Nimitz Class (20 page)

“You got it, Billy. But it’s your lifetime…and mine.”

By this time, they had crossed the Pawnee County line, driving westward across the old Indian lands along a flat, near-deserted prairie road as straight as a gun barrel. To the left and to the right the landscape was identical, miles and miles of uncluttered farmland, sometimes wheat, less often ripening corn, and, much more often, great swathes of prairie, endless grass, waving in the ever-present whisper of the south wind.

This was the Big Country, the land of Wyatt Earp, the Dalton Brothers, Bat Masterson, Wild Bill Hickok, the Comanches, the Pawnee and the native Kanza, the plains Indians, who once rode out here behind herds of buffalo twenty-five miles long.

The Baldridge Ranch, with its distinctive B/B brand, set in wrought iron on the high gateway to the house, was actually across the Pawnee border in Hodgeman County, built in a rich alluvial plain in the fork where the Pawnee River and Buckner Creek finally converge before meandering on down to the broad Arkansas. But the Baldridge land begins before the border, straddling two counties, and Bill could see part of the white-faced family herds of Herefords long before they came in sight of his mother’s house.

He cast an expert eye over them. “Looking good, Ray,” he said. “A real credit to you. Like always.”

“Thanks, little brother. We’ve been pretty lucky this year. Lotta rain in the late spring, brought the grass on—you know the story, the better the pasture, the less they wander, and the more weight they put on.”

“Yup,” said Bill. But then he fell silent again. And once more the vision of the sinister black Russian Kilo stood stark before his mind’s eye, as it had done just about every two hours for the past five days.
He knew exactly what it looked like, just as he knew the minutest detail of the conformation of a Hereford steer. Right now he seemed to occupy two worlds, each one several million light-years from the other—the soft winds and homely cattle out here, grazing on what a Kansan poet once described as the Lawns of God. And far away, the villainous, menacing, malevolent arena of international, militarized terrorism, into the black heart of which he must journey before the next week was done.

Ray drove the Cherokee up to the door of the big white clapboard house, with its long Doric columns, surrounded by great maple trees planted by generations of Baldridges.

Inside, across the high-timbered hall and through the arched doorway to the sunlit living room, sat the tall, white-haired matriarch of the family, Emily Baldridge, aged seventy-five. She was nursing a cup of English tea, a copy of the state magazine,
Kansas
, and Bill guessed, a broken heart.

She rose as he walked through the door, smiled and hugged her youngest son. “And how’s my Navy officer today?” she said, holding him appreciatively at arm’s length.

“Pretty good, Mom,” he said, secretly marveling at her control, so soon after the shocking death of the male head of the family. “My own news is varied. I’ve been appointed to an investigation into the accident on the carrier, and I’ve pretty well made up my mind I’m resigning from the Navy right after it’s over.

“Ray and I had a chat on the way out here. I’m coming home within the year.”

“Oh, bless you, Billy. I so hoped you would. It’s too much for Ray and me. I was always worried it may have been years before Jack could come back but now he’s not coming back and I was beginning to consider reducing the land and livestock. It’s too big for us.”

“I’d say it’s a good thing neither Dad nor Jack heard you say that, both of ’em hated selling anything. I don’t like it much either, so let’s not do anything. And, Mom, you were right. It would have been a long time before Jack got back home. They were going to make him an admiral for sure. He’d have ended up right at the top. In the Pentagon. He was the best potential battle commander I ever met.
Everyone knows that. Scott always said he was just keeping the ole CNO’s chair warm for Captain Baldridge. And he didn’t mean me!”

“Ah, my darling, but he couldn’t ride a horse like you, could he?”

“No, ma’am, that he couldn’t. But he coulda taken on the Russian fleet. Coupla times I heard him say he’d a been real happy to do just that. Wasn’t he something?”

Bill knew he had to change the subject quickly. But there was something compulsive about the subject of Jack Baldridge. Bill gazed at his mother with profound affection, but he was too late. She was trying to tell him that Margaret and her two granddaughters were arriving from San Diego next week. But there were tears streaming down her face—hopeless, helpless, desolate tears for her lost, beloved second son, the only one of the three who looked just like his father. The one she had loved most of all.

“I’ll get him, Mom,” he blurted, incomprehensibly to her. “You can put the ranch on that. I’ll get him.”

But Emily Baldridge was too preoccupied regaining her own self-control to worry about Bill’s. She gratefully accepted the big white linen handkerchief he offered, and fled toward the door. “I’ll just go and rejoin civilization,” she called. “Go and have a rest. Let’s all meet on the veranda at seven.”

Bill stood and watched her go with huge sadness. She was such a handsome woman, still clinging to her starchy East Coast manners, still aware of the old taboo about showing emotion, still bearing the stamp of Wellesley College, plain as if someone had put a
W
* branding iron to her just before graduation. She and Tom Baldridge had seemed a slightly out-of-step couple to strangers, she so much more polished than the broad-shouldered Kansan rancher.

Bill followed his mother up the long oak staircase, through the arch set with the big longhorns and Indian regalia. He wandered along to his old room, the heavy, brightly covered Sioux blanket slung over the bed, the crossed Comanche lances beside the mirror, the big framed sepia picture of Crazy Horse gazing sternly across the room. It was the headquarters of a schoolboy scout, a veteran of a hundred battles in this historic plains Indian country. At the bottom
of the bed were two pairs of cowboy boots, one with spurs. Inside the big pine wardrobe there were four Stetsons, and a selection of cowboy shirts and trousers, befitting the youngest son of one of the big ranchers in the area.

Ten minutes later he strode out over the veranda, dressed now in the only clothes in which he felt truly at home, the lightweight white Stetson pushed back a bit, just enough to take the glare off his eyes. Tonight he would ride alone for a while, heading west into the gigantic Kansan sunset. Bill’s spurs clanked lightly as he headed out to the stables.

He lingered for a while talking to Freddie, the big bay horse, which only he and Ray ever rode. Then he hoisted the big Western saddle, with its Indian markings and wide saddle horn, up and across the horse’s back. He tightened the girths, moving easily around the quarters, gently smoothing Freddie’s tail, unafraid of the hind hooves which could launch a man with the wrong touch twenty yards through the air.

When Bill rode out past the cattle pens, tipping his hat toward a couple of ranch hands mending a fence, no one would have guessed he had ever left this place.

“Hey, Billy, welcome back…terrible ’bout Jack. Everyone’s very sad out here right now.”

Bill Baldridge rode slowly westward, out between the two rivers. Forty miles to the southwest lay Dodge City, their nearest sizable town—his mom was a trustee of the museum there. Dead ahead lay more or less nothing, mile after mile of prairie, the wind making patterns on the bluestem. In this late afternoon light, the pasture seemed greenish gold in color. But as the south wind gusted the grasses bent before its gentle force and bluestems showed in long patches like the ripples on water. Bill stared, watching the blue patterns as he once had as a boy, dreaming of an ocean he had never seen.

Freddie’s hooves were almost silent on the prairie, so deep and lush was the grassland. The only sounds were the occasional soft crushing of the taller stalks, and the endless chirping of the cicadas.
Glancing down, Bill could see bare patches where all of the grass and wildflowers appeared to have been the victims of a giant lawn mower, and the wind blew no patterns here.

The great Baldridge herds had passed by very recently. So recently none of the wildflowers had shot new blooms. Bill knew the cattle must be close, but he had to get back to meet his mother and Ray. Another mile or so and he must turn around, maybe let Freddie have a gallop home, blow him out a little, keep him young.

They kept going for a bit, now at a light canter through this lonely American outback, which renders its natives lifetime prisoners of a vast and silent beauty.

Bill gazed out in front of him, to a bank of high cloud building on the horizon. He squinted his eyes into the lowering sun, which was already becoming the color of spent fire. He could not see the herds yet, and he turned his horse around and began the ride home, with the last of the day’s warmth now upon his back. A mile from the ranch, riding now close to the creek where the ground was a little softer, he spurred Freddie on, urging him to gallop.

Up ahead he could see two cowboys rounding up the last of a half-dozen stray steers, down by the water. They nearly had them bunched now, riding with one man to the rear and one out on the left. Two steers kept wheeling away back toward the river. Instinctively Bill Baldridge urged Freddie forward, drawing his long whip from the left side of his saddle. He came up on the right, on an easy stride, just outside the leading runaway. The famous Kansan brand,
B/B,
was clear on their hides.

Bill Baldridge let out a yell, cracked the whip high over his head, and drove Freddie into the steer’s right flank, and turned the brute away, back to his pals in the bunch. Bill grinned at the look of stark relief on its bovine white face.

He rode in to the group, guarding the right-hand escape route. “Hey, thanks, Bill,” said the older of the two men, another tall cowboy, with a big tobacco bulge in his left, nut-brown cheek. “Ain’t lost your touch any, have you?”

The two men had not spoken for a couple of years, but there are some places where time stands, more or less, still.

Bill grinned. “No problem, Skip. These hot days they can get real determined to stay near the water.”

“Sure can. Staying long?”

“Uh-uh. Leaving Sunday.”

“Miss havin’ you around. We was thinking you might come back now…Jack and everything.”

“Next year I’ll be back. For good.”

They rode in silence for a little way, before Skip McGaughey spoke again. “Know what I hate most about the Navy, Bill?”

“Lay it on me.”

“I hate the way there are no gravestones for most men who die in big warships. You know, my grandfather was killed in the Pacific in World War II. Never found him. And my grandma always said how she wished there was just somewhere she coulda seen his name.”

“Yeah. ’Course in the
Jefferson
there were no bodies, not even any wreckage. Nuclear blasts don’t leave much behind.”

“At least it was instant.”

“No doubt about that.”

“We gonna have a memorial stone for Jack?”

“Guess so. Hadn’t really thought about it much. Mom’s kinda upset right now.”

“Hell yeah. Still, I think there should be something. You know, ever since yer dad passed away, we’ve always called Jack, ‘the Boss’, even though we didn’t see that much of him.”

“Yeah. I know you all called him that. I called him that myself. You already know, I guess, he was serving as the Group Operations Officer on the carrier, the admiral’s right-hand man. They were gonna make him a rear admiral for sure.”

“Guess then we’d never have seen him.”

“Not for a few years anyway.”

“That’s even more reason to have a memorial, eh?”

“What kind of thing? It’d have to be pretty low-key. Jack hated anything showy.”

“Well, some of the boys were thinking. You know how Jack used to go fishing down by those rocks on the creek. ’Bout four hundred yards from the main house. One of them rocks is pretty big, twelve
feet tall, pure granite, like that strata over in the Flint Hills. How ’bout a memorial tablet in bronze set right in that rock, by a stone-mason. Something kinda quiet, and impressive…like him.”

Bill pondered for a moment, thinking again of Jack, of the great U.S. warship, of the black Russian Kilo he knew had sunk the Americans. Then he spoke. “Skip, I love it. Jack had fished down there all his life. He would a liked that. Really liked that. Right next to the water. Tell you what. I’ll draft the words, Ray’ll get a photograph, and we’ll have a bronze relief done of him in uniform. Head and shoulders. ’Bout a foot high, above the plaque. Lemme leave the casting and the mason up to you and Ray, can I? Then we’ll get it fixed up, and have a little service out here in the spring. Surprise Mom…get a few of the Navy High Command out. That little glade will be full of sailors and cowboys. When the priest blesses the stone, I guess Jack’s spirit will have come home, from half a world away…at least it will to all of us.”

“Beautiful, Bill. That’s gonna be real nice. And we’ll all be close to the boss every time those goddamned steers stray down by the river.”

“Hey, I’m glad we met up. That gate open at the pens?”

“Yup. I got young Razor right there, ready to close it soon as they go in.”

The three cowboys tightened their grip on the six strays, each man now with a drawn stockwhip. The horses squeezed in tight, edging up to the gateway. Then Skip broke loose, wheeled around, and came in behind fast, with a loud yell and a crack of the whip. The steers never even looked back, just bolted for the safety of the corral. Razor banged the gate shut behind them. “G’job, Skip,” drawled Bill Baldridge.

“Jest about gittin’ the hang of it now.”

And then Bill rode over toward the stables, calling back, “G’bye, boys—till next time, eh?”

“Yes, so long, Bill—don’t let ’em get you down.”

Then, somewhat mischievously, the young master of the big ranch called back, “Water trough’s a little empty.”

“Goddamit, I bin filling it for thirty-five years, I don’t guess any of ’em gonna die of thirst tonight.”