Giant

by Edna Ferber

  “Now look here, Leslie, I don’t want to hear any more of that.”

  “It might be a good idea if Luz skipped Wellesley and went to Switzerland right off. She could use a swipe of polish, if you ask me.”

  “They’re both too young to know what they’re doing. One thing’s sure. Jordy’s going to run Reata. He’s got to learn.”

  Jordy learned. He rode magnificently. He spent days and nights and weeks and months out on the range with the vaqueros, sleeping as they slept, eating as they ate. Old Polo’s family became as much a part of Jordy’s life as his own. Old Polo taught him from his rich store of knowledge acquired through the centuries before the Anglo-Saxon had set foot on this hot brilliant land. Polo’s wrinkled wife gave Jordy strange unguents and weird brews to use when he had a cold or a fever (Leslie threw these out); Polo’s handsome daughter-in-law fed him hot spicy Mexican dishes; Polo’s pretty little granddaughter, Juana, one of a brood of eight, gazed at him adoringly, managing demurely to convey with her eyes that which a proper young Mexican girl must not express in words.

  Old Polo, the caporal, deposed now but refusing to admit his downfall, hovered over Jordy like a benevolent despot. He still sat his palomino, a storybook king of vaqueros. The Benedict vaqueros still addressed him as Caporal, though Angel Obregon now reigned in his place, and young Angel, seeming one with his horse like a centaur, galloped at his father’s side.

  Young Jordy in the saddle and Bick mounted near by, with Polo on his miraculous quarter horse that he had trained to work reinless, guided only by a pressure of the knee or by the weight of the rider’s body thrown from this side to that. In the lean brown hands that looked so fragile and that yet were so strong was the rope that obeyed his every wish like a sentient thing, whirling, leaping, performing figures in mid-air.

  “The media cabeza,” Bick called to Jordy. “The half head. Now watch Polo. The loop will catch the bull behind one ear and horn and in front of the other and then under the jaw. All at once. That’s a mean-acting bull.”

  Out would go the rope, snakelike, curving, looping. The huge animal was stopped dead in his tracks.

  “Maravilloso! Rebueno!” Jordy shouted.

  “Shut up, Jordy. You telling Polo he’s good!”

  “Yes, but did you notice his hands?”

  “Hands! What do you suppose he uses——”

  “I mean—” sotto voce—“the old boy’s got a little tremor, see, in the right hand, but when it came to throwing the rope he controlled it. That’s pretty terrific.”

  “This isn’t a diagnosis, this is roping, for God’s sake what’s the matter with you!”

  But Bick’s heart lurched within him in pride as he saw the boy thus mounted; in his cream-white Stetson and the shirt and the buckskin chaps; the rather sallow pointed face, the dark eyes ardent beneath the great rolling hatbrim. Leslie’s eyes.

  The lazo remolineado. The piale. The mangana. These were tricks used for expert roping in the brush. “Keep close to the horse’s mane when you ride in the brush,” Polo counseled him. “Where his head can go you can go.”

  Roping in the open range was less hazardous. “Not so many motions,” Polo would warn him. “Leave all that to the city cowboys, to the brave ones who rope the skinny cows in the rodeo in New York. The motions are pretty, but you scare the cattle.”

  Young Angel Obregon, shorn now of his long black braids, needed no such instruction. Of the two inevitable reactions to his childhood years of petticoat servitude he had chosen the tough one. He rode as one of his charro ancestors. At sixteen he was a swaggerer, a chain smoker, the despair of his father Angel and his mother Deluvina. At seventeen he spurned Reata with all its years of Obregon family loyalty. He took a job as bellboy at the Hake in Vientecito and on his visits to the ranch he swaggered the streets of Benedict in sideburns, fifty-dollar boots, silk shirt, his hair pomaded to the lustre of black oilcloth. He and his friends affected a bastard dialect made up of Mexican jargon, American slang, Spanish patois. His talk was of cars and girls. He did not speak of an automobile as a coche but as a carro. A battery was not an acumulador but a batería. A truck was Hispanicized as a troca. A girl was a güisa—a chick. The Reata vaqueros said of him, in Spanish, “He’s trying to change the color of his eyes to blue.” Young Angel ran with the bonche.

  His father, Angel Obregon the Caporal, his mother Deluvina, were by turns furious and sad at this metamorphosis. He was a disgrace to the raza—the proud race of Mexican people. They were ashamed. They spoke to the padre about him. To old Polo. Even to the patrón, Bick Benedict.

  Almost tearfully Angel Obregon said, “He is a good boy, Angel. It is as if some bruja, some evil witch, had him under a spell. He is without respect for the things of life.”

  Thoughtfully Bick agreed. “I don’t know what’s the matter with the kids today. They’re all alike.” He hesitated a moment. But it was a temptation to talk to someone who felt as he did—someone to whom Reata was life, was the world. “My son doesn’t have the real feeling about Reata.” They were speaking in Spanish. Bick looked at this man whose blood for generations had gone into Reata. He wanted Angel to dispute his statement, he wanted him to say, no, you are wrong, he is a sincere Benedict, the type genuino. But instead Angel now nodded in sorrowful agreement.

  Curiously enough, the friendship of the two boys had endured. On Angel’s rare visits home he and Jordy discarded the pretense they wore in the presence of their parents. They heard each other in understanding.

  “Vaquero with twenny or twenny-five dollars a month,” Angel said, and laughed scornfully. “Sometimes I earn that in two days at the Hake if there’s a big poker game on in one of the rooms, or a drinking bunch, and I’m on duty. Vaquero like my father and his father and his father, not me! I want to marry with Marita Rivas, Dimodeo Rivas’ daughter. But I don’t want my kid to be vaquero, and his kid and his kid. Now who does that is a borlo.”

  Jordy said, “My father is always experimenting to get better beef. The perfect all meat all tenderloin heatproof tickproof beef animal. That’s good, that’s swell. But I want to do that with people, not animals. T.b.-proof Mexican-Americans, that would be even better.”

  On parting Angel no longer said, “Adiós!” He used the Mexican slang of the city. “Ay te watcho!” I’ll be seeing you.

  Bick Benedict decided that the time had come for action. He would have a talk with Bob Dietz, the kid was finished at Cornell, he’d speak to him now. He planned not to make a casual thing of it, a mere chat about a job if he happened to meet the boy out on the range or in the lab or the corral. This would be a serious talk. He called the Dietz telephone at supper time.

  “Bob?…Bick Benedict…. Bob, I want to talk to you about something important. Jump into your car and come over here about eight.”

  But Bob Dietz, it seemed, was going to a Grange meeting. Somewhat nettled, Bick said oh, the hell with that, you can go to a Grange meeting another time, this is important.

  “I’m sorry,” Bob said, “but I’m the speaker there this evening. I’m scheduled to talk on soil and crop rotation. I’ll be glad to come tomorrow if that’s all right with you.”

  “You turned into a dirt farmer or something?” Bick jeered.

  “Just about,” Bob Dietz said genially. “Tomorrow okay then?”

  Bob arrived before eight. Bick in his office heard his voice and Luz’s laugh from the direction of the veranda, they seemed to have a lot to say to each other, though Luz did most of the talking, there was the slower deeper undercurrent of Bob’s voice with a curiously vibrant tone in it. Frowning, Bick came to the door. “Bob! Come on in here. I’m waiting for you.”

  “Oh. I thought I was a little early.”

  Bick preceded him into the office, he motioned him to a chair, he sat back and looked at the young fellow, he thought, Golly that’s a handsome hunk of kid. There was rather an elaborate silence during which Bob Dietz did not seem ill at ease.

  “You wondering why I sent
for you, I suppose.”

  “Why, no, Mr. Benedict. Not especially.”

  “You’d better be. I’ve got something pretty important to say to you.” There was another silence. Bob Dietz did not squirm or shuffle his feet or cough. Bick thought he never had seen such clear eyes. The whites were blue, like a baby’s. Healthy young bull. “I’ve been watching you pretty close these last few years. Ever since you were a little kid. It took me a while to get over the idea that you were ten years old, two front teeth out, the kid that used to run around fetching for the tumbadores at branding.” He laughed.

  Bob Dietz laughed too, politely. “I thought I was pretty smart,” he said.

  “Well, you were right. You are. Now I’m going to come to the point. Reata may have dropped a million acres or so in the last fifty years, but it’s bigger than ever in more important ways. Our breeding and feeding program is something I needn’t tell you about. You know. This isn’t just a ranch any more, it’s a great big industrial plant, and run like one. It takes experts. I know about you—well say, I ought to—and I’ve checked up on you at Cornell. And what they say there is pretty hot.”

  Bob Dietz looked mildly pleased. He said nothing.

  “I’m not getting any younger—that’s what my wife calls a cliché——” Bick was a trifle startled to see Bob Dietz grin at this. “Anyway ten years from now this is going to be too much for me even with Jordy taking over a lot of it. I want to start you in now. From what I know about you, I’m not making a mistake. Soil. Irrigation. Breeding. Feeding. Crops. You know the works. My plan is, you start in next spring. I’ve got a ten-year plan and then another ten-year plan, and so on. Say, the Russians haven’t got anything on us at Reata, huh? At the end of ten years you’ll be General Manager around here—under me and Jordy. At the end of another ten years—well, anyway, you’re fixed for life. And good. Now don’t tell me any more, when I call up, about how you have to go to a Grange meeting. Got it?”

  “I think so, Mr. Benedict.”

  “You’ll want to go home and talk this over with your folks. You ought to. So I don’t expect you to say anything just now. You go along home and mull this over and we’ll talk about it again, say, day after tomorrow, that’s Wednesday.”

  “I know now,” Bob Dietz said. “I couldn’t do it.”

  “Couldn’t do what?”

  “A ten-year plan—a twenty-year plan—the rest of my life on Reata, like my father. I want a place of my own.”

  “You crazy kid! A place of your own. Do you imagine you’ll ever have a ranch like Reata!”

  “Oh, no sir! I wouldn’t want it. I wouldn’t have it for a gift. Heh, that doesn’t sound good. I know the terrific stuff you’ve done here. I want a little piece of land of my own for experimentation. Never anything big. That’s the whole point. Big stuff is old stuff now.”

  “Is that so!” Bick was stunned with anger, he could feel something pinching his chest, little pains like jabs. “So big is old-fashioned now, huh?”

  “I didn’t mean to be—I didn’t go to make you mad, Mr. Benedict. I just mean that here in Texas maybe we’ve got into the habit of confusing bigness with greatness. They’re not the same. Big. And great. Why at Cornell, in lab, they say there’s a bunch of scientists here in the United States working on a thing so little you can’t see it—a thing called the atom. It’s a kind of secret but they say if they make it work—arid I hope they can’t—it could destroy the whole world, the whole big world just like that. Bang.”

  As he left Luz must have been waiting to see him go. Sitting in his office, stunned, furious, Bick heard them talking and laughing together again. Then their voices grew fainter. To his own surprise he rushed out to stop them like a father in a movie comedy.

  They were just stepping into Bob Dietz’s car.

  “Luz! Where you going!” Bick yelled.

  “Down to Smitty’s for a Coke.”

  “You stay home!” But they were off down the drive in the cool darkness.

  Leslie appeared from somewhere, she slipped her hand into his arm, she leaned against his shoulder. “Luz is almost a grown-up, darling. Girls of her age don’t have to ask permission to go down to Smitty’s for a Coke.”

  25

  “Someday,” Texas predicted, wagging its head in disapproval, but grinning too, “someday that locoed Jett Rink is agoing to go too far. There’s a limit to shenanigans, even his.”

  The Spanish conquistadores had searched in vain for the fabled Golden Cities of the New World. They had died on the plains, their bones had rotted deep in the desert and the cactus and the mesquite and the dagger flower grew green above them, their thorns like miniature swords commemorating the long-rusted steel of the dead men. And now here were the Golden Cities at last, magically sprung up like a mirage.

  There were in these cities a thousand men like Jett Rink and yet unlike except for their sudden millions. Other men might conduct their lives outrageously but Jett Rink had become a living legend. Here was a twentieth-century Paul Bunyan striding the oil-soaked earth in hundred-dollar boots. His striding was done at the controls of an airplane or at the wheel of a Cadillac or on a golden palomino with tail and mane of silver.

  A fabric made up of truth and myth was hung about his swaggering shoulders. Whenever men gathered to talk together there was a fresh tale to tell which they savored even while they resented it.

  “Did you hear about that trip of his, hunting there back of Laredo? Seems him and that Yerb Packer were in that hunting shack Jett’s got there. They were eating in the kitchen—you know Jett—drinking more than eating I reckon, and with this and that they got to quarreling and then to fighting. They was clawing and gouging like a couple of catamounts, blood running down their faces, their clothes half tore off. Well, Yerb clouts Jett a real sock and Jett he reaches out on the shelf there for a big bottle of some kind of fluid like it kills bugs and you pour it down the sink and plumbing and so on. It’s got acid in it or something. Anyway, he fetches Yerb a crack over the head with it, the bottle busts and the stuff pours all over Yerb, liked to burned the hide right off him, they say he’ll be months…”

  “…You know that hospital for old Vets of the World War, a bunch of them been sitting around there for years now, poor lunks, went in maybe when they were twenty after the war, thinking they’d be out cured, and now they’re forty and more, some of them, and never will be out. Well, anyway, somebody sent over a bunch of free tickets for the football game. So the bus took some of them that was well enough to go to the game. But along about the middle of the game a mean norther blew up, rain and cold, and quite a few folks skedaddled for home. This one old fella he gets soaked, he wasn’t feeling too good to begin with, a artificial leg and all. So he leaves, he starts heading down the road toward the car park, he figures somebody will sure pick him up and give him a lift back to the hospital. Well, along behind comes Jett in his Caddy he’s got those strong-arm guys always riding with him. Jett’s driving though, you know how he is, he’d been liquoring up to keep warm. You know the way he drives, even sober a hundred miles is crawling to him. This lame old vet don’t hear him coming or maybe Jett don’t see him in the thick rain, he misses him by an inch. Well, the vet gives a quick jump, just barely saves himself and falls down a course with that leg and all, but he scrambles up and shakes his fist at Jett like a fella in a play and he lets out a line of language even Jett Rink couldn’t do better. Jett gets an earful of this and what does he do he gets out with those guys with him and they beat up this old cripple, they hit him around the head and all, they say he’s lost his hearing. I hear Jett paid out quite a hunk afterwards but just the same what I say is someday Jett Rink’s agoing to go too far.”

  “What became of that first woman he married? Schoolteacher, wasn’t she? Imagine!”

  “Oh, that was a million years ago. He’s had two others since then. Maybe three. I haven’t kept track. Second one was a secretary of his, must have had something big on him.”

  �
��They say when he’s really good and drunk he talks about that wife of Bick Benedict.”

  “He’s a dirty liar! She’s straight as they come. Too straight. They say a regular do-gooder. From up North, she is. But straight.”

  Sometimes he strode, very late, into one of the big city shops—Neiman’s or Opper’s or Gulick’s—when they were about to close for the day. He liked to inconvenience them, he felt deep power-satisfaction in compelling the saleswomen or department heads to stay on after hours, serving him, Jett Rink. He liked his little joke, too. He would extend his hard paw to shake hands with a saleswoman of middle age, perhaps, with a soignée blue-grey coiffure and a disillusioned eye. As her thin hard-working hand met his she would recoil with a squawk of terror. In the great palm of his hand he had concealed a neat chunky steel-cold revolver.

  As he lolled in the brocade bower that was a fitting room they would spread for his selection furs silks jewels.

  “This looks like you, Mr. Rink,” they would say, fluffing out the misty folds of a cobweb garment. Frequently they were summoned to bring their wares to one of his ranches and there these would be displayed for him, an oriental potentate in redface. A mink coat. A sapphire. A vincuña topcoat for himself or a special hunting rifle with a new trick.

  SOCIETY

  By Gloria Ann Wicker

  Mrs. Jordan Benedict and daughter Luz are Hermoso visitors and shoppers this week. While in the city they are stopping at the Tejas Hotel. Miss Luz Benedict will spend a year or more at a select girls’ school in Switzerland. There are other more interesting rumors which have not yet been confirmed.

  Luz read this aloud to her mother as they sat at breakfast in their sitting room at the Tejas. “What rumors, I wonder. And just how interesting. It sounds so tantalizing. No girl ever had a duller summer.”

  “Reata’s always good for a rumor,” Leslie said, “when there’s no news. Come on, dear, let’s get started or we’ll never cover this list.”