In Amigo, everything is black and white.
Except for the wetbacks. They’re brown.
They’re the color of the dirt that I heaped on that coyote’s grave.
Yeah. That’s right. I said “coyote’s grave.”
See, there wasn’t any naked Mexican. Not anymore. In fact there never had been a Mexican, now that he was tucked away under a dead coyote and dirt blanket.
Ask me. Ask Rudy. Ask Wes.
Rudy chuckled one last time. “So what d’ya say, Wes? We take our buddy Roy to Carmelita’s? The three of us have a couple of beers and see what ’Chita and the other girls are up to?”
Wes stared at the grave. “No, Rudy. We don’t got time for that.”
The news didn’t break my heart. Carmelita’s is all right if you don’t mind your women with bite marks on their asses, but it’s not exactly my kind of place. The border patrol boys like it, though. But guys who drive around with Mexicans chained to their bumpers tend to develop some pretty7 strange quirks.
“Shit,” Rudy complained. “It ain’t like they’re payin’ us overtime.”
“You’re forgettin’ comp time,” Wes said.
“Fuck that. I got so many hours of that shit, I could retire now if they’d let me take it.”
“You should have thought of that before you killed the wetback.”
“I was tired of listening to him scream. Jesus. I just got mad, is all. I couldn’t help it.”
“Whatever,” Wes said, digging in his heels. “The simple fact is this: we come up short, and we have to do something about it.”
I stopped listening. The conversation didn’t have anything to do with me anymore. I tossed my shovel in the back of my truck and dug my keys out of my pocket.
Wes stepped in front of me. “Where you think you’re goin’, cowboy?”
“C’mon, Wes — ”
“Hold your horses. I got a question.”
“Shoot.”
“Did you see anybody else out here today?”
I nodded. “Some guy drove by, heading toward the buttes. Usual idiot. Looked like a saucer nut, if you ask me.”
“Sure he was a saucer nut?”
“I didn’t get a real good look at him, Wes. He didn’t even stop. But he looked like the type.”
“What was he driving?”
“He had a van.”
“What kind?”
“Dodge. Solid-panel — ”
“Solid-panel, huh?” Wes smiled. “That’s interesting.”
“Coyotes use solid-panel vans,” Rudy said. “Gringos who haul illegals. They pack ’em in like sardines. Haul ’em as far north as Chicago.”
“C’mon,” I said. “This guy was a saucer nut. Believe me, I know the type like the back of my hand.”
“Yeah,” Wes said. “I forgot. You went to college. You’re smarter than idiots like me and Rudy.”
I laughed it off. I had to. Most people who grow up in Amigo never leave, let alone come back. I’d done both. I was pretty sure that Wes didn’t trust me because of it. At least not the way he trusted Rudy, or other guys who’d stuck it out the way he had.
“I don’t think I’m all that smart,” I said. “Elsewise, I wouldn’t be going around with a shovel and a truckful of roadkill.”
“Yeah, well… ” Wes sighed. “Maybe you are smarter than us. Maybe the simple fact is that we need your help.”
“I haven’t had lunch, Wes.”
“Sorry, son. But I need me a bird dog.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not one bit.” Wes straightened. Sunlight glinted off his polished badge, and I was fairly blinded by the golden brilliance of authority.
Wes said, “This kind of work, you can’t just show up in a uniform. Folks tend to get nervous, change their plans all of a sudden.”
“What makes you think he’ll treat me any different?” I asked. “I wear a uniform. I carry a gun.”
Wes stared at my dirty khaki outfit. Gas station attendants looked more intimidating. As for my gun, there was no use showing off the .22 target pistol I kept in the glove compartment of my truck. The truck itself was bad enough — Wes stared at that dented hunk of Detroit steel with a smirk simmering on his face.
“It ain’t exactly the Batmobile,” he said. “And you ain’t the caped crusader, neither.”
I tried one more time. “C’mon, Wes — ”
He shook his head. “You know how it works around here, Roy.”
“Damn,” I said, because Wes was right. I did know.
Wes didn’t have to say anything else. Rudy handed me a walkie-talkie. “We’ll be close. You won’t see us, though.”
I tossed the walkie-talkie into my truck and opened the door. “And if I’m right?” I asked. “If the guy is just a saucer nut?”
Wes scratched his chin. “Got a tip for you, Roy.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t think positive. It’s a waste of time.”
The longer I talked to the guy in the solid-panel van, the easier it was for me to believe that Wes was right.
Not that he wasn’t different enough. For starters, he had a weird accent. The kind that made him sound smarter than he probably was. German, or Austrian — like Schwarzenegger in the movies — but with a hint of something else, too.
And on first glance the guy certainly looked the part. That was for sure. Like the hardware he was packing. He had a pair of expensive binoculars slung around his neck, and a video camera mounted on a tripod stood next to his van along with a couple of gizmos that might have been Geiger counters or electric juicers, for all I knew. Plus he had a pasty complexion and a nervous tic at one corner of his mouth, like he spent too much time indoors engaged in compulsive behavior. Covering all the electrical outlets in his house with aluminum foil to protect himself from alien transmissions. That kind of thing.
But after I’d spent a little time with him I began to think that the tic — just like his story and the video camera and all the rest of it — was some kind of elaborate put-on. Kind of like he’d read about UFOlogists in
See, the look isn’t everything. What the guy didn’t have was the curiosity that always piggy-backs the look. I mean, he didn’t ask me hardly any questions, and that’s not the way it works with saucer hounds. One of those nuts finds out you’ve lived in Amigo practically all your life, you can’t get rid of them with a crowbar.
First they want to know if you’ve ever seen a saucer. And if you’ve never seen a saucer, why then they want to know if you’ve ever seen an alien. And if you’ve never seen one of those, why maybe you’ve seen a black helicopter. Or one of those ubiquitous men in black.
