One day, on his way to the farm-equipment dealership in Buchanan, Red stopped in at Victor Ibañez’s grocería for cigarettes. The small, cavelike grocería was crammed with shelves of canned goods and fishing equipment, and racks of gloves, Chap Stick, sunglasses, and car deodorizers. Faded piñatas and dust-furred coils of chiles hung from the ceiling. Two highway patrolmen sat on stools near the register, and on the counter itself sat Billie Fitzgerald, who lived with her father and son in an historic adobe on the banks of the Rito River. It was Billie who had instigated the court orders to prevent Red from opening his drunk farm.
To give Billie room to leave or move, Red hung back by the bulletin board near the door, pretending to read ads for pygmy goats and lawn mower/outboard motor repair.
“Hey, Red Ray,” Victor Ibañez called out. “What d’ya need?”
“Smokes,” Red said and reached for the flying pack of Pall Malls. “Thanks.” He still had to step forward to pay.
Billie slid off the counter, moving to one side. She was quite tall and fit. Muddy clothes only underscored her imperious, pedigreed good looks. Her neurasthenically pale skin was scrupulously covered even in this dry summer heat.
“What brings you to town so early?” Victor said.
“On my way to pick up an auger,” Red answered quietly.
“What do you need an auger for?” said Billie.
“I ordered a couple hundred trees to fill out a few groves and I need to dig the holes.”
“I thought you were raising souls out there, not fruit.”
“Hopefully, the souls will raise the fruit.”
Billie stared at Red and pulled absently at her springy black hair. She harvested a few long, curly strands in her fingers, then dropped them on the old wood floor. “If I remember right,” she said, “Sally had a couple augers in the warehouse.”
“They went at the auction.”
Billie painstakingly dropped more hair onto the floor.
“I’m gonna make you sweep before you leave,” Victor said.
She ignored him. “Okay, Red.” She sighed as if accepting an endless, onerous task. “I’ll bring you an auger.”
She came that very afternoon, and after a twenty-minute walk down the roadway, she told Red he had to lease the groves if he wanted to save his shirt. “You don’t seriously think,” she said, “you can run a drunk farm and a major citrus ranch?”
“That’s the whole idea. The men work the farm.”
“C’mon, Red. You’re too nonprofit to be a farmer. You can’t make money and help people at the same time. And even if you could, farming’s not the way to do it. Now, you can lease ’em to me or you can lease ’em to Sunkist.”
He leased them to her; she, in turn, hired her work crews off the farm. Given her reputation for machismo and slave driving, any resident who worked for Billie soon called her, among other things, the Amazon Next Door.
LEWIS didn’t want to work for any Amazon, especially one he pictured as a steely older woman wearing jodhpurs and carrying a quirt. Neither did cultivating the organic vegetable garden appeal to him, nor joining the grounds crew. That left the garage.
In his twenties, at a loss at what to do with a B.A. in European history, Lewis had worked in a friend’s garage in Monrovia. Karmachanics hadn’t lasted long; instead of recycling the proceeds, the owner spent them on cocaine, which he ingested or sold to his employees at cost. When the business went under, right about the same time Lewis’s marriage ended, he found a job in an auto parts store in Pasadena.
To be a good parts man—and Lewis had been an excellent one for five long years—you have to be a demon for details and compulsively, even supernaturally, tidy; otherwise chaos boils up so fast that you might as well shut down the store as try to find a Volvo alternator. While Lewis wasn’t particularly neat about his own person or living space, he was used to a workplace where everything had—and was in—its designated place. The Round Rock garage, then, was a version of hell.
On the far end of the farm, near the workers’ village, the garage was an old-fashioned setup with two wide bays that originally served the tractors, trucks, spray rigs, and forklifts of Sally Morrot’s ranch. Instead of hydraulic lifts, each bay had a narrow trough where a man stood to work beneath a vehicle. “It’s like a grave,” Lewis complained to Gene, the only other mechanic. “You know how monks used to sleep in coffins? Well, we get to work all day in graves.”
They were to perform simple, tax-deductible tune-ups and oil changes for the few patient locals who brought in their cars. Since both Lewis and Gene had less than thirty days of sobriety, neither could leave the farm for parts; they had to phone in their orders, then ask someone else to pick them up. Gene liked handling this procedure, having quickly figured out that by asking the wrong people, he could delay a single parts delivery for days, during which time he could watch TV in the parlor with impunity.
While Lewis waited three days for an oil filter, he gradated socket sets and crescent wrenches, labeled drawers, and matched various tools to outlines painted on pegboards. Gene, putting in a brief, guilty appearance, said that Lewis was exhibiting the classic symptoms of an adult child of an alcoholic—overresponsibility, workaholism, obsession with control. Lewis wondered to what condition, then, did one attribute avoidance, laziness, and chronic messiness?
After that first, interminable oil change, Lewis resolved to track down his own parts. His next project, the reconditioning of a recently donated, ice-cream-white ’65 Ford Fairlane, might require any number of parts orders. He wrote a preliminary list—points, plugs, spark plug wires, belts—and went in search of Red Ray.
A FEW hundred yards west of the garage, two shady cul-de-sacs branched off from the roadway, with nine small bungalows scattered between them. The former fieldworkers’ village looked like tourist courts Lewis had seen in Pasadena, although not as quaint or well preserved. Red’s house and the office, both painted a rustic redwood brown with ivory trim, had been landscaped with lawns and roses and house-swallowing bougainvillea. The other seven cottages were boarded up and sitting in hard dirt like studies in decrepitude: crumbling chimneys, listing porches, silvery clapboard shedding a few last flakes of paint.
Lewis’s knock and tentative “Hello-o” drew no response, but the office door was unlocked, and he let himself inside.
Another mess. Psychology and recovery books were shoved this way and that into shelves. Wastebaskets overflowed with styrofoam cups, the holey edges of computer paper. The desk was a thicket of stacked files, newspapers, and fast-food wrappers. A large calendar mounted on an easel displayed November, and this was the first week in February. Lewis cleared a space to sit on the plump green sofa, then plucked a brochure from the stack on the coffee table. A brief description of how Round Rock worked was followed by three lengthy testimonials by former residents. Lewis skimmed these, finding the usual earnest litanies of personal loss and physical decline followed by triumphal recovery. The back page featured a few shorter endorsements:
Until I came to Round Rock Farm, I thought nobody cared. How wrong I was! George L.
In my six months at Round Rock Farm, I found the freedom to become the person God intended me to be—myself! Bob K.
He flung the brochure aside—how corny can you get?—snuggled into the cushions, and sleep, his dearest ally, carried him off. The next thing he knew, Red Ray was standing over him, hands full of mail. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! How the hell’d you get in here?”
Lewis struggled into a sitting position. “The door was open….”
“Scared the wits out of me.”
“Sorry. I need some car parts picked up.”
Red tossed the mail on the desk. “Just came back from town.” He sat down, still breathing hard. “It’ll have to be tomorrow. Okay?”
Lewis nodded. Red slipped on a pair of half-frame reading glasses, pushed papers off his blotter, and began sorting through the mail. “Everything else okay?” he asked absently. “We treating you
well enough?”
“Yeah….”
“Good.” Red gave him a quick, over-the-glasses glance.
Here he was, finally alone with Red Ray—and tongue-tied as a starstruck teenager. He recalled his mission, however: to let Red know that he, Lewis, wasn’t one more run-of-the-mill juicehead. He wracked his brain. “I was wondering,” he said finally. “Is there a typewriter or computer I could use?”
Red stacked letters in piles as if playing solitaire. “And what would you need a computer for?”
“I’m a Ph.D. candidate in cultural history and I have to give a paper at a conference in March.”
Red swiveled in his desk chair until he faced the calendar. Absently, he lifted the month of November, then the month of December. Behind December: empty space. They both gazed into it. The phone began to buzz. Red made no move to answer it.
Lewis said, “If you let me use this computer, I’d be happy to answer the phone for you, take messages.”
Red turned to Lewis. His eyes were kind. “How much time do you have now, Lewis?”
Lewis knew what Red meant: how long had he been sober? “Fifteen days.”
“Terrific! And you’re here for how long?”
“Thirty,” said Lewis.
Red’s forehead pleated. “Lewis, you have the rest of your life for cultural history. Why not take the next two weeks to get grounded in sobriety? Read the Big Book. Talk to other alcoholics.”
“I’d clean this place up for you.”
“You would, would you?” Red smiled, rueful, and tapped the corner of an envelope on the blotter. “Tell me, Lewis. Who’s your sponsor?”
Lewis picked at the piping on the sofa arm.
“You have a sponsor?”
“No.”
Red aimed the envelope at Lewis. “It’s a good idea to have a sponsor.”
“Yeah. But …” The whole concept of sponsorship gave Lewis the jitters. One of the more excruciating things about life in the Blue House was hearing grown men say, My sponsor says I should do this; My sponsor says I shouldn’t do that—as if no one could blow his own nose without special dispensation.
“Tell you what,” said Red. “You get yourself a sponsor, and if he thinks it’s a good idea for you to work on your paper, we’ll talk. Okay?”
Lewis couldn’t say how unokay this was. He clutched the sofa arm, trying to think. Red returned to the mail and, after a few minutes, shot Lewis another sharp look.
Against his own will, Lewis was embarrassing himself, behaving like a fool, like a clingy girl who wouldn’t take no for an answer—like that girl from Texas in his Shakespeare class. He’d slept with her once and she’d glommed on like industrial-strength adhesive. Dogged him everywhere. He would be at a bar and suddenly, on the next stool, there was Tex primly sipping a beer and radiating pain. He’d ignore her as long as he could, then break down and talk to her. Eventually, he’d grown curious: just how long would she sit there without acknowledgment? Hours. Several times, in fact, she outlasted him.
Lewis, so strangely paralyzed, prayed he wouldn’t sit here for hours, a pathetic, groveling supplicant.
Red spoke abruptly. “You say you like to write?”
“I don’t know how much I like it,” Lewis said. “But yeah, I do a lot of writing.”
“Tell you what. You write something for me, you can have a couple hours on the computer. But I don’t want you over here all the time hiding out with the damn thing.”
“I was thinking you need some help with your correspondence.”
“No,” said Red. “I’d like your drinking history.”
“My what?”
Red wanted a narrative about how Lewis’s family drank, how Lewis drank, and whatever trouble alcohol or drugs had caused him—arrests, humiliations, jobs and friendships jeopardized or lost, all of it. “I don’t want the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” Red said. “But try to be thorough.”
Lewis assumed Red needed text for another brochure and was certain he’d only disappoint him. Next to the stories told at the Blue House AA meetings—including Red’s own impressive saga, which had achieved the status of legend—Lewis’s drinking career had the dramatic content of skimmed milk. A guy named Oscar had come out of a blackout with his arms torn up and bleeding only to find his beloved cat drowned in the bathtub. Chuck had woken up married to a woman he didn’t recognize. Lawrence had been stabbed in a kidney while shooting dope in a West Hollywood alley. Lewis could count maybe half a dozen blackouts, total, and he’d always woken up at home and in bed, safe and sound and—regrettably—alone. “I don’t know if I can provide what you’re looking for,” he told Red.
“I’m not looking for any one thing,” Red said. “Just tell the truth. Can you do that?”
The truth, thought Lewis, was just what would make ’em snore.
AFTER Lewis left, Red Ray locked the door and slit open a letter from his ex-wife. A note, really; half a sheet of heavy, ivory stationery, the message typed and brief. Evidently, Joe wanted to go out for track. The meets were on Saturdays, which meant he couldn’t come down to Red’s for three months, four if the team made the state finals: “You could come up here and see him run.” She signed off “Best wishes” and typed her name, initialing it with a large, loopy “Y” in bleeding blue ink.
Old fears arose, tireless as waves. Was this another ploy to disenfranchise him? Or was Joe trying to avoid him? Was Yvette exacting punishment for yet another perceived failure in parenting?
Not that Red was a terrific father even by his own standards. He ached for Joe, yearned to spend more time with him, yet often felt awkward, shy, almost afraid around the boy. At fifteen, Joe was going through such rapid physical and emotional changes, Red worried he’d embarrass or appall his son, miscalculating him from one visit to the next. And then there was the steady bass beat of dread that Red would unconsciously emulate his own intemperate, well-meaning father, who, through no effort or guile, had managed to harm everyone in his path.
Red shared with his father the same name, John Robert Ray, which neither ever used. John Senior went by “Jack.” He was a tall, lean man who had both the gift of gab and “the failing.” He would gauge the needs of others with uncanny accuracy and then promise to fulfill them—which, of course, he never did. In a few short years of marriage, he gambled away the farmhouse in Azusa and a modest sum of money his wife had inherited from her father. Red distantly remembered a series of shabby motel rooms made huge, almost infinite with waiting, always waiting for his father to return from the bars.
His parents separated when Red was five, and his mother took a teaching job in Glendale. Red was left behind, to be shuttled among his aunts and grandmother. He saw his father with increasing infrequency. At one point, Jack was enlisted to move Red from his aunt Maude’s house in Redlands to his grandma Iris’s house in Pomona.
“We’ll make a day of it,” Jack told Red over the phone. “Get you moved, then pay a visit to the water gardens. Sound good to you, son?”
Red, seven years old, had no idea what water gardens were; he envisioned a landscape where running water was piped and channeled to flow in the shapes of trees and flowers, a park whose foliage was transparent, boisterous, ever in motion. And yes, that sounded very good to him.
Red waited for his dad in the front yard with two suitcases and Smoky, an adolescent barn cat he’d acquired from the ranch next door. From the way Jack Ray slammed on the brakes and spun his tires in the gravel drive, Red sensed that his father was in a terrible hurry and that he, Red, was to blame. Jack Ray had a craggy face and sandy hair. Aunt Maude called him “a tall drink of water” to Red and “a long list of troubles” to everyone else. Jack grabbed Red’s suitcases and loaded them into the trunk of his ’42 DeSoto coupe. “Put the cat down and get in, son,” he said.
Red would not put Smoky down. Smoky was his cat. He rolled Smoky up inside his sweater, ran to the edge of the property, and refused to get into the car until Aunt Maude appeared on the porch
and told Jack that it was okay, Iris was expecting Red to bring the cat.
Jack reached an arm impatiently toward Red. “Give him here. I’ll put him in the car.”
Reluctantly, Red handed Smoky to his father. Jack tossed the cat into the trunk and slammed it shut.
At dazzling speed, they drove west on Foothill Boulevard, Route 66, through stretches of scrub desert alternating with vineyards and orchards. The front seat was black leather, warm and slippery. Red clung to the armrest and saw mostly sky over the dashboard. They’d gone only a few miles when Smoky started to yowl, a desperate, guttural noise of impossible length and resonance. Red’s father said nothing. The yowling persisted, in waves, each louder and more protracted than the last. Red glanced around and saw that, somehow, Smoky had crawled up between the roof and the sand-colored headliner, and was slowly coming their way. Red could make out four convex points—Smoky’s paws—as he advanced, step by step. Occasionally, a translucent claw broke through the headliner’s weave. With a series of ripping sounds, the liner pulled free from where it was glued to the roof. Soon Smoky’s yowling was directly overhead, chordal, extended, bloodcurdling. Between Jack and Red, the headliner sagged with the cat’s weight and shape. Jack gazed straight ahead, driving faster and faster toward smeary clouds and washed-out blue sky.
When they arrived at Grandma Iris’s house, Jack drove up on the lawn. He leapt out, went to the trunk, and threw Red’s suitcases onto the grass.
“Get out of the car,” he said to Red and took out his pocket knife, pried open the blade. Red scrambled away and watched as Jack plunged the knife into the headliner, cut a long gash, reached in, pulled Smoky out by the leg and hurled him, a black fright wig, out into the yard. The cat sprang to his toes, unhurt, and dashed into nearby orange groves. Without another word, Jack climbed in his car and drove off, his face curtained by the flap of torn headliner.
Red never saw his father alone after that. Subsequent meetings were stiff, virtually silent half-hours in the presence of a grandmother or aunt. When his mother married Giles Southerly and brought Red to live with them, it was easier for everyone if Jack stayed away.
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