by T. C. Boyle
Into this vale of tears stepped Jim Isringhausen.
Jim came out in February to open up his brother’s place and make his move on one thousand acres of prime flat well-watered citrus land in Goleta, four miles to the north of Santa Barbara. Demand was up since the War ended and people back East were just going crazy for oranges, lemons, tangerines, limes, grapefruits, kumquats, you name it, and what they were getting from Florida was a drop in the bucket compared to what California could produce. Now was the time to get in on it before every used car salesman and soda jerk with a hundred bucks in his pocket got wind of it, not to mention the big conglomerates. And he came to O‘Kane first, because O’Kane had been with him from the beginning on this, and he’d been patient, sitting on his hands for two years now while Jim consolidated his holdings and lined up investors, and Jim appreciated that, he did.
He told O‘Kane all this on their way out to inspect the property on a day of biblical splendor, the sea leaping, the mountains chiseled, the sun hanging in the blue-veined sky like a big Valencia orange. Jim was looking good. He was wearing a checked sport jacket and white duck trousers, spats over his shoes, and his hair was frozen to his head with French pomade and his mustache so neat and refined it was barely there. The car was new, a yellow Mercer roadster with blood-red wire wheels and a fold-down canvas top. The wind was in their faces. Everything flashed and winked in the brilliant California light. Jim Isringhausen passed O’Kane a silver flask and O‘Kane drank deep of ambrosia—Scotch whiskey, the real stuff, smoke and peat and the very baaing of the sheep all in one swallow, whiskey like you couldn’t find anymore and maybe never would again.
“So what did you say you’ve got to put up,” Jim said, gently disengaging the flask from O‘Kane’s reluctant fingers and putting it to his own lips, “—three thousand?”
The wind beat at O‘Kane’s hair, the sun warmed his face. He squinted his eyes and felt the hope come up in him again, a breath of it, anyway. “Just about. Twenty-nine and something.”
Jim turned to him with the flask. He had the look of a priest on his face, all sympathy and concern. “That’s not your whole life savings, is it? Because I wouldn’t want to put you under any strain here—I mean, this is as close to a sure thing as you’ll find on this green earth, but nothing’s a hundred percent, you know that, don’t you?”
O‘Kane shrugged. He lifted the flask to his lips, casual as a millionaire. “No,” he lied, “I’ve got some put away still.”
He was no idiot. He knew what Jim was saying: there was risk involved. But there was risk involved in anything, in walking across the street, gulping your food, looking into a woman’s eyes on a Saturday night. This was his chance, and he was going to take it—all he needed to see was a row of orange trees, and he was in.
“All right,” Jim said, “call it three then—if you can round it off between now and next Tuesday, which is when we close the deal. At two hundred an acre, we need to raise twenty thousand dollars down against the bank loan and another thousand in reserve to hire a bunch of wops to water the trees and pick the fruit. Three’ll get you thirty shares, at a hundred per. Sound good, pardner?”
“Sure,” O‘Kane said.
Jim put both hands on the wheel as they swept too fast into a turn banked the wrong way; the wind sheared at them, there was a delicious jolt and Jim downshifted and hit the gas on the straightaway that suddenly opened up before them. “By the way,” he said, “Dolores sends her love.”
O‘Kane chewed over this bit of information as the flask came back to his hand and they swung off the pavement and onto a snaking dirt road that bloomed with dust and insects and flying bits of chaff. Dolores sends her love. Well, fine—O’Kane hadn’t seen or heard from her in two years, not since her husband came back from the War. He’d asked Jim about that, trying to sound casual, and Jim had told him they were over in Europe, reconstructing a villa someplace in Italy—not that it mattered two figs to O‘Kane one way or the other. Women were a thing of the past for him. He’d given up. After Rosaleen and poor Eddie Jr.—and Giovannella.
He hadn’t seen her either, the widow Capolupo. He heard she’d moved back in with her parents, pregnant with a dead man’s baby—or so she claimed. And he hadn’t heard whether she’d given birth to a wop or half a wop, and he just didn’t care, not anymore. If he could make his fortune here, in oranges, and get out from under the McCormicks and set himself up someplace—in San Francisco maybe, or Los Angeles—well then he might just possibly think about finding some young girl of twenty with some grace and style about her and settle into his forties with something to show for his life. But right now he didn’t need the complications. Or the heartache either.
The car swung round a bend and all at once they were in the groves, running along between rows of orange trees, glossy copper-green leaves and the oranges hanging fat and sweet in every one, as if this were Christmas, endless Christmas, and every tree decorated just for them. Jim pulled over at the end of one of the long tapering rows, where the trees suddenly gave out and the open fields began, yellow mustard up to your armpits and some kind of hairy blue flowers struggling through the weeds and a riot of every possible thing reaching up out of the dirt—everything but oranges, that is. “Well,” Jim said, throwing out his arms, “what do you think?”
O‘Kane looked over his shoulder at the ranks of unassailable trees, and then out into the field. Jim’s white trousers were stained with flecks of yellowish mud. There were gopher mounds everywhere, and at least now O’Kane knew what they were. “I don’t know,” he said. “What am I supposed to think?”
“I guess it’s kind of hard to picture,” Jim said, wading out into the undergrowth, “but once we get this cleared out of here and give these trees some attention—”
“What trees? You mean”—a gesture for the grove behind them—“those aren’t the trees right there?”
Jim Isringhausen was bent over something in the deep grass. “Here, look,” he said.
O‘Kane saw a sapling no thicker than his finger, four feet tall maybe, with a puff of vegetation at the top of it. And then he saw the others, the smallest stunted flags of copper-green leaves poking out here and there from the morass of weeds. “That’s an orange tree?” he said, and even as he said it he understood how elusive a thing a man’s fortune could be.
Jim Isringhausen had straightened up, holding his hands out in front of him as he rubbed the dirt from them. “Yep,” he said, “that’s it. And before you know it these little beauties’ll be producing like their big sisters behind you.”
O‘Kane just stared at the place Jim had cleared in the weeds and the leafy stalk of nothing stuck in the middle of it like an arrow shot down out of the sky. Then he looked over his shoulder again, at the deep-green wash of leaves and the oranges hanging uncountable in the interlocking grid of branches that went on as far as he could see. “It’s going to take a while,” he said finally.
Jim didn’t deny it. “Yeah,” he said, working his heel against the running board to dislodge a clot of mud from his gleaming tan shoe. “But not as long as you think.”
After that, things began to go downhill, a long steady slide that was so gradual O‘Kane wasn’t even aware of it, not at first. It was as if everything in his ken—Mr. McCormick, Dr. Brush, Riven Rock, Mrs. Fitzmaurice, the hoarded whiskey and beer and Mart and Pat and the accrued weight of all those saved and salvaged dollars—was on an incline and the top end of it tipping up higher and higher every day. O’Kane gave Jim Isringhausen his life’s savings—and talked Mart into putting up a hundred and some odd dollars too, to round off the investment at an even three thousand. He’d stood in that overgrown field and looked at those sorry twigs and saw the whole thing unfold, the gophers ravaging the roots, the well run dry, Jim Isringhausen back in New York enthroned in some townhouse like J. Pierpont Morgan, the weeds dead and parched and fallen away to the faintest skeletons of what they were and the orange trees as barren and dead under the summer sun as
the grainy yellow dirt itself. But he didn’t care. It was a chance, that was all. The worst chance, maybe, but he was tired of waiting, cored out with it, exhausted, worn down, reckless and mad and seething with self-hate and the blackest kind of fatalistic despair: throw a nickel in the ocean and see if it makes a splash.
He drank beer with the whiskey and when that ran out he drank the bourbon. He was sick in the mornings and his throat was dry through the afternoons, his sinuses clogged, his head throbbing. He drank the sloe gin and it tasted like some sort of liquefied tooth powder, and then he dug up the wine and drank that. There were bootleggers in town now, weasel-faced desperadoes who drove up from Mexico with tequila and mescal and Pedro Domecq brandy, but it was eight dollars a bottle, nine, ten, and what the local entrepreneurs were making out in the canyons was a quarter the price, even if it was just about undrinkable. What they called whiskey was grain alcohol diluted with tap water, colored with caramel and flavored with prune juice, and “Scotch” was all of the above with a dose of creosote added for taste and texture. It was like drinking strychnine, battery acid, toilet cleanser, but it did the trick, and O‘Kane resorted to it, a loyal customer, a daily customer, a customer whose hands shook as he tried to unfold the money and slip it into the palm of Bill McCandless from Lompoc or Charley Waterhouse from Carpinteria or Farmer Caty from God knew where. They ran the stills—they made the shit—and handsome Eddie O’Kane took it back to his room and drank it. Oh, once in a while he’d go up to Menhoff’s and order a hamburger sandwich and a ginger ale and sit there drinking ginger ale after ginger ale till the bottle in his back pocket was empty and somebody had to help him out the door, but mainly he just went to his room and stared at the walls.
And what walls they were. Mrs. Fitzmaurice had interred them beneath a thick fibrous covering of the cheapest grade of wallpaper applied with liberal quantities of glue over what must have been plaster, also liberally applied. These were not sheer walls, not by any means—they plunged, leapt, bulged, threw up a cordillera here, sank into the depths of a laguna there. The wallpaper pattern was meant to represent some sort of tubular flower, endlessly repeated in blue, violet and chartreuse, and if O‘Kane stared at it long enough, the flowers first became bells, then sausages, and finally, if he’d had enough Lompoc swill, severed heads, elongated in the most horrible and unnatural way. There wasn’t much furniture to obstruct his view—a washstand, bed, wardrobe, chair and table—but that was all right with O’Kane. He had the opportunity to contemplate furniture all day long at Riven Rock, room after room of it, the finest money could buy. He didn’t need to bring it home with him—and he didn’t need the encumbrance either. Possessions were for the rich, and he wasn’t rich and never would be—not unless Jim Isringhausen pulled off some sort of miracle.
Mrs. Fitzmaurice had graced his room with her chef d‘oeuvre, an ambitious four-foot-long-by-two-foot-high canvas that daringly intermixed puppies and kittens both in what seemed at first glance to be a demonic battle over the remains of a disemboweled kitten, but on closer inspection proved to be an innocent tug-of-war over a ball of yarn. This inspirational piece had pride of place on the wall over the bed, where O’Kane had to twist his neck to study it while lying there drinking and listening to the only record he had (a distant, hissingly ethereal rendition of “Semper Fidelis” that sounded as if it had been recorded in the locker room at Notre Dame). One wall was broken up by a window, another by the door; the third was an uninterrupted medley of bell-like and sausagelike flowers. His fellow boarders—there were eight of them, all in various stages of unhope and decay—strenuously avoided him, except at meals, when a certain degree of contact and even conversation was inevitable, but he began skipping meals and avoiding them in the hallways even before they had a chance to avoid him.
So it went, through the winter, into the spring and the parched, citrus-wilting summer. O‘Kane began to miss the odd day at work when the ersatz whiskey or Scotch or “Genuine Holland Genever” was especially bad and hit him so hard even the fillings of his teeth ached, and he didn’t like to do that, miss work, and he knew it was the beginning of the end of everything he’d ever struggled and hoped for, but he just couldn’t seem to muster the energy to care. And no one else seemed to care either. Brush was on the way out, even a blind man could see that. He’d stopped putting in regular hours altogether, and half the time when he did show up it was no more than a hello and good-bye for Mr. McCormick before he puffed and blustered his way out to the theater house and buried himself in his office. Mart was as thickheaded as ever, oblivious to everything, and Nick and Pat were putting on weight till they looked like twin bulldogs, asleep on their feet. And Katherine, the presiding genius of the place, was nowhere to be seen. She was a name in a newspaper clipping, Mrs. Stanley McCormick, running around the country with a bunch of birth control fanatics and blood-sucking feminists—now that women had got the vote and voted down drinking, they wanted to do away with babies too. And sure, why not—let the stork fly down out of heaven with them so women could spend all their free time smoking and griping and wearing pants.
There was a real decline in the upkeep of the place, too—so much so that even O‘Kane noticed it through the scrim of his alcoholic haze. Torkelson was gone, lured away by one of the nonschizophrenic local millionaires, and the new man, ponderous, slow-moving, with a phony English accent and the ridiculous name of Butters, let the household staff get away with murder. There was dust everywhere, great roiling clouds of it rising from every chair you sat in, Mr. McCormick’s shirts were haphazardly laundered and indifferently ironed, the male housemaids spent half the day lolling around the kitchen with their feet up and you never saw a broom or feather duster in action anymore, let alone a mop. Outside, it was even worse. Stribling had given notice the day after the gopher incident and for lack of a better alternative, Brush had put the skinny Irishman in charge (O’Mara his name was, not O‘Hara, he was from Poughkeepsie, New York, and he didn’t know a cactus from a coconut), and everything went to hell in a handbasket. There were Italians asleep under the bushes in broad daylight, gophers eating their way through the gardens and plowing up the lawns, whole flower beds gone dead for lack of care, and no one seemed to notice, least of all Mr. McCormick—he just went on talking to his judges, reading aloud in half a dozen voices and veering off across the estate at a mad canter every time somebody opened the door and let him out.
It was late that fall, on a day of slanting sun and scouring winds that tossed the trees and twisted themselves around puffs of yellow dust, that O‘Kane, drunk on the job, broached the subject of his orange-grove investment with his employer. Mart was asleep on the sofa. Dr. Brush was in his office. There wasn’t a sound anywhere in the house but for the gasp and sigh of the wind. “Mr. McCormick,” O’Kane said, setting down the book he’d been staring at for the past half hour without effect, “I’d be curious to know your opinion on something—an investment I’ve made with Jim Isringhausen. In citrus.”
“Who?” Mr. McCormick was moving round the table, hopping lightly from one foot to the other, arranging the chairs and table settings for lunch, a thing he particularly liked to do. Some days he’d spend as much as an hour or more positioning and repositioning the chairs, shifting plates, spoons, cups and saucers a quarter inch to the left or right, worrying over the napkins in their rings, endlessly rearranging the cut flowers in the vase in the center of the table. It was one of his rituals, one of the more innocuous ones, and all the doctors had encouraged him in it, even Brush—at least he was doing something.
“Jim Isringhausen,” O‘Kane repeated. “He says he used to know you at Princeton.”
Mr. McCormick had the look of a wading bird standing there over the table, some lean beaky thing studying to spear a frog or a minnow and gulp it down whole. His eyes went briefly to O‘Kane’s and then fell away again. “Never heard of him,” he said, realigning spoon and plate on the doctor’s side of the table, and then he said something under his brea
th to one of his judges. This wasn’t unusual, particularly at meal-times, and O’Kane thought nothing of it. Often Mr. McCormick would set extra places at the table, and when Dr. Brush questioned him about it, he would explain that they were reserved for the judges. Today there were only four places—for Mart, O‘Kane, Dr. Brush and their host—so it was safe to assume that the judges had already eaten.
“Sure you have,” O‘Kane heard himself say, a faint tocsin ringing somewhere in the back of his fuddled brain, “—Princeton, ’96. He was your classmate.”
Mr. McCormick commenced hopping from foot to foot again; this was another of his rituals, and it meant that the floor was on fire. When the floor wasn’t on fire it was made of glue, a very efficacious and unyielding glue, and he had to strain to lift his feet. But now he was hopping, and because he was hopping, he was too absorbed to respond to O‘Kane’s assertions.
“He lives in New York, O‘Kane went on, and he was beginning to feel just the tiniest bit desperate now, marshaling his facts till the weight of them would give him the reassurance he was looking for. ”He has something to do with the stock exchange, I think. And his brother, you know his brother—or you know of him. He has that grand big place out on Sycamore Canyon Road, the one we pass by on our drives sometimes?“
When Mr. McCormick still didn’t answer, O‘Kane, who was feeling very strange and out of sorts, as if he had a fever coming on—or a hangover and fever combined—sat brooding a moment, trying to recollect just what he did know about Jim Isringhausen, aside from the fact that his sister-in-law was a terrific lay. Not much. Not much at all. He worried it over a bit, then tried a new tack. “Mr. McCormick, when you were ... well, before you came to Riven Rock, before you were married, I mean, I was just wondering how you felt about investing in real estate—in general, I mean.”