The Last King of Texas - Rick Riordan (44 page)

I turned to the apartment's interior. Not as
promising. The living-room wallpaper was blistered pink, the ceiling
water-stained and fixed with a tiny glass chandelier. There were
heaps of moving boxes everywhere. Despite Ines' cleaning efforts, the
carpet still smelled faintly of cat urine.

On the right, master bedroom and bathroom. On the
left was the kitchen, and the short hall that led to Michael's room.
His father's silk tie was lying in a melted P on the floor just
outside Michael's doorway.

I thought about it for a good three minutes. Then I
walked over and peeked in. No sheet cave. Michael's bed consisted of
a stripped mattress and a sleeping bag. The walls were bare except
for a little window that looked out on the trunk of a palm tree.
Moving boxes were crammed into the tiny closet.

Michael sat cross-legged on the turquoise carpet,
cutting out ads from a magazine.

He was still in his button-down and slacks but he'd
pulled off his dress shoes and socks. His pale, bare feet were
splotchy with chigger bites. He seemed completely focused on the toy
advertisement he was cutting out.
 
When
I'd visited the night before, Jem had come with me, bringing his
PlayStation unit and a spare TV for Michael to borrow. Erainya had
insisted. Poor paidi needs to learn these things. Donkey Kong as a
life skill. Jem had done most of the playing last night himself, and
the television was still on. As near as I could tell it was the same
game. The basketball-dribbling dinosaur was doing continuous,
pointless flips, waiting for someone to give it directions. Michael
ignored it.

I rapped on the door. "Can I come in?"

Jem's PlayStation game kept cranking out the carnival
music. I walked inside, sat down on the carpet, pressed escape on the
gameset. It told me to enter my name. I was one of the high scorers.
I punched in T-R-E-S, then shut off the TV. Michael finished cutting
out the picture. It was an advertisement for a G.I. Joe. He looked at
it for a second, then added it to a stack of cutouts next to him.
"Hey, kiddo," I said. "You doing okay?"

"Uh-hmm."

He flipped a few more pages, set aside that magazine,
and picked up another.

"We don't have Nickelodeon," he told me.
"Jem borrowed me these."

"What're you doing?"

He shrugged.

"Can I look?"

He flexed his scissors thoughtfully a few times, then
nodded.

The clippings showed action figures. Play-Doh kits. A
Christmas tree that sang karaoke. Several other Christmas items. He
must've found the December issue.

I thought about the little crumpled picture of a
Christmas tree I'd found in Michael's cleaned-out room, two Saturday
evenings ago, the last remnant of the sheet cave.

"Is this what you do when you're not zapping
aliens with your ray gun?" I asked gently. "You collect
art?"

Michael deliberated over an advertisement for an
Erector set. "My wish list."

He looked as sleepy and grim as a late-night driver —
no joy in his face, no indication that this toy-browsing was anything
but deadly serious work. He started to cut out the Erector set.

"You want all these things for Christmas?"
I asked.

He pulled his head in, rubbed his ear on his
shoulder.

"Mommy threw the old list away," he
muttered. "It wasn't invisible. I have to start over now. Daddy
said, 'What would you rather have for Christmas — a lot of toys or
a new home in San'tonio? If you don't get it, you can put it on your
wish list.'"

The house was strangely silent. A rustle of palm
fronds outside the window. From the other bedroom, the faintest
trickle of water from Ines' shower. I focused on Michael Brandon's
little fingers as they worked. I tried to remember if Jem's hands had
even been that tiny.

"Do you want to know a secret?" I asked.

Michael's scissors stopped snipping.

"When I was younger," I said, "my
father died, too."

There it was. Laid out in front of a five-year-old.
Way to go, Navarre.

"I wasn't as young as you," I amended. "Not
nearly. But it was very hard. For a long time."

Michael's pale, inscrutable eyes stayed on me for a
heartbeat, then drifted back to the hole he'd cut in the magazine.
"I'm making a wish list."

"I know," I said. "You want some
privacy?"

He pondered that. He'd probably never had anybody ask
him that question before. "No," he decided. "That's
okay."

Then, almost inaudibly, he added, "Did you make
a cave?"

I nodded. "A very big one. Called California."

Michael scratched a chigger bite. His fingernails
left red streaks against the pale skin of his ankle. His lower lip
started to tremble. "Daddy asked me what I wanted, and I said I
wanted San'tonio."

He finished cutting another picture, flattened it on
top of the other toy advertisements.

"And I'm sorry," he whispered. "Were
you sorry?"

It took me a minute to get my voice to work.

"Yeah, Michael," I said. "Yeah, I
was."

He pulled up one knee and rested his chin on it. He
made the scissors do a one-bladed pirouette on his big toe.

"We need more Christmas pictures, Tres," he
decided.

"It's April," I croaked. Then I realized
how little that would mean to Michael — how the last four months in
San Antonio had been one hellish Christmas present this little boy
wanted with all his heart to put back in the box.

"More Christmas pictures," I repeated.
"Yeah. All right. Hand me a magazine."

For the next thirty minutes, until his mother got out
of the shower, Michael Brandon and I flipped through toy circulars,
looking for things worth wishing for.
 

FIFTY-THREE

Final exam week at UTSA came too quickly. In all
three of my classes, the students scrambled when they realized that
there actually would be an evaluation for the term — that the
chances of me getting blown away before grades were due were not as
likely as they'd once thought.

Gregory the Radish Boy led the grad seminar in a
rousing discussion of Marie de France. We decided that maybe
Bisclavret's wife had gotten a bad deal, but they kept asking why
Marie de France had chosen to tell such a depressing tale and why
Aaron Brandon and I liked to teach it.

The last class before the final, Morticia Addams and
the two housewives brought casseroles to class. Sergeant Irwin
brought some pastries and made a big deal out of handing me a
purple-sugar pan dulce, telling me it was my medal for combat wounds
in my first term. The sergeant pounded me on the shoulder and said he
was damn proud to have had my class.

Professor Mitchell sat in the back, smiling, taking
notes, sipping a Sprite one of the students had given him, while we
went through some last-minute questions from the study guide.

After the class broke up Mitchell offered to walk me
back to my office. "You're a hell of a teacher," Mitchell
told me.

I refused to blush. I looked straight down the
hallway of yellow bolted panels, thinking about the corridor as it
had been a few weeks ago, filled with FBI and bomb-squad men and
police.

"You should see me on semesters when I don't get
shot."

Mitchell chuckled. As we walked he brought out some
student evaluation forms, the kind they use to assess each class.

"I hope I get that chance," he said. "These
reports are excellent — the dean was very pleased to see them after
such a hard beginning to the term. There've already been quite a few
questions about your classes for next fall."

"Next fall?"

"You're interested, I hope? Same arrangement?
Same hours?"

"Dividing my time with Erainya Manos? You're
willing to have a part-time P.I. on staff?"

Mitchell laughed. "Probably keep everybody
honest when it comes to post-tenure review time, knowing I've got my
own investigator. Absolutely, son."

We stopped at the door of my office. Mitchell patted
me on the shoulder, grinned. His white sideburns inched back. "Well?"

"I'm on board," I said.

"You've got a future here, son. Unofficially
speaking, I think you'll be around for some time."

"My landlord and creditors will be happy to hear
that."

Mitchell patted me again, then said, "I'll see
you at the department party?"

He turned without waiting for an answer and went
whistling down the hallway.

I closed up the office and got home around one, just
in time to change for my next engagement.

It was the first Friday in May. Some friends and I
had a date. I put on one of my new dress shirts, some slacks, and a
tie I had been able to afford with my first paycheck from UTSA. My
tie was a springtime explosion of rose on yellow. I looked in the
mirror and wondered if there had always been a little streak of gray
above my left ear.

Around one-thirty, Erainya did her unsyncopated
rap-ta-tap on the door. Jem and Michael burst in, followed by their
mothers. The boys looked like miniature versions of me — slacks,
white shirts, same rose-and-yellow ties, sawed off and hemmed to
their sizes. They'd insisted on their own ties when they'd gone
shopping with me a few days before. I told them we would look like a
clown troupe if we went out in public together, but that just made
them more determined.

Erainya and Ines, mercifully, had chosen their own
clothes. Erainya wore her standard black T-shirt dress, black
sandals, a black leather purse that looked like an S&M mask. Her
only concession to the May Festival atmosphere was a single red
plastic bracelet on her wrist. It somehow looked more like the
remnant of incarceration than a spring fashion statement.

Ines wore white slacks and a blue Guatemalan shirt
that made her red hair glow like neon. She gave me a kiss on the
cheek, then went to rein in Michael, who was helping Jem capture
Robert Johnson from the top shelf of the closet — his normal hiding
place from children.

Erainya came up and straightened my tie. "You're
how old? And you can't tie a tie?"

"I'm new at this formal dress business."

She sighed. "So you going to grace us with your
presence at the office one of these days?"

"Tuesday," I promised. "Same day
George'll be back. Things have just about settled down at UTSA. You
close out the Brandon case?"

She stepped back and examined my outfit critically.
"They sent the check. It didn't bounce. Things are fine."

"No more death threats to the English
department?"

"Ah." She waved her hand. "Not unless
you keep dressing like this. No."

Jem was raking Robert Johnson down the sleeves of my
shirts. Michael was giggling.

We granted the poor feline a reprieve and told the
boys to come on to the car. As it turned out, Jem and Michael's new
school was not going to be the one they'd visited together three
weeks before. During the course of the police investigation, one of
Erainya's lawyer friends who was representing Ines had learned that
both women were looking into private education for their sons. The
lawyer had put in a good word at his daughter's school on the North
Side, which just happened to be short on boys' enrollment for the
fall. Lo and behold, Jem and Michael received acceptance letters and
half-tuition scholarships a few days later, along with invitations to
visit for the annual Spring Celebration to meet their future
classmates.

The school was just north of Loop 410 but it seemed a
thousand miles from town — an isolated village of Spanish-style
limestone buildings and courtyards and covered walkways nestled amid
hundreds of acres of live oaks on the banks of Salado Creek.

Today the huge front lawn of the school was overrun
with families and food booths. The trees were bedecked in ribbons.
Hand-painted signs advertised Beanie Baby tosses, peppermint sticks
in lemons, a dunking booth. In the breezeway by the theater, a junior
school jazz band was foot-tapping their way through a tune that
sounded like Miles Davis struck with baseball bats and strained
through an organ grinder's box. Parents in suits and flowing white
summer dresses floated along, smiles in place, tickets in hand,
children in whirlwinds around them, faces painted like spiderwebs or
rainbows. Within fifteen minutes of our arrival, Jem and Michael were
tugged into a group of kindergartners and taught to play
fishing-for-treats with a stick and a glittery sheet.

Erainya was pulled into a conversation with her
lawyer/parent friend who wanted to introduce her to a state senator
who might have some business for a good P.I. They walked off talking
about the possibilities and eating Sno-Kones. Ines Brandon smiled at
me nervously. "What the hell are we doing here?"

"Pretending to be rich," I said. "Come
on."

We walked along the periphery of the festival, trying
our best to avoid little bodies. I glanced at Ines in her bright
colors and tried to convince myself she really was the same woman I'd
met just a few weeks ago.