Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [105]
“How are you doing?” he asked.
She wrote down a figure before answering. “I’ve got to get these measurements.”
Lewis waited, thinking she’d talk to him when she finished writing, but she walked over and began measuring another window.
He found Red staining shelves in the library, a wood-paneled room with a large fireplace built of oblong riverstone. Red’s T-shirt had sickening-looking brown smears on it.
“Need some help?”
“Well, hello. Sure,” said Red. “My carpenter’s wife broke both her legs, so he’s got to take care of her. My painter can’t start for two weeks. And we need to move in before this baby arrives.” He went off to find another brush and Lewis heard him talking to Libby in a low voice.
“Should I leave?” he asked when Red returned.
“No. Please. I’ve hardly seen you since you got here.” Red handed him the brush. They applied a first coat of urethane to finely made, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Lewis could see Red in here in his dotage, the color bleached from his hair, his skin papery and pink, eyes twinkly as he read to his children—or grandchildren, maybe—Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Rose Red, The Red Balloon.
“Been hearing good things about your cooking,” Red said.
“Come see for yourself.”
“Thought I’d give you some time to get the hang of it.”
“I’m ready. Bring Libby too, if she wants….”
“Will do. And you and David might think about coming to the Old Bastards. You’re welcome, you know.”
“Even if I only have three and a half years of sobriety?”
“It’s open to all professionals,” Red said. “Might make working here easier on you.”
“I’ll think about it,” Lewis said.
They got into a rhythm, slapping the brushes this way and that. Several times, Lewis almost mentioned his disappointment in not seeing more of Red. But here they were, painting side by side, a paragon of male bonding. Why make a big deal out of it? He was dragging the drop cloth over to the fireplace mantel when Libby appeared in the doorway. “Red,” she said, ignoring Lewis completely, “I’m starving. If I don’t get something in my stomach right away I’m going to throw up this baby.”
LEWIS found David behind the mansion working on a float for the Fourth of July parade. Men were trimming the trailer, looping red, white, and blue crepe paper around bales of hay while one guy was trying to figure out how to secure a flagpole to the trailer bed.
“Can I borrow you for a minute?” Lewis asked, and they walked a distance from the float builders. “I think I need one of your … you know … ritual things.”
“Let’s do it,” said David.
Before he moved into his second-floor quarters in the Blue House, David had removed all the furniture, taken up the carpet, painted the walls a clean white, sanded the floors, and applied coats of polyurethane until the mottled hardwood looked like still brown water. In the first room was a low, round table with a glass globe filled to the brim with agua preparada, the curandero’s clear, basic medicinal fluid. An altar occupied one corner of the room—candles and branches, bones and flowers, arranged beneath large painted-tin retablos of Santo Niño and the Virgin, around which hung smaller retablos and, on dressmaker pins, many silver and tin milagros of animals, disembodied limbs, hearts, stomachs, and tiny trucks, buses, passenger cars.
David closed and locked his door.
“It’s Libby,” said Lewis. “She hates me.”
David had adopted the basic Round Rock uniform of jeans and a white T-shirt. His long hair was twisted into a knot at the base of his head; his brown skin was smooth, his arms rivered in veins. A red string with bone beads hung around his neck. He lit the candles in front of his altar, then swept a space on the floor and asked Lewis to lie down. He gave him an egg to hold in one hand and a short, sturdy stick for the other.
“I feel,” Lewis said, “like I’m being prepared for burial.”
David smiled. “You are, in a manner of speaking,” he said, and crossed Lewis’s hands over his chest, pulled one leg a little to the left, aligned his head with his