My Hero (11 page)
“Great,” he said again, this time a bit more defensively.
Holly wasn't buying it, not in her capacity as a journalist nor as the woman who'd watched this man slumber so peacefully the night before only to have worry return once he opened his blue eyes. “You haven't been sleeping well, I gather.”
Those eyes fixed firmly on her face. “I did last night.”
“So I noticed.” She couldn't fight off a foolish grin or the slight flush she felt burning across her cheeks.
God, what a juvenile reaction for a thirty-one-year-old woman. She needed to start thinking like a producer instead of some silly, starry-eyed kid. She reached for her water glass and took several cooling gulps. And anyway the man had fallen asleep on her, hadn't he? How flattering was that?
“You should have kicked me out last night,” Cal said, “but I'm grateful that you didn't.”
Holly shrugged. “No big deal.” Well, it wasn't, after all. “I didn't have the heart to wake you. But I'm grateful you made such a dashing exit this morning.”
“I figured you would be.”
Holly got lost for a second in the crinkles at the corners of his eyes just before Coral re-appeared, plucking a pencil from her blond beehive. “Okay, what'll it be, folks?” she asked.
“I'll have a bagel and orange juice,” Holly said.
“Sorry, hon. No bagels. We used to have them on the menu, but nobody ever ordered them. How 'bout if I bring you one of those nice cherry Danishes before they're all gone?”
“That'll be fine,” Holly said, all of a sudden craving a golden-toasted, butter-dripping bagel more than anything in the world. Or one with lox and cream cheese like the ones Mel brought to work every once in a while. Her stomach twisted with hunger and homesickness.
Cal ordered the Danish, too, and after Coral sashayed back to the kitchen he grinned across the table and said, “You're not in New York anymore, Dorothy.”
She laughed. “Do I look that disappointed?”
“Well, your face fell an inch or two. It's still a really pretty face, though.”
Cal Griffin thought she was pretty! The unprofessional part of her began to melt like ice cream down the side of a cone, while the professional in her went all stiff and thin-lipped. What did pretty have to do with anything? The two attitudes clashed with a little cluck of her tongue as she reached into her handbag for her notebook and a pen.
“I had intended to do a few collateral interviews before officially interviewing you, but I guess it doesn't matter all that much,” she said, pushing aside her cup and saucer, then flipping open the notebook to a clean page.
Now who looked disappointed? Ha! Now whose face fell several inches but still managed to look really, really handsome?
“I didn't realize this was an interview,” he said.
“Well, why waste time?”
She sat up a little straighter, and with her pen poised above the blank page, Holly wracked her brain for a good opening question, one that wouldn't make Cal Griffin uncomfortable, one that would lead innocently and irrevocably to meatier questions and astonishing replies. A Barbara Walters kind of question. God help her, she couldn't think of anything at the moment except the way those soft whiskers darkened his strong jaw and the way that little muscle jerked in his cheek and how the color of his eyes reminded her of a Siamese cat she once had named Murrow in honor of Edward R.
“If you could be any kind of vegetable,” she blurted out, “what would you be?”
He laughed, then rolled those deep blue eyes toward the ceiling. “What kind of dumb question is that?”
“It's not a dumb question.”
“Yes, it is.”
Holly gripped her pen and stared at him belligerently. This never happened to Barbara Walters. “There are no dumb questions,” she said. “Only dumb answers.”
“Right,” he said, just as Coral approached their table. “Well, let's get one.”
“Here's your Danish, hon,” the waitress said, sliding a plate in front of Cal.
“Coral, darlin',” Cal said, “I've got a question for you. If you could be any kind of vegetable, what would you be?”
“Broccoli,” the woman said without missing a beat while she set the other Danish on the table.
“See!” Holly yelped.
Cal glowered at her. “What do you mean ‘See’?” He looked up at Coral and snarled, “Why the hell would you want to be broccoli?”
She shrugged. “I don't know. It was just the first vegetable that popped into my head. It's a really dumb question, Cal. Can I bring y'all anything else?”
“No, thanks, darlin'.” He flashed a fairly smug grin across the table at Holly. “I rest my case.”
Putting her pen down and closing her notebook with a solid thump, Holly said, “You're just not into the spirit of the interview.” She reached for the Danish and took a bite.
Across the table, her companion didn't begin eating, but rather leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, all the while aiming a smile at her that struck Holly as inappropriately amused if not slightly arrogant. Okay. So she wasn't Barbara Walters. Maybe it was the vegetable part of the question that didn't quite work, she thought. Maybe she should have asked what kind of dog he'd like to be.
He was still giving her that nasty grin, so she swallowed the food in her mouth, then took a sip of orange juice. “What?” she demanded.
His head cocked a bit more to the left, slanting his grin. “What kind of vegetable would you be?”
She thought about it a minute, and the more she thought, the more she wanted to laugh. Dammit. Nobody in their right mind wanted to be a vegetable of any kind. “All right. All right. You win,” she said finally. “It was a dumb question. There. Are you satisfied?”
“Reasonably.” He sat forward and picked up his Danish. “How many people have you interviewed?”
“Hundreds,” she lied. “Why?”
“Just curious.”
They finished their meal in silence, and then—after a brief tussle over the check, which Holly won, by God—they walked out into the warm sunshine.
“What are your plans for the day?” Cal asked her.
“I thought I'd just wander around town and get some ideas for backdrops for camera shots. That sort of thing.” She was sorely tempted to ask if he'd like to join her, but decided she really shouldn't be distracted. She needed to focus on Honeycomb itself, not Honeycomb's favorite or least favorite son.
“Okay. Well, I guess I'll head back out to the ranch. Thanks for breakfast.”
“You're welcome.”
She tried not to feel sad or disappointed as she watched him walk away from her down the sidewalk. This was business, not pleasure, after all. She wasn't here to have fun. She tried, too, not to think about those long, obviously powerful legs heading in the opposite direction or the way the worn, sky blue denim of his jeans hugged that oh-Lordy just-right butt.
When he was a hundred or so feet away, he stopped and turned slowly back toward her.
“Zucchini,” he called.
“Excuse me?”
“The vegetable I'd want to be. Zucchini.” Then he laughed and walked away.
Holly laughed, too, then shook her head, wondering how she was going to get
that
image out of her head during the next week or so.
A
fter Cal left, Holly sat in the little park next door to the bank. In New York the space would have been called a pocket park, and chances were good that it would have been decorated with eccentric sculptures and whimsical benches and brightly painted playthings, all of them covered in graffiti, of course, but still more appealing to the eye than one gnarly-rooted mesquite bush, a picnic table stained with bird droppings, and a rusty swing set with a broken seat.
It was already hot at nine o'clock, and she had to shade her eyes in order to read the list of names that Ellie had written for her. She'd struck out on three interviews yesterday, four if she counted Ellie. This morning's attempt to interview her hero had been a joke, at best. Still, after thinking about it, Holly was grateful it hadn't been worse. It only occurred to her after Cal walked away that you didn't ask the victim of a serious head injury what kind of vegetable he'd like to be. God. How insensitive was that? What had she been thinking? What was wrong with her?
“Nothing,” Holly muttered. Absolutely nothing was wrong with her, for heaven's sake. “You can do this, Hollis Mae Hicks. You know you can do this.”
Well, of course, she could! She'd produced hundreds of pieces—thousands!—over the years. The fact that they were all in her head didn't detract from their quality one bit as far as Holly was concerned. She had put together everything from hard-hitting exposés of political hacks and military morons and industrial sleazebags to poignant vignettes, little jewels of journalism that would make even Charles Kuralt weep with envy. Compared to all those pieces, a straightforward biography of Calvin Griffin, hero or not, ought to be a piece of cake. A slam dunk. A breeze. A walk in the damned park.
As if propelled by her own thoughts, Holly began pacing from one side of the little park to the other, careful to avoid the tangled roots and the low limbs of the mesquite bush. She'd wasted far too much time already. It was time to commit to a hook, and her instinct at the present was to go with the hill of beans theory, to make the Calvin Griffin story one of overcoming low expectations in a less-than-enriched environment. Given a few twists of fate, Honeycomb's hero might just as easily have taken a bullet in a gang fight or a bank robbery as he had in saving the life of the President of the United States.
Now all she needed to do was to sit down with Mel's laptop, hammer out a solid plan for this production, and then follow through with it. With her hook firmly in mind, her interviews would just naturally improve. Holly grabbed up her handbag and strode along Main Street on her way back to Ellie's.
She was just about to turn the corner onto Washington when something caught her eye through the vacant lot that sat between the barber shop and the saddlery. Over the weeds and broken bottles and paper trash, about a block to the south, Holly saw sunlight glinting off a turquoise Thunderbird convertible parked next to what appeared to be a running track.
It was Cal Griffin's car, she was certain. After all, how many classic turquoise convertibles could there be in a town this size? Or any town, for that matter? When they'd parted, Cal had told her he was going back to his sister and brother-in-law's ranch. Obviously he'd changed his mind.
In that instant, Holly changed her mind, too. Rather than return to her room, she decided to wander over toward the track, which she presumed was part of the high school. It wouldn't hurt to take a look at her subject's alma mater before she worked up her list of shooting locations. And if she just happened to encounter her subject in the process, well, so much the better.
As she got closer, she noticed that the track formed the perimeter of a football field, which was torn up at the moment, no doubt ready to be re-seeded or somehow revamped for next year's season. They loved their football in Texas, and Honeycomb probably wasn't any different from Sandy Springs or any other town in that regard. The phys ed budget in her high school was double that of any other department. She'd written more than a few nasty editorials on the subject for the school paper.
Cal Griffin wasn't anywhere in sight, so Holly walked toward the grandstand and perched on a bench in the first row, almost as if she were the first spectator to arrive for a big game. She could see the back of the school itself, and decided that she hadn't been too far off the mark when she'd imagined it would be a one story Texas-Danish modern building with tan bricks and plenty of glass. Probably hot as hell inside, too, she thought, remembering her own school while she looked at the air-conditioning units that stuck out of every third or fourth window.
The feeling of déjà vu was nearly numbing. Not that Holly had spent much time in the grandstand at Sandy Springs High, however. She'd watched
20/20
instead on Friday nights, usually with her mother stomping in and out of the living room, making disparaging remarks about her social life.
She wondered if Cal Griffin had been on the team here. It was easy to imagine his muscular physique in a football uniform with rippling, thigh-hugging spandex. After all, just because she hadn't gone to the games didn't mean she didn't appreciate some of the finer aspects of the sport.
She wondered if the knife fight Cal had mentioned had taken place after a Friday night homecoming game when tempers tended to flare. Or maybe Cal and Hec Garcia had come to blows over Nita Mendes, the beautician. In her imagination, Holly conjured up a bonfire and two crowds gathered at each of the goal posts—the Anglos on Cal's side and the Hispanics on Hec's, and nobody in the middle asking, “Can we all just get along?”
But maybe the fight hadn't happened here at all. Maybe Hec Garcia lay in wait for Cal in the alley behind Ramon's. Or…oh, brother. Maybe it had been Cal who'd lain in wait for an unsuspecting Hec. If that had been the case, Holly really didn't want to know. She'd have to write a memo to Arnold and Maida, requesting that her package be scheduled for Hooligan Week, instead.
She heard a footstep to her left, and turned just as a voice said, “You must be the little TV gal, waiting on Cal.”
The man who spoke was tall and lean and pure Texas from the crease in his straw Resistol to the dusty tips of his Tony Lamas. His sand-colored mustache failed to hide a warm and engaging smile.
“I'm Dooley Reese,” he said, extending a hand. “Cal's brother-in-law.”
Holly put her hand in his solid, enthusiastic grip. “I'm Holly Hicks,” she said. “I met your wife yesterday.”
“She told me.” He lowered himself onto the bench beside her, nudged the brim of his hat upward, and drawled, “Hero Week, huh?”
“That's right.” She gazed back at the track that circled the football field. “I saw Cal's car and thought my hero just might be around here someplace.”
“He is,” Dooley said.
“Excuse me?”
“Right over there.” The man pointed toward a small stand of oaks halfway between the track and the school building, where Holly could see one arm and one leg, both covered with gray sweats. “He's taking a little break from his workout, I reckon.”