Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  “The texture of your cervix has changed,” she heard Sawyer say. “Your uterus is enlarged. Are you tender here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your breasts are slightly swollen,” he went on, touching her nipples. “How does this feel?”

  “It tingles,” Anna said, her face hot.

  Sawyer took off his gloves. He met with her in a consulting room afterward and explained that he was 99 percent sure that she was pregnant. “We can do a blood serum test if you like,” he offered. “That’s as close to foolproof as it gets. It’s none of my business, but I gather this was an accident?”

  “I don’t have a clue how it could have happened,” Anna said, but she did know, of course, and could even pinpoint the very moment of conception—that spring afternoon when Atwater had burst in on her in the kitchen, when she was tipsy after her tour of wineries and prickly with desire, wet and yielding and wholly open to him. She had wanted him more than anything just then and hadn’t bothered with her diaphragm.

  “You have a little time to consider your options,” Sawyer advised her. “But don’t take too long. If you need to talk some more, please call me. We’ll have to monitor this closely, given your history.”

  The streets in town looked foreign to Anna when she left the office. It seemed incredible to her that she could be carrying a child in this curious and random fashion, especially after all the fruitless striving with Bud, those precisely arranged matings that had involved body temperature, datebooks, and the approximate motility of sperm. She wandered around in a daze, mad at herself for being so careless and yet pleased in a purely biological way, high on the changes in her body. She thought about poor Arthur, her innocent accomplice, and felt that she ought to spare him from any damaging consequences. If she chose to terminate the pregnancy, there was no reason to tell him about it at all, and if she went home to Manhattan and had the baby, a daughter or a son—the words had a gemlike brilliance—she would tell him at the appropriate time. Anna played with those sentiments as she walked and walked, half conscious and half in dreams.

  13

  They were sitting on a bench outside Roy’s Market and watching the traffic go by on Carson Valley Road, three old men in denim and cotton as fixed in place as totems, very tranquil, contained, and thoughtful in the heat of the afternoon. They felt their age most keenly on such sweltering days when the air rested heavily on their lungs and made every minor infirmity seem major, but they were still quick to focus their attention whenever a car pulled up, competing in an undeclared contest as to who could be the first to name its occupants and earn bragging rights to superior mental agility. Strangers they ignored each in his own way, Charlie Grimes by eating M&Ms, Fred Vescio by chain-smoking Camels, and Victor Torelli by studying the drowned fly in the fizzy dregs of his Calistoga water.

  Their conversation proceeded in fits and starts according to a ritual only they understood, one established over a half century or so of friendship. The silences among them were frequent, and after a fairly long one, Vescio introduced a new topic that was close to his heart.

  “I got up to pee six times last night,” he said. Fred had a face as wrinkled as a sun-dried apricot. “That’s a record for me. And I hadn’t drunk but a single beer. I’m so sick of it I might just pee in my bed from now on.”

  “You’ve got a condition there, all right,” Grimes told him. “Probably I don’t pee more than three times in a whole day. That’s about average for normal people.”

  “But you fart all the time.”

  “Ah, that’s just letting off steam! What about it, Victor? You been doing a lot of peeing?”

  Torelli’s eyes were concentrated on the parking lot, ready to pounce on the next car. “I don’t keep count, Charlie.”

  “Well, estimate for us, then.”

  “I estimate I pee about as often as I have to.”

  They fell silent again. Grimes tossed up a red M&M and caught it in his mouth. He tossed up a green M&M and caught it, and then an orange M&M.

  “You always eat those one at a time?” Torelli asked him.

  Grimes nodded affably. “Mmm-hmm. And I never eat the same color twice in a row.”

  “The hell you don’t,” Vescio corrected him. “You ate two straight reds just a minute ago. I wish I had a videotape camera to prove it to you.”

  Torelli sensed an opportunity. “Either of you boys ever seen one of those adult videos?”

  “No, but I saw the cops beat up a few Negro fellows on TV,” said Vescio. “They was really pounding on ’em.”

  Grimes looked away and feigned an interest in the wasps swarming over an open trash can.

  “You can rent those tapes in town,” Torelli went on, pressing his advantage. “I rented one once.”

  “What was it called?”

  “Titles aren’t so important in the pornography line, Fred. But I’ll tell you this much. If you rent one yourself, you won’t feel cheated. ’Course, you have to be brave to walk into the X-rated section in broad daylight.”

  Vescio pondered this for a moment, then tamped out another cigarette and changed the subject. “I got leafhoppers in my vineyard,” he said. “They’re leaving yellow spots everywhere.”

  “Nuke the bastards,” Grimes advised him.

  “I did twice. But they come back for more. They’re pretty rough customers. How are your grapes going, Victor?”

  “It depends on who you listen to.” Torelli swirled his bottle and watched the dead fly go around. “Atwater swears we’re in fine shape, but those CV boys, they keep sending me reports to the contrary! I don’t know who to believe.”

  “Atwater’s an honest sort,” Vescio said. “I’m not inclined to disbelieve him.”

  Torelli frowned. “CV’s got all those goddam facts and numbers and graphs! How can you argue with that stuff? It’s enough to rattle a person.”

  “Maybe they mean to rattle you.” Grimes raised a haunch and released an echoing fart whose stale gases had an effect not unlike a mushroom cloud on those in the general vicinity.

  “I told you so!” Vescio laughed and backed away. “Jesus, Charlie! Whoa! That’s bad medicine!”

  “Why would CV want to rattle me?” Torelli asked. “What’s in it for them?”

  “Some folks just like to show off how goddam smart they are,” Grimes told him. “Take that Rawley Kimball. He can’t be more than five feet tall! Plus he’s so full of fancy scientific bullshit, it’s running out his ears.”

  “That’s true,” Vescio agreed. “Rawley can be a righteous little bugger. But Wade Saunders, he’s a decent enough sort. He’s been buying my grapes for eight or nine years now, and we get along like peas in a pod.”

  “He keeps to his word, does he, Fred?”

  “Old Wade’s a company man, but he wouldn’t cross the street just to kick you in the ass. He belongs to the Rotary Club, you know. They’re not allowed to lie.”

  “Who told you that?”

  Vescio picked at a wart on his ear. “Nobody,” he admitted. “I just assumed it.”

  “I’d trust Atwater if I were you, Victor,” Grimes put in. “He’s got the practical experience. It could be you want to discount him because he’s fooling around with your daughter.”

  “That doesn’t come into it at all,” Torelli said hastily.

  “Well, it must stick in your craw a bit, don’t it? The two of them being together? Having sex with each other and whatnot?”

  “Anna’s old enough to do as she pleases,” Torelli said, thinking but not confiding to his mates, What’s the goddam difference? She’s already slept with twenty other men!

  “She’s a beautiful girl,” Vescio said. “It’s hard to believe you had a hand in creating her, Victor.”

  Grimes was smirking. “It wasn’t his hand that did it.”

  “Why do you always have to be so goddam low?” Vescio asked him. “Everything with you is farts and smut! You just boil it right down, don’t you, Charlie?”

  They were for
ced to quit talking when a Ford Bronco as armored as a tank veered into the parking lot, and a perky woman leaped from behind the wheel, circled to the other door, and grabbed the hand of an apathetic buzzcut boy in a Little League uniform.

  “There’s Alice McLaren!” Torelli shouted, thrilled to have spoken first.

  “We know who the hell she is,” Vescio told him sourly. “If you’re going to list every goddam person who drives up, I’m going home.”

  “Yes, and I’ll go with you,” seconded Grimes.

  Torelli let his head rest against the wall behind his bench and asked himself, Was I ever as small as that child? Did I ever really go to school? He remembered the old Carson Valley schoolhouse, a clapboard building painted white with a gabled roof and a cupola where an iron bell lacking a clapper was stored. He pictured the playground, the ballfield, and the orchards that used to border the school in those ancient days before wine grapes had taken over the valley. There were pears, peaches, apples, plums, and prunes in abundance, and the sweet aroma of fruit would linger through the summer and on into September, filtering into the classroom where Mrs. Schmidt, a particularly strict teacher feared for her treacherous use of a yardstick, stood writing arithmetic problems on the blackboard. He felt the solid rungs of a ladder under his feet and knew again the excitement of climbing into the arching limbs of a tree and reaching up toward perfect ripeness, the rich scent of it nearly toppling him as he floated among the branches.

  “Did you pick much fruit when you were a kid, Charlie?” he asked.

  Grimes nodded and tossed up a brown M&M. “I surely did. I remember filling those bushel baskets and how good the apples tasted. You can’t find apples like that anymore. Gravenstein, Delicious, Macintosh, we had every damn kind.”

  “Bartlett pears were my favorite.” Torelli’s face looked relaxed, as if the memory had refreshed him somehow. “I’d eat so goddam many I’d get sick to my stomach.”

  Vescio stomped out his cigarette butt, grinding it under the heel of a worn work shoe. “We had some hops over to our farm when I was growing up. My pop sold off most of the crop, but he always kept out enough to make homebrew. That was powerful beer! This crap they’re selling now, it just turns straight into pee.”

  “I never knew a man to be so concerned with his own urine as you are, Fred,” said Grimes, with considerable loathing. “There’s more to life than draining your bladder, my friend.”

  Vescio, immune to such criticism, studied his knuckles. “You figure Atwater’s in love with Anna, Victor?” he asked.

  Torelli didn’t answer right away, although it was a question he had contemplated on his own many times. “I suppose he is. If you can judge by how he behaves, he must be. Arthur’s not much for hiding his feelings. I’d say he dotes on her.”

  “You figure she loves him back?”

  “I’m not so sure about that. Some women, they don’t like to show what they’re up to, do they? They like to keep you in the dark. Anna’s that way. She’s been careful since her divorce. She doesn’t want to make another mistake.”

  “If those two wind up getting married,” Grimes said, his voice full of glee, “Arthur Atwater will be your goddam son-in-law!”

  “Aw, there must be a legal way to get around that.” Vescio plucked a strand of tobacco from his lip. “If you went to court, you could get it, what do they call it?”

  “Annulled,” Grimes told him, rubbing it in. “You’re mind’s going on you, Fred.”

  “Yes, sir. You could annul Atwater as your son-in-law.”

  “Why is love so complicated anyhow?” Torelli asked. “It’s the strangest goddam thing. Matter of fact, I’ve been having these dreams lately about the first girl I ever fell in love with.”

  “Who might that be?” Vescio asked him, his eyes narrowed.

  “Do you remember Lucy Carpenter?”

  “Lucy Carpenter!” Grimes popped up from the bench with a blast of jet-propelled enthusiasm. “She had the biggest tits I ever saw! I never met a girl so hot as her. Lucy lived to do the dirty deed!”

  Torelli was shocked by what he heard. “I never knew you even had a single date with her,” he said.

  “A single date?” Grimes sat back down, enjoying his turn at having the upper hand. “Hell, Victor, I priced out an engagement ring for her and all that, and we were going to take a stroll down the aisle, but she broke up with me all of a sudden and ran off with some midget she met at a cafeteria in Santa Rosa. They landed in a trailer park in Honolulu, last I knew of them.”

  “A midget, Charlie?”

  “I made up that part.”

  “You just can’t ever tell with love, can you?” Vescio hacked to clear the phlegm from his throat. His voice was hoarse but emotional. “I had this piglet once—just an ordinary piglet, I thought—but when it keeled over and died from the swine flu, it hurt me so bad I pretty nearly didn’t get over it.”

  “Maybe you should have wed that piglet instead of your wife,” said Grimes. “Probably it was a whole lot better-looking.”

  “For a man who never could find a wife,” Vescio replied, with cool detachment, “you do carry on.”

  Grimes spat on the ground. “Goddam that Lucy Carpenter!”

  They were silent once more, watching the traffic flow and conserving their energy in the sapping heat. A flock of red-winged blackbirds flew by with a great rushing of wings, and they lifted their heads to look. The birds were bright black in a field of blue and formed a kaleidoscopic pattern as they sailed apart and then flowed together again.

  “I’ve been thinking about those hunting trips we used to make every fall,” Grimes said, starting in again. “We’d be doing our planning right about now, wouldn’t we, Victor?”

  “Yes, sir. We had that nice camp up by Chester one year,” Torelli said, with a satisfied grin. “Up there in Feather River country.”

  “Oh, that was a gorgeous camp!”

  “Fred, I wish you could have been with us. We were on a flank of the Sierra, way up in the pines and Douglas firs, and we could see Mount Lassen just as clear as day. We had a good big tent and set ourselves up on a creek where you couldn’t but cast a line and not catch a trout.”

  “They were in there as thick as bricks, Fred!” Grimes cried.

  “That’s the truth,” Torelli confirmed. “And we both got our bucks the first morning out. If I’m not mistaken, Charlie’s was an eight-pointer.”

  Vescio helped himself to another Camel from the crumpled pack in his shirt pocket. “I never did take to hunting,” he told the others. “I couldn’t bring myself to shoot a deer except if it was eating my grapes.”

  “It’s different in the Sierra. Don’t you think so, Charlie?”

  “No comparison.” Grimes looked rhapsodic. “I slept real good up there, too.”

  “I never saw a better camp in my life.”

  “We should go on up there again this autumn. All three of us this time.”

  Torelli swirled his bottle, and the dead fly went round. “It’s a little late in the game for me,” he said hesitantly. “I doubt I could handle the altitude anymore. The air gets awful thin in those mountains.”

  “Ah, hell, Victor. I never knew you to be scared of a little challenge.”

  “I’d go in a minute if I felt right. Trouble is, I get so short of breath! Maude’s been pushing me to see a specialist.”

  “It’s none of my business,” said Grimes, “but I don’t hold with those specialists. Their whole job is to test you and test you until they find something wrong.”

  “You better beware of Maude,” Vescio whispered, glancing over his shoulder to check for eavesdroppers. “She’ll pussy-whip you for fair. She pussy-whipped my poor brother until he up and died on her.”

  Torelli smiled. “I haven’t seen a pussy in years, Fred. Much less been whipped by one.”

  He let his head rest against the wall again and thought about that camp on the Feather River, which was really every hunting camp he’d ever known rol
led into one. He thought about the stony mountains and how the light fell through the Douglas firs, a piney fragrance everywhere and the little stream so bright and clear. Trout for breakfast, eggs scrambled over a wood fire, bacon frying, strong cowboy coffee, those long siestas in the afternoon, the deer gutted and hung out to season, blood on the earth, blood on his hands, and the blood washed off in the ice-cold water of the creek. Each detail of the trip lived in him as a nucleus resides in a cell, and it was the most disturbing aspect of his old age that he would soon be deprived of such sensations forever.

  Torelli looked over at Charlie Grimes, who had consumed his last M&M and was studiously folding the empty packet into quarters for reasons that were no more discernible to anybody than the why of red-winged blackbirds passing in the sky. He had known Grimes and the Grimes family almost since his birth, and yet he felt that he didn’t really know his friend at all, even that every other person in Carson Valley and beyond was an enigma to him finally, a code never to be cracked.

  “I come up with a new way to promote my wine, boys,” Grimes said, having concluded his labors on the packet. “It’s a right smart one, too, if I do say so myself.”

  “Anybody got a match?” Vescio asked with a cough, still another in the infinite chain of Camels dangling between his lips.

  Torelli held out his lighter and indulged in a Toscano himself. “So what have you got in mind, Mr. Promoter? Another painting spree?”

  “No, my career as an artist is over. My lawyer, he tells me it was ‘ill-advised,’” Grimes cackled. “What I have in mind is something new.”

  “Why don’t you dive off the roof of your barn into a barrel of water?” Vescio suggested. “That’d get you some free publicity.”

  Grimes brushed aside the comment. “What if you saw an ad in the paper that offered you two bottles of wine for the price of one, Victor?”

  “I’d wonder what the catch was.”