Texas Born (2 page)

In addition, she had planned two billboards.
Each would face the highway a quarter of a mile away in either
direction of the tourist court. She could see them already.
Hale
Tourist Court
. That was what the letters would
spell, and to make certain that there was no mistaking the quality
of the place, she would use a symbol—a gold crown—to assure weary
travelers that the rooms were indeed fit for a king. Perhaps in
time that crown would become as well-known in the area as the
Coca-Cola script in the Quebeck General Store. She hoped so.

She strode about briskly in her sturdy black
lace-up boots. She had just turned twenty-nine years old, and the
fact that she was one of the first enterprising businesswomen in
America had never even entered her mind. Work was nothing new to
her—it was, quite simply, a way of life. If required, she gladly
rolled up her sleeves and did the lowliest of chores herself.
People were amazed that a grass widow found the time and energy to
raise three children properly while running two flourishing
businesses and starting yet a third. The secret, Elizabeth-Anne had
discovered, lay in the management of time and priorities—the
delegation of authority and putting the most pressing, immediate
problems where they belonged—right in the forefront. Besides, what
choice did she have? Her husband was gone, and the children were a
living reality. The facts had been like a smack in the face when
Zaccheus had left her, but she'd had to accept them—cruel as they
were—right then and there. Someone had to run the rooming house and
the café, and she couldn't afford to hire anyone other than Rosa,
the Mexican maid. Besides, the bank loan for the Hale Tourist Court
had already been made and the construction begun. She couldn't stop
in midstream, not if she wanted to repay the loan and be
financially solvent. A woman on her own, no matter how young,
wasn't left many choices, and certainly not a grass widow in
southwest Texas. She was just grateful that the businesses were
there and doing well. Otherwise . . .

'. . . There's no time to contemplate any
other tragedies that might happen!' she scolded herself harshly.
'This emotional rambling is one luxury you can't afford to indulge
in!' And with that she resolutely swept the thoughts from her mind
so that she could concentrate on the things for which she had
driven out here.

Holding on to the two-by-fours, she stood on
tiptoe and leaned over the waist-high brick walls to look into each
of the unfinished rooms. Carefully she took note of the progress.
She grasped the doorframes in her nimble hands and tugged and
pushed on them with all her might to check their sturdiness. Then
she clapped the dirt off her hands and stamped her feet on all
sixteen of the wooden porch platforms, checking to make certain
that they, too, were well-built and would hold up. If you've got to
build something, she opined, then why not build it to last?

Her inspection finished, she hiked up her
skirt and pushed the twenty yards through the dry yellow-brown
weeds to where the highway would pass. She found the surveyors'
marker without any trouble. For a while she remained there, her
body leaning slightly forward, one hand held like a stiff salute
against her forehead in order to shield her eyes from the glaring
sun. Critically she analyzed the tourist court.

Yes, she reflected for the hundredth time, it
was symmetrical and pleasing to the eye. It looked like a
comfortable rest stop—above all, there was a welcoming quality
about it. She herself wouldn't mind coming across a place such as
this if she had spent long, tiring hours on the road.

Suddenly her eyes grew hard and her handsome
features creased into a frown. Something was missing. The tourist
court which seemed to have everything could use yet something else.
But what? She searched her mind and then shook her head in
frustration and sighed. It disturbed her when her instinct hinted
at something she couldn't put her finger on. Well, in time it would
come to her, she thought. Sooner or later, it always did.

Minutes later, she heard the sound of an
approaching horse. She turned around. Carlos Cortez had arrived on
his old mare. He was the foreman she had hired, and he had turned
out to be a good one, efficient and demanding, yet well-liked by
the Mexican laborers.

Elizabeth-Anne knew that she had made a good
choice in putting him in charge rather than a white man. The
laborers didn't resent taking his orders. They considered him to be
one of them, yet looked upon him with admiration and respect. They
felt that if anyone from Mexican Town made it to the other side of
the tracks, it would surely be Carlos. He had gone away and worked
his way through a big university, where he had studied engineering,
and for this they were very proud of him. He was a feather in the
Mexican community's cap, even if building projects where a Mexican
engineer was welcome were virtually nonexistent.

He was young and handsome too—perhaps too
handsome for his own good, Elizabeth-Anne thought. He had the
blue-black hair, dark glowing eyes, and bronze skin of the
Mexicans, but his nose was surprisingly aquiline and his chin was
square and determined. All the women in Mexican Town eyed him
covetously, the young ones with open admiration, the older ones
with hope and muttered prayers that one of their daughters would be
blessed with the luck to be chosen as his bride. But for some
reason known only to himself, he hadn't shown a preference for any
particular girl yet.

Elizabeth-Anne watched as he dismounted and
strode quickly toward her. After her, he was always the first to
arrive on the site in the morning, and the last to leave at
night.

When he reached her, he politely took off his
straw hat and held it in front of him. 'Buenos dias, Senora Hale,'
he said formally.

'Buenos dias, Senor Cortez,' Elizabeth-Anne
returned politely.

Each time they met they greeted each other
formally in Spanish before slipping into English. It had become a
ritual of sorts. Still, Elizabeth-Anne couldn't overcome the
feeling that his Spanish greetings and his formal 'senoras,' as
well as the doffing of his hat, were not done without a hint of
mockery. It was as if he were playacting the part of the humble,
subservient Mexican, and even the deliberateness of his English
seemed somehow affected and mocking. But whenever she looked at him
closely to determine if this was the case, she could never see
beyond the guarded veil which dropped down over his eyes. There was
something impenetrable about him, and although she was not
frightened by him in the least, she did find the distance he
deliberately placed between them a bit unsettling.

Now she looked around the tourist court and
nodded. 'The work is progressing well,' she said with
satisfaction.

He nodded agreement. 'My men are good
workers. In sixteen weeks it shall all be finished.'

Elizabeth-Anne shook her head and looked at
him levelly. 'I was going to talk to you about that.' She lowered
her head as if to inspect the scuffed tips of her boots, which
peered out dustily from beneath her skirt. Then she looked back up
at him. 'We must be ready to open for business in thirteen weeks,'
she said softly. 'By then the highway will reach all the way to Rio
Grande City, and there'll be a lot of traffic going by.'

He listened attentively, then sighed and
scratched his head as he squinted thoughtfully at the construction
site. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. 'The men already work
like feverish ants eleven hours a day. We cannot demand more of
them.'

'Then we must hire extra workers.'

'I'm afraid that is out of the question,
senora. These men are the best. They are trained and know what they
are doing. Besides, the others are busy with ranch work or the
crops. They cannot possibly leave their jobs.'

Elizabeth-Anne frowned. 'Then we must push
the workday up. To fourteen hours a day.'

For a second his coal-black eyes flared. 'But
that means they will have to work through the noonday heat!' he
protested. 'It's summer, and the temperature--'

'We raise their wages by twenty cents an
hour,' she said firmly, 'and give them time and a half for any
hours they work beyond the usual eleven. For the extra money,
they'll do it.'

He let out a deep breath and shook his head.
'I will put it to them, senora, but I can make no promises. You
understand?' He held her gaze.

She nodded. She herself would have preferred
to speak outright to the men, but the Mexican men's macho sense of
pride was easily wounded, and, like most men she knew, they found
taking orders from a woman loathsome. Women were supposed to stay
home and cook and have babies, not run businesses and put up
buildings. So she went through Carlos Cortez, who passed on
everything she wanted to the men. It was a roundabout way of doing
things, a method her headstrong nature rebelled against, but she
was smart enough to know when to compromise. She consoled herself
with the fact that if anyone could persuade the men to do
something, it was Carlos Cortez.

'I'll be by tomorrow with the payroll,' she
said.

He nodded. Then he placed his hat on his head
and reached into his shirt pocket. He took out some folded sheets
of thin yellow paper. Wordlessly he unfolded them and handed them
over to her.

Even before she glanced at them she knew what
they were. More bills from Coyote Building Suppliers. These were
for yesterday afternoon's delivery.

She glanced at the first sheet. Then her brow
furrowed and her lips creased into a frown. Hurriedly she leafed
through the rest, her eyes scanning the scrawled list of items and
prices. She stared at Carlos Cortez. 'There's got to be some
mistake!' she exclaimed softly.

He shook his head sadly. 'No, there is no
mistake, senora. As soon as they arrived I immediately checked and
demanded an explanation. 'Rising costs.' That is what I was
told.'

There was the rustling of paper as she
angrily slapped the sheets against her thigh. For a moment she
closed her eyes and slowly twisted her head from side to side.
Every week, the cost of building supplies went up. It was
monstrous! No, not monstrous.
Blackmail
. That's what it
amounted to. Ever since she had begun the tourist court it had been
a constant drain on her finances, like a gluttonous monster that
constantly had to be fed, gobbling up precious dollars and cents.
Already it had cost her far more than it ever should have. And she
knew that she wasn't to blame for going over budget.

It was the Sextons.

First she'd had to get the loan for the land
and construction costs from Quebeck Savings and Loan—a Sexton-owned
bank, and Quebeck's
only
bank. Then she'd had to get all her
supplies from Coyote Building Suppliers, which was also owned by
the Sextons. The Sextons practically owned the whole county—their
stores bought and sold the vegetable crops and all the beef, pork,
and poultry; their cotton mills processed the picked cotton; their
freight cars shipped the citrus crops up north. As if that weren't
enough, it was their land that produced nearly everything. And last
but not least, their politicians sat in all the important seats of
the local government. No matter which way you turned in this part
of Texas, you could always count on one thing: finding yourself
face-to-face with a Sexton—or someone on the Sexton payroll.

Without exception, everyone had learned to
hate the Sextons, and with good reason. They either owned you
outright, or you were beholden to them in some way or other. Tex
Sexton, the family patriarch, was a greedy, power-hungry
egomaniac—and his young wife, Jennifer, was evil personified. While
Tex was the undisputed 'king' of the county, his mean younger
brother, Roy, had—until a tragic accident claimed his life—been in
charge of the various hydra-headed branches of the family business.
And since Roy's death, Tex and Jennifer had become more corrupt
than ever.

Tex and Jennifer were rich beyond
comprehension; they had more money, in fact, than they could keep
track of. But somehow they invariably managed to find the time to
personally involve themselves in the pettiest of schemes. They bled
everyone dry, and when there was nothing left to bleed, they could
be trusted to somehow squeeze yet another few drops out of their
victims. Long ago Elizabeth-Anne had decided that the Sextons must
be very unhappy people indeed.

But analyzing the state of their happiness,
Elizabeth-Anne realized, didn't accomplish anyone a bit of
good—herself least of all. Happy or unhappy, Tex and Jennifer were
there, all-powerful and avaricious, sucking up the juices of the
land and its people. For a long time they had turned a blind eye
toward her, but she had suspected that blindness to be temporary,
that her time would come. Now it had. They were going to take her
for everything she had, try to milk her dry. Wasn't it enough that
her beloved Zaccheus had run off because of them?

She felt suddenly weary. If only she didn't
have to battle the Sextons' monopoly. If only she could buy her
supplies elsewhere. . . . But what choice did she have? she railed
silently. Or, for that matter, anyone else? Coyote Building
Suppliers, with its twenty branches, was the only outlet of its
kind within a radius of two hundred miles. There simply were no
competitors to whom people could take their business; Tex had seen
to that. He had neatly built himself a monopoly that covered any
and all industries and businesses that showed a decent profit.
Anyone who dared offer competition was squashed as effortlessly as
a beetle under a boot.

Cruelty was Tex's middle name. He was
well-known for sitting back and watching with amusement as
potential competitors fought to gain a hard-earned foothold.
Nothing gave him more pleasure than biding his time and waiting
until the iron was hot before he struck. Now, out of the blue, he
had lashed out in Elizabeth-Anne's direction, suddenly raising his
already usurious prices. Why?