East of the Mountains

by David Guterson

  ELEVEN

  The contractor at the Wolfhound Orchard, a man named Lyle Parmenter, squatted with his clipboard and a carpenters pencil, filling in the blanks on a Department of Justice Employment Eligibility form. He pondered Emilio's employment card, tattered and worn along its edges and bearing the name Raul Ramirez; he examined Bens Washington State drivers license and social security card. Parmenter eyed Bens photograph, scratched his forehead, scrutinized Ben—who wore dark glasses at the hour of dusk—then considered the license once more. "There were Givens," he said, "other side of the river. You related to them?"

  "No," said Ben. "I'm not."

  "You ever picked apples?"

  "I have, yes."

  "Where at?"

  "All over. You name it."

  "But you're from t'other side of the mountains."

  "I can still pick," said Ben.

  Parmenter tapped his nose with the pencil. He was a red-skinned man with pointed sideburns and a chapped, cross-hatched neck. "This is a young man's work," he said. "It's harder than it looks."

  "I'm old for picking, that's true," said Ben. "But you can figure at my age I know better than most how to do it right."

  Parmenter seemed to take this as a challenge. "We'll see about that," he replied. He turned to size up Emilio. "You speak English, senor?"

  "No," answered Ben. "He doesn't."

  "Raul Ramirez," Parmenter read. "Does he know what he's doing with apples?"

  "Yes," said Ben. "He's good at it."

  "How do you know?"

  "I've seen Raul pick."

  "Where was that?"

  "In Yakima."

  "Well, I don't know how they do it down there, but here I don't want any broken branches or crashing around with the ladders. And I want people handling the fruit gentle. You start bird-dogging or bottoming trees, I'll pull you off your ladder fast and send you down the road."

  "Understood," Ben answered.

  "We've got to be this way," said Parmenter. "Better to make it clear beforehand than have trouble because we didn't."

  "I'd do the same," Ben assured him.

  Parmenter handed Ben the clipboard and showed him where to sign. "It's late for them sunglasses, isn't it?" he asked. "There's not much light anymore."

  "I've got cataracts," Ben answered. "In both eyes."

  Ben and Emilio were passed into the hands of a field boss introduced as Sanchez, who was told to show them to the pickers' camp. A small, crisp man in cowboy boots, Sanchez wore a rawhide belt with a silver buckle embossed to depict a bucking bronc. He wore a lightweight cowboy hat high on his bronzed smooth forehead. The hair at his neck was closely cropped. His breath smelled of menthol cough drops.

  Ben, walking, took off his sunglasses, but when he went to tuck them in his pocket, they tumbled to the ground. Emilio picked them up for him, and they hiked on toward the pickers' camp. "Wolfhound Orchard," Ben said to Sanchez. "That's a peculiar name."

  Sanchez nodded, inaccessible. He was quiet in a perturbing way and would not look at Ben's face.

  "Are there wolfhounds out here or something?" prodded Ben. "Or did they just make it up?"

  "There are wolfhounds," Sanchez answered.

  "A lot of them? A pack or something?"

  "Yes," said Sanchez. "Twelve."

  "Twelve hounds," Ben said. "You'd think a guy with an orchard this size wouldn't have time for that."

  "His brother is the keeper of the dogs," said Sanchez. "His brother is always the dog man. We have to turn left on the path right there and go down that hill."

  They followed Sanchez along a dirt track, past dark orchards and stacks of pear branches ravaged by fire blight. The camp lay in a hollow of hoary pines, cottonwoods, and tall poplars. There was a row of cabins sheathed in graying plywood, a cinder-block washhouse beside a creek, and a vast, dilapidated equipment shed thronged with the rusting detritus, the trim and tackle, of an orchard. In a flat, dusty field beyond the pines sat a ragged arc of pickers' trailers, moonlight playing off their sides through the vertical lines of the trees. Sanchez led them past a shed half full of neat apple cordwood. It was cold now, with the suns descent. A gid labored at a chopping block, splitting stove wood with a short-handled ax; she didn't look at them, resolutely, as though it was dangerous to look.

  Sanchez showed them the features of the washhouse: hot-water tank, two shower stalls, a wall heater, a washing machine, a Manila line for drying clothes. He and Emilio spoke in Spanish, then stopped when Ben collapsed on a bench. "You look pretty sick," said Sanchez.

  "It's nothing," said Ben. "Indigestion."

  "I hope it isn't contagious or nothing."

  "It isn't," said Ben. "Indigestion."

  Emilio helped Ben to his feet again by pulling on his left arm. They left the washhouse and walked the row of cabins, which Sanchez explained were the dwelling places of the unmarried pickers. Lights glowed in most of these; smoke blew from cinder-block chimneys. Ladders and bins lay scattered about. Two cars sat parked in front, one with a crucifix, one with foam dice hung from their rearview mirrors. On each small porch sat a hatchet and cutting block, pine kindling and scrap wood. A man emerged onto his porch as they passed—a shirtless man, in jeans and slippers—hung a mesh bag of onions from a hook, and spoke to Sanchez in Spanish. Sanchez answered, and they talked for a while. From the man's open door came the hiss of meat frying, the smell of onions simmering. A cat slipped noiselessly between the man's slippers, rubbed its flank against his leg, and stalked out into the pines. A car pulled in beside another cabin, and two young men piled out of it, laden with groceries. Ben heard the blaring of the car radio while the doors stood open. There was the smell of wood smoke and pine needles; the heat and light from the man's cabin spilled into the night.

  Sanchez unlocked the next cabin and handed the key to Ben. He pulled a beaded chain inside to switch on the overhead light. Emilio surveyed things at Bens shoulder, his face impassive, neutral. They stood together, taking everything in, the lightbulb swinging on its cord. The cabin was the size of a garden shed, with a buckling, warped linoleum floor and slap-painted walls of plywood. A scanty, red-checked gingham curtain was drawn across a small window. A cast-iron cookstove sat on a fire pad; oilcloth covered the little table. From hooks just over the sink hung a fly swatter, a potato masher, and a ladle. Sanchez waited with one hand on the doorknob. "You have to be careful with that hot plate," he advised. "We don't want to have any fires."

  "I don't plan on cooking," Ben said.

  "There's a little trail across from the washhouse. You walk up there at six A.M., and we'll put you up in a ladder."

  Ben nodded. "I'll be there."

  "This is a cabin for one person only. They don't want more in here."

  "What about my compadre; though?"

  "He sleeps next door," answered Sanchez.

  He said something to Emilio in Spanish, and they all said buenas noches to one another, and gracias, and see you in the morning, and finally the two others left.

  Ben collapsed on the cot. A paltry mattress on a loose web of springs, it put him in mind of Camp Hale. Pulling his knees up toward his chest, he wrapped his arms around his gut and moaned softly with each breath. The moaning soothed him a little. He didn't have the energy to pry off his boots, so he untied them and left them on. It was silent except for a bluebottle fly that landed on him now and then. The naked bulb had ceased its swaying and cast a bald white light.

  Ben sat up and fumbled in his rucksack for the drifter's breath-mint tin. There was one marijuana cigarette left, and he lodged its tip between his lips and lit it with a kitchen match he found in a dish on the cookstove. Standing in the doorway, Ben blew smoke toward the pines. The moons glow lay over the world. The girl splitting wood had left the ax in the chopping block. A light was on in Emilios cabin. Ben drew smoke into his lungs again, and while he kept it there, holding his breath, an owl hooted in the hollow. A strident and mysterious call, somehow disconcerting.

 
; He turned out the light, lay on the bed, and in his thick, slow, narcotic way, took note of disconnected details. The stovepipe had a right-angle bend above the damper key. On an open shelf stood a candle, a flashlight, and a spray can of Barbasol. The ceiling was made of square fiber tiles coming loose in two corners. A bottle of castor oil stood beside the sink, slightly less than half full. Ben weighed the merit of taking some, desiring its purgative effect, but chances were it was rancid, old, and in the end he decided against it.

  His mind shifted, dancing. He thought of Catherine Donnelly, then of Christine Reilly. He thought of the horsewoman at the veterinary clinic, the blue veins in her shoulders. He was half in dreams, mired in marijuana, when someone knocked on the cabin door and opened it tentatively. In the darkness Ben made out only a shape, a figure hovering silently, and his heart raced, panicked. "Who is it?" he called. "Who's there?"

  The answer came, indecipherably, in Spanish, but Ben was familiar with its pleasant lilt, and the figure resolved into someone he recognized—Emilio, or Raul Ramirez, whatever his name was, it didn't matter. Stove wood heaped in the crook of his arm. He waited patiently by the door. "Qué pasa?" Ben asked. "What is it?"

  "Hace mucho frío," the boy answered.

  He set the wood on the floor by the stove and brushed his shirtfront clean. In the darkness he moved about silently. He put Ben's rucksack on the room's only chair, lay a blanket over Ben's legs. Next he built a warming fire, slowly feeding the flames. The light reflected against his face, the cleft in his chin, his bold forehead. He sat on his ankles comfortably, a stick in his hand, poking. Ben lay listening to the spit of the kindling. The boy looked contemplative with the fire's glow in his pores. " Gracias," Ben said. "Muchas gracias. I appreciate the fire."

  "De nada," Emilio answered.

  He adjusted the damper, closed the firebox, and fine-tuned the draft. He sat for a moment looking about, then took the candle from the shelf, set it in the sink, and lit it. Candlelight fluttered across the room. Trembling shadows, the borders of things muted. Emilio came to Ben's cot and knelt. "Okay, senor" he said.

  Ben lifted an age-mottled hand and settled it on the boy's forearm. "Thank you," he said. "Muchas gracias."

  Emilio nodded and made the sign of the cross in the air in front of Ben. Then he rose and went to the door. In silhouette he was featureless, dark. The shape of a boy, slender and easy. "Buenas noches," he whispered.

  But a good night wasn't possible. In this world of shifting, quivering shadows, Ben fought with his disease. The chill of death was upon him, he felt, though it might have been something less than that, mere exhaustion, nausea—marijuana obscured the truth. Marijuana stood between him and knowledge of his condition. Yet to the best of Ben's ability to perceive, he felt the blowing of the Last Wind, heard the scraping of the scythe, smelled the grave. And for how long had he anticipated this, expecting it with dread? How long afraid of its coming? Outwardly he'd been stalwart and stoic, but privately he'd quaked like a child, trembled in apprehension, lived with a constant, quiet fear below the surface of everything.

  Ben lay on his cot in the fruit pickers' hut, listening to the ticking of the fire in the cookstove, and felt the carabiner against his chest and the length of the ring-angle piton. In their classic application, they held a climber in the throes of ascent fixed to a wall of rock. Bits of human ingenuity standing between the climber and death. As if death was a game, as if challenging it was recreation. Ben thought of the young people in the Volkswagen van, eagerly headed for the Sawtooth Range, the mean, sheer faces there. The two of them thought of death romantically. They hadn't reached their apex yet. In their blood they had no inkling of decline, could hardly imagine it.

  Dazed, Ben sought some view of death that made leaving the world endurable. No matter how often he'd turned it over, no matter the years he'd passed with it, there was still no answer to the final riddle, or an answer lay beyond his reach. Always his search had led him nowhere, and the next day he was one day older, with no greater wisdom as a shield against death, no revelation to pit against its strength. And this was how a person aged. Suffering in astonishment the progress of the days. One moment puffed up by a blustery denial, the next drowsing in blessed forgetfulness. Ben's life was an ocean of fear punctuated by islands of calm acquiescence, by well-lit places in which he forgot because his work or love or the mere light distracted him from the truth.

  He had not found any way to proceed beyond such distractions. It was not the life of the spirit at all, in which mortality inspires a course of right action and humility. It had been instead a willful turning from the true conditions of existence. And, for the most part, this had been fine. He'd partaken of life with appetite. But now he found—he'd known it since Rachel's death—that this forgetting couldn't sustain him to the grave. The interludes of ignorance had grown shorter. And now there were none, there was only knowledge, and he wasn't ready for it.

  Ben recalled how, on ten thousand nights, he'd watched Rachel undress at her armoire—turned from him, her long torso in the lamplight, her hands reversed at the small of her back swiftly and deftly to unclasp her bra—and the memory deepened his sadness. It was something that had never ceased to move him or to prompt in him a momentary reflection on the nature of love's good fortune. He did not take such a thing for granted, even after fifty years: always he celebrated what he'd been granted and admired what he saw. When they'd argued or carried some silent grievance or were divided temporarily by ill-chosen words—still Ben clung to her. She'd carried a tranquil grace at her center. A poise he could not limn, in the end, which had kept him turned toward her.

  Now her poise had left the world. In the seasons since, he hadn't learned to live—he hadn't let go of mourning. The arc of his grief had been willfully long. He had indulged and extended its trajectory.

  His death would solve that problem. It was nice to think of it that way. But death presented a thousand other faces. His thoughts on it were madly circuitous. Inevitably, there was no other subject, and he forced himself to muse on death as though it were simply a form of sleep, warm and full of dreams.

  His musings finally gave way to sleep, and Ben dreamed he was traveling in the desert. On a journey whose purpose he couldn't guess. Underfoot, a fine sand shifted and confounded his progress. A strange apprehension haunted his limbs. He changed his direction twice, three times. Low, barren mountains appeared on the horizon. A lunar barrenness, the topography of dreams, stones strewn artfully down an arroyo as if laid by a Japanese gardener, a sinuous bend in the dry bed of stones, one stone, two, a stone carved in runes, the inordinate size of his walking shoes, an anxiety over the lack of water, he carried nothing, went empty-handed, looked out over the land from a ridge where the desert shuddered and disappeared, trembled and folded into itself: waves of heat, burning sheaves of air, a pall obscuring his view. He followed a trail of cobbles then, and knelt beside a rivulet. Christine Reilly knelt there, too, and placed the lucky carabiner once more around his neck. Which made no sense, since he wore it already. The illogic of that jarred him loose. He was in the fruit pickers' cabin, he was at the Wolfhound Orchard. The fire in the cookstove ticked and popped. The candle in the sink cast a wavering light. He thought of the girl with the nose ring, Catherine Don-nelly with her book by Steiner, a pimple on her chin, the hems of her jeans dragging. What he wanted was gently to hold her, nothing more than that.

  The boy, Emilio, knelt at his side, uttering repeatedly the word señor, until Ben opened his eyes. "Necesito un medico—rápidamente" said the boy. "Rápidamente, señor, rápidamente, por favor."

  The field boss, Sanchez, was in the cabin, too. He pulled the cord on the overhead light, and its white glare blinded Ben. "He says you are a doctor," explained Sanchez. "There is a woman in the camp having a baby tonight. Maybe there is something you can do."

  "Okay," said Ben. "I'm with you."

  "Please hurry," answered Sanchez. "That baby is stuck tight in her. It's trapped there.
It doesn't move."

  "Okay," said Ben. "Let's go."

  Beneath stars, as in a dream—Emilio before him, Sanchez at his back—he stumbled through pines and into an orchard where the dark apples had not yet been picked, on between rows of silent trees, until he emerged in a dusty field. The lights of a dozen trailer homes burned; pickers stood about. The place seemed blurred, but flat and still, as in a photograph.

  They hurried past the first three trailers, where pickers gawked like spectators at a race, men and women standing in the cold, their hands stuffed in their coat pockets, their hats pulled low on their foreheads. It was clear that few were abed in the camp, dogs wandered in agitation, children ran footloose and dumbfounded in the night, their faces tired, quizzical. Emilio ran through without stopping to speak, without apology or explanation, and the pickers moved to make room for him and for the strange-looking doctor with one eye swollen shut, wearing steel-rimmed spectacles, his boots untied, limping. Emilio pressed on toward a silver trailer hulking in the dark like a dry-docked submarine or airplane fuselage. Its low door was thrown open, and a woman waited there, in vigil.

  As they approached, she clasped her hands beneath her chin. She was fat and wore a parka patched with duct tape. "You are the doctor?" she asked.

  "Let us through," said Sanchez.

  "Thanks to our God," the woman said. "I have been praying for you."

  "Let us through," repeated Sanchez.

  Ben put his head in the trailer door. The room had the feel of a cave or chamber; distorted shadows shimmered against walls of riveted, contoured aluminum. The spectral light of a kerosene lantern illuminated a macabre scene. At one end of the trailer, on a bare mattress thrown there as if by a tornado, a woman—a girl—was in the throes of labor, naked and twisting on a nest of blankets, bucking and swaying on her hands and knees, her eyes shut, her belly heaving. Her hair had matted to her shining face, obscuring half of it. She tucked her head between her breasts and groaned until the cords in her neck bulged; then she fell onto the lengths of her forearms and paused to catch her breath. Her feet kicked spasmodically, she cradled her head in the palms of her hands, her face lay against the rough mattress. She rolled on her side, flailing, and a wail escaped from her lips.