Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  Atwater seemed to find this diverting. “It’s news to me, Jack,” he said serenely.

  “You’re the asshole who stole Anna away from me, aren’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”

  “Maybe she prefers him,” Torelli suggested.

  “He stole her away from me, Victor! I never had a fair shot at her!” Farrell wailed. “If I did, she’d be in love with me. Hell, I can convince anybody of anything if I try! People from Hawaii have visited this valley on account of me. I’ve sucked in tourists from all over Europe. There’s a delegation from Senegal due in November. That’s a country in Africa. I am the Chamber of Commerce, friends. You better believe it.”

  “What’s the challenge?” Atwater asked.

  “A game of horseshoes. The winner gets to take Anna home.”

  “Like a duel, Jack?”

  “Exactly! Except nobody has to die.”

  “Suppose Anna has her own car?” Torelli asked.

  Farrell was flustered. He thought for a moment. “Sufficient unto the day are the worries thereof,” he said, rather pleased with his biblical scholarship. “Will you play, or won’t you?”

  “Sure, I’ll play,” Atwater told him.

  “Good. Fifteen innings, count-all. I pick Ron Santini for my partner. Who do you pick?”

  “I pick Victor.”

  The men removed themselves to a pitching court at the side of a barn that was carefully concealed by some artful landscaping. The Poplingers’ field hands maintained the court for their own use after work. A chalkboard hung from a nail on the wall for scoring purposes. Farrell tossed a coin and chuckled when it turned up heads and earned his team the hammer. His aim with the shoes proved to be erratic. The first two that he threw sailed past the stake by a good eight feet, propelled by the thrust of his anger, but Santini, a retailer of farm machinery, had once belonged to the National Horseshoe Pitchers’ Association of America and recouped with five ringers in just six turns.

  “Easy as pie,” he bragged after the fifth one, showing off a primatelike forearm.

  “Easy when you’re a professional,” Torelli growled at him. “Whatever became of that son of yours, Santini?”

  “Eddie moved up to Bend, Oregon.”

  “What’s he doing with himself up there?”

  “He opened a hardware store.”

  The old man was having trouble with the game. The shoes only weighed about three pounds each, but they felt much heavier to him. His tosses kept falling short, and he didn’t score a single point through nine innings. The fatigue and shortness of breath that had been bugging him added to his discomfort. The score was twenty to twelve, with three innings to go, when Anna walked up to him.

  “It’s a little hot for this, isn’t it?” she asked. “I’ll bet it’s a hundred degrees in the sun.”

  She took to the heat herself, Torelli thought. Her skin was tanned to a lovely bronze. “We’re having a duel,” the old man explained to her. “Your affections are at issue. The winner gets to take you home.”

  “Ha!” Anna cried. “Did it occur to anyone that I might have my own car? As well as my own wishes?”

  The game was decided in the next inning when Atwater’s team failed to make a point. “Do you concede?” Farrell bellowed from his end of the court.

  “I concede!” Atwater called back through cupped hands.

  Farrell came toward Anna at a shambling trot, taking pitty-pat steps like Babe Ruth rounding the bases after a homer, but she was too quick for him and veered off in a different direction.

  “Sorry, Jack,” she said, a possessive arm around Atwater’s waist. “Arthur’s my guy.”

  “But he accepted my challenge!” Farrell shouted. “Tell me one thing he’s got that I don’t.”

  “Savoir faire.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s French for cojónes,” Anna told him.

  “Cojónes?” Farrell asked. “You don’t think I have cojónes?

  They all started back to the mansion through the lengthening shadows of early evening. Torelli trudged along by himself slowly and warily. He saw in his daughter’s confident gait the same easy grace that Claire had possessed and recalled the strolls that they would take at twilight, just the two of them wandering around the vineyard and talking over the happenings of the day. How simple and yet how comforting, he thought. He realized how much he had depended on Claire and how much he missed her. All at once, with an utter certainty, he understood that the earth was wearing out for him. Though he was not a man who prayed, something like prayer gripped him, and he found himself hoping that he might die in relative peace, with no more pain than he could tolerate.

  He sat at a table again to watch the ceremony that Hazel Poplinger had devised to conclude her gala. Two little girls in flowing dresses, nieces of the hosts, materialized on the patio and carried a huge rectangular cake down to poolside, tripping once on the flagstone steps before they reached the spot where a caterer stood at the ready with a stack of plates and an urn of coffee. The frosting on the cake was white and raised up in curlicues at the edges. A talented pastry chef had added some purple bunches of grapes in a field of green leaves. Above the grapes, in luminous orange script, were the words, “Long May They Bloom.”

  “Speech!” somebody shouted.

  Irwin Poplinger was not cut out for speaking in public. He meant well, but he was terribly long-winded, and Torelli had to stifle several yawns behind a fist. He had almost fallen asleep when he caught a gamey whiff of perfume and saw that Maude Vescio had seated herself next to him and was applying lipstick and blotting it on a paper napkin.

  “That dentist can go on, can’t he?” she said under her breath.

  “He has the gift.”

  Maude was staring at him oddly. “You look a little peaked, Victor.”

  “I’m tired, Maude.” He surprised himself with the admission.

  When the speech was over, Maude insisted on bringing him some coffee and cake. She belonged to a different generation than his, the same one as Claire, and he had always treated her as a kid sister, both flattered and irritated about how she fussed over him. She considered him to be an important person, somebody from a better class. The Vescios were a rough-and-tumble breed, private and secretive and possessed of abundant and sometimes malignant vices. Maude was a Vescio by marriage only, of course, and so was exempt from such character flaws, but the old man remained leery of how she had flourished after her husband’s death. Her hair was too red, too optimistic.

  “You still doing all that traveling, Maude?” He’d heard about her recent trips to Lake Tahoe and Disney World in Florida.

  “Yes, I just love it!” She was a giddy sort, prone to outbursts of baseless enthusiasm. “And I’m off to Europe with my ballroom dancing club in the fall!”

  “If you’re going to Europe, you ought to visit Italy. That’s where my people are from. A city in Tuscany called Montalcino.”

  “Well, what do you know about that!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Torelli said, with pride. “I was just thinking about my grandfather this morning.”

  “Isn’t that a coincidence!” She inclined her head toward him in a show of interest. “You must tell me all about him.”

  Torelli scoffed at the idea. “I’d bore the pants off you.”

  Maude ruffled her skirt with a hand. “But I’m not wearing pants!”

  “You got me there,” the old man said, admiring her quick wit and launching into his story.

  12

  On Memorial Day, the Valley Herald always ran a traditional front page photograph to remind its readers that full summer was just around the corner. The composition of the photo was based on a famous painting by Thomas Eakins, but no one except the town librarian, who was an amateur art historian, still remembered that. It showed a group of schoolkids, not a few of them in their underwear, cavorting on a bridge by the river, where a temporary dam of bulldozed earth had created a swimming hol
e that was known as Carson Beach. It was the paper’s conceit that the children were about to dive into the water, a freefall of about thirty feet, but nobody had done that since the Markley twins had their accident, and the boys and girls were actually shepherded away right after the shoot and treated to some ice cream at a Baskin-Robbins.

  The back pages of the same issue featured a few pictures from the Poplingers’ gala, including a shot of Anna Torelli grouped among some other guests at a buffet table. When Anna came across it over breakfast one morning, she was astonished by her own radiance. She barely recognized herself at first—her tangled emotions weren’t reflected anywhere on her face. She looked serene, relaxed, and younger than she had in years, despite a terminally overwrought Jack Farrell lurking behind her at the margin of the frame. Farrell’s contorted expression bore a curious resemblance to a gargoyle that Anna could recall seeing on a church façade in Germany during her grand tour of Europe. “Visitor From Back East,” read the caption above her head, but she didn’t feel like a visitor anymore. Instead, she felt like someone whose true location, an aspect of the spirit, couldn’t be pinned down on any map.

  Slowly and with difficulty, Anna had accepted the fact that it was time for her to leave Carson Valley. Her sojourn on the farm had the texture of a pleasant dream from which she was reluctant to wake, but she had run out of reasons and excuses to prolong it. Jane Weiss was understandably tired of covering for her at the bookstore and kept pestering her by phone until she had agreed to return to New York at the end of June. She was trying to be sensible about the arrangement and told herself that there was really nothing final about her departure. If the valley still tugged at her when she got home, she could make the necessary changes in her life and come back. She hoped, too, that the distance might grant her some clarity, although she had a sneaky suspicion that her current problems wouldn’t ever bend to logic. On a certain level, she understood that this particular idyll could not be reconstructed once it was undone.

  Atwater was the sticking point, of course. Anna had no idea what to do about him. So far, she had dared to broach the subject of her leaving just once, while they were picking plums from an old orchard tree in the meadow. She mentioned it casually in passing as she might have an insignificant item of gossip, but the news seemed not to disturb him at all. “I always knew that,” he replied simply, turning away from her. She was crushed by his detached response, but what had she expected? If he had gotten down on one knee and begged her to reconsider, would it have made a difference? Definitely not. Her plans were firm. Besides, Arthur wasn’t the type to beg—under any circumstances—and Anna couldn’t blame him for the bind she was in. Against her better judgment, she had allowed herself to develop feelings for him. She had assumed at the start that their affair, in its sheer incandescence, would quickly crash and burn, but she desired him more than ever now, and not merely in bed.

  For Atwater, this difficult and eccentric man, had given her a wonderful gift. He adored her without reservation. Anna would never have guessed how satisfying that could be or how much she craved such attention. When she was married to Bud Wright, she had taken on the role of an adoring young wife, but it was just playacting, and extremely unconvincing at that. Often Bud must have seen that she was putting on a show for him; but in Arthur, there was nothing false. All his actions and convictions, right or wrong, admirable or despicable—and he could be despicable—had a wholeness about them, a richness and a roundness, as if he had cast off every imaginary and fantastic version of himself long ago and could only offer up his essence. He was incapable of half measures and only knew how to love someone with the full screaming intensity of his heart. And Anna had no doubt he loved her that way.

  As much as she doted on his affection and flattery, though, it could be overwhelming sometimes. Atwater—whose motto might have been “Damn the torpedos”—lacked the slightest talent for nuance. In his wild exuberance, he was insensitive to Anna’s occasional need for privacy and had a bad habit of intruding on her whenever she chose to be alone for a while, and she would have to withdraw from him to pursue her own interests. He resented it, naturally, but she felt that she was under attack. What he wanted was for Anna to be up to the pitch of his energy and ready for some high jinks at any hour of the day or night, while the last thing she wanted was to be grafted to him at the hip; but her efforts to explain that to him had fallen on deaf ears. Arthur drove her nuts, too, with his maverick streak, posing as the only sane person in a universe gone mad. Go join the Foreign Legion! she had shouted at him once, swearing that he deserved one of those wacky hats and a seven-year trek across some womanless desert in Arabia.

  The vineyard was another bone of contention between them. Anna had lobbied for a joint venture, with her as the junior associate, but Atwater refused to listen to a word she had to say about wine grapes. He couldn’t get it through his thick skull either that there might be something worthwhile, maybe just a single scrap of pertinent data, in the biweekly CV reports that she read, annotated, and underlined for his benefit. Whenever she screwed up the courage to ask him about the progress of the crop, he answered her in monosyllables—fine, good, fair, shitty—he was a minimalist genius at blocking her out. The only job he had let her handle was to investigate what kind of rootstock to plant when they ripped out the old Chardonnay vines. Anna was determined to prove her mettle and went at the research in her own predictably maximalist way, and when after countless calls to nurseries and a road trip to Foundation Plant Material Services at UC Davis she had presented him with the results of her survey—Ganzin Number One—his response was less than satisfactory.

  “Ganzin Number One, eh? Yeah, I can see that. It does well on the valley floor.”

  Thank you so very much, Mr. Atwater! After such patronizing dismissals, she was ready to pack her bags and head straight for the nearest licensed clinical therapist to get the counseling she so evidently required, and then, out of nowhere, Arthur would charm her again just by being himself. That was what she liked best about him, actually—Atwater was Atwater, secure in his identity and never putting on airs. She respected his integrity in facing the world as he truly was, without any mask. Because he wouldn’t refashion himself to suit her, or even entertain the possibility of altering any of his most offensive traits, they’d had some terrific arguments, real knock-down drag-outs of a sort that Anna had never participated in before. Oddly enough, she enjoyed them—not for the arguing itself but because she didn’t have to hold anything back. Arthur could take her best shot. That was a corollary to their fucking, she supposed, and it made her think that perhaps he was her equal and, further, that equality wasn’t a given in any relationship but rather something to be struggled for in the ceaseless dance of yin and yang.

  So, day by day, Anna’s confusion was mounting. She saw that she had built an elegant trap for herself in Carson Valley, and to escape from it she put in long hours working in her vegetable garden. The garden was her Back Forty, her guru, her mantra, her salvation. She had planted it close to the house in a big rectangular plot rototilled for her by Dick Rhodes and fertilized with compost, bonemeal, nitrogen, and ample loads of horse manure from Pepper Harris’s paddock. Her selection of crops was decidedly cornucopic. Anything she could find a seed for she had sunk into the ground: Golden Bantam corn, green and wax beans, several exotic lettuces, some spinach and Swiss chard, Early Girl and Ace tomatoes, and more Chefini hybrid zucchini squash than could be eaten onsite or laid off on her friends and neighbors, who already had too much Chefini hybrid zucchini of their own. Anna could have operated a truck farm out of her own backyard.

  But the garden caused her some trouble, as well. Many nasty predators were attracted to its bounty, and Anna despised them all. She wasn’t prepared for their vicious forays at first. Her most recent try at growing things, a larkish urban adventure, had involved two pots of cherry tomatoes on the fire escape of her apartment, where the only predator around was Sam McNally, who plucked them when sh
e wasn’t looking. This country farming was serious business, though, and it had turned her into a killer. She murdered slugs and white flies with abandon, but the pocket gophers had her stymied. One afternoon, she watched in horror as a mature bean plant disappeared down a hole. How very brazen! Anna scoured the barn for heavy artillery after that and found some old spring-loaded gizmos on chains. They resembled medieval instruments of torture and impaled their victims on a metal spike. Still, she sank them into tunnels with enthusiasm, only to blanch when she finally nailed a gopher and had to scrape away its crushed and bloody remains with a trowel.

  That was more destruction than she could stand, so she called around the valley for advice. She heard support for rat poison from Rhodes, dog urine from Charlie Grimes, garlic cloves from Maude Vescio, and compassionate tolerance from Betty Chambers, who had taken a course in Tibetan Buddhism at Santa Rosa Junior College. As for Arthur Atwater, he swore to her that his grandmother had policed her garden with a handgun.

  “She sat out there in her rocker smoking a cigarette and reading True Romance, just as patient as she could be,” he told her. “And pretty soon one of those little guys would get careless and stick his head out of a hole to see what was going on, and bam! bam! bam!”—Atwater was yelling—“my granny would blow him away.”

  “What an exquisite tale. Thank you for sharing it with me, Arthur.”

  “Gophers are a low form of life. They steal from people.”

  “So they should be shot?”

  “Correct. Shot or poisoned. It’s the law of the jungle.”

  “Even in the garden?”

  “Yes, even in the garden,” Atwater said. “One time when I was a kid, we stuffed a firecracker . . .”

  Anna chose to follow the Chambers approach and tolerate the gophers. She adopted a high-minded attitude toward them that was in no way natural to her, but when some blacktail deer crept down out of the hills one night and devoured a whole row of okra, she was indeed tempted to spring for a .357 Magnum and take to her rocking chair. Instead, she prevailed on Atwater to build her a fence. He did it in his free time, complaining about how tough it was to drive stakes into soil that was so hard and dry, but he got it done. The garden, once fenced, became a private preserve for her, where she could fall into the hypnotic and meditative rhythm every gardener knows and cherishes, her thoughts ranging far and wide and generally in the opposite direction from her worries.