Let Frank Hammett write about that.
The principle around which Austin, Texas, revolves is heat.
It is late. Phil lies on the bed staring at the ceiling, waiting to go to work. His head is next to the window, the coolest spot in the room, but that’s not saying much. He shares a house with three strangers. He’d found the house advertised in the paper when he’d hit town in June. It was cheap, and he liked the idea of living with strangers. Later, he realized why the house was cheap. It’s made of brick, and the Texas summer sun turns it into a rock oven in the day, and the bricks re-radiate the heat at night. In the Texas winter, it is merely uncomfortable.
Every town has a hockey team these days and Austin is no exception. The Austin Ice Bats are resting comfortably near the bottom of the WPHL. Last week, against his better judgment, he’d gone to see them play the Amarillo Rattlers. He knew as soon as the game started that the Ice Bats would knock down his door if they knew he was here.
Phil tends bar in the Mexican side of town. The only Spanish he knows is “otra cerveza,” “un tequila,” and a list of other liquor-related words. He takes the money, sometimes dollars, sometimes pesos, and serves the drinks in silence.
Mainly, it’s hot. Even in February. One of the other bartenders has lived in Austin all of his life and says it didn’t used to be so hot in the winter. But now the February sun burns down and it’s in the eighties every day. Up North, he thinks, there are the January snowstorms followed by February, when everything freezes so hard you can’t even bury somebody until the spring thaw. Then, there’s March, when the ground gently softens under the wet snows, April, when it’s mud season, and a quick spring in May.
As he cleans the bar, he thinks of winter in Massachusetts, when the temperature starts to hover around zero, and the ice gets thick and draws all the water from the air and the ground starts to feel rough and bumpy as it freezes down. Everything comes down to essentials in a New England winter: bare trees, snow, frozen earth, ice.
Down here, it feels too easy to be winter. The Anglos sail on the man-made lake. They water their grass. They grow their flowers. February is just another month.
He corresponds with Danny regularly. Instead of the net, they send written letters, on paper, by mail. Except for packages and certified letters, physical letters are largely a thing of the past, having been replaced by photon packets moving at the speed of light. Danny started it and Phil responded the same way. Neither has ever talked about the comfort of holding a paper letter.
Phil’s letters go like this:
Danny,
I’m still working at the bar. We’ve got a little heat wave now so every night the place is packed. Lots of sweaty music. I’m tending bar on weekends so I get some more money. By the way, guess who I ran into down here? Roxanne, my old girl friend from high school. Seems she went to University of Texas. She’s been down here all this time and we never ran into each other. She came into the bar and recognized me. It was good to see her. She’s engaged to a nice enough guy.
My boss Guillermo took me camping out of the city a couple of weeks ago. I’ll say one thing about Texas. The sky is just as big as people say. We lay in our sleeping bags drinking Jack Daniel’s and just watching the moon go by.
Write and tell me about things up North.
Phil
Phil knows the process Danny goes through to write a letter. If he uses the voice writer, it’s a struggle to get the words out, a struggle to correct them when the writer makes a mistake. Phil has seen Danny sweating and shaking after leaving a note for his mother.
Instead, Danny usually prefers to use a specially fitted keyboard. The process is still slow and laborious, each key combination carefully thought out and forced through his trembling hands. But it’s easier than speaking. Such a letter might take Danny a week or more of concentrated effort. Each letter Phil receives feels heavier than his own, as if the effort has given it mass and heft. Phil keeps a box in his room and each letter from Danny is carefully flattened and stored there.
Phil wonders why he saves the letters so carefully. He thinks it might be the way Danny always talks about little things going on around him. Danny is home most of the time and the local world is most of what he sees. Other times, he thinks it’s because it was only an accident that Danny was the crippled one and Phil was born unmarked. Both could have been crushed by their birth or neither, or Phil could just as easily have been locked into the wheelchair by his own body and Danny been whole. As Danny had said the first day, Phil owed Danny something. Recognition, maybe. Acknowledgment. Respect.
But often, as he carefully smooths the paper wrinkled and creased by travel, he feels as if he is saving something important, a message in a bottle from another country. It is not as if he is saving the work of some great artist or poet – in fact, when he thinks about it, he wouldn’t save such things the same way or with the same reverence. No, this is more like saving letters from your father in wartime or your brother who lives across the world from you. The letters show your connection. You treat their letters as carefully as you would treat them if they were here but sick or dying, because by taking care of the letters, you’re taking care of your brother, or your father, or your friend.
Danny’s letters go like this:
Dear Phil,
I had a good day. I bundled all up and took the chair outside while Grace was at work. She hates it when I do that because she’s scared I’ll get stuck out there. But the sky had that big carnival glass bowl look and the snow was on the ground. I was able to scatter out some bird seed and pretty soon two gold finches, a cardinal, and a bunch of titwhistles were hopping all over me. I don’t know where the cardinal came from. I thought they migrated.
I’d like to see the sky you were talking about. Maybe Grace and I could come down later in the year.
Dr. Robinson visited. Guilt, I suppose. I told him I wanted to try the Twain treatment. I said it was a special device that combined the principles of the screw, the lever, and the inclined plane. You attach it to the upper part of your jaw and it extracts the entire skeleton. Then, you send the patient home in a pillowcase. He was going along with me until the extraction. He is such a serious man. Then, he got huffy for a minute until he saw I was baiting him. He laughed.
At one point, I went with him to the kitchen and bumped him two or three times with my chair. By the time he’d apologized a couple of times for me bumping him, he figured it out and turned into a pretty nice doctor. He gave me the straight skinny on what he knew both on the cloning and how it went so bad in my case.
I’ve been doing some net searches in the last couple of months about the cloning. I didn’t find anything. You should go up there and talk to the detective Dalton used. His name is Rice.
Austin sounds great but you belong up here. This is where you will end up; I feel it in my twisted little bones. Down in Austin you’re just marking time and three years is a lot of time to mark. Up here you could be doing something with your – and, I confess, our – life. It’s important to do more than tread water, even if you drown.
At least you could do the legwork for me and go up to Detroit and talk to Rice. I sure would like to find these people. I’d like to know why they cloned us and, more interestingly, why they revealed you alone. Maybe they have clone marketing plans.
Hey, you could take me with you and I could see another Big City: two in one lifetime!
Danny Helstrom
He gets a call from Grace. Danny is in the hospital with congestive heart failure. Come home if you can.
Phil thinks about Danny all the way from Austin to Massachusetts, about his twisted body, his half smile, his letters. Phil takes with him his collection of perhaps twenty letters as if they were talismans. He’d read them over before he left and thought about them during the drive. Phil wishes he had been able to write better letters in return.
Danny is able to smile at him when he gets there, but can do nothing else. He slips into a coma soon aft
er. Grace signs the Do Not Resuscitate order, and, after a long two days, Danny’s heart gives out and he dies.
Phil and Grace sit in the room with the body afterward, talking of small things: the weather, the sun coming in the room, Danny’s letters. Danny’s body is small and still on the bed. Sitting together feels as natural as breathing.
When it feels right, they leave the room and tell the nurse. On the way to the car, Grace takes him and grabs his hand and turns him so he has to look her in the face. “Danny wanted me to tell you he couldn’t have had a better brother than you.”
“Thanks,” he mumbles.
The funeral is a small thing: Grace, Phil, Phil’s parents, Gustavo, the aide who had helped with Danny after Phil had left, Dr. Robinson. Gordie Howe sends a short note of condolence. Ill health has prevented Howe from attending. Danny had requested cremation; as far as Danny had been concerned, this was the end of the line for that body.
Driving to Detroit to meet a private detective is paying a debt. Rice’s office overlooks the river, and Phil can see the civic center in the distance, and, beyond that, Windsor, Ontario. When he enters, images of him, Danny, his parents, and Gordie Howe are being displayed on the wall along with annotated legal documents and forms.
“I reviewed our files and checked to see if there is any new information,” says Rice, gesturing to the wall. “Nothing new has turned up in the last few years.”
“Danny thought there was a connection between Meel and Weed and Gordie Howe. Gordie Howe played for the Red Wings for a long time when they were in Detroit. Could that be true?”
Rice looks suddenly tired. “You know, Dalton tried to make the same argument.” Rice rubs his thumb along the edge of the desk. “Tell me, Phil, where did your parents meet?”
“In college. They both went to Brown University.”
“But your mother was raised in Hopkinton. Your father came from Hopkinton, too. They never met in high school?” He gestures to the wall. “We have it all on file from the work we did for Dalton a few years ago.”
Phil shakes his head. “They didn’t meet in high school.”
“Yet they met, presumably fell in love, at Brown, subsequently married, and returned to Hopkinton. Was there a plan in that?”
“No. They just met in college.”
“Exactly. A coincidence without an overarching plan. Coincidence is not evidence of conspiracy, Phil. ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’ ” Rice waves his hand in the air. “The truth of the matter is that we had very little to go on when we started looking for Meel and Weed. Subsequent investigation – including a regular check on new information – has yielded nothing. People often get away with things and it looks like this is one of those times.”
Rice falls silent for a moment. “I’ve been in this business for about twenty-five years. When I was younger, I worked on a case interestingly similar to yours. Upon the death of her parents, a woman had discovered she had been adopted. Her parents had not understood that their new baby had been stolen in Texas, from an illegal Mexican immigrant family. She wanted to find her birth parents and was unable to do so through conventional means. She came to me. The adoption had been forty years before – sixty-five years ago, now. I went to Texas and searched through birth and death records for two weeks, both in Mexico and along the border. In the end, I came back here and had to tell her I couldn’t help her. She was heartbroken.”
Rice stares at his thumb for a moment. “I’ve thought about that case for years. It’s one of those problems you keep trying to solve even when you know you can’t. I still send inquiries when I think of something. I still make calls. I say to you now what I wish I had said to her at the time: what’s done is done. You are a young man. Your past does not determine your future.” He points to the wall. This time the pictures disappear. “That does not determine who you are. Only you can do that.”
Rice stands, signaling he is done.
Phil rises with him. “Did she ever find her birth parents?”
Rice smiles. “No, but I managed to console her. I married her.”
When he returns from Detroit, Phil is struck by how frail his parents seem. The house seems empty. When they ask him where he’s going next, he doesn’t know. He has some money saved and his car is still serviceable. They ask him to stay, but he shakes his head. He doesn’t think he can live here ever again.
ACT III
Portales, New Mexico, could be another country. Out here in the desert, halfway between Santa Fe and Lubbock, the names of the towns sound like private jokes: Clovis, Littlefield, House, Floyd, Levelland. Roswell is only an hour away, and people in Portales talk about UFOs and flying saucers the way they mention the car wash and the drug store.
It’s an accident he’s in Portales. He had proceeded southwest from Amarillo on a whim once he realized the mountains in the distance were still a hundred miles away. His car boiled over and threw a rod. It’s spring and the flowers are everywhere, along the road, in front of the adobe and stucco houses. The colors are different from anything he’s ever seen. It’s as if every flower he’s seen before this shouted at him. These flowers smile shyly and whisper. He walks along the road and can’t think of words for the colors. Is this azure? Is that peach?
He gets a job tending bar again. Portales is twenty blocks by thirty blocks. After that, there are the ranches. After that, the desert. He keeps thinking of the winter in Massachusetts, the trees, the cold, the ice. Here, it has to break a hundred degrees to get a comment. Sweat disappears without being noticed. Open water looks like a miracle. In Massachusetts, everyone was a different shade of pale. Here, everyone is a different shade of brown. In Massachusetts, Jake had refused connections to feeds his neighbors thought indispensable. Out here, though the net is as close as a telephone or a cable line, there are no local feeds at all.
He takes a room above the bar and settles in. For the moment, he feels at home.
Every Friday night, a tiny dark man enters the bar. He has a thin, unsmiling face and flat steady eyes. Frank, the owner, points him out as Esteban Correleos. He drinks tequila at a table by himself until he passes out, around midnight. When Frank closes the bar, he picks Esteban up and sets him carefully on the porch. By the time Phil wakes up and comes downstairs, Esteban is gone.
After Phil has been working at the bar for a few months, Frank starts letting him close on weekends. He inherits the task of moving Esteban outside.
One night, as he is carrying Esteban to the front porch, Esteban wakes up unexpectedly. He stares right at Phil and makes a long speech in Spanish. Phil stares back at him blankly.
“Tequila?” Esteban says, finally.
“Sorry, friend,” says Phil as he puts him down on the porch. “Last call.”
“Sí,” says Esteban very sadly.
Phil takes pity on him and buys them both a bottle of Cuervo while he walks Esteban home. They spend the rest of the night drinking and talking. Esteban has lived in Portales all of his life. He repairs the ancient farm and ranch equipment used on the poor farms and ranches around the town.
He wakes on Esteban’s sofa. He lies there, feeling the nauseous glow of a tequila hangover. The first thing he sees is an old upright grand piano painted a ghastly orange. The initials CJC are carved into the side and some of the veneer is peeling. The ivory is missing on half the keys, exposing the ancient glue underneath. There are open music books held ready on the face of the piano and the stool is worn.
Esteban’s wife, Matia, startles him from behind. She is a gigantic woman, towering over him with a dancer’s grace. He looks up at her, and she silently hands him a dry flour tortilla as a cure for a tequila hangover. Phil hears a cough and turns toward it. Esteban is sitting in a chair to one side of him, chewing one thumb thoughtfully. Phil sits up slowly and looks around. The house is two stories, unusual in Portales, with a heavily carved stairway ascending into the dark upstairs. Phil can hear faint voices coming down the stairs. There are at least four children playin
g in the next room, though his hangover keeps him from being sure.
“How did you come to be here?” Esteban asks at last. His voice is surprisingly deep for a small man, and his English is precise and well spoken.
“From Amarillo,” says Phil, holding his head.
“That is not what I meant.” Esteban shakes his head. “You’re too smart to tend bar.”
“Frank’s not exactly dumb.”
Esteban ignores him. “Where are you staying?”
“Frank rents me a room.”
“Bring your things over here. Matia will have your room ready when you get here.”
“What?”
“You’re coming to work for me.”
At first, Phil resists. He has been making his own way for a while now and has little desire to have anyone take over his life. But Esteban’s utter disregard for his protests and arguments has its effect. Without quite realizing how, Phil finds himself living upstairs. He quits his job at Frank’s, which Frank does not appreciate, and starts working on hot, rusty tractors out in the desert. Esteban does not teach. Instead, he points to a nondescript piece of wire-shrouded Bakelite and says: “That belongs here,” pointing to an irregular opening in the engine. Phil learns by doing. In time, he discovers he has a talent for it. He wonders if Gordie Howe had ever torn apart cars when he was young. He wonders who Gordie Howe is outside of hockey.
Esteban has six children, ranging in age from six to twenty. The oldest is named Chela. Phil only knows that she works for archeologists out of Albuquerque and is home only between digs. He meets her coming in after living in the house for a few weeks. He opens the door and is assaulted by the crashing of the piano. Startled, he looks around, and sees a dark woman playing intently. Phil realizes that this must be Chela.
Chela is small even compared to Esteban. After a moment, she looks up from the music and sees him. Her eyes look sleepy and she smiles slowly. Her nose is big and bent.
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