All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (21 page)

That being the case, it was nice to be just on the rim of home. At the very least I had another whole day to drive. If I stopped to see Uncle Laredo, as I had promised myself I would if I ever came back, I could put off getting to Austin for two or three days. I wanted to see Uncle Laredo anyway. He was ninety-two years old and there was no telling how many more chances I would get to visit him. Once he was dead I would never get a chance to visit anyone remotely like him—that was certain. There was no one remotely like him.

In Van Horn I stopped at a dusty filling station and asked the attendant if Uncle L was still alive. He was only an in-law, and my family wouldn’t have bothered to tell me if he had died. The filling station man was fat and wore a dirty green baseball cap. He looked at me as if I were a freak, and when he found out whose nephew I was he almost stopped putting gas in my car. He was about forty and he chewed tobacco.

“If that old bastard ain’t alive he’s the stinkinest ghost I ever met,” he said. “We got a barbershop downtown, if you’d like to get a haircut. Must not be no barbers where you come from.”

“I come from Texas,” I said. “I just like hair.”

“Aw yeah?” he said. “If a feller was to drop a match on your head it’d go up like a haystack.” He gave me a mean wink. He didn’t want me to ignore the fact that he was insulting me. I ignored it anyway.

“I could squirt a little gasoline on it,” he added. “Might help it burn.”

“You could mind your own fucking business, too,” I said, stung. No one had commented on the length of my hair in
so long that I had forgotten about it. I was home again, and I didn’t feel like being trifled with, especially not by fat rednecks in green baseball caps. He hadn’t bothered to check my water, so I got out and checked it. Then I went around to the trunk and checked the air in my spare. I had forty-seven miles of dirt road to cross. The man pitched my gas cap about ten feet in the air, and caught it when it came down.

“You oughtn’t to sass around and use your goddamn profanity with me,” he said. Suddenly he hunched over, made a fierce face, and gave the air a hard karate chop.

“See that?” he said. “I just finished a karate class, up in Midland. These hands is lethal weapons. I’d about as soon give a curlyheaded little fart like you a chop or two, for practice. Hai! Karate!”

He concentrated on what must have been an imaginary brick and gave it a terrific chop. Then he looked at me to see if I was properly intimidated. I wasn’t. I was back home. Nobody had the right to push me around. Also my trunk was open. All I had to do was reach down and pick up my tire tool. The minute I did the look on the man’s face changed. He looked forty, and foolish. I shook my hair at him and smote the air once or twice, for effect.

“Hai!” I said. “Tire tool!”

“Let me get them windshields for you,” the man said. I put the tire tool in the front seat with me and it had a wonderful effect. Not only did the man clean my windshields, but he chased me halfway down the driveway as I was pulling out.

“Say, young feller, you must not be awake good,” he said. “You’s about to drive off without your green stamps.”

UNCLE L
was my most colorful relative, but there was no denying that he had his drawbacks. Ninety-two years had not mellowed him at all. The minute I stepped out of my car and heard his rasping old voice I began to remember his drawbacks, and to wonder why I’d come. The voice came from somewhere in what he called his kitchen pasture—a little twenty-acre pen north of the house, where he kept an assortment of animals he planned to eat.

When I walked up he was down on his knees, stabbing at a hole in the ground with a big crowbar. It was a hot morning and he was sweating like a Turk. Three bedraggled Mexican cowboys sat on the ground nearby, looking unhappy. Uncle L still had freckles, at ninety-two. His little blue eyes were as clear and mean as ever. The ground was so hot it was burning my feet through my sneakers.

“I still got ever goddamn one of my teeth,” he said, opening his mouth to show me. His teeth looked perfect. While he was showing them to me his mean little eyes scrutinized me inch by inch. He was not a man to pass lightly over one’s faults.

“What the hell, you got the mange?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Your hair’s a foot long,” he said. “Thought you must be hiding the mange. How old are you?”

“Twenty-three.”

“That’s old enough to remember to go to the barbershop,” he said.

He spat in his gloves and went back to stabbing at the earth with the crowbar. Holes were one of his obsessions. Over the years he had scattered some three hundred corner postholes about the ranch, to the peril of every creature that walked, including him. The theory behind them was that if he ever got around to building the fences he meant to build it would be nice to have the corner postholes already dug. But he had lived on the ranch fifty years and it only had two fences, both falling down. My own theory was that he dug the holes because he hated the earth and wanted to get in as many licks at it as he could, before he died. The earth might get him in the end, but it would have three hundred scars to show for it. Uncle L was not the kind of man who liked to be bested in a fight.

“Hey, Pierre,” he yelled to the cowboys generally. “Get off your asses and strangle one of them goats. We got company for dinner.”

The kitchen pasture held a motley collection of edible animals, all of which were standing around in a half-circle behind the Mexicans. Perhaps they hoped to be fed, rather than eaten. They managed to look disheartened and desperately belligerent at the same time. There were six or eight goats, a yearling camel, a scruffy young buffalo cow, a flock of malign-looking guinea hens, five spotted pigs, and a dozen molting turkeys. All of them looked as desperate as the cowboys—on Uncle L’s ranch it was an open question as to who would eat whom.

The three cowboys all scrambled up and made a run for the animals, shaking out their ropes as they ran. The animals immediately scattered to the four winds, all except the pigs, who formed a tight little phalanx and stood their ground. Uncle L hired only Mexicans and called them all Pierre—by accident the first man he had ever hired had been French. Pierre was a generic name for hired hand; only old Lorenzo, the cook, was exempt from it.

The three Pierres were not charismatic ropers. They never got a loop within ten yards of anything. The goats, most of whom had looked half-dead, fled around and around the pen with the fleetness of gazelles. The buffalo cow lowered her head and bellowed and pawed the ground. Pierre, Pierre, and Pierre left her alone. They ran wildly after the goats and caught nothing. One accidentally ran behind the young camel, who kicked him flat. The minute he fell the five pigs started for him, squealing horribly. His companions rushed over and got him to his feet. They beat the pigs back with their lariat ropes. Everything on the ranch seemed to be starving. The three men picked up rocks and began to throw them at the guinea hens and the turkeys. They were clearly desperate to kill something quick, before Uncle L’s temper rose. It seemed to me it was rising. His face was turning red.

“Look at them shitasses,” he said. “Can’t rope a goddamn goat in a goddamn pen. Pierre! You shitass! Bring me that goddamn rope,” he yelled. All three Mexicans came hustling back, their eyes downcast. Uncle L took the first rope that was offered him and strode off. He was only five feet four—in his fiercer moods he reminded me of Yosemite Sam.

At his approach all the animals stopped dead. They knew who was boss. The fight went out of them and they stood meekly, awaiting their doom. Uncle L slipped the rope over
the head of the first goat he came to and led him toward the gate.

The tallest and most desperate-looking of the Mexicans wore yellow chaps. To my surprise, and everyone’s, he suddenly yanked his chaps loose and began to take down his pants. He looked crazed, and apparently was. His companions started toward him, but he shook his fist at them. They backed off and glared.

“You filthy toad, what is it you do?” one of them said. He was a humble little fellow with symmetrically broken front teeth.

“Go away, people!” the crazed Mexican said. “Do not stand in my way.”

Something, perhaps his madness, had given him an erection. Suddenly he flung himself on the mound of earth beside the posthole and began to fuck it passionately. I was amazed and his two companions were profoundly annoyed.

“Antonio, stop this you are doing,” the little one said. “You lizard, where is your religion? What do you think you are doing, fucking this dirt? Do you want me to kick you?”

The man in the yellow chaps paid him absolutely no mind. Finally the others turned their backs on him. They both spat loudly, to show their contempt for his moral standards. I went over to the gate, glancing behind me from time to time to see if the man was still at it. He was. The little goat Uncle L led looked like it might drop dead at any moment, from pure resignation.

Ahead of us, beyond my car, loomed Uncle L’s house. It rose from the floor of the valley like some kind of great tabernacle, not Mormon, not English, not American. Russian, maybe. What it really looked like was a great black Russian church. It had four stories, three turrets, seven porches. On the top was a huge cupola, with a spire rising from it. The wood had long ago been scraped by the sand
until it was almost black. When I had driven along the rim of the valley that morning and saw the house, ten miles away, rising out of the desert like a great grotesque mirage, I had thought immediately of Leon O’Reilly. He would buy it on sight, if he ever saw it.

The house had been built before the turn of the century, by an English architect named Lord Montstuart. Lord Montstuart had come to America and gone broke in the cattle business, and had spent the dregs of his fortune and the last ten years of his life building the house. I think it must have been his vengeance on England, or America, or both, but unfortunately it was situated right in the center of an isolated, forty-thousand-acre valley, fifty miles south of Van Horn, Texas, and neither America nor England ever knew what Lord Montstuart had done to them.

On the east side of the house, attached to it by a little catwalk, was a praying tower made of adobe brick. Lord Montstuart had had a fling with Mohammedanism and had sometimes gone out at dawn and bowed toward Mecca. He had had earthly flings, too. One day in an excess of bitterness he had flung both himself and his last mistress, a Mexican woman, to their deaths from the fourth-story porch. The two of them were buried on a small knoll in the horse pasture, as Lord Montstuart had wished it.

The house had twenty-eight rooms, most of which had never been used. It was a kind of bitter, demented parody of everything Victorian, with marble bathtubs, all half full of sand, and quarters below ground for three cooks, two valets, and a laundress. Lord Montstuart’s last mistress had been the laundress. The living room was sixty feet long and contained a grand piano and an orchestra pit, with instruments laid out for a nine-piece orchestra. There was even a bassoon. The instrument cases were half full of sand.

In the center of the living room, snarling eternally at the
nonexistent orchestra, was a stuffed lobo wolf. It was Uncle L’s one addition to the house. It was the last wolf killed in the Pecos country, he claimed, and he himself had killed it, after an intermittent hunt that had lasted sixteen years. Uncle L was as obsessed with last things as he was with holes. He never did anything that wasn’t a last thing.

I followed him and the sad little goat around the towering black house to the backyard, where Uncle L had made his permanent camp. He never slept in the house and seldom went in it at all. All his life he had slept around a camp-fire. His ranch was called The Hacienda of the Bitter Waters. Lord Montstuart had named it, and it was a very apt name. The waters were so alkaline that no normal person could drink them without disastrous effect.

As soon as we turned the corner of the house old Lorenzo, the cook, got up and came over. He had always seemed to like me.

“Señor Danny, your hair is beautiful,” he said.

“It ain’t no such a goddamn thing,” Uncle L said, handing Lorenzo the rope that held the goat. Lorenzo was even tinier than Uncle L. He was fifty times as wizened, and claimed to be even older, though their respective ages had been a bone of contention between them for many years.

Lorenzo looked contemptuously at the hopeless little goat.

“This is a terrible goat you have brought me, Jefe,” he said. “I think it has got the worms. Am I supposed to cook a sick goat for Señor Danny? Why didn’t you rope me a nice pig?”

“This goat’ll do,” Uncle L said, sitting down and leaning back against his saddle. Two camels were tied to the windmill—they placidly chewed their cuds. For years Uncle L had ridden nothing but camels. He had had a great studhorse
named El Caballo, and when El Caballo died he had sworn off horses.

Lorenzo took the rope off the little goat’s head and gave the goat a kick. “Go away, goat,” he said.

“Cook that goat,” Uncle L said.

The goat itself did not believe it was alive. It only took one step when Lorenzo kicked it.

“No, it is not possible,” Lorenzo said. “Who knows what this goat may have? It may have the cholera.”

“Goddamnit, it don’t have no cholera,” Uncle L said. “The goddamn pigs have probably got cholera. Just cook the sonofabitch. I never asked you to diagnose it.”

Suddenly the goat saw its chance and darted away. It was quick but Uncle L was quicker. His Winchester was right by his saddle and he snatched it up and shot the goat just before it went around the corner of the house. The crack of the gun echoed strangely off the distant ridges. The goat had been right the first time, when it concluded it was dead. Now it was undoubtedly dead. Probably I had inherited my shooting eye from Uncle L. Lorenzo went over and cut the goat’s throat, but he took his defeat with bad grace.

“All right,” he said, dragging the goat to the cook fire. “I will cook this filthy goat. You had to go and shoot it, Jefe, instead of going to rope one that was fat and healthy. I myself am much too old to rope now, or I would have done it gladly. You are young and can still rope well. There was no excuse for what you have done.”