It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles by Stephen Graham Jones Page B

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-a-bottle 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