Desert Discord

by Henry D. Terrell

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by River Grove Books

  Austin, TX

  www.rivergrovebooks.com

  Copyright ©2018 Henry D. Terrell

  All rights reserved.

  Thank you for purchasing an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright law. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.

  Distributed by River Grove Books

  Design and composition by Henry D. Terrell

  Cover design by Greenleaf Book Group

  Cover images: ©iStock/BenDower; ©iStock/aoldman; ©Shutterstock/Markik

  Author photo: Sarah S. Terrell

  Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63299-158-4

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-63299-159-1

  First Edition

  Dedicated to the memory of Dorothy Croft

  Contents

  1 – It’s All About Sex

  2 – Apollo Needs Correction

  3 – Dr. Dietz Has the Community to Consider

  4 – Ramona Keeps It Together

  5 – Punchy and Pug Move to the Front of the Alphabet

  6 – Men Act Like Dogs Sometimes

  7 – Randy and Billy Respect Tradition

  8 – Ramona Gives a Private Reading

  9 – Peggy Makes the Poinsettias Red

  10 – No Fear at the Cactus Flower

  11 – The Zamaras Won’t Be Leaving Soon

  12 – The Fiddle in the Tree

  13 – Chris Rhodes Needs Scratch

  14 – Continuo

  15 – Apollo Feeds the Dogs

  16 – The View from the Eleventh Floor

  17 – A Clear Case of Self-Defense

  18 – Tim Left the Milk out Again

  19 – Andy Has Strong Role Models

  20 – Things That Must Not Be Said

  21 – A Desert Reverie

  22 – Simon Says Will You

  23 – Pinky Is the Last of His Kind

  24 – Prairie Desserts

  25 – A Cowboy with an Honest Face

  26 – Andy’s Big Secret

  27 – Vixen Becomes Vick

  28 – The House in the Country

  29 – Lessons Are Called For

  30 – An Electric Fence or Something

  31 – Not Quite What It Looks Like

  32 – The State versus Morris Goudrault

  33 – Boredom Explains a Lot of Things

  34 – Pancakes for Breakfast

  35 – Tuck and Protect Your Left

  36 – Nothing but Bad Choices

  37 – Anita Marta Maria Castidad-Fuentes Frost

  38 – Peggy’s Home Remedy

  39 – But Douglas’s Birthday Is May 9

  40 – What Bus Stations Are Really For

  41 – The Marine Could Use Some Ice

  42 – Apollo Completes the Picture

  43 – The Infrequent Rivers

  44 – Andy Stands Accused

  45 – He Just Plum Got Away

  46 – Grandpops Will Fix It

  47 – A Major Criminal Enterprise

  48 – Leary Come Home

  49 – Duro’s Finest Comes Heavy

  50 – Of Course It Was the Dead Guy

  51 – Billy Might Find It Difficult to Sleep

  52 – The Death of Art

  53 – Two Encores

  Epilogue – November 1971—Between Wichita Falls and Lawton

  Afterword/Acknowledgment

  Q&A with the Author

  Questions for Discussion

  About the Author

  – 1 –

  It’s All About Sex

  “We have to separate the boys from the girls,” said Douglas.

  “Why?” asked Andy. He was trying to attach the garden hose to the spigot just outside the shed door, but he couldn’t stop it from leaking water furiously. Water had been dripping wastefully for quite some time, and there was a puddle of mud right under the faucet bib. Andy strained to tighten it, but water ran over his hand and onto the ground.

  Douglas Fairchild stood just inside the greenhouse doorway, pointing and counting under his breath. “Twenty-six, twenty-seven … twenty-eight. Twenty-eight means we probably have about fourteen males, and the males will have to go.”

  “What’s the difference?” asked Andy.

  “Boys are useless. We need girls, and females do better when they’re raised separately.”

  “You should leave a couple of males,” said Reed Polk. “The strongest and the biggest. Just keep them nearby, but don’t let them get too close. Just to let the females know that it’s okay to go ahead and be female.”

  “I don’t see the point,” said Andy. “Besides, how do you tell them apart?”

  “At this age, you can’t,” said Douglas.

  “Then what are we worried about?”

  “I’m just thinking ahead,” said Douglas, who set his beer down, turned around, and started shoveling alternate scoops of dirt and sand out of two buckets into a third. “In a few weeks they’re gonna declare their sex, and we have to be ready to move.”

  “Declare their sex,” said Reed, nodding. Reed wasn’t doing any work, he just stood there looking thoughtful in his wire-rim glasses, smoking one of his skinny little cigars with the plastic tips. He did that a lot.

  “That sounds wasteful,” said Andy. Though horticulture was his avocation, he wasn’t the expert here. He gave up trying to stop the faucet leak and picked up the end of the hose, where water flowed out at an unsatisfying rate. He uncoiled the hose with one hand and tossed it outward with a whipping motion, making sure it wouldn’t kink, and walked down the rows of two-gallon ice cream buckets, each of which was filled with equal parts soil and sand and had a single green plant about two feet high. With the poor water flow, this would take awhile, but Andy liked the chore. It was meditative, and he liked gardening and helping things grow. As he walked, he hummed Bach’s “Passacaglia and Fugue.” He had read somewhere that plants liked music, particularly when a person sang to them, but that wasn’t why he hummed. Andy hummed compulsively, and only the finest music the Western world had ever created.

  Andy Zamara wasn’t really in on this scheme. It wasn’t his greenhouse and wasn’t his garden. He rented a room from Douglas for twenty-five dollars a month so he could be closer to town and to the auditorium where he played in the Duro Symphony Orchestra. He loved plants and didn’t mind pitching in to help.

  It was a hot day in early June, and they had gotten a late start. It took six to eight months to grow a crop, and by December there would be freezing nights and a struggle to keep the greenhouse warm. They should have planted in April, but Reed Polk had promised he would bring back killer seeds from Vietnam, so Douglas waited until Reed arrived in Duro in May, roaring up on his Triumph motorcycle following his discharge from the marines, carrying a duffel bag of clothes and a small leather pouch containing hundreds of magic seeds. It was worth the delay, Reed had said. The Cambodian grass would grow short and thick and sticky, and put the Mexican ditchweed to shame. The local heads would be impressed, and lots of money made.

  Andy attended the plants one by one until water dribbled out the holes that had been drilled in the bottoms of the buckets, then sloshed through the muddy puddle over to the faucet and shut it off. He unscrewed the hose and coiled it, hanging it on the
hose rack on the side of the tool shed. Reed watched him silently, smoking. Inscrutable.

  “That hose leaks. You need a rubber washer,” he said. “I think there are some in the kitchen drawer beside the sink.”

  “Okay,” said Andy. Nice to find out now. He looked at his watch. He needed to practice. Rehearsal was at seven, and he had to allow time to eat, plus an extra thirty minutes to get to the auditorium. It was less than a week till the Duro Symphony opened its summer season, and rehearsals were held every weeknight now.

  Andy went into the house and washed up, scrubbing his hands thoroughly to get rid of every trace of grit. When his hands were dry, he trimmed the nails on his left hand ever so carefully down to the nub. He hated the way his fingertips looked when he played for hours every day. Thick, ugly calluses. But it went with the territory. Every week or two, Andy filed his fingertips with an emery board to smooth the calluses.

  When he was in fifth grade, Andy had begged his mother to let him learn the violin. He had seen a man with crazy hair and the crazier name of Yehudi Menuhin play the violin on the Ed Sullivan show, and from that moment on he was hooked. Andy’s mom had wanted him to play piano. But every brainy nerd played the piano, or was forced to try. Any kid with minimal coordination could be taught to play a rich and pleasing chord on the piano, but the violin was special. In the right hands, it became an extension of the musician.

  And so, from the time he was ten years old until he graduated from Pelham High School, class of 1965, Andy Zamara had studied music with Mrs. Usher Kellogg, as people called her back in the days when a married woman lost her identity completely. Her given name was Dorothy. Mrs. Kellogg was a fierce and angular woman who dressed impeccably and wore heavy makeup even when giving lessons to elementary-age students.

  Early in his musical education, when Mrs. Kellogg was still working with him on holding his violin and bow the “right way,” that unnatural and painful position music teachers had insisted upon for generations, Andy noticed the fingers of her left hand. Her fingernails were trimmed so short that some of them were barely a quarter-inch long, and the ends of her fingers were thick and shiny, with black indentions. It made him question his decision to play the violin. He didn’t want his fingers to look like that. But he kept at it.

  It takes months and sometimes years before a kid can play notes on a bowed instrument without sounding awful. Not just awful, but worn-out-brakes awful, angry-parrot awful. Andy had a knack for the violin, it turned out, so he was able to produce a not-excruciating sound by his fourth lesson, and a tone that was modestly pleasing by the end of his first year. At his first recital in May of 1958, he played well enough that his mother decided she had not wasted her money.

  In the meantime, Andy had discovered that classical music spoke to him in a way nothing else did. The pop music his friends consumed off the radio did little for him. He appreciated some, but not all, of his mother’s Big Band recordings, especially those with female trios. His father had a beautiful voice and sang a lot when Andy was little, always in Spanish, but he owned few recordings. Although the Zamaras never spoke Spanish at home, from the time he was six, Andy could sing many songs by Trio Los Panchos all the way through, learned from his dad. When Andy got older, he stopped singing in Spanish, because his friends made fun of him.

  But it was the Great Ones who spoke to him, especially the nineteenth-century composers like Verdi, Chopin, Bruckner. These so-called Romantics captured his imagination like nothing else. From the time he had an allowance and could do odd jobs, he spent his money on these records and often listened to them at low volume in the night as he drifted off to sleep, letting the music steep into his DNA.

  Since graduating from Texas Tech, Andy had rented a room from his old high school friend Douglas, who had inherited a remote suburban ranch-style house from his parents. Andy claimed the front bedroom, the one farthest from the living room TV. Today, before he started practicing, he opened the window because it was a mild, sunny day, and the nearest neighbor on Jupiter Lane was 200 yards away. Out here in the Duro hinterlands, the houses were widely spaced and the yards were enormous.

  The house was the last one on Jupiter, which was the last street in the subdivision. This was truly the edge of Greater Duro. Out beyond the back fence was a little-used dirt road where surveyors had plotted lots for another street—to be named Saturn, of course—but so far it had attracted no pioneers. That was for the best. They didn’t need anybody sneaking up on the property from behind.

  Andy went to the kitchen door and looked out to see if the guys were paying attention, then he turned back and quickly unplugged the kitchen telephone. The phone had the loudest, most clanging ring anyone had ever heard, and Andy hated it like death. It was designed for rural living so that a half-deaf grandpa could hear it from the barn. Douglas had it turned up as loud as possible so he could hear it when he worked in the greenhouse. Andy tucked the wire into the corner of the phone jack so the minor sabotage would not be noticed. He would plug it back in after practice, but he wasn’t putting up with that goddamn phone while trying to learn new music.

  Andy returned to his room, tightened the bow, and rosined it quickly, using long, confident strokes. Taking the violin out of its case, he thrummed the strings once, then played them two at a time to check the harmonics. Almost perfect. A slight turn of the E-string knob on the tailpiece, and he was ready. He opened the music bag and took out a warm-up piece, one he already knew pretty well.

  What was Andy practicing for the Duro Symphony’s Summer 1970 season? Mahler? Shostakovich? No, this was the Summer Pops Extravaganza—“Benny Goodman, the Best of a Legend.”

  Okay, here we go. Andy was learning “Goody Goody,” arranged for strings by Howard Beaumont. An upbeat number to get the older, wealthier audience members clapping in recognition. Dumb beyond words, but fun to play, and a nice break from the usual classical clichés. He knew he was lucky. Somebody on the symphony board had pushed hard for “A Tribute to The Beatles,” but the Goodman set had won out in a squeaker vote.

  Andy played a few scale runs, then set his metronome for three-quarter speed and started sawing away at “Goody Goody,” teaching his fingers the notes. He’d worry about tone later.

  He had played about forty minutes, moving on to “Swingtime in the Rockies” and “Air Mail Special,” when the sound of a car engine, revving high, cut through the harmony. He stopped playing and looked out the window. A car had turned off the highway and was now headed up Jupiter Lane at high speed. It was a red Ford Mustang, and Andy recognized it even before it reached the open gate and turned up their long gravel driveway. It was Andy’s longtime friend and Douglas’s current girlfriend, Saskia. The car roared up the driveway, throwing gravel everywhere, and crunched to a stop right in front of the house. Saskia jumped out of the car and burst through the front door.

  “Doug!” she yelled. “Doug, where are you?”

  Andy came out of the bedroom, violin in hand.

  “What’s wrong, Saskia?”

  “Andy! Where’s Doug? I tried to call, but y’all wouldn’t answer the phone!”

  “He’s out in the greenhouse. What on earth is wrong?” said Andy.

  “What’s wrong is he’s coming out here!” Saskia ran through the house and out the kitchen door, letting the screen door bang shut behind her. Andy followed as far as the door, then turned back to quickly plug the phone wire back into its wall jack. He felt a little bit guilty.

  Outside, Douglas and Reed came out of the greenhouse, and Saskia met them, waving her hands and talking excitedly. Reed turned and trotted back to the greenhouse, while Douglas and Saskia walked quickly back to the kitchen.

  “What is going on?” asked Andy. “Who’s coming?”

  “Jerry De Ghetto!” said Saskia.

  “Motherfucker!” said Douglas. “That shyster motherfucker!”

  “What does he want?” asked Andy.

  “What do capitalist pigs always want?” said Douglas. “H
e wants us to pay him even more, and use our hard work to make free money for himself. Bastard!”

  “Doug, you could have met him at a bar, like he asked,” said Saskia. “Then he wouldn’t be coming out here.”

  “Oh, it’s my fault now!” said Douglas.

  “I didn’t say that,” said Saskia.

  Reed came in from the back and walked right past them toward his bedroom. “I locked up the greenhouse. I’m gonna get my gun,” he said.

  Douglas hurried after him. “Wait! Wait, man.”

  Andy heard Douglas and Reed talking in the living room. Douglas was saying, “Be cool. Be cool. Very, very cool.” Reed’s voice was too low to make out.

  Saskia bit her lower lip, more agitated than Andy had ever seen her.

  “Andy!” she said. “I hate this. I hate this whole thing. This was all supposed to be so easy and safe, and now there’s a mafia guy getting involved.”

  “He’s not mafia,” said Andy. “He’s not even that much of a criminal. He just loaned Douglas some money. He’s been paying it back. I don’t see what the problem is.”

  Douglas and Reed came back into the kitchen. Douglas was in commander mode.

  “Okay, here’s the plan. Very simple. Reed, you wait in your room like everything is totally cool. Keep your forty-five where you can get to it, but just act like you’re reading a book or something. I’m going to talk to De Ghetto. Andy, go back and play your fiddle just like you were doing. Act like everything is totally normal and cool. Saskia, you answer the door when he knocks and be all smiling and ‘Hey, Jerry!’”

  “You want me to be ready with the gun, in case he pulls out a piece?” asked Reed.

  “Hopefully it won’t come to that,” said Douglas. “But in case he starts getting radical, I’ll use a code word. I’ll say ‘Hey, Reed. We need your opinion.’ That’s the signal for you to come out and back me up. Listen for the word ‘opinion.’”

  “Opinion. Got it. Then I come out with my gun.”

  “No, just come out and look serious, back me up. But if I say, ‘Reed, I really need your opinion,’ that means bring the gun.”