A silence followed. Quinn was dead calm, his eyes fixed on the lawyer.
The lawyer didn’t like it.
“Shall I continue?”
Vito Vincent Zacco nodded cautiously.
“Between Tikkah Air Base and Fort Urbakkan, some glitch developed in
bomb rack four. Could have been the plane shaking violently, drastic
changes in temperature, perhaps a little ping of some sort of debris which was flying at us as we crossed closely over the ridge tops. I got no indication of a problem on the display panels or gauges.”
Lightner was transfixed. Zacco was confused.
“We positioned ourselves to fire,” Quinn said. “I had under a minute to unload the missile racks. One bomb obviously veered off course and fell short in the courtyard. It was too small for our FLIR to pick up, and we didn’t even sight it until the end of the raid. We moved our people away from the bomb, but she went off. Next half hour, forty minutes, was spent in ankle-deep blood, brains and guts on the ceiling, an amputation and a copilot with his guts about to spill out... we needed to patch a window .. . with Barakat’s knowledge of the terrain and IV’s courage, we made our rendezvous with the tanker plane .. . and after that ... IV stayed alive and instructed me for over two thousand miles .. . that was five and a half hours from the time we left the fort. When I touched down on the helipad of our container ship and cut the engines, IV died instantly.”
Zacco knew that when the fourth version of this insane story was told, Quinn would riddle himself with contradictions. He had the goods now to blame Quinn for the friendly-fire bomb.
“The bomb was my responsibility,” Quinn said, entirely taking the wind out of both inquisitors.
Senator Lightner had a rare moment of shame and disgust for himself. Zacco had been stripped of his congressional right to bully. He knocked on the table in successive knocks. “I have a feeling you have something more to tell me, Gunner.”
“Yeah, I sure do,” Quinn said with a lowered voice. “You’re a necrophilic, a corpse fucker. Now, get out of my sight.”
“Mr. Zacco,” the senator creamed reflectively, “the gunner has been through a tremendous ordeal. I suggest his remark was made in the heat of the moment. Kindly wait outside.”
The senator crushed an empty cigarillo box, tried but was unable to say something to Quinn. Quinn called for Mandy, waiting just beyond the door, who wheeled him away.
Now the scornful eyes of Commandant Brickhouse fell on Lightner. “I don’t think we’d better have a hearing on this,” the senator said. “I’m not going to tangle with Gunner Quinn.”
TROUBLESOME MESA, 1980
Oh, what a glorious valley. It echoed in a sound that said, “peace.”
Dan O’Connell was neither able to drive a car nor ride in the saddle. The first time Quinn swooped him up into his arms and set him in the passenger side, the two looked at each other, wordless but rich with joy. Neither of them ever said, “I’m sorry.” Dan was at his son’s side a good part of the day, at the chessboard, or the movies, or being wheeled into Mile High Stadium for a Bronco game.
Quinn said to himself, over and again, “This is what life should be all about.”
Dan O’Connell ceded his seat as state senator, and the governor selected Quinn to finish the term, even though it was a switch from Republican to Democratic.
Dan had made dramatic changes and lost some of his Brooklyn cop mentality, broadening his base and finally getting a keen and compassionate understanding of other people.
He had been confused by the roiling student protests of the Vietnam War, by the ruckus called music, and by the decline in the basic morality, yet he’d grown enough to understand the meaning of the civil rights movement.
It was good to have a son as knowledgeable as Quinn, who seemed to have a grasp on all kinds of events and was a student of human history and behavior.
With Dan and his son so close these days, Siobhan was able to free herself to take a path she longed for. Siobhan had always been a stalwart of the church. She had to make peace with Greer Little’s abortion and finally concluded that her church made mistakes. The mistakes usually came from men asked to give more than they had to give.
Siobhan soon represented Colorado as an upper-middle national committee woman. She and Dan traveled a lot on church tours of the cathedrals of grandeur in Italy and France, or they would cruise to the Alaskan glaciers, visit Buddhist temples, or charter for the Greek islands.
Quinn took over more and more of the ranch operation, bringing him into daily contact with the Martinez family. Consuelo and Pedro had four children, three of them university graduates, settled in cities as professionals with careers.
The remaining son, Juan, evolved into what seemed a natural passage from his father.
The Martinez family were twenty-five percent partners in the ranch operation. The changing of the guard from Pedro to Juan continued the close relationship with the O’Connells.
The families accorded one another the affection and respect of people who had spent a long time in one another’s kitchens. And this, too, was good. Dan had overcome a good part of his bigotry as the Martinezes largely replaced his own family back in Brooklyn.
The older people were delighted that Quinn and Juan would continue to run the ranch. Juan, in particular, was a cowboy’s cowboy, born to ride and rope, a mountain man with a graceful work ethic.
The clinker was that Carlos was missing. Quinn and Carlos had bud died so well, playing the games, dancing the music, riding like fury over the range, chasing girls, and tiptoeing into drinking and carousing when they felt manhood in their groins.
Carlos had gotten through law school in a blaze and been snatched up by a major Houston firm. His speciality, immigration. Whatever it consisted of, the family knew that Carlos would be good. Carlos was always flying off to the South and Caribbean and seemed prominent in his firm early on.
Quinn had only seen him once in the five years he was gone from Troublesome Mesa. They met in San Diego, mostly by happenstance, when Quinn was in the Corps.
Carlos had carved a hell of a life for himself, but why didn’t he ever return to Troublesome? Consuelo and Pedro visited him every year in Houston and wondered why their son remained a bachelor or why he didn’t let them know when he was traveling to Denver.
It had an eerie slant to it. Well, Quinn thought, I sure as hell didn’t get Carlos’ approval to join the Marines, and Carlos was certainly not indentured to the ranch. But he had loved the ranch. What made him divorce himself from it? In Quinn’s fantasy of the future, Carlos had always been riding alongside him.
Quinn’s homecoming brought a heartwarming letter from Carlos. He would come to the ranch for the first time in five years. When Carlos showed up, he and Quinn met each other as strangers.
Carlos wore an Italian suit, a wristwatch worth thousands, and was altogether a wealthy young dandy. It seemed that his reputation as a lawyer grew by the day.
Quinn’s thoughts of them riding and howling at the moon and tying one on fell awkwardly by the wayside.
Carlos’ visit was brief. They bumbled through their litanies, each realizing that they had outgrown one another and now lived in different worlds.
Carlos was dark and secretive and decorated like an expensive crown prince. What of his love life? Many ladies to love but none to marry, Carlos told him.
Something was strange, out of kilter with the homecoming. Carlos never
mentioned the third member of their childhood club, that little pest, Rita Maldonado. After she had graduated from Wellesley, she had stayed on in the East to do postgraduate work in creative writing and some teaching at the endless writers’ conferences.
Why had her letters to Quinn suddenly ceased? Why hadn’t she returned for Quinn’s homecoming? Well, now, all Marines freeze a part of their childhood, a perfect part. Life evolves and Quinn had made no provisions in his dreams for the adulthood of Carlos and Rita.
The rew
ards of his new life with his parents was countered by an emptiness over his pals.
If Carlos and Rita were Quinn’s disappointment, Reynaldo Maldonado mellowed it. They came together strongly, swapping tales of the Corps and tales of the road, conversing half the night away.
Maldonado remained unmarried but still had a collection of great beauties, particularly in Mexico, where he kept a studio in Cuernavaca. There was always a waiting line of magnificent creatures who wanted to model for him, and Quinn thought it wondrous how Mal had evaded the wrath of some jealous husband.
Each time Quinn came down to Mal’s, he was halted by the array of photographs on the mantel depicting Rita’s growth from a little girl to the present. Quinn studied the photographs each time with growing interest.
“Jesus,” he muttered one evening.
“You didn’t expect she’d stay in pigtails,” Mal said, carefully charting Quinn’s interest.
“She is really beautiful. I mean, unearthly beautiful.”
“Devastatingly so,” Mal said. “Give or take a little more of this and a little less of that, Rita is probably one of the most beautiful women in the world.”
“And she writes a lovely letter,” Quinn said. “Her letters were never
repetitious ad nauseam. She could relate any story about the wiggle on
the end of the nose of one of your models, or maybe Saturday night in
the old mining town, or the sheriff being the fattest gun in the West, or her walk through the wildflowers. You know, she was awfully pretty walking through a field of flowers, even when she was a kid, and then holding her skirts up to cross a stream.”
In contrast to his own catting around, Mal had raised Rita as a protective father with great intelligence. Rita had developed into Rita, and that was what he had prayed for.
Rita was a constant child, quietly off with her poetry, quite sweet, and quite charitable about her father’s wicked ways, for he also was a source of her growth.
Mal knew, almost from the beginning, how she had ached for Quinn from the time they first had come to Troublesome Mesa. It was something a father could do poor little about. Watching Rita progress and develop, and after Quinn broke up with Greer Little, perhaps he would notice her. Their age difference was not that awesome, but the years of separation put them on different plateaus.
She’s fully grown, Mal thought, and the homecoming fiesta is over and Siobhan and Dan are off to Florence. Well? What about it, Quinn? How many hearts were broken during your hitch in the Corps?
“What was Rita,” Quinn said, “sixteen or seventeen when I left?”
“She’s not seventeen anymore, Quinn? When you hooked up with Greer, Rita grieved as only a teenager could.”
“Oh, come on, Mal. I never gave her an improper look.”
“Yes,” Mal said, “and I felt very good about that. Even a roustabout artist can have lionesque protective instincts about his only daughter. Rita was always a holy light to me. She tried to model for me a couple of times, but she was too beautiful to ruin in stone or oil.”
“Why are you suddenly telling me this?” Quinn asked.
“She made a loud noise by her absence.”
“I missed her, too,” Quinn said. “I’ve loved Rita all my life but never thought of her as more than a little sister.”
“Exactly the point,” Mal retorted. “Rita is terrified that you’ll reject her as a woman.”
Quinn wanted to argue, but Mal’s pronouncement had too much sting to it, too many years of wisdom.
“Do you want to see the Quinn O’Connell shrine in her room?” Mal led him by the arm and opened her door. The walls were adorned with photographs of Quinn the ball player, Quinn the rodeo rider, Quinn the Marine. There was a torn football jersey hanging off a rafter, a scrapbook.
“How do you feel about this, Mal?”
“You can’t tell a person to change the longings of her heart. But now, well, you are back to stay, and I believe Rita wants to come back to stay and to write. I would like to see this part of her life resolved. In the drawers there are short stories and poems. Rita trying to prove to you and me that she is worthy of our love. That’s why little girls twist themselves in pretzels in ballet class, to win their father’s approval. That’s why big girls write erotic poetry, to win their lover.”
“And me, Quinn Patrick O’Connell?”
“Don’t you know how much I love you, amigo?” Mal said. “It has been no pleasure knowing her secret and having to remain silent all these years. Will you stand up and tell her now?”
Mal’s words chilled him. He was frightened. “Suppose I don’t.. . can’t love her that way?” Quinn asked.
“You’d have to be crazy not to love Rita, but it’s your heart, man, just tell her the truth.”
Quinn stared at her photographs and blended them with his own memories of a quiet little sloe-eyed, raven silk-haired being, tickled by him but hardly laughing to show him the stuff she was made of. Even in her early teens she had been scrumptious, classically round, voluptuous in a bikini.
“I’ve done something dreadful,” Mal said. “I knew she kept a drawer of secret poetry, and I went in without permission.” He opened the drawer and handed Quinn a paper. “She wrote this when she was sixteen.”
Our first night together after dark you never caught me following at reaching distance behind you on your way home from the river.
Had you looked back you would have seen the same child whose spare, uncharted body you would instinctively shield with yours against the sudden loss of passing time.
Twice you paused,
as if between movements of a symphony the secret panicked crackling leaves under my feet and artless rhythm in the audience of your forest.
An aspen tree marks the place where your land begins.
Its infinite shadows like fingerprints of the moments I have stood
beside it confusing your arms with its firm extended branches,
the deep cedar color of your skin,
the bark white corners of your eyes,
the sap which in unnatural light fills them,
runs down the ordinary roughness of wood,
your unshaven cheek. For the first time, this night,
I stayed longer to watch you walk toward the lit windows of your cabin saw your two halves split at the roots:
wood and flesh bark and skin the veins of dried leaves the greener veins across your wrists.
You never knew but we fell asleep together half of you beside me,
the other half locked behind a lit window,
all silent until the dark noisy grass woke us,
rousing itself with thoughts of its own fallen dew.
“God,” Quinn whispered. “Her stories? Have you ever read them, Mal?”
“She read to me once in a while, or used to. I never wanted to be in judgment of her. Suppose she has no talent. I don’t want to be the one to reject my daughter. Quinn, I’ve seen enough of her writing to know she isn’t going to make it. I’ll be there to pick her up when the realization comes to her. I’m a mediocre artist. I get through by being a Mexican tit man. I fart around with this modern bullshit because nobody, critics or clients, knows what it is but wouldn’t dare say so. You can’t get away with my shit as a writer.”
“Mal, no sale. You’re great.”
“He’s great,” Mal said, pointing at an original scribble by Van Gogh.
That night Quinn’s letters from Rita came out of his sea trunk. There were well over a hundred of them. Seen from letter to letter, their continuity was soon understood. Not exactly veiled words of love, but more of missing him as a part of the mountains. Nothing about boyfriends or her own growing maturity. She let the photographs do the talking.
Quinn had gotten one of two monkeys off his back. The resurrection with his parents was a great blessing. The other? Greer Little. He clung to a diminished, unreal thread. Hadn’t Rita done the same thing? The women who loved Marine gunners were plentifu
l, but .. .
Quinn was puzzled by his own soul opening up. He didn’t know if he loved her and wouldn’t know until they stood face to face.
Quinn quivered every time he thought of Rita. All the way to the upstate New York Writers Conference, he sighed constantly.
A powerful uncertainty it was whose moment of truth had come.
In the splendiferous woods bordering Lake George, the great old novelist Christopher Christopher held forth for ten weeks in the summer for serious aspiring writers. Ten weeks to feed the dream.
One had to go back a bit to remember Christopher’s last great novel. He had outlived his mediocre talent but knew the whens and hows. He became a legend.
Actually, did old Christopher have any masterpieces? His name wove in and out of a generation of magnificent American writers, from the ex patriots in Paris between world wars or in Pamplona, where he chased the bulls with Hemingway. Hadn’t he actually been a cub reporter who got an interview with Hemingway and after Papa’s death became a Hemingway “close friend” and aficionado. He wrote of visits to Cuba to arm wrestle Papa. Never happened.
What about Sinclair Lewis? Christopher Christopher’s New Yorker portrait of “Red” was certainly quintessential. Of course, not that many things had been written about Sinclair Lewis.
Christopher Christopher really made his big hit in American literature with an article for Esquire entitled “Chrysler Airflow—The Great American Car.”
A Broadway producer of zingy revues thought it had a catchy ring to it—The Great American Car. He named one of his annual follies after it, and eight hundred performances later, Christopher Christopher was made for life.
These days he was an American icon (who once had tossed a chilled martini into F. Scott Fitzgerald’s face). Now thatched with wild silver hair, he held forth at Lake George with a dozen “master” students conducting the eternal hunt for the great American novel.
“I’ve done my little bit, made my small contribution,” he would say as his eyes misted to the students of mixed gender.