the emphysema that had plagued him for ten years, and Tony Gallagher, then about twenty-five, a year older than Carl was, had taken over the ranch.
“Tony was the oldest of his children?” Gideon asked.
Annie answered for Carl. “That’s right. Tony was the oldest, then my mother-Blaze was her name-and then Jamie. In fact my grand-mother died giving birth to him, do I have that right, Pop?”
“Well, not long after. Anyway, to go back to after Vince died and Tony took over… Whew, talk about a new broom…”
Carl paused to give his full attention to making a left turn from the highway. As with everything else, he was a focused, deliberate, unhurried driver-he took his time, patiently waiting a good twenty seconds for a rattletrap pickup coming from the other way to approach and get safely by. (“ Go, already,” Annie mouthed silently, rolling her eyes.) Finally, when the highway was clear for as far as the eye could see, he turned onto a narrow, potholed, shoulderless, utterly deserted, but more or less paved road. The rusted green sign read, 2 KM TEOTITLAN. In front of them the road crested a low rise, then disappeared into dry, gently undulating brushland dotted with small farms, with the stark brown hills in the distance. Carl took up the story again as they started down.
Tony Gallagher, young as he was, had a good head for business and was a natural salesman besides. There were a couple of Mexico City mining outfits that had been angling for mineral rights to the land-gold and silver concessions-but Vince had been turning them down in hopes of getting them to up their offers. Tony took a different, tougher tack: They wanted the mineral rights? Fine, but the only way they were going to get them was to buy the land itself. He maneuvered them into a bidding war and eventually sold off almost all of the original rancho, seventy-five of the eighty acres, for almost $500,000-this was in 1980 money-keeping only the hacienda complex itself.
The mining operations failed, but Tony had made out like a bandit. He used the money to restore the hacienda buildings and convert them to a high-end dude ranch/retreat/resort, and within three years the Hacienda Encantada was in the black. After that he’d made a lot of money in the markets. He’d made his primary home in Coyoacan since 1995, living there now with his fourth wife, the Miss Chihuahua 1992 second runner-up. But every now and then he liked to spend a few days at the Hacienda to see how things were going, make some simple repairs-he loved working with his hands “Ha!” Annie cried. “Working with his hands is right! He comes up here to get away from his nutball wife Conchita and make himself a sweet little love nest with whoever his current local sweet patootie is. The repair work’s his cover with Conchita.”
“Annie,” Carl said, “that’s not the kind of thing I like to hear coming out of your mouth.”
“I thought I was being generous,” Annie said. “You guys will meet her, don’t worry; he loves to show them off. Who is it now, Pop? Is it still Preciosa the Pretentious? It must be a year now. Isn’t he about ready for a new one?”
“Come on, now, Annie,” Carl said, “that’s no way to talk about your uncle.”
“Hey, am I knocking it? More power to him, I say. I just wish he had better taste.”
“Annie-”
“You two will love Preciosa, she of the swanlike Neck,” Annie said. “I guess she’s some kind of international hotel management consultant. Tony met her at a conference in Mexico City where she was a speaker. Every time she shows up here, she’s got some new harebrained scheme that he makes us try.”
“Annie,” said Carl, “don’t you think you’re being a little hard on her?”
“What, swimming with the Fishes wasn’t harebrained?”
“Well,” Carl said, “it wasn’t a bad idea to begin with. It just didn’t work out.”
Annie emitted a honk of a laugh. “I’ll say! see,” she said to Julie and Gideon, “she was all worked up about the idea of putting in a kind of swimming with the Dolphins attraction?-like they have in Hawaii?-in a mostly dried- up pond we have out back, so we lined the whole thing with concrete-it cost a mint-but of course, dolphins can’t make it here, so she went to work to find a local fish that could, and that wouldn’t mind a bunch of humans floundering around with it. Unfortunately, the one she came up with, carpa cabezona, had an English name that seemed to turn off the Americans for some reason. Don’t ask me why, but swimming with the Bighead Carp just never caught on.”
Even Carl joined in on the laughter with a soft, throaty chuckle.
“But you know,” Annie said, “we’d put a lot of money into it-”
“ Tony had put in a lot of money,” Carl corrected.
“-on water flow control, and drainage technology, and so on, so the next year, Preciosa has an even better idea of how to recoup. ‘I know, let’s turn the pond into a therapeutic mud bath!’ So we did. Well, the problem there was that the people who put it in were pool people. They didn’t really know how to drain a mud bath properly or keep it clean, so within a couple of months, you didn’t want to be within two hundred yards of it.” She made a face. “Ooh, that was nasty.”
Carl had to agree. “That was pretty nasty, all right.”
“On the other hand,” Annie said, “Preciosa’s a hell of an improvement over the one before. Rosie was really -”
“All right, that’s enough now,” Carl said sharply. “Tony’s affairs are-” He corrected himself. “Tony’s personal life is not your affair. Not mine either.”
“Yes, Pop,” Annie said meekly.
Gideon thought a slight shift of subject was in order. He turned toward the back. “And your mother, Annie, did she-”
“We lost her,” Carl said curtly, closing down the conversation the way a slamming iron door closes down a corridor.
Now what did I step into? Gideon wondered.
FIVE
It was a while before he found out. The rest of the drive was completed without further talk, other than work-related dialogue between Julie and Annie, and when they reached the Hacienda there were some difficulties to contend with. For one thing, there was a minor kerfuffle over their room. It seemed that Josefa, who supervised the housekeeping staff, had gotten things mixed up. (“I’m shocked. Shocked,” Gideon heard Annie mutter.) Josefa had followed instructions to have their room spruced up, but she had mistakenly thought that they wouldn’t be arriving until the next day. Thus, the room was presently in mid-sprucing, its floor strewn with cleaning supplies, touch-up paint, and bedding and linens fresh and not so fresh. It would be a while before it was usable.
In addition, two American women, in for a workshop to be conducted at the Hacienda, had been waiting there for twenty minutes, drinking coffee, impatient and angry, for somebody who spoke decent English to show up to register them and give them keys to their room.
“Oh, we don’t use keys here,” Annie said pleasantly, “unless you really want them. I’m so sorry you were kept waiting, ladies. If you’ll come with me to the office, I’ll get you set right up. I hope you’ll let me offer you a bottle of wine at dinner tonight to make up for the inconvenience?”
And off she went with the considerably mollified couple to register them. A twitch of the head brought Julie along too, presumably for some hands-on training. “We’ll see you in a few minutes,” Annie called back to Gideon. “Ask Dorotea to make me a quesadilla too, will you?”
Carl, still withdrawn and focused inside himself, mumbled something about tending to the horses and withdrew to the corral and stable, which were down the hill a little from the resort buildings via a dusty track. Gideon was left to himself at a table on the broad flagstone terrace of the main building, the Casa Principal. That was fine with him. The morning air was dry and fresh and agreeably warm-in the sixties-and the terrace, overlooking the village, was an altogether pleasant place for a still-sleepy man to be. He slouched happily in a comfortable wicker armchair, legs outstretched, face turned up to the December sun. Dorotea had wordlessly plunked down a steaming mug beside him, and the wonderfully aromatic cinnamon-and-chocolate-scented Mexican coffee slid down his gullet like honey.
The Hacienda Encantada, sitting as it did atop its own hill, dominated Teotitlan del Valle almost like a baronial castle in France dominated its feudal lands; almost like (this took a little more imagination) the far grander
