Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  Torelli polished off the pie with a few more bites and called for a second helping. Pie was what he wanted, and pie was what he would have. He watched the vanilla ice cream melt and pool up beautifully in the crannies of the crust, off-white against the rich red syrup and fruit, and got so absorbed in the abstract swirl of colors that he didn’t register the fact of Atwater’s arrival. He became aware quite suddenly that someone was standing by his booth and felt as if he’d been caught in a revealing act that was not entirely wholesome. In public, he had proved himself to be a pie-eating fool. He rubbed at his lips with a napkin, amazed that he could be sitting there with so much food smeared across his face. How little there was to care about at this stage of the game, the old man thought. A single teenage pimple used to make him feel like Frankenstein.

  “Arthur,” he said with a nod. He worked his tongue over his teeth and gums to police up any stray morsels. “Sit down, why don’t you? Care for a piece of pie?”

  “Just coffee, thanks.”

  They huddled over the accountant’s report and shuffled papers between them. Atwater pored over the columns of numbers and looked doubtful. He seemed not to want to accept Chambers’s brilliantly manipulated conclusions.

  “We didn’t come out too bad after all, did we?” Torelli asked, coaching him. “All things considered?”

  Atwater threw down the report, causing the pages to flutter. “Lloyd did a good job. I’ll give him credit for that. He makes it look nice and tidy, but we both know what really happened.”

  “Read the bottom line, Arthur. It says we came out ahead. We made a profit.”

  “We should have done much better.”

  “You can always do better.” He wants to hang onto his sense of failure, Torelli thought. Why should that be? “Every farmer knows that. Nobody gets all the weeds.”

  “You don’t have to go easy on me,” Atwater complained. “I let you down again, and I’m sorry.”

  “Some things can’t be helped,” the old man told him. “What would you like me to do about it? Punish you because you gambled and lost? Every grower has to gamble. Don’t you get enough punishment as it is?”

  “I cost you a lot of money, Victor. You can’t just write it off.”

  “You earned me a lot of money, too. Look how the Chardonnay did! So quit your pissing and moaning.” He took out the envelope he’d brought and slid it across the table. “Go on and open it.” He watched Atwater fumble with the check inside, one for five thousand dollars. He felt unexpectedly splendid about the transaction, recalling all the times he’d been small and mean and tight with his money and all the things he had denied his wife, his children, and even himself for no reason that he could currently imagine, dolls, dresses, furniture, and baseball gloves. Why not be generous when you have the opportunity? There you go, Victor, he told himself. Congratulations. That’s the goddam spirit!

  “What’s this for?” Atwater asked him, clearly flustered.

  “It’s your bonus.”

  Atwater made a prissy face, returned the check to the envelope, and slid it back. “No way. I won’t accept something I didn’t earn. I’m not a charity case yet.”

  “I say you did earn it.” The old man sat smugly, his arms folded. “And I’m the boss.”

  “Listen, this is silly, Victor,” Atwater protested. “You’re treating me like a child.”

  “Let me tell you a little story.” Torell’s brain was in a whirl as he invented an object lesson on the spot. “Suppose you wear out a pair of work boots. What do you do with them? You put ’em out with the garbage. They’re not worth a goddam thing to you anymore. Hell, you’re glad to get rid of them, in fact! Well, who should come along the next morning but a fellow that’s barefoot.”

  “Why is he barefoot?”

  “He just is, Arthur. I never told this story before.”

  “I see,” Atwater said with the hint of a smile.

  “Anyway, this barefooted fellow, he spies those boots, and it’s like he’s found a treasure! He won’t be barefooted anymore! Do you get my point?”

  “Not really.”

  “It all depends on how you look at things.” The old man pushed the envelope across the table. “If you think you failed, then you did. But I think you succeeded. So you deserve your bonus.”

  “I respectfully decline.”

  “Arthur, you are a very stubborn person. I believe I’ll have one more piece of pie.”

  Torelli summoned the waitress and chose a wedge of blueberry this time around. He ate ravenously and obliviously and lifted his eyes from his plate only when Atwater spoke again.

  “It’s not that I don’t appreciate it,” Atwater was saying in an earnest way. “I do. I really do.”

  “Take the goddam check,” Torelli urged him. “Go on a vacation. Have some fun while you still can.”

  “All right, I give up. I’m not going to fight you about it forever.” Atwater picked up the envelope and stuffed it into a pocket. “Thank you, Victor. I’ll split it with Antonio.”

  “Whatever you want. It’s your money now. Is he coming back to work?”

  “No, he’s got his mind set on being a roofer. I can’t talk him out of it.”

  “People will do what they’re going to do.”

  “That’s the truth, I guess.”

  Torelli narrowed his eyes, examined Atwater in all his dimensions, and saw how young he was and how much he still had to learn. “Well, at least this harvest taught you something, Arthur,” he said.

  “I don’t know what on earth that might be,” Atwater replied.

  “A Rotarian’ll screw you just as quick as anybody else,” the old man told him, digging into the last of his pie.

  27

  The Vescios threw a big hoedown in honor of their pickers when the grapes were in every year. It always took place toward the end of November, right before Thanksgiving. All the crew members were invited, plus their families and sixty or seventy of Fred’s intimates, semi-intimates, and nodding acquaintances. On the morning of the grand event, Vescio’s men dug a pit near the main house on the property and lined it with some dry oak and grape cuttings. Then they lit a fire, and when the pit was white-hot with ashes, they brought out a spitted calf and fixed it to an old iron rotisserie. The calf was a thing of beauty, marinated in red wine and virgin olive oil, studded with garlic, and rubbed with a mixture of herbs, and it would cook slowly for hours until a crust had formed and the meat was fork-tender and falling off the bone.

  The guests started arriving around five o’clock. They were in a festive mood. A complimentary harvest edition of the Valley Herald had landed on most doorsteps that day, and its evaluation of the crop was wildly optimistic and held in much higher regard than it probably should have been, given the paper’s long history of boosterism. Of the dozen growers interviewed, only one had expressed any doubts about quality, but his wife had just left him for an Episcopal minister over in another county, so his opinion was roundly discounted. The other growers were full of praise. They conspired to put forth a theory whereby the late-maturing red grapes were bound to have an exceptional concentration of flavors, making for a vintage that would cellar well and be awarded blue ribbons even in foreign countries, including France.

  There were folding tables set up not far from the barbecue pit, each covered with a dime-store tablecloth and laden with food. The beef was served on three large ceramic platters that were hand-painted in intense yellows and blues and decorated with crowing roosters. Bowls of pinto beans, rice flecked with peas and tomato pulp, green salad, coleslaw, potato salad, nopales, and several kinds of salsa ranging from mild to infernal were set out in an order that led logically to baskets of corn and flour tortillas. A few guests had never rolled their own taco or burrito, so Vescio was called upon to demonstrate and rose to the occasion. He wore a Mexican wedding shirt of incalculable age and a pair of huaraches, while on his head was a sombrero purchased years ago in Tijuana, with the legend VIVA ZAPATA! stitched across its
crown.

  “There’s nothing to it,” he told Irwin Poplinger, sidling along the buffet. “This isn’t some candy-ass deal like using chopsticks. To a Mexican, a tortilla is the same as his fingers. You put whatever’s your pleasure on one and wrap it up real tight.”

  “You make it look so easy.”

  “Easy as pulling teeth, Doc.”

  Arthur Atwater attended the party in his new down vest. He had finished picking his crop about a week before—on November sixteenth, to be exact—when he pulled off the last grapes from his thriving block of hillside Zinfandel. The Zins had come in first rate, almost six tons to the acre, and there were no more ugly incidents at the CV outlet. Wade Saunders had even offered something like an apology, and Atwater had pretended to accept it, although he really wanted to drag Saunders around a corner and give him a stout pummeling. Still, he was mostly satisfied with how things had turned out. If the harvest had not been all he had hoped for, neither had it gone completely sour. He would have other years and other chances. His bonus check he had split in half and sent the other share to Antonio, who was very glad to get it now that Elena was pregnant again. He planned to spend his own money on a trip to Oaxaca in the spring, between bud-break and bloom, and he would explore the much-lauded Mysteries of the Yucatán.

  The Vescios had hired a mariachi band from Santa Rosa to provide some atmosphere. The five musicians showed up at twilight, each in a bolero jacket, frilly pink shirt, and tight black trousers. They set up near a makeshift dance floor outside the barn and played such rousing standards as “Cucurrucucu Paloma,” and “Guadalajara,” as well as a plaintive version of “Si Estás Dormida” that had many of the pickers and their wives in tears. Atwater allowed himself a small whiskey for the sake of boldness and danced twice with a pretty blond he hadn’t ever seen before. She worked in the office at Hawk Wind, laughed easily, and invited him to tour the winery with her some time when he felt like it. He thought he would feel like it quite soon. He was in the market for a new girlfriend, in fact, having concluded his brief fling with the bartender, who drove him from her bed early in the game by talking about commitment.

  Atwater released the blond reluctantly to another fellow and sat on the steps of the house to bask in the music. He felt so grateful and ordinary that he didn’t protest when Jack Farrell lowered his bulk to the step below him, with his elbows splayed back for additional support and his gut flopping.

  “I don’t have a single gripe in the world,” Farrell said sweetly. “Isn’t this the nicest night?”

  “Yes, it is,” Atwater agreed.

  “Who was that woman you were dancing with, Arthur?”

  “Just nobody, Jack.”

  “She work up at Hawk Wind, does she?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Anyhow, you’d be better off with her than you would have been with Anna. She never returned any of my phone calls. Can you believe it?”

  “If I try real hard, I can,” Atwater said. His obsession with Anna had dimmed during the toil of the harvest, but he knew that it was likely to come back. He knew it very well.

  Farrell stroked his belly. “Well, I guess it wasn’t meant to be between me and her. That’s how it goes with romance sometimes. Shakespeare, he wrote about it in the olden days.”

  “So you were Romeo, and Anna was Juliet?”

  “I think that’s fair enough to say.”

  “It’s funny,” Atwater said pointedly. “I never pictured you two that way.”

  “How did your grapes come out, Arthur? Didn’t I hear you had some problems?”

  “No problems, Jack. We did real fine.”

  “Victor, he was happy?”

  “About as happy as he gets.”

  “He doesn’t look so good,” Farrell said with concern. “Maybe it’s the change in the weather. My tennis elbow hurt like a son of a bitch last night.”

  “I never knew you were a tennis player.”

  “I’m not. But I’ve still got the elbow. You figure old Fred is going to let loose a piglet tonight?”

  “Yes, I do,” Atwater said. “I’m absolutely certain of it.”

  “He must have a screw loose somewhere.”

  Atwater didn’t stay around for the piglet routine. He left early, before ten o’clock. The harvest might be over, but he still had work to do. The vineyard looked desolate now with the vines all tattered and ruined, as if a gale-force wind had blown through it. Every leaf was dry and crinkly to the touch, and every dying filament burned with color. He walked among declensions of flame red, among pale yellows and fulminate golds. There were small, worthless bunches of grapes hanging from some canes, a second crop never to be picked, fodder for the birds, and also a few raisiny clusters that the crew had correctly passed up. The soil had turned to hardpan, so he took to his tractor and tore it apart with a harrow, opening its pores to the winter rains. He spread fertilizer as necessary and spent hours packing away the special harvest gear, his hands in rubber gloves as he scrubbed out the plastic tubs, with soap bubbles floating all about him.

  Already November was almost over. Atwater found that scarcely credible and thoroughly unacceptable. Time that once had been his friend was becoming his enemy—fleeting time, time as quicksilver, every bearded cliché was coming home to roost. Often he thought about a crotchety aunt of his, who was always going on about the general speeding up of things as the aging process slowed her down. She got as splintery as a chicken bone, wrapped herself in black shawls, and nattered around with a cane. She even bought herself an hourglass and kept it on her dining room table, next to the salt and pepper. Atwater himself felt old. He felt he knew too much about too little. He felt lonely in the broad and tranquil sweep of the fields as well, and it was almost like a blessing when he admitted to himself that he was overextended and needed another pair of hands, so he put out the word on the valley tom-tom and hired a half brother to the vaunted Manuel. The youth’s name was Salazar Gallego, and his reputation for being honest and dependable was high.

  Atwater enjoyed the company of his new field hand. Gallego was shy, quiet, and very serious. His manners were impeccable, and he didn’t sing any melancholy songs. Together they began the tedious but essential job of clearing away the diseased Chardonnay vines by the river. The rootstock was more than thirty years old, gnarled and historical. It could tell us stories, Atwater thought, if we only knew how to listen. He and Salazar used spades and pitchforks to dig up the ancient trunks and roots and replaced them with Ganzin Number One. The Ganzin came in bundles of fifty. Each seedling was about a foot long and an inch thick. Delicate greenery sprouted from the seedlings and attracted gophers, rabbits, and deer, so they had to slide an empty milk carton down each grape stake to form a protective barrier. The work was not difficult, but it demanded care and patience. They were kept busy, pressed close to the earth.

  It happened one afternoon that Atwater looked up while they were crawling around and saw an unfamiliar car approaching on the dirt road. He got to his feet, ran a hand through his hair, and tried to figure out who it might be. While he waited, he occupied himself by counting the number of rows still to be replanted and musing on other chores yet to be done before the rainy season began. Dust swirled up from the road and made it hard to see, but when the car came closer, he could make out the driver’s face and saw that it was Anna. That didn’t seem possible to him, but it was her, undeniably, and he knew in an instant of revelation that he had been expecting her all along, although he couldn’t have predicted when or how or in what shape or form. He had imagined just such a scene in his dreamiest moments, but now that she was really here he was not the least bit certain what to do.

  She parked not far from the row where they were working and walked toward him with her confident stride. Her simple cotton shirt, those long legs in jeans, that rich bounty of hair he had so often lost himself in—Atwater had not forgotten a single thing. A part of him wanted to turn from her and hike away in the opposite direction, fording t
he river, climbing into the hills and over the Coast Range, and continuing on to the ocean and thence to China, but instead he moved forward with the faltering step of a man stunned by a blow to the temple. Every aspect of him was divided. He had a half smile on his face, he had half a mind to run her off the property, and he was half ready to take her into his arms.

  What he said was, “Hello, stranger.”

  Anna stopped a few feet from him. He recognized that she, too, was nervous and a little frightened. “Hello yourself,” she said.

  He said next, cursing himself for it, “We’re planting the new rootstock. You remember that Ganzin Number One you found for us? It’s what we’re using.”

  “The harvest is over?” She sounded disappointed.

  “We finished about a week ago.”

  “I’m sorry I missed it. I hoped I might get here for the last of it.”

  “Salazar!” Atwater cried, motioning to Gallego. “This is Anna Torelli! La hija de Victor! Come say hello!”

  Gallego wiped his hands on his jeans, rubbing and rubbing, and did Atwater’s bidding. “Welcome, señora,” he said, elegant in his bearing.

  “He’s a damn good worker,” Atwater told her as Gallego turned his attentions back to planting. “Antonio, he decided to become a roofer.”

  Anna was walking toward him again, closing the gap between them, and making his throat go dry. “Will you hold me, please?” she asked, her face turned up to him, imploring.