Michael calls out; “Need a push?”
The boy grabbed at the rope, grinning back at us. Lifting his feet clear of the ground.
“Let's see what you got down there...” Michael walked towards him, under the tree.
Orla watched from the porch, a blank expression on her face. “Bonnie,” she calls out. “Honey. Won't you come on out here?”
I reached the step.
In the open doorway, Bonnie appeared. She stood, arms at either side, holding onto the door frame. Her mother's hair, same freckles.
“Uncle Gil and Uncle Michael are here.”
She watched me, a quick, nervous smile at her mouth.
“Show Uncle Michael the swing you made.”
Bonnie waited at her mother's skirts.
“Josh is showing him, I don't think he's doing it right.”
She jumped from the porch and ran over to the trees, Michael kneeling to her, as she wind-milled her arms.
I caught Orla's eye, caught the rawness.
She turned.
I followed her inside.
She stood in the dark shack—a sole room, staring at the uneven floor. “What happened to Michael?”
“Nothing. He's alright.”
“Whose is the pick-up? You get a new one?”
“No, I...”
“How come it's all smashed up on one side?”
I stared at the rough kitchen table. Kid's drawings, paste-board books. The remains of a meal scattered. I put the flight case and the envelopes on a corner of the table. By a plastic figure. A US Marine.
I walked to the window. It faced east, for the morning light.
I thought of the weight—that hung inside me. Was that where she stood at the start of each day? Behind me, I heard her footsteps on the floorboards. The scrape as she pulled out a chair.
I stared out the window, tried to imagine it; through Nate's eyes, a last time.
When he left the Corps, discharged injured, I thought it would be me.
I'd be first
. I'd stop a bullet one day. Set out down a garbage filled street, a patrol, some mud-brick town. I'd set out. Never come back.
I turned from the window, to face her. Laid a hand on the corner of the flight case.
“Put this somewhere. Where no one could find it. We have to leave.”
I thought of never seeing her again. A feeling like a wave hit me. So long thinking on a moment.
She sat in the kitchen chair, staring up. Not really seeing.
I hardly recognized the girl I used to know.
Through the open door of the shack, I heard the sound of Bonnie shrieking; Josh laughing, Michael calling out. At some feat of great prowess. On a rope swing above the tattered ground. The wind whipped away the sound.
Orla stared up at me. “How?” she says. “All this? How did we get here?”
I didn't answer.
We broke off looking at each other.
She sat at the kitchen table, hands together in her lap, rocking slightly.
“We can't stay,” I said.
She nodded to herself. “You know we never blamed you. A doctor at Walter Reed told me.” She stopped. “Even if you hadn't kept the patrol there. He said it wouldn't have made a difference...”
I blinked my eyes closed. Opened them. Felt the breath in my lungs.
“Nate said, you had to have been there...”
I ran a hand in my hair. Felt the grit and dirt. Thought of laying close to another human being. Tennille. On the hard ground. In the cold light of morning. What was there that I could tell her? What last wish, for Nate's woman. The children he'd never see.
“Keep everybody together...”
I pointed at the flight case, at the envelopes on the corner of the table.
She says, “What about Michael?”
I shook my head.
“He still doesn't know?”
“No,” I told her.
Orla had the right, that night after the funeral. The right to ask me anything.
I'd driven my truck across town, the streets I'd known all strange to me—Lafayette—my whole life, as if I'd never seen any of it before.
Nobody that knew Orla Childress would've denied her. Or cast the first stone.
We'd talked less than half an hour, no detail, no plan.
Nobody would ever know.
Steven was dead, better that Michael believe she never had a thing to do with any of it; that she was innocent. In the only way that mattered, she was.
We couldn't look each other in the eye no more. But we both agreed, me and her.
“Will you tell him?”
I shook my head. And stepped from the shack, out of her door.
My face stinging.
Under the strange yellow sky.
CHAPTER 32
Val Verde County.
The A-Star slides low across a swale of black and leonine grass. Whicher scans the burnt ground below the helicopter. From two hundred feet, it rushes at him as they sweep and turn.
“Bush fire,” says the pilot through the headsets. “We've been getting more and more, since the drought.”
A sighting—a vehicle reported trespassing on private property.
They'd listened to the radio traffic; a half-abandoned farm, some widow in her eighties. A green truck, she said, or it could've been blue—a truck that cut across the edge of her field of corn.
Nearest unit, a state trooper, had made his way up. Searched the place. Found nothing. Something went across the field, the trooper said. No telling what, or when it'd happened. DPS called up the grid reference for the helo.
“Shall I continue two-seven-zero, Marshal?”
There's scarcely a feature worth the name. Abandoned farms. Homesteads with miles in between them.
The marshal searches the empty terrain—stands of oak, a score of dry creeks. A twisting river.
The cover's poor, the going bad—only thing in its favor, it's not running close to any road.
“What do you think, son?”
The pilot levels the helo. “This close to the border, that's what I'd be looking at...”
“The border?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How far away is it?”
“Less than thirty miles from here.”
The wind buffets the canopy as they hover in the air. The pilot puts the helo into a steady climb.
“Y'all chase a lot of border jumpers?”
“Yes, sir, Marshal. Mostly headed the opposite way, though. Running north.”
“Catch many?”
“Hell, yeah. We get a bunch.”
No sign. Nothing out there. If it had been them, they were in transit—they'd already be gone.
“Del Rio's only ten miles from here,” the pilot says. “If they came through, maybe that's where they were headed...”
Del Rio.
What if everybody was tied up in the wrong spot?
What if they switched cars, right outside of Rocksprings? One of them had to have been waiting. Tennille Labrea. It would've been her.
Whicher stares out the glass canopy. An eerie cast at the horizon—the sky turning orange in the distance.
“What do y'all make of that sky?”
“That's the dust storm, Marshal. Doppler radar's picking it up. Strong pressure gradients over Mexico. Reminds me of the Middle East.”
“Y'all serve there?”
“Black Hawks. Out in Iraq.”
Whicher thinks of Reuben Scruggs. His Good Book. “We stay airborne in that?”
“Negative. That could be carrying half the Chihuahuan desert.”
Where to go, where to look? He thinks of the girl again; Tennille Labrea. Gilman James had his truck parked in her barn. Red paneled bodywork, shining like a fire truck when Sergeant Baker found it, two days back.
“How long before we'll have to land?”
“I can check...”
“Can you get me US Marshal's Service, western division?”
“We can down-link to pretty much anywhere.”
The pilot works on patching through the call.
Whicher tunes out the bursts of static on the radio.
Everybody tied up a hundred mile radius of Rocksprings. What if they're already gone? He watches a group of five horses, bolting in the shadow of the helo.
Gilman James left his truck inside her barn, the high desert hills at the border. Maybe they figured going back, all along. Nowhere more remote than that stretch.
A signal beeps in the headset.
“Press comm 2,” the pilot tells him.
A familiar voice crackles in Whicher's ear phones.
“Marshal Reuben Scruggs.”
“Sir, it's Whicher. I want to go after the girl—the Labrea girl.”
“What?”
“I think they're gone. There's a storm coming in, I got one chance to get ahead of them.”
“What's that on?”
“Gut call...”
“God Almighty, John, we need more than that.”
“I want to head west. To Terlingua. I think they might be done.”
Scruggs is silent a moment.
“I think Rocksprings could be the end of the line,” says Whicher.
“Y'all don't know that.”
The marshal reaches in the pocket of his suit. He pulls out the lined notepad, his eyes skimming the handwritten notes. Looking for anything, checking, re-checking, his mind racing, clutching at threads.
“Lafayette was for Tyler,” he says, “Michael Tyler.”
“Say again?”
“We know he used to work there, at the airport—after he came out.”
Scruggs doesn't answer.
“The bank at Alpine was Steven Childress.”
“That's what y'all been thinking?”
“He worked there, he lost his job, he cut up rough...”
The cockpit of the helo is filled with noise; the turbo whine of the engine, the thrum of rotor blades. Whicher tries to push it all out.
“Jackson Fork was all about Nathaniel Childress. That killed himself. What the hell difference they thought it was going make, I don't know...”
“This the brother?”
“He was living on some farm, him and his wife, two kids.”
Whicher stares down in the gulley of a limestone ridge, deep shadowed; barren. He wills himself to believe it. Lets his boss think it over.
“How about today?” says Scruggs.
“For the widow. Rocksprings was for the widow.”
The house lost, finally. After the farm.
The helicopter lurches in a sudden gust of wind.
“Where's the damn girl fit?” says Scruggs.
“I don't know. Honest to God. But she's got a daughter in this somewhere, a little girl...”
“So?”
“I don't reckon she's going to leave her behind...”
So close to Mexico, that was where they had to be headed.
He could call Lieutenant Rodgers; get a search organized.
“Say they were going to try to cross the border?” says Whicher. “I think Terlingua's where they'd do it...”
“I don't know, John.”
“She's unfinished business.”
Whicher taps the pilot's shoulder. Points his finger to the west.
The pilot rotates the helo, pushes forward on the cyclic.
“Y'all a praying man?” says Scruggs.
“Say again?”
“I know you ain't. But it's never too late.”
Whicher stares into the sick-looking sky—dust gray, orange; yellowed at its edges.
“Y'all catch them birds down there, do me one thing?”
“I'll see that justice is served...”
“Amen to that.”
South of Pandale.
We crossed the Pecos River through a country void of people, the land abandoned, only ghosts in the blistering heat.
Michael thought he saw a helicopter, running south along a ridge. It was just for a second—I looked but couldn't see. We stopped the truck in a gravel draw by a bank of desert willow. Waited. Then picked up again, heading west.
The course we made was parallel with the border, not more than thirty miles to the north, across the empty land.
We'd planned to head up country. Montana, it was going to be. Or maybe North Dakota. We'd live quiet, stay close to Canada. Cross if needed.
But Steven got himself killed, Michael was hurt bad—now that it all came down there was only getting out, staying free. Running. Cutting off the past.
“Two thousand miles,” I says, “to Alberta.”
Michael shook his head.
“Or British Columbia.”
“My blood's too thin for Canada, man.”
“Thirty five hours. We could be there.”
He held his arm in the sling.
Thirty five hours through Texas, Colorado, Wyoming. On into Montana. What were the odds? We'd never get to use an interstate, it could take us days.
I drove the Ford pick-up on through the trackless land. Bush scrub stretched out in every direction—the silhouettes of beaked yucca and ocotillo, clumps of tarbush, no end in sight.
“Coahuila,” Michael says.
Coahuila, north eastern Mexico.
“That's the closest...”
“It's too flat,” I says. “Too open.”
They'd be looking for us there. We'd never get the truck across. Michael couldn't swim the river—if he did, they'd be waiting, they'd pick us up easy. On foot we were dead and gone.
“How about we boost a car?”
I looked at him.
“Steal something,” he says.
“You even know how to do that?”
We were following a wash, dead wood and pieces of broken fence scattered in its path. Clouds of dust starting to gust now, in the tight valleys.
Thousands of miles to the border with Canada. I thought of Tennille, of Joe. The stretch of desert she came from, like the end of the earth.
She'd get out, at least, her and the kid.
I thought of standing up close with her—on the lane at Rocksprings.
“She's going across tonight...”
Michael raised his head off the seat back.
“Tennille.”
“Tennille?”
“She's going to cross the border.”
“Knock it off.” He shook his head. “Forget it. That's a crock...”
Two hundred-odd miles. What would it take us? Three hours.
Farm roads, ranch roads. We could run in desert—if anyone could, we could. “She knows the land, she knows people...”
He didn't answer.
“She saved your life...”
He lay his head back. Searched the ceiling of the cab, mouth ajar.
“We're never going to make it,” I says, “on our own.”
The sky to the southwest was deepening amber. I felt a quickening in my gut.