A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [10]
“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 Cañon 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