The Last Call

CHAPTER TWO

There are places to get good coffee and a decent breakfast and be in your own crowd. The place I took Miss Simmons was nothing like that. Nestled in a predominantly lower class neighborhood on the East Side of Interstate 35 there is a hole-in-the-wall place where they start the barbecue about ten years ahead of time and the wood smoke hangs about in the late morning hours like London fog. We had places like that back where I grew up, and I made it a point to find one about the second day of my life in Austin, Texas.

My old Mercedes was parked underneath probably the only willow tree in East Austin, not ten feet away.

The two of us sat just outside the screen porch at a rickety, paint-peeled picnic table as the April sun rose toward zenith between draping willow branches. I found myself wondering whether or not I'd died and gone someplace I couldn't begin to deserve. Her sunglasses lay not an inch from my right hand, which held the scalding cup of coffee from which I sipped.

I heard the familiar crunch of heavy footsteps drawing close from around the wisteria bush close by.

“Julie,” I said, “I’d like for you to meet a friend of mine.”

She stood up halfway, and I suppose because of my upbringing, I found myself standing as well.

“This is Lawrence White,” I told her. “Lawrence, meet Julie Simmons.”

Lawrence White was a gentle giant. He was a mountainous, dark-skinned, Haystack Calhoun-of-a-man with a blood-red apron already stained with his homemade barbecue sauce. The smile Lawrence wore on his face that morning was slightly nervous, as if he were in the presence of royalty. I’d never seen the man act that way before, but then again I’d never seen him in the presence of a beautiful woman before. I’ve seen men who have gone through some of the worst hells that men have ever experienced under fire who, when they came face to face with a beautiful woman became slightly less articulate than your average garden squash, which is descriptive of how Lawrence White was acting.

“Lawrence,” I said. “Shake her hand.”

He did.

“It’s nice to meet you, Lawrence.”

“Uh. You too,” he said.

Julie’s arm got a good workout as he shook it up and down.

“Lawrence,” I said. “How about two plates of your world-famous breakfast?”

“You got it, Chief,” he said, finally looking at me, his face breaking into a huge, boyish grin.

For a moment he just stood there, his attention back on Julie, who sat back down and looked up, smiling at him.

Just great, I thought. But then he looked back at me and must have noted my frown, because he turned back around and trudged back to the house, his shoulders now properly hunched.

Within ten minutes we had two small paper plates in front of each of us complete with plastic fork, two fried eggs sunny side up, a slice of Jimmy Dean sausage and a healthy pile of banana pudding.

For a while there under the shade of that willow tree on that first morning, I would have sworn that the woman was happy. What a difference. Twenty minutes before she had looked like the most pathetic creature in existence.

Okay. Not a bitch, I decided.

I watched Julie as she attacked her eggs, not chipping away at the flanks but going for the heart.

I suppose I was smiling at her, enthralled.

“So what's your story?” she asked me between mouthfuls of egg.

“Story?”

“Everybody's got one.”

“So they say,” I told her.

“Yeah. So let's hear it.”

“Well, lessee,” I began, not knowing quite how to do so, so I just started at the beginning. “I was born and bred about a hundred and forty miles east of here, been to more Texas A amp;M bonfires than I can count, survived junior high and high school somehow and the idiots graduated me. I took some pre-law classes at Sam Houston State, then decided that it wasn’t my thing. I went to grad school at the University of Houston and again somebody goofed and I got a sheepskin. One marriage, ten years. Bad divorce. No kids. Still love her, though. Suppose I always will. I know. Stupid of me. Three year fiancee-ship with another one, but we broke up and got back together so many times that any marriage would have been doomed. For a while though, her kid was my kid. Good kid. Not the best mother, though. So… I'm here in Austin and it's all work and no play makes Bill a dull boy. That's about it.”

“Gonna stick to that story, huh?” she asked, forkful of banana pudding suspended in time and space between us for emphasis.

“Wouldn't you?”

“Yeah, except in my case it’d be a lot different.”

“So your turn now,” I said. Bold of me.

“Aw man!” she said in sudden disappointment and dropped her fork.

“What?”

“Pudding is too sweet!” It could have been a report like Micronesia sinking beneath the sea or killer tornadoes in the Midwest.

The shifting pattern of willow frond shade and sunlight in her hair with shimmers of pure spun gold, delicate sharp pink tongue removing pudding from her front teeth, soft yet piercing green eyes with too much knowledge about the world and not enough of the mundane; and dark secrets hidden like treasures, the way squirrels will hide their nuts. I suppose from that moment I was in love. A dead man. No mourners, please, just shovel in the dirt and shut up.

“Besides,” she said. “You wouldn't be interested.”

“Oh, believe me. I am.” I took a strong draw of coffee and the movement of the earth slowed a bit.

The most amazing thing happened! She clucked, three times. Her tongue against the roof of her mouth pulled down quick. My idiot heart stopped, then resumed a full three beats later.

“Okay. You really wanna know? I'm gonna tell you. I survived a bad cocaine addiction when I was in the tenth grade. Was pregnant in the eleventh and carried it for six months, then miscarried. My mother and father were murdered while I was away in rehab for the second time. They were watching Punky Brewster and he, or maybe they-no one really knows-just came in and blew them both away and made off with the jewelry, the silver, the electronics, everything. I never graduated from high school. No GED either. I married the Coca-Cola guy from the rehab just so I would have a place to go after I got out, you know, somebody to take care of me. Three years later I realized I had his I.Q. plus another forty points, so I hopped on a bus to Las Vegas. I won't tell you what I did there. You wouldn't approve. I've lived in Sacramento, New York, Boston, Greensboro, Fort Myers, Mercer Island, and six months on a pineapple plantation on Molokai. Then, of course, back to Vegas. While I was there this last time I ran into a really bad character named Carpin who had more money than sense-that’s had, for sure-and that about brings us up to present time. I've been married four times but I'm not wearing any rings now. And all work and no play makes Julie a dull girl. That's it.”

I checked to see if my mouth was wide open. It wasn't.

“I understand.” It's all I could say.

Her jaw dropped. I swigged at my coffee.

“No. You don't understand, Bill. My middle name is Trouble. You should run. Now. Very fast.”

I had no excuse after that. I’d been officially warned. A lot of good it would do me.

“But you won't,” she said. “Will you?” I couldn’t tell whether she was begging me to get up and leave or begging me to stay. Probably more than a little of both.

“Not on your life. How old are you Julie? I'm thirty-nine.”

“Thirty-two.” There was a long pause. You could almost say the pause was pregnant. “So, Mr. Travis, Bill, what do you want to do now?”

I didn’t even have to think about my response. “If you really want to know, what I’d like to do more than anything is spend the rest of the day in bed.”

“With me?” She didn’t miss a beat.

“Not by myself.”

Her face turned a shade of scarlet.

“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s go.”

I’ve always had this strict policy: Never get intimately involved with a client. It’s a violation of just about every ethical code imaginable.

The only problem is, there has to be one exception to every rule. Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Julie and I spent most of the rest of that first day in the sack with only the occasional jaunt to the surface for air, food, water, and other necessities.

We finally came all the way up to the surface of our ocean of lust long enough to dress ourselves and step out for awhile.

I took her out on the town. After driving around for a good hour I remembered a very special spot I hadn’t visited in a few years: the Captain’s Cabin, down at Ski Shores on Town Lake. It was the most out-of-the-way venue I could think of going and still stay in the same city. The place is one of Austin’s little-known secrets.

Sure enough, the place was still standing.

Over a couple of beers at an outdoor picnic table right on the water of Town Lake we got to know each other a little more, even over the melodic din of a native-Austin folk singer with a good sense of lyrics, not a bad voice, and a propensity to turn the amp up too loud.

After the food arrived we ate, made eyes at each other and soaked up the atmosphere and the loud music. As we finished our hamburgers and onion rings, the singer took a break.

“Bill,” she said. “You know all that stuff I told you about all the husbands and miscarriage and everything. Some of that’s not completely true.”

“Why’d you tell me that stuff, then?” I asked.

“Because,” she said and then looked down at the table, unable to look me in the eye. “I wanted to shock you. I wanted you to not be interested in me. It didn’t work. Did you believe me?”

“I believed everything you said. And I believe you now.”

“Why?”

“Because. Because you look like you could use a little faith right now. And because I damn well like you. I don’t think there’s anything you could tell me that would make me not like you.”

And then the tears came again, slow but certain, and then, afterwards, came a smile like warm sunshine.

“Bill,” she said. “You never did answer my question this morning.”

“Which question was that?”

“Have you ever been afraid?”

“Can’t say as I have,” I told her.

“That’s what I thought,” she said and upended her Budweiser long neck.

I found myself looking out over the water behind her. Across the lake there were mansions on the cliff, new homes built by new money scant yards from the edge and a hundred- yard tumbling fall. Out on the lake the Jet Skis and pleasure craft had lessened with the rapidly descending twilight. But all the while I was really looking at Julie, my new lover, and hoping it would last, thinking that it just could, and also hoping I’d be able to harden my heart a little just in case it didn’t.

And it hit me.

Fear. It’s what I felt right then and there.

*****

Traveling back home that evening as a brilliant, fading sun traced the last arc of purplish sky, Julie and I took the winding, twisting City Park Road through the rocky countryside west of Austin. A sense of calm and surrealism came over me. I turned to look at her as I felt her fingers interlace with mine. She flicked her eyes my way and smiled, then turned back to take in the vista as we topped another hill. Something in my chest thudded fatalistically. I was either sinking or swimming. I had no way of knowing which as yet. If I drowned soon, then I’d know; or conversely, if I didn’t, I’d also know.

By the time we made it back to my split-level home in Westlake Hills night had fallen and it had grown cold out.

Once inside I opened a bottle of port and got the fireplace going. There was one rough moment when I realized I’d forgotten to open the flue and managed to singe some of the hair off my arm getting it open. The house got a little too smoky so I opened up a few windows. Julie laughed at my antics. That sort of stuff seems to happen to me all the time. By the time the flames were roaring and the small pine knots were cracking and we were sipping our port, all the questions that I had been holding back from asking her seemed to be wrong for the mood I had set. So, instead of talking we found other things to occupy us.

One time during the night we found ourselves both awake and whispering to each other.

“Bill?” Julie asked.

“Yeah?”

“What is it that you do?”

“I help people, darlin’,” I said. I didn’t have to pause on that one.

“If that’s not a practiced answer, I’ve never heard one.”

“Yeah. Okay. I’ve said it a few times too many.”

“Yeah. So answer.”

“People who have problems with money come to me. I solve their problems.”

“You launder money?”

“Hey,” I said. Not a whisper. “I do not launder money.”

“What do you do then?”

“I spread it around. And it comes back. But the people who come to me are good people-meaning not criminals.”

“I’m no criminal,” she said. Did I detect a little poutiness in her voice?

“No. You’re not a criminal. You’re just a thief.”

Julie talked in her sleep, or rather she talked in her nightmares. Those squirreled-away secrets normally kept hidden behind her soft green eyes and even softer lips came out and showed shadows and corners of themselves.

Across her delicate face there was a soft splash of blue light from my fish tank. In there I keep Tiger Oscars, Jack Dempseys, and an African Knife, all cichlids imported from Lake Victoria, a dark ocean and an even darker continent away. Huge fish shadows swam over her face, possibly evoking these dreams, these torments. I could have awakened her, sure. But then again I was under some kind of spell. Really, I could no more have brought myself to do it than I could have granted her immortality.

“Doan,” she murmured, which I translated as “don't.”

“Doan.” Again.

“No, Ray.”

Who's Ray?

“Please. Not there. Doan shoot me there…”

Shoot? Either a gun or a needle. God, I thought, please let it be only a needle.

“Raa-aaa-AAAY!”

She cried out and a shiver knifed through my stomach.

I reached for her but my hand didn’t even make half the distance. She awoke, eyes stark and wide in the blue light and she was in motion and hitting me and screaming.

“NO! I SAID NOOO!”

A rake of nails across my ribs like the tracks a red hot poker might make. A cuff to the chin and for just an instant there were little splashes of light, and my adrenalin kicked in and I was strong and grabbed her and held her.

“Julie! It's me! It's Bill!”

Eyes frozen, locked on mine in the submarine glow. First horror. Dawning recognition. Wonder.

“It's okay,” I cooed to her. “I've got you.” I put my arms fully around her and held her to me, tight. “It was a dream.”

“Oh… uh… Bill. God. Bill. I'm… so… so sorry!” Her voice broke.

She sobbed like that for five minutes until her sobs became whimpers and even the whimpers soon drew away into silence as I held her. We found ourselves looking into each other's eyes and she kissed me and I kissed her back and we were making love yet again, and I wasn’t thirty-nine but eighteen, or maybe sixteen, and our bodies and our thoughts and what we could see and touch and feel became one thing.

And it wasn’t even Tuesday yet.