Zoning Change

Some weeks back, a blue sign emerged from an empty lot on the edge of Abilene. It has stood largely unobserved and brave, like the figurehead at the bow of a ship. For those stray dogs and transient persons who are among the only to approach, it might feel as if, lifted upon its pole, the sign is putting on a nauseating display of power, the harbinger of massive destruction, standing vigilant through the long night, emitting its slow message, and when its communication is complete, the machines will arrive.
City of Abilene
Site Plan/Zoning

Change Request
For Information Please
Call Abilene Development Dept.
(3**) ***-****
Around the same time as the blue sign’s appearance, Luna Wilson’s designs went up on a number of billboards in and around the city. They are meant to be somewhat cryptic, reading simply: The Mountains Are Walking Yer Way. Her palette utilizes the colors of the western aesthetic: reds, oranges, yellows, and browns, overshot with a clear sweep of baby blue sky under which a line of hand-holding, smiling mountains is walking, reminiscent of the style a National Park-funded 1980s cartoon might have utilized. She can almost hear the music. She hums along with the imaginary theme song as she emerges from her trailer one morning. Across the flat of her father’s property, she can faintly make out I-20, along which stands one of her finished products. She feels good. Not only is this her biggest job yet, but it feels as if she is actually doing something capital-I Important. It’s in all the holy books. From the Mountains and Rivers Sutra to the Bible itself. Faith the size of a mustard seed and all that, and here she is, moving mountains. She can scarcely believe it and must return inside her Airstream to prepare for another take, maybe one without such an irrepressible grin staking its claim to her facial apparatus.
Airstream has achieved the platonic ideal. A gleaming chrome trailer dines forever in the halls of Product Valhalla. To speak the name is to evoke not only vivid imagery but a feeling, one totally unique in that vast, mapped fusebox of North American consumer responses. To see one flash past on the highway, shining and reflective, denotes at once a sense of longing and an ideal of freedom, a cozy safeness embedded within the very hunt for adventure. For one to pull into a campsite brings doubts to the neighbors who thought they themselves were camping, but now are feeling less than sure. Its name has not become ubiquitous for its type, like Kleenex, Chapstick, or the Taser, for it stands quite apart from the boxy clunkers that get dragged cross-country, those ridiculous takeaway homes of retirees that blow up any possible notion of freedom from life’s claims for they are all brought along in those other recreational vehicles with whom the sleek, idyllic Airstream shares only the most technical of categorical similarities.
Airstream is a true name, the name Adam would have bestowed upon the first model, had God been ready to reveal it so early in his grand plan, back there in the garden, which now that you mention it would have made a hell of a spot to settle in, let those wheels just corrode and sink into that Edenic loam, baby…
West Texas is a far cry from paradise, although Abilene’s inclusion in even that region is under some scrutiny. With such a wonky shape, you tend to get a lot of confusion over what’s what.
“Don’t the cardinal directions apply no matter the shape of the boundary from within which the compass is measurin’?”
“This ain’t no wonky shape, honey. This is Texas.”
Just because Lubbock is a full latitudinal degree further north than Fort Worth does not mean it is included in North Texas. No sir, that there’s the panhandle and it is sort of outside the typical rules. East Texas is easy enough. You see a pine tree, you’re in East Texas, unless of course you find yourself ‘round ‘bout Bastrop. That’s more central, which overlaps more precisely with the hill country than with any geometrical center. And Houston doen’t really count as East either since they’ve become large enough to excerpt their own influence, call that the Gulf Coast Region, though don’t expect that means it covers the whole coast. No, eventually you get down into South Texas which takes up the nicest stretch of coastline we have here in the lone star state as well as most of the border with Mexico, what gets called The Rio Grande Valley, or simply The Valley, by folks in the know, but you get far enough west along that Rio Bravo and you’re into the Big Bend country, and surely that has got to be West Texas, but some folks would disagree with yah there, pardner, insist that’s the Upper Rio Grande, or the Big Bend Region, which is west of West Texas. Those sticklers, and there are a fair share who do consider such a set to be sticklers and who themselves would enthusiastically include Big Bend in West Texas, or at least Far West Texas, but, those who do not, would delineate true West Texas more around the twin nightmares of Midland-Odessa.
Yessir, us Texans sure have got a real stick up our ass about hardline borders no matter how nonexistent a thing they may be in so-called nature. Don’t believe me, just turn on the evening news and acquaint yourself with underwater barbed wire and other such horrors set up as a bulwark against the environmentally and economically strained south.
Anyway. . . the concept of West Texas has been trending for awhile now, so, as something of a burgeoning influencer, it behooves Luna Wilson to lean into it, park her Airstream on a stretch of her parents’ land that looks arid enough that few will find reason to argue with her over her nomination. Besides, if Italy can play West Texas on the silver screen then surely Abilene can manage it on social media. And it’s not exactly as if any other region in the state is making much of a passionate claim for Abilene’s inclusion despite its coordinates landing it smack in the middle of what could be a four-way land dispute between North, Central, West, and the Panhandle. Poor Abilene. A city at the crossroads. In the winter, they’re left out on those plains in easy reach of Santa’s Workshop. Seems a straight shot up to those doomed polar ice caps when a blue norther gets going, charging down that big chute between the Rockies and the Mississippi like no bull any Abilene cowboy has the cojones to so much as wink at.
Luna Wilson emerges from her Airstream for the nth time of the morning, reciting to her glowing palm a memorized monologue in a slow, calming drawl. She holds her phone before her face with one hand and a cup of black coffee in the other. As she exits the Airstream, she executes a full five-forty and inhales deeply as a parade of chickens and goats marches past in the background, as if on cue.
Ich bin eich reichsbürger. We live in the fourth reich, some delusional devotee comments but it is just as quickly dragged away by the platform’s automated screening so that when Luna goes back to watch her posted video later, a few dozen times at least, the message is not only gone, it has left not even a sign it ever existed, and the poster has been banished from the platform before anyone could even ask, Now what was that gentleman on about?
“Good morning,” Luna recites to herself with a calm whose intensity almost betrays itself. “How often do we say it and how often do we mean it?” she asks, intoning the final two words with inquisitive depth. “Good morning,” Luna repeats. “When you say it with conviction it becomes more than a throwaway greeting. It becomes an invocation. It’s like you are blessing those you come into contact with, truly blessing them with a gift. Good morning you say, and mean it, and it changes something. Maybe something minute. They certainly aren’t going to thank you for it. They probably aren’t even going to notice. Everyone is so busy, running around so quickly these days, that they might not accept your gift, but for those who slow down and embrace it, it has the power to do something. Good morning,” she repeats again with a slow, unfurling smile. “Look at the goats,” she says. “They’re having a good morning. The chickens. The sun, the clouds, the wind,” she closes her eyes and breathes slowly in through her nose. “Good morning, wind.” Eyes unfurling. “I don’t care how busy you think you are, how many chores you have to get done that day, or what you do for a living. You always have time to stop on your doorstep, close your eyes, take a breath, and tell the earth good morning, dontchya?”

Not if you’re waking up to bombs, go the comments.
Not if you don’t have a doorstep.
Not if you have to be at work before it even is ‘morning’, you entitled bitch.
Not if going outside triggers your anxiety disorder.
“Let’s check on the vegetables. See if they’re having a good morning,” Luna watches herself say and then step barefoot onto a mulched path towards the veggie patch beside the Airstream. The partially decomposed bark used to hurt her feet, but the boosted attention from the coalition of foot guys as well as the ever-growing grounding crowd has made it well worth it. By now her soles have toughened up and she has even become somewhat convinced there may actually be something to this grounding business. Feels good to step barefoot into warm mulch, at least. No arguments there. At the garden gate she gasps at the beauty of her little patch of green against such vast, flat stretches of brown and yellow. “Do you see that?” she asks. “Looks like breakfast to me.”
Sure enough, the zucchini and tomato served up alongside an egg from the hen house and a slice of her homemade sourdough with a scoop of blackberry preserves from the vines growing behind the house do make up quite a pretty little plate. She eats slowly at the small round table within her trailer, peering out the window across the neighboring cow pastures as the thin, wispy curtain hangs at her shoulder. She does try to practice what she preaches and savors each bite without the distraction of a screen then she heads over to the small sink and places her plate in the basin, waits for warm water, keeping her eye on a bird out the window, a little speckled starling, its bright beak poking about in the grass. A few hundred others must be draped across the pasture like living netting, ready to lift into the air somehow in unison and begin their morning murmurations across their recently conquered landmass.
Luna does graphic design work. Choosing the prettiest font, as her oil rich daddy teases, mimicking pulling down the font bar in Word and scrolling through the options before finally landing on one, then wiping brow and closing laptop. “Another hard day’s work!” he squeaks in an imitation of his daughter’s voice.
Waylon Wilson, Luna’s grandfather, pumped more wealth out of West Texas than anyone has any right to. Doug, her father, has used his cut of that inheritance to become one of the leading developers in the state, mostly by throwing up luxury apartments in Austin and DFW or by converting old warehouses into brunching districts, but as he enters another decade of life he has found himself experiencing something of a crisis of the spirit. It is an ailment beyond the curing properties of even the south’s finest bourbon, although perhaps he has simply not yet found the correct dosage, it occurs to him, as he lifts his glass from the table, where it sits next to the bottle of wine his wife and daughter are splitting.
Before them, the L-shaped pool reflects the last of the day’s light. Its surface is broken only by the floating hose of the vacuum roboting about the deeps.
“You forgot the part about making a video of yourself saying Good Morning!” her little brother adds on as they are all sitting out by her parents’ pool enjoying the sunset. “That looks like real hard work, too!”
“Oh and what would you know about work? You’ve never worked a day in your life.”
“School is his job,” her mother comments. “Just like it was yours when you were his age. We want your brother to focus on his grades.”
“And you know when I do start working I’m not going to be living in a trailer on my daddy’s land cosplaying like I’m some hippie-ass-doomsday-prepping—”
“Tectonic Prints has been called the most exciting business venture in the field of geological morphology since Pangea.”
“Pangea? More like Pan-woke-ea.”
“Pan-woke-ea,” Luna repeats, knowing better than to get sucked into such arguments with her little brother, but unable to stop herself. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means so-called Pangea is a lie! Think about it--”
“I want you all to focus on the sunset,” her father snaps suddenly, smacking a hard four fingers across the back and off the top of his son’s skull, as if it wasn’t he who started the whole teasing train out the station. Everyone quiets down and sits in unsteady silence as the blob of orange drips over the distant flatlands and drags the last of the day’s purplish grey light with it. “Pan-woke-ea,” Doug mutters to himself with no lack of contempt evident in his voice. “Jesus Christ, son.”
Tectonic Prints had indeed been called the most exciting business venture in the field of geological morphology since Pangea. Esteban Gonzalez had acquired the company early on as a way to more cheaply create access for his wells in the West Texas terrain, but he had been quietly investing considerable sums into their R&D department for decades, and now they are ready to unveil their new line of earth-moving machinery on the world stage. The massive 3D printers are capable of creating entire mountain chains and can do so out of the rubble cleared from areas of urban blight. Of course, supplementary earth is necessary, but that can easily be acquired. Cheap as dirt, as they say.
“You own half of West Texas and you’ve never been to Big Bend?” Luna had asked Esteban upon their first meeting. His father had done work with Luna’s grandfather, which no doubt had helped her land this position, or at least the consideration for it. Her ability still had to close that final gap.
Esteban, playing the coy billionaire, shrugged his ample shoulders and blamed it on daddy. “He was always all business. That’s how I grew up. Not that he was a one-sided man. He was incredibly well read. His library, well, you should see it. I’ve had it moved into our Houston house. He wanted to understand how everything worked, and I guess I got that from him, which has left little time for uh”
“Life,” Luna filled in as Esteban floundered for his next word. She’d been living in LA until recently, but had since bought her Airstream and was making a tour of the desert southwest.
“Sure,” he agreed. “Life,” he surrounded the word with air quotes in a way that gave Luna a cold chill.
The feeling was somewhat mutual. Luna unnerved the man, looking deep into his hard stare. She’d gotten a little spooky out there, under all that California sun. Something she’d cultivated. Though it’s not exactly as if the seeds had not already been sown in her lineage. She used to call up her mom after moving away only to get responses like: “Heaven is lonely. Life is in preparation for it. You should really be getting better at it by now, dear. You’re not as young as you think.”
“Sheesh, Mom. I only meant--”
“Oh! I’ve got to go. My water is going to boil over.” For all her worldly wisdom, Genny had not exactly figured out the whole Facetime thing just yet, so Luna had to watch her mother fein a cooking disaster in order to get off the phone while never moving from the couch. She swore to herself she would not wind up like her mother, and, counter to rationality, proximity does act in her favor. The return to Abilene prunes it back some, that California spookiness.
“Ever heard of the Great Ohio Desert?” Esteban asked after a prolonged meeting of the eyes.
“No?”
“It’s a manmade desert of black sand.”
“Let me guess, in Ohio?”
“Well, it’s from a book. Great Ohio Desert. Get it? G.O.D.? Empty stretch of black sand.”
“Oh, yeah, sounds like it's from a book alright, vaguely gesturing towards the ineffable.”
“And what more is there? ”
“Can you live in two places at once?” Luna asks the front-facing camera in her dream drawl during a live stream. She has woken up feeling rather at a remove from her surroundings. Such a feeling strikes her from time to time. Like she is only truly conscious during small windows and in that short period she must attempt to make sense of everything that has occurred between this window and the last. She is back home, in Abilene? living in an Airstream? No. She’s a California girlie. Lives in a bungalow outside Los Angeles. In a blinding landscape of yellow and white. But now that doesn’t feel right either. Her whole timeline is crumbling beneath her feet. She waits for it to reach solid ground and stabilize, surely this period is a bridge spanning a gap, and even as it collapses it must be projecting from something, some time and place in which she actually belonged, in which her real life is occurring still, a place she can return to, but the collapse keeps going back and back, receding into the murky, half-remembered years of high school and beyond. Forget living in two places at once, does she live anywhere at all?
Yes, you live in the imperial core AND cuckoo baby make believe dream land, arrives the first comment.
“More than two?” she continues then pauses. “Less than one?”
Uh sure, sounds like you live up your own ass. Speaking of, I wouldn’t mind coming up there with you one of these days. Check your DMs.
“It’s like everything has an other, a parallel soul, somewhere, and nothing can truly exist until they are paired up.” It is not her usual content and she is not exactly sure where she is going with it. She lingers on the question for a long time, then cuts the feed prematurely. It’s early. There’d been less than a dozen people watching, and at least one had been a troll. Not a great look, but better than continuing on and making a fool of herself. She prepares to fry an egg and forget about it, but the egg is double yolked. A cruel joke from the universe this morning. She knows a full moon is approaching and her not-quite vestigial California instincts tell her this has something to do with it. Something is out of line. Some important planet, how do you say, in retrograde. That might fly out there in the city of angels, but here in Abilene, well there are certainly plenty willing to pray with you. Dear Lord, Our Heavenly Father, Thank You for the Gift of This Day, and Please Lift Us Up, Your Wretched Servants Who Squat Here in Your Forgotten Back Forty, We Need Only the Tiniest Sliver of Your Unimaginable Bounty to Turn Things Around, Please God, Just a Little Bump.
In an attempt to kill the bad vibes she seems to have woken up with, Luna climbs into her truck and starts for town. She is going to work out of a coffee shop, she tells herself. There are a handful of them downtown, a couple are even pretty good. She heads for her favorite, and feels cheered by the drive. Sometimes all one must do is surmount that initial paralysis and a day can turn right around. Why had she woken up in such a funk? It’s something about being back home. All those old dynamics try to return, but they don’t quite fit anymore. She is no longer the girl she was when she moved out for school, and, though it is harder to admit, her parents aren’t the same, either. And her little brother, he’d been a late surprise for them, separated by nearly a decade, he’d been such a sweet child, and now he’s unapproachable. Steeped in the internet and totally reprehensible. A teenage boy.
“Blow it out your ass, Thomas Wolfe,” she’d said one night in a stream, shortly after returning home, but no one got it, and, besides, he’d been right.
And now she is here with nothing to do. Tectonic Prints has kept her on their payroll, so the checks continue to come in even though months have passed since she finished the designs for the billboards and has been given no further instructions. Esteban has not been in contact since that first meeting. Everything since had been through a member of his company. The pay is considerably higher than market price, but probably only out of some good ol’ boy favor to her dead grandpa. Esteban had not even commented on her final designs, no text, email, nothing. And what is this? Is she really pining over some billionaire, craving his approval? Gross, Looney. But he’d not been what she expected. He’d been thoughtful and surging with vitality, even funny and charming.
She can fool herself into believing in her little national park cartoon fantasy all she wants, a chain of hand-holding, smiling mountains making its way across the southwest to park here, but she has done her digging. She knows Tectonic Prints has shady connections. It was born out of petroleum extraction, so it should come as no surprise. It has also been deployed, under military contract, across the MidEast since the turn of the century, helping level out those tricky, ancient desert mountains and cave systems you once heard so much about. And of course Esteban has also graciously lent a hand to mining interests all throughout those continents the other side the equator. Even has let it slip once or twice he might like to take a whack at terraforming Mars, or hey, at least the moon. And he’s cultivated a modest army of followers online who think maybe the world ought to let him. A contingency plan, they call it, against the unspeakable. Bullshit, of course, but now here’s Luna helping him to peddle it.
She arrives at the coffee shop and chats with her favorite barista until the bell chimes and a man enters the quiet shop. She waves goodbye and finds an open table where she powers up her laptop to tinker on her few side projects. She has continued seeking out freelance work due to the tenuous nature of her position with Tectonic Prints, but she hasn’t put in nearly the amount of time and energy she would be if it weren’t for those generously deposited paychecks, and the current lack of rent.
Luna always thought such freedom from work was all she ever wanted, but she actually feels more in bondage than ever. She feels totally indebted to Tectonic Prints and as if she is at their beck-and-call. It has kept her in a state of anxiety, and the longer she goes without hearing from them the more uneasy she becomes. There is a typed out email in her drafts folder, addressed to the Tectonic Prints HR department, inquiring about what, if anything, is expected of her at this time, but her father advised her not to send it.
“Don’t kill the golden goose,” he’d advice. “Just try to learn how to relax.”
“What do you offer that no other shops have? What makes you unique? Why do you need to be here?” the man who had recently entered is prattling off. Luna gets settled into her seat and listens in, catching the eye of the barista who is looking around for help, but there is none to be had. Doesn’t matter. The man doesn’t actually care. He just orders a drip. He was always just going to order a drip. What he had been doing is laying his ground game so he can hit her with those old evangelical questions certain Christians love pestering service industry workers with. But what does make this place unique? Luna wonders. It certainly has no obvious ties to Abilene. It is a rather sterile glass box, full of sunlight and emerald. Looks more like a poor copy of all the shops she frequented in LA.
Nothing gets built according to local need anymore, but only out of a general surplus, which has been a great boon for graphic designers. If it was all operating at less of a remove from reality, her line of work would have no rationale for existence. Nothing would need to be reorganized through the filter of vibes and projected back to people. Luckily for her, everything has become so layered and irreal that people are hopelessly lost and need her like a guide in an uncharted land, but who does the guide turn to when they become lost?
“Some days are hard for no real, obvious reason,” she tells her followers that night.
Your soul is fracturing beneath the weight of your unaddressed contradictions.
OMFG is she serious right now? She thinks she has it hard? Try working for Amazon, bitch.
“And that’s okay. What I find that helps is to have a daily Practice. One you stick to whether you feel it or feel like you are just going through the motions. It can be anything, from prayer, to meditation, to going for a walk. For me, it has been to ground myself everyday. That is, put bare feet on the bare earth. When I do, I close my eyes and breathe deep. Sometimes for a long time, sometimes just for a few seconds. It has become such a source of energy and renewal for me. My one hope for all of y’all is that you can find your own daily Practice and truly try to stick with it. It might just change your life.”
My daily practice is trying to stay alive in this hellworld.
Would love to see some close ups of your bare feet in the grass. Will pay $$$!
Does bedrotting count?
Luna stops filming but remains standing out front of her Airstream. The full moon is rising. There ought to be coyotes howling, but only the most stealthy have survived these many generations of wide-eyed ranchers and their rifles and poisoned bait. They now observe the moon in reified silence from hidden crags in the distant pastures. “Hello,” she whispers to the big buoyancy in the sky. “Do you know me?” she lets the question hang as she grows embarrassed and looks around, as if someone might be spying on her. The lights in her parents’ house are still on, of course, as it’s barely past dusk. In fact, she can hear the distant bounce of a basketball as her brother dribbles upon the private court round the other side of the house. As if he has felt her now spying on him, the bouncing stops and a few moments later the sound of the door opening and closing.
The boys are out smoking a Saturday brisket. There’s a bouquet of empty Shiner cans already gathered on the patio table. The pool is gleaming and still in the late morning light. Luna walks the path from her Airstream over to the house. Some goats follow her as far as the fence surrounding the yard and then they disperse. The fragrance of beef and charred post oak dominates the nasalscape surrounding the house, but she cuts through it and goes in through the big back glass doors to find her mother pittering about the kitchen with a cup of coffee and half a grapefruit. The house is very still and clean. Her bare feet grate against the smooth, cold saltillo as she makes her way around to the coffee pot only to find it empty.
“Just use the Keurig. It’s much quicker.”
Luna obliges, morosely flipping through her parents’ collection of first responder and military-industrial themed blends before settling on some leftover Christmas flavor less out of enthusiasm for Sugar Plum than out of conscientious objection to the alternative.
“I’m sorry we’re not operating your own private Blue Bottle here. Your daddy won’t drink anything else these days, so that’s what I keep around.”
“It’s fine. I mean, thank you, really, for the coffee. I know I don’t really live here anymore.”
“Will you stop with the guilt tripping already?”

“I wasn’t guilt tripping. I was just saying, if I’m going to march in here and make myself a cup of coffee then I shouldn’t be picky about what there is.”
“What is it you prefer to drink? I can go get you some. It will just be a minute,” she says, digging out her keys and rattling them in Luna’s face.
“No, this is good. This is perfect.”
“Text me what it is you want. I’ll be right back.”
“Will you stop, please, and just sit down and have a cup of coffee with me?”
“I’m trying to be a good host here. Just text me. Bye.” And she’s out the front door, leaving Luna to wander out the back and find her dad and brother lounging in a pair of tubes in the pool.
“What’s wrong, Looney Toon?” her dad asks from under a hat whose brim is almost wider than the pink tube he’s crammed his buttocks into.
“Mom won’t settle. She’s going to the store to get coffee because she thinks I don’t like what y’all have.”
“Is that what she told you?”
“Yeah.”
“Well take a breath. She’s just going to yoga.”
“What?”
“Yeah, she was on her way out thirty minutes ago.”
“Since when does she do yoga?”
“A while.”
“It’s what allows her to maintain such a relaxed demeanor,” Gunner says from his own tube which brings on a nice, tension-killing group laugh.
“Don’t let her get you down. Come on, jump in.”
“I got to go change into my suit.”
“In that case, will you grab me a beer?”
“Me too.”
“You got some identification for that?” she asks her little bro who, from beneath an even larger sombrero, his banded with an American flag print, lifts a hand and gives her the finger.
“Alrighty then, one beer coming up.”
“And check the meat while you’re at it. Probably about time to add some water,” Doug says.
“Make that no beers.”

“Awh, I’m just teasing!” her dad cries out. “Honey? You still there? Looney Mooney?” the voice beneath the hat beckons, but she’s already checked the smoker and plodded across the field to her trailer where she throws on a suit and comes cannonballing into the pool, broadsiding Gunner with enough force that it flips him out of his tube, but what do you know, this massive straw hat has enough buoyancy that it leaves him floating on the surface, calm as can be.
“Thanks for that,” he says obnoxiously. “I need to even out this tan. Now about that beer,” he asks, grinning maniacally. She throws an arm of water his direction then swims off to claim his recently vacated tube and leaves him to his hat. A few minutes later, he leaves the pool to procure the beers himself and Luna uses big sister hypnosis to acquire her own, finds herself bumping up alongside her old man and floats the question, “You did some work with Esteban Gonzalez’s dad, right?”
“Me? No. Your grandpa did. By the time I got in the game, they’d left it for the stratosphere. Maybe I did some work with one of his subsidiary’s subsidiaries without even realizing it, but never anything so direct as grandpa. Why? curious about who you’re working for?”
“Yeah,” she says, thinking meanwhile, totally not just that girlish desire to talk about a crush. “Just seems surreal sometimes to be heading a project for such a famous guy.”
“Hey, speaks to your talent,” he turns and peers at her from within the cavern of his hat and beams a rare, ironicless smile. “I’m proud of you. I tell everyone, Hey when you drive into town, those massive billboards, can’t miss ‘em, those are my baby girl’s.”
“You don’t tell them anymore than that though, right?”
“How could I? I don’t know anymore than that.”
“What? Like it’s some kind of secret?” Gunner points out. “It says it right there on the billboard. He’s going to install mountains. I can see it now, Ski Abilene. Ah shit! Dad, we got to make some shirts. Cash in on this.”

“Install mountains. Do you hear yourself when you speak?”
“What? That’s what they do!”
“They make efficient roads in rough terrain. All the rest is a lot of hot air. Good for a short bump in stock prices, but nothing more.”

“Then what do you think they’re doing here?”

“I think they’re setting up a corporate office and investing in building up the city, trying to draw people in from the metroplex and Austin. Whatever other excitement they can drum up without having to come right out and make any explicit claims, well that’s just pure icing. Me, I couldn’t be happier. I’m already looking at a few potential acquisitions. Would love to do more work locally. No more trips across the state? Sounds great.”
“Boorringg,” Gunner drags out. The fibers of his hat have become saturated now and are losing buoyancy. He’s mostly underwater, except his head and a forearm holding up his beer.
“That’s life, son. A lot of hot air packaged up and sold to the marks. I didn’t raise you to be a rube. You were born behind the curtain, none of this should be news to you.”
“Yeah, but--”

“But what?”
“It just goes on and on like that?”
“On and on and on, son. On and on and on.”
Luna spends much the rest of the day in a half doze in and around the pool. Her mother returns a few hours later without any mention of coffee and she does actually seem a little more relaxed. Sometime in the late afternoon, Doug announces that the brisket is ready and the four of them sit down to eat. Sides of store bought potato salad and baked beans are arranged on the kitchen island along with the brisket, some sausage, a loaf of white bread, pickles and onions, and a range of barbeque sauces collected from her father’s travels across the state.