Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [22]
Chipper in his new clothes and increasingly well-rested—he had a sense of swimming through viscous green liquid toward a dim light—Lewis began to seek out intelligent conversation. Carl liked to talk about waterskiing. Lee punctuated the briefest exchanges with fast, furious jamming on the air guitar. Lawrence spoke knowledgeably of designer labels and suit cuts. The only person who displayed anything resembling a literate sensibility was the head honcho himself. Red Ray was the only speaker at AA meetings who didn’t put Lewis out cold: he was funny and modest, and once he’d even quoted from a Blake poem: “I give you the end of a golden string….” Also, when Red laughed, it was quiet, inward, almost like a sob. Lewis found this endearing, especially in such a large man.
The trouble was, everybody else wanted a piece of Red Ray, too. Whenever he came into the dining room, there was an obvious, communal hush. Hands reached for Red’s hand. Men interrupted their own conversations to greet him. This reminded Lewis of the time he and a girlfriend went to see a man who trained animals for Hollywood. The man had trained a bear for beer ads and a stag for insurance ads and now ran a riding stable. When the three of them walked out to the barn, the farm dogs leapt joyously in front of the trainer, dropping sticks and toys at his feet. In the corral, horses edged toward him, pushing and nudging and surreptitiously nipping at one another to get closer, to be the one spoken to and petted. That’s what it was like when Red Ray came into the Blue House—the same animal magnetism. As Red passed his table, Lewis didn’t reach out a hand, but inside he craned and yearned with the rest of them, one more beast nuzzling up.
ON HIS second Sunday, visitors’ day, Lewis felt strong enough—and social enough—to play softball. A diamond had been chalked into the base of the mansion’s gently sloping lawn. The game served primarily as a diversion for residents who, like Lewis, had no visitors, although a few visitors also played, and any number of Round Rock alumni arrived to flesh out the teams. Lewis was instructed to choose a side: Shitheads or Doodads. He chose the former—Red Ray was their pitcher—and thus made what he learned was a lifelong commitment. As the day warmed up, his teammates peeled off their sweatshirts, revealing T-shirts that read, ONCE A SHITHEAD ALWAYS A SHITHEAD. Lewis played both the morning and the afternoon game, back to back, a total of twenty-two innings. The next morning, his ninth at Round Rock, he could barely walk and couldn’t move his neck at all. Lewis was, in fact, in worse pain than when he was fresh out of detox, and John informed him that R & R was over and it was time to go to work.
WHEN Round Rock first opened, Red started out thinking—his first mistake, he always said—that if he put the drunks to work in the groves, the farm would support itself. This didn’t play out precisely as planned: the groves were in such a state of neglect, the handful of newly recovering alkies so shaky, and Red’s farming knowledge so halting that the first project—removing deadwood from a two-acre grove—took three months.
One day, on his way to the farm-equipment dealership in Buchanan, Red stopped in at Victor Ibañez’s grocería for cigarettes. The small, cavelike grocería was crammed with shelves of canned goods and fishing equipment, and racks of gloves, Chap Stick, sunglasses, and car deodorizers. Faded piñatas and dust-furred coils of chiles hung from the ceiling. Two highway patrolmen sat on stools near the register, and on the counter itself sat Billie Fitzgerald, who lived with her father and son in an historic adobe on the banks of the Rito River. It was Billie who had instigated the court orders to prevent Red from opening his drunk farm.
To give Billie room to leave or move, Red hung back by the bulletin board near the door, pretending to read ads for pygmy goats and lawn mower/outboard motor repair.
“Hey, Red Ray,” Victor Iba