The Perk (19 page)

"You want me to use that to win?"

"Yes."

"I never won that way."

"Thought you were a lawyer."

"Oh, I played hardball, but not
sleazeball."

"Beck, you haven't lived here the last ten
years, seen how it is. I'm tired of living in a town where people are afraid.
If you're the judge, you can change that. You can change this town."

Beck shielded his eyes from the low sun. The
eighth day of September was still hot, but by five the sun's heat had played
out for the day. The heat was bad for humans but good for grapes.

"Jodie, you're expecting a lot from me.
You might be disappointed."

She turned and looked up at him.

"I don't think you'll disappoint me, Beck
Hardin."

They were standing in the vineyard watching Meggie
and Josefina carry a basket of grapes between them over to the bins manned by
Luke and Danny, Janelle's twelve-year-old son. Luke dumped the grapes into one
of the bins sitting on a small trailer. The girls carried the basket back to
their picking spot, where Butch was waiting. Meggie's goat followed behind like
a duckling following its mother. It was last harvest at the Trail's End
Winery.

"They're cute," Jodie said.

"She named the goat Frank."

"Odd name for a goat."

"Especially for a girl goat."

"Is she still having accidents?"

"The goat?"

"Meggie."

"Yeah. I read the books, but nothing's
worked."

J.B. drove past on the green Gator. He stopped
at Luke's trailer, backed into place, and hitched up.

"You boys hang on."

He gunned the Gator and drove off with the trailer
and boys in tow. Hector was in the winery overseeing the grape processing, and
his wife was up at the house cooking for the fiesta. The winery hands were
helping Hector, and their families were spread out over the vineyard,
handpicking the grapes. Aubrey was picking alongside Janelle; the Goats had
won their first game the night before, 56-0 in San Antonio. Slade McQuade had
thrown for five touchdowns.

Beck and Jodie were picking together.

"She didn't think I could raise the kids
alone. Said I was a lawyer, not a father."

"Annie?"

Beck nodded. "In her emails to J.B."

"Beck, she—"

"Was right."

By the time they had filled their baskets, J.B.
had returned with the trailer and the boys. Beck carried the baskets over to
the bin. He heard Danny say, "My dad left us."

"But he's still alive," Luke said.

"Not to me."

When the boys saw him, they went mute like
lawyered-up suspects. Luke emptied the baskets into the bin.

"You're doing good, Luke."

He gave Beck the baskets and a half smile.

An hour later the picking was done, and all
hands had gathered on the patio for the grape stomp. J.B. had dumped grapes
into a dozen barrels cut in half; the kids were now giggling and stomping the
grapes into mush and getting purple in the process. With the destemmer and
press, the stomp was just for fun.

Jodie jumped into the barrel nearest Beck. She was
wearing a wreath of purple grapes and green leaves on her head and a traditional
grape harvest outfit, a colorful shirt and long skirt, which she now hitched up
thigh high. Her legs were muscular and soon purple with grape juice. The
setting sun caught her face like it had Annie's on that Hawaiian beach. She was quite beautiful. She bent over,
and Beck caught the briefest glimpse of her black panties—and he felt a slight
stirring, something he thought had died with Annie.
Something he hadn't thought about in a long time. He looked up at her face and saw her looking at him. He felt his face flush. He turned away.

Jesus, you're
pathetic. Your wife's been dead eight months and you're looking like that at a
lesbian.

"She's a looker, ain't she?" Aubrey
had sat down next to Beck with a beer. "How old you figure she is,
thirty-five?"

"I don't know."

Aubrey drank from his beer.

"Seems a shame, a good-looking woman like
her going to waste."

"She's not a dead deer rotting on the side
of the road, Aubrey. She and Janelle, they're happy in their own way."

"Aw, I'm just jealous, I guess. They both
got something we don't."

"What's that?"

"A woman." Aubrey again drank from
his beer then said, "So what was Grady holding back from me?"

A lawyer has an ethical duty to disclose to his
client all the information he learns in the course of his representation of that
client. Beck Hardin had never failed that duty. But he had never before learned
that a client's daughter had had sex with two men on the same night. So he
didn't answer his client.

"Did Heidi have a cell phone?"

Aubrey shook his head. "Wouldn't let her
have one. So you ain't learned nothing? Beck, we only got three months and
twenty-two days to find this guy."

"Aubrey, the election is a week from today.
It's not looking good."

"I never figured
you for winning. Hell, those San Antonio boys had a better chance of winning against
Slade—he played like a man among boys. He
was
a man among boys."
He chuckled. "But you're still my lawyer, Beck. I'll find a way to pay
you."

"I don't want your money."

A lanky older black man walked up with a beer in
his hand. Beck reached over and shook hands with him.

"Mr. Johnson, how're you doing?"

The man shook hands with Aubrey then sat.

"Beck, I reckon you're old enough to call
me Gil now. Course, this time next week I'll have to call you 'judge.' "

"Doubtful. Gil, you still build the best
rock I've ever seen."

The patio had been laid out like a courtyard.
The rear limestone wall of the winery formed one side and a four-foot-high
limestone wall the others; the walls joined to form a fireplace constructed of river
rock. J.B. had built a roaring fire that didn't seem out of place on a warm September
evening. The patio was covered by a pitched cedar roof supported by thick logs
fixed in rock beddings. The floor was stained concrete. Every piece of rock
had been hand-laid by Gil Johnson.

"Why, thank you, Beck. I'm kind of proud
of this patio." Gil Johnson shook his head. "Hell of a thing, ain't
it? Saturday night and none of us got a woman. What we should do is, go over
to the auction house and buy us one. They got the Fall Female Replacement sale
going on. And boys, we need replacements."

"Shame it ain't as easy as buying a heifer,"
Aubrey said.

"Life is better with a woman," Gil
said. Then in a softer voice: "I was married once."

"I never knew that," Beck said.

"Her name was Doris. She died in
childbirth. Baby was coming out feet first, midwife couldn't turn it. Lost
both of them, her and the child. Boy."

"I'm sorry, Gil."

"I'm sorry about your wife, too, Beck. But
they're in a better place now. It's us that are left here to suffer. Don't
know why the Good Lord keeps me around." He downed his beer and stood.
"Now I'm getting melancholy on a Saturday night. Reckon I'll go help Lillianna
with the food."

Hector's wife had pulled up in J.B.'s black
pickup truck. Everyone sat at the picnic tables on the patio and ate enchiladas,
tacos, guacamole, rice, beans, and handmade flour tortillas until Hector began
playing his guitar and singing a Mexican ballad. J.B. grabbed Jodie and pulled
her up to dance. Gil and Janelle were next, then Libby dragged a reluctant
Luke out. Beck lifted Meggie and danced with her in his arms. Aubrey tapped
his cane on the concrete floor. The winery workers and their wives and kids joined
in, and they all danced until Hector's hands were too tired to play.

Julio Espinoza was invisible.

He stood right there, yet no one saw him. He
was like that movie poster on the wall: an inanimate object. He had often
thought of jumping onto the counter and stripping naked, just to get someone to
acknowledge that he existed. But he never had, because that would have brought
trouble to his family.

His parents were illegals. They had come to Fredericksburg nineteen years before from Piedras Negras to work in the turkey plant. And
that was to be his life as well, twelve hours each day killing and gutting
turkeys for the Mexican wage. But Julio wanted more, more than the life he had
been born into, the life the world told him to accept as his own. Julio was
seventeen, he would be the first Espinoza to ever graduate from high school,
and he would be the first to go to college.

He wanted to build rockets at NASA.

He was a senior, he made straight As, he had
scored 2350 on the SAT, and he had been accepted at the University of Texas at
Austin with a full scholarship—but only because he was Latino. Because he
served their purpose: "Oh, look, we have found a smart Latino. Let us
help him and show the world what good Anglos we are." They wanted to
display him like a rare species, as if finding a smart Latino in Texas were some sort of great anthropological discovery—like finding a dinosaur bone!

The school counselor had told him, "Julio,
take the free ride. Sure, they're giving you a free college education just because
you're Latino, but that's no different than dumb jocks getting free rides just
because they can play football." But it felt different to Julio. If felt
wrong to get a scholarship just because his skin was brown, just as it felt
wrong to walk down Main Street and be viewed as a crime waiting to happen just
because his skin was brown.

Julio did not want the Anglos' help. He did not
want to go to college on the Anglos' money. He did not want to live his life
on the Anglos' terms. He wanted to go to college and live his life on his own
terms with his own money.

But he had no money.

So he worked weekend nights here at the theater
and weekend days with his father. Rafael Espinoza worked at the turkey plant
during the week and built rock for the rich Anglos' new houses on weekends. Julio's
hands ached this night from his work that day. His father was from the old
school; he spoke only Spanish at home and in his native tongue he had often
said, "Julio is not going to build rockets—he is going to build rock!"
But his mother, Maria, always replied in her sharp Mexican tongue, "No, Rafael,
building rock is not to be his life! Julio must have the education so he will
have a better life and so he may help his brothers and sisters to a better
life!" Rafael Espinoza was the
hombre
of the house, except when Maria
Espinoza was home.

Home was the barrio on South Milam, just five
blocks off Main Street but in the part of town the tourists do not see.
Tourists drive south on Milam, cross Baron's Creek, and turn right on Whitney Street
to dine at the Herb Farm on—and Julio had read this in the newspaper—"Herb
& Coffee Bean Crusted Tenderloin Served with Rosemary & Garlic Potato
Mash & Grilled Asparagus with Lemon Herb Hollandaise" and after dinner
to purchase aromatherapy bath salts in the gift shop. They do not continue just
one block farther south on Milam into the barrio to dine on
cabrito
cooked
over an open pit and drink Tecate to the sounds of
Tejano
music and after
dinner to purchase marijuana, cocaine, and meth from El Gato, the neighborhood
dealer.

Julio lived in the barrio but he hoped one day
to taste a Coffee Bean Crusted Tenderloin.

His was a
casa
pequeña
: living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. His father worked
the night shift, so his mother slept in the bed with Juan, the baby, and Rosita,
the two-year-old. Margarita slept on the couch, and Gilberto and Jorge slept on
pads on the floor in the living room. Julio slept in the bathtub. Each night
he dried the tub with a towel then placed a pad and his pillow in the tub.
Sometimes he would wake with a crick in his neck. But he could shut the door
and read by flashlight after the others were asleep. He had read many books in
the bathtub.

But Julio did not complain. Other houses in the
barrio were home to three and four families each, often twenty people in four rooms.
All Mexicans. All illegal. All invisible. Careful to stay in the shadows so
as not to bring trouble to their families. When the girl had been found dead
in the ditch, the Anglos blamed the Mexicans; and the Mexicans had been fearful
of a raid in retaliation. One phone call could bring ICE into the barrio, immigration
agents wearing black jackets and pointing guns and ordering everyone into buses
for immediate deportation to Nuevo Laredo. Fear of a raid never left the
Latinos; they carried the fear with them always just as the Anglos carried
their cell phones.

If trouble came to
the barrio, it would come to the Espinoza family. Julio and his siblings had
been born in America; they were citizens. But if their parents were deported,
they would have to move to Mexico with them. And there were no universities in
Nuevo Laredo; there were only the
narco-traficantes
.

So Julio stayed out of trouble.

He did not hang out on the Latino porch during
lunch at the high school with the other Latinos, their arms and necks wrapped
with white bandages that covered their tatts; gang tattoos violated the school
dress code, so tatts had to be covered with long-sleeve shirts or bandages. On
hot days when the boys wore short-sleeves and bandages, the Latino porch looked
like the burn unit at the hospital.

Of course, Julio also
did not hang with the sk8rs, the socialites, the jocks, or the rednecks with
the
Long Live John Wayne
bumper stickers on their new Ford F-150 pickup
trucks. He wasn't a skateboarder, he wasn't rich, he wasn't a football player,
and he wasn't German.

He was invisible.

Julio was invisible in town, at school, and here
at work. He was just the brown boy selling snacks to Anglos, just as invisible
as the brown men roofing Anglo homes and the brown women cleaning dishes at the
Anglo restaurants. He was as invisible to the Anglos as the hot wind on their
faces, and far less important.