I don’t know if you will receive this. I guess I don’t care whether you do or not. Call Verisa if you feel like it. Or simply tear this up.
Bailey didn’t bother to sign his name.
“What did the man say?” I said.
“He was going up to the café, and then he was coming back,” Mojo said. “He give me a dollar so I’d be sure to tell you.”
Good old perceptive Bailey, I thought.
“I think we ought to buy that man a glass of this mellow heat when he comes back. He needs it,” Mojo said.
“He needs a new mind,” I said.
Rie went into the back to change clothes. I looked in the icebox for a beer, and then drove the Cadillac down to the tavern and bought a dozen bottles of Jax and a block of ice. I found a tin bucket in the kitchen, and chipped the ice over the bottles. Rie came out of the bedroom dressed in a pair of white ducks, sandals, and a flowered shirt. She had brushed back her gold-tipped hair and had put on her hoop earrings and an Indian bead necklace.
“Hey, good-looking,” I said, and put my arms around her. She pressed her whole body against me, with her arms around my neck, and I kissed her on the mouth, then along her cheek and ear. I could smell the rain in her hair.
“Do you have to leave with him?” she said.
“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.”