While Hershel talked, Cody wrote on a paper napkin. Then he shook a Lucky Strike out of a pack and lit it, looking at the figures on the napkin, without offering a cigarette to anyone else. “What’s your feeling about all this, Miss Rosita?” he asked.
“How about not addressing me as though I’m a character in Gone With the Wind?” she replied.
Cody removed a piece of tobacco from his tongue. “You seem like an intelligent woman. I want to know what you think.”
“I think Hershel is a good man. I think you’re fortunate that he’s come to you rather than to someone else.”
“I didn’t get that.”
“You’re rude and you’re arrogant, Mr. Holland. You radiate a sense of self-satisfaction that’s hard to take.”
Cody tipped the ashes from his cigarette on the side of his plate. I took the dinner check from the table and put it in my pocket.
“Give me that,” Cody said.
Rosita, what have you done? I thought.
“This is the way I see it,” Cody said, placing the napkin he had doodled on in front of Hershel and me. “Thirty to forty thousand won’t cut it. You’ll need bulldozers and side booms, and you want to buy them, not rent them. At the least, you’ll need seventy thousand dollars. I’ll lend it to you at four percent interest. I’ll need eighty percent of that to be guaranteed by collateral. Since you don’t have any, you’ll have to factor me in as a fifty-one-percent partner. I don’t know if that suits y’all or not.”
“I might have to study on that, Uncle Cody.”
“You don’t want a relative as your partner? You just want to borrow his money?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“You know who’s funding the major drilling around here now?” he said. “It’s not the banks; it’s insurance companies. Talk to those sons of bitches.”
“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t use that language in front of my wife,” I said.
He tapped the ashes off his cigarette again, his expression neutral. He looked out the window. “I wouldn’t want to get caught on the highway in that storm.”
“Grandfather said if we went to the bank, he’d put up the ranch as collateral. Except the ranch just isn’t worth the kind of money we need.”
Cody put out his cigarette on his plate. Waves were capping out on Matagorda Bay, exploding in geysers of foam against a jetty that looked like a long black spinal cord protruding from the water. “He said he’d do that?”
“Why wouldn’t he?” I replied.
“Tell him it’s not necessary.”
“What isn’t?” I asked.
“He doesn’t need to put up the ranch. Not with the bank, not with me. I don’t need a percentage of your compa
ny, either.”
“Do we got us a deal, Mr. Holland?” Hershel said.
“You deaf, son?” Cody said. He got up from the booth and placed three ten-dollar bills by the cash register and walked out into the rain. He turned around and looked at us, the rain clicking on his hat. “Y’all want to come up to the house?”
AT SUNRISE THE next morning, I fired up the woodstove in the kitchen and began cooking a large breakfast for everyone. Grandfather was the first to come downstairs, sitting down heavily at the breakfast table, his chin razor-nicked, a piece of bloody toilet paper stuck to it. I poured him a cup of coffee and placed the cup on a saucer and set the saucer and cup in front of him. He poured coffee into the saucer and blew on it, then drank from the saucer. I had told him late the previous night of the agreement we had struck with Uncle Cody. Grandfather had said nothing in reply.
“You want a pork chop or ham with your eggs, Grandfather?” I asked.
“Whatever you’re fixing.”
“You’re the one who has to eat it.”
“How’s Cody doing?”