Aaron Elkins - Skull Duggery

More appreciative honking from Tony. “Damn right. Now you’re getting the picture.”

Clearly, he was used to having his parades rained on and perhaps was even amused by it. It was also clear that none of their opinions on the temazcal were, or ever had been, factors in the decision. The thing was settled, had been settled before he ever brought it up. The Hacienda Encantada would have the first temazcal in the Valley of Oaxaca, or more accurately the first temazcal in a thousand years or so. He would have preferred that they like the idea, but if they didn’t, he’d have no trouble living with the fact.

He looked up with interest as Dorotea herself led her nieces in bringing in more food. “Hey, here comes the main course,” he said, picking up a knife and a fork in his fists. “Whoa, look at that! Are you kidding me? Is that caguesa? My favorite dish in the whole damn world! Dorotea, you outdid yourself again.”

Dorotea responded with an ungracious shrug and said something in spanish; “You always did like peasant food,” Gideon thought it was. This was not a woman who went out of her way to butter up her boss. Or anyone else, as far as he could see. Presumably she got away with it on the strength of her famous cooking.

Indeed, the caguesa turned out to be a pungent and delicious stew of chicken, tomato, and toasted corn, perfectly flavored with garlic and served with melt-in-your-mouth fresh corn tortillas and rice. Once a few spoonfuls had been put away, individual conversations resumed. With Tony and Julie reminiscing about family matters and members unfamiliar to him, he tried conversing with Josefa, who was seated on his left. (“I understand Tony is your nephew?” “Are you originally from Teotitlan?” “Have you always lived here?”) But she was intently focused, first on cleaning her silverware with her fingernails and her napkin, then on eating her meal, and even when he tried the questions in Spanish, the only thing he got out of her other than si s and no s was an unsolicited comment about Preciosa:

“I bet she no back next year,” she said with satisfaction, jerking her head in that lady’s direction. “She getting old. Look at them hands, all them veins, all them bumps. She get all the face-lifts she want, she still an old lady. Always you can tell from the hands.” As before, the remarks were made, not quite to Gideon, but to some invisible person now a few feet behind him, now just in front of him, sometimes a few feet above him. He wondered if she might not be aware that she was expressing her thoughts aloud.

In any case, he had to admit (to himself), she did have a point. Preciosa’s veiny, arthritic hands were a good twenty years older than her face. It was the sort of thing he ought to have noticed, or so he thought, but somehow he never did. He revised her age upward to the fifties, probably the late fifties. Well, he’d always had trouble judging a woman’s age, at least when she still had flesh on her bones.

He gave up on talking to Josefa and tuned back in to the conversation between Julie and Tony. “I used to envy you all so much,” Julie was saying. “I would have given anything to have grown up here on the Hacienda, the way you and Jamie did.”

Tony, who had been guzzling steadily but seemed no drunker than before (nor any less, either), paused in shoveling stew into his mouth and gave a low, gravelly laugh. “Like Jamie, maybe, but not like me.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

Tony looked puzzled. “You mean you don’t know the story? Of my misspent youth? Sure, you do.”

“No, she doesn’t, Tony,” said Carl, who was sitting on Julie’s other side. “Don’t you remember? She was just a wide-eyed kid back when she was working summers here. We all figured there was no point in loading all that baggage on her. You did too. So no, she doesn’t know, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s still no point.”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Disappointed, Tony went back to eating.

“Now, wait a minute, you two,” Julie said, putting down her fork. “Just you wait one cotton-pickin’ minute. I am no longer a wide-eyed kid, and I am certainly not innocent. I am a worldly, experienced, married woman. You should hear some of the things Gideon talks to me about. If there’s something about this family that I don’t know about, I want to hear it.”

“Aw, Julie…” Carl began, and Gideon could see from her suddenly frozen expression that she was kicking herself, having suddenly realized that it might have to do with Blaze, a subject she now knew to be so painful to Carl. But it didn’t, as Tony made clear.

“You’re absolutely right,” he said, perking up. “Time you found out what a hell-raiser your Uncle Tony was. Which reminds me, you’re plenty old enough to drop that ‘Uncle’ shit now-hey, sorry, pardon my language. Anyway, it makes me feel a hundred years old, besides which I’m not your uncle in the first place, I’m your-” He scowled. “What am I to her, Gid? Anything?”

“Well, let’s see,” Gideon said. “Carl is her uncle, and you’re Carl’s brother-in-law, so that would make you her… nothing. You’re not genetically related, and while some cultures would have a formal name for the relationship, we don’t.”

Tony nodded his satisfaction. “See? I’m nothing,” he said to Julie. “Plain old Tony.”

“You’re on,” Julie said, clinking glasses with him. “From now on you’re nothing to me; plain old Tony.” She was on her second beer, and the buzz was showing a little. There was something about beer that had always gone quickly to her head. “Now let’s hear the story.”

“Okay. First of all, I was a confirmed dope addict by the age of twelve…”

She laughed, thinking he was joking, as did Gideon.

“No, I’m serious,” Tony insisted. “Jamie, was I a dope addict or not?”

“You were a dope addict,” confirmed Jamie, who was sitting two seats down, on the other side of Carl. “But it wasn’t your fault, Tonio. What happened to you was a damned shame. You were just a little kid, how could you know what was going on?”

“Thanks, Jaime, I appreciate that.”

Gideon had noticed earlier that they sometimes used the Spanish versions of their names when they were feeling affectionate or familial. Tony was Tonio, Jamie was Jaime, Carl was Carlos, Annie was Anita. “But the truth is the truth. Julie, Gideon, you’re looking at the man who was the world’s youngest speed freak. However, let me point out that from that point on in my life… from that point on, I went rapidly downhill.” Another brief, rolling, belly-shaking laugh, but not as hearty as his earlier ones. This man sure laughs a lot, Gideon thought. It wasn’t hard to take in small doses, but he’d be hell to live with. “Seriously, I was, like, nine years old when it started; ten at most.”

He was looking at Julie and Gideon as he spoke, but once again he was really addressing the table at large. This time he had their honest attention. It might have been a familiar story to them, but apparently that didn’t make it any less engrossing.

“You see,” he said, “as a kid, I was kind of overweight.”

“You mean, as opposed to now?” Julie asked with a giggle. She was a little under the influence, all right.

“Hey, watch your mouth!” Tony said, reaching out to tousle her hair. “No, I mean really overweight.” He puffed out his cheeks to illustrate. “Remember, Jamie?”

“Not too well,” Jamie said. “When you were twelve, I was only three years old.”

“Oh yeah, I keep forgetting,” Tony said. “It’s because you’re always acting like my older brother, not my younger brother. Anyway…”

Anyway, Vincent Gallagher, Tony’s father, had been distressed, maybe obsessed, over his son’s weight, Tony explained. The senior Gallagher had dreamed from the beginning that Anthony, his firstborn, would inherit and run the ranch some day, and a waddling, three-hundred-pound cowboy didn’t fit the picture he had in mind. He had tried all kinds of remedies and had finally taken Tony to a weight-reduction specialist in Oaxaca, a doctor who had prescribed what was then the trendiest, most up-to-date reducing drug available: methamphetamine.