all this; Montana, Gideon thought, or the Dakotas. The only off-note was the sharply delineated fish-belly-white expanse of skin from just above his eyebrows to his thinning widow’s peak. Clearly, the hat he was holding in his hand was rarely off his head in the outdoors.
His daughter Annie, for whom Julie would be filling in, was waiting at the curb outside, beside a dusty red Ford Explorer SUV with the Hacienda logo, a photographic blowup of a man and a woman on horseback on the side. Annie, like Julie in her mid-thirties, was plump and pretty (in a squirrel-faced kind of way) and as voluble and feisty as her father was strong and silent. Her welcoming hug of Julie involved emphatic, bilateral cheek-to-cheek air kisses, during which her steady stream of chatter never missed a word.
“Dorotea’s making a late breakfast snack for you,” she was chirping as they got into the van. “ Quesadillas de queso; she makes them with epazote and green chiles… yum! I wasn’t going to join you-I’ve already had breakfast, but I’m making myself hungry. Maybe I’ll have just one…”
Gideon sat in front with Carl, so that Julie and Annie could catch up more easily, and the two women gabbed happily away about people he’d never met, with names either unknown to him or only hazily familiar. He had grown a little sleepy again-it was just after eight o’clock in the morning; they had taken a red-eye from Mexico City rather than staying the night at an airport hotel-so he was content to sit quietly and watch the scrub-dotted countryside slide by, so starkly different from the green, cool ambience of the Olympic Peninsula. And Carl was the sort of man who was just as happy, or probably more so, to be sitting in companionable silence as he would be to making conversation.
The airport was on the south side of the city, on the way to Teotitlan, so in no more than ten minutes they were free of the bustle of city traffic and the scrawled political graffiti, and out in a wide, flat valley checkered with the same small, rectangular farms he had seen from the air. Most were communally owned, he’d read, a result of the sweeping nineteenth-century reforms of Benito Juarez. Here in Oaxaca, Juarez’s home, virtually all of the old haciendas and large ranchos had been broken up. There were alfalfa plots, corn, garbanzos, maguey (for making mezcal), cereal crops for animal feeds… not that he could tell one from the other, of course, but so he’d read and so he believed.
There were small communities on the flanks of the distant dun-colored hills on either side, but buildings in the center of the valley, along the highway, were scarce. There was an occasional isolated roadside tourist shop- weavings, mezcal, crafts-but no businesses geared to the locals. And those few scattered dwellings that existed near the highway were in small family compounds enclosed within high whitewashed walls, although every now and then one in brilliant tangerine orange, or canary yellow, or chartreuse green would bring him suddenly awake.
When, after a while, he was awake enough to tune in to the conversation behind him, Annie was bringing Julie up to date on things at the Hacienda. Her uncle Jamie, the resort bookkeeper, had indeed left for Minnesota a few days ago to have his knee operated on. Annie would be staying through today so she could orient Julie on things, but she would head for Winston-Salem the next morning to wrap up the last of her divorce. Tony Gallagher was back home in Mexico City at the moment “Oh, I’m sorry,” Julie said. “I’d love to have seen Uncle Tony.” Tony, being Carl’s brother-in-law, wasn’t actually Julie’s uncle, but she had come to refer to him that way when she was working at the Hacienda. She had felt strange calling him “mister,” she had once explained to Gideon, and she’d been too shy to call him “Tony,” so “Uncle Tony” it had been. For whatever reason-perhaps that he was younger- Tony’s brother Jamie, who had exactly the same relationship to her that Tony did, was just plain Jamie. Interestingly enough, Annie, who was niece to both of them, called neither of them “uncle.”
“You will see Tony,” Annie said. “He’s planning on coming down in a couple of days.”
“You mean Tony doesn’t live here?” Gideon asked. “He lives in Mexico City?”
“On the outskirts,” Annie said. “In Coyoacan. In this fabulous gated community surrounded by other rich Yanquis, assorted strung-out rock stars, and the occasional Colombian drug lord. He only comes down here once a month or so for a few days.”
“So who runs the Hacienda? I mean, who’s in charge?”
“Nobody’s in charge,” Julie said. “It’s a family affair. No boss, really. Right, Uncle Carl?”
“Well, yeah, I guess that’s true,” Carl said. “We just kinda get along, muddle through, you know? Jamie makes sure we get the bills paid, and Annie kinda keeps an eye on things around the place, keeps us all in line. Not that much to it, really.”
“says you!” Annie said, then loyally added: “And you do plenty too, Pop. The place wouldn’t even exist without you.”
“Aw, hell, I just look after the horses,” Carl said softly.
“But Tony does own it?” Gideon asked.
“Oh, Tony owns it, all right,” Carl said with a nod. “You got that right.”
“Okay, fill me in a little, would you, folks? Tony Gallagher is an American, isn’t he? How did he come to own the Hacienda Encantada?”
“Well, yes, he’s an American citizen, all right,” Annie said, “because he was born there, but he was raised on the Hacienda, although it wasn’t the Hacienda back then. See, his father-my grandfather-Julie, didn’t you ever tell this husband of yours all this stuff?”
“Of course I did. He just didn’t pay attention, although he did put on a pretty good act.”
Julie and Gideon both laughed, and she reached forward to give his shoulder an affectionate squeeze with just a little bit of a wicked twist at the end. The thing was, it was exactly the kind of thing he was always accusing her of when she failed to commit to memory some fascinating point he’d made about skeletal morphology or protohominid locomotion.
And the excuse he gave now was just about as lame as hers usually were. “I guess it didn’t seem to appertain to anything concrete at the time. Now that I’m here, it’s become highly germane.”
“ Appertain,” Carl said, appreciatively rolling the word around his mouth, trying it out on his tongue. “ Highly germane. Whoa. Does he talk like that all the time, sweetie?”
“I warned you,” Julie said. “He’s a professor.”
“Right,” said Gideon. “It’s what I do. Hey, I even know some better words than that. Wait till you get to know me. But go ahead, tell me about Tony.”
“You tell him, Pop,” Annie said. “Pop knows the whole story better than anyone.”
“Well, okay, sure,” Carl drawled. “Guess I better start with the place itself…”
A hundred and fifty years ago, the Hacienda Encantada had been a genuine hacienda, a real working sisal ranch, including a small factory where the sisal was made into rope. But by the 1940s the property, then an eccentric compound of decrepit nineteenth-century buildings surrounded by almost eighty acres of maguey plantings from which the sisal had been made, had stood, unused and moldering, for twenty years. It had been bought in 1947 by Annie’s grandfather, Vince Gallagher, a wounded Army veteran who had combined his military payout with his life’s savings to live out his dream of ranching in some sunny, warm place as far away from his home in International Falls, Minnesota (officially the coldest city in the continental United States) as possible. Knowing little about either ranching or farming-before the war he had worked as a steamfitter-he hired an “agricultural consultant,” on whose advice he tore out the exhausted old magueys, replacing them with tobacco plants and coffee trees, and invested heavily in stock for fighting bulls and fine Arabian riding horses.
Things didn’t work out as hoped, however. The consultant turned out to be a crook, bullfighting turned out to be illegal in Oaxaca (who knew?), and the plantings had a hard time of it in the rain-starved hills. Only the horses, against all odds, were a success, but only a modest one. Worst of all, his new Mexican wife, the beautiful, flashing-eyed Beatriz, decided after her first trip to the United States that she liked International Falls better than Teotitlan and began spending more and more time there with the Minnesota Gallaghers, who were glad to take her in, not only having taken a genuine liking to her, but relishing the chance to penalize Vince for having chosen to leave in the first place. And with medical care far superior to what was available in Mexico, she made sure to be in Minnesota for the birth of each of her three children. Eventually she would spend more than half the year there, almost always taking their children with her.
It made for a lonely life for Vince, who, underneath his romantic expatriate veneer, was really a family man at heart. Still, he managed to keep the place going-barely-by raising and selling his horses, and later on by boarding them and working with an Oaxaca tour agency that specialized in back-country treks. In 1975 he brought in Carl, the Montana-ranch-raised son of an Army buddy, to handle that end of the business, and there Carl had remained ever since.
In 1978, Vince, a two-pack-a-day man (three packs a day in his twenties) had died from complications from
