Rick Riordan - The Devil went down to Austin

I thought about the hundreds of times I'd watched the sun come up over the Balcones Escarpment from here, the topography like an onion, layer upon translucent layer-my first hunting trip with my dad, a dozen Thanksgiving dinners, my first night with a woman, three hurricanes, two fires, even a snowstorm. I remembered my grandfather, over there by the northern property line, digging holes for fence posts.

And even after six weeks of manual labour, rebuilding my relationship with the ranch, I could still feel that Sunday afternoon last April, down in the clearing, when I'd almost died at the hands of an old friend.

All I wanted was a few more weekends, time to scrape paint.

"Look, Lars, I won't say I'm not worried. But Garrett and Jimmy-what you're describing. Unfortunately, it sounds pretty typical. I appreciate your concern…"

"You don't understand," Lars said. "Garrett needed capital for his share in the Techsan startup. A lot of capital. With his financial record, nobody else would help him. I hate even talking to you about this, Tres. I know you don't have a lot of money."

I tried to hand back the computer disk. "If you made my brother a loan, I'm sorry, Lars.

I don't see how I can help you."

"I couldn't talk him out of it," he said. "The deed is in his name. He made me promise not to worry you, but when he signed the papers he still had a steady job. Now… He hasn't made a payment in over a year.

It's just-I don't know what I can promise, come July first. My boss is breathing down my neck."

My heart twisted into a sailor's knot. "July first?"

Lars pinched the blade of his knife, threw it toward an old live oak stump, where it stuck straight up.

"Garrett mortgaged this ranch, Tres. And Unless I see something-a sign of good faith by the end of this month, I'm going to have to foreclose."

San Antonio and Austin are like estranged siblings.

San Antonio would be the sister who stayed home, took care of the elderly parents, made tortillas by hand in the kitchen, wore cotton dresses until the colours faded.

She's the bigboned one- handsome but unadorned, given to long afternoon siestas.

Austin is the sister who went away to college, discovered rock 'n' roll, and dyed her hair purple. She's the one my mother would've warned me about, if my mother hadn't been an exhippie.

That afternoon I figured out why God put the two sisters seventy five miles apart. It was to give irate siblings like me a coolingoff period-an hour on the road to reconsider fratricide.

Around two o'clock, I finally tracked down my brother. A friend of a Hell's Angel of a friend told me he was staying at Jimmy Doebler's place on Lake Travis.

Sure enough, they were down by the water, building something that looked like the third little pig's house. It was a kiln- pottery being Jimmy's second oldest hobby, next to getting Garrett in trouble.

From fifteen feet away, Jimmy and Garrett hadn't noticed me.

Jimmy was hunched over, tapping down a line of bricks.

Garrett was up on a scaffold, five feet above, doing the chimney. His ponytail had flipped over the shoulder and gotten stuck in a splot of wet mortar. Sweat glistened in his beard. He made an odd sight up there, with no legs, like some sort of tiedyed polyp grown out of the board.

The afternoon heat was cooking the air into soup. In the crook of a smoke tree, a jam box was cranking out Lucinda Williams' latest.

"Garrett," I called.

He looked down as if he'd known I was there all along, his expression as friendly as Rasputin's.

"Well," he said. "My little brother."

Jimmy wiped his hands on his tattered polo shirt, straightened.

He hadn't aged well. His face had weathered, his mop of sand castle hair faded a dirty gray. He had the sunblasted look of a frat boy who'd gotten lost on Spring Break thirty years ago and never found his way out of the dunes.

"Hey, man." He cut his eyes to either side, wiped his nose. "Garrett said you wouldn't be up until your class started."

"Wasn't planning to be," I said. "Then I talked to the family banker. That kind of changed things."

Garrett stabbed his trowel between two scaffold planks. "This ain't the time, Tres."

"When would be the time, Garrett? Next month-when they stick the FOR SALE sign on the front gate of the ranch?"

Lucinda Williams kept singing about her mamma. The bottleneck flew across her guitar.

"What do you want?" Garrett asked. "You want to take a punch at me?"

"I don't know. Are you filled with money?"

Garrett climbed down from the scaffold-one hundred percent upper body strength.

He settled into his Quickie wheelchair-the deluxe model with the Holstein hide cover and the Persian seat cushion. He pushed himself toward me. "Come on. You've driven all this way pissed off at me. Take a swing."

He looked terrible. His skin was pasty, his eyes jaundiced. He'd lost weight-Christ, a lot of weight. Maybe fifteen pounds. He hardly had a gut anymore.

I said, "I want an explanation."

"It's my ranch."

"It's our ranch, Garrett. I don't care what it said in the will."

He puffed a laugh. "Yeah, you do. You care a whole shitload."

He jerked the macrame pouch off the side of his wheelchair, started rummaging through it-looking for his marijuana, his rolling papers.

"Would you not do that?" I asked.

"Do what?"

I grabbed the bag.

He tried to take it away from me, but I stepped back, felt how heavy the thing was, looked inside. "What is this?"

I came out with a handgun, a Lorcin. 380.

"What did you do-buy this on the street?" I protested. "I took one of these away from a fourteenyearold drug dealer last week. Since when do you carry something like this?"

Complete stillness. Even Lucinda Williams paused between songs.

"Look, Tres," Jimmy said. "Back off a little."

I checked the Lorcin. It was fully loaded. "Yeah, you're right, Jimmy. Garrett's got you on his side now. Everything's under control."

It was a cheap shot.

Jimmy shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His face turned the colour of guava juice.

"We're working things out," Garrett told me.

"With a gun?"

"Jimmy and I made a pact for the day, man. No arguing. You want to stay here, abide by that rule."

His tone made me remember trips to Rockport when I was in middle school, Jimmy and Garrett college kids, forced to babysit me while my dad got drunk down on the jetties. Garrett had resented me tagging along, told me to shut up so they could meet some girls. The memory brought back that irrational anger, shaped in the mind of an elevenyearold, that this was all Jimmy Doebler's fault-that he had always inserted himself into our lives at the wrong time.

I shoved the Lorcin back into the bag, tossed it to Garrett. "Lars Elder passed along some headlines you've been making in the hightech magazines. Betatesting problems. Glitches in the software. I didn't understand half of it, but I understood several million in debt. Millions, Garrett, with six zeroes. And your friend here wants me to back off? "

Jimmy said nothing.

Garrett rummaged in the bag, found a prerolled joint, stuck it in his mouth. "If we thought it was your business-"

"You pawned the ranch."

"And Jimmy got divorced today," he yelled. The joint fell out of his mouth, into his lap.

"Okay, Tres? So shut the fuck up."

His voice wavered, was closer to breaking than I'd ever heard.

Jimmy Doebler stared down at his unfinished brickwork.

I remembered years ago, seeing heat tester cones in Jimmy's old portable kiln-how they turned to pools of liquid rock in the fire. Right now, Jimmy's eyes looked a little hotter than those cones.

"All we want to do," Garrett told me, "is build this damn kiln. You want to help, fine. You want to criticize, get your sorry ass home."