Leon Uris (9 page)

“Into my senior year. I’m a Maldonado junkie for sure. Aside from his class he does a semi-private ethics course with four students. He has a great way of explaining the human condition in relationship to civilization and Eros. And you?”

“Me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Just a skinny ole gal from Junction on a pit stop en route to New York. I’m going to the top in the media. I’m going to be a boss, a giant. I was born with all kinds of wigglies driving this little engine. Maybe Professor Maldonado can explain them to me next semester.”

“You try to shock people with your jock talk. What are you covering up?”

“Ninety-eight pounds and a lot of other wigglies, horny ones. Next year is my dirty year. I’ve read every book and seen every porno flick I can get my hands on. Let me say, I do not exactly come chaste. Unfortunately, there have always been cowboys practicing roping and branding. Anyhow, there was enough of an appetizer in it to tell me good things are ahead.”

“Well, lucky guy.”

“Could be you,” she said.

“Include me out,” Quinn replied.

“Uh-uh. Every day a new day and a new way. We’ll buy out all the candles in Boulder, incense, mirror the nooks, clothing fit for a whore, tattoos. I’m having a one-year blowout before I go conquer New York.”

“You’re really a friggin’ nutcase,” Quinn said.

She flung her arms about him. “I know! And I
know something else. You’ve got a thing for that Maldonado chick.”

“Come on, stupid. She’s only sixteen years old.”

“But oh, my. You ought to see her watching a ball game.”

“Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

The “I’ll call you” macho talk didn’t last long. Quinn was annoyed that Greer didn’t show up for practices and a game where he hit three doubles, one to each field.

He caught a glimpse of her in the deli in the company of a tank-topped beanpole crowned with a bush of hair that could give shade to a regiment. He was the star of the basketball team. It occurred to him that an animal like Greer was the ultimate colorblind woman; in fact, she might just pursue her curiosity. Quinn always ended his sermons to himself with, she ain’t nothing but misery.

The ball club played a respectable .500 season. Quinn O’Connell became a .294 spray hitter, moved from eighth to second in the lineup.

As a matter of fact, the professional A-team out of Bakersfield tried to woo him for the summer. Coach Hoy held his breath and put on his hound dog look.

“Hey, don’t worry,” Quinn told him. “I owe my dad a big summer’s work, and I want to get reacquainted with the ranch.”

“You coming back for a senior year?”

“Funny. Professor Maldonado lives down the road from me, but I’ve got to come to Boulder to hear his lectures. I kind of think I’ll be back.”

“The skinny broad?” Coach Hoy grunted.

It hit! Quinn shrugged. “Her game is just a game. Big mouth trying to cover little boobs.”

“They called it cock teasing when I was a young man,” Hoy said.

The conversation ended with Quinn holding a pair of trembling hands down by his sides.

He saw her alone again cuddled in a chair in the reading room of the Norlin Library.

“Howdy, pardner.”

“Oh, hi there. Sit down, it’s public.”

“I was hoping you’d see what your student did in the last three games.”

“I saw you. You hit nine-for-fifteen against the best pitchers Missouri and Kansas had. God, if Colorado had one more pitcher.”

“Why haven’t I seen you, Greer?”

“Same reason I haven’t seen you. I felt so good and open with you, I guess I went over the edge. I painted you a picture of a tawdry whore, and actually, all I want to be next year is a tawdry whore. I thought it could be kind of crazy with us but…”

“What?”

“What! Hey, Quinn, you got it all going for you with that handsome, steady, skilled silence and you ain’t Elmer Fudd, not with the titles on your bookshelf. You’ve got a few dozen girlie tricks up your sleeve, but you’re just not as loud about it as I am.”

“Movies, Friday night?”

“Why don’t we pass?” she said.

“Are you ashamed of yourself or something like that?” he asked.

“Feel silly.”

“Christ, woman, I envy you from head to toe. The way life bursts out of you and puts bright colors on everything around you,” Quinn said.

“You stealing that from some poet?” she replied.

“Movies, then?”

“No.”

Quinn gnashed his teeth to head off in some different direction. He was trying to decide which. A frustrated fist on the table brought “shhh” and “ahem” from around the library. His squealing chair brought the required raised eyebrows from the librarian.

“Look,” Quinn said, speaking softly and smiling to those seated nearby. “See, I know how to talk barely above a whisper. Let’s go outside.”

She pouted a moment. He loved to see her pout. “Okay,” she said.

They found a place on the library steps. From there the campus was guarded by a picket of mountaintops on the other side of the Great Divide. Many were old white-headed boys gushing their winter snow, soon to fill the downslopes with great mountain daisies.

“Is it me?” Quinn asked. “Is it me—Quinn O’Connell’s personality or belching habits or nose picking that puts you off? Just say, ‘I don’t like you, Quinn,’ and I’ll split.”

“No, it’s me,” she said. “I threw you all that raw meat, and you’ve called my bluff.”

“Hey, Greer, baby…”

“Quinn, I’m not in my right mind about you, and I know what I know and what I know is that once I put my hands on you, we’re going to go for the championship.”

“We can start slowly,” he said. “Lots of weekends to know each other up at the ranch.”

“Dammit! I don’t want to go to the ranch with you. I don’t want to fall helplessly in love with you. Nothing is going to keep me from going to New York.”

“Well, can’t I visit?”

“Quinn baby, I’ve got a ten-week internship with a
producer-director at Crowder Media in New York. If you’re there, it won’t be fair to me.”

Quinn digested it grudgingly. Her whole life had been geared to this opportunity. As a couple in Manhattan they could barely learn the bridges and tunnels in ten weeks. She was on a sacred mission. Quinn? Going nowhere, doing nothing. Since the trip East with his mother, Quinn had a mountain of second thoughts about that human blizzard called Manhattan, but he could see Greer relishing it, all right. Not himself.

“You plan to come back to Colorado?” he asked.

“Scenario one, yes. Scenario two, no. Maybe I’ll forget you, maybe I won’t. Maybe New York is going to grab me.”

“You’re gone,” he whispered.

“Quinn, maybe you don’t know how desperately I’m holding myself together at this moment. I want you, man, but I can’t stay home the rest of my life and bake cookies.” She thought. She had been thinking of it. The time had come.

“I’ll make you a deal. I swear I’ll come back from New York and take my next year in Colorado and live with you. Then we go our separate ways.”

“Why come back?” he asked, a bit acidly.

“Twenty years from now I don’t want to curse myself for passing this over.”

“Sounds a little Faustian to me. How free can we be knowing there is a time clock ticking away?”

“If it’s not for you, Quinn, I don’t come back. I’d go to NYU. God knows, a TV station might want me—no, wait, don’t butt in. Even if I get the scholarships and even if I see myself advancing, I’ll come back because I’ll know I can make it there. I’m not afraid of swapping my place in line for a year with you.”

He pulled her up to standing, and they walked tightly together. She cuddled so close he felt better
than at any moment he could remember. “How about us making love tonight?”

“Oh, God!” she cried. “Don’t dangle wisps of paradise over me, driving me back to Colorado before my time.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I was trying not to be fair. Baby, when I think of you, I just forget to remember what I was supposed to be thinking of. It’s more powerful than anything I’ve known,” he said.

“Me, too.”

“I’ll be at the airport to meet you on Labor Day.”

It was the summer of great hurting and healing. Dan tried to hold his feelings of fear and urgency and to take their lives back ten years when peace and love prevailed.

Quinn realized how much it ran against Dan’s Marine Corps grain to take this path of compassion and was glad for it. They had a fine time together, the best, a retreat to Langara Lodge up on the Canadian-Alaskan border, where the salmon were an honest yard long.

Quinn read a lot and hung out with Maldonado, always coming out brighter than when he went in. Mal didn’t preach, he just spoke and a twisted U-turn in one’s brain suddenly straightened out.

Rita whipped through her seventeenth birthday looking twenty and feeling ridiculous with some of the pimple-faced young men she was dating. Quinn was a man! A man in his twenties! Her spirits dropped when she considered her chances.

In the first two weeks of vacation, the phone lines burned up between the Village in New York and Troublesome Mesa. These times were difficult for Quinn because Greer was hiding the thrill of her New York experience. He slowly brought himself
around to the realization she might not come back, even for their fantasy year.

Dan and Siobhan met Greer by telephone. Dan felt it was rather serious because Quinn was spending the summer very much alone except his visits to Maldonado and a long week when Carlos came home.

Was Dan more desperate to know more about Greer—or more desperate not to rock the boat?

“She Catholic?”

“Nope. Why?”

“Well, you know it’s better if everyone’s the same religion.”

“Why?”

“You know, kids and all.”

“Dad, we’re not that serious about each other.”

“Sure, good,” Dan would say, relieved.

“Greer a good cook?”

“Pizza Hut’s finest.”

“She a Nixon person?”

“She’s a Kennedy liberal.”

“They say most of the girls at Colorado are on the wild side.”

“You mean, like Mom?”

The feeling was forlorn as August ended and Labor Day led to the new semester.

Greer had not returned as promised, and he could feel the apprehension in her voice. Phone calls had slowed to a trickle. Greer told him she’d be working on late shifts or have to cover something out of town or would be a second teamer on a big event in Manhattan.

No calls for ten days. Quinn didn’t complain as he braced for the fall.

“Son,” Dan said with great empathy, “why don’t you bring one of your girlfriends up to the
ranch and head up to the cabin for the weekend? You’ve been getting calls from everyone else all summer.”

“Except from Greer.”

“You haven’t smiled much this summer, either.”

“Appreciate your sympathy, Dad, but let’s call it for what it is. You’d be just as happy if she stays in New York.”

“Yes and no. I don’t like to see you this unhappy. I’m your father, and I’m entitled to an opinion. Greer Little will never give you what you need. The pain of losing her will diminish. It simply wasn’t meant to be.”

“Never truer words spoken,” Quinn said with a saddened voice.

Siobhan’s foot kicked the screen door open, and she set a pair of grocery bags on the counter.

“Any more groceries?”

“Yes.”

As he went out the back door, the phone rang and Siobhan took it. When Quinn returned, she handed him the phone, appearing somewhat dumbstruck. Dan had his face halfway down his coffee cup. Siobhan smiled very weakly as she left the room with Dan.

“Quinn,” he said.

“I’m on the way back to Colorado,” Greer said at the other end. “Baby, I haven’t been laid all summer. Can’t fight you, man.”

Quinn’s sigh was complete with vocals.

“Here’s the skinny. I’m flying to Junction to see my family. I’ll be at your apartment sometime Sunday.”

“Me, too. We’ve got a round-up in the high country and a branding, but I’ll be in Sunday as well. Baby, is this for real?”

“Changed your mind?”

“No way.”

Greer arrived first, bursting with Manhattan stories she wanted to share but afraid they’d bother as much as please Quinn. Like the madness in the increasingly strong gay community and women’s lib, she had said she had not had sex, which was virtually true, but the dancing until four, the party refreshments and the speeded-up scene…the vastness of the New York Public Library, the height of the Empire State, the whiz of graffitied subways. One night dancing, one night maudlin. She didn’t let on about the staggering pain of his loss.

Whatever! Greer Little did not go unnoticed anywhere!

Quick, she said to herself at Quinn’s apartment, before he arrives from Troublesome. She opened the first of two suitcases. Out came a trapeze to hook over the beams above the mattress in the nook. A whip, but mercifully covered in velvet, handcuffs, and…candles: big candles, little candles, smelly candles, floating candles, Christian candles, Jewish candles. There were enough undergarments to outfit a small chorus line—or a chorus line of small women. The balance of the suitcase held a variety of adult toys.

The second case held the artist’s paraphernalia. Greer undressed and stood before the bathroom mirror. First on went an orange-colored wig; then she painted her face down the middle, violet on the left side and orange on the right. She encircled her breasts with a swath of green on the right breast and red on the left.

“Bottoms, bottoms,” she said to herself. White thigh boots. Now, let’s see, here we go. Across her midsection she painted the words and spread sparkles on it, reading:
PRAISE THE LORD
.

Greer heard a car parking outside. Holy moly—not a second to spare. She caught her breath and stood a few feet back, so he would have to get full sight of her.

A knock on the door. “Use your keys, I’ve got my hands full,” she called.

The key was tight from its summer’s rest. Finally, the door popped open.

“Fuck me, man!” Greer cried, holding arms and legs spread-eagled.

A number of beats of silence were required for everyone to get rearranged. Siobhan held a pair of shopping bags.