The Devil went down to Austin

CHAPTER 3

By seven o'clock, we'd built the exterior walls four feet high around the cook box. The chimney and the doorway arch were finished.

The sun was sinking behind the hills on the far side of the lake. My skin itched from sweat and lime dust, my shoulders felt like sandbags, and I was thinking warm thoughts about cold margaritas.

I can't say I felt any better about being around Jimmy and Garrett, but I'd managed to keep my mouth shut and coexist with them for an afternoon.

Jimmy surveyed our masonry.

"Good," he decided. "Got to place the kiln goddess."

He ambled to his pickup and came back with a ceramic statuette-a misshapen female gargoyle glazed a nasty shade of KoolAid red. With great reverence, Jimmy placed her over the doorway, readjusted her a few times to get the angle right.

Garrett said, "What the hell is that?"

"Kiln goddess. You know-keep my pots from breaking. Keep them from turning out ugly. I'm naming her Ruby."

Garrett grunted. "You're a masochist."

I wasn't sure Jimmy knew what that word meant, but he grinned slowly. "Stayed friends with you, haven't I?"

Garrett let him have the point.

We left Garrett's van and Jimmy's pickup at the kiln site, piled into my Ford F150, and drove back up the gravel road to Jimmy's house.

The white dome was visible from just about anywhere on the lake-an upsidedown radar dish Jimmy had gotten cheap from a military salvager when Bergstrom Air Force Base closed down. He'd hauled the thing up here piece by piece, reassembled it at the top of his six acres, insulated it, wired it for electricity, and bingo: a two thousandsquarefoot fibreglass igloo.

We stayed long enough to use the outhouse, grab barbecue supplies, stock the ice chest. Jimmy loaned me a fresh shirt that said RACAfest '98. We loaded my Ford and rumbled back down to the waterfront, where we proceeded to use Jimmy's new kiln as our cooking pit.

The summer sun had just set. A line of clouds was thickening on the horizon, charging the air with the metallic smell of storm. Around the curve of Jimmy's cove, the wind blew black lines across the water, dipping the buoys in the boating channel. In the distance, I could make out the edge of Mansfield Dam-a concrete monolith turning blue in its own shadow.

Garrett made the fire. Jimmy marinated fajitas in Shiner Bock and jalapeno juice, snapped a branch off the nearest wild sage plant to use as a basting brush. I mixed highoctane margaritas and poured them into Jimmy's handmade ceramic goblets.

We watched the sunset fade to purple and the storm clouds roll in. Nobody said a word about anything important.

After dinner, lightning traced veins in the clouds. The chirr of crickets replaced the daytime hum of cicadas. Flames glowed in the doorway of the kiln, washing the ugly little goddess in orange light.

Leave it to me to ruin a perfectly good ceasefire.

"Techsan," I said. "Give me the full story."

Jimmy reclined against a mesquite, putting himself back into the shadows.

Garrett looked toward the kiln-the shelves of unfired pots, their plastic cover ballooning in the breeze. "You ever make yourself a promise, little bro? Tell yourself someday, you'll do suchand such?"

"Play pro ball," I answered. "Be a Fellow at Christ College. Neither happened."

Garrett nodded. "I told myself years ago I was going to make a quick fortune, get out of programming, spend the rest of my life hitting Buffett concerts and Caribbean islands.

Jimmy, he wanted to settle down making ceramics right here. Am I right, Jimmy?"

"You're right," Jimmy murmured from the shadows.

"Then we turned thirtyfive, little bro. Then we turned forty."

"You quit your job," I said. "Sixteen years, and you quit."

In the firelight, Garrett's face looked as red as the kiln goddess'.

"Maybe you can't understand. We've been in Austin, Jimmy and me, way before the hightech boom. We go back to the Apple lie days-working our little grunt jobs in the big companies, making peanuts. Then suddenly we start seeing twentyyearolds getting signup bonuses for four times our yearly salaries, zitfaced kids at UT writing programs for their undergrad theses and retiring multimillionaires the next year, bought out by venture capitalists. It's fucking unreal. Jimmy and me-we realize we've missed the Gold Rush. We were born too early. You have any idea how that feels?"

"So you decided to risk a startup company," I said. "And you screwed up."

His eyes had a look of vacant anger, like an old soldier struggling to remember the details of a battle. "Mr. Sympathy. All right, yes. We screwed up. Lady named Ruby McBride-somebody Jimmy and I knew from way back. She invited us for drinks at this bar she owns down at Point Lone Star-she owns a whole fucking marina, okay?

Ruby said she had some money to invest. She'd done some programming, had some ideas for a new encryption product. She wanted our help. The three of us agreed we could do something big togethersomething we could control all the way from the planning stages to the IPO. Ruby and Jimmy…"

Garrett paused. "Well, you know about Doebler Oil."

It took Jimmy a moment to react.

Then he leaned forward into the light, frowned, and swiped the margarita thermos.

"Goddamn it, Garrett. You know Doebler Oil didn't cut me a cent."

"Whatever, man," Garrett said. "You had money. So did Ruby. I didn't, and I wanted to be an equal partner."

"So you mortgaged the ranch," I said.

"We expected a quick profit," Jimmy put in. "Our product kicked ass. Tech companies with programs a lot less solid than ours were seeing their public stock offerings quadruple the first hour of trading. All we figured we had to do was keep alive that long- finance the product through betatest phase, keep the investors excited. It's like a poker game, Tres. The longer you stay in, the bigger the pot."

I looked at Jimmy Doebler, then at Garrett. I felt like I'd been dropped into a camp of defective mountain men, trying to figure out how to get beaver pelts traded on Wall Street. I said, "No wonder things went bad."

Garrett glared at me. "As of January, smartass, we were flying high. Mr. Doebler here even convinced himself he was in love- went off and got himself married to our lovely third partner."

Jimmy shoved the thermos back into the dirt, took a slug of his second drink. "Leave her alone, Garrett."

Garrett waved the comment aside. "We convinced half a dozen companies to do a sixmonth betatest-meaning they'd try our product for free, we'd monitor how it went.

Things went well, we could market the program commercially. Man, we rented offices, hired staff, did installation."

"You spent more money you didn't have," I translated.

"Three months in, things were going so well we were turning down buyout offers, little bro. Turning them down."

"And then?" I asked.

"We were sabotaged."

Jimmy shifted his back uneasily against the mesquite. "We don't know that, Garrett."

"The hell we don't. Fucking Matthew Pena."

I made the timeout sign. "Who?"

"Back in April," Garrett said, "we got this buyout offer from an investment banker in Cupertino, guy named Pena. Reminded me of a fucking vampire. He got along great with Ruby, which figures, but me and Jimmy said no way. Right after we turned Pena down, things started to go wrong with our betatesting. The program is supposed to protect traffic on our clients' computers, okay? Email, Internet commerce, important shit."

"That's one of those hightech terms, right? 'Important shit.' "

Garrett ignored me. He'd had a lot of practice at that over the years.

"All of a sudden," he said, "it was like our program sprung leaks. Our clients start reporting documents showing up in weird places-employees getting termination notices in their email before they were officially fired, salary schedules getting posted on the company Web site, business plans emailed to competitors. Worst scenarios you can imagine. We've been busting our asses trying to figure it out, tell the clients the program can't be at fault. The leaks are too malicious, too… intelligent. It's got to be somebody-Pena for instance-bribing people to leak files directly from the test sites."

"Yeah," Jimmy mumbled. "Couldn't be Garrett's perfect algorithms."

"Oh, fuck you, man. And what do the betatesters do? They blame us. We're supposed to protect them and we can't, so it's our fault. Three of the six companies have stopped testing and filed lawsuits, and we don't have the money to fight them. The other companies are threatening to do the same. If they do, we lose everything-two years of work, our IPO, any chance at investors. And now the bastard that sabotaged us-fucking Matthew Pena-comes back to us with a last ditch buyout offer, a fifth of what he offered us three months ago. And his goddamn wife-" Shaking his finger at Jimmy. "His goddamn?xwife is telling us we should feel grateful about it."

Jimmy got to his feet. "Maybe she's just smarter than you, Garrett. You ever think of that?"

I didn't like the looks Garrett and Jimmy were giving each other. I'd been in enough bar fights to recognize the prelude music.

"How much money?" I broke in.

"About four million total in the stock," Garrett growled. "Peanuts. Enough to break even, get out of debt. Nothing more."

I tried to visualize an equals sign between the words four million and peanuts. I couldn't do it.

"You're hesitating?" I asked. "Sell."

Garrett pitched his margarita cup into the grass, pushed his wheelchair back from the fire. "Two years of my life, little bro. You walk in here, not knowing shit, and you tell me,

'Sell.' "

"It's the same Ruby's telling us," Jimmy said. "You're just too stubborn-"

Garrett broke down in a miniature seizure-cursing and spitting and patting his arms around his chair looking for something else to throw. He grabbed his bag, and before I knew what was happening he had the gun in his hand.

"Ruby!" he yelled. "All I hear about is damn Ruby. What the hell was your fucking divorce for? Here, Ruby. I got something for you."

The round he fired at the kiln goddess blasted her left arm clean off, sending shards of brick and ceramics out into the night.

After that, things got very quiet.

When the ringing in my ears subsided, I said, "Please put the gun away, Garrett.

Okay?"

To my relief, he shoved the Lorcin into his pot bag, then turned his chair toward the road. "Jimmy Doebler wants to ride on my hard work, marry the girl, then bail out in the end, what the hell did I invite him along for?"

I said, "Garrett-"

"Forget it, little bro. You and he finally agree on something, you can both go to hell."

Garrett wheeled across the gravel-popping and tilting over the rocks, trying not to keel over.

We watched him hoist himself into his safari van, fold and stash the chair, roll the side door shut with a SLAM. Brake lights came on. A mushroom of yellow dust blossomed under the back wheels as he peeled out.

Jimmy drained his margarita, stared into the empty goblet.

"Happy Divorce Day," I told him.

"Your brother's upset."

I kept my mouth shut. I looked down at my own mug- wondered how Jimmy had managed such an intricate fishscale pattern in the glaze, deep blues and greens, perfect symmetry. I wondered if he managed the complexities of programming the same way. I'd always thought of Jimmy as, if not an idiot savant, at least an idiot honourable mention.

"Garrett really didn't talk to you about the ranch?" Jimmy asked.

"No."

"He kept telling me he would. I know that isn't right, Tres. Somebody tried to sell this place without telling me…"

"Difference," I said. "This place legally belongs to you."

Jimmy's face squinched up, like I'd hit him with an invisible pie. "All right. But the last two years have been hell, Tres. You got to understand that. Garrett didn't want you to know how dicey things were."

"I know you're drowning in debt, you have a bailout offer, and my brother doesn't want to take it."

"Pride-"

"He can swallow it."

Jimmy set his goblet on his knee. "Just back off for a few days, okay? Let me work on Garrett."

"Back off," I repeated. "Like you used to tell me down in Rockport: 'Stay out of my way, kid.' "

Jimmy stared at me with that look of hazy consternation, as if he was still wandering among the sand dunes. But he got the message. And I felt petty.

"If it makes you feel any better," he said, "I spent years resenting you, too. At least you and Garrett have each other. Maybe not much of a family, but it's more than nothing."

My third margarita had started seeping into my bloodstream. A flash lit the sky and a peal of thunder rolled one way across the lake, then the other. God testing the balance on his speakers.

"This was your mom's place," I said.

Jimmy nodded.

"Is it ever hard, living here?" I was thinking about the months after my father had died, when I'd been living alone in his house.

Jimmy cracked a twig, sent one half spinning into the dark. "Getting divorced, watching my career fall apart. I start wonderingwhat have I got left, you know? In the end, there's just family and friends, and for me the family part has always been… difficult.

I've got a lot of time to make up for."

He paused uncomfortably.

"What?" I asked.

"I was thinking. You could do a favour for me. You can do background checks, right?"

Most of my nightmares start with those words.

I immediately thought: Divorce. Jimmy's family money, the settlement with Ruby final, but maybe not on terms Jimmy wanted. Knowing him, he'd allowed himself to get bled dry. He'd want detective work in order to appeal the court decision, maybe make his ex look bad.

I said, "Jimmy…"

"Forget it."

"It's just, it's not a good idea working for a friend."

He looked at me strangely, maybe because I'd used the word friend.

"You're right," he said. "Forget it."

I wanted to say something else, something that didn't sound like an excuse, but nothing came.

We watched the storm roll above us, the air get heavier, and finally break with a sigh, the first few splatters of warm rain hissing at the edge of the fire.

Jimmy stood. "It's too late to drive back to S.A. Take a couch in the dome. I got plenty of spare clothes and whatever."

Staying overnight hadn't been part of my game plan, but when I tried to stand, I realized how the tequila had turned my legs and my anger into putty. I accepted Jimmy's offer.

"Go on, then," he said. "I'll take care of the fire and the dinner stuff."

"I don't mind helping."

"No. Go on." More of a command now. "I want to stay down here a little longer."

"Fix your kiln goddess?"

He gave me an empty smile, picked up his Tupperware fajita bowl. "Thanks for your help today, Tres."

He headed toward the lake to wash his bowl.

I drove up the gravel road in the rain, parked behind Garrett's van, then got fairly well soaked running from the truck to Jimmy's front door.

Inside, the dome smelled like copal incense. One large room-a small kitchenette to the right, sleeping loft in the back, four high skylights like the slits of a sand dollar. The curve of the south wall was sheered perpendicular at the bottom to accommodate a fireplace and Jimmy's pottery display shelves.

Despite Jimmy's years as a programmer, there was no computer. No television. With Jimmy's jam box down at the lake, the most hightech appliance in the dome was probably his refrigerator.

Garrett's sleeping bag was spread out on one of the canvas sofas by the fireplace, but Garrett wasn't there. Probably in the outhouse.

I crashed on the opposite couch and listened to the thunder, watched the rain make milky starbursts on the windows above. Lightning flashed across Jimmy's pottery, turned the photos on his mantel into squares of gold. One of those photos showed Garrett before the accident that had made him a bilateral amputee. He was standing next to Jimmy on the Corpus Christi seawall. Another photo showed Jimmy's mother, Clara, a sadeyed woman I remembered vaguely, dead now for something like five years. Next to her was a picture of Jimmy with a redheaded woman I assumed was Ruby, his newly exwife. And in the middle of the mantel, taking the place of honour, was a signed publicity shot of Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefers.

I don't remember falling asleep at all.

I dreamt about the ranch. I was lying out in the wheat fields, rain falling on my face.

Standing over me was Luis, a drug dealer who'd once stabbed me in San Francisco.

We were having a pleasant conversation about property values until Luis drew the Balinese knife on me again and plunged it into my kidney. I heard paramedics, heard my old mentor, Maia Lee, chastising me for my carelessness.

Then a single, sharp report snapped me awake.

My eyes stared into darkness for several lifetimes before I realized I was out of the dream. My side still ached from the knife wound.

I sat up on the couch.

No light came in the windows. The rain seemed to have stopped. The room was lit only by the glow of a stovetop fluorescent.

Garrett's sleeping bag was mussed up but unoccupied. Open face down on the pillow was his wellworn copy of Richard Farina- Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. His wheelchair was nowhere in sight.

I climbed the stairs to the sleeping loft. Jimmy's bed hadn't been slept in. The red digital numbers on his alarm clock glowed 2:56 A.M.

Then I heard a car engine-Garrett's van.

I stumbled downstairs, pulled on my boots, and came out the door in time to see Garrett's taillights disappearing below the rise in the woods, heading toward the kiln.

Dry ice started burning in my stomach.

The sky above was a solid gray sheet of clouds, tinted orange in the east from the perpetual glow of Austin. I ran, every rainsoaked branch thwapping into me on my way downhill.

The VW safari van had been parked with its front wheel on the cement slab of Jimmy's future studio, slammed into the side of the kiln. The driver's door was open, the engine idling with its steady, tubercular cough.

The headlights cut a yellow oval in the woods, illuminating wet trees hung with Spanish moss, silver streaks of gnats, the back bumper of Jimmy Doebler's Chevy pickup.

The truck had rolled from where I'd last seen it-down the slope of the bank, over a few young saplings, and straight into the lake. Its nose was completely submerged, the cab just at the waterline.

Garrett's wheelchair was overturned in the mud about twelve feet away. Garrett was on the ground and something metal gleamed in the mud nearby.

When he saw me, Garrett tried to speak. In the dark, his eyes wild, his bearded face glazed with sweat, he looked like some sort of cornered night animal. He lifted one muddy hand and pointed toward the truck.

"I couldn't get down there. I couldn't-"

I focused on the Lorcin-Garrett's. 380-in the mud about three feet from him.

I ran past him, toward the truck.

The odour of gun discharge hit me. Then a fainter smell, like a breeze through a butcher's apron. I sank bootdeep into silty water, put my hand on the passenger's side door handle and looked in the open window.

My vision telescoped. It refused to register anything but the smallest details-the gurgle of lake water springing from the cracks at the bottom of the driver's door, glossing the parchmentcoloured boots a shiny brown. An upturned palm, callused fingers curled inward.

"Tres?" Garrett called, his voice brittle.

The driver'sside window was shattered, the frame and remaining shards painted burgundy and gray.

"Is he in there?" Garrett called.. "Please to fucking Christ, tell me he's not in there."

I tried to step back from the truck, but my boots wouldn't come free of the silt.

I want to stay down here a little longer.

Garrett called again. "Tres?"

I wasn't seeing this.

I've got a lot of time to make up for.

I grasped at that sentence like a burning rope, but it wouldn't pull me out. It couldn't change what my eyes were showing me.

Jimmy Doebler had been shot in the head, and my brother was the one with the gun.

Date: Fri 09 Jun 00 04:18:05 Pacific Daylight Time

From: faqs@ I pal_mail. com

To: ‹recipient list suppressed›

Subject: the tracks

XMSMailPriority: Normal

I've spent years imagining what that night must've been like.

His good buddy taught him the trick, didn't he? It was so easy from where they lived, down in the Olmos Basin. The Union Pacific line went straight through, two times a night, always slowing for the crossings.

He was fighting with his father again-about the length of his hair, maybe. Or drugs.

Maybe his father didn't like his plans to drop out of business school, become a mathematician. That was his plan back then, wasn't it? Straight math. Pure numbers.

So he stormed out of the house on Contour around eleven o'clock, midnight. He'd already made plans to meet his buddy down at the tracks, and his anger must've given way to excitement.

He made his way down to the crossing-to the far side, the signal box where they always meet. He knelt in a clump of marigolds and waited. It might've been cold, that late in October. Or maybe it was one of those unseasonable Texas fall nights-steamy and mild, moths and gnats everywhere, the smell of river mud and garbage from Olmos Creek.

He waited, and his buddy didn't show.

He knew the train schedule. He was a little late. His friend could've caught the last train, could already be on his way north, to the junction of the MKT line-that underpass where they'd stashed a lifetime supply of stolen beer. His friend could be there right now, hanging out in the broken sidecar where, on a good night, they could find the transients with the Mexican hash.

He gets a sudden thrill, because he's never tried to hitch alone, but he knows he can do it. And when he catches those rungs, he'll be Jack Kerouac. He'll be Jimmie Rodgers. And he knows his friend will be there at the junction to hear him brag about it-because it's a shared dream. His friend gave him the itch, reassured him, that first scary time-Look how slow it moves. It's beautiful, man. Just waiting for you. Let's get the rhythm. Count to three So he makes his decision, waits for the rumble of the second train, the glare of the headlamp. He smells diesel, feels the strange, steady rhythm of a million tons of steel in motion.

How could he know that his good buddy has forgotten all about him-that he is already in Austin, tending to his poor mamma, who has called out of the blue, after years of fuckyou good riddance nothing parenting? And his buddy went running to her.

He doesn't know that, so waits for a good car-one of the old fashioned flatbeds. AII he has to do is jump on. When he targets one, his friend could've told him-not that one. Look at the ladder. But there's no one to warn him.

He times it, then runs, catches the metal side rails. His boot hits the bottom rung and slips. His sole drags in the gravel. He should be able to hoist himself back up, but he hasn't planned on the rungs being so wet-cold metal, newly painted. His heel snags a rail tie and his fingers betray him. The last thing he feels is gravel and cold steel as he's pulled underneath, and the slow rhythm is not so slow after all-the giant metal wheel, a smooth disk, covering what-thirty inches?-in the space of a second.

Whatever noise he makes can't be heard above the rumble of the train. There's no pain. No blood loss-every artery sealed perfectly against the tracks.

He lies there in shock, staring at the stars. How long-an hour? Two?

How long before this little brother got nervous, decided to give away the secret of where Big Brother goes when he's angry?

And what did he think about as he lay there?

I hope he thought about his good buddy who'd abandoned him, made him fall in love with trains, gave him a few months of freedom that he would now pay for by being immobile, bound to metal wheels-forever. I hope, somewhere inside, he wished his friend had been the one on the tracks.

Because he's waited twenty years for this train. I want him to enjoy the ride.