by Edna Ferber
It was midafternoon as they came down at the Hermoso airport, the shabby old municipal airport. As they buckled their seat belts for the landing their faces were pressed against the windows, they beheld glittering beside the scrofulous old airport the splendid white and silver palace which Jett Rink had flung down on the prairie. Spanning the roof of the building was a gigantic silver sign that, treated with some magic chemical, shone day and night so that the words JETT RINK AIRPORT could be seen from the air and from the ground for miles across the flat plains from noon to midnight to noon.
“Oh, look!” cried Adarene Morey. A trail of heaven-blue as if a streamer of sky had been tossed like a scarf to the earth spelled out the omnipresent name of Jett Rink.
“It’s bluebonnets!” Leslie said, and her voice vibrated with resentment. “He has had bluebonnets planted and clipped and they spell his name. In bluebonnets!”
“How cute!” said Lona Lane. “It’s simply fabulous! I’m dying to meet him.”
It was the pallid Queen who put forward the query this time. “We ask a great many questions, I am afraid. But bluebonnets—what is it that this is?” In a literal translation from the French.
“Why girlie!” bawled Bale Clinch—he had had three bourbons—“girlie, you been neglected in your Texas education down there at the Benedicts’. Bick, you old sonofagun, what’s a matter with that old schoolhouse you got on your country you’re always bragging on!” He beamed now on the Queen. “Bluebonnets! Everybody knows they’re the national state flower of Texas. The most beautiful flower in the most wonderful state in the world. That’s all bluebonnets is.” He pondered a moment. “Are.”
The huge craft touched the runaway as delicately, as sensitively as a moth on a windowpane. The clank of metal as straps were unbuckled. The Texans strolled to the door as casually as one would proceed from the house to the street. The visitors breathed a sigh of relief. They stood ready to disembark, huddled at the door, king and cowboy and rancher and politician and actress and statesman and shrewd operator and housewife. Royalty in the lead.
At the door, smiling but military in bearing, stood the slim young steward and the pretty stewardess. “Come back quick now!” the girl chirped.
“I beg your pardon!” said the King, startled.
“It’s a—a phrase,” Leslie explained. “It’s the Texas way of saying good-bye.”
Just before they descended the aluminum stairway that had been trundled quickly across the field for their land Bick Benedict made a little speech, as host.
“Look, I’m going to brief you, kind of. Those of you who aren’t Texans. This is the old airport, you know. The new one isn’t open for traffic until after tonight. That’s where the party’s to be. I’m afraid there’ll be photographers and so forth waiting out there; and reporters.”
“You don’t think Jett Rink’s going to lose a chance like this for publicity, do you, Bick?” Lucius Morey called out, and a little laugh went up among the Texans.
“This is going to be a stampede,” Gabe Target predicted.
“No, now, Gabe. Everything’ll be fine if you’ll just trail me, you know I’m a good top hand, Gabe. There’s a flock of cars waiting, we’ll pile right in and head for the hotel. And remember, everything’s pilone. No one touches a pocket—except to pull a gun of course.”
Even the outsiders knew this was a standard laugh. But, “Pilone?” inquired Joe Glotch.
“Means everything free,” yelled Congressman Bale Clinch, “from Jett Rink’s hotel and back again.”
“Yes,” drawled Pinky Snyth. “And I’ll give anybody odds that Gabe Target here will own the hotel and the airport and the whole outfit away from Jett Rink inside of three years.”
There were the photographers kneeling for close shots, standing on trucks for far shots. There were planes and planes and planes overhead and underfoot. A Texas big town commercial airfield. Squalling kids, cattlemen in big hats and high-heeled boots—the old-timers. The modern young business and professional men, hatless, their faces set and serious behind bone-rimmed spectacles, their brief cases under their arms as they descended the planes from Dallas and Lubbock and Austin and El Paso. Local air lines with cosmic names tacked to and fro between cotton towns and oil towns, wheat towns and vegetable valleys. Hatless housewives in jeans or ginghams with an infant on one arm and a child by the hand flew a few hundred miles to do a bit of shopping and see the home folks. Everywhere you saw the pilots in uniform—slightly balding young men who had been godlike young aviators with war records of incredible courage. Years ago they had come down out of the wild blue yonder; and now they found themselves staring out at the Southwest sky in two-engined jobs that ferried from Nacogdoches to Midland, from Brownsville on the Mexican border to Corpus Christi on the Gulf. In the duller intervals of the trip they would emerge from the cockpit to chat with a sympathetic passenger and to display the photograph of the thin and anxious-looking young wife and the three kids, the oldest of these invariably a boy and always of an age to make the beholder certain that he had been born of their frantic love and their agonized parting in ’42 and ’43.
The Wonder Bird, the dazzling invention of the twentieth century, had become a common carrier, as unremarkable here in Texas as the bus line of another day.
“This way!” Bick Benedict called. “Just follow me through this gate, it’s supposed to be closed but I know the…right through here…those are our cars lined up out there…”
There were signs printed in large black letters on the walls. One sign read DAMAS. Another, CABALLEROS. “What’s that?” inquired Lona Lane scurrying by. “What’s that sign mean?”
“Sh-sh!” Vashti Snyth hissed as she puffed along. “That’s Spanish. Means toilets for the Mexicans. Men and women, it means.”
Through the motor entrance another sign read RECLAME SU EQUIPAJE AFUERA A SU DERECHA. Miss Lane glanced at this, decided against inquiring.
“H’m,” said the ex-Presidente. “I find this interesting, these signs in Spanish. It is like another country, a foreign country in the midst of the United States.”
“Texas!” protested old Judge Whiteside puffing along, redfaced and potbellied. “Why, sir, Texas is the most American country in the whole United States.”
“I should have thought New England, or perhaps the Middle West. Kansas or even Illinois.”
“East!” scoffed Judge Whiteside. “The East stinks.”
Through the withering blast of the white-hot sun again and then into the inferno of the waiting motorcars that had been standing so long in the glare. The newspaper men and women crowded around the windows, they said lean forward a little will you king, as they tried for another picture.
Bick Benedict’s eyes blazed blue-black. “Look here, you fellas!” But Leslie put a hand on his arm, she was the diplomatic buffer between Bick and his rages against the intruding world forever trying to peer into the windows of his life.
“We’ll see you all later,” she called in that soft clear voice of hers. “Tonight.” She pressed her husband’s arm.
“See you later, boys,” Bick muttered grumpily, not looking at them. He climbed into the huge car in which the King and Queen were seated in solitary grandeur except for the driver and their aide in the front.
“You all going to be at the Conky?” one of the reporters yelled after them as they moved off. Leslie, with the others about to step into one of the line of waiting cars, smiled over her shoulder at the cluster of reporters and cameramen. “Conky,” she repeated after them with distaste. She caught a glimpse of the royal pair, an artificial smile still pasted, slightly askew, on their faces. Then their car picked up speed and was away like the lead car in a funeral cortege. The grimace of forced amiability faded from their weary features. With a gesture Leslie seemed to wipe the smile from her own countenance, she thought, I’m one of a family of rulers, too, by marriage. The Benedicts of Texas. I wonder how soon we’re going to be deposed.
Somehow the first formality
of the earlier hours was gone. Helter-skelter they had piled into the capacious cars and now there mingled affably in one big interior the prize fighter and Vashti and Pinky, Leslie, the South American and the Congressman. The car doors were slammed with the rich unctuous sound of heavy costly mechanism.
“Do you object,” inquired the ex-Presidente as the cortege drove off, “that I ask so many questions? After all, I am here to learn. We are Good Neighbors, are we not?”
“Oh, please!” Leslie said quickly. “Please do.”
“Uh—Conqui? However it is spelled. Is that the name of a man like this Jettrink?”
“That’s two names, you know. His first name is Jett. His last name is Rink. Conky. Well, they just call it that, it’s a sort of nickname for the big new hotel. The Conquistador. Jett Rink built that too.”
“Mm! The Spanish is very popular here, I can see. And this Jett Rink whose name I hear so often. He is a great figure in the United States of America?”
“Say, that’s a good one,” said Mott Snyth. Then, at a nudge from his wife, “Pardon me.” A little cloud of ominous quiet settled down upon the occupants of the car.
Through this Leslie Benedict spoke coolly. “This Jett Rink about whom you hear so much—he’s a spectacular figure here in Texas.”
“They say he was weaned on loco weed when he was a baby,” Vashti babbled. “He’s always trying to do something bigger or costs more money than anybody else. They say this Hermoso airport’s bigger than any in the whole United States. La Guardia, even. And this hotel we’re going to, why, ever since he saw the Shamrock in Houston he said he was going to put up a hotel bigger and fancier and costing more than even it did. And that’s the way he always does. Ants,” she concluded, smiling her cherubic smile at the gravely attentive South American diplomat, “in his pants.”
Congressman Bale Clinch spoke cautiously. “You’d be put to it, trying to explain Jett Rink outside of Texas.”
Whirling along the broad roads, past the huddled clusters of barbecue shacks and sun-baked little dwellings like boxes strewn on the prairie. Oleanders grew weed-wild by the roadside, the green leaves and pink blossoms uniformly grey with dust.
Little Pinky Snyth, grinning impishly, addressed himself to the visitors. He spoke in the Texas patois, perhaps perversely perhaps because instinct told him that this was the proper sauce with which to serve up a story about Jett Rink.
“Well, say, maybe this’ll give you some notion of Jett.”
Congressman Bale Clinch cleared his throat, obviously in warning.
“Pinky, you ain’t aiming to tell about that little trouble with the veteran, are you, I wouldn’t if I was you, it’s liable to give a wrong notion of Texas.”
“No. No this is nothing serious, this is about that fellow up to Dalhart,” he addressed himself to the Ambassador, and to Joe Glotch, impartially. “That’s way up in Dallam County in the Panhandle. This fella, name of Mody—yes, Mody, that was it—he had a little barbecue shack by the road up on Route 87. He got a knack of fixing barbecued ribs they say it had a different taste from anybody else’s and nobody can get the hang of the flavor even tasting it and nobody’s wangled the receipt off of him, he won’t give. So Jett Rink he hears about these ribs and one night when he’s good and stinking he gets in his plane with a couple of other umbrys, he always travels with a bunch of bodyguards, they fly up to Dalhart it’s as good as a thousand miles or nearly and the place is closed the fella’s gone to bed. Jett and the others they rout him out they make him fix them a mess of barbecued ribs and they eat it and Jett says it’s larrupin’ and what has he got in the barbecue sauce makes it taste different. This Mody says it’s his receipt it’s his own original mix and he don’t give it out to nobody. Well, Jett gets hot the way he does, he started out just rawhiding but now he gets wild the way he does when he’s by-passed, he gets serious he starts fighting like he does when he’s been drinking they had beer and whiskey too with the barbecue. He hits the fella over the head with a beer bottle, the fella dies, Jett has to pay his widow ten fifteen thousand dollars besides all the other expenses and lawyers and fixers and the plane trip and all, why it must of cost Jett Rink better than twenty-five thousand dollars to eat that plate of barbecue. It’d been cheaper for Jett to buy that fella and his barbecue shack and all that part of town including the grain elevator. Funny thing about Jett. If he can get a thing he won’t want it. But if he wants it and can’t get it, watch out.”
“That’s right,” ruminated Congressman Bale Clinch. “Yes sir. You got to say this for Jett Rink. He goes after what he wants.”
A heavy silence fell upon the occupants of the great rich car as it swept along the sun-drenched streets of Hermoso’s outskirts.
Leslie Benedict had been sitting with her eyes shut. Vashti Snyth reached over and patted her hand almost protectively as a mother might touch a child. She ignored the presence of the others.
“Mott got one fault, it’s talking. Talktalktalk. What he missed out in growing he makes up in gab.”
Congressman Bale Clinch smiled chidingly upon her. “Now now, Vashti. You hadn’t ought to talk about your lord and master thataway.” He then roared as at an exquisitely original witticism.
“We will soon be there,” Leslie said to the Ambassador. “Just another minute or two. The Conquistador isn’t in the heart of the city, you know. Like the other hotels. It’s almost like a big resort hotel. Very lavish.”
“Air-conditioned,” shrilled Vashti, “from cellar to roof, every inch of it—except the help’s quarters, a course. They say there’s guests there never had their faces outdoors since Jett flang it open—or sealed it shut, you might put it.”
“And the recipe for the barbecue,” the South American persisted gently. “Did he get it then?”
Pinky looked doubtful. “Well sir, I never rightly heard. The place was closed down or sold out. Jett he felt terrible about the whole thing when he sobered up. There was a daughter, girl about eighteen, she got a job in Jett’s outfit somewheres. In the office in Hermoso or Houston or Dallas or somewheres. Did real well.”
“She sure did!” said Vashti with more bite than her speech usually carried.
Silence again. The streets were broad boulevards now, the houses were larger, they became pretentious. Hermoso oil and cattle society had gone in for azaleas, the motorcars flashed past masses of brilliant salmon-pink and white and orchid and now you could see the towers of the Conqueror, the Conquistador, rising so incongruously there in suburban Hermoso thirty stories up from the flat Texas plain. Towers, balconies, penthouses, palm trees, swimming pool. Flags and pennants swirled and flirted in the hot Gulf breeze—the single-starred flag of the Lone Star State, the Stars and Stripes above this, but grudgingly; and fluttering from every corner and entrance and tower the personal flag of Jett Rink, the emblem of his success and his arrogance and his power, with his ranch brand centered gold on royal blue as he had sketched it years ago in his own hand—years and years before he had owned so much as a maverick cow or a gallon of oil: the J and the R combined to make the brand JR. Houses had been razed, families dispossessed, businesses uprooted, streets demolished to make way for this giant edifice. All about it, clustered near—but not too near—like poor relations and servitors around a reigning despot, were the little structures that served the giant one.
4
Royal blue and gold smote the eye, the air swam with it. The doorman’s uniform, the porter, the swarm of bellboys that sprang up like locusts. Royal-blue carpet in the vast lobby. Gold pillars. Masses of hothouse blue hydrangeas and yellow lilies. The distinguished guests were engulfed in a maelstrom of boots, spurs, ten-gallon hats, six-foot men; high shrill voices of women, soft drawling voices of sunburned men; deep-cushioned couches and chairs hidden under their burden of lolling figures staring slack-jawed at the milling throng, their aching feet wide-flung on the thick-piled carpet. An unavailing vacuum cleaner whined in a corner, an orchestra (in blue and gold) sawed discordantly ag
ainst a cacophony of canned music which someone had senselessly turned on and which now streamed from outlets throughout the gigantic room and the corridors and shops that bounded it. The Conquistador was a city in itself, self-contained, self-complacent, almost majestically vulgar. Downstairs and upstairs, inside and out, on awnings carpets couches chairs desks rugs; towels linen; metal cloth wood china glass, the brand JR was stamped etched embroidered embossed woven painted inlaid.
Later, over a soothing bourbon consumed in the privacy of the Snyth suite together with ten or twelve neighboring guests who had drifted in from this floor or that, Pinky incautiously observed, “Jett’s sure got his brand on everything. Prolly got his initials cut in the palm trees out there. Puts me in mind of a little feist dog gets excited and leaves his mark on everything he can lift his leg against.”
What with Bick Benedict’s familiarity with fiestas such as this, and Leslie Benedict’s clear orderly sense of situation, the members of their group had, for the most part, been safely disposed in their Conquistador quarters, each according to his importance as seen through the eyes of the Manager, the Assistant Manager and the Room Clerk, guided perhaps for this very special occasion by the bloodshot orb of Jett Rink himself. Protean couches could magically transform single sitting rooms into bedrooms. Good enough for an ex-Presidente, the hard-pressed Management instantly decided. Sitting room and bedroom in a nice spot for the heavyweight ex-champion. Nice little suite for Cal Otter the Cowboy Movie Star, where the crowd could get at him for autographs and so on. Snappy little balcony job for Lona Lane where the photographers could catch her for outside shots if the swimming pool section got too rough. Never could tell with a gang like this, liquored up and out with the bridle off. The Coronado penthouse suite for the Bick Benedicts and the Hernando de Soto apartment for the King and Queen, ex or not, the Management said in solemn discussion, they were a bona fide king and queen even if they had been cut out, you couldn’t laugh that off and it would look good in publicity. This festive opening of Hermoso’s airport, gift of the fabulous Jett Rink, had turned Jett Rink’s hotel (mortgaged or not, as gossip said, for something like thirty millions) into a vast and horrendous house party. There wasn’t a room or a closet or a cupboard to be had by an outsider. From lobby to roof the structure was crammed with guests each of whom had a precious pasteboard, named and numbered, which would identify and place him at Jett Rink’s gigantic airport banquet tonight.