Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  Willis lifted a string of barbed wire for Linda to climb beneath. “Left over from the Rancho San Pasqual. The sheep used to graze up this high.” They were at a lookout, and below was the sloped table of the San Gabriel Valley, the busy cluster of Pasadena laid out on grids of white concrete, and the outlying farms and ranches and groves, and the long gleam of the railroad tracks. “Imagine this. Not even fifty years ago, all of this was a single rancho. A big old Victorian house, a couple of lean-tos for the hands, some barns, hundreds of miles of barbed wire, and thirty thousand head of cattle. That’s what was here. Nothing but scrub and cow dung and fifty thousand sheep. Fifty years ago, two people owned a hundred thousand acres, maybe more. They owned so much that no one was really sure what they owned; the parchment surveys only described the property line as running from the sycamore with the heart-shape hole to the dead spring and everything in between. And no one bothered to even wonder what they owned until they started selling it off.”

  She could imagine it, not needing to close her eyes to see the past with its endless vista of scrubland and dry riverwash and the mesas and the dust clouds driven heavenward by stampeding hooves. She had seen the growth in Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea, but it was nothing like this: there the village measured progress by the pier’s extending length and El Camino Real’s widening macadam and the electricity poles rising on the horizon—but not much else. The number of farms and families had changed little, a few more one year and a few less the next; and except for the increasingly heavy wave of spring-seeking tourists, their cars leaving pools of motor oil in the dirt, the village had remained an outpost between Los Angeles and San Diego. But Pasadena, even Linda could see, teemed with growth, its soil practically sprouting houses and roads: a population doubling in ten years, doubling again in twenty; how long could the valley hold it back?

  “Fifty years ago there were maybe fifty people out there,” said Willis. “Now there are fifty thousand spread around.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “The same place they all come from. Someplace else.”

  She wished that Bruder were there to share the view, and she said so.

  “Bruder? I asked him along. He didn’t want to come.”

  “You asked him?”

  “You know how he gets. He waved me off. Told me to make sure you had a good time.”

  The familiar disappointment returned to Linda, and Willis must have noted it because he said, “I’m sorry you’re not enjoying yourself.”

  But she assured him that she was.

  His medal sent a blinding reflection of sunlight into her eyes, and for a short moment she couldn’t see him: she only knew instinctively that a man unlike any man she’d ever known was at her side.

  During her weeks at the ranch, Linda had learned from Hearts and Slay and from Rosa something of the Poore family. They said that Willis Senior had arrived on the Rancho San Pasqual in 1873 and convinced the owners to sell him four thousand acres. Where he got the money for it Slay and Hearts couldn’t figure out, but he turned around and sold fifteen acres to a hundred soybean farmers from the Illinois-Indiana border, and in a single afternoon he had founded the Indiana Colony of California. “They say it was quite a sight on that January morning in 1874,” Slay had said. “Wagons and buggies of every kind coming up the arroyo, and each laying claim to fifteen acres. Each colonist waving a piece of paper scrawled in Willis’s illegible hand. He was famous for terrible writing. It was so bad, some said he didn’t know how to write.”

  “You never know about a man’s past,” added Hearts. “Those settlers rode into town, and from what I’ve heard it was unlike anything seen in the San Gabriel Valley since God created it and the mission first rose. Nothing but dust and men and women and babies in baskets and skinny horses and stupid mules eating flies. Wagons loaded with rockers and trunks and cooking pots stacked eight feet high, and weary, patient faces beneath sunbonnets looking for a man named Willis Fishe Poore.”

  “And there he was,” said Slay. “Handing out a hundred deeds and declaring the establishment of a new colony and then walking away with his twenty-five hundred acres and plans for an orange grove and a mansion on the hill.”

  “Hey, Slay, do you think he was a crooked man?” Hearts had asked.

  “No more crooked than the next.”

  Now, on the path, Willis told Linda they had another mile before reaching Paradise Canyon. Then, in a gesture that resembled a hummingbird landing at a fat-faced rose and flying off, Willis took Linda’s hand for a tiny, fluttering moment and then released it, leaving it suspended between them, fingered with his oils. She looked at her hand as if it belonged to someone else, and Willis cracked the small spell by saying, “I hope you’ll like Pasadena. A lot of good people here. Not everyone’s like the folks you read about on the society page.”

  “I mostly read about you.”

  “Then I hope you know enough never to believe what you read.” Each morning when Linda arrived at the pantry for the groceries, Rosa would fill her in on what had taken place at the house the day before. “Yesterday was Lolly’s Orchid Club. Rummy all afternoon.” Or, “The University Club ladies were here to discuss their upcoming pageant, something called ‘The Mexicana.’ ” And once: “Willis and his friends were over last night shooting in the trout pond. Didn’t you hear their guns?” Linda wouldn’t ever have believed Rosa if she didn’t also open the Star-News to the page that reported on these events and the city’s other social activities: the Friday Morning Club putting on Shaw’s “How He Lied to Her Husband”; the Sunshine Society’s bridge tourneys; the Masque Ball at the Hotel Maryland; the Bierlich Trio’s concert at the Hotel Raymond; horseback trips up Mt. Wilson; lessons in portraiture by Miss Mabel Watson, 249 E. Colorado; dancing instruction in the Huntington’s ballroom; fashion shows sponsored by Fuhrman’s French Millinery. And all over the page, Linda would find Willis and Lolly Poore’s names: as a mixed doubles team on the Valley Hunt’s ladder; as members of the College Club’s book discussion group, led by Leslie Hood of Vroman’s Bookstore; as runners-up in an archery tournament sponsored by the City Beautiful Committee. At least once a week there’d be a picture, and Rosa would say, “Doesn’t he look awful, with that little sneer of his?” But Linda would hold the newspaper and study the smile of Willis Poore, posing in his bathing tank suit, winner of the swimming and diving championship at the Water Carnival. The suit would reveal his small but muscular arms and the water sparkled in his hair and the trunks were cut high on his stocky, powerful thighs. She had leaned on the pantry counter, bringing the newspaper close to her face, and Rosa would say, “Doesn’t it make it worse that he’s so beautiful?” Once Linda ripped a photo from the paper and took it back to her room, folding it into her pocket next to Edmund’s unanswered letters.

  The day was hot on the trail, and Willis’s shirt was now soaked with sweat. As if something obscene were exposed in front of her, she tried not to look at his narrow pink flanks, yet there was nowhere else to look except at the quilted muscles of his back.

  “I suppose you know all about Bruder,” said Willis. “I suppose he’s told you everything himself.”

  Linda asked what Willis meant.

  “He’s not from Pasadena, not like Lolly and me.”

  “Nobody’s like Lolly and you.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” And then: “He was a strange child.”

  “Weren’t we all?”

  “Did he ever tell you about the boy he killed?”

  Something gripped at Linda and she said, “Not in so many words. But what can you expect? He was at war.”

  “I was at war, too, but that’s not what I’m talking about.” Willis said that as a child he was told about the little dark-haired boy at the Children’s Training Society. “The widow who ran the place didn’t know how to keep him under control,” he said. And she’d run to the Presbyterian minister to confess her exasperation at the six-year-old who refused to speak and who spit at strangers
like a camel. “The newspaper used to write little stories about the boy they called ‘El Brunito,’ and the minister said that the only way to calm him down was to get him into the fields from dawn to dusk. He said that this ‘El Brunito’ was like an animal, that if you didn’t work him he’d go crazy on you—a little black stallion, snorting, growing an inch a day. They decided that working him was better than sending him to school. Everyone in town knew about him—had read about him, at least—but because he was so young they didn’t put his picture in the paper or print his real name, and Mrs. Banning was too good to him to allow that. And so when I was growing up there was a fear around town that any half-Mexican boy encountered on the street was El Brunito, and if some sort of mischief had occurred, like a rose bed sprinkled with lime, everyone would blame him.”

  “You never met him?”

  “Not then, not when we were so young. Sometimes Lolly would wake in the middle of the night and say she heard something, some sort of noise on the trellis, and she’d run down the hall and jump into my bed crying, certain it was El Brunito.

  “Then one day, when Bruder was just leaving his boyhood behind, he was helping with the ice delivery at the City Farm. He was working the iron tongs, and the next thing that happened—but how, no one really knows even today—the delivery boy was dead beneath a block of ice. They say you could see his red curls and his broken nose through the three-foot slab.

  “It was in the newspaper. Every day for a month another article, more speculation, interviews with Mrs. Banning, quotes from the manager of the Pasadena Ice Company, a picture of the poor kid’s grave. The police determined it was an accident, but it was a fishy accident, and there was no one’s word to go by but Bruder’s. The police believed him but no one else did, and once the whole thing died down, for a few years after, he stopped talking altogether. He’d plow the fields and pick the lettuce and the grapes and the lemons, and he said nothing all day and stayed up all night with a book borrowed from the library. They never ran his picture or used his name, but most people thought they knew who he was. Women would cross the street to avoid passing any dark boy who they thought might be El Brunito. Men, too. The only one who knew anything about him was the librarian, Miss Westlake, who checked out book after book for him—one a day, as I’ve heard her tell it.”

  “Doesn’t it make you feel sorry for him?” said Linda.

  “Lolly and I used to send books to the Training Society. He never knew who they were from. Probably doesn’t, to this day.”

  Willis explained that he first met Bruder in a beechwood forest, not far from the banks of the Meuse. “That was the summer of 1918. When the mechanic in line next to me said that he was from Pasadena, immediately I figured out who he was, and I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you it made me a little scared. I thought he might kill me.”

  “But he didn’t kill you.”

  Willis hesitated. “No, he didn’t.”

  “Did you save his life? Is that how you got your medal?”

  “We were all saving lives.” And Willis fell silent.

  There was a step up in the path, and he offered his hand, and his palm was slick and left a ripe scent on Linda. At last they had reached Paradise Canyon. It was a narrow blue cleft between two peaks in the Sierra Madres, bottomed by a dry wash glittered with mica. A wall of granite headed the gulch where, Willis said, in spring a waterfall rushed white and cold and deadly. “You should see it in April, everything alive and in flower. Every fall, before the harvest, I hike in here to see the dead gully. Then in the spring, after we’ve picked the last orange, I return. We’ll come back, Linda, you and I, and I’ll show you. Look at it now, remember what it looks like now, dead like this, dried up like this. In April, you won’t believe it. There’ll be thickets of sweetbriar and masses of feathery greasewood and wild buckwheat and prickly pink phlox.” He moved and she felt something near her, his shifting heat. “We’ll come back and you’ll see the larkspur and the Indian pink. And hundreds of mariposa lilies and thousand of golden poppies. Poppies everywhere, in the ravine and in the crook of a tree and peeking from the crag. Everything bursting and alive, and in April you forget that rain is half a year away, you forget that everything shrivels and dies, every last thing.”

  The shade of the canyon wall reached them, sending a chill across her neck. His shoulder touched hers, and she smelled a blend of musk and tonic. The part in his hair had disappeared, replaced by a tousle of blond falling into his eyes. He smiled, and she wouldn’t know it then—how could she know it then?—but his eyes were alive with plans for her, and even Linda couldn’t explain or reclaim the forlorn, desperate sigh that just then pressed from her chest. If she’d ever doubted what she wanted for herself, it was now, and Willis found a dry wild rose, its heart brittle and white, and pinned it at the throat of Linda’s blouse.

  6

  The following morning, at shortly after seven, the ranch hands divided into teams of four and walked down the grove lanes. Each team propped its bamboo ladders against a quadrant of trees and stacked its field boxes, their identification numbers painted bright on the sides. The buckskin picking gloves cost each man seventy-five cents, and at night they slept with them beneath their pillows, because the first thing to tempt a ranch-house thief was a pair of picking gloves. A pair of citrus clippers cost $1.75, and the hands would sharpen them before bed and then chain them to their cots. From time to time a representative from the Growers Exchange would arrive unannounced, and Bruder would scramble to find Willis, and together they would walk the man—typically, Mr. Griffith—through the groves to inspect gloves and clippers. There was a mandated method to picking a navel orange, whose easily damaged rind, if bruised, could succumb to decay spores, spoiling an entire box and then a ranch’s reputation. It was the job of Slay and Hearts to make sure the boys knew how to handle the oranges, and on that first day they walked up and down the rows and shouted into the trees. “Clip it off, don’t pull it. Be sure not to cut the stem’s button. And don’t dare pack an orange with a stem longer than half an inch.”

  The ranch hands wore burlap trousers held up by suspenders and solid-colored shirts to mask the dust. Everyone but the youngest boys wore a workman’s coat or vest, and some wore aprons; some carried more than one gunnysack over the shoulder; they hauled crates that could hold twenty pounds of fruit when the oranges were neatly packed like eggs. Each man had his own ladder, and a bamboo prodder, and they worked in rows, their faces only partly protected by thin-brimmed bowler hats. The occasional hand wore a loose bow tie, as if expecting something great to occur in his day.

  One team of hands, boyhood friends from the orphanage of the Catedral de la Ascensión in Hermosillo, called themselves the Naranjo boys. They were seventeen or eighteen—even they didn’t know—and they traveled from ranch to ranch, picking the navels in the winter and the Valencias in the summer, and they made only one demand of the foremen: four beds in a row. They would climb the trees and clip the oranges and pull their floppy, feathered hats down against the sun. Throughout each day they would chatter as if they hadn’t seen one another in weeks, amusing themselves with stories about their unknown mothers. Pablo was the smallest, with a moony forehead and a corn-silk mustache of six or seven limp whiskers. His hair was mysteriously blond, and he told his friends that his mother was a Pima princess and his father an admiral in the Spanish navy, cousin to the king. Juanito was the oldest—or at least his beard suggested that—and he had luxuriant, wavy hair and a bump on the ridge of his nose, and he’d tell the others, from his bamboo-ladder perch, that the actual explanation for the blond hair was that Pablo had been born into a family of yellow-headed blackbirds, one of the thousands roosting in the trees of Plaza Zaragoza back home. The Naranjo boys would laugh, even Pablo, and Linda would find them giggling in the branches, their picking sacks full, when she arrived at noon with the crew lunch. She brought a chicken tamale to each boy and an orange soda and a single polvorone wrapped in white kitchen paper. They’d de
scend their ladders for the noon rest, their picking hands swiftly replaced by gray-rumped mockingbirds. With the Naranjo boys she’d sit in the shade and share a tamale and assure them she’d say nothing as they quartered a pint of white tequila—for by now Linda knew that if she were to report the alcohol on the ranch, every last man and boy would be thrown out. “No one’s dry,” Slaymaker would say. “How else could we accept our fate?” The first time the Naranjo boys offered Linda a sip of tequila, she declined; and the next day they offered again, and she declined again; and every day it was like that. Bruder had told her to watch out for them (they told her the same about him), and she sat with the tequila fumes itching the tip of her nose, confident that there was no one she had to watch out for—nothing could infect her; she thought of what Willis had said on the hike out of Paradise Canyon: “I’ll keep an eye out for you.” She thought of Edmund’s letters, growing in desperation: Who will look after you, Linda?

  Bruder’s job was to oversee the hands in the groves and the gossiping girls in the packinghouse and just about everything else during the harvest and to report to Willis the daily yield. “What do I care if the girls don’t like me much?” he said more than once when Linda pointed out that he should be careful not to shout so much: “Nobody likes to be barked at.” The identification numbers painted on the field crates helped Bruder figure out who was clipping carelessly and packing sloppily, and nearly every day as she delivered lunch to the teams Linda heard his voice rising above the trees: “That’s coming out of your wages!” He told her to cut down on the lard in the polvorones and the chicken in the tamales and the ice cooling the sodas, and when she asked what he cared about it, he said he cared about everything at the Pasadena: “Everything here is my concern.” He said this with that familiar look in his face, his eyes narrowed and nostrils flaring, and Linda couldn’t interpret it any more now than she could years ago at Condor’s Nest—that hard gaze that seemed a terrible mixture of love and hate, all of it shadowed by his patchy beard. She wondered where his loyalty to the ranch came from; his love for this particular stretch of land in this particular valley was too specific for it to be merely professional fidelity. Certainly Willis didn’t return the sentiment: after all, hadn’t he said, “Sometimes I think Bruder isn’t quite from this world.” Hadn’t Willis leaned in and whispered to Linda, “Isn’t quite human, do you know what I mean?” But Bruder wasn’t thinking of Willis; no, Bruder was concerned with himself and his future, and if ever he was going to have a tract of land to call his own—for was there a greater security in California than a V-shape fold of fertile soil?—it would be the Pasadena. It was owed to him, he reminded himself often, and sometimes he’d take the piece of paper from beneath his mattress and reread Willis’s childlike scrawl. But when Bruder said things about the land becoming his, Linda would ask, “What on earth are you talking about now?”