Read Online It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles by Stephen Graham Jones - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Stephen Graham Jones
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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
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
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