In Big Trouble

Chapter 4

Tess, who never paid close attention in seventh grade social studies, had expected Texas cities to spring out of vast, dusty prairies, then disappear quickly in the rearview mirror. But Austin seemed to begin in fits and starts as a series of strip centers along Interstate 35. Where were the green fields with little blue flowers? What had ever happened to Lady Bird Johnson's Highway Beautification program? Her eye was drawn to the strange names of local groceries and convenience stores. HEB, Circle K, Stop ‘n' Go.

Traffic was heavy, too, worse than any rush hour she had ever experienced back home. Even when the Toyota crested a hill on I-35 and she saw the Texas Capitol building ahead, the glimmer of a river or a lake beyond it, she was still unmoved. She also was overwhelmed and exhausted. What had she been thinking?

"You shouldn't be in Texas by yourself," Kitty had scolded when Tess called her earlier that day. "Tyner will have a fit when he hears. He's already called here twice, looking for you."

"I'll call him pretty soon," Tess said. She was at a roadside restaurant in Waco, the Health Camp, which seemed to specialize in spectacularly unhealthy food. A gas station attendant had given her the tip when she filled up her car outside Dallas that morning. She sucked up the dregs of her coffee milkshake, gave Esskay the last bite of burger and bun. More bun than burger, but Esskay was still grateful.

"Where are you going to stay?"

"Some fleabag motel that takes fleabags, I guess."

"That won't do. You should be in a place where you have access to a fax machine, or even a computer if you need one. I know a bookstore owner down there. He might put you up, as a favor to me, and help you find your way around." There was a strange, awkward pause, and Kitty laughed a coy, most un-Kittyish laugh. "We…were together at that convention for independent booksellers a few years back. The one in San Antonio."

"‘Together?' Aren't you shy all of a sudden. Why haven't I heard about this adventure before?"

"Keith was different." Kitty sighed. "He runs Quadling Country."

"Come again?"

"Keith's store. It's like mine, a store for children and adults, only with an emphasis on fantasy, with a comics department on the side. Quadling Country. From the Oz books."

"Oh, where Glinda lived. Right. But comic books and fantasy?" Tess made a face, even though Esskay was the only one there to see it. "You mean sci fi and outer space and little green men and images of the future that almost always include some kind of monorail system?"

"Don't be a snob," Kitty admonished. "Besides, I can't remember the last time I saw a book of any stripe in your hands."

"Hey, I'm almost finished Don Quixote," Tess pointed out. Just five hundred pages to go. She had actually read a little bit here at the Health Camp. It was surprising how much of the famous stuff-the wind-mills, the muleteers, the barber-came at the beginning of the book. Or maybe not so surprising. Probably a lot of people lied about reading the damn thing.

"I'll call Keith as soon as I hang up," Kitty said.

"But let me give you the directions to his store first."

"You've been there?"

"Oh, yes. My last vacation."

"You said you went to Atlanta for a bookseller's convention."

"Did I?"

Tess left the highway and drove west along Sixth Street, which appeared to be home to a good portion of Austin's club scene. Wouldn't it be nice, Tess thought, if she could just see Crow striding along here, guitar case in hand? So easy and simple. But things had never worked that way for her. The long way around was the route she always ended up traveling.

About two miles west of the downtown district, Quadling Country sat on a small hill above Sixth Street. The two-story purple house didn't have the spick-and-span quality of Kitty's Women and Children First, but it was large and enticing, Tess supposed. As was the young man bounding down the crumbling concrete steps.

He was young, of course. Tess had expected that much, although this one was something of a record, even for Kitty. He looked to be nineteen, a strapping but very dewy nineteen. He must have needed instruction in all aspects of life, from bed to bath and beyond. But he didn't seem as hangdog as most of Kitty's castoff lovers. Maybe the distance, the whole gestalt of the convention fling, had inoculated him against the inevitable disappointment.

"Are you Tess? And this must be Esskay. Cool dog." Esskay, ever the sucker for a compliment, promptly attached her face to his leg and began whimpering for attention. "Kitty called to say you'd be here this afternoon. But you must drive kinda slow. That was almost two hours ago. I can make it from Waco to here in less than ninety minutes."

"Well, I drive pretty fast, too, when I know a place," Tess said, and instantly felt as if she were all of two years old. "But the traffic was horrible, and I was worried about speed traps."

"Speed traps? Like, only if you're going above a hundred. Let me get that for you." He tried to lift the duffel bag of new clothes from Tess's shoulder.

"I can carry it," she said, wrestling it back from him.

"Of course you can. But you're a guest here. You're just gonna have to take our courtesy even if it kills you." He grinned at Tess, a little wickedly, and she sensed that his idea of Southern hospitality might include late-night visits to lady guests, if they were so inclined. Of all Kitty's young louts, this one was the youngest and most loutish by far.

"How did you come to have your own bookstore, anyway?"

"Well, I only run the comics section, but it's the best one in the city. I won the readers' poll in the Chronicle, even."

"And you are…"

"I don't know," he said. "What am I?"

Tess blushed. "I mean, how old are you?"

"I'll be eighteen in April."

Jesus. This one wasn't even legal.

"And you met Kitty…"

He put his hands on his hips and stared her down. "So, do you like ever ask a direct question, or do you just play this fill-in-the-blanks game? 'Cause I gotta tell you, it's annoying."

"Look, Keith, I'm just trying to figure out how my aunt ended up in what is probably an illegal relationship even under the statutes of this backwards state."

"Keith? I'm not Keith, I'm Maury, his son. And who are you calling backward? As I recall, Maryland was all over the news not long ago because a thirteen-year-old married her twenty-nine-year-old boyfriend." He stopped, then allowed himself a sly smile. "So you thought I was getting it on with Kitty? Crazy. Not that I would mind scrounging my dad's leftovers. He's got pretty good taste."

"Keith is your dad?"

"Right. He's at Whole Foods, picking up some stuff for vegetarian lasagne." Maury suddenly looked the way Esskay did when some off-limits food was simmering on the stove. "We're death on red meat around here."

"Texas vegetarians? Isn't that an oxymoron?" Great, she had come all this distance to a place famous for barbecue and fajitas, only to end up in a household where meat was banned.

A sputtering bright yellow Triumph pulled up on the side street.

"There's my dad now. Guess I'll go help him with the groceries." He was back to smiling, bouncy Maury now. "He's not threatened a bit, if I lend him a hand."

The man who got out of the car was short and stocky, pot-bellied in truth, with thinning hair. Maybe he had fallen apart after Kitty had thrown him over. The Kitty that Tess knew took up with young men like Maury, not pudgy guys of her own age, and ran through them as quickly as Esskay devoured rawhide bones. Keith's face was round, pleasant but ordinary. Maury's genes obviously came from some long-legged, long-ago stunner of a leftover, to use his parlance.

"Tesser," Keith said, balancing his canvas grocery sack in one arm, pulling her to him with the other and kissing her on the cheek. "Not to be overly familiar, but I was almost your uncle, you know."

"Oh, sure." She had never heard of him and he knew her family nickname. That seemed fair.

"A magnificent woman, your aunt. I just couldn't see moving to Baltimore, leaving my life here. And she felt the same way about Texas."

"Uh-huh."

"I'm glad we could finally be friends, although it wasn't always easy. When she called today and asked me to put you up, I couldn't have been happier. I look forward to us getting to know each other."

"Absolutely."

Tess grabbed Esskay's leash and followed Keith and Maury into Quadling Country, wondering if anyone ever really knew anyone.

Texas was hot in October, with no promise of the autumn weather that had settled over the mid-Atlantic. Tess-traveling with Maury at Keith's insistence-drove to Crow's old neighborhood on the city's north side, a place called Hyde Park, beyond the University of Texas. She tried not to complain, but the Toyota 's air conditioner had given up just last month. Back in Baltimore, this had not seemed particularly urgent.

"I don't see how you stand it," she said for the fifth or sixth time, shrugging out of her leather jacket, then the denim shirt she had worn over her T-shirt.

"Stand what?" Maury asked. "Wait, turn here, this is the block you're looking for."

The address to which Crow's parents had sent checks through the month of August was an old Victorian, cut up into at least six apartments by the count of the mailboxes. Names had been affixed randomly-one with an old-fashioned label-maker, others with scraps of paper held in place by layers and layers of Scotch tape. Groves, Perelman, Lane, Gundell, Linthicum. None of the names meant anything to Tess. She rang the bell for number 5, which had been Crow's apartment.

"No answer," she told Maury.

"Would you answer if you were an illegal sublettor? Like Dad told you over dinner last night, there's no way an apartment is sitting vacant in this market. The question is whether the landlord kicked Crow out to up the rates, or if he found someone to take his place. Let's try the door." He started up the steps ahead of Tess, but she passed him on the landing and reached the door marked No. 5 before he did.

"I'm looking for Crow Ransome," she called through the door, after knocking and getting no reply. She heard footsteps creeping toward the door and away again, as if someone had peered through the fisheye and decided not to answer. "Look, this door is so thin I can practically hear you breathing through it."

"You got the wrong place," a voice called from the inside. "Never heard of anyone by that name."

"No, it's the right place. And I know whose name is on the lease here, and it sure isn't yours," Tess said, her voice louder now. "I'd hate to track down the landlord and tell him you're not the one on the lease."

Her bluff brought results. A marijuana-laden breeze drifted into the hall as a skinny man in baggy plaid shorts opened the door. He had red hair pulled back in a scraggly pony tail and pink, blotchy skin. His hairline was as high as it could be and still be considered a hairline at all.

"You with someone official?" he asked.

"I'm a private detective looking for the man who used to live here. Crow Ransome. You know him?"

"Never heard of any Crow."

"Maybe you knew him as Ed or Edgar."

"Eddie?" Eddie? "Okay, sure, a little. I mean, I met him when I took over the place. I gave him cash up front for the next six months, he pays the landlady. He makes an extra 25 dollars a month on the deal. Everybody's happy, you know?"

"Twenty-five dollars isn't that much. Why didn't he just break the lease and have his mail forwarded to wherever he was living?"

The man was beginning to relax, or maybe he was just too stoned to stay anxious. He yawned, leaned against the doorjamb, scratched the gingery hair under one freckled arm. "I don't know. He had moved in with this chick, and he needed every peso he could get. Maybe he wasn't sure it was going to last. We kind of left it open. I knew if he showed up here before his lease was up, I had to let him have it back. Those are the breaks."

Moved in with some chick. Tess was having a little problem getting past that one piece of information. When she didn't say anything right away, Maury jumped in.

"So when was the last time you saw him?"

He needed to think about this. "September? Anyway, a while ago. He came by, picked up his mail, not that there was much, a letter from Virginia, which he told me to mark ‘Return to sender.' Although he always looked real carefully, as if he thought something else might be in there, too. He told me he was going to be out of pocket for a while, but promised he'd keep paying the rent. I hope so. I'd hate to lose this place."

From what Tess could see through the open door, it wouldn't be much of a loss. The remodeling of the old house had been done as cheaply as possible. The walls looked like painted cardboard, the kitchen wedged into one corner was nothing more than a two-burner stove and a half-sized refrigerator.

"Did you have a number for Crow? For Ed, I mean."

"A number? Oh, you mean like for the phone." He wandered back into the apartment, scratching himself at intervals, until he found a scrap of paper on the floor, near his own phone. "I think this is it."

Tess glanced at it, then checked it against her date book. "This is the number he had here, before it was disconnected."

"Oh, yeah, that makes sense. It was disconnected for a while, but I got it turned back on." He crumpled it into a ball and tossed it on the floor.

"What about the girl, the one he had moved in with?" This was Maury again. Tess would have to tell him later that they were not partners in this enterprise, that he was to stop asking questions. "Did you know her? Do you know where they lived?"

Another yawn, another scratch. "Naw. I saw her once, when Eddie stopped by. She was pretty, like a little doll. Real blond hair, big blue eyes, and cheeks that looked like she had little pink circles painted on them, but natural, you know? I noticed her because she looked like one of the sorority girls around here, except kind of sad-looking, too. Like she was tuned into some frequency only she could hear. He called her lady. At first, I thought it was generic, like ‘my old lady.' But it might have been her name."

"Blond hair, blue eyes, pink cheeks, sad-looking. Anything more, uh, specific?"

He shook his head. "Naw. Beautiful girls are everywhere in Austin. You get kind of numb to them after a while. Not numb, exactly, but you stop making those real fine distinctions. It's like eating too much Mexican food. Just burns out your taste buds."

Maury nodded in commiseration. Tess was mystified-she hadn't noticed that Austin was so burdened with pulchritude, although she had observed that bodies here ran to a taut, lean look quite unlike the mesomorphs back home.

"Here's the number where I'm staying, please have him call if he should stop by again." She handed over one of her business cards, skeptical of how it would fare in this apartment's filing system. "One last thing, do you know where he played?"

"Played what?"

"With his band. Where did they perform?"

"I didn't even know he was in a band, but I guess everyone in Austin is. Everyone who's not a movie star or in software," he amended. "Man, what you damn Yankees have wrought."

"Yankee? Crow was from Virginia and I live in Baltimore. Check a map sometime, Maryland lies below the Mason-Dixon line."

"You telling me you're a Southerner?"

It was an astute question, one no Baltimorean could answer. The map said one thing, the city's architecture said something else, its race relations something else again. It was both, it was neither. "Just giving you a little geography lesson."

"What's this about, anyway? Eddie in trouble? He seemed like a good guy, but you never know."

Tess avoided his questions by asking one of her own. "What do you do, anyway?"

"Me? I'm a student."

"You look like you're almost thirty."

"Try thirty-five. But I'll have my master's by the time I'm forty if I don't get distracted again, wander off to Mexico for a while. I worked a couple years down in San Miguel de Allende, but that's almost too American now. I'm thinking Merida, maybe farther down the coast in the Yucatan. Tulum. Or I could just keep going, all the way to Belize. I don't know. Whatever comes next."

"Whatever comes next," she repeated to Maury, once they were back in the car.

"What does come next?" he asked. "Where do you want to go now?"

"I was just quoting Crow's tenant. Seems like an enviable way to live. Except that when I lived that way, I didn't realize how free I was. I just thought I was unemployed."

Maury held his forefinger and thumb out toward her. "You are about this close to singing a Joni Mitchell song and you don't even know it."

"No, what I'm saying is that things are different here. In warm climates, people are more relaxed about being down on their luck, because spending a night outside isn't a matter of life and death."

"So, you don't have any homeless guys up in Baltimore?" he asked.

"Okay, my theory needs a little refining." Still, there was something in the weather here, or the water, that changed one's perceptions of time and possibilities. If Crow had caught this local fever, he could be anywhere.

With anyone.