The Carrion Birds by Urban Waite Page A

job working for some land company in Las Cruces that turned out to be
bogus.
    Gus finished his coffee. He looked over at Tom and
waited, but then when nothing came, Gus said, “Your cousin was never a good man.
Never was going to be and never will be.”
    “Harsh words from his father.”
    “I’m not saying I don’t love him, but I think you
know he made some bad decisions after the wells went dry.” Gus got up from his
chair and went into the kitchen. Ray had been gone for ten years now and there’d
been nothing from him in all that time. The only things left of Ray his son,
Billy, and his wife’s grave up the valley under the big oak, a little apart from
that of Gus’s own wife. A place where Gus, nearly eighty years old, said he’d be
buried someday as well. “You done?” Tom heard Gus say from the other room.
    “With the coffee?”
    “No,” Gus said, coming back to look in on Tom where
he still sat in Gus’s living room chair.
    “I’m sorry about this, Gus, I just thought—”
    “I can’t keep going on with you about this. I just
can’t. You understand?”
    Tom stood and brought his coffee cup into the
kitchen and put it in the sink. He sprayed water on his hands and then dried
them on his pant legs. “I’ll go now,” he said. “I suppose it’s getting
late.”
    When he got home there were several messages
waiting for him on the machine. One was from his father, giving him a start time
for the day after next, the other two were from Claire. Tom rewound the tape and
listened as Claire’s voice came on the machine again. “Tom? You there?” A long
pause and then, “Call me when you get this message.” He pressed delete and then
listened to the most recent message, left only twenty minutes before. “I know
you must have seen the story tonight, Tom. They just replayed it on the ten
o’clock news,” Claire said. “I know we didn’t leave things in the best light,
but if you want to talk, I’m around.”
    Tom deleted the message, then walked into the
kitchen and took out a beer. He was standing with the door of the fridge open
when the phone rang. The message clicked on and he listened for a while to the
silence of the machine and then, “I’m getting worried about you, that’s all.
I’ve left messages and you’re not calling me back. I’m just going to come by and
check up on you, Tom. That’s all. I’d feel better about it if I did.”
    Tom stared at the machine. The light of the open
fridge on him as he stood in his kitchen, expecting the answering machine to
click on any moment and keep talking to him. “Jesus, Claire,” he said under his
breath, taking another long pull from the beer and then putting it down on the
counter. He closed the fridge and then called to Jeanie, “You want to get out of
here for a while?” watching the mutt where she lay on the cool tile floor at the
far end of the kitchen.
    R ay
raised the apple to his mouth and took a bite. He was sitting in the Bronco,
watching the front drive of the hospital. The hospital was three floors in
total, built of a beige sandstone composite, with a side entrance for the
emergency room and the bright gleam from the front glass emanating all down the
block.
    The air had turned cold with the night and with the
windows up, he could see his own breath as he exhaled, the moisture in the air
beginning to condense against the glass.
    He set the apple down on the dash and took the
white paper napkin out of his jacket pocket. The room number written there in
blue ink. Memo had given him all there was to know about the kid up there and
the state of their affairs. Ray knew that if the kid lived, he was a liability
to them. He didn’t need to hear it again from Memo, though Memo had been
insistent on telling him.
    From where he was parked, three-quarters of the way
down the block and one block in from Main, he could see the two county cruisers
sitting there in the drive. One had been there most of the day, and the other
had