Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  “How was your lunch?” Jane asked as they strolled on.

  “It was fun. Sam’s an old shoe. We’re comfortable together.”

  “Heard anything from the valley lately?” There was an edge to the comment.

  “How strange that you should ask,” Anna said, smiling to herself. “I had a call from Jack Farrell today. You remember him, don’t you? He is the Chamber of Commerce.”

  “But nothing from Arthur?”

  “No, and I don’t expect anything. You know better than to ask that.”

  “Why don’t you call him, then?”

  “We’ve been over this ground before,” Anna said testily. “He asked me not to, and he was right to protect himself. I’ve already caused him enough trouble. I won’t meddle in his life anymore.”

  Again Jane gave her a look. “You’re driving all your friends crazy with this stuff. I was out there, I met the man. I saw how you were with him.”

  “How was I?”

  “I’d say you were contented.” Anna saw how pleased Jane was to have scored a point. “You’re still involved with him, whether or not you admit it. There’s nothing settled between you two.”

  “Everything is settled.”

  “Go on and be stubborn, if you like. But I don’t see what you’d have to lose by picking up the phone. I used to think of you as my impulsive friend. My daring friend.”

  “I was. Look where it got me.”

  “So you’d rather suffer?” Jane asked.

  “Time will pass. Someone new will come along.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “It’s what will happen.”

  They parted in front of the greengrocer’s. The family’s eldest son was on duty, a moon-faced teen in a Metallica T-shirt. He bagged some plums and apples for Anna, careful not to disturb the lavish display. Earth’s bounty was visible even here in a matrix of steel, glass, and concrete, she thought, in this pinprick of light flickering like a candle cupped in a hollow of formidable buildings. Pears, peaches, cantaloupes, and table grapes, too—it would be Indian summer on the farm, and the harvest would be underway. The surging sweep of it would carry the valley to its pinnacle of purpose—to ripeness, deliverance, and release—and Anna had a fervent momentary wish to be transported directly into the center of it, so she could ride out its furious energies.

  Her apartment was five blocks up and three over. The central air-conditioning was on full blast and gave her a chill when she unlocked the door; she shut it off and threw open some windows to the animal roar of the city. Nights had been difficult for her since her return. She had never been truly lonely before, but she felt alone in a deep and painful way now. She had trouble sleeping as well, so she poured a glass of white wine, sat in her dark living room, and looked out at the twinkle and glow of Manhattan. Again the writers on her bookstore walls entered her thoughts, and she found herself mulling over how their lives had ended, Fitzgerald alone and dead of a heart attack, Hemingway alone with his shotgun, and Kerouac alone with a bottle of cheap port. Was it the absence of love, the failure of art, or merely the human condition? That was another of the unanswerable questions Anna had begun to pose to herself in the futile insomniac hours.

  21

  Autumn came to Carson Valley. The changes it brought were subtle at first and lost on the local farmers, who were still caught up in the grueling labor of the harvest. They failed to notice the Lombardy poplars turning yellow or the Big-leaf maples beginning to wither, flame, and die. They had no time to remark on the heartbreaking light, the supreme clarity of the air, or the noisy ducks and geese on the wing. Their work was waiting for them every morning, and it put them to sleep every night. They paid no attention to the rest of life and missed the equinox entirely, a luminous Thursday toward the end of September when a pair of pileated woodpeckers as big as crows attacked an old black walnut tree on the edge of town, tearing off the bark to feast on the insects beneath it.

  The birds beat their great wings and put on a spectacular show, but only Victor Torelli stopped to watch. He parked on a shoulder of the road and stood for nearly an hour in the shade of an old water tower while bits of bark showered down. Trucks loaded with grapes rolled by him, and he could smell a musky odor of fermentation and waved whenever somebody honked. Harvests were behind him now, happily so, and he felt no need to hurry on. The woodpeckers in their blind intensity were beautiful to him, a gift. He listened to their hammering beaks and imagined the poor terrified bugs trying to escape and wondered if the bugs were really terrified or just surprised, or if they had any emotions at all.

  It was late in the afternoon before he packed up his binoculars and left. There was a slight chill in the air as he passed through town, crossed the bridge by the hospital, and saw ahead the place he was looking for, George’s Firewood, a fenced yard between a tire mart and a self-storage warehouse. The yard was crowded with cast-off refrigerators and washing machines as well as cordwood stacked in tiers. A bad-tempered German shepherd tethered to the fence barked viciously when Torelli pulled up, baring its fangs. The wood man himself sat on a folding chair inside a ratty shack and applied a pencil nub to a crossword puzzle. His cheeks were sunken, and he lacked a few important teeth and wore the oily coveralls of a mechanic.

  “Yes, sir!” he bellowed, clearly glad to have a customer. “What can I do you for today?”

  Torelli yanked a crumpled Valley Herald from his back pocket. There were holes in it where he had clipped out coupons and any significant news items. “I’m here about this advertised special of yours,” he said, pointing to an ad that featured a badly reproduced drawing of a Bunyanesque logger. “This mixed cord of oak and madrona.”

  “Oh, that’s the prettiest wood! Nice and dry.”

  “How long you been seasoning it for?”

  “It must be a good six months or so,” the wood man said, chewing on his pencil.

  “Where’d you cut it at?”

  “Well, now, that’s a fair question, but I couldn’t exactly say where.”

  “How could you forget a thing like that?” Torelli asked him bluntly. He never would have made such an error himself.

  “Hell, mister, I got all kinds of wood in here,” the wood man said in self-defense. “Some of it I cut, and some of it my partner cut. Some of it we brought down from Oregon. It all gets tossed in together.”

  The old man reacted with concern. He had never bought firewood from a dealer before and worried about getting cheated. Always he had cut his own wood and swore as his father had done before him that the wood a person cut for himself burned hotter, better, and in some crucial sense more truly. “Maybe I ought to think it over,” he said. “There’s no goddam rush.”

  “Thinking can be costly,” the wood man told him with some urgency. “Our prices shoot right up in winter. That’s why the special’s so special.”

  “What’ll it run me for a half cord?”

  “I could let you have a half cord for, oh, seventy dollars. But if you’re value-conscious, why not get some eucalyptus with a little fir mixed in? I’d sell you a whole cord of that for a hundred bucks.”

  “I don’t burn soft woods,” Torelli said with distaste.

  “Make it ninety dollars, then. Or eighty-five.”

  “I don’t burn eucalyptus. I’ll take the oak and madrona, a half cord.”

  “Stove length or fireplace?”

  “Fireplace.”

  The wood man put on some gloves, repaired to a chockablock pile, and started throwing eighteen-inch lengths into the old man’s truck. The logs landed with a clatter, and the German shepherd yapped and howled. Torelli made as if to assist and picked up two stray pieces, but he stopped when his breath came short and instead leaned an elbow on the hood and let the last bit of sun warm his face.

  “This looks like a decent business you’ve got here,” he said by way of conversation.

  “It keeps me out of trouble,” the wood man told him.

  “Are you George?”
>
  “No, sir. George is my partner. You won’t find him around when there’s a truck to be loaded.”

  “He sounds like a smart one.”

  “He’s no smarter than me,” the wood man said. “But he put up the money to get us going. Plus he only has one arm.”

  “He ought to be hanging paper.”

  “Don’t I know it. I’d quit on the son of a bitch, but I got a family to feed.”

  “Any children?” Torelli asked.

  “Mmm-hmm. Too many of ’em. My wife’s a breeder.”

  “I’ve got a son and a daughter myself.”

  The wood man glanced up at him. “You’d think by your age, you’d be shut of them.”

  Torelli smiled. “They don’t just disappear.”

  “More’s the goddam pity,” the wood man said, bending to toss more wood. “Where do your kids live at?”

  “My boy’s visiting Japan. My girl’s in New York.” He had clipped out an article for Anna that very morning about the progress of the harvest, in fact. Across the top he had written Thought this might interest you, and when that seemed too flat, he had added an exclamation point. He had not yet decided how to sign it.

  “The only place I ever visited was Grenada in a uniform,” the wood man said sourly. “I’ve had better vacations.”

  “Well, at least you got yourself a good job.”

  “Wood’s as honest as it gets.”

  Torelli listened to the clatter of the logs and the rumble of trucks in the distance. “I cut some wood around this valley in my time,” he said in a nostalgic way, his eyes a bit filmy. “Up there on Pine Ridge.”

  “Pine’s a soft wood,” the wood man told him.

  “We only took the oaks. Lot of oaks up there in those days.”

  “Lot of everything in those days.”

  “I won’t argue with you about that.”

  The wood man finished up with the logs and brushed some shavings from his chest. “You have any interest in buying a washing machine, mister? A used one from Sears all refixed?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “We got them on special this week, too.”

  “I’ll stick with the firewood.”

  “What about a dog?” The wood man nodded at the German shepherd. “I’d sell you that dog over there in a minute.”

  “I’m all set for dogs right now,” Torelli said, smiling.

  “What if I pay you something to take the ugly bastard? How about that?”

  “Sorry, no deal.”

  “I’ll tell you what, mister,” the wood man said, throaty with despair. “That dog is driving me right around the bend. If he keeps barking like that, he’s going to wind up with a bullet in his head. So why don’t you go on and take him?”

  “It’s hard to shoot a dog,” the old man said.

  The wood man came closer. His face was all scrunched up as he angled his head to peer into Torelli’s eyes and read whatever miraculous message might be behind them. “You ever tried?”

  “Yes, sir, I did.”

  “And you couldn’t do it?”

  “No, I couldn’t.”

  “Maybe you’re not as mean as I am,” the wood man said.

  Torelli handed over some cash. He drove out of the yard and across a river bridge and dropped in at The Bullshot for a quick drink. None of his friends were around, not Grimes or Vescio or Pepper Harris. They were still out in the fields or hauling their grapes to a winery, lined up and about to be judged, so he sat by himself enjoying the relative quiet of the tavern and the rough taste of the bourbon going down. He was happy about seeing the woodpeckers and also felt very tranquil and thought fleetingly about his many nagging aches and about death, too, and the words laid to rest and rest in peace. He released his grip on every living thing to let himself float freely in space. It was a good feeling, not at all scary, and one he’d never had before.

  He thought about the bedraggled wood man and his one-armed partner and chuckled to himself as he recalled how he had gathered wood every spring of his youth, heading into the hills with his brothers as soon as the ground was dry. They carried a gasoline can, their only chain saw, and an ancient crosscut saw whose use often resulted in fistfights when one Torelli boy demonstrated his superior strength by pulling another Torelli boy off balance and smack into a trunk. They cut down oaks that were diseased and any tree that lightning had struck and blackened, and they uprooted stumps and chopped up any deadfall worth saving, drenched in sweat from the effort, each isolated in the muscular net of his being, proud and without a care.

  The old man finished his drink and walked the streets. Halloween costumes were already displayed in a window at the Ben Franklin Store, gossamer fairy gowns, peaked hats for witches, and rocketeer costumes with fancy epaulets for little cadets traveling to the Milky Way. More familiar to him were the cardboard skeletons doing their jangly dance and some snaggle-toothed plastic pumpkins. He didn’t see any children. They were all back in school again and bent to their homework at desks and tables down every block. He passed his former office on the square and saw that it still had not been rented. Shadows crept between the buildings, and mourning doves took up their fretful cooing in the crown of an ornamental palm.

  He thought about his son and daughter as he walked on, both so far away from him now, and missed them with all his heart, especially Anna who had not yet found a comfortable way to be in the world and suffered because of it. He had gone through the same sort of tribulations when he was young, the same sort of arguing with the often brutal and unacceptable facts involved in being alive, all the cruelty and stupidity of existence, and such contentment as he had finally known had come to him much later on, when he had run out of the energy he needed to conduct his argument and had learned, besides, that nobody was listening.

  Those goddam woodpeckers sure were beautiful, he said to himself.

  Home the old man drove with his load of wood. It rattled around with every bump he hit and every curve in the road. Tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, he would hire a neighborhood kid to stack the logs on his patio. That would give him a good feeling, too—the nearness of fire, a glowing hearth at his command, a gob of spit in the face of winter. The wood was like a buck shot clean and butchered for its meat, or a steelhead gutted, filleted, and packed for the freezer. It pleased him enormously, and when he parked his truck in his driveway, he was compelled to admire it again before going inside. The madrona was slick and smooth to his touch, a reddish-brown in color, while the oak had thick bark and was bearded in places with webs of Spanish moss. How solid the wood felt to him, and yet in the hills he had seen wood crumble to powder. A man has nothing to lose and he loses it, Torelli thought, and that is just the beginning.

  22

  They were working in a row of riverside Chardonnay and moving as swiftly as they could from vine to vine, two pickers parting the dusty leaves with their skilled fingers, using their knives to cut through the short peduncles, and gently dropping one cluster of grapes after another into their stained plastic tubs. The grapes were a rich amber color and very sweet. Whenever a tub was full to overflowing, they ran with it to the end of the row and dumped it in a bin, making sure that Eloy Hidalgo tallied the lug. The work was hard but rewarding. Because the fruit on the Torelli farm was abundant and of superb quality, they put in ten- and sometimes twelve-hour days without objecting, thinking of themselves as rich men, fortunate men, even men of a certain choice destiny.

  It was cool and damp in the shade by the river. The pickers could smell the funk of algae blooming and the foul and lingering scent of a skunk that had been maneuvering along the deer fence the night before. The two of them were almost invisible to the others on the crew, concealed in the lushness of the greenery, their presence registering only as a flutter of energy that rippled like a current through the vineyard and made it seem more alive than ever, a thing unto itself, an ocean or a cloud. They were gathered up into it and served it, whistling as they went along, humm
ing melodies to themselves, and when they came to a slight rise that led them into a curved beam of sunlight, they stopped as if signaled, nodded at each other, and grinned.

  “Muy bonito, hombre,” said Omar Perez, stretching and flexing his arms toward the sky.

  “Es verdad,” the other man agreed. Skinny and pimply faced, he always wore a green watch cap and was known as El Serrano on account of it.

  They began picking again. Omar was an expert now, but that wasn’t the case at first. He had barely survived his apprenticeship. The job looked easy to him, but he couldn’t keep up with the pace. He was too rough and mashed the grapes in his tub, his fingers cramped up on him, and his back and shoulders burned with pain in spite of the aspirins he took in heaping doses. He had been humiliated, in fact. He was about to quit and go back to the nursery in Oceanside, but after three days, or maybe four, he had experienced a transcendent moment when he lost all consciousness of his knife as a foreign object. It melted into his flesh and became a part of him, something he no longer had to worry about, and he treated it respectfully after that, padding the handle with masking tape to cushion the grip and tying it to his wrist with a string so that it dangled freely between cuts. At every opportunity he sharpened the serrated edge with a file.

  The crew broke for lunch well before noon. They were hungry and fetched the sandwiches and drinks that they had stowed in their cars. Omar liked to buy his food from the wife of another picker, who showed up at the same time each day with burritos wrapped in foil, tamales still warm from the oven, and Cokes iced in a cooler. Today he bought some potato chips and a brownie from her, too, and walked over to the barn where his cousin and the boss Atwater sat in privileged sanctity at a card table piled with ledger books and papers, eating burritos themselves and passing a jar of jalapeño peppers and vinegary carrots between them.

  “Con permiso?”

  “Hello, Omar,” Atwater said to him. “How’s your moral character this morning, buddy?”