A hundred yards from the house, Jo-Ann reined her horse to a stop again. She yawned. "Would you believe I got out of bed this morning in New York?" she said. "Are you having dinner with me, Nevada?"
"I wasn't countin' on it, but you are alone, huh? Gonna eat early?"
She nodded. "Surprise Robair," she said.
"Not much surprises that man. Anyway, sure, tell him to set two places."
The dinner was what she'd asked for because she knew it was what the ranch kitchen most easily afforded — besides which she did not want to invade the food stocked for the Christmas Eve party. She and Nevada sat facing each other across the table, over steaks and potatoes, salads, and a bottle of red wine. Neither had changed clothes since their ride. Nevada actually wore buckskins. Jo-Ann wished he would wear them tomorrow night but knew he wouldn't. She would like to show up at the party in her jeans and wool shirt — and knew she wouldn't.
"If I asked him," she said, "I think my father might let me come and live here. My mother would hate it, but —"
"You'd be lonesome out here," said Nevada. "Tomorrow this house is gonna be full of folks. It isn't that way most of the time."
"You'd come and see me, wouldn't you? It's only a short drive. And I could come and see you."
"You can't count on me," he said.
"What? We've always counted on you. My grandfather, my father —"
"Not much longer," said Nevada.
"Nevada ... ?"
He smiled. "A man ain't forever, y'- know. I'm seventy years old."
"Kiowa men live to be ninety."
He shook his head. "Not this Kiowa. I tell you because you talk about countin' on this ol' man, like the Cords have always counted on me. If you tell your father what I'm goin' to tell you, then you ain't my friend. But the Great Unknowable has started callin' fer Nevada. Fer Max. That's my real name, y' know: Max Sand. I sit on my porch and look at the country. The country's callin' me. I kin hear it in the wind."
"What are you saying, Nevada?" Jo-Ann asked, alarmed.
"Promise me you won't tell."
"I promise."
Nevada stared for a moment at the bite of rare beef on his fork. "By god, that's good," he said. "There ain't nothin' better to eat than a real good piece of beef. We didn't have it in the old days, you know. This comes off a fat steer, one that couldn't a lived on the range grass. We —"
"Nevada You're changing the subject."
He sighed loudly. "Man doesn't know how long he's got. But they's signs. Mine don't read good."
Jo-Ann put down her knife and fork. "You can't read life and death from owl feathers," she said. "Or anything like that."
"Don't be so sure. But that don't make no difference. That's not what I'm readin'. I've started rottin' away inside. I can feel it, and I can smell it. When a man don't smell good —"
"Nevada! Have you seen a doctor?"
He nodded. "Cancer."
"Oh, my god! But you must tell my father! There are wonderful hospitals where —"
"You gave me your word you wouldn't tell him."
4
She had exacted from Robair a promise to wake her when her new half brother arrived. He did. She had not been asleep, really. What Nevada had told her, the cancer, had intruded on every sleep fantasy and jarred her awake. It was nearly one o'clock. She dressed in tight blue jeans and the blue-and-white wool shirt she had worn in the afternoon and at dinner. She brushed out her hair and put on a little lipstick.
They were in the living room waiting for her, standing before the fireplace where Robair had kept the fire going.
Jonas the Third stepped toward her, smiling broadly, his hand reaching for hers. "Jo-Ann! I've been looking forward to meeting you and am only sorry it didn't happen sooner. Let me introduce Antonia Maxim."
He was not what she expected, not in any way. Having heard he had been born and reared in Mexico, she had expected a swarthy, dark-haired man with a Spanish accent. This tall, handsome man was blond. He looked nothing like their father. He spoke perfect American English and yet not like their father's. She could detect no family resemblance at all.
The woman he had brought with him was beautiful. "Call me Toni" were her first words, and she reached out with both her hands and took both of Jo-Ann's.
Jo-Ann was polite to Toni, but her eyes fastened on Bat. She had wanted to dislike him, had decided to dislike him. But how could a woman — how could anyone — dislike a man with laughing eyes that drew you in and invited you to share whatever was making them laugh? Her half brother was naturally, gracefully magnetic, even more so than her father was.
"We've wakened you in the middle of the night," said Jonas the Third. "And we've been up since dawn. What time do we meet for breakfast, Jo-Ann?"
"Oh, let's be late. When our father is here, he'll be at the table by six-thirty, eating bacon and eggs and potatoes and God knows what. The Christmas Eve party is at seven and will go on well after midnight, but plan on being up at dawn again on Christmas Day. I don't have to tell you that his schedule will be our schedule."
5
On Christmas afternoon, Nevada took Toni out to teach her to fire her Winchester. Bat and Jo-Ann came along. The weather was raw. The sky was pale, and snow threatened. Except for Nevada, they wore coats from the ranch house closets: sheepskin that cut the wind.
Watching the old man, after what he had told her two days ago, was painful for Jo-Ann. That Nevada Smith was mortal had never occurred to her. And he walked and talked like a man who expected to live to be a hundred. He put wine and liquor bottles on fence posts. He talked quietly with Toni, telling her how to hold her rifle and aim; then he stood back and let her try.
She shattered three bottles with her first three shots, missing only the fourth.
"Know why y' done?" Nevada asked her.
Toni shook her head.
"Locked y' elbow. Keep 'er loose, Miss Toni. Nothin' stiff, nothin' locked. Easy ... easy ..."
She missed twice in knocking down his bottles. Now he set up beer cans, half as big. She needed eight shots to knock down five of them.
"Got a natural talent for it," he said. "Let's let Jo-Ann try."
Jo-Ann shot about as well as Toni.
"How 'bout you, Bat?"
"I'm better with a pistol," said Bat. "Happen to have brought one out from the house. What I like to shoot at is empty shotgun shells, but I couldn't find any. But I found a bunch of bottle corks."
Nevada shrugged as Bat walked forward and set up wine corks on the fence posts.
Five corks. Six shots.
Nevada grinned. "Y' ever decide y' bored bein' a lawyer, I kin prob'ly git y' a job in a Wild West show."
Jo-Ann tried to hide her feelings. Her new half brother was too goddamned good! Give him a blackboard and chalk, he'd probably square the circle.
6
She had one more chance to talk with Nevada. She didn't know it, but it would be the last time. They went riding, alone.
"What do you think of my new brother?" she asked.
"Y' dad's lucky to find him," said Nevada blandly.
"Bullshit. What do you think of him?"
"He's gonna be a handful," said Nevada, staring at the mountains and not turning his eyes toward her. "You know somethin'? He's a Cord. Your old man's figured that one out. I ain't sure he likes it much."
Jo-Ann smiled and nodded. "He'd have liked to have a son he could —"
"What his father wanted," Nevada interrupted. "A boy who'd take orders. Well, they didn't neither of them git that kind of son. This new boy has got somethin' of his gran'dad in him. Jonas sees it. That's hard for him to take. Could be this boy's got the old man's tough and your dad's smarts. Could be."
"Shuts me out of everything, doesn't it, Nevada?"
"Wouldn't think of it that way. I'd make my peace with the new man, if I was you. Looks to me like an honest sort of fella. He ain' gonna take on your dad right off, but them two's gonna go nose to nose. I'm not ready to place
my bet."
7
Jo-Ann broke her word to Nevada, and three weeks later he was admitted to the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City.
Jonas was with him and stayed at the hospital through ten days of tests, going to the Waldorf Towers only at night. Monica came to visit Nevada. Robair came. Morris Chandler. Angie. Bat, who had known Nevada only for a little while but had impressed him favorably. And Jo-Ann, and he forgave her.
The prognosis was not good. The doctors talked of radiation therapy and chemotherapy — and six months, maximum.
Nevada said no to all of it. "Y' cain't fight nature" was the way he put it. "Anyways, why should y'? Who knows what's next? Y' fight it off, maybe y' just postponin' somethin' awful good. In all my life I only took stock in one writer. Mark Twain said he warn't afraid of where he was goin'. He'd been there before, and it didn't hurt."
A Cord company plane flew Nevada back to his ranch. He sat in his old rocker on the porch, in his buckskins, sheepskin coat, and a stained old hat; and he stared at the desert and the mountains. He told Jonas to go on about his business. He promised to call if he felt the end was near. Meantime, he would just sit and wait. He was content just to wait.
Jonas knew Nevada would never call. He promised to come back to see him, but he left him with a sense he would never see him again.
8
When Nevada died, Jonas called Jo-Ann.
That afternoon she left Northampton in the black Porsche he had given her for Christmas, bearing the Nevada license plate cord two. She drove to New York in three hours. And having reached the city she was not sure why she had come or what she would do. She had driven mindlessly, probably assuming she would go to the apartment on Fifty-ninth Street. Then she realized she would face a mother who would demand to know why she had left Northampton — or a mother so absorbed in whatever man was there with her that she would hardly notice that her daughter had come home. She drove past the apartment and did not stop.
She put the Porsche in a garage on Fifty-seventh Street and had dinner in a Hungarian restaurant she had learned to appreciate. When she came out and retrieved the car, it was after ten o'clock and she had to face it that she could not drive back to Northampton that night and could not cruise through the streets of Manhattan in an expensive sports car much longer. She had drunk a whole bottle of rich red Hungarian wine. A sense of urgency, not panic but approaching it, seized her.
She drove into the garage at the Waldorf Towers.
"Miss?"
She showed the garage attendant her key to the Cord apartment. She didn't know what her mother had done with hers, but Jo-Ann had never surrendered her key. The man glanced at the license plate on the Porsche and opened her door. She got out, and he drove the car down into the garage.
The key gave her access to the elevator, too. She went up. At the door she pressed the bell button before she used the key. No one responded, so she unlocked the door and entered the apartment.
When Bat came home a little before midnight he found Jo-Ann sitting on a couch in the living room. She was smoking a cigarette and had taken off her dress and her stockings and garter belt and shoes. She sat in a white silk slip.
"It's a family apartment," she said.
He nodded. "Of course. The garage man told me you were here. I'm glad to see you."
Jo-Ann nodded. A bottle of Scotch sat on the coffee table before her. The ice in her glass had long since melted, and she had been sipping Chivas Regal neat. "Nevada died," she said.
"I heard. Our father called from California. I didn't know the man as well as you did, but I understand what a great loss it is."
Jo-Ann picked up her glass and drank the little that was left of the warm whiskey. "I feel as if I'd lost a father. He was more of a father to me than Jonas ever was."
"I understand," said Bat. He sat down on the couch, at the opposite end.
"I don't think you do, but it's all right."
"I know something of the family history," said Bat.
"You grew up in odd circumstances, too. Did you have anybody to talk to?"
"My mother," he said. "My grandfather."
"Lucky you," she said despondently. She crushed her cigarette. "Jonas is nobody's father, you know."
"He's a great man."
Her eyes narrowed as she glanced at him. "Do you think so? Or is that a Cord employee talking? Congratulations on your job, anyway."
He got up and went to the bar to get a glass. "A little more Scotch?" he asked.
"A splash."
He brought back two glasses, both with ice. As he poured, he glanced at her and said, "I wish we'd known each other sooner. I have two other little sisters: Rafaela and Mercedes. I was away from home during most of the years when they were growing up."
"Do you love them?" Jo-Ann asked.
Bat nodded. "Of course."
Jo-Ann scooted across the couch to sit close to him.
She reached for his hand. "You and I would have loved each other."
"Yes."
"Still can," she said.
He squeezed her hand. "Of course."
"Nevada gave me some advice," she said softly. "He told me to give my love to a man I could trust. A man who would accept responsibility for the consequences."
"That was good advice."
She lifted his hand and kissed it. "Nevada and I weren't talking about the kind of love you're thinking about."
"Jo-Ann ... ?"
"A man I can trust," she said simply, directly. Then her voice rose, and she said, "I'm a virgin, goddammit!"
Bat frowned. "You've had too much to drink."
Jo-Ann snatched up her glass and drank the Scotch he had poured. "Drunk! You think I'm drunk. No. Let me tell you what I am. I'm Jonas Cord's daughter. I'm the granddaughter of another Jonas Cord. When I heard about you, I wondered if you were a Cord at all, or some kind of fraud. There was never a Cord by the name who'd turn down a shot of whiskey or a piece of virgin pussy!"
She grabbed at the hem of her slip and pulled it up and over her head. She was wearing panties but no bra.
"Jo-Ann," he murmured.
"C'mon, big brother. You a Cord, or you not?"
"My sister —"
"My brother. So what the shit? You're the man I can trust, if you've got the guts. Brother and sister. We're gonna love each other — brother and sister, for the rest of our lives. If I can't trust my brother, who can I trust? I need your help, big brother. Besides the fucking I need from you right now, I need a standard to compare with."
"Our father —"
"Jonas will laugh if he finds out, which he doesn't have to. He'd do it himself if he were here. Only I wouldn't let him. Him, I wouldn't trust. Hey, brother! Look at me! Toni have nicer tits than these?"
For a moment Bat closed his eyes. "Oh, Christ," he muttered.
"You wouldn't know maybe, but Nevada Smith was a great man," said Jo-Ann. "Greater than our father and grandfather in some ways. He said something to me — I wrote it down when I got back to my room, and I think I've got it exactly the way he said it. He said. This thing we're talkin' about, it's mine, it's your'n, it's his'n, it's her'n. It's nobody else's but. And it's not worth moanin' and groanin' and worryin' and hurryin' about. Live, little girl! Pee when you have to and fuck when you want to.' You bastard, I want to!"
" 'Bastard.' You used the wrong word, little sister. Okay, I'll fuck you outta your mind!"
Jo-Ann grinned. "Promise? Promise it's going to be everything I've ever heard about!"
9
Everything she'd ever heard about.
Jo-Ann had seen pictures but had never seen a male organ before. He guided her hand to it and let her examine it with her fingers before he brought it near her. She satisfied her curiosity. She had been told it would be hard, but it wasn't hard; it was just stiff. She had been told it would be cold. She had been told it would be hot. It was neither. She curled her hand around it and squeezed it gently. A drop of gleaming moisture appeare
d on the rosebud of its tip. She pinched the drop off between her thumb and finger and tested it. It was slippery.
"Life," he said quietly.
They lay on his bed. She wanted to be kissed more before he entered her, so she rolled on her side and pressed her mouth to his. He responded forcefully. They kissed so hard she could taste blood from her lips. Then he turned gentle and pushed his tongue into her mouth. She had heard of this but had not imagined the lazy delight she would find in it. They lay side by side for a long time, their tongues caressing each other. She held his penis in her hand, and he stroked her wet private place with one long finger.
Until his patience ran out. Then he pushed her over on her back and rose to straddle her. For a moment she was afraid. For a moment she was sorry she had brought herself to this point. Then it was too late for fear, too late for regret.
He was tough and he was tender. He was gentle and he was rough. He hurt her and he soothed her. He subdued her and he exalted her. She shrieked and writhed under his unrelenting deep strokes: from pain and pleasure so intermixed she could not separate them. And when he finished and withdrew, she was hurt, she was exhausted, she was drenched with sweat; she was submerged in warmth and wonder.
For sure she would never again live without it.
"Big brother," she whispered, playfully mimicking a girl child.
"Hmm?"
"How soon can we do it again?"
"In a few minutes," he said. "Then never again after tonight."
15
1
FOUR MONTHS AFTER THE DEATH OF NEVADA SMITH — that is, in late summer 1953 — Bat flew to Havana. Jonas sent him. It was the first time Bat would be working alone, without his father's close supervision.
Fulgencio Batista had sent Jonas an invitation to come to Havana, delivered as a personal message by the Cuban consul-general in New York. Batista hoped Jonas Cord would invest money in Cuba: specifically in building a casino-hotel. Jonas had replied that he could not come anytime soon but would send his son, Jonas Enrique Raul Cord y Batista.
JC2 The Raiders Page 19