The Devil Went Down to Austin (3 page)

"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 wondering— what 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:

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.

Coffee and stale garlic bagels at the Travis County Sheriff's Department didn't improve my frame of mind. Neither did twelve hours of waiting rooms, shoe prints, fingerprints, atomic swab absorption tests, and questions from the lead investigator, Victor Lopez, who was convinced he had a sense of humour.

I saw my brother once, from across the homicide office. The betrayed look he gave me made me glad the deputies had separated us.

If Jimmy's exwife made an appearance, I didn't notice her.

The only member of the Doebler clan I spotted was one of Jimmy's cousins from the wealthy branch of the family—Wesley or Waylon, I couldn't remember his name.

Jimmy had introduced us once at a Christmas party, maybe a decade ago. He wore a gray silk suit and three gold rings and a look of professional concern he probably saved for family tragedies and stock devaluations. He spent a few minutes at the opposite end of the room, talking to the sheriff, then gave me a cold glance on his way out.

At 4:30 in the afternoon, I was finally trundled into the backseat of a patrol car next to Detective Lopez and chauffeured toward Garrett's apartment.

We cruised up Lavaca, through West Campus neighbourhoods of white antebellum sorority houses and highrent condominiums. The postrain air steamed with sumac.