Playing Dead

CHAPTER 2

“Are you OK, Tommie?”

A familiar gravelly voice. A voice like my father’s, worn raw by smoke and sawdust. I lifted my head from the pile of papers. If I squinted, I could pretend he was Daddy. Tall, angular lines, a fifteen-dollar haircut from Joe, jeans and boots that had met some cows, a face like the Texas earth, wrecked by sun and drought and cigarettes. The damn cigarettes. I pushed away the image of Daddy at the end, with his oxygen tank at his side like a loyal pet.

“Wade. Hi.” I finished pulling my uncooperative hair through an old rubber band I’d found in the drawer and flipped it down my back. “I’m awake. Just unsure where to begin with Daddy’s papers.” I wanted to say that the whole room made me physically ache.

Instead, I spread my arms to encompass the scarred oak desk in front of me, slotted and pegged together like a master puzzle by a cowboy more than two hundred years ago. Not a single metal nail. I took naps on top when I was three. Daddy bragged that it required five men to get the desk through the door.

The oversized leather couch in the corner still held the deep imprint of my father’s lean body. A plastic hanging bag of dry cleaning, Wrangler jeans and lightly starched pressed western shirts, was hooked over one of the closet doors; a case of Corona Light and two cases of Dr Pepper sat by a small refrigerator on the plank floor, vices as hereditary as the cigarettes that killed him. I quit smoking at sixteen, the day Daddy slapped the first one out of my hand behind the barn, the only time he hit me. I stuck with the Dr Pepper.

My eyes lingered on the photo behind Wade’s head, from another lifetime, a blown-up print of Daddy and Wade in federal marshals’ gear. Arms around each other, cigars drooping out of their grinning mouths. A good day, Daddy always said. A bad guy went down.

This refurbished 1800s building in the historic Fort Worth Stockyards was once a place where bad guys went down every week, usually with a chunk of lead in the back. Sometimes in the saloon below, sometimes surprised in this very room while stuck in a woman spreading her legs for a few pieces of change.

Over the last thirty years, among these violent ghosts, my father turned his family’s legacy of land into a multimillion-dollar oil and gas business, with the assistance of a secretary, seven lawyers, two investment advisers, and the man slouched in front of me the way only cowboys in jeans can get away with, a Tony Lama hat that had seen better days held with one giant hand over his crotch.

Wade Mitchell, ten years younger than Daddy, was the heir to the big job, so specified in my father’s will, unless I wanted to step up. My sister, Sadie, had eliminated herself as a candidate years ago.

“I hate to ask, Tommie, but have you made a decision?” At first, I wasn’t sure what Wade meant. Was he talking about his job? About Rosalina Marchetti? How would he know about that? I fingered the pink stationery nervously. Then I remembered, at Aunt Rebecca’s house, at the wake, his urgent whisper.

“You mean about the wind farm?” I ask him.

“Yes. It’s the one thing that we need to sign off on this week. BT Power wants to put up a hundred more turbines in Stephenville. If we don’t, they’re choosing another site. They’ve also got their eye on our Big Dipper property near Boerne.”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly.

“Tommie, you need to leave some of these early decisions to me. We’ve got a good lease going with them.”

“Is there any controversy over the farm so far? The seventy-five turbines already in place?” I’d stood on our land just once since the turbines had been erected. I’d had mixed feelings. Nestled near an old farmhouse, they had a strange beauty about them, rising higher than the Statue of Liberty, gently whirring and spinning with the wind, turning the plains into an eerie, alien landscape when night fell, their red eyes blinking.

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I asked. A year ago Daddy put in seventy-five turbines on this land with an option for more. Do you think it has gone smoothly?”

Wade looked surprised that I had this much information. Or maybe surprised that I cared at all.

I’d never liked Wade much. He was brusque, always around, quick to shoo us away from Daddy when we were little. But Wade and Daddy once walked into bad situations with nothing but each other and a gun. Shared violence is like human superglue.

He decided to answer my question. “The rancher to the north makes a lot of noise to the media about the way it looks,” he drawled. “Says the turbines destroy his view. The town’s happy about the taxes improving their school system. They got a turf field out of the deal.”

“I told Daddy a few months ago that the turbines are bothering the kids,” I said. “And the horses.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“They put up a wind farm near the rehabilitative ranch where I work. We can’t see the turbines, but they’re close enough for the kids to hear. They call them the whispering monsters. The horses don’t sleep as well. Some of the kids deal with constant nausea since they went full power. Wind turbine syndrome, they call it.”

Wade frowned. “I can’t deal with this damn hippie crap right now, Tommie. This is what your father wanted. You keep dawdling and we’ll lose two million dollars like this.” He snapped his fingers, leaning over the desk, a little too near my face. “You can’t decide based on a few courses in psychology and a bunch of cancer kids and gimps and four-legged animals. That ain’t how you make business decisions.”

He used ain’t to underscore his irritation, since we both knew Wade was a literate cowboy with a master’s in agribusiness from Texas A&M. But in his mind, the only kind of satisfactory therapy involved a bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle whiskey and an hour to kill with a gun and a bull’s-eye.

“The Big Dipper is a beautiful piece of land,” I told him. I bit back that I was finally only a couple of months from my Ph.D. “Untouched. There aren’t that many properties with natural running water from streams and the river.”

“It’s recreational property,” Wade countered. “People aren’t paying for it anymore, not a prime piece like this.”

We’d never sell that piece. I stared at him steadily. He was deliberately missing my point. I was deliberately missing his.

Grief for Daddy poured out of both of us, seeping into the cracks in the floorboards where blood used to run.

I knew that Wade fished with his twenty-five-year-old autistic son every Saturday, a promise he never broke. Wade’s cowboy boots were custom-made at Leddy’s down the street because of a limp that he’d never talk about. With that limp, he insisted on carrying my mother out of the house the day she left it for good, a rag doll in his arms.

He was mostly a good man, a smart man. I knew it. I just didn’t like him.

“Get out,” I said, because I didn’t want him to see me cry.

“Yes, ma’am. Call when you need me. It’s going to be sooner than you think.” He gestured to the wooden file cabinets that lined the walls, to the mail stacking up on the desk, to the Apple computer that had yet to reveal its secrets, and my heart sank because I knew he was right: I would need him.

Wade turned with his hand on the doorknob.

“Tommie, you’re going about this dead wrong. But I will say, it’s nice to see a little fire in you. I thought that side of beef stomped it out of you for good.” His face softened. “I hear you’re still wicked on top of a horse. Maybe we should take a ride and works things out.”

He shut the door quietly.

My eyes roved over the walls, tears gradually softening the edges of the cattle drivers and whores and gamblers, historic photographs of Hell’s Half Acre that Daddy picked up one at a time out of dusty boxes in antique shops.

I stopped at the picture of Etta Place, the beautiful, unfathomable girlfriend of the Sundance Kid. Nailed in a place of honor over the doorframe, one of Daddy’s favorite pictures, a Christmas gift from Mama pulled out of a shiny silver box.

Long, dark hair piled up, gray eyes, a slim, lithe body. Etta didn’t look wild or cruel but they swore she was.

Why did no one know her real name? Was she really a prostitute when she met the Sundance Kid? And where did she vanish to? How do you live a life without a beginning and an end?

As a child, I would sit cross-legged on the hard floor directly in front of her, craning my neck up, willing Etta to speak, to spill her secrets just to me, until Daddy finally glanced over from his desk and said:

“She’s a mystery, honey. A goddamn mystery.”