Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  On such a morning, Arthur Atwater sat on a dry patch of ground eating a tuna sandwich. He often took his lunch break before noon, having started in the vineyard at first light. Stretched out beside him was Antonio Lopez, who was already down to his last layer of clothing, a pair of old jeans and a treasured black T-shirt from the Hard Rock Cafe. He lay flat on his back with one knee raised and a leg crossed over it, chomping on an apple. The others on the crew were resting under a bay laurel some distance away. One man was singing a song in lilting Spanish, his voice rising and falling as it rode the sweeping tides of his emotions.

  When Atwater had finished his sandwich, he began a troubled examination of his right hand. He held it in front of him and regarded it with disgust. It could have been an alien thing grafted onto him for no known purpose. “Watch this,” he said to Lopez. He extended his fingers as far as he could, but they curled right back at him, drawn into a claw. “I’m going to be a total cripple before long.”

  “That’s ugly, man. You should see a doctor about it.”

  “I did see a doctor. He told me to quit pruning.”

  “How can you do that when it’s your job?”

  “That’s the same thing I asked him. He still charged me seventy-five dollars.” Atwater nodded disconsolately at the hand shears on the ground. “Plus I paid fifty bucks for those Felcos brand new. They’re supposed to be the best around. The Swiss make them.”

  “Do they have grapes over there?”

  “Good question! I don’t know how the hell you put up with it, Antonio. You could probably do two hundred fifty vines a day and not even feel it, couldn’t you?”

  “Probably I could. But I’m a lot younger than you.” Lopez bit into his apple, and the crunching sound was loud. “This is really tasty, Arthur. You want a bite?”

  “No, thanks. I got some chocolate cupcakes.” Atwater tore open a Hostess package, split a cupcake in half, and sucked out the creme center. A scrub jay, its blue feathers shiny in the brilliant light, hopped up to him, and he tossed it a few crumbs. “Here you go, you aggressive little bastard,” he said, as the jay hopped closer. “I’ll bet he’s never done an honest day’s work in his life.”

  “He doesn’t have to,” Lopez told him. “He’s a bird.”

  “You’ve got a point there.”

  “Birds are lucky. They have it easy compared to us.”

  “No rent to pay,” Atwater said dreamily. “No car insurance. No income tax. No alimony.”

  “No nothing, man. Everything in the world is free to them.”

  They were quiet for a while, their faces lifted to the sun. They could hear some crows cawing down by the creek, chasing one another around, black specks against the sky, and also the pruner who was singing, his voice louder now as he poured out his agitated heart and let it flow into lyrics that were drenched in gloom, in dust and bitter tears. Each sound stood out in the big silence of the vineyard.

  “Doesn’t Morales know any happy songs?” Atwater asked. “All that son of a bitch ever does is whine!”

  Lopez laughed. He was still flat on his back, still enjoying the sun. “This is a happy song, only it’s a little bit sad, too,” he explained. “A man falls in love with a beautiful woman, and they get married, but a horse runs over her, and she dies.”

  “Tramples her, you mean.”

  “Yeah. The horse tramples her.”

  “That’s a happy one, all right,” Atwater told him curtly.

  “You know what your problem is, Arthur?” Lopez sat up to offer instruction. “You don’t like anything romantic. How can you live the way you do, all by yourself in that trailer? It’s not natural, amigo. How long now since you and your wife split up?”

  “Three years. But the divorce just became final. I showed you those papers from the court.”

  “You showed them to me,” Lopez said in a withering way, nailing shut his case, “and look what you went and did.”

  Atwater remembered quite well what he had done. His flight from the farm was etched into that chamber of his brain where he stored similarly retrograde experiences, those embarrassing incidents that were the psychological equivalent of shooting himself in the foot. He remembered shoving all his furniture into his bedroom to hide it from imaginary thieves, deserting his dogs, flopping from bar to bar as he traveled north, conversing with a wide variety of crackpots, deadbeats, and philosophers, picking up a nineteen-year-old student nurse who was hitchhiking to Portland, and subsequently waking up with her at the Buckin’ Bronc Motel in Redding, California, his wallet empty and no idea in his head about how such a travesty had come to be.

  “Something about those papers must have set me off,” he said, amused by his own foolishness. “The ‘final’ part, I guess.”

  “You have to find yourself a girlfriend,” Lopez told him sternly. “I mean it, Arthur. You’re not being normal. At least you should have somebody to be fucking, even if you don’t love her.”

  “Love is the last thing I need,” Atwater muttered, although he wasn’t sure he meant it.

  “No, it isn’t, man! You’re just being lazy about it. I think you’re scared of it, really. It’s like when a person gets hit by a car, and it makes them afraid of the traffic forever. The person doesn’t even dare to cross a street anymore.”

  Atwater was impressed by the logic. “You’re a regular Oprah Winfrey, aren’t you? Why don’t you open your own therapy shop?”

  Lopez stood up and paced the vineyard row, his hands locked behind his back as he carried on his lecture. “Okay, Arthur,” he said. “Let me put it to you a different way. What if you die, and nobody cares about you? Don’t you ever worry about that?”

  “Give me a break, Antonio. This is ridiculous.”

  “Hey, I’m offering you some help here! Believe me, you’re going to die someday. It’s going to happen.”

  “Jesus!” Atwater shouted at him. “You think that comes as a surprise to me?”

  “All right, then,” Lopez said calmly. “You know what, Arthur? Here’s what to do. Take a good look at yourself tonight. Go right up to the mirror and don’t be scared. Look at your hair, for example. It’s already got a lot of gray in it.”

  “But I’m not dead yet.”

  “That’s what I’m saying to you, man. Time is on your side. Find yourself a girl you like and go after her before it’s too late.”

  “I’ve never been much for wining and dining,” Atwater confessed, with a fervor that denied the fact that he was stating the obvious. “I hate all that moony bullshit.”

  Lopez stared at him in awe. “You expect to get something for nothing? You expect a girl to spread her legs for you because you were, like, nice to her?”

  “Listen, Antonio, there’s a basic problem here. I don’t meet a whole lot of women while I’m out pruning. They don’t tend to be wandering around with a pair of Felco shears in their back pockets.”

  “Let’s start again from the beginning.” Lopez was visibly frustrated. “This is like dealing with a baby, you know? Say to me real plain what kind of girl it is you want.”

  Atwater thought it over. “Victor’s daughter isn’t bad,” he said, grinning broadly at the notion. “She doesn’t show you much, but she’s a looker. If I had a someone like her, I’ll bet my whole life would change.”

  “Don’t even joke about it, man!” Lopez cried. “Anna’s way above you. She’s Victor’s daughter, and he’s your boss! Come on now and say for real what type of girl you like. You like big tits or what?”

  “How in the hell can I have a special type when I don’t ever meet anybody?”

  “What about parties? Don’t you have any invitations to parties or anything?”

  Atwater laughed and got a little squinty-eyed. “Sure, I do. I’m invited to a Valentine’s Day fund-raiser for Carson Valley Elementary at the grange hall next week.”

  “You should go!” Lopez paused to savor an enjoyable barb he was about to deliver. “Maybe it isn’t the pruning that’s making yo
ur fingers so crooked, amigo. Maybe it’s something else you’re doing to yourself at night in secret.” He motioned with his hand, up and down. “Something you’re pulling on?”

  “I don’t have the energy for that.”

  Lopez swept a bug from his cheek. “If you see someone at that party who attracts you, go right up to her. Don’t hesitate, man! My Elena, when I met her outside our 7-Eleven that night, a ton of guys were coming on to her. But she went home with me.”

  “That’s because you’re so handsome and smart.”

  “No, Arthur. It’s because I had the most desire for her.”

  Atwater knew where Lopez lived, in an unincorporated area of Santa Rosa. It was a neighborhood of small rental houses occupied primarily by Hispanic families. Tracts were beginning to surround it as the city grew.

  “I saw where they’re putting in a new subdivision over by you,” he said. “They’ve got billboards up along the freeway and everything.”

  “Yeah, it’s getting too cramped over there,” Lopez said, with distaste. “Before it was much better. Maybe we might move if we can save up some money. I should ask Victor for a raise.”

  “You know what he’ll say, don’t you?”

  “Sure. He’ll say ‘no.’ That’s why I never asked him yet.”

  “Well, they’ll turn the whole county into a suburb sooner or later.” Atwater studied the orderly curve of vineyard rows arching from east to west and admired the symmetry. “They’d do it in Carson Valley if they could. God bless the grapes, I say.”

  “God bless the grapes,” echoed Lopez.

  Atwater ate the last of his cupcake and walked away, a signal to his crew that it was time to start in again. He worked with them for a while each day just to keep them from shirking. He liked the contemplative aspect of pruning, in fact, and how it freed his mind to ponder other things, but his ruined hand truly couldn’t tolerate the repeated clutching motions anymore. The first cuts he made that afternoon were sheer torture, but gradually the stiffness in his fingers disappeared and the pain was not so bad. He pruned next to Ernesto Morales, who seemed always to be lagging behind the others, and corrected his mistakes, gently and with respect. If he spoke one harsh word, he knew that Morales would throw down his shears and be gone, his pride insulted, and tremors would ripple through the crew and upset an essential harmony and balance.

  “This way, Ernesto,” Atwater said, demonstrating a cut. “Okay?”

  Morales had a droopy bandit’s mustache and murky, lifeless eyes the color of gravy. “Okay,” he replied dully.

  Atwater quit at dusk and left Lopez to dismiss the crew. Down the hill toward his trailer he went, filthy and fatigued and whistling for his dogs. They ran to greet him, and he played with them in the fading light, Rosie and Prince and the still unnamed pup, who had a habit of rolling around, panting, and begging to have her belly rubbed. “You’re a sexy number, you are,” he said, as he knelt to oblige her. The trailer had a plywood deck on two sides of it covered with worn all-weather Astroturf that gave off a sort of duff, and he sat in a lawn chair out there to take off his boots, propping his stockinged feet against a redwood railing that was falling apart. He watched in wonder as bats sailed out from their spectral community somewhere under his aluminum roof, little winged Draculas emerging from their hidden caves and tunnels. There were dozens of them, gleeful and intrepid as they looped about in goofy cartwheels to celebrate their nightly release. What a thing it is to be so free, Atwater thought jealously.

  He padded inside, filled a pot with hot tap water, and soaked his right hand in it for about five minutes. The aching, crippled sensation slowly went away. He could smell the faintest trace of urine rising from the shag carpeting, a lingering reminder of the mess that he’d had to deal with when he returned from his run to Redding, miserable and chastened. He did not dwell on the memory. He fed the dogs, put some canned chili on the stove to simmer, and repaired to his lawn chair again to make some notes in his vineyard log, a record he kept of daily events. Frogs in the pond, in the creek and in the shallows of the river, cranked up their coarse serenade. It was conducted to a score that Atwater could almost decipher by now, and it increased in volume as the sky grew dark.

  FRIDAY, FEB. 3RD. Cold early, then good sunshine to 3:30 p.m., high temperature of 62 degrees. Hillside ground drying out. We pruned in a block of Cab, old vines. Morales still too slow, no more than 150 vines for the day. Replace him?

  His writing done, he began his evening routine, a drill he had devised to get himself through the empty hours until bed. He could perform its rituals blindfolded—start a fire in the wood-burning stove, turn on the TV news, have dinner, and drink Spicy V8 or Diet Coke instead of beer because one beer on a boring night led inevitably to another. Sort through the mail—this evening, it brought him a telephone bill and a chance to own a gold Visa card without paying an annual fee—do the dishes, poke the fire, fruitlessly consult the TV Guide for something else to watch, eat a bowl of ice cream, stretch out on the couch, and find a book to read. He had been an avid reader for as long as he could recall, with a special interest in detective novels and stories of espionage. His grandfather, Tom Atwater, used to joke that it was all the reading he did that had caused his brain to be so scrambled.

  Tonight he dug into a mystery set on the Italian Riviera, where dazzlingly rich people were being murdered at an alarming rate. The book was fairly entertaining, but he was so tired that he nodded off before nine o’clock. He threw a big chunk of oak on the fire and brushed his teeth, staring at himself in the bathroom mirror as Lopez had ordered him to do and registering what he already knew. His hair was indeed going gray. He studied his face from different angles and decided that he wasn’t too homely, just frayed around the edges—nothing that two weeks on the beach in Viareggio wouldn’t cure. He supposed that he might even be judged borderline good-looking under certain loose circumstances. In high school, he’d been a star half-miler on the track team, and there was still an appealing litheness about him that made him confident he would never go to fat as most Atwaters did in middle age, including Old Tom, whose stomach had bulged as though he’d swallowed a basketball.

  Then he was alone in bed and suffering once more from a familiar hollowness deep in his soul. He felt this way almost every night, haunted by the loss of his marriage and able to remember only its positive aspects now. It seemed to him that he had spent his entire life searching for love in one form or another, and yet when he had finally found it in the person of his wife, he hadn’t valued it enough. He had turned away from it and made it go sour. He still had bitter regrets and believed that he was scarred now and would never be granted another opportunity. He wasn’t honestly certain he wanted one, either, because of the problems that love could bring. His efforts to find a girlfriend since he’d settled in the rural wasteland of the valley had been discouraging, too. The few women who had caught his eye were married or attached or not interested in his tentative advances—he was absolutely pitiful when it came to dating, still nervous and awkward even at his mature age, and wished that he could live in a world where a man just grabbed up the object of his lust in some mutual and wordless biological rite and started fucking—while those who did take to him soon proved to be seriously flawed, desperate for a husband or, in one outstanding case, even crazier than he was.

  It had always been like that for him. The transitions were never easy. As a child growing up in Napa, he didn’t mesh smoothly with so-called normal life, and his parents couldn’t handle him at all. That was one of the reasons he had sought refuge in his grandfather’s expansive presence. Old Tom was three times as eccentric as his pal Victor Torelli, Atwater thought agreeably, and he had accommodated his grandson’s need for a safe harbor by introducing him to vineyard work. The boy had flourished in the fields, at least when he was left to his own devices and not subjected to the supervision of any prominent authority figure. Atwater knew himself to be a first-rate defier of teachers, cops, bureaucrats, and a
nyone else inclined to be a bully or to wield power like a club, and his run-ins with such types had been legion, landing him constantly in after-school detention and once in jail for pushing an asshole highway patrolman who had given him an unwarranted ticket, and also earning him the promise of purgatory from his minister after he had dropped out of his confirmation class at the local Presbyterian church. He required all his fingers and a few of his toes to count up all the jobs that his explosive temper had cost him over the years.

  Ah, Atwater, he told himself, you make it so difficult! Still, in spite of his multiple flaws, he had managed to patch together a kind of life for himself in Carson Valley. It was nothing special, of course, but he could not be considered altogether a lout. He played poker once a week with some other grape growers, he fished the river for steelhead, the big sea-run rainbow trout, he swapped lies with the few anglers who continued to frequent Ed’s nearly defunct sporting goods store—Ed had absconded, in fact, and his mother was running the place while she tried to sell it and had lately begun stocking cute fly fishing apparel, much to Atwater’s chagrin—and he had a few good friends over in Napa that he visited on occasion. He was neither happy nor unhappy, just mostly on an even keel except for his nightly bout of melancholy, and in the vineyard, where he labored as hard as anybody, he flourished in response to the land and its quietly urgent demands.

  MONDAY, FEB. 6TH. Heavy rain, six inches by evening. No work. Shit.