Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan (3 page)

"I don’t get as much time as I did in
college," she said. "But soon. I have some new ideas."

I decided not to push it. After a large waiter with
an even larger mustache came to take our order, Lillian changed
subjects.

"How about you? Now that I’ve got you out here
without a job, I mean. It can’t be that easy without an
investigator’s license. "

I shrugged. "Some legal firms like that—informal
help for the messy jobs, no records on the payroll. I’ve got a few
leads. Maia has lots of friends of friends."

The minute I said her name I wished I hadn’t. It
landed in the middle of the table between us like a brick. Lillian
slowly licked some salt from the rim of her glass. There was no
change in her face.

"You could always get a job evicting wayward
tenants," she suggested.

“
Or I could help sell art for you."

She gave me a lopsided smile. "When I have to
pin a customer in a joint lock to buy my work, I’ll know it’s
him; to put down the camera and the paintbrush for good."

The waiter returned quickly with a bowl of butter and
a basket the size of a top hat filled with handmade tortillas.
Unfortunately Fernando Asante came up to our table right behind him.

"I’ll be damned!" he said. “If it isn’t
Jack Navarre’s boy. "

Before I could put down my half-buttered tortilla I
was shaking hands with him, staring up at his weathered brown face
and a row of smiling, gold-outlined teeth. Asante’s hair was so
thin and well greased, combed back from his forehead, that it
could’ve been drawn on with a Marksalot.

I stood up, introducing Lillian to San Antonio’s
eldest city councilman. As if she didn’t know who he was. As if
anybody in town who read the Express-News tabloid section didn’t
know.

" ’
Course," Asante said. “I remember
Miss Cambridge. Fiesta Week. The Travis Center opening, with Dan
Sheff. "

Asante had a gift for names, and that one fell onto
the table like another brick. Lillian winced a little. The councilman
just smiled. I smiled back. An Anglo man had come up behind Asante
and was waiting patiently with that distracted, brooding expression
most bodyguards develop. About six feet, curly black hair, boots and
jeans, T-shirt and linen jacket. Lots of muscles. He didn’t smile.

"Councilman. You made it into the San Francisco
paper a while back."

He did his best modest look. "The Travis Center
opening. Millions in new revenue to the city. Friends called me up
from all over the country, said they saw the coverage."

“
Actually it was that piece about the secretary and
you in Brackenridge Park."

Lillian suppressed a laugh by choking on her
margarita. Asante’s smile wavered momentarily, then came back
different—more of a snarl. We were all quiet for a few seconds. I’d
seen him give that look plenty to my dad in the years they had been
at each other’s throats. I was downright proud to see it turned on
me. I figured wherever my father was he would probably be biting the
end off a new cigar and laughing his ass off about then.

Asante’s large friend felt the change of mood, I
guess. He moved around to the side of the table.

"Love to have you join us for dinner," I
offered. "Double date?"

"No thanks, Jack," the councilman said.
That was the second time today someone had called me by my father’s
name. It sounded strange.

"I hear you’re in town for good." He
didn’t seem to like the sound of that. "It can be tough
finding jobs down here. You have any trouble, let me know."

“
Thanks."

"Least I can do." A politician’s grin
smoothed over his face again. "Not every day a Bexar County
sheriff gets shot down. Your dad . . . that was a bad way to go."

Asante kept smiling. I was counting the gold caps on
his teeth, wondering how hard they would be to break off.

“
I always wished I could do something more for your
family, jack, but, well, you left town so fast. Like a jackrabbit,
heard that shot and boom, you were in California. "

A young orange-haired woman in a glittery dress came
up behind Asante and waited at a respectful distance. Asante glanced
back at her and nodded.

"Well," he said, parting his belly.
"Dinnertime now. Like I said, you need anything, Jack, let me
know. Nice to see you again, Miss Cambridge."

Asante’s fan club followed him to a table nearby.
My enchilada dinner was probably very good. I don’t remember.

Around midnight Lillian and I drove back to her house
with the VW top down. The stars were out and the air was as warm and
clean as fresh laundry. "I’m sorry about Asante," she
said after a while. I shrugged. "Don’t be. Coming home is like
that--you have to face the assholes too."

She had taken my hand by the time we pulled into her
driveway. We sat there listening to the conjunto music from the house
next door. The windows were lit up orange. Beers were being opened,
loud talking in Spanish, Santiago Jimenez’s accordion wailing out
"
Ay Te Dejo En San Antonio
."

"Tonight was hard anyway," Lillian said.
“We’re going to need time to figure things out, I guess."

She raised my hand to her lips. I was looking at her,
remembering the first time I had kissed her in this car, how she
looked. She had been wearing a white sundress, her hair cut like
Dorothy Hamill’s. We had been sixteen, I think.

I kissed her now.

"I’ve been figuring things out for ten years,"
I told her. "It’s got to get easier from here."

She looked at me for a long time with an expression I
couldn’t read. She almost decided to say something. Then she kissed
me back.

It was hard to talk for a while, but I finally said:
“Robert Johnson will be mad if I don’t bring him these leftovers
for dinner."

“
Enchiladas for breakfast?" Lillian suggested.

We went inside.
 

5

Everything with Lillian was familiar, from her linen
sheets to the citrus scent of her hair when I finally fell asleep
buried in it. I was even hoping I might dream of her for a change,
the way I used to. I didn’t.

The dreams started out like a slide show—newspaper
photos of my dad,
Express-News
headlines that had burned themselves into my memory that summer. Then
it was a late spring evening in May of ’85 and I was standing on
the front porch of my father’s house in Olmos Park. A battered gray
Pontiac, probably a ’76, tinted windows and no license plate, was
pulling up by the curb as my father walked from the driveway to the
front door, carrying two bags of groceries. Carl Kelley, his deputy
and best friend, was a few steps behind him. For some reason I
remember exactly what Carl was holding—a twelve-pack of Budweiser
in one hand and a watermelon in the other. I was opening the front
door for them, my eyes red from studying for my last round of
freshman final exams at A & M.

My dad was at his very heaviest—nearly three
hundred pounds of muscle and fat stuffed into oversized jeans and a
checkered shirt. Sweat lines running down his temples from the rim of
his brown Stetson, he lumbered up the steps with a cigar drooping off
the corner of his mouth. He looked up and gave me one of his sly
grins, started to say something, probably a wisecrack at my expense.
Then a small hole blew open in the grocery bag in Dad’s right arm.
A perfect white stream of milk sprouted out. Dad looked momentarily
puzzled. The second shot came out the front of his Stetson.

Fumbling for his gun, Carl hit the ground for cover
about the same time my dad hit the ground dead. Dad was three months
away from retirement. The watermelon made a bright red starburst as
it exploded on the sidewalk. The gray Pontiac pulled away and was
gone.

When I woke up alone in Lillian’s bed the
conjunto
music from next door had stopped. The cranberry glass night lamp was
on, making the squares of moonlight pink against the hardwood floor.
Through the open bedroom door I could see Lillian standing naked in
the living room, her arms hugging her body, staring at one of her
photos on the wall.

She didn’t seem to hear me when I called. When I
came up behind her and put my arms around her shoulders, she
stiffened. Her eyes never left the photo.

It was one of her early college pieces—a black and
white photo-collage of animals, human faces, insects, buildings, all
of it hand-tinted and merged into one surrealistic mass. I remembered
the December weekend when she’d been putting it together for her
end-of-term project. I’d done my best to distract her. We’d ended
up with photo scraps scattered all over the bed and clinging to our
sweaters.

"Naive," she said, absently. "Beau
used to take me out into the country—we’d be shivering all night
in sleeping bags on some godforsaken hilltop in Blanco for one shot
of a meteor shower, or we’d trudge through twenty acres of pasture
outside Uvalde so we’d be in just the right position at dawn to
catch the light behind a windmill. He used to say that every picture
had to be I taken at the greatest possible expense. Then I’d look
back at my old collages like this one and think how easy they’d
been."

"Maybe naive gets a bad rap, " I said.

We stood there together and looked at it for a
minute.

"It just feels strange," she said. “You
being here."

"I know."

She leaned her head against me. The tension in her
shoulders didn’t go away.

"What else is it?" I said.

She hesitated. “There are complications."

I kissed her ear. "You asked for me to be here.
I’m here. There’s no complication."

Until Lillian looked around at me I didn’t realize
her eyes were wet.

“
When you left San Antonio, Tres, what were you
running from?"

“
I told you. The rest of my life stuck in Texas,
the idea of marriage, the careers everybody else wanted me to take--"

She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. Why
did you go when you did, right after your father’s death?"

I hugged her from behind and held on tight, trying to
I get lost in the citrus smell of her hair. But when I closed my eyes
against her cheek, I still saw the old newspaper photo of my father,
the caption that I knew by heart.

"Sheriff Jackson Navarre, gunned down brutally
on Thursday evening in front of his Olmos Park home. Deputy Sheriff
Kelley and Navarre’s son watched helplessly as the assassins sped
away."

My father’s face in the photo just smiled at me
dryly, as if that caption was some private joke he was sharing.

“
Maybe because when I looked around town," I
told Lillian, "all I saw was him dying. It was like a stain."
She nodded, looking back at her photo-collage. "The stain
doesn’t go away, Tres. Not even after all these years."

Her tone was hitter, not like Lillian. I held her a
little tighter. After a while she turned around and folded herself
into my arms.

"It doesn’t have to be a complication for us
now," I whispered.

"Maybe not," she murmured. But I didn’t
need to see her face to see that she didn’t believe me.

She didn’t let me say anything else, though. She
kissed me once, lightly, then more. Soon we were back in the linen
sheets. I wasn’t sleeping again until almost dawn, this time with
no dreams.
 

6

I was back at 90 Queen Amie at nine the next morning
to meet the movers. Robert Johnson gave me an evil look as I walked
in the door, but decided to call a truce when he heard the sound of
aluminum foil being peeled away from my leftovers.

He has a system with enchiladas. He bats them with
his paw until the tortillas unroll. He eats the filling first, then
the tortillas. He saves the cheese for last. This kept him occupied
while I did the first hour of my
tai chi
set, at which point the moving truck gunned up the driveway and
scared him into the closet.

Three guys wearing baseball caps and leather weight
belts were trying to figure out which way to fold my futon frame to
get it through the door when the phone rang. I pulled down the
ironing board and picked up the receiver.

Maia Lee said: “Hey, Tex. Ridden any good bulls
lately?"

The background noise placed her immediately. It was
Sunday morning at the Buena Vista.

"No," I said, "but me and the boys are
hog-tying a futon even as we speak. It’s an uppity little filly."

"You cowpokes sure know how to part."

I could picture her standing in the dark green entry
hall of the bar, the receiver balanced between her I shoulder and
chin. She’d be wearing her business clothes—blazer and skirt,
silk blouse, always in light colors to show off her flawless
coffee-colored skin. Her hair, chocolate-brown and curly, would be
tied back. Behind her I could hear Irish coffee glasses rattling, the
unmistakable clanging of cable car bells.