Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  “Yes?” He addressed them as graciously as he could under the circumstances. “Hay algun problema?”

  “Me he torcido la muñeca,” the first picker replied. His wrist was sprained.

  “Me duele todo el cuerpo,” said the second picker. His entire body hurt.

  They had more grievances, too. Atwater knelt next to them and heard them out, his expression one of utmost concern. These new red grapes were much smaller than the old white grapes and were concealed more intricately and deviously in trickier foliage, the pickers claimed. Even if a man pushed himself to the limit, he still could not earn as much money as he had earned on the old white grapes. That was nature’s fault, of course, and not the boss’s, both pickers agreed, but it was still unjust and unacceptable. At other vineyards, the boss used a blower to remove the leaves in advance and make the picking easier. The whole crew was discouraged, in pain, sick at heart.

  “Yo comprendo,” Atwater told them, drawing circles in the dirt with a twig. He explained that he felt pity for the pickers—how could he not, being a laborer himself?—but the patrón had to make a profit for the farm to survive. He couldn’t afford any special equipment to blow away the leaves. The patrón was a person of high honor and integrity, though, and he wouldn’t want his crew to suffer unduly, so five dollars would be added to everyone’s pay at the end of the day.

  “Five dollars?”

  “Every day?”

  Atwater confirmed it. The grinning pickers congratulated one another by shaking hands. They were cured miraculously and simultaneously of their ailments and trotted into the vineyard to spread the word.

  The raise in pay greased the wheels of commerce. The harvest machine and all its component parts clicked back into gear and began to run at optimum speed once more, with each important movement falling as if by divine intervention into its appropriate groove. There was a smoothness to the flow again, and Atwater permitted himself a moment of pride, congratulating himself for being a genius bilingual mediator who had saved his crop from certain failure. In the mesh of shadow and light, he could hear a distinct hum that was the hallmark of a harvest going well.

  He hauled his first load of red grapes, eight-plus tons, to the winery late that afternoon and had to wait for more than an hour in a line of trucks that extended beyond the horizon, but he was grateful enough just to be there. The fields were dark on his return. He spent his evening on the phone talking to neighboring growers and asking for some help. Again and again he tried to reach Antonio Lopez, without any success. The silence nagged at him, but he was too tired to go hunting for his foreman in the wilds of Santa Rosa. Something very bad must have happened, he had to admit.

  Morning brought with it a promise of deliverance. Atwater woke with a surge of unanticipated energy, his spirits refreshed by a good night’s sleep. The weather was warmer, and the world looked gentler around the edges, rosier and more accommodating, robbed of its menace. He wished that he had a football to throw in homage to the glories of autumn. With his right arm, he performed a quarterback’s feint and pretended to release an arching spiral toward the sky. He saw that a few pickers were already at work, while others drank coffee and prepared themselves. He counted heads and was delighted to find that he had not lost anyone. Some new men were present, too. On loan from Charlie Grimes was a stocky old veteran he knew simply as Manuel, and Dick Rhodes had sent him a pair of young brothers just in from Oregon, where they had harvested apples and pears in the orchards around Medford.

  The brothers had never picked any grapes before, so Atwater conducted a tutorial. They were fast learners, skillful with their knives and eager to satisfy. Manuel, on the other hand, needed no instruction at all. He was an imperturbable master of his craft and could be trusted to keep the crew on its best behavior. Atwater assigned him the task of maintaining order and walked over to run a test on a block of hillside Zinfandel. His refractometer showed him in empirical terms what he had suspected. The warming trend was affecting the sugar level in the grapes. It was rising rapidly. Soon he would be swimming in ripe fruit, tons of it, so he decided to rig a trailer behind the flatbed truck for double hauling, outfitting it with four gondolas instead of two. That way he’d make just one trip to the winery daily instead of two or three and wouldn’t waste his precious time waiting in line.

  The pickers worked straight through the noon hour, fueling themselves with snacks eaten on the fly. The fruit was coming off nicely now, still smoothly, and they refused to break the rhythm for fear that they could never capture it again. Their efforts were all of a piece, braided together toward a common goal. They were inside the harvest machine and looked unstoppable, Atwater thought. Sweat poured from them and streaked their faces, and grime and dust coated their arms. The men had stripped down to T-shirts that were stained and spotted with purple blotches, while the women wore broad-brimmed straw hats and had knotted kerchiefs and bandannas around their necks to protect themselves from the brutal sun.

  Atwater stayed apart. He was busy on his tractor and emptied one bin after another into his gondolas. The rig was capacious and would hold upward of twenty tons of grapes. Around three o’clock, with every muscle in his body stretched to its elastic limits, he took a breather, drove to Roy’s, and brought back some cases of cold beer and soda to invigorate the crew. He packed the cans in two buckets, layered them with cracked ice, and toted them from row to row, saying, “Here you go, here’s something to kill that taste of dust, here you go, have yourself a cold drink.”

  “We are a winning team!” Manuel hoisted a can and toasted the other pickers with an impromptu cheer. “Teamwork!”

  “Eso es!”

  Atwater pressed a frigid Coke to his forehead like a compress and smiled. “You’re a goddam wonderful team, if you ask me,” he told them all. “You saved my bacon.”

  “Wonderful team.”

  “We save the bacon!” There was merriment all around.

  Back to work the pickers went, pushing themselves, enduring. The sun dropped toward the far hills, and the valley floor was rich with a last incandescent torrent of light so powerful that it added a patina of burnished color to everybody’s skin. Every tinge of red in the soil, every lateritic particle, grew bright. Atwater watched his crew slow to a crawl. They were in a trance and stared out as though at a fiery hearth. When Serena Cedillo took off her straw hat, shook out her hair, and combed the tangles from it with rough strokes, the light caught in each auburn strand and rippled about her in an aura. The sun kept dropping until it became an orange disc balanced atop some pines and firs on a distant ridge, and then it was abruptly gone, guttered out, and shadows fell across the vineyard. The thump of buckets went on, but the lively racket of voices began to die down.

  The brothers from Oregon were the first to call it quits. Stoical to the core, they showed off the raw and bloody blisters on their hands, but they vowed to return in the morning anyway and were praised for their manly attitude, their simple courage. Others followed them shortly, shouting farewells, stowing away their grape knives, and collecting the sweaters and jackets that they had cast aside or hung on grape stakes in the heat of the day. As they walked doggedly from the vineyard, they had the thoroughly depleted look of athletes at the close of a grueling contest, Atwater thought, winners who had barely snatched a victory from the jaws of defeat.

  It was a little past six o’clock when he started for the CV outlet to deliver his monster load of grapes. The drive would take him about twenty minutes. He flipped on his headlights in the gathering dusk. The gondolas rumbled noisily behind his truck and swayed with the weight of his cargo, filled up nearly to the brim. He didn’t know for sure how many tons of fruit he was hauling—seventeen, eighteen, it could have been a full twenty tons. It was a solid payload, at any rate, and it gave him a good feeling in his gut and a sense of money in the bank. He looked out at the dry brown hills and the fields now fading from view and saw everywhere the same comradely scene of dispatch as more and more picking cre
ws unraveled to go their separate ways. The spiraling dust, the arms raised in salute, the figures solitary and committed, all were beautiful to him.

  He passed over a creek where a trace of water still trickled and moss slicked about. He was whistling and unaware of it. When he reached the CV outlet, he was shocked to see how many trucks were lined up ahead of him—not only trucks but also many tractors pulling gondolas. It was worse than the previous day by far. The line stretched back across the bridge for hundreds of yards. By craning his neck, Atwater could just make out the lit platform of the sugar shack. He was so far away from the winery proper that he couldn’t hear the purr of the crusher or the whine of the transfer pumps that moved the grape juice from tank to tank. All down the line, drivers had climbed from their cabs to wait on the road. In the foul and heavy exhaust fumes from their idling engines, they smoked and talked softly and aimlessly as they passed around a box of doughnuts.

  Atwater joined them. “What’s the trouble?” he asked.

  “Trouble?” he was told. “Trouble is, every red grape in Carson Valley decided to get ripe at the same goddam time.”

  “Ah, shit, that’s just an excuse,” another driver said angrily. “They could kick it along a lot faster if they wanted to. I came out with a load this morning and got through in under an hour.”

  “Everybody’s tired,” said a third driver. “CV, they weren’t prepared for this. They need a whole lot more help. Some of the boys inside, they’re about to fall over on their faces.”

  “Have a doughnut here, pal.” Atwater chose a honey glazed from a box and ate it greedily in a couple of bites. “Go on, have another one. There’s no reason to starve yourself to death just because you’re desperate, is there?”

  The line of trucks inched forward. The drivers watched to see if the advance would merit a return to their cabs, but the fleet had only traveled a few feet. So they stayed where they were and chatted and flung about accusations and alibis until the next jump forward opened the space between vehicles a little wider and created an illusion of progress. Atwater climbed up with the rest, shifted into first gear, and drove on for about five yards until he had to stop again. He got down after that and walked past the men on the road as if in a delirium and started counting the trucks ahead of him, but he was soon discouraged. The exercise was pointless. The number of trucks didn’t matter. The line, however long it was, would move or not move of its own accord, at a rate of speed over which he had no control. His hopes and desires were immaterial. He resigned himself to waiting.

  Whenever a truck that was emptied of its load went by the line on its way out, the liberated driver would honk or give a wave of solidarity, but it happened in time that a truck still piled with grapes passed by the men and disappeared without any fanfare. Atwater stuck his head out the window and listened to the drivers relay news of spoiled and rejected fruit.

  “Bunch rot,” he heard it said, and “They tried to downgrade him,” and “He wouldn’t swallow it,” and “He told ’em where to shove it.”

  “What’s he going to do now?” Atwater shouted above the rattling trucks.

  “Damned if I know. There’s nobody else around who’s even open. He might as well shovel those grapes into a creekbed.”

  In about two more hours, Atwater was in clear sight of the sugar shack at last. Six trucks were still in front of him, while three stragglers lagged behind him. He watched a tester on the platform of the shack plunge a corer into a load of grapes to take a reading. The tester was so fatigued and trudged about so sluggishly that he might have been drugged. Atwater felt stiff and ornery himself, severely put upon, and he closed his eyes and slept for a few minutes. When he woke and looked at the shack again, the platform was vacant and the light inside it had gone out. He saw Wade Saunders hustling down a ladder and some workers swinging shut the big wrought-iron gates in front of the winery. He couldn’t believe it—he was being locked out. He threw open his door and ran toward Saunders in his heavy work boots, tripping over a sprung lace and shouting, “Wade! Hey, Wade! Hold on!” until Saunders yielded to his cry and spun around on his heels.

  Hands on his hips, Atwater leaned forward to catch his breath. “Wade?” he asked. “Where are you going?”

  “Home,” Saunders told him sharply. “I’ve been roasting in that shack like a stuck pig since before noon. This heat is the damnedest thing.”

  “My grapes,” Atwater said, still gasping. “Who’s going to log me in?”

  “You’ll have to come back tomorrow, Arthur.”

  “But I’ve been waiting almost four hours out here!”

  “Well, I’m sorry about that.” Saunders cupped a hand around his lighter and fired up a cigarette. “But you can’t fault me, can you? Do you know what time it is?”

  “I don’t have a watch. Past ten?”

  “Pretty near. And I’m supposed to shut those gates at nine. You fellows all know that. It’s spelled out in your contract, and it’s up on that sign right over there.”

  Atwater felt ambushed. “But I got here way before nine!”

  “You saw how busy we were yesterday,” Saunders reminded him. “You should have built that into your calculations. To turn up at the last minute, well . . .”

  “The last minute! I just told you, Wade, I’ve been waiting four hours!” Atwater shrieked. He was almost beside himself, and yet he knew there was some truth to Saunders’s accusation. He could have played it safe and brought in smaller loads, but he had chosen to roll the dice and gamble it all on one big double haul. “How dare you say that to me!”

  “All right, I stand corrected. But you only see your side of things, Arthur. This situation, it happens once in a lifetime. It took CV by complete surprise!”

  Atwater pointed to his cargo. “Those are the best grapes in Carson Valley. I remember how bad you wanted them.”

  “I won’t deny it, but I have to draw the line somewhere, don’t I?” Saunders asked. “Else there won’t ever be an end to it. Look!”

  Another truck had pulled up to the winery, piloted by a driver even more ill-fated and behind schedule than the others who were still waiting.

  “Cut me some slack, Wade,” Atwater begged. “Do me just this one favor, and I’ll never ask you for another.”

  “I couldn’t cut you any slack even if I wanted to,” Saunders replied, his voice raspy. “I’ve done all the favors I can get away with for one day. You see those workers by the gates? They’re on time and a half. It’s costing me money just to talk to you.”

  “Only ten of us are left. At most, it’d take you another half hour.”

  “I wish I could help you, Arthur, but I can’t. The winery’s closed, and that’s all she wrote.”

  Atwater grabbed Saunders by the arm. “My grapes will turn overnight in this heat, Wade.”

  Saunders yanked his arm back. “And you want to hang the blame on me.” He chuckled and shook his head at the irony. “Isn’t that the shits?”

  “I’m not blaming anybody.”

  “The hell you aren’t. Every goddam one of you fellows makes me out to be the scapegoat. Since when am I responsible for your errors in judgment, Arthur? Since when is that? The fact is, you weren’t paying attention. Hundreds of trucks have run through here today without a problem. It’s your goddam fault, brother, not mine.”

  “The winery’s never been this crowded.”

  “I guess I get blamed for that, too. Okay. I accept it. Go right ahead and hang it on me.”

  “Come on, Wade.” Atwater hated himself for groveling. “Just this once. Just ten more trucks.”

  “There’ll be eleven by the time I open again.”

  Atwater swallowed hard. “Have it your way, then,” he said, seeing that it was a lost cause. “But do you have to be such a prick about it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You enjoy turning us away. You’re being a prick about it.”

  “Is that what I am?” Saunders looked outraged. “A prick? When I already st
ayed open an hour past closing time to help out a couple dozen growers? I can’t save everybody in the world! The only people who think Wade Saunders is a prick are the ten assholes left in line.”

  The other drivers got wind of the conversation. They climbed down and came at Saunders with pleas of their own.

  “Well, it may look simple to you,” Saunders told them slowly, as if they were dullards. “But it isn’t. This involves more than a few truckloads of fruit. It involves a whole corporation. I have a boss of my own I have to answer to.” He sighed. “I don’t make the rules, friends, I only follow them. If it was strictly up to me, I’d open those gates in a second.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.” Atwater stared at the ground. “Because you’re a prick.”

  “Pardon me, gentlemen, but I’ve had about enough of this,” Saunders said as he brushed past them. “It’s been a long day, and I am going home.”

  The drivers made no move to block him. They stood there in a stunned pack and railed about the harshness of their treatment, but their hands were tied. They had no means of appeal, so they returned to their trucks, swung them around, and drove away, everybody except Atwater, who was unable to summon the energy to leave. He dozed some more in his cab and woke again in the middle of the night. The moon was low in the sky, and he got out and felt how hot the air still was. He stood on a tire and reached up into the gondola to taste a grape. As he expected, the skin was puckered, and it was way too sweet. The same thing was true of every other grape he tasted. All his work, all his striving, had come down to this—a roll of the dice and boom! Snake eyes.