Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(12)

I started digging through my box of books until I found Lillian’s letters wedged in between the Snopes family and the rest of Yoknapatawpha County. I read them all, from her first in May to the one that had arrived last Thursday, just as I was packing. Reading them made me feel much worse.

Irritated, I dug around in the box some more, looking for some lighter reading material—Kafka maybe, or an account of the Black Plague. What I found instead was my father’s scrapbook.

It was a huge canvas—covered three-ring binder stuffed with just about every insignificant piece of writing he’d ever scribbled but was too lazy to throw away. There were yellowed drawings he’d done for me when I was live or six-stick figures of armies and airplanes that he’d used to illustrate his drunken Korean bedtime stories to me. There were letters that had never been mailed to friends who had long since died. There were pages of notes on old cases he’d been pursuing that meant nothing to me. There were grocery lists.

I still have no idea why I’d taken the scrapbook from his desk after the funeral, or why I’d kept it, or why I decided to look at it again now, but I sat down on the futon with it now and started flipping through. In several places I’d dog-eared interesting pages, most of which I’d forgotten about. One of them caught my

attention.

A yellowed piece of spiral paper, the kind of scrap my dad was always leaving around the house, filled with rambling reminders to himself. It appeared to be a list of notes for a trial testimony he was making against Guy White, a suspected local drug trafficker. Then at the bottom it said: Sabinal. Get whiskey. Fix fence. Clean fireplace.

This page had bothered me the first time I read it and it bothered me now, though I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t just Guy White’s name. I remembered White’s drug trial vaguely, then later some speculation that White’s mob connections might have been behind my father’s murder, but Dad’s testimony notes revealed no shocking secrets. The seven words Dad had scrawled at the bottom of the page bothered me more. They sounded like a reminder of what to do next time we went to the family ranch outside Sabinal. Except we only went to Sabinal at Christmas, for deer season, and the notes were written in April, a month before Dad died. I finished off my six-pack of Shiner Bock while I read, and felt almost grateful when my father’s shaky cursive started to blur.

I’m not sure when I actually fell asleep, but when I woke up it was full dark and the phone was ringing. I almost impaled myself on the ironing board trying to get to the receiver.

“Hello—" I said. My mind was fuzzy, but I could hear the sounds of a bar in the background—glasses clinking, men talking in both Spanish and English, a jukebox playing Freddy Fender. No one said anything into the receiver. I waited. So did the caller. He waited much too long for a typical prankster, or an honestly confused drunk with a wrong number.

"Leave," he said. Then the line went dead.

Of course it was just the fact that I was half-asleep, probably still half-drunk, and that I’d been thinking about things way too much. But the man’s voice sounded familiar to me. It sounded a little like my father.

10

The next morning I made the mistake of practicing tai chi sword in the backyard. By nine o’clock I had served as breakfast for a small army of mosquitoes and scared the neighbors half to death. The woman next door came outside in a blue terry-cloth bathrobe around eight-thirty, dropped her coffee cup when she saw me swinging the blade, then went back in and locked the door. She left the coffee cup broken on the back porch. Across the alley, two pairs of large dark eyes were following my movements cautiously through the miniblinds on the second floor.

Finally Gary Hales shuffled out in his pajamas and asked me, in a listless voice, what I was doing. He might’ve been sleepwalking for all I could tell. I stopped to catch my breath.

“It’s a kind of exercise," I said.

He blinked slowly, looking at the sword. "With big knives? "

"Sort of. It makes you exercise very carefully."

“I reckon so. "

He scratched behind his ear. Maybe he was trying to remember why he’d come outside.

"You think maybe it’s better if I don’t practice out here?" I suggested.

“I reckon maybe," he agreed.

Before I went inside, I looked up at the people behind the miniblinds and pretended to stab at them with the sword. The lifted slat flicked down instantly.

After a shower I tried Lillian’s number and got her answering machine. I figured she was in transit to work, so I tried an old number for Carlon McAffrey at the Express-News. I was bounced back to the main operator for the newspaper, who told me Carlon was now working for the Friday entertainment section. She transferred the call.

“Yo," McAffrey answered.

"Yo?" I said. "Is that the way all you slick entertainment writers answer the phone, or do you just have trouble with words over one syllable?"

It took him three beats to place the voice.

"Navarre, do the words ‘piss off’ mean anything to you?"

“Not when you hear them as often as I do."

“Hang on," he said.

He covered the phone for a second and yelled at someone in his office.

"Okay," he said. "So where the flying f**k have you been the last decade or so?"

Carlon and I had been in high school together, then had worked for the A & M newspaper in college. He’d layed the star journalist while I, one of the very few human beings ever to major in both English and physical education, had written a sports editorial column. Young and stupid, we drank to excess and terrorized the cows of Brian, Texas, by pushing them down hills while they slept with their legs locked. After I moved out to California my sophomore year we had eventually lost touch.