Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  “La migra,” he said bitterly, holding the door for her. “They picked me up at the 7-Eleven.”

  “Why would they do that?” Elena asked him. “What did you do wrong, Antonio?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t do a thing.”

  “Come on. Be straight with me for once. The cops don’t hassle people unless they do something wrong.”

  She isn’t a Mexican, Lopez thought. She doesn’t get it. He was twice bitter. “I was with those guys, Tío and Jorge,” he said listlessly, hoping she would have some sympathy for him. “We were just goofing around. La migra, they made a sweep. They didn’t ask one question. They hit me, too.” He lifted his shirt to show her his bruised ribs.

  Elena would have none of it. “You’re a liar, Antonio, you know that? Why were you at that 7-Eleven in the first place? Were you trying to hook up with a girl?”

  “No girls were there. Not even one girl.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Why else would you be hanging out with those low-life creeps? Either for girls or for drugs. And you probably got into a fight.”

  “I didn’t fight anybody. Why can’t you be on my side one time, Elena?”

  Her eyes were murderous. “Because you lie to me, Antonio. It’s the same with your bullshit about a raise. You’re not getting any raise, are you?”

  “I am getting one.”

  “Well, I don’t believe you. You liar. Take me home.”

  They reclaimed Dolores from her grandparents. Elena put the child to sleep and immediately went to bed herself. Lopez was saddened by what had happened to him. How could he have begun the day with his lips brushing Elena’s hair, only to have the day conclude in this way? It was an awful situation. Elena failed to understand his problems and yet he loved her more than ever. This love is like a knife, he thought. It will kill me someday.

  He was up at dawn as usual and soon gone from the house. The rolling green vineyard country brought him some comfort. He was always in harmony with the farm. Its laws were simple, clear, and immutable, yoked to the seasons and understandable to anyone in touch with the cyclical rhythms of the earth. All morning, he weeded one row after another with his hoe. He was steadied by the work, an ear close to the whispering leaves and shoots, his head lowered in an act of concentration so devout that he didn’t see the two white men until they were almost upon him. For a few seconds, he figured that they must be border patrol agents out to question him again, but they weren’t wearing any uniforms and had no revolvers or nightsticks.

  “Boss man around?” The speaker had wooly sideburns and a toothpick jutting aggressively from his mouth.

  “Victor or Arthur?”

  “Already spoke with Victor.”

  “Arthur’s in town,” Lopez told them. “He’ll be back by noon.”

  “We’re from Consolidated Vintners,” the toothpick man said. “This here’s Rawley Kimball, your new field agent. You’ll be seeing a lot of him this summer.”

  Kimball made no move to shake hands. His right one was mangled, the fingers bent in on themselves, and he hugged a clipboard to his chest. “I had a little accident involving a chain and a drive-shaft,” he explained, in a friendly way. “We’re just here to visit with the grapes, son.”

  “They’re pushing real good,” Lopez said with pride. “Those are happy grapes.”

  “Why don’t you let us be the judge of that?” said the toothpick man.

  They set off to tour the vineyard on their own. Antonio saw them put their heads together and write notes on the clipboard for an hour or so before they left. He went back to his weeding in earnest then and hoed until the sky was streaked with fading clouds. He bid farewell to Atwater, who was up on his tractor for a last pass at tillage before dark, and started along the dirt road he knew so well, having been its virtuous traveler now for eight full years, a master of its every rut and bump. As he drove on, though, he felt his worries begin again, plaguing him in the way of a recurring nightmare, so at the top of the road he turned left instead of right, away from Santa Rosa toward Carson Valley town, thinking that he would stop at La Perla Roja, feed some quarters to the jukebox, and shoot a few games of pool before he went home.

  8

  In a meadow off Carson Valley Road, on Pepper Harris’s ranch and by his invitation, Anna Torelli went hunting for mushrooms a warm April morning after several days of light drizzle. Harris, his graying porcupine crewcut in sharp contrast to his yellow rubber boots, led her through the damp ankle-high grass and showed off his expertise by pointing out some inky caps and some puffballs, although he passed them up. He also ignored a few jelly ears on a fallen oak. It was clear that Pepper had something else in mind altogether. Anna stayed close to him, moving along almost at a trot, and followed him down a modest slope and across a runnel. The sun brought up a loamy smell and cooked to pungency the horse manure in a small corral nearby, where an old roan mare was trying to get at some milkweed just outside her fence.

  Harris hiked another ten paces at double time, stopped abruptly, cast his eyes about, and dropped to his knees. His Swiss Army knife flashed out from his pocket, and he used the saw blade to part the grass and reveal a half dozen agaricus campestris—he knew the Latin name and was obviously delighted to recite it—grouped together in tight formation.

  “Ah,” he said lovingly, with a gentle exhalation of breath. “Pinkies. The last of the season. Aren’t they pretty?”

  Anna knelt to have a look. They resembled supermarket mushrooms, but when Harris dug one up and turned it over, she saw that the fluted gills underneath were a delicate pink.

  “That’s the perfect color. It means they’re real young,” he told her. “I like to slice them thin, cook them in butter, hit them with a splash of sherry, and sprinkle on some parsley and a little salt and pepper. I mean, you’re in for a serious treat.”

  “Thank you, Pepper.”

  “Don’t thank me. It’s my pleasure.”

  They scoured the meadow and collected about thirty more mushrooms before they quit at last. Harris, ever the gentleman, insisted that Anna take the lot of them. She was enjoying an overflow of attention from her father’s pals these days, not a few of them bachelors or widowers, kindly old men with a hole in their lives that she was able to periodically fill. That wasn’t a bad role for someone on the mend, she thought. Only three weeks had gone by since the funeral, and she was still in the process of healing. The old men were enamored of her company and felt duty-bound to introduce her to every last aspect of the valley, believing that they—and they alone—held title to it. It was their way of expressing their concern over her mother’s death, Anna supposed. They had adopted her as they might have an orphan, and she was thriving on it, as silly as it seemed. By accident, she had landed in the middle of a pastorale that was doing wonders for her spirits.

  The beauty of Carson Valley, its colors and flowing contours, newly revealed at all hours in the everchanging light, had become a source of great nourishment to her. Often she indulged in extravagant fantasies about what the Torelli farm could become someday, imagining a fieldstone chateau and a prize-winning cellar. She would turn the vineyard into a grand estate on the Provençal model, she would wear long dresses and wide-brimmed hats and plant bougainvillea and hibiscus as a floral border along the deer fence. Preposterous, yes, but this was a time in her life that she had set aside for dreaminess. Anna wanted no commitments beyond the moment. She had not felt so free in years. Sometimes she thought she would prefer to rusticate forever, although more often she diagnosed herself as just another victim of spring fever. Come the hard sun of early summer, and her enthusiasm would surely wane.

  At any rate, she had bought herself a bit more time away from the bookstore and New York by inviting Jane Weiss out for a visit later in the month. As for the farmhouse itself, Anna had concluded her labors on it for now. She had done everything she could do short of painting it and undertaking some major repairs and renovations. Every bathroom still had peeling wallpaper in a w
ide variety of grotesque patterns, as well as porcelain fixtures that were permanently grimed with streaks of oil, grease, and ground-in vineyard dirt. In spite of such nuisances, she took a measure of satisfaction in having saved the old homestead from a sorry slide into oblivion. She had recently splurged on a pair of handsome Adirondack chairs in hunter green for the porch and sat out there on balmy evenings to soak up the sunset. Here she and Jane would convene to discuss the future of their business and would no doubt wind up discussing plays, movies, politics, and the sex lives of their mutual friends instead.

  Anna was feeling starved for some female companionship after being so often surrounded by men. True, the old guys were sympathetic, earnest, and never overbearing, but they were of another species entirely. There were some things that she simply couldn’t talk to them about. Once she had alluded casually to her menstrual cramps while Fred Vescio was in the vicinity, and Fred had stuck his fingers in his ears and almost fainted. The only woman Anna saw regularly was Betty Chambers, her occasional tennis partner, but Betty could seldom spare more than a couple of hours on account of all those children, who relied on her to be their transportation coordinator. On her own, Anna swam laps at the public pool in town, took walks around the property and up into the hills, slept in if she felt like it, and was a constant patron of the Carson Valley Library, where she indulged in long leisurely afternoons of reading.

  She brought home the mushrooms and scrubbed them at the kitchen sink. From her window, she could see acres of glowing grapevines and swore that the leaves and tendrils were unfurling before her eyes, inch by inch, at an incredible rate of speed. The push was on for fair, as the farmers liked to say, and it had Arthur Atwater hopping to keep up. He was a regular whirling dervish these days. Rarely did he have any spare time to field her questions now. With the help of some field guides and some dog-eared Boy Scout manuals from his youth—Anna cracked up whenever she thought of him in his Webelo uniform, a sash of merit badges across his chest—he had schooled her in the local flora and fauna and had also taught her a bit about wine grapes, always stiff and formal in her presence, but he was apparently incapable of cutting loose, still as tightly wound as he was on the morning she had first met him. What would it take to shake him up? And did she honestly want to tackle the job? It was something she had pondered more than once.

  In private, she had to admit that Atwater continued to intrigue her. He reminded her of Gary Cooper in one of those grainy Technicolor westerns that her father liked to watch—stoical, honest, reserved, and devoted to a code of behavior from centuries past, with a few probably not very riveting secrets that he was loath to reveal. It was a physical thing that Anna had for him, really. He came freely to her in fantasies, but in the flesh he remained inhibited. He had yet to show an iota of romantic interest in her, in fact. There were no dinner invitations, no flowers, cards, or flirtatious gestures. He had not made the tiniest move toward her that could be interpreted as extracurricular. Atwater was merely a cold fish, Anna thought at times, a loner content to wallow in his dump of a trailer, but she knew it was far more likely that he was already screwing some short-skirted, empty-headed barmaid in town on the sly. She and Arthur were apples and oranges, pears and tomatoes, X’s and O’s. He clearly had the right idea in leaving her alone.

  Jack Farrell, on the other hand, was boiling over with misdirected lust after their single never-to-be-repeated date. Jack had squired her to The Rib Room for drinks at the piano bar and dinner in the restaurant, where he consumed a gargantuan surf-and-turf combo and coaxed Anna into hauling away a half pound of scorched sirloin in a doggie bag. As a topper, he had served up a massive good-night kiss in the French style that she was too surprised to fend off—full on the lips with his mouth wide open, the whole dismal bit. It was a measure of her buoyant mood that the kiss hadn’t thrown her into a suicidal depression. She had turned down all his subsequent requests for further assignations, usually with considerable vehemence, but Jack kept calling every few days anyway to “shoot the breeze,” parceling out the hot gossip and regaling her with his many addled schemes to promote Carson Valley as a tourist destination, including a plan to fly to Italy and convince the mayor of Florence, if there was one, to agree to become a sister city.

  Anna wrapped up half the mushrooms in a cellophane package tied with a bow and gave it to her father the next day. They had fallen into the habit of having lunch together once or twice a week. It was a more enjoyable ritual than she ever would have guessed. “Ah, pinkies,” he said when she arrived, echoing Pepper Harris. The old man, too, was in salutary shape and remained resolutely uninterested in vineyard affairs. His command of metaphors to describe the extent of his uninterest was also increasing. He would rather suffer a double hernia, he had told Anna at their last lunch, than ever discuss wine grapes again. His major concern at present was the dime store adjacent to his office, whose aged owner had sold out and retired to Palm Springs. Carpenters were dividing it into four smaller retail spaces, and Torelli had a hurtful paranoid vision of the trendy shops that might occupy them someday.

  “Maybe you ought to open up a bookstore next door, Anna,” he suggested, while he was slipping on a coat. “It’s a good location. Better than San Francisco.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” she told him. “You’d be yelling at me over the fence all day long. Has there ever been a bookstore in Carson Valley?”

  “Yes, ma’am. A Christian lady ran it.”

  “How did she do?”

  “She was finished in less than a year. Those video stores ate her alive. Put a book up against a video, and the video will win nine times out of ten.”

  “They say the Bible is the best-selling book in history.”

  “It didn’t help her any.”

  For once, Anna persuaded him to forego his restaurant of choice, The Country Kitchen, where the Senior Citizen’s Lunch cost just $2.99 and at least five kinds of pie were on the menu, to try Patisserie Parisienne. They had a sunny, two-block stroll over to it. The cafe was crowded with people grabbing a bite to eat between visits to wineries. There were Toulouse-Lautrec dancehall scenes on the walls and a scratchy tape of Edith Piaf playing over the sound system, her vibrato cutting through the clatter of dishes. Anna was afraid her father might bolt in the face of such effeteness, but instead he ambled awkwardly toward a table in back, the unwieldy bulk of him threatening to upset the delicate balance of the place.

  They began a long wait for service. The only waitress, a tormented farm girl, couldn’t cope with the traffic. “Don’t be so antsy,” Anna said, patting her father’s hand to calm him.

  “They come to you right away over at The Country Kitchen.”

  “Why don’t you look at the specials on the board?”

  “I can’t read writing that small,” the old man griped.

  “I’ll read them to you, then. They have a sausage plate with red cabbage, a salade niçoise with potatoes, green beans, and tuna, and a croque monsieur. That’s a fancy grilled cheese sandwich.”

  Torelli smiled in a nostalgic sort of way. “Your mother liked a grilled cheese sandwich, you know. With those bread-and-butter pickles she used to put up.”

  Anna was still astonished at how quickly he seemed to have recuperated from the trauma of losing his wife. She had expected him to wallow in self-pity—and he did, although not for very long. He came out of his funk very deliberately, by incremental degrees, as someone might crawl up from a deep well into which they had fallen, and when he spoke of Claire now, it was always with supreme affection. She appeared almost to exist for him, re-created from a list of loving particulars that he had stored away in memory and invoked at appropriate moments.

  “I heard this music for the first time my freshman year at Berkeley,” Anna told him, listening to Piaf with a wistful smile. “We’d get a bottle of cheap Burgundy, lay around the dorm, and pretend we were in Paris.” She noticed her father’s dour look. “No, Bud Wright wasn’t with us, Dad.”

  “
There’s a fellow who can go jump off the Eiffel Tower for all I care,” the old man said.

  “Bud wasn’t so bad. We were just kids. We made mistakes.”

  “Well, you were bound to. You wouldn’t take any goddam advice from anybody, that’s for sure.”

  “What sort of advice would you give me about Jack Farrell?” she asked him lightly.

  “Jack Farrell? Has he been sniffing around you?”

  “Like a stallion in heat. He’s pursuing me.”

  “I hope to hell you’re a fast runner,” Torelli said.

  Anna laughed. “I did go out on a date with Jack. He held me to my word. He’s one forceful kisser, I’ll say that for him.”

  “Lord, have mercy!” The old man shuddered. “I’m glad it isn’t any of my business who you sleep with anymore.”

  “I did not sleep with Jack Farrell! What a thing to say!” Anna was vastly amused. “And from the mouth of my own father!”

  “Sometimes I wish I’d slept with more women before I got married,” Torelli confessed without any shame. “I had the opportunities. What’s the big deal about this sex thing, anyhow? People should have more pleasure, not less.”

  “I don’t believe what I’m hearing.”

  “Well, that’s how I feel, anyway. Why do they make sex out to be so dirty? I don’t see the point of it.”

  “It’s a threat to the established order,” Anna said, wondering what act of God had transformed her father into the valley’s own Wilhelm Reich?

  “You can learn a lot about a person once they take off their pants,” he carried on, teasing her now. “When somebody’s naked, they don’t have much to hide, do they? Old Jack, he’s an ace ladies’ man. He might have something special down inside his trousers.”

  “Enough, please.”

  The waitress finally came to their table, strands of wilted hair escaping from under her beret. They chose not to consult the menu, sure that the overextended child might never reappear. The old man ordered the sausage plate, Anna the salade niçoise.