In Big Trouble

Chapter 5

They took a break, heading back to Quadling Country to wile away the hours until the clubs started opening. A late-afternoon run along the paths near Town Lake gave Tess a glimpse into Austin 's charms. Here was a city, that worshipped fitness, that accommodated those who exercised. Quite unlike Baltimore, where chain-smoking drivers liked to force runners off the roads for the sheer sport of it. It should have been a perfect fit for her. If only Tess believed in perfect fits. Thanks to Kitty, she had been raised on the real Brothers Grimm, where Cinderella's sisters sliced off their toes and heels to cram their feet into that stupid glass slipper.

A few scullers and sweep rowers were working out, and she found she missed her own unpretentious little Alden. The rowing season was almost over in Baltimore, she would lose some of the best days if she stayed here too long. But she would be home soon, she reminded herself. Things were simpler than she or Crow's parents had realized. He had moved out to be with a woman. She'd probably find him-and her-on Sixth Street tonight. All she had to do was walk him to a pay phone, and she was out of here.

So why had he stopped calling his parents? she asked herself, as she ran along Town Lake. How to explain the postcard? Crow might still be angry enough to play such a prank on her, but why would he want to worry his parents?

Her best guess was that carelessness was the prerogative of sons and daughters everywhere, at every age. After all, she hadn't called her parents since she arrived in Texas, and she waited to phone Tyner's office until last night, when she was sure of getting the machine. There were times when one was in too much of a hurry-or too much in love-to stop and talk to anyone.

It was after ten and they were walking north along the street that bordered the west side of the UT campus when Maury said: "You want to stop and get something to eat? I'm dragging. There's a good place not too far."

"Vegetarian?" Tess asked skeptically. She was dragging, too, although not from hunger. It had been depressing, going from music club to music club, showing photos of Crow-one as Tess had known him, with his dyed dreadlocks, and the one in the newspaper clipping. Have you seen him? Have you seen him? No one had.

"Barbecue."

"Barbecue? I thought you had given up red meat."

"Sure, at home. But I can eat what I want when I'm out-as long as I brush my teeth before I come home. I can come home smelling of marijuana, but if Dad catches a whiff of burger on me, I'm grounded."

The thing was, no one here knew Crow or Edgar or Ed or Eddie. They had started with the better places, along Sixth Street, where the local headliners played. And, as Maury kept telling her, a local headliner in Austin was a pretty big deal in the city that was home to Willie Nelson, Shawn Colvin and a lot of other people that Tess had never heard of. Then they had worked their way out and out and out, in ever-widening circles, until they were checking depressed little bars where some kid might be allowed to play in the silences between televised sporting events. Still, no one remembered a guy named Ransome, with or without a doll-like girl.

Now she and Maury were walking through the university section, just in case Crow and his band had been reduced to playing for handouts.

"Or we could go to Sonic," Maury offered. "Get a chili dog."

Tess could accept that no one had hired Crow, although she had always thought Poe White Trash as good as any punk band she had heard. It was harder to believe that no one remembered him. Crow had been so vivid, so alive. He had always made an impression on people.

"Can't you even remember if he ever came in here looking for work?" Tess had asked one club manager.

The manager was the kind of person who never made eye contact, keeping his gaze riveted over one's shoulder, in case someone more interesting might appear on the horizon.

"You know how many kids I see in a typical week? Everyone who gets off the Greyhound thinks he's going to be Austin's next whatever. The place is like Hollywood in the forties. Everyone wants to live here."

"Really?" Tess had said. "I don't."

He met her eyes then, in order to scoff properly. "As if you could."

"So what do you say?" Maury demanded.

"To what?"

"Barbecue or chili dogs. Ruby's is right up here at the top of the Drag, if you don't mind walking a little ways."

"The Drag?"

"Guadalupe Street, the very concrete beneath your feet. Hey, is there anything you want to see on campus? We could cut through there, if you like. Maybe you could post WANTED signs or something on the community bulletin boards."

Tess looked at the utility poles of Guadalupe Street, so covered with fliers that they might be made of papier-mâché. "I don't think so."

"Don't you want to see the campus, anyway? See the Tower?"

"The Tower?"

"Charles Whitman, baby." Maury's eyes lighted up. "Did you know that there was, like, this whole family that was shot inside the Tower that day and they lay there-lie there? lay there-throughout the whole thing and one of them was alive."

"How interesting," Tess said. Still, she understood why Maury would find such a tale fascinating, as long as it was in the abstract. Paradoxical as it might sound, it was often the very lack of experience that made people calloused. She considered telling him some of the things she had seen in the past year. A couple gunned down in their bed. A body in a ditch. A cab coming out of the fog to dispatch a young man in the prime of his life. All the "reality" shows on television couldn't make you understand what it was like to be there at the exact moment when life ended, when someone's soul, for want of a better word, ebbed from the body. But Maury was a boy, a handsome, happy boy who sold comic books for a living. He wasn't remotely interested in reality, which made him a strangely agreeable companion.

As she and Maury walked, she continued to scan the faces of the buskers and hustlers along the Drag. A young woman played her violin, a lovely classical air soaring over the street, but she didn't even look up when coins dropped into her open case. They passed a little open-air market with glass and beaded jewelry, a textbook store crammed with burnt orange and white accessories. A young man sat on top of a trash can, whaling away on a set of bongos.

A young man she knew. Well, she was overdue for one brilliant moment of plain, unadulterated good luck.

"Gary!"

It took him a second to register that someone was calling his name, and there seemed to be far too much subtext in the changes his expression went through on its way to recognition. Confusion, the momentary joy of spotting a familiar face in a land of strangers. Finally, he settled for something petulant and sulky.

"Tess Monaghan. Fancy meeting you here."

"Ditto."

"So, what's up?"

"Maybe you can tell me. I'm looking for Crow."

"Good luck." He unfold his legs, crawled down from the top of the trash can. "I haven't talked to that fucker in weeks."

"What about Poe White Trash?"

"Deader than its namesake. The name never did go over down here. The few times we got a gig, usually at some freebie festival, someone would call the Chronicle and complain about our name. ‘Inherently racist in its implication that other cultures don't meet the same standards of normative behavior.' Someone actually wrote that in a letter to the editor. Normative behavior. I thought it should be our new name."

"You're kidding me."

"About the name, not about the letter. Welcome to PC city, hon, and I'm not talking about the computer industry."

"So the band broke up? Where did everyone go? Where's Crow?"

"Crow broke up the band. Said he was going in a new direction, literally and artistically, but it was really her fault."

Crow's mysterious female companion again. "Blond girl? With features like a china doll?"

"Blond, sure, but I don't know about any doll," Gary said, rubbing his chin, as if trying to stimulate growth in the wispy, halfhearted goatee there, a new affectation. "Unless you're talking Chuckie, from those slasher movies. She Yoko'ed us but good. Once Crow met her, it was like I didn't even know him anymore. He suddenly wanted to do all this indigenous shit. He even asked me if I could learn to play the accordion. I told him he could take that Lawrence Welk shit and shove it up his ass."

"When was this?"

"Summer, I guess. Like it's not summer now. I remember it was hot. Then again, it's been hot since we got here in May. July? August? I don't know. A while. The other guys went back to Baltimore. I thought I'd give Austin a try. I mean, the winters here gotta be better, right?" He was pleading, his voice as urgent as any panhandler's. "A whole summer gone, and I haven't had a single steamed crab."

Tess had no patience for seafood reveries. "Where is Crow now? Is he in a new band? What's the name of this blond girl?"

"You know, I never knew her full name. She called herself Emmie, just one fucking name, like Madonna. She was performing under the name Lady M when we met her. But she had a place out in the Hill Country, I know that much. She and Crow crashed there sometimes. She said Austin wasn't the place to be anymore, and he believed her. He believed every stupid shit thing that came out of her mouth."

"Where's the Hill Country?"

"It's the area west of Austin and it's a pretty big place. LBJ's home," Maury put in. "You're going to need more than that to go on."

Gary glared at Maury, as if this strapping young Texan was responsible for everything that had gone wrong for him in the Lone Star State. "I know that. I'm not stupid. It began with a B."

"Boerne Tess asked, remembering the postmark on Crow's note to her.

"Naw, but somewhere like that. Bingo? Boffo? Blanco! He's in Blanco, OK? Or near there. I remember because of the White Album. But I think the town was called something like Two Sisters."

Tess was still mystified, but Maury nodded, smiling. "Now that's something to go on. Twin Sisters's a small enough place so a stranger might stick out."

Two lucky breaks in fifteen minutes-finding Gary, finding a lead. Tess just hoped she hadn't blown her serendipity account for all eternity.

"Okay, I'll head down there tomorrow."

"But what about dinner tonight?" Maury put in plaintively.

"Sure, fine, your pick."

"Barbecue. Chili dogs? Barbecue."

"Barbecue's good here," Gary said, his tone grudging.

Maury inspected the dejected drummer. He was wearing a Mencken's Cultured Pearl T-shirt with the sleeves ripped out and his arms were scrawny and sunburned. He had managed a haircut recently, but that only called attention to the white stripe on his bright red neck. "You want to join us? My treat, because I hate to hear of someone having a bad time in my hometown. Don't you know this is Eden?"

"Yeah, well, the snake and the broad with the apple have already been here and gotten me kicked out," Gary said. "But I could go for some barbecue, I guess."

There was precious little that was white about Blanco County. The hills were brown, with outcroppings of rock, the highway black, the cloudless sky above so blue, and so huge that Tess felt paradoxically claustrophobic, as if a gigantic sheet had been thrown over her. It seemed she could drive for days and days and never arrive anywhere.

Still, it was a relief just to be alone for a while, no one but Esskay for company. Not that solitude had come easily. Maury, sensing a payoff might be near, had wanted to continue on his whole Bwana trip. She had wanted to confront Crow alone. Perceptive Keith had told Maury that he had to cover the store while Keith ran errands that afternoon. She had left him sulking behind the counter, pretending to read a new comic book.

The town of Blanco wasn't much more than a small grouping of buildings and a sign warning that the speed limit had dropped. Tess, still wedded to her Old Western version of Texas, had expected a dusty Main Street flanked by late nineteenth-century buildings with porches, maybe a saloon. It passed by in less than five minutes, and in another five minutes she had found the dance hall and convenience store that seemed to be the sum of Twin Sisters.

The girl behind the counter was bright-eyed and friendly, a little too happy to be working as a cashier in the local convenience store. Just the kind of personality Tess had hoped to find-an outgoing busybody who engaged every passerby in conversation. The photograph of a boy in a football uniform was taped to the cash register.

"How're you doing today?" the girl asked, her voice as loud and enthusiastic as a big puppy on the loose.

"Fine, just fine," Tess replied.

Experience had taught her it was better to come at things slantwise. People trusted you more if you didn't seem too focused. She grabbed a Coke, then tried to find some regional specialty among the junk food. Alas, another aspect of American life gone totally generic. While some of her favorites were missing-Goldenberg Peanut Chews, Fifth Avenues, Clark Bars-there didn't appear to be any local equivalents to take their place.

"You looking for something in particular?" the clerk asked.

"In a manner of speaking. I want something I've never had before."

The girl's eyes widened, as if this was a strange, almost subversive thing to say.

"I mean, candy-wise," Tess explained. "What's the point of traveling if everything is the same wherever you go?"

"We've got some of these Mexican candies here by the cash register, pralines and such. These ones look like the Mexican flag." The girl held up what appeared to be a block of solid sugar, striped red, green and white. The red had faded, as if the candy had been sitting out in the sun for a very long time. "And you could always have a Big Red, I guess, instead of that Coke."

"What does Big Red taste like?"

"Truthfully?" The girl looked around, making sure there was no one to overhear her. "Ground-up pencil erasers. But it is local."

"I guess I'll stick with the Coke. And a moon pie. I can't get that back home."

"Really? There are places where they don't have moon pies? Imagine that."

Yee-haw. If she saw a swimming pool, she'd probably call it a "cement pond." But Tess held her tongue and put her money on the counter. "So I guess life is pretty quiet around here."

"Yeah. They say movie stars are moving out here, but I've never seen one. Of course, they're all up closer to Fredericksburg way, but you think we might get a little one. Like Pauly Shore."

Tess laughed. The girl had a spark of wit to her. Maybe she'd escape Twin Sisters after all, if she could avoid getting knocked up by the football hero boyfriend.

"As it happens, I was up in Fredericksburg, looking for someone," Tess said, pulling out the two photographs. "Not a movie star, but maybe you recognize him?"

"I know this one," she said, pointing to what Tess now thought of as the "Ed" picture. "He came in and bought groceries last month, just before school began. I remember, ‘cause I work the earlier shift in the summer. He was staying up at the Barretts' place."

"Is Emmie Barrett a young woman with blond hair?"

"Oh, no'm." Tess didn't find the shortened version of ma'am any less painful. "But I know the blond girl you're talking about. I saw her, too, but she stayed in the car."

"What did she look like?" Tess was counting on a woman to come up with something more precise than a china doll or Yoko Ono.

"Blond, like you said. Big eyes, or maybe they looked big 'cause her face is so skinny and small. She looks as if she hasn't been getting enough to eat, to tell you the truth."

Could there be more than one blond woman in Crow's life? Tess couldn't decide if she would prefer this to the idea that he was traveling with some chameleon who appeared differently to everyone who met her.

"You remember the car?"

"Yes'm, because it was a real nice Volvo, but he counted his money out careful-like, as if he wasn't sure he would have enough to pay for the groceries and the gas." Crow had driven a Volvo, a castoff car from his parents, complete with the private school stickers of his privileged youth. "He was polite, I'll say that for him. A lot of the new folks coming through here aren't very nice."

Yeah, yeah, yeah, spare me another anti-Yankee diatribe, Tess thought. "The Barrett place-could you tell me how to get there?"

The girl's eyes, already so bright, seemed to shine with excitement. "Is he in trouble?"

"Not at all," Tess assured her. "I've been hired to find him because-because he has a huge windfall waiting for him. Only heir to a large-well, I probably shouldn't say anymore."

"My goodness. Well, sure, I guess there's no harm in telling you how to get up to the Barrett place, although I haven't seen him for more'n a month, it seems to me now. Here, let me draw a map for you. You know what a Ranch Road is? They're paved, it's not as rugged as it sounds, but they're not on all the maps."

Many minutes of chatter later, Tess emerged with the directions and a second moon pie. The Barrett place, as the helpful cashier had told her, was a weekend place owned by an old San Antonio family. Twenty minutes from the convenience store, she turned her Toyota onto a gravel driveway. A small limestone house stood at the end of a long fieldstone path. There was no car in the drive, Volvo or otherwise.

But he had been here. She trusted her information. More importantly, she trusted her feelings, and she could sense his presence here.

She walked up the path and tried the front door. Locked. She walked around to the rear, which had a small patio with a pool, overlooking the hills. Hill Country-she got it now. It really was quite pretty here-endless vistas of soft hills, blue sky, a temperature of eighty-five this late in October. The only ugly note were the gnarled and stunted trees, which bent toward the ground like sour old women. Some were pecans, Tess could see the nuts coming in. The others were a mystery to her. Cottonwoods? Maury had been prattling about something that sounded like Wee-satches as they drove around Austin, but she hadn't paid close attention to his travelogue.

The back door was locked, too. Tess went to the Toyota and returned with a glass cutter from the old-fashioned picnic hamper she kept in her trunk. She had been accumulating the tricks of her trade-the gun, the lock picks (which she couldn't quite master), and this sweet little glass cutter, her favorite by far. She removed one pane, complimenting herself on her neatness, put the piece of glass aside, reached in and unlocked the door.

The house looked unused. No, the house looked as if someone wanted it to look unused. An important distinction. Covers over the furniture, no dishes out, garbage emptied, nothing in the old-fashioned refrigerator except ice-in trays and caked on the sides. Dusty cans of pork and beans and succotash were the only things in the cupboard. But Tess was convinced that the house had been inhabited, and fairly recently.

She opened the cabinet below the sink, found a wrench and took apart the pipe. She had dropped enough earrings down the drain to know how to do this quickly and efficiently. Exactly what she had expected-a few pieces of pulpy bits that had been washed into the sink, rotted and ripe-smelling, but evidence that people had been here, and not that long ago.

She wandered through the small house, hopeful of finding more clues. Weekend houses were such strange places, sterile even when they weren't rented out to others. A line from a favorite short story surfaced in the strange little swamp of her mind: something about the secrets of summer houses, which no real house would deign to keep. Not only could she find no traces of Crow, but she really couldn't discern anything about the owners. Rich, presumably, because they had this place. Yet the house wasn't opulent, far from it. It looked sad and lonely to her, not so much neglected as disowned and forgotten.

She left the house, wiping her fingerprints from the surfaces she remembered touching, putting away her tools. What now? Where now? She found herself drawn back to the view. The sun was sinking below the hills, and the shadows were purple. In the violet light, she noticed a shed in a grove of trees that looked as if it had been converted into a pool house.

She walked over and tried the old wooden door. It was stuck, probably swollen from years of moisture and heat. She yanked harder, and it recoiled on her, almost knocking her off her feet.

What the door couldn't do, the smell accomplished. She fell to her knees, retching reflexively. For here was something much more pungent than a few carrot peelings: a nice, ripe human body in brand-new blue jeans and a denim shirt, a gaping hole in the chest, the face blown away for good measure, as if this was someone so reviled he had to die twice.