The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

William Harrison Texas Heat

From The Texas Review

Carla met him first: an oddly handsome, tall, grinning cowboy type with large red hands. He introduced himself as Boomer Smith and said he grew up in Harlingen and the valley, but moved around these days chasing deals. He wanted a nice house out in the hill country, he said, with a pool, a view, and, if possible, stables.

Carla told her partner, Mary Beth, about him. They owned a small realty company, Lantana, out on Highway 290, west of Austin, and specialized in small ranches.

“He bring a letter from a bank?” Mary Beth asked. “He sounds too good to be true.”

“Said he’d pay cash. But he also said we could check his credit, though I haven’t done it. I think we’re talking a buyer who’ll spend a million or two.”

“You like him?”

“Kinda. Once or twice this look came over his face, though.”

“What sort of look?”

“Like he definitely might want to get in my pants.”

“Carla, we’re having a lousy month and you know it. You might have to sacrifice your body.”

“Tell me about it,” Carla answered, and they shared a snort of laughter.

Mary Beth and Carla decided in college that they could run a successful real estate business together, but since that time they had suffered failed marriages, money problems, heartbreaks, and heavy competition from the larger real estate firms in both Austin and over in Blanco County. They struggled to pay rent on their office building, a washed-out abode with noisy plumbing set back in a grove of scrub oaks and windblown mesquite trees halfway out toward Dripping Springs. Mary Beth had a nine-year-old son with asthma, Luke, who sat on the bench for his Little League team and Carla had a demanding mother with too many cats and a series of bad hairdressers who cut too much off. Even so, both Carla and Mary Beth danced the salsa at Miguel’s, the Texas Two-Step at the Broken Spoke, and up close on Sixth Street with assorted telephone linemen, executives, former halfbacks and dull professors. They traded date notes after occasions at Threadgill’s or the Oasis and agreed on just one general rule between them: no musicians.

They also took care. At the clubs or in business they worried about men.

When they met male clients at isolated houses or ranch property they went as a team, a caution against unwanted sexual advances. They vowed to watch out for each other, figuring they lived in a masculine ethos: beer and barbeque, football and bullshit, kisses and violence.

Boomer Smith, of course, had a shy, goofy, awkward way about him and wouldn’t even meet their gaze. Carla felt motherly toward him because his Stetson was somehow tilted wrong and he moved clumsily, bumping chairs and desks with his hip, fumbling, grinning, and getting out of sync even in his best moments.

“How can he go around making deals? He hardly talks!” Mary Beth observed while they waited to show him the first property.

“Maybe he does all right with the guys,” Carla offered. “He was probably the nerdy valedictorian in high school. Straight A’s and a member, you know, of the model airplane club.”

He arrived an hour late after their part-time secretary, Maria, had gone home for the day. Held up at the Driskill Hotel, he told them, and very sorry. He brought them each a single rose and offered to take them to dinner as compensation, but still wouldn’t look directly at either of them.

They drove out to a small ranch near Driftwood. On the way Mary Beth asked if he meant to raise cattle and he said, “No, maybe horses,” yet he admitted he didn’t ride. Carla asked if he had a family and he said, “No, I’m single and mean to stay that way.” He snapped off that last reply, so that five minutes of silence ensued. Later, the little ranch looked overgrown and wrong.

“Maybe if you could give us an idea of how much you intend to spend,” Carla ventured cautiously. “I mean, if this place is just too small, what do you have in mind?”

“I mean to impress,” he instructed them, and that cryptic reply — as they later discussed with one another — was curiously worded and spoken. His voice actually changed when he said it. The drawl vanished. He seemed more out of place than ever, a lost outsider employing a strangely arch diction.

At the Salt Lick, though, a big barbecue hangout on a nearby farm road, they relaxed. Boomer bought a case of Budweiser, laughed for the first time, and began to tell stories: one about his mother, who lived near Alpine and owned a pet kangaroo, and another about an uncle who lived in a maze of trailers in the middle of nowhere near Amarillo. In such tales his drawl returned and he became an affable and earnest country boy.

“Six trailers.” he said about his uncle’s place. “Two of ‘em big double-wides. Lashed together with cable, so they won’t blow off in a dust storm! “ In their accompanying laughter they forgave him his peculiarities and he fit, clearly, Carla’s view of him as a former high school nerd, the one with the nutty family, the one who never knew what to do with his hands. While they ate peach cobbler and pecan pie with their coffee, later, Mary Beth went on about her little boy, Luke, who didn’t fit in at school and who occasionally whined that he wanted to live with his drunken daddy. Boomer offered that Mary Beth seemed practical and sure of herself and that she could undoubtedly accomplish more with him than any man. When she smiled at this flattery he went on, saying that a young boy needs his mother, ask any psychologist, and if the teenager, later, needed a stronger hand, then maybe the father. “But for now, Mary Beth, have confidence in your intuitions,” and he placed a big red hand over hers as big, moist, inebriated tears appeared in her eyes.

“I think Boomer’s just wonderful,” Mary Beth said, turning suddenly to Carla, who watched all this over the rim of her coffee cup.

“He’s fine,” Carla replied. “But when you drink beer, Mary Beth, you have a tendency to fall in love, to believe in gurus, or to want plastic surgery. “

Minutes later they reeled through the parking lot arm in arm beneath a gaudy display of stars in a moonless sky. Boomer forgot his Stetson, so Mary Beth volunteered to retrieve it, leaving Carla alone with him. She leaned against the rail fence and gazed up at the Milky Way — a down-home name for a galaxy, she commented — and Boomer moved beside her. For a moment she thought he might try to kiss her, and then she wondered if he intended to say something, but he remained wordless and didn’t make a move. When Mary Beth came back wearing the Stetson down over her ears and grinning, he moved off sideways, awkwardly, in retreat. They were soon all talking at once and driving back.

A few days went by. Clients materialized, including a young couple with only a thousand dollars for a down payment. When Boomer phoned again, Carla told him about a spread at the edge of Blanco County, a working horse ranch whose owners agreed to let him look at it. No, he said, he didn’t want to deal with occupants, not with anybody except Carla and Mary Beth themselves.

“Maybe you can drive by the ranch and look at it,” Carla suggested. “I’ll give you directions. If you like it, we’ll arrange to see it when the owners are away.”

He agreed.

But he also said that he had business in Galveston, so another week passed before they heard from him again.

Carla lived in an apartment just off the Mopac: four big rooms furnished with light pine furniture and lots of gadgets — an espresso machine, an ice-cream maker, a big music center, a forty-one-inch TV, and dozens of novelty clocks, mobiles, and sculptures that turned on rotating pedestals. That week she and Mary Beth attended another Little League game, watching Luke sit in the dug-out, then play right field after the score was decided. Afterward, walking away from the concession stand, Carla thought she saw Boomer’s big dark Lincoln Continental, and she walked halfway across the parking lot to make sure. It was somebody else’s car. Later, she fretted over the mistake.

When Boomer came back he gave Carla a friendship ring. Just an item bought in Galveston, he said, but it was too extravagant: a sapphire of about a half-carat. “Payment for all the work you’ve been doing,” he said, and he gently pushed away her hand when she tried to give it back.

“To tell the truth, I bought it secondhand,” he admitted, not looking at her. “It was a genuine bargain. You take it. Please.”

They were at the office on Maria’s day off. Carla had been typing out a contract for the young couple, who were probably going to be turned down by loan officers. The toilet down the hallway made an embarrassing noise.

“Did you drive over and look at that ranch in Blanco County?” Carla asked, trying the ring on her finger. It was a dazzling gift, bigger than the wedding ring she once wore, and she couldn’t analyze the nervousness she felt.

“Didn’t go by,” he said of the ranch in question. “But I saw another place over that way. Just off Highway 165. A vacant house that looks new with good grassland.”

“I’ll find out who handles it and set up an appointment,” she told him, and at that point Mary Beth and Luke drove up, the windshield of her green Toyota flashing at them. Carla felt strange and caught, especially moments later when she showed Mary Beth the ring and tried to explain why she couldn’t accept it, yet had. Boomer hunched down and talked to Luke while Carla followed Mary Beth back to the toilet, where they jiggled the handle, grinned, gave each other looks, and tried to cope with their client.

“It’s just an inappropriate gift,” Carla said of the ring. “What do you suppose he thinks it means?”

“Honey, accept it,” Mary Beth advised. “When he chooses a house, we’ll sell the damn thing and split the profit as part of our commission.”

“He wants to get me in bed, I just know it,” Carla sighed.

“Well, sure he does. You’re a looker and he’s clumsy as a goose. He didn’t know what to do, so he just bought that damn ring.”

When they emerged, Boomer was showing Luke how to throw a curve ball and, somehow, baseball made everything natural again. Mary Beth actually flirted, bumping Boomer with her hip, and they all grinned and went out for burgers. At the Dairy Dip, Boomer played pinball and, later, showed Luke a switchblade knife with a curved ivory handle, but something happened so that Luke came over with his root beer float and sat beside his mother as if he didn’t want anything more to do with Boomer.

“What happened, Honey?” Mary Beth asked, but Luke wouldn’t respond.

“Did Boomer hurt your feelings?” Carla persisted, but Luke just crushed his baseball cap in his fist — a pinstripe cap in the New York Yankees style — and sucked the straw of his empty root beer float. Meanwhile, Boomer slapped the sides of the pinball machine, his face and raw hands illumined in its glow.

“What, Luke? Tell me,” his mother kept on.

“Oh, it’s some male conspiracy thing,” Carla decided, so they let it go.

The weekend arrived and Carla continued to fret. It was illegal to run a credit report, but she considered it. She didn’t want to ask Boomer to allow himself to be investigated because she might offend him and lose a sale. Too awkward, she told herself, yet her skepticism annoyed her, especially since she had accepted the ring. She scolded herself for having doubts.

The weather turned hotter.

According to the listing information, the house out on 165 had sixteen adjoining acres, no pool, no stable, and no view, but Boomer wanted to see it that weekend, so Carla made arrangements. Mary Beth would attend another Little League game with Luke, Carla would show another house to the young couple with only a thousand dollars, then they would meet Boomer out in the hill country late on Saturday.

A wind blew up, but hot: swirls of dust in the flats, trees bending on the ridges, great pavilions of cloud rising on the southern zephyrs. Deadly humidity, too: Carla’s blouse stuck to her back and the young couple perspired and whined. She wanted Boomer to write a big fat check, so she could go off to the mountains, up in New Mexico, say, where the nights turned cold even in summertime.

She drove west behind an old slow pickup and couldn’t pass in the traffic, then turned off on a farm road quivering with a mirage of rising heat. The twang of an irritating guitar jangled her nerves, so she turned off the radio.

Following another realtor’s instructions she found the house: an angular rock, cypress, and glass monstrosity — no architect would do such a thing — along a dry creek bed in a stand of live oak and cottonwood trees. The house could barely be seen from the highway and she wondered how Boomer had found it, but there he was, waiting, leaning against his big Continental beside a rock archway and gate, grinning and waving. He had sweated through his T-shirt and his Stetson was pushed back on his head.

“Found me,” he said, as Carla got out of her car.

“Lordy, I feel like I’ve driven all day,” she managed in reply, and she manufactured a smile. The heat bore down on them.

“The house is already open,” Boomer told her. “I peeked inside.”

With that they started up the flagstone walkway. She felt relieved to be rid of the young couple and confident that Mary Beth and Luke would soon be along.

“You know, I like this place,” he said when they stood in the living room.

“Nice,” Carla agreed, though she didn’t completely mean it.

The high windows let in a brass-colored and stifling heat of late afternoon.

“It’s nothing like I wanted,” he admitted. “But it has a good feel to it.”

“This happens a lot,” she said, as they made their way toward the kitchen. “A client will have a very specific idea about what he wants, then buy something completely different. Just goes to show.”

“I’m not anybody’s usual client,” Boomer reminded her, and his voice did that thing again: formality crept in in an aloof arch tone.

“No, I don’t want to imply that you are. You’re one of a kind, Boomer, really, I mean it.”

“Hey, you’re not wearing the ring.”

“It’s in my purse. I intend to have it sized right away.”

They admired the kitchen and breakfast nook decorated with bright Mexican tiles, then they stepped outside on the wide deck across the back of the house. At one corner of the deck an outdoor shower surrounded by glass brick emptied into a drain that led through the cottonwood grove to the dry creek. Boomer stepped inside the shower and found that the water could be turned on.

“Look at this! Nice, huh?”

“It’s a great outdoor shower,” Carla agreed.

“Tell you what. Let’s take a shower and cool off.”

“You go ahead,” she managed, and that nervous laugh came out of her. Before she knew it, he began to skin out of his T-shirt and sat down abruptly on a wooden bench to remove his boots.

“Now come on, don’t leave,” he instructed her. “At least stand guard, so Mary Beth doesn’t barge in on me.” He had a wide grin and as he fumbled with his belt his effort seemed frantic, childlike, as though his big hands couldn’t keep up with his enthusiasm.

She watched until he began to stumble around in his jeans, trying to get them off, then she turned away, laughing, and thinking, no, you’re certainly not the usual client, you’re a doofus, you’re too much, and she caught a glimpse of his bare butt as he entered the shower stall. Above the glass bricks, then, she could see his grinning face and the curve of the chrome shower head.

“Whoa!” he yelled when the water came on. “That’s cold!”

“I’ll bet it’s nice,” she called to him. He made a noise like a goat and ran his long fingers through his hair.

When she started to leave, he once again called her back, saying, “You know, I think I’ll buy this place. I’d have to add a stable, but it could be small. I only intend to keep a coupla horses.”

She found herself getting used to this silliness of his: talking business while buck-naked underneath a shower.

“You haven’t even seen the upstairs,” she reminded him.

“Five bedrooms, five baths, all tucked away, very private. I like it. You know, I think I’ll make out a check.”

She began to feel lightheaded. Cash, a solid commission. Then he started talking about an apartment in Austin, too: Something close to the center for nights he might want to stay in town. She sat down on the wooden bench while he yelled out his thoughts. Was there anything for sale around Town Lake? Some real nice condos?

“Carla, are you there?”

“Right here,” she said, standing up again, so he could see her. “Standing guard as ordered.”

“Just drape my T-shirt over the stall,” he said. “I’ll dry with it. And if you don’t mind, lay my jeans over the side, too.”

While he dressed, she suggested that he should make a low bid on the house, but he rejected that. No, the asking price seemed fair, he said, and they went back to a discussion of condos. Maybe something around the university, he added. He liked to watch the kids come and go.

By the time he came out of the shower, dressed, they were laughing so naturally that when he suggested that she should hop into the cold water, too, she considered it.

“I won’t watch, promise,” he told her. “In fact, I’ll go get a big ol’ beach towel outta my car. I bought it in Galveston, never used it, and you can dry off with it afterward.”

“Well, maybe,” she allowed, and by now, somehow, all of Boomer’s unpredictability was part of a general charm.

“We’ll do it this way,” he said. “Wait until I bring the towel to you, then I’ll go away again. I’ll go wait for Mary Beth and Luke and when you’re finished you can show me upstairs. Or we can walk off some of the land. How about it?”

“Sounds okay,” she agreed. “I’ll wait for you.”

He hurried off and while he was gone Carla listened to a dove’s familiar call from the glade. The sun sank low behind the cottonwoods and the last of the wildflowers — so lush in the springtime that they blanketed the hillsides — now filled what remained of the day with their sweet decay. She wondered if someone like Boomer could possibly become her fate: an odd guy, never quite on cue. The money, of course, would make a difference, and she speculated for a moment about a life where sapphires came as easily as Cracker Jack prizes. Awkward endearments would be the routine, not romance, she knew, but romance never worked anyway. And she wanted somebody to love and care for; her mother had sensed the vacuum in her life, so had become too demanding and the only things that moved in her apartment were the mechanical sculptures. Such thoughts — and a chorus of dove calls from the darkening trees — occupied her until Boomer came back with the beach towel, grinned, shuffled his feet, backed away, and excused himself.

“You just take your time,” he assured her. “I’ll be out front. When you’re all done, you can show me the rest of the house.”

After he disappeared she stripped off quickly, left her clothes draped over the stall, stepped in, and turned on the tap. A little shriek came out of her when the cold water hit her; skin, then she stood there, getting used to it, and noting that the beach towel said Welcome to Biloxi, so that she wondered how Boomer came to buy such a thing in Galveston.

She wished she had soap. Then, holding her face up to the spray, her thoughts going nowhere in particular, she felt his arms encircle her.

“Boomer!” she cried out with another burst of nervous laughter. “You lied to me, you devil!” And to herself: Okay, here it is, deal with it, stupid, because you’re bare-assed and helpless.

She spoke to him again, but he didn’t answer and she could feel his naked body pressed against her backside, feel his chest rising and falling with excited breathing, and feel, distinctly, his pubic hair pressed against her hip. He turned her slightly, cupping a breast in his giant hand, saying nothing, and she felt him trembling as if all his timid wires had come loose.

A moment passed, then she said softly, “There, Boomer, steady,” and she felt strangely motherly and helpful as if he hadn’t deceived her, as if he hadn’t circled back and slipped out of his clothes again. She took his free hand in hers and felt its shudder. For all his boldness he was sexually frightened, she sensed, and in this knowledge her own fear lessened.

“Boomer?” she murmured again, gently, urging him to say something. But he kept his silence. She knew she couldn’t fully express her apprehension: He had stepped over the line into this heavy sexual move, but couldn’t go on. Dozens of times in her life Carla had experienced this, a sad thing, really: The aggressive mating male often boldly lurches forward into an embarrassing sexual paralysis and requires soothing out.

“Boomer? There, it’s all right,” she heard herself say.

“Very well,” he said in rasp. And his voice became strangely formal again, clipped, the Texas drawl gone. “Touch me.”

With this request — or was it a command — she felt curiously in charge and decided to obey. As he bent forward, dipping his head into the stream of water so that his lips touched her shoulder, she let her fingers move down his body. He was limp and pitiful, nothing there at all, and she decided that the cold water pouring over them caused this so began to lead him out of the stall. She even managed a smile and let him gawk at her nakedness, then she saw that her clothes were gone. “Boomer, Honey,” she said gently and carefully, “where are my clothes?” and she managed to still keep her calm although this was definitely a little crazy.

“You’re very pretty naked,” he told her, and his voice was someone else who used considerably more proper diction. “I knew you would be.”

“Here, let me get the towel,” she said, and she pulled it off the stall as he led her by the hand. They padded across the deck, leaving wet footprints, passing through the tiled kitchen and into the den where he took the towel from her and spread it onto the plush carpet. Fine, all right, he’s gaining confidence, she told herself, and we’re going to do it now, okay, and she thought about her sexual history — how many boys and men? Fifteen? A husband and two lovers of some duration and all the others — and she decided that she hadn’t been promiscuous, not really, maybe it was sixteen or twenty, it was the way of the world, the adventure and the desperation, and she settled on the towel and pulled Boomer down beside her. Pressed against him, she could still feel his indecisiveness so she tried to kiss him — to say, yes all right, with a kiss — but he wouldn’t have it.

And where was Mary Beth? And the only sounds now were the distant three-part notes of the dove and his labored breathing, that deep rasp, and he turned her on her side and settled himself against her thigh and began grinding himself against her, so that she thought, no, wait, should 1 help him out here? And from his mouth came a deep n sound, an unexpected, doleful, creepy subtext to his breathing: “Nnnnn, Nnnnn.” She felt her lower lip tremble and knew she might cry, but held on.

He had no erection, but moved against her thigh in a wild impersonation of the act, and she felt her heart go out to him even as she wanted to weep for herself. She prayed to the wall, oh, God, please, don’t let him be the one, and she didn’t even know what she meant, exactly, but the prayer spilled out of her along with a sob. She clasped her hand over her mouth, so he wouldn’t hear her cry, and his movement went on and on, accompanied by that same “Nnnnn” that he made with his teeth clenched and in what seemed to be a prolonged agony that he couldn’t release.

At last something in him was finished and he lay beside her, his arm draped across her rib cage, and she fought for control, trying to recover, until finally she managed, to say, “Boomer? If it’s all right now, I’d like to get my clothes. Where are they? You can tell me now.” And she spoke to him as if he were a child, she realized, with a parent’s calm, but it didn’t sound right, he wasn’t stupid, she knew, and the condescension was unmistakable.

“Go look out that window,” he told her evenly with his strange new voice.

“Which window?”

“That one in front of you. Tell me what you see.”

She got to her feet, wrapping her arms around her breasts, and padded over to the window, bent and covering herself. The final slant of a red sunset touched the trees and for a moment the view comforted her.

“What?” she asked, looking out. “See what?” He came and stood beside her.

“Here, put this on,” he said, and she turned to see that he held the sapphire ring. Obediently, she allowed him to slip it on her index finger.

“There we are. My signature,” he announced, smiling, and his voice, she decided, was like a trained actor’s, a voice that could project or dive into a whisper and that knew exactly its effect.

“You’re not from Texas, are you, Boomer?” she asked, and her own voice trembled with the question.

“Sure I am,” he told her. “Same as the Bowie knife. Like the drought in summer or the blizzard in winter. A force of nature. Like the tornado. Like the rattlesnake and scorpion. Same as the blinding dust storm. That’s exactly who I am and where I’m from.”

It seemed like a practiced speech, one delivered by a curious foreigner, and although her mouth twitched involuntarily and although she wanted to bolt away she gazed out the window yet again to see the sun’s last rays pick up something metallic in the hillside stand of cottonwoods. A car. It was out there in the woods. She looked more closely and knew this was what he had meant her to see. Somebody’s car, green. And then she knew.

“Come on, we’ll get your clothes,” he told her, leading her away. She embraced his words in hopeless hope, wanting everything to be zany and perfectly all right, wanting Boomer to be the guy at the pinball machine, the big clumsy guy, but she knew better. The ring, she knew, had belonged to some woman before her. His signature. Prayers and memories fell on her, then, like weights.

He led her through the master bedroom to an enormous bathroom covered with the remains of Mary Beth and Luke. In a far corner, smeared with blood and casually tossed aside, was the pinstripe baseball cap, and why, she asked herself, why me? I don’t deserve this, nobody does, I’m really a good person, a little lonely, trying hard, and he’s not even named Boomer, he used somebody else’s name, and I don’t even believe he’s from Texas, not at all, he’s lying, he’s not one of us.