All the bones in brooks.., p.1
All the Bones in Brooks County, Texas, page 1
ALL THE BONES IN BROOKS COUNTY, TEXAS
ADAM TAYLOR BARKER
WILDBOUND ENTERTAINMENT EDITION, AUGUST 2023
Characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by Adam Taylor Barker
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
First Wildbound Entertainment paperback edition August 2023
Published by Wildbound Entertainment
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author.
Book cover design by CoverKitchen
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming All the Bones They Left Behind by Adam Taylor Barker. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
ISBN: 979-8-9885124-1-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 979-8-9885124-2-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 979-8-9885124-0-0 (ebook)
Manufactured in the United States of America
CONTENTS
I. Far Down within the Dim West
Day One
Monday 1:22 pm
3:14 pm
5:22 pm
5:41 pm
6:04 pm
6:56 pm
8:22 pm
Day Two
Tuesday 12:09 am
2:10 am
9:22 am
11:07 am
7:38 pm
8:40 pm
9:32 pm
10:24 pm
Day Three
Wednesday 7:24 am
10:41 am
5:48 pm
7:44 pm
9:17 pm
II. An American Guide to Babylonian Walls
Day Four
Thursday 6:44 am
7:55 am
8:39 am
9:26 am
12:31 pm
2:03 pm
3:17 pm
4:41 pm
6:22 pm
Day Five
Friday 8:47 am
9:30 am
2:24 pm
4:03 pm
4:51 pm
6:27 pm
7:40 pm
8:38 pm
9:04 pm
Day Six
Saturday 2:38 am
3:41 am
4:23 am
5:09 am
4:35 pm
6:07 pm
7:53 pm
9:23 pm
11:11 pm
III. Ruins of the Doomed City in the Valley of Death
Day Seven
Sunday 2:06 am
6:00 am
7:22 am
7:53 am
9:21 am
9:47 am
11:09 am
1:32 pm
6:48 pm
Day Eight
Monday 9:12 am
10:09 am
4:36 pm
6:08 pm
8:11 pm
8:44 pm
9:37 pm
11:11 pm
Day Nine
Tuesday 2:17 am
5:48 am
8:36 am
9:15 am
9:26 am
9:39 am
9:46 am
10:02 am
11:53 am
12:32 pm
12:40 pm
1:12 pm
1:28 pm
2:02 pm
2:11 pm
2:16 pm
2:33 pm
2:56 pm
3:21 pm
Epilogue
ALL THE BONES THEY LEFT BEHIND
Sequel Prologue
About the Author
DEDICATION
For my family, both here and there
ALL THE BONES IN BROOKS COUNTY, TEXAS
PART ONE
FAR DOWN WITHIN THE DIM WEST
According to official Border Patrol statistics, illegal crossings along the southwestern border have claimed 7,209 lives over the past 20 years.
But investigations have determined that those numbers may be grossly underestimated by as much as 300%.
There exists no reliable system for tracking these deaths.
DAY ONE
AUGUST 11, 2019
MONDAY 1:22 PM
Vultures had been circling above through a heat haze for hours when the unearthed bones were found. A doberman had returned to his master's porch on an evening ripe for rain with a long object in its maw, scritch-scratching its teeth across something as hard and pale as porcelain.
"Watcha got there ol' Gertie?” a rancher muttered.
His aching body unwound from his perch on a rocking chair and ambled its way across creaking planks of wood, his ladder-back rocker continuing its motion by wind like a pendulum.
He kneeled beside the dog and reached through her salivation to wrench the object free, wiping the bone of grit and gristle. In his hands he held one part of a body, one piece of a puzzle that would bring its soul and many others to their salvation.
As he made the call, he looked out over his ranch, at the property his family had owned for centuries, from a time when cowboys were heroes and when injuns had fastened their spear-tips with sharpened skeletal remains that once held unspoiled meat.
We're all just corndogs, he thought. Walkin talkin meat on sticks.
He held his flip-phone to his ear and on the other end was the voice of a woman and after he finished talking he flipped the phone closed again and blinked and for a second he was unsure of whether he'd made the call at all. His eyes remained on the horizon where storm clouds were forming. He watched as heat lightning flashed in intermittent strikes of nature's threatened violence and his thoughts were still on ancient times and how far we were from having just been apes in trees whose bones were gnawed by saber-teeth.
He watched the vultures from his porch, the wide-winged birds collecting by the hundreds and coasting in long and languid circles as if trapped in the weak funnel-suck of a slow-moving drain. He never knew what time it was when he made the call or how much time had passed until a deputy arrived but he knew the vultures were lower now and that he was as close to his own grave as those raptors were to carrion.
"Good day, Mr. Ellis," the deputy offered, nearing the porch steps.
"Call me Ephraim, wouldja?" he replied, eyeing the deputy.
"Deputy Velazquez. Call me Hondo, if you like."
"Ain't seen you before."
"Ain't been out this way before."
Ephraim noted the dark skin of the deputy and the hidden accent of a Hispanic buried beneath the Texas twang that seemed forced to his ear and he creased his eyes with incredulity.
"You ain't new?"
"I ain't new. Got a year under me," was all the deputy offered so Ephraim shrugged and swayed from side to side as he descended his steps with stiff legs.
"Found this sometime earlier. Least my dog did."
He handed the forearm bone to Hondo who tugged on some blue plastic gloves before gently accepting the object.
"Reckon it came from over yonder... Got a death spiral formin goin on a few hours, I figure. Ain't made a move to scour the area yet... heat bein what it is."
"Don't blame you," Hondo muttered as he placed the bone inside a large zip-up bag and eyed the distance to the black birds nearing the soil, their circular coasting somnific and fluid, morose in their incessant and unstoppable motion.
A feathered halo for angels below, Hondo thought to himself.
"We can take a truck if you'd rather," the rancher muttered through lips stretched by chewing tobacco.
"Prefer t’keep our tracks to a minimum."
"Understandable, if unfortunate," rancher said as he notched his cowboy hat upon his balding scalp.
He used one finger to rid his mouth of that cancerous brown gob and flung it to the dirt with a wet smack and Hondo watched as he scuttled his way through sand and scrubs with those vultures his guide and that bone his beacon.
Hondo waited a moment, studying the farmhouse and its porch and the doberman nearly as old as its owner and he thought for just a moment about the marathon of life and how its finish lines are hidden and only revealed by either age or illness and how unfortunate it is to cross yours by any other means.
He followed the rancher and so did the elderly dog through a vast expanse of vegetation made up of swaying tufts of waist-high grass and thorn-scrub and the rare live oak or honey mesquite tree that stood upon the shifting dune-sands of the South Texas Plains. They passed the skull of a horned Nilgai laid sideways in matted grassland where the rest of its body had once been before it had been ripped apart and gnawed clean by scavengers and varmints.
After fifteen minutes of silence the rancher coughed and wiped his sweat with a white and brown rag. "Get about a dozen of these a year, y'know. Time to time, my dog'll turn up with a bone. Leg, fingers. Hell, I even had a skull once... pristine."
"Hope you turned that over to someone."
"Turned it over to my mantle, s'what I done,” he barked as he cackled and coughed and finally swatted his hand in the air as if at a fly but really at judgment. "I kid. Cou
"Not many," was all the deputy could offer as he ducked beneath the branches of a mesquite tree, suddenly overtired and overheated. "You got a large property, Mr. Ellis."
"Over three-thousand acres. And call me Ephraim, I said. Be out this way enough I reckon we oughtta be on first names."
Hondo nodded and followed Ephraim beneath a shade tree, pushing on.
The calls of vultures startled them both. Like their screech had replaced the absent thunder of the far-off heat lightning but rattled their instinctual fear just the same.
We're just apes in trees, the rancher remembered, and he pressed on.
"Here we are," Ephraim relayed and used one hand to hold a low branch of a mesquite and moved sideways to allow both Hondo and the doberman to duck into a clearing beneath an encirclement of shrubbery and shade trees. An oasis for the lost.
There, on the floor of the world, halfway sunken into soil, were the long-gone corpses of five human beings. Hondo knew at first sight that they were South American migrants. They carried with them the tell-tale signs of desperate refugees: all-black clothing to hide from authorities, jugs of water to stave off the heat, duct-taped wrists and ankles to protect from thorns, threadbare backpacks slung to their fronts to protect from theft. And, sometimes, their children––to protect their heart.
Hondo kneeled beside one skeleton half-submerged in cracked earth, a hand reaching out, its claw-like fingers stretched across sand, and the other holding the small bones of a child, the same size as the dirt-streaked stuffed bunny that lay beside it. Dull shell casings glinted around them like fragments of broken glass.
"An endless stream of human suffering," the rancher said.
Hondo could barely hear him, his ears swarming with the sounds of phantom flies and the moans of invisible lost souls, mixing with the pain within his own. He kneeled and used a gloved hand to retrieve the stuffed bunny. It was crude and handmade. A pillow with its stuffing cinched at the joints using rubber bands––two black eyes made with sewn buttons. He took a breath and closed his eyes and centered himself. He removed his weathered, dirtied cowboy hat and used it to cover his mouth, an attempt to prevent his retching from disturbing what looked, to him, like a crime scene.
But a moment later, there it was. His ten-dollar lunch of grilled cheese and soup nearly the same in appearance half-digested as it was on a plate at the cheap diner near his trailer.
A splash and a pained hack and then Ephraim was offering his sweat-soaked rag to Hondo.
"So much for keepin our tracks to a minimum, huh?" the rancher said in jest as Hondo climbed to his feet. "You gonna say somethin or just stare like that 'til the vultures get us too?"
It took what seemed like an endless eternity to form words from terrible thoughts. No vocal cords in history were ever strong enough to match the horror.
"What a goddamn tragedy," was all Hondo could think, his thoughts escaping his dry-cracked lips.
3:14 PM
After an hour, Hondo's vomit had sunken and been swallowed by the same soil that sought to consume the bodies and bones of all who walked atop it.
Hondo and Ephraim took solace beneath the same trees that countless migrants had likely found in their delirious desperation on journeys from violent lands and to violent lands. Hondo's thoughts drifted to his own family, most of whom were still in Mexico. He wondered if fate would spare them this end or if it had already determined to doom them.
Stay, he thought... only Death lives here now.
The far-off roar of helicopter rotors became suddenly pronounced and the dancing forms of vehicles shimmered on the horizon from the direction of the ranch-house. The cavalry was coming.
When the helicopter landed, Hondo ducked beneath its downwash and awaited the arrival of the Sheriff of Brooks County, Bo Bergeron. He was an aging man. A thing becoming undone. Where once his apricot uniform stretched at the shoulders and at its brown buttons, it was now loose and marred by fabric scars like stretch marks. He was shorter than he’d been just five years before. He was thinner around the meat of his legs and arms. Even the width of his shoulders seemed to be shrinking. His waist was the only part of his body that seemed to be holding steady in size, as if his limbs were exposed to oven heat and were dripping their fats back to their core.
Hondo often thought he was witnessing the disappearing act of a dying man. It was sometimes a slow process, he knew.
Sheriff Bergeron stepped from the now-stationary helicopter with his Stetson in-hand and so did a rookie border patrol pilot and they converged upon Hondo, ducking beneath whirring rotor blades.
“This way, sir,” Hondo yelled.
Hondo escorted the men toward the site that was now walled-off with yellow tape stretching from the branches of shade trees.
"You're tellin me those are bodies?" the doe-eyed pilot asked as they neared.
"Hard to believe, ain't it?" Bergeron barked.
"Ain't seen nothin like that since I left the border."
"We a long way from the border, son."
"Don't much look like it from here, Sheriff."
Bergeron furrowed his brow and offered a thought that seemed to encapsulate every stress in his life for the last decade: "That's 'cause the border come to us."
Beside the shade-tree site, the vehicles had arrived and deputies had gathered round Hondo and a white cargo van was yawned open with a driver and a round potato-sack of a woman emerged.
Her name was Louise Gonzalez, the county Justice of the Peace, a position chosen for counties in Texas that did not have Medical Examiners.
Out of 254 counties in the state, only 14 had M.E.'s. The other 240 elected J.P.'s like they did their sheriffs. They had few requirements to meet and often ran unopposed.
The state required that they be U.S. citizens of at least 18 years of age, a resident of Texas for no less than one full year, and to have resided in the precinct in which they wish to serve for no less than six months. They could have no felony convictions on their record and had to be considered mentally competent to hold office. However, the position had no threshold for degrees, whether college or high school.
Whose barometer is so broken, Hondo wondered to himself, as to allow a high-school dropout to determine a human being's cause of death?
Hondo watched as the two elected officials of Brooks County neared one another, hands outstretched and teeth bared like monkeys in a show of submission.
