by Bill Barich
He started in again as soon as the waitress left. “Here’s a bet I’ll make with you, Anna. I’ll bet you’ve slept with more men than I’ve slept with women.”
She was ready for him. “What’s the bet? The price of lunch?”
“You’re on. Want me to go first?”
“It only seems fair. You proposed the wager.”
“I have to think for a minute.” He shut his eyes, and his lips moved as he counted. “Five, all told. That must be about average for a man of my generation, or maybe a little more. How about you?”
“I’d say right around twenty,” Anna informed him, with a straight face.
“Twenty!” He pounded the table and nearly sent it flying. “You’ve been to bed with twenty different men?”
“It could be closer to eighteen. Let’s see, there was Bud Wright, of course, and Eddie Santini and the Mexican guy who worked in the grease pit at the old Esso station—”
“Never mind, Anna.” He was barely able to conceal his distress. “You don’t have to name every goddam one of them.”
Anna was pleased with herself. She would happily pick up the tab.
They ate their meal with good appetite. The old man made grunting sounds of approval as he cut up his sausages of duck, veal, and pork, washing down the food with a glass of red wine. It was mid-afternoon when they departed. The sun was still bright in a clear sky, but Anna could feel a chill in the air and turned up the collar of her denim jacket.
“It’ll probably freeze tonight,” her father warned her. “Arthur better be on the ball.” He glanced across the square. “Who’s that outside my office?”
She looked. “Charlie Grimes, I think.”
“I’ll be damned. That’s three visitors in one day. Antonio, he came by this morning to ask me for a raise.”
“Did you give it to him?”
“Hell, no. We can’t afford it. He’ll get a bonus like Atwater does if the grapes go well. The boy’s all upset. Somebody put it into his head that he could earn more money as a roofer.”
“Can he?”
“Maybe. But roofers die young.”
Grimes was resting on the office steps and perusing a Valley Herald. His clothes were spackled with whitewash, and he had whitewash in his hair, his eyebrows, and his nostrils. It was as if he had jumped into a bucket of whitewash and swum around in it until every exposed portion of his anatomy was thoroughly coated.
“Old Charlie Grimes!” Torelli called to him. “What are you doing darkening my door?”
“I ventured into town for a cocktail,” Grimes said. “I thought you might venture to join me over to the Bullshot.”
“You been painting your barn?”
“I’ve been painting it for almost three days now.”
“It’s a bigger barn than you ever thought it was, isn’t it?”
Grimes cackled. “I never encountered a barn so goddam big!”
“I ate French food for lunch,” Torelli bragged.
“That don’t make you the president of anything,” came the reply.
Anna pecked her father on the cheek and left him with his ancient crony, a man Victor had once praised for his ability to string a line of bullshit from the valley all the way down to Bakersfield and not get caught. She was impressed by the duration of their friendship, a tricky relationship compounded over time and surviving for more than fifty years. It seemed to defy a law of nature she was gradually being forced to accept, that everything on earth was frail and fleeting, destined to crumble. All you could cling to in the end, she thought, were those loving particulars.
She stopped at the library on her way home. She browsed among the stacks and found a novel that looked intriguing, along with an old buckram-bound edition of James Carson’s journals that a company specializing in Californiana had published decades ago. Anna watched the sun drop behind the western hills as she drove out to the farm. There was no wind and not a single cloud, and the afternoon grew colder. The landscape had an absolute clarity, each detail fixed firmly in space with none of the soft focus of a warm and hazy day. She kicked up the furnace in the house and carted in some oak and madrone logs, aware of an anticipatory silence in the valley. It was as if every farmer had shut down every piece of machinery to listen closely to what the elements had to say.
Antonio Lopez showed up on her porch at twilight and asked to use the telephone. The sky behind him was molten.
“Is anything wrong?” she asked him. It was unusual for Antonio to come knocking.
“No, it’s just about what groceries to buy,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you.”
“It’s no bother at all.”
She gave him her cordless phone and let him stand in the foyer while she busied herself in the kitchen, noisy among her pots and pans, but she heard the sounds of an argument anyway. It was being conducted in sibilant and fervent Spanish. Lo siento. Como? No. No. Qué quiere decir esto? Estoy cansado, tambien. No sea tonto! Lo siento. Lo siento. And then, “I’m done, Anna.”
She walked him out. “The sky’s on fire,” she said, marveling at the glow.
“Poor Arthur,” Lopez said.
“You think it will freeze?”
“It’s gonna freeze for sure.”
After a light supper, Anna sat by the fireplace to read Carson’s journals. They gripped her with an unexpected force because the writing was so immediate and reflected such a grand passion for adventure. The American West still had a quality of myth and represented true danger as well as potential rewards to Carson and his team of explorers. There was a portrait of the author that served as a frontispiece and brought him vividly to life. Robert Vance, a famous photographer of the period, had shot it at his studio in San Francisco when James Carson was in the full bloom of middle age. He looked prosperous and well fed, wore a bushy black beard, and posed with his right hand resting on a globe, as if the planet itself could be counted among his possessions.
That evening, Anna learned how Carson, a wealthy furrier, had crossed the Mississippi River from St. Louis with a party of ten men. They were headed for Fort Ross on the Pacific Coast of what would later become Sonoma County, an outpost where some Russian hunters did a thriving trade in sea otter pelts. Carson had hoped to do some business with them, but the Russians had hunted the sea otters almost to extinction, so he left in disappointment and meandered inland through Pomo Indian territory until he came to the valley that now bore his name. The journals provided an illustration of the diseño that he had submitted to the Mexican government, a rough topographical sketch of the land he hoped to claim. He was awarded a rancho of six leagues on which to graze some cattle and described the property as being “fertile and glorious, very near to Paradise.”
Anna closed the book at ten o’clock and checked the porch thermometer. The temperature was 36 degrees. Atwater’s trailer was dark. He must be out prowling, she thought, on the alert.
She threw an extra quilt on her bed and slept fitfully for a few hours before waking to the loud barking of a dog. The house was entirely dark, and for an instant she didn’t know where she was. But then a profound sense of recollection came over her, and she remembered how her father’s heavy footsteps would wake her on just such frosty nights when she was a child. He would race by her bedroom and clamber down the stairs, and she would hear the front door slam as he disappeared into the vineyard to stand his lonely vigil. Sometimes her mother would get up, too, and make him some coffee to keep him going. The lights in the kitchen would go on, and Anna would pad down in her pajamas and slippers for a cup of hot chocolate or a glass of warm milk, standing by the stove and listening to the hiss of the sprinklers outside.
Again, the dog barked—two dogs, actually, Prince and Rosie. Anna stayed in bed and tried to go back to sleep, but something gnawed at her. She wanted to be included in the action, not kept out of it as she had been as a kid, when all she could do was to wait like a sentinel at her window, drowsy and yawning, for the sprinklers to stop and the crop to be s
aved. Shivering in her chilly bedroom, with goose bumps all over, she dressed hastily and went downstairs. She put on the old navy peacoat and a knit watch cap and grabbed a flashlight from a shelf. The time by the kitchen clock was three-forty. The temperature on the porch was now 34 degrees.
She walked hurriedly toward the creek, where she could see another light shining. The cold air rose from the ground and climbed above her knees and then up to her breasts, making her nipples hard. That was high enough to damage the tender buds and shoots of the grapevines for certain. The new growth would begin to wither and die in a matter of minutes without the water necessary to protect it, Anna knew. She was in the middle of the vineyard when she realized that the sprinklers might start at any time and drench her, so she began jogging. The rush of frigid oxygen through her lungs energized her, and when the dogs picked up on her scent, they dashed toward her, two panting shapes in the dark, and Anna let them smell her and lap at her hands, their saliva hot and slippery on her icy skin.
The light by the creek converged on Atwater in his fishing waders. He was knee-deep in the stream and using a wrench to tinker with the Berkeley pump. He was so dedicated to the task that he failed to register her presence on the bank. “Arthur?” she said faintly, not wanting to scare him. “Arthur?”
He raised his head and looked up at her. She had never seen anyone quite so isolated, a solitary human being struggling in the night and on the verge of being swallowed by it.
“What are you doing out here?” There wasn’t any anger in his voice, only wonder and confusion.
“Can I do anything to help?”
He took a few seconds to answer. “Yes, you can. Scuttle down the bank and steady that beam for me, will you?”
She did as he asked and took hold of a nine-volt lantern. “Where should I point it?”
“Right down here, where I have the wrench.”
“What’s the problem?”
“I wish I knew,” Atwater said, in disgust. “It could be some dirty fuel clogging the line. It could be the battery. It could be the same damn foot valve as last year. I ought to let the grapes freeze just to teach Victor a lesson.”
Anna watched him tighten the valve with his wrench, then step out of the creek to reflect on what he’d done. His fingers in the lantern beam were smeared with oil. From the hills across the river came a howling cry.
“Coyote?” she asked.
“That’s a coyote, all right.” He pronounced it the cowboy way, kaiyote. “Somebody’s sheep are in big trouble.” He slid down the bank and knelt by the pump to try and start it again. “Here goes nothing.”
Anna was supremely conscious of the stillness of the night. Even the dogs had stopped their dashing around and lay attentively on the ground, as if their fortunes, too, were riding on the moment. Atwater checked the level of the diesel fuel and applied his wrench to the foot valve a final time, but his attempts to get the motor going only resulted in a series of coughing chugs, little sputters that spiraled toward ignition and faltered on the brink.
“Turn over, you useless bastard,” he muttered, kicking the pump in his frustration.
It seemed to Anna that he truly believed the machine had a will of its own and was withholding its services for reasons no mere mortal could comprehend.
“Be nice to the pump, Arthur,” she advised him. “Give it another try.”
He stood staring at her with his fists on his hips. “Anna, that is the stupidest piece of advice I’ve ever been given,” he told her. “The pump doesn’t have any feelings. The pump is just a pump.”
“You act as though it had feelings.”
“Oh, this is comical, indeed!” Atwater shouted, throwing down his wrench. “In blackest night, heaven has sent me a pump expert!”
“I didn’t say I was an expert,” Anna corrected him. “But I do know that kicking a pump won’t fix it.”
“Well, what the hell! What have I got to lose? Some woman’s stupid goddam advice might be just the ticket.” He bent to the Berkeley as a doctor would, as if to apply a stethoscope to its faltering ticker. “I’m sorry if I offended you, pump,” he began, stroking it and glancing up at Anna. “How’s that sound? Am I doing okay?”
“Just get on with it. I’ve got my fingers crossed.”
“That’s another big help. How did I ever get along without you? Now if we can find a rabbit, we ought to cut off a foot.”
“Get on with it, Arthur.”
Atwater gave her a sour look and launched into his speech again. “I apologize for kicking you, pump, but I’ve been up to my ass in freezing cold water for about an hour out here, and I’m worried that my whole crop of grapes is going to die on me because you won’t work. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars here, pump. I’m sure you understand. You’re so goddam old, you must have seen it all by now. Most pumps your age are in the junkyard, aren’t they? Anyway, I promise never to kick you again. Now start, you little fucker!”
The pump erupted with another coughing chug, but something clicked this time. A plume of smoke shot up in a puff, and there was a resonant noise as the water from the creek filtered through a network of underground pipes to the sprinkler heads, and the heads began spraying water in rainbow arcs. Anna almost applauded, but she caught herself because the ordeal was far from over. The pump might still break down, and if that happened, the water on the vines would turn instantly to ice, and the ice would be every bit as disastrous as a frost.
“You can go back to bed now,” Atwater said wearily, standing on the bank and stripping off his waders. “I’ll be fine on my own.” He offered her a conciliatory smile. “You were right, I guess. The pump does have feelings.”
“I’ll bring you a Thermos of coffee if you like.”
“I wouldn’t refuse it.”
The night dragged on. Anna read by the fire and listened to the music of the sprinklers. The coldest hour was right at dawn, and it posed the last and greatest threat. She went out to the porch and watched the sky go from black and starry to the palest gray, a color unique unto itself, the color of first light, and when the Berkeley kept pumping, she experienced a slow release of the tension that had put a knot in her stomach. To the east, toward Napa and a spiny mountain ridge, the sun was on the rise, and as its warmth hit the farm, she and Atwater and the grapes were relieved of their burden. The vineyard was all shimmery with droplets of water pearled up on the green buds and shoots.
By eight o’clock, the temperature had risen to 39 degrees, and Atwater was able to shut down the frost-protection system. Anna intercepted him as he walked back to his trailer. She had a desire to stay connected to him, wanted a continuity between them. She was acting on an impulse, trying not to think her way around him. Up close, she saw that he had a three-day stubble and tired old eyes. He seemed battered and beaten.
“You did a superb job,” she told him.
He eyed her with distrust. “That’s a bit of an exaggeration.”
“That pump has to be replaced. You shouldn’t have to put up with such nonsense. I’m going to talk to my father about it.”
Atwater didn’t speak. He looked at her and through her.
“What would you say to some breakfast?” Anna asked him, with more urgency than she intended.
“Breakfast?”
“I mean, I’d like to cook you some breakfast. If you’re hungry, that is.”
“I’d say yes to breakfast. That’s what I’d say.”
They walked to the house together, and Atwater insisted on taking off his boots in the foyer. His thick wool socks, two on each foot, had several holes in them, but it didn’t appear to bother him. Anna cracked open a half dozen eggs and set some strips of bacon to sizzling in a cast-iron skillet. She could feel him staring at her from the kitchen table and knew what was in that stare, the tempered heat of it.
“Bacon frying is one of the best smells there is,” Atwater said, relaxing now with his hands locked behind his head and a smile on his face.
“You want my list of top ten smells?”
“If you’ve got that many.”
“I’m not so sure I do. There’s the smell of grass after somebody mows a lawn. Coffee brewing. Bread baking. The smell inside a dry cleaning store.” He paused to think. “How many is that?”
“Five.”
“Maybe I’m not as smart as I used to be.”
They made a feast of the scrambled eggs and the crisp bacon, some buttered toast, two kinds of jam, and some leftover potatoes fried with onions and green peppers. The sun was roaring through the kitchen, and the room was all ablaze. Anna felt a profound need to be close to Atwater, to hold him and be held by him, a need to extend the moment that they were sharing. It was that simple and natural, and yet it intimidated her so. The plates clattered in her hands as she cleared them away, and she dropped a juice glass in the sink and broke it and almost cried out in joy when she saw how bold she was going to be, stealing up behind him, too bashful to confront him directly, and lowering her lips to his ear.
“Come to bed with me, Arthur?” she whispered. She was struck dumb after that, and she became anxious and wished she could take back her words, certain that he would reject her and thinking she had never done anything so foolish in her life. She wanted to run and hide somewhere, but that sensation passed in a few seconds, and she felt brave again, strong within herself and convinced of the rightness of her need as she circled his chest with her arms. Her lips were still at his ear, and she asked him once more, with real confidence now, “Would you like to come to bed with me?”
“Yes, Anna,” Atwater said, shy himself as he reached up to her. “I’d like that more than anything.”
9
Atwater on his tractor rode the fields in turmoil the next afternoon, semiconscious and trying to dismiss what had happened to him. It was all wrong, it made no sense. He did not belong with a woman like Anna Torelli, a worldly woman with perfect legs and the softest lips and no tattoos anywhere. They were never meant to be. Two lonely people on a lonely farm on a cold and lonely night—it had been an accident, pure and simple. Only a simpleton would believe otherwise. He vowed to call Anna that very evening to set matters straight, sure that she would understand and probably be relieved. In a moment of weakness, they had committed an error in judgment, one that was forgivable but not to be repeated. He was the man, after all, and he would put a stop to the affair before it got out of hand.