The Gillespie Country Fair

by Marc Hess

  The other worst day in Willow’s life came a year later, in the spring of her sophomore year, when she had to go to her dad’s wedding. It was a big show-off church affair with a catered reception at Turner Halle. His new wife—Willow’s new stepmom—smacked of dressed-up trailer trash, with makeup thicker than the icing on the wedding cake. Two new stepbrothers, Justin and Jordan, were thrown into the deal as well. They would be living in her dad’s big new house up on the hill. Willow went through the rest of her high school years watching her dad get richer and her mom get more overwhelmed by the common burdens of single motherhood.

  As Willow heard it, her dad made his money first by selling off pieces of his family’s land and building fancy houses on them, and then by fixing up stores in town to make them appear old-fashioned. The tourists were attracted to that old-timey look. Carel Geische got to be a big man in town who liked to throw his weight around and brag about his pioneer family name—which was also Willow’s name. But Willow didn’t see him as the Saint of Historical Renovation that he made himself out to be. The simple story was that he got rich buying and selling something that really wasn’t his: the very history of Gillespie County.

  • • •

  A crew of Carel Geische’s contract laborers were stranded on the roof of the Austin Street Bed & Breakfast. They were afraid to come down. Holding them at bay up there was a three-man delegation from the Historical Society, who stood on the front lawn waving papers at the workers and insisting they put their hammers down. The men on the lawn shouted at the workers in German. The roofers called back in Spanish. Matters got worse when Carel arrived at the building site after his run-in at the bank, running his truck up onto the lawn and scattering the docents from the Historical Society.

  The folks from the Historical Society were threatening to get a restraining order that would require Carel to change his roofing plan to be more consistent with the traditional look of the neighborhood. Carel dismissed their suggestions by out-shouting them and running them off the property.

  It wasn’t until the hottest part of the afternoon that he found his way back to the air-conditioned offices of Geische Land & Development: Real Estate. “You guys sell anything today?” he shouted out to announce his entrance. It was his habitual greeting.

  Two, three years ago, their firm had half a dozen licensed agents filling the desks in the front office. Now there were two: a retired Air Force officer who ran a ranch-load of Boer goats out on the Old San Antonio highway, and a cute young go-getter with a long string of bad luck in each and every aspect of her life. Carel’s wife, Cora Lynn, held the broker’s license for the firm and was the only one of them who had been to a closing in the past four months.

  In the office Cora Lynn was a busy worker, deliberate with her paperwork and direct in her manner. At home she spent her evenings drinking margaritas and watching old John Wayne movies. She dressed with a cliché Texas flair that complemented Carel’s contemporary cowboy style, and overall she came off as a gal who might have grown up as a rodeo girl—which she hadn’t.

  “I’ve got some papers for you to notarize,” he said as he breezed past, continuing into his office, where he parked himself behind his desk.

  All too familiar with his methods, Cora Lynn made him wait a while before she showed up at his door with her record book and stamp pad. “Do I need to fetch a witness for this?”

  “Oh, no. I haven’t even written up the papers yet. Going to be tricky. Do you just happen to have an empty line in that book—say, three, four weeks ago?”

  She stepped forward and half-sat on the corner of his desk. “What are you up to, sugar boots? I heard you was at the bank this morning.”

  “Oh, I’m just buying some distressed property.” He gave her a sly wink. “But we’re buying it before it became distressed. Should be able to turn it in just a few weeks—after the smoke clears, so to speak.”

  “You just might be fixin’ to get my notary’s license revoked.” She stepped up to him. “I love you, but I ain’t going to jail for you.”

  “You already took a chance on me one time.” Carel pulled her onto his lap. “You’re not willing to risk another go?”

  “Hell, no. If I go to prison, you can get an automatic divorce. Then you’ll be running off with little Miss Go-getter out there.”

  He tried to lay a kiss on her, but she pushed him off.

  “Other than that, there won’t be no call for me to be notarizing your made-up papers. Bank’s not going to be giving you any money, after all the damage you already done ’em.” She stood up and straightened her clothes.

  “You need to get yourself a more positive outlook, darling.”

  “You’re a dreamer, Carel Geische.” She walked to the door, turned back to him, and blew him a kiss. “And that’s the part of you I’m in love with.”

  • • •

  A couple of hours behind his desk made Carel antsy. The only things he did in the office these days were wrestle with unpaid bills and field calls from collection agencies. The only time he felt he was getting anything done was when he was out and about in his truck.

  The doors of Carel’s Ford F-450 Super Duty were emblazoned with his new company logo: a rustic lone star surrounded with the words Geische Land & Development: Real Estate. A heavy-duty work truck, it was a definitive part of Carel’s identity. On Tuesday evenings that truck was always parked out at the softball fields, where he served as a volunteer umpire for the Fredericksburg Optimists’ T-ball League. This allowed him to cozy up to the two county commissioners who sponsored the league—“two of the grumpiest ‘optimists’ I know,” his wife had once told him—but important allies to have when Carel applied for building code variances.

  When the evening games ended, Carel could count on returning home to find his wife on the south-facing patio—a double-shot margarita cooling her hand—watching the lights rise up from the little houses of Fredericksburg as the last long streaks of a slow red sun finally yielded their hold on the day.

  He knew how Cora Lynn looked down upon Fredericksburg, the town where she, her mama, and her grandmama had all been raised, and raised poor in a double-wide trailer house just a whiff away from the county landfill. Carel was proud to have a girl as pretty as her take his name and work so eagerly alongside him. Years ago, amid a summer sunset not unlike this one, Carel had brought her out onto this same patio, when it was unfinished and owned by someone else. With one strong arm reining her up against his side, the other arm sweeping across the panorama below, he had said to her, “Someday, darlin’, we are going to own this whole damn town.” With those words he’d won her heart.

  But tonight as he kicked off his boots in the front foyer, where he had found them that morning, it was, “Hey, sweet darlin’. Sell anything today?”

  His wife came to him. “Not today, sugar boots. That contract down on White Oak still won’t sign.” She stood up on her tippy-toes to peck his cheek as he flipped through the mail.

  “What’s the damn holdup?” he bleated.

  “The appraised value. Our bank found it a little out of kilter with the dumpy way the place really looks.” She spoke over her shoulder as she headed to the bar to fetch him a drink and refresh her own, paying no attention to his mumbled response.

  “Our bank is the one that’s out of kilter.”

  Carel crossed through a corner of the too-spacious living room and threw some new envelopes onto a pile of papers that he was ignoring. Then he strode on down to the bedroom, where he took off his modern-day gun belt: cell phone, pager, buck knife, and all. “The boys coming for dinner?” he shouted back down the hall.

  “Jordan’s already been,” Cora Lynn hollered back. “Just stopped by to clean up. He’s taking that Keubel girl out to dinner at Friedhelm’s.”

  “What? He just came by to steal my condoms, didn’t he?” Carel ducked into his bathroom to check.

  When he reemerged, Cora Lynn was in the bedroom doorway with his drink and a smirk. “Well, t
hat would be a good thing, wouldn’t it? Must have had a darn good mama, teaching him about safe sex and all.”

  Carel was used to losing arguments with her before they even started. As he took his drink, the phone on the nightstand started to ring.

  Cora Lynn turned to get it, saying, “You wash yourself up, now. Dinner is just about on the table.” She picked up the phone, exchanged the familiar pleasantries with someone, and passed the call to Carel.

  “Wie gehts, Chuckie? You’re working late. Got some good news for me?”

  Cora Lynn left Carel to his conversation, which quickly lost its civility.

  “No! You listen to me, buddy. You’ve got to grow some cajones and tell those sons of bitches down in Houston …”

  When Carel rejoined his wife in the kitchen, he was perfectly calm and collected. “You were right about the bank. They got no more money to lend to me. Guess you get to stay an honest notary public for just a while longer.”

  She lay her hand on his forearm. “Don’t you go frettin’ about this one deal, sugar boots. We got each other. And we got this house.”

  Geische Manor was what Cora Lynn’s two boys, Justin and Jordan, called it. They had been raised in that house from the time their mother had taken on the Geische name. Carel had built it in a neo–Hill Country style, using exposed limestone and rustic timbers that were meant to be reminiscent of the German pioneers. Rustic styling, yes, but far too elegant for a working homestead, with its sweeping atriums, floor-to-ceiling windows, and granite countertops. This had become the signature style of Geische Land & Development: Real Estate—lavish with a traditional bent. It was difficult to keep clean and spoke greatly of the affluence of the owner.

  Carel had built the home, but not for himself. Years ago he was the contract builder for a Midland oilman who was squandering himself into bankruptcy during the construction process. Back in the early days of the real estate boom, the name on the side of his truck was Geische Custom Framing—Construction. Carel was the one who dug out the trench lines, drove the nails, and held the builder’s lien. Filing for bankruptcy in Texas is, by design, a long, drawn-out process, and Carel used that time to expand the original house plans and add the inside-outside patio, the pool, and the hot tub—all on his customer’s tab. When the bankruptcy court finally settled, Carel leveraged his builder’s lien and a relatively small amount of cash for full ownership of the property. It was a clever way for a one-truck builder to move himself into such a grandiose property, which also brought him a big chunk of instant equity.

  Carel could now sit at the dining table under the cypress pergola on the outside portion of his patio and look down across the open creek bottoms and onto the town proper. From there he could watch the setting sun glistening off the tin roof of the old German rock house at the end of the last street coming out of town, where the yellow field rose from the creek bed to the back door—the home of his first wife, Mari Hilss Geische, and their daughter.

  That little house on Washington Street was a sore point between him and Cora Lynn because Carel got title to that property when he was married to Mari. In spite of Cora Lynn’s persistent suggestions, Carel remained bull-headed in his determination not to sell off any part of that property—at least while Willow still lived there. Actually, it was more complicated than that because Carel had, a long time before Cora Lynn came into his life, put up his interest in Mari’s house as collateral for one of his first big business loans, and that particular note was part of the package of debts that Carel’s buddies at the bank were now threatening to call in. Cora Lynn knew nothing about that.

  “Your sister called,” came Cora Lynn’s voice, jumping into his distracted moment. “She’s coming up this weekend. Bringing her little girl, for the fair. I invited her to stay up here with us, but she’s made other plans.”

  “What’s she doing with her kid? We’re not getting stuck watching her, are we?”

  “Caitlin’s gonna spend some time with her father.”

  “Dean?” Carel damn-near spilled his drink. “Jeanie’s letting my niece stay with that son of a wetback? He owes me money, you know.”

  “We all know that, sugar boots. But Dean is her father. Jeanie says that good or bad, Caitlin needs to get to know him. That’s her decision, and I agree with her. And if you can’t offer up a smile for that, you should just keep that down-in-the-mouth look of yours all to yourself.”

  Carel settled into a rush of tequila and lime juice. “All that little girl got from Dean Calderon was a Mexican name and those thieving eyes. So, what’s he going to do with my niece? Take her out to some honky-tonk, feed her Jell-O shots, and let his buddies grab at her ass? I’ll have to put an end to that shit.”

  Another phone call put an end to their patio dinner. Carel took it in his downstairs study. It was the attorney for the Historical Society, calling with an official complaint about the manner in which Carel had physically threatened representatives from the—

  Carel hung up. He stayed in the study, scowling into his computer monitor, until Cora Lynn, now in a thin chemise, crept down the stairs to find him.

  “It’s time to give it a rest, sugar boots,” she purred.

  His hands moved from the keyboard onto her hips. As she ran a couple of suggestive fingers up to his shoulder, her mouth came close enough to his ear to take a bite. “And I got just what you need.”

  “Oh yeah?” He slid a hand under her gown. “And just what would that be, sweet darlin’?”

  She held out a vintage video box—something, she told him, that she’d found on eBay. Comanche Station, the old Randolph Scott Western. In black and white. With that she lured him back upstairs, where she threw some popcorn in the microwave and served up the last of the margaritas. They sank together into the folds of their faux leather sofa under the glow of the forty-five-inch plasma TV screen mounted above the fireplace. Carel was snoring before old Randolph Scott could get word to the fort that the Comanche were on the warpath.

  • • •

  Too hot to sleep, too buzzed to lie still, Carel slipped out of the bed he didn’t remember getting into. He pulled on a pair of boxers, stumbled through the dark into the kitchen, and poured what was left of the tequila straight into the nearest glass. Back downstairs, sitting in front of his computer, he tried once more to get different results from the same set of numbers.

  The “study” itself had been an afterthought. The room was too big to be the wine cellar in the original house plans, and now it was filled with his stuff—a room that every young boy imagines for himself. One wall was dominated by an original G. Harvey print—cowboys in the rain—framed in mesquite, signed, numbered, and properly lit. It was a prize he had taken home from a Gillespie County Fair and Festival Association scholarship auction. On either side of the print hung the racks of deer he’d killed and the oak gun cabinet with his collection of Western firearms. Hogging up most of the space in the room was a pool table; shoved too close to the wall to be playable, it was covered with a white cotton drop cloth.

  Carel rang up his sister, thinking he might just catch the Austin party girl at this late hour. He intended to bitch her out, once again, about Dean Calderon, but all he got was a recorded message.

  It wasn’t enough that Dean had gotten his sister pregnant. Their short marriage had then become the favorite topic for the family quarrels, which ended up driving Jeanie to take her baby and move off to Austin. Carel’s affection for his little sister was genuine. They were the two youngest out of five kids on a ranch that was always struggling to make ends meet. While the rest of the Geische clan had moved past the catastrophe of her marriage, accepted her divorce, and gone back to their ranching, Carel never got over her leaving town—he just missed having his sister around. In his way of thinking, it was proper for the man to remove himself. But Dean Calderon wasn’t German, and he stayed on to prey on other women, most recently Carel’s own ex-wife. Dean was a pest who just needed to be shot—that’s all there was to it.

>   Carel left a message on his sister’s answering machine in the kindest tone, inviting her to bring her daughter up and stay with them at Geische Manor. His message ended, “Love you. Look forward to seeing you and, uh, Caitlin.”

  That done, Carel looked down at all the unresolved issues on his desk, took a long, slow sip of tequila, and stood up to shake it off. He picked up the old black-and-white photo of his uncle Victor and him leaning against a fence line at the Gillespie County Fair. How long ago had that been, then? Carel wondered. He looked maybe ten or eleven years old, standing on the bottom rail to make him look much taller than he was at the time.

  Big hats and big smiles—it was a dark and grainy picture, but it was the one that Carel put into a frame after his bachelor uncle died—the image Carel chose to remember him by, with both of them wearing those big oval belt buckles. Victor had won many of those trophy buckles as a rough stock rider at rodeos and county fairs throughout the Hill Country and all of Texas. He had given one to Carel not too long before that picture was taken. The impressionable young cowboy relished it as if he had been given the entire history of Texas, and there was nothing grittier, nothing grander than all of that.

  Some folks, including many in Carel’s own family, talked about Uncle Victor drinking himself to death, but he didn’t really die that way. Sure, Victor kept himself pickled a lot. He even tutored young Carel on how to handle his liquor—and on how to be a real Texan: “Ya don’t back up, and ya don’t back down.”

  Victor wasn’t one to rot away with cirrhosis of the liver, becoming a burden to his family or disappearing into a nursing home. He was a lot more cowboy than that. Victor had stood up in the bed of a pickup truck one night when some of his buddies were delivering him home from a honky-tonk called the South Star, out on the San Antonio highway. Sure, he was drunk, probably had no idea where he was. Just stood up looking for a place to pee, and stepped out over the tailgate as the pickup raced down Tivydale Road, and that was all she wrote.