The Gillespie Country Fair

by Marc Hess

  “Goddamn!” the man sung out over the din. “That bitch puked on me.”

  Brady grabbed Mari’s arm from behind as she reeled backwards.

  Girls nearby went, “Ewww,” and the cowboy’s friends stepped up, belligerent and eager for trouble.

  Brady jostled Mari into a more maneuverable position and held his hand up. His words, “Keep it cool,” were heard by no one.

  From the dark cacophony of bodies pressed around them, young Ryan Ebberhaus pushed his way onto the scene. He seemed to be buzzing, and a couple of his friends followed him into the fray, which drew up the fight lines, if there was going to be one. The music and the background noise were still loud enough to drown out anything that could be said between them.

  There was sawdust in Mari’s hair. Her stomach convulsed again, and her eyes rolled. Brady held her head upright and told her, “Time to go, babe.”

  Mari made an effort to muster some resistance, but Brady held her firmly, scooping her into his arms in one gorilla-like move, and followed Ryan as he bulled a path to the door. The music slowed to a country waltz, while the uproarious crowd kept the deafening babble. As they started to push their way out, Brady heard the man in the black cowboy hat hollering after them, “Yeah, you moron. Get that drunken whore out of here.”

  The guys around him let out a roar of laughter louder than the band. Brady seethed, encumbered by the embarrassment of Mari’s limp body. He was mad at her, but his ire was focused on the loudmouth in the black hat and the newly stained shirt. Blocked by the density of the crowd ahead, Ryan turned, and Brady just dropped the limp Mari into his arms, cocked his elbow, and threw his right fist into the shirt-stained cowboy’s face. Arms out and stunned like a slaughterhouse cow, the man stumbled backwards into the edge of a table and crashed to the floor, taking chairs, glasses, and bottles down with him.

  The music came to an immediate halt on that one single beat. The leather-vested band leader, a man they all knew as Bo—just Bo—took just a moment to set his Fender Stratocaster into its guitar stand, took one long step off the band platform, and pushed his way across the dance floor, gracelessly parting the seas of kickers and sweethearts as he plowed into the scene.

  He quickly stepped between the two of them, addressing the cowboy first. “You okay?” Then he drilled his eyes into Brady. “Get her out of here, Brady. Now.”

  Brady and Ryan, who still had Mari draped in his arms, had no trouble making it to the door.

  Jeanie, still on her barstool, held her glass up as they made the door. “Dang, Brady. You sure know how to pick up a girl.”

  As soon as the door slammed behind them, Bo had his guitar slung over his shoulder and the joint was rocking again.

  • • •

  Brady pulled up to his house in the quiet darkness of the long night. He found Thea sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of mesquite-roasted coffee in her hands.

  “Still here? Still up?” he asked as he came in.

  “Just waiting.” She paused, offended at his greeting. “But I’m sober now, and there’s no headache.”

  Brady sat down across the table from Thea and studied her for a moment. She didn’t look angry and she didn’t say a thing.

  “It’s complicated,” he said at last.

  Instead of responding, Thea got up, poured out a fresh cup of coffee, and brought it to him, saying, “Your coffee’s terrible.”

  “It’s like I’m her big brother or something. Bad sister.” He could see that Thea wasn’t buying it, and he bit down against the anger rising from every direction. “Promised my brother that I would look after her while he was away.” It bothered him that she was just sitting there, mute. “He was going to marry her when he got back.” Brady wiped at his eyes. “Never figured he’d be gone forever. So?”

  “Do you think that’s what Gus would have done?”

  It was the tone in her voice that irked him. He knew that he had put her in an awkward position, but if she had meant that as an insult, it was out of line. “She wouldn’t be out there if Gus was here,” he mumbled before moving to a new topic. “I’m surprised to find you still here.”

  “Did you think I’d go home?”

  He nodded and confessed, “I did.” He was flattered she was here, but at the same time uncomfortable about why she had stayed.

  “Did you think that I would run out just like that? Like everyone else running off on poor Brady?” Her words had a caustic tone. “You thrive on that, don’t you?”

  “On what?” He found the growing hostility in her eyes unnerving.

  “I know what’s going on with you. I know why you get up in the middle of the night to drag drunks out of bars. It’s the same reason that you pull helpless orphans out of Mexico and Bolivia.”

  “Peru.”

  “What?”

  “Margit’s from Peru, not Bolivia,” he corrected. Thea just sat there staring at him. After a long pause Brady mansplained, “Bolivia is further south. It’s more multiethnic than Peru.”

  “Peru, then,” she conceded, but pressed her point. “When did it become your mission to save the world, one drunk at a time?”

  “What are you getting at, Thea?”

  She paused. “How old were you when your mom and dad died?”

  His hackles were up. “What is this? One of your Austin group therapy sessions? All that is a long time behind me now. It’s nothing to you. Or me.”

  “Is it really, Brady? Or do you just keep playing it over and over again?” She raised her coffee to her lips, keeping her eyes on him as she sipped. When she finished, she continued pressing her thesis. “Do you know what I have always admired about you, Brady? You’ve always pulled yourself through. You had some tough stuff thrown at you. But you always pull through.” She hesitated a bit. “Your heart is as big as it is stupid.”

  That might have been some kind of compliment or it might have been an insult, but Brady didn’t want to sort that out. “Don’t go there, Thea.” He held his hand up to stop her.

  She didn’t stop. “The way you deal with other people is just weird. Rescuing Margit from poverty in”—she added a satirical emphasis—“Peru.”

  Brady nodded. She got that one right.

  “Then Miguel. And rescuing Mari Hilss from her tragic life at the South Star. None of that’s going to help them.”

  “Help who?” Brady asked.

  Thea leaned over the table, with the coffee cup directly under her chin. “The dead ones. The ones who abandoned you.”

  Brady sat back. To him she looked like a witch casting a spell.

  “None of this is going to help them.” Thea pointed down the hall to the rooms where Margit and Miguel slept. “If that is what you are trying to do.”

  Brady was shaking his head, straining to keep his anger checked. “I’ve seen a lot of people just turn away, Thea. Change their mind about the promises they made or how they feel. Pretend they can’t do anything. You may be right, and maybe I do things for all the wrong reasons. Maybe you can choose not to get tangled up with people who might become a burden to you. But that’s not what I am, and if that’s the way you are, this isn’t going to work. You and me.”

  “Work? What?” She stood, almost slapping the table, gasping for breath and grabbing for words. “What do you think this is? You don’t. Oh, God.” She turned away, scolding herself out loud. “What a mistake.” Then, spinning back toward Brady: “Don’t you make more of this than it was.” She stomped off to the living room, where she had left her small leather purse and her car keys.

  Brady kept his seat at the kitchen table and felt the aftershock of his front door slamming. He had blown that one, and he couldn’t help but think that it was all Mari’s fault.

  He rose up and went to sit next to the sleeping Margit, where he watched her slowly pull air into her little body and easily let it out again. He slowly moved the back of his finger around her smooth cheek and brushed the wayward strands of hair from her lips. “I’m sorry, littl
e angel,” he said aloud. Privately, he had once thought himself something of a hero for adopting these children from the Lutheran Charities, but now he wondered who was rescuing whom.

  Margit stirred, rolled her head, and flickered her eyes awake. Her deep brown eyes looked into his, then past him. Brady turned to see where she was looking.

  Thea stood in the bedroom door.

  He hadn’t heard her return, and for a moment, just a brief moment, he felt his body drained of blood, thinking that she may have come back to him. Or maybe Thea had been quiet out of respect for the tender moment, the kind of moment she had never known as a child.

  “You have to move your car,” she said in a soft tone. “You’re blocking me in.”

  The Last Road Trip of Max Ritzi

  There is nothing that rouses the vigor of expired youth like the passing blur of a highway, elbow out the window, radio loud, warm breeze ruffling through thinning hair while the scenic grandeur of the American Southwest rolls past, like you’re riding a wave. Max Ritzi was squarely in his middle age, but the view through the windshield brought with it a grin of youthful promise. That future was disrupted by an occasional glance into the rearview mirror and the reminder that this trip marked the end of his second marriage. He was leaving his wife, leaving her daughter, and leaving Arizona pretty much the way he came in—rambling around in a car, looking for work. Behind his road trip smile, he found it hard to admit that after she threw him out, he had no place left to go but back to Fredericksburg.

  Nevertheless, he was coming home in a pitch-black Dodge Challenger, a badge of his success that harkened back to the muscle car fantasies of his youth. It was that success that drove the final wedge between him and his soon-to-be ex-wife, Caroline. In a career that transitioned like flip cards, from construction to warehouse work and selling building materials, Max had stumbled into a multilevel marketing scheme that sold an energy booster called the Power Patch.

  Billed as an alternative to protein shakes and energy drinks, the Power Patch worked like those quit-smoking stick-on strips and found a cult following among gym rats and fitness geeks. He cultivated a talent for selling bulk quantities of this “vitamin voodoo,” as Caroline called it, to amateur athletic groups, and for taking in money from downline distributors. The gulf between Max and his wife grew in earnest when Max left his day job to pursue the Power Patch as a full-time career.

  “It’s a total scam that appeals to the sleazeball side of your personality,” Caroline scolded, and after Max attempted to recruit members of her own family, she went ballistic. Of course, the Power Patch was merely the most recent flashpoint in their already broken marriage, and to Max it was a convenient excuse to move on.

  “I’ll be cruising back home in this two-door, hardtop classic coupe, paid for in cash,” he argued as he drove. “That’ll show my old hometown buddies what you get for getting out in the world. All thanks to the vitamin voodoo. And when I get home, I’m going to really shake it up. Make myself some real train-riding money.”

  Keeping with his newly affluent self-image, Max checked into a Zagat-rated hotel in the center of Santa Fe and spent the night at the rooftop bar, taste-testing his way through their menu of margaritas. When he ordered his first tequila shot, he borrowed a pen from the bartender so he could make a list on his cocktail napkin: things to do when he got back home. But he got distracted by an olive-skinned lady with hair that fell like feathers over her naked shoulders. She was whooping it up with her friends at the loudest table on the roof—reminding him of someone he might add to his cocktail napkin list. He scribbled it down: The one that got away.

  “Mari Hilss,” he whispered to his shot glass. The girl he might have married. Should have stuck with the script, he thought. Stayed in town, had some kids right away, worked my dad’s place until I was fat and boring.

  He downed his tequila in one quick gulp and slammed the empty glass on the bar. “Yeah, but Carel screwed that up for me,” he said, loud enough to get the bartender’s attention.

  “Ready for another, amigo?”

  Max pointed to his empty shot glass. “Hit me again.” He picked up the pen and added another line to his to-do list: Kick Carel’s ass.

  It was the hotel housekeeper who rousted Max out of bed the next day, past checkout time and a night of tequila still pounding in his head. There was nothing for him to do in Santa Fe but get a plate of migas and find his car. The open road helped ease his headache. Pushing around the southern horn of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains—where the final run of the mighty Rockies collapses into the great Chihuahuan Desert—Max pierced through a hot August afternoon of crusty pueblos and cottonwood bottoms at speeds as high as the temperature outside. Then, after a long couple of hours behind the wheel, he crossed the Texas line and was swallowed by an endless flat of sagebrush and bad memories.

  Not a rock had moved, not a shrub had grown, it seemed, since Max had first crossed the Llano Estacado decades earlier. Back then he was an outlaw on the run in a pieced-together, unregistered, uninsured, and mostly baby blue Camaro with one banged-up gray door that was kept closed with a twist of bailing wire. That beat-up car could have broken down out there; he could have ended up with turkey buzzards standing on his chest. He’d actually had that dream, over and over again. This was the place of that recurring nightmare.

  Things were bad for him in Fredericksburg when he’d left. His maniacal father had been ready to kill him. Actually kill him. But Max was at the top of his game now, making money and cruising home like he owned the road.

  By the time he reached Sweetwater, the sun was down but there was still light in the sky. The moon sat like an immense kumquat on the horizon. The road was still hot, and the moaning in his stomach reminded him of the microwaved burrito he had picked up at a Texaco station outside of Lubbock. At this speed he’d be back in Gillespie County well before midnight. The two-lane West Texas highway kept rolling into his headlights and falling under his wheels. The nearer those roads drew him to Fredericksburg, the more frequently his thoughts turned to his father.

  Out of that unending blacktop came composite images of those terrible family suppers: his father standing up from his chair, a napkin still dangling from his neck, red-faced and leaning halfway across the table, one hand drawn up into a fist, ready to strike. He was always yelling, pointing, and threatening. Max could envision his sister, Gerdie, breaking into tears, and his little brother, Jock, stuttering out rapid apologies for something that had nothing to do with him. This was the vivid and recurring image of his childhood. Max wondered now if it was all an exaggerated memory that he had nurtured in his own head over so many years away.

  He was ready to see his father again. Now a man standing on his own, Max didn’t have to put up with the belittling and the yelling that had defined his childhood. And as cruel as the old man could be, he was in a wheelchair now. If it came to blows, Max could take him.

  • • •

  Ba-wham! The Challenger jumped. In the road. Off the road. Screeching. Animal? Tires? And a bump. A hard bump. The fender, up and over … something. Headlights panned the desert brush, and another … thump—back wheels this time. A dog-sized mass skidded across the pavement, and a swatch of wet darkness smeared the road.

  Max worked the wheel with tight knuckles and reached for a prayer he’d long forgotten. He kept his foot off the brake and pulled the car out of the skid. The headlights had just started to find the white lane lines, when with one final, jarring blow—What was that?—the car came to a hard stop, and Max’s forehead ricocheted off the steering wheel. Everything stopped. A fine dust trickled down about him, or so it seemed.

  Dead silence.

  A slow pain welling up across his forehead pulled Max from a fog. He squeezed his eyes tightly. That made him nauseous. Slowly he reached for the car door and stepped out into the night. Good—he could stand. Overhead, stars undulated and the moon, fully round and yellow now, moved in and out of focus. Sweetwater was somewhere back th
ere, but he couldn’t remember what the next town was. The loudest sound in the night was the pounding of his own heart.

  After checking to see how solid the earth was under his feet, and without a flashlight, Max tiptoed toward the dark mass heaped on the pavement. He saw no movement except the steady flow of blood oozing from mouth and anus. The bristled hair of a wild boar, much bigger than a large dog, lay cleaved with long gashes where its hide had been torn away. Behind a gnarled tusk, one open eye reflected the moon.

  The saliva glands in Max’s mouth told him that he was about to vomit.

  He hurried back to his car, gulping in the dry night air, but he kept that Texaco burrito in his stomach. The driver’s-side headlight had been shattered and its housing smashed, while the one good light shot its cone out into the vast nothingness of West Texas. The front bumper was stove in, the fender panel mashed up. The motor was still running. He reached in and turned it off.

  He didn’t want to, but Max returned to the corpse and just stood over it wondering where the beast had been headed. Home to rejoin his family, perhaps? That hog had a father too—a daughter, maybe.

  Just get it out of the highway, Max instructed himself. Taking a deep breath, he took hold of the bristly forelegs and heaved on them. The mass didn’t yield, but a hot stream of blood shot up from an open artery, catching Max just below his neck and splashing up onto his chin.

  “Oh, God. Holy shit.” Max danced around, chanting profanities. Again, this would have been a good time to puke, but his stomach just convulsed and nothing came to his throat.

  Max removed his belt and looped it around the neck of the beast. With a lot of tugging and rolling, he lugged it off the road and then a little bit further, and with a push, let the mangled pig roll into a shallow arroyo. Max pulled off his shirt—now drenched in sweat and blood. He tossed it down on top of the dead animal, imagining the turkey buzzards that would soon be feasting on it.

  Regaining himself, Max found his tire iron and mustered the strength to pry the stove-in fender away from the front tire. He used a rock to shape the headlight housing back against the hood. Reaching into the trunk, he rummaged through his duffel bag for a clean T-shirt. Then, back behind the wheel, he turned the key and moved the car down the road at a more cautious speed. Now he’d be coming back to Fredericksburg the way he’d left—pretty much a wreck.