Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(7)

"Naive," she said, absently. "Beau used to take me out into the country—we’d be shivering all night in sleeping bags on some godforsaken hilltop in Blanco for one shot of a meteor shower, or we’d trudge through twenty acres of pasture outside Uvalde so we’d be in just the right position at dawn to catch the light behind a windmill. He used to say that every picture had to be I taken at the greatest possible expense. Then I’d look back at my old collages like this one and think how easy they’d been."

"Maybe naive gets a bad rap, " I said.

We stood there together and looked at it for a minute.

"It just feels strange," she said. “You being here."

"I know."

She leaned her head against me. The tension in her shoulders didn’t go away.

"What else is it?" I said.

She hesitated. “There are complications."

I kissed her ear. "You asked for me to be here. I’m here. There’s no complication."

Until Lillian looked around at me I didn’t realize her eyes were wet.

“When you left San Antonio, Tres, what were you running from?"

“I told you. The rest of my life stuck in Texas, the idea of marriage, the careers everybody else wanted me to take--"

She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. Why did you go when you did, right after your father’s death?"

I hugged her from behind and held on tight, trying to I get lost in the citrus smell of her hair. But when I closed my eyes against her cheek, I still saw the old newspaper photo of my father, the caption that I knew by heart.

"Sheriff Jackson Navarre, gunned down brutally on Thursday evening in front of his Olmos Park home. Deputy Sheriff Kelley and Navarre’s son watched helplessly as the assassins sped away."

My father’s face in the photo just smiled at me dryly, as if that caption was some private joke he was sharing.

“Maybe because when I looked around town," I told Lillian, "all I saw was him dying. It was like a stain." She nodded, looking back at her photo-collage. "The stain doesn’t go away, Tres. Not even after all these years."

Her tone was hitter, not like Lillian. I held her a little tighter. After a while she turned around and folded herself into my arms.

"It doesn’t have to be a complication for us now," I whispered.

"Maybe not," she murmured. But I didn’t need to see her face to see that she didn’t believe me.

She didn’t let me say anything else, though. She kissed me once, lightly, then more. Soon we were back in the linen sheets. I wasn’t sleeping again until almost dawn, this time with no dreams.

6

I was back at 90 Queen Amie at nine the next morning to meet the movers. Robert Johnson gave me an evil look as I walked in the door, but decided to call a truce when he heard the sound of aluminum foil being peeled away from my leftovers.

He has a system with enchiladas. He bats them with his paw until the tortillas unroll. He eats the filling first, then the tortillas. He saves the cheese for last. This kept him occupied while I did the first hour of my tai chi set, at which point the moving truck gunned up the driveway and scared him into the closet.

Three guys wearing baseball caps and leather weight belts were trying to figure out which way to fold my futon frame to get it through the door when the phone rang. I pulled down the ironing board and picked up the receiver.

Maia Lee said: “Hey, Tex. Ridden any good bulls lately?"

The background noise placed her immediately. It was Sunday morning at the Buena Vista.

"No," I said, "but me and the boys are hog-tying a futon even as we speak. It’s an uppity little filly."

"You cowpokes sure know how to part."

I could picture her standing in the dark green entry hall of the bar, the receiver balanced between her I shoulder and chin. She’d be wearing her business clothes—blazer and skirt, silk blouse, always in light colors to show off her flawless coffee-colored skin. Her hair, chocolate-brown and curly, would be tied back. Behind her I could hear Irish coffee glasses rattling, the unmistakable clanging of cable car bells.

“Listen," Maia said, "I wasn’t really calling for a reason, if you’re busy."

"That’s okay."

In my doorway the futon seemed to be holding its own. One mover was wedged against the wall and another was trying to extract his leg from between two of its slats. The third guy had just figured out that the bolts could be loosened. An ice cream truck drove by, providing us with a momentary soundtrack: a very warped recording of "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’."

"It’s a whole ’nother world down here, Maia," I said.

She laughed. “I remember telling you something like that, Tex. But everything’s going all right? I mean . . ."

“It’s okay," I told her. "Being home after so long is like—I don’t know."

"Coming out of amnesia?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of infectious skin diseases."

“Hmph. You don’t pick your home, Tres. It just is."

Maia knew about that. Take away the Mercedes and the law practice and the Potrero Hill loft, and Maia’s most important possession was still a photograph of an unpainted Sheetrock shack in Zhejiang Province. Logic had nothing to do with it.