"How about across the river? We could bide out in Big Bend until morning."
He sat back on his heels, picked up the bottle. "I can think of at least six reasons why that's a bad plan," he replied taking a sip. He wiped his mouth. "And all of them are snakes."
I laughed. "Then what do you suggest."
"Well," he replied, closing the blanket-thing back across the gap, "if we stay here I figure we got a fifty-fifty chance."
I frowned. "You mean they'll either find us or they won't."
We had another drink. The woman had two more. We talked. The woman said nothing at all until, some five or twelve drinks later, she decided to change her name to "Fifteen dollar American."
We drank and talked some more, about another half hour, before she decided to change it to "Five dollar American."
Fickle.
Somewhere into the second bottle, after the third and closest wave of mob rustling occurred just outside, we, Felix and me, decided to make ourselves a pact.
We were clearly doomed, we decided. So the thing to do was to tell each other, in these the last moments of existence, the Major Truths About Our Lives, like passengers on a falling airliner.
Which is how I found out he was a drug smuggler and he found out I was a narc.
It's funny now but at the time I was pissed as hell. Well, grumpy, anyway. Felix laughed, knowing, as per the pact, that I couldn't do anything about what he told me. Until I pointed out to him that neither could he tell anyone else about me and then we were both quiet. And then we both had another drink.
And then we both said, "Fuck it!" in unison, and laughed.
It was fun.
What was strange about it was me being so surprised in the first place. I mean, what the hell else did I expect Felix to be, way out there like that? It's just that he wasn't at all the type or something.
Something.
Anyway, about then two bad things happened in a hurry. The first was that horrible woman deciding to change her name to "Free" and leaning back and pulling up her dress and spreading her legs so wide you could see her liver.
I swear to God it gave me vertigo.
The second bad thing was her husband showing up through the other door.
I'd figured the other door was rusted shut or something. The rest of the place looked like it should be, anyhow. And maybe it was, but ol' Hubby just slid it open with a flick of his wrist and there he stood, all six and a half feet and two hundred plus pounds with a headless chicken in one hand and a bloody machete in the other.
Next to his wife he was the ugliest human I'd ever seen.
"I think I know how the boxcar got down here by the river," whispered Felix from beside me.
I whispered back without taking my eyes off Hubby. "He carried it down here on his back."
And then the woman, the wife, screamed and Hubby roared and Felix and I were scrambling around and that machete was slashing through the air flinging drops of bright red chicken blood and the candle got turned over onto the cardboard furniture and flames rose up and the woman jumped between us and the giant to protect her furnishings and Felix and I used that moment to basically run screaming into the night.
Except Felix stopped long enough to grab the tequila and I got my metal wristwatch stuck in the blanket-curtain over the doorway and ripped it off when I jumped through into the weeds.
Outside, the mob was waiting.
Not close enough to see us. Not yet. But close enough that they were about to and close enough that there was no way to get around them and close enough for them to see the flickering light from the boxcar almost immediately and start toward it.
Too damn close, in other words.
"C'mon, Felix!" I hissed. "The river!"
"Hell, no!" he hissed back. "The snakes!"
We were running out of time. I grabbed him. "Fuck the snakes!"
And then he grabbed me back, all calm for a moment, looked me right in the eye, and said, "That's really sick!"
I just had to laugh. He was just too weird.
But in the meantime we were in a bad spot, stuck between two groups anxious to pound on us, and we needed a plan.
To this day I still don't know how we got up that tree, as drunk as