The Devil Went Down to Austin - By Rick Riordan Page 0,2

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."

I looked at the halfbuilt little pig house.

I looked at my brother's fingers, scarred and bleeding and crusted with mortar.

My anger drained away, left a taste in my mouth not unlike a TV dinner tray.

I said, "Hand me a trowel."
Chapter 3
By seven o'clock, we'd built the exterior walls four feet high around the cook box. The chimney and the doorway arch were finished.

The sun was sinking behind the hills on the far side of the lake. My skin itched from sweat and lime dust, my shoulders felt like sandbags, and I was thinking warm thoughts about cold margaritas.

I can't say I felt any better about being around Jimmy and Garrett, but I'd managed to keep my mouth shut and coexist with them for an afternoon.

Jimmy surveyed our masonry.

"Good," he decided. "Got to place the kiln goddess."

He ambled to his pickup and came back with a ceramic statuette - a misshapen female gargoyle glazed a nasty shade of KoolAid red. With great reverence, Jimmy placed her over the doorway, readjusted her a few times to get the angle right.

Garrett said, "What the hell is that?"

"Kiln goddess. You know - keep my pots from breaking. Keep them from turning out ugly. I'm