HOLD YOUR HORSES, I told myself. If you fly off the bus like a rabid bat, they’ll turn and run.
Two plane rides and three and a half hours on a Greyhound bus, through the emptiest, most sunburned landscape I’d ever seen, and I was closing in on the town of Alpine, Texas. Alpine is where my cousin and my uncle were picking me up. There wasn’t any bus service down to Terlingua, in the Big Bend, where my mother’s long-lost brother made his living as a river guide.
West Texas was a thousand miles farther from home than I had ever been. I’d come all this way to paddle the fabled Rio Grande with Uncle Alan and his son, my cousin Rio. I’d never met them before, but in my imagination they had always loomed larger than life.
Strange to say, my mother hadn’t seen Uncle Alan since the year before Rio was born, and Rio was now fifteen. Her excuse? “Too many scorpions out there.”
My uncle’s excuse for never coming to visit us in North Carolina? Mom was sketchy on that one. I got the idea it was too expensive for him, or else he thought so little of civilization, he preferred to stay home with the scorpions.
The bus rolled on, and Alpine came into view across the high desert plain. I had pretty well guessed that the town’s surroundings weren’t going to look that much like the Swiss Alps. But Alpine did have mountains of a sort—scattered, scaly, and cactus clad. Pronghorn antelope were grazing below a billboard for the High Desert Hotel, which is where I would get off.
I soon had the hotel in my sights. I scanned the sidewalk and the front steps for my cousin and my uncle. I had a pretty good idea what they looked like from their annual Christmas card. “Greetings from Terlingua,” it always said, over a recent picture of the two of them, canoe paddles in hand, alongside the Rio Grande. The invitation for me to come out and run the river with them came three years ago, but my parents weren’t the sort to rush into things. My dad joked that if I was going to go out into the world to slay dragons, I should be of dragon-slaying age and trained in swordsmanship. Which meant that I had to wait until I was fourteen, with two years of canoe camp under my belt.
They must be waiting inside the hotel lobby, I told myself as I stepped from the air-conditioned bus into the searing heat of mid-July. Local time was six PM. I was right on the money.
Backpack and duffel bag collected, I made for the High Desert’s lobby. No relatives. No big deal, I told myself, they’re in a nearby grocery store. A week on the river meant twenty-one meals. Rounding up all those groceries was taking longer than they thought it would.
The lobby was deserted with the exception of a stuffed mountain lion and a rail-thin old man under a Stetson hat who rose from behind the counter to greet me. He might’ve been pushing ninety, with parchment skin, a nose like a hawk’s beak, and piercing blue eyes. “With your permission,” I said, “I just got off the bus, and I’d like to wait in your lobby. My relatives said to meet them here. They’re on their way to Alpine to pick me up.”
“Where from?” His voice was raspy and demanding.
“Terlingua. It’s about eighty miles from here, down close to the Mexican border.”
“Terlinguans are different,” the old man said with attitude.
I already knew that, but given his tone, I wasn’t going to admit it. To my way of thinking, that was the whole appeal. My cousin hadn’t grown up like me and practically every other kid in the country. In the Age of Connectedness, my cousin and my uncle were about as unconnected as you can get. They didn’t have a phone, and unbelievably, they didn’t even have a computer. My mother liked to say they lived under a rock. I guess my uncle did at one time, literally. There was always a grin on Mom’s face when she spoke of me going out west one day to dig them up.
What I said back to the old-timer was, “I wouldn’t know if they’re different, sir, I haven’t met any.”
“Take my word for it,” he insisted.
It seemed like we had reached an impasse. I took my leave, set my duffel bag in a corner, and headed over with my backpack toward the couch and the coffee table for what I hoped would be a short wait.
The breeze stirred by the paddles of the overhead fan felt good, and the leather couch was comfortable. For a couple of impatient minutes my eyes triangulated from the front door, to my watch, to the eyes of the mountain lion lounging on a waist-high slab of burl wood across the room. From where I sat the big cat kept staring at me. Those eyes might have been made of glass, but they were making me nervous.
Maybe to avoid the mountain lion’s predatory gaze, I grabbed for the newspaper on the coffee table. THREE HEADLESS BODIES FOUND IN THE RIO GRANDE, the headline read.
Well, I thought, that’s not so good.
The dateline read Rio Bravo, Mexico, which reminded me that Bravo was my cousin’s middle name. I didn’t know much about the Rio Grande, but this much I’d picked up back home: Rio Bravo del Norte—Brave River of the North—is the Mexican name for the Rio Grande.
The article was only a couple of paragraphs long and added little to the splashy headline. The bodies had been discovered just the day before, and the murders were presumed to be the work of Mexico’s vicious drug cartels. What I wanted to know was the location of this town of Rio Bravo. Was it in the Big Bend or anywhere close to it? I considered asking my friend behind the desk but thought better of it. Rio and his dad would know.
Sighting a computer at a table in the corner of the lobby, I checked in with my parents while the emailing was easy. I decided against mentioning the headline in the local paper. Uncle Alan had already assured them that the violence they’d been hearing about along the Rio Grande hadn’t come anywhere close to the Big Bend. It was either way upstream, especially around the city of Juárez, or way downstream, closer to the Gulf of Mexico. Terlingua’s river companies were running trips as usual through the canyons of the Big Bend.
What I emailed my parents was that I’d made it to Alpine and was expecting Rio and Uncle Alan any minute.
As I was finishing up with shout-outs to my younger sisters and brother, the phone was ringing behind the hotel desk. I heard the scratch of the old man’s voice as he took the call. Just then some rowdy Texans emerged from the restaurant behind the lobby and drowned out all other sound. By the time they passed through onto the street, the old guy was off the phone. “Your name Dylan Sands?” he called.
“Yes, sir,” I volunteered, “that would be me.”
He beckoned me over. “That was your cousin calling. Left a message for you.”
“They running late?”
“Not exactly. Said you should hitchhike down there.”
“Hitchhike? You have to be kidding.”
“Son, those were his exact words.”
“What was his explanation?”
“No explanation. Oh, and one other thing. Look him up at the Starlight.”
“What’s that?”
“The Starlight Theatre is what he’s talking about.”
“Meet him at a theater?”
“It used to be one back in the mining days. That was before the market for mercury went bust and Terlingua went to ruin. The fellow who bought the ghost town put a new roof over the walls of the old theater and turned it into a restaurant.”
“Did my cousin leave a callback number?”
“Nope, sure didn’t.”
“Did he know I was sitting right here in the lobby?”
“Sure did. I told him you was right here.”
“Hmmm . . . ,” I said.