Leon Uris (8 page)

Mother and son drove about New England, in a journey of realization. The East was not the West. In New York, during the second act of a Tennessee Williams play, all the characters on stage were crying out their misery and no one heard the other. If truth be known, Quinn wanted New York City and Fordham. But no one would hear the other’s misery.

Quinn knew if he went East, he might have serious trouble returning to the ranch. It would devastate his parents. Further, no one leaves Colorado without having inflicted a wound on himself. It was Quinn’s life, but he could not turn away from Dan’s legacy. Wanting a brother had long come and gone in Quinn’s fantasies. Quinn was it, alone.

Quinn and Siobhan made a drive from Washington state through Stanford and into Los Angeles. Quinn was awed by the greatness of America and felt his first urges of desire to do something of value for everyone.

They returned to the ranch to find Dan elated. In their absence something good had gotten to the man.

“Which school was your favorite, Siobhan?” Dan asked.

“I personally liked Berkeley.”

“Commies,” Dan retorted. “They eat protest flakes for breakfast. As for UCLA, it’s a brothel.”

The moment was at hand for Dan to pass to them a half dozen letters of acceptance, all fine schools. Dan held one out, then slapped it on the table and broke into a wide, wide grin and awaited the howls
of joy which never arrived.

Siobhan could see Quinn’s stare become troubled as Dan read,
“Harvard!

“…That’s Harvard, in case you didn’t know. Harvard! The first O’Connell to go to Harvard, the first to do anything but night school. Harvard. My son goes to Harvard!”

“Mom told me to apply through my school. I didn’t think I had a prayer.”

“Prayers have been answered. Along with my Silver Star, this is the proudest moment of my life.”

“Hold up, Dan,” his wife said. “You don’t seem to be pleased, Quinn.”

“Shouldn’t I have something to say?” Quinn asked.

“Well, didn’t you and your mother visit enough campuses? I mean, we’re talking Harvard. The greatest university in the world. Do you know how many applicants they turn down?”

“Dad, I agreed to take a look at Harvard to confirm I’m going to make the right choice.”

“What’s your point, son?” Dan asked with a touch of meanness in his voice. “You could even make the baseball team.”

“For God’s sake, Dad, I’m a marginal athlete.”

“Not in baseball. You have a real talent.”

“Stop trying to make a Brooklyn Dodger out of me. Students go to Harvard for scholastics. I don’t want to get involved in the rat race until I know what I want to study.”

“Quinn, you’re the first white man ever to turn down a Harvard education. Have you got any idea how much it costs?”

“That’s enough, Dan,” Siobhan said angrily. “Forget what he said, son. God has been gracious to us, and I’ve got plenty of money put away.”

With direct insults falling now, Dan unloaded bottle into glass. Quinn made him uneasy by not backing
down.

“I want to live my own life, Dad. I saw enough of the country with Mom to know how wonderful it is. I don’t want to be lured, yet. I want to stay near here. Dad, you don’t need a Harvard education to operate a ranch.”

“So what is it, then,” Dan said ominously.

“He’s only a boy,” Siobhan said. “How many times did you come in off of your police beat cursing your father for setting up your life?”

“I’m going to the University of Colorado,” Quinn said. “No ice hockey, no football. Maybe I’ll play baseball if the team is bad enough. I’m going to study a general liberal arts course and the humanities. I want to study with Reynaldo Maldonado. I hope it leads me to something I can be passionate about.”

Dan arose, came to Quinn, and slapped him in the face. Siobhan was between them instantly. Quinn turned away and made for the door.

TROUBLESOME MESA, 1968

It was mud season. The tracks and washboard of the dirt road went from slop during the day to a thin coat of frost through the night. It was a slippery go from the ranch to the town, two miles of switchbacks and steep grades. Walking was slippery. One was off one’s feet every twenty steps.

Quinn left without a jacket, a flashlight, the Jeep he never really felt was his. Go to Carlos in Texas? No. That would bring Consuelo and Pedro into a family brawl they had no part of.

Call Uncle Sean? He laughed aloud at his own misery. There were no phones for over a mile. Headlights hit him in the back. He stopped in a rut with slush running over the top of his boots.

“Quinn!” Siobhan called, stopping the Jeep. “Son, come home! Please! Your father is beside himself with sorrow. Please! Quinn.”

All he did was shake his head.

She pleaded to the mesa and the valley, for he did not hear. Her arms went about him. He pushed her away firmly. She was a mud woman, a streaked mud woman grotesquely crying with mud running down her face.

“Take the Jeep,” she gasped. “There’s money and credit cards in the glove compartment. Please phone me, son, please!”

She turned and staggered back toward the house. After a time, Quinn grabbed the steering wheel and,
in an automatic move, slid into the driver’s seat. The windshield was half ice, half water. He wiped away a spot of fog so he could see through, then put the vehicle into four-wheel low and inched down the incline.

Between his tears and the frost he could hardly see, but he knew the turns of the hill and he understood it could be his last moment on earth. His caution told him he did not want to die and gave him a tiny relief from his pain.

The Jeep skidded. He had to lay off the brakes. It stopped abruptly down in the roadside ditch, barely kissing a great old pine tree. He’d stay here. Town was still two switchbacks away. Well, what’s the difference? he thought, I don’t belong to anyone. I’m no one.

A flashlight beam hit his face.

“Holy Mary, is that you, Quinn?”

“Ugh.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No, no, I’m okay.”

“Oh, my God,” she whispered when she saw the agony worn like a Pagliacci mask.

“Who are you?”

“It’s Rita Maldonado.”

She found a rag and wiped his face carefully and put handfuls of snow on the rising lumps and bruises.

“What the hell you doing out on a night like this?” he groaned.

“I was at the movies and, if memory serves me right, you were the one in the ditch trying to climb this tree. I’ll take you to the hospital.”

“No, I swear I’m okay.”

“Looks like you’ve just seen the abominable snowman.”

“Yeah, maybe I have.”

“All right, then, I’ll run you home,” she said.

“No. I have no home.”

“Oh, God,” Rita mumbled. “Come on, now, I’m taking you to my house. I’ll call the sheriff and tell him where your Jeep is. Come on, now.” She half dragged him to her pickup and plopped him on the seat and buckled him up, then got behind the wheel.

“What are you doing driving? You’re only thirteen years old,” Quinn growled.

“I’m going on fourteen and I’m very mature for my age. Besides, I baby-sit the sheriff’s kids. He just doesn’t want me to drive during the daytime.”

Rita was right about one thing, she was mature.

They sputtered on the slick track up to the next shelf and turned into a one-lane road affording another fabulous view down to Troublesome Mesa. The Maldonado spread was highlighted by a few acres of level lawn filled with wild sculptures and a flying-wing house.

Reynaldo Maldonado, only a seven-year resident, had brought a measure of fame to Troublesome by selecting it for his studio and home.

He had done it all, from picking cotton in Texas to doing prison time in Cañon City. He did it by being a roustabout, by smuggling on the border, by boiling booze, by selling peyote.

His early primitive drawings were of the usual Mexican rage against exploitation, and he worked to become one of the nation’s foremost portrait artists and sculptors. Although he was always thought of as being Mexican, he was actually third-generation American. His only marriage was to a fair, blond Minnesota girl who died of breast cancer and left him with a six-year-old daughter.

Her death settled his wild ways, and for the sake of Rita he found Troublesome Mesa.

Maldonado’s home had become a sort of sanctuary for the high school children of the area. He spun rapturous tales, he sang and played the guitar, he had lots of nudes on his walls and pedestals. For years Maldonado was an in-and-out figure at the University of Colorado, where he taught to small groups, at random, about an array of worldly subjects. He was a Colorado “treasure.”

Rita helped Quinn up the back porch steps. Mal flicked on a light for them. “What you got there, Rita?”

“Quinn O’Connell.”

“Quinn, you look like a yard of dirt road.”

“I’m all right. I mean, I’m not hurt. I mean, I’m hurt but I’m not hurt…nothing’s broken or anything.”

Rita unlaced his shoes, gave him a big robe from the hot tub, and ordered him to take a shower. Each time the icy fingers brought him closer to awareness, the whap from Dan hit him again. All right, he told himself, pull it together.

“I’d better call your home,” Mal said a few minutes later.

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

After a time he said, “We had some words.”

“I’m calling him. If Rita was out in this weather, I’d want a phone call no matter what had transpired.”

Everyone knew, Quinn thought, that Mal was an artist with an eccentric leaning. He heard Mal’s muffled voice from the next room.

“You’ll stay with us tonight. Eaten?”

“I wouldn’t mind something warm.”

As the soup brought chilled nerves and circulation back to Quinn, he came out of his half-frozen trance.

“Did you know I was adopted?” Quinn asked.

“I didn’t know,” Rita said.

“Nor I. You didn’t just find out tonight?” Mal asked.

“No, I was about ten.”

“We’ve only been in Troublesome seven years. Quinn, if I had known something like that, I personally would have confronted your parents. Your mom was in it, too.”

“Nobody knows anything about my birth parents. The Church is all mixed up in it: secrets, lies, God’s will.”

“Well, that’s Church business. A priest once brought me back from hell. Win some, lose some. You’re too beat to talk. Stretch out. I’ll sit with you and maybe sing a little song or two.”

Quinn’s head fell on Mal’s chest, and he sobbed softly and allowed himself to be walked to a guest room, wishing at this moment for his dad.

He was damned near asleep by the time Rita turned down the lights, lit a candle and a night-light in the bathroom. Mal sang about a poor little dying dove. As he drifted, Quinn thought, where do the Mexicans get their magnificent voices?

Mal set his guitar aside and looked at Rita with a bit of apprehension. She adored Quinn, always had. At thirteen and counting, those galloping ovarian changes inside her—no way. Quinn would never take advantage of his lovesick puppy, despite her attributes.

Last summer Rita had tried to have Mal do a nude study of her. What the hell, they skinny-dipped with those who would and took hot tubs in the altogether. But as she posed, Mal couldn’t even look at his daughter. Both artist and model began laughing until they were hysterical. He burned the beginnings of the sketch and told her to come back after she’d
had a couple of kids.

“I’ll be turning in,” Mal said.

Rita fished for some kind of permission.

“Why don’t you sit with him for a while? Make sure he’s out for the night. Something terrible must have happened.”

“Thanks, Papa,” she said.

Oh, Quinn…flower of my heart…why is it you have never noticed me? Don’t leave our valley, Quinn. If you do, I’ll die…You’re going to belong to me someday, and I’ll take care of you. Nothing will ever hurt you again…

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, BOULDER

The result of maternal rage happened fast. When Siobhan left to take her mother and sister to Europe, Dan got the message.

He prayed. He offered penance. He paid. He confessed. He felt like the dumbest cop in the universe.

He spoke by phone endlessly to Father Sean.

“Now, Dan, God’s finances are in relatively good order. You have got to make the gesture to Quinn.”

“I was thinking of sending him a Mustang—”

“Send yourself instead.”

Dan had felt badly for some things he had done as a cop and a Marine. Bullying from behind his stripes. In the past, a slap on the back and the problem was over.

But now? It sat like an undigested cabbage under his heart, day and night.

Siobhan brought her son a used Jeep and set up a moderate but ample bank account for Quinn to rent his own apartment. Enfolded by a peaceful campus unlike Kent State, he danced through two years of humanities courses, still wondering, as one is apt to do at that age, where the road was taking him.

The sting of the fight with his father faded somewhat, until the day that Dan entered a Boulder bar where Quinn worked one day a week covering for a pal.

Dan strode to the end of the bar, took a stool, and shoved the cowboy Stetson back on his forehead. “I’d like to talk to my son. If there was a million
ways to say I’m sorry, I’m saying them now.”

“Coors?” Quinn asked.

“Lite.”

“You, Lite?” Quinn said.

“Fucking doctors.”

As Quinn wiped the bar, Dan’s hand shot out and covered Quinn’s. Quinn looked into a face that was beyond pleading.

“I’ll be off my shift in an hour,” Quinn said. “Why don’t we try the steak house?”

By the end of the evening, Quinn had forgiven him and Dan’s face instantly gained color. “Thank God, we’re not like an ordinary Irish family to carry something like this to the grave. You set up okay?” Dan asked.

“Yeah, I went for a two-bedroom apartment. Professor Maldonado comes down every two weeks to teach an arts ethics course. He camps out at my place, pays part of the rent.”

“Professor? What do you mean, professor?”

“Well, Dad, go into a gallery, any gallery, and tell them you want a Reynaldo Maldonado.”

“I’ll be damned. I thought he was just painting naked women down there.”

“He does those, too.”

“I’ll be go to hell. Are you after coming home, Quinn? It’s been a long time, over two years.”

“I want to,” Quinn said with a shaky voice. “I uh, have lots of friends here, sometimes a new girlfriend.”

“I see what you mean. Christ, kids are advanced these days. I mean, shacking up isn’t any more sinful than drinking a beer. That’s part of my problem, son. It’s hard for me to equate my, you know, squeakyclean life with all this stuff going around. I mean loose women, the kind you don’t marry.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, Dad.”

It worked somewhat. Quinn didn’t come too often and brought home a girlfriend even less frequently. Quinn and the girl of the moment usually jeeped up to Dan’s Shanty, a lonely cottage on the ranch at the tip-top of Ivory Pass by some hot springs. On those weekends anyone standing close to Dan could see him look up the hill to Dan’s Shanty and hear him emit a gurgle of displeasure.

However, when they all sat down for dinner, Quinn’s girlfriends were pleasures. Imagine, this one studying law and that one studying engineering. Brave new world, they call it. Father Sean says even Catholic kids shack up.

Well then, maybe Quinn will find a
good
girl, one interested in her personal dignity. Holy Mother!

Quinn fungoed fly balls to the outfielders. A potbellied Coach Hoy stood with hands on hips, bellowing to his fielders to peg the ball home.

When Quinn changed buckets of balls, he realized he was putting on a tad of a show for the same girl who had been watching practice for three days now.

She wasn’t all that much to look at. She was thin but moved in a manner that said that being lean didn’t cost her too much. She moved it all in concert when she walked. That was good stuff. Cute, about a seven on the female scale. Date? Maybe.

Coach Hoy called an end to the outfielders’ drill, and as they jogged toward the dugout and locker room, Hoy whistled and waved for the girl to come over.

“Quinn, I want you to meet this young lady, here.”

“I’m Greer Little.”

“Greer writes for the
Bison Weekly
and is doing an in-depth piece on someone from each of the teams.
You’re the baseball interview.” His bow legs disappeared into the dugout.

“All yours,” Quinn said.

They took a front row seat in the stands, and she took down the vitals. Junior year, rancher’s son, general humanities courses, some politics, some lit. He seems a little light on drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll. Close personal friend with the illustrious Professor Maldonado.

Vibes! Quinn thought. I’m getting vibes.

The first thing Quinn noticed was a very light olive skin that seemed too smooth to be skin. She let her clothing work for her, enfolding her little highlights with a drifty material that picked up her salient points. Knockout jewelry, not expensive but explosive. Her body language was speaking but not tauntingly. Aware but not aware.

“I’m going to need at least another two or three sessions,” she said.

“Anything for my country.”

“Men’s locker rooms smell,” she said. “My apartment has two other girls in it who are messier than boys. Library?”

“How about a working dinner?”

“Yes,” she said, “and yes again. The damned football players think you can suck on a beer all night.”

“Let’s go off campus,” Quinn said. “There’s a restaurant a little ways up the valley.”

With a nearby motel handy, Greer thought.

Greer ate more than her size would indicate. And afterward. Three milk shakes. “Let’s see, Daddy’s a state senator. Mind if I say, off the record, he’s a terrible reactionary?”

“He’d be the first to agree with you. He still
undresses with his clothing on.”

“Tell me about the orphan business?”

Quinn’s eyes instantly became moist, and he shook his head. “Pass.”

She simply stared as he worked his way through his discomfort. “Greer, I don’t think your readers need an Oliver Twist chapter.”

“All right, then, let’s go off the record,” she answered.

“Why are you doing this?”

“For Christ’s sake, Quinn. I like you. I like you a lot. Coach Hoy gave me the pick of the litter. I saw your tush doing all those little first baseman ballet steps and the long stretches. Then you examine the ball and whip it to the third baseman in the same motion. The first baseman’s moves are unique.”

“I leap, too, for overthrown balls. You want me to leap for you?”

“Depends on where you land.”

“The only thing is,” Quinn said, “I’m a nonentity until I know who my parents are. Was I born in a lady’s room? Have I got a sister in Dallas? The people who adopted me were sworn by some kind of Catholic voodoo to silence, and they have suffered from it as much as I have. My dad told me last weekend that a lot of the anger against me was not that I wasn’t his son, but that I could do most things better than he could. Dad’s your basic Brooklyn cop. He’s tough and knows the territory. So, this little squirt here is found under a rock, shoots better, rides better, reads books he’s never heard of, repairs cars, and loves the Mexicans in the valley whom Dan is never quite comfortable with.”

Greer flipped her notepad closed. Quinn looked so smooth and easy on the ball field she’d thought she’d gotten a pudding. Six hours into a relationship and it was void of vulgarity and snappy rejoinders
about feminists and bras.

She slurped the bottom of the milk shake as though it was a dying man’s last supper.

“One more?”

“Pass.”

“How do you stay so slim?”

“Sex,” she answered.

“Here, you’ve got a mustache,” he said, dabbing her lip with a napkin.

“I want to thank you for the dinner, but I have bad news. You hit two-seventy last year because you’re loaded with bad habits. I could get you up to three hundred.”

“Excuse me?”

“My pop played double-A ball for Des Moines, and being the son he didn’t have, I have intimate knowledge on everything, including jock straps.”

“You wacko?”

“Yep, but I can raise your batting average. You’ve got me, afraid to say, ‘in more ways than one.’”

“Explain.”

“You’re either a batsman or a gorilla. Nine out of ten college players are gorillas. Quinn, no offense to your macho, but I could throw you sliders and splitfinger fastballs all day, and you wouldn’t hit one past the pitcher’s mound.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday. See you after noon mass?”

“I don’t go to mass.”

“Neither do I. I think I’m like a Lutheran or something Scandinavian.”

*  *  *

They loaded up the ball machine and took a dozen bats from the racks. Greer stood at the pitcher’s
mound, set the machine on medium speed, and the iron arm began hurling missiles.

Quinn was a right-handed batter who got a piece of most balls and cracked a few that sounded like a hallelujah chorus. After thirty or forty swings she stopped the machine and came to the plate.

“Ski?” she asked.

“Half-ass racer.”

“Golf?”

“Few times.”

“How about tennis?”

“I love it, but I’m a real hacker, a lefty.”

“All right,” she said. “We’ve just thrown a club to a cave man, and he’s going after a lion. Most of his moves are natural. Put a bat in your hand, and most of your moves are what you feel comfortable with. There is one basic movement in tennis, skiing, and baseball. Drive your hip.”

She swung in slow motion, the forward step natural, and that set off the sequence. The hip turn and change of weight must be fluid and part of the whole swing, or everything goes out of synch.

She drilled him as though he had never held a bat. What was astonishing was her reasoning.

“You bat right-handed but play tennis left. Now, I want a back-handed swing, hold the bat with your left hand only. Don’t let your backswing fall too low. Now loft the ball like a backswing, loft it this way, loft it that way.”

Quinn found himself seeing more of the ball than he ever had. His swing had been jerking his eyes and thrusting his bat out a millisecond too late. She came to him and backed up into him. “Here is the part of the movie where the instructor gets fresh,” she said. “Arms around me, get against me as close as you can. Now, let’s go through some swings.”

“I can’t,” Quinn said.

“Why?”

“You’ve given me a hard-on.”

“Well, I do declare, Mr. Quinn Patrick O’Connell.”

They teetered thusly for a moment, and Greer stepped away. “I know I’ll forget this. Don’t line your fingers up on the bat. I want you to move the knuckles of your left hand about an eighth of a turn. All kinds of control falls into place.” She went back to the ball machine.

Sonofabitch! Whack! Whack! Whack!

“Go down with it! Lay off it! Step in the bucket and pull!”

She smiled, and her eyes were big brown muffins.

“Oh, that last batch of swings felt sweet. How many little boys have you lured to the ball field?”

“Dozens. I had to learn to play ball or starve. My daddy’s Little League team, the John Deere Tractors, won one state and two local championships.”

Quinn debated with himself as he came to the verge of doing something really stupid.

“You still need fixing,” she said.

“I was afraid you were going to discharge me. Greer, you scare the hell out of me.”

“And you make me hot,” she said.

“Nobody from Grand Junction gets hot.”

Quinn’s apartment was a very desirable two bedroom flat, but it didn’t brag. It was startlingly tidy, jammed with books and filled with touches.

“That’s Mal’s bedroom at the end of the hall.”

“Hmmm.”

“His daughter comes in often. When she does, she sleeps on the air mattress in the living room.” Nice. It was covered with an embroidered
bushkashee
spread, and every place was inundated with fuzzy and leather pillows.

“You could use a few mirrors. We can’t have an alcove without mirrors. Hark, what’s this?
Madame Butterfly, La Bohème
?” she said, thumbing through his LPs.

“My buddy, Carlos Martinez, taught me this.”

“Mozart, Glenn Miller, Satch. Neat, but no Beatles?”

“The beginning of the end of music in this century.”

“I hate to say it, but I agree. Between the frantic tribal ritual and the pot and an obvious lunatic shrieking at you; hey man, maybe you and I are not tribal. Had many girls here?”

“I’ve got them marked off and graded on a calendar somewhere. I’ll see if I can find it.”

“I want something serious to drink,” she said.

“I keep a few bottles for the priests.” He opened the cabinet. Ah, here was something to shiver her timbers. Lemon Hart, a Polish paint remover sold as liquor.
Plunk
,
plunk
and some grenadine so she wouldn’t have heart failure. Greer, cowboy style, said, “Here’s lookin’ at you, pardner.”

Her eyes widened as she tore to the sink and filled herself with water.

“You son of a bitch!”

“Sorry, ma’am,” he said, taking a nip of the Lemon Hart and purring, “Ahhh, smooth!”

She threw her arms about him. “Oh, boy, you’re fun. You should have seen that hairy Iranian left tackle I had to do a bio on.”

“Best seat is on the mattress,” Quinn said. “It’s also the safest. I don’t make passes. I just put on my Sunday best manners and wait to be invited.”

Greer flopped on her back and stretched in every direction as he fixed her a sweet, humane gin and tonic. “I feel wonderful. You got a rich daddy?”

“So-so.”

Quinn fixed some of the little pillows around his back to full comfort. Greer sat up, tried her new drink, then tucked her knees under her chin and wrapped her arms about them.

“So, where do you go from here?” she asked.