“When he comes back to Argentina, what am I supposed to do, pretend I never met him before?”
“Since he was never in Argentina, how could you have met him?”
“OK. Marjorie told me to ask.”
She sipped her coffee, then gestured around at the rolling hills.
“I like your spread, Clete,” she said. “It’s so green….”
“As opposed to Big Foot Ranch, you mean? Yeah, this is great farmland. The topsoil is black and five, six feet deep. Too good, really, to graze cattle and sheep, which is about all they do with it.”
“I like i
t down here,” she said. “I almost hate to go back.”
“Nobody special’s waiting for you?”
She snorted. “Nobody who looks at me the way you look at Dorotéa.”
“How do I look at Dorotéa?”
“Like she’s everything you want in life.”
“Guilty,” he said.
“When the war is over, what are you going to do? Stay here? Or come home?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Somehow I can’t see Dorotéa in Midland.”
“What about ‘Whither thou goest,’ et cetera, et cetera?”
“It’s really strange, Beth, but I feel I belong here. Too, I mean. I will always be a simple roughneck-slash-cowboy from Midland, Texas, but—”
“‘Simple’? The one thing you have never been is simple. You’re really a chip off the old blockhead.”
“Which blockhead is that? My father? Or the Old Man?”
“I was thinking of the Old Man, but now that I think about it, probably both. I can see how you eat up this ‘el patrón’ business.”
“Meaning what?”
“Just what it sounds like. You like it. That’s an observation, not a criticism.”
“There is something to be said for putting out your hand and somebody putting a cup of coffee in it.”
“That’s not what I mean, I mean, I thought about it. You’re half Argentine. I knew that, but I never understood it until I saw you here. This is your country, too.”
“You’re speaking to Major Frade of the Marine Corps, the United States Marine Corps.”
“You know what I mean, Clete. Face facts.”
“What I’m doing right now is facing that fact. I am a Marine Corps officer. When the war is over, then I’ll worry about what else I am.”
“OK,” she said. “Are you going to get married in that gorgeous Marine uniform, Major Frade?”
“I never thought about what I would wear,” he confessed. “But, hell, yes, that’s a great idea.”
A maid came onto the patio and told El Patrón that breakfast was being served.”