At the entrance to the ranch, a young girl was leaning against a sign, the one with the crossed tomahawks. She smiled, and waved for me to stop.
YOUNG GIRL: Afternoon! I’m Nancy Quinn. My dad sent me to meet you.
TC: Well, thanks.
NANCY QUINN (opening the car door, climbing in): He’s fishing. I’ll have to show you where he is.
(She was a cheerful twelve-year-old snaggle-toothed tomboy. Her tawny hair was chopped short, and she was splashed with freckles from top to bottom. She was wearing only an old bathing suit. One of her knees was wrapped in a dirty bandage.)
TC (referring to the bandage): Hurt yourself?
NANCY QUINN: Naw. Well, I got throwed.
TC: Throwed?
NANCY QUINN: Bad Boy throwed me. He’s one mean horse. That’s how come they call him Bad Boy. He’s throwed every kid on the ranch. Most of the guys, too. I said well, I bet I can ride him. And I did. For ’bout two seconds flat.
You been here before?
TC: Once; years ago. But it was at night. I remember a wooden bridge—
NANCY QUINN: That’s it yonder!
(We crossed the bridge: finally I saw Blue River; but it was a glimpse as swift and flurried as a hummingbird’s flight, for overhanging trees, leafless when last seen, blazed with obscuring autumn-trimmed foliage.)
You ever been to Appleton?
TC: No.
NANCY QUINN: Never? That’s funny. I never met nobody that’s never been to Appleton.
TC: Have I missed something?
NANCY QUINN: Oh, it’s okay. We used to live there. But I like it here better. It’s easier to get off by yourself and do the kinda stuff I like. Fish. Shoot coyotes. My dad said he’d give me a dollar for every coyote I shot down; but after he’d give me more’n two hundred dollars, he cut me down to a dime. Well, I don’t need money. I’m not like my sisters. Always got their face stuck in a mirror.
I got three sisters, and I’ll tell you they’re not too happy here. They don’t like horses; they hate most everything. Boys. That’s all they’ve got on their mind. When we lived in Appleton, we didn’t see so much of my dad. Maybe like once a week. So they put on perfume and lipstick and had plenty of boyfriends. That was okay with my mom. She’s a lot like them, someways. She likes to fuss with herself and look pretty. But my dad is real strict. He won’t let my sisters have any boyfriends. Or wear lipstick. One time some of their old boyfriends drove over from Appleton, and my dad met them at the door with a shotgun; he told them, said the next time he saw them on his property he’d blow their heads off. Wow, did those guys scoot! The girls cried themselves sick. But the whole thing gives me the biggest laugh.
See that fork in the road? Stop there.
(I stopped the car; we both got out. She pointed to an opening in the trees: a dark, leafy, downward-sloping path.)
Just follow that.
TC (suddenly afraid to be alone): You’re not coming with me?
NANCY QUINN: My dad don’t like anybody around when he talks business.
TC: Well, thanks again.
NANCY QUINN: My pleasure!
SHE WALKED AWAY WHISTLING.
Parts of the path were so overgrown that I had to bend branches, shield my face against brushing leaves. Briars, strange thorns caught at my trousers; high in the trees, crows cawed, screamed. I saw an owl; it’s odd to see an owl in daylight; he blinked, but did not stir. Once, I almost stumbled into a beehive—an old hollow tree-stump swarming with wild black bees. Always I could hear the river, a slow soft churning roar; then, at a curve in the path, I saw it; and saw Quinn, too.
He was wearing a rubber suit, and holding aloft, as though it were a conductor’s baton, a supple fishing rod. He stood waist-deep, his hatless head in profile; his hair was no longer flecked with grey—it was white as the water-foam circling his hips. I wanted to turn and run, for the scene was so strongly reminiscent of that other day, that long-ago time when Quinn’s look-alike, the Reverend Billy Joe Snow, had waited for me in waist-high water. Suddenly I heard my name; Quinn was calling it, and beckoning to me as he waded toward shore.
I thought of the young bulls I had seen parading in the golden pastures; Quinn, glistening in his rubber suit, reminded me of them—vital, powerful, dangerous; except for his whiter hair, he hadn’t aged an iota; indeed, he seemed years younger, a man of fifty in perfect health.
Smiling, he squatted on a rock, and motioned for me to join him. He displayed some trout he’d caught. “Kinda puny. But they’ll eat good.”
I mentioned Nancy. He grinned and said: “Nancy. Oh, yeah. She’s a good kid.” He left it at that. He didn’t refer to his wife’s death, or the fact that he had remarried: he assumed I was aware of his recent history.
He said: “I was surprised when you called me.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t know. Just surprised. Where you staying?”
“At the Prairie Motel. Where else?”
After a silence, and almost shyly, he asked: “Jake Pepper with you?”
I nodded.
“Somebody told me he was leaving the Bureau.”
“Yes. He’s going to live in Oregon.”
“Well, I don’t guess I’ll ever see the old bastard again. Too bad. We could’ve been real friends. If he hadn’t had all those suspicions. Damn his soul, he even thought I drowned poor Addie Mason!” He laughed; then scowled. “The way I look at it is: it was the hand of God.” He raised his own hand, and the river, viewed between his spread fingers, seemed to weave between them like a dark ribbon. “God’s work. His will.”
Part III Conversational Portraits
I A Day’s Work
SCENE: A RAINY APRIL MORNING, 1979. I am walking along Second Avenue in New York City, carrying an oilcloth shopping satchel bulging with house-cleaning materials that belong to Mary Sanchez, who is beside me trying to keep an umbrella above the pair of us, which is not difficult as she is much taller than I am, a six-footer.
Mary Sanchez is a professional cleaning woman who works by the hour, at five dollars an hour, six days a week. She works approximately nine hours a day, and visits on the average twenty-four different domiciles between Monday and Saturday: generally her customers require her services just once a week.
Mary is fifty-seven years old, a native of a small South Carolina town who has “lived North” the past forty years. Her husband, a Puerto Rican, died last summer. She has a married daughter who lives in San Diego, and three sons, one of whom is a dentist, one who is serving a ten-year sentence for armed robbery, a third who is “just gone, God knows where. He called me last Christmas, he sounded far away. I asked where are you, Pete, but he wouldn’t say, so I told him his daddy was dead, and he said good, said that was the best Christmas present I could’ve given him, so I hung up the phone, slam, and I hope he never calls again. Spitting on Dad’s grave that way.
Well, sure, Pedro was never good to the kids. Or me. Just boozed and rolled dice. Ran around with bad women. They found him dead on a bench in Central Park. Had a mostly empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s in a paper sack propped between his legs; never drank nothing but the best, that man. Still, Pete was way out of line, saying he was glad his father was dead. He owed him the gift of life, didn’t he? And I owed Pedro something too. If it wasn’t for him, I’d still be an ignorant Baptist, lost to the Lord. But when I got married, I married in the Catholic church, and the Catholic church brought a shine to my life that has never gone out, and never will, not even when I die. I raised my children in the Faith; two of them turned out fine, and I give the church credit for that more than me.”
Mary Sanchez is muscular, but she has a pale round smooth pleasant face with a tiny upturned nose and a beauty mole high on her left cheek. She dislikes the term “black,” racially applied. “I’m not black. I’m brown. A light-brown colored woman. And I’ll tell you something else. I don’t know many other colored people that like being called blacks. Maybe some of the young people. And those radicals. But not folks my age, or even half as old. Even people who really are black, they don’t like it. What’s wrong with Negroes? I’m a Negro, and a Catholic, and proud to say it.”
I’ve known Mary Sanchez since 1968, and she has worked for me, periodically, all these years. She is conscientious, and takes far more than a casual interest in her clients, many of whom she has scarcely met, or not met at
