“No.”
“Are you sure, Hack?”
“We’ll give him some of Mojo’s sneaky pete. That’s all he needs.”
She ran her fingertips over the back of my neck and pressed her head hard against my chest.
“Don’t feel that way, babe,” I said. “I just have to talk to him.”
She breathed through her mouth and held me tightly against her. I kissed her hair and turned her face up toward me. Her soldier’s discipline was gone.
“I couldn’t ever leave you, Rie,” I said. “Bailey is down here out of his own compulsion. That’s all there is to it.”
I hadn’t lied to her before, and it didn’t feel good. I picked up the bucket of beer and cracked ice by the bail, and we walked onto the porch and sat in two wicker chairs away from the rain slanting under the eaves. The solid gray of the sky had broken into drifting clouds, and I could see the faint, brown outline of the hills in the distance. The Rio Grande was high and swirling with mud, the surface dimpled with rain, and the tall bank on the Mexican side of the river had started to crumble into the water. I opened two beers and raked the ice off the bottles with my palm.
It had been a long time since I had enjoyed the rain so much. The wind was cool and smelled of the wet land and the dripping trees, and I remembered the times as a boy when I used to sit on the back porch and watch the rain fall on the short cotton. In the distance I could see Cappie’s gray cabin framed in the mist by the river, and even though I couldn’t see the river itself I knew the bass were rising to the surface to feed on the caterpillars that had been washed out of the willows.
“Is he really like you describe him?” Rie said.
“I don’t know. Maybe I’m unfair to him. After our father died he had to take care of the practical things while I played baseball at Baylor, and then I quit college to join the Navy, and he had to finish law school and run the ranch at the same time. He can’t think in any terms now except finances and safe people, and he usually makes bad choices with both of them. Sometimes I’m afraid that if he ever finds out where he’s invested most of his life he’ll shoot himself.”
I drank out of the beer and leaned my chair back against the porch wall. Inside, I could hear Mojo singing, “Hey, hey, baby, take a whiff on me.”
“Do you think that’s why people shoot themselves?” she said.
“I never thought there was anything so bad that it could make a man take his life in seconds. But I do know there are other ways to do it to yourself over long periods of time.”
“Bailey sounds like a sad man.”
“He gets some satisfaction from his tragic view. His comparison of himself with me lets him feel correct all the time.”
“Hey, hey, everybody take a whiff on me,” Mojo sang inside.
I saw a taxicab turn into the flooded street and drive toward us, the yellow sides splattered with mud. The floating garbage and tin cans rolled in the car’s wake.
“Do you want me to go for a drive?” she said.
“No. I want you to meet him. It will be the best thing that’s happened to him in a long time.”
“I feel like I shouldn’t be here, Hack.”
“Who the hell lives here, anyway? He doesn’t, and I sure didn’t ask him down.”
I squeezed her hand, but I saw it made her uncomfortable. The waves from the taxi washed up through the yard and hit against the porch steps. Bailey paid the driver and stepped out the back door into the water. His brown windbreaker was spotted with rain, and the lines in his brow and around his eyes had deepened with lack of sleep. The rims of his eyes were red. In fact, his whole face looked middle-aged, as though he had worked hard to make it that way. He walked up through the water with his head lowered slightly and his mouth in a tight line.
“How you doing, brother?” I said, and took a sip out of the beer.
“I have a plane at the county airport,” he said. He looked straight at me and never turned his head toward Rie.
“Get out of the rain and meet someone and have a beer.”
“We’ll leave your car there. You can fly back and get it later,” he said. His voice had a quiet and determined righteousness to it, the kind of tone that he reserved for particularly tragic occasions, and it had always infuriated me. But I was resolved this time.
“It’s bad weather for a flight, Bailey. You should have waited a day or so,” I said. I was surprised that he had flown at all, because he was terrified of airplanes.
“Do you have anything inside?” he said.
“Not a thing.”
“Then we can be going.”
He was making it hard.
“Would you sit down a minute, for God’s sake?” I said. “Or at least not stand under the eave with rain dripping on your head.”
He stepped up on the porch and wiped his forehead with his palm. He still refused to recognize Rie. I carried a chair over from the other side of the porch and pulled another beer from the ice bucket.
“There. Sit,” I said. “This is Rie Velasquez. She’s the coordinator for the union.”
“How do you do, ma’am?” He looked at her for the first time, and his eyes lingered longer on her face than he had probably wanted them to. She smiled at him, and momentarily he forgot that he was supposed to be a somber man with a purpose.
I opened the bottle of beer and handed it to him. The chips of ice slid down the neck. He started to put the bottle on the porch railing.
“Drink the beer, Bailey. If you had some more of that stuff, you wouldn’t have ulcers.”
“The Senator and John Williams are at the house.”
“John Williams. What’s that bastard doing in my home?”
“He was spending the weekend with the Senator, and he drove down with him this morning.”
“You know the old man wouldn’t let an asshole like that in our back door.”
“He told me he would still like to contribute money to the campaign.”
“You’d better get him out of my house.”
“Why don’t you take care of it yourself? This is my last errand.”
“Do you think we could get that in writing?” I said.
“You don’t know the lengths other people go to for your benefit. The Senator is going to stay with you, and so is Verisa, and I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t feel an obligation to her.”
“What obligation is that, Bailey?” I said.
“I’m going to fix lunch,” Rie said.
“No, stay. I want to hear about this feeling of obligation. What is it exactly, brother?”
His eyes looked quickly at Rie, and he drank out of the beer.
“Don’t worry about decorum or people’s feelings,” I said. “Dump it out on the porch and let’s look at it. You’re doing a swell job so far.”
“I’ll be inside, Hack,” Rie said.
“No, goddamn. Let Bailey finish. He’s saved this up in his head through every air pocket between here and Austin.”
“All right,” he said. “For the seven years of disappointment you’ve given her and the alcoholism and the apologies she’s had to make to people all over the state. A lesser woman would have taken you into court years ago and pulled out your fingernails. Right now she’s under sedation, but that will probably slide past you like everything else in your life does.”
“What do you mean, sedation?” I said.
“She called me up drunk an hour after the television broadcast, and I had to go over to the house with a doctor from Yoakum.”
Rie lit a cigarette and looked out into the rain. Her suntanned cheeks were pale and her eyes bright. I didn’t know why I had forced her to sit through it, and it was too late to change anything now. The wind blew the rain against the bottom of Bailey’s chair.
