ROBBINS Harold - The Carpetbaggers

And behind the Northern Armies came another army of men. They came by the hundreds, yet each traveled alone. They came on foot, by mule, on horseback, on creaking wagons or riding in handsome chaises. They were of all shapes and sizes and descended from many nationalities. They wore dark suits, usually covered with the gray dust of travel, and dark, broad-brimmed hats to shield their white faces from the hot, unfamiliar sun. And on their back, or across their saddle, or on top of their wagon was the inevitable faded multicolored bag made of worn and ragged remnants of carpet into which they had crammed all their worldly possessions. It was from these bags that they got their name. The Carpetbaggers.

And they strode the dusty roads and streets of the exhausted Southlands, their mouths tightening greedily, their eyes everywhere, searching, calculating, appraising the values that were left behind in the holocaust of war.

Yet not all of them were bad, just as not all men are bad. Some of them even learned to love the land they came to plunder and stayed and became respected citizens.

THE SUN WAS BEGINNING TO FALL FROM THE SKY INTO the white Nevada desert as Reno came up beneath me. I banked the Waco slowly and headed due east. I could hear the wind pinging the biplane's struts and I grinned to myself. The old man would really hit the roof when he saw this plane. But he wouldn't have anything to complain about. It didn't cost him anything. I won it in a crap game.

I moved the stick forward and came down slowly to fifteen hundred feet. I was over Route 32 now and the desert on either side of the road was a rushing blur of sand. I put her nose on the horizon and looked over the side. There it was, about eight miles in front of me. Like a squat, ugly toad in the desert. The factory.

I eased the stick forward again and by the time I shot past, I was only about a hundred feet over it. I went into an Immelmann and looked back.

They were at the windows already. The dark Mexican and Indian girls in their brightly colored dresses and the men in their faded blue work clothes. I could almost see the whites of their frightened eyes looking after me. I grinned again. Their life was dull enough. Let them have a real thrill.

I pulled out at the top of the Immelmann and went on to twenty-five hundred feet. Then I hit the stick and dove right for the tar-pitched roof.

The roar from the big Pratt Whitney engine crescendoed and deafened my ears and the wind tore at my eyes and face. I narrowed my lids and drew my lips back across my teeth. I could feel the blood racing in my veins, my heart pounding and the juices of life starting up in my gut.

Power, power, power! Up here where the world was like a toy beneath me. Where I held the stick like my cock in my hands and there was no one, not even my father, to say me no!

The black roof of the plant lay on the white sand like a girl on the white sheets of a bed, the dark pubic patch of her whispering its invitation into the dimness of the night. My breath caught in my throat. Mother. I didn't want to turn away. I wanted to go home.

Ping! One of the thin wire struts snapped clean. I blinked my eyes and licked my lips. The salty taste of the tears touched my tongue. I could see the faint gray pebbles in the black tar of the roof now. I eased back on the stick and began to come out of the dive. At eight hundred feet, I leveled off and went into a wide turn that would take me to the field behind the factory. I headed into the wind and made a perfect three-point landing. Suddenly I was tired. It had been a long flight up from Los Angeles.

Nevada Smith was walking across the field toward me as the plane rolled to a stop. I cut the switches and the engine died, coughing the last drop of fuel out of its carburetor lungs. I looked out at him.

Nevada never changed. From the time I was five years old and I first saw him walking up to the front porch, he hadn't changed. The tight, rolling, bowlegged walk, as if he'd never got used to being off a horse, the tiny white weather crinkles in the leathery skin at the corner of his eyes. That was sixteen years ago. It was 1909.

I was playing around the corner of the porch and my father was reading the weekly Reno paper on the big rocker near the front door. It was about eight o'clock in the morning and the sun was already high in the sky. I heard the clip-clop of a horse and came around to the front to see.

A man was getting off his horse. He moved with a deceptively slow grace. He threw the reins over the hitching post and walked toward the house. At the foot of the steps, he stopped and looked up.

My father put the paper down and got to his feet. He was a big man. Six two. Beefy. Ruddy face that burned to a crisp in the sun. He looked down.

Nevada squinted up at him. "Jonas Cord?"

My father nodded. "Yes."

The man pushed his broad-brimmed cowboy hat back on his head, revealing the crow-black hair. "I hear tell you might be looking for a hand."

My father never said yes or no to anything. "What can you do?" he asked.

The man's smile remained expressionless. He glanced slowly across the front of the house and out on the desert. He looked back at my father. "I could ride herd but you ain't got no cattle. I can mend fence, but you ain't got none of them, either."

My father was silent for a moment. "You any good with that?" he asked.

For the first time, I noticed the gun on the man's thigh. He wore it real low and tied down. The handle was black and worn and the hammer and metal shone dully with oil.

"I'm alive," he answered.

"What's your name?"

" Nevada."

" Nevada what?"

The answer came without hesitation. "Smith. Nevada Smith."

My father was silent again. This time the man didn't wait for him to speak.

He gestured toward me. "That your young'un?"

My father nodded.

"Where's his mammy?"

My father looked at him, then picked me up. I fit real good in the crook of his arm. His voice was emotionless. "She died a few months back."

The man stared up at us. "That's what I heard."

My father stared back at him for a moment. I could feel the muscles in his arm tighten under my behind. Then before I could catch my breath, I was flying through the air over the porch rail.

The man caught me with one arm and rolled me in close to him as he went down on one knee to absorb the impact. The breath whooshed out of me and before I could begin to cry, my father spoke again.

A faint smile crossed his lips. "Teach him how to ride," he said. He picked up his paper and went into the house without a backward glance.

Still holding me with one hand, the man called Nevada began to rise again. I looked down. The gun in his other hand was like a live black snake, pointed at my father. While I was looking, the gun disappeared back in the holster. I looked up into Nevada 's face.

His face broke into a warm, gentle smile. He set me down on the ground carefully. "Well, Junior," he said. "You heard your pappy. Come on."

I looked up at the house but my father had already gone inside. I didn't know it then but that was the last time my father ever held me in his arms. From that time on, it was almost as if I were Nevada 's boy.

I had one foot over the side of the cockpit by the time Nevada came up. He squinted up at me. "You been pretty busy."

I dropped to the ground beside him and looked down at him. Somehow I never could get used to that. Me being six two like my father and Nevada still the same five nine. "Pretty busy," I admitted.