Owning Jolene

by Shelby Hearon

  “Nothing’s far in San Antonio,” Brogan tells her. “San Antonio—our part of it I’m talking about here—is just one little slice of pecan pie. You’ve got Loop 410 is the crust, and then right down cutting through all the pecans and sweet part you’ve got Broadway and New Braunfels, with the tip just nudging Fort Sam. If it’s not inside the loop; if it’s not off Broadway or New Braunfels, then it’s not in what’s your true city of San Antonio.”

  “What about San Pedro?” I ask him, thinking of L.W.’s house on Rosewood, which is halfway between where he goes to school at Trinity and where I used to go, at San Antonio College. That’s right at the heart of the city, it seems to me, closer to downtown, and makes a wedge of its own with the Fine Arts Museum at the end.

  “San what?” Brogan says and laughs. “Must be some other town, San Whatever; that’s not a piece of the pie I was referring to. That’s some other piece of pie, maybe your coconut or your banana icebox, but that’s not your pecan pie, if you get my meaning.”

  I do, even if I don’t agree with him. But maybe that’s why L.W.’s house feels so safe to me: Brogan doesn’t even know where that part of the city is.

  “If you say so,” Cissy says. “But beats me what we’re all dressed up to go see.”

  “We are going to view this architectural marvel of the twentieth century designed by your former New York City architect, which, according to my newspaper here, has a palm house one hundred and ten feet in diameter and fifty-five feet tall—your basic giant erector set—that is going to be filled with palm trees, and which also has a reflecting pool, a sunken fern room, a spiral terrace, and your big arcade for promenading with a Platonic tree in the middle. Now if this—and I’m quoting here, I’m quoting from my newspaper—if this greenhouse, this Fern Barn, in which ‘plants are not merely nurtured but brought into a vibrant architectural dialogue’ is exactly ten minutes from this very house where we’re sitting on the patio having our morning pineapple juice, then I say we’re wasting the six million dollars it coast and it’s our civic duty to climb into the Oldsmobile and go see it for ourselves.”

  “Six billion dollars?” Glenna gets out her ballpoint and begins to calculate. “That’s four million MasterCards, figure a fifteen-hundred-dollar limit a card, that’s four MasterCards each for every man, woman, and child, legal and illegal, in the city of San Antonio.”

  “Million.” Hoyt sets her straight. “Six million.”

  “Wait a minute then.” She recalculates. “Why, that’s different. Imagine, that’s only four thousand MasterCards total. Figure four people, average, a household, to make it come out even, why if just one out of every two hundred and fifty families donated just one MasterCard each they could pay for the whole thing.”

  “Some bigwig donated the money. Named it for his wife or something. A philanthropist shelled out the capital, Glenna.”

  “I was just saying what if they were having to raise the money, that’s what I was saying. You have to get some idea what it means, translate it down where people can figure it out. I mean what does six billion mean to people? Nothing. It’s a number, that’s what.”

  “Six million.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. I’m saying six billion is four MasterCards apiece for every living soul in the city and six million is one MasterCard for every two hundred and fifty people. Now most folks don’t know that; they don’t know the difference. They throw those numbers around. I mean, for example, if the federal budget or the weapon wars were translated into something your average person could understand, that would keep us out of debt. The President could say to the people: ‘Now this nuclear device is going to cost every citizen and alien in the USA exactly six MasterCards each. Is that okay with you? Are you game?’ And the chances are that people would say, ‘Are you kidding?’ ”

  Cissy is still fidgeting. She hasn’t got the point yet of what this big excursion is about. Normally, she and Hoyt like to spend their Sundays waiting for Mondays, on account of they can’t gamble on Sundays.

  “I didn’t get my beauty sleep,” Cissy complains.

  “Why didn’t you get your beauty sleep?” Brogan asks.

  “Because the charcoal-briquet lobby moved daylight saving from the end of the month where it belongs to the first of the month where it doesn’t.”

  “You didn’t get your beauty sleep because you bought a dozen extra bingo cards last night.”

  “Four.”

  I’m slightly nervous, going out in public. But Henry is hanging the show and said it was bad luck for me to watch. He says, anyway, that I have to practice being out in public so I won’t be jumpy at the opening next week. That the Botanical Gardens sounds like a great idea: the grounds will be wall-to-wall people, who I’ll have to push my way through. Sunday gardeners most of them, coming for the official opening of the palm house and the fern room.

  He gave me a kiss when he walked me to my car, which was something different on his part. Usually when I left—or at least how it was before I moved in with him—he’d open the door the way you do for a cat who’s scratching to go outside and let it out and then go back about your business until you hear it scratching to get back in again.

  “See here.” Brogan shows his mother the story in the paper. “They’ve got a lot of native areas, see—that’s the old part of the gardens—that show different parts of the state, the Hill Country, South Texas, which is us. See, it says mesquite, huisache, retama, cacti, sotol, yucca. You girls can take a look, settle your argument about which tree is which tree.”

  “Huisache is the one with the green bark. I don’t have to put on hose and a girdle to know that,” Cissy says.

  “That’s retama,” Glenna tells her, “that has the green bark. You get them mixed up. They both have yellow flowers so you get them mixed up.”

  “I guess I do not get them mixed up,” Cissy says, “as I happen to have a tree with a green bark growing in my very own yard next to the sweet gum; I just happen to have a native huisache plain as day in my own yard located on Lot 4, Block 48, aka 123 Savoy, which just happens to belong to me.”

  “You yourself and no one else?” Hoyt asks her.

  “You and me. That’s me. This is a community property state, don’t forget. You and me equals me in this state.”

  “That’s a retama in your yard,” Glenna says.

  Hoyt has been doing some figuring of his own. He is wearing boots, faded jeans, a leather belt with a big silver buckle with a raised longhorn on it, white shirt, and a real bomber jacket from the Second World War, he claims, although Brogan says his dad didn’t fly any missions, being only a supply sergeant in the States for the whole time. Now Brogan asks Hoyt did he know the outfit he has on some yuppie is right this very week paying $900 for, and Hoyt says that that yuppie is getting took.

  “What I’m trying to figure here,” Hoyt says, “is what would be the mortgage on a place like that.” He has a white mustache but his thick hairpiece is coal black. “You figure you got the palm home, the fern pit, the whatyoucallit with the tree, the walkway—you can’t figure the price of that like you can a basic three-two plus or minus school district and extras. But, okay, six million. Figure it straight. The bank has said six million, you check your Fanny Maes, you check your adjustable rates, so ten percent down, that leaves you five mil four. Okay, if, say, a mortgage of sixty thou runs you six hundred a month, P-I-T-I, then that’d be, on the Fern Barn, that’d be a monthly payment of fifty-four thousand. That’s a whale of a lot of interest deduction for your benefactor; that’s not just a philanthropic itch you’ve got here.”

  Glenna frowns, then takes her finger and smooths the lines away. “I don’t think that’s the way they do it, Daddy Temple. I think they give the full amount, donors like that.”

  “You think they shell out six million in cash and tell the IRS and the IRS says, Fine, Big Donor, take that sum right off the top of your taxes? Not likely. It’s spread out. Has got to be.”

  “What it is,�
� Brogan says, “is your typical Texas venture. Every second person in the state is filing a Chapter Eleven, real estate has bottomed out, snake oil is going for more than crude, and San Antonio is showing little d that we can spend six million dollars on culture. That’s what’s going on.”

  “I guess I know what’s in my own backyard,” Cissy says. “I guess I know a huisache when I see it every day of my life.”

  • • •

  The Botanical Gardens are actually about twenty years old, and mostly are an outdoor museum with different spots that try to look like different areas of the state, and in the paper it showed all these new buildings rising up out of big dirt mounds behind the old part. But when we turn into the grounds of the gardens (right before the entrance to Fort Sam), all we see is a whole lot of other cars. It’s really crowded, not just because of the opening but also because the weather has not yet turned to baking hot and people are in the mood to get out and take a good look at each other before they spend four months huddled around their air conditioners. They want to be sure that other people are still alive and kicking, doing their civic Sunday thing, and haven’t crawled off like sick dogs in some corner, because of their puny bank balances or unsettling investments.

  In the gatehouse there is a poster about a talk on the South Central Texas Xeriscape, “The Conservation of Water Through Creative Landscaping,” and another for a lecture on “Papaya Trees: Culture and Hybridization.”

  Right away, Cissy has a fit about the ticket. “When’s the drawing?” she asks the woman standing behind the desk.

  “Drawing?” the woman repeats. She’s selling tickets and hoping to sell some booklets about the local flora as well. She’s in the sort of rose-colored dress with matching jacket that makes me think she’s probably a volunteer, giving up her Sunday afternoon to help out this cultural cause.

  “The drawing,” Cissy says.

  “There is no drawing.”

  “Well, there’s no number on this ticket. You want us to write our names on the back? You need a name for a door prize if you don’t have a number.”

  “It’s just an admission ticket, ma’am.”

  “No door prize? You mean we pay a dollar fifty for nothing? We give you one dollar and fifty cents? That doesn’t entitle us to a chance on anything?”

  “Come on.” Brogan takes her arm. “Let the folks in line behind us get in.”

  “Can you believe it?” Cissy whines. “No door prize.”

  “We could all chip in a dollar,” Hoyt says. “There’s five of us, make that two dollars, have ourselves a private drawing. Ten dollars—”

  “Come on, come on.”

  “It’s a rip-off, if you ask me,” Cissy mutters as Glenna takes charge and leads us through the doorway of the gatehouse out into a lovely planted area with a vine-covered archway to one side and a Lone Star-shaped fountain in front of us. Up ahead, naturally, we expect to see the main attraction: the fifty-five-foot-tall palm house filled with, I guess, palm trees. But we don’t

  A lot of other people are looking around, too.

  People who don’t seem like they come from Brogan’s slice of the pie. There are a couple of Indian women in saris with smudges on their foreheads; some woman pushing another one in a wheelchair; some very short Mexican nuns in heavy black robes and white hats like you don’t see much any more. There is a frizzy-haired blind lady, who is doing a lot of smelling, and I wonder if they didn’t let her dog come in with her, but she seems to be managing with a cane. The only men are part of couples, usually white-haired ladies in also pastel volunteer-looking Sunday dresses with jackets, and men in stiff white shirts and black string ties, weathered as ranchers, looking around trying to decide how come they are at this place and if they know anybody they see.

  While I am busy trying not to jump out of my skin thinking that every single one of them, no matter what the size or shape or shade or sex, is either Midge Temple (knees bent, playing a short Mexican nun? eyes blank, playing a frizzy-haired blind lady? foreign-speaking, playing an Indian in muted red with oiled black hair?) or Turk Jackson (in elevator shoes, in a gray toupee, in heavy suntan pancake makeup, playing a onetime football player, an old Texas settler, a West Texas rancher). In fact, I can hardly walk along with Brogan and Glenna and Hoyt and Cissy—four-square protection—without getting the total jumpy creeps.

  We, along with most of the crowd, look here and there, behind us and to each side, trying to spot the main, newspaper-promised attraction.

  Most people have their 35-millimeters out and are taking shots: of each other, of special plants, such as the bulging green oblongs hanging from a fan-shaped bush, of the star-shaped fountain.

  “Where’s the Fern Barn?” Brogan asks in a loud voice.

  “Don’t ask me,” somebody answers him.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” says another.

  What’s clear to everyone is that what’s going on is construction. Up ahead on a high rise is an old summerhouse with an iron rooster on top. Close ahead, past the planted areas, we can see a fence, and on the other side of that all over the rolling little mounds, semi-hills, workers in hard hats, surveyors, pieces of metal tubing and frames in the process of being assembled.

  We crowd as close as is possible to the fence, and are able to spot a big hole covered over with some plastic stuff, that Brogan decides must be going to be the sunken fern garden. The palm cone has about one bottom bunch of metal pieces on one side. There is a large scooped-out place, big as a shopping mall almost, that must be going to be the arcade and the reflecting pool. This opening is clearly not the real opening; there will be an official one next year, with the big donor cutting some ribbons and pictures in the paper—the same pictures we already saw in Brogan’s paper, which must have been of the architect’s models.

  “You know what we’re seeing?” Hoyt asks.

  “I know what we’re seeing,” Brogan says. “Some construction workers working time-and-a-half for overtime.”

  “We’re seeing some future oil field. You and me are standing on the site of a future South Texas field.”

  “How’s that?”

  Hoyt adjusts his silver belt buckle with a thumb. “You know what oil is? Oil is ferns plus a few billion years. Right? Well, what if the oil fields we got now were some Neanderthal’s former Fern Barn?

  “What if they were a showy greenhouse that he opened up for the other Neanderthals to see? Price: a piece of fresh meat. He showed it off, his sunken fern room, his palm house, the whole bit, and then after a time it all packed down under somebody else’s feet—latecomers, us after a while—and then by that time it had been squooshed until it had turned to black slime and then black crude and then the latecomers, us, piped it out.

  “Well, same here. We’re gazing at some future well site. Gives you a thrill, boy, to look at it that way, doesn’t it?”

  Hearing how everybody is busy not seeing what they see makes me think about Henry’s show and have some sympathy for him. What if it will be the same at his opening? A bunch of people showing up and wandering around because they read in the paper that this local artist was showing off his giant mountains and bridges (shoulders and knees, but they wouldn’t know that), and some of them are hoping for door prizes or drawings and some of them are looking for dates, but none of them see the pictures. And after they wander around a while, they decide to all go to Lou Tess and eat, because they’re all dressed up anyway, and then call it an afternoon.

  It makes me sad for people who work so hard to try to do something special, and, on impulse, I give Glenna a big hug. She doesn’t understand, but likes it and whispers to me, “So you’re happy where you are, aren’t you, hon?”

  We wander back under the archway, which Brogan says is a big grapevine, and then he calls to us, “Here, girls, here’s your native trees.”

  Cissy and Glenna drag their heels while I walk over to where he’s standing in front of a replica of an old-time rancher’s house. We read the sign that
says:

  ADOBE STRUCTURE with vertical cedar posts, chinking and plastering.

  “Here, over here.” he calls out. “Right here are the native trees.”

  We can see a little grove of South Texas vegetation, but Glenna and Cissy don’t want to look too close, because they can see that everything is labeled in plain English, and so one of them stands to be the loser of their argument.

  I say I’ll do the reading for them, so they won’t have to put their glasses on, and I’ve decided ahead of time to leave out any mention of bark color, but I don’t need to worry, because the Botanical people haven’t mentioned it either.

  With the women nervous as cats, I read aloud:

  SCREW BEAN: Mimosa family, height to twenty-five feet, yellow flowers, thorny, beans used for syrup.

  RETAMA: Senna family, height to twenty-five feet, yellow flowers, needlelike leaves with medicinal properties.

  HUISACHE: Mimosa family, height to twenty-five feet, yellow flowers, fernlike leaves, good honey plant.

  “If you ask me,” Cissy remarks, relieved, “there’s not a hill of beans difference between any of them.”

  “I have to agree,” Glenna says. “I think everything we’re seeing here is mesquite. I think they planted a bunch of mesquite, one person did that, and then another person came along and copied stuff from her garden book.”

  “Not a one of them looks like what’s in my yard at Lot 4, Block 48, aka 123 Savoy, that’s for sure.”

  “How can we tell anyway? None of them is in bloom.”

  We head back to the deep shady archway to pose for Glenna’s camera.

  People keep getting in the way, the lady in the wheelchair, the blind lady with her cane, one of the Indian women, a nun crossing herself, but that makes it a public place, having the corner of somebody else in the picture and some of the white-haired ladies married to the men in string ties take pictures, too, and there isn’t a lot of grumbling about the fact that we’ve all come out to see something that isn’t there. Because we’ve got photos to show for it anyway.