Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  A woman answered on the other end. “Puede hablar con Antonio Lopez, por favor?” Omar asked.

  “Just a minute.”

  The boy was skittish, apprehensive, overjoyed. The booth felt like a rocket ship to him.

  “Dígame,” Antonio Lopez said.

  “Omar habla!” he cried.

  “Con quien hablo?”

  “Omar Perez.” A blank silence greeted his words. “I say in English,” he went on. “I am cousin to you, yes?” That provoked no response either, so the boy switched back to Spanish and described how he and Antonio had met and reminded him of his offer. “Quiero trabajar contigo,” he said.

  “You should have called before you left, man. You should have written me a letter or something,” his cousin said. “There’s no work now, Omar. Not until the harvest.”

  “I can harvest, yes?”

  “It’s not until August at the earliest. The last part of August. Agosto, comprendes? Más tiempo.”

  “I come in August.”

  “Does your mother know where you are?” his cousin asked him. “Where are you, anyway?”

  “San Diego.”

  “You should go home, Omar.”

  “I come in August, please?”

  There was a pause. “If you show up, I’ll see what I can do. But I can’t promise you anything. You should go home. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I come in August.”

  “Come if you want. I can’t stop you, man.”

  “Muchas gracias.” The boy said his good-byes and moved off into the colorful swirl of the barrio, elated that the future had been decided in his favor.

  11

  The first field report from Consolidated Vintners reached Victor Torelli in his office mail on a Saturday in mid-May. He studied its six pages over a shot of Old Crow. He had never read a document so dense or data-strewn, its conclusions supported by numbers, percentages, and fractions that swam before his eyes, the work of a computer somewhere in the bowels of the universe whose intricacies he dared not contemplate. The news was depressing, if the report could be believed. The CV field agent, one R. W. Kimball, had employed an esoteric formula involving some advanced mathematics that Torelli could not fathom in the least to project an estimated yield for the vineyard of 4.2 tons per acre. That was far below his average yield of five-plus tons. Kimball listed several possible reasons for the problem, each of which, he suggested, pointed toward oversights on the part of the vineyard manager.

  Torelli rolled up the report and stuffed it crankily into a back pocket. He could have done without such news. His mood was already bleak. He had spent another rough night tossing in bed, his sleep interrupted so often by various aches and pains that he felt as if he hadn’t slept at all. His bum knee was as sore as ever, and his heart was bothering him, too. It kept jumping around in his chest and skipping beats, and he got so short of breath at times that a short stroll thoroughly tired him out. He was also subject to an extreme exhaustion that swept over him every afternoon and made him want to lie down wherever he was and rest for an eternity. The spell always passed after a few minutes, though, so he wasn’t ready to concede that anything might be wrong with him. He had, of course, not mentioned his worries to anybody.

  The day was bright and burning, already in the mid-eighties when Torelli stepped out of his office a little before noon. Catfish weather, his grandfather used to call it. Giovanni Torelli chewed Red Man tobacco, had jug ears, and wore suspenders that slipped down his shoulders and threatened to take his trousers with them. He was renowned for a special spaghetti sauce that he fixed with chicken livers, which also figured in the horrendous bait he liked to concoct. Every May, when the heat kicked in, Giovanni would head for the nearest butcher shop to buy a few pounds of innards. Then he dumped them in a metal pail, carried the bloody mess outside, and left it in the sun to cure for a week or so. The innards festered, slimed, suppurated, and reeked beyond belief, and when the stink got so bad that the family pets ran from it, Giovanni would consider the bait properly cooked and would try it on the lunker catfish lurking in the depths of the pond.

  The streets in town were busier than usual, Torelli noticed. Tourist season was in full swing again, with weekenders holed up in all the quaint bed-and-breakfast inns, city folks who blinked and gaped at the spectacle of an aging grape grower in baggy dungarees. I ought to do like the Indians do, Torelli grumbled to himself, and charge ’em a quarter to shake my hand. He felt the good heat penetrate his splintery bones and was certain that summer had arrived, no matter what the calendar date—the valley would be hot, dry, and ever more dusty right through until the harvest. It was a time of year when the pace of things slowed down at last, when farmers took a break to watch ballgames and odd-shaped clouds and did the neglected household chores that their wives had been after them to do since budbreak, a time given over in the old man’s mind to tranquil evenings on a bench in the square, where he and Thomas Atwater, the closest of pals, sat waiting to meet some girls.

  Torelli slid behind the wheel of his truck. He had a social obligation to fulfill, one that he would gladly have swapped for a nap on his couch, but Hazel Poplinger had put the screws to him. She was throwing a huge gala and had phoned him herself, all sugary and phony, to be sure that he would attend. It would not be a true valley event, Hazel had said, unless Victor Torelli graced it with his presence. What nonsense! Her formal invitation was strewn among the detritus on the old man’s dashboard, a fancy printed card trumpeting “A Celebration of the Bloom.” It featured an artist’s rendering of a grape flower in the form of a goddam tulip, when grape flowers didn’t even have any petals. Instead, there was a cap of green tissue that dropped off to reveal four white stamens lightly powdered with yellow pollen at their anthers. The flowers were so fragile that Torelli’s grandfather wouldn’t set foot in the vineyard while the bloom was on. Stai attento! he’d yell at his grandson, who was fond of chasing butterflies down the rows.

  The Poplingers lived on a high hill off Carson Valley Road. Although it was commonly asserted that Irwin Poplinger was a humble dentist, Torelli had more accurate information. The doc was actually a crack oral surgeon who practiced at a consortium of Bay Area hospitals and had earned a million dollars before his fortieth birthday. Poplinger was in his early sixties now, and the estate was a monument to his skill and his business acumen. The wrought-iron gate at the bottom of the driveway served him as a sort of trophy. Torelli had once been told that it had cost more than fifty thousand dollars. A filigree of tendrils were threaded in decorative swirls around a massive, sans-serif P. The mansion beyond it, up on a rise, was equally impressive with its turrets, fieldstone walls, and arched windows in the Gothic mode, a capricious estate praised in the leading architectural journals for its bravura style.

  The old man turned over his truck to a valet parker and paused to get the lay of the land. Guests were convened all over the estate, some of them in very expensive and fashionable clothes—more city folks on the lam, Torelli gathered—and he could hear the clink of glasses, lots of yakking and laughter, and a clear and winsome bell-like sound that came from a set of wind chimes. Some musicians were playing a Haydn string quartet on the patio, while children splashed around in a big swimming pool below them and batted a pink beach ball into the air. Entering the foyer, Torelli stopped to admire the marble floor, the elegant porcelain vases, and an abstract painting that looked like the aftermath of a car wreck before he continued into a huge living room that afforded him a stunning panoramic view of the valley and its billowy green vines.

  The Poplingers were receiving there. Hazel was short and vivacious, while Irwin was lanky and earnest and seemed honestly to respect the craft of growing wine grapes.

  “How nice of you to come!” Hazel exclaimed, as though she had never made an importunate call.

  “We’re honored to have you,” Irwin added.

  “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Torelli told them dryly. “You know that grape flow
er on your card?”

  Hazel blinked. “Yes?”

  “It shouldn’t have any petals.”

  The old man excused himself and escaped to the patio, where he was accosted by a four-eyed gent with three cameras draped around his neck. “Photo for the Herald?” the fellow asked him.

  “There’s no need to shoot a photo of me,” Torelli complained, although he whipped out a pocket comb and started right in on his wavy white hair.

  Charlie Grimes toddled over, eager to be part of the composition, and edged his way into the frame. He was holding a full-to-the-brim flute and slopping champagne on a Navajo rug. “Hell, yes, take our picture!” he shouted, zooming a fist into the air. “We’re the very pioneers of Carson Valley!” He put an arm around Torelli, pulled him close, and whispered, “Hold still, goddam it. I need the publicity!”

  A flashbulb popped, and the photographer dashed off. “There now, that didn’t hurt, did it?” Grimes asked. “Isn’t it nice to be a celebrity for once?”

  “Celebrity, my ass.”

  “What’s eating you, Victor? You don’t look so swell, you know.”

  “Neither will you when you’re almost eighty.”

  “Don’t you be pissing on my shoes,” Grimes told him huffily. “I’m your friend, remember? Why don’t you go out back and listen to those fiddlers in tuxedos? Maybe they’ll cheer you up.”

  Torelli obeyed. Standing on the patio as the string ensemble cycled into a minuetto allegro movement, spritely and uplifting, he surveyed the festive scene on the backyard lawn. He could smell some beef and pork ribs cooking on a grill at a barbecue pit where a black man, the rarest of valley sights, tended them with a pair of tongs over ember-bright coals, his apron soiled with sauce. He wore a toque that had a red star on its crown and in script the words Original Willie’s BBQ. Bowls of coleslaw, beans, mustard greens, and several kinds of salad were on a side table, and the old man took a place in line and helped himself to the food, accepting a heavy ration of ribs from the smiling chef.

  He ate on his feet and observed the goings-on around the swimming pool. His daughter was reclining on a chaise lounge and chatting with Dick Rhodes. He had not seen Anna so mellow or carefree since she’d gone off to college. That her contentment was due, at least in some measure, to her affair with Arthur Atwater was difficult for the old man to swallow, but he had learned long ago that hearts were lunatic, not rational. Love of that sort had its own dynamic. It struck with the speed of light. He thought of stooping hawks, of a stone dropped from the top floor of the leaning tower of Pisa. Atwater was a pretty scuffed-up individual, but then Torelli had not chosen his own wife on the basis of her beauty. Claire had instantly touched something in him, an empty place that he had never before recognized as empty. He had been half a man and unaware of it, and she had made him whole.

  It was the middle of the afternoon before Atwater himself showed up. Without so much as a hello to anyone, he dived straight into the chow line, commandeered a vacant table, and started eating ravenously, as somebody does when they’ve passed up their lunch hour to keep working in the fields. Torelli approached the table with a sense of foreboding, the CV report like a grenade in his back pocket. Why should he be drawn into the business of wine grapes again when he had done all he could to be liberated from it? And how would Atwater, who had a tripwire nervous system, react to Kimball’s criticism? Well, he knew the answer to that one, but what if his vineyard manager went on the offensive? What if he had to let Atwater go? The unfairness of his predicament caused the old man’s heart to do its little dance.

  “Mind if I join you, Arthur?” he asked, with an abnormal blandness.

  Atwater glanced up from his plate. “No, sir,” he said. “I’d be glad for your company.”

  “You’ve got yourself an appetite.”

  “I could eat a horse, tail and all.”

  Torelli had a sip of his 7-Up. “Anna tells me you took the ladies fishing while her friend was here.”

  “Yes, I did, after Anna lit into me.” Atwater grinned, and his eyes were jolly. “Victor, I wish you could have been there! The look on Jane’s face when she hooked that bass! She jumped up and down, and the bass flopped and thrashed and ran on her, and she jumped again and landed on her butt.”

  “Did she keep the fish?”

  “Hell, no.” Atwater was nearly beside himself with mirth. “She’s for animal rights!”

  Torelli couldn’t bring himself to share in the fun. The CV report was weighing on him, so he tossed it on the table. “Tell me what you think of that, will you?”

  Atwater put down his fork and read it with close scrutiny. The old man could see his outrage mounting. When Arthur reached the last page, he turned back to the beginning and read it through a second time. “It’s bullshit,” he said finally. “Pure, one-hundred-percent, unadulterated bullshit.”

  “This Kimball, he’s a scientist,” the old man replied, with a hint of doubt. “He’s got a degree in viticulture. Wine grapes are his field.”

  “He hasn’t ever worked our farm.”

  “That’s not the point, Arthur. Nobody is questioning how much effort you put in. We all know how hard you try. Kimball just wants to improve things a bit.”

  “But it’s all hypothetical, Victor!” He pushed the report away from him and crossed his arms. “It’s nothing but graphs and projections.”

  “What about this section here?” Torelli flipped to the last page. “Where he says there’s some mildew on our Chardonnay because you didn’t do enough sulfuring?”

  “Nobody in the whole valley did enough sulfuring! We had showers all through the first half of the month, and the rain washed the dust off the leaves. Every grower got caught.”

  “He says we’ve got leafhoppers and thrips, too.”

  Atwater snorted. “Those bugs aren’t harming anything.”

  “Kimball believes you should do more spraying.”

  “Rawley Kimball doesn’t know that vineyard the way I do, does he? A little more of this hot weather, and the thrips will die off. The leafhoppers have enough predators to keep them from spreading. We’ve got a good natural balance going. Why ruin it with chemicals?”

  “This estimated yield here is low.” Torelli isolated a column of numbers. “It’s real low, Arthur. My Chardonnay vines always bear five tons or more. My old Zinfandel vine will go as high as six tons in a good year.”

  “We’ll come close to that.”

  “Not by Kimball’s estimate.”

  Atwater was fuming now. “I guarantee it. Measure this, measure that—he’s just blowing smoke, Victor. It’s only arithmetic. That’s what he gets paid to do!”

  “Suppose he’s right?”

  “I’m not going to argue with you anymore,” Atwater said flatly. “You can trust a computer, or you can trust me.”

  Torelli returned the report to his pocket. “It’s not a matter of who to trust, is it? This is science we’re dealing with here.”

  “Okay,” Atwater said. “I get it. You want me to quit.”

  “No, I don’t want you to quit! That’s the stupidest goddam thing you’ve said yet.”

  “You want to fire me instead?”

  “No, I don’t want to fire you either. Boy, you are a pain in the ass, Arthur! Why do you have to be so goddam sensitive?”

  “That’s how I’m made,” Atwater said contritely. “I can’t control it.”

  “All I’m asking you to do is to listen. Kimball, he’s not a bad fellow. You don’t have to take every bit of advice. Just take some of it. You can pick and choose. I—” Torelli’s train of thought was abruptly derailed by some intense shrieking. “It’s Vescio,” he said, shaking his head. “Wouldn’t you know he’d pull his stunt?”

  The guests were scattering in the wake of Fred Vescio who, in customary fashion, was cuddling a piglet in a blue baby blanket and feeding it milk from a bottle. His sister-in-law Maude followed several steps behind him, a hand covering her mouth, half embarrassed and half
enjoying the ritual, her hair, dyed a flame red color, alive in the sun. The piglet squealed, squirmed, and twitched its corkscrew tail whenever Fred thrust it into someone’s face. The valley old-timers were fond of barnyard humor and took the performance in stride, but some genteel friends of the Poplingers were very uncomfortable and seemed to think that the poor little critter meant to bite them. Their reaction only egged on Vescio, and he released the piglet and sent it skittering toward a particularly fainthearted woman, who slipped and fell into the swimming pool.

  “The day they handed out brains,” Torelli sighed, scratching a mosquito bite, “Fred was last in line.”

  “Victor,” Atwater told him, calmer now, “I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll listen to Kimball, but I won’t take any orders from him.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to take orders. Just to listen.”

  “You’re the only one who has the right to give me orders. So long as that’s clear.”

  “Fair enough,” the old man said. “But don’t go running away on me, Arthur. You’ll never get a fourth chance out of Victor Torelli. I can promise you that.”

  “I understand.”

  Torelli offered his hand to seal the pact. While they were shaking, they were joined at the table by Jack Farrell, who sat glaring at Atwater with total aggression for a minute or two without speaking. Silence wasn’t ordinarily Farrell’s style.

  “Well, Jack,” the old man asked him. “Cat got your tongue?”

  Farrell broke down. “All right, I’ll state my purpose. I’m here to challenge my rival.”

  “Who might that be?”

  “Him!” Farrell pointed at Atwater. “Arthur Atwater.”