Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“Ah? Well, yes. That’s true.”

“So glad to hear it.” She touched his wrist with two soft fingertips. “Planning to develop?”

“The property?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Maybe.”

“Maybe.” With a fingernail she traced a long, deliberate line down his wrist and across his palm, ending at the barrier of his wedding ring. “I’d like to discuss this with you sometime. But—” She rose abruptly from her seat. “Privately.”

Buzz looked over his shoulder and saw that General Norris, whiskey in hand, cigar in mouth, was watching him. Buzz smiled, and Asha hurried off. The General ambled over and proposed a hunting trip.

All fall, with mysterious frequency, the General had been dropping into Buzz’s life and standing him to drinks, talking of the agonies and ecstasies of corporate presidency, proffering cigars, and expanding endlessly on his Indian conspiracy theory. Buzz couldn’t figure out why Norris was suddenly so interested in spending time with him. The General had plenty of cronies and an army of sycophants, and he always seemed to have to hold his nose around Buzz. You could hardly call them friends.

And yet here they were on Buzz’s land at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, preparing for a midday hunt. The two men sat on safari stools on the bungalow veranda, a hundred yards downhill from the shelter. The land was as still as a chapel on a weekday, the sky a bluish shade of white.

The General unzipped his gun case and displayed his weapon. “A big man needs a big stock,” he said. He wore a red-and-black lumberjack jacket, green trousers, and gigantic swamp boots. His big thumb stroked the walnut stock. “I had this custom-made, from the barrel on up. You guess what it cost me?”

Buzz was loading the magazine of his Sako.

“Try three grand,” the General said.

“That’s a lot,” said Buzz.

“Worth every nickel, dime, and penny of it. I show you the scope? Take a look at this field.”

With an effort — the gun weighed a ton — Buzz raised the scope to his eye. It was a bright, flat field, extra wide, parallax corrected, with a crisp reticle. But a scope was a scope. “Not bad.” He handed the gun back to the General.

“It fits my eye, Buzz. It fits my eye.” He paused. “You got some kind of toilet out here?”

Toilet? He had thirteen hundred acres of land. “Up at the shelter.”

“We’ll stop there a second.”

The General stepped daintily off the veranda. Buzz dropped a handful of cartridges into his jacket pocket and followed. At the shelter he opened three locks and two doors and sent Norris to the toilet, which probably hadn’t been used twice in twenty years. He hoped they could kill a deer quickly so they could return to the city in time for him to eat a late lunch and work eight hours. A couple of young men from R&D had helped him write a set of programs to simulate air current tensors. He was working on weather prediction from a relativistic viewpoint, basing his model on the mutating coordinates of an individual pressure system — a new wrinkle, and it had some potential, at least in “simple” meteorological fields like the Great Plains. Around 7:00 he’d call downstairs for a Reuben sandwich, chips, pickles, and a bottle of Guinness.

Up here on the ridge the trees held their peace. Their bare crowns were studded with squirrel nests and galls and bluejays chattering at the dusty sunbeams. Today would have been perfect for just walking. Except for a short-lived inch of snow last week, there had been no precipitation since well before Thanksgiving. The land was dry. The leaves sighed and fluttered when you kicked through them, the warmth shimmering up from the red clay underneath.

Norris banged the door shut behind him and mopped his forehead and his gray-blond eyebrows with a handkerchief the size of a guest towel. “Let’s go shoot us some wildlife. You got a rope?”

“Darn. I left it in the bungalow.”

“We’ll do without. I wanna git.”

At the top of the ridge they turned and headed west at a good clip, the General striding along in visibly higher spirits and Buzz tagging after him. His machete slapped his thigh, and his high Wellingtons, not made for forced marches, bit the beginnings of blisters into his ankles. The ground was just a tawny blur. Buzz’s idea of a hunt was sitting in a blind while the sun came up, drinking coffee, chatting with his son-in-law Eric and then, maybe, aiming at a deer. The General stopped. Buzz caught up with him in time to hear his question. “This Osage country?”

“Uh, not really.”

The General started walking again. “I assume there was such a tribe.”

“Oh yes. Yes. There were actually two tribes, and then…the Missouris. Who were related.” Buzz drove a wedge of air into his lungs. “They were in the lower Missouri valley when the French came. The Missouris and the Little Osages, they stayed by the river. They got pretty much wiped out by smallpox, and by the Great Lakes tribes—”

“And whiskey,” Norris said, staring straight ahead.

“Sure, by whiskey too. But the Big Osages, they hung on right into the twentieth century. Down in the Ozarks. Then Oklahoma. They got rich. They got rich from oil leases. Can we stop a minute?”

Norris stopped.

“At one point they were the richest Indian tribe in the world. Although maybe the new generation—”

Norris sniffed. “How do you know all this?”

“Don’t you read the Post-Dispatch?”

“Savages.”

“Well. They weren’t all that savage.”

“I haven’t seen much evidence to the contrary,” Norris said. “They were savages.”

“Well, of course. Although that’s a judgmental way of looking at it.”

“Bloodthirsty, naked savages.”

“They were that, yes, it’s true, although—”

“There was twelve folks injured in the stadium, Buzz. Twelve serious injuries. And what do we read in the Post-Dispatch? How thankful we all should be these Warriors’ bark is worse than their bite. I bet those twelve people in the hospital—”

“Thirteen, actually. Martin Probst was there—”

“Probst.” The General spat and hit a sweetgum tree.

“Yeah. He got really busted up. He broke his finger and gashed open his neck. He thinks he lost about a pint of blood, and Barbara took him—”

“He have a measuring cup with him?”

“Seriously. He was right in the thick of it.”

“Entertaining the ladies in the box seats.”

“No, General. They had to take him to the hospital. I don’t see what you have against him.”

“He’s a little dandified for my taste.”

“I thought you were friends.”

“You thought wrong.”

“Aw, don’t tell me you’re letting that little argument at Municipal Growth stand between you two? I’m sure he’s forgotten all about it. There’s absolutely no—”

“A little too faggified.”

“Now wait just a minute, General. Give the man a chance. I’m on your side, don’t forget, and I say you’re taking this Indian thing too seriously. Now pardon me, but Martin Probst happens to be one of the most patriotic, generous and masculine men I know. He was at the stadium on Sunday, he was fairly badly hurt, it took twelve stitches—”

“So wait. He —bled? ”

“That’s what I just said.”

“Well if he bled…” Norris frowned. “Maybe I’ve. Maybe I’ve. Hmmm.”

Buzz owed a lot to Martin and Barbara, if only for having been kind to Bev when many of his other friends were beginning to strike her and Buzz from their dinner-party lists. He pressed on. “I don’t think there’s any point in spurning an ally like Martin. It doesn’t make sense.”

Norris fingered the muzzle of his rifle reflectively. “He bled for the cause…”