“Or what?”
“I’ll have the artist paint you into the picture, with one of those glowing circles over your head, and send a copy of it to the Dallas Petroleum Club. It’ll look great in the lobby.”
“They call those halos, Clete,” Marjorie said. “Not ‘glowing circles.’”
“No fooling?”
“No fooling. They go back to around four hundred and fifty B.C. The first pictures showed one over the head of Perseus as he killed Medusa.”
“I’m awed. I guess I forgot they finally let you out of the eighth grade and into junior high.”
Marjorie made a face.
“Then I guess you also forgot,” she snapped, “to send that Browning over-and-under for graduating from Rice a year early and summa cum laude! I always suspected either Mom or Grandfather sent it. If you had sent me a shotgun, it would have been a Sears Roebuck economy special.”
“God have mercy on the man who marries her,” Clete said. “She’s as bad as the old man.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Marjorie said.
“Both of you knock it off,” Martha Howell ordered with a mother’s authority.
Antonio, the butler, came to where Clete was sitting at the head of the dining table.
“El Coronel Perón is on the telephone for you, Don Cletus,” he announced.
“Tell him Don Cletus is not at home, Antonio,” Dorotea ordered.
“I did. He said it’s very important, Señora.”
“What the hell does he want?” Clete asked rhetorically. “Okay, Antonio, bring in the goddamned phone.”
“Watch your mouth, Cletus,” Martha Howell said.
Antonio brought in a telephone, plugged it in under the table, and handed him the receiver.
“Cletus, this is your godfather,” Juan Domingo Perón announced.
“What can I do for you, Tío Juan?”
“I need a great favor from you, Cletus.”
“Will this wait? I have a houseful of people.”
“No. It won’t.”
“What kind of a favor?”
“I want you to meet me at the city hall in Junín.”
“I’m not even sure where that is.”
“In the north of the province. Take National Route 7. It’s about two hundred sixty kilometers.”
“What the hell’s going on in Junín?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here.”
“You sound like you want me to come wherever the hell that is right now,” Clete said incredulously. “I just told you I have a houseful of people.”