Carlos was the advance man for the trip, sent ahead of the Governor and his party by ten days so he could organize Jeremy’s reception by town and county officers and local district leaders. A tight schedule had to be set up so that all kinds of political clubs and civic associations would be given an opportunity to welcome the Governor.
After five days, Carlos sent back a tentative itinerary for the Governor’s approval.
They were to fly to the one jet port in the western counties, arriving August 9th, and then proceed in a fleet of cars with many stops along the way that would take them altogether until September 8th.
“Carlos will have to change those dates,” said Job. “I’m meeting the Chairman of the National Committee in Washington on August ninth, hoping to get the President to speak at one of your meetings once the campaign really gets going in the east. I can’t and won’t postpone anything as important as that.”
“Why don’t you meet us afterward then?” said Jeremy. “You could fly out west alone and get there August tenth or eleventh.”
The program included luncheons and dinners in small cities and large towns, nights spent in private houses or country inns, and what Job called “whistle stops”—brief halts for ten-minute speeches in village halls or schools along the way from one town to another.
Carlos described one of these whistle stops in a letter to Jeremy.
“Not even a hamlet. Just a crossroads, with one building. When we get there, you’ll wonder why we’re stopping at all, so I’d better explain. It’s partly because that crossroads is the social center for about thirty big sheep ranchers who’ve been rooting for you all over the county, but it’s also because this is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen in my life, and I want you and Tash to see it, too.
“You know how most rivers flow in valleys, so when you get a river view, you can’t get a close-up of mountain tops at the same time? Here, by some freak of nature, you have both. The river is right up there among the peaks of high mountains. You can hardly believe it even when you see it: five peaks soaring to the sky, cliffs plunging down a thousand feet or so to valleys below, and there, at the top, where it has no business to be, a river.
“That view is so improbable, it’s unreal. You get an eerie feeling just looking at it. At the same time, you have a feeling of awe, as if the whole planet was unfolded and laid out at your feet. What people call an ‘airplane view.’ Didn’t Anatole France say, ‘My front door opens on the infinite’? That’s exactly the way you’d feel if you had a house in a place like that.”
“These romantic Latins!” said Jeremy to Hilary. “Carlos has made that day’s schedule much too tight just to get this weird place in. You’ll have to cross it off the itinerary. If you don’t, we might be late for our last big meeting, the one at the new jet port in Boone City before we take off for home. That’s more important than any whistle stop, however picturesque.”
Hilary drew a blue pencil through the “weird place.”
“Carlos has done pretty well,” she said. “This is the only stop you’ve had to cross off his itinerary.”
When Tash and Jeremy were alone together they spent some time discussing their first meetings, as lovers are apt to do.
“From the first time we met we wanted each other,” said Jeremy. “Only we didn’t know it consciously at all. When Nature is bent on procreation she pushes us all around like pawns in a chess game, and the fascinating thing is that at the conscious level we always have perfectly good reasons for what we are doing that have nothing to do with procreation at all.
“Why did I want you as a speech writer? Why did you accept immediately and give up your column to do so? It was the only way we could have got to know each other so quickly. Why did I kiss you the evening the strike was settled unless it was because I loved you? I only kissed Hilary to have an excuse for kissing you. I realized that at the time, and yet I thought both kisses were sexless.
“What was the real reason you resigned? To break up our relationship? It was the very thing most likely to stimulate our relation, as you must have known unconsciously.
“Why did I come to your rooms late the night of the fire when I could so easily have talked to you the next morning? Because I wanted you and didn’t realize it at the conscious level.
“Each of us was in an intolerable situation. I was trying to go on loving a wife who didn’t love me. You were telling yourself that you would never fall in love because of what had happened to your parents. Something had to give. If it hadn’t been the fire, it would have been something else that brought everything to a head.”
“What about people who don’t want children? Doesn’t Nature push them around?”
“There aren’t any. Unconsciously, everybody wants children. That’s why we have over-population.”
The night before they left for the west, Tash lay awake in his arms long after he had gone to sleep. This time at Fox Run had been so happy for her that she hated to think of leaving the place even for a little while.
He stirred and opened his eyes. “Why are you awake?”
“I don’t know.”
He took her in his arms.
“It’s like dying . . .” she whispered.
And later he told her: “That’s what the French call it: la petite mort, the little death.”
15
THE MOMENT YOU stepped out of the plane you knew you were in high country. Wave after frozen wave of mountains ringed the mesa where the airport
