Read It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles for Free Online

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