ALEX HATED DRINKING ALONE.
Alcohol was for social settings—for music and dancing, sporting events live or televised, national holidays, family celebrations. Alcohol took the edge off, made things smoother and easier, made himself and other people smarter and more appealing. Words and dance steps came quicker and better; anxiety and tension dissolved, leaving clarity, lucidity, wisdom, charm, dashing good looks and a better singing voice. What was the point of any of that without other people around?
He could have gone to a nice friendly bar, like Tito’s, and told his troubles to whoever was available. Maybe not his Lauren troubles, but his land troubles for sure. Everyone would sympathize. And when the bar closed, there was no reason he should go home alone. He could get company. Lots of women would be glad to have him, and he knew he was looking good because Tony had chosen his shirt.
But the only woman he wanted to be with had given him the heave-ho. He’d offered her everything he had, everything he was, and it wasn’t good enough. She’d climbed into her van and left him standing like an idiot in the middle of Navarro Road.
Just for an instant, as he’d made his plea out there between their two parked vehicles, he’d come within a hairbreadth of offering to go traveling with her. He hadn’t said it, but he’d thought it. And not five minutes later, he’d found out that he’d lost the land. It was as if fate had called his bluff.
So, yeah. He’d done enough talking already today. He’d more or less asked Lauren to marry him, and she’d turned him down. And now he’d never see her again. Even her little location blip was gone from his phone. The closest he’d ever get to her from now on was looking at her Instagram. As weeks and months passed it would fill with pictures of new places she was visiting without him. Eventually there would be pictures of the baby—a baby that would have called him Daddy if he’d had his way, but would grow up a stranger to him now.
And meanwhile, the land his ancestors had worked for the past two centuries would be carved into tracts for crude modern housing, to be bought up by a bunch of transplanted Californians.
He didn’t want sympathy, and he didn’t want company. He wanted oblivion.
So that’s how he came to be here, sitting on the rusted seat of a defunct tractor in front of his grandparents’ house, drinking tequila straight from the bottle.
Lauren had basically said she was leaving him to protect him—that it would be foolish of him to give up his dreams for her, and one day he’d wake up and realize she wasn’t worth the sacrifice, and blah, blah, blah.
But that was bull. This isn’t about you, it’s about me. Yeah, right. Just a token handout, a tossed crumb, a cop-out meant to allow him to salvage some self-respect.
“You’re not afraid of getting boxed in,” he’d told her. “You’re afraid of boxing me in.”
And she hadn’t denied it.
But when he’d said, “I love you,” she hadn’t said it back.
Still. He’d kissed her, and she’d kissed him back. And that memory was the worst torment of all.
He took another swallow of tequila. There was no worm in his bottle, no salt on his palm; he wasn’t some punk on spring break. The bottle was about half-full...or was it half-empty? And how many shots was that equal to? Not that it really mattered. The whole point of drinking from the bottle was to not keep track, to drink until you just couldn’t anymore.
The limestone walls of his grandparents’ house were streaked with red clay soil from where the rain had bounced up from the hard ground. The whole exterior needed a good pressure washing, and the clapboard lean-to addition had needed repainting since before Alex had his driver’s license. Every spring his grandmother had been full of hope that this would be the year the house got fresh paint, and every winter had found the boards a little bit shabbier. There was always something else to spend the money on—a tractor repair, feed during a drought. By the time she’d died, there’d been more bare wood than painted wood. By the time his grandfather died, even the last flakes of paint had gone.
Tears stung Alex’s eyes. Why hadn’t he just bought the paint himself and done the work? His grandfather wouldn’t have permitted it, of course, but he could have come in the middle of the night and gotten it done before anyone could stop him.
But what did any of that matter now? The house would be knocked down and all the boards and stones would be taken away.
Alex’s phone went off for like the millionth time that evening. He felt a wild surge of irrational hope that it was Lauren calling, followed by a dreary letdown when he saw Tony’s name on the screen. He knew he shouldn’t hope, but he couldn’t stop himself, and the hope was all mixed up with dread, because the odds were a hundred to one that he was about to be disappointed.
He could turn off the phone, but then if Lauren actually did call, he wouldn’t know it.
Modern conveniences were such a curse. If you were a nineteenth-century vaquero and your woman turned you down cold, that would be the end of it. She might write you a letter or track you down in person one day, but you wouldn’t be waiting every second for that to happen. You couldn’t look at her Instagram, either.
Calls from Tony had been alternating with calls from his mother. He kept hitting Reject. He knew Claudia must have told them about the land, and he didn’t want their sympathy. They would mean well, but they would tell him to let it go, and he simply could not bear to hear those words right now. Besides, they didn’t really know. The land had never belonged to his mom’s family, never been in her blood. And Tony had never loved the land like he did, besides which he already had La Escarpa. Claudia had struck the proper tone, but even she could only sympathize so much.
Everyone was always talking about how there was no use chasing something that wasn’t meant to be and how you had to bow to the inevitable. But was it really inevitable? The Alamo had been a lost cause from the start, but it ended up being the rallying point for the Texas Revolution—well, that and Goliad, which had been an even worse disaster. Bowie bayonetted on his sickbed, Fannin shot in the face, defenders and prisoners slaughtered without quarter—the carnage had been sickening, but it wasn’t for nothing.
What Alex needed now was a gesture. Something to make people take notice.
Would it accomplish anything? Maybe, maybe not. But he wouldn’t go down without a fight.
What should he do? It wasn’t like there was an actual bulldozer heading his way to knock down the house this very night. That would be kind of nice, actually. He’d prefer a concrete conflict to this hopeless legal wrangling. An adversary he could meet face-to-face.
No, he didn’t have a human enemy he could go at with musket and cannon and bowie knife. But he had an idea.