• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Do you even begin to get the picture of this peninsula?” he said. “With this land I could do the most brilliant piece of business in my life. These smart-ass Cubans will have to go along. I’ll sweep those bastards with me. I’ll develop a plan—while I’m convalescing I’ll get a survey done, and a map, and when I make my pitch to those lazy Spanish jet-set bastards, I’ll be prepared with architect’s models and all my financing ready. I mean if, you know. Do you want to try some of these loquats?” He reached gloomily into one of his trees and picked handfuls of fruit.

“I’m bilious now,” I said, “from all I’ve eaten.”

He stood plucking and eating, spitting out stones and skins, his gaze fixed beyond me. He wiped at his Acheson mustache from time to time. Arrogant, haggard, he was filled with incommunicable thoughts. These were written dense and small on every inch of his inner surface. “I won’t see you in Houston before the operation, Charlie,” he said. “Hortense is against it. She says you’ll make me too emotional, and she’s a woman who knows what she’s talking about. Now this is what I want to say to you, Charlie. If I die, you marry Hortense. She’s a better woman than you’ll ever find by yourself. She’s straight as they come. I trust her one hundred percent, and you know what that means. She acts a little rough but she’s made me a wonderful life. You’ll never have another financial problem, I can tell you that.”

“Have you discussed this with Hortense?”

“No, I’ve written it in a letter. She probably guesses that I want her to marry a Citrine, if I die on the table.” He stared hard at me and said, “She’ll do what I tell her. So will you.”

Late noon stood like a wall of gold. And a mass of love was between us, and neither Ulick nor I knew what to do with it. “Well, all right, good-by.” He turned his back on me. I got into the rented car and took off.

thirty-two

Hortense, on the telephone, said, “Well, he made it. They took veins from his leg and attached them to his heart. He’s going to be stronger than ever now.”

“Thank God for that. He’s out of danger?”

“Oh, sure, and you can see him tomorrow.”

During the operation Hortense hadn’t wanted my company. I attributed this to wife/brother rivalry, but later I changed my mind. I recognized a kind of boundlessness or hysteria in my affection which, in her place, I would have avoided, too. But on the phone there was a tone in her voice I had never heard before. Hortense raised exotic flowers and hollered at dogs and men—that was her style. This time, however, I felt that I shared what as a rule she reserved for the flowers and my attitude toward her changed entirely. Humboldt used to tell me, and he was a harsh judge of character himself, that far from being mild I was actually too tough. My reform (if it was one) would have pleased him. In this critical age, following science (fantasy-science is really what it is) people think they are being “illusion-less” about one another. The law of parsimony makes detraction more realistic. Therefore I had had my reservations about Hortense. Now I thought she was a good broad. I had been lying on the king-sized motel bed reading some of Humboldt’s papers and books by Rudolf Steiner and his disciples, and I was in a state.

I don’t know what I expected to see when I entered Ulick’s room—bloodstains, perhaps, or bone-dust from the power saw; they had pried open the man’s rib cage and taken out his heart; they had shut it off like a small motor and laid it aside and started it up again when they were ready. I couldn’t get over this. But I came into a room filled with flowers and sunlight. Over Ulick’s head was a small brass plate engraved with the names of Papa and Mama. His color was green and yellow, the bone of his nose stuck out, his white mustache grew harshly under it. His look, however, was happy. And his fierceness was still there, I was glad to see. He was weak, of course, but he was all business again. If I had told him that I thought