The Carpetbaggers (93 page)

Even when I was a kid, when I was through with a toy, I was through with it. And I'd never go back to it. "Sell the theaters," I whispered to Mac.

"What?" he shouted, as if he couldn't believe his ears. "They're the only end of this business that's making any money."

"Sell the theaters," I repeated. "In ten years, no one will want to come to them, anyway. At least, not the way they have up to now. Not when they can see movies right in their own home."

Mac stared at me. "And what do you want me to do about the studio?" he asked, a tinge of sarcasm coming into his voice. "Sell that, too?"

"Yes," I said quietly. "But not now. Ten years from now, maybe. When the people who are making pictures for that little box are squeezed and hungry for space. Sell it then."

"What will we do with it in the meantime? Let it rot while we pay taxes on it?"

"No," I said. "Turn it into a rental studio like the old Goldwyn lot. If we break even or lose a little, I won't complain."

He stared at me. "You really mean it?"

"I mean it," I said, looking away from him up at the roof over the stages. For the first time, I really saw it. It was black and ugly with tar. "Mac, see that roof?"

He turned and looked, squinting against the setting sun.

"Before you do anything else," I said softly, "have them paint it white."

I pulled my head back into the car. Nevada looked at me strangely. His voice was almost sad. "Nothing's changed, has it, Junior?"

"No," I said wearily. "Nothing's changed."

I sat on the porch, squinting out into the afternoon sun. Nevada came out of the house behind me and dropped into a chair. He pulled a plug out of his pocket and biting off a hunk, put the plug back. Then from his other pocket, he took a piece of wood and a penknife and began to whittle.

I looked at him. He was wearing a pair of faded blue levis. A sweat-stained old buckskin shirt, that had seen better days, clung to his deep chest and broad shoulders and he had a red-and-white kerchief tied around his neck to catch the perspiration. Except for his white hair, he looked as I always remembered him when I was a boy, his hands quick and brown and strong.

He looked up at me out of his light eyes. "Two lost arts," he said.

"What?"

"Chewin' an' whittlin'," he said.

I didn't answer.

He looked down at the piece of wood in his hands. "Many's the evenin' I spent on the porch with your pa, chewin' an' whittlin'."

"Yeah?"

He turned and let fly a stream of tobacco juice over the porch rail into the dust below. He turned back to me. "I recall one night," he said. "Your pa an' me, we were settin' here, just like now. It'd been a real bitcheroo of a day. One of them scorchers that make your balls feel like they're drownin' in their own sweat. Suddenly he looks up at me an' says, 'Nevada, anything should happen to me, you look after my boy, hear? Jonas is a good boy. Sometimes his ass gets too much for his britches but he's a good boy an' he's got the makin's in him to be a better man than his daddy, someday. I love that boy, Nevada. He's all I got.' "

"He never told me that," I said, looking at Nevada. "Not ever. Not once!"

Nevada's eyes flashed up at me. "Men like your daddy ain't given much to talkin' about things like that."

I laughed. "He not only didn't talk it," I said. "He never showed it. He was always chewing on my ass for one thing or another."

Nevada's eyes bore straight into mine. "He was always there whenever you were in trouble. He might have hollered but he never turned you down."

"He married my girl away from me," I said bitterly.

"Maybe it was for your own good. Maybe it was because he knew she never really was for you."

I let that one go. "Why are you telling me this now?" I asked.

I couldn't read those Indian eyes of his. "Because your father asked me once to look after you. I made one mistake already. I seen how smart you was in business, I figured you to be growed up. But you wasn't. An' I wouldn' like to fail a man like your father twice."

We sat there in silence for a few minutes, then Martha came out with my tea. She told Nevada to spit out the chaw and stop dirtying up the porch. He looked at me almost shyly, got up and went down to get rid of the chaw behind the bushes.

We heard a car turn up our road as he came back to the porch. "I wonder who that is?" Martha asked.

"Maybe it's the doctor," I said. Old Doc Hanley was supposed to come out and check me over once a week.

By that time, the car was in the driveway and I knew who it was. I got to my feet, leaning on my cane, as Monica and Jo-Ann approached us. "Hello," I called.

They'd come back to California to close up their apartment, Monica explained, and since she wanted to talk to me about Amos, they'd stopped off in Reno on their way back to New York. Their train wasn't due to leave until seven o'clock.

I saw Martha glance meaningfully at Nevada when she heard that. Nevada got to his feet and looked at Jo-Ann. "I've got a gentle bay horse out in the corral that's just dyin' for some young lady like you to ride her."

Jo-Ann looked up at him worshipfully. You could tell she'd been to the movies from the way she looked at him. He was a real live hero. "I don't know," she said doubtfully. "I’ve never really ridden a horse before."

"I can teach you. It's easy, easier than fallin' off a log."

"But she's not dressed for riding," Monica said.

She wasn't. Not in that pretty flowered dress that made her look so much like her mother. Martha spoke up quickly. "I got a pair of dungarees that shrunk down to half my size. They'll fit her."

I don't know whose dungarees they were but one thing was for sure. They'd never been Martha's. Not the way they clung to Jo-Ann's fourteen-year-old hips, tight and flat with just the suggestion of the curves to come. Jo-Ann's dark hair was pulled back straight from her head in a pony tail and there was something curiously familiar about the way she looked. I couldn't quite figure out what it was.

I watched her run out the door after Nevada and turned to Monica. She was smiling at me. I returned her smile. "She's growing up," I said. "She's going to be a pretty girl."

"One day they're children, the next they're young ladies. They grow up too fast."

I nodded. We were alone now and an awkward silence came down between us. I reached for a cigarette and looked at her. "I want to tell you about Amos."

It was near six o'clock when I finished telling her about what happened. There were no tears in her eyes, though her face was sad and thoughtful. "I can't cry for him, Jonas," she said, looking at me. "Because I've already cried too many times because of him. Do you understand?"

I nodded.

"He did so many things that were wrong all his life. I’m glad that at last he did one thing right."

"He did a very brave thing. I always thought he hated me."

"He did," she said quickly. "He saw in you everything that he wasn't. Quick, successful, rich. He hated your guts. I guess at the end he realized how foolish that was and how much harm he'd already done you, so he tried to make it right."

I looked at her. "What wrong did he do me? There was nothing but business between us."

She gave me a peculiar look. "You can't see it yet?"

"No."

"Then I guess you never will," she said and walked out onto the porch.

We could hear Jo-Ann's shout of laughter as she rode the big bay around the corral. She was doing pretty good for a beginner. I looked down at Monica. "She takes to it like she was born to the saddle."

"Why shouldn't she?" Monica replied. "They say such things are inherited."

"I didn't know you rode."

She looked up at me, her eyes hurt and angry. "I’m not her only parent," she snapped coldly.

I stared at her. This was the only time she'd ever mentioned anything about Jo-Ann's father to me. It was sort of late to be angry about it now.

I heard the chug of Doc Hanley's old car turning into the driveway. He stopped near the corral and getting out of the car, walked over to the fence. He never could drive past a horse.

"That's Doc Hanley. He's supposed to check me out."

"Then I won't keep you," Monica said coolly. "I’ll say good-by here."

She went down the steps and started walking toward the corral. I stared after her bewilderedly. I never could figure her out when she got into those crazy moods. "I'll have Robair drive you to the station," I called after her.

"Thanks!" She flung it back over her shoulder without turning around. I saw her stop and talk to the doctor, then I turned and walked back into the house. I went into the room that my father used as his study and sank down on the couch. Monica always did have a quick temper. You'd think by now she'd have learned to control it. I started to smile, thinking of how straight her back was and how sassy she'd looked walking away from me, her nose in the air. She still looked pretty good for a woman her age. I was forty-one, which meant she was thirty-four. And nothing on her jiggled that shouldn't.

* * *

The trouble with Doc Hanley is that he's a talker. He talks you deaf, dumb and blind but you don't have much choice. Since the war started, it's been him or nothing. All the young docs were in the service.

It was six thirty by the time he'd finished his examination and begun to close up his instrument case. "You're doin' all right," he said. "But I don't hold with them newfangled notions of getting you out as soon as you kin move. If it'd been up to me, now, I'd have kept you in the hospital another month."

Nevada leaned against the study wall, smiling as I climbed into my britches. I looked at him and shrugged. I turned to the doctor. "How long now before I can really begin to do some walking?"

Doc Hanley peered at me over the edges of his bifocals. "You kin start walkin' right now."

"But I thought you didn't agree with those city doctors," I said. "I thought you wanted me to rest some more."

"I don't agree with them," he said. "But since you're out, an' there ain't nothin' that can be done about that, you might as well git to movin' about. There ain't no sense in you jist layin' aroun'."

He snapped his case shut, straightened up and walked to the door. He turned and looked back at me. "That's a right pert gal you got there, your daughter."

I stared at him. "My daughter?"

"That's right," he said. "With her hair tied back like that, I never seen a gal who took so after her father. Why she's the spittin' image of you when you was a boy."

I couldn't speak, only stare. Had the idiot gone off his rocker? Everybody knew Jo-Ann wasn't my daughter.

Doc laughed suddenly and slapped his hand on his thigh. "I’ll never forget the time her mother came down to my office," he said. "She was your wife then, of course. I never seen such a big belly. I figured, no wonder you got married so sudden like. You'd been doin' your plantin' early."

He looked up at me, still smiling. "That was before I examined her, you understand," he said quickly. "You could have knocked me over with a feather when the examination showed her only six weeks gone. It was just one of those peculiar things where she carried real high. She was so nervous an' upset just about then that she blew up with gas like a balloon. I even went back to the papers an' checked your weddin' date just to make sure. An' dang my britches if it weren't a fact you'd knocked her up at most two weeks after you were married. But there's one thing I got to say for yuh, boy." He turned back at the door. "When you ram 'em, you ram 'em good. Right up the ol' gazizzis, where it sticks!" And still laughing lewdly, he walked out.

I felt the tight, sick knot ball up inside me. I sat down on the couch. All these years. All these years and I had been wrong. Suddenly, I knew what Amos had been going to tell me after we returned from the flight. He'd seen how crazy I'd been that night and turned my own hate against me. And there was little Monica could have done about it.

What a combination, Amos and me. But at least, he'd seen the light by himself. No one had to hit him over the head with it. And he'd tried to make up for it. But I — I never even turned my head to seek the truth. I'd been content to go along blaming the world for my own stupidity. And I was the one who'd been at war with my father because I thought he didn't love me. That was the biggest joke of all.

Now I could even face the truth in that. It never had been his love that I'd doubted. It had been my own. For deep inside of me, I’d always known that I could never love him as much as he loved me. I looked up at Nevada. He was still leaning against the wall, but he wasn't smiling now. "You saw it, too?"

"Sure." He nodded. "Everybody saw it — but you."

I closed my eyes. Now I could see it. It was like that morning in the hospital when I looked into the mirror and saw my father's face. That was what I'd seen in Jo-Ann when I thought she looked so familiar this afternoon. Her father's face. My own.

"What shall I do, Nevada?" I groaned.

"What do yuh want to do, son?"

"I want them back."

"Sure that's what you want?"

I nodded.

"Then get 'em back," he said. He looked at his watch. "There's still fifteen minutes before the train pulls out."

"But how? We'd never get there in time!"

He gestured to the desk. "There's the phone."

I looked at him wildly, then hobbled to the phone. I called the stationmaster's office at Reno and had them page her. While I was waiting for her to come on, I looked at Nevada. Suddenly, I was frightened, and when I'd been little, I'd always turned to Nevada when I was frightened. "What if she won't come back?"

"She'll come back," he said confidently. He smiled. "She's still in love with you. That's something else everybody knew but you."

Then she was on the phone, her voice worried and anxious. "Jonas, are you all right? Is there anything wrong?"

For a moment, I couldn't speak, then I found my voice. "Monica," I said. "Don't go!"

"But I have to, Jonas. I have to be on the job by the end of the week."