Armadillos & Old Lace (3 page)

“What the hell does Pat Knox want?” I said. “Isn’t she busy enough marrying people and going around certifying dead bodies?”

“I think that’s what she wants to talk to you about.”

“Marrying people?”

“No,” said Ben. “Dead bodies.”

The truck was zimming along headed west on

I-10 through the graceful, gently rolling green hills. In the sky ahead of us, backlit by a brilliant, slowly dying sun, we could see an inordinately large number of buzzards circling. They moved methodically, timelessly, as if imbued with ghastly, fateful purpose.

“You’d be crazy to get involved,” said Ben.

“Maybe I am crazy,” I said. “You know what Carl Jung said: ‘Bring me a sane man and I will cure him.’ ”

“Maybe,” said Ben, “Carl Jung will help us with the laundry.”

Halfway to Kerrville along I-10 Ben took a left on a smaller road. The cat and I went through periods of dreamtime as we passed a number of small towns on the way to the ranch. Pipe Creek: so named because a local settler over a hundred years ago ran back into his burning cabin to fetch his favorite pipe after an Indian attack. Bandera: “the Cowboy Capital of the World,” where Ben and I stopped at the Old Spanish Trail Restaurant and had dinner in the John Wayne Room. The John Wayne Room’s sole motif, other than an old covered wagon used as a salad bar and two defunct pinball machines, was fifty-seven photos, pictures, sketches, and sculptures of John Wayne. This thematic approach led to a rather macho orientation among the regulars, and did not serve particularly well as a digestive aid to the occasional traveling butterfly collector from Teaneck, New Jersey.

I had the Mexican Plate and Ben ordered “The Duke,” a chicken fried steak approximately the size and appearance of a yellow-and-white-streaked beach umbrella. Many of our fellow diners wore straw cowboy hats and belt buckles the size of license plates. Possibly they were on their way to the San Antonio airport.

By the time we walked out of the O.S.T., dusk was falling over the old western town. We headed up Highway 16 toward Medina. I offered the cat a few residual pieces of “The Duke,” but she demurred. We rode to Medina in silence.

Medina was a very small town that had been dying for over a hundred years and actually seemed to almost thrive on that notion. Sometime back in Old Testament days, it had voted not to serve alcoholic beverages. It was open to some debate whether this policy had caused the town’s long decline, or whether it had been responsible for eliciting God’s favor in enabling the place to die so successfully for so long.

“Stop for a drink?” I said to Ben.

“You kiddin’? I doubt if they’d even let me recycle my Yoo-Hoo.”

I thought briefly of what our longtime friend Earl Buckelew, who’d lived in the area for over seventy years, once said about the place: “Medina is as dry as a popcorn fart.”

“This town is so small,” I said to the cat, “that if you blink you won’t even see it.”

The cat blinked.

Medina wasn’t there.

We drove a number of miles farther down 16, then took a left and rolled in a cloud of dust across a cattle guard, down a country road, and into the sunset toward Echo Hill. The ranch was set back about two and a half miles from the scenic little highway, but ever since we passed Pipe Creek we’d been in a world that most New Yorkers never got to see. They believed the deer, the jackrabbits, the raccoons, the sun setting the sky on fire in the west, the cypress trees bathing their knees in the little creek, the pale moon shyly peeking over the mountain—they believed these things only really existed in a Disney movie or a children’s storybook. I closed my eyes for a moment, turned a page in my mind. When I opened my eyes again everything was still there. Only New York was gone.

We splashed through a water crossing and two more cattle guards, then turned where the sign said Echo Hill Ranch. Ben drove across a small causeway, then deposited me and the cat and our belongings in front of an antique green trailer that looked like it might’ve once been the object of a failed time-share arrangement between John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac. Clearly, it wasn’t going anywhere else again, geographically speaking. I felt as much at home as a jet-set gypsy has any right to feel.

I opened the door of the trailer, brushed away a few cobwebs, and turned on a lamp. A happy little raccoon family had apparently been living there over the winter.

“If they want to stay,” I said to the cat, “they’ll have to pay rent.”

The cat said nothing, but it was obvious that she was not amused. In fact, I’d long held a theory that the cat hated every living thing except me. She was ambivalent about me. And that was a nice word for it.

I opened the cage and the cat warily looked out. In a moment she emerged and appeared to gaze in some disgust around the little trailer. It was getting more decrepit every summer, and one of these days even I was going to realize that man can’t live on funk alone. The cat stayed a few seconds longer, then shot out the open door like a bottle-rocket.

“What’d you expect,” I shouted after her. “A condo?”

She’d be back, I thought. Certain cats and certain women always come back. The trouble is that no man is ever quite certain which ones they are.

I lay down on my bunk to take a quick power nap before going up to the lodge to see Tom and say hello to everybody. Ben had said that Tom was having a borientation meeting with the staff in the dining hall. I figured I might do the same for a while here in the trailer. Orient myself to the sound of crickets instead of traffic. Before I closed my eyes I noticed on the far wall that the large framed pictures of Hank Williams and Mahatma Gandhi were still hanging there side by side. They were a little dusty and off-center, but who wasn’t that ever did anything great? They stared down at me and I met their cool gaze.

Then I closed my eyes for a moment and, from the afterimages of the two faces, little karmic hummingbirds seemed to fly to my pillow.

When I opened my eyes again Hank was smiling at me with that sad spiritually copyrighted crooked smile and Gandhi’s eyes were twinkling like the helpless stars above us all. Just before I fell asleep, I recalled, for some reason, what John Lennon had repeatedly asked the Beatles during their meteoric rise to fame: “Did we pass the audition, boys?”

I woke up from my power nap to find that the cat had not returned. I put on my boots and headed up to the lodge. Across the nighttime Texas skies someone had unrolled a shimmering blanket of stars. I walked up the little hill toward the lights of the lodge. My father was sitting in an ancient redwood chair on the front lawn, staring into the darkness. He’d made a lot of wishes in seventy years and some of them had come true.

He’d seen thousands of boys and girls grow up here over the years. Many of them had gone away into the grown-up world imbued with an intangible gift my mother, Aunt Min, had called the “Echo Hill Way.” The world, in all this time, had not really become a different or a better place. But the world, as most people knew it, stopped at the Echo Hill cattle guard. Here, everybody was somebody. Everybody had fun. Everybody got to first base once in their lives. Many would, no doubt, be picked off later, but at least they’d had a chance.

Many of the early architects of the “Echo Hill Way” were now among the missing and missed. My mother had died in 1985. Uncle Floyd Potter, my high school biology teacher and, for many years, our nature-study man, went to Jesus soon after that. Floyd’s wife, Aunt Joan, had helped direct the camp for as long as I could remember. Her birthday, August 18, fell on the same date as Min and Tom’s anniversary. They had all been very close. Close as the cottonwoods standing by the river.

Slim, too, had passed, as some colloquially refer to dying. Slim had washed dishes, served the “bug juice,” and drank warm Jax beer as he listened to the Astros lose a million ball games on his old radio. Death is always colloquial.

Doc and Aunt Hilda Phelps had been the first to go. They’d always been older, I suppose. Doc was Tom’s friend from the air force days who helped Tom and Min start the ranch. Hilda, his Australian wife, had taught handicrafts at Echo Hill, and, when I was six years old, had taught me “Waltzing Matilda.” For several years I sang the song as “Waltzing with Hilda.”

There were many ghosts at Echo Hill, but most of them were friendly. They mixed in quite gracefully with the dust and the campfire smoke and the river and the stars.

Tom was almost all that was left now of the old days. He looked out over the beautiful valley, now quiet except for the horses and the deer. The lights of some of the cabins twinkled merrily. Laughter drifted down from the dining hall, where my sister Marcie was still meeting with some of the counselors. It was hard to believe that within a few days over a hundred kids would be running around the place. It was hard to believe that forty years had gone by and Echo Hill was still the same. Only the names had been changed to protect the innocent.

I opened the gate and walked up the path. Sam, Tom’s myopic Jewish shepherd, barked furiously, ran at me, and came within a hair of biting my ass before he recognized me and smiled like a coal-scuttle.

“Sambo!” Tom shouted. “Pick on someone your own size.”

“That dog keeps eating like a boar hog,” I said as I hugged my father, “we’ll have to get him a golf cart.”

“Sam’s doing fine,” said Tom. “Large mammals always put on a little weight in the winter.”

Tom would never hear a bad word about Sam. In truth, Sam was a wonderful dog. Tom had gotten him from the pound in the year following my mother’s death, and Sam had been a friend indeed. He was a terrific, possibly overzealous watchdog who scared most visitors within an inch of their lives, but he loved children. The only people he hated were teenage boys, people in uniforms, and Mexicans. “What can I say?” Tom had once offered after Sam had chased a Mexican worker onto the roof of the pickup truck. “The dog’s a racist.”

Tom had put on a little weight himself over the year, adding to an already protuberant abdomen, but he could still whip almost all comers in tennis. Other than an extremely large gut, which he did not recognize he had, he looked very fit and virile.

We talked for a while about the ranch, the staff, the upcoming summer, and, finally, the conversation worked its way around to another matter.

“You got a rather strange message on the machine today from Pat Knox. I still think she did you the greatest favor of your life by keeping you from being elected justice of the peace in Kerrville.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That could’ve been ugly. It’s a good thing my fellow Kerrverts returned me to the private sector.”

“If you’d won that job, what would you have done with it?”

“Pretty much what I’m doing now,” I said. “That’s what I was afraid of,” said Tom.

I took out a cigar, lopped the butt off, and achieved ignition. I puffed a few easygoing puffs and gazed out over the flat.

“Doesn’t the ranch look beautiful?” Tom said. “Sure does,” I said, staring down the quiet, peaceful line of bunkhouses, which appeared to be bracing themselves for an onslaught of shouting, boisterous ranchers. “So what did Pat Knox want?”

“I have no idea,” said Tom. “It was strange. She said some things were happening that she didn’t understand. She sounded very upset about it. She said she needed to talk to a man of your talents.”

“Musical?”

Tom laughed. “Not unless she wants you to perform at somebody’s funeral. From her tone, it sounds pretty serious. When she mentioned ‘a man of your talents,’ I think she must’ve been referring to some of your forays into crime-solving in New York.”

I took a few more thoughtful puffs on the cigar and watched the moon rising over the mountain.

“Or,” I said, “she may just want me to drop off her laundry.”