Free Big Red Tiquila - Rick Riordan by Rick Riordan Page B

hazy
crashed feeling you get when adrenaline stops flowing. I tried to
muster up a smile. “Look, it’s fine."
    She turned and stared through the windshield.
    "You’re my only boy, Tres."
    She has tremendous strength, my mother. Despite all
her eccentricities, she can harden to steel in sixty seconds flat in
a crisis. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her cry, or look as shaken
as she had a few moments before. Now she smiled at me, reassuringly.
When I bent and kissed her on the cheek, I could feel the slight
tremble in her skin.
    “ Call me tomorrow," she said.
    After she drove away I went inside and locked the
door. Robert Johnson sniffed my legs for the strange odors of Red and
Tattoo while I sat in the dark and called Lillian’s number.
    Her answering machine didn’t pick up after ten
rings. Lillian should have been home from Laredo by now. It was
almost ten o’clock. She was there, I decided glumly, choosing to
ignore the phone.
    I stared at the coffee table, at the packet of old
news clippings Carlon McAffrey had given me that afternoon, my
father’s grinning face still on top. Looking at his picture, I
realized how badly I needed to see Lillian tonight. I needed
something clean and physical with her that wasn’t part of our past.
I pushed the news clippings onto the floor.
    Then I went to the refrigerator and got two items I’d
picked up at Pappy’s Grocery in a moment of whimsy: a six-pack of
Big Red and a bottle of tequila. I went out to the VW. A summer
thunderstorm was coming in over the Balcones Escarpment, but I took
the top down anyway. Then I drove toward Monte Vista, thinking about
the future.
 

    15
    There is no place in San Antonio quite as lonely as
the Olmos Basin. You can drive across the dam road at night, looking
over an ocean of live oaks, and see no sign of the city that
surrounds you. Just you, your car, and the dam. Unless you are my
mother’s old high school chum, Whitley Strieber. Then I guess you
have the UFOs to keep you company.
    Tonight, diffused flashes of lightning illuminated
the Basin, turning it from black to deep green. Thunder rolled over
the tops of the trees like oil over the surface of a hot pan.
    Up and down Acacia Street, dogs were barking at the
storm. Lillian’s house was dark except for the small cranberry
glass lamp she kept on her bedstand. Fuchsia light seeped out through
the closed miniblinds. Her car was in the driveway.
    Next door five or six Rodriguez children, fearless
and unattended, roller—skated up and down the sidewalk in
semidarkness, screaming with joy every time the thunder cracked. The
music from inside their parents’ living room was muted tonight, as
if in deference to the storm.
    I pulled up to the curb and got out, carrying my Big
Red and tequila up to the front porch. Two grinning Rodriguez
children almost sideswiped me as I passed them.
    In the basket Lillian used for mail was a stack of
letters and ad circulars. Two newspapers on the porch. She could’ve
come in through the back. Or maybe she hadn’t taken her own car to
Laredo; maybe she was still gone. I thought about whose car she
might’ve taken to the border instead, and I didn’t like the
options I came up with.
    The buzzer didn’t work. I knocked as loudly as I
could on the frame of the screen door but it was very possible she
wouldn’t hear me. The wind was picking up. Ripped from their
branches, petals from Lillian’s crape myrtle and antique rosebush
were thrown across the yard like pink confetti.
    After three knocks I tried the door and found it
open.
    “ Lillian?"
    I put my six-pack and Herradura bottle down on the
coffee table and called her name again. There were magazines strewn
around the floor by the couch, typical of Lillian’s "read and
dump” method.
    Still the only light was the pink glow under the
bedroom door. I stuck my head in slowly, half expecting her to be
curled up under the covers. An unmade bed, a half-open underwear
drawer, but no Lillian.
    An