackles, they were wagging their tails through the dirt. For a long time we just looked at each other, and finally I nodded, swept past them, some of my new cape bunched in my right hand. I think I felt like a king, maybe. What I’d done was fight through death, take a god’s heart in my hand. That was just the beginning, though. I turned my face north, to Texas, and didn’t blink. Without looking back, I just started walking there, my teeth set, my breath deeper than it needed to be, and I would have tried to cross like that, I know, stood against all the border cops America could muster, their small rifles blowing pieces of me into the air, my loyal jackals snarling and snapping at the water, but the ferris wheel stopped me. The only sound was memory. For the first time in fifteen years, then, I said my daughter’s name — Laurie —

and, like she was going to be up there waiting for me, I started climbing the wheel, some of the struts crumbling under my hand. My cape tore off on one of them but I kept climbing, and, when I finally got to the top, sat in the gondola and closed my eyes, I swear I could feel her hand on my leg after all these years. She was telling me to keep her safe. That she trusted me to keep her safe. If you think it was any black rock from space that brought me back to this world, then — I don’t know. You haven’t been listening, I don’t think. It was her.

Laurie

I don’t know where to start with this, really. When I had to identify my father’s body? Or should I be seven again, down in Mexico? Or is it the tower you’re looking for here, like everybody else? Or the lake? God. Give me a form, please. I’m used to forms, I’m the queen bitch goddess of forms. And turn down the lights, maybe. Stop watching me from the other side of the glass. Give me a fucking ball point pen instead of this loud-ass pencil. It doesn’t matter, though. I want to start over now, please.

This is not a statement, and this is not a confession. Let me skip a line so there’s no confusion: This is draft number one of my allocution, should an allocution become necessary. So it doesn’t really exist yet, or, if it does, it’s in that little cranny of the law called ‘attorney-client privilege,’ and should be invisible to you. And no, it’s not my idea. If I had it my way, somebody would be chaining their bumper to the front of this holding unit right now, and squinting their eyes as they pulled away. Or angels, yeah: trumpets would be playing and angels would be floating down to get me, and would be flipping you off with their long and perfect middle fingers as they winged me out of here. My attorney says he can’t be party to anything like that, though. He’s a lot more interested in being prepared for the worst. That way, I guess, everything kind of looks like a victory. I don’t know. Anyway, the way an allocution can work, he says, if it’s good and honest and convincing and perfect and says all the incriminating stuff you couldn’t say before, like you’re unloading all your sins, placing yourself on the mercy of the court, is that it can have some direct, positive bearing on sentencing. It’s like a big, long excuse for why you did it. This is why he’s my new best friend — the way he thinks he has to dumb things down for me. This isn’t about him, though. It’s about what happened. In my words, not all the newspapers’. The truth, yeah. And my attorney, he’s right about one thing anyway: after reading this, no honest judge in his right mind could ever send me to Huntsville. I might even get a promotion.

My name is Laurie Romo. It’s Spanish, I know. You should hear my attorney say it, like he’s trying to impress me with his three

semesters of foreign language. Down below the border, he’d be worse than a joke. He’d be a mark. Hey, you mind carrying this across the bridge when you go back? The only thing better than a good mule is a stupid ass. But he’s not where this starts, he’s where it ends. I guess where it starts is when Sanchez called me in. That’s Gabriel Sanchez, not Hector Sanchez from the Marfa sector. Just ‘Sanchez’ to me, though — nothing first name and romantic. Not that he hasn’t tried. But don’t worry, I’m not trying to pull him down with me here. To say it another way: if he ever tried to harass me, then we would have settled it then and there, meaning it’s all over and done with now, if it ever even happened. So it doesn’t matter anymore. To me, anyway. You’d have to ask him if you want to know anything else, though. As for our professional relationship, Sanchez was my commanding officer then, yes. In spite of anything else, I still had to call him ‘sir’ over the air. “They need you there by six, it sounds like,” he said. “It’s my night on, though.” “Excuse me?” “It’s my night on, sir.” “I’ll move somebody, don’t worry.” I looked out over my hood at a stand of dead trees I was pretty sure I’d seen a lighter or match in earlier. More than once I’ve found a party of walkers out in the sun, dead, their water bottles sucked dry but one or two chest pockets square with a pack of cigarettes. Like, if they were already sneaking themselves in, they might as well bring a pack of untaxed smokes with them, right? We’re not exactly battling an international team of chess players down here. That’s not to say it isn’t a game, though. Just that the complicated moves, they all happen above the board, not out in the hills. And you never even see them directly, at least not at my pay grade. Instead, I’ll just be over at a certain commanding officer’s house for the Fourth, his wife not smiling at me, and in his garage will be, say, two motorcycles, and a shiny new wave runner. But I’m not saying anything. Even if I was, it’d just be speculation. As for the facts, I did go in that afternoon, even though Sanchez wouldn’t tell me what it was all about. “Surprise birthday party?” I tried, cranking my truck over. “Just be there,” he said, and signed off. That he didn’t make me call him sir should have been my first indication of what I was about to walk into, I suppose. Not that I would have done anything different, understand. If an allocution is supposed to be about regret, or if regret is some important part of the legal definition of guilt, then I pray this never gets that far.

I showed up at the Jomar motel just after six. I’ve never asked why it’s called that — Jomar. Somebody’s name, I guess. The neon was just lighting up. At least in the places the glass wasn’t broken. Of course you may know it as the ‘omar Inn,’ yeah. I mean, if Del Rio’s your number one vacation destination, but you only have forty dollars to spend for the week

and don’t care about air conditioning or lice or noises from the parking lot all night. According to people at the store down the street from it, one girl even got pregnant from sleeping in one of the beds by herself, naked. That kind of place. Me, I hadn’t been there since high school, back when it was just economical instead of run-down. What I was doing there now, I had no idea. Aside from that every other law enforcement officer for two hundred miles was on-scene already, slurping coffee and shaking their heads. Maybe Sanchez had been telling the truth: it was a party. I parked down at the gas station, locked my truck, and walked in. If they needed me, I figured, it was probably because whatever big thing had gone down, it somehow involved illegals. One of them had said my name, or I’d shown up on one of their sheets, or they were talking a really specific dialect of white girl Spanish, something like that. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The reason they needed me there by six, it turned out to be because the coroner on duty that night led a choir practice at six-fifteen. He was waiting on me, though. Everybody was. I had an identification to make. I tried to fake a smile as the crowd of badges parted for me but my smile felt rounded off, all muscle, nothing real. God, I didn’t think it would still get to me like this, either. I’m sorry. This isn’t where it starts.

When Sanchez called me that afternoon, he’d been far enough away that they’d had to patch him through the switchboard, leapfrog his voice up over the border. He was working a breaking and entering with the locals in Piedras Negras. Preventive maintenance? It made no sense. This is most of what he said before telling me to be at the Jomar by six: “The owner says he knows who did this to him.” “Did what?” “He’s this pharmacist. You should see this place now. I mean goddamn.” “I don’t understand. Don’t we usually wait until they’re at least close to the border?” “He says he knows who did this because of what was stolen, Laurie.” “Okay. Drugs. Money. Big mystery there, Gabriel. I can’t imagine who would want that. Especially in Mexico. Isn’t it all Catholic down there or something?” “You should try it some time.” “What?” “Church. That’s not why I’m calling, though. Didn’t you grow up down in Zaragoza or one of these little shit towns?” I didn’t answer. He probably had my personnel file open on the seat beside him, in his shiny metal notebook. He went on: “That’s where this guy originally set up shop. Zaragoza.” “Very interesting, sir. Thank you for the update.” It was the least sarcastic

response I could come up with. Sanchez laughed a barely tolerant laugh through the static about it, which, when you’re talking on the radio, isn’t the same as doing it in conversation. Over the air, because you have to hold the button down to broadcast yourself, it’s a lot more intentional. “He says it’s some old-time smuggler who did this to his place, Agent Romo. Interested yet?” I took my thumb from the button, breathed in, through my teeth. “And do you want to know what he stole? Apparently this pharmacist guy, he kept his cash in some old ammo box or something.” I breathed out my nose, in thanks. “I don’t know anything about any ammunition boxes, sir.” “Do you know this pharmacist, though?” “What if I do?” “Well that would be a coincidence, wouldn’t it?” “Let me guess. His name is Juan. Or Jorge. Or Manuel. And his last name has a z in it ...” “You do know him.” “I get my prescriptions filled in town, sir. Here, America.” “You haven’t even asked me why this would be a coincidence, Romo.” “Listen, not to be rude here, sir. But unless you’ve got a new directive for me here, I’m glassing that little stand of chinaberry just past the old Maybelline sign.” For a long time then, nothing. Then, finally: “The one with the red lipstick?” “Affirmative.” “Somebody should just burn those trees down some time.” “Is this an order, sir?” Again the laugh, but this time he cut it off halfway through. “Don’t guess you’re in your car, are you?” “You called me. On the radio.” He was asking because one of his favorite tricks to lure illegals up from some low place by the highway was to pretend your car had broken down. All you have to do is stand there with the hood up. After a few minutes, one of them will ease up at right angles, shrugging the whole way, his hair falling into his eyes. When you can’t speak his Spanish, then he’ll wave his wife or sister or aunt up — it’s always a blood relation, like that’s going to be the thing that convinces you — and then, with her translating, he’ll use a water balloon and a beer can to get your car started. Or whatever else he can find in the ditch. And then he’ll probably hit you up for a ride. What he’ll smell like is river sediment and cigarettes and sweat and sun and hope, so that it burns your eyes a little and you have to look away. It’s not a trick I like. “Just saying, Laurie. You should use what the good lord gave you, that’s all.” I decided right then and there that, even if this group came out of the trees in a kick line, wearing glow-in-the-dark Virgin Mary shirts and Christmas light sombreros, I was going to let them pass. Maybe even buy them some fountain drinks.

“I can fix my own vehicle, sir.” “Yeah, well. Catch a lot more flies with honey, y’know?” “I’m doing just fine now, thanks.” “You mean they’re —?” “I think I’m attracting plenty of shit-eaters already, sir.” Because this was being shuttled through the switchboard, everybody on our band had heard that. And we both knew it. What followed was a long, deliberate silence. Just the crackling of distance. “If I need to go down to Zaragoza, Agent Romo, I’ll let you know. Roger?” “I’m sure it’s changed a lot, sir. But if you need me.” “Not tonight, but thanks anyway.” On purpose — and this is for the record — he said that with a cute little halflaugh, like an in-joke. He was playing for the audience, for everybody else out there on patrol. He was still the boss, yes. Alone in my cab, I made myself grin. “Thank you, sir. I’ll just have to keep trying, I guess. Now, unless there’s anything else, tell Manual something nice from me, maybe —” “So you do know him.” “Or Juan, or Jorge ...” When he clicked off this time, I thought it was for good, but then he was back again: “I’ll just tell him Laurie says hey, how’s that?” “Wonderful. Thank you.” “He does still remember you, you know.” “He’s thinking of somebody else, I’m sure.” “I don’t know. He seems —” “I think my crew’s about to rabbit here, sir. So, unless you’re retasking me —” “Now that you mention it, Agent Romo. Evidently you’re needed over in Del Rio. Special request or something.” I left him room to snicker, but he held back somehow. “Del Rio, you say?” “They need you there by six, it sounds like.” And you know the rest of how it went.

I’d never seen a body in a closed room before. Or fresh. On patrol, of course, I’d found my share, like everybody else. But out in the scrub, people turned to mummies in the space of a month. You could pretend you were on National Geographic or something, just exploring another tomb. Unless the coyotes had been at them already. But we weren’t to touch them anyway, out in the field. Just call them in then take some pictures. Secure anything that might be about to blow away. Leave your headlights on all night if you have to, so the other trucks can find you. It’s not the best part of the job, but people do deserve a better burial. It’s not their fault, I mean.

If I were stuck in Mexico, I’d probably be building all manner of hang gliders and tunneling machines. If I hadn’t been seven, I mean. But I don’t want to talk about that yet. At the Jomar, the Omar Inn, I had been delivered to a door fluttering with police tape. That nobody was making eye contact with me was a bad thing, I knew. “What happened?” I said to a trooper I knew by sight. He pointed with his chin, into the room. “What didn’t?” somebody said after I’d turned away. Suddenly the coroner was ducking out of the room. Not because he was tall and spindly and haunted like you expect a mortician to be, but because there was some yellow tape strung across the doorway, about level with the peephole. Instead of some nineteenth century black suit, complete with puffy tie and blood-stained cuffs, he was wearing an old concert t-shirt. “Ms. Romo,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Dr. Carter. Just Carter.” I shook, took my hand back, and he led me under the tape. Over the next few days, I hear, everybody who came into that room, or the two rooms on either side — there’s no second story at the Jomar — had to wear bunny suits, like astronauts. We were stupid, though. Or innocent. There’s not much difference, I don’t think. Inside, the room was set up like a thousand others: a wallowed-out queen bed taking up most of the floor. Opposite it and offset a little toward the door, a dresser with a bolted-down television set. Under the window, an air conditioner. On the opposite wall, a vanity, and the door to the bathroom. “Why am I here?” I said. My voice was small. I was a little girl again. Dr. Carter took my hand. I let him and then almost shook away just as fast. Through the bones of his arm and wrist, I could tell he was humming something. I could feel it the way you can when a cat you’re holdings winds up to a strong purr. He stretched his lips out like he’d been caught. “Sorry. Usually it only shows on dictation. I’ve got choir in — well. Tonight.” I looked to him, as if for more. “It’s nothing inappropriate,” he added. “The tune.” He was afraid he’d offended me. It’s what you say to a person who’s in a delicate frame of mind. It made me study the room some more, see the boots sticking out from the other side of the dresser. This is the part where I identify my father’s body. That’s where I’m starting. Only — I couldn’t. Dr. Carter squeezed my hand tighter, maybe hummed a bit louder. To drown out the smell, maybe. Somehow. I pulled my hand back, churched it with my other one over my mouth and nose. In the movies, this is what all the girls do, right before they start screaming. They also kind of curve their bodies away from whatever they’ve just walked up on. This is what it felt like, too: like I was in a movie. Because this couldn’t really be happening.

Instead of identifying my father’s body, I identified his boots. You’d think a

person who’s been kept inside, in air conditioning, out of the sun, just dead, he’d be pretty recognizable. But the air conditioner wasn’t working in that unit. As for the boots, they were the only ones I’d ever seen him in. They were black, lace-up, vaguely military but shined and polished and abused for so many years that they were really just these thick socks that he tied on, and swore by. Supposedly, the number of illegals he’d run down in those boots was into the thousands. He said they were going to go into the border patrol hall of fame someday, whenever they built one. Except that he wanted to be buried in them. His solution was a plexiglass casket in a special wing. As a girl, him talking like that had scared me, but I understand now that he was just getting me ready for this motel room as best he could. Because he knew it was coming, I suppose. Or something like it. Carry around enough guilt, you find yourself scratching out your epigraph on stray napkins in donut shops. That was my father. He was sitting against the wall on the other side of the dresser like he’d been hiding from somebody sitting on the bed. Or talking to someone, maybe. The reason they needed me to make the identification was that most of the skin had been burned from his face and arms. In places you could see where the blood had cauterized a blackish purple. His hair, which he’d been proud of never losing, it was only there in patches. I wouldn’t have recognized him, I don’t think. I closed my eyes, opened them back. “How long?” I said. “I was supposed to be there five minutes ago,” the coroner said absently, glancing down at his watch. I turned to face him. It was like he was talking a language I’d never even heard, much less understood. But then it came: choir practice. Hymns. That other world. “Him, I mean,” I said, nodding down. The coroner smiled with the corners of his eyes. Had he been joking? Was he laughing at himself now, inside, or was this part of some disarming technique they taught at coroner school? “Before I can release any information,” he said. “I need you to confirm his identity.” “He’s my — you know. He’s my father, right? That’s why I’m here.” When the coroner just stared at me, I cocked my head, started to shrug, then got it: “The deceased. Yeah. Okay. His name is Refugio. Romo like me. Is that it?” “Thank you. It’s just that —” “I’m white. Check.” “According to his liver, he expired within the last twelve hours.” “No, I mean ... How long did it take?” Even now, after everything I’ve seen, I can’t imagine how a person can go from a murder scene like that and right into some carpet-walled back room of a church, everyone’s voices lifted in some holy falsetto. Maybe there’s an eye-wash station back by the preacher’s office or something. If so, then Sanchez was right: I needed to get myself

to a church. As for how long it took, the coroner didn’t want to commit to anything before the autopsy. According to what he could be sure of, though, my father had checked himself in seven days ago, paid in advance, and the room was a single. I was sitting at the foot of the bed now. I looked up to the coroner. He shrugged, pooched his lips out in something like defeat, and finally said, “It took a while. Maybe all week. I’m sorry.” I nodded, had kind of known that already, I suppose. “Tox screen’s going to come back with something, though,” the coroner assured me. “There’s no ligature marks, see? That suggests the restraints were chemical. Which is good. Maybe he didn’t even feel any of it.” He was wrong. My father’s blood was going to come back clean. He’d felt every minute of the last week of his life. I nodded, accidentally saw myself in the mirror as everybody out in the parking lot was about to. When I brought my hand up from the comforter to run my hair out of my face, my fingers trailed flakes. The comforter was coming apart, like it had been microwaved. “Omar Inn ...” I said to myself, and flicked the dry pieces of fabric away. I’d spent some of prom night here, in the room down by where the ice machine used to be. “Excuse me?” the coroner said. I flinched, had somehow forgotten he was there, I think. It took me a moment to focus in on him again. “How ...” I started, then swallowed, started over: “How did you know to call me?” “So you are a cop ...” the coroner grinned, wedging his file folder up under his arm so he could slide an envelope up from his rear pocket. “His wallet was gone of course, but this was in the sweatband of his hat.” He handed me the envelope and I scanned for the old felt hat, tie-dyed with sweat, the edges of the brim curled up from drying in the sun a thousand times. It was on the nightstand, under the lamp. Where he always left it, so it could be the first thing he ducked into when he woke. I knew what was in the envelope, but waited for the coroner to excuse himself before I angled it open, to look inside. A wallet-sized, twice-laminated picture of me, at six years old. I let the envelope snap shut again.

Sanchez found me at my trailer the next morning. He’d driven all night, probably. Meaning neither of us had slept. He took his hat off when he stepped down from his truck, and I looked away. His wife’s name is Gwen. I don’t like her, but I don’t dislike her either. “How’d Piedras Negras go, then?” I said. He settled himself into the other chair on the porch. “How does every investigation go down there?” he said, hissing a laugh. It was the usual comeback. I handed him my cup of coffee and he drank, and I went back to watching the pasture.

The truth of us, I guess, is that I was young when he first started coming home with my father, and things happen, stupid things, but the world makes you pay, too. It makes everybody involved pay, really. He turned out to be my first commanding officer, sure. But I could say one word to my father and Sanchez’s career would hit a ... well. Not a wall, but a tall, unclimbable fence, anyway. It’s what every border cop is terrified of. Instead of evening things out, all this did was leave us — I don’t know. Too even, I guess. There are stupider situations, I’m sure, but most of them are on television. We passed my coffee back and forth until it was gone. “You hadn’t talked to him the whole week?” Sanchez finally said, then looked up at me, one of my coasters balanced between all his fingers, like that was what he was really concentrating on here. “Guess you call your father every day after work, right?” I said, a little bit singsong. “I’m just saying.” “I already told the Rangers — I answered all their questions.” I sipped at my empty cup. “Did you see him?” I asked, then. “You don’t know?” he said back. “What?” “Somebody had a counter in their truck. It squealed a bit, then quit working.” “A Geiger counter, you mean?” “No, Laurie. An abacus.” “You’ve been talking to Manual too much, I think. He’s corrupted you.” “Then you do know him.” “Zaragoza wasn’t big back then.” “As opposed to now, yeah. Speaking of ... when you were a kid. I hear you lifted some evidence from the scene. A picture?” “It’s not theirs.” Sanchez shook his head about this, like I was a hopeless case. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m the corrupt one.” I rubbed my face, breathed in. “We were talking about a Geiger counter, I think,” I tried. “Like for radiation.” “I know, yeah. But, I mean ... it was the Omar, right? You really think that place is up to code?” I laughed a little, cupped my cup in both hands. “It’s probably for the best, sterility-wise. Maybe a federal program, even.” Sanchez smiled, was staring into the pasture so hard it made me want to look. “You know what it means, though,” he said. “They’re not going to release his body for a while.” “It’s evidence.” “I guess, yeah. But listen. I’m — I just wanted to say that ... do you know what bereavement leave is?” I didn’t answer. “There’s a clause,” he went on. “It’s either for three working days or until the first working day after the funeral.”

“Paid?” “Paid, yeah.” He was looking up at me now, to see if I was following here. “This a sting?” I said, only half in play. Maybe three-quarters. “It’s just the way it’s written. If your dad isn’t released for two weeks, then the funeral can’t be before then. Or — think of it this way. Refugio probably had at least two weeks vacation coming, right?” “Why are you doing this?” I said. “Keep you off the air for a while. Maybe we can get something done, finally.” I was staring at the side of his face now. “They sent you out there, didn’t they?” I said. “They?” “They don’t want me interfering. Is this policy, for when a law enforcement officer is killed in the line of duty, and his closest relative has a badge?” “I’m just trying to do something nice for you here. Sorry. Should have known better, I guess.” For maybe ten seconds we just sat there. “No strings?” I finally asked. Sanchez smiled with his eyes. I pulled my feet up into the chair, signed the forms. From the door of his truck, Sanchez asked me what I was going to do with all this time, then? “Grieve,” I said back. “Isn’t that what it’s for?” It’s quiet enough out at my trailer that you never have to raise your voice. “After that, though,” Sanchez said. It was an invitation, I think. Now that my father was out of the picture, I couldn’t threaten Sanchez’s career. And of course he was saying all this with a smile, his hand hooked over the top of his door, his eyebrows raised, waiting. I shook my head no to him, looked purposely away, so I could start the day over.

The next morning my father’s teeth blew up the forensic x-ray machine the DPS had in their rv. I wouldn’t have known, except that the machine pulled enough juice that to even get it to fire they had to send a trooper around front to start the rv, keep it revved until all the film had been shot. Or, to be more specific, I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t been using my state-sanctioned bereavement time to nose around the investigation. At a quarter shy of lunch, I was standing in the parking lot of the courthouse, asking a Texas Ranger if they had any more questions they needed to ask me. We both looked over to the rv when the engine started climbing. Trash that was in the gutter by the exhaust drifted up, as if curious, and a little bit afraid. The sound, when it came, was exactly like a dry, heavy piece of metal hitting a wide concrete floor. “That’d be my father,” I said. The Ranger smiled, touched the brim of his hat. It was a nervous thing with him. I think he liked the way it made his arm hide his face. “So what do they got you working on?” I asked. He shrugged, said, “You know anything about dogs?” Because he didn’t know

what to do with me, maybe, he let me ride with him out north of town, into the open pastures. “You do something wrong?” I said, holding onto the armrest. “I thought we were the only ones who went out here, I mean.” The Ranger smiled, jerked his truck around a sudden refrigerator. From a rise, I was able to make out a civilian car maybe a half mile up. “That’s where we’re going?” I said, nodding ahead. The Ranger scooped the dip from his mouth, trailed it out the window. “Over to your left here,” I directed, “about fifty yards — there.” It was an old rut-road that ran a few feet east of a ridgeline. My father had told me that roads like this, they were usually game trails that had been packed down enough over the centuries that the early ranchers’ old Model A’s had been able to hook one of their narrow tires in it, not go slipsliding down. Ranches now didn’t use them much, though, because in the late afternoon they were in shadow, and the ridge cut off your view of a whole side of the pasture. That was kind of the idea for the mule deer, though. “Guess you do come out here a lot,” the Ranger said, stepping his truck down into the comfortable ruts, able to drive now with just one hand. “On the weekends and whenever,” I told him, “growing up, my father would always take me out here. All around here. Up to Uvalde even, sometimes.” “You keep doing that,” he said. “What?” “‘Father.’ Instead of ‘Dad.’” “And?” He shrugged it away. “Uvalde,” he said. “Kind of getting far from the river, yeah?” “It was ...” I smiled, like I was embarrassed about this. “He had this knife, with like a silver handle, and turquoise in it. He lost it out here on patrol one week. It was a sentimental knife, I guess.” What I didn’t say was that he did it mostly just to drive around on the state gas card, show me things. Train me to be like him. The Ranger wasn’t listening anyway. The civilian car had been a tan Chevette, probably born the same year I was. It was moving back along the ridge, had probably seen our lightbar silhouetted against the clear sky. “Davey,” the Ranger said, like he was a scuba diving biologist, just taking note of another seahorse. The most common kind. “I know which gate he’ll have to use,” I said. The Ranger considered this but finally shrugged it away, his thick arms crossed over the wheel now so he could lean forward, ease up as close to the burned-out flares as possible. “I think somebody does hate me, yeah,” he confessed. On the ground between the flares, like an offering, was a dead dog. A dead something, anyway — coyote, giant fox, you couldn’t really tell. A cross between a giant fox and a small greyhound, maybe. Except it didn’t have any hair. And its ears were satellite dishes. Chances are you’ve seen pictures of it by now, so I probably don’t need to explain. It was in all the tabloids, and even made the Austin and San Antonio papers.

That was all later, though. And stupid. We put our sunglasses on and walked around it. “What is it?” I said. “Either mange or some kind of joke,” the Ranger said, then nodded to the stillretreating Chevette. “Or, if you listen to him, chupacabra.” He flared his eyes for that last part. I watched a pair of buzzards way to the north. They were just coasting, riding a smell. Coming here even, maybe. By the time I turned back around, the Ranger was moving back to the truck. “So your dad ever find his knife?” he asked. “Your father, I mean,” he added, all pleased with himself. “It’s a big pasture,” I told him, walking sideways away from the dog, so I could keep watching it. “Probably more high traffic than you want, too,” the Ranger said, his voice softer, so I’d know it wasn’t an insult. “Yeah,” I said, not disagreeing. “We also watched the pawn shops.” On the way into town, a road I was showing the Ranger as a gift — it didn’t have gates, just cattleguards — I finally asked if my father had received any calls in his motel room. So the Ranger would know I was still the grieving daughter, I just stared straight ahead. We went like this for maybe two miles, until I was starting to doubt if he’d even heard me, but then he rolled a can of dip from his shirt pocket, packed it on his wrist five identical times, a tobacco metronome, and said, “One, yeah. The desk clerk would tell you the same thing.” I digested this, understood what he was saying. “How about we just say he did tell me?” I offered, because nothing on the border is simple. “Like anybody’s even going to ask.” “Like anybody’s going to know to ask,” I corrected. He shrugged a heavy shoulder, agreed. “It wouldn’t matter, though. Can’t get anything from a broke payphone.” When it seemed he wanted to tell me something else, I finally did look over to his face, just for a flash. It was about confirmation. “Any other phone activity,” he said, talking slow and deliberate, guiding his spit cup to his mouth, “you’d probably have to ask somebody in the local office, yeah?” If you haven’t figured it out yet, this Ranger, I’m not saying his name on purpose. I don’t even think he was officially on the dog case, had just been dealing with some rancher’s complaints about trespassers. ‘Any other phone activity,’ though. He’d been telling me something, as much as he could. It didn’t have to do with the Jomar, either, I was pretty sure.

The working theory about what happened to my father at the time was that it was payback from one of the thousands of illegals he’d had dealings with over the years. Or one of their family members. So, tens of thousands, yeah. Like Sanchez had said, Mexico’s Catholic. With a vengeance.

Except there were just so, so many more ways to prop the gate open at the border than killing a senior, decorated officer. If anything, that would just give everybody itchy trigger fingers. And, even if it wasn’t about that, was just about him, Refugio Romo, something he’d done in the wayback — to come into town to do a thing like this, and then to take a whole week doing it? It didn’t make sense. If you wanted to kill a border cop, all you had to do was lay out in the pasture, dial your scope into some obvious duffel bag or something you’ve hooked on a fence post, and wait. By the time anybody drifts out to see if this officer’s radio’s broke or what, you’re gone, back across the river, or to your day job or wherever, your rifle dropped down some uncapped well. This had been more personal. For some reason I kept wanting it all to wrap back around to the silver-handled knife. Not that I was romantic or anything, don’t get me wrong. I mean, even now I can see that if it had all been about the knife, then that would just be a cheap way of keeping him alive for a week or two longer before pulling the plug, letting his story flatline. Never mind that that knife was never out there. God. In my property box, along with the rest of my stuff you’ll find that doublelaminated picture of me at six years old. It’s not supposed to be there. But then neither am I, I know. According to the State of Texas, I’m still on bereavement leave even now. Because my father hasn’t been buried yet. Go deeper than that, and I’m probably still supposed to be down in Mexico, last name Garza, trying to catch a bus up to Juarez to work in the factories. If not for that picture, that’s where I would be, I’m sure. I was seven when the tall border cop with the important mustache found me, lowered himself down to my level, and said he had been looking for me for a long time. That he had something to show me. The picture. I remember my face, prickling. According to him, he’d been with my real dad in Texas right at the end, after the accident, and my real dad had given him this picture, told him this was the most important little girl in the world, and that she deserved everything, and to find her, save her, keep her safe forever. A fairy tale, yeah. But my face, it’s still prickling. I went with him, sure, and it wasn’t even any kind of illegal traffic when he drove me across the bridge, because I was born American. It probably even looked like he was saving me. And he was. That’s the thing. You want to know why he carried that picture in his sweatband like he did? It was so, wherever he was, he could take his hat off, look into it and see me, know the world was a good place. What he called me was his million dollar girl, his princess. Growing up, you never expect that you might come to hate yourself, just for having lived. That you might feel guilty. But that’s not why I did what I did last week, either. I did it for him, for my real dad. This is that story. Where I am now in it is the fifth day after my second father died. I’m standing in

the viewing room at the morgue. It’s not like in the motel room, where there was a burned smell in the air. Now I’m having to look through a video monitor. It’s crackly. “Because of the radiation?” I ask the orderly, my chaperone. “That’s just it,” the orderly tells me. “He’s clean now.” The monitor pops and fizzles. “Of anything we can detect, anyway,” he adds. I stand there for ten more minutes, until the feed decays to nothing.

Over lunch, a girl who works the switchboards part-time smoked an amazing fourteen cigarettes and explained through her veil of smoke that, the week before my father — “before the tragedy” — there’d been a call bouncing around from monitor to monitor. A post-it note with Refugio’s name at the top, and a number, and a question mark. “And he got it, then?” I said. “Who?” “Refugio.” “Your dad, yeah. I guess. I can’t work more than thirty-four hours a week, y’know?” “And the Rangers know about this?” “It was from a payphone, dear.” Of course. I paid for our meal, thanked her, then went outside and coughed in the heat until my lungs were clean, my eyes not watery. The reason they only let her go parttime was because the state of Texas didn’t want to be responsible for her health care. She didn’t have the payphone number anymore, though. But, if it had been the same as the one that had been used to call my father at the Jomar, then it would have been news, I was pretty sure. And anyway, according to that unnamed Ranger, that particular payphone was broken. Not that they were going to give me the number for it either way. But I’m not stupid. It took me all of twenty-minutes to find it. All I had to do was park at the Jomar, walk to my father’s room, then turn, study Del Rio for any payphone bubbles or booths with a clear line on me. There were four: at the gas station by the first bay, a booth in the parking lot of the old grocery store, and one hung outside another hotel. The fourth was about five doors down from where I was standing. I walked to it, picked up the receiver. The dial tone was so strong and insistent I flinched a little. After that I went to the rest of them, got a clean dial tone at the gas station, a sputtery one at the other hotel — so the Jomar had that going for it, anyway — and nothing from the one in the parking lot of the grocery store. It was the last one I would have guessed, too. It was out in the open. To get to it, you’d have to walk across fifty feet of open asphalt, even coming from the road. But this was it. I could tell because the change case had been keyed open instead of pried, then left swinging. The Rangers had processed the quarters for prints, and they’d left behind the adhesive backings for the lift-kits they carried in their glove compartments. For the receiver, the scratched glass, all of it probably.

They weren’t stupid either. I picked up the receiver again, held it to my ear, and watched the door to my father’s room, then turned when a truck nosed up behind me. It was Sanchez. I pretended to be saying goodbye as he walked up, then looked around to him. He reached past me, fingered the cable of the receiver. It was loose, hanging. Torn, not cut. I’d just done it. It was that weak, somehow. That didn’t change the fact that he’d busted me. I bit my lower lip, leaned back against the inside of the booth. “You checking up on me?” I said, no sunglasses to hide my eyes. “Hungry?” he said back. I wasn’t, but went anyway. As I climbed into the passenger side of Sanchez’s truck — he had to come around, unlock it — he whisked flakes of blue and silver from the back of my shirt. It was the advertising decals from the phone booth. “Pinche sun,” he said, shutting my door either like this was a date or like I was his prisoner. “Yeah,” I said, “the sun,” but was looking past the phone booth, too, to the Jomar. It wavered in the heat like it wasn’t even real.

Over chips and burritos in a place that didn’t cater to cops, Sanchez asked me what did I think I was doing here? His uniform shirt was keeping the tables all around us empty. We could talk, I mean. None of this was accidental. “What, you want me to sit out at my trailer all day?” I said back to him. “If you want to come back, you can. Sometimes it’s easier to work.” Sanchez guided a dripping chip to his mouth. “I’m not the bad guy here,” he said. “Then you are here to say they sent you, right?” “Not everybody knows you’re on leave, officer. So they think that when you come around asking questions, it’s in an official capacity, not a personal one.” I studied a painting on the wall. It was of a sombrero. Beside it on the wall was a real sombrero. I couldn’t tell if this was meant to be a joke or not. Probably not. And Sanchez was still talking: “... how about this, then? Whatever you want to know, ask me. If I know the answer, I’ll tell you, and can save us all a lot of embarrassment.” “Anything?” “Regarding the case,” he amended, smiling with the right side of his face. “The homicide.” “Then you can’t solve the mystery of the chupacabra?” I said, hooking my head north. “It’s a coyote. I saw it.” “Well then. Okay. Have the Rangers made any headway about who called the room?” “Just that the call was made.” “And the other call?”

“Other call?” “It was a message for him. From before.” “I’ll ask.” I studied Sanchez for about twenty seconds, here. “You knew him,” I said. “What do you think went down here last week?” He broke eye contact, leaned back in his chair. “I’m with the Rangers on this,” he said. His voice was too level, though. Too controlled. “Then it’s anybody with dark skin and a grudge.” “What else is there to think?” I just stared at him, finally shrugged. “You haven’t told me anything yet I didn’t already know,” I said. “I think you’re supposed to give me a reason here to ask you instead of everybody else. Or did I misunderstand?” Sanchez smiled, let it build it into a sort of laugh. “Romo Romo Romo ...” he said. “And the chupacabra doesn’t count,” I told him. He came back to me, his eyes flat, then leaned forward, both his hands together on the table, his plate to the side. “A version of what the Rangers think, then. How’s that? So ... what I think, I think, is that it’s not really about somebody he busted, if you know what I mean. Unofficially.” I looked away, did. It was about somebody my father hadn’t busted. Someone he’d been paid not to bust. I’d known this for as long as I could remember. To his credit, though, he’d never tried to include me, Refugio. “What makes you think that?” I asked. He shoveled another chip in, chewed it for too long. “If I tell you,” he said. “Then will you not come into town again, after today?” “Ever?” “Until this is over.” “What about the funeral?” “Just that.” I shrugged sure, like it would be that easy, staying away. Maybe I’d been going to do that exact thing anyway. Sanchez knew I was lying, of course. But he was showing off some, too. “The Rangers are backing off,” he whispered. “Getting their case files all bundled up in same-size boxes.” “They’re giving up?” “He was one of us, Romo. C’mon. No, they’re not giving up. But why do you put all your stuff in boxes in the middle of an open investigation?” I thought about it, thought about it, and finally looked up to him: “Because it’s being taken away from them ...” Bingo. “Who has more jurisdiction than them, though?” I asked, then answered it myself: “The feds.” Sanchez sat back, satisfied with himself. I sat back too, my eyes hot.

“DEA or ATF?” I said, nearly whispering, I think. “Try again,” Sanchez said back just as quiet. I closed my eyes, opened them. The FBI was swooping in. I looked up to Sanchez, my face as blank as I could make it. “You know this, but he wasn’t burned with a — with a flame,” he said, leaning forward again, so only the chips could hear him. “It was ... they don’t know for sure. But there’s been word for a while.” “Word?” “That somebody’s trying to build a device.” A bomb. Which of my fathers was Sanchez talking about?

That my real dad was a criminal was no secret. It was part of the fairy tale, even. But then of course I didn’t always know it was a fairy tale. Sometimes it’s good just to be a kid. Things don’t get so complicated. Sure, yeah, the first time you call the guy who isn’t your dad ‘Dad,’ it feels like a betrayal and something cracks inside you that you can never really get back, but — it’s like with languages. When you’re young, you can do amazing things without even thinking about it. Insulate whole parts of your mind, so that they don’t mess with eating dinner, with going to school, with all the thousand other things you need to do to just be a normal kid. This isn’t to say I was pretending all the time either, though. Instead, what I did was start calling my real dad just ‘Dodd,’ inside. Like a secret. I justified it because it had been an old joke between the two of us. So, calling him Dodd, it was maybe even better than Dad. More like something a real daughter would do. And it’s not like I forgot him or anything. I wasn’t a baby when he left, I mean. If he’d stayed around, yeah, I wouldn’t remember it all as clear as I do. But he didn’t. So all I had left were those first few years, to play over and over, so that, years and years later, eating in some diner, I’d get caught wholly off-guard when some tall, half-smiling guy would stand to leave, then turn in the doorway to razz the waitress about something. For some reason that always goes right to the center of me, makes me feel warm and cold at the same time. What I don’t have a lot of, though, are memories of us up here, in Texas. According to the records I had my father — Refugio — look up for me when I was fifteen, those memories are probably from our last little whirlwind tour of Texas. Our long goodbye after the bank that killed my mother. I only have one clear memory of her, though. No sound, just her ... But no. I don’t have enough of her to share. Sorry. And you don’t need to know about her to understand all this, anyway. All you need to do is believe that what her and my real dad had stumbled into together, it was the kind of good and perfect and right that the world hates and is jealous of, and will align itself against until it’s got the two of them framed in a doorway they never really meant to be in, a half-moon of badges waiting for them out there in the heat.

So, okay. I kind of lied about not being a romantic. Really, it’s the default setting for you, when you’ve lost both your parents so young. You go so long without telling anybody what you really want that — that what you really want becomes its own little place inside that you retreat to when the world’s not perfect enough. For me, that first year back in Texas, that was pretty much every day. First, because Texas was supposed to be like I remembered it — green, with different music playing — and second, because back then I had the fantasy that I was a hostage, that I was being ransomed, held as insurance, something like that. And the person who was going to save me, it was my real dad. Of course. But then after dinner one night Refugio told me I was old enough to know the truth, maybe. Yeah? Here I nodded. I must have. It wasn’t an honest nod, though. My real dad had been a smuggler, Refugio said, leaning forward out of his recliner, his voice soft and even like an apology. My dad had taken the survival training his American government had paid for and then used it against the government, to carry in illegal goods. Not just, say, replacement piano keys made of contraband ivory, either, but real and true drugs — heavy duty, duty-free narcotics, as the plainclothes guys call it. This meant his employers were the worst kind of people. They routinely, just as a matter of business, killed their employees and buried them in holes out in the desert. And anybody else who got in the way, too. And they weren’t always dead when they buried them either. As my father told me this, I just sat there, my face slack. Because of the drug bosses, I think. Not because it was news, my real dad being an outlaw. I mean, I still even had some of the phone numbers from back then memorized. My real dad never knew I did it, but I did, because I knew what he was doing, in the vague sense. Why it was a night job instead of a day job. My idea back then was that knowing the important phone numbers would give me some kind of power when it came down to it. That I was going to be able to trade those numbers for my real dad someday. Like I said, I was a little girl. But then came the part I didn’t know. According to Refugio, my real dad had been enough of a big-time smuggler that he was Refugio’s whole job. Every day he woke up and thought about how he was going to catch Dodd that day. It went on like this for two years, he said. A big cat-and-mouse game on the border. At the end of it, because he couldn’t help it, Refugio even started to respect my real dad. Think of him as more of a brother than an enemy. Just a brother he’d had a big fight with a long time ago. Now he was chasing after him, trying to say he was sorry, maybe even save him from himself. Every day. But my real dad didn’t know any of this. To him, Refugio was just this one impossible border cop who wouldn’t give up, who was making his smuggling job so, so hard. What Refugio thought, he told me, was that my dad was probably thinking about getting out. Retiring. Too many times he’d come too close to getting caught, and — Refugio wasn’t sure back then, but it always seemed like the reason Dodd was so good was because he was desperate. Not to do a good job, but to get back to me, in Mexico. Which of course translated to doing a good job. If he didn’t, then his bosses would

make sure he never got back anywhere. So he left night after night, carrying packages he never opened, and once Refugio had him in his rifle sights, even, but let him go. Because that’s not the way an honest man catches somebody. The whole time he was telling me this, I wasn’t saying anything. It was like he’d peeled up a corner of the wallpaper in my bedroom, to show me a whole different house behind it. One that shared some of our walls. He told me he didn’t want to tell me the next part, either, but then rubbed his mouth hard with the palm of his hand and did anyway. When he finally caught my dad, he wasn’t even looking for him. What he was doing was helping some other law enforcement guys break up this drug meeting out in the desert. It was supposed to be just routine — the law announcing themselves over the bullhorn, then turning the lights on all around. Except this was a meeting some of the bosses were actually at. And my dad, my real dad, he was just suddenly there, handing a backpack through the dust of six trucks’ headlights, and the bosses, before they started strafing the bullhorns with their automatic weapons, they first shot a burst into my dad. Four of them at once, before my dad could even do anything. Before either of my dads could do anything. By the time it was over and my father — Refugio — could wade through to Dodd, it was too late. It was their first time to meet. It was like they’d known each other forever, too. “I was the only one he could trust with you,” my father told me. “His most important thing in the word.” And that’s the fairy tale. In the wake of it, my face was cold. The week after that’s when, for the first time, I called him ‘Dad,’ Refugio. In thanks for trying to save my real dad, I think. But it’s not something you can say once, then not keep saying. After a while, it doesn’t even feel wrong anymore, and you don’t even remember that it’s supposed to. That it doesn’t matter if your real dad’s dead or not. That he loves you enough to still be out there, trying to save you. God. I think Refugio knew this, too, or suspected it. It’s probably why he made up that story about the turquoise knife my dad had left for him one morning, in a fencepost. The knife Refugio trained me over the years to look for, out in the pastures north of Del Rio. All it was going to be, he told me, was a dull silvery glint, like an old coffee thermos or something, except smaller. Because it was a family thing, too, he was going to let me keep it when we found it. It would be the only thing I still had of my real dad’s. I was there every weekend.

After talking to Sanchez, I sat in my truck in the parking lot of the Jomar for ten minutes, I think. In the two o’clock heat. The desk clerk was watching me through his small window. A device. The FBI. My father.

I started my truck, turned on the air conditioner. One option no one was considering was that the Ranger’s story and the FBI’s were both right: my father had caught some illegal he already had a history with, yeah. Only, this time, that illegal was being paid to carry plutonium or uranium or whatever. And he somehow used it to get the upper hand, then panicked, locked both of them into the Jomar for a week. This was the only explanation that allowed my father not to be a terrorist. And — if that’s what they thought he was. Of course they wanted me off the case. Not because my priorities were wrong — I wanted the killer, not the materials for the device — but because maybe I was involved. I pulled out of the parking lot when the desk clerk picked up a phone, angled his head over for my plates. If that’s even what he was, a desk clerk. The other choice was FBI. When I eased into the street, it was right into the path of a hot oil truck. He locked up his eight rear tires, his bug-splattered bumper dipping down maybe twenty-four inches from my face, then sighing back up to level. I pulled out the rest of the way, going extraslow now, like I could make up for being stupid. As for the truck driver, I didn’t look up, and he didn’t lay into his air horn, and Del Rio just kept happening all around us. I drifted through two lights, a drive-through for a coke with the rabbit turd ice I liked, and realized about forty-five minutes into it all that I was saying goodbye. Soon enough I was parked in the visitors’ section of the main office. It was where the Rangers were working out of, where Sanchez might be reporting back, where the advance FBI agents might be sweeping for bugs. I was hoping to avoid all of them, though. I pushed through the public doors, smiled to Rosario behind the bulletproof glass so she’d buzz me through, then bee-lined the switchboard, making zero eye contact with anybody in uniform or out. At the door to Dispatch, though, I lost all momentum. You had to have a five-digit code to get in. And there was no doorbell, and everybody in there had a headset on, so wouldn’t hear a knock, and couldn’t leave their stations even if they did hear. All I wanted was that post-it note. Or, if it was already tagged as evidence, in some folder, then somebody who remembered the post-it. I don’t know. Because I needed an excuse to be there, I rounded the corner, stiff-legged it through the breakroom and reached into my mailslot. If Sanchez asked, I was just cleaning it out before I started staying out of town. It made sense. But then, because the boxes were alphabetical, right under mine was my father’s. And it was full, and nobody was looking. I palmed his stack of mail under mine, ducked back out to the visitor’s parking lot and read it over my steering wheel. Most of it was the usual nothing — newsletters and updates and memos and jokes — but about halfway down, rolled so it would fit in with the rest, was a fast photocopy of the post-it. More than that, it was even tagged already, meaning this photocopy was an afterthought, like regulation usually was. What the books probably said was that the

Rangers could confiscate the original only so long as they supplied you with a copy for your own records. Never mind that my father was dead, and that they were investigating it. Whoever’d done this was just following policy. If he hadn’t been, I probably wouldn’t be here right now. On that post-it, in hurried handwriting, up top, in the corner like I used to do it, was my father’s name, then, below, the number the caller must have said was supposed to be good for my father. In the middle, a big question mark. Not for me, though. I’d called this number a thousand times, growing up. It was Refugio’s old office extension. I pulled away, my world crumbling around me. This was someone from my father’s past. That he had some radioactive package was just bad luck. For both of them. I looked to the north again. What the FBI was probably spending all their computer time trying to figure out was the final destination of that plutonium or uranium or whatever. What they maybe weren’t taking into account, was how many times a package tended to change hands after it came across the river. My father had tried to break that chain of people — for love or profit, it didn’t matter — and been killed for it. But it had taken a while. And now the courier had to hand the package off to the next person, at some anonymous drop on an empty stretch of highway, probably. Except he’d spent a week in that room at the Jomar as well. Meaning he was burned, sick with it. Not as bad as my father, but enough to keep him out of convenience stores. And nobody picks you up off the side of the road when you’re bleeding from the eyes. All this left was north, by foot. Maybe that dog did mean something, then. If it had been the killer’s dog, or just one that had fallen into step behind him, then it was a breadcrumb. And I had at least ten more days left of my bereavement leave, and they’d already told me they didn’t want me in Del Rio anymore. For the rest of the afternoon I told myself I wasn’t going to do what I knew I was going to do, and when I finally gassed up and started feeling through the pastures north of town, cutting for sign, watching for buzzards, glassing the ridges, the way I pretended I wasn’t doing what I was doing was that I only brought one thermos of water and one change of clothes. When dark came and I was still out there, though, there was no denying what was happening. I was going after the man who’d killed my father. It sounds like a movie poster, I know. Starring Laurie Dodd, the Austin Marksman. God.

It didn’t take me long to pick up the trail. It wasn’t from any of the seminars I’d attended on spotting illegals, either. It was on the radio. Crazy Dave was broadcasting from his mother’s garage in Ozona. For the two hours leading up to the new concrete stock tank a little way into the big Mosely pasture, he’d been my only company. It was completely possible I was his only listener, too. The Misanthrope Morning Show probably wasn’t real big with the crowd who woke before the sun to drink their coffee and glare at the world.

But then, too, they had their coffee to keep them awake. All I had was Crazy Dave’s lispy, enthusiastic delivery, his complicated theories on everything from the real reason for the spacing between the yellow stripes on statefunded roads to why his mother preferred afghan lap blankets to fleece throws. It’s hard to nod off while you’re smiling, I mean. And, though I never called in to any of Crazy Dave’s nightly charity drives (he was his own favorite charity), still, for as long as it took me to dip my thermos into the cool water of the stock tank, I did expand his audience out to a record seventy-something, it looked like. About twenty yards out, to the south and a little bit east, were a wall of dully reflective eyes. Cattle. They’d followed my truck in. But only so far. It wasn’t me keeping them away, either, I knew — I’ve yet to see a cow that won’t nudge me out of the way, if it wants what I’m blocking — and it wasn’t that they weren’t thirsty. The few I’d seen trotting beside me had been starved down, the skin on their sides drawn in to their ribs. I looked at the water I had my hand in, smelled it. Nothing. And then I saw past my hand, to the tracks right beside where I was standing. Someone hadn’t just drunk from this tank not long ago, had gotten in and waded in it. Maybe swam. Someone wearing new boots with an aggressive tread. Not the kind that go in a stirrup. I nodded thanks to the cattle and wished them long, boring lives, then left my thermos right where I’d been dipping it full. It floated out to the center of the tank, the moss reaching for it, slowing it down. Thirty seconds later it was under, part of the ranch now. Part of the land. So be it. I was waiting for its last gulp of air to roll to the surface and pop — it had become a sudden little game, part of a deal I was trying to make — when a bullbat flitted down to pick some bug from my headlights. For an instant its shadow melted across the side of the tank and I shivered on the inside. But Crazy Dave was still with me, talking steady from the cab. I came back to myself, remembered how to breathe. Tried to smile about how stupid I was being. For the cattle, yeah. What Dave was talking about were the old-time CSI guys — old time like horse and buggy — how they used to think they could shine a light through the back of a murder victim’s eyeball, and then see, projected on the wall by that light, the last thing that eyeball had ever seen: the killer. He’d got there off a monologue that had started with a comic book, I was pretty sure, but then had leafed down through the contents of his desk, to the freshest tabloids. Now he was doing a running commentary on the news items there. It was supposed to feel unscripted, I know, but still, standing at the edge of my headlights, a hundred-andforty green eyes watching me, I was pretty sure Dave was taking me somewhere good. As it turned out, it was back to the Jomar. Dave pronounced it like it was a Spanish word, but still, I knew what he was talking about: my father. According to Crazy Dave’s unimpeachable sources — he always knew more about the tabloid stories than were actually in the tabloid — the case was solved, the killer practically caught, thanks to the lessons learned from those Victorian CSI guys.

Inset lower right was a sketchy rendering of the killer from the shoulders up. It was just the vaguest outline, according to Dave, but still, there was no denying that, standing up from the head like the twin shadows of feathers, there were two tall ears. The caption was Jack the Rabbit, only to get to ‘Rabbit,’ they had to cross out Ripper. I pushed off from the stocktank, my lips pressed together. I was trying to reach the volume before Dave could make one of his jokes about this, because I didn’t want to have to hate him and not listen to him anymore. I almost made it, too. My finger was even on the dial. I didn’t roll it back toward me, though. Now Dave was explaining how the tabloid had obtained this artist’s rendering. It was from a television set the Jomar had thrown away. Apparently the image had been burned into the screen. Like a giant rabbit had sat on the edge of the bed for days, watching my father die. It made my eyes unfocus, lose themselves in the rough weave of my saddleblanket seatcover. A rabbit? I got in, pulled the door shut and backed the truck out, stepping down into the pair of ruts that had brought me here. A rabbit? It was a question I hadn’t even thought to ask Sanchez: ‘Speaking of that, you wouldn’t know if a bunny maybe’s the one who killed my father, would you?’ It was a tabloid, though. I had to remind myself. And Crazy Dave, too, “The Original Dryland Pirate,” known far and wide for his scurvy tongue and swashbuckling good looks. Still, I was going to have to buy this issue, if it wasn’t already sold out on the shelf. Just to see if the television set the tabloid had all lost and lonely beside a dumpster wasn’t the same fake-wood, green-screened model I remembered. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted it to be or not. Instead of dwelling on it, I tried to remember where the grocery store was in Uvalde. What I would buy the tabloid with would be blue Gatorade, I told myself. Because then it could just be something funny that had caught my eye, not specifically what I’d gone in for. It was Uvalde, though. Nobody knew me in Uvalde. Yet. But then I could have said that about all of Texas back then, too. All of America. I may have even made the Misanthrope Morning show last week, for all I know. Become tabloid fodder myself. That’d be about right. Maybe, even, that’s the only kind of immortality that’s real: for Crazy Dave to lean down to his mike, close his eyes, and intone your name once, so that it’s swirling up in the ionosphere forever. It would let me be with my family, anyway. There are worse things. For all I know, though, the Misanthrope Morning show doesn’t even have a news segment anymore. Because of me, yeah. But back to Crazy Dave that night, peeling open another tabloid, the falseseriousness in his voice as much as saying that this was an article he’d had a hand in, and was now showcasing for the true believers. What he was talking about now was the Del Rio chupacabra. Apparently another

had turned up. Not the one pictured here, that some intrepid photographer with a rapier wit had probably photographed, but a newer, fresher one. It was only then that it hit me, that Crazy Dave drove a light-brown Chevette, not a skull and crossbones ship. I felt guilty almost, knowing that. Remembering how he’d scampered back to his front seat. According to him, this new chupacabra wasn’t just some chemotherapied Collie dog, either, like the law enforcement officials were saying. It was the real thing. ‘Chemotherapy’ being the key word there, of course.

After getting the tabloid Dave had been talking about — it was the same television, no matter how I looked at it — I slept for four hours in a motel. And, yes, I flashed my badge at the desk to get the bed free. I can pay it back, if that’s any kind of issue. But then I haven’t seen it listed on the charges against me, either. I suppose, in comparison to what I’m supposed to have done — it would be like citing a serial killer for jaywalking, just in case all that murder stuff doesn’t stick. Not that I killed anybody. But you know that. If this has gotten this far, that I’m reading it to you, then you know what I was doing up there. Never mind that you’re not even real yet, and that this isn’t either. If this goes some other way and this legal pad gets filed anywhere, it’ll be in my attorney’s file cabinet, under P, for privileged, or E, for eyes-only. Or, just burned. Better yet, left scattered on the surface of Town Lake. I’m smiling now. I don’t know any other way to say that than just to say it. If I wind up reading this out loud, though, I’ll have to try not to. But I’m sure my good attorney will have sliced out anything like that. The real irony, of course, would be to lock me way up in some tower. That doesn’t make me smile so much. If my lawyer’s good and not stupid, then juries are predisposed to decisions which round a story out well, so the beginning and the end kind of match, balance each other out. The scales of justice, all that. Punishment fitting the crime, the more poetic the better. Except I don’t want to be locked up. Understand this, instead: the real closure for this story would be for me to walk out of here on some idiot technicality, like that officers on extended bereavement leave are immune to prosecution, or that, because ‘Romo’ isn’t my legal name, then that person being charged isn’t me, and whoever I am, I can just drift out the double doors in front, melt back into Austin. That way I’d be free to say the goodbye to my real dad that I never got to say before. Or hello, yes. And everything else.

In Uvalde that day, I woke with the tabloid beside me on the bed. It made me want two showers, but then the water pressure made me want just one, please. I slid my big key though the night drop slot, paid for a drive-through burrito — badges never work so well there — and without even thinking about it, filled up the front

and back tanks at one of the places that took the state card. What I told myself to make it okay was that if I saw even one illegal, and mentally noted where he was standing, what he was wearing, then the gas wouldn’t be stolen. Just driving slow down the main street in Uvalde, then, every third Mexican suddenly falling into the kind of lockstep that meant they were walking normal, that there was no reason for me to flare my brakelights, I earned every gallon, and probably built up enough credit to get me to Ozona and back, Crazy Dave in tow, to show me the Uvalde chupacabra. Except I’m not stupid. That would be a seven-hour round trip. What I did instead was skirt Uvalde in my truck until dark, looking for some road flares burning down, maybe a flag or a trail of pilgrims. When I didn’t find anything but coyotes nailed to fences, left-behind steers, and one tow-headed donkey I cupped water in my hands for, I tuned Crazy Dave’s station in. He wasn’t on for a few hours yet, but this was the DJ who led up to him anyway, and always pretended in obvious ways not to know their place on the band was getting pirated afterhours. I figured him and Dave had gone to high school together or something. Once he dropped into a triple-play set, I pulled up to a payphone, called him. “Crazy Dave?” “More like Sane Roger, but thanks. I think.” “I was just wanting to, y’know, make a donation.” “‘Fill his till?’” It was the way Dave always said it. “This is where I call, right?” “Listen, I can’t — how about this. His last name, it might rhyme with ‘handoval.’” “He’s Mexican?” “Why? You La Migra? Anyway, don’t call until after ten. His, um, landlady knocks off right after the early news.” I thanked Sane Roger, dialed up Dispatch, had them run a name for me, get back with a confirmation on the phone number. ‘Unauthorized use of state resources,’ yeah. I don’t care. It’s not like I could call up the sheriff’s office in Uvalde, I mean. If I did, and word got back to Del Rio about it, Sanchez would know that I was just following the letter of what he’d wanted me to do, not the spirit. So it had to be Dave. I left a message on his machine at five after ten, and he called me back a half hour later. The first thing he asked was if I was a cop? From the way I paused, I think he knew. And, because I was the only human on either side of the border not to have a cell phone with me, I didn’t have any caller ID to nab him with, and I didn’t want to wake his mom, get him in trouble. So I could either circle Uvalde some more, or sit there by the payphone and pray, or wait for the next issue of Weekly World News. Or give up, yeah. As it turned out, it didn’t matter which I chose. When I eased down to the convenience store for a coke, my windows down so I’d hear the phone ring, a pair of yellow headlights glowed on, fell in behind me. Crazy Dave edged up beside me at the fountain drinks. “Mr. Sandoval,” I said, pretending my lid was more complicated than it really was. “I know it’s not just some dog that had cancer.” Crazy Dave swallowed, fidgeted, and I bought him a coke.

In the parking lot, leaning against the grill guard of my border patrol truck, one of us white, one Mexican, neither with handcuffs on, we talked chupacabra. What they might really be, why they liked goats so much. Whether they were mammal or reptile, alien or demon. It was a test, to see if I was worthy to see one in the flesh. By the time our cokes were down to ice, I was. Crazy Dave wouldn’t ride with me yet, though. He was like a dog that, after being beaten every day, has finally just gone to live in the pasture. What I was doing in Uvalde that night was trying to lead him back under the porchlight, back to the world of people. Maybe the better way to say it is that he was a true radio personality. He didn’t belong in a room with real people, but on the air, with listeners, who wouldn’t see how unpiratical he looked in real life. I don’t mean to be mean to him here, though. But I’m not supposed to be lying, either. And this probably won’t make it to open court anyway. All that’s going to matter there are the facts. It sounds like I’m giving up, though, doesn’t it? Let me start this again.

The Uvalde chupacabra was a litter mate of the Del Rio chupacabra. Enough that I had to ask Dave if he’d maybe just moved the one from down there. He gave a dismissive little snort. I was profaning a sacred place, as far as he was concerned. The problem, though, was that this was no chupacabra. If I’d had a Geiger counter in my toolbox, I could have shown him. The dog-thing was unusual, yes, didn’t look fitted for down here, really. Like a show dog or some other kind of high dollar, overbred import. But the hair, that was easy to explain: prolonged exposure to radiation. I knelt down, reached into the thing’s mouth with my bare fingers and shook one of the incisors. It was loose, a classic sign. I stood, didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say. “There’s going to be more,” I finally tried. “More what?” Dave asked back. “Bread crumbs.” I looked at him then, all dramatic like the movies. “You doing your show tonight?” He shrugged, squinched his face up. “It’s something,” he said about the chupacabra, and there was a little bit of whine in his voice. Because my battery was stronger, it was my headlights that were on for us. “Well then,” Dave said, ducking away to his dark Chevette, his three and-a-halfhour drive back to Ozona. “Wait,” I called, but he didn’t. He lowered himself into his front seat, pulled the door closed, and cranked the window down. “Don’t tell anybody,” he said, about the chupacabra. He was talking about that week — he didn’t want to get scooped. I don’t think it matters anymore, though. Of that chupacabra, his pictures are all that’s left now. Any of a hundred things could have happened to it, too: the SPCA tagged it infectious and had it cremated, the

sheriff’s office buried it to keep the unwanted from loitering up their county, the coyotes dragged it off, the aliens came back for it, the government trucked it out to Area 51, it got up and trotted away, or, most likely, some hand working that pasture found it, threw it into the back of his truck, and, because it would take most of the afternoon, keep him from fence-mending or whatever, he carried it back to the main house. Meaning, ten or twenty years from now, you’ll step into some living room down here, the kind with tables made from longhorn horns and coat hooks welded from horse shoes, and there against some wall will be Dave’s chupacabra, mounted on both hind legs, probably. A joke. Not that I’d want to stand in that living room after the lights were off, either. Or — I would, really, but just to remember Dave the way he was that night in Uvalde. I almost let him pull away, I mean. If that had happened, I never would have known that he wasn’t in Uvalde for me, that he’d just been looping through, on the way to another story. And I never would have known that some pirates can be heroes, too. So, if you’re hearing this, Dave Sandoval, thank you, and I’m sorry. But I know you wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. This is what I said that got him to stop grinding his starter: “That Jack the Rabbit guy?” Silence. Dave’s finger and thumb still cocked on his ignition key. I shrugged, looked over the pitted roof of the mostly brown Chevette. “I think he killed my father,” I said, then lowered my eyes, didn’t let Dave look away.

Thirty miles out of Uvalde, Dave said that he wasn’t going to get back to Ozona in time for the Misanthrope Morning Show. I told him it didn’t matter. I had the real thing here in the truck already. He smiled and then grimaced, pretended to watch something out his window. I’d just called him a misanthrope. Still pretending to watch whatever was out there, he said, “It’s just some guy in a big mask, y’know?” “Jack, you mean?” Yes. Where we were going was to get pictures or interviews related to a tip he’d got on The Landlubber’s Line — his mom’s answering machine. At the time, I was pretty sure it was a scam, that he’d just told me this pertained to my father’s murder to get me to foot the gas bill — to get the state of Texas to, okay — but, too, I was counting it as part of my bereavement stuff. Some undocumented stage of grief. My mother was supposed to be buried in Sealy’s the thing. I’d never seen her grave. For all the obvious reasons, I suppose. The one maybe not so obvious was that it was one of the places I still remembered a little, from our long goodbye when I was four, maybe even three, and I didn’t want it to have changed. It was a place where things were still possible, I guess. After the bank job fell apart, my real dad had taken us there, to Sealy. Not because my mom’s parents would take us in, and not because he wanted to leave me on their doorstep, but because — and I just think this, from the way he kept standing in certain places, like he was listening — because he thought that what him and my mom had had, it was strong enough that she was just going to step out from behind some tree, or float

down from the sky on a foil balloon. Once he even spun a merry-go-round that he must have remembered, then watched it until it stopped. Like, the next time it came around, or the next, she was going to be there hanging on, smiling, telling him not so fast, the tips of her long hair skating across the gravel and cigarette butts. It never happened, though. Because this is the real world, the one where shot people stay shot, dead people stay dead. Or it was, anyway. The other place we went on the way to Mexico was the other place he’d grown up, after Beaumont. Wimberley, just south of here, down toward San Marcos. It was all mosquitoes and green water and houses built of rock halfway up their walls, then wood. The two things I remember most clearly are about twenty sheep running in a ditch, terrified of something I couldn’t see, and Jacob’s Well. It’s just a natural spring back in the trees, with beer bottles balanced all around it, their labels old enough that, if you drop them into the water, the paper floats back up in shreds. But not the bottle. Because Jacob’s Well has no bottom, the bottle never comes back up. Standing on the slick rock over that water, my real dad held my hand the whole time, and then we left, and then the rest of my life so far happened, except — and maybe I just say this now, I don’t know — it never felt quite as real as waiting for my mother to be sitting on the merry-go-round, or my real dad, keeping me from falling into a hole that went forever. Like I’ve been trying to say, we’re oysters, shining little pieces of dirt into the most useless, important things. I can’t believe I’m even writing it down here. It’s not just Sealy that starts it all again for me, though. Just east of San Antonio, more cars on the loop than I thought made any kind of sense at two in the morning, we stopped for refills on our cokes, and, not on a whim at all — I’d been practicing it in my head for nearly an hour — I passed the envelope over to Dave. It was the one the coroner had given me, the evidence I’d stolen. The picture of me my father had carried for all those years. Dave pursed his lips and took it. “Why?” he said. “You need to know why I’m doing this.” “No I don’t,” he said, trying to give the envelope back. “I was five then,” I said, not taking it, just pointing to it with my eyes. “Really, I —” “He carried that with him for fifteen years. It was his treasure, he said. Jack the — whoever. He didn’t know that about him.” “And?” “And I did. Do. He deserved better.” Dave shook his head like he was already regretting this, but shook the picture out anyway as I waited for the ice screw to give me a couple more cubes. It just kept turning. Finally I realized Dave was standing there, doing nothing. “Sure this is the right one?” he said when I turned around, and I followed his eyes down to the picture he was holding. It wasn’t me. I took it from him and spun away as politely as I could, cupping the picture with

my body. It was my real dad. A cut-out from an old Polaroid. In it, he was standing in some dark room, over an aluminum case with specimen tubes lined inside. On the backside, me at six years old. I’d only ever seen it in Refugio’s hat, like a secret. Just the front, never the back. Because it was his treasure. I pressed it between my palms, held my hands together and looked over them, at the rack of chips. “Double laminated,” I said out loud. Dave didn’t ask. It made sense, now. Refugio, letting me look into his hat, had explained to me that he’d laminated it twice in the machine at the office, for if he sweated. He didn’t want to ruin the picture. It wasn’t a lie, either, I don’t guess. But the real truth was that the original one of me had already been in a laminate sleeve. What the other layer did was hold them together, make them front and back. Why, though? Standing in that convenience store outside San Antonio, Dave filling my coke behind me, letting the fizz die down so he could get a few more drinks in, I had no idea, and wouldn’t, until a couple of days ago. My attorney is a thorough attorney, though. What he did with that picture was copy it and send it to every border patrol station in Texas, until somebody remembered it enough for him to track it down. What it is is a Polaroid of a Polaroid, and it had been found on a man who’d collapsed trying to walk across the bridge at Del Rio. A white man with a sketchy record, cause of death unknown, but, as somebody had written on the report, ‘pretty damn effective nevertheless.’ According to that same cursory report, this Clancy F. Walford had also suffered severe, ‘bubbly’ burns over a good 60 percent of his body. The back side, mostly, from the scalp to the hips. The only reason the Polaroid of the Polaroid had survived was that it had been in his front pocket. Evidently, my father hadn’t lifted the Polaroid at the scene, but months later. The fax my attorney showed me has Refugio’s scrawly signature there by his badge number, checking out Clancy F. Walford’s property envelope. The date is three weeks to the day before he found me in Mexico. It’s probably best I didn’t know any of this that night. If I had, I probably would have told Dave to just forget it, that it didn’t matter. That Refugio deserved whatever rabbit he got. I was stupid, though, still on a mission. Two hours later, that mission parked us up against the chain link of a storage unit in my mother’s girlhood town.

Like I’d been afraid of, Sealy didn’t match my memory of it. It was like everywhere else now. The only thing about to come floating down out of the sky was one of the sad balloons the car lot a quarter mile down had tried to train a spotlight on. On the service road we’d edged around one patrol car, its parking lights on. “Guard,” Dave said, like this was all just another night for him. His face was glowing blue on one side from his cell phone. As it rang he lowered it a bit, asked me

where mine was? I shrugged the question off, studied the storage unit before us some more. The truth was my cell was charging on the kitchen counter at my trailer. Overcharging, probably. If I’d brought it with me, though, then Sanchez could have tricked me into answering somehow, and asked me questions I wouldn’t be ready for, or told me the funeral was tomorrow, come home. And anyway, I like pay phones. It makes me the caller, not the one having to answer pages. And it’s not like I don’t have a twoway under my dash, a bullwhip antenna standing up from the center of my toolbox. Just that it’s for official business only. As you can tell, I spend a lot of time worrying about what’s personal, what’s work. But maybe that’s natural, when you’re like me and have two dead fathers, one a cop, one a criminal. The more disappointed you become in one, the more you try to mold yourself after the other, pretend that smuggling and larceny is in the genes. So of course I fell in with a pirate. Inside of twenty minutes, Dave’s tip had us past the guard, into the yard of the storage units. The way he did it was one of his regular listeners — the anonymous caller, I was pretty sure — drove a Frito truck from snack machine to snack machine for a living. As Sealy was the center of his territory, of course he had two units side by side, and, unless the Sealy PD wanted empty snack machines across the land, he could come and go as he pleased, pretty much. So long as he promised not to call any radio personalities or anything. Or something like that. Anyway, he let us ride in the back of his truck, foil packages glittering all around us, then took the long way around to his two units, dropping us off in the process. The storage unit of interest was supposed to be in the low 200’s. Because there was only one guard, though, the door wasn’t open, so we had to rattle each lock. Finally, at 234, I shook one that let go of its long curved arm. It was just supposed to look locked. So the guard out at the service road wouldn’t have to chaperone visitors in and out. Dave pulled the door open as quietly as he could — it sounded like the thunder you hear at high school plays — and I suddenly felt guilty for having brought this to my mother’s hometown. Behind two crossbars of police tape was a version of that room at the Jomar. Only worse. Against one wall, more boiled than burned, was a man in what had been slacks. Slowly, as if having to process my senses one by one now, I became aware that Dave’s hand was clamped around my forearm. I didn’t pull it away, needed an anchor the same as he did. “Jack was here,” I whispered, because we didn’t know any other name to call him then. Dave nodded once, swallowed, then raised his camera, bathed the unit silver, his shots spaced wide over the next two minutes. It was some kind of respect, I think. Or just plain awe. Later I would find that the reason the scene was undisturbed was that they were trying to get the coroner from Del Rio on-scene, and some of the FBI agents assigned to

the Jomar/bomb-thing. Anything with an even half-similar m.o. was automatically falling into their laps. Which the four-and-a-half Sealy PD were probably none too sad about. Too — and this I found out from Sanchez, when he finally caught up with me in Austin — the reason the FBI was all night getting there was that they were trying to locate me. Just to rule me out as a suspect. Meaning it wasn’t helping any that I was doing my bereavement stuff in parts unknown. What it did was keep me on one of their lists nobody really wants to be on. But things happen for a reason sometimes. If I hadn’t been wanted for questioning, then what I’m being charged with here — nobody would have taken me so seriously, I don’t think. Only now they won’t believe me, that it was all a joke. Because of scenes like Sealy, I know. The only things that made it stand apart from the Jomar were a lantern against the opposite wall, a spiral notebook under the dead guy’s wrist, like he’d been writing and just keeled over, and, above him on tacks, a series of Polaroids of what had been done to him. Like with my father, it had taken nearly a week. Without thinking, I reached for the first Polaroid — I guess I thought it was going to tell me something about what had happened to my father at the Omar — but Dave stopped me. “We’re not here,” he said. I nodded, agreed, and, he took individual shots of each Polaroid for me. When he finally showed me the prints, each of them would have a portion of shadow on the concrete behind them, that seemed to bleed from picture to picture. What Dave would do with them was photocopy them, then cut the copies so they were continuous, like a panoramic setting. It was Jack the Rabbit again. In the lower corner of that panorama would be the spiral I didn’t pick up, the one that my attorney says isn’t on any of the FBI evidence lists. Except it was there. Believe me. Unlike us, of course. Because they would be evidence themselves, against Dave, he never even tried to run the pictures he shot that night. They were too real. Instead, two nights later he burned another roll on a third chupacabra that turned out to be just a dead dog. It was back near Del Rio. I don’t know. On the slow ride away from there, in the back of the Frito truck, we didn’t look at each other, me and Dave, and didn’t say much when he got on his bus for Ozona either. He did write his cell number onto the back of my hand like the sixth grade. “Thank you,” I said. “It’s not over,” he said back, shrugging. “There’ll be more, right?” I hoped not. Bereavement’s a complicated thing. Instead of drifting to the cemetery like I’d promised myself, to leave one flower in place of a lifetime of them, I went to the diner, stared at the napkin dispenser. Behind the counter the two waitresses were talking about their kids. Apparently the seven-year-old

was going to get his hide tanned for ruining his stepdad’s flashlight. Apparently he’d been using it to pin bullfrogs when the batteries had died. According to him, he shook it, trying to get enough juice for one more frog, and when it wouldn’t work, the Easter Bunny stepped from behind a tree, held his hand out for the light. The boy passed it over. In the Easter Bunny’s hand, the light glowed on, held its light long enough for the boy to get home. The punchline of course was that it was July. The waitresses laughed, and, when they looked over to me, holding my breath, gripping the table top, I turned away too fast, I know. My eyes were full of the morning, of the night. I was going to see my mother.

On the way to the cemetery, all the questions I should have asked Dave crowded around: — This guy who’d killed my father, why, when he stepped into Granger Mosely’s stock tank, hadn’t he taken his boots off? The more I thought about it, the less it made sense. Unless he was the Michelangelo I’d heard about on Paul Harvey, who didn’t take his boots off because he’d had them on so long that the skin would come with the boots. Something like that. Except these boots had been just off the shelf, the tread crisp. Too, I supposed, if the guy had a rabbit head, maybe he had rabbit feet, too, and didn’t want to leave those kind of tracks. Never mind that this was the real world. — The tacks the Polaroids had been stuck to the wall with in the storage unit, had they been tempered steel? Thin little cement nails with thumb-push plastic heads? It didn’t make sense. The walls were cinderblock, the mortar between them as hard as the cinderblocks were. You could flake chips off with a tack, maybe, if you had the time, but, unless you drilled it beforehand or could somehow soften or melt or heat the mortar to make it at least spongy, I didn’t see how any tack could ever get seated enough to hold anything up against the wall. Except that they were, they had been. And they’d been pushed in so casual, the Polaroids not even in a straight line. — The guy who had been in the Polaroids, who was he? He’d gotten the same treatment as my father, I mean, so either Jack the Rabbit had hated him the same, or him and my father had done something together a long time back, which was only just now catching up with them. And, as the FBI and the Rangers weren’t on anybody’s trail already, I had to assume that it was payback for something the principals had all thought forgotten. Even now, though, my attorney can’t find any connection between them, or even with Clancy Walford from the bridge in Del Rio, who was from fifteen years before, which counted as long enough to have been forgotten about, I figured. If you wanted to, that is. Fifteen years was also how much time had passed since my real dad had died. I don’t know. I could have also asked Dave how he knew the bus schedules so well, I guess, or even how he knew what payphone went with what number in Uvalde, but, just from the little while I’d spent with him, it seemed he was big on conspiracy talk and paranormal sightings, not so big on personal details. At least not ones he couldn’t spin, like he did on

the air. Anyway, all those questions went away the moment I saw the low stone wall of the cemetery. I let my foot off the accelerator for maybe twenty feet, hovered it over the brake then coasted through the old neighborhood around the cemetery instead. Who knows what I was telling myself then, either. That I’d missed the gate, that I needed to check the perimeter, that it was bad luck to just go right in, disrespectful to be so bold. Maybe it was that I wasn’t sure where the grave was going to be, and might be able to luck onto it from the truck, thus saving minutes of suddenly valuable time. All lies, of course. I was just scared. What I have of my mother, all I’ve ever had and have never told anybody about, is walking through an old kitchen with her. She’s holding my hand. Because there are no dishes or pans and only a big square hole instead of a refrigerator, I’m pretty sure this is a house we were looking to rent, or stay in. The way she looks is exactly like the girl my real dad fell in love with, exactly like the woman who, if she’d lived, would have kept us out of Mexico, kept my dad from muling unmentionables across the border, would have taught me to feather my hair on the sides like hers, so there would be yellowy old snapshots of us together, our hair dated and identical. The memory of that kitchen that we probably never even rented lasts no more than nine seconds, from where the linoleum starts in the doorway to the warped floor just past the refrigerator hole. I’ve gotten hours and hours out of it, though. Because my father, Refugio, was never married, I didn’t have to put walls up around that kitchen either, but could let her always be my only mom. So, what I was afraid of, I think, was that when she saw me standing over her grave, she would be disappointed. Not that I was a cop where she’d been a criminal, and not that I hadn’t held onto my real dad better, but that I’d learned to do my hair at my girlfriends’ houses over the years, instead of at her vanity. What I imagined was that she would want to reach out, run a loose strand behind my ear, to bring my face out better. Which, I mean, I would shake all my hair into my face as I walked up, if that was the case. But I’m being stupid. Just the facts. Her headstone is six rows in from the east gate, four graves over from the path. It took a while to find her because there was no ‘Dodd’ in her name. And no, I wouldn’t be telling you any of this if it didn’t matter. This is maybe the most important part of any of it, really. For maybe two minutes I studied the beloved daughter, dear sister in the pinkflecked granite, resisted tracing it with my fingertip to make those brothers and sisters and grandparents real, and then I found myself watching some silk flowers two rows away. They were faded and ragged at the edges, and nosing into the sky like blind people wanting to feel the rain. I smiled a little bit, knew I was going to move those flowers, that my mother would have approved of that, stealing flowers, and then came back to the ground around her headstone, to see if the little brass fitting was there for the brass-looking vases some of the other graves had. It was. That wasn’t why I stopped breathing, though.

Directly behind it, which is exactly beside the right part of the headstone, was a single stick, like a Fourth of July punk or punt or whatever they are. Its handle-end was stuck into the ground, so that its head kind of leaned against the stone in the most tender way possible, maybe the most tender way ever. Instead of screaming like my body wanted to, I swallowed once, blinked, then stood as naturally as I could, looking to see who was watching me. Nobody. I looked down to the stick again, to be sure. Silver nitrate. The last time I’d seen one of those sticks had been in our Mexico house. When Refugio walked in through the sliding glass door by the kitchen table, pulling it shut behind him like he lived there, I’d had all my real dad’s sticks lined up on the table. All the ones he’d forgot in the couch and by the sink and folded in magazines as bookmarks. Because he was going to need them when he came back. Passing the table, Refugio held his fingers over the sticks as if blessing them, and nodded, knew them, and that more than anything told me he hadn’t just found my picture out in some pasture, but had really and truly known my dad. As for the next few hours after the cemetery, I can honestly say I’m not sure what I did. It’s what happens when your world is changing shape, I think. At the end of it I was back at the low wall of the cemetery, looking across all the headstones. I didn’t even have to get out of my truck to see it, now. The silver nitrate stick, it had soaked up enough sunlight that it was almost glowing. I breathed a laugh out through my nose and looked away, to the two birdbaths on either side of the path. In one of them, the birds were splashing and drinking and playing. In the other — the one on the right side, that you might drag your fingers through if you were walking by — there were no birds. Before I left the cemetery and Sealy and what the prosecution will probably have already called my rational senses, I tipped that empty birdbath over, let the water drain into the pebble path. Because it was evidence. It’s what any good daughter would have done.

That night Sanchez raised me on the radio. I mean, I was listening, anyway, each time he clicked on: — Romo, listen. I know you’re out there. — Call me. — The funeral is Friday. — I know what you’re doing. He wasn’t trying to guilt me into getting in touch with him, but embarrass me into it. It was going to take more than that, though. For two hours already, a full hour and forty-five minutes longer than I’d meant to, I’d been sitting in the ditch west of Sealy with the dome light on. What I was doing was studying the backside of Refugio’s laminated picture of me. My real dad. I was waiting

for him to tell me something. From the shirt he was wearing, I could tell the Polaroid had been shot no more than two weeks before he went on his last job. Probably less. The shirt was a pearl snap denim, his favorite kind, but they faded fast as much as he wore them. In the picture, the shirt he had on wasn’t quite unwashed blue, but the part of the sleeves I couldn’t see more than likely still had a crease or two from being folded in the store. No matter how long I stared, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to see backwards through the camera, to Clancy Walford, and whoever had been standing behind him. Refugio? Why not, yeah. And now his funeral was Friday. Refugio, in his famous boots. I still had a good thirty-six hours before I needed to be back for it. From where I was, I could either keep making the straight line east, head into the lights of Houston, or I could tend back west, into country I knew. I picked west, finally. Not because it was more likely — if there was something big and criminal going on, then Houston was as good a place to start as any — but because if I got too far from Ozona, I wouldn’t be able to pick Crazy Dave out of the air. Before pulling back up onto the asphalt, I looked both ways twice then turned my blinker on. Ten miles later I was in the ditch again, studying the Polaroid. I was right about the shirt — it wasn’t faded — but why did it have to be from right before he left that last time? It could have been from a year before, or two years before. I tucked the picture into the map holder on the backside of my visor and climbed up onto the asphalt blind, a rig pulling livestock sweeping past so close that it left my hands shaking on the wheel, close enough that the driver stopped, walked the quarter mile back to me, his pigs screaming behind him. “You okay, ma’am?” he asked, not looking at me directly. “Officer?” I guess I was crying. It wasn’t about him, though. I nodded that yes, I was okay — obviously — and then pretended to be looking for something buried deep inside my metal clipboard. The driver walked backwards for a few steps, his hand to the brim of his hat, and then he nodded, jogged back to his pigs. Sometimes I love Texas, sure. Other times I just want to be alone, though, anonymous, nobody. By the time I got up to where the driver had been parked, his tail lights were hardly even red dots anymore but the diesel and manure were still in the air, coming through my vents. I powered both windows down, laughed to myself about how stupid this all was — my real dad was dead, the same as he had been for the last fifteen years — and a flash of motion pulled my eyes to the fence. Without even stopping to think about it, I knew that a pig had escaped the trailer, was running for the pasture, for freedom. And then, of course, I knew that what had really happened was what always happened: the screaming pigs had drawn the coyotes in. Except this was no coyote. I raised my hand to my face, for Dave’s cell phone number. What I was looking at was one of his chupacabras. Working the wheel of the truck slow, I tried to center my headlights on it. The chupacabra saw that smooth move coming, though. I got one eyeshine and then it was gone, like it had just slit the night open, stepped in. Like I had a phone to call Dave with anyway.

It didn’t matter. What did was that I was going the right way. Ten miles later was the first sign for Austin.

The name of the dead guy in the storage unit in Sealy was Martin S. Larkin. It was a cartoon character name, the way it rhymed. His cause of death was listed as suicide. Evidently he’d asphyxiated himself with some sort of chemicals, and then the heat last week had done the rest. There was no mention of the FBI, or of Del Rio. I pushed the newspaper away from me. It sloughed into the empty seat of the booth I was in. The whole night before, there had been no Misanthrope Morning Show. I’d drifted into Austin but had nothing to go on, so just eased from light to light, finding coffee where I could. By lunch I knew I was looking in the wrong place. Five hours later I was back in Del Rio, sleepwalking through my father’s two bedroom house. Except for the file boxes stacked by my bed, my room was just like I’d left it. I threw away the Chinese food rotting in the fridge but the whole house still smelled like decay. To try and stay awake I turned on Wheel of Fortune, but the colors clicking across the screen knocked me out before the first solution. Knowing my luck, it was probably the answer to all my questions.

When I came to, it was still light. At least that’s what I thought at first. Really, it was the next morning. On my father’s television set now, an old brown and white western. With the closed captions on, no volume. I followed it back to the remote control. Sanchez. He nodded once, never looked away from the screen. I stumbled into the bathroom, the kitchen, and finally settled onto the foot of my old bed, my head in my hands. Soon enough Sanchez was standing in the door. “What time’s the funeral, then?” I said, not looking up from the carpet. He handed me a cup of the coffee I’d started, didn’t answer. “Where you been, Romo?” It was my turn not to answer. “I’m not doing what you think I am,” I finally said. “And what do I think you’re doing?” We could have gone on like this all morning. Instead I went back to the bathroom, locked the door behind me and stood under the shower. My father’s shampoo smelled like medicine. Instead of using his razor by the sink for my legs, I broke open a new one. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to throw the one he’d been using away, though. Sanchez was still there when I came out, my hair in a faded green towel. His western was down to the final shoot-out. The closed captions were off now. “Feel better?” he asked, lifting his cup to me in greeting. “Shouldn’t you be out catching illegals?” I said back. “I could say the same.” “I’m on bereavement.”

“Been meaning to say, you’re welcome for that, yeah.” I just stared at the gunfight. “Eight hundred new miles on your truck,” he said, like he was just noting it. “As opposed to your log, I mean.” I stopped drying my hair long enough to do the math, think of an excuse maybe. It’s what an amateur does every time, I know. “I told you,” I said, no eye contact. “Bereavement.” “You weren’t out at your place.” “I went to my mother’s ... to where she’s buried, is that okay?” Sanchez narrowed his eyes about this, said, “Your mother?” “She died before — before Mexico.” Sanchez was still just staring at me. “Manuel never knew her,” I added, then went back to the bathroom, brushed my hair out with an Ace comb then braided it wet, all the way down to the tips. This time when I came back to the living room, the television was off. Sanchez was standing at the screen door, coffee in hand. He was staring out at the street. Probably because he’d just seen a western and felt like a sheriff. “I never knew,” he said. “Your mother.” “I go up there to — to tell her important things,” I said. The pause was manufactured of course, but perfect. My mother would have approved. Sanchez nodded, drank from his cup. “You should think about locking a door,” he said, tapping the screen open to show how easy it had been for him to get in. “FBI says somebody was after your dad specifically.” “Yeah,” I said. “And they’re probably still looking for him, too. Or his couch.” Sanchez shook his head. “I’m just saying,” he said. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.” “Guess that makes two of us.” Sanchez turned around, handed his empty cup to me in farewell and started to duck out but stopped, as if just remembering. “Oh yeah,” he said, “regulations and all. You know using state vehicles for personal use can be prosecuted, right?” I just stared at him. His truck was fitted with a tow kit, for his jet skis. He tipped his hat, smiled his way out, and only stopped when I called to him from the porch. “What time’s the funeral?” “Shit,” he said, hiding behind his door again, one hand already on the wheel, to leverage him in, “forgot to tell you. Looks like the feds are going to need to hold onto him for a little while longer.” He shrugged one shoulder, as if he was the victim here. “Week, two? Something like this, who knows ...” I focused past him, to a bicycle laid over on a lawn. It had been mown around two, maybe three times. Sanchez said something else to me but I wasn’t listening to him anymore, was just waiting for him to be gone. Ten minutes later the western he’d been watching started over. I turned it off, stood from the couch, and, on his advice, locked the door but then got caught there, watching my hand on the deadbolt. Why would anybody still be interested in my father’s

place? Had that been what Sanchez had let slip? Was the FBI letting him read their reports? For the next two hours I sifted through the house, starting with the file boxes in my old bedroom, as they were the most recent, but moving on to the kitchen drawers, the garage, the attic, and, finally, my father’s bedroom. In his sock drawer, way at the back, was the silver knife with the turquoise-inlaid handle. I held it for exactly thirty seconds, like the sacred object it was, then wrapped it back in its crisp new bandana and walked out of the house, the door open behind me.

Because the tabloids that week couldn’t all use the same name, Jack the Rabbit was also Frankenbunny and Bunnyhead and Doc and Peter and I don’t know what-all else. Parked at the curb in front of Dave’s house in Ozona, not a Mexican for blocks, I read through all of them. If I smiled, it wasn’t in pleasure. Not even amusement. The whole time, Dave’s mom was a pair of fingers holding back a living room curtain. The fingers were at about wheelchair level. I tried not to watch the black space behind them, skimmed the other stories in the tabloids but kept coming back to the Frankenbunny version. It wasn’t front page material but was sensational enough that the tabloid people had gone to their photo archives and pulled up Thumper, and the white rabbit from Alice, and a man-sized rabbit shadow from some black and white movie, and then some news-looking photo — real, untouched news — of a guy holding a rabbit up by the hind legs. The rabbit was sixty-two pounds, flopeared and British. The caption was that, to a rabbit that size, everybody probably looked like a carrot, right? Except my father — I was calling him Refugio by then, when I could remember to — had just been cooked, not eaten. I don’t know. In the Bunnyhead article, the drawing of the detective working the case had a coyote head and a magnifying glass. He was the source for the article. The canine grin was supposed to protect his identity. I crumpled the page up, pushed it into the floorboard, then crumpled the rest up as well, kicked them as far down as I could. It’s not satisfying, though, paper. But if I put my boot to the truck instead, I’d have to write the damage up, deal with Sanchez’s patient, double-edged questions. Maybe I’d tell him I’d been questioning a large cartoon rabbit, whose left hind foot twitched each time he tried to lie. That was how the dash got all cracked. Sir. For the first time in maybe a day, I let myself smile, but then I saw what I should have been seeing already: sitting in the backseat of an LTD about six houses ahead was the hazy silhouette of a pair of rabbit ears. Leading up to them, the shoulders of a man. Slowly, the head turned back to look at me, then the LTD eased away from the curb, the rabbit head watching me until its driver rounded the corner. My heart was thumping. That’s a joke, yeah. If it’s considered private use to chase chauffeured rabbits through the streets of Ozona in the daytime, then lock me up. But that’s not the way it turned out.

And no, I’m not breaking any confidentiality agreement by writing this next part down. That’s not to say you’re going to believe it either, though. Some things you never talk about because they make you look crazy and paranoid. Which was the point, I’d guess. It did happen, though. Where the LTD finally put on the brakes was about four miles outside town, behind another LTD that had been sitting there. Moving slow so there was no way I could miss it, the rabbit in the backseat stood from the car, swept the rabbit ear headband from his head and ran his other hand through his hair, like the band had itched. Other than that, he was standard issue FBI. Just a bit more smiley than usual. A glint in his eye that, looking back now, I think was probably there because he’d puppetmastered some of the tabloid stories. They were the best way to keep people from taking a thing seriously. Putting the ears on for him, it would have been like stepping into the story he’d made up. I’d probably smile too. I rolled past him, my border patrol tires immune to the ditch, and pulled up even with the LTD I’d been led to. I thumbed my passenger window down to talk to the agent in the backseat. Evidently that wasn’t secure enough for him, though. He said something to whoever was sitting beside him — my truck was too tall for me to get an angle — tapped the driver on the shoulder then climbed out of his car, stepped up into the cab with me, rubbing his hands together like he was ready, yes. “Drive,” he said, hooking his chin forward. It took him all of three-tenths of a mile to reach under my dash with a pair of clippers, snip the power to my radio. I looked over to him about this. “You could have just unscrewed the mike,” I told him, holding it up so he could see the long nut at the base of the cable. “This way’s more thorough,” he said. “What are we doing here?” “We’re letting me ask the questions, that’s what.” “Is this about —” “Yes,” he said, “and no,” then produced a rainbow-colored film envelope from his suit jacket, fanned the photos out on the seat between us. They were the shots Dave had taken in Sealy. The storage unit. Martin S. Larkin. Now my heart really was thumping. “The charges we could make stick here kind of, y’know, boggle the brain, wouldn’t you say, Officer Romo?” I wanted to play dumb, ask who took those, where were they taken — I wasn’t in any of them, anyway — but, too, he probably had my prints from the stainless steel interior of the Frito truck, my description from the diner, my heel impressions from the cemetery, my mileage from Sanchez. I’d been stupid, I knew. But that was just because I didn’t feel like I’d been doing anything that wrong. “And that’s just the beginning ...” the agent added, fanning the photos out wider, so the envelope they’d been in got important. In block letters, with an address, was Sandoval, David. “It’s not his fault,” I said. “Of course it’s not,” the agent said back, then smiled a little more. “It’s nobody’s

fault. Oh, too, you do know that, by following a man-rabbit out here, you confirmed certain things for us, right?” “You, too,” I told him. “Clarify.” “If I wasn’t on the right track, you wouldn’t be here.” He laughed, riffled the photos back into their sleeve. “Every track is the right track down here, Laurie Romo. It’s all connected.” “Then what are you here for, instead of out there catching him?” “You tell me.” Like reciting, I said, “Either you want to warn me off, or you’re about to break regulation and tell me all the particulars of this bomb you’re chasing.” I thumbed out one of the pictures, held it up for him. “Let me read this, maybe.” It was the spiral that had been under Larkin. The agent shrugged that he was impressed. “We assumed you’d already read it.” “You’re trying to get me to say I was there.” He hissed a laugh through his teeth. “Say you had to make a prediction now,” he said. “Am I going to break regulation, pull an amateur with personal motivations into an international investigation with truly global implications, or am I going to tell you just to concern yourself with certain funeral arrangements, let the government do its job?” “Can I turn around now?” I asked, my eyes in the rearview, my lips pursed so I wouldn’t say anything too smart. The agent shrugged a sure. I wheeled the truck slow and wide from ditch to ditch, started heading back to the LTDs. “Let me ... um, clarify if I can here,” I led off. “Please do.” “If I don’t back off, you turn these pictures over to the state authorities, and it’s bye-bye Laurie Dodd you crime-scene tamperer, justice obstructer, trespasser, all that?” The LTDs were waiting for us about a quarter mile up. “Well, twenty years ago, yeah, maybe,” the agent said. “Things these days, though, they’re a lot more ... oblique, you could say.” To show what he meant, he nodded ahead of us. The rear passenger door of the front LTD was swinging open. The side I hadn’t been able to see. From it, falling into the empty road, Dave. They’d put the bunny ear headband on him. “If, facing charges, you give a deposition about federal coercement,” the agent beside me said, shrugging as if this was just the way the world was, “some fringe newspaper might actually pick it up. If he goes on the record about conspiracies though, well ...” I looked over at him, my foot on the brake now. “That’s not playing very nice,” I said. “Yeah, well, what we’re dealing with’s not very nice, Officer Romo,” the agent said, like that’s the name he wanted to stick, then stepped down while we were still rolling, jogged himself down to a fast walk, never looked back. On the dash he’d left a shiny new pair of electrician’s pliers and a sealed blister pack of crimps. To fix my radio. The two LTDs backed out in tandem, turned around,

disappeared. Federal choreography. I was officially impressed. In their wake Dave stood up, peeled the ears from his head, and, when I eased the truck up for him, he shied away, started running for the pasture like bees were after him. He didn’t make it over the fence, though. And it wasn’t any better on the other side anyway. I idled my truck and walked over, trying not to see the way he was shaking, then finally just told him the only thing I could that would bring him back: that I knew where another chupacabra was. That I’d seen it. Slowly, Dave looked up to me, to see if I was lying. I nodded that I wasn’t, then touched his shoulder, left my hand there. An hour later we were heading east again, the FBI’s pliers in my glove compartment, my radio still dead. “Misanthropes,” I said out loud, a few miles closer to Austin. “Pirates,” Dave said back, unable not to grin. And no, we didn’t have the rifle yet. That was still days away.

Three nights later, Hell Bunny debuted on the Bastrop six o’clock news. It was the beginning of the end. I was sitting at a counter alone, waiting on a cheeseburger with jalapeños that were going to cost fifteen cents each. Dave was supposed to be in the bathroom taking a sink bath, but I knew he was back at the dumpster checking messages on his cell phone, maybe dictating some story into his voice mail. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust me, I don’t think, but — since the FBI, he hadn’t been the same. Sitting behind the tinted windows of that federal LTD, it had broken something in him that I’d guess had been broken once already, years ago, and he’d only just been holding together. He was seeing them everywhere now is what I’m saying. Suits, ties, sunglasses. Satellites. If you asked him, he’d tell you he hadn’t slept any since Ozona, but he had, his face pressed up against the side glass of my truck. What we were doing was coasting the back roads for chupacabra. Because the pigs had drawn it in once, Dave had a wooden call of some sort that he blew through my bullhorn. If I hadn’t had a lightbar on top of my cab, we would have been hauled in, I know, and I wouldn’t be here now. But we’re not here to talk about what if. For me, trolling 71 for chupacabra was just a holding pattern, until my dad surfaced again. My dad with the rabbit ears. Who was dead and gone, and now carrying a nuclear device. I’d tried to explain it to Dave but he’d just stared at my mouth, as if suddenly unsure, like he was checking to see if the way my lips were moving really matched the words he was hearing. He wasn’t used to people speaking his language, I don’t think, and didn’t trust it coming from someone else. Maybe that’s what he was muttering into his voice mail back at the dumpster — a long suicide note to his mom, about how he was hitched up with this crazy girl who thought she had a zombie for a dad. That he never meant to get involved. That all he wanted was one more clear shot of a chupacabra, to make up for the chemotherapied dog he’d wasted a roll on outside Del Rio. He’d showed them to me along with the second set from Sealy. “How —?” I’d asked, looking at the same set of pictures the FBI had.

Dave had smiled, shrugged. He’d been prepared for the FBI for a long time, he said. He always ordered double-prints on a separate ticket, then had them mailed to a post office box at the radio station, one not in his name. Looking at the shadow of the rabbit on that cinderblock wall was when I’d tried to tell him about my real dad. It probably didn’t sound any better there than it will in court. Because things like that don’t happen. If there was any other way to explain it, though, then please believe me, I would. And no, in spite of what my attorney says we could do, I’m not going to ride some insanity plea here. What I’m trying to do, really, is make it all not insane. Which brings us back to Hell Bunny, I guess. The clip was exactly nine seconds long. In it, in slow motion, Hell Bunny lunges through the doors of a convenience store in Bastrop, grabs a spiral off the school supply endcap, then backs out, trying to hide his face from the clerk. His ears were taller than the sleeve of his jacket, though. And then it was over. Beside me, Dave was just standing there, his face not wet from the sink. And yeah, if we had this footage for court, it would be more than a little bit helpful, I know. As far as my attorney can find, though, it only ever ran once, fed into a live broadcast that’s itself already been recorded over. Apparently the next time the station tried to run it, they finally found it under some derelict coffee cup. It was a novelty one, designed never to spill in the car. Its magnetic base was perfect for some dashboards. Dropped into the coffee, too, were about fifty dollars of hearing aid batteries, and a handful of lithium camera ones, too. Just to be sure. Evidently the coffee conducted their cumulative electricity, gave the magnet under them a bit more charge, enough to erase the tape from front to back. Granted, for the electricity to reach the base there would have to have been a hole drilled somewhere, maybe even a wire in the plastic, but I’m sure whoever accidentally set that cup there was proficient enough with the principles of electromagnetism to know that. The only real question is whether that coffee drinker was wearing a headband that day or not. That he was smiling goes without saying. They shouldn’t have even let it run at all, though. Because of it, I knew, next time, to take the spiral with me.

We weren’t the first ones to converge on that convenience store in Bastrop that night. The parking lot was full. We were the only ones to start walking the marshy pastures around it, though, our flashlight beams swimming with bugs. The clerk who had been working the night of the big spiral theft didn’t know anything. He’d been in the bathroom. It was why they didn’t even find the footage until eight days after it happened. They were looking for a beer run or something, and chanced on a giant rabbit — just the kind of comedy segment the news always wants, as, in comparison, it makes them look more human, I suppose. As for the trees around the convenience store, they were hopeless. We had no system, were just going on stupid luck, like always. We gave up after an hour and-a-half. Dave was sure he’d seen a chupacabra —

evidently he can tell their eyeshine from a raccoon’s — but he saw them every time I got more than about thirty feet from him, too, and it was going to take more than that for me to pull my truck out into the mud. “Well?” I said to him, finally. We were standing in a pool of our own light. Dave shrugged. There were more of the faithful out in the trees now, the convenience store’s battery rack empty. “When’s the funeral?” Dave asked. I watched a woman fall in the darkness, struggle up. “When’s the next show?” I asked back. Dave didn’t answer, just chewed his cheek. “You know they’re just pretending?” he told me, about all the people who’d followed us out into the darkness. I pretended I did know that, yeah. Because the FBI has that kind of manpower. But who knows. I touched Dave’s shoulder to tell him it was time to go and we turned, started weaving our way back to the neon sign of the convenience store. Beside us and off about thirty yards, the woman I’d watched fall stumbled again, then came up screaming. All the lights gathered on her. What she had was a dead something. It was bloody and stiff and smelled, but she wouldn’t let it go. Dave looked at it and then away, fast. It was a rabbit head. Mask, I corrected myself. A hood with ears, and caked around the eyes with blood. I stepped forward, pulled it up to see better, the woman’s arm coming up as well. “Excuse me?” she said, jerking the mask back. I directed my light into her face, cocked my head behind it. “Official business,” I told her. Laughter rippled through the crowd that had gathered. I cast my light around. The faithful were holding up their own fake badges and phony IDs. They glittered in the moonlight. “Allow me,” Dave said, affecting a humble, amused sort of authority, and stepped forward, between me and the stumbling woman. When his negotiations started to go upwards of twenty minutes and involve sightings so delicate and obscure that no one could possibly object to them, I turned, slogged back to the coffee machine in the store. Ten minutes after that, Dave climbed into the passenger seat beside me. “Go,” he said, his face serious. I did, west on 71. In his lap was the mask. What he’d traded was the roll of film of the Del Rio dog. Only he’d told them it was just up the road, and was the real thing. We led the caravan for six miles maybe, then, at Dave’s cue, I clicked my headlights off and put my foot all the way into this escape plan. By dawn we were deep into Austin, bellied up to a table at the Magnolia Café. On the patio, of course. Because of the smell. In his lap, twined deep in his fingers, was the thing Dave had been waiting for all his life. Proof. Though technically it should have been mine, I didn’t try to take it away. Hell Bunny was real. Long live Hell Bunny.

Neither of us could eat.

That afternoon, after spending four hours at a comic book store with one of Dave’s listeners — his word was ‘contact’ — we wound up following ourselves up and down Congress. At least that’s what it felt like. The truck one block ahead of us was a Border Patrol job like mine. It was funny, almost. All the people who had stepped behind telephone poles and trees when the first truck passed would just be sticking their heads out again when I passed. What was funny was watching them try to slick their hair back, lick their lips, act exceedingly normal. While I drove, Dave laid sideways on the passenger side floorboard, trying to rewire my radio so we could eavesdrop on the truck we were following. It never happened, though. After making a complicated, backtracking grid from the interstate to Congress, driving slow along all the sidewalks — was he looking for somebody? — the truck finally headed east on Fifth, going too fast to see anybody. I followed as best I could, lost the truck a few times, then managed to find it again. With Border Patrol skills, yeah: all the Mexicans caught out in the open would still be android-walking on whatever road the truck had just taken. Legal or not, I mean. According to my — to Refugio, it used to be a real problem, even. Where the state could sell their retired DPS and city cars at auction after they’d stripped the light kits off, they found that the Border Patrol trucks were different. Even without lights, they were still pale green. So, aside from restaurant and club owners complaining that certain customers’ trucks could shut down business for a whole afternoon, the high school crowd started getting ahold of the trucks, too. The big fun then was to screech across the tracks, slide into some dirt yard while laying on the horn. Until somebody got themselves shot, yeah. But that’s how all the stories end in Texas. Even this one.

Where the Border Patrol truck finally stopped was the pound. It nosed up right alongside another, one that had somebody already standing beside it, his straw hat cocked back on his head, his right foot up on his non-standard running board. Sanchez. The grid was for me. I eased past holding my breath, but Sanchez had already seen me. He held up his radio until I couldn’t see him anymore. From a carport deep in residential, we watched the other truck cruise by once, but he was just going on the same luck we’d been using in Bastrop. It made me wonder how close we’d been, there. That night we slept at Dave’s contact’s place. It was a twelve-year old’s room that had spilled out across a whole house. It smelled like cheetos and lotion. My truck was parked in the back yard, a tarp thrown over it, a hole punched through it for my antenna. To escape the sticky sweet smoke of the living room, I ducked into the sweatbath my cab was now and fixed my radio for longer than I needed to, then finally started calling

Sanchez up every fifteen minutes. After an hour and-a-half, he answered. It didn’t mean it took him that long to hear me, just that it was a power trip, me saying his name over the air like that. Like it was me that needed him here. The first thing he told me was that I was driving stolen property. I told him it was more of a test drive, really. I’d have it back on the lot soon. Everybody was listening, of course. “Where are you?” “In sixth grade, I think.” “Say again?” “Forget it. When’s the service?” “What are you doing here, Romo?” “You were there.” “Where?” “The Omar.” “And you think you can do more than the ... the guys with ties?” “They’re interested in materials, not people.” “This isn’t going to bring him back, Romo.” “I stayed out of Del Rio.” “More like Del Rio’s a lot bigger than any of us thought.” “Yeah, well.” I held the button down, looked across my tarped bed at the lights of Austin. One of them would be Sanchez. “Let’s not do this here,” he said. “I’m close.” “I’m not asking you to ... to surrender or anything.” There it was, then. ‘Surrender.’ It was what you asked a fugitive to do. “How do I know it’s not a trap?” “I brought you a change of clothes.” In the living room, Dave and his contact were using tweezers and probes and ultraviolet lightbulbs on the rabbit mask. It was going to be the tabloid story of the decade. Where the rabbit skin ended, a different kind of skin took over. “They’re looking for you, Romo,” Sanchez said then, not even in any kind of code. “That’s where they were that — that Sealy night.” “How do I know they’re not sitting beside you right now?” “I —” He had nothing, though. “The punter,” he said then, slurring it enough so that if you didn’t know him, he could be saying anything. “Just us.” I breathed in, exhaled, said it with my eyes closed: “Quíen?” “When ... when your shift used to go over that month of the Senator’s birthday.” ‘Senator’ was what he called Warrant, the only guy newer than me. His birthday had been in March, when I’d been working nights. We all knew it because we’d had to cover his shifts while he tried to sober up. So what he was saying was six in the morning. Where he was saying was the bridge. ‘Punter’ was Sanchez for ‘il puente,’ from some time in his high school when a legendary friend had kicked a football all the way from America to Mexico. It had just been full of air, but, Sanchez always told us like a lesson,

there could have been anything in that ball, right? Not all games were innocent. I clicked off and said it to myself: six, the bridge. We could watch the early morning granola crowd kayak across Town Lake, their plastic paddles dipping silently into the water, their fiberglass hulls surging forward. That night I slept in the utility — it was the only room that smelled even partially sanitary — the dryer drowning out Dave’s breathless monologue. My watch beeped me awake at four-thirty, and I was gone without him, coasting downhill with my windows open. But I wasn’t stupid. Instead of the bridge, I went to where Sanchez had been. The pound. They opened at seven. I was walking the runs by a quarter after, until an attendant saw me, cued into the uniform shirt I’d washed the night before and led me all the way to the end. She had a dewy Dr. Pepper fresh from the coke machine in her hand, and offered me a drink. I shook my head no, but that was a lie. I would have paid twenty dollars for one drink from that can. Waiting in the final pen, with a buffer of empty runs around it, was a chupacabra. It was bloodying itself, trying to get through the wire at the attendant. “It’s dying,” she said. “What is it?” “Autopsy’s this afternoon.” I nodded, watched the dog, the chupacabra. Its missing hair made its nose seem more narrow, its ears larger. Its skin was cracked in a way I knew, its eyes rimmed with blood in a way I didn’t want to know about. “Thank you,” I told the attendant. When the silence got too thick for her she backed off a couple of runs. As she did, the chupacabra settled down. Just sat there. I looked back to her but her eyes were saucers. “Good boy,” I said into the pen, almost singsong, then stepped forward, placing myself between the chupacabra and the attendant. The chupacabra didn’t explode, just edged forward, its ears flush against its skull. “There there ...” I told it, placing the back of my hand to the wire of the cage. Its nose was warm against my skin, its tail fanning the slick concrete. Behind me, the attendant’s radio buzzed to life, her voice muffled and nervous in it. It didn’t matter. “You know me, don’t you?” I whispered through the wire. My scent, anyway. That I got from my dad. My real dad. When it was over I was smiling, just at the corners of my mouth. It was a little girl smile. I could feel it. “Thank you,” I told the attendant again, brushing past her, leaving before the rest of them could get there. There was no doubt now. By noon the chupacabra would be dead on a table, the light above it sputtering from the radiation. I never told Dave about it, either. It wasn’t because of him, but because of me. For a moment, my back to the attendant, I’d closed my eyes, let that dog’s nose become my dad’s hand. It was a touch I’d been waiting fifteen years for. Now all that was left was to find him. To save him from himself, yeah. I was a long way from the Jomar.

That afternoon, trolling south Austin in Dave’s contact’s antique Datsun, we saw our first Hell Bunny shirt. If there were shirts, then there would be campaign buttons, and bumper stickers. This was Austin after all. I pretended to know what to do with this new development, eased us down another random block. We weren’t just going to see him walking into a coffee shop, though. Without any resources, any breaking news, any really bad leaks or rogue agents at the FBI, we were lost, nowhere. Within five miles of him probably, but it might as well be the whole state. But — would he even remember me? I mean, it had been fifteen years already. And there were phones everywhere. We had to keep moving. Driving, not thinking. According to Dave, his contact’s phone had been tapped last night, and there were just way too many cars in the neighborhood with up-to-date inspection stickers and fresh new tags, and we had to allow that every plumber’s van was automatically lined with technology, all of it focused on Dave. My truck was in a paid parking garage up by the convention center. We could have painted it, but that would be defacing state property, as much as admitting it was stolen. And a tarp would only make people want to look under it. Real pirates would have known what to do, probably. As it was, we were still just coasting on luck, trying to stretch it as long as we could. If I’d made it to the bridge, had that talk with Sanchez, I could have found out how he’d known to look for me in Austin. Instead of Houston or San Antonio or Piedras Negras. But I could guess. If he was reading the FBI field reports like I figured he was, and their investigation was leading them here, then that’s where I’d be as well. And if I wasn’t, it didn’t matter, as I couldn’t be messing anything up. It was a compliment, really. He thought I was as good as the FBI. And important enough to assign two trucks to. It was better I’d stood him up, though. He’d never believe that my real dad was back, or trust that he’d had to do what he’d done to Refugio. Worse, he’d tell it to everybody. In his words, which, yeah, they’d be pretty much mine, but with long, meaningful pauses inserted. Not that any of that was telling us whether we should go right or left at whatever light we were at. Nothing was. Soon enough Dave fell into a pout. At first I didn’t pick up on it, but then I realized he wasn’t muttering anymore about how this rabbit mask was going to change the world, make everybody see it as it was, the way he’d known it was for years. And it wasn’t that kind of silence he fell into sometimes, where I could tell he was trying hard to pretend he’d never had a rabbit ear headband fitted down over him. With his index finger and thumb he was ratting some of the rabbit fur together then smoothing it back down. Over and over. “A little social grooming?” I said, faking a smile. He stopped. I reached for the radio but he was already interrupting: “Why are we still here?” It was a good question. “Because he’s here,” I said. “And we know this how?”

“It’s ...” I started. “He was coming up 71, right?” It sounded like an excuse, even to me. But I couldn’t tell him about the pound, either. Not this late in the day. And anyway, the dogs, the chupacabras — they were just the indicators, the breadcrumbs, the seagulls tracking the shark. Dave did his eyebrows and patted his side of the car like it was a horse and we drove nowhere for the rest of the afternoon, one clove after another trailing smoke up from the ashtray. They were incense sticks against the mask. Because it smelled exactly like roadkill. I tried not to think about it, then did anyway. Without the mask, what would my dad look like? Had he just been wearing it to hide who he was, or was he injured? Was that why it was all bloody? Where do you even find a mask like that? Why a rabbit? The kind of investigation we were on was the kind where you had to go fast all the time, or else risk stopping to think about what you were doing. I almost wanted to call Sanchez, make up some excuse for the bridge. Or get on the news somehow, so my dad could see me, know I was out here looking for him. But then everybody would see me. Beside me, where I wasn’t supposed to hear, Dave was curled around his cell again, talking to his mom. Apologizing. Something about the pharmacy, and the air conditioner. When he hung up I licked my lips to get the words right and asked him if he needed a bus. It took him a moment to get his words right as well. “What about this?” The mask. I made a slow right, the whole Datsun shuddering from the downshift. “Take it,” I told him, flashing my eyes over. “Just don’t let them put it in some museum, okay?” Dave smiled, hid it by looking out the window. “He’s real,” he said then, in the voice that unsettled me. It wasn’t like it wasn’t him or anything soap opera like that, it was something in the delivery. I could tell by the way he talked, all wistful and dreamy, that he was staking everything on what he’d just said. That it was the new center his life was going to be revolving around. From here, this room, where I can look at myself in the big mirror any time I want to, any time I don’t want to, I understand why it unsettled me, I think, him using that voice for the mask. It wasn’t that I cared for him. That’s just the way I want to remember it. The good version. In it, he’s tragic, I’m kind of heroic, and everything’s inevitable. There’s something under that, though. Jealousy. It was my dad he was trying to make his own. “You should have known him fifteen years ago,” I said, grinding up into his contact’s driveway. Dave heard something in my voice too, I guess. He didn’t say anything back. Inside the house he walked around wiping his prints off everything, and adding more to certain comic books he considered borrowing. I sat in a metal folding chair by the kitchen table and watched him — he really was twelve years old — then found myself counting numbers on the old telephone beside me. It was the heavy institutional kind like Refugio had always had in his office, with the number pad on the base instead of the handset. Like I used to do then, waiting all

afternoon in his office, I started launching my eyes from number to number, faster and faster. It was just a game. Like Sanchez was always trying to tell us, though, not all games are innocent. I breathed in sharp when I realized the number I was dialing. It was the last one I’d given to my dad before he left. The one I used to pretend was going to save me from the office my kidnapper had locked me in. My face flushed, my eyes went hot, and I picked up the phone. Because I was in Austin, it wouldn’t even be long distance. I had the first four numbers punched in before Dave caught me. It was the fastest I’d seen him move since the ditch in Ozona. But now he had a purpose. He dove across the living room, his palm aimed at the twin plungers, fingers spread wide. The table and everything that had been balanced on it collapsed, leaving me in my chair, the phone still in my hand, the line spiraling down into the wreckage. “It’s not clean,” Dave said like it was the most obvious thing in the world, then palmed his cell up from his belt, passed it to me. I nodded, only half there I guess, and dialed the number into his cell phone. It rang and rang, and somehow — this I have no clue about — I could hear it resounding on the other end, in some big empty place. “What?” Dave said, watching me closer than I really wanted him to. I shook my head no, and then the ringing stopped. Someone on the other end was listening. “Dad?” I whispered, my eyes closed now. Dave wasn’t the only one who was still twelve years old. On the way to the bus station we had to stop by the pound. Dave’s tabloid instincts had finally kicked in, started wondering why Sanchez had been there. I didn’t say anything, just made all the rights and lefts that would get us there, keeping to the small roads because we were in my truck again. I’d only agreed to coast by because if I didn’t, it would mean I knew what was there. And anyway, Sanchez and whoever had already been to this particular sideshow. They wouldn’t be there again. I was wrong. We pulled in from the blind side, my mind already made up to stay with the truck so the attendant wouldn’t recognize me, and there was another truck just like mine. Parked right beside it, another, with running boards. Sanchez. Because I’m an amateur, I chirped the tires, splashed coffee all over the dash. Dave’s face was expressionless, just totally slack. For maybe twenty seconds we just stared at the two trucks, then, slowly, became aware of a tall, long-haired attendant with a pushbroom. He was watching us. I nodded to myself that this was okay, this was good, and, wholly for that attendant, parked right alongside the two trucks it looked like I was supposed to be parking by. The attendant went back to his sweeping. “W-What —?” Dave stammered, the rabbit mask clutched hard to his chest. “It’s okay,” I said, turning the truck off, leaving the key in. My mind was racing. Not about why Sanchez was here again — I assume the chupacabras were turning out to be obviously from south of the border, somehow — more about the radio in his truck. Ever since the call this morning, I’d been trying to figure out how to get my hands

on a good reverse directory. And praying that the number I’d called was listed. A radio not registered to me leapfrogged all that, though. A clean radio and a male voice. I looked over to Dave. “Been a while since you were on the air, yeah?” I said. Everything that happens to him after this, it’s my fault.

Though I knew how to get at Sanchez’s hidden key — it was in a dummy trailer ball, caked with mud — I tried the other truck first. The driver’s door was locked, but the passenger side vent window was still cocked open. I snaked my arm in, jimmied the handle from all the wrong angles, and, finally, the right one. I pushed Dave in ahead of me, and kept my feet on the asphalt. He already knew all the codes, and had the number written in ink on the side of his hand, and his identification number was written on masking tape on the back of the aluminum clipboard case, and I’d promised him that this would be cake, that he was in no danger whatsoever. All he had to do now was dodge any small talk, act like he didn’t have time for it here. It would have gone fine and perfect if the front doors of the pound hadn’t swung open and shut right when he twisted the radio on. I melted back out the door, pushed it almost closed, and rolled under Sanchez’s truck, stared up at his rusted emergency brake cable. That there weren’t pounding footsteps yet meant that they hadn’t registered three trucks yet. As far as they were concerned, the one on the outside now was whoever Sanchez had dragged to Austin to look for me. Except then that truck started talking. I’d left my radio on. I shook my head no, no, please, but now Dave was using a set of ID numbers that had to be familiar to at least one person standing by the door. All noise in the parking lot stopped. Even the dogs inside weren’t barking. Like I’d told him, Dave didn’t stop for weather or location reports. He just asked for the address that went with the number. The pounding footsteps I’d been expecting never came, either. Instead there was just the slow crunch of gravel — three people, crossing the parking lot, one of them slanting off, to go make a call. The other two were saying something about my truck, suddenly there. Just before they got to Dave’s door — he was ducked down, had no idea — Dispatch got back with the address. I wrote it deep enough into my hand that blood mixed with the ink, and then closed my eyes. They pulled Dave out by his collar, threw him in front of the truck. The sun beating down all around. Me crying, I think. Now, I mean. It is all my fault. All I could see were legs and boots, but it was enough. They pulled Dave over to a section of the fence mostly hidden from the road and interrogated him. By the time I finally got around to them, Dave would be on his knees, his wrists cuffed in front of him. What his face would look like I’d have no idea, because they’d put the mask on him. The thing was, though, I don’t think he ever said my name. When he should have. When I would have wanted him to. But if he had, then they probably would have been watching for me, might have

even heard me getting Sanchez’s key, opening his door, sliding the non-regulation rifle out from the leather scabbard behind the seat. I let it lead me around to them, and settled the barrel on the back of the Sanchez’s head. The other border guy was named Henderson. I knew him now. In his hand was a thermos lid. In the thermos lid was something thick and pink. It was also splashed onto Dave’s shirt, I could see now, and dabbed around the mouth of the mask. “It’s just Pepto,” he said, trying to smile, and I brought the gun over to him. I know now what they’d told Dave about the Pepto. That the cocktail they killed the dogs with, it was bright pink, so there would never be any accidents. It was all a joke to them. I motioned with the rifle for space and pulled Dave up by his handcuffs. He was dead weight. It wasn’t that he’d given up either, I don’t think. At least not on purpose. It was that he’d stepped over some internal ledge, fallen into himself. Crumbled away. “Your keys,” I said to Sanchez and Henderson, and they slid them over. “This isn’t good,” Sanchez told me, still smiling. “No shit,” I said back, then starting trying to pull Dave to my truck. He was too heavy, though, and not standing very well, not caring anymore. Sanchez, moving slow and obvious, helped, guided Dave into his seatbelt. Then, still very deliberate with his hands, he sat Dave’s cell phone up on the dashboard. I looked from him to it. “That’s how,” I said. “Momma’s boy,” Sanchez said back, patting Dave, then held his palm out, for me to hold off on my big escape here. Just for a moment. He was going to his truck. I followed him, still covering Henderson as well. Luckily the passenger door was already open. As Sanchez dug behind his seat, his voice fell into an easy lope. What he was talking about was Ghandi, the old story about one of his sandals falling off the back of a train, and how he threw the other off as well. When Sanchez stood again, it was to toss me a box of cartridges. For the rifle. “You’re trying to get me killed,” I said, catching them just because it was that or take them in the chest. “Looks like you’re doing a pretty god job of that yourself, Romo,” Sanchez said back. “I can’t say your dad’d be proud.” “You don’t know what he’d be,” I said back, and it was complicated getting behind my wheel with the rifle, trying to cover two people, but I managed. Fifteen minutes later I was guiding Dave down into a bus seat, diesel in the air all around, his cuffs in my floorboard in the parking lot, the mask in a bag tied to his wrist. I’d tried to rub the pink off his shirt, too, but had just rubbed it in, really. He had no idea, though. Like I said, it’s my fault there’s no Misanthrope Morning Show anymore. My fault that there’s no more pirates. I’m sorry.

The next scene you already know. It made the national news. Four dead,

mutilated. Assailant unknown. The news hadn’t even heard about me yet, though. I waited until night, pulled the lightbar off my cab, and went to the address still scratched into my hand. That Sanchez wasn’t there already meant he hadn’t written down the street numbers Dispatch had read, and hadn’t thought to ask for them yet. She’d still have it in her logs, though. I didn’t have long. The address was out in what had been nowhere ten or twenty years ago. Now there were businesses sprouting up all around it, everything faced with local white rock. In contrast, the warehouse looked run-down, abandoned, from another time. Tucked in the yard beside it were huge rolls of rusted wire that somebody had probably meant to slip past chapter 11, but then been unable to sell. I walked among them, trailing my fingers across their metal, flakes of rust falling down behind me like rose petals. The side door was open, and I already had my flashlight. Inside was about half an acre of slick, pitted concrete, one long table, three file cabinets, an office with flimsy walls, and, in the rear corner, their hands tied behind them like they’d been brought in one by one, two dead men and one dead woman, their wallets open beside them, for purposes of identification. It was the Omar. It was Sealy. Over the course of a few days, they’d been cooked. I sat down in the metal chair my dad had sat in. It put him so close to the three people that he had to have almost been touching them. I didn’t tell them I was sorry, either. Whatever they’d done, it probably had something to do with my dad not coming home, and that was enough for me. There were no rabbit shadows burned into the wall this time. No comical footprints in the cement, no glow-in-the-dark teeth. Just dead people, killed people. After a few minutes I finally stood, was aiming for the door when it came to me: somebody had answered the phone. Could he still be here? I centered my light on the small office. It was empty but I went in anyway, then fell out. A dead man had answered the phone. Or, he was dead now anyway. And worse than the rest. Since his clothes were still holding together, I assumed he’d been the last one collected, the last one my dad had been able to find. I looked to him again, then away. Because there hadn’t been time to let the radiation seep into him, he’d been skinned instead. Just his face, his head. It hadn’t quite killed him, though. Not enough, anyway. I made myself look again. Told myself that if my dad could do it, I could see it. That that completed something. That I was his little girl. That I was his little girl again. It wasn’t easy, though. I’d never seen inside somebody’s face. And he’d crawled across the whole warehouse like that. The rest of him was easier — just a suit jacket, slacks. In his hand, the phone. Spilled beside him, so it was open on the floor, facing down, a spiral. I reached across, gathered it to me, and took the phone from him as well, hung it up. It was another way Sanchez could find this place: I’d called it on Dave’s phone. It didn’t matter anymore. Beside the phone was a radio. I looked to the dead man for permission, then

twisted it on. For about eight seconds it tried to work, but had been too close to my dad for too long. I nodded, accepted this, then started to excuse myself from the dead man — you get superstitious around the just-dead — realized that there was no way he’d been able to cross the floor in time to answer a ringing phone. Not in the shape he was. What this meant was that he’d already been there. Trying to live. I looked to the phone again, lifted it slow to my ear and hit the redial button. The other end picked up on the first ring, dumped me into voice mail. Just a robot voice. I opted to page instead of leaving a message, and entered Dave’s cell as the number to call. Twenty seconds after I hung up, Dave’s phone whistled in my hand. I wrote down the caller ID number before clicking the green button. “What do you mean he’s coming for me?” a man was already saying at the other end. I smiled, wasn’t at all embarrassed about it. “Hell Bunny,” I said back in my own voice, then clicked off, looked to the side door, the only other light in the place except for me. Silhouetted in it was a chupacabra. He was just watching me, his ears huge. “Well come on already,” I told it, and it did, padding easy back to the corner, to feed in the darkness. I left him to it.

Getting the address that went with the number was easy. All I had to do was call Sanchez on his cell. From Dave’s. A number he knew. He laughed when I told him what I wanted. “Turn yourself in, Romo. We’ll go easy. You were temporarily deranged.” “I’ll trade,” I told him. “I know where the next ones are.” “The next what?” “Crime scene.” This stopped him for a moment. “I don’t even have the whole number,” I lied. “Taking care of my sweetheart?” he said back. His .308 with the rosewood tip on the front of the stock, set off with ivory. “It’s in the truck,” I told him. “I left it down at the convention center. Keys are in it. Yours too.” “What are you driving now?” “Listen, if you want me to just call the FBI myself —” Which is how I got him to write down the first six digits of the seven I had. All I had to do then was dial my radio in, listen to the nine addresses Dispatch read back to him. Sanchez had filled the last digit in himself, starting at zero. I was the only one who knew which address was the right one, though. It was almost dawn. I eased my truck into neutral, coasted down out of the apartment complex parking

lot I’d been in. At this point, not a single shot had been fired. If everybody wasn’t so stupid, it could have stayed that way, too.

This is the part where I finally meet my real dad. The address that went with the phone number was up in Mount Bonnell — the rich part of Austin. I could see the whole city. In any other state, with houses like this, I’d be the only pick-up for miles. This was Texas, though. The only real difference between my truck and all the rest was that I had an immigration-green stripe on the side of mine. Otherwise I was an early morning gardener, or newspaper thrower, or car washer. Invisible to the movers and shakers. And yes, of course I’d read the spiral by then. It’s what I’d been in the apartment complex parking lot for, my dome light disconnected, my ashtray pulled out so I could lean over, read by that light. Or, read’s the wrong word, I guess. Instead of a story or a letter or an explanation, what my dad had drawn in, page after page, was the floor plan of our house in Mexico. It started out rough but got better as he went, and more furnished. On the counter he’d even drawn a small cup. It was holding a napkin down. I never knew he could draw, either. That he had that kind of patience, that kind of concentration. Page after page of it, like — it was like he talking to me. Which of course I would say, I know. But, of everybody in the world, nobody but me would ever remember those halls, nobody would care that the handle for the screen door was on the opposite side from the handle for the front door, which was why we always just used the sliding door by the table. It was perfect. He’d gone farther, though, and that was why I’d been in the parking lot most of the night, starting my truck over and over so the battery wouldn’t die. In the last pages of the spiral, he’d started shading footprints into the carpet. His were the biggest, and had distinct heels, and then there were mine, smaller, shaped like sneakers. What kept me sitting there, though, were my mother’s footprints. They were all around ours, all over the house. Like she’d really been there. In the margin of the last page, erased now but I could still make it out, there was something written, finally. It was that he hoped she looked like her. I turned the page, held the spiral closed, then opened it again to be sure. The reason he’d erased it was underneath that, the part that had been erased first: ‘not me.’ He hoped I looked like my mom, not like him. And no, you’ll never find that spiral. It’s made-up, really. I lied, I’m crazy. This is what this whole thing has done to me, made me start latching onto fake things, making them real. All the same, you’ll never find it.

The address was a tall, tan house with a wide, rolling lawn. Because Dispatch

hadn’t read the names that went the phone numbers, I had to back up to the mailbox, pry open the locked flap on front. Inside, on an upside down label the postman had probably left, was Marsh, Lem. I pushed the flap shut, rolled forward. Lem Marsh. It’s a name my attorney says I should know. The ‘Lem’ part anyway. He’s associated with my dad for two bank jobs. Including that last one. But then he lucked into enough cash in South America to scrub his record clean. It wasn’t drug money either, but something to do with mines. He had a silver cartel, I don’t know. Or Aztec gold. It doesn’t matter. What does is that his double-size front door was open. I killed my truck, ratcheted the emergency brake down and followed a line of trees up to the house, close enough that I could feel the refrigerated air washing across the warm grass of the lawn. Looking back to my truck to be sure I hadn’t left the visor light on or something stupider, I saw that the line of dark footprints I’d dragged into the dew were the only ones. How long had that door been open? I stared at it, told myself I was waiting for my eyes to adjust. That I wasn’t scared. That he would recognize me. Through the open door, instead of the sound of vases breaking and wood cracking and frantic numbers being punched into a phone, there were two voices. Both were deep, and steady, and one of them, I was used to not understanding it. As a girl, I’d not understood it through the wall so many nights. I edged closer, flush enough with the house that the brick grabbed at the tips of my hair. I stopped, gathered it over my shoulder. They were talking about some woman in a bank. And — not quite laughing, but chuckling, anyway. Like how had they ever been that stupid? I leaned closer, my head over the porch now, and a security light buzzed on over me, my shadow suddenly crisp on the ground around me. Without even thinking about it, I closed my eyes. It was how I used to hide in hide and seek, my dad told me once. Inside, nothing. They were listening. I swallowed and it was loud in my ears. Finally one of them broke the silence: “So you understand then? It was all contract work, man. I never knew who the hell Shelly was hiring.” Lem. Not because I recognized the voice, remembered it from childhood, but because his tone, it was all about false bravado. It was supposed to sell his excuse better. The way you talk when a man you killed sits down across from you one day, to reminisce. “I fixed your leg, man,” my dad said back, just when I thought he wasn’t going to say anything else. “And I owe you for that,” Lem said, weaker. Another thing I could hear in his voice was how my dad looked, close up. The way I was picturing him in my head, he still had the rabbit head somehow, but was looking straight down into the rug, his ears dropping. “She — your girl.” “Shelly.” “She knew her name, Lem. She knew exactly who she was calling. You needed

somebody good and I was in the book, yeah? Tell me that’s all it was.” “You were better than good.” “But it was a one-way trip, man. You knew that, too.” “It doesn’t have to be like this,” Lem tried. “It already is like this,” my dad said back, and then there was the fast, desperate shuffle of feet, the sound of a thin glass breaking, a shell being chambered, then a silence so thick that the security light above me even went back to sleep. In the sudden darkness I was staring hard at nothing, trying to think who Shelly was, or could have been, but that all went away when the shotgun fired. I fell back with everything except my body. Now, from inside, there was just a deep ragged breathing. And then someone using a piece of furniture to pull himself up from the ground, it sounded like. Starting to breathe all at once, sudden, gasping. My dad. The real one. The shotgun clattered against expensive tile, Lem fell back down, or against something, and then, I don’t know. My dad hit him with a lamp or bookend, maybe. Hard enough to end their story once and for all. Because he knew the law was closing in, knew he didn’t have the luxury of a week to sit with him, I guess. I would have waited, though. Not disturbed him. Just to be that close, I mean. Slowly, so as not to rouse the security light, I balled my hands into fists. What I was doing was telling myself now over and over, for what felt like minutes. Instead, my dad came to me, the security light flaring with his first step out onto the porch. I didn’t scream, either. But it was an effort. He wasn’t wearing his face anymore, but somebody else’s, loose around the eyes and jaws. He’d pulled it over his head just like he’d done with the rabbit. It was him, though. Even after fifteen years, I knew. It was something about the way he stood in the doorway, half in, half out. A certain hesitation to his step or posture that I would know anywhere, I think. That I’ll know forever. Over his shoulder was Lem, rolled into a rug and tied with some kind of electrical cord. The front of my dad’s duster was ripped and smoking from the shotgun blast, his body seeping underneath, staining his right leg shiny black. But he was standing. Alive. And, more important, for a moment he seemed to forget what he looked like, I think, what he’d become. For a moment he was just Dodd, smiling a confused smile behind his mask, his off-hand rising as if to cup the side of my face. What he said then, his voice slow like a question, like this couldn’t be happening, was “Tanya?” My mom. I pursed my lips, swallowed, and didn’t look away from him. “Where have you been?” I heard myself saying, and, if I had it to do all over again I’d say something different, I know. A thousand other things. But this was all we were going to get. Instead of answering, my dad angled his head over the slightest bit, to see around me, and then six separate red dots clustered on his chest. I opened my mouth to tell him the thousand other things I had, or just to scream, but the FBI slugs were already slamming through the air on either side of me, into my

dad. It blew him back through the door, into the living room. And that was the last time I ever saw him.

Six days later — last week — the rest of the chupacabras would show up dead. Not killed, but woven together in a pile they probably remembered from their den. As far as I know, only three pictures of them made it into any kind of print. In it, they could just be sleeping. Those pictures are uncredited, though, and undocumented, so nobody takes them seriously. They could be doctored and staged a hundred different ways, and even if the negatives had turned up, the radiation probably would have made the film look suspicious anyway. The light would have been wrong. There would have been a glow around them, indicative of tampering. And no, Dave didn’t take those pictures. For all I know, it was that lady we’d traded for the rabbit head. She finally found her real treasure, and carried it off in a series of trash bags, is out there with them right now, running from the government. That’s the way legends go, I mean. They’re not real if there’s a body to dissect. But you know all this. Probably before I did, even. I don’t even get the papers until the day after, and my attorney won’t bring me any tabloids. We’re supposed to be focused on the case, on my defense, not on Bigfoot. Not on Hell Bunny. Some days I just sit here as he talks, though. Where I am is in a fairy tale. It starts in a convenience store.

The night after the day the FBI blew my dad’s heart all over a living room in Mount Bonnell, I was standing at a counter, paying for my ten thousandth cup of coffee since the Jomar. The clerk had just asked me if I was okay but I hadn’t answered him. Either he’d seen my fingers, trembling around the dollar I’d just given him, or he’d cued into the gauze my other hand was taped in. It was a cut. The FBI agent I’d hit had been wearing glasses. After that, they didn’t let me connect anymore, but passed me back across the lawn, to my truck. What I did then I’m neither proud nor ashamed of. Standing on my toolbox, crying, I threw everything in my bed at them, and then everything from my toolbox, and then everything I could pull from my cab — clipboard, rearview mirror, a plastic cup — but none of it made it far enough. I wanted them to take me in, needed them to take me in, but they wouldn’t. Finally I just slumped in the passenger seat, watched them file into the house one by one, leaving me alone, free to go. Or, free from federal charges, anyway. Sanchez would be another matter, I knew. For maybe ten more minutes I sat in my truck, and then the ambulance pulled in behind me. It wasn’t to save anybody, I knew, but to transport bodies. The way I could tell was that it was old, one of the ones with a van front end instead of a truck. I popped my emergency brake, rolled forward, didn’t want to have to hear a

gurney roll past. Technically, I wasn’t avoiding arrest either. They didn’t want me. What I did with the rest of that day, I’m not exactly sure. Just drove from place to place. One of them was Dave’s contact’s house. Another was the warehouse with the wire rolls. It was surrounded by emergency vehicles and news vans, and two Border Patrol trucks. I slowed down to just go ahead and get it the hell over with, surrender like Sanchez wanted, but let myself go to the convenience store first, for one last cup of coffee. The night clerk was glad for the company, I think. What he was watching on his black and white set was a news bulletin. The report was a sculpted woman standing in headlights. She was by some road. She was talking about my dad. Not by name, but as the “Mount Bonnell Disturbance.” Instead of her words, I heard what I’d been telling myself the last however-many hours: that I’d killed him. Sure, Sanchez hadn’t had enough manpower to cover nine different addresses, but the FBI did. Either that or they’d known to follow me to the right one. Either way, by going there, framing him in the doorway like that, I’d killed him. After all these years. Maybe this was how Dave had felt in the back of the LTD that day. A kind of numbness around the soul. As to what the reporter was really saying, I had no idea. “Seen this part yet?” the clerk was saying from somewhere, muting her with the remote. I turned to him slow, like I was drugged, or we were both underwater. “What?” “It’s been running since I came on,” he said, shrugging. “Turn it up,” I told him. “This is the best part,” he smiled, the volume bars climbing. Behind the reporter, past the SWAT teams and emergency vehicles and other news teams, was a retired ambulance. The kind with a van front. It was lying on its side, injured. The back door kicked open. According to the reporter, the only voice in the world for me anymore, the ambulance had been delivering two of the victims from last night’s Mount Bonnell Disturbance from the city storage unit to the federal one when — they didn’t know, exactly. But it seemed to be connected to the “Sixth Street Situation,” which the news previewed: a sea of people, all wearing rabbit ears, balancing beer in cans, because all the bars had closed hours ago. A riot. For Hell Bunny. Because he was alive. I dropped my coffee all over the magazines, pushed away from the counter. I was breathing too hard, too deep. “Yeah,” the clerk said, slapping his hand on the counter and leaving it there. “Nobody messes with Hell Bunny, right?” My mouth moved, but I couldn’t seem to get anything out. I took the remote, went up a few channels. The other news was the same thing but closer, following the mounted police through the crowds, the reporter trying hard to stay in-frame. Evidently the suspect had last been seen in a two-block radius, and seemed to be going for the bridge at Congress, maybe. To cross the river one last time. That’s how I knew it was my dad, yeah.

“What,” the clerk said. “You know this Hell Bunny or somesh —?” I was already gone. Running.

In 1966, a student with a rifle climbed the tower at the University of Texas and held the city of Austin hostage for an hour-and-a-half. Last week, as you know, I climbed that tower too. The only thing Austin, Texas is more scared of than something like my dad is history, repeating itself. My first shot was at dawn. It punched through the windshield of a car parked way over on 23rd. Nobody noticed. My next two went into a fire hydrant, until it geysered. And then people started looking up, and then, slowly, too slow for me, the police swarming Sixth Street were retasked, and the news copters banked high and hard, came back to me, to what I was doing, round after round, aiming so carefully, spacing my shots so as to give him as much time as I could. The way I imagine it, when the police started peeling away from him he stopped for a second and looked up, smiled. Except not all of them left, of course. Even one is enough, I suppose. I’d do it again, though. As many times as it took. And this time I’d bring a whole case of ammo, and go all day, until the barrel melted. But this time, I only had enough bullets to make it until lunch. It was Sanchez who finally talked me down. He said the only thing that could make me stop dry firing his precious .308. That they’d finally got him, trying to cross the water. That it was over. It could have been a lie, though. I had them use a firetruck ladder to deliver a television to me, and the whole city watched me hunch over that screen. Sanchez hadn’t lied. It was all there, from every angle, on a national broadcast. Instead of trying to walk across, Hell Bunny had commandeered a couple’s kayak and tried to row to south Austin. For the first few strokes, too, the water’s so smooth before the little yellow boat, like he’s really going to make it. Because there was too much news coming out that morning, some of it had been garbled. The established fact was that someone in a rabbit costume was shouldering a hostage across town, using that hostage as a shield. It was the only explanation for why he hadn’t been shot yet. But I was in the news, too, in the tower. Evidently, one of the times an editor flipped feeds, he’d left the banner at the bottom of the screen the same. My name. For a few minutes just after seven o’clock, I became Hell Bunny’s hostage for the national audience. That’s the only explanation I have for what happened anyway. What everybody who was watching me watch that broadcast up in the tower couldn’t see was that I had my hands over my mouth. I didn’t know whether to scream or smile. Just like the report was saying, Hell Bunny was in that little yellow boat. You could tell because of the big crusty rabbit head. Dave. Alone in the tower that day, I said his name aloud, touched the screen. He’d seen the news. That Hell Bunny had me. And it had stirred something in him, and he’d

come back somehow. To — I don’t know. Explain to him who I was? If anybody could have talked to the real Hell Bunny, though, it would be another person with giant ears. I don’t know. It’s what I like to think, anyway. That and that Dave, when that slug caught him in the back, was smiling, complete. Not afraid at all. What I told Sanchez when he pulled me down was nothing. “What?” he said, taking my hand to help me through the door at the bottom of the tower, my hands already cuffed five times over. I shook my head no, nothing. It took them two days to dredge up the body of David Sandoval, of Ozona, Texas. Like a real pirate, he’d been buried at sea. How long I’ll love him is forever, I think. That one photograph I cut out of all the dead chupacabra, what I’ve done to it, for Dave, is draw a small heart underneath, where the credit should go. He’d understand. As for the other two photographs, I left them in the paper. They don’t matter, see. In the one I saved, what the photographer’s done is lower herself down for a better angle on the chupacabra, so that, past them, you can see the slick brown rock they’re curled up on, and, right at the left edge of the picture, a hint of still water. It’s Wimberley, where my dad grew up. Jacob’s Well. This is what happened: thanks to Dave, my dad made it across that water like he always did, and carried and dragged Lem Marsh by night through Barton Springs and out 290, his chupacabras ghosting through the brush around him. His time was over, he knew. He’d seen — he’d seen his wife in a porchlight vision, right before the bullets slammed into him, and knew she was waiting for him, now that what he’d come back to do was done. His only problem was that he couldn’t die. So he went to the one place he knew would take him, Jacob’s Well, and he stood on the slick brown rocks for a long while, holding Lem Marsh, his old best friend, the chupacabra nipping and whining around him, and maybe he remembered standing there with me, even. He did, yes. Right at the end his hand opened and closed around the memory of mine, and then he nodded, looked back in that way he has, and stepped into the calm water, and went down and down and down forever, until not even the sunlight could touch him, all the way to Edwards Aquifer, and if you haven’t figured out yet how smart my lawyer is to have got me to write this all down in a tablet with a big red Private at the top, then you probably don’t know what a mistrial is either. It’s what happens when you tell the city of Austin about the rabbit content of their drinking water. Information you couldn’t possibly have had, except by reading this. So, yeah, this is it, the end. Fuck you. I’m going to see my dad now.

Author’s Note

The first night I stayed gone, seventh or eighth grade, where we slept mostly was Jacob’s Well. There were high-schoolers there with a little .22 pistol, and this huge giant turtle looking up at us from the water, and just this endless field of stars, and I was trying to get comfortable under them all on this shelf of rock, not having much luck, and then, fifteen years later, doing a reading in Houston for my first novel, somebody gave me a flyer talking about the dangers of border crossings, and Dodd just kind of looked up from under his shelf of rock in Mexico, like he was coming up here again. I’d just written a werewolf novel set over in Ozona, so I gave Del Rio to Dodd and Laurie, let them come up through the area codes I knew, places I’d sat with goats that had been pulled down by dogs, places I’d climbed trees to see if the mistletoe was really poison or not. Places I’d chased deer into the cactus, places I’d buried snakes, places I’d carried five-gallon buckets full to the top with horny toads. Pastures I’d seen these small parachutes drifting down into, before I even knew what getting stuff across the border was about. Storage units I’d painted for weeks. Convenience stores I’d lived in. Old broke-down houses I’d found in the middle of nowhere, with elaborate floorplans drawn on the walls with fresh blue ink, and little X’s there that were guards, walking. I’m still in all those places. Thanks to Chris Matney for reminding me, and to Kate Garrick, my agent, for keeping everything straight, and to Paul Tremblay, for some last-minute help with the complicated, complicated math, and to Tommy Bates and Ryan Myers, for help with parts of Austin I’d forgot, and to Ito Romo, for a pass over this from somebody who knows the bridges, and to Robert McKee, for telling that canoe joke so well, and to Matt Groening, for making the eared folk walk, talk, and hurt, and to Brenda Mills, always my first reader, and to Christopher O’Riley, Del Rio’s last, and mostly thank you to my daughter, just born when I wrote this, and to my wife, for giving me that perfect little girl.

About the Author Stephen Graham Jones is the author of Demon Theory, The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti, Ledfeather, and a few more, with The Ones That Got Away (horror stories) coming soon. His work has been included in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Best Horror of the Year vol.2, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, and has been a finalist for The Shirley Jackson Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and

the Black Quill. Jones grew up in West Texas, Ph.D’d at Florida State University, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.