Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(6)

Asante’s large friend felt the change of mood, I guess. He moved around to the side of the table.

"Love to have you join us for dinner," I offered. "Double date?"

"No thanks, Jack," the councilman said. That was the second time today someone had called me by my father’s name. It sounded strange.

"I hear you’re in town for good." He didn’t seem to like the sound of that. "It can be tough finding jobs down here. You have any trouble, let me know."

“Thanks."

"Least I can do." A politician’s grin smoothed over his face again. "Not every day a Bexar County sheriff gets shot down. Your dad . . . that was a bad way to go."

Asante kept smiling. I was counting the gold caps on his teeth, wondering how hard they would be to break off.

“I always wished I could do something more for your family, jack, but, well, you left town so fast. Like a jackrabbit, heard that shot and boom, you were in California. "

A young orange-haired woman in a glittery dress came up behind Asante and waited at a respectful distance. Asante glanced back at her and nodded.

"Well," he said, parting his belly. "Dinnertime now. Like I said, you need anything, Jack, let me know. Nice to see you again, Miss Cambridge."

Asante’s fan club followed him to a table nearby. My enchilada dinner was probably very good. I don’t remember.

Around midnight Lillian and I drove back to her house with the VW top down. The stars were out and the air was as warm and clean as fresh laundry. "I’m sorry about Asante," she said after a while. I shrugged. "Don’t be. Coming home is like that--you have to face the ass**les too."

She had taken my hand by the time we pulled into her driveway. We sat there listening to the conjunto music from the house next door. The windows were lit up orange. Beers were being opened, loud talking in Spanish, Santiago Jimenez’s accordion wailing out "Ay Te Dejo En San Antonio."

"Tonight was hard anyway," Lillian said. “We’re going to need time to figure things out, I guess."

She raised my hand to her lips. I was looking at her, remembering the first time I had kissed her in this car, how she looked. She had been wearing a white sundress, her hair cut like Dorothy Hamill’s. We had been sixteen, I think.

I kissed her now.

"I’ve been figuring things out for ten years," I told her. "It’s got to get easier from here."

She looked at me for a long time with an expression I couldn’t read. She almost decided to say something. Then she kissed me back.

It was hard to talk for a while, but I finally said: “Robert Johnson will be mad if I don’t bring him these leftovers for dinner."

“Enchiladas for breakfast?" Lillian suggested.

We went inside.

5

Everything with Lillian was familiar, from her linen sheets to the citrus scent of her hair when I finally fell asleep buried in it. I was even hoping I might dream of her for a change, the way I used to. I didn’t.

The dreams started out like a slide show—newspaper photos of my dad, Express-News headlines that had burned themselves into my memory that summer. Then it was a late spring evening in May of ’85 and I was standing on the front porch of my father’s house in Olmos Park. A battered gray Pontiac, probably a ’76, tinted windows and no license plate, was pulling up by the curb as my father walked from the driveway to the front door, carrying two bags of groceries. Carl Kelley, his deputy and best friend, was a few steps behind him. For some reason I remember exactly what Carl was holding—a twelve-pack of Budweiser in one hand and a watermelon in the other. I was opening the front door for them, my eyes red from studying for my last round of freshman final exams at A & M.

My dad was at his very heaviest—nearly three hundred pounds of muscle and fat stuffed into oversized jeans and a checkered shirt. Sweat lines running down his temples from the rim of his brown Stetson, he lumbered up the steps with a cigar drooping off the corner of his mouth. He looked up and gave me one of his sly grins, started to say something, probably a wisecrack at my expense. Then a small hole blew open in the grocery bag in Dad’s right arm. A perfect white stream of milk sprouted out. Dad looked momentarily puzzled. The second shot came out the front of his Stetson.

Fumbling for his gun, Carl hit the ground for cover about the same time my dad hit the ground dead. Dad was three months away from retirement. The watermelon made a bright red starburst as it exploded on the sidewalk. The gray Pontiac pulled away and was gone.

When I woke up alone in Lillian’s bed the conjunto music from next door had stopped. The cranberry glass night lamp was on, making the squares of moonlight pink against the hardwood floor. Through the open bedroom door I could see Lillian standing na**d in the living room, her arms hugging her body, staring at one of her photos on the wall.

She didn’t seem to hear me when I called. When I came up behind her and put my arms around her shoulders, she stiffened. Her eyes never left the photo.

It was one of her early college pieces—a black and white photo-collage of animals, human faces, insects, buildings, all of it hand-tinted and merged into one surrealistic mass. I remembered the December weekend when she’d been putting it together for her end-of-term project. I’d done my best to distract her. We’d ended up with photo scraps scattered all over the bed and clinging to our sweaters.