When Hudspeth wasn’t looking, Rex would give me a wink in the mirror, or glance up from scribbling in his notebook to throw me a quick, wicked smile. He was having a good time.
We ended up at a big barn where these Mexican cowboys were working cattle. A half dozen pickups were parked next to the corrals, and a couple of horses were tied to horse trailers, their coats dark with sweat. All sorts of cattle-bawling was going on inside the barn—it sounded a little like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
Hudspeth found Rex and me a place to perch on one of the fences and went to check on his foreman. It was a scene, cowboys climbing from pen to pen with long-handled plastic paddles, whistling and hollering. Some of the cattle were getting shots, some were getting tags clipped in their ears, and some were getting their horns wrenched off by a big metal contraption that looked like it had been invented by Hannibal Lecter. There was a lot of dust and the smell of cow shit, panicked animals charging from one pen to the next, cowboys jumping up on the rails, trying not to get trampled as the cattle came through.
Rex waved a fly away and glanced over at me. “You hanging in there?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Schoeninger, I sure am.”
It took him a second to get the joke, but when he did, he burst out laughing. He reached across to give me a slap on the shoulder. “All I know is, you’re a hell of a lot better sport about this than I’d ever be.”
When Hudspeth came back to join us, he was fit to be tied. One of the cowboys had left a gate open and nearly a third of the cattle they were supposed to be working were off wandering God knows where.
“But nothing we can do about it now,” he said. He took off his cowboy hat, wiped the sweat off the band with a finger, and put the hat back on. He looked as if he was ready to murder somebody. “Come on, let me show you around.”
He took us for a tour of the barn, leading us through the maze of pens, explaining the various breeds, introducing Rex to some of the cowboys. I was being basically ignored, which was fine with me. I drifted along behind, snapping pictures of trembling animals peering out between planks.
My shirt was soaked through and I was starting to feel a little sick from all the heat and the deafening noise and the smell. I must have been daydreaming about being back at my air-conditioned place, watching a golf tournament on TV, and drinking black cherry soda, because when I glanced up, Rex and Hudspeth were staring back at me with these odd looks.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Were you speaking to me?”
“I was just asking,” Hudspeth hollered, trying to make himself heard above the din, “what exactly does a Rex Schoeninger assistant do?”
“What do we do?” I said, raising my voice to match his. I shoved the camera in my wet shirt pocket. “Sometimes we’re in the library. Sometimes we run errands.”
“What kind of errands?” he shouted. The man was still steamed about those missing cattle.
“Oh, I don’t know. Could be anything.” In the chute next to me, a Brahma bull bucked and kicked while two cowboys, clinging to the rails above him, took swipes at him with plastic paddles. “We might buy shoes for him.”
“You buy Jews for him?”
“No, shoes!” I said. “Shoes!”
“Ahh!” he said. Rex hitched up his belt. I could tell he didn’t like this line of questioning any more than I did.
“And we help with the mail,” I said. “The amount of mail Rex gets is incredible. From all kinds of people.”
“I had an assistant once,” Hudspeth said. “All we ever did was get on one another’s nerves.”
Hudspeth led us out of the barn to one of the smaller corrals, where a circle of cowboys was gathered. “Miguel?” he shouted. One of the cowboys looked up and he and Hudspeth went back and forth in Spanish. It was clear that Hudspeth was not happy.
I could see now that the cowboys had a bull calf pinned in the dirt. A couple of them held the legs, another sat on the neck, and a wiry, gold-toothed man was down on his knees with a pocketknife.
There was no doubt in my mind that this was a setup, that Hudspeth wanted to see if Harvard vegetarians could stand the sight of blood. If Hudspeth could only have known—it was running from the sight of blood that had brought me here. Barry’s blood.
One flick of the knife and it was done. The calf gave a pathetic little bleat and the gold-toothed cowboy tossed the testicles into a plastic bucket as if they were no more than a handful of blueberries. The other cowboys let the animal up and he wobbled off into the sunshine.
“So, Harvard, how much of the writing do you do?” Hudspeth asked.
I was looking right at Rex when Hudspeth asked his question. Rex didn’t seem to react at all at first, but then I saw those crocodile eyes of his blink once, and then twice. Hudspeth had crossed the line.
“Writing?” I said. “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t go near that stuff with a ten-foot pole.” I fumbled with my camera, pulled it out of my shirt pocket, and wagged a hand at them. “Hey, you two, stand together for a minute. The light’s perfect. This should be a good one.”
That night at dinner I was seated next to Hudspeth’s wife, Constance, a tall, elegant woman with great manners and a turkey feather stuck in her hair. She’d grown up in Connecticut and was delighted to have another Easterner to talk to. She’d met Hudspeth at a dance at Newport and made it sound as if he’d swept her off her feet, whisked her away to Texas, where he’d been holding her prisoner for the past forty years (except, of course, for the month of October, which they spent at their pied-à-terre in New York so she could see the opera and all the new art shows). She had many, many dear friends from Cambridge—as a young girl she’d been Arthur Schlesinger’s mixed doubles partner. She was determined to find someone at Harvard we knew in common.
The meal wasn’t bad, a big salad for me (Hudspeth had been kind enough to limit himself to three or four cracks about it) and steaks for everyone else. Best of all was the batch of frozen margaritas that his wife whipped up, thick as Slushies and packing a real punch.
Hudspeth was giving Rex the rundown of his entire family tree, going over everyone from his great-great-grandmother who’d been kidnapped by the Comanches to the distant relative who’d been killed at the Alamo and his uncle who’d disgraced the family by working in the Johnson administration.
From the way his wife kept looking over at him, I could tell this had been a problem before, Hudspeth’s monopolizing dinner conversations, and she finally couldn’t hold herself back any longer.
“So Rex,” she said, “tell us about your parents. Where are they from?”
“I don’t have any parents.”
The table was struck dumb. Ramona, who’d been sucking the marrow out of a bone, set it down on her plate. Even the row of glass-eyed antelope mounted above the fireplace seemed a little sad.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Constance said.
“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Rex said. “It’s not all bad, being an orphan. When you don’t know who you are, you kind of get to make it up as you go along.”
Eyes down, I chased a chickpea around my plate with my fork.
“But you must have wondered . . .” Constance said.
“Of course I wondered,” Rex said. “That’s what kids do. But at some point you’ve got to grow up and put all that stuff behind you. Horton, when you finish with your salad, I think we should probably call it a night.”
Rex, Ramona, and I were spending the night in Hudspeth’s guest cabin, which was rustic but comfortable, with a stone fireplace, cowhides tacked to the wall, and pine floors that creaked.
When I went to my room, I just lay on my bed, scratching my fire-ant bites and staring up at the stained wallpaper. I was exhausted from the heat and all the hopping in and out to get the gates, but my mind still buzzed.
My pretending to be Rex’s assistant had come up aces. Whatever suspicions Rex may still have had about V. S. Mohle, he had been totally won over by F. Horton Caldwell. It’s a little confusing, pretending to be
one guy pretending to be another, but if it was working, I was game.
The big shocker had been Rex announcing that he was an orphan. In a way, it made perfect sense, tough and wary as he was. But the thing about orphans, they’re never as tough as they look. They can be gotten to. Take it from me.
I finally pushed up from the bed and went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I was dangling my dental floss over the wastebasket when there was a knock at the door.
“Yes?” I said.
“It’s me. Rex.”
When I opened the door, he was standing a few yards off, rubbing his elbow. His old man face looked spooky in the dim light.
“You going to sleep?” he said.
“Not quite yet,” I said.
“I was thinking of taking a walk down to the dam. Want to go with me?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
It wasn’t much of a walk, just a couple hundred yards, but under the trees it was hard to see more than a few feet in front of us. As we scuffled down the gravel road, Rex took my arm to steady himself. It felt as if the temperature must have dropped a good twenty degrees.
“After what I saw today,” Rex said, “I swear you could have yourself quite a career in acting.”
“Oh, I don’t think so, Rex,” I said.
“I appreciate your putting up with all this.”
“I enjoyed myself.”
“Really?” Something rustled in the brush off to our left. “When he started waving his gun around, I could have sworn we both were going to die.”
The road curved around and we came out of the trees. A sliver of moon reflected off the water and a pair of swans floated far out, looking like ghosts.
We stopped for a moment, taking it all in, but then Rex took a couple of teetering steps down the bank, trying to get to the river’s edge. I don’t know if he slipped or if his foot caught on something, but he suddenly lost his balance and reached back to grab my hand.
“Woof!” he said.
“You’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said.
He didn’t take his hand away, and neither did I. We stood side by side, hand in hand like a couple of schoolgirls, looking out over the dark water. It was pretty weird, but the last thing I wanted was him pitching into the drink. His hand felt like a claw.
“So I hope you got something you could use,” I said.
“Oh, you never know what you’re going to use. You just have to keep on gathering and gathering. Can I ask you something?”
There was a soft plop in the water, no more than ten feet away. “Sure,” I said.
“Did you really loathe my stuff as much as you said you did?”
The person Rex was talking to wasn’t even here, was still thousands of miles away. Somehow it bothered me.
“That was an awful long time ago, Rex,” I said.
“I know. But best as you can remember.”
“Mostly what I remember is that we both lost our minds.”
“I still regret getting those damn lawyers involved,” he said.
The swans had disappeared behind a small island of cypress. From far off, I could hear the cows still bawling, looking for their calves.
“We don’t need to talk about this now,” I said, giving his hand a squeeze.
“But one day.”
“Right. One day,” I said. “But not tonight, Rex. Not tonight.”
Chapter Seven
After my big ranch weekend, I was in the mood for a celebration. Monday night I took the Volvo for a spin. I must have driven around for at least two hours, the loose upholstery draped around my head, cruising past the football stadium, the capitol, and a big old park. I was sitting at a red light somewhere in South Austin when I glanced over and saw a barbeque place on the corner. It had big windows and I could see flames in the soot-blackened pit and a big side of beef turning on a spit. Some guy in a greasy apron hacked up ribs with a cleaver.
I sat there with my mouth hanging open. I didn’t even notice that the light had changed until the car behind me honked. I eased over to the curb to let everyone pass. When I cranked down the window, I could smell the sweet smoke.
Did I dare go in? I cursed V. S. Mohle’s vegetarianism under my breath. It was unlikely that any of my students were going to be inside, but if they were and they saw me stuffing my face with pork, my cover would be blown, but good.
But how much can one man take? I was tired of dutifully eating my dented peas and watery squash when I went over to Rex’s, clapping my hands like a trained seal when Mildred brought me carrot sticks in the middle of the afternoon. I wanted meat.
I got out of the car, pulled my hat down low, and went inside. It was a rambly barn of a place, with the barbeque pit and a bar up front, and a pool table and knock-hockey in the back. An old drunk was complaining to a waitress about the government putting corn in his gasoline. I ordered the biggest platter they had and the guy made it for me right at the counter—a half dozen ribs, some slices of brisket, and a healthy serving of sausage. Around all this he artfully arranged a scoop of yellow potato salad, coleslaw, a slice of white bread, onions, and pickles. The peach cobbler came in its own dish.
I carried my tray to the back and found a booth under the Rolling Rock sign. Hunkering down, I attacked my food like a returning POW. The ribs were perfect, tender, with lots of meat on them, and a little crispy around the edges. You couldn’t beat the brisket, once you got some sauce on it, and the sausage made pleasing little popping sounds when I bit down on it. Grease dripped between my fingers. The weight of the last few weeks slipped from my shoulders like a yoke from an ox. I made a little stack of bones on the side of my plate and sopped up the extra sauce with my bread.
I felt like a million dollars. Not only were Rex and I now thick as thieves, the whole F. Horton Caldwell thing was working like a charm. Sometimes, honestly, I dazzle myself. America is a great country. Just when you’re sure you’ve lost everything, when it looks like there’s no hope, what comes hopping down the trail but an opportunity bigger and better than anything you could have dreamed.
But as I was sucking on my fingers and congratulating myself, I glanced out the front window and there was Barry walking down the street with some floozy on his arm. I about had a heart attack. This was not like the dream I’d had of him, or some LSD flashback. This was the real guy, carrying a little more weight than he should have, with the flyaway red hair and that little limp of his.
It took just three or four seconds before they passed out of sight. I sat there staring down at my pork ribs. How could this be? The last time I’d seen Barry he’d been lying facedown in a pool of blood on a hotel room floor. My mind was like chop suey. The thought of going after him terrified me, but what other choice did I have?
I stumbled away from my booth, strode quickly past the rows of tables, and pushed out the front door. There was no one on the sidwalk, not to my right, not to my left. Across Congress Avenue, a few members of the Pepsi Generation were being stupid, laughing and pushing and throwing headlocks on their buddies.
I walked down to the corner to check out the side street, caught a glimpse of Barry and the floozy teetering around the back of the building. I hustled after them, half running, half walking.
There was a good-sized parking lot behind the restaurant and by the time I got to it, Barry was helping the woman into a red Cadillac down at the far end.
“Barry!” I shouted. “Barry!”
Barry turned and of course it wasn’t Barry. They definitely looked alike—it wasn’t as if I was totally out of my mind—but this guy was slick, with expensive cowboy boots and fancy jeans with sequins on the back pockets, the kind Barry wouldn’t have been caught dead in.
“You got a problem?” the guy said, and he wasn’t that nice about it. The woman, peering across the front seat, just seemed confused.
“No problem,” I said. “I just thought you were someone else.”
The guy shot me one last dirty glance
, slid in behind the steering wheel, and slammed his door shut. I stood there, watching the guy back around, and then retreated a step as the Cadillac peeled out of the parking lot, spitting gravel. I don’t know if the guy was still looking, but I gave the car the finger as it rocketed off down the street.
The smell of barbeque smoke was sweet and you could see it as it drifted off the roof of the restaurant like fog rolling in off the ocean.
I was a little shook up. It’s no picnic, let me tell you, when your mind starts playing tricks on you. Barry was dead and gone. I had to get that through my head.
I had never heard such barking in all my life—high-pitched yips, mournful baying, wolflike howls. I walked up and down the aisles of the animal shelter, peering into one cage after the other. Most of the dogs would rouse themselves as soon as they saw me, trot over to the wire, wagging their tails, looking up at me with soft eyes. Some would jump up and flail a paw through the narrow gap between the gate and the fence. Then there were the ones who’d given up, who would just lie curled up motionless in the dirt, giving me the evil eye as I passed.
Dog pounds have always given me the creeps. They’ve always reminded me a little too much of the orphanages I grew up in—part of it was the smell, part of it was the wire mesh over the windows, part of it the constant yappy din. The shelter was divided into two sections—the adoptables and the strays—and there were lots of nice young volunteers in fluorescent-green vests to help you pick out what you wanted.
It seemed like at least half the dogs were pit bulls and rottweilers, which were way more than Rex could handle, but I finally found this little brown and white mutt not more than a few weeks old, with floppy ears as smooth as satin.
I paid my seventy-five dollars and carried the little sucker out to the car, trying to keep it from licking my face. None of this was much fun, but it wasn’t about me anyway. I’m not trying to pass myself off as a Boy Scout, but sometimes it really does feel good, making someone’s day a little brighter.
When I pulled up in front of Rex’s house, he was sitting in a folding chair on the lawn, going through a stack of mail while Ramona mowed the side yard. Dranka, the hawk-faced cook, watered potted plants on the front porch, her back turned to the street.
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