"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.