“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 Scan.
“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:5 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 Mal don ado 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, squeaky-clean 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 Scan 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 Boy 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 Boy called an end to the outfielders’ drill, and as they jogged toward the dugout and locker room, Boy 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 Boy 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 split-finger 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 BohemeT 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?”
bo-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.
“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.”