Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  But Willis didn’t stop the car. “We live here, Lolly and I,” he said, accelerating out the other side of the portico, the Kissel rattling as the drive returned to dirt. “I’ll show you around one day.” The car pulled away from the house, and Linda looked over her shoulder and saw, in a small upstairs window, a girl staring at her with moist black eyes; she had a fragile-looking face: bony, breakable nose and cheeks, forehead like a brown-glass bowl. The girl’s white nightdress blew against the windowsill, and she looked as if she might collapse, but her eyes were following Captain Poore’s car, following Captain Poore himself, and Linda too, and Linda wondered if the girl was Lolly; Linda wondered why the girl’s gaze was blank with longing, but then the car passed a stand of yews and the house fell from Linda’s view.

  The road descended a hill, and the small valley of orange grove opened before them. Rows and rows of trees, as green as pines, as dense as shrubs, the lowest ground fruit only inches from the hard soil, the highest and sweetest more than twenty feet above the stubby roots. The grove looked ready for harvest, each tree drooping with a thousand cadmium-orange lamps of fruit. A road and an irrigation ditch surrounded the grove, and every hundred feet or so, ten-foot stacks of cordwood stood as neat as bunkers.

  “He’s probably still up with Rosa at the house,” Captain Poore said.

  “Will you tell him I’ve come?”

  “He’ll be eager to see you.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “Not exactly.” And then: “But you know how he is.” Captain Poore went on, “I’ve never hired a girl to work in the ranch house. The packers, of course, are girls, mostly hired over from the orphanages, but they’re day workers, gone by sunset, and some might say a ranch at night isn’t a place for a young woman. But Bruder told me you could take care of yourself. I said that you could stay up in the house; there’s an extra bed in Rosa’s room. But for some reason Bruder doesn’t think the two of you will get along. It’s not fair of him, really—to think like that.” Captain Poore paused and then asked Linda how old she was. She told him, and he said, “That’s what I would’ve guessed, but it’s funny: Bruder said you were Rosa’s age, and she’s barely eighteen.”

  Linda laughed in a confused sort of way, and for the first time she permitted herself to touch the small pink wound Bruder had left upon her heart by not meeting her at the train station. And as if Captain Poore had been reading her mind, he then said, “He’s a funny one, your Bruder. He wasn’t going to have me come pick you up. He said you could take the trolley and then walk to the gate. I had to insist, because Bruder went on and on saying you could take care of yourself. It’s just the way he is, I guess. Of course you’d know better than I.”

  Linda told Captain Poore that indeed she could look after herself, but the truth was she was a little worried. There she was, sitting in the car, quiet, and it wasn’t supposed to happen to her: the showy world causing her soul to fold up like a fingered anemone.

  Evening was approaching; the sun was bleeding behind the western hills. A purple shadow covered the valley, the orange trees dark and the fruit glowing. The road descended a hillside of chaparral and sumac; the car’s path was narrow and rutted and crumbling at the edge, pebbles shooting from the car’s rear wheels a hundred feet out over the valley and into the orchard. A railroad whistle echoed against the hills. Those men she had seen on the drive in: for them she’d boil a nightly pot of pink beans and North Burbank spuds, and maybe one of them had been Bruder, and something filled Linda’s chest, pressing urgently. She had grown up since he’d abandoned Condor’s Nest, and she wondered if he would expect this; or if a chilly shock would climb his spine when he saw her. What if he were to say, “You’ve become someone else.”

  At the bottom of the hill, Willis and Linda got out of the car. It seemed as if the grove extended forever: the trees lined up in the soil that crumbled beneath her heel; branches curled against the ground like a dragging skirt; a few lime-green oranges on each branch among the flaring ocher globes. On some of the trees were final sprays of nectary white blossom, and bees swarmed the tiny bleeding flowers. A bee sawed next to Linda’s ear and then sat upon her shoulder, and Willis watched her carefully, as if to test her. How would the new girl-hand react to a bee on the shoulder? She’d keep walking, as it turned out, grabbing an orange from the ground and then a second and a third, juggling them as she and Willis listened to an early night breeze rattle the hems of the trees.

  “I’ve got a hundred acres,” said Willis. “Eighty-six hundred trees. Last year we yielded nearly eighteen thousand boxes of oranges.”

  “One hundred acres?” She thought of Condor’s Nest, a sliver of land, a third of it swallowed by arroyo, the ocean perpetually eroding everything away.

  “We’ve got a lot more than a hundred acres. Only a hundred are planted. One day I’ll ride you around and you’ll see.”

  His stride was short but he walked quickly and he made Linda think of a schoolboy running to class. He looked too young to be a captain, and she could sense his mild petulance, but at the same time he seemed to know everything, she thought. Here was a man twenty-four or twenty-five years old heading up a ranch, a decorated captain, someone who in the course of his day could go from picking and grading oranges to checking the cylinders in his Kissel to fox-trotting and dancing the Portland waltz around the terrace. She knew so little about this type of man—about this type of world, really—that it was like meeting a foreigner: exotic and charming and unknown.

  As the sky saddened with the blue of evening, they continued down an orchard alley. Here the lower branches had been cut back, revealing white numbers painted on each trunk. They made no sense to Linda, the three numbers stacked:

  5

  26

  7

  A code she had no doubt she’d crack in a few days. She wondered what else waited for her in the morning, the tasks at dawn. Would Captain Poore expect her to run the water in the ditch? Would he tell her what she was supposed to do?

  Willis held his hand to his eyes, scanning the ranch. “I don’t see the boys.” It felt as if no one had been there in a long time, nothing but the trees and the swelling oranges, nothing but three empty field crates turned on their sides—no one but Linda and Willis. Evening darkened their faces, his dimming like a candle dying in a glass shade. She felt the chill of autumn’s sly approach; and Willis shivered and stood close to her. “It’s not the biggest ranch in California,” he said. “But they love our navels.” His voice snagged and broke, a pip-squeak’s crack, and Linda was touched by this vulnerability, and the way he carelessly rubbed his scar. He wasn’t at all what she had expected: no, she had anticipated a cowboy, a sun-worn face beneath a broad-brimmed hat dull with dust, and maybe a leather vest and a belt buckle forged from horseshoe.

  “How many years have you been a rancher?” she asked.

  “All my life. I was riding bareback when I was four, and when I was eight I drove the final ten heads of steer out of Pasadena. And I’ve probably picked more than a million oranges since I was a boy.” His suit didn’t fit him especially well, Linda noted; it was a bit baggy in the chest and the thighs, as if he were still growing into it, but it was easy for Linda to imagine his handsome face in the overcoat advertisement she had seen painted on the brick wall of Perkins & Leddy on Colorado Street. She closed her eyes, and already everything about him had burned into her memory.

  They returned to the ranch house, where Willis told her that the harvest would begin in two weeks and that once the pickers arrived she’d be cooking for forty. “They get hungry,” he warned. “The Mexicans want beans, and the Chinese want rice, and everyone wants coffee, and no one’s allowed to drink. If you see a hand drinking, you must report him to me.” They walked in step, the quiet of evening guiding them, the air thick with citrus. A rusty Cooper’s hawk circled above, wings calm in glide. She imagined the field mice scampering down holes as the hawk turned and swooped, and a gray squirrel plucked from a live-oak’s
branch. She looked again and saw the prey already in the hawk’s talons, writhing in fear.

  By the time they reached the packinghouse, the sky was black. The packinghouse’s side door was open, revealing an idle processing hall of conveyor belts and grading equipment and a pile of crate lumber. “In about two weeks,” Willis said, “all hell will break loose in there.” He said that he liked the ranch this time of year, just before the migrants arrived with their shoulder sacks and their sleeping rolls, and he pointed to a small house nearby with a willow in its yard. “That’s the Chinese house. They like to sleep by themselves.” The house was empty, but it wouldn’t be for long: from all over they’d come, he said, a family named Yuen, brothers and sons and fathers and their great-grandmother, her hair bone-white: “She cooks for them, but sometimes she sleeps through dawn and the Yuen men will come to you for their breakfast.”

  Willis touched Linda’s wrist reassuringly, but his fingers were cold. “You’ll get the hang of it,” he said. A breeze ran across the triangle of flesh revealed by Linda’s blouse, and she sensed that the nights were colder here and that frost could arrive in the dark. “Most of the boys sleep in the bunkhouse down there,” Willis went on, “but Bruder and Hearts and Slaymaker sleep in the ranch house, where your kitchen is.” He pointed; the ranch house’s windows were lit, askew squares yellow and bright in the house’s face. Two men were sitting at a table in the yard, their open boots up on a bench and their suspenders hanging from their waists. They were smoking Billy Gang cigarettes, and the glow revealed their eyes as they carefully watched Willis and Linda approach. They acknowledged their employer without rearranging themselves, and Willis said, “Boys, say hello to your new cook.”

  The two nodded and continued discussing their plans to win a poolhall tournament. One of the men was tossing and catching a cube of chalk.

  “That’s Timmy Slaymaker,” Willis explained, “and the skinny one, he’s Davey Hearts.”

  Slaymaker flicked his cigarette and tapped a new one out of its pack and held its tip to the flame of the orchard-heater burning warmly at his side. He glanced up at Linda. “What’s your name?” When she told him, he said, “I hope you know how to cook.”

  Davey Hearts rose to his feet and welcomed Linda with a stutter: a narrow nose in a narrow face greeted her, trousers held up by grime, the black of fatigue beneath his eyes. He was young, Linda could see. And then Slaymaker stood too, a hand on the table pushing him up. He grunted, and beneath the layer of muscular fat and the dirt worn into the creases of his hands, Linda could see that he was no more than thirty years old. “You know how to make jellied chicken?”

  “Have you seen Bruder?” asked Linda.

  “He just came down the hill,” said Hearts.

  “How’s Rosa?” asked Willis.

  A voice came from the ranch house: “She’ll be fine. A little stomach flu.” Then a silhouette appeared in the doorframe, and Bruder stepped into the orchard-heater’s light. Except for an oily black beard he appeared almost the same as the last time she’d seen him, as if time had held back, and Linda had to stop herself from running to him.

  “I see you made it in time for dinner,” he said.

  “I’m starving,” said Hearts.

  “What’s on the stove?” asked Slaymaker. “You know how to make livers and bacon?” Linda would learn that Hearts and Slaymaker were a pair, and had traveled up and down the San Joaquin from ranch to ranch, strawberries to almonds to green lettuce to avocados, before settling at the Pasadena. They shared a bunk room in the ranch house and a single towel and a cheap long-toothed hair comb, and when one finished the newspaper he passed it to the other, the stories about water supply, raided pool halls, and the program at the Playhouse circled. Neither man was more boisterous than the other; when one was drunk, so was his mate, and the same was true when sadness descended, or when the brittle winter cough lodged in the lung. If one was more pensive it was Hearts, and Linda would soon learn how his thin face displayed somberness more acutely than Slaymaker’s full cheek and jowl. Although both men could be rough—stubbled cheek, orange-bourbon breath, grime capping their fingernails—they were never rough with each other, and what would surprise Linda most about Davey Hearts and Timmy Slaymaker was that with the din of gossip that spun around the ranch, none of it ever involved them. Later, she’d ask Willis about this, and he’d explain that it was because each man tucked a derringer pistol with an ivory grip into his boot, the two guns identical, a pair. Hearts and Slaymaker had each been known to point his pistol in defense of the other. “Once one of them shot a hand charging them with a pitchfork on a vineyard up north,” Willis would tell her, “and the man fell dead in the dirt, and till this day neither Hearts nor Slaymaker will say which one of them pulled the trigger.”

  “Did Willis show you around?” Bruder asked her.

  Linda nodded, and then Willis said he’d take her to the kitchen. As they passed Bruder, he stepped out of their way, and the odor of a hardworking man reached Linda and she hesitated but then went on; they would speak later, she thought, when everyone else had gone to bed. And as she entered the ranch house she heard Slaymaker ask Bruder, “She’s doing all right? Do you know what it is?” And Linda realized that they were talking about Rosa, not about her.

  The kitchen was dark, and Linda could see only Willis’s outline, but his breath was rapid in her ear. He fumbled for the light and then a bulb dangling on a wire switched on and revealed a gentle, tentative smile upon his face. “It’s wood-burning,” he said. He touched the blue-steel Acme range. He seemed to be apologizing, as if she might have expected something more. But Linda hadn’t expected anything beyond a stove and a sink and a narrow bed and the minutes in the day she would see Bruder. “Be sure to get the boys to deliver wood,” Willis said. “They know it’s their job, but they won’t do it unless you ask.” He turned the faucet. “The water’s fine. The ice wagon comes around in the morning. Bruder won’t help out with that.” And then: “But Hearts and Slaymaker will. They’re good men. I told them to look after you.”

  The shelves were stacked with plates and jelly jars and soup pots and ladles on a hook. There was a sack of flour and a tin of sugar and a half-empty pot of honey. “Where do I get the food?”

  “Up at the house. Go to the kitchen, and one of the girls will give you your groceries. If Rosa’s feeling better, you’ll see her in the morning.”

  Only now did Linda fully understand that she wasn’t cooking for Captain Poore and his sister; no, Linda was nothing more than a ranch-hand cook, and all she would ever see of the mansion was the bolted kitchen door. But she wasn’t disappointed, because it meant that her days would be spent near Bruder. It occurred to her she might not see Willis Poore again for a long time.

  “How do I get back to the house?” she asked.

  He looked at Linda with an odd smirk, as if he was reassessing her. “There’s a path up the hill.” And then: “You’ll let me know if you need a hand? If you can’t manage on your own?”

  But the hill was steep and she wondered how she’d transport milk and meat for all the hungry men. Was there an extra cart lying around? She wasn’t apprehensive; no, instead she simply wondered how best to do her job. The bulb cast a bell of dim light upon them, and his face appeared even younger than before, but out of the evening chill a warmth kindled beneath his flesh and he smiled, and though she couldn’t interpret it she felt relieved that Captain Willis Poore had come to fetch her: she suddenly imagined the long trip from the station, the trolley ride and then the long walk, and the loneliness that would have mounted within her if she’d had to enter the ranch on her own.

  “Your bed’s back here,” he said. He opened a door, and together they peered into a narrow room just big enough for a steel cot and a wood chair with a missing arm. The bed was shoved against a window that looked out to the groves, and she could see the outline of the trees and the early moonlight on the leathery fruit; then she made out the dark shape of a coyote crouc
hing in the orchard, its eyes glowing. The animal howled, and Willis looked at her and said, “I hope this’ll be all right, Miss Stamp. That you’ll be all right.”

  Linda felt grateful. “I should thank you,” she said, and he remained in her small, dusty room for another dark moment, and they said nothing, and the scratch and rustle of the ranchland at night came to them and she finally said, “The boys are hungry, Captain Poore. I should get to supper. Is there anything else I should know?”

  He hesitated, and she didn’t want him to go just yet, and she wondered if Bruder was noticing the time they were alone together in the house. “I suppose that’s it for tonight,” he said. “But if you need anything, Miss Stamp …”

  “I’m sure I’ll be okay.”

  “But if you do, I’m just up the hill.” He said something else, and it wouldn’t be until later that night that the words would clarify in her ear.

  “Thank you, Captain Poore.”

  A veil of disappointment descended over his face, and this somehow made him appear even more handsome, and she thought of him as the wounded soldier. “This is the last time I’m going to tell you,” he said, moving to leave. “You must agree to call me Willis.”

  She felt the pressure within her chest relent. “All right.”

  He thanked her. “And from now on I’ll call you Linda.”

  2

  The girl had been sick and they were friends and she had asked for Bruder’s help and he knew that Rosa didn’t have anyone else and he was disappointed in Linda for not understanding. “You promised you would meet me at the station.” To her own dismay, Linda had stamped her foot. “If it hadn’t been for Willis, I would’ve been all alone.”