The Perk Read Online Free PDF Page A

for the first time
in twenty-four years, his eyes beheld the Texas Hill Country. It took his
breath away, like the first time he had laid eyes on Annie, and brought a sense
of regret to his thoughts: she had asked to see the land he had once called home.
It was the only time he had ever said no to Annie Parker.
    He had tried to run from this land and the life
he had lived here, but he might as well have tried to run from his own shadow.
    An hour later Beck said, "That's the LBJ Ranch."
    They had driven fifty-five miles due west of Austin and were now driving past the vast ranch in Stonewall that had been the Texas White
House when Lyndon Baines Johnson had been president. It was now a state park.
He glanced back in the rearview: Luke's eyes remained fixed on the Gameboy and
Meggie's on the doll; she was brushing its hair and talking softly to it.
    "A president lived there."
    That got Meggie's attention. She looked out the
window.
    "George W. Bush lives there?"
    She had learned about the president in her pre-K
class. At the last open house, her teacher had questioned the kids in front of
their proud parents: "Does anyone know the president's name?"
    "George W. Bush," the children had recited
in unison.
    "And what's his wife's name?"
    That had stumped them. The kids had glanced
around at each other with confused expressions until Meggie had finally said,
"Mrs. Bush." Which had seemed like a perfectly reasonable answer to Beck,
the only father at her open house.
    "No, honey," he said, "another
president from Texas. Lyndon Johnson. He was born and raised right there."
    "Are all the presidents from Texas?"
    "No, thank God."
    Beck chuckled at his own words, downright treasonous
in Texas. He had been away a very long time.
    "Was he a good president?"
    "Well, some people would say yes, some would say no."
    "What do you say?"
    Beck had been born in 1965, so what he knew
about LBJ he had learned in history classes and from the old-timers in town.
His father had talked of seeing LBJ—after his presidency had ended and he was back
living at the ranch—driving around town in his Lincoln convertible with his long
white hair and much younger girlfriend. And Beck the boy had asked, "I
thought Lady Bird was his wife?"
    "She was," his father had said.
    "Did he bring her along?"
    "Nope. He left her back at the ranch."
    Beck had studied on
that for a while, then had asked, "How does that work, a man having a wife and a girlfriend?"
    His father had chuckled. "Well, for most
men it wouldn't work so good. It'd damn sure complicate things. But if you're
an ex-president who happens to be one mean son of a bitch, I guess it works
okay, particularly if you happen to be married to a saint."
    "Was he?"
    "Yep, LBJ was about the meanest SOB to come
down the pike."
    "No. Married to a saint?"
    "Oh. Yeah, matter of fact, he was."
His father had paused, Beck recalled, and then had said, "Never realized I
had something in common with LBJ."
    As had Beck.
    "No, baby, I don't think he was a good
president."
    They drove on westward. The sleek
foreign cars of Austin with bumper stickers that read Who Would Jesus Bomb and Impeachbush.org had been replaced by bulky diesel pickups with grill
guards to protect against unexpected encounters with deer and bumper stickers that
read Luv Ya Dubya and Support Our Troops; and the dense subdivisions
had given way to open pastures where horses, cows, sheep, and goats grazed
peacefully under the July sun as if they were the happiest creatures on earth
even though the Navigator's outside temperature gauge registered 98 degrees. Weathered
homesteads with windmills sat back off the highway, and a series of cell towers
ran parallel to the highway. A sign affixed to a fencepost offered
"Hay-4-Sale."
    "What are those big round things?" Meggie
asked.
    Beck glanced out her side at a field of hay being
cut by a farmer driving a tractor and holding a cell phone to his ear.
    "Hay bales."
    A mile later, she said, "Mommy says those are