A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [78]
Carlos had gotten through law school in a blaze and been snatched up by a major Houston firm. His specialty, immigration. Whatever it consisted of, the family knew that Carlos would be good. Carlos was always flying off to the South and Caribbean and seemed prominent in his firm early on.
Quinn had only seen him once in the five years he was gone from Troublesome Mesa. They met in San Diego, mostly by happenstance, when Quinn was in the Corps.
Carlos had carved a hell of a life for himself, but why didn’t he ever return to Troublesome? Consuelo and Pedro visited him every year in Houston and wondered why their son remained a bachelor or why he didn’t let them know when he was traveling to Denver.
It had an eerie slant to it. Well, Quinn thought, I sure as hell didn’t get Carlos’ approval to join the Marines, and Carlos was certainly not indentured to the ranch. But he had loved the ranch. What made him divorce himself from it? In Quinn’s fantasy of the future, Carlos had always been riding alongside him.
Quinn’s homecoming brought a heartwarming letter from Carlos. He would come to the ranch for the first time in five years. When Carlos showed up, he and Quinn met each other as strangers.
Carlos wore an Italian suit, a wristwatch worth thousands, and was altogether a wealthy young dandy. It seemed that his reputation as a lawyer grew by the day.
Quinn’s thoughts of them riding and howling at the moon and tying one on fell awkwardly by the wayside.
Carlos’ visit was brief. They bumbled through their litanies, each realizing that they had outgrown one another and now lived in different worlds.
Carlos was dark and secretive and decorated like an expensive crown prince. What of his love life? Many ladies to love but none to marry, Carlos told him.
Something was strange, out of kilter with the homecoming. Carlos never mentioned the third member of their childhood club, that little pest, Rita Maldonado. After she had graduated from Wellesley, she had stayed on in the East to do postgraduate work in creative writing and some teaching at the endless writers’ conferences.
Why had her letters to Quinn suddenly ceased? Why hadn’t she returned for Quinn’s homecoming? Well, now, all Marines freeze a part of their childhood, a perfect part. Life evolves and Quinn had made no provisions in his dreams for the adulthood of Carlos and Rita.
The rewards of his new life with his parents were countered by an emptiness over his pals.
If Carlos and Rita were Quinn’s disappointment, Reynaldo Maldonado mellowed it. They came together strongly, swapping tales of the Corps and tales of the road, conversing half the night away.
Maldonado remained unmarried but still had a collection of great beauties, particularly in Mexico, where he kept a studio in Cuernavaca. There was always a waiting line of magnificent creatures who wanted to model for him, and Quinn thought it wondrous how Mal had evaded the wrath of some jealous husband.
Each time Quinn came down to Mal’s, he was halted by the array of photographs on the mantel depicting Rita’s growth from a little girl to the present. Quinn studied the photographs each time with growing interest.
“Jesus,” he muttered one evening.
“You didn’t expect she’d stay in pigtails,” Mal said, carefully charting Quinn’s interest.
“She is really beautiful. I mean, unearthly beautiful.”
“Devastatingly so,” Mal said. “Give or take a little more of this and a little less of that, Rita is probably one of the most beautiful women in the world.”
“And she writes a lovely letter,” Quinn said. “Her letters were never repetitious ad nauseam. She could relate any story about the wiggle on the end of the nose of one of your models, or maybe Saturday night in the old mining town, or the sheriff being the fattest gun in the West, or her walk through the wild flowers. You know, she was awfully pretty walking through a field of flowers, even when she was a kid, and then holding her skirts up to cross a stream.