I opened my mouth, tried to stifle the words. “I knew Jim had bought you but I didn’t know he was buying up the whole family.”
I’d always been too smart by half, and I’d sat more than my fair share of days in detention back at Redrock for speaking when I shouldn’t have.
“Money matters, Michael,” she said, not even angry with me for my jab, pitying me for viewing myself as above whoring, as if, in its own way, that wasn’t what everyone was doing. And maybe they were.
I’d seen Jim glad-handing and flesh-pressing when he didn’t want to, smiling his face sore and working oily guys in snakeskin boots and turquoise bolo ties. Old Administrator Stevens was good at bootlicking the parents who had the money to invest in Redrock’s expansion, maybe a new wing here, or a satellite campus there, with even some talk of a planetarium when he was at his oleaginous best. He’d trail them as they made their tours of the rocky grounds like a stag following the scent of female estrous in rutting season.
Gotta serve someone, as the curly-headed bard and Nobel-laureate Robert Zimmerman once put it.
“Besides,” she added, open-toed pump pressed down on the gas pedal. “Your uncle has friends in high places. He doesn’t even need Jim or his money.” She stared through the tint of her glasses and that of the windshield, toward the sun turning the air to rippling warm waves on the horizon. “People loved him in Vegas when I worked there, almost as much as Benny Binion.”
All I knew about the guy was that he had been a boxer, a great one even, but then he’d gotten his brains beaten to mush, lost his title, lost his faculties and his wife, lost everything.
Now at least he had a house, and I was going there to live with him for the next month. I could have argued with Deborah more, but I knew her life was hard enough without me and my big mouth.
And I still loved her a bit more than I hated her.
CHAPTER TWO
CASA DE LUNA
The man was technically my great uncle, since he was my grandfather’s brother, but it was easier to just go with the flow and call him my uncle when talking with Deborah. I couldn’t exactly say why she kept in contact with him, except that perhaps unlike the rest of the male relatives in her family he had never tried to hit on her or borrow her money or car. Whether that was down to him being punch-drunk or if he had been a nice guy before that was also something I didn’t know.
“I’ll come get you at the end of the month, drive you back to Redrock.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
The weather was strange. Ripples of lightning followed each other so close that the sky seemed like a bug zapper ready to short-circuit after frying an army of dive-bombing moths. The sun had set, but its traces still dyed the thin cloud cover pink and threw the green cacti into black shadow.
The Range Rover rocked a bit as it passed first from asphalt to sand and then finally to hard caliche. The tires made a sound like a fat man taking a bite out of a hard shell taco as the treads gripped the ground.
“Can he talk?” I asked.
She watched me for a moment in the rearview, tapped the last of her Gauloises from the soft pack, and sparked it. “He’s getting better than he was. That’s all Luna told me.”
Luna?
My Spanish was barely good enough to know that meant “moon.”
We took the oxbow bend in what passed for the road and drove beneath a wooden entrance shaped like a massive horseshoe, on which someone had written “Ghost Gulch” in whitewash.
My uncle’s house came into a view a short time later. It was mud brick, a Spanish Mission-style hacienda with red-tile roof and honey-colored stone slabs cladding its sides. The sashed windows were heavy leaded glass, clear but still somehow as somber as stained glass.
To the right of that was a tin-roofed awning propped by split rails palisading three sides of a concrete apron. Along one wall of the open-faced garage was an ancient horse trough and hitching post set in the gravel, looking as big as planter boxes compared to the massive fishtailed Caddie in the center of the concrete pad. The only other car was a late model silver coupe parked to the right of the sky-blue Cadillac.
Debbie put the car in park in front of the house and got out, ditching her half-smoked cigarette and crushing it under her box heel. She shifted her purse across her body bandoleer-style, pushed her sunglasses up the bridge of her nose reflexively. I hefted my bag and got out after her. We walked up the stone walkway to the front door.
She clutched the brass knocker fitted in a massive oak door but the door pulled inward before she could knock. A whiff of lilac-light perfume hit me. Standing there was a beautiful Mexican girl with thick dark eyebrows and cocoa-brown skin, black hair pulled into a ponytail that spilled down her back. She wore a white ruffled peasant blouse patterned with roses, and low-cut jeans that left a bit of midriff exposed, across which she’d strung a gypsy coin-bejeweled belt.
Her eyes were heavy-lidded, with a sensuous droop to them, as if she’d gotten stoned and was trying to hide it. She smiled and the brightness of her white teeth was almost fluorescent in the fading twilight, and the sleepy-sexy eyes became half-alert as she took us in.
“Michael?” Her smile was impersonal but not fake.
“Moon,” I said, like a dumbass. I took her hand in mine and found her small fingers literally cold but somehow intimate. She grazed my hand as much as gripped it, and I went rigid in the hopes my blood would slow, not course toward my dick and embarrass me.
“Oh, ‘Luna,’” she said, “Sí, muy bien.’” She blinked, curtly endured my lame attempt to impress her.
Her bushy eyebrow arched. Don’t ask me why but I’d always found those caterpillar brows sexy on a girl.
She waved us in and then turned. My mother smiled, Luna’s easy manner having apparently put her at ease. Or perhaps she was eyeing the antiques, the rosewood cabinets and mahogany-cased player piano.
I tried to keep my mind clear, my senses a blank slate on which I refused to let anything emerge. I could steal glances at Luna throughout my month here, work up the nerve to get out monosyllable answers before I risked my voice cracking, and each night I could exorcise my demons and purge my urges as I saw fit so my crush wouldn’t be too obvious during the days when I had to deal with her, if I did.