Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (35 page)

50

The Carmen Miranda took the long way, down Highway
90, Old Sabinal Road. By the time we got there I was half-stoned just
from sitting next to Garrett. I’d heard Changes in Latitudes on
CD-ROM continuous replay cranked and remixed through Garrett’s
computer in the back until I knew all the lyrics sideways. I’d had
enough Pecan Street Ale to make my throbbing tequila hangover from
the night before fade to a dull ache. There wasn’t much that could
bother me at that point. Nevertheless, it was hard to look at what
the march of civilization had done to Sabinal.

“
Oh, Jesus," I said. "There’s a traffic
light."

"Yeah," said Garrett. “They changed it
from flashing yellow about six years ago."

I sat up a little straighter in my seat. “What the
hell happened to Ogden’s?"

As a kid I’d loved and feared the place. Every time
we stopped at Ogden’s for lunch on the way into town I used to get
scolded for trying to sit at the forbidden Old-Timers’ Table in the
back. Once I’d had my ears pulled good; from that time on I just
watched from the counter while the old men diced to see who would pay
for the morning coffee. My father would order the world’s greatest
chicken fried steak sandwiches to go from a waitress named Meryl.

Now the diner was closed. The Hill Country mural that
was painted on the glass in front was faded and chipped. The lights
were off.

"Man, you are out of touch," Garrett said.
"They changed the name to the Pepper Patch years ago. Then they
went seasonal. No business out this way. They just open up for the
hunters, now."

"How the hell do you know all this? You turning
kicker on me?"

Garrett seemed to like that idea. "Sometimes I
need a place to get away. It doesn’t get any more ‘away’ than
Sabinal, little bro."

We passed the Schutes’ land, then a few smaller
spreads of mesquites, olive-colored hills, cows. A few old ranchers
leaning against their fence posts turned to watch the mound of
plastic tropical fruit drive past. One of them raised his roll of
spare barbed wire in a salute. Garrett honked.

The old Wagon Wheel across from the entrance to
Navarre land had always been our landmark for finding which gate was
ours. Now the restaurant was boarded-up. Our cattleguard hadn’t
been hosed out in so long it was filled three feet deep with dirt.
Our cattle were walking back and forth over the bars, grazing the
side of the highway at will. One of them, a Charolais mix, was right
in the gateway, staring down the Carmen Miranda.

"How about honking at it?" I said.

“
No way," Garrett told me. “They’re tame,
man. You honk your horn, they come running to be fed. You ever seen a
safari bus crowded by thirty-three hungry Charolais? Ain’t pretty.
"

“
Hpw about a red cape then?" I suggested.

Garrett just leaned out the window and had a heated
discussion with the heifer. I guess it was paying attention because
it finally moved out of the way. Then we drove through, trying to
find the driveway under the prairie grass.

The ranch house itself hadn’t changed much since
the 1880s, when it had been the homestead for the Nunley family, one
of the founders of Sabinal. just three rooms with limestone walls and
hardwood floors, rough-cut beams holding up the ceiling, more or
less. My grandfather had grudgingly agreed to get electricity and a
septic tank when he bought the land after the original Nunley spread
had been divided back in the 1940s, but neither the plumbing nor the
wiring had been touched since then. These days the septic tank was
called Old 90 because you could only flush the toilet or take a
shower once every hour and a half without everything overflowing.

I was a little surprised to find Harold Diliberto
standing on the porch waiting for us.

“
He still takes care of things out here?" I
asked.

“
Yeah," said Garrett.

Harold had taken the job when he was still married to
my sister Shelley. He’d been abusive, drunk most of the time, and
not very energetic, but he’d been family, he knew about cattle, and
he’d been cheap to hire. I’m not sure which was the biggest
selling point for my father. That had been ten years and two of
Shelley’s husbands ago.

I looked at the house, the cattleguard, the lawn that
had turned back to prairie grass.

“
Doing a great job," I said.

Garrett shrugged. “He’s okay when his friends
don’t get him drinking."

“
What friends?"

“
Me, usually."

Harold looked like he and the cows had been partying
pretty hard the night before. His shirt was buttoned wrong so his
collar stuck up on the right side. His jeans were half-tucked into
his boots. At one point his third-grade teacher had probably told
him: "You make that face at me and one day it’ll stick that
way." She’d been right. Harold always looked like he was
trying his best to look ugly.

He nodded at me like he’d just seen me last week.

“
Tres. Garrett."

Garrett took the stairs on his hands, then pulled his
chair up after him. The chair probably weighed fifty pounds. Garrett
used one arm without straining.

"How’s the well?" he asked.

Harold scratched a rash on his neck. "Got the
pump working, but it’d been a few days. Cattle stampeded the trough
soon as it was going."

“
Great."

Garrett lifted himself back into the seat and led us
through the door.

I looked around while Garrett and Harold talked
maintenance. Except for being dirtier and older, the place had hardly
changed. The Army Corps of Engineers elevation drawing for Highway 90
had turned brown on the living-room wall. The coffee table we’d
gotten for Christmas from the Klayburgs down at King Ranch still had
boot marks on it from the last time my dad had propped his feet
there. There was still a metal pail full of Cricket lighters sitting
in the corner from fifteen years before when the Western Union had
derailed in the middle of town. Before the Army Reserve had come in
to guard the trainload of new Toyotas that had spilled unexpectedly
into downtown from that accident, everybody in Sabinal had already
helped themselves to the smaller dumped cargo—three boxcars full of
lighters. Sabinal still didn’t have a single Toyota on the streets,
but it was a good place to go if you needed a light.

I wasn’t quite ready to look in the fireplace.
Instead I sat on the couch. I traced the old boot prints on the
table. Finally Harold went out to shoot a rattlesnake he’d seen in
the back field. Garrett wheeled his chair up next to me. He handed me
a warm beer out of the chair’s side pocket, then lit another joint.

“
So you checked?" he asked.

“
Not yet."

He took a noisy inhale. Together we sat and looked at
the limestone fireplace for a while like it was getting great
reception, a Cowboys game maybe, deep in the fourth. I stood up.

“
Look," Garrett said, “just don’t expect
anything, okay, little bro?"

“
Okay."

I moved the rock and looked in the stashing hole. No
Jim Beam. Nothing but dark, mortar, a few daddy longlegs hanging
dead. Then I stuck my hand inside. The hole was almost a foot deeper
than I’d thought. I brought an old business-sized envelope into the
light. My back was to Garrett. After a while he couldn’t stand the
silence.

“
Well?" he said.

The envelope had faded from pink to brown, but the
original letter was still inside—written on pink stationery that
after all these years still smelled faintly of strawberry potpourri.
I read the first few lines, then turned and let Garrett see Cookie
Sheffs last letter to our father.

“
God damn," said Garrett.

“
Does your mouth taste funny?" I asked. “Kind
of like metal?"

Garrett nodded, then wheeled his chair around to
leave.

“
And the bastard didn’t even leave us any bourbon
to wash it down," he grumbled. “Fucking typical."
 

51

After reading the letter several times, Garrett and I
either needed to get seriously drunk or do something to take our
minds off what we’d learned. We opted for both.

First, Harold put us to work worming thirty-three
head of cattle. I’d like to say there was something cathartic about
it, but there wasn’t. I had the privilege of clamping the victim’s
head between metal bars while Garrett pumped a wad of paste that
looked suspiciously like K-Y jelly into the side of the cow’s
mouth. If you’ve never seen cattle gag, don’t go out of your way.

When we were done, we sat on the porch drinking
Harold’s cheap booze and watching the evening come down over the
plains. The sunset was orange, except when you looked at it through a
liquor bottle. Then it was brown and yellow.

On the way back to town Garrett and I cranked up the
Jimmy Buffett. Occasionally we’d look at each other, then decide
not to talk. We both had the letter from the fireplace memorized now,
and phrases of it kept gnawing at me. Protests that my father had
used Cookie, searched her husband’s private files, and only thus
found incriminating documents about Travis Center. Pleas not to break
her heart with a public scandal that would destroy her family.
Promises that Dan Sheff, Sr., really wasn’t to blame, that Cookie
would help my father find out who was responsible for using Sheff
Construction to embezzle millions. Fervent affirmations of her love,
kept from open admission by her duty to her son, to her sickly
husband. The letter implied that my father had made Cookie a deal:
Leave her husband and have the Travis Center issue forgotten. Garrett
was bothered by it as much as I was, though his way of dealing with
it was to curse at the semis on the highway and flip off the
snowbirds in their RVs as he zoomed past them.

“
Learn to drive, sheepdip!" he shouted at an
old man whose license plates were from Wisconsin.

Garrett leaned so far out his window, with no legs
for ballast, that I was afraid he was going to disappear into the
wind. Then he gave the finger to another semi that wouldn’t let him
pass. The trucker blasted his horn.

"You ever get worried somebody’s going to get
pissed at you?" I asked, when the noise died down. "Somebody
with a gun?"

Garrett shrugged. “It’s happened. I’m still
here."

We drove for a little longer before Garrett looked
over at me again. This time he decided to talk about it.

“
He was going to do it, wasn’t he? The son of a
bitch was going to ditch a major investigation for a woman. Another
guy’s wife, no less."

The Hemisfair Tower appeared on the horizon, sticking
up from the orange glow of the city. I stared at it instead of
answering Garrett’s question. I wanted to deny the obvious, but the
letter was pretty clear.

"Maybe he wouldn’t have," I said.

“
For a woman," Garrett repeated. “You know,
I guess I always had one consolation, that he might’ve been a
bastard and he might’ve screwed up his family, but at least he was
honest about doing his job. He was the guy in the fucking white hat.
Never mind."

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “Maybe he meant
; to make it public."

"Maybe he died for it anyway, little bro."

There wasn’t much I could say to that. We cranked
up the Buffett a little louder and rode into the smell of sulfur
springs that always marked the southern entrance of either hell or
San Antonio.

Gary Hales was standing in the front yard of Number
90, watering the sidewalk with a garden hose. He watched without
expression as Garrett’s van pulled up in front and I hopped out of
Ms. Miranda’s air-brushed blouse on the passenger’s side.
Garrett’s horn honked to the tune of “Coconut Telegraph? Then the
mound of plastic pineapples and bananas shuddered as he put the van
into first gear and lurched off toward Broadway. It didn’t seem to
wake up Gary much at all. When I walked up he raised his finger
listlessly, as if he wanted to say something. After waiting for a few
seconds I remembered it was August 2.

“
The rent?" I said.

“
That’d be fine," said Gary.

He shuffled a few steps behind me as we went into the
in-law. If Mr. Hales had been harboring any last hopes that I was
indeed an honest and upstanding young man, I managed to shoot them
right to hell when I handed him a wad of fifty-dollar bills from my
kitchen drawer.

"No checking account yet," I explained.

“
Huh," Gary said.

He peeked over the kitchen counter at the drawer,
which was now closed. He looked disappointed. Maybe he was expecting
some assault weapons.

Then the phone rang.

“
Been ringing nigh on thirty minutes now,"
Gary said. “I reckon I’d answer that."

Gary waited. The phone rang. I reminded Gary where
the front door was. Then when I’d herded him out I picked up the
receiver.

"Jesus, Navarre, where in Christ’s name have
you been?"