Nobody accosted me. I hadn’t been in the cell phone videos they showed so many times on television, so my face wasn’t as well known as the rest of the so-called butchers. I was minding my own business with a glass of single malt when a little guy in shorts and sandals and a riotous Hawaiian shirt sat on the stool beside me. After a few minutes, he asked if I was from around there. I told him I was from Uvalde.
“Where is that?” he asked.
I told him it was about an hour and a half west, out past Hondo.
“No kidding?” he said. “That’s funny.”
I didn’t see the humor in it, but there didn’t seem to be much point in disagreeing. I went back to what I had been doing, which was drinking Scotch and thinking about what I ought to do with the rest of my life.
After a while the guy said, “How’d you like to make five hundred dollars?”
I wondered if I should get up and walk away, but he had kind of an earnest look about him in spite of the ridiculous getup, so I asked what I would have to do for the money.
“Just drive me around,” he said. “Out west, where you’re from.”
It turned out he was scouting locations for a motion-picture company that planned to shoot a film on location in southwest Texas. Parker, they planned to call it, about the mother of the last free Comanche chief, Cynthia Ann Parker, who was kidnapped by the Indians as a child and “rescued” twenty-five years later, only to starve herself to death when she wasn’t allowed to return to the tribe. Every Texan knew the story.
The little man’s name was Morton Saperstein, and he was pretty good company once I got past the New Jersey accent. We took my old Ford F-150 pickup on several forays out into the hill country over the next few days, Morton and me, with an ice chest filled with sodas and sandwiches on the seat between us. I took him up to Pipe Creek and Bandera and Kerrville, where he wanted to spend a lot of time looking for a spot to film along the Guadalupe River. We went out to Lost Maples and then back down to a spot I knew on the Frio River, called Comanche Crossing, which is near Concan. I suppose having grown up there, I was used to the idea that the countryside was littered with scenes straight out of John Ford westerns, but Morton was fascinated by the fact that there really, truly had been Indian massacres at various locations all around that country.
Morton suggested that I might want to work for the production company while they were in the area as a kind of driver-bodyguard. He mentioned the pay for six weeks of work, which was nearly what I had earned in half a year as a marine.
“You’d have to join the union,” he’d said.
I told him I was used to joining things and asked him whom I would be guarding.
He asked me if it mattered.
I said no, not really.
When the film company arrived nearly four months later, it turned out to be Haley Lane.
She and I didn’t talk much at first. I met her at the door of a house they had rented for her in Alamo Heights, walked her to the car—the production company had provided a dark green Range Rover—and drove her to the locations, most of which were places I had shown Morton. Sometimes she had her assistant with her in the backseat. They would review the morning’s lines together or talk about other business.
It was impossible to avoid hearing them, so I soon learned she had controlling investments in companies all over the world—mines, shipping companies, hotel chains, and so forth. It was obvious she managed her investments personally. She also spent a lot of time discussing things like hospitals in Ghana and orphanages in Mexico, and I began to realize she was talking about taking care of thousands of poor people.
I’ll admit to a certain reverse snobbery at first. I had expected a major movie star to be a self-absorbed fool. But by the end of the first week, before she and I had even had much of a conversation, I knew beyond a doubt she was one of the smartest and most generous people I had ever met.
The sun was rising behind us one morning as I drove her out of town. It was just her and me in the Range Rover that day. I sipped coffee from a thermos lid as we headed west on Highway 90. She was focused on some paperwork in back. Her cell phone rang. From her half of the conversation, I figured George Clooney had the flu and couldn’t work.
When she hung up the phone, I said, “Back to the house?”
She said, “I guess so.”
The highway rose over a hilltop about half a mile ahead. I slowed and made a U-turn to return to San Antonio. When the Range Rover was on the shoulder of the road, pointing east, she said, “Could we stop here a minute?”
I pulled a little farther off the highway. She opened her door, got out, and walked a few yards up ahead of the truck. I got out too, and stood beside the front bumper.
With her back to me, she said, “I had no idea Texas is so beautiful.”
Below us, row after row of hills rolled toward the horizon, the white limestone dotted with mesquite trees and glowing golden in the first rays of the sunrise. I said, “Yes.”
She looked back at me. “You’re from around here, aren’t you?”
“About forty miles farther west.”
“Would you do me a favor?”
“If I can.”
“I’ve been working pretty hard for a long time. I need a day off, and this country is so gorgeous. Would you take me someplace where I could relax a little? Maybe someplace only local people go?”
I drove her to Uvalde, where we stopped at Ramirez’s, a little place that used to be a burger stand but had been converted long before to serve Mexican food. You walked up to a window, placed your order, and paid Jane Ramirez, and one of her daughters brought your meal out to you at the picnic tables under a huge live oak. I asked for a couple of burritos filled with frijoles, chopped potatoes, onions, scrambled eggs, and fresh salsa. I also bought two slices of pecan pie and four bottles of water. They wrapped the food in foil and put it in a plastic bag, and then they put that into another bag, which they filled with ice.
From there we took the Crystal City Highway south from town to a ranch road that headed west. Haley was still riding in the back. A couple of miles up the road, I turned off the pavement onto a gravel road. Another mile along that road, I stopped at a steel gate. I got out, walked up to the gate, and opened it. I got back in the Range Rover and drove through. I stopped again, got out, walked back to the gate, and closed it. I got back in the Range Rover and continued on along the road, which was now more of a trail.
We came to another gate. I stopped. I opened my door, and Haley said, “Let me do it.”
Before I could answer, she was out and walking toward the gate. She had her hair back in a ponytail. She was wearing jeans and boots and a plaid shirt and no makeup as far as I could tell. She looked as if she belonged there. She was nearly old enough to be my mother, and she was easily the most desirable woman I had ever met.
Haley waited while I drove through, and then she closed the gate behind us. She walked up to the front passenger side door, opened it, and got in beside me. We headed out across the pasture.
“Is this your land?” she asked.
“It belongs to a friend of ours.”
“Ours?”
“My family. We’ve lived here for generations. Most everybody knows us.”
“Is your parents’ place nearby?”
“My grandparents’ place is, yes.”
“What about your parents?”
“My mother died when I was six. My father’s doing twenty-five to life in prison.”
We had come to another gate. I stopped. She got out without a word. Once we were through that gate, the country around us started to get rocky.
She said, “Do you mind if I ask something?”
I stared straight ahead. We were on a dirt track that wove uphill between mesquites and limestone outcroppings, barely wide enough for the Range Rover. I said, “First-degree murder. Is that what you wanted to know?”