The red Cadillac idles at 70 through the Texas Hill Country, past mesquite and live oak and working longhorn ranches. This is where we live, on the southern edge of Austin where the suburbs bleed into the postcard perfect cowboy country. Today Pearl and I are driving to a birthday party even further out, 45 minutes south of south. She is in the back seat, a bright splotch on the black leather in her bathing suit, a one piece thing with beach balls and frills. She doesn't want to wear it. She wants to wear nothing but her bikini bottom like she does in the summers when we go to Italy, but it's not done here. I can only see the top of her head in the rearview. She has only recently stopped wearing her Captain America Halloween costume every day. A head-to-toe red, white, and blue jumper. For Pearl, a serious matter, The Captain. She inhabits him. This is why we all still call her Cappy.
The air is on and the world is silent except the growl of the engine when I punch it on the hills. We're listening to Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again and Pearl is singing along, making up lyrics trying to get a rise out of me. It's a song all the kids know exactly. I've taught it to them like a medieval parent might have taught their child to recite the Pater Noster. It has that lovely Dylan architecture of verses stacked like a ziggurat about to collapse with a recurring refrain, but each verse is its own little surreal universe that feels like it was there in the pneuma when god separated the sky and the water.
I look back at her and she smiles and looks sideways. She has amazing presence. A decade younger than her brother and sister, she's the baby and has been treated as a living buddha from the start. We call her The Baby. As in: Don't make The Baby cry. Give The Baby what she wants. Let The Baby decide. You'd think she'd be spoiled, demanding, rotten. But she's not. She was born with the middle way as resting heart rate. Calm. Present. Watching everything with those enormous blue eyes with gravitational pull.
Pearl's been in her bathing suit all week. The air conditioner is broken and we've just been suffering it because we're all tired, waiting for rain. The topsoil is paper thin and fire warnings are constant. Eventually the hill country will ignite and be erased. She likes to fill up a giant bucket and sit in it on the front porch and talk to the scorpions and snakes and lizards and tarantulas. All of which she will readily pick up and make friends with, so we have to keep close watch. She's a country girl, born here. The tarantulas are a constant presence. Showing up like fluffy Miyazaki characters on bedroom walls. Raising up on hind legs and staring us down in the driveway when we pull in. They're harmless. Gentle. The kids always have one stowed away somewhere.
Yesterday her brother Walt learned a White Stripes song swinging beside her and her sister made a video. Sparky, aka Sparkles, fluffy yellow cat, lazed about next to the bucket with a lizard she'd picked off a tree. Its entrails relocated, the thing spinning around in circles like a demented clock hand, its guts stuck under Sparky's lazy paw. It all came to a screeching halt when Rachel pulled into the drive, home from work, and saw the lizard.
"What the fuck, Sparkles! Just kill it!" She tried to shoo her, but she didn't move.
"Leo, where are you? Are you not seeing this?"
I had been building a wall in front of our relatively modest stone facade house. The wall is just stacked limestone. I'd bought a four-wheeler and a trailer and had been excavating and dragging all the rock from our acreage. My neighbor Ted, who has an airplane and a French wife who wears thigh-high leather boots to cookouts, also has a tractor with a front loader. He helps me with the boulders. I think he does it because he wants to fuck Rachel and thinks the tractor is impressive. His property is behind mine, and he could just cross through the woods up to the wall in front, but he takes the road so he can arrive like a fucking Bolshevik prince entering Red Square. Not that he's a communist. He's definitely not, in spite of the French wife.
I heard the car pull in and had been making my way to the front porch.
"What's the big deal, Rachel? She's not gonna drown."
"Not the baby, Leo. The goddamn Marquis de Sade here. And they're just sitting here watching it."
She goes inside and loads up the martini shaker. She always goes in and starts clanking at the bar with ice and metal containers I don't understand. She's an alcoholic, a professional drinker. Or so I think. She doesn't agree. Or she just ignores me when I point out that she drinks out of need. Every day. On our 25th anniversary we flew to Chicago and stayed at the Hard Rock Hotel and did things neither of us remember. She threw up in the Uber after we'd eaten at that famous seafood place. Oysters and martinis. And we were Ubering to the next spot to keep it rolling, and we kept it rolling. I remember seeing her in the cab. Her eyes. She had drunk so fast and so much that she'd accidentally made a complete exit. She was gone. We were over then. I knew. Because she'd entered a world I didn't understand and she couldn't bear it and I couldn't help her.
That's when Ted arrived on his tractor. Walt kept playing his mandolin as all of them watched the Bolshevik procession. Debron was behind him on his Mule, the ATV thing everyone rides around in the neighborhood. We're all on four to ten acres and go about on ATVs like middle-aged children. Like we did on bicycles when we were kids. Debron is divorced and always has a beer in his hand. Oxygen for him. He's never drunk, always just in that state of glassy-eyed remove. On the edge of oblivion and always perilously close to getting murdered because he's obsessed with Ted's wife. He lives next to Ted, and late one night last year he pulled up in his Mule outside Ted's place, which is a sprawling Spanish influenced thing he calls the hacienda. Palatial, and all the trees have been razed around it, so its full expanse is laid bare. Debron just sat there in the shadows on his Mule, drinking and staring at the hacienda. And at Geneviève moving past the windows in her underwear smoking Gauloises. I mean, that's what he's imagining anyway. The truth is she married Ted because he's got a goddamn million dollars in the bank and an airplane. But when we had a giant bonfire from the brush Ted scraped off all our properties, she and I talked about Rimbaud and she wondered what actually happened to him after he started running guns in Africa. If he still wrote. So Debron has no chance. But that's part of his charm, I guess. He's filled his house with overstuffed leather couches and giant screen TVs, the kind of stuff you look at and immediately think—I'm not sitting on that. He's still living in 1970, listening to Townes Van Zandt and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and thinking about Geneviève. How do I know this? Because he tells me. We talk. He ends every conversation with some version of To Live Is to Fly. I think Ted's going to put a bullet in him eventually. Or me. Whoever gets to Geneviève first. We were at Laura and her husband's place—he's like wallpaper, a retired toy salesman who has a garage full of things on wheels he hands out to all the kids—but nice. Laura is spiritual. When we get together at her place we have to pray to "her" and give thanks for our vegan sausages and Geneviève's leather-wrapped thighs. Laura likes to talk about her friend Sandy. Oh yes, Sandy's in town. We talked about blah blah blah and she mentioned some other famous person that bores everyone to death. Sandy being the actress Sandra Bullock. She talks about Sandy like she's fucking Anna Magnani or something.
I scoop up the lizard in my gloved hand and Sparky tries to paw it back, fails, and I start walking toward Ted and Debron coming up with a boulder for the wall. I wave them down to the far end. Ted has it raised in his front loader like he's carrying the goddamn Olympic torch and he knows it. He's got a cigar hanging out his mouth. I forgive him all of it because the rock is perfect. The size of a small car. The end cap. The wall has thousands of stones and could quite possibly be seen on satellite imagery. It extends an acre at least, in front of the house along the road. The kids call it Papa's Great Wall of China. They've all been on the dangling end of a crowbar, wrenching limestone from the earth, stones that weigh more than them. Dragging them to the wall one at a time. Two years now. I've lost weight building it. Become nothing but sinew and muscle. Rachel thinks I've lost my mind. Ted and Debron know I've lost my mind, but they understand. It had to be built. There was nothing else to do but build this wall. I've decreased the value of our house with it, though. It's not professional work. It's "city boy shit," as Ted says. "But I admire the effort."
When Ted stops at the place we're going to drop the boulder, he and Debron climb out of their vehicles and Debron pulls some Shiners out from the back of his Mule. We pop them and look at the boulder, up in the sky.
"You got a new friend," says Debron, looking at the near-dead lizard in my hand.
I drop it. I was going to find a stone to put it out of its misery, but Debron just raised his fat sandaled foot and smashed it.
"What are you gonna do now, this thing's about done?" Scanning the Great Wall of China with his beer midway to his mouth, paused like a thought balloon.
"You need a wall?" I ask Debron.
"Like a hole in my head."
"Yeah, you got enough of those," said Ted.
"I don't know," I say. "He might need one more. Just to release the pressure."
"We all got holes to fill. And them holes are all that's real."
"Exactly," said Ted. "I got one in my backyard gettin' realer by the day."
"What?" Debron looked confused.
"He's drunk," said Ted. "Let's drop this baby before he remembers the next line."
I look back at the porch. Rachel is on the porch barefoot, black suit slacks still on. Her white collared shirt open, showing her breasts, a little. She's smiling wide and Walt's performing for her. They're singing and watching us.
"One was Texas medicine. The other was just railroad gin."
She sings her favorite bit loud because she's Texas proud.
"Like Moby Dick with his honky-tonk harpoon," I offer up. She's not impressed. Rolling her eyes at me.
"Are we almost there, papa?" she asks for the tenth time.
When we arrive I have to lean out the car because I missed the intercom. The iron gate opens and we idle past what appear to be castles, separated by cowboy pastoral elements—live oak, tumbleweed, old wagon wheels. On the exterior gate: THE VENETIAN. The name of the gated community.
Every house a stucco palazzo with arched loggias and clay barrel tile roofs the color of dried blood, the Mediterranean rendered in foam and Hardie board, forty minutes from the nearest grocery store.
Pearl's eyes are saucers. I'm holding her hand and have her backpack with her dry clothes and towel over my shoulder, cupcakes and baked beans in my other hand. She's hugging my leg, not letting go, and I'm worried I'm going to trip and drop the food. As we approach, a child pops out onto the Juliet balcony overlooking brush clearance on the side of the house. A sentinel.
Inside the pool gate, kids are running through all the crevices. In and out of the house, around the pool, in the yard, in the distance, in our faces—it's a little girl universe, all about six, all in the same ballet school in Austin, and an inordinate number of them named Sophie or Bella.
The mothers are all seated around a large table under an umbrella, all wearing bathing suits, drinking beer and mixed drinks. The only man I see is inside sitting at the bar in the kitchen.
The women all exude Texas friendly. I see them smiling, laughing, and when they see us they all turn, their faces open and they see my precarious situation. Hannah, the castle owner, gets up and moves to Pearl and me with a loud gigantic smile and the kind of lack of hesitation a good mother embodies automatically, and Pearl feels it. She lets me go and Hannah launches her into the pack.
Hannah sends me inside to put the food we brought—baked beans and chocolate cupcakes—on the kitchen bar. A giant Italian marble thing excavated from the quarries in Carrara, overstuffed with salads and meats and desserts and a giant punch bowl with pineapple bits and candy eyeballs floating in it.
On the far end of the bar, the lone man in the castle is nursing a beer and looking at the food like he can't decide where to start.
He's friendly, but not Texan. I notice immediately when he introduces himself as Oli Weiss. Because so many Texans are of German descent, Oli fits right in, until he speaks.
I pull up a stool next to him. He gets me a beer and we go about doing what men do in these situations, make the best of it. Both of us preparing to be bored to death by the other.
Oli tells me which Sophie is his, and I know her. Our daughters are friends in the class. He tells me his wife was a ballerina in New York, then she started a catering business when her knees wore out. In two minutes he's told me his life story. How he met her in New York when he was working on a Wim Wenders project as an editor—that's what he does, edits film. And I tell him one of my favorite films is Wings of Desire. He didn't work on that one. But he did work on Palermo Shooting, so we talk about that. We both know Palermo well. Me because I travel to Italy often, and my family is from nearby in Montelepre. We talk about the mountains of trash in the city.
Suddenly everyone is scrambling. We see Hannah walking around to the front of the house. We get up and walk through the loggia, barking and kids splashing in the pool echoing off the marble. And then we see it. Dogs in full sprint flying across the brush clearance, toward a delivery truck at the gate, a distant star. And behind the dogs, homeowners on ATVs with trailers.
"This is the place," Oli says, shaking his head, smiling.
"Do you miss Germany?" I ask.
"Always. But it doesn't matter. Sophie is in heaven here."
"Do you think you'll ever leave?" he asks me.
"We talk about selling everything and moving to Italy, but Rachel won't ever give up her job. We waited too long."
"Got in too deep," he says, smiling still. "But you're Italian, right? Sophie says you guys go there a lot."
"We're Italian citizens, yeah. But we're not really Italian. We make longhorn Bolognese on Sundays and the kids take Italian lessons."
We fill our plates with barbecue chicken and beans and coleslaw. Nobody's eating. It's just us and this feast. I see the mayonnaise wet and oozing into the baked beans and the perfect browned skin on the chicken and my jaw tenses up with anticipation of the pleasure.
I've never seen Palermo Shooting, so I talk about Wings of Desire. Oli is from Berlin, the film's setting. He was seventeen when it came out. He tells me about cutting black-and-white angel footage against color human footage before digital, the photochemical nightmare of it, the A/B negative cuts and dupe generations that gave the angel scenes their strange tint. How the editor had to pace all those layered internal monologues—the symphony of voices—against Alekan's slow crane shots. How the film is a time capsule of West Berlin as an island city, claustrophobic and timeless, surrounded by the Wall. How old Homer wanders the wasteland of Potsdamer Platz looking for a world that no longer exists. I understand little. But I understand Homer.
"It's a handmade, black-and-white world that no longer exists," he says. "And here, Paul Newman in a tuxedo, finger-gunning fans, in black and white. Poof."
We're a little drunk on beer and mutual admiration.
Out the sliding doors I see Hannah go toward the pool. She takes her wrap off and tosses it into a lawn chair.
"I'm gonna swim," I say.
I walk out and the sun blinds me.
"Where are the girls?" I ask.
Hannah is holding herself on the side of the pool with her arms spread wide. A cigarette in one hand. She's separated herself from the others to smoke.
"Watching Paddington Two," she tells me. "Sophie watches it constantly."
"Did you get yourself some food?"
"Yes, too much. Thank you for everything. You have a lovely place."
She takes a drag of her cigarette and smiles.
"It's big," she says. "Very Italian. Almost like being in Venezia, right?"
She says Venezia, not Venice, and pronounces it correctly.
"You sound like you've been there."
"Sure. We went on our honeymoon and then just kept going back. Jake found this place and built it. It's like being in San Marco, but with ATVs and shotguns." She laughs and takes a drag. "I actually like Padova better, but it's too late to turn back now."
She sees me looking at her cigarette and raises her eyes, and offers it to me.
"I quit about ten years ago," I say.
"Me too."
She hands me the cigarette. I look over my shoulder to make sure Pearl's not creeping up on me, and take a drag. Pearl wouldn't care necessarily, but if she told Rachel I was smoking cigarettes in the pool with a woman it'd be a whole thing. Mainly because quitting smoking a thousand times has put them all through hell repeatedly. They don't want to see that monster ever again. But Hannah is beautiful. And the sky is blue, too blue. And I'm a little drunk. I take a long drag. The filter is wet from her lips and I like that. I hand it back to her and she looks at me squarely in that West Texas way that says she sees me in full and she's got me. I fall back into the deep and let myself sink, slowly like a reverse skydiver.
I detach. And my heartbeat is audible. Hannah a Braque portrait dissipating into the vast Texas sky. I see her put the cigarette out on the edge of the pool. I hear the women laughing at the table. One of them shops at Sam's Club, not Costco.
"She just ignores status markers. She thinks she's above it all."
"She drives a pickup too."
"We all drive pickups, Gabby."
"I don't!"
"Well, you're not from around here, are you?"
"I mean, is Fort Worth not from around here?"
"Different world, sweetie."
And then I hear the screams and metal chairs scraping against the patio. I jump out of the pool and follow the women running inside trying not to slip, and we're immediately met by a wall of screaming girls coming from the theater. As we round the corner I feel Hannah behind me, and then I hear a thud. She's down. The girls burst through, screaming Tarantula. I look behind me and Hannah has her leg twisted behind her, her bathing suit shifted, exposing her. She raises her hand to me and I look down at her, and her exposure, and she registers my eyes, and drops the hand to shift her suit back in place. She's tearing up. The other women gather around her and help her right herself and then to her feet. I turn away. I search for Pearl in the frantic Sophies and Bellas, but she's not there. They're all talking a thousand miles an hour and seem to be mostly performing terror.
Then, she's there. Walking from the theater on tiptoes in her Captain America outfit. Hood up, barefoot. Pearl has the tarantula in her palm and is talking to it in soothing tones.
Pearl walked to the middle of the expanse between the house and the road, where the dogs had raced through earlier, and set the tarantula down at the base of a tree.
I watch and wait for her from the car. I roll down all the windows so we can feel the afternoon heat dissipate into evening and smell the cedar and dust and something like chalk, the whole Hill Country ossifying around us.
Pearl finishes and turns to find me waiting. I can see in her walk that she's tired. As she crawls into the back seat and buckles herself in she asks, "Will she be able to find her family from there?"
"Of course darling. Tarantulas are like birds, not people. They know which direction to go automatically."
I turn the radio off and idle the car and we float and the captain drifts off to sleep as the sun goes down. I return to the wall, which Rachel refers to as my rattlesnake habitat. I wear cowboy boots and thick gloves when I work because she's right, as she usually is. I remember last fall when I was burning brush and Ted was fighting with Debron over who borrowed whose chainsaw, and then whether the tops of the trees were going to spontaneously combust from the fire's radiant heat. Ted said it wouldn't be spontaneous. That spontaneous combustion was the wrong concept. I walked away. It was almost dark, and I could see Rachel and the kids through the back window overlooking the deck and the woods I was standing in. I picked up a stray oak stump with a hollow center and roots splayed out like gorgon locks. One Walt wanted to save I reckoned, but had forgotten. I raised it up to toss it in the fire and there in its hollow was a rattlesnake, coiled, asleep. I panicked and without thinking, launched it into the fire. I've been reliving that moment ever since.
We pull through the gate from the blacktop onto gravel and the sound under the wheels is a comfort as we wind through our less grand version of the Venetian—solar panels, rainwater collection, and salt water pools. I look through the trees to Debron's property. The headlamps on his Mule blink on and off, on and off.