My Hero

by Mary McBride

  At last, entering the lobby of her building, she smiled cheerfully at the terminally crabby doorman and called out, “I'll be out of town for a week or so, Hector. Could you keep an eye on my mailbox?”

  Holly took his grunt for a yes, and then, even though she could have ascended on her own, newly acquired executive producer wings, she took the elevator up to her tiny twelfth-floor apartment.

  She courted sleep that night the same way she had every night since she was twelve years old, by packaging a story in her head. She did it all—the producing, the writing, the reporting—with the exception of the camera work, which, since about 1992, had been handled by an imaginary cameraman named Rufus who, for some unknown reason, had gone through three imaginary wives in the past eleven years.

  Sometimes Holly would do a re-take of a story she'd seen on the news that day, and she'd craft an opening sentence that blew the actual televised one out of the water, then she'd get better sound bites, each of them guaranteed to play forever in broadcast archives. Other times she'd invent murders or scandals or disasters, but the creative effort of doing that usually got her so jazzed that she couldn't fall asleep at all.

  Sometimes the voiceover in her head was in Charles Kuralt's plummy tones. Sometimes it was in Jane Pauley's crisp, Midwestern, no-nonsense voice. Most of the time, though, it was Holly's own voice, minus any residue of drawl.

  Tonight she had Rufus panning Honeycomb High School, a single story, distinctly ugly, Texas-Danish modern building of fake stone and glass erected in the '50s to replace the old, red brick two-story school that had stood on the site since 1896.

  As Rufus panned in on the portable marquee in front of the building—Honeycomb High School, Home of the Hornets—Holly voiced over.

  Despite appearances, tradition runs deep at Honeycomb High, where the great-great grandchildren of…

  Cut.

  She flopped over on her side, swore softly, and jammed the pillow under her ear. There probably was no Honeycomb High. Not anymore. It had probably gone the way of Sandy Springs High, consolidating with Gardenville and Cholla and Roper and Spurge, to become the Bi-County Consolidated High.

  Okay.

  Rufus panned Main Street, closing in on the limestone court house in the town square. Holly voiced over, maybe with the merest hint of a drawl for effect, assuming she had any hint of a drawl at all.

  Heroes are hard to come by here in Honeycomb. In 1874 they hanged Horace McGinty for stealing two horses, one for himself and one for his neighbor's wife. Sixty years later, in 1934, the notorious Bonnie and Clyde stopped just south of here…

  Cut.

  Wait. A person could make a pretty cogent argument that Bonnie and Clyde were heroes in their own perverse fashion, which made heroes even harder to come by, assuming they existed at all.

  Holly sighed as she punched her pillow and kicked the covers off her feet.

  Rufus, yawning, panned over a vast, flat landscape, roughened by mesquite and prickly pear and the occasional live oak. A pickup truck spewed dust in its wake. An armadillo bumbled along the side of the road. And nary a hero in sight.

  Chapter Two

  Cal Griffin hated it when Ramon hired a new bartender, and this kid with his hay-colored hair, pierced ears, and erupting skin didn't even look old enough to work at a lemonade stand, much less at a rundown tavern in Honeycomb, Texas. Cal took another swig from his beer bottle, idly watching the baby barkeep wipe the counter again and again, nearly rubbing the cigarette burns right out of the Formica. Well, hell. It was pretty obvious the kid was working up the courage to start a conversation. Might as well get it over with, Cal thought.

  “What's your name, kid?” he asked him.

  “Ricky. Well…Rick.” He shrugged and passed the rag across the bartop again, not quite able to make eye contact. “Say, I was just wondering, aren't you that Secret Service guy who was such hot shit a while back?”

  Cal almost laughed. “Yeah, but I'm lukewarm shit now.” He drained his bottle and set it down with a dull thump. “You want to reach back there and get me another one of these?”

  “Sure.” Young Rick used the rag to twist off the cap before he put the cold, wet bottle in front of Cal. The kid swallowed, making his Adam's apple bounce off the collar of his shirt. “So, what was it like?” he asked.

  Cal cocked his head. “What was what like?”

  “You know. The White House. The President. All that.”

  “It was okay.”

  He lifted the bottle and let the chilled lager slide down the back of his throat. There. He had conversed, goddammit. He hoisted himself off the bar stool and carried his beer to a table on the far side of the glowing jukebox, pulling out a chair and settling in for a long, liquid day. Alone.

  Nobody had to tell him that he wasn't very good company these days, or that his knack for small talk, if he'd ever had one, had gotten into the wind, along with his agility, his physical endurance, and his ability to run a six-minute mile. Mile, hell! Six months into his rehabilitation, he could just barely make it twice around the Honeycomb High School track, and that was at a pace which allowed Bee, the school's ancient, gray-muzzled mascot, to happily lope alongside.

  And since he was such lousy company, he particularly liked sitting here at Ramon's in the morning, after yet another lousy workout, before any of the regulars arrived, when there was just the bartender to ignore. What better place to hunch down in a corner and feel sorry for himself? If he were an injured dog, nobody would think twice if he ran into a crawlspace. Now there was a perfect name for a tavern, if ever he'd heard one. The Crawlspace.

  Then, just as he was really settling into his comfortable funk, the front door opened, sending a hard shaft of sunlight across the bar's dark interior. Cal immediately recognized his brother-in-law's rangy silhouette in the doorway. It was probably too late, he decided, to make any kind of decent, much less graceful escape out the back door. Busted. Damn.

  “I figured I'd find you in here.” The heels of Dooley Reese's boots clacked on the linoleum floor as he approached the table. His droopy, sand-colored mustache appeared to be sagging more than usual as he reached out a long arm, twisted a chair around, and slung it between his knees. “Starting a little early, aren't you, Cal?”

  “Actually, Dooley, I'm late.” He raised his hand in the air, snapped his fingers to get young Rick's attention, and then held up two fingers.

  “Yessir. Coming right up,” the kid called. “You want a glass with your beer, Mr. Reese?”

  “No. Nothing for me, Rick. Thanks.” Dooley edged his chair closer, draping his bony wrists over the slatted back. He cleared his throat. “I came to apologize for your sister, Cal. Ruthie didn't mean what she said this morning.”

  “What part didn't she mean, Dooley?” he asked in a voice that was affable and insidious all at once. “The part about me being a drunk, or the part about being glad our mama was dead so she didn't have to see this?”

  The droopy mustache twitched uncomfortably. “I told you she didn't mean it. Any of it. She's just upset.”

  “We're all upset,” Cal said coldly.

  Ruthie. God bless her. She was only four years older than Cal, but sometimes it seemed like forty. After their mother died, Ruthie had taken on that role with a nearly religious fervor.

  After the assassination attempt, she'd dropped her own life to oversee his care during his extended stay in the hospital, and then she'd brought him home to the family ranch to recuperate. Ruth Griffin Reese was loyal and generous and tough as nails, but these days she seemed to be in the throes of some kind of mid-life crisis, constantly talking about her turn and her dreams and pointing to Cal as a clear example of just how short and unpredictable life could be. Lately, she'd been making noises about selling the ranch, her half at least, in order to fund her dream of opening a restaurant.

  Poor Dooley walked around half the time like he'd just been hit by a two-by-four or kicked in the head by one of the champion bulls he raised for rodeo
stock. For his part, Cal just stayed out of Ruthie's way as much as possible. Mostly here at Ramon's. The Crawlspace.

  Across the table, Dooley sighed. “Look. Ruthie said you got a couple phone calls this morning. Come on back to the house. See who called. We'll have some lunch. Ruthie's trying out some damned new recipe she saw on TV yesterday.”

  He didn't want to answer any phone calls. He didn't want some experimental lunch that he'd be forced to critique, and then get in trouble no matter what he said. All he wanted to do was stay right here at Ramon's and watch the day shake out. In a few hours Skeet Crawford would wander in after his lunch business petered out at the Longhorn Café. Tim Beg-ley would arrive once he delivered the mail. There would be others, all unemployed or disabled one way or another, like himself. Patsy Holling usually showed up about four-thirty, teetering in on her spike heels, trailing a different fragrance—lilies or lilacs or rosewater—for every day of the week.

  “How about it, Cal?” Dooley asked quietly.

  Cal pondered the label on the beer bottle while he dragged his thumbnail through its wet center, effectively slicing it in two. Not so different from what had happened to his life nine months ago when he took the bullet meant for President Randolph Jennings. One minute he'd been at the top of his game—strong, agile, in control. The next minute all of that was gone.

  Those seconds flashed before his eyes again. He preceded Jennings through the hotel door, out into the bright September sunlight. He could still feel the change in temperature and humidity as they passed from air-conditioning to the heat of the D.C. afternoon. He could feel the distance between himself and the President, a palpable measure, close enough to protect the man yet removed enough so the man didn't trip over his feet. Right where he needed to be. On point. In control. Ready. For anything. Everything.

  He heard the first bullet. It went thunk as it bit a chunk out of the pavement just ahead of him, and his body reacted instantly, independent of his mind, twisting sideways, inserting himself just as he'd been trained between…

  “Cal?” Dooley asked again. “How about it?”

  “What?” He blinked the dark bar into focus.

  “Come on home, Cal.”

  He sighed. Hell, why not? Where else was there to go?

  It didn't take long to quit the town limits of Honeycomb, whose population had slipped to about seven hundred souls in the two decades that Cal had been away. Out on the state road, he stomped on the accelerator of his rebuilt '64 Thun-derbird convertible—his convalescent gift to himself despite the vertigo that had kept him from driving it for a lousy three months—and blew past Dooley's pickup at eighty-five miles per hour with plenty of juice to spare.

  Okay. So it was a high-school stunt, a stupid testosterone trick. Still, it managed to lift Cal's spirit a notch for a couple of seconds. The hot wind scrubbed his face while the summer sun beat down on the top of his head. From horizon to horizon, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and since it was nearing noon, there were no ragged shadows to smudge the landscape or dull the greens of the mesquite trees and the prickly pears along both sides of the road. It was as pure a summer day as they made in this part of South Texas.

  The ranch appeared in the distance, what was left of the land that had been in his family for nearly a hundred and fifty years. With each successive generation selling off a parcel here and a couple hundred acres there, Rancho Allegro was down to twelve hundred acres now. At the going rate of about eight hundred bucks an acre, Ruthie's half would net her a nice half million to pour into a restaurant venture, but Cal was hoping she'd reconsider. As little as he'd been back here these past twenty years, the place was still home, and at the moment he didn't have any other.

  The house itself was no great shakes. Just a single-story yellow stucco with several cinderblock and aluminum siding additions. The outbuildings, all pre-fab, were a sandy color that matched the dry ground on which they were lashed.

  He eased his foot off the gas, close enough now to see Dooley's lineback mare shoving her muzzle over the fence and swishing her tail. His sister, Ruth, was outside, her skirt whipping around her legs as she tended her tomato plants. At this distance, with her long, dark hair, her tiny waist and narrow shoulders, it would have been easy to mistake her for their mother.

  Cal pulled into the gravel drive, half expecting to see his sister beat an angry and hasty retreat into the house to avoid another confrontation. When she stood her ground, he mouthed a silent curse. She had already ripped him a new one this morning. Wasn't that enough?

  By the time he was out of the car, Ruthie had crossed the yard with a basket of tomatoes slung over her arm.

  “I'm glad Dooley found you,” she said.

  Cal breathed a faint sigh of relief, recognizing an apology, even a grudging one, when he heard it. “I wasn't all that hard to find, sis,” he answered in his own conciliatory code. One of these days, he thought, he and Ruthie might actually say “I love you” out loud, surprising the hell out of each other.

  She lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the sun, and then said, “Diana called.”

  The headache Cal had been nursing all morning blossomed inside his skull. He swore softly.

  “She wants you to call her lawyer,” Ruth said. “Something about the divorce. She said—”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Okay.”

  “And you got another call.” Ruthie was on a definite roll, if not a direct mission. “From the White House, Cal. A woman named Janet Adler. She—”

  “Janet Adcock?”

  “Yeah, maybe that was it. She said it was important that you get back to her as quickly as possible. I nearly called you at Ramon's, but then Dooley offered to drive into town and get you.”

  As if on cue, Dooley, who had obviously maintained the proper speed limit, swung into the drive. He aimed a dark “you damned fool” glare at Cal before he smiled at Ruth. “Hi, honey,” he said, angling his long bones out of the dusty pickup.

  “Hi, yourself. I'm going in to slice these tomatoes. Lunch will be ready in about twenty minutes. Cal, that'll give you time to return at least one of those calls, so you do it, you hear?”

  He nodded even as he wondered why the hell Diana wanted him to call her lawyer. This divorce was supposed to be a no-brainer, wasn't it? And what did Janet Adcock want?

  The conversation with Diana's lawyer quickly deteriorated to a childish chorus of Did, too's and Did not's. Frederick Burton, of Bishop, Burton, and DePew, was looking for some paperwork he claimed to have mailed to Cal three weeks ago for his signature.

  “I never got it,” Cal told him.

  “It was sent in care of Mrs. Ruth Reese on Rural Route 3, Honeycomb, Texas.”

  “I don't care. I never got it.”

  The more Cal insisted he hadn't received the papers, the more the lawyer argued that he had. Of course, the difference between them was that Burton was probably consulting an actual file while Cal was depending on his not-so-reliable gray matter. He really wasn't all that certain the paperwork hadn't arrived, only to be crammed in a drawer or shoved in the glove compartment of the Thunderbird. But one of the things he'd learned in the nine months following the assassination attempt was that a little belligerence went a long way in covering up short-term memory problems.

  “Why don't I just fax them to you?” Frederick Burton suggested, then didn't find it so hilarious when Cal informed him that the nearest fax machine was probably two counties over. “I'll get them in today's mail, then,” he said. “You really need to sign them, Mr. Griffin, for the divorce to proceed.”

  Cal could feel the headache flare in his right temple, somewhere in the vicinity of the metal plate. He closed his eyes a moment, then asked, “How's Diana?” There was no longer any trace of defensive anger in his tone.

  “Excuse me?”

  “How's my wife?”

  The silence at the other end of the line was eloquent. Well, hell. Diana was a beautiful woman, and one who enjoyed, even craved, sexual encounters of the d
ramatic kind. Why wouldn't she be sleeping with her divorce attorney?

  Finally Burton replied, “She's fine. She sends her regards, as always.”

  “I'll bet.”

  Cal broke the connection and stared straight ahead. They had met in First Class on the red eye from L.A. to New York. Diana Koslov was a honey blonde with a honey voice whose job description with a D.C. PR firm was fairly loose. He was never sure exactly what she did except get off airplanes into limousines, take phone calls from people whose names she thought he ought to recognize, and strike terror in the hearts of maître d's in every major city in the contiguous forty-eight.

  During that flight, somewhere over the heartland, they had renewed their dues in the Mile High Club. Diana liked it rough, and Cal, tough guy, had been only too happy to accede to her demands. The six or eight weeks after that were a blur of hotel rooms, twisted sheets and gardenia-scented sex. How they wound up getting married, he wasn't quite sure. He'd probably repressed it, although he had a vague recollection of the Fourth of July celebration on the Mall and Diana's beautiful face framed by the most spectacular fireworks he'd ever seen. More than likely it had something to do with his inability to spend his nights as a sexual athlete and his days protecting the President of the United States. Part of it was just that he was thirty-seven years old with not much to show for his life except a couple medals and an address book that was the envy of every agent on the White House detail.

  The marriage didn't go to hell right away. It took at least six weeks. Then, on a warm September Sunday afternoon, Thomas Earl Starks made his bid for the history books by trying to kill the President, and the sole fatality had been Cal's marriage. Well, his marriage and maybe his career. The jury was still out on that.

  “Cal, lunch'll be ready in five minutes,” Ruth called.

  “Great.”

  He didn't even realize he was still holding the phone until it rang in his hand. It was Janet Adcock. After the formalities, she softened her starched Deputy Director of Communications voice and asked, “How are you doing, Cal?”