January Justice (6 page)

Nobody accosted me. I hadn’t been in the cell phone videos they showed so many times on television, so my face wasn’t as well known as the rest of the so-called butchers. I was minding my own business with a glass of single malt when a little guy in shorts and sandals and a riotous Hawaiian shirt sat on the stool beside me. After a few minutes, he asked if I was from around there. I told him I was from Uvalde.

“Where is that?” he asked.

I told him it was about an hour and a half west, out past Hondo.

“No kidding?” he said. “That’s funny.”

I didn’t see the humor in it, but there didn’t seem to be much point in disagreeing. I went back to what I had been doing, which was drinking Scotch and thinking about what I ought to do with the rest of my life.

After a while the guy said, “How’d you like to make five hundred dollars?”

I wondered if I should get up and walk away, but he had kind of an earnest look about him in spite of the ridiculous getup, so I asked what I would have to do for the money.

“Just drive me around,” he said. “Out west, where you’re from.”

It turned out he was scouting locations for a motion-picture company that planned to shoot a film on location in southwest Texas. Parker, they planned to call it, about the mother of the last free Comanche chief, Cynthia Ann Parker, who was kidnapped by the Indians as a child and “rescued” twenty-five years later, only to starve herself to death when she wasn’t allowed to return to the tribe. Every Texan knew the story.

The little man’s name was Morton Saperstein, and he was pretty good company once I got past the New Jersey accent. We took my old Ford F-150 pickup on several forays out into the hill country over the next few days, Morton and me, with an ice chest filled with sodas and sandwiches on the seat between us. I took him up to Pipe Creek and Bandera and Kerrville, where he wanted to spend a lot of time looking for a spot to film along the Guadalupe River. We went out to Lost Maples and then back down to a spot I knew on the Frio River, called Comanche Crossing, which is near Concan. I suppose having grown up there, I was used to the idea that the countryside was littered with scenes straight out of John Ford westerns, but Morton was fascinated by the fact that there really, truly had been Indian massacres at various locations all around that country.

Morton suggested that I might want to work for the production company while they were in the area as a kind of driver-bodyguard. He mentioned the pay for six weeks of work, which was nearly what I had earned in half a year as a marine.

“You’d have to join the union,” he’d said.

I told him I was used to joining things and asked him whom I would be guarding.

He asked me if it mattered.

I said no, not really.

When the film company arrived nearly four months later, it turned out to be Haley Lane.

She and I didn’t talk much at first. I met her at the door of a house they had rented for her in Alamo Heights, walked her to the car—the production company had provided a dark green Range Rover—and drove her to the locations, most of which were places I had shown Morton. Sometimes she had her assistant with her in the backseat. They would review the morning’s lines together or talk about other business.

It was impossible to avoid hearing them, so I soon learned she had controlling investments in companies all over the world—mines, shipping companies, hotel chains, and so forth. It was obvious she managed her investments personally. She also spent a lot of time discussing things like hospitals in Ghana and orphanages in Mexico, and I began to realize she was talking about taking care of thousands of poor people.

I’ll admit to a certain reverse snobbery at first. I had expected a major movie star to be a self-absorbed fool. But by the end of the first week, before she and I had even had much of a conversation, I knew beyond a doubt she was one of the smartest and most generous people I had ever met.

The sun was rising behind us one morning as I drove her out of town. It was just her and me in the Range Rover that day. I sipped coffee from a thermos lid as we headed west on Highway 90. She was focused on some paperwork in back. Her cell phone rang. From her half of the conversation, I figured George Clooney had the flu and couldn’t work.

When she hung up the phone, I said, “Back to the house?”

She said, “I guess so.”

The highway rose over a hilltop about half a mile ahead. I slowed and made a U-turn to return to San Antonio. When the Range Rover was on the shoulder of the road, pointing east, she said, “Could we stop here a minute?”

I pulled a little farther off the highway. She opened her door, got out, and walked a few yards up ahead of the truck. I got out too, and stood beside the front bumper.

With her back to me, she said, “I had no idea Texas is so beautiful.”

Below us, row after row of hills rolled toward the horizon, the white limestone dotted with mesquite trees and glowing golden in the first rays of the sunrise. I said, “Yes.”

She looked back at me. “You’re from around here, aren’t you?”

“About forty miles farther west.”

“Would you do me a favor?”

“If I can.”

“I’ve been working pretty hard for a long time. I need a day off, and this country is so gorgeous. Would you take me someplace where I could relax a little? Maybe someplace only local people go?”

I drove her to Uvalde, where we stopped at Ramirez’s, a little place that used to be a burger stand but had been converted long before to serve Mexican food. You walked up to a window, placed your order, and paid Jane Ramirez, and one of her daughters brought your meal out to you at the picnic tables under a huge live oak. I asked for a couple of burritos filled with frijoles, chopped potatoes, onions, scrambled eggs, and fresh salsa. I also bought two slices of pecan pie and four bottles of water. They wrapped the food in foil and put it in a plastic bag, and then they put that into another bag, which they filled with ice.

From there we took the Crystal City Highway south from town to a ranch road that headed west. Haley was still riding in the back. A couple of miles up the road, I turned off the pavement onto a gravel road. Another mile along that road, I stopped at a steel gate. I got out, walked up to the gate, and opened it. I got back in the Range Rover and drove through. I stopped again, got out, walked back to the gate, and closed it. I got back in the Range Rover and continued on along the road, which was now more of a trail.

We came to another gate. I stopped. I opened my door, and Haley said, “Let me do it.”

Before I could answer, she was out and walking toward the gate. She had her hair back in a ponytail. She was wearing jeans and boots and a plaid shirt and no makeup as far as I could tell. She looked as if she belonged there. She was nearly old enough to be my mother, and she was easily the most desirable woman I had ever met.

Haley waited while I drove through, and then she closed the gate behind us. She walked up to the front passenger side door, opened it, and got in beside me. We headed out across the pasture.

“Is this your land?” she asked.

“It belongs to a friend of ours.”

“Ours?”

“My family. We’ve lived here for generations. Most everybody knows us.”

“Is your parents’ place nearby?”

“My grandparents’ place is, yes.”

“What about your parents?”

“My mother died when I was six. My father’s doing twenty-five to life in prison.”

We had come to another gate. I stopped. She got out without a word. Once we were through that gate, the country around us started to get rocky.

She said, “Do you mind if I ask something?”

I stared straight ahead. We were on a dirt track that wove uphill between mesquites and limestone outcroppings, barely wide enough for the Range Rover. I said, “First-degree murder. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“That must be very hard. I’m sorry.”

We began to descend. As we did, a white-stone bluff rose on our left. Soon we came to a hairpin turn, and Haley got her first view of the river down below. A few minutes later, I drove out onto a gravel bar, parked, and turned off the engine. We sat there in the truck, shaded by towering cottonwoods and surrounded on three sides by the shallow river as it gurgled and splashed and curved around the bar.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“This is the Nueces River,” I said. I pointed south. “Mexico is about eight miles that way.”

“It’s just…incredible. We should shoot a scene here.”

“No.”

She looked at me. “No?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

“People would want to know where it is.”

She smiled. “And you don’t want anyone to know where it is?”

“I do not.”

“So…this is some kind of secret swimming hole? For locals only?”

“Something like that.”

“But you already brought me here. Your secret’s out.”

“You’ll never find it again.”

“I have a pretty good memory, buster. Especially now that I know it’s a big deal. I’ll memorize everything on the drive back.”

“Guess I’ll have to blindfold you.”

She laughed. “Just you try.”

She took off her boots, rolled her jeans up to her knees, and went wading while I stood beside the Range Rover, watching. The river bottom was lined with stones and gravel, rounded by centuries of erosion. She had to go slowly, picking her way out into the water in her bare feet. I warned her to be careful of the current, which was stronger than it looked. Sure enough, she slipped and fell. I had a moment of panic and ran across the gravel bar to help her. But before I got to the river’s edge, she was already back on her feet, and laughing.

She looked over at me, still laughing. She then leaned down and got two hands into the water and sent a shower through the air in my direction. I looked down at my shirt. It was a hundred-dollar western-cut shirt with pearl buttons. I had bought it in San Antonio just to wear to work. It was soaking wet.

I looked up at her. She stood there with her hands on her hips, grinning as if daring me to do something about it. I waded into the river with my boots on and splashed her back. Then we were both stumbling around, hip deep in the river, splashing each other furiously and falling and floating in the current.

After that, I took the rear seat out of the Range Rover and set it on the gravel beside the river. She sat there in the sun with her shirttails tied together, stomach bared to the sun, and her jeans rolled up to her knees. I took off my boots and drained the water out of them; then I removed my shirt and draped it over a boulder to dry out. I built a little fire with mesquite, and once the wood had burned off pretty well, I set the foil-wrapped burritos in the coals. In a few minutes they were ready, and we ate them with our fingers and drank the ice-cold bottled water. We finished with the slices of pecan pie.

I stretched out beside her on the seat, my legs crossed on the gravel, my fingers clasped over my belly, and my head leaned back against the leather. The sun had risen above the treetops and was hot upon us. I went to sleep for a while, and when I awoke, she was staring at me.

She said, “I don’t impress you at all, do I?”

I looked at her, trying to decide what she meant. She didn’t seem like the type to fish for compliments, so I figured it was an honest question. I said, “If it makes you feel any better, I bought a new shirt to wear to work.”

She laughed.

I said, “I’m sorry. I’m sure I’d be impressed if I watched more movies.”

“You have heard of me, haven’t you?”

“Oh, sure.”

“But you don’t seem to be, you know…intimidated.”

“I don’t remember ever being intimidated by anyone.”

She stared at me a moment with a thoughtful expression. Then she smiled, and it was as if a second sun had dawned over the river.

7

In the spare room of Haley’s guesthouse,
I turned away from my easel and walked back through the living area. Stepping outside, I stood by the front door, blinking in the Southern California sunshine. Teru Fujimoto was kneeling by a flowerbed about fifty yards away. His pipe was clenched between his teeth, sending little puffs of smoke skyward while he worked. He saw me and waved. I waved back and went over to him. He stood up to face me as I approached, brushing at the knees of his dark-green uniform trousers. When I got close, he stuck out his hand and we shook. His hand felt rough and hard. Not the kind of hand you would expect on a man with philosophy and law degrees from Stanford and Harvard.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Not so hot, actually. How about you?”

“
 
‘Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.’
 
”

“I’m sure Coué would be pleased to hear it.”

I was impressed as usual with his breadth of knowledge. Most people would have thought I was quoting a Pink Panther script. But then, Haley hadn’t hired Teru solely for his gardening skills. He had always been something of a spiritual advisor to her too.