The Gillespie Country Fair

by Marc Hess

  Rundown and way off the beaten path, Victor’s hardscrabble ranch was more expense than equity. It passed to family hands, and Carel was one of those listed as a co-owner—a piece of real estate that figured large in his future plans.

  Carel set the old photo back on his desk and meandered over to admire the toys in his gun cabinet. Collector’s items, really. No one had much use for guns these days. You couldn’t shoot bad guys anymore, and you needed jet fighters and nuclear warheads to defend the American way. Still, Carel was particularly fond of his matched pair of Italian replica 1872 US Cavalry revolvers, sporting seven-and-a-half-inch blue steel barrels and solid bone grips. They shot real .45-caliber bullets. He had a hand-tooled leather holster belt made so that he could wear them to the cowboy shooting reenactments he used to attend.

  Naked except for his skivvies, Carel slipped the gun belt around his waist and dropped the pistols into the holsters. Emboldened by his armaments, he strode across the room for his Resistol. He was now pumped to the man of action that he reckoned himself to be, ready to take on bandits, Indians, and the whole damn Gillespie County Historical Society.

  Sauntering up to the pool table, Carel took the corner of the white sheet in his hand and pulled it away with one swift jerk, the way a dining room magician would. And there lay his entire future: a scale model of the Ranger Creek subdivision, a protruding set of figurines spread out like a tabletop railroad town. It was a detailed architectural relief plat of the development that was going to emerge from Uncle Victor’s ranch.

  Carel stalked around the table, eyeing the precise details the way that a mountain lion studies its prey. It was topographically correct, with every flint upshift and limestone creek bed meticulously sculpted. In place of the existing flats of mesquite brush and gravel pits, however, were tiny replicas of landscaped lawns and scale models of the Hill Country rancheros that would be built there. The first thirty-four rancheros came in five basic styles, all to be sold and built by Geische Land & Development: Real Estate. There was room for horse barns and deer stands and high-fenced pastures where trophy bucks could be farmed, fed, and harvested. That scale model had set Carel back more than it would have cost him to build a couple of those rancheros, but his instincts told him that it was this kind of investment and vision you needed if you were going to play in the world of big-money real estate. Carel was betting his hat on all this.

  The model had been used to lure the backing of a syndicate of Houston land developers. Carel had wooed this group of men over several years. They had big-city expertise in real estate development, and they had the resources to get behind such a grand scheme. Carel had the land. And the history.

  He had taken these moneyed men deer hunting on the raw land, always making sure they took home a trophy buck that he’d stocked on the sly, fed like a pet, and set out in front of their Leupold VX-6 riflescopes. He put them up in local bed-and-breakfasts and treated them to big, beefy dinners at the town’s German restaurants, where he’d tell them Uncle Victor’s rodeo stories. The legend of Ranger Creek grew out of these investor briefings—the story of this Geische ranch, back in 1881 or thereabouts, where a company of Texas Rangers from Del Rio made their camp while they waited to ride into the battle that drove the last warring Comanche from the Hill Country and freed all of South Central Texas from the Indian menace—or so the story was told.

  “You’re not just buying a ranchero in the Texas Hill County,” Carel told them. “You’re buying a piece of Texas history.”

  They loved that tagline. They had a big-name Houston ad agency design a marketing campaign around Carel’s You’re buying a piece of Texas history theme. Promotion materials and billboards were waiting to be created. Carel knew he had reached the championship round, but the process had drained him financially. If only he could keep himself afloat long enough to see the deal come together. Now it was all down to a matter of true grit.

  Carel downed the last of the tequila and stood before the oval mirror, checking his character and practicing his draw. Six-guns, white hat, and skivvies. Polishing those Ranger skills. It was his heritage. Hadn’t he been a good Lutheran son of this town? Giving generously of himself and his money?

  Draw!

  Click. Click.

  And those who came before him—hadn’t the Geisches poured their blood and sweat into the soil of Gillespie County for the past hundred years? How did it come to be so difficult to work with his own people? The permits and the surveys and the bickering it took to do something that would be so good for this town. And the obstinate Historical Society. Hell, he was the history of this town.

  Draw!

  Click. Click.

  It was all so different now. Back then, all you had to do to leave your mark on Texas history was shoot a bad guy or a bunch of Comanche. Carel stared deeply into the reflected eyes in the mirror, trying to focus on that tequila-blurred image looking back at him: determined and focused, staring down that demon standing between him and his destiny. Just put twenty feet between them, like they did in the old days. The image in the mirror waved in and out of focus. A drunken, hazy image of the bad guy: black shirt, black hat. Deep Spanish eyes. It was none other than Dean Calderon. With palms steady over the pistol grips, Carel didn’t let his smile show, but stood firmly planted until the image rippled.

  Draw!

  Click. Click.

  The swiftest draw. The deadliest shot. And the image of Dean Calderon disappeared from the mirror. If only it were that easy.

  • • •

  In the mirror that hung behind the row of liquor bottles at Buc’s Bar and Grill, Mari kept an eye on Dean Calderon as he set aside his pool cue, picked up his beer, and sidled up next to her at the bar—all while she pretended to ignore him. Without looking directly at him, Mari knew that lascivious half-smile was spreading across his face. Even as he leaned into her, she kept her attention on, well, nothing really.

  One thing that she liked about him was that he was patient with her. He let her have her moment, before he moved in closer to share a secret.

  “Mari.” He let the word flow slowly off his tongue with a slight roll on the r and a quick departing accent on the i. Not a Spanish Marie but a name unique to itself. “I know someplace we ain’t been yet. Someplace way out there hidden in the night.”

  She also found it kind of cute the way he’d twist bad song lyrics into pickup lines. She held back her smile, but it must have shown in the glow of her cheeks because Dean was encouraged to press on.

  “Someplace we’ve never been so many, many times before.” He reached out to push a tress of raven-black hair over her ear, out of the way of her silver earring. Still she wouldn’t look at him, but nor did she resist. He moved in closer. “It’s down some back roads I know. An’ there’s a moon out there just waitin’ for a couple of … Well, I’m talkin’ about you and me.” His arm moved around her shoulder.

  Mari spun on her barstool to face him. She had heard those same words come out of the jukebox earlier in the evening. “Dean, I’m not screwin’ you in a truck, if that’s what you have in mind.”

  Unfazed, Dean eased back a bit to give her some space, but continued with a line from the chorus: “Am I gonna need you tonight? Where are you when I need you? I …” He forgot the rest and just hummed the tune.

  When Mari’s face broke into something between a smile and a mocking laugh, Dean just said, “Let’s blow this joint.”

  They left Buc’s through the Schubert Street stairs, to avoid the Gillespie County sheriff parked in the shadows across from the parking lot, waiting for the DWIs to pull out. Mari and Dean stumbled away, arm in arm and silly-giggling the few blocks to where Dean had left his truck. A southern man, he opened the door for her, borrowing another lyric: “The door’s open, but the ride—it ain’t free.”

  Dean’s truck was a well-worn Chevy Blazer with dirt on the windshield and dents in the hood. The dashboard was littered with a mess of papers, work gloves, coffee cups, and other things
that might have come in handy at one time or another. There were ornaments dangling from the rearview mirror and a “Viva Terlingua” bumper sticker on the roof of the cab. Mari shoved some stuff out of the way and climbed in. Dean rounded to the driver’s side, jumped in, and gave her a smile before guiding his truck out through the gravel side streets of the sleeping neighborhood, where there were no cop cars lurking in the shadows.

  That’s how Dean got to be the trophy buck. He bragged that he could circumnavigate the entire town, “all the way around,” without driving on a road that was divided by a white line. He said that as if it were some kind of superpower he possessed.

  You don’t give directions to a man like that, Mari thought as she rolled down the window to drink in the cool night air. They cruised to the northwest of town on the Old Mason Road and crossed the state highway at the Cherry Mountain Loop, rolling along the unmarked, two-lane blacktop into the darker parts of the Hill Country—all the while pulling a moonlit cloud of caliche dust down the road behind them. Willie Nelson on the radio was nice at first, but the DJ seemed too stuck on him. Dean was lip-synching when Mari reached out and switched the radio off, pronouncing, “A little bit of Willie goes a long way.”

  Before Dean could cop a mood, she laid her foggy head against his shoulder.

  “It’s cooled a bit,” he said, trying to start a conversation.

  “Just drive, baby,” she mumbled back.

  He slid his right hand onto her thigh, letting his smallest finger slide under the frayed cuff of her denim shorts. She lent no encouragement, no discouragement, and kept her head cocked against his shoulder.

  “These roads are all ours in the nighttime,” he said, as if that was something deep and poetic.

  “Yeah,” she mumbled. “Too bad none of them go anywhere, really.”

  “Oh, they’re not meant to take you anywhere, girl. They’re just meant to drive on.”

  “If it ain’t some stoplight, it’s a fence gate or a bar ditch,” Mari murmured. “Even a mountain or an ocean, if you go far enough. Whatever it is that gets in your way just gets bigger and bigger.”

  Dean took his hand from Mari’s leg and moved it around her shoulder. “You just don’t worry about getting off to some other place, girl. This here is home to us.” He looked down at her to see if she was up for a kiss.

  Mari turned her face away and closed her eyes and just said, “Home.”

  They hit a low water crossing near the old gypsum mine, rattled across a loose cattle guard, and bounced through Metzger Creek, always dry this time of year.

  “So why even bother?” Mari asked in a whisper, not really wanting to hear an answer.

  But Dean had an answer for everything. “Just do it so we can slip into town every once in a while. Drink a little whisky. Get laid every now and again. Go dancin’ at Luckenbach.”

  He let a mile or so go by, and Mari hoped that he was done talking. But Dean rambled on in a more serious tone.

  “Really, babe, take a look at all these new folks movin’ into town with all their money an’ all. All they want is what you already got. An old house in the Hill Country. You got your daddy’s place. See, you are already better off than the whole lot of ’em.”

  Mari snapped into instant sobriety when a whitetail deer leapt into the cone of their headlights—freezing there, just waiting to be smashed. Dean’s steady hand dodged the collision, and they both watched as the young buck hurdled gracefully past their fender and disappeared into the night. Good thing, too, because they both knew Dean had no collision insurance on his truck.

  The deer that scared Mari was not the young spike out on the road; rather, it was the one that you couldn’t see. She had learned from her daddy that wherever there was a buck in the road, willing to put a dent in your bumper, there would be a doe or two in the mesquite shrub, startled enough to bound into your windshield and total your car.

  “One time, out there, my daddy killed a wild boar for me.” Mari faced out the window—her words meant for no one.

  Dean had heard her. “Right there?”

  “No. Not in that exact spot.” Mari turned to him. “But out there.” She gestured with a toss of her head. “Saved me from getting all gored up, I suppose.”

  They bumped along without words over the cattle guards at the dilapidated Crabapple schoolhouse, where the road started to wind through some flat pastures of trampled Bermuda grass.

  The memory of the boar stayed with Mari. “When I was a little kid, I always wanted to get out into these hills, but my mom and dad wouldn’t have it,” she told Dean. “These hills had a pull on me like magic. But not after that one time.”

  He looked over to her like he was due a full explanation.

  “Daddy had his rifle,” she went on. “That old lever-action Winchester that still sits in my kitchen closet … Think that was my opa’s gun too. Been in the house forever.”

  “Ya out huntin’ with Mr. Hilss?”

  “Not really. Something been killing our sheep. Daddy thought it was some kinda big cat.” She paused a bit, recalling that day. “We was trompin’ around, and I guess I was the one who scared ’em up. Daddy was behind me. Way behind me.” Somehow that memory made her flinch.

  Dean stayed quiet, patient.

  “When that ugly boar came a-chargin’ downhill right at me, with that bristly snout and all them curved teeth and all …” She looked over at Dean, who held her in his eyes, not watching the road. “Dean, I swear to this day, I heard that bullet whizzing right over the top of my head.”

  “Really?”

  “I tell you, it made one bloody mess out of that pig. Daddy got that poor beast just in time. Smacked dead on the ground right there in front of me, so close I could reach out and almost touch it, with all that blood oozing through the dirt right down at me. Scared the piss out of me. And I mean that literally. I was just a little kid then.”

  The truck hit some gravel on the side of the road, and Dean returned his attention to driving. He said something that Mari didn’t hear.

  “I was a-cryin’ in the dirt ’cause I’d just peed my pants, and my daddy came and squatted next to me, and you know what my daddy said?”

  “What?” he answered softly.

  Mari closed her eyes for a moment to be sure she got this right. “He pointed up to where that pig had come from, from where we could hear the squealing of some little baby piglets that we just orphaned. And my daddy was wiping on my eyes with that sweaty old bandanna of his, and he says to me: ‘That ol’ pig just doin’ the same thing as me. Just a mama tryin’ to look out for her kids.’”

  Mari took a deep breath and looked out into the night, where the moonlight silhouetted the slow roll of the hills. “This is a hard land we live on, Mr. Calderon.” Dean pulled her in closer to his side, and she was surprised to find tears welling up in her eyes. “Why does everything have to be so damn hard?”

  “What’s so hard about it?”

  She turned her face toward his. “Well, puttin’ up with you men, for one thing.”

  • • •

  When Dean dropped off Mari at her house, she gave him a quick good-night kiss in the cab of his truck and sent him on his way. Inside, she found Willow sprawled awkwardly across the sofa, swallowed up by a loose-fitting pullover, occasionally snoring. The TV was on but its sound was off, and the radio provided a juxtaposed soundtrack to the flickering images on the screen. A faint scent of marijuana hung in the air.

  Mari found a place to sit on the sofa and moved some tangles of hair from Willow’s face without waking her. Mari could never imagine them not living together, but then again, she never thought of anything beyond next month’s bills. There were eighteen years between them, but as Willow grew older it seemed that they had become closer in age—like they were two grown-ups living together.

  Mari reached out to gently slide the long sleeves up Willow’s arms, just to have a look at the old cuts, to participate in her daughter’s pain. Nothing made Mari feel m
ore like an inadequate mother than these dainty little scars—just fractions of an inch above that delicate blue artery at Willow’s elbow.

  Her touch startled Willow awake.

  “Get away! Leave me alone. Damn it.” Willow recoiled angrily, slapping frantically at her mother’s hands.

  Mari backed away. “Sweetheart. I was only trying—”

  “Don’t touch me!” Willow snapped, and she pulled herself into the corner of the couch, folding her arms tightly across herself. “You’re drunk. Leave me alone.”

  Mari took a breath, slowly stood up, and retreated into the kitchen. That anger, too, was what it was like between the two of them.

  There was cold water in the fridge but no ice in the freezer. That girl never refilled the ice trays. After pouring a glass of water Mari spun around, intending to go back and lay a scolding on her insolent daughter, but instead she found Willow stumbling into the kitchen, wiping the sleep from her eyes.

  “Got the B and B all cleaned up,” Willow told her. “Ready for those guys. They said they would be in early tomorrow, didn’t they? Or is that today already? Hell, if they’re going to be that early, they could show up anytime now, couldn’t they? Where did you say they were from?”

  “Um … Up north. Denton or someplace ’round there. I think.” The mood had changed from fight-ready to affable mother-daughter sweetness. “Here, do you want some water? It’s cold.”

  Willow took the water and sat at the table. Mari fetched another glass for herself before she took a chair.

  “It’s too hot to bake anything for them,” Mari offered. “If they’re driving all the way down from Denton, I’ll just pick up something at Dietz’s Bakery in the morning. They won’t care.”

  “Won’t care? Bunch of Yankees. They won’t know.”

  Mari looked out through the kitchen window, recalling what Dean had said on the ride home, about her daddy’s ranch. The first permanent structure erected on the Hilss farmstead had been a Sunday house, a highly efficient limestone structure that so many German settlers in this area put up, with two stories in front and a long, sloping roof that dropped to one story in the back. The taller roof in front allowed for a loft where the children would sleep when the ranch families made their way into town for market day on Saturday and stayed for church on Sunday. Like all the Sunday houses in Gillespie County, this one was constructed of limestone blocks—cool in the summer, warm in the winter—and built so solid, it wasn’t ever going to come down.