Judith Krantz (11 page)

She had piled all of her hair high on her head, experimenting until she found a look that somehow suggested Spain, with the help of a few invisible tortoiseshell combs. All I need is a rose in my teeth and three feverish bullfighters throwing themselves at my feet, Jazz mocked herself, but she was thrilled by the romance of the effect she had achieved, for it seemed to be in perfect harmony with the benign spirit of the evening, a spirit that hung over the golden, firelit bowl of the Fiesta and sang of another century, a spirit rarely captured in Orange County, where only a few social traditions dated back before 1950.

Jazz moved almost to the edge of the bowl, where there were few people, and looked at it in meditation. If only it were possible to capture this instant in a picture, Jazz wished briefly, but she knew it was impossible because if she were in the photograph she couldn’t take it, and so much of the joy she was experiencing was tied to being in her own skin and looking outward, knowing that she was in her own beloved home place, wearing a dress whose value only she appreciated, as well as the priceless family shawl. And carrying it off with a flair that no other woman there could match—why pretend to false modesty on such a night? Or on any night for that matter?

Unable to resist framing the scene in her photographer’s eye, Jazz made an improvised viewfinder of the circle of her thumb and forefinger and peered through it, framing the scene. Impulsively, moving toward the last row of lights, to widen the focus, she took three quick steps backwards.

A sudden impact jarred her so abruptly that she almost tripped. She had backed into someone who
was—no, make that someone who
must have been—
eating an enormous plate of chili, she realized in horror, as she stood stunned into immobility, feeling a mass of the semi-fluid concoction spreading in a hot, oily, quickly widening splotch of tomatoes and beans and hamburger down from the edge of the shawl to the bottom half of her skirt. Slowly, ever so slowly, as if that could minimize the damage, she turned her head over her shoulder and looked down her back.

“No, oh my God, no, tell me I didn’t do this!” It was a man’s voice.

She raised her eyes from the appalling mess to look at her assailant. The oaf, the clumsy, unforgivable klutz was an absolute stranger, flushed with dismay, a big redheaded lunkhead in a navy blue pinstriped suit and black city shoes, more out of place among the men of the party than a clown. Would it be unladylike to kick him in the balls?

“But—you—did,” she said, so stunned that she could barely get the words out.

“I’ll get club soda, I’ll get salt, just don’t move, stay there, I’ll be right back,” he implored her.

“Club soda? Salt? They never work, not even on a little spot on a tablecloth.
You’ve ruined everything. For good!”

“No, wait a minute! Don’t get so upset! I’ll buy you another dress, I’ll find another shawl, I promise you I’ll replace them as good as new. Better!”

“Oh, will you really? You think it’s that easy? Listen, dickhead, one of the ten best-dressed women in the world would have to
die
before another dress like this becomes available, assuming she didn’t will it to her daughter, and as for the shawl—it belonged to my great-grandmother—it’s one of a kind, irreplaceable, an heirloom. That is, it used to be, before you took a shot at it.”

“Shit!”

“That’s the first halfway intelligent word you’ve said so far. Shit is exactly the word for it. What kind of a cretin eats chili standing up? You’re like a highway accident just waiting to happen. Don’t you see all
those tables and chairs over there? Haven’t you ever been to a party before?” As she spoke, Jazz got angrier and angrier. The chili was now puddling on the ground, and she could feel its wetness under her hem.

“Look, I’m as sorry as I can be, I couldn’t possibly feel worse, but I was just standing there, out of the way, minding my own business, watching the crowd, when you came out of nowhere and backed into my elbow with a hell of a jolt. I had a good grip on the plate, but you just popped it out of my hand. I take all the blame, every bit of it, but to be fair, it wasn’t a hundred percent my fault.”

“Aha! Let’s play ‘blame the victim’! The next thing you’ll say is that I was trying to attract your attention and couldn’t think of any other way to do it.”

“No, the next thing I’ll say is that if you tried to exercise some tiny sense of perspective, we might agree that this isn’t exactly the Exxon oil spill,” he said, finally furious himself.

“Great. Let’s intellectualize this out of existence. It isn’t Three Mile Island either. Or Chernobyl. Your turn. What else isn’t it?”

“The fucking end of the world,” the stranger said quietly. “Let me try to get some of that stuff off the shawl before it sets. I’m going to lift it off you as carefully as I can.”

He walked forward, his arms outstretched stiffly, and lifted the shawl from her shoulders. Its wet pointed tail hung down and dripped repulsively as he turned and stalked slowly toward two trestles and laid it across them. Jazz darted to the nearest table, grabbed two knives and a handful of napkins and joined him. They both bent over the big black silk triangle.

“Try to flip the visible bits off,” he instructed her, “but don’t scrape the silk. It looks awfully fragile.”

“What are you, a dry cleaner?” Jazz muttered, but she followed his directions.

“Jazz, Casey, what are you doing?” Suddenly Mike Kilkullen’s voice sounded behind them. They
both straightened up and arranged themselves side by side in front of the shawl.

“Don’t tell me you two have something to hide already?” he said, grinning at their guilty faces.

“An accident, Mike. I’m afraid I spilled chili all over this young lady’s antique shawl,” the stranger said.

“Damn.” Mike grimaced in dismay. “Every time I serve chili, something like this happens. Never again.” He bent down to inspect the shawl. “Oh Lord! But what the hell, I guess something can be done. I don’t think you should touch it—leave it to an expert.”

“See,” the stranger said, turning to Jazz, “I knew there had to be a way.”

“And that makes you feel just fine? I know, I know, you said you were sorry! Why don’t you suggest that I dye my dress brick red while you’re at it. That’ll make everything perfect.” Her voice was still dangerous, but her father’s presence had made her modulate her tone.

“Juanita Isabella, is that any way to talk to your long-lost cousin?”

“Cousin? No way,” Jazz said flatly.

“Cousin? She can’t be,” the stranger said at the same time.

“Didn’t you introduce yourselves? Jazz, this is Casey Nelson. His great-grandmother was a Kilkullen. Casey, this is my youngest daughter, Jazz. She’s your third cousin, as I understand it.”

“Who was this great-grandmother?” Jazz demanded, arms akimbo. “I’ve never heard of her.”

“I hadn’t heard either, until Casey tracked me down and wrote me a few weeks ago.”

“Wrote you?” Jazz asked her father. “Wrote you out of the blue? What for?”

“I didn’t expect you tonight, Casey,” Mike Kilkullen said, ignoring Jazz’s question. “Not till next week. But I’m delighted you could make it for the Fiesta.”

“I finished my business in Chicago early, so I
took the first plane out. I didn’t bother to change, just dumped my bags at the house and rushed up.”

“Why don’t you go get yourself another plate of chili? I’ll take care of the shawl.”

“You’re sure? O.K., I hate to admit it, but I’m still hungry.” He walked off, leaving Jazz and her father alone.

“Dad,” she asked casually, “you said that Casey Nelson tracked you down and wrote you. What did he want, anyway?”

“A job,” her father answered.

“So the boyo is out of work and needs a job, does he? How did he think you could help, I wonder?”

“He wants to work here, on the ranch.”

“Oh sure,” Jazz giggled. “I can just imagine him polishing tack in a brand-new, all-but-threadbare, super-macho Ralph Lauren cowboy outfit.”

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking he’s a dude, honey. He isn’t.”

“How much do you actually know about him?”

“After he wrote, I made it my business to find out. My grandfather had a younger sister, Lillian, who married a boy named Jack Nelson. He came over from Ireland back in the 1880s. Grandpa told me that this Nelson didn’t like California so he and Lillian went to New York and he got into the tugboat business. Had a lot of kids. Grandpa stayed in touch for a while, but after his sister died, maybe sixty years ago, he stopped writing. He mentioned her to me a couple of times way back, but I’d completely forgotten that we had relatives in the East. Casey’s great-grandmother must have been my great-aunt Lillian.”

“And that makes him a cousin?”

“As close as I can figure it out. Definitely a relative.”

“Are they still in the tugboat business?”

“Casey’s father has done very well in tugboats.”

Jazz gaped at him. Her father used the expression “doing very well” for neighbors like the Segerstroms, of whom he’d said, “They’ve done very well in retailing,” only after the South Coast Plaza, the biggest and
most luxurious shopping mall in the United States, had done close to a billion dollars a year in its location on what used to be their fields of lima beans. The first John D. Rockefeller would be, as far as Mike Kilkullen was concerned, a man who had done very well in the oil business.

“Then why is he looking for a job on a ranch? Why isn’t he carrying on in tugboats?”

“It seems he’s always wanted to be a cattleman. Since he was a kid. Who knows, maybe it was that bit of Kilkullen blood? He’s been getting experience working ranches on and off for years; wrangler up in Wyoming, buckaroo in Nevada, jackeroo in Australia, assistant Cow Boss of the Stanton ranch in Texas—graduated Texas A&M. He’s planning to buy a big spread in Nevada, but he wants a solid year of on-the-job training first—that’s why he wrote me.”

“Nevada? Good land there’s worth a fortune. Stocking it’s another fortune.”

“Casey’s done well—in fact, I’d have to say that Casey’s done very well—in business. He went to Harvard Business School after college. Has a knack for investing, it seems, but his heart is in ranching.”

Jazz digested this information. If her father said it was true, it was.

“What are you going to do with him?” she asked, wonderingly.

“Cow Boss,” her father said shortly.

“Come on, Dad,” Jazz laughed. “What are you really going to do with him?”

“Jazz, I told you. Cow Boss.”

“You can’t possibly mean that!”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s
your
job! You’ve been Cow Boss here for forty years! That’s insane. Absurd, impossible! You don’t even know this guy. Cow Boss!
You must be out of your mind!”

“Don’t talk to me like that, Juanita Isabella, and don’t try to tell me how to run my ranch.” His voice was quiet but deeply angry.

She looked at her father in a mixture of bewilderment
and outraged shock, her whole being absolutely rejecting the idea of anyone but her father as Cow Boss of the ranch. She struggled to find words, but the look on her father’s face warned her not to continue to protest. After a few seconds of silence he continued to speak, his anger quickly gone.

“Hell, Jazz, I can use him. I haven’t been covering the ground the way I used to. Not for quite a while now. We lost the grass on a couple of mesas last month to wild English thistle because I hadn’t been around to those pastures recently—damn it, Jazz, just last Tuesday I finally discovered two windmill pumps that must have broken down God knows when. And those damned vandals—they’re coming in on motorcycles, destroying the fences, shooting the cattle and blowing up the water troughs. It’s their idea of fun, and it’s getting worse day by day.”

“But still—why call him Cow Boss?” Jazz ventured, gaining courage from this list of normal rancher’s complaints.

“No other title will give Casey the authority with the vaqueros. He’ll need it to keep them hustling, being a stranger to the place. It’s my ranch, so where’s the problem?”

“No problem, Dad,” Jazz said hastily. “I’m just surprised, that’s all. It … happened so quickly.” Her father had said nothing about Casey Nelson all weekend, and he’d clearly been expecting him soon. So he couldn’t bring himself to tell her, she realized, and he wouldn’t have done so until the oaf actually arrived. Mike Kilkullen had decided to replace himself—even if only for a year—in the only job he’d ever wanted in his life.

Being the big boss, or the owner, or however else he cared to phrase it, might be good enough for most other cattlemen, but it had never been sufficient for Mike Kilkullen. Nothing but the nominally lesser title of Cow Boss would ever be the right title for him, a man who had gloried in the responsibilities only the Cow Boss commands; who rode out at sunup and gave orders till sundown; who could do every single job on
the ranch himself, from fixing fences to bidding on prize steers at the Cow Palace in San Francisco; who could ride into a herd and pick out a sick cow with one glance and doctor her in less than a minute; who was the leader, the unquestioned and absolute and proud leader on the land, living all day on horseback among the cattle and the vaqueros, a leader without peer.

A Cow Boss was always a general in the midst of a constant struggle that had not changed much since the first man on a horse fenced in the first cows. A big boss could be any city man in a Stetson and a cigar who liked the idea of owning cattle. Her father would never give up his title of Cow Boss because of a mass invasion of English thistle or a dozen broken pumps. He must be feeling—what? Jazz’s heart raced in near-panic as she searched his face. Weary? Tired? He certainly didn’t look it, but yes, that must be it, he must be just plain tuckered out for the moment to even think of letting Casey Nelson become Cow Boss. But did that make sense? Would Mike Kilkullen give up being the Cow Boss of the Kilkullen ranch because of simple fatigue?

“Honey, haven’t you got something else to put on?” her father asked. “You can’t go around like that.”

“I’ll find something,” she said absently. “Now.”