A God In Ruins

A God In Ruins

TROUBLESOME MESA, COLORADO

AUTUMN, 2008

A Catholic orphan of sixty years is not apt to forget the day he first learned that he was born Jewish. It would not have been that bombastic an event, except that I am running for the presidency of the United States. The 2008 election is less than a week away.

Earlier in the day, my in-close staff looked at one another around the conference table. We digested the numbers. Not only were we going to win, there was no way we were going to lose. Thank God, none of the staff prematurely uttered the words “Mr. President.”

This morning was ten thousand years ago.

I’m Quinn Patrick O’Connell, governor of Colorado and the Democratic candidate for president. The voters know I was adopted through the Catholic bureaucracy by the ranchers Dan and Siobhan O’Connell.

My dad and I were Irish enough, at each other’s throats. Thanks to my mom, we all had peace and a large measure of love before he was set down in his grave.

All things being equal, it appeared that I would be the second Roman Catholic president in American history. Unknown to me until earlier this day, I would be the first Jewish president as well.

Nothing compares to the constant melancholy thirst of the orphan to find his birth parents. It is the apparatus that forms us and rules us.

Aye, there was always someone out there, a faceless king and queen in a chilled haze, taunting.

Ben Horowitz, my half brother, had been searching for me, haunted, for over a half century. Today he found me.

Tomorrow at one o’clock Rocky Mountain time I must share my fate with the American people. You haven’t heard of Rocky time? Some of the networks haven’t, either. Lot of space but small market.

The second half of the last century held the years that the Jews became one of the prime forces in American life. Politically, there had been a mess of Jewish congressmen, senators, mayors, and governors of enormous popularity and power. None had won the big enchilada. I suppose the buck stops here.

Had I been elected governor as Alexander Horowitz, I’d have been just as good for my state. However, the discovery of my birth parents a week before the presidential election could well set off a series of tragic events from the darkness where those who will hate me lay in wait.

How do I bring this to you, folks? In the last few hours I have written, “my fellow Americans” twenty-six times, “a funny thing happened to me on the way to Washington” twenty-one times, and “the American people have the right to know” three dozen times. My wastebasket overfloweth.

Don’t cry, little Susie, there will be a Christmas tree on the White House lawn.

No, the White House kitchen will not be kosher. My love of Carnegie tongue and pastrami is not of a religious nature.

By presidential decree, the wearing of a yarmulke is optional.

Israel will not become our fifty-first state.

To tell the truth, my countrymen, I simply do not know what this means in my future. O’Connell was a hell of a good governor, but we are in uncharted waters.

I’m getting a little fuzzy. I can see into the bedroom, where Rita is sprawled in the deep part of a power nap. Rita and our bedroom and her attire are all blended with Colorado hush tones, so soft and light in texture. At the ranch Rita liked to wear those full and colorful skirts like a Mexican woman at fiesta. As she lays there a bit rumpled, I can see up her thighs. I’d give my horse and saddle to be able to crawl alongside her. But then, I’d never finish my Washington’s farewell to the troops speech.

On the other hand, Rita and I have made the wildest gung ho love when we were under the deepest stress.

Write your speech, son, you’ve got to “face the nation” tomorrow, Rocky Mountain time.

Straight narrative, no intertwining B.S. or politicizing. Explain the O’Connell ne Horowitz phenomenon. Truth, baby, truth. At least truth will not come back to haunt you.

Strange, I should be thinking of Greer at this moment. Rita is the most sensual soul mate one could pray for. We have loved one another without compromise for nearly thirty years. Yet, is it possible that Greer is really the love of my life?

I’d have never come this far in the campaign without Greer Little’s genius. I would have been tossed into the boneyard of candidates never heard from again. She organized, she raised money, she knew the political operatives, and she masterminded my “miracle” campaign.

I was struck by the realization that Greer would leave soon, and I felt the same kind of agony as when we broke up years before. I had needed to see Greer on some business, and knocked and entered her room. She had been on the bed with Rita, passed-out drunk. Rita had held her and soothed her as though she were a little girl, and Rita had put her finger to her lips to tell me to be quiet.

Well, there was life without Greer, but there could be no life without Rita. Yet it still hurts.

I watch the hours flow in the passageway behind me like the tick of a suppressed bomb about to be released. I am through with a draft. I write another.

As the hours to dawn tick off, it all seems to come down to the same basic questions. Am I telling the truth? Do the American people have the civility and the decency to take the truth and rise with it?

Why me, Lord? Haven’t I had enough of your pranks? Isn’t slamming the White House door in my face just a little much, even for Your Holiness? I’m at the landing over the reception foyer of the White House. The Marine band drums up “Hail to the Chief” and the major of the guard proclaims, “The president of the United States and Mrs. Horowitz.” Oh, come on now, Lord. Aren’t you carrying this a little too far?

Well, all the stories of the good Irish lives are best passed on around the old campfire from schanachie to schanachie, and I’ll not spare you mine.

In actual fact, my own beginnings began at the end of World War II, when my future adopted father, Daniel Timothy O’Connell, returned from the Pacific with a couple of rows of ribbons and a decided limp.

BROOKLYN, AUTUMN 1945

The war to end all wars had ended. The Military Air Transport DC-3 groaned as the cables stretched in a turn, and a piece of the plane’s skin flapped against the pilot’s window. The tail swung. A queasy contingent of soldiers, sailors, and a few Marines were losing the battle with their equilibrium.

Staff Sergeant Daniel Timothy O’Connell tried to suck oxygen from the

wilted air as beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. The sergeant

mumbled into his beard that he had come all the way from San Diego without puking and damned if he was going to puke in front of a planeload of swab jockeys and dog faces.

In the cockpit a pair of MATS women flew the craft, adding to his discomfort. “Guadalcanal,” he continued mumbling, “Tarawa, Saipan, Okinawa, only to crash ten miles from home!”

Crossing the United States was no simple matter. There was no commercial air service to and from San Diego. MATS, which took as many discharged veterans as it could, had hundreds on their waiting list.

O’Connell had caught a train from San Diego to L.A. From there, two different airlines making nine stops over a twelve hour period landed him at Wright-Patterson Field outside Dayton.

There was a delay of several hours before another MATS plane could get him to the East Coast. He checked in and segued into a bar just outside the gates and sashayed in with a sailor he had teamed up with named Gross. Marines seldom used first names, so Gross was Gross.

They entered the Blue Lady lounge to see a half dozen women lined up at one end of the bar.

“Could be a B-joint,” O’Connell said. “Got your dough safe?”

“Money belt.”

“You see,” O’Connell went on, “they know a lot of GIs are coming through Wright-Patterson Field loaded with back pay and that we have to be out of town soon.”

“I know you’ll protect me,” Gross said.

“Jim Beam with a Jim Beam backup.” “A couple of ladies would like to

treat you boys.” “I’ll bet they would.” “Hey, take off your pack and

stand at ease,” the bartender said. “I’m Army, myself. These are a lonely wives club. Some of them have been without for two years. Just women without men. They work at Wright Patterson

“You know,” Gross said, “I might settle in here for a few days.”

“Yeah, only after we find a Western Union and you wire home the money you’re carrying.”

“You going to stay?” Gross asked.

“No,” O’Connell answered.

“I mean, look at them, their eager little bodies twitching.”

“It’s a duty thing,” the Marine snapped.

“With me, too,” Gross said. “God would never forgive me if I just upped and ignored His perfect works of beauty.”

“I haven’t seen my sweetheart in over three years,” Dan said, becoming serious. “So pick a filly and let’s get your money home.”

With Gross on the way to wonderland on the arm of a happy sad lady with two kids, Dan O’Connell returned to MATS at Wright-Patterson Field. He had been bumped by an officer.

In a race down the train platform he got aboard a train to Pittsburgh with no time to spare for the overnight ride to New York. Dan was up before daylight, a hundred dreams all fusing. How does one play out his homecoming scene?

Siobhan Logan rushed into Dan’s arms while her brother, Father Sean Logan, remained a step behind. Scan smiled widely as they embraced. He had seen them as teenagers, young adults, same pose, only this time she screamed for joy.

Dan’s testy hip and knee made itself felt when he dropped his sea bag to en curl her and spin her about.

“Oh, Dan, your leg, I’m sorry.”

“I’m still big enough to hold up a drunk in either hand. Siobhan!

Siobhan! Oh, you are so beautiful.”

Dan spotted Father Sean advancing timidly. He wore a Roman collar.

Ordained and everything.

“Father Scan.”

“Just Scan.”

The two men were the closest of pals, and they went their separate ways—Sean to the seminary and Dan to the Brooklyn Police Academy. Both had prayed that Dan would get home. Dan didn’t embrace men. A tough handshake, a couple of slaps on the shoulder.

“I’ll take that sea bag,” Father Sean said.

“I can deal with the weight.”

“Oh, it’s not the weight, it’s your general awkwardness. See now, with your limp we’d have to attach the bag to your waist and have you drag it, or you could put it back on your shoulder and when you fall down I can pray over you and Siobhan will pass the plate.”

“All right, all right—if you’ve no respect for a wounded veteran!

Anyhow, I sent the big trunk home by Railway Express.”

“I hope it finds its way to you someday,” Father Sean said.

The Promenade along Brooklyn Heights rarely had enough benches and parking spaces these days. Dan was not the only lad from Brooklyn coming home.

“They’re talking about putting a bridge over the Narrows,” Siobhan said quickly and shakily, “to Staten Island.”

“They’ll never get a bridge over there.”

This kiss was fiercely mellow or, as Dan would say in the Marines, “The price of poker has just gone up.”

Siobhan straightened up and gulped a monster sigh. “We’re all but married in name.”

“Of course.”

“Then you are behaving stupidly.”

“What did I do?”

“It’s not what you did. It’s what you dol If we are virtually married, I want to do what married people do, now, today,” she said.

“I’ve thought about it so much,” Dan said, “that I want it to be utterly perfect, utterly. I want us to be joined by God first.” “That will take God two weeks. God may be patient, but I can’t wait that long. I’ve got a key to a girlfriend’s flat. Either we go there now, or I’m going to undress right here, right now.”

Home! The grand illusion.

Everything you remembered had to be perfect to balance the imperfections. A cop from Flatbush. Now, that was a big man in Marine eyes. The only man who really came from a perfect place was his closest and eternal buddy, Justin Quinn.

Home! Dan had forgot that his mother’s voice ranged between a squeal and shrill. Gooseflesh popped out on his skin when she argued, like someone had run chalk over a “singing” blackboard.

Home! Dan remembered those midnight-to-eight walking beats. It could be noon before he could get to the paperwork. The nights brought gunplay and gore. One of his backup partners had been massively wounded. A tot murdered in its crib, the mother’s throat slashed, and a deranged boyfriend opting to shoot it out. (“That was a bad one. Take a couple days off, Dan .”)

Home! Until he saw her again, he had clear forgotten about the wart on the end of his aunt’s chin.

Or how small and crushing the streets were.

Or how tiny his room was.

The closeness of space and people led to a repetition of life.

Now, Justin Quinn had a real home! Justin Quinn had never returned. He had been killed in Saipan, but even the night before his death he had spoken of the beauty of his father’s ranch in Colorado. It was the perfection sought by all but experienced by few.

A Marine’s life can be boring, but there is always a jazzy sparkle when he is polishing up for shore leave. He and Justin blew through the camp gates. Justin would go to waiting arms.

Dan played it straight with Siobhan for the entire time. But he was a singer and dancer and great teller of jokes. Well now, he did get into an awkward situation or two with the ladies in New Zealand, but nothing he couldn’t tell Siobhan of, at a later time.

Home. Relatives and friends who spent most of their lives stirring the pot in each other’s kitchens and salty old yarn spinners bragging about WWI, the “big” war in France and their blowout in Paree.

No Sunday came and went without a wedding or a christening. Hardly a week passed without a wake. “How many Japs did you kill, Dan?” “San Diego! That’s the end of the earth now!” “Go over your medals one more time, Dan. Which one was for getting wounded?”

“Is it true what they say about them Asian women?”

WELCOME HOME, CLAN read the banner over the entrance of the precinct station. It was a happy event, indeed. The precinct had lost five men to the war.

A big cake had been baked and several cases of Coke hustled. (Can you believe it, Dan? Coke is up to a dime a bottle.)

Dan’s new uniform came compliments of a grateful mayor. He was issued a revolver, a sweet .38 Smith & Wesson Police Special.

“You know, you can wear your military ribbons on your police uniform.

Now, what’s that one?”

“It’s called a ‘ruptured duck,” to signify you are a veteran.”

The powers that be knew Dan would not be able to take up a walking beat again. He could handle it somewhat, but he’d lose too many suspects and arrests if he had to give chase. Well, no matter, Dan O’Connell was a war hero, and they’d talk about a desk job or perhaps a patrol car and, just maybe, becoming a detective.

A rookie named Kofski was on Dan’s old beat. He put on his new uniform and bolstered his new pistol for “the walk.” Kofski was all thumbs. Dan preferred Irish cops to polacks.

“The walk” would be a sort of victory lap to reclaim the homage of his protectorate. It started as all walks started, with Dan taking an apple from the Italian vendor.

Farther along, they rushed up to a third floor to break up a marital. In the old days, Dan had been an arbitrator, along with the parish priest. Consultation fees, a cup of tea and a slice of pie. Jesus, Kofski, don’t just burst in with your baton swinging!

A final cuff was made when they nailed a kid heisting hubcaps. Kofski shook the kid real hard and wanted to take him back to the station. Dan had to read quickly whether this boy was too far into the street scene or could still be salvaged. He opted to take the boy to his mother and dad.

This chase incident made Dan aware of his limited mobility. Kofski had to run the kid down, and it wasn’t easy.

In the Corps, he’d been thrown in with all kinds of guys, Texans, farmers, and those wild lads from L.A. He’d only heard of such people and never believed he would live to see them. Won’t the nation change at the end of the war? As they left “the walk,” Dan wondered if his beat wasn’t really the perimeter of a walled graveyard.

He sank into a mood of Irish maudlin. The pending mayhem of a large Irish wedding shaped up. A yard filled with clucking hens writing invitations, pinning up, pinning down. A band and step dancers and a tenor and a poet were hired, and even the mayor might make it.

As the kitchen calendar was X’d, Dan entombed himself in his tiny room, awaiting his only respite, the daily visit from Father Scan Logan, his forthcoming brother-in-law.

“Looks like you’ve had enough of the women, Dan.”

tet t Egh.

“Well, marriage is the one moment in life that a girl can make a kill. It’s bound to test your patience. But some fine news! Permission to use the big cathedral came from the cardinal of Brooklyn himself. I’ve waited for near on three years and have never performed a marriage ceremony. I wanted you and my beloved sister Siobhan to be my first.”

Dan said it must have cost him a fortune in fees.

“Never to mind. You don’t wear this collar to make money. You appear to be having normal prenuptial jitters.”

“No doubts, Scan. I love Siobhan fiercely.”

“Almost as much as you love the Marine Corps,” the priest retorted.

“It’s so damned hard to let go!” Dan cried.

“I’m counseling veterans a good part of the day. Lots of lads are stumbling around. It was for most of you the first taste of life beyond Brooklyn, and no matter what happens, the war will always remain the big event of your life.”

“It passed through my mind to reenlist.”

“One of the chaplains from the Sixth Marines was with me at a retreat a few months ago. He told me that your battalion lost four commanders in the first day.”

“Saipan was a shit kicker. So were Guadalcanal and Tarawa. The worst foxhole is the one you happen to be in when the shit hits the fan.”

“Did you find something along the way?”

“Yeah, right in the beginning. On the train on the way to boot camp in San Diego. In Buffalo there was another train of recruits. To join them we had to walk through the station to their platform. The station in Buffalo was scary, high and icy and silent, a walk to the unknown. When the two trains merged they were so full, some recruits were sleeping on the floor. I ended up in a lower bunk with another guy. That’s the way fighting for space had been back home.

“Later in the trip we slowed down at the tip of daylight. I had the window position that night and rolled the shade up. Outside was a huge green lawn before a beautiful, newly painted station. Douglass, Kansas. Beyond, I could see nice houses, like Mickey Rooney lived in when he played Andy Hardy.”

“Weren’t you trying to deceive yourself, Dan? Pretending there are perfect places outside Brooklyn? If you knocked on any door in this Kansas place, you’d find Brooklyn once removed.”

“Well, what have I got here? There are still five of us in our home on top of each other trying to ace each other out of the bathroom. My parents are arguing. Everyday ordinary conversation is argumentative. Some fifteen-year-old niece is knocked up, someone is stitched up from a fight, and the friggin’ bed is lumpy.”

“It sounds like you’ve been making a plan for a long time.”

“I want to see Douglass, Kansas, and a lot of the places my men came from.”

“That’s not a bad idea, but you’ll not drive far enough to escape trouble. The virgin you saw at dawn may now show you some pimples on her ass in the midday sun.”

Dan became excited. “After Douglass, Kansas, we’ll head for Colorado and visit the parents of the one great friend of my life, Justin Quinn. It drives me, Scan. I can’t rest until I see Justin’s mom and dad and let them know what a powerful Marine their son was. Justin Quinn was the man among us, winning any broad with a glance, winning the division rodeo. Ah, the fucking fool, trying to win the battle of Saipan by himself. Maybe after that I’ll concentrate on settling down. I’m too restless now.”

“Well, you should be. Your war has been taken away from you. When do you plan to go?”

“After the wedding.”

“Does Siobhan know?”

“Ah, Jaysus, I can’t face the tears now.”

“Has it occurred to you that she might not want to go? She’s very tribal.”

“Yes, but I have to take the chance.”

The bachelor’s stag party was but three nights away. There would be nearly a hundred cops boozing and relatives all the way from Jersey and just maybe one of those weasly guys with an 8mm projector and dirty films.

Siobhan was picking up puzzling vibrations from Dan at a rapid rate. Did he truly want to marry? Was it coming back from a war too emptied out? He spoke little of vicious battles or malaria or dengue fever. From a strange, secret place he’d mutter the name of one of the boys in his platoon. Except for Justin Quinn. He’d talk about Justin.

“Two more days and I’ve got you,” Siobhan said. “I understand the boys will have a couple of strippers at your stag party. Just remember, you’re an officer of the law.”

“Ah, geez, Siobhan, the captain himself is sending them.”

“How does Mrs. Jane O’Connell sound?” she asked. “Or should I continue to use Siobhan?”

“You use Mrs. Daniel Timothy O’Connell. If it was good enough for the liberator of Ireland, it’s good enough for the likes of us.”

“Oh, thank you, milord, but I’ll be using my own Christian name.”

“Look at what the war went and done,” Dan retorted. “All you ladies got liberated to work in the defense factories. That doesn’t give you the right to throw your husband’s fine name out with the garbage.”

It was wonderful. Dan knew new ways of defusing his woman. The official engagement had many advantages. He could touch her breasts any time he wished. Every damned time, she liked it! She’d put her hand atop his to make him stay awhile. Having petted her into a weak state, he sprang forth.

“I’ve got something of great consequence to tell you,” he blurted.

“We’re not going to get married!”

“Of course we’re going to get married. Sunday we’re getting married.

I’m addressing you on a matter after the wedding.”

“We are still going to Niagara Falls, aren’t we, Dan?”

“Definitely, but not by train,” he croaked.

“I’m not walking!”

“Will you let me get a word in edgewise!” She became silent. He paced. All of his airtight arguments disappeared in a dim puff. “Well,” he managed, “I was of a mind that when we leave Niagara Falls, we continue directly to San Francisco.”

“Sacred Heart! I may faint!”

“Siobhan, I tried to hint to you in my letters. I’ve met too many men from too many places not to realize that this is a great land and life could be wondrous in a way that it never could be here.”

After a time she whispered, “I’ve been thinking much the same. Brooklyn is an island. Islands dull the race after time. Maybe I should have told you, but I would say nothing, ever, at the risk of losing you, Dan.”

“Jaysus, now, isn’t that something.”

Siobhan pulled off her blouse and unhooked her bra. “Kiss them, Dan.”

He did as told and took her on his lap.

“There will be a better life for us. You remember the Romero kid over in the eyetalian street? He put his car up on blocks for the duration of the war. He was killed at Iwo.”

“I know.”

“My brother Pearse knows cars as well as Henry Ford, went and inspected it from bumper to bumper. It’s in perfect condition. Father Scan said if someone bought the car, it would help Romero’s old man get over his grieving. It’s a ‘41 DeSoto.”

“Forty-one! Aren’t we hoi polloi! Did you steal the money?”

They stopped for a little personal entanglement. It couldn’t get too serious in the middle of the day.

“Anyhow, I got the car for a pittance. Old man Romero wanted me to have it, his son being a fellow police officer and Marine. I, uh, paid seven hundred dollars for it.”

“Seven hundred dollars! Besides, I never heard of anyone driving across the country. Where would we sleep? Where would we eat? We could be attacked by Indians.”

“Let me explain, let me explain. I went to the AAA and, being a veteran, they gave me free maps and a book listing motels.”

“What the devil are motels?”

“Well, they’re not exactly hotels .. . they’re motor hotels.”

They digested it.

“Do they have toilets?”

“Yes, toilets and private showers, and we’re apt to run into one every hundred miles or so.”

“Are we coming back?” she whispered shakily.

“If we don’t find something better. But we’ll never know unless we try.”

“Are we fooling ourselves that there is something better than here?”

“From what I’ve seen, there is every chance.”

“How will we live?”

“I have a New York state bonus, plus severance pay from the Marines, and I’ve got disability compensation. I’ve been sending money home, which Dad deposited. Then, you know, gambling is not illegal in the Marine Corps, and I got this knack for poker.”

“Poker! You used to raid poker games!”

“And some dice.”

“You used to raid such games. You got a citation for it!”

“In the Corps it’s perfectly legal, so when you’re in the Marines you do as the Marines do.”

“How much dirty money did you take from them?”

“We have over nine thousand dollars in total, including the bonus and stuff like that. And don’t forget, I get two hundred a month from the government for my wound.”

Siobhan fumed a bit at the revelations.

“I’ve been too many places, Siobhan. I don’t want to be another Irish cop all my life.”

She snapped her brassiere shut and put on her top. “I suppose,” she said, “I can always find my way back to Brooklyn if I have to.”

FALL 1945

Their honeymoon became a sort of pioneer epic. Daniel O’Connell continued to wear his Marine Corps uniform with the “ruptured duck” over his breast pocket, and he speeded up his pace every time they walked past a men’s clothing store.

Siobhan O’Connell lost her newlywed nervousness. At the end of the day’s drive they either found a motel or the usual four-story brick hotel used by traveling salesmen, occupying a corner of the main cross streets of whatever town they were in. The similarity of rooms, the fishy-eyed desk clerks, and stuttering bell boys was striking. They were mid-range, six- to eight dollar-a-night rooms.

Siobhan usually waited in the car while Dan signed in at the registration desk. The fishy-eyed clerk guarded the gates to the kingdom like a true centurion. By the time they got to Cleveland, Mrs. Siobhan O’Connell opened her purse and slapped their marriage certificate on the desk.

They glowed each morning and even more so when the correct safe dates appeared on the calendar. Siobhan realized that there might be other channels of gratification during the abstention part, but she had a whole life ahead to work on it. For now, though, abstention was hell.

CHICAGO!

A married buddy, Cliff Romanowski, lived in Chicago. Cliff had lost an arm in the earlier battle of Tarawa. Beautiful reunion. Cliff’s wife, Corinne, was six months pregnant and all popped out. Good omen, Siobhan thought.

After a homemade dinner featuring Polish sausage, the four went out to paint the town. Dan mustered his bad leg into duty and did a sort of polka, which seemed to be the national dance of Chicago.

The wives were deliciously tolerant of their lads’ drinking and subsequent hell-raising. They all crashed with the daylight.

Next day, noticeably slowed, Dan took them to a Greek restaurant, the anxiety of their first meeting converted into nostalgia. At Cliff and Corinne’s apartment, they ended up sitting on the floor in a circle, propped up by pillows, and Siobhan’s toe trying to creep up inside Dan’s pant leg.

The Marine Corps. Reminiscence began with the sweat of a double-time hike, then drifted into their patented tomfoolery and sophomoric behavior. Beer busts were recalled with kindness.

“And me and O’Connell and Quinn hit the railroad station just as the

last liberty train was leaving. Everything was full, the seats, the

floor, the platform where you could sleep standing up. So the three of

us climbed into the overhead luggage rack, where there was already men

laying end to end. And an hour out of Wellington, the luggage rack

comes crashing down! The lights went out and I’ve got to tell you, I

felt a lot of Marine

I”

ass!

New Zealand had been a never-never land with the bursting scenery, Maoris, flocks on the skyline, colonial ways. Siobhan was tempted to ask about the New Zealand women but held her tongue. It was the night to let their men erupt.

Now came the war.

“.. . remember that little runt?”

“.. . yeah, Weasel from Arizona.”

“.. . nobody thought he’d hold up.”

“.. . great fighter.”

“.. . little Weasel.”

“.. . remember .. .”

“.. . geez, I forgot about that bout of malaria.” . remember .. . remember ... for God’s sake, remember me, Marine.

“I was in the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital near Frisco when you guys hit that beach at Saipan. I finally found a guy, remember Prentice in Intelligence?” Cliff asked.

“Yeah, sure do.”

“He told me what happened to you. All the casualties on the beach. But I think the worst was the day I heard about Justin Quinn,” Cliff recalled. “You don’t figure a Marine of his quality would catch a stray bullet.”

“He got hit because he had to deliver a message and there were no phone lines connected yet. It was his own bloody fault. He should have waited.”

Thump, the visit was wearily ended.

Dan and Siobhan and Cliff and Corinne would never forget it. After two devastating hangovers, the O’Connells packed the ‘41 DeSoto and pointed it toward the corn and wheat fields of the Great Plains.

Even though it cost a long-distance phone call, Siobhan always made certain there would be food and lodging at the end of the day. Ahead, they moved into an infinity of two-lane roads.

It was here that Siobhan learned to drive. When stopped for speeding, she became Everywoman, coyly explaining their newlywed status, and what with her husband home from the war .. .

“Never mind, lady, just slow down.”

They drove through Kansas City, then chose the E-Z Inne on the road out of town because it was offering half-price rooms for veterans. There were a lot of big trucks about and a steak house right next door.

Fooled them! Dan thought to himself as he took a long drink from his purchase from a state bottle store. Actually, a dry state, can you imagine? Must not be many Irish about.

He set the glass on the floor and submerged to the bottom of the tub.

“Ahhhh!”

Siobhan answered his moose call and scrubbed his back as he kept diving and coming up exclaiming “Ahhhh!”

At the steak house, the two stared at the extraordinary size of the meat. “Sure, I’ve never had a piece of meat like this in my icebox,” Siobhan said in wonderment.

“And it cuts with a fork. I wonder what they do to the meat?”

“It’s not what they do,” Siobhan said, “it’s what we do after we get it.”

Dan quickly shifted his brown-bagged bottle of bourbon as the sheriff strolled in and took a stool at the counter. In a few minutes, their waiter came and presented them with two bottles of beer, compliments of the sheriff.

Ah, now this is living, Dan thought.

“Notice how nice people are out here?” she noted.

“Yeah,” Dan said so sadly he croaked. “Yeah.”

“Dan, I’m trying to be patient and understanding. It’s not a case of merely getting rid of the war. It will always be with you, but it can no longer dominate our lives. We’ve big tomorrows to think about, and you have to shift the Marine Corps and hold it in a place close to your heart but out of the mainstream of our marriage.”

Dan nodded and watched the big trucks speed past, their sound muffled by glass.

“Why are we driving south tomorrow?” she asked.

“I went over and over and over a picture in my mind of you and me

standing before that make-believe little rail station in Douglass,

Kansas. Me, with my arms about you, looking past the lawns to those

beautiful doll houses

“You can’t move your hometown because you don’t like its location. You are going to great lengths to fool yourself. If we don’t go, the memory of it will remain perfect.”

“I’m afraid to reach Colorado,” Dan blurted. “I’m scared of seeing Justin Quinn’s parents. My visit might bring them nightmares. They don’t know we’re coming. I avoided writing them. There is something so final about it.”

“Yes,” she said. “It means you are closing the cover of a book. Not that you can ever forget Justin Quinn.”

“We were so close, almost as close as you and me, Siobhan. You cannot say or feel that you actually love a man because that is sinful and unhealthy. But you know, we enjoyed horsing around, jumping each other, goosing each other. Strictly correct, you know. With my baritone and his tenor, we could strike our tent silent. And with the two of us ... well, no one ever did anything to my boys. We cleaned out one bar that was clipping. Busted them down like lumberjacks.”

Her hand slipped into his, and she nodded for him to continue.

“Damned shame. His family has this tremendous spread, as they call it, beyond Denver. Justin Quinn, being the oldest son, was due to take over the ranch. First he was going to the University of Colorado, where he had won a football scholarship.”

“Calm your fears, Dan. Justin’s folks will be eternally grateful for your visit, and we’ll be totally comfortable there.”

No pilgrim’s ride up to Jerusalem was ever more ethereal than the one they experienced as Dan piloted the ‘41 DeSoto around their first taste of an unpaved, washboard, rutted, cliff-side excuse for a road. Every switchback brought more stupendous scenery. Siobhan took her hands from her eyes to look at the vista, gasp, and then take cover again.

At last the township of TROUBLESOME MESA welcomed them. The West was there. All they needed was a pair of gunmen to face each other down in the dirt street.

“M/M Ranch?” the gas station owner said.

Yes, sir.

“Huh. Don’t hear too much about it these days.”

“How far is it?”

“About fifteen miles ... up. Probably take you better part of an hour.

Sure you want to drive it today?”

“Yes.”

“Well, now,” the attendant said, shading his eyes to ascertain the time, “if you get past five o’clock and haven’t reached the ranch, turn on back. Otherwise you’ll be in stone cold darkness, and we’ll probably have to pull you out of a ravine tomorrow.”

A crude map was drawn, and Dan thanked the attendant profusely. Half numb, Daniel Timothy O’Connell girded himself as the attendant filled his water bags.

“If you come back tonight, I have a bed for you over the garage. Damned hotel folded when the molybdenum mine closed.”

Half greeting and half guarding, a pair of border collies held them at bay until a man emerged from a large, fancy house.

“It must be the place,” Dan said. “It’s exactly as Quinn described it to me.” “Hello, Marine,” the man said, shooing the dogs back. “Can I help you?”

“Is this the M/M Ranch?”

The man laughed. “Used to be a long time ago.”

Dan studied the man. His skin was dark and he certainly was full of Mexican blood, but he spoke with no accent.

“I’m looking for the Quinn family. See, uh, Justin Quinn was in my company. He was killed at Saipan. My wife, Siobhan, and I have come to pay respects to his family.”

A nice-looking woman in her mid-twenties emerged from the house and came alongside her husband. He spoke to her in Spanish, and as he did, her face became grim.

“I am Pedro Martinez, the caretaker. And this is my wife, Consuelo.

Will you please come in? Your name?”

“Sergeant .. . rather, Daniel Timothy O’Connell. My wife, Siobhan.”

“Siobhan is a beautiful name,” Consuelo said.

“It’s Irish for Jane. Oh, what a lovely room.”

The ranch house living room was timbered and high ceilinged, with a river stone fireplace to match. The Pedro fellow seemed concerned as he checked his watch.

“Can I offer you drinks?” Consuelo asked.

“No, thanks. I mean, I want to know about Quinn’s mother and father.”

“I have to take you to another part of the ranch,” Pedro said. “The problem is that it will be dark before we return, and I won’t let you go down to Troublesome on that road at night. You are most welcome to stay here overnight.”

Siobhan smiled and nodded to Dan.

“Perhaps, Miss Siobhan, the sergeant and I should make this visit ourselves,” Pedro said. “Uh, there is a stream to cross.”

Pedro was not very good at covering his uneasiness. “Certainly,” Siobhan said.

Dan and the foreman jeeped down a winding dirt road inside the property until they could hear a faint rush of water. They parked at a tentative wooden bridge across the stream from a ramshackle miner’s cabin.

“Is this what I think it is?” Dan asked, sinking.

“I’m afraid so,” Pedro replied.

“I may not be able to cross,” Dan said suddenly. “My leg might give out on that narrow beam.”

“I understand.”

“Like hell you understand! Like hell you do!” Dan told himself.

“Shall we go back to the ranch house, then?”

Dan did not answer. His choice was to turn and go, but he was unable

to. If he walked away, he’d come back. “Let’s cross,”

he whispered.

The shack reeked of mold. Everything inside was broken.

Newspapers had been stuffed in the cracks to keep the cold out. The roof was half down, the windows broken and thick with sludge. Outhouse turned over. It was altogether a place for rats. Dan’s eyes studied a place of disemboweled human life. He could not speak, or barely breathe. Dan staggered outside and stared at it, crazed pain in his eyes.

“The ranch never belonged to the Quinns,” Pedro said.

“Tell me!” Dan cried.

“There is a large settlement of Serbs between here and Crested Butte. This ranch was property of the brothers Tarka and Sinja. Tarka Malkovich was the only man I ever saw who could beat an Irishman to the bottom of a bottle. He and his brother were at war with everyone, and each other. They were troublemakers. It was hard for the valley to live with them. Everyone had a beef going with the Malkoviches: the doctor, the sheriff, the feed store. Tarka died of a heart attack, undoubtedly from drink. That was right before the war. Sinja ran the place into the ground in no time flat. The bank evicted him, and the ranch stood unattended for over a year. The bank made me a deal. I was to get the ranch up and running in good shape. When it was sold, the bank promised to stake me to three hundred acres, my own little ranch.”

“I want to know about Justin Quinn!” Dan interrupted sharply.

“You should only see the way the water gushes down in the springtime after the winter snowmelt,” Pedro said.

“I want to know about Justin Quinn!”

Pedro sighed and said a soft “Amigo.” “His father was Roscoe Quinn, a bad, bad hombre. For a time the Malkovich brothers let him sharecrop and mine a claim. Roscoe was a pig,” he spat. “He beat his wife and children, and played with his daughter, you know how. Anyhow, Justin was the oldest and grew to be able to handle his father. They say their fights were vicious.”

“He was a fighter, all right,” Dan mumbled.

“Roscoe went into Denver to the cattle show and got piss assed drunk and ended up raping a woman and trying to rob a bank. He’s in the state penitentiary in Canon City. Twenty years. The wife and kids went to relatives in Arizona. Justin joined the Marine Corps.”

Dan’s voice cracked, but he knew he had to keep talking, keep thinking. “Well, too bad he didn’t get to play out his scholarship at the University ... or ... have all the valley girls falling all over him.”

“Sergeant Dan, Justin never had a scholarship. He never completed high school. As for the girls, no one wanted to come near the Quinn family.”

Dan sat by the window all night. “Fucking liar,” he said under his voice.

Siobhan felt for him in bed, then propped herself up on an elbow. The betrayal had left Dan robbed of his sacred moment. Nothing had ever clutched him so, not even the word of Quinn’s death. “Fucking liar.”

“Why can’t you feel for the pain in his life that forced him to live a lie?” she challenged.

“I do! Poor Quinn! The sonofabitch! We all lie, but nothing like this. Me? Brooklyn cop. Sure, I exaggerated about cuffing gangsters. We all lie. Impressing each other is a craft. But this was a big fucking lie!”

“Justin had a lot to lie about.”

He felt her hand on his shoulder. Oh, Jaysus, that felt fine enough. He turned around and found her breasts for his head to rest on and breathed uneasily to hold back sobs.

“He lied from day one about his grand house and prize beef. About his football scholarship. Maybe he wasn’t even American. He had kind of dark skin. The Corps was taking in Mexicans and Indians. We had three Navajos. But we never had no blacks in the Corps!”

“Dan, that’s an ugly word, I don’t like it.”

“Well, you never had to walk the beat in the colored neighborhood.”

“Shut up. You sound like a bigot.”

Dan wept.

“I feel for your sorrow,” she said. Siobhan slipped on her bathrobe and went out onto the veranda. For the first time she saw the moonlight up a string of mountaintops. Troublesome Mesa lay at the bottom of a glen in a steep, winding valley. Snow blankets and a silver sliver of a stream. What a land, indeed. She’d never known of a place like this.

“Jesus, I’m sorry,” Dan said, coming from the bedroom. “I’m really sorry. That Martinez fellow has been a good, sensitive man. I guess they import a lot of these people from Mexico. It’s nice to see a good one, I mean, not just another Mexican who would multiply and go on relief.”

“Consuelo told me that Pedro served six years in the Navy. He is from an old Colorado family, and he was wounded at Pearl Harbor, or maybe you didn’t notice that he’s blind in one eye.”

“I seem to have everything upside down,” he said softly.

“That is because your world has been set upside down. We’ll have to set it right, then.”

“Can I touch you, Siobhan? The blow goes away.”

She knew now how to fit into his big, strong arms. “Quinn knew that you would come here,” she said.

“You really think that?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“What does it mean, then?”

“Hard to say what might have gone ‘round in his head. But I know he wanted you to come here.”

LATE 1945 --ONWARD

The banker’s chair from the turn of the century was worn through in several spots, just as the decrepit First National Bank of Troublesome Mesa had survived the land rushes, the silver crash, and ever-present drought.

Mr. Dancy, a Mormon, knew every tree in the valley and beyond. He was strikingly direct. “I was able to close on the Mal kovich boys just in time. Frankly, I couldn’t have sold the M/M if I threw in the Brooklyn Bridge. Anyhow, Pedro there comes home from the war, one eye and all, and marries the most beautiful girl on the western slopes. I knew his yahoo days were over, right, Pedro?”

“I don’t even miss it,” Pedro answered.

“Pedro talked me into letting him run the place until after the war, when I could find a buyer. We’re going to stake Pedro to a couple hundred acres somewhere.”

“I’ll let you two gentlemen have at it,” Pedro added. “I’ll be down at the diner, Sergeant Dan.”

There was talk between Dan and Dancy about the size of the ranch—well

over two thousand acres with bits and pieces all over the mountain, and

the water rights were clean. The house, worth at least eleven thousand

dollars, would be part of the deal. They shillied and shallied, Dan’s

service and decorations making their own impact. Dancy had hoped to save the ranch for some Mormon boy returning from the war, but this had a hopping good flavor to it.

“What’re the numbers?” Dan gulped.

Dancy studied the ledger. “It’s a good ranch and expandable, except for where those crazy Slavs started fencing each other off and cheating with the water.”

“How much?”

“Can’t tell precisely. There’s almost thirty thousand still on the books. I’d have to research the county records, particularly the government land abutting the south. Forty-some thousand would swing it, I’d say.”

Dan’s heart became a cannonball.

“You were a cop in New York?”

“In the three days I’ve ridden with Pedro, I find I can ride a horse without too much discomfort.”

“Wounded?”

“Yes, sir. Saipan.”

“How much can you put in?”

“I have over nine thousand cash and probably can raise another four or five from my family.”

“But you don’t know doodly egg roll about cattle.”

Dan lowered his eyes and shrugged.

“I have an idea,” Dancy said. “Do you like Pedro Martinez?”

“I’d have him in my platoon any day

“He used to be a hell-raising kid, too generous with money he didn’t have, and Mexicans have no inherited family money. Fact is, Sergeant, we have already turned him down for a large loan. They are not too dependable, if you know what I mean.”

“He’s honest, isn’t he?”

“Honest as Jesus. He was in the hospital for almost a year, mostly

blindfolded with sandbags holding his head still. If you don’t find

God that way, He isn’t there for you. Right now I pay him ten percent

of the net and housing. If you were to, say,

give him twenty percent, you’d have one of the best cattlemen in Colorado.”

“Let me talk it over with the wife.”

“Confidentially, Sergeant, you and I can make a deal, but only if you have someone to train you.” Dancy leaned over close. “I’m a man of God,” he said, “and God tells me the two of you together are well worth the risk.”

It took time for Daniel Timothy O’Connell to transform from Brooklyn cop to rugged Coloradan. All of about a week. His attitude was a force, a force that wakened him every morning, led him to his knees to thank God for bringing them to this place.

Dan loved boots and cowboy hats and leather chaps. He loved to rope and brand and train his new border collie. He loved life during a challenging blizzard.

Dan loved the rodeos and the B.S. that went with cattle trading. He loved the respect. He was a tough man in a tough valley.

Saturday night in the old mining town, Troublesome Mesa came to life at the Bottomless Mine Saloon. For all the hurrahs, it was peaceful enough to bring the women folk. Dan taught the band a repertoire of Irish ballads to augment the sad-ass country and western songs.

“It’s Irish time!” and Christ, Dan O’Connell moved you to tears with his “Danny Boy.” If he only had Justin Quinn singing with him, he always thought.

As trust developed between Dan and Pedro, they made a hardworking, clever, aggressive team. Dan had been a platoon sergeant, and men learned to listen to him. He did not have to be told to listen to Pedro.

For several months the families lived together. Cautious at first, there was space enough to grow easy with each other. Siobhan in particular was ecstatic about the entirely new ways of cooking, and she adored Consuelo.

Come springtime, the top priority was to build onto the caretaker’s cabin a mile toward Troublesome Creek. To add to the urgency, Consuelo was due to have a second baby.

They finished the house in a rush. In the next month or two, every man in the valley pounded nails, making a charming lodgepole log cabin. The Mexican part of the valley pitched in, as did some Mormons and Catholics and Protestants as the finish drew near. A fiesta exploded when they raised the roof! In this time and place they all seemed less threatening to each other. Dan caught the sight of some of the Mormon men nipping booze out of view of their wives. From then on Dan kept a “Mormon” bottle in his cupboard.

The Martinez family no sooner moved into their place than Consuelo went into labor and gave birth to wee Pablo. The joy of a new child was tempered by Dan and Siobhan’s situation.

Once settled, every month for three years Dan waited for her to tell him the good news that she had missed her period. It never happened.

As they grew prosperous, the O’Connells became total Coloradans Both of them flew the ranch’s twin-engine Cessna, inched out their ranch boundaries, sent money home, were magnificently generous to the church, the school, and even the Mormons. Dan was elected state assemblyman. All that was missing was a baby for their waiting nest.

Joy gave way to an ever-present sense of sorrow. Their bed grew colder and colder. When he sang “Danny Boy” these days it was maudlin, and the Bottomless’s owner had to caution Dan about getting mean. The day after an apologetic sheriff dumped Dan off, after putting him in the cooler for the night, Siobhan reached the breaking point.

Their bed held a half-full suitcase, the French one of the set he had bought her for Christmas.

“What the hell’s going on here?”

“I’m going into Denver. I’ll be at the Brown Palace.”

“What for?”

“To get a complete fertility examination.” “It’s about time,” he said. “I pray to God they are able to find out what is wrong with you and cure it.” “I want you to come with me,” she said. “Me? You mean, me?”

({\ t

Yes, you.

“I’ll have none of that voodoo black-magic quackery.”

“Very well. I intend to continue on to New York. I’ve been missing everyone sorely. I haven’t seen Father Scan in over three years.”

“Is this a threat?”

“No, I want to see them. But I think it’s time you face up to the fact that something serious is the matter. Are you scared to go to Denver with me? Is that why you’ve never suggested it before?”

Dan started for the door.

“One of these nights you are going off one of the hairpin turns, the way you’re guzzling.”

Dan opened the door.

“Sleep in the guest room,” she commanded.

He slammed the door but remained in the room.

“Are you going to a Catholic hospital?” he asked.

t*/^r

Ur course. “Then maybe, well, pack a bag for me, too.”

The eminent Dr. Leary at St. Anne’s Hospital put Siobhan into a regimen to chart her ovulation. It could be months before they had an accurate reading on her.

Meanwhile, Dr. Leary got access to Dan’s Marine Corps medical records. He had had the usual Marine ailments, cat fever in boot camp, jaundice and malaria after Guadalcanal, dengue fever at Tarawa, and a blown hip at Saipan. Dan was shocked when Dr. Leary asked him for a specimen of his semen.

*

“It couldn’t possibly be! I mean, I, the cause?”

“This is routine, Mr. O’Connell.”

Dan grunted in displeasure but did as he was told.

A time later, he was called by Dr. Leary and asked to come to Denver alone.

“I’ve some difficult news,” Dr. Leary said. “It’s taken this long because I had to be certain.”

“She can’t bear children,” Dan moaned.

“Your wife is healthy as a heifer.”

“Then .. .”

“I want to check something here in your medical record. Camp Matthews, January of 1942,” the doctor said.

“Camp Matthews was the rifle range, a long drive from the base. We stayed there several weeks on weapons training.”

“Did you get sent to a quarantine tent?”

“A bunch of us got sick, and there was no regular doctor at Matthews. Yeah, I sure remember now. I had to finish boot camp with a new platoon.”

“All that jibes with what we feel was an outbreak of mumps.”

“My face was swollen, funny-like, and I had a lot of pain around my, you know, private parts. Yeah, it was hard to walk.”

“Did anyone diagnose it as mumps?”

“We’d had all this cat fever and dysentery; we may have joked about mumps, but you know, it’s a kid’s disease. I thought I had already had it as a baby.”

“The record here says, “Possibly mumps.””

“Isn’t that a kid’s disease?”

“It usually is, with no after effects. With an adult there can be.

Your semen is sterile.”

When was it ever more terrible than the day he learned he’d never sire

children? No jungle, no lagoon at Tarawa with the Japs shooting at you

and you in chest-high water holding your rifle over your head, not Red Beach on Saipan watching your battalion blown to shreds, not even Justin Quinn dying .. .

It would be a double slam against Siobhan, for Consuelo had had another perfect baby boy. Carlos was the beauty of the Martinez family.

God! What of poor, dear Siobhan! How crude I’ve been not realizing that she has suffered even greater than I. He talked it over with a priest in Denver before returning to Troublesome Mesa.

“Forget about God for the moment,” the priest said. “What did they do during your worst moments in the Corps?”

“I always told my lads, when you’re scared shitless, you’re in such pain that death would be a pleasure, or no matter the catastrophe, the only thing you can do is “Be a Marine.””

“Then be a Marine for that woman of yours.”

Dan found Siobhan at the Martinez house. She was in the rocking chair, yakking with Consuelo, who was putting up a dinner for the O’Connells as well as her own family.

He looked in, but they did not see him. “Be a Marine,” he told himself.

Siobhan sat in the chair Consuelo used for nursing. She had handed little Carlos to Siobhan to hold while she filled the oven. Siobhan put the child’s head on her breast with a longing not to be realized. Then she saw Dan.

Dan’s hand was never so firm, so filled with meaning, as it grasped her shoulder. “It will be all right, darling,” he said.

WASHINGTON, D.C.” 2008

Yes, it’s your president, Thornton Tomtree. A year ago I was considered unbeatable for a second term, but as George Bush and James Earl Carter learned, there is a fickle bent to our voters.

At this moment we stand a week before the 2008 election. A bizarre series of events has damaged my candidacy. Lord, is there a man more dismissed than a one-term president?

Anyone can pinpoint the time and place when the tide turned against me.

It was the Six Shooter Canyon Massacre.

Immediately following the disaster, my rating bottomed out, then climbed back up as I traveled the country ceaselessly and was able to placate some of the national trauma. I was successful in divorcing myself from direct responsibility for the massacre, in the eyes of most of the people.

During those hard days, my vice president, former Texas senator Matt Hope, held in line that massive group of voters of the Christian conservatives. Taking on Hope as VP. meant I did not have to personally deal with those pompous preacher men guarding the kingdom. Vice President Hope quickly convinced the Christian constituency they had no place else to go. Certainly, Governor Quinn Patrick O’Connell, a Catholic liberal, represented an unthinkable alternative.

It is election day minus seven. Perhaps I’m grasping, but I sense that the sudden dry-up of news out of O’Connell’s headquarters means something. Although we are separated by two thousand miles, I sense a tension and quandary.

I had given O’Connell a hell of a run. Whatever hope I had was squashed at our “great debate” at the New York City Public Library. During an intermission at the end of the first hour, I was informed of treachery that would send me packing out of office.

Well, Thornton Tomtree, how did you get here? How did I get enmeshed in a tragedy that was not of my making? Why have I had to live to the great betrayal?

Even back in the 1950s, I never wanted to be much more than a junkyard dog, like my daddy, Henry Tomtree, who knew every scrap of metal, every bale of newspaper, and every dead battery and doorknob in his yard, and who could carry on business without calculator or ledger because he kept everything in his head. Henry Tomtree was the greatest junkyard dog the Northeast states ever had.

How old are your first memories? Vaguely, around kindergarten or first grade. I loved the yard so, I didn’t have many friends on the outside. Suddenly, I was in big classrooms with them, boys and girls. One day I was standing before our long hall mirror in our hallway. I remember finding it hard to look at myself. I was different from the other kids. Even looking in the mirror I wanted to defend myself from outside inspections of me.

In my early grades I had a terrible time in school. Studies were fine and simple. It was lunch period, the cafeteria, and the playground where I was not spared perpetual taunting.

And as they taunted, I ran to my safe place in a corner of the junkyard. It was here that I began to build my empire. I studied my daddy’s ways. I fiddled endlessly with physics problems. I became able to play both sides of a chess game in my mind.

If you can’t crack a problem through logic, you make an end run. I developed an auxiliary to standard mathematics, my own methods. I slipped in and out of quantum math.

All this I had in me, but I could barely hold up my hand in class or engage in conversation or, God forbid, approach a girl. I was interesting, but nobody knew the things I was interested in.

I was storing so much data and so many formulae that I had to have a place to hold it all. So I created a fantasy place. It was called Bulldog City, although it was really a nation, in an isolated place with mountains encircling it and mountaintop guard posts and missile emplacements. I invented a super laser to knock out incoming missiles and spy planes. I could even hit a satellite when it spied on Bulldog City. Boy, nothing could get in and out, and I commanded the armed forces and quarter backed the football team and sang concerts and all the stuff I couldn’t do.

My daddy’s partner was a Negro named Moses Jefferson. Moses was a spiritual gentleman who did odd jobs until he proved his true worth. Moses entered a secret bid to demolish the old Williams Hotel. His bid was lower than Henry Tomtree’s.

Moses didn’t have the money for a crew and equipment, but subcontracted everything and put them on a profit-sharing plan. He ended up with an enormous cache of sinks, pipes, toilets, bricks, fine old turn-of-the-century urinals, chandeliers, railings, and everything a petit grand hotel could yield.

Henry Tomtree had been skinned, but he got the message. Moses Jefferson possessed the keen mind of a junk dealer. As messy as the yard might appear, a good dealer had it organized in his head, down to a button. Hell, better to have Moses in as a partner than as a competitor.

Sorry, that’s my phone. “Yes?”

“We’ve hit up everybody, Mr. President, but we can’t find out what the hell’s going on with O’Connell.”

Tomtree mumbled “Shit” under his breath. “It’s two A.M. here, what’s that mean in, what the hell you call it, Mountain Time?”

“I think I’d want to keep some people here to cover the monitors and phones and the rest of us pack it in,” Darnell said. “The instant O’Connell calls for a news conference, we assemble top staff, watch the conference together, and immediately whack out a counterattack.”

“No inkling of what the Democrats are up to?”

“None.”

“Right,” the President said, disappointed. “Darnell, bunk in tonight here at the White House. I, uh, need you to be close by.”

PAW TUCKET RHODE ISLAND

LATE 1950s TO LATE 1960s

Henry Tomtree’s junkyard occupied a full block in a semi derelict industrial zone. Long past its heyday. Stacks of crushed autos and chopped-up tires mingled with the new pop harvests of soft drink and beer bottles, broken glass bins, plastic, and the junk dealer’s mainstay—baled-up old newspapers and magazines.

“A cacophony of smells,” Henry would note, breathing in the fumes from the fuel trucks, smoke from a nearby landfill, and oil from the grease pits. Every night the garbage truck fleet parked in a nearby lot, the sky maddened with the mean wings and frenzied yowls of seagulls.

When Henry discovered Mo’s true worth, the two entered a life-long relationship which was to be carried on by their sons, Thornton Tomtree and Darnell Jefferson.

Moses and his family lived in Pawtucket, a very decent lower-middle-class city. It had a little less of everything, except for the Pawtucket Red Sox.

Henry Tomtree lived a few blocks from Mo in Providence, which was considered to be middle-middle. Providence was a good-sized little city, lovely to look at as it rippled up and down the hills to the sea.

Houses seemed newly painted, and the town was filled with educational facilities and boasted a strong cultural life, so as to be a kitchen community for both New York and Boston.

Twenty miles down the bay preened Newport, which ranged from tourist all the way to upper-upper. Setting aside the beach town aspects, and other summer garnishments, Newport was a world-class port of yacht racing. Here, the main thoroughfare was named America’s Cup Way after the trophy won by Yankee sailors for over a century.

Moses Jefferson’s American ancestry went back further than Henry’s and even further than many of the mansion owners of Newport.

Mo’s family originally came from a Portuguese colony in the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa. They were never completely slaves but made their livelihood servicing the hundreds of ships plying the Atlantic routes. Mo’s wife, Ruby, continued to clean houses for a few years after he began to work for Tomtree. Oftentimes, she had to leave little Darnell with his daddy at the yard.

Thornton Tomtree was a shy lad. Hanging out at the yard was his main form of recreation. As Darnell grew to waddle around on his own, Henry was in an endless checkers war with Mo. No one knows the exact number of boards they went through until Ruby gave her husband a wooden one for his birthday.

Throughout grammar school Thornton’s attraction to the yard increased. He’d pillage everything before it went to the crusher or was shipped out: instrument panels, washing machine motors, boat props, lawn mowers, and more used fan belts than GM would need in a year.

In the inner-inner area of the yard stood a warehouse where the good stuff was stored: stained-glass windows from derelict mansions, statuary, copper hardware, scrolled woods, once gleaming banister rails.

Inch by inch Thornton and his little helper, Darnell,

pushed things around in this warehouse, so he was able to establish a work bench.

When Thornton was eleven and Darnell merely nine, Moses and Henry put up a basketball hoop. In the beginning the two daddies had a notion they were more skilled than their sons. The notion was quickly dispelled by Darnell, and there was a swift return to their checkers.

An unmentionable thing drew Darnell to the yard: stacks of old Playboy magazines. Darnell got a whooping when Ruby found one under her son’s mattress, but that didn’t deter him. He thought there was something strange about the magazine-strange as well as invigorating. All the women in the photographs were white women, and none of them had pubic hair. Darnell long believed that this was normal. Years later at a midnight skinny-dipping party, he realized that all women, black and white, had pubic hair. That was about the time the magazine took a courageous position and flat-out showed it.

Darnell Jefferson was a born point guard and remained one: quick, graceful, deceptive, and cool, momma, cool. He had a face full of sunshine and was blessed with a silk tongue.

Thornton Tomtree grew gangly like his father, with a permanent aura of nerdiness about him, although he was wiry and very strong from slinging bales of newsprint and handling scrap metal. It seemed early that shaping Thornton’s personality—or lack of it—would become a lifetime mission for Darnell.

They went their separate ways to school and were pushed into different social circles, but always they rushed to return to the yard where their joint kingdom lay.

Then came the training of Thornton Tomtree, unlikely basketball player. Darnell ran hours of films, depicting how the great centers of the game operated as a hub.

Darnell snapped the ball to him a hundred times a day until his reflexes and coordination were brought to their limits.

“Catch the ball! Pass to the open man!”

“How about me getting some shooting time?”

“You ain’t no shooter, Thornton. Them that can, does. You are a trench warrior. You’re a white maypole with guys hanging all over you. But you are junkyard strong. Plant your ass under the basket and disembowel anyone who tries to get your rebound.”

Thornton Tomtree was awkward, not dumb. Once he understood the niche Darnell was creating for him, he studied the complexity and possibilities of the game and his particular value.

Darnell invited kids into the yard for pickup games which were nonstop verbal assaults on his student, to move his feet, leap, dunk.

By the end of the summer Darnell had created a player out of bits and pieces. His strength was under the basket, elbow and knee land. Only one problem. The two were going to different high schools.

Thornton changed his address from his home to the junkyard, which allowed him to transfer to Pawtucket High.

There were only two white boys trying out for the team, and they became the target of bad intent. At six foot three, Thorn ton was a nice-sized center for a small school. He closed his ears to the jiving. His physical strength tested and proved, Thornton became a legitimate second-string player. Darnell Jefferson’s “Frankenstein.”

Competence on the basketball court was a hard-earned grace. Less difficult was Thornton’s quick mastery of all the school’s curriculum in math and science.

Darnell drilled him in social skills, particularly girls. In time he joined Darnell in reading old Playboys in the yard.

“How come white women don’t have pussies?” Darnell wondered.

“I never saw a pussy,” Thornton said. “Do your women?”

“Oh, hell yes, but they’ve never had a picture of a black lady in Playboy.”

These sessions ended more quickly than Darnell wished.

Thornton would always end with a sigh and a shake of his head and make for his workbench.

Without saying it aloud, or even knowing it, Darnell was becoming an intricate part of Thornton’s ability to function in the outside world. Darnell preferred shooting baskets, Playboy, fishing and pussy-speak, but Thornton’s enormous devotion to the workbench lured Darnell in. An electronic ding-dong of some sort was explained as a Rube Goldberg-type invention. As he learned enough just through proximity and contact, his large vocabulary became punctuated with scientific terms.

A new day of science wizardry was arriving, and Thornton Tomtree was at home with it. Thornton’s ding-dong invention was a kind of computer which he called the Bulldog. He never shared the secret of Bulldog City with Darnell, or anyone.

Thornton tweaked the curiosity of the technical colleges that loomed large in the region. He established contact with MIT and played complex physics games. Whatever the Bulldog could do, it seemed to mop up the opposition of renowned institutions.

When Thornton Tomtree graduated Pawtucket High, they named a science medal after him. But it was a bad day for the odd couple. Thornton would leave for college, and Darnell had two more years to go at Pawtucket High.

For a time it was feared he would be drafted for Vietnam, but he was given an exemption as an only son.

On a late summer’s night in Newport, a thousand and one tourists strolled up the street looking at curios, and another thousand and one across the road strolled down the street looking at curios. Macho sailors, who manned the yachts of the rich, partied. Petitioners looked over Brown University, which had an open night for applicants. In the drawing rooms of the great mansions, string quartets played for charity at a thousand dollars a pop.

Thornton parked the junkyard pickup truck in Darnell’s driveway and waited on the porch swing for him to come home from a date.

“Darnell.”

“Yo, Thornton?”

“Yeah, how’d you make out?”

“Not too bad, I guess but those Jamaican girls have an agenda that has something to do with American passports. So, what’s going on?”

“You haven’t been in the shop most of the summer,” Thorn ton said.

“All right,” Darnell said, seating himself opposite on a rocker. “I mean, you’re going your own way. I hear my daddy talk about all the schools after you. MIT, Harvard, Carnegie Tech. How many scholarships have you been offered? They’ve got you mistaken for a quarterback.”

“Well, what’s that got to do with our friendship?”

“Everything,” Darnell said. “Man, you’re in solo land. A couple of years of college and we’ll need a translator to be able to speak to each other. Hey, man, you’re going to take off like a rocket. You and I just ran out of time and space. I mean, we can always be friends. Good friends, but you’re going north and south and I’m heading east and west.”

“I’ve made a decision,” Thornton said. “I’m not taking a scholarship. I’m not going to college. Why should I spend four years learning something I already know? My time would be better spent continuing to develop the Bulldog.”

“What the fuck you talking about?”

“I’m not going to college.”

“Your daddy know?”

“My daddy’s smart,” Thornton said. “He looked me over like he was bidding on ten tons of metal and asked me if I knew what I was doing. He trusts my judgment.”

“Because Henry didn’t need a college education to run a junkyard,” Darnell shot back.

He needed more. He was born with stuff you don’t learn in school. Don’t you get it, Darnell? You’ll be at Pawtucket for two more years and I’ll be at the yard.”

“I’m not married to you, man.”

“No, but you’re the only person in the world I want helping me. The Bulldog is going to do some awesome things, once I figure it all out.”

Darnell stopped the rocking chair.

“I thought you would be really happy about this,” Thornton muttered.

“It seems to be about you and what you want,” Darnell answered. “What about me? So, let’s go a couple years down the road. I’ll be heading for college. Columbia Law School. They have encouraged me to come to them first for a basketball scholarship. Like man, we’re talking New York City.”

“I hate stupidity,” Thornton said in disgust. “I mean, I truly hate stupidity. Look at me. Four left feet. I can still catch the ball and pass the open man. How come you can’t smell shit in a cow barn?”

“Columbia is no barn. Get used to it.”

“So waste your life for a law degree and end up as the house dar ky for one of the insurance companies. Everyone’s looking for darkies, especially point guard darkies. You are the dream minority package, Darnell.”

“Why are you doing this, Thornton?”

“By the time you pass the bar, the Bulldog computer will be the standard of its field. And you’ll have bupkas. That’s Jewish for zero.”

“Let’s just talk about putting leverage on each other,” Darnell said. “Hey, man, you’re arrogant. I’ve got my own life. What do you want me to be? Your little nigger boy?”

“Maybe you don’t get it, Darnell. I’m going to the top. I need somebody out there in front of me to take care of things so I can stay at my workbench.”

“That’s arrogant.”

“Is it? I live in a funny world that has me in its grip. I’m past most mathematicians in the world. It’s something I didn’t learn. It’s just there. But when I look into a mirror, I see ugly. I see this broken clay statue with fingers missing and a shoulder missing and a leg missing. I am incomplete, and there is nothing I can do about it. You’re the only real friend I have or probably will ever have. Maybe, going to the yard day after day this summer, alone, I maybe got scared without you.”

Oh, Tomtree, Darnell thought. In the middle of a game he’d read Thornton’s eyes on the court. The guy would be working on a physics problem. The pretty little cheerleaders in their pretty flaming red satin shorts way up on their sweet little black and white legs. Thornton’s head was somewhere else while they were cheering him. He was always so far away, most folks were afraid to speak to him, to interrupt that siren song that Thornton alone heard.

It had not been all that great a summer for Darnell, bikinis notwithstanding. Too much of the uniqueness and lore of the junkyard had invaded his being over the years. He’d missed Thornton. Thought he was free of him at first, but ended up lonely for him. Why? What he wants from me, Darnell thought, was to be a junkyard dog’s junkyard dog.

“So, you want me to come in with you the minute I graduate high school? I don’t know business. I don’t know how money works. I don’t know nothing.”

“Yes, you do, Darnell. You’ve got instincts about.. . people .. . and that’s number one. Nobody in this state is smarter than you.”

“It’s a small state.”

“Well, if we went in together, you could still go to one of the colleges around Providence.”

“I’m going to Columbia.”

Thornton left the porch fuming and harangued the pickup truck into starting.

Darnell turned at the slam of the screen door to see his daddy shuffle out.

“Sorry, I overheard,” Mo said.

“That be okay, Daddy.”

“You’ve got two years of high school left. That gives you all the time in the world to make up your mind.”

“What are you thinking, Daddy?”

“Listen to what he is saying, real good.”

“Daddy, I love you and I respect your judgment. But one thing I know better than you is Thornton Tomtree. His whole life is like a chess game where he’s four moves ahead of Bobby Fisher. If I let Thornton collar me, I’ll walk behind him with a broom and dust pan.”

“You ready to shut up for a minute?” Mo said.

i(\r .

Yes, sir.

“You’re going to be real good at whatever you do, son. Let’s talk a little black-ass reality. We’re still pushing against the door for equality. No matter how incredible a young black man may be, the road for him is still going to be torture. You’ll become the house nigra and you’ll be forced, all your life, to try to act and live in a white world. No matter what profession you choose and no matter how good you are at it, you’re still going to be thought of by the color of your skin.”

“Maybe the blacks aren’t going to take it anymore, Daddy. I’m talking about the civil rights movement.”

“That’s going to be a long, bloody struggle, and in the end it’s still the white man who’s going to be boss,” Henry answered.

“Thornton Tomtree might not make all the high-and-mighty plans he has. He wants me to be his doo-doo bird. I think I’d rather struggle through and have my freedom.”

“Or learn one day how you missed the boat.”

“Why you so high on Thornton, Daddy?”

“Because I’ve never seen a genius like him. It’s the kind of genius

that has to be served. If he stays out of trouble, if he learns his

right foot from his left, if he learns everything you can teach him,

he’s going to end up one of the most powerful men in America. I’ve

been watching you young men most of *

your life, Darnell. If you become indispensable to him, you’re in for a real ride.” Now Daddy Jefferson came down with a pointing finger. “In my opinion, you’ll always have a boss. A boss that you can control is the best one to have.”

For two years Darnell kept a sharp eye on Thornton Tomtree’s invention. The Bulldog was doing spell-binding work. Thornton rebuffed a dozen offers to join the top national electronics companies.

He did not exactly know what he ultimately wanted from the Bulldog. More and more electronic research and product appeared around the country. Thornton concentrated on understanding an overall pulsation of the computer phenomenon.

Darnell was lured in. With the way opened for anything, he started his own collection of data to try to find an indispensable niche where the Bulldog would fit.

Columbia came courting, to no avail. Darnell was now in his corner in the junkyard. Backup point guard for the elegant Providence College team might better suit his future.

For the next couple of years he wanted to collect and analyze every bit of business information he could get his hands on. Providence would serve him well.

“Henry, don’t take the boat out today. I don’t like the direction of the wind. Could kick up some rogue waves.”

“Moses, that hole is full of sea bass, and they’re boiling with lust,” Henry said, tossing his fishing gear into the rear of the pickup.

Mo grabbed his arms. “Don’t go out today. It just don’t feel right.”

“You get the head and tail.”

When the bass were running, the best fishing was at Noah’s Rock with its nasty little riptide that ran between the rock and the beach, a quarter of a mile away. When the incoming tide overpowered the outgoing tide in the rip, fish came in like a blizzard.

But this day the power of the churning and surging sea proved too much for the old converted lobster boat to outrun. A rogue wave a dozen feet high bashed the rock, then sucked the water out of the inlet until one could see the bottom. Behind it came swells that literally hurled the boat into Noah’s Rock, where it burst apart.

Henry Tomtree was so bashed up, he had to be buried in a closed coffin.

Thornton did not weep at the wake or funeral. He did not hear or have a remembrance of Darnell’s entreaties. The numbing pain of his first great loss plunged him deeper into himself where he worked ‘round the clock, hunched over his maze of wires. After a month he allowed himself a single groan of pain.

Like new, he showed up at the yard to go over the accounts with Moses.

“The books are a mess, Mo,” Thornton said.

“Those ain’t the books. The books are up here,” Mo answered, pointing a forefinger at his forehead.

“Well, I’ve got to get them in some kind of order. We’re in probate. I don’t just inherit. I inherit what is left. Mo, I’m scared of losing the yard.”

Mo rubbed Thornton’s hair. “You won’t lose the yard, son. Henry was very good to me. I’ve put away a creditable sum for just such an occasion.”

A month later, a very lonely Moses Jefferson took a last look around the kingdom of tortured metal. He stood by the basketball court. “Catch the ball! Throw it to the open man!”

The light was burning in Thornton’s shack. Seemed like it was always burning. Mo felt he was waiting around these days, just waiting around. He knew he’d be going off to sleep soon.

* *

TROUBLESOME MESA, 2008

Quinn, I told myself, keep it simple. Literature is not appreciated these days. Say your piece and get off the stage. What is this!

Only

2:14 A.M.

What would Rita and I and the kids do after the election? If we were defeated on the campaign issues, we’d suck it up and go on with life. To have come within touching distance of the White House and have the door slammed in your face, rejected, is another matter. I could take some solace in the fact that it was Alexander Horowitz who was defeated and not Quinn O’Connell. Reality says this will go with us to our graves and largely dictate the lives of our children.

I scan the speech. Well, it needs some more touching up, but not now.

I feel a glow. Rita is near. I’d know her presence from a half mile away. Driving up to the ranch house, I can tell by the feel of it if she is home or not.

She floated in from the bedroom without me hearing, but I knew she was there, behind me. Her fingers are at my temples. Nobody groans like I groan.

“How does it look?” she asked.

“No matter how I put it to the American people tomorrow, it doesn’t

sound real. Winning the Democratic nomination didn’t seem real, either. But this, it’s unabashed madness. Want to wake up Greer, honey? She’s got to set up the press conference.”

“Greer is in la-la land. I turned it over to Kohlmeyer before I hit the bed.”

Quinn phoned out.

“Kohlmeyer speaking.”

“Pete, it’s Quinn. How are we looking for tomorrow?”

“The saints are marching into Troublesome Mesa, boss. They’re buzzing around like sunset gnats hunting for a piece of dead skin. Quinn, if I can push this into the noon spot in Denver, we’ll break at eleven on the coast right before their noon news and at three in the afternoon on the East Coast, giving us a flying start on the evening news.”

“It will make no difference this time, Pete,” Quinn said.

Peter Kohlmeyer, as everyone else on the staff, wanted to know what Quinn was up to. Pete held his tongue with a gnarl between his teeth.

“Pete, this is largely in the hands of President Tomtree. His reaction could change the entire election.”

“Sonofabitch is too smart to shoot himself now,” Pete said.

Give up, Quinn. Surrender to Rita. She offers everything to comfort you. Lord, I no sooner hit the pillow than I’m streaking through space. Rita knows what is lovely to me. I feel the warmth of protection, and relief in knowing I’ll still have her when all of this is over.

Christ, I can’t sleep, but at least the atmosphere is comfortable.

The details of my birth have eluded me all my life and never fail to grate on me.

I try to remember back, some tiny connection with my infant life, but everything I recall began in Troublesome Mesa.

Dan and Siobhan had gone through a half dozen winters of discontent when I came onto the scene.

TROUBLESOME MESA, 1953

Dan was a Marine, the most tender and loving of men but faced with the most sorrowful of circumtances. Siobhan, equally comfortable in jeans or behind the controls of the Cessna, found Dan’s faith and understanding giving them the power of many.

In the springtime the snowpack in the high mountains melted and let go its cargo, the journey turning it into great, gushing rivers. The roar of it created quivers in the ranch house.

As water poured into the valley, it left little lakes and tiny beaches filled with hungry but wise mountain trout in the high country.

The ranchers read the winds, predicted the rains, knew the value of crop by touch.

In came the hummingbirds, skinny and exhausted from their flight north. Consuelo put up several pieces of red glass to attract them and tell them they had a free handout at the O’Connell ranch. Feeders of sugar water and red dye were set out, and by twilight hundreds of hummers had arrived. A bully, the rufous, larger than the “ruby throats,” spent hours near the feeder chasing off the little ones. They went into WWII dogfights and battled to get to the food.

With little light finding its way up from town at night, the O’Connell ranch sat in darkness, allowing a star-gazing extravaganza. And one would have to wonder if the earth was truly the center of the universe.

Now came the ballet dancers: showers of yellow, red, and purple columbines, each mass filling its own hill or meadow or cliff side to radiate its vibrance and then leave, far too soon. Dan and Siobhan chose their own magic meadow and made love in the grass. And he laughed at the white-capped demigods hovering above them.

Dan did whatever a good man had to do to ease the heartache of their

life. With Pedro Martinez firmly in control of the operation and Siobhan doing the books, Dan was able to win a seat as state senator.

From Pedro, Dan learned to hunt and fish and canoe, how to survive if lost in the mountains, how to mend fences, drive and buy and sell cattle, read the fast-moving weather fronts roaring down their valley.

The fine warm weather didn’t last long enough, though. It didn’t have to, because stands of millions of aspen trees, propagated through their roots, covered the slopes on both sides of the valley. Their translucent pale green leaves trembled at the slightest breeze. The Mexicans called them “money for the pope.”

In the second or third week of September came the announcement that winter was not far behind as the leaves turned solid gold with the occasional dark green spike of a conifer piquing the stand.

Spring and autumn were muddy and sloppy from snowflakes holding too much water. Around Thanksgiving, as the real cold snapped in, the flakes became so light you could blow them off a branch with the slightest breath.

Father Scan was coming!

For three years he had been in one of those godawful places in Africa where only a Catholic missionary would go. Ravaged by ailments, he had been recalled to the States. The three years in Africa had earned him the respect due a full and sacrificing priest in the eyes of Paul Cardinal Watts, archbishop of Brooklyn. The cardinal sequestered Sean.

The priest needed healing. A light course of duty was set up in which he could spend part of his time at nearby St. John’s in study and teaching.

Cardinal Watts agreed that a month off in Colorado would put some roses

back in his cheeks. Father Sean was picked up at the Denver airport

and whisked to the small aircraft side of the field. He nearly fainted

with fear when his sister, little *

Siobhan, took the controls of the Cessna. She had waited long for this golden moment and flew it high and down into Troublesome’s dirt runway flawlessly.

Another surprise—an apartment, Scan’s apartment, had been added to the ranch house! It had everything from his own vehicle to a futuristic sound system, to a mighty fireplace, to a veranda which afforded a grand vista.

At the fire, Father Scan’s initial fire, they gathered around. Siobhan unlaced her brother’s shoes and slipped his feet into a pair of woollies. He groaned with delight, and soon the smoke of his pipe danced with the smoke of the fire.

“How’s it going to go?” Dan asked.

“Cardinal Watts is the kind of man you want to work hard for.”

Scan sipped a rare velvety cognac, audible in his contentment, then stared from one to the other.

“Siobhan, you’ve been back to Brooklyn how many times?”

“Eight, ten. I don’t know exactly.”

“Everyone glories in the life you’ve made in Colorado. But that room at the end of the hall stays locked.”

“You know what happened,” Dan said. “For a time I traveled to God knows where to see fertility doctors. I even dropped my pants for Jewish doctors. They all said sterility from mumps is rare, and there is a chance I may become whole again.”

“How long do you plan to wait?”

Dan’s paws fell into his lap, and he lowered his eyes. “We may be ready to adopt,” he said in a whisper.

“We looked into our Catholic agency. Somehow, it seems very risky, getting an ill child, and after months, maybe years, of waiting,” Siobhan said.

Father Scan tapped out his pipe. “I did some investigating of my own,”

he said. “Cardinal Watts’ closest aide is a Monsignor Gallico. He is

the diocese fixer. When I told the cardinal of your situation, he

said, “Why don’t you talk it over with the mon signor Both of them tensed noticeably.

“You don’t have to do much more than meet Monsignor Gallico to realize he is a wheeler-dealer, a real Jesuit. In the past few weeks he showed me a number of infants, but I just couldn’t square any of them in terms of the ranch and the mountains. Just before I was to fly out here, Gallico called me, very excited. One particular baby he had been tracking was found. The child had lived with his birth parents for its first year and was placed in a convent with special attention told to be given. I have a suspicion that the mon signor might have known about this child all along and showed me the others as a straw man. You know the church, we’ve got to play out our mysteries and secrets.”

Siobhan roused herself more than once. Father Sean filled and lit his pipe again.

“What do you know about this child?” Dan asked tentatively.

Sean shrugged. “The church has a massive bureaucracy for handling orphans, welfare, and foster homes. I am sad to report that most of our infants up for adoption are from unwed and often underage mothers. Fathers gone. The trick is,” he went on, “if you don’t take a newly born, you should know as much as possible about the child’s first year.”

“How so?” Dan asked, puzzled.

“In the first year human-to-human touch is paramount. It is nearly always the key to future behavior. I do know that this was a wanted child and the object of great affection. He trusts the nuns, who do a great deal of fawning over him.”

“Sounds to me like the mon signor might have known this child from the beginning,” Dan said. “Is he the father, Sean?”

“I don’t know. I am barred from asking. However, when Gallico brought

this child to see me, there was no further reason to wonder why he is

so special. He’s handsome, he’s smart, he’s cuddly. The child is

wonderful with the infants at the orphanage, a little gentleman. There is a glow about him I can’t put into words.”

Sean dug into his worn wallet, torn and with green spots from African fungus. Siobhan reminded herself to get him a new one tomorrow. Sean held the billfold up to the light and drew out a photograph.

“Oh, God, he’s beautiful!” Siobhan cried. Dan knew, from her reaction, it was a done deal, beyond his input or personal reaction. He took the photograph and he, too, melted.

“I’m going to have to ask you, Father Sean, are we to know nothing about his parents?”

“Nothing.”

“How was Monsignor Gallico mixed up in this?” Dan wondered aloud. “I love my church. The ranch is filled with shrines. But I don’t fancy getting mixed up in secrets and deceit. Are they covering the child so because it was conceived by a priest or a nun?”

“ClanI” Siobhan snapped. “You know the rules.”

“It will be pretty much the same with any child you adopt,” Father Sean said.

Dan took the photograph again. He never again wanted to see the anguish on Siobhan’s face when she had learned her husband was sterile.

“It may sound cruel, but the more you and a child know of its past, the more you open your doors for strangers to come and live in the house. I’ve been there when children meet a birth parent, and it can shatter a life. It wrecks dreams that should be left as dreams.”

“And who makes that judgment?”

“Centuries of a priesthood charged with men’s and women’s most sacred and secret problems.”

“Secrets to the grave. Lies to the grave.”

“If you don’t know and tell your son you don’t know, you’ll be telling him the truth.”

“God damned, Galileo’s Jesuit double-talk.”

“Dan,” Siobhan said, “what is tomorrow night and the nights thereafter going to be like if we turn this down?”

“I can’t tell you how many times I passed the fishing hole and saw myself with my son. How many times we were at the ball games together. How many times . , . these things are always complicated, aren’t they, Father?”

“Life is complicated.”

“All right, Siobhan, we have a son,” Dan said.

“I’m glad, and let his life begin the moment he steps foot on the ranch. I caution you that sometimes a child’s drive to find his birth parents is insatiable. The only thing you can do is raise him with wisdom and love. His life can be made so full, his need to know may simply fade. Make it so he won’t want any parents but you.”

Dan leaned against the fireplace. The mantel, the picture gallery of all Irish homes, was empty.

“God has given us everything,” Dan said. “We can’t take our failings out on the child. What is his name?”

“The sisters call him Patrick.”

“That’s Irish enough.”

“Patrick O’Connell,” Siobhan said three times over.

“You know,” Dan said, “in the Corps we almost entirely knew each other by our last name. Do you suppose we might ;| call our son Quinn Patrick O’Connell?”

“That was in my line of thinking as well,” his wife said.

WASHINGTON, D.C.” 2008

It is nearly three o’clock. Nothing makes time pass more slowly than waiting for a cold pot to boil.

“Get me Whipple,” I ordered over the phone.

“Whipple here, Mr. President.”

“What’s going on?”

“Just a few minutes ago the O’Connell people called a news conference for tomorrow at one P.M. Rocky time.”

“Sounds like O’Connell is burning the midnight oil.”

“Yes, sir. The press corps is heading for Troublesome Mesa en masse.”

“Contact my staff advisers. We’ll watch the press conference in the Situation Room. Christ, what’s going on?”

“A lot of rumors. One here is interesting. A New York Times correspondent, June Siddell, spotted someone she knew debarking at the Denver airport. She got to the manifest and confirmed the passenger was a fairly well-known police detective by the name of Ben Horowitz. He was met by O’Connell’s staff, and they headed from the airport in the direction of Troublesome Mesa. Reporters at Troublesome confirm Horowitz’s arrival, where he was taken straight up to the O’Connell ranch.”

“How does all this fit, Whipple?”

“Haven’t got a clue, Mr. President.”

“Have the FBI in New York find out who this Horowitz guy is.” Before Whipple could complain about using the FBI for this, I tried moving on quickly: “Now, where is the veep?”

“Uh, sir, are you sure about the FBI?”

“We’ve got no goddamned time to fiddle-fart. Do it! Now, where’s the vice president?”

“Dallas.”

“Get him.”

Senator, now Vice President, Matthew Hope was my major concession to a very vocal Southern Christian coalition. Matt Hope was one of them, body and soul. Through him I could control that bloc. During the last stage of Clinton’s reign, several Christian denominations, Presbyterian, United Methodist, as well as the Catholic and Jewish clergy had come out with thorough anti-gun proposals. After Clinton left office, the gun lobby awakened and gained back most of their rights. Central to this was Matt Hope’s unquestioned hold on sixteen million Southern Baptists.

“Matt Hope speaking.”

“Matthew, what’s the rumor mill saying down in Dallas?”

“Not much, Mr. President.”

“We’ve got a little change of plans, Matt. Get back to Washington immediately. Be in the Situation Room by two P.M. Before we sign off, I want you to be thinking about some disturbing numbers I received from our pollsters a few hours ago. Since the big debate there has been slippage all over your territory.”

The vice president cleared his throat. “Oh, just a surge. There will be a more favorable adjustment picture as the line flattens out.”

“Bullshit!” I informed him. “There has been a two-point swing to O’Connell in South Carolina and Alabama. A two and-a-half-point swing in Louisiana, Georgia, and Mississippi. That’s a fucking trend, Matthew.”

“Hell, the Presbyterians are your people, Mr. President.”

“That’s my point, Matthew. The Southern Baptists are your baby. There are sixteen million of them. We are losing ground in Baptist land. Maybe their women haven’t submitted graciously.”

Matthew Hope, my would-be deliverer, waffled and spoke Potomac gobbledygook. I hung up. The door to the adjoining room was open, and Darnell came in.

“I thought I heard a lark singing,” he said, “so I supposed you were up.”

“I sent for Matthew. If I can win without the Baptists and get that Baptist gun off my head, I’ll have Matthew Hope shoveling horse shit like a vice president should.”

“My hunch is that what O’Connell announces is going to be a national issue. The South may only be one player.”

“You’re usually right, Darnell. We’ll use Matthew this final week to lock up Texas and Florida.”

Darnell knew my discomfort.

“We’re in very gray territory, Thornton. However, we’ve been in gray territory a good part of our lives. Talk about getting through by the skin of our teeth; we didn’t have a slice of baloney to put in the middle of two slices of bread when we hit bottom. We were sharp, we were bold. We were unethical and bailed ourselves out by our wits. Do you miss those days, Thornton?”

“Hell, no.”

“This election is not over. Something is in the air. I can almost smell O’Connell’s blood from here.”

I sent Darnell to get the latest updates.

No use of me trying to fall back asleep. I never had trouble sleeping before I became president. I tried to set up a physics problem in my mind, but I simply wasn’t clicking in.

It is strange how Darnell sees our lives in two sweeping cycles. He’s right that the early days set the tone of our toughness and resourcefulness. Can you believe that the nineteen seventies were nearly four decades ago?

Do I really miss it? Hell, no! Well, maybe.

PAW TUCKET THE 1970s

Thornton Tomtree clung to the square block of the junkyard by the hair of his rinny-chin-chin, so absorbed in his work he scarcely differentiated between light and darkness. He handmade a fleet of prototypes with their own bells and whistles and exotic functions.

The great electronic revolution that had growled and growled now burst through the top of the volcano.

Because Thornton did not study the wizardry of his future competitors, he was alone in a technology of one. Yet, how would the Bulldog fit into this brave new world? Darnell, who was supposed to market it, wondered even more. To what avail was the Bulldog? Darnell did not return to Providence College in his senior year but joined Thornton in the yard. Darnell had already chucked in his entire inheritance, a hundred thousand dollars, which Thornton had no trouble eating up.

The yard had ceased to trade in junk. The bank account-nonexistent.

Darnell organized a fire sale.

As the various piles of scrap and paper disappeared, they ended one life and entered into another. Neither of them had inherited Henry and Mo’s love of trash.

Finally, the good stuff went. The stained glass and antique embellishments were carted off, and all that remained was a single shack like warehouse building and Thornton’s rat’s nest of wires.

Darnell charted the most likely paths the new enterprises would take. Much of it was happening too fast to comprehend. The top new inventors and marketers could not give a rational answer as to where it was all heading. Some companies soared, some crashed. They bashed into one another in merciless attempts to have their product become a standard item.

Darnell and Thornton spoke throughout more than one night trying to evolve a strategy. They knew they would not take the Bulldog into the middle of a battlefield. They also knew they had to remain free of outside control.

It came down to a purpose of being. To what avail was the Bulldog? What road could they take with the Bulldog that others could not follow? What unique niche would this system fill?

Simultaneously, they had come to a dark place. The darkness held the secret. Speed is the seed of greed, Darnell had said.

As each new innovation reached the market, Thornton’s “purpose for being” opened wider. He followed inroads in his mind where Darnell could not follow.

“We must keep the darkness dark,” Thornton said at last. “What’s happening, Darnell? Every computer is trying to outfox every other computer. High-wall technology is trying to turn back invaders. A mad hunt is on to keep security and integrity of a system. This eats up half a researcher’s time. But! What are they doing but reacting to something already taking place? In my own modest way, I can break into almost any line and decode any message.”

“We can’t market that.”

“We can build a system that’s impenetrable. We can have that system in place and grab our corner of the market while the others are playing catch-up. We’ll have it going in.”

“What?”

“Unbreakable encrypted messages and transactions.”

“You sure?”

“I am positive,” Thornton said, holding up a small black box called the Growler, an accomplished high-line code and decoder. The Growler also came from a place deep inside Thornton Tomtree, his versions of math, his flirtation with quantum. His natural penchant for secrecy!

“Wouldn’t we be better off just selling the Growler?”

No way.

“But it may cost millions to set up one network for one company.”

“We place our small terminals at Harvard, MIT, Cal Tech, Georgia Tech, Stamford, and with the Army, Navy, and Air Force and let those people break their balls trying to decode us. You, my dear friend, will sell the results to, say, three hundred companies in the Fortune Five Hundred. Three hundred corporations installed and paying monthly fees for absolute protection starts to add up to billions ...”

Thornton was right, but even so, he was wrong, Darnell thought. What had he said: keep the darkness dark. As Darnell studied the meaning of the system, he assured himself that they would be clear of antitrust violations, unfair competition, and other government interference. After all, they were only going after a very small piece of the market.

However, Thornton would not stop with three hundred Bulldog networks once it had become the Rolls-Royce of the computer world.

Banks, insurance companies, car manufacturers, oil companies, police, airlines, mercantile chains, medical networks ... all in secret.

A great central mainframe to be built in Pawtucket could drive thousands of networks. The senders and receivers could not operate unless both were positively identified through fingerprints, photos, and a DNA scanner.

Darnell did not go in fully convinced, but followed his own part of the work. He set up the university and military network, exciting and challenging the listeners. The military was particularly sought out, for any system installed for them would open the door to a hundred corporations. The bright people in his new thinking would exercise their minds achingly trying to break the Growler. To no avail.

Thornton growled in content as his friendly adversaries threw in the

towel. The Growler flipped to one of several mil lion code algorithms so that the sender and receiver had to be “married.”

But that was out there and this was down here. In the real world they were a long way from the financing to build mainframes.

Darnell had lingering doubts. He always held out hope that a universal benefit could be found somewhere in the system. It was Darnell’s upbringing, a matter of the soul to answer dirty questions. As Thornton went in, seemingly without scruples, Darnell wondered if he would be able to follow.

“What we are doing, Thornton, is tapping into man’s paranoia. Half the energy in a computer is to mistrust, and the walls go higher until we come to the ultimate weapon, the Bulldog. You see, mistrust begets mistrust, and the fucking computer industry is being built on greed. So, we’d be building a buffer around the corporate elites to carry on in total secrecy. That is the dark space, and we will control the night. The government eventually will make us give up the Growler.”

“Think about this, Darnell, because you plotted it. In another decade there are going to be millions of individual terminals and business networks, and a damned good part of them will be scamming the public. They are the ones the feds will go after, to clean up smut and thievery.”

“They’ll get around to us ...”

“By the time the government does, much of the world’s commerce and defense will run on Bulldog networks. We will be too integral a part of the world’s being to fuck around with.”

“Keep the darkness dark,” Darnell mumbled.

“You’ve got it. All we do,” Thornton said, “is supply the technology.

It is up to our clients to supply the morality.”

Refining the dream was slow going. Getting a full-sized network up and running was galactic in reach.

Ping, went the checkbook.

“I’m going to need twenty thousand dollars by the end of next week, Darnell.”

“Maybe we’re going to have to go to the bank or take in a partner.”

Thornton pondered long enough to empower his database of broken codes.

“Thornton, I don’t like you doing that!”

“Let’s see, First Union of Providence. It’s drug money. They launder it by transferring it to “Reserve Building Funds,” which the bank invests partly in new construction. Bundles of cash come in. Checks are cut by the dozens.”

“Man, we’re dealing with some nasty dudes.”

“Well, how the hell do you think we’ve stayed alive? Besides, we’re not dealing with real bright people. Those stupid-ass bankers lend money to Mexico. Anyhow, they don’t question transfers out of the Reserve Building Funds. All I do is bill them for consulting fees, pick up a check at a post office box, and deposit it. Darnell, they’re sending out checks to dealers all the time under the guise of consulting fees.”

“Ahem,” a voice behind them announced. A proper gentleman entered the shack and handed Thornton a card which read DWIGHT GRASS LEY It was one of those top-echelon business cards that need not carry an address, phone number, or type of business. Dwight Grassley was it.

The Grassley pedigree in Rhode Island went back over two centuries when they landed as Quakers on Block Island. The Grassley dynasty, once a towering insurance and banking power, had peaked, but mainly through too much inbreeding, it had fallen to a lesser plateau, as factory after factory shut down, plunging New England into a manufacturing and economic crisis.

Indeed, the Grassleys were a diminished power, but a power nonetheless.

The Grassley before them was short, round-faced, apple cheeked, with the pasty smile of an un favorite son. He would not have been heard from again, but the patriarchs and matriarchs all seemed to die about the same time, leaving him a primary heir.

Dwight got kicked up to first vice president and COO of the Grassley operating entity.

“Sorry to barge in on you without an appointment.”

“Well, that doesn’t seem to be a problem,” Darnell noted.

“I was looking over Hell’s Acres here to see what we can do with it. We own most of this land, but there’s no money in parking garbage trucks.”

“Hell, I didn’t know they did that around here,” Darnell said. Mr. Grassley was miffed over this fellow’s smart-ass comments. “If we had your parcel, we would have over twenty-five contiguous acres and could certainly draw interest on the market. Otherwise, it would have to go in two pieces, which makes it a very hard sell. Now, we’d build in a handsome premium for you.”

“And it just so happens that you have some parcels between Harmony and Chepachet you’ll swap us for a song,” Darnell said as Dwight Grassley grew aggravated.

“You selling or developing?” Thornton asked.

“All, nothing, or part and part,” Dwight answered. “There are a variety of options....”

“Yeah,” Darnell chipped in, “a shopping mall but too close to Pawtucket, a marina hotel but too far from Newport, a senior citizens’ development. Costs to build old folks’ condos are too far out of line of prospective receipts.”

Dwight now underwent a different reaction, one of shock. How did you get this information?”

Thornton started to jibber-jabber, but Darnell held his hand up. “We got the data on the land sell off your computers.”

Well, well, thought Dwight. Well, well, well. He cleared his throat and leaned toward Thornton, dropping his voice. “May we speak privately?” he asked.

“”Scuse me,” Thornton said. “This is Darnell Jefferson, my vice

president, sole employee, and nigra confidant. Sure you must keep a few nigra lawyers around so’s they can translate to the nigras in the low-rent district.”

“I did it,” Dwight said, folding his arms on the desk and laying his head in them. “Even great men like me make mistakes,” he said, trying to make light. “Now that we’re past introductions, you got a cold Coke?”

“If we still have electricity,” Darnell said. “What’s your thinking, Mr. Grassley?”

“The land will sell for enough to clear our books.”

“Let’s see, you can then put a Woolworth’s, Jacques Penne, Sears, Filene’s Basement, and maybe a hundred-thousand-seat stadium made entirely of luxury boxes to attract an NFL franchise. Al Davis would be interested.”

“Dwight—may I call you Dwight?” Darnell queried.

“Certainly. And you’re Darnell and you’re Thornton.”

“Let’s go up on the roof,” Darnell said. It afforded a view of the dump site and was rather depressing. “Mr. Grassley-Dwight—you’re from one of Rhode Island’s great families. This state is known for beads, bracelets, and costume jewelry, probably taught to the Pilgrims by the Indians. It’s no longer a growth industry or a major financial winner. This land, reclaimed, could hold a modern industrial park that could help revive the economy of Rhode Island.”

“With your plant as our anchor,” Dwight retorted. “Look, fellows, we’ve also done our research. Nobody knows what you’re doing, including yourselves.”

No sun would burn off the haze this morning. They returned to the office.

“Give me a figure for your land. We’ll attach it to our parcels and get you, say, twenty percent of the total sale.”

At that moment Darnell and Thornton looked at one another, completely locked into each other’s brain. Thornton gave a tiny, tiny nod. Darnell was on. He picked up a Growler and handed it to Dwight.

“This little devil makes our Bulldog network totally secure.”

Dwight burped out a laugh, excused himself, and waved them off.

“The computer environment is now being invaded by every con artist, cross-dressing sicko, porno pervert, thief, monster banks, stock manipulator, secret arms and trade dealer,” Darnell said.

“And you boys must have God on your side,” Dwight mocked.

“In a manner of speaking,” Thornton said. “The First Union Bank of Providence, your bank, dips freely into ten numbered cocaine accounts and ‘reinvests’ through your building funds. Accurate records are hard to come by. You’ve got a sweet, clean seventeen percent skim-off.”

Dwight paled. Suddenly he was looking at a pair of young men, eager of purpose and filled with frightening information. He told himself to remain calm. After casting about for a reason, he realized there was no explanation.

“Are you going to blow the whistle on us?” Dwight asked.

“Of course not,” Thornton answered. “You’re just doing what any respectable bank would do. But get yourself a new security system.”

“Like the Bulldog and Growler,” Darnell said.

It was a fortunate day for Dwight Grassley. Thornton Tomtree and Darnell Jefferson had long envisioned the extent of their own greed. It was plenty, and it converted to the computer’s mistrust of the computer, or more succinctly, man’s mistrust of man.

First Union of Providence, their insurance company, and their real estate holdings used the initial Bulldog/ Growler network. It was filled with bugs, but no one could tap into its secrecy circuit.

Then came the Air Force after one of its most vital and secret networks had been broken into by a hacker.

Teams of geniuses in many universities and laboratories went into exercises with the Bulldog/ Growler each coming out with incredible praise of attaining absolute secrecy.

The greening of Thornton Tomtree began when a row of | bulldozers moved in to reclaim the land. The first building would house the mainframes, a pair of electronic wizards hand created by Thornton.

Darnell made certain that every set of tests was covered by the media. With much publicity, the system sold itself and there was soon a waiting list for installations. Darnell came up with the great name and logo, T3 Industries.

In a few years T3 Industries had set up networks for over a hundred industries listed in the Fortune 500.

If demand were to be met, manufacturing capacity had to be increased by several hundred percentiles. Flushed with a generous deal with T3, Dwight Grassley knew he had a cash cow, an endless, endless, endless cash cow. He even got rid of his drug-money accounts.

As the system built, Darnell Jefferson took it upon himself to push the parameters of Thornton’s personality. It was slow, mushy going. Meeting the press, using wit, building a comfort level into local business and fraternal lunches. Darnell brought in a speech coach, and Thornton responded, slowly. At first, when he went to the rostrum, there was an awkward dry-mouth trembling and jokes that lay flat. A mild beta blocker calmed his trembling. The challenge was great, and Thornton stuck it out and became reasonably proficient.

The more he spoke, the more those elusive thoughts would clear themselves in his mind and then on his lips. He began to toy with words and got a grip on what was humorous.

Thornton moved up to college commencements, guest appearances at

business and professional power conventions, and learned that stumbling

in mid-sentence could be endearing. A moment of trembling could make

the audience tremble,

his shy charm brought smiles, and that old humor, which he scarcely understood, made others howl with laughter.

Meanwhile, Darnell saw to it that Thornton’s appearances were plentiful and important.

Darnell understood immediately that this was another page being opened to him in the now-and-future Thornton Tomtree Book of Revelations. Why is he trying to get people to adore him? Darnell wondered. What was his curse, his sin, his burden? He did not seem to return the warmth but always positioned himself as the wise father figure.

One night at the ultraliberal and prestigious 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, everything fell into place. About three or four minutes into his speech Thornton realized the audience was mesmerized. He crossed the enormous chasm that made an ordinary speaker into a speaker who absolutely controlled his listeners: an orator, an actor.

To step down from the lectern and shove his hands in his pockets “home style,” to wipe his glasses or remark he’d lost his place, to relieve drama with a funny quip, to drop a curse word.

Well, Thornton was a sound sleeper, but he didn’t sleep for three days after the 92nd Street Y speech. He was top-of-the line, just a notch below Kissinger, as an attraction.

Expand they must. It was Darnell’s baby. The Pawtucket Central station would be a state-of-the-art home of two mainframes capable of transmitting and receiving tens of thousands of messages simultaneously.

A factory would make and assemble the computer and the encryption box. No employee worked on more than a fourth of a Growler. Another building would hold the research lab and the repair and installation division.

A final building was to be a modest four-story office.

Darnell brought Thornton all the blueprints, including some T3 had never seen.

“What the hell is this?” Thornton spread the last several sheets on his workbench. “Do I read this correctly? Employees Health and Recreation Center? This your idea of a whiz-bang knee slapper?”

“The architects,” Darnell answered, “and I hold no brief for architects, say that every progressive new factory has workout rooms, TV room, dance hall, and so forth and so forth.”

“This dispensary here looks like the Mass General Hospital.”

“Think in terms of the days we won’t lose to illness.”

“Bullshit! Quality restaurant, travel office, beach club, packaged tours .. . whatl A nursery for preschool children!”

Thornton ripped the pages from their moorings, tore them into six parts, crumpled them and put them into his wastebasket and lit a match to it.

“I take it you’re not in full agreement,” Darnell noted.

“This is fucking, and I mean fucking, socialism. Baby-sitters! We’ll end up with a Russian labor force, complete with a portrait of Lenin in the Comrades Meeting Hall.”

“You do know why I’m pushing this,” Darnell said.

“No, unless it’s to be your last words on earth.”

“I had to fight you like hell to skim off the best personnel in the country. We have the best. But you can’t pay a man a six figure salary to work in a junkyard. We have a golden opportunity to take future labor troubles off the table. The public relations aspects are dynamic. If they ever vote a union in here, if absenteeism doesn’t drop and production per worker doesn’t rise, I’ll kiss your ass in Macy’s window at the Thanksgiving Day Parade.”

“Not a single Republican CEO, which make up ninety percent of the CEOs worth their salt, will support this. You’re crazy if you think you can buy employee loyalty.”

They had both reached their side of the chasm. What had started out as one of their friendly debates had sunk quickly to the very reason of their being.

“Are you giving me an ultimatum, Darnell?”

U\r J>

Yep.

“And spend the rest of your life blackmailing me?”

“Only when you’re going to fuck up, Thornton. The investment now will be a pittance. Later? A week on the picket line will cost us quadruple. Goddammit! You’re still living in the Industrial Revolution.”

“What if the business world turns on me?”

“The odds are that the better business world will follow you.”

The laying of the cornerstone for the employee recreation building turned into a joyous occasion and huge public relations coup.

A band, a picnic, the governor, Miss Rhode Island, and the Boston Pops orchestra sparked a gala. Two thousand one hundred and four steaks were devoured.

While the band played “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” T3 himself broke the ground for the cornerstone.

TROUBLESOME MESA, 1953

The nun, Sister Donna, set the little boy down at the Denver airport and pointed at Dan and Siobhan across the hall. He ran to them. “Momma! Daddy!”

Siobhan hugged him first. “How on earth did he know us?” she sniffled.

“We’ve been showing Patrick photographs of the two of you and telling him you are his father and mother.”

Quinn arrived with one small bag of clothing, a stocking doll, and eyes filled with wonderment.

During the changeover period, Siobhan was always at Sister Donna’s side, and each time the baby was passed to her she squeezed and kissed him, and every time Dan held him, he looked for an O’Connell or Logan resemblance.

As it came time for Sister Donna to leave, Siobhan inched around her with abstruse theories of the boy’s origin.

“Siobhan,” Sister Donna finally said, “I do not know where Quinn Patrick came from. As they say, I’m only the messenger. This child’s first years are a closed book. It is the passage you and Mr. O’Connell have to pay for such a blessed child. Vows are vows, Siobhan.”

“But Dan is so proud, so Irish, so generational. And Quinn Patrick.

God rue the day Dan finds out the boy isn’t Irish.”

“All I know is that he was brought to the convent, and he made us all very happy,” the nun said, staring directly at Siobhan.

Siobhan showed wisdom, Dan was ecstatic. All families have their secrets and closets and things to be whispered. Yet two ghosts—a man and a woman who had given Quinn life-were now part of their life, of the unsaid extended family.

During Quinn’s growing years he was rarely away from hand in hand with his daddy. The great hand held the little one; he rode on Daddy’s horse with Daddy’s arms about him.

Dan was tough, ran the posse, was crowned king of the valley, and won elections, twice as a state senator. Once a Tammany Hall Democrat, he turned into a ranching Republican, detesting .. . loathing .. . hating government regulations. Troublesome Mesa was his territory, and he didn’t want anything to do with those bearded hippy pot-smoking scum who called themselves environmentalists. Shit! Telling me I’ve got to move my stream! The day came, an environmentalist, dressed like a normal man, sat down at the table with Dan to work out a small dam that would save the beavers left in the mesa. Dan changed his mind slightly in their favor.

As for little Quinn Patrick, once his novelty had worn off and once he had shown that he had a temper and could be naughty, the calendar of parenthood caught up with them. Almost all the time and on almost every occasion, the boy made them proud.

Siobhan realized that a very clever Quinn was making better adjustments than Dan. When it came time to finesse his dad around, Quinn could side-slip and waylay an argument, or if things tightened up, he’d do something to please Dan.

Yet Quinn and Dan could be stubborn, so much so a fear crept into Siobhan when they were abrasive. As the result of Dan’s frustrations, he often blamed it on the mystery of Quinn’s birth.

Unraveling happened, as it does most times, by accident, a random and thoughtless remark.

“Hey, Quinn,” Frank Piccola said, coming up to the school bus stop.

“Hey, Frank, going to play ball today?”

“Naw, old man’s got a ton of work.”

“If we ever get nine men on the field, we’re going to have some kind of ball club.”

“Hey, Quinn,” Frank continued, “I heard my dad and mom talking in the kitchen, in Italian, like they talk when they don’t want me to hear. I heard them. My dad said he remembered the day the nun brought you to the ranch.”

The element of love was so deeply embedded, the secret disarrayed them but did not break them.

There would inevitably be this day of reckoning.

“Dad and I have talked about this a thousand times. When is the right time to tell you? Secrets don’t stay buried. They come up at the craziest times. At a school bus stop,” Siobhan said.

“Frank Piccola didn’t say it to be mean,” Quinn defended. “I’m glad it is on the table, son,” Dan said. “We waited too long, but long enough to know we belong to each other. You are Quinn Patrick O’Connell, named for a brave Marine, and you are our son.”

“I was adopted?”

“Yes,” Siobhan said, and went through the entire story, as much of it as they knew.

Quinn took their hands with utmost maturity. “I love you,” he said. “We are now and forever a family. This answers so many little questions that have popped up about me that seemed to have no answers .. . but I love you ... I love you.”

Dan and Siobhan knew the pain of pain. Quinn got up to leave the room. “What about my real—I mean, my other parents?”

“We don’t know!” Siobhan cried.

“In God’s name. In Mary’s name. We were told never to ask or we’d lose you! I swear to you, son, Mom and I don’t know,” Dan pleaded.

“The Church knows,” Quinn said, leaving.

The waters did not separate entirely. The three of them hung on to one another. Yet two ghosts lived in the house. Who were they? They were always lurking. At times it was sharply painful. At other times it drifted easily on through.

The years were good to all of them. Long fishing trips with his son .. . trips to L.A. to see the Dodgers .. . shooting the rapids .. . firing on the range. Dan’s hip kept him from running after a ball, but Quinn’s accuracy didn’t make it necessary very often.

Quinn’s great friendship with Carlos Martinez, son of the ranch foreman, formed early. Carlos was the non-rancher of his family. He liked chess, serious reading, and fine music. He also had a macho attitude of a Latin leading man. His conquests began in his mid-teens.

Quinn’s life, on the other hand, dealt with nature and cattle. Thus, each boy and, later, young man, brought gifts to the other. They reminded Dan somewhat of his own love for Justin Quinn.

The only young girl in the area was Rita Maldonado, daughter of the famed portrait artist and sculptor Reynaldo Maldonado. Reynaldo had built a magnificent A-frame home and studio on a plateau a mile down from the ranch. A widower, he had raised Rita with the help of a Mexican nanny.

Although Rita was considerably younger than Quinn and Carlos, she persisted in breaking into their two-person club. She rode with the wind, played ball, and helped build a monumental tree house. She hung out around the O’Connell kitchen. She learned chess well enough to beat both of her “brothers.”

By high school, Carlos Martinez knew where he was going and how to get

there. His ambition became to gain admission to a law college, pass the bar, and become a great lawyer. The posh Eastern universities were beyond his reach, but he wanted to specialize in immigration and that could not be taught better than at the University of Texas.

While Carlos had direction, Quinn sort of treaded water, mainly honing his ranching skills.

Dan O’Connell watched Quinn with intent. Dan didn’t have college because of family economics.

He kept track of Quinn’s growth and skill on the fields of play. Quinn would stand five feet ten inches and weigh a hundred and seventy pounds, most of it brick hard.

Troublesome Mesa High School put weak teams on the field, fortunately, to play other weak teams. Quinn was a nifty first baseman in baseball. He played ice hockey and ski raced in a rather mediocre manner.

Dan harangued him into football. Quinn played fullback on offense and linebacker on defense. He was average to everyone except Dan O’Connell.

Dan worried about the growing bookshelves in Quinn’s room, some on subjects he did not comprehend. He saw it as a symbol of the boy’s desire to leave home permanently. For Daniel O’Connell it would be the ultimate nightmare.

As time went by, there was less and less interaction between Dan and Quinn. It seemed that Dan had an agenda, hitherto unseen goals he was slowly uncovering.

To make matters very lonely, Carlos Martinez went off to the University of Texas in Austin, where he loaded himself up with courses.

The two boys wrote quite often at first, but as Carlos went into a new atmosphere, mail time lengthened. Carlos simply studied and let women chase him.

Their first meeting back at the ranch was tinged with sorrow, for they

knew that what they had once had was faded and would not return. Carlos even looked different, what with his mustache and all.

Quinn had his little pal, Rita, who seemed very content in being nearby. Almost into her teens, her body was beginning to bloom. Still a kid, unfortunately, but Rita was going to be extremely beautiful.

Quinn found himself pondering the issues of his Catholicism. School out, Carlos gone, and even Rita away with her father in Mexico. He had time to find a boulder by a stream, throw in a line, and think. The spark of his meditation was the devoutness of his parents, which often led to dead-end attempts at explanations.

Carried to somewhat of an extreme, the ranch and formal garden carried a dozen shrines, and every bed in the house was guarded by a cross.

Quinn knew better than argue the subject with his parents.

The arrival of Father Scan came on a good wind. He was a wise observer of the family progress. A certain quality of conversation was now possible on a hundred subjects Dan and Siobhan knew nothing about.

On the porch of Father Scan’s apartment, Quinn became an evening guest.

“Lonesome, Quinn?” the priest asked.

“In a manner of speaking. There’s plenty to do, and I’ve a bushel of great friends. What I seem to be missing is someone to talk to. Carlos is staying in Austin this summer. He’s maniacal to complete his courses. I had wonderful hours with Reynaldo Maldonado, but he and Rita are in Mexico till school starts.”

“Your dad tells me you’re a natural for a football scholarship to one of the smaller colleges.”

“My dad looks at me and sees Gayle Sayers. He’s never really asked,

but I don’t like football. Not that I mind mixing it up. I’m pretty

good at ice hockey. Football doesn’t excite me like, pardon the expression, baseball. But Dad seems obsessed with getting me a football scholarship.”

It was not the football scholarship, it was control of his son. Father Scan knew what he had suspected, that Dan was setting the boy up as an alter ego. It wasn’t working. Every time they grated on one another, Dan feared it was Quinn’s desire to bolt, to search for his birth parents. His fear became unreasonable.

It worried Quinn as well. “Uncle Sean, I can’t control certain insatiable desires. I can’t fathom why God has taunted me with the secret of my birth. So I look deeper into my Catholicism to find comfort from my frustration. Please know that my loyalty is to Dan and Siobhan, but I have lost some trust in the Church. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I’ve pondered on the same thing,” Sean said. “The system must be doing something right; it’s the oldest and strongest non-military organization ever known to man.”

“How can I find solace in so many alcoholic priests? Or a virgin birth? I almost died when I found out that Saladin, the Moslem, was the true hero of the Crusades, and the Crusaders were mindless butchers. And the Inquisition and the Holocaust. All of these were done by primarily Catholic nations.”

Father Sean held his hand up. “There are many paths to God; we are only one of them. We must put on a show for the wealthy who identify with the pomp and gold and splendor. The Church’s power is their power.

“The same show is performed for the hopeless. Human fodder. They use Catholicism for their own purpose, for survival. They sacrifice chickens on the cathedral steps in some cultures. Each group’s needs twist Catholicism around to fill those needs.

“Evil men attend church,” he went on. “Evil men pray in synagogues, and evil men perform mutilations on women to the glory of Allah. Evil men pay large sums for us to renew the leases on their consciences. Men invented the system because they needed it, and the system, faulty as it is, works.”

Wise man, his uncle, Quinn thought. His wisdom made him realize how lonesome he was for the rich food of ideas and conversations.

“There is one bottom line for me,” Father Sean said, “and that is the message of love from Jesus. All the rest of it, miracles and saints and whatever we’ve contrived or distorted, doesn’t matter. Love is the bottom line. Find something in that message you can weave into your life.”

Even as he spoke, Father Sean realized that Quinn would always inquire, always challenge a Church that did not promote inquiry and challenge. But no other religion would work for him, either, because he could never truly accept what was unacceptable to him.

It seemed that each turn in season, particularly coming out of winter, the divide in the father-son stream widened. At Troublesome Mesa School, with four hundred students from kindergarten through high school, Quinn was one of the campus heroes. A charming personality beamed from a charmed spirit. He was a nice person. Kids gravitated to him.

Father Sean, with great care and diplomacy, got Dan to thinking:

Quinn’s quest for his birth parents was a natural human drive known by every orphan. It would not endanger his relationship with Quinn.

Moreover, Quinn was an intellectual. Yet they had the Dodgers in common and Duke Snyder and Jackie Robinson and Camp and Pee Wee Reese and Gil Hodges and Preacher Roe. But the Dodgers upped and left Brooklyn.

Maybe, just maybe, Dan began to think, there could be a real mending instead of the growing aggrievement if he could think along the lines of a great scholastic university for his son.

Constraint took over. When civility has to be practiced with caution, it becomes a draining way for two people to communicate.

They ceased doing things together. Fishing or the rodeo or canoeing or riding their dirt bikes. With graduation from Troublesome Mesa School, the time had come to make a decision, perhaps the first life decision.

Carlos Martinez wanted Quinn to come to Texas, but it was a selfish request. At the speed Carlos was pushing through college, they’d be together for only a year or so.

Dan O’Connell applied to a number of universities for Quinn, some “just for the hell of it.” In a moment of magnanimity, and to prove to Quinn he had his interest at heart, he sent Quinn and Siobhan back East to look over some of the great campuses. Not that anybody ever gave Dan O’Connell this kind of golden chance. I’ll never, Dan thought, get him to understand that sports is where a young man sets his mark for life. But his life is his life. If he gets into a fine Eastern school, then he’ll be morally indebted to return to Colorado. Dan was wrapped up in scenarios, and none of them thought through seriously.

Mother and son drove about New England, in a journey of realization. The East was not the West. In New York, during the second act of a Tennessee Williams play, all the characters on stage were crying out their misery and no one heard the other. If truth be known, Quinn wanted New York City and Fordham. But no one would hear the other’s misery.

Quinn knew if he went East, he might have serious trouble returning to the ranch. It would devastate his parents. Further, no one leaves Colorado without having inflicted a wound on himself. It was Quinn’s life, but he could not turn away from Dan’s legacy. Wanting a brother had long come and gone in Quinn’s fantasies. Quinn was it, alone.

Quinn and Siobhan made a drive from Washington state through Stanford and into Los Angeles. Quinn was awed by the greatness of America and felt his first urges of desire to do something of value for everyone.

They returned to the ranch to find Dan elated. In their absence something good had gotten to the man.

“Which school was your favorite, Siobhan?” Dan asked.

“I personally liked Berkeley.”

“Commies,” Dan retorted. “They eat protest flakes for breakfast. As for UCLA, it’s a brothel.”

The moment was at hand for Dan to pass to them a half dozen letters of acceptance, all fine schools. Dan held one out, then slapped it on the table and broke into a wide, wide grin and awaited the howls of joy which never arrived.

Siobhan could see Quinn’s stare become troubled as Dan read, “Harvard!

“.. . That’s Harvard, in case you didn’t know. Harvard! The first O’Connell to go to Harvard, the first to do anything but night school. Harvard. My son goes to Harvard!”

“Mom told me to apply through my school. I didn’t think I had a prayer.”

“Prayers have been answered. Along with my Silver Star, this is the proudest moment of my life.”

“Hold up, Dan,” his wife said. “You don’t seem to be pleased, Quinn.”

“Shouldn’t I have something to say?” Quinn asked.

“Well, didn’t you and your mother visit enough campuses? I mean, we’re talking Harvard. The greatest university in the world. Do you know how many applicants they turn down?”

“Dad, I agreed to take a look at Harvard to confirm I’m going to make the right choice.”

“What’s your point, son?” Dan asked with a touch of meanness in his voice. “You could even make the baseball team.”

“For God’s sake, Dad, I’m a marginal athlete.”

“Not in baseball. You have a real talent.”

“Stop trying to make a Brooklyn Dodger out of me. Students go to Harvard for scholastics. I don’t want to get involved in the rat race until I know what I want to study.”

“Quinn, you’re the first white man ever to turn down a Harvard education. Have you got any idea how much it costs?”

“That’s enough, Dan,” Siobhan said angrily. “Forget what he said, son. God has been gracious to us, and I’ve got plenty of money put away.”

With direct insults falling now, Dan unloaded bottle into glass. Quinn made him uneasy by not backing down.

“I want to live my own life, Dad. I saw enough of the country with Mom to know how wonderful it is. I don’t want to be lured, yet. I want to stay near here. Dad, you don’t need a Harvard education to operate a ranch.”

“So what is it, then,” Dan said ominously.

“He’s only a boy,” Siobhan said. “How many times did you come in off of your police beat cursing your father for setting up your life?”

“I’m going to the University of Colorado,” Quinn said. “No ice hockey, no football. Maybe I’ll play baseball if the team is bad enough. I’m going to study a general liberal arts course and the humanities. I want to study with Reynaldo Maldonado. I hope it leads me to something I can be passionate about.”

Dan arose, came to Quinn, and slapped him in the face. Siobhan was between them instantly. Quinn turned away and made for the door.

TROUBLESOME MESA, 1968

It was mud season. The tracks and washboard of the dirt road went from slop during the day to a thin coat of frost through the night. It was a slippery go from the ranch to the town, two miles of switchbacks and steep grades. Walking was slippery. One was off one’s feet every twenty steps.

Quinn left without a jacket, a flashlight, the Jeep he never really felt was his. Go to Carlos in Texas? No. That would bring Consuelo and Pedro into a family brawl they had no part of.

Call Uncle Scan? He laughed aloud at his own misery. There were no phones for over a mile. Headlights hit him in the back. He stopped in a rut with slush running over the top of his boots.

“Quinn!” Siobhan called, stopping the Jeep. “Son, come home! Please!

Your father is beside himself with sorrow. Please! Quinn.”

All he did was shake his head.

She pleaded to the mesa and the valley, for he did not hear. Her arms went about him. He pushed her away firmly. She was a mud woman, a streaked mud woman grotesquely crying with mud running down her face.

“Take the Jeep,” she gasped. “There’s money and credit cards in the glove compartment. Please phone me, son, please!”

She turned and staggered back toward the house. After a time, Quinn grabbed the steering wheel and, in an automatic move, slid into the driver’s seat. The windshield was half ice, half water. He wiped away a spot of fog so he could see through, then put the vehicle into four-wheel low and inched down the incline.

Between his tears and the frost he could hardly see, but he knew the turns of the hill and he understood it could be his last moment on earth. His caution told him he did not want to die and gave him a tiny relief from his pain.

The Jeep skidded. He had to lay off the brakes. It stopped abruptly down in the roadside ditch, barely kissing a great old pine tree. He’d stay here. Town was still two switchbacks away. Well, what’s the difference? he thought, I don’t belong to anyone. I’m no one.

A flashlight beam hit his face.

“Holy Mary, is that you, Quinn?”

ugh.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No, no, I’m okay.”

“Oh, my God,” she whispered when she saw the agony worn like a Pagliacci mask.

“Who are you?”

“It’s Rita Maldonado.”

She found a rag and wiped his face carefully and put handfuls of snow on the rising lumps and bruises.

“What the hell you doing out on a night like this?” he groaned.

“I was at the movies and, if memory serves me right, you were the one in the ditch trying to climb this tree. I’ll take you to the hospital.”

“No, I swear I’m okay.”

“Looks like you’ve just seen the abominable snowman.”

“Yeah, maybe I have.”

“All right, then, I’ll run you home,” she said.

“No. I have no home.”

“Oh, God,” Rita mumbled. “Come on, now, I’m taking you to my house.

I’ll call the sheriff and tell him where your Jeep is. Come on, now.” She half dragged him to her pickup and plopped him on the seat and buckled him up, then got behind the wheel.

“What are you doing driving? You’re only thirteen years old,” Quinn growled.

“I’m going on fourteen and I’m very mature for my age. Besides, I baby-sit the sheriff’s kids. He just doesn’t want me to drive during the daytime.”

Rita was right about one thing, she was mature.

They sputtered on the slick track up to the next shelf and turned into a one-lane road affording another fabulous view down to Troublesome Mesa. The Maldonado spread was highlighted by a few acres of level lawn filled with wild sculptures and a flying-wing house.

Reynaldo Maldonado, only a seven-year resident, had brought a measure of fame to Troublesome by selecting it for his studio and home.

He had done it all, from picking cotton in Texas to doing prison time in Canon City. He did it by being a roustabout, by smuggling on the border, by boiling booze, by selling peyote.

His early primitive drawings were of the usual Mexican rage against exploitation, and he worked to become one of the nation’s foremost portrait artists and sculptors. Although he was always thought of as being Mexican, he was actually third generation American. His only marriage was to a fair, blond Minnesota girl who died of breast cancer and left him with a six-year-old daughter.

Her death settled his wild ways, and for the sake of Rita he found Troublesome Mesa.

Maldonado’s home had become a sort of sanctuary for the high school

children of the area. He spun rapturous tales, he

sang and played the guitar, he had lots of nudes on his walls and

pedestals. For years Maldonado was an in-and-out figure at the

University of Colorado, where he taught to small groups, at random,

about an array of worldly subjects. He was a Colorado

((. yj treasure.

Rita helped Quinn up the back porch steps. Mal flicked on a light for them. “What you got there, Rita?”

“Quinn O’Connell.”

“Quinn, you look like a yard of dirt road.”

“I’m all right. I mean, I’m not hurt. I mean, I’m hurt but I’m not hurt .. . nothing’s broken or anything.”

Rita unlaced his shoes, gave him a big robe from the hot tub, and ordered him to take a shower. Each time the icy fingers brought him closer to awareness, the whap from Dan hit him again. All right, he told himself, pull it together.

“I’d better call your home,” Mal said a few minutes later.

T\T “

No.

“What do you mean, no?”

After a time he said, “We had some words.”

“I’m calling him. If Rita was out in this weather, I’d want a phone call no matter what had transpired.”

Everyone knew, Quinn thought, that Mal was an artist with an eccentric leaning. He heard Mal’s muffled voice from the next room.

“You’ll stay with us tonight. Eaten?”

“I wouldn’t mind something warm.”

As the soup brought chilled nerves and circulation back to Quinn, he came out of his half-frozen trance.

“Did you know I was adopted?” Quinn asked.

“I didn’t know,” Rita said.

“Nor I. You didn’t just find out tonight?” Mal asked.

“No, I was about ten.”

“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?”