The Gillespie Country Fair Read online

  Jeanie kept her squint-eyed glower on Brady, who was trying to get back to his chair without banging into her. With a slur to her words, she blurted out, “There is no way in hell that I am going to let my daughter end up like her.”

  “Like who?” asked Brady as he took his seat. “Mari?”

  Jeanie answered with a tsk-tsk in her voice. “No. Who cares about that bitch?” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the inside bar. Everyone’s eyes tracked her gesture.

  “Which bitch do you mean, then?” Even Gerdie wasn’t following her cousin.

  “Her daughter, of course. I’m talking about Carel’s daughter. Willow. The one with the thing in her nose. Carel would have never stood for that.”

  “Well, he did, didn’t he?” Brady’s words stopped the conversation and earned the ire of both cousins.

  Jeanie bore into him with her intense frown.

  “Carel is the girl’s father.” Brady met Jeanie’s eyes. “He lives here. They’re in the same damn town. It wasn’t Willow who walked out on him.”

  “Why, you son of a bitch,” Jeanie snapped. “Carel did whatever he could to raise that little tramp. But she had to go side with her mom, and now she’s all screwed up, and it is just killing Carel to see his own daughter like that. I know. He talks to me about all that stuff.”

  Brady said nothing more, while Jeanie and Gerdie launched into a private quarrel about Carel and Mari’s divorce and how Willow had turned out.

  Thea leaned into her wine. She wasn’t going to get involved in this. She did think back to her one encounter with the Geische girl. And, yes, she found her to be unsophisticated, a small-town girl—not unlike the rest of them at that age.

  Coming into intimates, the young girl had said she was looking for some “sexy undies that would turn him on.” She’d held up a pair of scant T-back panties and examined the garment as if it was a pelt, not at all delicate. “So this is all there is to cover your junk?”

  “Junk?” That may have been the edge the cousins were going on about—a revealing little piece of trash talk. But there was something in Willow’s manner that reminded Thea of her sessions with a therapist in Austin. That therapist had tried to convince Thea that she had been abused as a child—not overtly, like she was beaten or molested, but rather that she had been ignored in a large family of modest means. Thea had never reconciled herself to the idea, but when Willow came into her shop, something triggered that random recollection of her long-forgotten therapist.

  Thea had redirected her customer’s attention with a learned sales response. “You want to buy lingerie for you. So that you feel good about yourself. You don’t buy lingerie for him.”

  A baffled and innocent look overtook Willow’s face at that moment, and her curious eyes bore into Thea. Something in that expression gave Thea, for an instant, the impression that there was more to Willow than met the eye—that there was something deep and contemplative inside this naïve girl.

  Then Thea had added, without a hint of humor in her voice, “Unless, of course, he’s a cross-dresser.”

  Willow’s explosive laugh had alarmed her. She’d recoiled when the girl had leapt forward to wrap her in a bear hug, right there in the store. More than a clasp of kinship, it was an embrace of enduring affinity that was almost sexual, like the secret handshake of a cult. It had lasted a little too long—very much like the one Thea had just witnessed between Brady and Mari.

  The cousins’ quarrel eventually reached a stalemate, and they became best friends once again. The ladies, with their glasses empty, looked around for Ross, who was entertaining another table. When Brady excused himself to go questing for more wine, the ladies raked their eyes over the back of his new shirt as he disappeared into the jungle of wine enthusiasts. He was fair game now.

  Jeanie dove in first. “Did you see how he stumbled all over me just to cop a feel from his old girlfriend?”

  Casting for yet another piece of the puzzle, Thea asked, innocently enough, “I don’t remember Brady dating Mari back in high school.”

  “Some big debt of gratitude, I’m sure,” Jeanie scoffed. “I’ll bet you she was his first, if you know what I mean.”

  “No,” Gerdie shot back. “It was Gus. Brady’s big brother, remember? Gus Casbier. Football guy? Gus went out with Mari. High school sweethearts, gonna get married and all. Then he went off in the army and got killed someplace. Remember? We had that big memorial. The high school band played at his funeral.”

  “So, they’re kind of wrapped up together in one of those platonic death-slash-affection kind of things.” Jeanie rolled her eyes with dramatic exaggeration. “Whatever it is, he just has to get over it. He’s as touched as she is.”

  Gerdie nudged Jeanie under the table, and both of them suddenly cast a contrite glance toward Thea.

  Thea picked up on it quickly. “Oh, no. It’s not like that at all. We’re not involved or anything. I just buy advertising from him,” she said and it was the truth. But she had to admit, to herself, that she had been somewhat impressed: Brady was strong enough to take a stand among friends and then hold his tongue when that was the right thing to do.

  The table fell quiet as Brady made his way back. “Check this out,” he grinned. “It’s their last bottle, but I got it.” Standing between Thea and Gerdie, he took on the airs of the sommelier and attempted to pour with the same flourish, except he managed to miss two of the glasses and slopped some on Jeanie’s hands.

  “Okay, then.” Brady filled his glass last and lifted it up to the light to study it. He sniffed at its bouquet and took a drink, and with a deeply satisfied expression, he held his glass out to them as a toast. “The body”—he looked deep into Thea’s eyes—“remains in the nose.”

  Thea laughed out loud while the two cousins exchanged perplexed looks. When Brady steadied himself on the arm of her chair, Thea had to stifle a momentary pang of affection, or maybe respect. She saw something purposeful in him, something that contradicted his big, ungainly mannerisms. Maybe the wine had tripped her hormones. At the same time, she was hoping he wouldn’t try to sit in her lap. She reached out to give his hand a little squeeze and noticed that it took him by surprise.

  “Thanks for this”—she paused to carefully choose her word—“beautiful wine.”

  Brady was glazed over. “It’s a kick-ass wine.”

  The two cousins raised their glasses and toasted in unison. “It’s a kick-ass wine.”

  Thea’s pleasant euphoria was stolen away when she went inside in search of the ladies’ room and was immediately swallowed up by the crowd. Being pressed against people in embarrassing ways made her especially self-conscious of her larger size as she maneuvered her way into the line. Mari was directly across from her, not in line but perched at the end of the wine counter.

  “We’ll be seeing you out at Luckenbach tonight?” Mari shouted.

  Thea managed a cordial smile at the unwanted attention. What she wanted most was to be anywhere else.

  Mari pressed her inebriated kinship and elbowed her way to join Thea, who now regretted her affable wave earlier that evening.

  “This is our dinner,” Mari hollered out, even though her face was just a few inches from Thea’s. “And after this we’re going to do some drinking.”

  Some of the other folks standing about found that humorous and added a boisterous barroom laugh, letting Thea know that everyone was aware she was standing in the bathroom line.

  Mari slid up closer to Thea and stage-whispered, “Brady’s a good guy. I hope you’ve found something that you can really like about him.”

  “Why, that’s nice of you to say, Mari. I think.” Thea tried to move away from Mari’s alcohol breath.

  Mari held her arm, her bloodshot stare boring into Thea. “He’s the kind of guy that would kill a pig for you.”

  Thea pushed ahead rather forcefully and finally made it into the privacy of the tiny commode stall, where she could catch her breath. Kill a pig for you? What was that
, some kind of redneck idiom? Mari had said it as if it were a good thing.

  Finally alone, with her panties at her ankles and her hand on the walls to keep them from spinning, Thea wondered what had happened to her hometown since she had been away. While the town itself had become so much more attractive and sophisticated, the people here—her childhood friends—all seemed so downright strange to her. Adults, with children of their own, who were still stuck in high school. Thea just wanted to scream.

  • • •

  “Caitlin’s all fussy. Says she wants a chicken-fried steak,” Cora Lynn told Carel on the phone. “Seems her mama told her that when they got to Fredericksburg, her Uncle Carel would buy her a chicken-fried steak. Can you imagine?”

  Carel was out in the county, doing something at Ranger Creek—not that there was anything to be done out there—and Cora Lynn had to leave work to take care of her sister-in-law’s kid because dear Jeanie had made plans to meet up with some of her cousins.

  “She’s six years old,” Cora Lynn was saying. “She can’t eat a chicken-fried steak.”

  Carel could tell that his wife had already copped a sour mood for the evening. “Hell, Cora Lynn. At six years old, she doesn’t even know what a chicken-fried steak is. Let’s take her out and show her one. Why don’t you bundle her into your car, and I’ll meet you down at Oma Kooks in a half hour. They’ve got that clear Mexican añejo … and Uncle Carel would like to buy you one of those margaritas.”

  Over the phone he could hear her smile, or so he thought.

  “Half an hour? I’m not going to wait for you to order. You just be sure to get there before the check comes.”

  Oma Kooks was a long, open hall of a restaurant with a well-stocked bar near the clunky doors that opened onto Main Street. An old vaudeville-type stage at the far end featured a solo guitarist or a package show from time to time. With walls of limestone block and high ceilings, it was loud even without a band.

  When Carel came through the door about an hour later, Caitlin was sitting behind a large plate of chicken-fried steak, and Cora Lynn had two salt-rimmed margarita glasses on the table in front of her. One was almost empty.

  “So how you like it, Caitlin?” he asked.

  “It’s big.” The squirrely girl grinned, pushing a french fry through the white gravy—the only part of her meal that she had touched.

  Carel kissed them both—Caitlin on the forehead, Cora Lynn on the cheek—before taking his seat and reaching for the untouched margarita.

  “That’s my second one.” Cora Lynn slapped his hand away. “You can order your own.”

  Carel signaled the waitress. “I’ll have two of those. I see I have some catching up to do.” He watched her ass-tight jeans as she walked away, his thoughts flashing to his own daughter and how men his age kept their eyes on her after she took their order.

  Cora Lynn brought his attention back to the table. “I was talking to the boys about when we might want to go out to the fair together. Make it a family day and all. Can you find out what your sister is planning to do? We can all go together, or meet out there. Either way. But I don’t want to be out there all willy-nilly—always looking for each other.”

  “Sure. Just tell me when, and I’ll tell Jeanie to be there.”

  “I’m not trying to be the trail boss here,” Cora Lynn snipped. “I just want it to be a nice family day.”

  Two new margaritas arrived, and Carel took a long, hard drink from the first one, forcing himself to keep his eyes off the waitress.

  “Wow, Uncle Carel. You drink fast,” Caitlin said while pushing french fries through her white gravy. Still not a bite from her chicken-fried steak. “Can I taste some?”

  “Not until you finish your dinner.”

  “It’s too big,” Caitlin pouted.

  “Here, sweetheart. You have your own drink.” Cora Lynn passed her sippy cup to her, then looked at Carel. “Maybe you should have ordered yours in a sippy cup.”

  Carel teased her with a smile. “They’re not big enough.”

  After getting Caitlin straightened out, Cora Lynn returned to the plans for the fair. “Anyhoo, Jordan wants to bring that Keubel girl he’s been seeing along with us. That’s a big thing, you know. It’s kind of like a next step in a relationship that’s getting serious.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. It’s like he’s fixin’ to introduce her to the family.”

  “We know the Keubels already. All of ’em.”

  “This is kind of a formal step. It’s important to Jordan, and he wanted to be sure it was okay with you.”

  Carel started in on his second margarita. “Well, sure. It’s fine with me. I look forward to getting to know her better.”

  “Thank you, sugar.” She stroked his thigh under the table. “This also gives me a reason to make a phone call I’ve been trying to get around to.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ll call Willow. Ask her along.”

  Cora Lynn retracted her hand. “Willow? Why her?”

  “Like you said, it’s a family thing. She’s my daughter.”

  Cora Lynn’s face twisted wicked. “She never came before. I don’t see how she’d want anything to do with us. I don’t see how you can even count her in our family.”

  “She’s my blood, Cora Lynn.” Carel’s voice boomed throughout the restaurant. “If you want to go questioning who’s family or not, we should start with Jordan and Justin. There is not a drop of Geische blood running through them. Just Geische money.”

  People at other tables paused to watch, and Carel could see Caitlin stiffen amid the growing tension. With a glance at his wife, he sat back in his chair and took a breath. Those dining around them returned to their own conversations.

  “Voices sure carry in here,” Carel said, trying to tone it down. “You want another drink?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, but he knew that she wasn’t. “We can talk about this later.”

  They sat there, trying to cajole Caitlin into tasting her chicken-fried steak. Carel ordered another margarita with a straight shot of clear Mexican añejo on the side. After downing the shot, he made an effort to take their conversation back to neutral ground. “Why did things seem so much more clear in the old days? The way this town was when all the families still spoke German.”

  “My family didn’t speak German,” Cora Lynn added.

  “If this was just one generation back,” he went on, “you and I wouldn’t be sitting around a table trying to figure out who was family and who wasn’t. We’d know, and so would everyone else.”

  “Maybe so, Carel. Maybe so.”

  When Cora Lynn started to gather up Caitlin, getting ready to leave, Carel added one more wrinkle to their predicament. “I want to add Willow in the ownership trust for Ranger Creek.”

  Cora Lynn’s jaw dropped.

  “Your sons are included,” he continued. “I want to include my daughter.”

  Cora Lynn scooped Caitlin out of her chair and gathered up her purse. “We’ll talk about this later, Carel. You get the check.”

  Before they were out of the door, Carel called the waitress and ordered another margarita. As she walked away, he called after her, “No, change that. Just bring me two shots.”

  • • •

  What is history but a mark set in the ground by a man furtive enough to set it there? Carel Geische saw himself as such a man. He was hard at work, way past midnight, out on the Hilmar Jung Road—a poorly maintained caliche road that cut its way along Palo Alto Creek, connecting two properly paved county roads. It was an inconspicuous place for a Texas state historical marker. No one came by here, but there was a rundown old farmhouse where some big-name Dallas lawyer had come along and turned it into a bed-and-breakfast for a few years, petitioned the Texas Historical Commission for a historical marker, and gotten it. When the auslanders lost interest, they’d abandoned the bed-and-breakfast and moved on, but the historical marker stayed there. That just wasn’t right.
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  Carel had a night’s worth of clear Mexican añejo in him, and the sparks were flying after those cross words with that unappreciative woman he had married. Now he was using an acetylene torch to cut through the metal pole that held this isolated historical marker. He would have looked odd to anyone who might have passed by, still in the starched white shirt and his ostrich-skin Lucchese boots, but with a welder’s helmet covering his head. Unable to keep the oxygen mixture right, and struggling to make a straight cut, he was finding out exactly how difficult it was to take history into his own hands.

  An official Texas state historical marker would have been a great boon for Ranger Creek, a tangible foundation of his marketing tagline: You’re Buying a Piece of Texas History. The University of Texas at Austin seated an eminent Texas historian who had a reputation for his revisionist interpretations of Texas history. It was that “revision” of Texas history that led Carel to pay the esteemed professor a summer’s retainer to research and provide a more favorable interpretation of a minor piece of Texas history in Gillespie County.

  What Carel learned for his money was that his great-great-grandfather had never been in the Texas Rangers; that the German pioneers of Gillespie County enjoyed an unbroken history of peaceful relationships with the Comanche; and that the battle in 1881, which Uncle Victor had colored and personalized for him as a youth, was nothing more than a running shoot-’em-up between a few ranchers and a small group of transient Indians. And that it had taken place up in Llano County, nearly sixty miles away.

  “Couldn’t you just move it down a little further south?” Carel had asked the professor. “I mean, couldn’t some of them have ridden down into Gillespie County?”

  Carel found the arrogant pinhead to be a disappointing waste of his time, and he watched more of his money vanish into history as he realized that there had never been a Texas Ranger at Ranger Creek.

  “Gott verdammte Sie!” A raucous blast of profanity echoed through the night as Carel threw the torch to the ground. The welder’s helmet flew into the roadway, and Carel kicked at the metal pole again and again. It didn’t budge. He slouched to the ground, brushing at himself where an errant spark had burnt through his shirt and scorched his skin. It stung badly. Not defeated, he told himself, just reloading.