Playing Dead Read Free

thing: Rarely did anyone spell my name right who wasn’t a blood relation, and half of them didn’t, either.
    I read the letter for the forty-third time and it’s like I’m twelve years old again sitting in the corner of a horse stall with a flashlight and a terrifying book, frantic to warn the heroine of terrible peril but secretly knowing I can protect her for a day, for months, for years, forever, by simply slamming the book shut. Ending her story in the middle.
    I stare at Rosalina Marchetti’s signature. It sweeps arrogantly across the right bottom half of the page, tall and loopy. Under her name, like an afterthought, she had scribbled:
    And the angels cried
.

CHAPTER 2

    “A re you OK, Tommie?”
    A familiar gravelly voice. A voice like my father’s, worn raw by smoke and sawdust. I lifted my head from the pile of papers. If I squinted, I could pretend he was Daddy. Tall, angular lines, a fifteen-dollar haircut from Joe, jeans and boots that had met some cows, a face like the Texas earth, wrecked by sun and drought and cigarettes. The damn cigarettes. I pushed away the image of Daddy at the end, with his oxygen tank at his side like a loyal pet.
    “Wade. Hi.” I finished pulling my uncooperative hair through an old rubber band I’d found in the drawer and flipped it down my back. “I’m awake. Just unsure where to begin with Daddy’s papers.” I wanted to say that the whole room made me physically ache.
    Instead, I spread my arms to encompass the scarred oak desk in front of me, slotted and pegged together like a master puzzle by a cowboy more than two hundred years ago. Not a single metal nail. I took naps on top when I was three. Daddy bragged that it required five men to get the desk through the door.
    The oversized leather couch in the corner still held the deep imprint of my father’s lean body. A plastic hanging bag of drycleaning, Wrangler jeans and lightly starched pressed western shirts, was hooked over one of the closet doors; a case of Corona Light and two cases of Dr Pepper sat by a small refrigerator on the plank floor, vices as hereditary as the cigarettes that killed him. I quit smoking at sixteen, the day Daddy slapped the first one out of my hand behind the barn, the only time he hit me. I stuck with the Dr Pepper.
    My eyes lingered on the photo behind Wade’s head, from another lifetime, a blown-up print of Daddy and Wade in federal marshals’ gear. Arms around each other, cigars drooping out of their grinning mouths. A good day, Daddy always said. A bad guy went down.
    This refurbished 1800s building in the historic Fort Worth Stockyards was once a place where bad guys went down every week, usually with a chunk of lead in the back. Sometimes in the saloon below, sometimes surprised in this very room while stuck in a woman spreading her legs for a few pieces of change.
    Over the last thirty years, among these violent ghosts, my father turned his family’s legacy of land into a multimillion-dollar oil and gas business, with the assistance of a secretary, seven lawyers, two investment advisers, and the man slouched in front of me the way only cowboys in jeans can get away with, a Tony Lama hat that had seen better days held with one giant hand over his crotch.
    Wade Mitchell, ten years younger than Daddy, was the heir to the big job, so specified in my father’s will, unless I wanted to step up. My sister, Sadie, had eliminated herself as a candidate years ago.
    “I hate to ask, Tommie, but have you made a decision?” At first, I wasn’t sure what Wade meant. Was he talking about his job? About Rosalina Marchetti? How would he know about that? I fingered the pink stationery nervously. Then I remembered, at Aunt Rebecca’s house, at the wake, his urgent whisper.
    “You mean about the wind farm?” I ask him.
    “Yes. It’s the one thing that we need to sign off on this week. BT Power wants to put up a hundred more turbines in Stephenville. If we don’t, they’re choosing