The Adventures of Slim & Howdy (14 page)

35

“THE EAGLE FLIES ON FRIDAY,” JODIE SAID, QUOTING T-BONE
Walker. She glanced at her watch. “Happy hour starts at four.”

And by five-thirty everybody feels like money to burn and nothing to lose.

Better hang on to your hat.

Weekends at the Lost and Found. Time to let it rip and roar. Didn’t matter if you’d spent the last five days working an oil rig or cooped up in a home or an office cubicle, all work and no play sucked. And when you
do
step out, it don’t matter if you’re high-rollin’ or honky-tonkin’, long as you’re out.

There were low-cut dresses, knee-high boots, and tight jeans to be wiggled into and back out of later. If all went well, somebody might even be there to help. Lots of friendly people at the Lost and Found. There were drinks to be drunk. Rugs to be cut. Stick a whole roll of quarters in the boogie box, son, turn up the heat. Put a buzz in the joint.

“Let’s get this thing rockin’!” were the first words Howdy heard come out of the mouth of the guy who walked in wearing a Can’t We All Just Get a Bong? T-shirt. His buddy, trailing right behind, figured he was going to impress the chicks with his Git-R-Done hat and his ability to do the majority of Larry the Cable Guy’s stand-up routine. Hey, it had worked before.

Howdy was on the door, checking IDs. Cover charge didn’t kick in until later. Bong Boy and Git-R-Done were both old enough so Howdy just smiled and let ’em in, told ’em to have some fun. Thinking about his own younger, dumber days.

Slim was back in Jodie’s office with his guitar and a legal pad, working on a song. It was an idea that had been percolating since the day he and Howdy pulled into Del Rio and stopped for gas at the Truck ’n’ Go Quicky Stop. Slim had noticed this guy climbing down from the cab of his Kenworth, looked like he’d been on the road forever. Kidneys sore from too much coffee, back knotted like a rope. Then he pulled a picture from his shirt pocket and looked at it. He smiled and it was like dark clouds lifting off his face.

Slim didn’t have to see who was in the picture to know there was a song in it. He figured the guy had deadheaded down from Tulsa or maybe Little Rock. His baby wanted him back home and he’d been in the fast lane since the last toll gate, haulin’ nothing but high hopes and thin air. “Eighteen wheels singing home sweet home” was one of the lyrics he was working with. “For too many days, he’d been on the road, missing her more with every load, goin’ broke one white line at a time.” Yeah, it was coming together, but he still needed a title.

Out in the main room, Jodie and the rest of the staff were slinging hooch and wings and whatnot left and right. It was a thirsty crowd heading for a good night.

Later, at the front door, Howdy popped up straight and brushed his mustache when these four hotties came in, must’ve been around nine o’clock. Looked like they’d been locked up in an office all week pushing papers and somebody was going to have to pay for it on the dance floor tonight. A pack of she-cat tigers coming out of the cage, as it were.

Howdy allowed as how he was going to use his doorman’s discretion to let the ladies in without a cover charge. “But I’m gonna have to see your driver’s licenses,” he said, tilting his hat at an authoritative angle. “Make sure you’re not too young to be up in a place like this.”

Well, you can’t hardly find a woman who doesn’t like to hear that she might look too young for anything, so Howdy immediately had one leg up with these ladies. And by the time he’d memorized all their names and told them the first round was on him, well, both legs.

Around ten, the girl of Arizona Cardinals T-shirt fame showed up straining the pearl snaps on a snazzy western shirt. In addition to that she was wearing a pair of old jeans and a willing smile. She paid the cover and drifted past Howdy, listening to her tall, mysterious troubadour who was up on the stage now playing a tender one at that very moment. As if he knew she was there.

“I like your shirt,” Howdy said as she headed for the bar.

To Slim’s credit he remembered her face and name pretty quickly, even without the distorted Cardinals logo staring at him. Just something about her. Next break, she said she’d hang around if that was all right. Slim insisted. Put her on his tab. Played her some songs. Shared her table between sets. Felt a firm squeeze on his thigh. Bingo. Give that man a cigar. Or maybe he was just happy to see her.

While all that was unfolding, Howdy bought a couple more rounds for the table of she-tigers, even stopped by their table once with a complimentary plate of nachos. Couldn’t stay long though, he said. Had to get back to the door. But maybe later. Go to Mexico, one of those crazy all-night joints, something like that. Hell yeah. They were game.

End of the night, turning up the lights, Jodie slapped the bar the way she always did and said to the stragglers, “You ain’t gotta go home but you
gotta
get outta here.”

Slim was about to leave with Brianna, which turned out to be her name. Moved here from Phoenix two months ago. Renting a place up on Devil’s Lake to which Slim had just been invited. He needed to borrow the truck to follow her out there, but Howdy had the keys and he was nowhere to be seen.

Jodie said she saw him heading for the parking lot, not two minutes ago.

Slim found him out there in the midst of the she-tigers and he called out, “Howdy, you gonna need the truck?”

Howdy tossed him the keys. “Nope.” He put his arms around two of the tigers and said, “I got a ride . . . or two.”

Brianna just had to ask, “Where’re y’all going?”

Howdy shook his head like the whole thing was a shame and a sin but he had to tell the truth about it. “I wanted to go to Mexico,” he said. “But the girls here have badgered me until I agreed to go back to their apartment to play a little strip poker.” He reached to his pocket and showed Dempsey Kimble’s deck of cards. “You two wanna come?”

Slim smiled and shook his head. “I think we’ll pass.”

As they headed off in different directions but with similar goals, neither Slim nor Howdy noticed the two men sitting in the truck in the far corner of the parking lot, watching.

36

BRIANNA PROVED TO BE A LOVELY AND SPIRITED HOSTESS.
Unfortunately, the next morning she woke up bright and
way
earlier than Slim had in mind. He sat on the edge of the bed rubbing his eyes and working his moldy sock of a tongue like a cow chewing cud. After a second, he blinked a few times and croaked, “What’re you doing?”

Brianna was busy packing a suitcase. She held up something silky, trying to decide, pack it or not? “I told you last night,” she said.

“You did?”

“Yeah, I’m driving over to San Antonio for a wedding.” She rejected the silky thing. “I invited you to come along.”

“What did I say?”

“You didn’t directly answer the question,” she said. “Of course, you might not’ve even heard me. Looked like you were concentrating real hard on something at the time, like baseball or fishing.” She paused and shook her head. “So, anyway, you wanna come?”

Slim’s head moved like something small and surprising had hit his forehead. “Love to,” he said with another couple of blinks. “But I gotta work.” Again with the tongue.

“Well, Brianna isn’t going to beg,” Brianna said, suddenly referring to herself in the third person for the first time.

So that was that.

Later in the day, after a leisurely lunch, one of the she-tigers dropped Howdy back at the Lost and Found. Said she might come back tonight to hear Howdy sing. He said he’d like that, and then he smiled, and she smiled. But nobody expected any promises. Howdy said he’d be there, either way. She winked and drove off. He never saw her again. Wasn’t the first time.

That night Slim worked the door while Howdy rocked the crowd.

Jodie said she felt a little headache coming on around eleven, nothing debilitating, really, just annoying. She took a couple aspirins and kept slinging hooch. She gave last call a little earlier than she might have otherwise. By the time they got the last customer out of the place, Jodie had hit a wall, exhausted. Still, she had the moxie to clean up, close the books, and give Duke the envelope for Uncle Roy. After that she said she was taking the remaining receipts to the night deposit at the bank, then she was heading home for a hot bath.

She left Slim and Howdy to lock up.

“Will do,” Howdy said, stepping behind the bar. “Hope you feel better.”

Slim walked over and laid the .22 on the bar. He climbed up on a stool and watched as Howdy started gathering bottles in front of himself. Curacao, Grand Marnier, triple sec, Rose’s Lime juice, Cointreau, gold tequila, silver tequila, and premium tequila. Then a blender, a shaker, some sweet and sour, and a bag of fresh limes, which he pushed toward Slim. He said, “Cut those in half for me, would you?”

“With what?”

Howdy gave him a cutting board and a knife before he organized his ingredients on the bar, grouping the orange-flavored liquors, then the tequilas, then the sweet and sour and other ingredients. Then he clapped his hands, pointed at Slim’s dark glasses, and said, “What do you know about the margarita?”

“I like ’em on the rocks,” Slim said. “No salt.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t know the margarita was invented in Hollywood, in the 1940s,” Howdy said. “For Rita Hayworth.”

“You’d bet on that?” Slim said. “Because the way I heard it was—”

Howdy pointed at the limes and said, “Just juice those for me, would you?” He slid the juicer across the bar. “You can tell your story later.”

Slim snickered and started squeezing the fruit. “Yassah, boss.”

Howdy continued by saying, “The story goes that a master bartender by the name of Enrique Bastante Gutierrez made the first margarita at the famous Tail o’ the Cock in L.A, for Rita Hayworth, whose full name was Margarita, after whom he named the drink.”

Slim dipped his head and looked over the top of his shades, saying, “Margarita Hayworth?”

“You can see why they shortened her name,” Howdy said as he poured some cheap gold tequila into the shaker with some ice and a glug of pale-green prefab margarita mix. He shook it, then strained it into two glasses. He slid one to Slim. “Now that’s the basic drink you’ll get at bars all over America,” Howdy said, giving his a sip and clucking his tongue to taste the thing. “Essentially, sugary limeade with a splash of tequila.”

Slim tasted his. “Yeah, that’s not very inspiring,” he said. “About a C-minus.”

“Exactly.” Howdy tasted his again before dumping the remainders from both glasses into the sink. “It’s not awful,” Howdy shrugged. “It won’t kill you to drink a few, but that’s the best you can say for it.” Howdy rinsed the shaker and added a new scoop of ice. “But people settle for it every day, like that’s as good as it gets.” He poured some 100 percent blue agave tequila into the shaker, measured an amount of Cointreau, then added fresh lime juice. He shook his head slightly and said, “I never understood that.”

Howdy went on to make a brief, if haphazard, argument that it was the same way people seemed to settle for so many things in life. They settled for things that were easy and adequate but not perfect and told themselves they loved it because perfect took too much work and even then there were no guarantees. But otherwise, he said, and all too often, you end up one day looking back at a decision and thinking, Why didn’t I hold out for something better than that?

“That’s a cliché because it’s true,” Howdy said. “I mean, how many people you know who are miserable, and got nobody to blame but themselves, because they settled for something less than what they really wanted?” He put the top on the shaker as if to cap his argument.

“But not you,” Slim said. “You’re holding out for perfect, aren’t you? No matter what the cost.”

Howdy was squinting when he looked up from under his hat and said, “What?”

“You’re holding out for Marilyn,” Slim said. “Or
a
Marilyn.”

“
A
Marilyn?”

“An imagined ideal,” Slim said. “The search for which has left many a man as unhappy as anybody who ever
settled
for less.”

Howdy chewed that over for a second before he rattled the cocktail shaker a couple of times. “What’s your point?”

“Well, if you can’t have Marilyn,” Slim said, “you can at least have a part of her. Something almost perfect.” Slim gestured at the bottles and said, “The margarita recipe.”

Face to face with the truth, Howdy smiled and said, “Nah, it’s nothing like that.” He poured the chilled drink into the two glasses.

“I was just guessing.” Slim hoisted his drink and said, “Here’s to perfection.”

Howdy joined the toast and they tasted the drinks.

“Now
that’s
a damn fine margarita,” Slim said. “A-plus.” He drank some more.

“Yep.” Howdy nodded at first, then shook his head. “But it’s not Marilyn’s.”

Slim eased a concerned look over the top of his glass and said, “You’re not going to throw it out are you?”

“Hell no,” Howdy said. “Holding out for perfection’s all good and well, but it’s no reason to throw out premium tequila.” Howdy was taking another drink when the phone behind the bar started to ring. He turned and looked at the caller ID. It was Jodie’s cell phone. Howdy answered, “Lost and Found, now under new management.”

“Yeah,” Jodie said. “And I bet you’re drinking all the good tequila.”

“Hey, boss, you’re the one left us here with the keys,” Howdy said.

“There’s a sucker born every minute,” she said. “But that’s not why I called. I don’t think I locked my office. Make sure it’s locked before y’all leave, okay?”

“No problem,” Howdy said. “Feel better.”

After Howdy hung up, Slim said, “I know a guy in Corpus who swears the margarita was created for Peggy Lee at a bar down in Galveston by the renowned mixologist Santos Cruz.”

“He can’t prove a thing,” Howdy said as he began working on a new recipe.

Slim said the margarita story he always thought had the ring of truth to it, involved a woman named Bertita who tended bar at a place on the cathedral square down in Taxco, Mexico.

“Bertita?” Howdy said skeptically. “So how come it’s not called a Bertita-rita?”

Slim opened his mouth to address this question when the phone began to ring again. Howdy looked, it was Jodie. He answered by saying, “Why can’t you just let us drink your tequila in peace?” He paused for the retort, but none came. “Jodie?” He could hear something coming over the connection but he couldn’t tell what it was. Odd noises of indeterminate origin. “Jodie? You’re breaking up.” The sounds were muffled, garbled, and disturbing in their uncertainty.

Somewhere in all this Howdy thought he heard Jodie’s voice, though she wasn’t speaking clearly, maybe she wasn’t even speaking, but it was her voice making some sort of sound. Then a sudden crack followed by a grinding noise followed a moment later by what might have been a car door slamming or a gunshot. “Jodie?!” Howdy looked at the phone. They were still connected. “Are you okay?” But there was nobody at the other end. All he could hear now was what sounded like crickets chirping. Then the connection dropped and Howdy hung up.

Slim said, “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” Howdy shook his head. “Something that . . . It sounded weird.”

“Call her back.” Slim stood up as if it might help.

Howdy punched in her cell number. After a few rings he looked at Slim and shook his head. “Voice mail,” he said.

Slim picked up the .22 and said, “Let’s go.”