“No, actually, I’m working on something I want you to see.”
“I’m staying the weekend, as it turns out.”
“You are?” His voice lifted. “Is everything okay?”
“Mother’s doing better, but I’m a bit unglued. I’ll tell you.”
“You want to get coffee?”
“Could you in the morning, late?”
“Anytime.” He definitely sounded glad.
I looked at my sheet of paper which had a single entry: Mr. Emu. I thought of him, Terrell’s man, waiting in the sleet. “Tell me,” I said, “how to call the guy on the runway?”
After a pause, he said, “You don’t have to do that.”
“We agreed.” And we had, on a rainy night in my car.
He gave me the basic information: his name was listed as Everett Rowland, everyone but the phone company called him Skip, he had a couple of ranches, one somewhere near Sweetwater, one in the vicinity of his dad’s holdings close to Odessa. His home was on a spread outside Buda, a small community west of Austin, with a post office, drugstore, and Czech bakery.
“Where will you call from?” Red asked.
“Oh.” It had not occurred to me to think that through. Of course I didn’t want some unidentified number on Daddy’s bill, in case it showed up as an out-of-the-area call. I suggested a pay phone, but could see how non-casual that would be, on some street corner, feeding quarters to a black box.
“You want to come here?” he offered.
“That’s too—awkward.”
“I’ll give you my card number.”
“Then it’ll show up on your phone bill.”
“Ella, I have the number. I just looked it up for you.”
“Sorry. I’m not too calm.”
“About this?”
“And over here.”
“Should I stop by to pay my respects?”
“Don’t,” I said, and gazed up at my foot. We were okay on the phone. Pretty relaxed. I imagined him stepping out of the Citrus Workers network room and maybe leaning against the counter in the kitchen. I wondered if he pictured me up here, in this tree-shaded room on the bed. Had he been allowed upstairs when he’d been courting Terrell? It made me think we could talk at night when I got back to Old Metairie; I could call him from the small front room, after the eleven o’clock train went by.
“Do you remember Cisco’s bakery?” he asked.
“Sure. In East Austin.”
“Meet me there in the morning.”
“Late. Eleven. No kids.”
He laughed. “No kids. Can we handle that?”
“I’m scared.”
“So am I,” he said, “but not about the livestock guy.”
“Him, too.”
I told my daddy I had to run some errands. He and Birdie were busying themselves with supper. Let him think I had to buy some personal product; all that females had to say to daddies was “some shopping” and avert their eyes to be sent on their way. The call didn’t turn out to be that difficult. I went to Central Market—thinking, I guess, of Terrell—and used an outside phone, under a deep overhang, out of the searing late-afternoon sun. From where I stood, I could see the sprinklers trying to make an oasis out of the star-shaped wildflower garden at Central Park.
“Is this—Skip?” I asked the male voice that answered.
“Who’s this?” he asked back, in such a wide West Texas twang I nearly reeled.
“This is Ella Hopkins.” I hesitated. Should I say Terrell’s name?
“The sister,” he said right off. “You’re the sister.”
“Yes, I am.” So we’d got past that hurdle.
“You here, or what?”
“I’m here, in Austin. Mother had a small stroke.”
“No wonder, from what I heard.”
“No, I suppose not.” My tongue felt tied.
“I reckon your sister talked about me.”
With relief, I said, “She did. When you—before the New Orleans trip.”
“That’s right. Elly. No wonder the name rang a bell.”
“I wanted to call you.”
He coughed, cleared his throat. “How about if we get together? While you’re here. A good opportunity, seems to me. I have a natural curiosity.”
I nodded, looking around at the stream of people leaving with sacks full of supper. “So have I.”
“You got a place in mind? I’m flexible. I got nothing to hide, running into you, nobody here knows.”
“I’m at Central Market, do you know where—” It came to me then, standing not too far from the live-oak-shaded deck where I’d had a pastry with my sister, that no doubt they’d met here. Where better to “run into” someone, where everyone must shop before the sailing weekend, the whitewing hunting weekend, the tennis tournament weekend?
“I been there.”
“Outside, at one of the tables? Tomorrow morning? Nine o’clock?” I could hear the anxiety in my voice as a panic came over me. What on earth was I doing, setting up this meeting?
“Suits me.” He didn’t sound bothered. “You look like her?”
“Not much.” Scrawnier, drabber, plainer. Not hardly. I had to laugh. “Not a bit, Skip. But I’ll be there, in a black T-shirt, a nervous wreck.”
He laughed then himself, ranch-country laugh. “Don’t be expecting some big stud, now, Elly. Terry had an inflated view of me.” He choked up on her name. “She didn’t happen to show you a picture?”
“No.”
“Let me give it some thought, here. How about if, shoot, this frying-pan weather.” He paused. “How about if I wear my NOTREES cap? Can’t be much of a duplication there.”
So I found myself totally at ease about the meeting with Mr. Emu. I’d tell him anything he might want to know about my sister. I’d be an ear for him to pour out some of his feelings into. And then I’d tell Red enough that he could close the matter in his own mind.
The next morning, I got myself looking decent and told Birdie that I was meeting Red and his Chinese techie to learn about his new project, that the boys were sorting things for Yale. Daddy, stewing around about the woman coming, thanked me for squaring it with Birdie’s principal and told me to fill my car up with gas, on him, for the return trip home and pressed his Mobil card in my hand. I don’t know what Mother thought about my absence, if she did; she’d scarcely appeared since yesterday, only to have some orange juice.
I parked, got us two cups of coffee at the outside bakery, and, in my best watering shorts and the black tee, headed for the tables on Central Market’s outside deck.
It wasn’t too much of an exaggeration to say that when I caught sight of Skip Rowland I almost fell down in a dead faint. I could feel my heart begin to operate in double-time. I couldn’t catch my breath. Holy Moly, shit, quick a wooden stake, I was looking at the spitting image of Buddy Marshall. The last snapshot I’d had of Buddy, taken half a dozen years ago, he was in his wraparound shades, a cap on, T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes tucked up one sleeve, wearing a monster grin. But the same exact look as this guy, sitting there in a tight burnt-orange T-shirt with a longhorn on it, and a cap that read I LOVE NOTREES. I thought of Red saying that he remembered Buddy: big old hunk, lots of macho moves. No wonder he’d felt stabbed to learn the lover was this man—the last guy in the world you’d want to know was having it with your wife.
“That you?” He half rose from the bench.
“That’s me,” I acknowledged, setting our coffee on the table. “Ella Hopkins.” Sitting down, I kept hearing bells go off. Not bells meaning I wanted any part of a return engagement with this type, but bells thinking about my sister. Hearing her say half a dozen times through the years: “I never had that, what you had with Buddy. I never was head over heels with anybody like that.”
“I sure appreciate you making that phone call,” he said, removing his cap and wiping the sweat off his forehead. He took off his shades, too, and I could see that, naturally, his eyes were blue. While I sat t
here, somewhat numb, he went and got us a couple of hot donuts, and then, while I was grasping for something, anything, to say, he began to talk.
“The thing about Terry”—he leaned over in a confidential manner—“was you could talk to her about real stuff and she didn’t interrupt or get busy doing something else the way my wife, the way some women, a lot of women, it seems to me, do. I had a rough year on account of my daddy had a tough time out there in Ector. He had to put down ten years worth of beef profits and he had to put down the big birds they were pushing for low-fat steaks. It’s a red meat, even though it’s your big bird, a ratite—that means, my daddy says, one of those that can’t fly on account of a faulty kind of breastbone and not their weight, the way you might think. And she’d sit right there and hear me talk until I wore my misery out about it. And then she’d be right there, still smiling in that way she had. I always figured that husband of hers to be one granddaddy longlegs of a cold fish, if you ask me.”
I was letting my special-ground South American coffee get cold. Had she picked someone my mother would hate on purpose? By instinct? Or just to finally have some choice in her own life? “Did you go to the—funeral?” I asked him. Stunned as I was at the time, I wasn’t singling out anybody in the crowd, which I remembered being in the hundreds.
“Not on your life.” He smacked the heels of his huge hands together for emphasis. “Elly, I hardly got myself out of my pickup where I spent the night crying and getting stone drunk. No way I was going to come back here and show up in a suit to offer my condolences to those people—I’m restraining my language here—who never appreciated her one little bit.” He took out a handkerchief and honked a couple of times. “When that plane went down, I thought about driving right past the barricades and plowing into the wreckage. What held me back was, that truck’s a tank. I’d of made a drunk fool of myself, which her memory didn’t need.”
“That must have been awful.”
“You don’t begin to grasp the half of it, ma’am.” By this time his pocket handkerchief was soaked.
“She thought a lot of you.” What a dumb, inadequate thing to say. But maybe he got the idea.
“She tell you about the piano?” he asked, blowing his nose again, slapping his NOTREES cap on the table a couple of times.
“I don’t believe—”
“What I did, I got her a piano. Baby grand. Kind of a getting-together present, an engagement present, you could say.”
“Did she know?” That was the very last thing in the world I would have expected.
“She was coming out to see it.” He honked again.
“She never talked to me about playing anymore. I thought she’d quit.”
“I sort of tricked her into it, as a matter of fact.” He looked proud. “I went down to Austin High School to see her high school yearbook. More’n likely you can get a look at everything like that you ever wanted to see on the Internet, so they tell me, but I like to heft the real thing, if you understand me, Elly. So I went down there to that big school and they were very obliging. I didn’t know the exact years, but I had a rough idea because of knowing her age, and, sure enough, there was this class photo of Terry Hopkins, pretty as you can imagine in a ponytail, looking like this kid, and it said Piano and Tennis under her interests. Then, the next year, her junior year, look out, Moses, there she was, blossomed into strictly your beauty-queen type, and it didn’t say piano anymore, it just said tennis. I asked her about that, when we had a little time together, on that trip over your way it was, and she admitted she used to play a lot, but she quit. So I asked her, would she play something for me sometime? If she had a piano?”
I’d been tearing my warm donut into little crumbs and tossing them on the wooden deck for the sparrows and starlings. The young mothers in shorts and tennies that I remembered from my morning here with Terrell must have all been out of town on the Texas coast or in the Rockies or on some island off Maine, the same as my clients back home. By this time, my cold coffee tasted like what the plumber had got out of my tenant’s stopped-up sink in the duplex. I couldn’t think straight.
Now it was my turn to borrow the wet, snotty handkerchief. I’d already soaked my paper napkin. “A piano,” I said, and really broke down.
What more could a guy give you than the chance to start over again and get it right?
20
Heading away from Central Market, past browning Central Park, down Lamar Boulevard, and then out East Sixth Street, I was amazed at how quickly I reached Cisco’s, the Mexican bakery where I was meeting Red. I nearly drove past it. Why, it seemed practically downtown, Austin now stretching miles past it. When I was in school, it seemed a big, somewhat daring deal to go way out Sixth Street in the heart of East Austin to eat at Cisco’s and watch all the Anglo politicians who came to press the flesh of their Spanish-speaking compadres. On a Saturday or Sunday morning, we’d crowd at a table in the back room, pigging out on huevos rancheros, hot biscuits, chorizo, tortillas, sweet pastries. It had seemed almost like going across the border in Laredo.
Today, I passed by the neighborhood regulars in the front room and headed into the packed back room, tables jammed so close together you could hear half a dozen conversations at once. Although the female waiters still balanced those immense platters of the same wonderful food, the crowd had changed. They all looked a lot like Red: pencil pushers with short hair. Techno prols in shorts and faded T-shirts, most of them male, most of them half my age, most of them non-Anglo, most of them with cell phones. What feet I could see—making my way through the crunch to where Red sat at a table for two on the side wall—wore Birkenstocks, Tevas, tennies. Not a politician in sight, though the same owner I remembered from a quarter of a century ago still worked the room, shaking every hand.
Red stood, and pulled out my chair. “I got here early,” he said.
I had to collect myself a bit when I sat down, from just being with him, and from realizing that this was the first time we’d been out alone together since the Pink Cafe. If you could call being in a room with sixty-odd eating, talking techies alone.
“I saw him,” I said. And it came to me that my eyes were probably still red and gummy, and that he could read everything he wanted to know from that.
“Are you okay?”
“I think.”
“Why don’t we eat first?”
“This is mine; I invited you.”
He hesitated a moment, then said, “Fair enough.”
In reflex, I touched the wallet in my back pocket. Not to worry: we’d eat on the money I’d been saving for a tank of gas for the trip home, thanks to Daddy’s Mobil card. Not bothering with the large menu, I made myself feel better by ordering old favorites: the over-easy huevos rancheros with sausage patties, the tortillas and the hot buttermilk biscuits with strawberry jam. A cup of coffee, which, when it came, tasted, yes, just like plain old hot fresh-out-of-the-Folgers-can coffee. Recovering somewhat with the aid of the pepper-hot salsa, I considered how prudent I’d been at Central Market, to shred my designer donut for the birds and let my designer coffee grow cold, and save myself for serious sustenance.
Red got the chorizo with tortillas. He waited as if he had all the time in the world to hear about Mr. Emu, but his face looked strained. He was forty-seven, if I remembered right, passing for fifty this August morning at eleven o’clock.
“I felt bad,” he said, “pressuring you into calling him. Mostly bad because I couldn’t seem to let it go. What does it matter now? I kept asking myself. As far as that goes, what did it matter then? But I couldn’t get her going to see him out of my mind.”
“It’s hard,” I agreed, “to let someone go, even if they’re gone. Because you had something once, you think that gives you a claim.” I remembered the talk I’d had with Mayfair, now that we were getting friendly. How possessive we are, she’d said, about everybody going and coming. It all starts with our mamas and daddies, she said. Then, we thought they belonged to us; now, they think we bel
ong to them.
“You talking about Buddy?”
“Mostly.” I could remember tearing my hair out when he started wandering, wanting to tear out his. Not able to believe it, after we’d been such hot stuff. Red must have felt that way, too, about my sister.
“What about the guy who sells houses? Birdie’s pal?”
“Karl?” I must have blushed. Still, it was okay for him to ask. “He wasn’t too happy when ‘Uncle Rufus’ came to town, I have to say.” I smiled, recalling. “But we were never headed for anything more. He’s scared of becoming his dad, of getting trapped—”
He ate a few bites of his sausage-scrambled eggs. “For a while I was seeing the Chinese woman from Dell who’s helping me out—not much older than my boys. But she said we should stop; she wanted to work with the project, that was something she couldn’t get just anywhere. And I wanted her on it.”
How easy all this was to talk to Red about, who we’d been having sex with. But then we’d always talked about personal things we couldn’t tell anyone else, back there in his old law student’s car.
While we let this settle in, we drank our coffee and listened to the exchange at other tables, the big center ones seating eight, family style. Most of the buzz concerned breaking news about Dell, Compaq, smaller companies I didn’t know. We heard this one loud guy in a logo-tee on a cell phone, standing in the corner, his back to the room, say, “Can I give you a credit card? Huh? I forgot to pay for the tune-up.” And proceed to rattle off his name and his Amex number for anyone in the room to have written down. No one even looked around.
“A different bunch here from the old days,” I offered. Wondering, how did they keep the fried eggs so hot yet still runny under the blistering salsa?
“It’s packed like this now any hour of the day,” Red said. “Late afternoon, there must be a hundred people in here, a lot standing against the wall, talking on the phone or reading the paper, or just having a beer. These kids seem to be at home in crowds.”
I ate one of the spicy flat crisp-edged sausages and washed it down. I hadn’t really got my mind off Skip Rowland. Think about having a guy so much in love with you he went to your high school and dug out your old class pictures. Terrell had said: “He makes me feel so young.” But I hadn’t known what she meant. “All right,” I said to Red, “how do you want to do this?”
Ella in Bloom Page 13
