Both of them turned their heads to look at a man and a woman entering from one of the adjoining spaces. It took Saskia a few moments to realize that the man was T.R. and the woman presumably his wife, Veronica. Compared to his YouTube persona, T.R. McHooligan, he was （of course） older, smaller, and more dignified. A little of the same impish energy still came through. Veronica
was a full-time helpmeet to T.R., a society lady who had been doing this her whole life. Early in his advance through the bar, T.R. got brought up short by a staff member and so Veronica peeled away without breaking stride and came for Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia like a border collie homing in on a Frisbee. Saskia stood up and there was the usual society-lady greeting, an activity Saskia had been born and bred for and that largely consisted of defusing any awkwardness or self-consciousness that the other might be experiencing without getting too informal too fast.
Veronica obviously knew her business and so it came off without a hitch. She understood the message Saskia was sending, for example, by wearing blue jeans. She’d done something similar that involved a pair of shockingly exquisite cowboy boots. It was entirely within the realm of possibility that she’d checked out Saskia on one of the video cameras that were presumably ubiquitous on her property and the hotel’s, and only then chosen her outfit.
A minute or two into that procedure, T.R. sidled up to his wife, who unfastened her gaze from Saskia long enough to make the introduction—which seemed like an afterthought. So that was finally out of the way. Protocol dictated that the host and hostess move on to greet other guests before too much time passed, and Saskia gave them an opening to do so after introducing her team. Veronica, much to her credit, didn’t so much as blink when introduced to T-shirted Rufus “Red” Grant, who had to transfer his beer to his other hand and wipe his hand on his pants in order to shake hers. T.R. even managed to work in a “thank you for your service.” This meant that in the approximately six hours since Saskia had abruptly and impulsively added Rufus to her entourage, T.R.’s people had run a background check on him and unearthed his military record and communicated all that to T.R.
“You and I gotta talk pigs later,” T.R. added as a parting shot. “Got a real problem on my Cotulla property!”
“Not for long,” Rufus shot back.
T.R. was knocked back on the heels of his hand-tooled ostrich hide cowboy boots only for a moment, then pointed his index finger at Rufus like a six-shooter and exclaimed, “Oh. Yes. You and me.”
“Yes sir!”
“We gonna take care of it!”
“I got the means!”
“I got a chopper,” T.R. threw in suggestively. His wife was dragging him off. He turned back to utter some barely coherent instructions regarding which of his people Rufus needed to follow up with to arrange it. Though Rufus was a shy man, Saskia could see in his face how pleasantly surprised he was that T.R. McHooligan, of all people on this planet, knew of him and his profession. Just before being dragged out of range, T.R. shot Saskia the slightest glance to make sure she had observed all these goings-on. My staff and I pay attention; in the Lone Star State no sparrow falls from a tree, no bug hits a windshield, no vulture lights on a road-kill armadillo without my knowing it. Saskia for her part just suspended her incredulity for a moment to revel in the fact that there was a part of the world where two men with so little in common could derive such mutual pleasure—not feigned—from the mere prospect of being able to go out into a harsh place and shoot feral swine out of a helicopter.
The purpose of this get-together in the bar was to get introductions out of the way so that when the various attendees bumped into each other during the program slated to begin tomorrow morning, they’d simply be able to begin talking and not have to fuss with protocol. Saskia resolved to grit her teeth and just get on with it. To relieve the sheer tedium—for queens had to spend rather a lot of time in these kinds of situations—she decided that she would try to see the whole scene from Lotte’s point of view as a loved one who deeply cherished the hope that Saskia might find a romantic partner. The first step in that process was to ruthlessly evaluate every straight man in the room on two independent axes: one, availability; two, a trait that Lotte, with Dutch bluntness, would probably call fuckability, but for which Saskia needed a more elevated term. The tools she had used to evaluate boys as a teenager were no longer adequate to the task. She decided to consider the whole matter as she might evaluate the lift-to-drag ratio of an airplane’s wing.