by Marc Hess
Max strolled casually along the garden’s picket fence, eyeing the waitresses who suffered through the merciless midday Texas sun, before he slipped through the low gate to choose his seat. His server came to him looking much like the classic St. Pauli Girl, with the exception of the speck of jewelry in her nose. She stood before him and launched into her waitress spiel, explaining the differences between the biers: Weiss, Hefeweizen, and Spaten Optimator. “That last one will put you on your ass on a hot day like this.”
“Well, then I’ll have the Optimator.”
“That all?”
“No. I’ll have the house salad, too.”
That took her by surprise. “Really?”
“Yep.” He nodded.
“The salad bowl is only about this size.” She demonstrated the size with her cupped hands. There was a Band-Aid around her ring finger, where Max guessed that she may have burned herself in the kitchen.
He smiled and nodded to confirm his order.
“House salad and Optimator,” she repeated, to be sure they were both clear about the order.
“Yes.” Max made a broad gesture with his hands. “Ein großes Optimator.”
That roused a laugh from her, and she took a moment to look him up and down. “So you’re from around here?”
“You disappointed?”
“I usually save that beer spiel for the tourists.” She snapped the menu from him as she turned to leave. “They drop better tips.”
He kept an eye on her after he was served, almost—but not quite—ogling her. In spite of the dirndl, she came off as a thoroughly modern kind of girl; no makeup, that little jewel thing in her nose, and that subtly sarcastic manner. When he was down to the bottom of his Optimator, she sat at his table while totaling the tab. She gave him a cocky eye and held the tab just out of his reach.
“So, how do we know each other?”
“You’re Willow Geische.” He didn’t reach out for the tab. “I’m Max Ritzi.”
“Oh? Oh! You’re Jock’s big brother. Maximilian and Evelyn’s son.”
He nodded.
“Then we’re kin on my dad’s side. Or something like that.”
It charmed him to see her get excited about that. “Yeah. Carel and I are first cousins.”
“Yeah. You’re the one who ran away. California or Canada or something, right?”
“Well, I was in California at one time, but I’m coming home from Arizona now. Flagstaff.”
“Coming home.”
“Well, it’s fair weekend and all.”
“Yeah. Mom’s been talking about that. You’ll see her there.” She was staring at him, maybe trying to remember him. “So what happened to your head?”
“Bumped into a steering wheel.”
“Oh.” She seemed oddly offended.
To keep her there for another moment, Max quickly turned the conversation to her. “And what are you doing with yourself?”
She shrugged her shoulders playfully. “Workin’ here.”
“For the summer?”
“Since I finished school.”
“When was that? This spring?”
“Spring before last. Graduated a year early. Wanted to get out.”
“And you’ve been working here all that time?”
“Yeah, kinda regular now. I know. Didn’t get out too far, did I?”
“I didn’t mean anything rude. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Just working here. Won’t be here much longer.”
“Oh?” Max smiled, hopeful that she had a plan to get out of town. “What are you doing?”
“Gettin’ married.”
Instinctively he glanced at her ring finger. “So the ring didn’t fit?” he tried to make a joke.
It wasn’t funny to her. “Somethin’ like that.” She took out a cloth and started wiping the table. “It’s what ya do ’round here.”
“Is he a local man, or are you running off to someplace new?”
“High school sweethearts, ya know. It’s kinda expected.”
“Oh sure. I know all about that.” Max gave a half laugh and noticed how intently she focused on his every word. Her smile was warm, genuine, and naïve, too.
“He’s a good guy. Ain’t got nothin’. We’ll be moving onto my mom’s place. Good worker, and we’ll make something of it. Get it going the way my opa had it running. It’ll be our little happily-ever-after.”
“That’s nice.” Max risked another probe. “And how is your mom doing?”
“Fine.”
There was a long moment when Max thought she might be figuring him out. Then Willow just said she had to get back to “workin’ here,” and they casually agreed to see each other around.
“To explore our genealogy,” Willow remarked.
“That could be treacherous stuff.” He left her a noticeably large tip. Something more than a tourist would have left.
• • •
Stuck in the slow days of mid-August, Max found it hard to get his business going. His family, still living in the forgotten past of this antique town, had no need for the Internet, so he had to use the rudimentary connections provided for tourists in the new coffeehouses and at the public library. Then he would go out and grab a beer with Heinie, Rickie, and Buddy, and they would sit in the grandstand watching the varsity football practices. No one on the coaching staff much remembered Max, but he made an effort to corner a coach here and there so he could pitch the Power Patch, without much success.
The best time to catch up with Willow, Max figured, was well after the lunch hour, when the table umbrellas had lost their ability to protect the tourist from the afternoon sun.
Willow was flirtatious. “Is this an Optimator afternoon?” She brought his beer before he asked and, once again, sat talking with him as she tallied up his check. They got talking about cars, and Max bragged on the pitch-black Challenger that was now in his brother’s garage.
“So you’re without wheels too?”
“No. Jock is my Kleiner Verdruß,” Max responded, using the old German idiom for “small annoyance” in place of Bruder. “I made him lend me his truck until he gets mine fixed.”
“Family cars. Tell me about it,” she started. “I lent my truck to my Mutter Verdruß the other night.” They laughed at her play on his words. “No, it was a few nights back. Now she’s workin’, and I gotta get out to Luckenbach and find it.”
She ripped the check from her pad and laid it on the table before him with an expression that Max found hard to interpret. She had her jaw set like she was spoiling for a fight, but there was an inviting twinkle in her eye.
“Either got lucky or got busted, I guess.” She smiled at the stunned reaction that got from him. “It’s okay. My mother has lots of friends. She made it home in one piece.”
Max nodded, encouraging her on.
“But my truck is still out there.” She let out a big sigh, and in one fluid movement stood up in that long skirt they made her wear and started to turn away.
“I can give you a ride,” Max called out to stop her. “I’m already off for the day.”
Willow stopped and seemed to think about that for a minute, then smiled broadly to him. “That’d be cool.”
The two of them driving off together, Max knew, left lots of fodder for small-town gossip—everyone in town would know.
On the drive out to Luckenbach, Max tried to start up a conversation about her life with her mother and asked how that was going to change when she got married.
“I don’t know.” Willow turned the question back on him. “Now, how do you fit in? My dad’s cousin, right?”
“Yeah. My mama is your oma’s half-sister. Your dad and I were kids together. Your mother too. Saw a lot of each other because our parents were tight.”
“Then …?” She turned in her seat to pull more out of him with her silent stare.
“Then your folks got married, and I got out of town.” This line of conversation was starting to make Max feel unco
mfortable.
She was brazen. “You were the one who got jilted, then?”
“Yeah. You might say that.”
“So, you still hot for my mom?” she teased. “That what brought ya back?”
“Shit, no. We were your age then.”
“I’m getting married.” She sat forward. “Think I’m doing the right thing?”
There was a sudden dip in the road and a low water crossing that had Max focus on his driving as they splashed their way to the other side of the creek.
“Do you love him?”
Again she turned the conversation back to him. “Did you love her?”
“Who? Your mom?” That took him completely by surprise, and he took his eyes off the road to look at her. It was a trick question, like she was luring him into admitting that love doesn’t last or hold a marriage together. He faked a laugh. “Nah. We just grew up together.”
Luckenbach hadn’t changed at all since he’d been there last. There was the same old clapboard dance hall across from the made-to-look-dilapidated general store/post office/beer joint all in one rambling henhouse of a building. Loitering about the porch on that weekday afternoon sat a brood of guitar-pickers who rearranged the lyrics of made-over Waylon Jennings songs while Winnebago-loads of visitors walked around snapping pictures of the honky-tonk and buying souvenir T-shirts.
Gone were the rows of cars that had made a parking lot out of the back pasture for Saturday night’s dance. There was no guessing at which truck was Willow’s—it stood out there as lonely as the last cow in the corral, an oversized black Ford Super Duty Dually with a Piss On Chevy window sticker. An old company logo had been crudely sanded off the door, but Max could still see the faint outline of a star and part of the words that had once been Geische Custom Framing—Construction.
“My dad gave it to me, so I just have to pay for gas and insurance,” Willow explained as she pulled the door open. A beer bottle rolled onto the ground. She looked at it, then gathered up her skirts, climbed in, and cranked and cajoled the engine to start. After a bit of fussing, the truck fired up with a roar that would scare off any college boy who tried to crawl in there with her.
“He really meant it for my mom,” Willow shouted from the driver’s seat. “Just because he’s got an attitude and can’t bring himself to give her anything, even though he owns half the friggin’ buildings in this town.” She left the engine running and jumped to the ground. “Works for her, though. She really doesn’t want anything from him.”
Max was leaning against the fender. “Well, girl, he doesn’t own Luckenbach. And he doesn’t own you.”
Her smile pleased him, like he’d said something right. She stepped up to Max with that flirtatious smile. “You gonna buy me a beer, mister?”
“You old enough?”
“I think you are.” She smiled in that way that promised boys more than she intended.
• • •
“Hey, Road Trip. Heard you were back.” Slaps on the back and high fives.
“Max? That really you?” Smiles and handshakes.
“Good to see you again, man. How was it up in Utah?”
“Welcome home, dude. Get ya a beer?”
“Sure. I’ll take a beer.” This was more like the welcome home that Max had imagined. “And I’ve never been to Utah.”
“Really? We heard you had seven wives up there.” Laughs all around.
Max was walking into the fairgrounds with his old gang: Aubrey and Addy along with the gridiron brothers—Heinie Ortner, Rickie Boensch, and Buddy Nuweinkraus. He wasn’t riding into glory in his muscle car like he had planned, but he was sliding right into the cozy surety of his past.
“I was out there, man.” He swept his arms in a large semicircle over his head. “I was out there.”
The fair hadn’t even started. The carnival rides were still being rigged. Yet the stock-show crowd had come for the free beer and cabrito laid out by the Texas Sheep & Goat Breeders Association—loudest party in town and not an auslander among them. Lots of tight-ass blue jeans and big, shady cowboy hats.
“Hey, Road Trip, ya wanna buy some property? Now that you’re back in town.”
“Yeah, Heinie’s gone into the real estate business, ya know.”
When they all laughed, Max grinned along with them. He couldn’t see Heinie as a real estate man.
“Go ahead and tell ’em, Heinie. Max is one of those money-bags comin’ in from California. Buyin’ up the town.”
“I’m not coming in from California …”
“Yeah, my dad’s place burned down.” Heinie’s head bobbed up and down, keeping time with his words. “I’m gonna sell it.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Max’s brow crinkled with sincerity. “Did you get insurance money? Can’t you rebuild?”
That comment raised an odd round of laughter from the gang, but Heinie wasn’t laughing. “Naw. Think I can get more selling the lot to some money-bag from out of town. Easier than wrestling with the insurance company.”
Max was smiling along with the joke that he didn’t understand as he scanned the crowd, and there was Carel, standing at the far end of the lot like he just stepped off the cover of a country music CD. Carel’s gun-sight gaze locked in on Max. There was an unusual gap in the sea of partiers, a sort of open gangway between the cousins. The silence that stretched between them was heavier than all the party chatter, the guffaws of his own gang, and the band tuning up on a short platform down by the racetrack.
In that frozen moment Mari stepped out of the crowd and into the corridor that lay between the two men. Her first glance was toward Carel. She must have caught the intensity of her ex-husband’s hard stare, because she turned slowly to follow its direction, her sundress fluttering about her knees as her fingers raked the wild hair across her forehead.
Max watched the smile fall from her face. It was the first time they’d laid eyes on each other since he’d left Texas in Aubrey’s busted-up Camaro, nearly twenty years back. She had kept her slight, boyish features but looked a bit worn-out—in the sun a lot, he guessed. It seemed she’d never figured out what to do with that stringy black hair of hers. Max held back to see if she would come to him for a sociable greeting or even a quick embrace, but instead she shot a quick glance back at Carel before stepping back into the anonymity of the crowd like a jackrabbit ducking for cover behind a stump—leaving only Carel’s focused glare.
Max cracked a subtly arrogant snicker and took a deliberately long, slow draw from his beer without breaking eye contact. Their lock on each other was disrupted by an old friend’s voice.
“Hey, Road Trip. What’s goin’ on with you?”
Max switched into his salesman persona. “Hey, Milt. Heard you’re the big JV coach now.”
“How true it is, Max. Got all the little ones going up the line.”
“That’s great, because I’ve got something that can really help their performance. Have you ever heard of the Power Patch?” Max went to work as they drifted off to get another beer.
Over his shoulder, Max caught Carel, still there at the far end of the yard, spoiling for the fight that didn’t happen.
After fetching a drink and running off the JV coach with his sales pitch, Max was left alone with his beer. He spotted Brady Casbier, off in the shade of the racetrack grandstands. The oversized newspaper man had a large camera dangling from his neck and seemed to be interviewing someone. Welcome or not, Max strode the distance between them and jumped into their conversation.
The interviewee was Thea, who seemed grateful for his interruption. She looked Max up and down before declaring, “My, my. I can see the years have been good to you, Mr. Ritzi.”
“Why, thank you. I think.” Max nodded, basking in her favor. “You did mean that as a compliment, didn’t you?”
That comment got a twinkle from Thea but a cold, nonverbal response from Brady. Thea’s attempts to chat with Max seemed stifled by Brady’s rolling eyes and caused her to scoot off with s
ome frail excuse. Brady kept his humorless eyes on her as she walked away.
“Did I break up something here?”
“No. Not really.” Brady turned to Max, the camera swinging across his chest like some obtuse amulet. He was such a geek. “What are you up to?”
“Well, Brady, I’m bringing a business to town. Hear you’re the man to talk to about some advertising.”
“What kind of business? But first, let me tell you: It’s not like it was when you left. You’re going to have a hard time getting a storefront in this town. Even if you are lucky enough to find something … Rents are through the roof.”
“Don’t need it. I’m doing a network marketing business.”
Brady screwed up his eyes like a dog watching TV. “I’m not sure I know what that is.” When Max started in on his explanation, Brady held up his hand. “Great. I want to hear all about it, but let’s get together when we’re not drunk.”
“Drunk?”
Only then did Brady laugh. And at what? Max found him just plain weird.
They started drifting together with short, purposeless steps, away from the party crowds, as Brady caught Max up on old high school friends: who had moved off, who had passed away, who was still married, who was getting divorced, who was available.
Max had to ask. “Mari still on her dad’s land?”
“She sure is. My kids spend a lot of time over there.”
“Really?”
“Willow watches them for me. She’s like their big sister, so we’re kind of like family.” When Brady came to a stop, his camera banged against his chest. His eyes narrowed. “You’re not back here to mess with things, are you?”
“What do you mean by that?” Max asked, with more of a challenge in his voice than he’d intended.
“You come back after Mari, or what?” The two men took a moment to study each other, divining each other’s intentions. Brady’s words could have been a warning. “Mari’s doing all right. They both are.”
“Dang it, Brady.” Max slapped his shoulder. “I didn’t come home to relive my high school days. That was way back when. I came back to get my business going.”
Brady’s demeanor changed. He slapped Max on the shoulder while holding his camera against his chest. “You come see me about that advertising. I’d like to hear more about that new business of yours.”
