The Devil Went Down to Austin

"Garrett," I called.

He looked down as if he'd known I was there all along, his expression as friendly as Rasputin's.

"Well," he said. "My little brother."

Jimmy wiped his hands on his tattered polo shirt, straightened.

He hadn't aged well. His face had weathered, his mop of sand castle hair faded a dirty gray. He had the sunblasted look of a frat boy who'd gotten lost on Spring Break thirty years ago and never found his way out of the dunes.

"Hey, man." He cut his eyes to either side, wiped his nose. "Garrett said you wouldn't be up until your class started."

"Wasn't planning to be," I said. "Then I talked to the family banker. That kind of changed things."

Garrett stabbed his trowel between two scaffold planks. "This ain't the time, Tres."

"When would be the time, Garrett? Next month—when they stick the FOR SALE sign on the front gate of the ranch?"

Lucinda Williams kept singing about her mamma. The bottleneck flew across her guitar.

"What do you want?" Garrett asked. "You want to take a punch at me?"

"I don't know. Are you filled with money?"

Garrett climbed down from the scaffold—one hundred percent upper body strength.

He settled into his Quickie wheelchair—the deluxe model with the Holstein hide cover and the Persian seat cushion. He pushed himself toward me. "Come on. You've driven all this way pissed off at me. Take a swing."

He looked terrible. His skin was pasty, his eyes jaundiced. He'd lost weight—Christ, a lot of weight. Maybe fifteen pounds. He hardly had a gut anymore.

I said, "I want an explanation."

"It's my ranch."

"It's our ranch, Garrett. I don't care what it said in the will."

He puffed a laugh. "Yeah, you do. You care a whole shitload."

He jerked the macrame pouch off the side of his wheelchair, started rummaging through it—looking for his marijuana, his rolling papers.

"Would you not do that?" I asked.

"Do what?"

I grabbed the bag.

He tried to take it away from me, but I stepped back, felt how heavy the thing was, looked inside. "What is this?"

I came out with a handgun, a Lorcin .380.

"What did you do—buy this on the street?" I protested. "I took one of these away from a fourteenyearold drug dealer last week. Since when do you carry something like this?"

Complete stillness. Even Lucinda Williams paused between songs.

"Look, Tres," Jimmy said. "Back off a little."

I checked the Lorcin. It was fully loaded. "Yeah, you're right, Jimmy. Garrett's got you on his side now. Everything's under control."

It was a cheap shot.

Jimmy shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His face turned the colour of guava juice.

"We're working things out," Garrett told me.

"With a gun?"

"Jimmy and I made a pact for the day, man. No arguing. You want to stay here, abide by that rule."

His tone made me remember trips to Rockport when I was in middle school, Jimmy and Garrett college kids, forced to babysit me while my dad got drunk down on the jetties. Garrett had resented me tagging along, told me to shut up so they could meet some girls. The memory brought back that irrational anger, shaped in the mind of an elevenyearold, that this was all Jimmy Doebler's fault—that he had always inserted himself into our lives at the wrong time.

I shoved the Lorcin back into the bag, tossed it to Garrett. "Lars Elder passed along some headlines you've been making in the hightech magazines. Betatesting problems. Glitches in the software. I didn't understand half of it, but I understood several million in debt. Millions, Garrett, with six zeroes. And your friend here wants me to back off ? "

Jimmy said nothing.

Garrett rummaged in the bag, found a prerolled joint, stuck it in his mouth. "If we thought it was your business—"

"You pawned the ranch."

"And Jimmy got divorced today," he yelled. The joint fell out of his mouth, into his lap.

"Okay, Tres? So shut the fuck up."

His voice wavered, was closer to breaking than I'd ever heard.

Jimmy Doebler stared down at his unfinished brickwork.

I remembered years ago, seeing heat tester cones in Jimmy's old portable kiln—how they turned to pools of liquid rock in the fire. Right now, Jimmy's eyes looked a little hotter than those cones.

"All we want to do," Garrett told me, "is build this damn kiln. You want to help, fine. You want to criticize, get your sorry ass home."

I looked at the halfbuilt little pig house.

I looked at my brother's fingers, scarred and bleeding and crusted with mortar.

My anger drained away, left a taste in my mouth not unlike a TV dinner tray.

I said, "Hand me a trowel."

CHAPTER 3

By seven o'clock, we'd built the exterior walls four feet high around the cook box. The chimney and the doorway arch were finished.

The sun was sinking behind the hills on the far side of the lake. My skin itched from sweat and lime dust, my shoulders felt like sandbags, and I was thinking warm thoughts about cold margaritas.

I can't say I felt any better about being around Jimmy and Garrett, but I'd managed to keep my mouth shut and coexist with them for an afternoon.

Jimmy surveyed our masonry.

"Good," he decided. "Got to place the kiln goddess."

He ambled to his pickup and came back with a ceramic statuette—a misshapen female gargoyle glazed a nasty shade of KoolAid red. With great reverence, Jimmy placed her over the doorway, readjusted her a few times to get the angle right.

Garrett said, "What the hell is that?"

"Kiln goddess. You know—keep my pots from breaking. Keep them from turning out ugly. I'm naming her Ruby."

Garrett grunted. "You're a masochist."

I wasn't sure Jimmy knew what that word meant, but he grinned slowly. "Stayed friends with you, haven't I?"

Garrett let him have the point.

We left Garrett's van and Jimmy's pickup at the kiln site, piled into my Ford F150, and drove back up the gravel road to Jimmy's house.

The white dome was visible from just about anywhere on the lake—an upsidedown radar dish Jimmy had gotten cheap from a military salvager when Bergstrom Air Force Base closed down. He'd hauled the thing up here piece by piece, reassembled it at the top of his six acres, insulated it, wired it for electricity, and bingo: a two thousandsquarefoot fibreglass igloo.

We stayed long enough to use the outhouse, grab barbecue supplies, stock the ice chest. Jimmy loaned me a fresh shirt that said RACAfest '98. We loaded my Ford and rumbled back down to the waterfront, where we proceeded to use Jimmy's new kiln as our cooking pit.

The summer sun had just set. A line of clouds was thickening on the horizon, charging the air with the metallic smell of storm. Around the curve of Jimmy's cove, the wind blew black lines across the water, dipping the buoys in the boating channel. In the distance, I could make out the edge of Mansfield Dam—a concrete monolith turning blue in its own shadow.

Garrett made the fire. Jimmy marinated fajitas in Shiner Bock and jalapeno juice, snapped a branch off the nearest wild sage plant to use as a basting brush. I mixed highoctane margaritas and poured them into Jimmy's handmade ceramic goblets.

We watched the sunset fade to purple and the storm clouds roll in. Nobody said a word about anything important.

After dinner, lightning traced veins in the clouds. The chirr of crickets replaced the daytime hum of cicadas. Flames glowed in the doorway of the kiln, washing the ugly little goddess in orange light.

Leave it to me to ruin a perfectly good ceasefire.

"Techsan," I said. "Give me the full story."

Jimmy reclined against a mesquite, putting himself back into the shadows.

Garrett looked toward the kiln—the shelves of unfired pots, their plastic cover ballooning in the breeze. "You ever make yourself a promise, little bro? Tell yourself someday, you'll do suchand such?"

"Play pro ball," I answered. "Be a Fellow at Christ College. Neither happened."

Garrett nodded. "I told myself years ago I was going to make a quick fortune, get out of programming, spend the rest of my life hitting Buffett concerts and Caribbean islands.

Jimmy, he wanted to settle down making ceramics right here. Am I right, Jimmy?"

"You're right," Jimmy murmured from the shadows.

"Then we turned thirtyfive, little bro. Then we turned forty."

"You quit your job," I said. "Sixteen years, and you quit."

In the firelight, Garrett's face looked as red as the kiln goddess'.

"Maybe you can't understand. We've been in Austin, Jimmy and me, way before the hightech boom. We go back to the Apple lie days—working our little grunt jobs in the big companies, making peanuts. Then suddenly we start seeing twentyyearolds getting signup bonuses for four times our yearly salaries, zitfaced kids at UT writing programs for their undergrad theses and retiring multimillionaires the next year, bought out by venture capitalists. It's fucking unreal. Jimmy and me—we realize we've missed the Gold Rush. We were born too early. You have any idea how that feels?"

"So you decided to risk a startup company," I said. "And you screwed up."

His eyes had a look of vacant anger, like an old soldier struggling to remember the details of a battle. "Mr. Sympathy. All right, yes. We screwed up. Lady named Ruby McBride—somebody Jimmy and I knew from way back. She invited us for drinks at this bar she owns down at Point Lone Star—she owns a whole fucking marina, okay?

Ruby said she had some money to invest. She'd done some programming, had some ideas for a new encryption product. She wanted our help. The three of us agreed we could do something big together— something we could control all the way from the planning stages to the IPO. Ruby and Jimmy . . ."

Garrett paused. "Well, you know about Doebler Oil."

It took Jimmy a moment to react.

Then he leaned forward into the light, frowned, and swiped the margarita thermos.

"Goddamn it, Garrett. You know Doebler Oil didn't cut me a cent."

"Whatever, man," Garrett said. "You had money. So did Ruby. I didn't, and I wanted to be an equal partner."

"So you mortgaged the ranch," I said.

"We expected a quick profit," Jimmy put in. "Our product kicked ass. Tech companies with programs a lot less solid than ours were seeing their public stock offerings quadruple the first hour of trading. All we figured we had to do was keep alive that long— finance the product through betatest phase, keep the investors excited. It's like a poker game, Tres. The longer you stay in, the bigger the pot."

I looked at Jimmy Doebler, then at Garrett. I felt like I'd been dropped into a camp of defective mountain men, trying to figure out how to get beaver pelts traded on Wall Street. I said, "No wonder things went bad."

Garrett glared at me. "As of January, smartass, we were flying high. Mr. Doebler here even convinced himself he was in love— went off and got himself married to our lovely third partner."

Jimmy shoved the thermos back into the dirt, took a slug of his second drink. "Leave her alone, Garrett."