When I returned to the kitchen, I set a glass of water down next to her. “I want you to take this,” I said and laid the pill down on the table.
“No.”
“Sunny, you can’t go out to Washington and attend Ruby’s funeral like this.”
“Yes, I can. I’m fine. Stop bugging me, okay. I’ve got a lot to deal with. You don’t know.”
“Katie, darl’n, watch your momma and make sure she takes her medicine,” I said and started the bacon. I put the pancake griddle on a burner to start warming up. “I was thinking that maybe Ariana could live here with us, while Kevin is in Basic Training. What do you think?”
I looked over at Sunny. Katie was at the table eyeballing her mother intently.
“Fine!” Sunny said to Katie and took her pill. Katie got up and hugged her mother. I wasn’t sure what that little drama at the breakfast table was teaching Katie, but at least Sunny would stay on an even keel for the upcoming Lummi family gathering and Katie wouldn’t have to witness another episode of her dark side. Katie had seen one too many in her short life.
While Sunny showered I found her prescription bottle in her purse. She renewed her prescription every ninety days and she had well over a month’s worth left. A few minutes later, I was on the phone with Southwest Airlines when Sunny walked out of the bathroom in nothing but a smile. I got so flustered I hung up on the reservation agent.
She looked at me like I wasn’t even in the room.
“Did Nick call while I was in the shower?”
“I didn’t hear your phone ring.”
“He’s not going to call me,” she said with a sigh.
“You don’t know that, he might surprise you. Just keep in mind that he might not be able to call you with his job. Cell phones aren’t standard issued gear while on duty. And, there’s the whole issue of locational GPS.”
“What job? Where is he? Oh, it doesn’t matter. First Nick and now Kevin; I’ve lost them both. Well, at least I still have Katie.”
I ignored the slight that I wasn’t included with Katie. “Look, there’s a reason Nick doesn’t call. We’ve talked about it before.”
“Oh, right! Blame me.”
“I’m not blaming you, Sunny. I’ve explained it before. He’s a Marine. Calling his momma isn’t high on his list of things to do,” I said and took her in with all the desire I still had in me at my age.
She must have noticed the change in my demeanor and suddenly realized how provocative she was carrying on a conversation with me with nothing on. She smiled and leaned on the triple dresser on one arm and eyed me. She looked at the unmade bed and then me. Her seductive power over me was as calming and effective as Seroquel to bring her peace of mind. Who was I to deny my beautiful wife a natural and holistic approach to good mental health?
We landed in the bed embraced in a heat of passion, but by the time we were done, we were locked in the embrace of a couple who found the comfort of one another’s arms just as satisfying as the physical act itself. We must have laid there a good half-hour afterwards just reconnecting and talking until we heard Katie turn off the TV and head for our bedroom.
Later that morning, we dropped Katie off at the Meeting Center under protest and Sunny and I took a truck ride. When we stopped, we stood up in the bed of the truck behind the cab and looked out at the Butterfly Pasture. It was one of those moments where you just wanted to take a thing of beauty in and not speak. We were parked beneath a lone Live Oak tree and in the shade. While the pasture soothed something in my soul and went a long way to filling the hole there, I figured most members of my family just thought it was weird and a waste of money; another one of old Max’s crazy ideas.
I heard Sunny sob. I looked over at her and tears were running down her cheeks. I side-stepped and moved in closer to her and put my arm around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze.
“It’s going to be alright, Sunny. Nick and Kevin are just trying to find their way in the world. It has nothing to do with rejecting their native heritage or you. I suspect that when they become comfortable with being a man in today’s world they’ll embrace the values you instilled in them. Give them some time and the room.”
“Says the white man who kicked my son out of our home,” Sunny said.
I was glad to see she was returning to her old self and had not lost her sense of humor. I shifted my body so that I was leaning into her from behind and then wrapped my arms around her. “You didn’t answer my question about Ariana coming to live with us.”
She leaned her back into me. “You think she would?”
. . .
After I dropped Sunny off at the house, Clete and I drove into town. We had to pick up a package from the Post Office in town and I went along to keep him company. He’d ordered a part for the well pump in the back pasture on eBay and it came with some postage due. Seemed like the fella that sold it to him should have known how much postage to use, but Clete was in a hurry for the part so we paid it. Clete was not one to sit idle and let a little thing like postage keep him from getting that well pump fixed and going again.
I guess you might say great minds thought alike as we passed the Sonic Drive-in on Main Street. He looked at me and I looked at him and we both knew where we were having lunch. He made a quick left turn across traffic and pulled into an open slot at the Sonic.
“Hey, Clete,” a male voice said through the speaker. “You gonna have the usual?”
Clete grinned at me sheepishly. “Yeah, Rudy, hold on a sec. What’cha want, Max?”
“Same as you,” I said.
“Two orders of the usual and hold the melted cheese for Mr. Howard. He likes his tots plain.”
“I know. Hey, Mr. Howard. How’s it going?”
“Hey, Rudy,” I said. “It goes. You doing okay?”
“Yessiree Bob! I’ll have your orders right out.”
Clete rolled up the window and pushed the bench seat back as far as it would go, which was not much, as big as Clete was. I guess he figured he could use the extra inch while eating.
“I’m think’n I might enter the chili cook-off this year. What’d you think about that venison sausage I put up a couple of months ago?”
“Are you going for venison chili?”
“Yeah, I think I need an edge my first time?”
“If you don’t take first place, there’s something crooked going on with those judges,” I said and watched an old Chevy pickup pull in across from us. I recognized Scoot Needham right away. He didn’t spot me until he had placed his order. We stared at one another for a few seconds than he got out of his truck. I could tell he was itching for a piece of me.
I got out too and headed for him in the middle of the island between the two sides of the park and order area.
“I’ve got you now, you sonofabitch,” he said. “You’re violating the Temporary Restraining Order.”
Scoot was in his fifties and life had not been kind to him. He was one of those men who went through life oblivious to the fact that he was an asshole and could never understand why no one liked him.
“Max?” I heard Clete say as he got out of the truck. I wasn’t going to look back to answer him and take my eyes off of Needham. He had sucker punched me the last time I saw him while I was trying to talk to Elizabeth. I hadn’t mentioned that for my daughter’s sake when I was arrested. I sure wasn’t going to give him another free shot at me, though, and hoped he would make the first move again.
“Only a stupid man like you would think of that. Fact is we were here first. You’re violating the TRO, not me.”
“Who are you calling stupid?”
“What’s going on Max?”
“It’s okay, Clete. This man is leaving, aren’t you, Needham?”
I glanced at Clete quickly, but saw Needham plant his foot before he let loose with a round-house hook that took way too much time for him to get away with it a second time.
If wisdom teaches an old man anything, it’s to duck when you have to and walk away the other t
imes. I bent over and let his swing graze by my head and then I shoved him backward after his momentum from the swing carried him around far enough to have him off balance. I had no intention of breaking all the bones in my hand with a shot to his jaw. He hit a steel pole holding up the roof over the area, bounced off it and stumbled to the ground.
I guessed he must have hit the pole pretty hard because he hesitated after he got up on one knee.
“You okay, Max?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, Clete. Let’s get our order to go.”
“You’re going to jail. I’m calling the cops,” Needham said. He stood up and took out his cell phone.
“You started it, Mister. I saw the whole thing,” Clete said. “So did all these people parked here.”
Needham turned and walked back to his truck talking on his cell phone. We walked back to Clete’s truck. “What do you want to do, Max? We can’t just leave. You didn’t start it,” he said.
I could tell by his voice he wasn’t of a mind to leave without our order.
“He’s called the cops and I need to let this play out for my family.”
“Who is he?”
“Unfortunately, my daughter Elizabeth is married to him.”
“He’s the one.”
“Yep.”
“Shitfire! I should’ve put him down for you.”
“Well, I appreciate the sentiment, but just tell the cops what you saw. Maybe he’ll be stupid enough to make a false statement.”
Once we were in the truck, Clete rolled down the window and pushed the speaker button. “Rudy, did you see that?”
“I saw him get out of the truck and take a swing at Mr. Howard. I couldn’t hear nothing, though.”
“Where’s our order?” I asked.
“It’s coming. All that excitement threw us off a bit.”
We were half way though our chili hot dog meal and I had just told Clete that I thought Needham had come to his senses and not called it in, when two NHPD cruisers pulled into the Sonic. Needham jumped out of his truck and ran to the police cars pointing at Clete’s truck.
“Just be cool, Clete, and tell it like you saw it. If they take me in, tell Emily and have her call my attorney, Sam Hallinan.”
“They won’t arrest you, Max. You didn’t start it.”
I could only imagine how this episode at the Sonic would translate in Clete’s telling of it at the feed store. They did in fact take me in that day, not so much for what had happened at the Sonic, but for the bench warrant for my failure to show up for the preliminary hearing on the charge of unlawful trespass. I had completely forgotten about that.
Scoot Needham eventually dropped the charges of trespassing after Sam got involved and negotiated an agreement that said I wouldn’t press charges of physical assault against Needham if he dropped the trespassing charges. And, it only cost me seventy-five hundred dollars. I guess it was worth it in that Elizabeth had to physically sign off on the agreement, which meant she knew I hadn’t started the altercation with her husband. It was a small victory, but I took it.
Chapter 19
Sunny and Emily had convinced Ariana to move out of the garage apartment she and Kevin had rented and into his old room at our house. He had now been gone for two weeks. As an inducement to Ariana, I offered her Sunny’s car so she wouldn’t feel trapped at the ranch and I bought Sunny a new Chrysler Pacifica when we got back from her sister’s funeral. The family sized minivan was an instant hit with Sunny and I took some pride in knowing what pleased my wife even if I didn’t sometimes. She accepted it as my penance for embarrassing her once again in front of the whole county with my arrest at the Sonic Drive-in.
Once Ariana was settled in, all was well on the home front, except that Kevin hated Basic Training. He did nothing but whine in his calls home to Ariana and she wanted to fly out to see him. I was glad to that she was uncomfortable enough in her pregnancy to heed the warning of her doctor not to fly. As for Kevin, I took some pleasure in his misery.
For me, things were not so good. The Pape Ranch was a real aggravation and I was glad I had decided to sell the ranch. The bid proposal for developing the cavern system beneath the cistern and putting in a road to the cistern site were way out of the range of anything we had considered. When we added in the infrastructure to support the tourists on site, the cost almost doubled. James Lee and George were flying in that morning for a meeting at ten-thirty with Shane, Hannah, and me. I knew in advance what he was going to tell them and I was in the process of preparing Hannah and Shane.
“Couldn’t you keep the section that contains the mesa and cistern? It’s probably less than two hundred acres,” Shane said. I liked the boy’s attitude; he wasn’t ready to give up. The fact that he wasn’t paying for it made his what-the-hell-go-for-it attitude much easier than it did me.
“The State could claim the cistern as a historical site,” Hannah offered.
“They could, but they wouldn’t compensate me for what the acreage is really worth on today’s market,” I said to give myself some cover. Truth was I wanted to sell it all and be done with it.
Now that economic reality had finally hit me over the head like a brick, I knew my dreams for the Pape Ranch were unrealistic and confirmed once again that I was more a man of dreams than vision and substance. My one consolation was that my children had those qualities I lacked and the world would be a better place for it.
The real question before me now was, how much was the ranch worth? I’d put a couple of hundred thousand dollars of James Lee’s money into the land reclamation and I owed it to him to get his money back plus interest for his investment. I’d get his money and more from the sale since it hadn’t cost me a dime. I could break the ranch up into smaller parcels or sell it whole. Both scenarios would work and the Howard Family Trust would be well endowed financially for several generations to come. Breaking the ranch up into smaller parcels would certainly bring in more money, but that was a plan of last resort, and it went against the wishes of Fran Pape. The whole idea from the beginning was to keep the ranch intact. I decided I would contact Cotton Lehr the first thing the next day and see if he still had a buyer.
“Let’s hear what James Lee has to say,” I continued. “Then we can talk about different scenarios other than putting the whole property on the market.”
“That damn jaguar crapped all over the grader again,” Shane said.
Hannah smiled.
“Have you seen the woman around?” I asked.
“Not since the three of us saw her. If I do, I’m gonna give her a piece of my mind,” Shane said.
“I guess we should tell her about selling the ranch. I can’t figure out why she’s still around. It’s obvious someone took the Mask, if it was ever there in the first place,” I said.
“Holy, moly! I just thought of something,” Hannah said. “Now that I think about it, the Jesuit carried the capstone with him from Mexico City along with the death mask. He said as much and I missed it. When he used the word ‘azalean’, I thought he was referring to a cover for the ‘heriotza maskara’, like a protective wrapping around the mask,” Hannah said apologetically. “He was really talking about the capstone. ‘Azalean’ is a Basque word for cover.”
“It doesn’t really change anything that I can see, except that we know what was on the back of the capstone. The Death Mask probably made its way to wherever it was supposed to be taken to in Louisiana and it’s now hidden away somewhere in the bowels of the Vatican or lost forever,” I said.
“Maybe. What do you think of this scenario? The Jesuit brings the Mask and the capstone with him from Mexico City to the cistern, but for whatever reason he doesn’t hide the Mask in the cistern vault like he was supposed to. That’s why we didn’t find it in the vault and the woman thinks it’s still somewhere nearby.”
“Okay, so he hides it someplace else in your scenario, instead of taking it to New Orleans. But aren’t you the least curious why a map of the Motagua River was so important to the
Jesuits, that they preserved it in stone and carried it all the way from Mexico City. And, then there’s the jaguar named Gabor. The Mayan woman said it was his and she sure didn’t want us to find it,” I said.
“Maybe the map shows where the Jesuits hid all their gold,” Shane said.
Shane’s renewed enthusiasm and speculation about a gold treasure took all the air out of the room and in the silence, we could hear the thumping of the rotary blades in the distance. We all got up and went outside to watch James Lee land his shiny new red helicopter in the pasture. When James Lee had called me to tell me about the Robinson R22 helicopter, he had asked if I wanted to go in on it with him, but I declined. I couldn’t see spending the money when it wasn’t in my nature to get in a helicopter again, ever.
Emily came outside with us. She had a local women’s botanical meeting going on in another conference room and she was outdone at the disruption and noise.
“Or maybe the Death Mask and the Motagua River map aren’t linked at all,” Hannah added as a final comment to our discussion.
Sunny, Katie, and Ariana were in San Antonio baby shopping. If I were one to hand out awards, I would have given myself one for “Smartest Man Alive” after suggesting that Ariana move in with us. Sunny was a changed woman after Ariana moved in, bless her heart. She had someone to engage with besides a young kid and an old guy who lusted after her way too often, according to her. I was happy to let her think that. I was satisfied with the cuddles she offered instead of a romp beneath the sheets with the new guest in the house.
Well, anyway, it was easier for all of us to meet and talk at my house and not worry with upsetting the family business manager. So after we exchange of hellos with James Lee and George, we headed up to the house and lunch.
Once we were settled in around the dining room table, and were enjoying some sun tea, James Lee gave us the bad news that I already prepared Shane and Hannah for. I felt a little guilty about hiding behind James Lee to be the bearer of the bad news because I planned to sell the ranch even if the financial numbers looked good. When he was done, he turned it over to George to explain the details and the reasoning behind his analysis.
The Turbulence of Butterflies (Max Howard Series Book 6) Page 25