Crooked Little Vein (8 page)

B
ob
refused to talk about it. Drove us to the hotel in stony silence, told us he’d pick us up at eight for dinner, tore off at high speed.

The hotel was expensive, because I felt like it. And this time I had arranged for a single suite, rather than two rooms. Trix didn’t say a thing, as we entered the room. Just smiled and raided the minibar.

Shoes off and feet up and drinks and smiling at each other, and life was pretty good.

“So,” Trix said. “Your friend Bob.”

“He’s gone completely nuts.”

“That was my educated opinion, yeah. What happened?”

“You know as much as I do. Haven’t spoken to the guy in ages. He could be a little odd when he was drinking, but nothing like this. Bob was a hardass. That whole thing in the car, I have no idea where that came from. He’s gotten into trouble down here, I guess.” I sighed, stretched. “I don’t think I want to know what kind of trouble.”

“You want to go out?”

“Dinner’s in four hours.”

“C’mon, Mike. We can’t see America from hotel rooms.”

“Sure you can. Window’s right over there.”

“You know what I mean. C’mon. There’s all those weirdo Texans out there to gawp at.”

“For someone who plays Champion to Perverts as much as you do, you’re awfully dismissive of the great state of Texas.”

“Oh, give me a break. This is Jesusland. Red State. Ma Ferguson country.”

“Who?”

“Mike, you are a cultural void.”

“Probably. Who?”

“Ma Ferguson. Governor of Texas back in the 1920s. When someone tried to get Spanish taught in schools, you know what she said? ‘If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, then it’s good enough for Texas!’ Mike, these are the people who want to put people like me in prison.”

I finished my drink. Smiled sweetly. “Miriam Amanda Ferguson, young lady. She ran as an anti-Klan candidate at a time when there were almost half a million Klan members in Texas. Pardoned two thousand prisoners.”

Trix frowned. “You’re kidding me.”

I jerked a thumb at the window. “1939, a civil rights leader gave a speech here in San Antonio, given legal coverage by the mayor. The Klan arranged a riot, and tried to kill the mayor. Not long after, the Klan were burned out of San Antonio and haven’t had a building here since. You know the mayor’s name?”

“You’re going to tell me. You’re enjoying this too much not to.”

“Mayor Maverick.”

I enjoyed the face she made.

“Couldn’t make this stuff up, could you?”

“What’s your point?”

“My point. Yes. My point is that people are the same all over. It’s not like you’re flying into a jungle when you go south. Texans, Minnesotans, Montanans, other ‘ans’ beginning with Ts and Ms—all the goddamn same, same mix of heroes and pricks, same old bunch of nice and nasty.”

“And this is your motivation for not wanting to go out for a walk? That it’s all the same out there?”

“Yep.”

“You’re a lazy bastard.”

“That, too. But your whole Us-and-Them Thing doesn’t work when it’s all Us.”

“But mostly you’re a lazy bastard.”

“Yep.”

“How the hell did you know that, anyway?”

“Way back when I was working at Pinkerton, I had to update an in-house dossier on the Klan. I used to be kind of thorough, and stuff sticks in my head. You know that in some places the Klan became general moral guardians and started flaying white men for getting divorces?”

“Is your head just filled with useless information?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe. Okay.” I struggled up out of my chair. “Let’s go see the Alamo. Apparently it’s never been the same since Ozzy Osbourne pissed on it.”

“Ozzy Osbourne’s funny. He never really did that, right? It’s like the story about the bat.”

“Nope. Ozzy Osbourne pissed on the Alamo. But he wasn’t wearing a dress. However, I happen to know that he got the soft treatment. Two-hundred-buck fine for public intoxication. But he actually committed a crime called desecration of a venerated object, because the Alamo is officially a shrine. Should’ve gotten a year in prison.”

“You’re trying to bore me into a coma so you don’t have to go out, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Let me tell you about the rogue Judas tribe of Native Americans, the Potowatomi, who sided with the French and the British before coming to Texas—”

“Fine, fine, I’ll watch some television—”

“But you know? If you look closely at the front of the Alamo, the top-right area, you can see where the numbers 666 have become visible on the brick since Ozzy pissed on the building. But you want to watch television. That’s fine. It’ll keep.”

Trix hit me with lots of things.

A
nd
to make up for being an asshole, I had to buy her some clothes.

We were going out to dinner, and she was worried about Bob. More worried than I was, I realize now, or perhaps just more sensitive to his touch of crazy. I think I just wanted to keep thinking of him as Teflon Bob. So she didn’t want to wear anything that might stand out in what she felt was an essentially conservative town. Didn’t want to make Bob uncomfortable. And I, apparently, needed to be punished for trying to educate her.

Not that I was doing anything of the sort. I was just being an asshole. So we shopped for clothes.

Shopping for clothes is a Boyfriend Thing. You stand around and look blankly at a bunch of pieces of fabric and you look at the price tags and you wonder how something that’d barely cover your right nut can cost the price of a kidney and you watch the shop assistants check you out and wonder what you’re doing with her because she’s cute and you’re kind of funny-looking and she tries clothes on and you look at her ass in a dozen different items that all look exactly the same and let’s face it you’re just looking at her ass anyway and it all blurs together and then someone sticks a vacuum cleaner in your wallet and vacuums out all the cash and you leave the store with one bag that’s so small that mice couldn’t fuck in it. Repeat a dozen times or until the front of your brain dies.

Point being: it’s a Boyfriend Thing. And it’s not just you, the Boy, who thinks so. Every shop assistant on the way will assume you’re the Boyfriend.

Especially with the laughing and the teasing and the hugging and the kissing and the holding of hands. And the carrying of bags. Very Boyfriend Thing.

The United States government bought Trix quite a lot of clothes.

I hope it’s clear that I was really, really trying not to be weird about the way things were. All the time, I was telling myself, just enjoy it for what it is, don’t be weird, don’t get all screwed up over something it isn’t. The usual mantra when you’re with someone who you’re not really with and desperately want to be.

Have you noticed how telling yourself all that shit never actually helps?

A
ob
picked us up outside our hotel, wearing his Same Old Bob face, not a hint of his earlier breakdown. I decided not to push it, and Trix read me. She was wearing tight black things: still very much her, but covering her tattoos, and had traded her boots for kitten heels. “You know he’s going to be looking to see what anyone thinks of him,” she’d said to me. “Why make it hard for him? It’s not like I’m swapping my brain for a Stepford Wife’s. You need his help, right? So let’s not give him anything to freak out over.”

For my part, I was just hoping for a quiet night.

The steakhouse was called Ma’s Place.

“Take it easy,” Trix whispered as I tensed up. “Just a coincidence.”

“It’s a sign from God that he’s going to shit on my dinner.”

“No such thing as God. You relax, too. I don’t want to have to manage two freaked-out men tonight.”

“I’ll have the Special.” Bob grinned at the waitress, spreading out in his chair.

“You sure?” said the waitress, eyeing him dubiously. With one eye, as the other was under an eyepatch. I saw Trix looking at the tattoo on the waitress’s forearm, which, in blotchy bluish letters, read
SKEETER
.

“Hell, yes.” Bob laughed. The Texas in his accent got stronger. “Been a busy day, and a man needs steak.”

“If you’re sure,” she muttered, and turned to Trix and me. We were still working our way through the menu. “Any vegetarian options?” Trix asked. “I don’t eat a lot of meat.”

“This is a steakhouse, ma’am,” the waitress hissed. “If it don’t come off a cow, we don’t sell it.”

“There’s a ladies’ option,” Bob said, trying to be helpful.

Trix caught a swearword in her mouth before it came out. Swallowed it and gave up a “that’ll be fine. Medium? With a salad?”

“No salad. Cows only shit salad, ma’am.”

Trix laughed. “Okay. The small portion of fries, then. Mike?”

“Jesus.” I scanned the menu hopelessly. It was all dish names, rather than useful descriptions. “Um…Rump steak? Well done. Some fries?”

“So that’s one Special, one Ma’s Dainty Plate, and one Cattle Mutilation, ruined. Drinks?”

“Ma’s Dainty Plate?” Trix scowled as the waitress rolled off. “I should’ve had the Special.”

“The Special’s for men only. Says on the menu,” said Bob, flapping the damp cardboard pamphlet at us. “See? ‘The Special—For Men.’”

“You get a club to kill it with, too?” Trix said, deeply unimpressed.

“I wish!” Bob laughed. The waitress returned with drinks. I reached for beer like a drowning man. Not that drowning men tend to want beer. You know what I mean.

Bob was given a veritable pot of iced tea. It was so full of sugar that the straw stood up. You could see Bob’s chest laboring to suck the stuff up into his head. The surface of the drink moved in slow viscous waves, like a lake of tar.

Bob sighed and belched. “I tell you,” he smiled, “when you find a place in this town that does good iced tea, you stick to it like glue. So. Let’s talk about your case.”

Again, I gave him the lightest details—missing book, handed around all over the country, collector wants it back but isn’t sure where it ended up, paper trail leading to the Roanokes. “What we need to do is talk to the Roanokes and find out if they still have the book. All I need to do is confirm that I can turn it over to the client afterward.”

“So we need to get you inside the ranch. Mano a mano, eh?”

“Something like that. Just a conversation.”

“You don’t just turn up on the Roanokes’ doorstep, Mike.”

“Well, this is why I’m talking to you, Bob. You’ve got the local knowledge. How do we get in to talk to them?”

“Heh. That’s the one Regis used to ask for the million-dollar prize.”

“Just the conversation. Not trying to deliver legal documents on them. It’s a five-minute thing. How do we get in the door?”

“The Roanokes…They’re not big on people, Mike. Especially since the whole politics thing blew up in their faces.”

“Yeah,” Trix said. “I was wondering about that.”

“The Roanokes don’t understand why they’re not the Bushes, is the short version. They’re old oil money, older than the Bushes. Old Man Roanoke spent some time in Joint Special Operations, deep spook stuff, has all kinds of weird friends. They figured they could jump right over building a power base in local politics and go right for the brass ring. The Old Man took a shot at kingmaking in the eighties, and that went wrong, so all his hopes were pinned on Junior.

“But what you need to get, Mike, is that the Roanokes are not normal. I mean, this isn’t just ‘the very rich are not like you and me.’ There are stories.”

“Uh-huh.” I busied myself with beer.

“What kind of stories?”

“Oh, you just
had
to, didn’t you, Trix?”

“I want to know. I couldn’t just leave that hanging in the air.”

Bob snorted.

“What’s so funny about that?”

“Well, one story says that’s how the Old Man was conceived. See, when guys are hanged by the neck, when their neck breaks they usually ejaculate. And apparently when the Old Man’s pop hanged himself, his mom scraped up his spooge and, well…shoved it up herself. So, you know, ‘hanging’…it just made me laugh, I’m sorry.”

There was a clanking of cutlery on ceramics. The middle-aged couple sitting next to us had stopped eating, and were looking at Bob like they wanted to unload six-shooters in his face.

“See?” Bob rasped, leaning over the table. “They’ve got friends fucking
everywhere
.”

The doors to the kitchen banged open. The waitress emerged behind a long steel trolley, which she pushed with much pantomimed effort toward our table.

On it was a horizontal section of a bull. As if someone had taken a steer, chainsawed the sides off, and chucked the middle part on an eight-foot-long steel platter on wheels.

It still had a horn sticking out of it.

It was served blue; cold, basically, just seared to seal it and slapped on the plate. If it had still had both sides, a good vet could’ve gotten it up on its feet in an hour or so.

The waitress parked it at the end of the table, and gave Bob outsized, sawtoothed cutlery. “Message from chef,” she growled. “He said to tell you that if you don’t eat it all—again—he’s going to take you outside and kick your nuts up into your lungs.”

Bob laughed nervously. “What does he mean, again? I was sick last time. And the time before that, I ate it all, and neither you nor he were working that night. I ordered the Special, I’ll eat the Special. Get me some steak sauce.”

Trix and I must’ve been staring. Bob looked at us as he sawed off a chunk of microcooked steer and forked it onto his plate. It oozed clotted blood from the thick veins sticking out of the meat. “This is real Texas food,” Bob said. “This is what we eat. Great fucking country, Texas.”

I thought Bob was going to start crying again as he chewed the raw meat.

“Delicious,” he mewled.

We sat there for five, ten minutes, silently watching Bob painfully shovel raw beef into his big, crushed face. Thankfully, our own food arrived at that point. A pound of meat on a flowery plate for Trix, and a huge chunk of rump for me. I turned it over with my fork. The skin was still on it. The skin’s brand was still intact. A big
R.

“Your fries,” the waitress announced. A metal pail of fries with what looked like a gallon of melted cheese poured on top.

“I asked for the small portion,” Trix said.

“That
is
the small portion,” the waitress said.

Trix gave me a little smile. “I guess I know how they justify serving fries in a place that only serves stuff that came out of a cow.”

“You got to eat it all,” Bob muttered stickily. “It’ll look bad for me otherwise.”

Trix gave him her sweetest look. “Bob, I like you. I’m trying to make you feel comfortable. But, honestly, if you think I’m going to eat all this shit, you can just suck out my farts, okay?”

The middle-aged couple got up to leave. Bob choked back a sob and went back to his hideous dinner.

Trix met my eyes. “What? I’m only human, Mike. Though I might not stay that way if I eat all this. They’ll be pulling cholesterol out of my veins with a bulldozer.”

“Quit moaning. My dinner’s still got the skin on it.”

“You’re kidding me.”

I lifted up one cheek of my pan-fried ass to show her the brand.

“R
?”

“Roanoke.” Bob coughed. “They’re in the cattle business, too. It’s a sign. Oh my God. Oh my God.”

He forked another squirting chunk of beef into his mouth, looked up at the ceiling fan, and started yelling as he chewed. “Look! I’m eating it, you bastards! I’m eating it all!”

Bits of meat flew out of his mouth, hit the fan, and were evenly distributed all over the restaurant.