The Austin Job (2 page)

His parents’ pill would be bitter, but thousands of other tenant farmers had no remedy at all, nothing but hot air and dry winds. Another season come and gone, another winter pressing in. Empty cupboards, empty silos, empty stomachs. A week ago the vast majority had up and quit, leaving the land owners to keep the cracked and exhausted soil from whisking away on the winds.

Despite the human tragedy involved, the recent collusion of events quickened him. It was just the sort of thing life in Austin—the place and its people—made possible, and in the face of it, the entirety of his life seemed to be given purpose. His past gave him insight into current issues, while his position introduced him to people with the minds to shape them—people like Daisy Lickter.

Months ago he met her father, a sheriff from Del Rio. Last night he met Miss Lickter, the most tantalizingly confounding woman imaginable. Hailing from backwater towns, they both shared a simple outlook on life along with a shared repulsion for the simple life. She understood that while rural lands pulsed with the nation’s life blood, cities were the swirling tempest of new ideas and possibilities necessary to keep the blood pumping. She shared his tension.

Beyond that, she unsettled him. After an evening of the conversational equivalent of skinny dipping, he’d spent a sleepless night replaying Daisy’s outrageously frank questions and his failure to answer them. A bubbling mixture of doubt and ambition rose in him as a result. Spending more time with Daisy seemed the best remedy.

An ironic gust, pregnant with the promise of rain, rippled his denim jacket. The smell reminded him of baser elements and lifted his gaze toward the grey September clouds—signs of an early autumn. Beginning as moisture from the Gulf, the clouds had already passed over miles of fallow farms on their way inland. He flipped up his collar, dug his hands into his pockets and shuffled toward the breakfast appointment that had interrupted his normal routine. All the while, he endeavored to push Daisy from his mind.

Returning home would have helped his parents, but by staying he could help all the tenant farmers. He and a few of his fellow senators had a good plan, a plan to return the land gradually back to those who worked it. The problem was getting Governor Hobby to release emergency relief funds for people he viewed as redneck hooligans besieging his city. The fool hadn’t even called a special session.

He zigzagged his way north and east a block at a time, leaving the linear lines and clean angles of the financial district to plunge into the off-kilter hoi polloi of the immigrant neighborhoods. The juxtaposition humbled him. Many men had traveled much further than he in pursuit of the promise.
 

He’d grown up in Bastrop with dirt under his nails. The short-term stardom of the rodeo arena had been his ticket out. The life savings of his adopted grandpappy, Big Eddy, had been his hand up. Becoming Texas’ youngest state senator at a day past his thirty-fifth birthday had been the first step in his calling. His new job at the Pride of Texas National Bank earned ten times what he could make as a tenant farmer and a sophomore senator combined, allowing him to remain in Austin year round.

A single, fat drop of rain splattered on the pavement. Something as simple as rain could define a man—to one a nuisance or pleasant diversion, to another life or death. To Starr, rain represented the tension between his two worlds. He had to stay. The farmers of Bastrop were still his people. But now he was their senator, bucking the system instead of bales of cotton.

~~~

Starr swung open the rough-hewn wooden door. Tinkling bells announced his entrance, but no one inside the dingy cafe took note. It struck him that he’d failed to prepare for this meeting, or even figure out who he was meeting with or why. Amidst the alien surroundings he regretted the characteristically cavalier decision. A wooden shield hung on the wall, painted in blue and gold, but he couldn’t place it.

He strode into the center of the narrow room before spotting a short man with a warm smile rise from a table in the back. “Mr. Starr, thank you for meeting me for breakfast.” Starr recognized the Russian accent from the telephone conversation he’d had the day before with the mysterious Yuri Medved.

“Hey, my pleasure.” Medved’s grip reminded him of a wrestler he’d met during his years at the University of Texas, like it came all the way from his shoulder. “It’s nice to see a new part of town. I tend to spend most of my time within the same few blocks.” Odors of cabbage and boiled meat wafted from the kitchen as the bells above the door tinkled again.

“Ah, financial district.” Medved spat out the words.

“Between there and the university.” Starr focused on gauging the man. Wiry, middle-aged, nondescript save a flamboyant mustache curled around his lips like the seed pods from a devil’s claw. “You said over the phone you were a professor?”

Medved directed Starr back to his table, the wear patterns revealing where thousands of elbows had rested beside bowl after bowl of borscht. The two men sat. “Law school is not my department.”

Starr laughed, thumping the table with his fist. “Is it that obvious? I mean, that I went to law school?” The bells chimed again as Starr spoke. This time he turned to see a couple of surly students take a table a few down from theirs.

Medved sat quietly, studying Starr for several seconds. The act reminded Starr of Big Eddy—a man who had edited his own speech, mulling over a hundred ways of saying a thing before opening his mouth to say the simplest possibility with the most profound impact.

Starr had tried to model his own speech in the same manner, but he lacked the patience to pull it off completely. Instead he’d found his facial expressions to be his strongest ally.
Humble a man with your words. Lift him with your brows
. He thought of his most effective facial expression as the ‘twinkle.’

Currently, he reserved all expression while staring back at the foreign man sitting across from him. Medved’s face couldn’t have been more different from Big Eddy’s—eyes close together, a single brow pinched in a “v.” The mustache contrasted everything about the man. Yet, Starr could hear his grandpappy’s gravelly voice in his mind. “Jimmy, you’s meant fer more than farmin’. Stop dis knucklehead dreamin’ and get to doin’.”

Without warning Medved shouted toward the kitchen, “
яичка
и
сосиска
,” before addressing Starr with a raised monobrow. The senator shrugged and nodded, consenting to have what his host was having. “
Другие
,” he finished the order.

Starr noted the man’s efficiency. It struck him as a sort of personal discipline, a commitment to starkness. It wasn’t really Starr’s thing, but he could respect it.

“I apologize Mr. Starr, but I might have mislead you on telephone. I do not wish to procure loan from Pride of Texas Bank.” Starr nodded, causing the man to break into a wide grin. “But I suspect you know as much already. This why I like you, James Starr. And please, call me Oleg. Oleg Rodchenko is given name.” Oleg leaned back in the booth while curling the tips of his mustache between his fingers. The gesture made the scar on Starr’s cheek itch, always a bad sign. “Several years ago given name was taken.” He pursed his lips. “Is time I take back.”

“I’m not sure I follow, Professor Med—Rodchenko.” Starr corrected himself.

“I grow up on small farm in Eastern Ukraine, four hectares. You know hectare?” Starr shook his head. “Is less than ten acres, while gentry own thousands of hectare in every direction. You and I know what is like to grow up coveting thy neighbor’s property.”

He winked at his reference to the Bible and leaned back as a bowl full of hard-boiled eggs arrived from the kitchen. “
где
чай
?” The young waiter, no older than 13, apologized before rushing off to return with a pot of tea, two chipped porcelain mugs and a plate of sweet rolls.

 
This was a breakfast Starr didn’t mind sinking his teeth into. He’d survived two years on his meager wages from the government before his recent job at the bank provided a level of comfort he’d never known—not even during his most successful stints in the rodeo. But he hadn’t grown so rich he’d turn down a free breakfast from a strange Ukrainian.

“Thanks,” he gave the boy a grin along with his best twinkle. Unfazed, the boy retreated to the kitchen. As he did so, Starr noticed the two students from before staring at him unapologetically. He scratched the scar on his cheek, left there by an encounter with a horn, before returning his attention to Oleg.

“Please, eat.” Oleg said.

Starr grabbed an egg and bit off half. Barely taking the time to chew, he swallowed. “I don’t mean to be rude, Professor Rodchenko, but where is all this going?”

“This, Mr. Starr, is right question.” He nodded before continuing almost to himself, “this why I like you.” Having just met the man after talking on the phone for a few minutes, Starr had no idea why the professor had a need to like him, much less how he’d developed such an opinion. Still, a sweet roll was a sweet roll. He picked one up and buttered it, having already shoved the rest of the egg in his mouth. If the strange breakfast meeting ended abruptly, he didn’t want it to do so on an empty stomach.

With roll still in his mouth he picked up his line of questioning, “It’s good to be liked and all, but—”

“Of course. I am one being rude, Mr. Starr. Again, I apologize. We both know value of honest work. We both know value of hearty breakfast.” Starr raised his mug in salute. As he tipped back the unsweetened black tea, the direction of the conversation suddenly struck him. So obvious now that it embarrassed him to have missed it. “We both—”

“This is about the strikes.” Starr put his mug down gently, glancing over his shoulder at the students. Seated without food, they did nothing but stare. “You support them.” Oleg nodded, waiting for Starr to continue. “And… you want to know if I do too.” Oleg took a bite of egg. The bells above the door jingled behind Starr’s back, the restaurant getting crowded.

The senator slapped his forehead, wiping away beads of sweat with a cut triangle of napkin while Oleg fiddled with his mustache. “I’ve seen you before, at the riots.”

“Protests,” Oleg corrected.

“Look, we both know better than to come at a horse from behind.” He crammed in another big bite of roll and spoke with his mouth full. “Despite being set up, I don’t mind saying I think tenant farming stinks to high heaven. I’ve gone on record saying as much dozens of times. And sure, the right to strike is American, while the right for a man to enjoy the fruits of his labor is God-given.” The tea having cooled enough, Starr knocked the rest of it back in a gulp. “Nothing will change my beliefs on that.”

“Well spoken, Mr. Starr. And yet you support government that take God-given right away—government owned by wealthy industrialists at expense of poor farmers.”

“I support no such thing.” Starr slapped the table as the bells behind him jingled again.

“Do not be naive, Mr. Starr. All government is tool of wealthy to oppress poor.” Oleg sat forward and pierced Starr with his gaze. “Money is power and power is poison, like alcohol.” He paused slightly, indicating he knew of Starr’s past with booze and his decision to break from it. “Small amounts make man feel good. But man not content with small amounts.” He tore a piece of sweet roll between his teeth and swallowed.

“Is universal truth, Mr. Starr. Men drunk with power will never stop until world on fire.” He nodded slowly to himself as he sat back in his seat. “Some fire is bad, while some is good. Every man has same choice.” Starr glanced over his shoulder where a crowd of young people had gathered, every pair of eyes intent on him and the professor. Oleg continued, “Good fire purify. From ashes of corrupt institutions, true humanity rise.”

“Interesting lecture, professor Rodchenko, but you’re talking about anarchy. Here in Texas we shoe a horse one hoof at a time, and we sure as hell don’t put him down for having a loose one. Governor Hobby will call a special session. If I were—”

“If you were governor? If you were governor, then what? This is right question, Mr. Starr. You think about this question tonight at fancy party among corrupt and wasteful men and women of power.” He emphasized the word ‘women.’ “Sorry to be abrupt, but I have previous engagement.” He shuffled out of the bench and stood while calling toward the kitchen, “
сосиска
.”
 

Starr rose as the young waiter scampered out straight away with two boiled sausages on a plate. “I think we both need this today.” Oleg offered a sausage to Starr before taking one himself and biting off the end. Not knowing what else to do, Starr accompanied the older man to the door. When he swung it open, the two men were greeted by a sea of cheers.

~~~

Stooped and uncomfortable, Lickter pressed his ear against the wooden box in his left hand. The noise from the alley and the street beyond intensified, disturbing his ability to hear the amplified sound waves traveling through the cafe wall, into the collapsible cone, around the winding metal tubes, through the electrified transistors and finally into his ear. Standing in a pile of rancid garbage didn’t help his concentration either.
I’m getting too old for this.

Starr spoke more loudly, making the conversation easier to track.

“Nothing will change my beliefs on that.”

“Well spoken, Mr. Starr. And yet you support government that take God-given right away, government owned by wealthy industrialists at expense of poor farmers.”

“I support no such thing.”

A loud slap from within the cafe reverberated through the device, forcing Lickter to pull away. At the same moment a scuffling arose from behind. While ducking and spinning around, he leveled his pistol. “Dammit, you were supposed to be here ten minutes ago.”

“Look, Sheriff. It doesn’t always work like that. Now do you mind?”

Lickter holstered his weapon and collapsed the cone of the amplifier before slipping it into a pouch dangling from his belt. “I told you, I’m not a sheriff here in Austin. I’m a private consultant, making you a—”