Free Bulls Rush In by Elliott James Page B

only represented one week’s worth of mess. Samuel didn’t have a car or health or life insurance, no gym membership, no Netflix account, no website fees, no cell phone plans. He never seemed to go to the hospital or the dentist. It looked like Samuel wrote one check once a week, and always at the same bank and always for the same amount of money. Keeping his routine simple.
    Samuel Blanco also didn’t have any pictures of this Luis, no personal letters or religious icons or even items with a favorite sports team logo. Where had Luis Blanco gone? And why had he left a shotgun and a box of shells behind in his closet if he wasn’t planning on coming back?
    Samuel’s room turned out to be the guest bedroom. It smelled like Samuel didn’t always remember to shower. In contrast to Luis’s room, the bed was unmade and clothes were thrown around everywhere. I found a couple of sketch pads jammed between the nightstand and Samuel’s bed. Most of the pads were full of pencil drawings of people and trees and dogs and different seasons. The pad on top, probably the most recent one, was the darkest. It was full of shadows and lonely landscapes and jagged lines, and the few people in it looked unhappy or angry. Toward the back, there were sketches of the acts of vandalism that had taken place in Samuel’s neighborhood recently, a penis that had been spray-painted on a car, a caricature of a naked woman on the side of a house, the words GO BACK TO MEXICO on a wooden fence, and the slur on Samuel’s driveway.
    I also found pictures of two teenaged boys who looked demonic. They didn’t have horns or fangs or anything, but their faces were twisted into evil, leering expressions.
    I was pretty sure it was their blood in Samuel’s bathroom.
    *  *  *
    “Hold on!” Jim Reedy interrupted. “What two teenage boys are you talkin’ about?”
    “Colton and Ben Sigler,” I replied.
    The deputy visibly pulled his shoulders back and raised his chin, his eyes narrowing. “They were killed by a bear.”
    “I read the paper,” I said. According to the sheriff’s office, Colton and Ben Sigler went out into the woods so that they could try to make a homemade flamethrower with spray paint cans. Colton and Ben either burned themselves alive and got messed up by a wild animal later, or somehow their pyro-foolishness wound up pissing off a large wild animal, and the small fire they started got out of control after the animal killed them. Either way, a couple of miles of woods burned down around Colton and Ben’s broken and crushed bodies before the police finally found what was left. “That story is some serious bullshit.”
    *  *  *
    The place where Samuel Blanco liked to eat was a large plain building made out of yellow cinderblocks and covered with a red roof. The sign in the gravel parking lot was home-made and said LA COMIDA UNIDA . Most of the customers seemed to be young Latino workers looking to catch a quick, cheap meal after their factory shift, and they generally ran in and bustled out of the place with big, white, greasy paper bags that smelled delicious.
    Samuel elected to stay, though.
    I walked into the place. It had a nice energy. There was music coming from a CD player rather than a sound system, and it was loud and distorted, but it was lively. The men eating or drinking cervezas at the small square tables –and at this time of day, most of the customers were men—seemed relaxed enough, even though they all clocked me coming into the place right away. I recognized two guys from the pumpkin fields and gave them a brief nod while they leaned forward over their tables and filled their friends in on what they knew about me, which wasn’t much. It was a small town.
    Samuel was the only person eating by himself, projecting a kind of sullen misery that seemed self-defeating—one of those you’d-better-stay-away-from-me-I’m-pissed-because-no-one-will-get-near-me attitudes. The only two empty tables in the place