Brown-Eyed Girl (8 page)

Chapter 9
All You Care to Eat

Delice had always made sure that no matter how bad the food at the Wrangler was, at least the canned music was good. You could be sitting there eating a soggy BLT on Wonder bread with Miracle Whip, but you'd still be listening to Hank and Patsy and the Amazing Rhythm Aces, if you wanted to listen. El Conquistador didn't bother to change the one tape they played all the time, which was a greatest hits thing by the Texas Tornadoes (“Hey Baby, Que Paso?”). Instead, El Conquistador relied on the food.

Most Laramie restaurants weren't particular about either the food or the ambience, so the places that pretended, vainly, to either were especially disappointing. The ones that claimed both and delivered neither, and had the balls to charge a fortune for spewing up a good case of entrée poisoning, rated a special narrow-eyed negative star or two on the Hawk Green scale.

The former Mudflaps had closed down when the owners torched the kitchen for the insurance money. In its place now was a pseudo-Italian place called Hasta La Pasta! which had an unpromising sign out front that said, best lunch buffet in laramie, all you care to eat, $8.95. Bad omen number one. Sally was no novice. She knew you should never eat at an Italian place that has an exclamation point in the name. But this was where she was supposed to meet Egan Crain for lunch.

Bad omen number two slammed her in the ears the minute she entered the dim, smoky entryway. The Muzak was the Hollyridge Strings, assassinating “Light My Fire.” Bad omen number three followed quickly. She turned into the dining room and saw Sam Branch, a man she had once tried to run over with a truck, sitting at a black Formica table, having lunch with a big man in a pinstriped suit. If she had still been a die-hard baseball fan, she would have thought the count had gone to three strikes, and retired to the dugout, cursing perhaps. In the past two decades, she'd switched to football (even if it was the Broncos). No mercy. After three downs, you were supposed to punt.

She pretended she hadn't seen Sam, and strode up to the hostess's station to say she was looking for the Crain party. The hostess, who was doing her nails and talking on the phone, didn't even look up: time to punt. But Egan saved her the trouble of announcing herself, hollering from a table with one of his patented “I say, Sally, over here!” fake-Brit remarks. She went to his table, hard by the pasta and salad bar (so convenient for refills!) and thought instantly about ordering an alcoholic beverage. For almost sixteen years in California she hadn't drunk booze at lunch more than a couple of dozen times, and now here she was, back in Laramie, going on two for two. Maybe this endowed chair thing wasn't such a good idea. “Iced tea,” she told the pierced-nosed waitress, feeling careful.

Sam acted as if he'd just noticed that she happened to be in the room, a ludicrous sham given that he was sitting approximately eight feet away from her, pretending not to stare at her over the rim of his Heineken bottle.

Sam looked good. Still had the sandy hair falling over one blue eye, still had the guileless, lying smile. He was wearing a denim shirt and Dockers. He'd obviously taken up working out. But then he'd always had a nice hard body, a miracle of biological design when you thought about what he'd done to it.

He waved, grinned. She mouthed a little “Hi, Sam” and flickered limp fingers.

Egan tittered at her obvious discomfort. “Guess you can't go far in this town without running into old chums, eh wot, Sal?” he chortled. “Isn't it just jolly, though, that we've all come up in the world so? Why, who would ever have thought that we'd live to see the day a chap like Sam Branch would be having his elevenses with the governor of Wyoming!”

Hey, thought Sally, she'd had an elevenses or twelveses or more often two a.m.-ses with one or two Wyoming governors along the way, as had most musicians who ever made a buck playing bar gigs in the state. Twenty years ago, the best place to see the governor, as anyone knew, was a bar. Sally had personally seen one governor at the airport bar in Cheyenne at two o'clock in the afternoon, and at the Holiday Inn twice when she was playing happy hours, and even once at the Wrangler, though, thankfully, never at the Gallery. Some things were just beneath a governor, no matter how devoted to bars.

This governor, a Republican, she recalled, was drinking something clear in a glass. She couldn't remember if he was born-again or not, so she couldn't decide whether he was loading up on water or vodka. Sam said something that made the governor laugh. She should have known he'd eventually be yukking it up with Republicans. Hell, he was probably a member of the NRA. He probably belonged to the militia.

The waitress finally returned and took their lunch orders. Sally ordered a caesar salad, a mental lapse she regretted almost immediately but was unable to correct, since the waitress fled quickly and didn't show up again for some time. (She imagined Hawk explaining that they should have spelled that salad “Seize Her,” as in the first two words of a sentence that ended “before she orders something that stupid again!”) Egan ordered the Pavarottiburger (menu: “It's a BIG ONE.” It oughta be, Sally thought, for eleven bucks!)

It took forty-five minutes for their lunches to come, by which time they'd nearly exhausted their store of reminiscence and innocent current gossip. The waitress, who obviously had something more important to do, nearly dropped the plate in Sally's lap. Rescuing her lunch, Sally looked down at a mound of browning romaine lettuce, drenched in bottled dressing and blanketed with stale industrial bread cubes. Egan dug into his huge burger, but judging from the vigorous way his undershot jaw was working, it had the consistency, if not the actual taste, of Styrofoam pellets.

“So do we have business to do, Egan?” she asked, wanting to get to the point of the lunch and get the hell out of there.

Egan swallowed a bite of his burger and drank half a glass of water. “Since you're supposed to be advising us on special collections we might purchase with Dunwoodie legacy funds, I thought it'd be a good idea if I brought you up to date on our plans for the archival acquisitions,” he began. “We've identified a number of donors around the state whose collections would be
superb
contributions to the archive. They include papers from some of the first ranching families in the state, really top-drawer stuff. I've a list right here,” he said, digging in his briefcase and coming up with a typed sheet. “You'll see that they're all over the place—Pinedale, Gillette, Green River, Torrington, what have you. Not all of the donors have agreed to give their collections to us, yet. We'd really like to have the Flanders papers, but of course the family is so distraught, what with Walter having that tragic hunting accident last fall—”

“Egan,” Sally said testily, sensing a major digression coming on. Time to show him who was sitting in the endowed chair. She pushed aside her untouched plate and got her reading glasses out of her big leather bag. Egan's list featured the names of ranching families she'd heard of, including his own.

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You're proposing to use Dunwoodie money to acquire, transport, catalogue, take care of, and store these collections, and you want me to help you get them nailed down?”

Egan's face fell. She'd deliberately started right up by using the word
money
—it made everything seem so tawdry. “Righto,” he answered brightly, as if she must surely see what a fine idea this was.

“But Egan, these look like Wyoming collections you guys would have wanted anyway. They may be interesting from the point of view of ranch life, but they're not especially pertinent to women's history—”

“Come on, Sally. Families have women in them!” he sputtered, setting his teeth so that his jaw receded even more than usual. “Why, none of the great ranches could survive without strong, determined women keeping the home fires burning ...”

She waxed him with a brown-eyed glare. “Spare me the hearth-and-home routine, Egan. You're trying to scam the Foundation to pay for stuff you already wanted. I'm not saying that Dunwoodie money shouldn't go to acquiring materials on Wyoming women—that's reasonable. There could be some interesting stuff in the collections you've listed. But I would advise you to think more carefully before you start going around spending Dunwoodie
money
.” She took a sip of iced tea to cool herself down. She nearly choked on a lump of undissolved instant tea powder.

“Now Sally,” said Egan, seeing his opening as she reached for her water glass. “You're no archivist. I'd really thought your role with us was to offer suggestions, not try to interfere with the integrity of our collections,” he grandstanded.

Sally turned diplomat. “Of course you guys are the experts. But I do have some understanding of what the bequest is supposed to do, and I'm advising you to be deliberate and conservative with Foundation money.”

“Deliberate? Conservative?” The dust-dry burger had stuck fast in Egan's throat, but the idea of Sally Alder advocating caution and care was impossible to swallow. “Sally?” he wheezed, as if it really couldn't be she, but some middle-aged Machiavellian look-alike cousin come to cash in on her big break. They laugh alike, they walk alike, at times they even talk alike.

“First of all, Egan,” said Sally, who was after all herself just a bit older and more knowledgeable, “you're going to have to pay for processing Meg's stuff, and you'll want to acquire more materials on her—letters in other people's hands, correspondence with publishers, maybe even do some oral history work with people who knew her. That'll cost big bucks. Just the letters—since she's become famous, letters from her are probably going to be auctioned off, and they're liable to be expensive. I read that an Emily Dickinson letter went for ten thousand dollars last month at Sotheby's.”

“I hardly think Meg Dunwoodie's in a league with the Belle of Amherst!” Egan said huffily.

The Belle of Amherst? “Look, Egan, you haven't even thought about this. All I'm saying is, let's take some time to think about what a really damned good collection of Dunwoodie papers might look like, and what it might cost to put it together. That strikes me as the logical first investment for the acquisitions money.” Egan was pouting, so she played her ace. “And I'm sure that if I called Ezra Sonnenschein and asked him to take it to the Foundation officers, they'd agree.”

Egan gave up on trying to make lunch out of the humongous hamburger that had been cooked to the consistency of a briquette and then left to cool slowly. He obviously had to concede that she was right. And Sally was sure he knew that the moment the Foundation stepped in to micromanage the archive money, he could kiss off any thoughts of having some say in how it was spent. It must be galling him that the Dunwoodie papers themselves were still sitting in Meg's basement, at the Foundation's insistence, at the mercy of everything from mice to mildew to murderers, for all he knew. He was stuck.

“Yes of course, you're right,” he told Sally. “I hadn't really worked this through. It might be well to wait until you've had a look at what's in those bloody boxes. And do have a go at getting Maude to have a burglar alarm installed.”

“I'll do that,” she said vaguely. “And I intend to get to the boxes as soon as possible.” She threw him a bone. “Of course I'll be grateful for any advice you can give me if I run into any problems.” He gave her a small smile. She worked up a smile of her own, laying her napkin over the Seize-Her salad and rising to make her escape.

She reached for her wallet, but Egan shook his head and insisted, “No no nonononono. My pleasure.” He had to be kidding.

“Thanks for the lunch, Egan. I'll be in touch.”

Escape denied. By the time she was on her feet, Sam Branch had gotten up, shaken hands with the departing governor, and come over to their table. “Just a little chat with the gov,” he told Egan. “Asked me if I want to be on the state party committee. Nobody's been appointed since we lost Mickey Welsh.”

“Terrible story,” Egan told Sally. “Mr. Welsh was killed in an automobile accident in Togwotee Pass. Leading citizen and all. His poor family.”

Sam cut him off. “Mustang,” he said, turning to Sally, his raspy, low voice annoyingly familiar after sixteen years. “Heard you were back in town. You look good.”

“Thanks, Sam,” she answered, flushing, but got hold of herself. “Last time I saw you, you were running for your life down Grand Avenue.”

He thought that was hilarious. “You had a shitty aim with a Chevy, Sally.”

“It must have been that,” she returned, “because I was really trying to kill you. Listen, great seeing you again, but I really have to be going ...”

Egan goggled, enjoying the show.

Sam picked up her left hand and inspected her fingertips. “Wimpy calluses,” he remarked. “Aren't you playing anymore?”

“Not much. Just for fun. Really, I gotta—”

“Well, you'll have to get back in shape. Dwayne and I've been putting jams together now and then. We've got a little band we call The Millionaires. Probably get together in a couple of weeks—you'll have to sit in.” He gave her his Look. It was a long way from melting her as it had, once or twice. Instead, it brought back a strong, guilty memory of melting: Sally Alder as the Wicked Witch of the West.

Sally and Sam hadn't exactly parted on the best of terms, but he'd evidently chosen to overlook her attempt at vehicular homicide. She was still not sure whether she had really meant to injure or kill him, though at the time she'd been quite sure he'd deserved to be harmed. He had managed to escape unscathed, laughing.

He was still holding her hand, smiling in a way that made her vastly uncomfortable. The calluses on his fingertips were thick and rough from intimate knowledge of a guitar neck, reminding her of other things with which his fingers were closely acquainted. She removed her hand and gathered up her bag. She ought to try to be reasonable. Whatever was bugging her, it had been over a long freaking time ago. She was a middle-aged college professor, holder of the Dunwoodie Chair. And at the same time, she was definitely ready to get back into playing some tunes. “Yeah, maybe. Give me a call. I'm in the phone book under the listing for Meg Dunwoodie.”