Travis Lee again at his office but only got his machine.
It took almost an hour to wind my way through traffic almost back to Austin, then around the lake west to the southern entrance of Tom Ben's twelve brush-choked, gully-broken, hardscrabble sections along the southern fork of Blue Creek. The entrance to his place was marked only by a battered mailbox in front of an electronic security gate. Cattle rustling was back in style these days. After somebody buzzed me in, I knew I had to cross half a dozen cattle guards and go through as many electronic gates at the electrified cross fences before I got to the main house. Tom Ben didn't much care for trespassers or modern-day cattle rustlers. His place covered a patch of land that was flatter than Betty's but broken by a series of shallow branches and dry washes so that it seemed rougher country than Betty's place. His place had suffered more from the thorny invasion of South Texas brush. But he worked it harder. At several places I saw teams of D-9 cats pulling anchor chains or root plows to clear the brush for grass pasture and hay fields to feed the small herd of Brangus cattle he ran, along with small bunches of Spanish goats he kept for barbecues.
Tom Ben still lived in the simple tin-roofed single-story fieldstone structure surrounded by a wide, shaded veranda that his great-grandfather had built. Except for electricity and indoor plumbing, it hadn't changed since it had been built just before the Mexican-American war. But the outbuildings – a hay barn, an abandoned dairy barn, and half a dozen sheds – were structural steel and as shiny as a new dime.
Betty and her uncle sat in cedar rockers on a small deck under a trio of live oaks, a pitcher of iced tea between them. Tom Ben looked nothing like his younger brother. The old man was short and sturdy, solid arms and legs and a round, drumtight belly that jutted angrily from his thick-chested body. He almost always dressed in bib overalls, rundown cowboy boots, and a battered banker's Stetson that looked as if it had been used a dozen times to swab a newly born calf or reinsert a cow's prolapsed cervix.
'You're gonna tear the bottom out of that fancy car, boy!' Tom Ben shouted as he always did, except when I arrived on horseback. 'When the hell are you going to get some real Texas transportation?'
'When I want a sore ass more than a bad reputation,' I answered.
'You're walking like a man who's been throwed and stomped, anyway, Milo,' the old man growled.
'You should see the other guy.'
'Yeah, I should have burned out that fuckin' Rooke family thirty years ago when I caught that trashy bunch roastin' one of my prize billy goats.'
'You ready?' I asked Betty. She nodded. I tossed her my keys. 'Why don't you move your stuff, love. I need to confer with your uncle for a minute.'
Betty hesitated for a second, then took off.
'What's up, Milo?'
'I seem to have gotten even more mixed up with the Lomaxes this morning,' I said. 'And I wanted to ask you about a story I heard a few years ago.'
' 'Bout that option to sell I supposedly signed? According to what Betty told me, you and me maybe crossed paths with the same slippery cooze.'
'Maybe.'
'Well, I'm glad Betty ain't here to hear this,' Tom Ben said, ''cause it don't make me sound like much of a gentleman. Ah, hell, this young woman came out one Sunday when I was watching the Cowboys. Said she wanted to write a piece about my Brangus bulls for
'What did you do?'
'When I got my clothes back on, looked at the size of the check, and realized that I hadn't even looked at that release, I locked all the gates, and sent some hands on horseback to drag the bitch back. When she found a locked gate, she tried to head cross-country. Banged up her pickup a little bit and tore up 'bout ten thousand dollars' worth of fence-line, and hid that signed option before my hands caught up with her.' He paused, dug in the pocket of his overalls for a blackened stub of a pipe. 'Wouldn't have done her no good anyway,' he added, but I wasn't listening.
'What happened then?'
'She fought my boys like a wet cat till they got her hog-tied and locked in the corn crib in the dairy barn with a pile of unshucked ears I keep for the goats, then I told her about the rats and mice in the corn, and reminded her that wherever you find rats and mice, you're bound to find rattlesnakes. Hell, she spent ten days in there drinking stale water and doing her business in a bucket, but she wouldn't say a word. Though I was damn sure it was that fuckin' Lomax who sent her. So we stashed her classic Jimmy pickup in an old line shack over there on the northwest pasture beside the catch pond.'
I remembered seeing the shack and the pond one of the times I had ridden one of Betty's saddle horses over to the old man's ranch.
'Hell, I had half a mind to bury it in the bottom of the pond 'cause we'd just dug it, but that model is such a great truck, I couldn't bring myself to do that. Then my hands dropped the bitch off in downtown Austin, and I tried to forget about the whole mess.
'Believe me, boy, these days when I have my evening whiskey, I lock all the doors and windows first,' Tom Ben said, then laughed bitterly. 'And I keep waiting for that piece of paper to show up. That fuckin' Lomax will get this place over my dead body.' He paused to light his pipe, then a snort of laughter blew out the match. 'And not even then actually,' he added.
'Is this the woman?' I unfolded one of the head shots Carver D had scanned off the Lodge registration videotape.
The old man nodded, suddenly sad. 'If that goddamned Travis Lee hadn't come limping back from jump school all shiny in his uniform while I was still in Korea, everything would have been different.'
'Sir?' I said, confused by this sudden turn in the conversation.
'You didn't know? Son of a bitch ran off with the woman I was supposed to marry when I got back from Korea,' he said, stood, then jammed his shapeless Stetson back on his head, and rolled on his old bow legs and frozen feet back to the veranda steps where he stopped and turned. 'Betty said you gave away a piece of family land one time.'
'I kept enough to be buried in,' I said.
'What'd it feel like?'
'Since my great-grandfather had sort of stolen the land from the Benewah Indian tribe,' I confessed, 'it didn't exactly feel like a family place.'
Tom Ben thought about that for a moment, rubbed his chin, puffed on the stubby pipe, then said, 'Goddamned little brother of mine brought home the mumps from high school, too, so there was never going to be any children for me, either.' Then he shook his head, grinned ruefully, then stepped into the shadows of his house.
I looked at the photograph one more time, folded it, and stuffed it back into my pocket, then stepped off the porch, and walked to the Caddy where Betty waited. I grabbed the manila envelope out of the front seat, and we stepped away from the car.
'I should have known she was a professional,' I said.
'He told you about the woman?' she said. 'He must really like you,' she added. 'He's never even told me the whole story. Just hinted about it.'
'Right,' I said, 'and he mentioned something about Travis Lee running off with his fiancee.'
She nodded sharply.
'What happened?'
'After a fling,' Betty said, 'Travis Lee dumped her to marry a rich girl, and she committed suicide. Tom Ben never spoke to him again.'