The November Special Guest Story is by Ronald Malfi
Please feel free to visit Ronald at: http://www.ronmalfi.com
CHUPACABRA
by Ronald Malfi
I am a nervous wreck coming into Salinas Cove, my sweaty hands slipping on the steering wheel. I have come from Durango, down through Mesa Verde and across the Rio Grande toward Las Cruces, and the air is warmer. Even at twilight.
I peer through the windshield at the oncoming darkness.
It is a rundown motel outside the city. An illuminated sign promises its employees speak English. I pull into the parking lot and turn off the engine. It ticks down in the silence. There is less light out here, outside the city. Mine is the only car in the parking lot.
The girl who signs me in is dark-skinned, pretty. She definitely does not speak English. I scribble my signature on a clipboard and fork over my driver’s license. Behind the counter, a wall-mounted television set flickers with the black-and-white, static-marred image of Cary Grant.
And for a moment, I zone out. I hear the man with the ironworks teeth saying, You do not look like him. He says, Your brother—you do not look like him. Yet he extends his hand anyway.
The room is bleak, tasteless, the color of sawdust. The shower stall is filthy and ancient, and there is the distinct impression of a foot stamped in grime on the shower-mat. Sketches of hunting dogs and wind-blown cattails cling to the walls in spotty frames. The bed looks miniscule, like something from a child’s fairytale about a family of bears, and it is packaged in an uncomfortable-looking bedspread adorned with fleur-de-lis. The ghosts of cigarettes haunt the room. Yet none of this troubles me at the moment. I stand in the center of the room and look at the miniscule bed and am nearly knocked over by the sudden strength of my exhaustion.
Immediately, I strip. I go straight for the bed and do not turn down the comforter and do not turn out the lights, for fear cockroaches will trampoline on my body in the dark. So I remain in bed, my hands behind my head, listing to my own heartbeat compete with the chug of someone’s shower through the wall. And despite my utter exhaustion, I cannot find sleep.
I am thinking of the man with the ironworks teeth, and how he extended to me a set of pitted brass keys. Keees, he pronounced it. Keees, chico. And then I think of my brother, of Martin, and the way he looked after returning from the Cove, like some vital fluid had been siphoned from him. When he first saw me at the trailer park, he tried to smile, but his smile was all busted up, his lips split, his teeth jagged. His eyes were bulbous, swollen, amphibian in their protrusion. They did me real good, bro. Sure they did. Sure.
Somehow, I become hostage to a series of dreams. They all have the sepia-toned quality of old movies. Shapeless, hair-covered creatures shuffle along the periphery of a nightmare highway; each time I try to look at them, they break apart into glittering confetti.
At one point, I awake. I think I hear Martin talking somewhere in the distance. He speaks with the marble-mouth distort of a stroke victim. Because I cannot sleep, I rise and do calisthenics just beyond the foot of the bed in the half-gloom. I am too wired to sleep.
Before I know it, morning breaks through the half-shaded window across the room. I shower with the dedication of a death row inmate. Brushing my teeth with my finger, I try to think of old songs on the radio to hum, but I cannot think of anything.
With some detachment, I dress. And it is still early morning by the time I’m back in the car. I drive for some time without seeing anything, then finally pull over at a gas station to refill the tank. I purchase a cup of black coffee and a chocolate chip cookie nearly the size of a hubcap. The gas station is practically a ghost town; only a mange-ridden mutt eyes me from across the macadam. Back in the car, I drive for an hour and breeze by the twisted carcasses of chupacabraalong the side of the highway.
I glance out the window to my left and watch the mesas watch me. I’m surprise I haven’t seen any border patrol vehicles yet. This relaxes me a bit. I cross into Mexico with little difficulty, sticking to the route previously outlined for me by the man with the ironworks teeth.
I pull into a deserted parking lot outside a diner somewhere west of Ciudad Juárez. An ice cream truck sits slumped and tired-looking in the sun, mirage-like in a halo of dust. The sun seems to be at every horizon. I park alongside the ice cream truck and step quickly from the car to survey the vehicle. It could be an elephant. Or maybe a bank safe. Its color suggests it was once a pale blue, the color of a robin’s egg. But both the desert sun and the passage of time have caused it to regress to a monochromatic gray, interrupted by large magnolia blossoms of rust and speckled with muddy chickenpox. Cryptic phraseology has been spray-painted along one flank. Reads, “Sho’nuf.” Reads, “Denis Does Daily.” Its windshield is grimy but in one piece and the tires, all four of them, look new.
Inside, I sip a glass of tasteless soda while picking apart a sopapilla-stuffed fat with beans that look like beetles. I wait. Soon, a young, scarecrow-faced man with a too-wide mouth and baggy dungarees materializes beside my table. He introduces himself as Diego. He seems friendly enough. He sits across from me and orders a 7-Up. To quell my nerves, he tells me about a helicopter ride into the Grand Canyon and how there is this entire Indian tribe living down there, just tucked away like a secret behind some waterfall, and I listen with mild interest. Then around noon, just when I think nothing is going to happen, I catch a glint of chrome on the horizon morph into a prehistoric Impala as it draws closer to the diner.
“That’s him,” Diego says.
His name is Caranegra and his face is indeed almost black as tar. He does not smile—not like the man with the ironworks teeth, the man who gave me the keees, chico—and he tries hard to be stoic when we first meet. He wears a tattered Iron Maiden concert tee which I find somewhat comical and his knuckles are alternately covered with tattoos and intricate silver rings.
“I’m Gerald,” I say and am not sure if I should shake this man’s hand or not. I opt for a slight nod and leave it at that.
Caranegra acknowledges both Diego and me with a grunt. “You are Martin’s brother?”
“Yes.”
“You do not look like him.”
“Yeah, that’s what the other guy said.”
“Pinto? Who gave you the keys?”
“Yes. Pinto.” I hadn’t known his name.
“You look nervous to me, boy,” Caranegra says. And before I can answer, he says, “Your brother, he was not careful. That is why his face looks like it does. He has been doing this for a long time, muchacho, and he got careless. If you get careless, then the bad things can happen. If you do not get careless, muchacho, you will not have a face that looks like his.”
“I won’t be doing this for very long,” I say quickly. For whatever reason, I feel I need to make this clear. “I’m just working off what Martin owes.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s my brother.”
Caranegra leans back in his chair. I can smell marijuana about him like body odor. His face is heavy with lines and creases, like a map that has been folded too many times, and I cannot tell if I am looking at a genius or an imbecile. “Martin, your brother, was not a stupid man,” he says. “He was a smart man. He just got careless. Did he ever tell you about his last crossing?”
“Some of it.”
“Not all?”
“He told me enough. He just left some parts out.”
“I would bet,” says Caranegra, “those are the parts that make him look careless.” And he smiles sourly.
“I have to piss,” Diego says and rises automatically from the table. “Can we hurry this along? I’ve got things.”
Caranegra watches Diego cross the diner and, when he is out of earshot, says, “He is my sister’s boy. He is the good kid.” Then he leans toward me over the table. Suddenly we are ancient friends and longtime conspirators. “How old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“You look younger.”
“I can show you my driver’s license.”
Caranegra waves uninterested fingers at me. “This is the delicate work, muchacho. Do you understand?”
“You don’t have to worry about me.”
“You have the map?”
I remove a roadmap from my rear pocket and splay it out across the table. With a fat red thumb, Caranegra presses down on a section just southwest of Guerrero. “Debajo Canyon. Up here, then up here, then—do you follow? Then up here.” His eyes never leave mine. “But this is the delicate work, muchacho.”
“You don’t have to worry.”
Caranegra thumps his thick bronze fingers on the tabletop. Says, “Come with me.”
Outside, he pats the side of the ice cream truck. “Pinto give you the route, no? The directions?”
“Yes.”
“That is the best route. Pinto knows all the best routes. You stay on that route and you will have no worries.”
“What’s in the truck?”
“Your brother was careless,” Caranegra says. “Also, he started to ask many questions.”
Diego saunters out into the broad sunshine, hitching up his too-big dungarees. He smiles when he sees us as if happy to see old friends.
“Diego will take you to Debajo Canyon to get the I.D.,” Caranegra says. “From there, you will travel alone.”
Awkwardly, I move to shake his hand.
Carangera just laughs. Says, “You do not look like him.” Says, “Get lost now.”
No more than a minute later, Diego and I are kicking up dust in the ice cream truck, leaving the ruddy-faced Caranegra standing in the parking lot of the diner, his ridiculous Iron Maiden tee-shirt flapping in the breeze. The truck drives horribly, and I can feel every bump and groove in the roadway. It gives off the distinct aroma of burning steering fluid and someone has spilled M&M’s into the radiator ducts; they rattle like ball bearings from one side of the dash to the other with each sharp turn.
Debajo Canyon is due south, near Guerrero, and we are closer to it now than I thought we were. Diego stares at the map and talks to himself and hums hair metal songs under his breath while drumming his fingers on his knees. Having driven all this way by myself, his presence is practically suffocating, despite the fact that we hardly speak to one another. Then, finally, Diego mentions Martin.
“Did he ever tell you about this?” he asks. “About the job?”
“A little.”
“He ever say what he carried in the trucks?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you ask?”
“Sure.”
“Frankenface didn’t tell you?” And he seems pleased with himself for coming up with the name.
“I just assumed drugs,” I said. “Or guns. Something like that.”
“Do you know who did that to his face?”
“No. He never said.”
“It was Pinto,” Diego says. “Used his big fists.”
For whatever reason, this upsets me.
“They sure banged him up pretty good,” Diego continues. “Had a B.A.G.”
“What’s that?”
“Busted-Ass Grille.”
“Let’s drop it.”
Something flickers just to the left of my line of sight. My breath catches. Immediately my mind returns to the dreams, and to the shapeless beasts that scale the highways. Chupacabra. Goat-suckers.
“What?” Diego asks, sensing my sudden unease.
“Chupacabra,” I say. “Martin used to scare me with stories of the chupacabra when I was little.”
“He raise you?”
“Our parents died when we were young, yeah.”
“So now you feel you need to pay him back? To finish what he started?”
I roll my shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“This is not the business for that, bro.”
“It’s just this one time.”
“Christ.” Diego sinks down into the passenger seat. “Chupacabra’s a myth. They’re coyotes. Your brother saw coyotes.”
“I saw something large and hairy dead on the side of the road coming down here. Looked too big to be a coyote.”
“You’re ridiculous,” Diego says.
Am I? Because I am thinking of the horror stories Martin used to tell me when I was younger and he’d return from weeks and sometimes months on the road. He would tell me of the chupacabra and of the way they drained the fluids from livestock and how, sometimes, they drained the fluids from people, too. Of course, I know now that there are no such creatures, but seeing the dead coyote along the side of the road and thinking, too, of Martin instill within me a certain disquiet. Suddenly, I feel like turning around and driving the hell home.
It is late by the time we pull into Debajo Canyon. It is nothing more than a sandstone bluff overlooking a scrub grass valley, milky in the oncoming darkness, interrupted at intervals by ramshackle hovels and peeling, sad-looking campers. I have no idea what to expect from Diego’s associates, but I can sense an urgency in Diego the moment we cross onto the rutted gravel roadway leading toward the semicircle of campers. In the distance, a small bonfire winks at us. The sky is dizzy with stars.
Diego has unraveled a worn slip of paper and looks at it now the way an explorer might scrutinize a treasure map. Says, “Pull off to the left here, Gerald.”
I pull off to the left. Say, “Which one is it?”
Diego points past the windshield. “Straight ahead. One with the lights on.” It is a beat-up trailer with automobile tires nailed to the roof. It is one of the few with lights in the windows.
Diego pops the passenger door and climbs down from the ice cream truck. For the first time, I catch a glimpse of a pistol butt jutting from the waistband of his dungarees, hidden beneath his shirt. “Let’s shake a tail feather, bro. I got things.”
I pop my own door and hop down, kicking up dust with my sneakers, and follow Diego to the trailer. Diego mounts the two abbreviated steps to the door then knocks and waits. Knocks again. My discomfort increases and I take a step back. Across the sandstone courtyard, very few lights are on in any other homes, and even the distant bonfire has disappeared. I scan the horizon for a sign of civilization beyond the trailer park, but I am kidding myself. We are alone.
The trailer door opens and we’re suddenly scrutinized by a barrel-chested Mexican in a wife-beater, his thick, hairless arms as red as the sunset. His matted, corkscrew hair informs me we’ve just woken him from a nap.
Briefly, Diego and the man exchange pleasantries in Spanish. I understand very little of what is said. It isn’t until I recognize my brother’s name that I feel I am included in all this, and the big man in the wife-beater grins bad teeth at me.
Inside the trailer is like being in a coffin. The air is stale and palpable. It is a home for papers and paperwork, of overflowing manila folders and spools of adhesive tapes, an ancient reel-to-reel recorder that blindly stares, and the like. Unwashed plates are stacked like ancient tablets in the sink. The whole place smells not of a structure of human residency and occupancy but, rather, of mildewed library cellars and wet paperback novels and discarded and forgotten towers of time-yellowed newspapers.
“Aquí,” the barrel-chested man says, and quickly directs me to stand against one wall. Suddenly, I am looking across the cramped trailer at the lens of a digital camera. The man rattles off a succession of photos then, moments later, perches himself in front of a computer monitor.
Startled by movement in a darkened corner of the trailer, I squint to find a set of dark eyes staring back at me. An ancient Mexican woman, nearly skin and bones, watches me from a Barcalounger across the trailer. She has a knitted afghan pulled over her legs, and her hands, like the talons of a prehistoric bird, sink into the divot of her lap. Like a ghost, she watches. I suddenly taste my own heartbeat.
Then she starts cackling.
“Here,” says the barrel-chested Mexican, stabbing a freshly-minted driver’s license in my direction. He has something else in his other hand—something that quickly steals Diego’s attention. It’s marijuana, a few ounces of the stuff, in a Ziploc bag.
“Hey, Frodo,” Diego says. “Go wait in the truck.”
Cold, uncomfortable, I climb back into the truck and punch off the headlights. I sit in the simmering quiet of a desert night. I wait for decades. Soon, Martin is seated somewhere behind me in the truck, whispering my name. He makes me promise to be careful and to not ask too many questions. I call him an idiot and tell him I’ll be home soon. He asks if I’ve seen the chupacabra and I snort…but deep down inside I am that lost, little boy again, fearful of the goat-suckers, of the desert vampires. You know they don’t exist, Gerald, right? he soothes me now. Yet I frown and tell him it’s too late, damn it, that he has already poisoned me with his stories, years of poisoning, years of waiting in my own sad little trailer for him to come home and raise me and act like a responsible adult. Is it fair that I should have to act like the responsible adult for both of us now? Is it?
It was an accident, he whispers. I drove a truck into a river. Then: They did me real good, for driving the truck into the river. They did me real good, bro.
Sure they did.
Sure.
Across the bluff, Diego spills through the trailer door. He staggers to the ice cream truck and motions for me to take down the window, which I do.
“Hey,” he says, “you know where you’re going, right?”
“I have the map.”
“Yeah. Uh, I’m gonna crash here, all right?”
“I don’t need to drive you somewhere?”
“Take it easy, Gerald.”
I spin the wheel and pull back on to the main road, this time heading north. I drive for nearly forty-five minutes, the only living creature among miles and miles of desert. And when I think I see something shapeless and black moving alongside the highway, I can’t help but slam on the brakes and straddle the highway’s center line like a tightrope walker. And I think, Chupacabra! I am breathing heavy and sweat stings my eyes. Behind me, somewhere in the darkness, I hear Martin assure me that the chupacabra are not real. Vampire devils. Goat-suckers. His face, he says—what they did to his face is real, but the goat-suckers are not.
It is always brighter the moment you step out of a vehicle in the desert, no matter how dark it is. Now, it is cold, too. When people think of perishing in the desert they usually don’t imagine themselves freezing to death, but that is the truth of it.
I step around the side of the ice cream truck, my ears keying in on every desert sound. The chatter of insects is deafening. I cannot seem to get my heartbeat under control. With one hand tracing along the body of the truck, I move to the rear of the vehicle and peer through the darkness. I am not shocked when I see the reflective glow of two beady eyes staring back at me from the cusp of the highway; rather, a dull sense of fatigue overwhelms me.
It is a coyote. I see it clear enough as it turns and scampers further down the shoulder of the roadway. And while I am relieved, I am quickly accosted by a delayed sense of fear that causes my armpits to dampen beneath my sweatshirt and my mouth to go dry. I turn and begin to head back to the cab when I hear a sound—some sound, some thump—echo from the rear of the truck. From within.
My footfalls are soundless on the blacktop of the midnight highway. There is no lock on the rear doors—just a simple bolt slid into a ring. Unhinging the bolt, I peel the doors open and stare into the black maw of the truck. The sick-sweet stink of decay breathes out. I climb into the rear of the truck. There are coolers affixed to the floor and metal boxes on shelves. There are a number of cardboard ice cream boxes lining the shelves here, too, but they are empty and so ancient that a slick, brown mildew coats every box. Looking down, I expect the coolers to be locked with padlocks, but they are not, and I am surprised.
Chupacabra? I wonder, and open one of the coolers. The hinges squeal and I fumble around my jacket pocket for a pen light. Shine the light into the back of the truck.
At first, it does not even register with me. And even after it does, I do not fully understand what I am looking at.
There are a number of them, bronze-skinned and wide-eyed, staring up at me, pressed so closely together that they are indistinguishable from one another. They reek of fear and sweat, their expressions just as uncomprehending as my own. Their clothes are filthy, their faces greasy with perspiration. So many of them, it is a wonder they can even fit. Finally, before I ease the cooler lid down, one of them says, “Muchacho.”
“I’m sorry,” I say…although I am unsure if I am actually speaking or am just hearing the words funnel through my head. And I hear Martin saying, They did me real good, for driving the truck into the river.
It is a long, quiet ride back across the border.
Ronald Malfi was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1977. Along with his family, he eventually relocated to Maryland where he spent most of his childhood growing up along the Chesapeake Bay. He professed an interest in the arts at an early age and is also known to be a competent artist and musician. In 1999, he graduated with a degree in English from Towson University. For a number of years, he fronted the Maryland-based alternative rock band Nellie Blide.
Ronald Malfi is the author of the well-received novel Snow and most recently, The Ascent. Recognized for his haunting, literary style and memorable characters, Malfi’s horror novels and thrillers have transcended genres to gain wider acceptance among readers of quality literature.
He currently lives along the Chesapeake Bay.
You can visit Ronald Malfi HERE.
You can find all of Ronald Malfi's books HERE.
