JC2 The Raiders (25 page)

Jo-Ann smiled and started her horse back toward the house. "Thank
you, Nevada," she said. "My father was right about one
thing. You are the smartest man about life either one of us has ever
met."

She had known yesterday afternoon that she and Nevada would be
returning to the house alone — alone, that is, but for Robair
and the ranch hands who worked around the place. The plane bringing
her new half brother and the woman from Washington wouldn't arrive
before midnight.

She had continued to wish Nevada would consent to come to her bed,
but she'd known he wouldn't, and she'd known better than to mention
it again.

A hundred yards from the house, Jo-Ann reined her horse to a stop
again. She yawned. "Would you believe I got out of bed this
morning in New York?" she said. "Are you having dinner with
me, Nevada?"

"I wasn't countin' on it, but you are alone, huh? Gonna eat
early?"

She nodded. "Surprise Robair," she said.

"Not much surprises that man. Anyway, sure, tell him to set two
places."

The dinner was what she'd asked for because she knew it was what the
ranch kitchen most easily afforded — besides which she did not
want to invade the food stocked for the Christmas Eve party. She and
Nevada sat facing each other across the table, over steaks and
potatoes, salads, and a bottle of red wine. Neither had changed
clothes since their ride. Nevada actually wore buckskins. Jo-Ann
wished he would wear them tomorrow night but knew he wouldn't. She
would like to show up at the party in her jeans and wool shirt —
and knew she wouldn't.

"If I asked him," she said, "I think my father might
let me come and live here. My mother would hate it, but —"

"You'd be lonesome out here," said Nevada. "Tomorrow
this house is gonna be full of folks. It isn't that way most of the
time."

"You'd come and see me, wouldn't you? It's only a short drive.
And I could come and see you."

"You can't count on me," he said.

"What? We've always counted on you. My grandfather, my father —"

"Not much longer," said Nevada.

"
Nevada
... ?"

He smiled. "A man ain't forever, y'- know. I'm seventy years
old."

"Kiowa men live to be ninety."

He shook his head. "Not this Kiowa. I tell you because you talk
about countin' on this ol' man, like the Cords have always counted on
me. If you tell your father what I'm goin' to tell you, then you
ain't my friend. But the Great Unknowable has started callin' fer
Nevada. Fer Max. That's my real name, y' know: Max Sand. I sit on my
porch and look at the country. The country's callin' me. I kin hear
it in the wind."

"What are you saying, Nevada?" Jo-Ann asked, alarmed.

"Promise me you won't tell."

"I promise."

Nevada stared for a moment at the bite of rare
beef on his fork. "By god, that's good," he said. "There
ain't nothin' better to eat than a real good piece of beef. We didn't
have it in the old days, you know. This comes off a
fat
steer,
one that couldn't a lived on the range grass. We —"

"Nevada  You're changing the subject."

He sighed loudly. "Man doesn't know how long he's got. But
they's signs. Mine don't read good."

Jo-Ann put down her knife and fork. "You can't read life and
death from owl feathers," she said. "Or anything like
that."

"Don't be so sure. But that don't make no difference. That's not
what I'm readin'. I've started rottin' away inside. I can feel it,
and I can smell it. When a man don't smell good —"

"Nevada! Have you seen a doctor?"

He nodded. "Cancer."

"Oh, my god! But you
must
tell my
father! There are wonderful hospitals where —"

"You gave me your word you wouldn't tell him."

She had exacted from Robair a promise to wake her when her new half
brother arrived. He did. She had not been asleep, really. What Nevada
had told her, the cancer, had intruded on every sleep fantasy and
jarred her awake. It was nearly one o'clock. She dressed in tight
blue jeans and the blue-and-white wool shirt she had worn in the
afternoon and at dinner. She brushed out her hair and put on a little
lipstick.

They were in the living room waiting for her, standing before the
fireplace where Robair had kept the fire going.

Jonas the Third stepped toward her, smiling broadly, his hand
reaching for hers. "Jo-Ann! I've been looking forward to meeting
you and am only sorry it didn't happen sooner. Let me introduce
Antonia Maxim."

He was not what she expected, not in any way. Having heard he had
been born and reared in Mexico, she had expected a swarthy,
dark-haired man with a Spanish accent. This tall, handsome man was
blond. He looked nothing like their father. He spoke perfect American
English and yet not like their father's. She could detect no family
resemblance at all.

The woman he had brought with him was beautiful. "Call me Toni"
were her first words, and she reached out with both her hands and
took both of Jo-Ann's.

Jo-Ann was polite to Toni, but her eyes fastened
on Bat. She had wanted to dislike him, had decided to dislike him.
But how could a woman — how could
anyone
— dislike
a man with laughing eyes that drew you in and invited you to share
whatever was making them laugh? Her half brother was naturally,
gracefully magnetic, even more so than her father was.

"We've wakened you in the middle of the night," said Jonas
the Third. "And we've been up since dawn. What time do we meet
for breakfast, Jo-Ann?"

"Oh, let's be late. When our father is here, he'll be at the
table by six-thirty, eating bacon and eggs and potatoes and God knows
what. The Christmas Eve party is at seven and will go on well after
midnight, but plan on being up at dawn again on Christmas Day. I
don't have to tell you that his schedule will be our schedule."

On Christmas afternoon, Nevada took Toni out to teach her to fire her
Winchester. Bat and Jo-Ann came along. The weather was raw. The sky
was pale, and snow threatened. Except for Nevada, they wore coats
from the ranch house closets: sheepskin that cut the wind.

Watching the old man, after what he had told her two days ago, was
painful for Jo-Ann. That Nevada Smith was mortal had never occurred
to her. And he walked and talked like a man who expected to live to
be a hundred. He put wine and liquor bottles on fence posts. He
talked quietly with Toni, telling her how to hold her rifle and aim;
then he stood back and let her try.

She shattered three bottles with her first three shots, missing only
the fourth.

"Know why y' done?" Nevada asked her.

Toni shook her head.

"Locked y' elbow. Keep 'er loose, Miss Toni. Nothin' stiff,
nothin' locked. Easy ... easy ..."

She missed twice in knocking down his bottles. Now he set up beer
cans, half as big. She needed eight shots to knock down five of them.

"Got a natural talent for it," he said. "Let's let
Jo-Ann try."

Jo-Ann shot about as well as Toni.

"How 'bout you, Bat?"

"I'm better with a pistol," said Bat. "Happen to have
brought one out from the house. What I like to shoot at is empty
shotgun shells, but I couldn't find any. But I found a bunch of
bottle corks."

Nevada shrugged as Bat walked forward and set up wine corks on the
fence posts.

Five corks. Six shots.

Nevada grinned. "Y' ever decide y' bored bein' a lawyer, I kin
prob'ly git y' a job in a Wild West show."

Jo-Ann tried to hide her feelings. Her new half brother was too
goddamned good! Give him a blackboard and chalk, he'd probably square
the circle.

She had one more chance to talk with Nevada. She didn't know it, but
it would be the last time. They went riding, alone.

"What do you think of my new brother?" she asked.

"Y' dad's lucky to find him," said Nevada blandly.

"Bullshit. What do you think of him?"

"He's gonna be a handful," said Nevada, staring at the
mountains and not turning his eyes toward her. "You know
somethin'? He's a Cord. Your old man's figured that one out. I ain't
sure he likes it much."

Jo-Ann smiled and nodded. "He'd have liked to have a son he
could —"

"What
his
father wanted," Nevada
interrupted. "A boy who'd take orders. Well, they didn't neither
of them git that kind of son. This new boy has got somethin' of his
gran'dad in him. Jonas sees it. That's hard for him to take. Could be
this boy's got the old man's tough and your dad's smarts. Could be."

"Shuts me out of everything, doesn't it, Nevada?"

"Wouldn't think of it that way. I'd make my peace with the new
man, if I was you. Looks to me like an honest sort of fella. He ain'
gonna take on your dad right off, but them two's gonna go nose to
nose. I'm not ready to place my bet."

Jo-Ann broke her word to Nevada, and three weeks later he was
admitted to the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City.

Jonas was with him and stayed at the hospital through ten days of
tests, going to the Waldorf Towers only at night. Monica came to
visit Nevada. Robair came. Morris Chandler. Angie. Bat, who had known
Nevada only for a little while but had impressed him favorably. And
Jo-Ann, and he forgave her.

The prognosis was not good. The doctors talked of radiation therapy
and chemotherapy — and six months, maximum.

Nevada said no to all of it. "Y' cain't fight nature" was
the way he put it. "Anyways, why should y'? Who knows what's
next? Y' fight it off, maybe y' just postponin' somethin' awful good.
In all my life I only took stock in one writer. Mark Twain said he
warn't afraid of where he was goin'. He'd been there before, and it
didn't hurt."

A Cord company plane flew Nevada back to his ranch. He sat in his old
rocker on the porch, in his buckskins, sheepskin coat, and a stained
old hat; and he stared at the desert and the mountains. He told Jonas
to go on about his business. He promised to call if he felt the end
was near. Meantime, he would just sit and wait. He was content just
to wait.

Jonas knew Nevada would never call. He promised to come back to see
him, but he left him with a sense he would never see him again.

When Nevada died, Jonas called Jo-Ann.

That afternoon she left Northampton in the black Porsche he had given
her for Christmas, bearing the Nevada license plate cord two. She
drove to New York in three hours. And having reached the city she was
not sure why she had come or what she would do. She had driven
mindlessly, probably assuming she would go to the apartment on
Fifty-ninth Street. Then she realized she would face a mother who
would demand to know why she had left Northampton — or a mother
so absorbed in whatever man was there with her that she would hardly
notice that her daughter had come home. She drove past the apartment
and did not stop.

She put the Porsche in a garage on Fifty-seventh Street and had
dinner in a Hungarian restaurant she had learned to appreciate. When
she came out and retrieved the car, it was after ten o'clock and she
had to face it that she could not drive back to Northampton that
night and could not cruise through the streets of Manhattan in an
expensive sports car much longer. She had drunk a whole bottle of
rich red Hungarian wine. A sense of urgency, not panic but
approaching it, seized her.

She drove into the garage at the Waldorf Towers.

"Miss?"

She showed the garage attendant her key to the Cord apartment. She
didn't know what her mother had done with hers, but Jo-Ann had never
surrendered her key. The man glanced at the license plate on the
Porsche and opened her door. She got out, and he drove the car down
into the garage.

The key gave her access to the elevator, too. She went up. At the
door she pressed the bell button before she used the key. No one
responded, so she unlocked the door and entered the apartment.

When Bat came home a little before midnight he found Jo-Ann sitting
on a couch in the living room. She was smoking a cigarette and had
taken off her dress and her stockings and garter belt and shoes. She
sat in a white silk slip.

"It's a
family
apartment," she
said.

He nodded. "Of course. The garage man told me you were here. I'm
glad to see you."

Jo-Ann nodded. A bottle of Scotch sat on the coffee table before her.
The ice in her glass had long since melted, and she had been sipping
Chivas Regal neat. "Nevada died," she said.

"I heard. Our father called from California. I didn't know the
man as well as you did, but I understand what a great loss it is."

Jo-Ann picked up her glass and drank the little that was left of the
warm whiskey. "I feel as if I'd lost a father. He was more of a
father to me than Jonas ever was."

"I understand," said Bat. He sat down on the couch, at the
opposite end.

"I don't think you do, but it's all right."

"I know something of the family history," said Bat.

"You grew up in odd circumstances, too. Did you have anybody to
talk to?"

"My mother," he said. "My grandfather."

"Lucky you," she said despondently. She crushed her
cigarette. "Jonas is nobody's father, you know."

"He's a great man."

Her eyes narrowed as she glanced at him. "Do you think so? Or is
that a Cord employee talking? Congratulations on your job, anyway."

He got up and went to the bar to get a glass. "A little more
Scotch?" he asked.

"A splash."

He brought back two glasses, both with ice. As he poured, he glanced
at her and said, "I wish we'd known each other sooner. I have
two other little sisters: Rafaela and Mercedes. I was away from home
during most of the years when they were growing up."