Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  Lopez ate slowly and contemptuously. His food tasted like poison. It was as if his daughter had never had a gift before, as if all the stuffed animals in her crib amounted to nothing. When Elena offered some chocolate cake for desert, he rejected his slice and watched in disgust as Omar tapped out a Marlboro and started squeezing the duck again and making silly faces. The boy tried to pour more coffee for him, but he covered his cup with a saucer and told Omar to hurry up and eat. They had to leave.

  “Where we going, hermano?” the boy asked in dismay.

  “To Carson Valley.”

  “Oh, it’s so late, Antonio,” Elena put in hastily, siding with Perez. “Why don’t we let Omar sleep here tonight? He’s probably tired from his trip.”

  “I am very, very, very tired, yes,” Omar said. He pressed his palms together and rested his cheek on them, his eyes shut.

  “You can take him out to the valley with you in the morning, can’t you? Wouldn’t that be easier? Just one trip instead of two? Antonio?”

  Lopez did not reply. He was thinking, You little bastard, you. Only once do you get away with this!

  So began an unending evening of duck squeezing, cigarette smoking, and inflated stories about old Guadalajara from which Antonio felt himself entirely excluded. Omar dogged Elena’s every step and fondled every object in the house, especially the TV and the stereo, flattering her and fawning over her to such a sickening degree that Lopez was certain that she would see through him. But she put up with his nonstop monologue and oohed and ahhed and even made him a cup of cocoa when at midnight he was ready to sleep at last and lay down on the couch.

  Lopez couldn’t wait for the morning to come. He was up and dressed at first light, pulling on the boy’s hair and dragging him out of his cozy cocoon of blankets. Omar was shuffled into the car before he was fully awake, his plea for a glass of milk denied. Elena said goodbye to him with sentimental words that seemed infinite in their duration, but then they were finally on the road, and Antonio breathed a sigh of relief. He enjoyed the unhappy way that his cousin was slumped in his seat, figuring that the boy was probably depressed by the dawning realization that a ration of back-breaking work might reside at the core of his adventure. The valley was at the peak of its late-summer glory, green everywhere, with a trace of lemony sunlight slanting down through another set of tattered blue-gray clouds, and this, too, improved his mood. No other landscape held quite the same purchase on Lopez, no other place on earth guaranteed him such an exalted position among its stewards.

  “You never saw this before,” he bragged to the boy. “Not in Mexico you didn’t.”

  “I never saw it,” Omar replied in a dull voice.

  “Take a good look, amigo. Because you’re going to know it real well before you leave. Your nose is going to touch that ground a thousand times.”

  The man who was known as the captain was now installed at cabin four. Bearded and big-bellied, with a damaged left eye that was permanently bloodshot, he ruled his roost from the choicest corner of the front room, his cot right next to an open window and bedded with clean linens. His authority could be read in the half-quart cans of Bud and the sacks of pork cracklings on the windowsill, treasures in full view of every occupant but in no danger of being snatched. The captain resisted Antonio’s attempts to strike a bargain, glaring at Omar as he might have at a worm, and denied that any transaction had occurred between Lopez and his compañero, the youth who, against the odds, still reclined on his cot in his Jockey shorts and continued his perusal of the identical novela.

  “Es un asunto mío!” the captain shouted, banging a fist against his chest. It was his business, and nobody else’s.

  Lopez pushed Omar forward. “He’s a good kid, honest, just a little green. I’ll give you a hundred dollars through the harvest.”

  “Two hundred.”

  “Escuchame, hombre. I live here. Conosces el rancho Torelli? I run those crews over there.”

  “Big fucking deal,” the captain said.

  “One-fifty, final.”

  Grumbling, the captain scratched his hairy stomach, grunted with majestic weariness to indicate his boredom over the inability of the world to present him with anything remotely resembling a surprise, and accepted the one-fifty. He led Omar to the approved cot in back, shook a finger in the boy’s face to apprise him of the NO PEEING HERE sign, and returned to his choice corner. When the youth who was reading mustered enough energy to raise himself on an elbow and hold out a beggarly hand for the payoff he unaccountably expected, Lopez slapped him away and said in a ferocious whisper, “Chinga tu madre, man. Cien por ciento.” One hundred percent.

  The deal was done. Lopez wanted to get out to the Torelli farm right away, but Omar acted clingy and seemed concerned that he was being abandoned.

  “When you come for me?” the boy asked, absurd in his yellow bumblebee jacket.

  “Tomorrow, Omar,” Lopez said with exasperation. “I already told you that three whole times. Escucha, por favor! Tomorrow or maybe the next day.”

  “I wait you tomorrow.”

  “There’s no grapes to pick yet, Omar. They’re not ripe. It could be tomorrow, or it could be next week. It could be into September. I told you that on the phone, didn’t I?”

  “Sí, hermano.”

  “So why are you fucking with me? I didn’t ask you to come here to work, did I?”

  “You didn’t ask me, no. But you invite me to your house.”

  For a moment, Lopez thought the boy was going to cry. He saw how frightened Omar was behind his mask of confidence, how babyish and innocent, and it moved him to a pity he did not care to feel. Life could be hard for the new pickers who had not yet learned the ropes—he recalled his own trials in that regard. Men such as the Captain were always taking advantage of the rookies, and there was really nothing anyone could do about it.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he told the boy. “Come on. Let’s go into Roy’s.”

  Indeed, Omar was snuffling. With a muttered oath, Lopez threw an arm around him, led him into the market, and bought him some cupcakes, a six-pack of Coke, a toothbrush, some toothpaste, and his own roll of toilet paper. The boy paused at a spinner rack of magazines, an antique that had ceased to rotate long ago, and fondled an old copy of Motor Trend, so Antonio bought that for him, too, and added some chewing gum at the counter. A cardboard carton by the cash register was filled with grape knives in a point-of-sale display, each curved and glittering blade honed to a fine edge at the factory and sunk into a compact plastic handle meant to sit comfortably in the palm of a picker’s hand.

  “Try this, Omar,” Lopez said. He gave the boy a knife and showed him how to grip it and make a swift cutting stroke to sever the stem of a grape cluster from its stem. “How does it feel?”

  The boy’s eyes were wide in wonder. “It’s very good,” he said. “I like it!”

  While the tab was being settled, Omar juggled his knife in a private game, tossing it higher and higher toward the fly-blown rafters until it flipped once too often on its downward journey and revolved a half-turn too many. He snatched after it again, but he caught it blade first this time and yelped when it sliced into his fingers. His blood began dripping onto the plank floor.

  “Antonio!” he said excitedly. “Mira!”

  Lopez looked at the blood drops and frowned. This boy, he thought, will not be lucky.

  19

  Those same tattered clouds in a blue-gray sky, day after day. The weather refused to cooperate with the harvest, but that was a given of the season, something that the old-timers knew in their bones. It had turned them into habitual pessimists who spat and cussed and courted providence. Whatever had happened last year, the obstacles presented and sometimes surmounted, could be counted on never to occur again, not in a million years—it would be too easy. The only worthwhile thing a grower could do, the reasoning went, was to prepare for disappointment. Better to imagine a vineyard full of raisins than to anticipate a profit. Hopes were meant
to be dashed, after all, and history was a record of losses. Nature survived, Dick Rhodes liked to say, by relying on its knuckleball.

  Everywhere in Carson Valley yearning prevailed. There were veiled threats and strange incantations. Some hippie printers in town, dope smokers par excellence and purveyors of obscure poetry in fine letterpress editions, spent three sleepless nights studying Aztec mythology and subsequently distributed a broadside paean to the sun god, swearing that it would break the stalemate. Instead, a fog descended. It was thick, cold, and damp, born of unfavorable ocean vapors, and when it finally burned off in the late afternoon the clouds were still tattered and the sky was still blue-gray. August was about to slide into September without a single grape being picked. The stainless steel tanks at wineries remained empty. Bored workers yelled into them for fun, an ear to the echo of their voices.

  The first would-be pickers were roaming the country roads, advance troops for the teeming army that would soon be arriving in force. They walked or drove from farm to farm looking to hire on, their rate of pay to be established up front against a pledge of good behavior—no temper tantrums, disappearing acts, or romantic displays of petulance. Some of them belonged to a rootless and hard-nosed migrant tribe that was always harvesting one crop or another in California—almonds in Orland, onions in Vacaville, strawberries in Watsonville, dates in Indio—while others were just in from Mexico and behaved as harmlessly as choirboys. They guaranteed their potential employers such desirable qualities as speed, sobriety, and simple diligence, then bedded down in bunkhouses, cabins, or under bridges on the river to wait for the signal to begin.

  That signal was slow to come. A remark of Fred Vescio’s was widely quoted to sum up the situation. “It’s so goddam gray out there today even a little baby couldn’t get its ass sunburned.” He made the comment while drinking coffee in his kitchen and watching a diapered grandchild whose name he had forgotten scramble across the floor. Vescio was known to be severely frustrated. He had finished every article in his monthly Reader’s Digest, had swamped out his pump-house, and had even gone so far as to trade in his old Red Wing boots for a new pair, and he didn’t have a notion what to do with himself next. Other farmers, equally stymied, fell to improvising. Pepper Harris left on a gambling trip to South Lake Tahoe, assuming that the sun would shine full strength to spite him while he was away, but he was wrong. The sun paid him no mind at all, and he lost five hundred dollars at the blackjack tables and returned a chastened man.

  Arthur Atwater surprised himself by staying calm. Nothing seemed to faze him. Every chore on his short list was completed. The hydraulic hoses on his harvest loader were in good condition, he had changed the points and plugs in the flatbed truck he used for hauling grapes, and had scrubbed the purple stains from the plastic tubs his pickers would carry. His barn was as spotless as a barn could be. His harvest bins were clean, too, and he had ordered two chemical toilets to be delivered and set up in the fields. When a pernicious patch of Johnson grass sprouted in a row of Cabernet Sauvignon, he plowed it under without any sense that he had been singled out for attack and also killed off some bindweed near it, pleased when the pretty flowers, morning glories in a classic trumpet shape, curled up and died.

  He had also conducted his summit meeting with Antonio Lopez on the subject of a crew and had approved the starting lineup as proposed, including its newest member, a boy from Guadalajara in an outrageous yellow jacket.

  “This is my cousin, Omar,” Lopez had said during a solemn introduction.

  “He ever picked before?”

  “Oh, yeah. Back home he did. He picked all kinds of stuff.”

  “Can he talk?”

  “Mostly in Spanish. But he’s learning fast.”

  “He’s got his documents, right?”

  “Sure, he does. Show him, Omar.”

  The boy passed over his green card and grinned his silly grin. “I yam of good moral character,” he said, tugging on an ear.

  “He does stand-up comedy, too?” Atwater asked archly.

  “He’s a good kid, honest,” Lopez told him. “He’s just a little nervous.”

  In his log, Atwater wrote,

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3RD. Still cool, big wind this afternoon to 20, maybe 25 mph. Ate a few grapes as sour as lemons. This time last year we were picking Chardonnay at Brix 23. Saw some gopher holes on Thunder Hill, must shoot some poison down them tomorrow.

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4TH. Cool and foggy again. Took a nap after lunch out of boredom. Dogs bored, too. Everybody bored, probably. Rejected three guys this aft. who wanted to pick, sent them up to Hawk Wind to bust rocks instead.

  His breakfast the next morning was the usual lackluster fare. He chewed on a gummy pastry, stared idly through dancing motes of dust at the view downriver to the oxbow of the Russian, and was struck by the sharpest possible sensation of Anna’s absence, feeling all around him the empty space of love gone wrong. Purely physical, the sensation came over him infrequently and never lasted long, but it always hit him like a blow to the solar plexus, and he could not breathe right for a time. He could not think right. Nothing in his experience compared to it, nothing had ever so unhinged him from the compass of his being. When he had separated from Laura, she had lived on in him as a dull incurable ache whose source he understood—it was disappointment, really, in the face of human frailty—but this was different, a type of possession, the hormonal equivalent of warp speed.

  He still had received no word from Anna, of course, and nagged himself for continuing to be hopeful. Often he took himself to task for not extinguishing the tiny flickering torch he foolishly carried for her. As for his part, he had written her three letters and torn them all up, although one actually made it inside a stamped envelope before he shredded it. What it came down to, Atwater felt, was that he had no more to say to her than he had said when they were parting, nothing that would improve on or embellish his simple declaration. He was not the sort of man who could, possessed of a jolly mood, pick up the phone, give her a casual call, and have a chatty but subversive conversation to find out what she was up to, and his intuition warned him that any contact in a more serious vein would only bring him more woe.

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5TH. Sent a bunch of Guatemalans up to Hawk Wind, should be charging those guys a commission. Found two dead gophers, good! Grapes a little sweeter, but still not up to Brix 18 (my guess). Must test by instrument soon.

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6TH. Omar here by himself at seven this a.m., walked over from Roy’s and asked for five dollars until his first payday. He’s a skunky little bastard. I took a break at lunch and wrote Anna again. I’ll be glad when the picking starts and the thinking ends.

  The following day, Atwater woke at dawn to perfect peace, with brilliant light flowing through the windows of his trailer. He marched naked to his deck, licked an index finger, and held it up to the elemerits—oh rapture, there was no wind! He smiled and gave his dogs a tender stroking. The sun crested a far ridge in minutes and sparked a chorus of insects into an electrified drone. The temperature hit eighty-five degrees by midmorning and almost a hundred by mid-afternoon, only to drop into the fifties once the hills were dark and the crickets had started their immemorial chirping. Such conditions were ideal. The heat increased the sugar content in every grape, and the cool nights allowed that sugar to blend with tannic, malic, and lactic acids to form a characteristic varietal flavor. It was a time of extremes in Carson Valley, of huge swings in every gradient, a time of magnitude and plenty.

  Here at last was fabled Indian summer. Atwater thought of ghost stories, inner tubes, bicycle rides at twilight, and spitting watermelon seeds in distance contests. He remembered cutting school to catch frogs and how he and Junior Thompson would put them in jars topped with mesh and feed them fat and lazy end-of-the-season houseflies that they swatted to death with their homemade weapons, old newspapers rolled tightly and bound with rubber bands. He remembered swallowing a peach pit by accident and swallowing in turn an ancie
nt lie about the peach tree that was growing in his stomach. The image had troubled him for fully a month before he let it go. These memories all spoke to what was left of the boy in him—not very much—and made him, however briefly, almost happy.

  He went at the end of the week to his broad patch of riverside Chardonnay, the earliest of his grapes to mature. Toting a bucket, he picked a sample of fruit randomly from different rows and took it to the barn for testing. He was ultraserious, in his astrophysics mode. He stored his refractometer in a box on a high shelf, out of harm’s way. It was a finicky, handheld instrument with a prism at its tip. He pressed the grapes with his fingers to extract some juice and transferred a smudge to the prism glass, then walked outside and exposed the prism to the light. That caused a shadow to fall across a Brix scale etched inside. The scale was used to estimate sugar content and translate it into a number. Atwater looked through the eyepiece and took a reading of 21.8 degrees Brix, just below the optimal range of 22 to 22.5 degrees that was stipulated in the CV contract.

  Overjoyed, he cornered Antonio Lopez right away and instructed him to have the picking crew ready to go in the morning. He developed a major case of anxiety himself, poised on the cusp of a thousand potential mistakes. He worried that his alarm would not go off, for instance, and slept poorly through the night, but it worked fine and jolted him out of bed at five o’clock. The world beyond the trailer was still dark, although he could see a few rattletrap cars already parked on the dirt road. The cars had disgorged about fifteen pickers, and they were huddled together and bouncing up and down on their toes, blowing into their cupped palms against the chill, eager to begin.

  After a quick cup of tea, Atwater approached his crew. It was important that he make a strong first impression. He noticed a couple of women and approved of their presence. He knew that they would be steady workers, much steadier than the men. A man at harvest time usually proved to be either a genius or a dud, or a genius one day and a dud the next, his emotional swings wide and unpredictable and tainted by the supposedly hysterical mood swings that he attributed in private to his wife or his girlfriend. A woman, at least in Atwater’s opinion, tackled the job of picking with the same domestic patience she might bring to knitting, cooking, or ironing, in no particular hurry to get finished, careful about the fine points and glad for a chance to think her private thoughts.