Pasadena

by David Ebershoff

  They were standing next to each other and a watery sensation passed through Lindy, as if Bruder were transferring something to her; as if he were a spirit passing through her. She felt something brush against her arm, but when she looked it wasn’t Bruder, who was two feet away, next to her but a small, treacherous gap away from her. She felt the pull and the resistance at once. She felt her heart rise high in her chest like a turnip-shape buoy lifted by a wave; she felt her pulse working. For the first time she feared he might find her silly. “Silly woman,” Willis would say about Ellie Sickman or Connie Ringe or even Lolly; “Don’t be silly, Lindy,” Willis would say. It was an insult Lindy would fight off with fists upon her husband’s lapel, but from Bruder it might simply crush her, its crinkle of truth.

  “How did you come here?”

  The ranch-house door opened and soon Hearts and Slaymaker were shaking hands with Bruder and slapping his back and they were standing close to each other, their arms folded against their chests as they were congratulating him for busting out.

  “You’re living proof that truth is freedom,” said Slaymaker.

  “I told you you should’ve never left us,” said Hearts. Time had touched him kindly in his lanky frame. But age had fallen swiftly upon Slaymaker, whose hair had whitened like sagebrush gone dry. The flesh around his throat had continued to pile up, his jowls sloppy, but his eyes remained blue and clear. Over the years Hearts would say, “It’s all in his eyes. I see straight through them, all the way down.” Now both men said that it was nothing but hard luck for a man to be thrown in like that, only to have the truth pull him back out five years later—and that’s five years too late, said Hearts. The two hands were jumping up and down, so excited were they to see their old foreman; and Hearts and Slaymaker confessed that they had missed Bruder, though they knew Bruder well enough not to hope for a similar confession in return.

  Hearts pulled the newspaper from his pocket and said, “We were reading it just now in the afternoon edition. I read it and ran across the groves to tell Slay.”

  “I thought someone was dead the way he was running after me, waving the paper. He had it folded up like he was about to hit an old dog, and he was saying, ‘You’ll never believe it! You’ll never believe it!’ ”

  “I don’t think I’d have believed it if you weren’t right here,” said Hearts, and he tossed the paper onto the table, and it opened as if on its own, and on the back page was a story by Cherry Moss—she had abandoned the “Chatty Cherry” moniker sometime last year—with the headline:

  CONVICTION OVERTURNED; JAILED MAN FREED

  There wasn’t a picture, only two columns of newsprint, and Lindy brought the newspaper to her face and began to understand. She was shaking and the paper was blurry before her and there was a moment when her eyes wouldn’t focus—as if she didn’t know how to read and the letters didn’t fit together into words—but then she blinked and understood.

  “Can you believe it? The tide was going out, not coming in,” said Hearts. “Leave it to Cherry.”

  That wasn’t the whole story, but they didn’t say anything else. Lindy read the newspaper in silence, and when she was done she said, “You’ve been free for a week?”

  “What was the first thing you did?” asked Hearts.

  “Did you take the ferry into the city and drink yourself down?” asked Slay.

  “I would’ve rented me a fancy hotel room,” said Hearts, “with sheets starched harder than ice, and gone to sleep for three days.”

  “I would’ve taken the bus out to Sunset Beach,” said Slay. “Stripped down to nothing and gone for a swim, just to feel myself as free as a fish.”

  “What’d you do, Bruder?”

  “I went home.”

  Hearts and Slaymaker nodded, this made sense to them—except that by now the old ranch house at the Pasadena was their only home.

  “Everything okay around here while I was gone?” Bruder asked. His eye cast about the property.

  But Hearts and Slaymaker told Bruder that everything hadn’t been okay since he’d left. There was plenty of talk of running the motor parkway up the valley, and Willis seemed more interested in concrete than citrus. The recent winters had been dry, and everything was brown and dead in that California way—when everyone gives up hope of life ever pushing through the cracked earth again. After a few years of drought it was hard to imagine a river in the riverbed, or a carpet of grass upon the foothills, or the delicate gold cup of a poppy. For the first time in as long as anyone could remember, the mountains had gone without snow, their spines patchy and pale like a half-starved dog. The spring’s runoff had trickled down the arroyo, murky and slow. “I could piss more than that,” Slaymaker said. “Go up to Devil’s Gate,” said Hearts. “Take a look at the reservoir. This city’s living on its last gulp. Everything’s gone to hell since you were sent away.”

  They were dutiful men, Hearts and Slaymaker, but they were like many others in the San Gabriel Valley, living high when the winters were wet, and then living drowned when the waters flooded the canyons, and then, once again, scraping hard when the winters dried up. Their memory was deep but imprecise, and in the years of rain they forgot the cycle of drought, and in the long, skinny years of drought they scratched their heads and forgot that the mountain springs had ever spurted their ice water. Of course, many men had grown accustomed to the burbling waters ferried along miles of concrete from the Owens Valley, but Hearts and Slaymaker remained suspicious, certain that one day a great hand from above would reach down and turn off the faucet. That water, white as foam, had never seemed to belong to them, running to Los Angeles and charged for like motor fuel at the pump, and Willis Poore never liked buying his water from a stranger in another county. No, he had his land, and his men, Hearts and Slay, would draw from the wells. “When the last one dries up, boys, it’s time to go home,” Willis would say. It was a joke because Willis never believed that his wells would dry up, not all of them; he didn’t believe because he was certain that his father, dead so many years now, would never have picked out a bum tract of land. But by the summer of 1930 the wells echoed and the water trickled up, a pathetic dribble barely strong enough to wash the worry from the eyes of Hearts and Slay.

  Bruder left them, walking off into the grove, and soon Lindy followed. She didn’t know what she should say, what she should offer just then. If Cherry’s story was true, did it mean that the version Lindy had delivered was false? It didn’t make any sense, and yet here Bruder was, corroborating the report: a prisoner freed, a conviction overturned, a ruling thrown out. Lindy’s word had been held up to the light and discarded as useless. Something in Cherry’s article had stuck out: “Mrs. Willis Poore had testified against Mr. Bruder, but even she, according to transcripts, once admitted that the night had been too dark to see, as she had put it, ‘what was what, who was who.’ ”

  “The ranch is too quiet,” said Bruder. “What’s been going on here?”

  She didn’t understand why he was so interested in the ranch’s well-being, but she told him about how three years ago Willis had shut the packinghouse, handing the whole operation over to the Growers Exchange. The hands no longer lived on the ranch for the season; instead, there were day pickers whose heavy field boxes were trucked immediately to the co-operative’s packinghouse in Burbank. “I begged him not to close it,” Lindy said. “I told him to think of the girls. What would happen to them? He said it wasn’t up to him to feed every girl in the San Gabriel Valley.”

  “He’s right. You can’t run a ranch on sentiment.”

  “The girls came to me, every last one of them, and asked for jobs cleaning floors or sewing hems or preparing the baby’s dinner. But I could hire only Esperanza. Now she sleeps in the room next to Rosa and helps Lolly with Palomar.”

  But Bruder showed no interest in the fate of the girls. He inspected the groves in a way that made him look both official and coldhearted. He turned an early orange in his hand and with his deer-foot knife peeled i
ts rind into one long coil. The orange was skimpy and hard and dry, and Bruder frowned. He lifted a tree’s skirt of branches and kicked the soil around the roots. The deeper they walked into the grove, the more he shook his head. Lindy wondered what he was doing and why he had returned to Pasadena to examine the orchards; he seemed more interested in their health than in hers. She wondered what he had learned about her life over the years. What news had traveled through the prison gate? Did he know, for instance, about Sieglinde’s difficult birth? The evil scream that all of Pasadena had heard—or so it seemed, from the way people continued to whisper of it? No, Lindy thought, he couldn’t know about that, for if he had, he would have written her. She took comfort in this, even if it wasn’t true. Nothing had come as promised, but Lindy had to acknowledge that there had never actually been any ribbons of promise, only those tied up in her mind. It was hard to accept that she was no different from any other woman, that her fate was common and forever repeated. But Bruder’s return—his hand grazing the sleeve of her blouse just now!—suggested that maybe this wasn’t the case. Just maybe, it wasn’t too late to defy her future. Just maybe, Bruder was concocting a plan to help her run from the inexorable path! Something was turning behind his eyes.

  But oh! how wrong she was when she thought she was capable of reading Bruder’s mind. He was planning nothing for Lindy at all. When he was thinking clearly and coldly and with both eyes cast solely upon his future, he thought of her only as one more obstacle between him and that which he was owed. There were times when the cold calculation melted away, and Bruder’s heart warmed with fond memories like that of any other man. But now he struggled against those lapses, wrestled them to the ground.

  They walked toward the mausoleum. The trees growing up into the foothills had weakened in the last two years, the top branches skeletal, the lower ones producing less and less fruit. Willis had sprayed for whitefly and aphid and citrus mite and melanose, and the sulfur had left the fruit with a rusty burn. The six or so acres around the mausoleum were in decline, half-dead trees rimming the marble temple. Bruder pulled a leaf from one of these trees and rubbed it between his fingers, and the orange oil smelled sharp.

  “You know what he’s got, don’t you?” said Bruder.

  She shook her head, thinking that perhaps Bruder was speaking about her: what Willis had in a wife like Lindy. She had always been loyal to him, as loyal to Willis as she’d been to Edmund—and loyal to Bruder, in her own way. But how do you consider the mind’s wandering, and the fluttering heart? Loyal in the most technical sense, to be precise. Again she thought of the lesson she had come to understand: Love can come and it can go and it can return. No one can love someone the same amount every single day. Was this true? Lindy could only hope; she had to believe in it, for hadn’t she lived by it, even without knowing it at the time? Yes, she could rely only on the truth of the rising and falling commitment of the heart, for if this wasn’t true, and she was the exception, then she would have to acknowledge that which everyone struggles to deny: that her own heart lay in her chest slightly blacker than the rest.

  “Spreading decline,” said Bruder. He sat on the mausoleum steps and sealed his eyes. She asked him what he meant. He explained that the nematode had burrowed into this part of the grove. “It eats away the small roots, cutting off the food supply. The trees die slowly over the years.” The spreading decline, he said again. “You’ve got it.” He said this with a greater concern than she would expect from him; and Lindy took this as a promising sign. She asked what could be done. “Nothing. Cut the trees down. Burn the soil.” The burrowing nematode didn’t attack an entire grove, he said. Just swaths, leaving gashes of dead trees across an orchard.

  “Why wouldn’t Willis have known about it?”

  “Maybe he did.” And then he startled her by saying, “You’re happy, I suppose.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You don’t look happy,” he added.

  “After all this time, do you really think you’re capable of recognizing my happiness?”

  “You might not recognize it yourself, Lindy.”

  His abruptness hurt her and she recoiled and again she wondered why he had come to see her. She was expecting tenderness from him, and an illicit arm about her waist. Instead he said, “Pasadena suits you, I see.” His voice was soft but accused her of falsehood and she said, “It’s my home now.”

  He asked after Lolly, and Lindy said she hadn’t changed. “She’s a little too watchful over Palomar.”

  “She probably loves the boy,” said Bruder. “Loves him as if he were her own—in a way that you can’t.” This insight surprised Lindy, as if he knew everything about their lives. “Maybe more than you love him.” Lindy said that she loved Palomar, that she had done much more for the boy than most people realized. “That’s not who I mean,” said Bruder.

  If not Palomar, then who? “Willis?” she said, but Bruder stopped her and said, “You didn’t tell the truth.”

  “I told them what I knew. What I saw.”

  “You saw only half of it.”

  “I saw what I saw.” And then, “What happened that night?”

  “You read it yourself in Cherry’s article.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  He paused because he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell her; he thought that maybe she deserved to know about it only from the paper, like everyone else. But for five years, hadn’t he thought about this? Every night, as he lay atop his bunk in his cell, he imagined the day he’d see Linda again and tell her he hadn’t killed her brother. He imagined their reunion; he imagined her tears; he saw himself cuffing her flinging wrists. He practiced the words: “And didn’t each of them want to kill me? Each for his own reasons?” Linda would ask who he was talking about, and Bruder, as he imagined it, would say, “First Willis, then Dieter, and finally poor, bumbling Edmund.”

  And so Bruder launched into his version of the story that Lindy had gotten so terribly wrong.

  “I was down on the beach,” he said.

  “I saw you. Why were you there?”

  “Why are you only asking that now? Things might have been different if you’d asked a long time ago.”

  His voice was grave and his eyes intense upon her, but she wasn’t frightened.

  “Why were you there that night?”

  “Your brother was a vengeful man.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He hated me.”

  “Can you blame him?”

  “He was intent on destroying the farm. But he wasn’t any good at plotting destruction. Except his own.”

  “Did you come here to tell me this?”

  “I came here to see the ranch, to see what trouble has surely sprouted here.”

  “None, I should say.”

  “Are you sure, Lindy?” He reached for her hand, but she recoiled and held it to her chest; it felt like all those years ago, when she was a girl and had struggled to understand what sort of man Bruder was. “As I was saying, what you don’t know about your brother was that he spent the last days of his life trying to destroy Condor’s Nest. He sprinkled the onion field with lye and tried to set a fire in the arroyo but couldn’t get the sagebrush to catch—everything was too green in March. It was a series of desperate acts: snapping the fishing poles over his knee and releasing the hens onto the road and shoveling manure down the well. He thought I didn’t know what he was doing but I watched, slowly deciding when I would catch him and maybe hang him or just throw him off the farm once and for all. I know you thought he was an intelligent man, Lindy, but he wasn’t. No matter how much he read, he learned very little. There are men like that, I’m sure you know. Lessons of history do not hold.”

  Lindy said that she wasn’t going to listen to this, but Bruder said that she would—You won’t get up and leave, you never could, Linda—and he was right, she stayed at his side. “You want to know,” he said. “You should know the truth.”

  Bruder continued: “H
e thought of himself as a secret agent, sabotaging the harvest and destroying the tools. Earlier that day, while you were in the cottage with the boy, he paddled the outrigger to the buoy and cut the pot warp.”

  “Why?”

  “No good reason. Just to make sure your old pots never trapped another lobster.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” said Lindy.

  “None.” And then: “Except it does.”

  “How do I know you aren’t lying?”

  “Because I’d never treat you as you’ve treated me.” She began to protest, but Bruder stopped her, continuing with his story. “Earlier in the evening the lobster pots washed up in Cathedral Cove, and I was down on the beach collecting them. They were your pots, Lindy. Your craftsmanship deserves my praise. Over the years, with a few repairs, they remained finely constructed. At the time, I remember thinking that at last you had ceased to surprise me, but that night you managed to do it again, your handiness with mallet and nail and wood slat apparent and estimable. And that was my mistake—you see, I freely admit to my own mistakes. It was my mistake to think you could no longer surprise me. But you had a few left in you, didn’t you, Lindy?”

  “A few what?”

  “Let me finish, Mrs. Poore.” Their few happy months working together—she in the kitchen, he in the groves—had come to feel like a large wedge of history, longer than the skimpy weeks they actually were. “They were perfectly good pots and they had washed up on beds of kelp. Six of them had surfaced at Cathedral Cove, and I stacked them atop one another near the mouth of the cave. All of this I told the jury, but they weren’t inclined to believe me, were they, Lindy? I was down there doing the work of a fisherman, no more or less, and it was then that I heard your brother, yelling and running toward me.

  “As you’ve been so careful to point out, Lindy, it was a dark night, darker than most on the beach, as if the great iridescent light in the ocean had been switched off. I heard Edmund, heard the strange calls and the nervous yell of a man who does not yell naturally. I even saw the wink of something metal in his hand, but what it was I had no idea. I stood near the stack of lobster pots, and I want you to imagine what six lobster pots stacked more than six feet high might look like on a dark beach. Do you have any idea, Lindy? They look like nothing. Nothing?, you ask. That’s right, nothing. The slats black, and the gaps between the slats black too, and you can see through a lobster pot, just as you can see through a barred window. But that’s something I would know about, not you, Mrs. Poore.