Villiers Touch (29 page)

In time the plane boarded and taxied four miles to a runway where eighteen jets stood in line waiting to take off. He tried to adjust himself in the seat, which, neither sitting nor reclining, had clearly been designed with something other than a human body in mind.

Seventy minutes after its scheduled departure time the plane got off, launched by fifty thousands pound of pollutant thrust. He closed his eyes and drowsed. But of course every six minutes a stewardess woke him up to inquire if he wanted a magazine or a drink, or insist that he uncross his legs so she could tip down the folding table, which sat empty above his cramped knees for twenty minutes before she set before him a meal reminiscent of fried concrete garnished with fossil ferns, served on a wood-grained plastic tray. “I don't mind plastic,” he said unreasonably, “but why does it always have to look like something else? Why can't they just let it look like plastic?”

“Is anything wrong with your lunch, sir?”

He waved her away.

Below, through the window, he could see a section of superhighway crawling with trucks and cars.
I used to like to drive
, he complained to himself, thinking of the awful turnpike food at overcrowded One Stop Service Areas, the stalled cars with their hoods lifted in the smoggy heat, the insulting stink of diesel exhausts, the construction—RIGHT LANE CLOSED 1 MI AHEAD—the unmarked cop cars and periodic bloody wrecks, the surly chargings of cars full of restless screaming kids, all of them bound to or from the great nerve center, Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson, the predatory megalopolis where eight million crushed bodies supported the weight of a handful of People Who Counted, who endlessly played games in which they fought to win, and having won, used victory-earned power to change the rules of the game to their own advantage. Rats, birds, fish, humans—it was all the same: crowd too many into too small a space and they lost their biological inhibitions and turned into mindless cannibals. It was no good trying to make decisions in those surroundings; he could no longer tell if he was still sane: in the city there was no norm, no way to judge.

At the end of the flight lay the open land—miles between beings. He harked back to male weekends in a damp duck blind, birds calling over the water.
I have got to make up my mind to get out of it
. Why care if someone played basketball with NCI? How could it possibly matter to those teeming ants down there? He had a vague recollection of last night's whimsical conversation with Carol McCloud. “
All you have to do is make things matter
.”

Air travel always depressed him; ultimately the ordeal ended. Through the hair-oil-greasy plastic inner window he saw the desert mountains moving up. He felt the changing pressure in his ears and recognized the San Pedro Valley, the towns, the right angle formed by the two ranges of mountains north and east of Tucson. The pilot's voice announced the temperature at Tucson International Airport was 103 degrees and the local time was 2:25
P.M.
Hastings set his watch back and closed his eyes for the landing.

When he walked into the terminal, he did not expect to be met, but still he found himself seeking familiar faces; he saw none, and walked up the long ramp to the terminal center, silently congratulating himself on having survived yet another adventure.

He spent twenty boring minutes at the Rent-A-Car counter, signed a dangerous-looking document in exchange for a set of car keys, and stopped at a phone booth on his way out. His ring was answered by an alert baritone voice that belonged to Lewis Downey, Judd's longtime private secretary, who gave him an affably courteous greeting and added, “I'm afraid Mr. Judd still isn't taking any phone calls, Mr. Hastings—my orders are specific, and he made no exceptions.”

“I'm in Tucson,” Hastings said. “I've got a car, and I'm on my way up there. I should be there by five. Will I be admitted?”

He heard, distinctly, the suck of Downey's indrawn breath. Downey said, “Hold on a minute, will you?”

The operator presently came on the line and asked for an additional fifteen cents. Shortly thereafter Downey returned. “Sorry to hold you, Mr. Hastings. I didn't mean to be rude, but I only work here, you know. Mr. Judd hasn't been seeing anyone. But the gate will be open when you arrive. We'll prepare a room for you. How long were you planning to stay?” The voice rode on a tone of distant politeness, but nothing more.

Hastings said, “That has to depend on Mr. Judd. I've got a tentative booking on a return flight tomorrow evening.”

“Very good, sir. We'll expect you around five?”

“Is he all right, Downey?”

“Sir?”

“I don't want to disturb him if he's not well.”

After a beat Downey said, “Mr. Judd is in excellent health, sir. You'll see for yourself. Good-bye, then.”

Frowning, he went outside into the brass blaze of sunlight. He found the gray Plymouth in the vast parking lot and unlocked it. The windows had been left rolled up; he opened them and tossed his suitcase in back and switched the engine on, and stood in the shade while the engine and air-conditioner got working. Even then, when he got into the car the vinyl seat covers blistered his back and rump. The steering wheel was too hot to hold; he drove with his fingertips, finding it hard to breathe. The radio informed him again that it was 103 degrees—“A nice mild day today, folks, after the hundred-and-twelve we had yesterday.” He switched off the infuriating voice and squirmed on the seat, driving out along the familiar streets to the interstate highway.

In the next hour the road took him past the edge of the mountains; he took a fast, paved side road toward the high country, and by four-fifteen was climbing through long gentle meadows hip-deep in yellow grass. Dark spots on the hills were beef cattle, slowly browsing.

The sky was vast, cobalt blue, serrated at its edges by jagged peaks of crystalline clarity. He had forgotten how beautiful this country was—back East he always got to thinking of Arizona in Eastern stereotypes, as if it were all desert, sand and cactus. Easy to forget about the high country, the grass and hills and those high peaks where the snow hadn't melted in a thousand years. The road lanced up the center of a valley, and he didn't meet another car in twenty miles, and when he did, it was a pickup truck driven by an Apache Indian. Out here you didn't have to prove anything to anybody, and you could leave your doors wide open. No use for the horn on your car.

This was Judd's land now; he had been on Judd property for miles. The barbed-wire fences ran gleaming along both sides of the road, shiny wire and orange-painted steel posts, fading ahead of him with perspective, two parallel lines joining at infinity. At five thousand feet on this plateau it was cool enough to turn off the temperature control and throw the windows open to the wind. He pushed the car up to eighty and enjoyed himself.

In the back of his mind he was thinking about Judd. Lewis Downey had said he was in excellent health; it was the kind of thing he would say if he suspected the phone was tapped, and a man in Judd's position always had to assume his phones were tapped; that was the way of the modern world, and Hastings had no liking for it.
Maybe I ought to retire out here and hang out my shingle. Country lawyer
. He grinned at the hills and breathed deep of the crystal air; it tasted as if no one had ever breathed it before. It made him think of the times he and Diane had spent out here, holidaying, visiting the old man. Diane had no affinity for the outdoors; her visits here had always been designed solely to please her father. But Hastings recalled long walks along the grasshills with Judd, jeep and helicopter rides across the vast acres, and now and then there had been the feeling he was as close to Judd as Diane was—and closer, in some ways.

The road lifted him now toward the summit of a long hill topped by a deep-green stand of planted cottonwoods. Inside the barbed wire a graded landing strip ran along with a lonely windsock and three parked crop-dusting planes. To make a landing, he remembered, you had to buzz the field first to chase the whiteface cattle off. Judd's operation used jeeps and planes to do its cowboying.

Lewis Downey was standing by the front gate, a trim neat man with salt-and-pepper hair and a good tan, dressed in light slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. When he recognized Hastings he waved and opened the wire gate. Hastings drove in, wheels rumbling on the steel-slatted cattleguard, and stopped just inside. Downey latched the gate shut and got into the car; it was a quarter-mile ride up to the house. “Hi.”

Hastings said, “You're looking fit.”

“This country's good for you.” Downey propped his right arm in the open window. “Have a good trip?”

“Any air strip you survive is a good trip. Look, we're not on the phone now. How is he?”

“Improving. But better prepare for a shock when you see him.”

He shot a brief sidewise glance at Downey, but the man's cheeks revealed nothing. He didn't seem particularly happy to see Hastings, but Hastings was no longer a member of the family; Judd had no real obligation to him; and Downey was a man who liked to keep things neat and exact, he didn't like complexities and muddles. He was efficient, brainy, assiduously neat and clean—otherwise unassuming and capable of immense diffidence. A superb private secretary. And like a good butler, he knew his place. He volunteered nothing.

There was no point in pumping him; Hastings would learn from Judd as much as Judd wanted him to know, and he'd never elicit any more than that from Downey.

The house was not especially large. It was single-story adobe, built around a quadrangular patio in the Spanish style, with exposed whole-log beam ends protruding from under the eaves. They approached it up a blacktopped drive that crossed a sloping grass meadow. Here and there were blocks of salt; gnats and flies swarmed around warm piles of cattle dung; the thick brown backs of steers swayed above the rippling tall grass. Beyond the summit, timbered peaks reared tier upon jagged tier.

Downey said, “Those cattle pens are new since you were here last. The one off to the left is full of seventy-dollar cows, and the little one in back of it's full of one ten-thousand-dollar bull. Funny when you think about it—it's the cow that does the work, giving birth.”

Russ pulled up by the house and switched the engine off. The hot steel pinged with contraction. He heard cows lowing and saw a buzzard swoop silently across the treetops on motionless wings. Getting out of the car, Hastings was amazed by the loud crunch of his own shoes. Sweat rolled freely along his face but the heat was dry and not unpleasant.

The big front door swung open and Elliot Judd came forward, smiling warmly.

The old man emerged from the house with his hand outstretched and his thin lips creased back in a welcoming smile. “Russ, I'm glad to see a human face.”

The fragile old hand felt as if it would crumble to powder within Hastings' fist. “How are you, Dad?”

“Still taking nourishment.”

“You look fine,” he lied.

The painful smile twitched. “Like a battery—it looks just the same whether it's fresh or all used up. By God, I
am
glad to see you, Russ.”

Hastings tried to keep his smile steady. His breath was caught up in his throat. The old man had lost an alarming amount of weight. The skin hung in brittle folds from the gaunt, scored face. His color had turned to a cyanotic blue and his spidery hands, once firm and powerful, shook with the palsy of age or illness—they were mottled with small brown-blue spots. But Judd's commanding features were dignified, if anything, by pain; the eyes were still fiercely blue against the dark skin. He was a tough old man whose pride, not arrogant, was the kind that took itself for granted, like a high-caste Brahmin's. He managed to wear a white tennis visor and a disreputable herringbone Harris tweed sport jacket without looking at all ridiculous.

Downey went by them, taking Hastings' suitcase into the house. The old man tugged at the flap of skin that sagged beneath his jaw. “Let's not stand here all day staring at each other like two strange dogs off their home ground. Come inside and let's relax.” He turned, not quite steady on the balls of his feet, and led the way, talking over his shoulder: “I talked to Diane a few days ago. A regular damn tycoon I raised there—I guess she's doing fine with her art, and I suppose it's what she thinks she wants. But I wish I'd made more of a woman of her. No disloyalty meant to my own blood, Russ, but I've always taken it for granted the break-up was more her fault than yours.”

“I wouldn't say that, exactly.”

It was only a few steps, but by the time they entered the big front room the old man was trying to conceal the fact that he was breathing hard. Hastings felt uneasy alarm. Judd pressed a buzzer and waved toward a chair. He sounded hoarse when he said, “I know all about Women's Liberation and all the rest of that Carrie Nation crap, but nothing's convinced me yet that women are biologically designed to excel as hunter-gatherers. Physically we're still a tool-making species of apes, and any woman who tries to hunt with the men has something wrong with her. Know what I'm driving at?”

“Sure. I'm almost old-fashioned enough to agree with you.”

The old man grinned at him. A chicken-necked old Indian woman, her parchment face as wrinkled as a prune, rustled into the room in response to Judd's ring. Covered by a long severe black dress that was buttoned up to the chin, she carried a drink on a silver platter. Hastings scented it and watched the old woman walk out. “Always the best Scotch in this house,” he said. “Aren't you joining me?”

“Not now,” Judd replied. “Diane's got a wire down in her somewhere, that's certain—and I don't imagine she'll find any real kind of satisfaction until she gets over trying to prove she's better than a man.”

“Back in New York things never seem that clear-cut.”