Lone Star Legend

by Gwendolyn Zepeda

  Dominga Saavedra

  37

  Sandy felt like a bird—a free, feather-light bird without a boring day job any longer—floating her way through Calypso’s brown velveteen ottomans and worn rattan chairs. As she approached the counter her phone buzzed. She checked and saw the name Jeremy. She opened the text and read, “Coming to Austin next week. Can we have coffee?” She smiled in remembrance of the cute marketing guy she’d met in Atlanta. She would check her calendar for space as soon as she got to the office.

  At the counter, she recited her usual order to the barista on duty. The young woman stared at Sandy for a moment before letting out a slow “Hey-y-y-y,” of recognition.

  Sandy looked at the barista’s face and immediately regretted having ventured so close to the university. She hadn’t seen Daniel since their breakup and now, here she was, face-to-face with one of his fellow TAs’ girlfriends. But Sandy couldn’t remember her name.

  “You’re Sandy S.,” the cashier said. “From Nacho Papi’s Web Site!”

  Sandy felt her smile fall into place, as if she were on camera for the site. It was okay—this was one of her fans.

  “Remember me? Kristy? We met at the Fat Man and talked about Ann Radcliffe being the grandmother of Goth? You were with Daniel.”

  “Right, right,” Sandy said. Concentrating on the girl’s light brown bangs falling over green eyes made Sandy recall her name. Kristy. And Kristy had been with…

  “I was with Adam,” she supplied, then added, “but I’m not anymore.”

  “Oh, really?” said Sandy. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t be. I’m better off. We both are, right?” At this, Kristy gave Sandy a mischievous smile. She leaned forward conspiringly, her long hair falling out of its cap and over the shoulder of her pale blue uniform shirt. This caused Sandy to lean forward too, and Kristy lowered her voice. “I laughed my ass off at your parodies of Daniel’s poetry.”

  Sandy smiled with pleasure. It was good to have her talent recognized. But then, replaying Kristy’s compliment in her mind, she realized something. “Wait, what? What do you mean? That wasn’t on Nacho Papi.”

  “No, right. It was on your other site, My Modern TragiComedy.”

  Sandy stood straight and felt the hair on the back of her neck quiver. “You know about that?”

  Kristy laughed. “Yeah. But don’t worry—Daniel didn’t know that I knew. He never read the site at all, right?”

  “No.” Sandy’s mind raced over possibilities before she came out and asked. “How did you find out about it, though? That it was me writing it, I mean?”

  Kristy laughed again. After glancing at the other two customers in the corners of the shop and assuring herself that they were both immersed in their respective laptop screens, she explained. “It was the funniest thing. Adam asked me to look up one of Daniel’s poems online. He was always comparing his work to Daniel’s and wanting me to tell him his was better. You know?”

  Sandy nodded. She knew, all right, exactly how insecure grad-school poets could be.

  Kristy continued. “So I searched for this one cheesy line about ‘a string of bloody hearts,’ thinking it would come up in one of the online journals, right? But instead I found that entry where you made fun of that line, last summer. And I started reading your site, and it was pretty obvious that you were Daniel’s girlfriend, you know? I didn’t say anything when we met at the Fat Man because I didn’t want to freak you out. You know, I didn’t want to come off like a stalker or anything.”

  Sandy was completely dumbfounded. It was a big coincidence, but the story made perfect sense. Of course someone would be able to find her site by looking up Daniel’s worst lines. It was stupid of her never to have considered that before.

  At that moment, a younger barista emerged from a door behind the counter. “Hey, Amy,” Kristy said to her, “this is Sandy S., from Nacho Papi!”

  “Hey!” said Amy in pleasant surprise. “Oh my God! I love your site. You’re my favorite writer on it. I’m a writer too!”

  Sandy asked the girl what she wrote and then nodded knowingly and encouragingly at her answer. Inside, though, she was still reeling from what she’d just heard. Amy chattered hard and fast, telling Sandy that she herself was a journalism major and asking if she could become a Nacho Papi intern.

  “Hey,” Kristy interrupted. “Tell her what happened the other day, in Daniel’s class.”

  “What? Oh!” said Amy, her blue eyes rounding in sudden revelation. “Oh, that’s right! You’re the one!”

  “The one what?” Sandy asked, bracing herself for more. Apparently Amy was one of Daniel’s students.

  “Oh my God, it was so lame. So Mr. Thomas—Daniel—had been missing class a lot, right? And blowing up at some of the other students and stuff? And then, the other day, he sent us all this e-mail, right? It said he was sorry he’d been so out of it, but that he’d suffered”—here she made her voice low and serious, in a somewhat competent impersonation of Daniel—“ ‘a personal blow in the form of a romantic disappointment.’ And he tried to make it seem like he’d been the one to dump you. But it was so obvious that he wasn’t. He said that he and this woman were, like, torn apart by ‘a difference in personal ambition.’ It was so lame. We were all laughing about it.”

  “Wait, what?” Sandy said. “He told his students about our breakup?”

  “He totally did!” Amy continued. She wasn’t as careful about keeping her voice down. Out of the corner of her eye Sandy saw one of the other customers glancing their way as Amy went on with her story. “And then when Kristy told me about your blog, and I sent everybody the link, we were totally dying, it was so hilarious! And, like, he keeps assigning all these poems about breakups and evil women now, and it’s so hard to get through class with a straight face—”

  Right then, the door bells chimed. Kristy turned to greet the new customer and then, with a comically exaggerated look of panic, said, “Oh—hi, Daniel!”

  Sandy and Amy spun to see that it was, indeed, the same Daniel they’d just been discussing.

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Thomas,” Amy said, more casually than Kristy had.

  But it wasn’t any help. Daniel froze in an awkward stance, staring at Sandy. Then he turned and left the shop, prompting his student to say “Awww!” Whether it was because she felt sorry for him or because she was disappointed that the drama had ended early, Sandy couldn’t tell.

  After getting Amy to make her iced mocha as quickly as possible, Sandy drove to work in an emotional debate with herself, torn between feeling pity and absolute triumph.

  It served Daniel right, being humiliated like that. It was the least he deserved after having spilled his guts to his students about their private lives. Sandy may have mentioned a few things about it on her blog, but she’d never intended for anyone who knew them in real life to read it. Daniel, on the other hand, was obviously trying to drum up sympathy from his young co-ed fan club. Sympathy, and who knew what else? Maybe a rebound relationship or two?

  Maybe she would have felt bad about the students reading her blog entries if Daniel had been any other guy. But he wasn’t. And now he was finding out how she’d felt the whole time she was his girlfriend. Ignored. Pushed aside. Unappreciated.

  Now he was the one being pushed aside, and she was the one with all the fans. It served him right, she told herself again, so there was absolutely no reason for her to feel guilty.

  And the little voice in the back of her mind that kept telling her, as she drove on, that she’d done something wrong? Sandy told it to shut up. She was going to enjoy this reversal of fortune, at least for a little while.

  38

  She made it to the office at noon. Their flight back from LA had arrived a mere thirteen hours before that, so she didn’t expect any of her fellow staffers to be slaving away at work just yet. Francisco proved her wrong, though. He was sitting at the conference table clicking back and forth between two laptops when Sandy walked in.

 
“Hey, Sandy, guess what. Your friend’s T-shirt is highest-grossing this week.”

  “What friend?” Sandy assumed he meant the disgusting Official Nacho Papi Nalga Inspector T-shirt George had come up with. And it was no secret among their co-workers that she and George had been anything but best friends forever.

  “You know. Your friend the Chupacabra. Everybody’s homeboy. They’re selling as fast as we can have them printed,” Francisco said.

  Sandy felt the color drain out of her face. “Really?”

  “Yep. We’ve sold almost two hundred of them since yesterday.”

  Sandy said nothing in reply. There was no use feeling guilty about that now, either, she told herself. She had made this decision and now she had to live with it.

  She had almost forgotten about the whole thing amidst the excitement of Los Angeles and the news about the TV station. Could anyone blame her? Here she was, about to make a career transition that most people only dreamed about. And then, flitting through her brain like a mosquito, there was this petty problem with a T-shirt and a piece of paper.

  Not for the first time that week she reminded herself that Tío Jaime would most likely never discover they were printing the shirts anyway. Who would he know who would buy a joke T-shirt from a gossip Web site? Nacho Papi’s readers were people with boring corporate jobs who surfed the ’Net all day. Or else they were students. But they definitely weren’t goat ranchers or cactus farmers. So there was nothing to worry about, was there? And, really, if Tío Jaime had actually understood how much this T-shirt thing was helping Sandy in her career, he probably would have gone ahead and given his permission.

  That was what she told herself—again—as she set up her laptop to review Francisco’s edits on her latest video. Before long she became engrossed in her work and the Chupacabra went back to lurking in the dark corners of her mind.

  Later that day, however, she couldn’t avoid it any longer. It was time for another edition of “Ask the Chupacabra.” Sandy packed up her equipment and started the long drive out to Tío Jaime’s house. She had to face him as if she hadn’t done anything wrong.

  She hadn’t, she reminded herself as she sped down the highway. He had given her his permission to use his image, right from the beginning. How was she supposed to know, back then, that he would later change his mind and get picky about how she’d use his image?

  Besides, he would never find out anyway. He would never find out, she told herself, over and over again like a yoga student chanting. How could he ever find out?

  She drove south faster, wanting to get it all over with.

  Eventually she reached the gold-green fields of cactus and mesquite. Chupacabra Country, she named it in her mind. She slowed her Malibu and began the sequence of twisty turns that led to the old man’s house.

  At the second turn she rounded the corner and almost ran smack into a turquoise VW Bug that had stopped in the middle of the road. Sandy slammed on her brakes, then pulled over to one side to see what was going on.

  Two young men stood in front of the Bug examining a sheet of paper. Sandy could tell by their skinny jeans and kooky hats that they were hipsters—maybe UT dropouts. Their Bug’s bumper stickers, including the inevitable KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD, confirmed her impression.

  What were guys like that doing out here? she wondered.

  They turned to see who had driven up behind them. Their facial expressions practically shouted “We’re lost!”

  Then Sandy noticed their shirts. Specifically their brand-new THE CHUPACABRA IS MY HOMEBOY T-shirts re-creating Tío Jaime’s smiling face in double vision.

  Oh, no.

  There was only one reason they could be all the way out here, in the middle of nowhere, wearing those shirts. They were fans. As in short for fanatics.

  She had to drive away before they recognized her. She put her car back into gear, but it was too late.

  “Hey!” one of the hipsters called. “Sandy S.!”

  They ran over to the front of her car, keeping her from being able to drive away. One of them put his hands on her hood. “Hey, Sandy S.! Don’t leave! Help us!”

  Sandy held her foot on the brake wondering what to do. Her heart was pounding all of a sudden. She was a little afraid. More than a little, actually. What were these guys doing out here? She was alone and they knew who she was. What would they do to her if she didn’t drive away right now?

  “Sandy!” They ran up to her window and motioned for her to roll it down. She did, but only an inch.

  “Don’t leave! Help us, please! We came out here to meet the Chupacabra. We want to interview him for our site! It’s an arts organization! Can you introduce us? Please?”

  The shorter one in the trucker hat did all the talking, and the taller one in the fedora nodded his head furiously in support. After examining their faces for insanity and their hands for weapons, Sandy put her car back into Park. Their jeans were too tight to conceal guns or knives. She opened her door, thinking fast all the while.

  “Listen, guys,” she said as she emerged from the car and then leaned against it as casually as she could. “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”

  “What? Aw, man. Come on, Sandy S.! We’re not trying to steal your gig. We want to ask the Chupacabra about his politics. And, like, about living off the grid and stuff,” the shorter one said.

  “No, I get you,” Sandy said, making her voice as placating as possible. “I feel that. What I’m trying to tell you, though, is that the Chupacabra doesn’t actually live out here.”

  “What?” said both guys.

  “Right. He lives in Austin. We just come out here to film his segments.” Sandy saw their faces fall in disappointment and felt a little bad about lying to them, but not bad enough to quit. “In fact, you just missed him. He just left the set and drove back to his apartment, off Riverside.”

  “Wha-a-at?” they said again, slower and with more sad disillusionment.

  “Yeah. We film the interviews at this house out here—it’s my brother’s friend’s house. And the Chupacabra—Well, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but the man we call the Chupacabra is actually an actor.”

  “Aw, man,” the shorter one said. The taller one just stood there looking downcast.

  “I’m sorry, guys,” Sandy said, feeling relieved that her story was obviously working. “How’d you find our set, anyway?”

  They looked down at the piece of paper they’d been studying, which Sandy now saw was a printout from a mapping site. “We have this friend,” the shorter guy began. “We showed him your site—your interviews with the Chupacabra. He, um, recognized the area. Because, um, he, um… used to do stuff out here. Sometimes. So, um, he told us where it was. The general area, I mean. And so, um, we came out here to look.”

  Sandy nodded sympathetically. “Well, that was pretty smart of you. You guys are pretty good reporters.”

  They muttered thanks but were obviously completely broken-hearted.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Sandy said, suddenly thinking up the perfect way to end it. “Do you have a card? For your Web site?”

  “What? Uh.” They searched their tight pockets without luck. Then the taller one ran to their Bug and retrieved something from the backseat. He brought it to Sandy and she saw that it was a flier for an event, printed on red construction paper. The hipster folded it so that the blank side showed, and then they began searching their pockets again. Intuitively, Sandy opened her own car door to get a pen from her bag.

  After asking them to write their Web address and contact information on the backside of the flier, Sandy promised she’d contact them about doing a segment for Nacho Papi. They thanked her again, much more cheerfully now. They turned back to their Bug, but Sandy stopped them. “Guys, everything I just told you, about the Chupacabra being an actor? And about his house being my brother’s big weight-lifting jock friend’s house? I need you guys to keep that secret, okay? I need you guys not to blow my cover. Reporter to reporter. You know what I�
��m saying?”

  They nodded and said they knew what she was saying. “Don’t worry, Sandy S. We’ll say that we found his house and he pulled out a shotgun.”

  “Good. That’s good. All right. I’ll be contacting you guys about the interview for your organization, then.”

  And with that, they left. Sandy stood watching and waving until they were gone. And then she stood there for a while longer, congratulating herself for handling the situation so well.

  She got into her car, turned it around, and drove back north. She couldn’t do any more work today, she decided. Because, all of a sudden, she felt sick to her stomach.

  39

  Post on Nacho Papi’s Web Site, Thursday, May 11

  It’s the Sensitive Ones You Have to Watch, G-Friends

  by Sandy S.

  For Part 32 in the eternal saga that is their breakup, Lawrence Villalobos is now claiming that he was the one to break up with Sara Milan, and that he did so because of her drug use and “reckless behavior.”

  Come on, Laurencito. We all loved you in that movie about Cesar Chavez, but you’re eroding that goodwill faster than you snorted those lines on DJ Kabuki-O’s yacht. We all know what happened between you and Sara, and the best you can do now is accept it, haul yourself through rehab, and then call your agent and try to get booked for another tear-jerker.

  Speaking from recent personal experience, there’s nothing more pathetic than a man who can’t take a breakup like a man.

  40

  Time: Thursday, May 11, 4:02 PM

  To: Dominga Saavedra

  From: Daniel Thomas

  Subject: your words

  Sandy,

  I have to say that I’m disappointed, to say the least, in your decision to discuss our breakup in a public forum.

  I understand that bitterness may be eclipsing your better judgment. But I would ask that you endeavor to take the high road, as I have.

  Sincerely,