“Is anything wrong with your lunch, sir?”
He waved her away.
Below, through the window, he could see a section of superhighway crawling with trucks and cars. I used to like to drive, he complained to himself, thinking of the awful turnpike food at overcrowded One Stop Service Areas, the stalled cars with their hoods lifted in the smoggy heat, the insulting stink of diesel exhausts, the construction-RIGHT LANE CLOSED 1 MI AHEAD-the unmarked cop cars and periodic bloody wrecks, the surly chargings of cars full of restless screaming kids, all of them bound to or from the great nerve center, Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson, the predatory megalopolis where eight million crushed bodies supported the weight of a handful of People Who Counted, who endlessly played games in which they fought to win, and having won, used victory-earned power to change the rules of the game to their own advantage. Rats, birds, fish, humans-it was all the same: crowd too many into too small a space and they lost their biological inhibitions and turned into mindless cannibals. It was no good trying to make decisions in those surroundings; he could no longer tell if he was still sane: in the city there was no norm, no way to judge.
At the end of the flight lay the open land-miles between beings. He harked back to male weekends in a damp duck blind, birds calling over the water. I have got to make up my mind to get out of it. Why care if someone played basketball with NCI? How could it possibly matter to those teeming ants down there? He had a vague recollection of last night’s whimsical conversation with Carol McCloud. “All you have to do is make things matter.”
Air travel always depressed him; ultimately the ordeal ended. Through the hair-oil-greasy plastic inner window he saw the desert mountains moving up. He felt the changing pressure in his ears and recognized the San Pedro Valley, the towns, the right angle formed by the two ranges of mountains north and east of Tucson. The pilot’s voice announced the temperature at Tucson International Airport was 103 degrees and the local time was 2:25 P.M. Hastings set his watch back and closed his eyes for the landing.
When he walked into the terminal, he did not expect to be met, but still he found himself seeking familiar faces; he saw none, and walked up the long ramp to the terminal center, silently congratulating himself on having survived yet another adventure.
He spent twenty boring minutes at the Rent-A-Car counter, signed a dangerous-looking document in exchange for a set of car keys, and stopped at a phone booth on his way out. His ring was answered by an alert baritone voice that belonged to Lewis Downey, Judd’s longtime private secretary, who gave him an affably courteous greeting and added, “I’m afraid Mr. Judd still isn’t taking any phone calls, Mr. Hastings-my orders are specific, and he made no exceptions.”
“I’m in Tucson,” Hastings said. “I’ve got a car, and I’m on my way up there. I should be there by five. Will I be admitted?”
He heard, distinctly, the suck of Downey’s indrawn breath. Downey said, “Hold on a minute, will you?”
The operator presently came on the line and asked for an additional fifteen cents. Shortly thereafter Downey returned. “Sorry to hold you, Mr. Hastings. I didn’t mean to be rude, but I only work here, you know. Mr. Judd hasn’t been seeing anyone. But the gate will be open when you arrive. We’ll prepare a room for you. How long were you planning to stay?” The voice rode on a tone of distant politeness, but nothing more.
Hastings said, “That has to depend on Mr. Judd. I’ve got a tentative booking on a return flight tomorrow evening.”
“Very good, sir. We’ll expect you around five?”
“Is he all right, Downey?”
“Sir?”
“I don’t want to disturb him if he’s not well.”
After a beat Downey said, “Mr. Judd is in excellent health, sir. You’ll see for yourself. Good-bye, then.”
Frowning, he went outside into the brass blaze of sunlight. He found the gray Plymouth in the vast parking lot and unlocked it. The windows had been left rolled up; he opened them and tossed his suitcase in back and switched the engine on, and stood in the shade while the engine and air-conditioner got working. Even then, when he got into the car the vinyl seat covers blistered his back and rump. The steering wheel was too hot to hold; he drove with his fingertips, finding it hard to breathe. The radio informed him again that it was 103 degrees-“A nice mild day today, folks, after the hundred-and-twelve we had yesterday.” He switched off the infuriating voice and squirmed on the seat, driving out along the familiar streets to the interstate highway.
In the next hour the road took him past the edge of the mountains; he took a fast, paved side road toward the high country, and by four-fifteen was climbing through long gentle meadows hip-deep in yellow grass. Dark spots on the hills were beef cattle, slowly browsing.
The sky was vast, cobalt blue, serrated at its edges by jagged peaks of crystalline clarity. He had forgotten how beautiful this country was-back East he always got to thinking of Arizona in Eastern stereotypes, as if it were all desert, sand and cactus. Easy to forget about the high country, the grass and hills and those high peaks where the snow hadn’t melted in a thousand years. The road lanced up the center of a valley, and he didn’t meet another car in twenty miles, and when he did, it was a pickup truck driven by an Apache Indian. Out here you didn’t have to prove anything to anybody, and you could leave your doors wide open. No use for the horn on your car.
This was Judd’s land now; he had been on Judd property for miles. The barbed-wire fences ran gleaming along both sides of the road, shiny wire and orange-painted steel posts, fading ahead of him with perspective, two parallel lines joining at infinity. At five thousand feet on this plateau it was cool enough to turn off the temperature control and throw the windows open to the wind. He pushed the car up to eighty and enjoyed himself.
In the back of his mind he was thinking about Judd. Lewis Downey had said he was in excellent health; it was the kind of thing he would say if he suspected the phone was tapped, and a man in Judd’s position always had to assume his phones were tapped; that was the way of the modern world, and Hastings had no liking for it. Maybe I ought to retire out here and hang out my shingle. Country lawyer. He grinned at the hills and breathed deep of the crystal air; it tasted as if no one had ever breathed it before. It made him think of the times he and Diane had spent out here, holidaying, visiting the old man. Diane had no affinity for the outdoors; her visits here had always been designed solely to please her father. But Hastings recalled long walks along the grasshills with Judd, jeep and helicopter rides across the vast acres, and now and then there had been the feeling he was as close to Judd as Diane was-and closer, in some ways.
The road lifted him now toward the summit of a long hill topped by a deep-green stand of planted cottonwoods. Inside the barbed wire a graded landing strip ran along with a lonely windsock and three parked crop-dusting planes. To make a landing, he remembered, you had to buzz the field first to chase the whiteface cattle off. Judd’s operation used jeeps and planes to do its cowboying.
Lewis Downey was standing by the front gate, a trim neat man with salt-and-pepper hair and a good tan, dressed in light slacks and a short-sleeved shirt. When he recognized Hastings he waved and opened the wire gate. Hastings drove in, wheels rumbling on the steel-slatted cattleguard, and stopped just inside. Downey latched the gate shut and got into the car; it was a quarter-mile ride up to the house. “Hi.”
Hastings said, “You’re looking fit.”