He accelerated past big box stores and auto-body shops and gas stations out into the country. The land opened into vast orchards and groves. Peach and apple and cherry trees planted in neat straight rows, trunks wrapped in cyclone fence.
Ten minutes passed before it hit him.
He'd looked away. He'd broken eye contact first.
He'd lost a stare-down...
...to a dog.
The Ripple Creek winery was spread across fifty acres of land overlooked by the Niagara Escarpment. Paul's folks had planted the vines themselves some twenty-five years ago.
Paul's father, Jack Harris, had fallen in love with Paul's mother, Barbara Forbes, the daughter of a sorghum farmer whom Jack first saw slinging sacks of fertilizer into the bed of a rusted pickup at the Atikokan Feed'n' Seed, and whom he saw again at the annual Summer Dust-Off, where she danced with raucous zeal to washboard-and- zither music. He fell in love with her because at the time he felt this coincidental sighting was fateful—later both came to realize that they'd lived little more than thirty miles apart, but in northern Ontario it was possible to go your whole life and never meet your neighbor two towns distant. They had made love behind the barn while the Dust-Off raged on, in a field studded with summer flowers on a muffet of hay left by the baling machine. Afterward they lay together with hay poking their bodies like busted drinking straws, feeling a little silly at the unwitting cliché they'd made of themselves: gormless bumpkins deflowered in a haypile. Even the dray horse sharing the field with them looked vaguely embarrassed on their behalf.
After graduating high school Jack spent the next year tending his father's cornfields. He married Barbara and she moved into the foreman's lodgings on Jack's father's farm. Barely a month had passed before Barbara began to chafe under the deadening monotony.
One night Jack returned from the fields, filthy and itching from corn silk, to find his wife in the kitchen. The table was piled high with books on wine making.
"What's all this?"
"What else would you have me do all day," Barbara wanted to know, "crochet?"
Jack knew not a thing about wine. He favored Labatt 50 from pint bottles.
"You want wine, I'll head to the LCBO and pick up a bottle."
"I want wine, I'll head to the LCBO and buy myself a bottle." Barbara closed a book on the tip of her finger, keeping the page marked. "We might try making our own."
She told him that the soil of southern Ontario, much like that of southern France, was well suited to grape growing. But wine ... it conjured images of beret-wearing Frenchmen zipping down country lanes in fruity red sports cars. An altogether foreign image, Jack thought, leagues removed from his tiny foreman's cabin on the edge of the Ontario cornfields. Then again, why not? He knew how to grow corn; why not grapes? And a gut instinct told him that a curve might be developing; if they hopped on now they might land a few steps ahead of it.
One afternoon they headed down to the Farmers' Credit Union and applied for a small-business loan. With it they purchased a homestead on fifteen acres in Stoney Creek, a farming community in southern Ontario. Fruit country: local farmers grew peaches, cherries, blueberries. Jack was the only one growing grapes; this incited a degree of neighborly concern. Concords? other farmers asked. Juice grapes? When Jack told them no, a Portuguese variety called Semillon, the farmers shook their heads, sad to see a young fool leading his family down the path to financial ruin.
Jack was in the fields every day that first spring, pounding posts and stringing vines. He was out in the cool dawn hours with scattered farmyard lights burning in the hills and valleys. He was out in the afternoon as the sun crested high over the escarpment, its heat burning through the salt on his skin to draw it tight. He was out in the evening with the wind wicking moisture off the soil until it was like tilling shale. Jack's boots became so worn he padded them with newspapers; his feet turned black from the ink. For weeks they ate nothing but peaches: at night, Jack snuck into his neighbor's groves to fill his jacket pockets. At night, they collapsed into bed, newlyweds too exhausted to do what might have come naturally.
That first winter Jack made the rounds of local bars and restaurants. Though many owners expressed skepticism at the idea of southern Ontario wine—What's your next plan, one said, growing taters on the moon?—Jack's salesmanship resulted in a flurry of orders. Springtime found them back in the fields. When Barb saw that first yellow bud flowering on the vine she broke into a giddy jig that collapsed her husband into reckless laughter.
It was a success from the outset. The wine was clean and crisp, made distinctive by the soil of a virgin growing region. The first vintage sold out by mid-winter; retail orders tripled. Word of their success spread, and the farmers who'd scoffed at Jack's plan were soon selling their own farms to those hoping to copy Jack's business model. Ripple Creek became the first, and was still the most successful, winery in Ontario.
Paul was four years old when the family moved from their tiny home in the field—which was really no longer a field but rather an estate—into their massive gated manor.
The winery offices were built on the foundation of Paul's childhood home: his father, no teary-eyed nostalgic, had had it bulldozed. The foyer was paneled with oak slats bellying outward: visitors often remarked that they felt as though they were inside a wine cask— indeed, the intended effect.
Their receptionist, Callie, was pale with long blond hair, skinny but in a good way and cute. Her perfume held the bracing aroma of a car air freshener. Paul often fantasized about her: passing each other in the narrow hallway, their bodies brush accidentally-on-purpose and next thing they're on each other, kissing and clutching, ducking into the supply room where he gives it to her bent over the photocopier.
"Mr. Harris," she said. "Are you all right?"
"Not to worry. A mild misunderstanding."
"You were in a fight?"
Paul didn't care for her tone of voice: incredulous, as if he'd told her his night had been spent spinning gold out of hay.
"There was a ... an altercation."
He couldn't quite bring himself to say fight. The word implied an exchange of blows, mutual bloodshed. Beating better expressed the reality. Mauling. Shellacking.
"Are you hurt?"
"It's nothing much. You should see the other guy."
"Is that so?"
Paul was filled with a sudden dreadful certainty that Callie had been there last night. She'd witnessed the whole sad affair and now could only smile as he stood there lying through his teeth.
His office was located off the lobby. On the desk: Macintosh computer and blotter, German beer stein, three high school rowing trophies bought at a thrift store. These were his father's idea, whose own trophies—for wrestling, and legitimately won—sat on his own desk in a much bigger office down the hall. His father thought athletic trophies accorded a desk, and by proxy its owner, that Go- Get-'Em attitude.
The nameplate on his desk read PAUL HARRIS, and under his name, in small engraved letters, his title: ORGANIZATIONAL ADVISER. When he'd questioned his father regarding the precise duties of an OA, he was told it was crucial that he "keep his fingers in a lot of pies, organizationally speaking." But since his father had his own fingers in every important pie at Ripple Creek, Paul's were relegated to inconsequential ones: the "Refill the Toner Cartridge" pie; the "Reorder Staff Room Coffee but Not the Cheap Guadeloupian Stuff Because It Gives His Dad the Trots" pie.
His nameplate may as well have read TOUR GUIDE. Every so often a buyer happened by and Paul was ordered to show him around. He'd lead a tour through the distillery with its high cathedral ceilings and halogen lights, pointing out the presses and pumps and hissing PVC tubes, rapping the stainless steel kettles and commenting on their sturdy craftsmanship. He'd lift the lid on a boiler and stir its dark contents with a stained wooden paddle, remarking how the process had come a long way from some Sicilian bambino stomping grapes with her dirty feet. This usually elicited a laugh and soon the tour wo
uld wind back to the foyer, where his father was waiting to usher the buyer into his office.
How was he expected to learn anything—osmosis?
When bored—this was every day, vaguely all day—Paul would shut his eyes, lay his head on the blotter, and craft elaborate fantasies. Most frequent was the one where his mother and father were slaughtered by vicious street thugs, spurring Paul to embark upon a Death Wish-style killing spree. Except instead of affluent winery owners his folks were hardworking firefighters, and Paul became Rex Appleby, a tough-as-nails cop hardened by the mean streets of his youth. In the final and most satisfying scene, Paul/Rex staggers from the gang's hideout with a switchblade sticking out from his shoulder and his shirt torn open to display his totally buff abs. He's carrying a gas can, trailing a line of gasoline across the lawn. A thug crawls to the front door, his face bashed to smithereens, and, snarling like a dog, he aims a pistol at Rex's back. Rex flicks the flywheel on a burnished-chrome Zippo and drops it in the shimmer of gasoline. A line of fire races toward the house and the thug screams Nooooo! as a fireball mushrooms into the twilight. A cinematic pan shot captures Appleby striding from the wreckage in super-slow motion, unblinking and ultra- cool.
"Son, oh son of mine."
Jack Harris stepped into the office. He paused in the doorway, a framed daguerreotype: tall and thickly built, dressed in a suit that hung in flattering lines, jaw and cheeks ingrained with a blue patina of stubble.
He tapped the Rolex Submariner strapped to his wrist. "Make sure the damn thing's still ticking," he said. "Or perchance you're operating on Pacific Standard time, in which case you're hours early and I applaud your dedication. But if, like me, your watch reads eleven- thirty, you, child of my loins, are late."
It was laughable, the very suggestion that it mattered whether Paul arrived early, late, or at all. What was the point of his being there— were break-room coffee supplies running at dangerously low levels?
Paul removed the Ray Bans. "Extenuating circumstances."
"Yee-ouch. That's a beaut."
Jack tilted his son's head up and poked the blackened flesh with the tip of a blunt, squared-off finger.
Paul pushed it away. "Lay off, will you? I'm not a grape—don't need to squeeze the juice out of me."
"That's a blue ribbon winner." Jack set a haunch on the desk's edge. "How'd it happen?"
"Fell down a flight of stairs."
"Those stairs knock your teeth out, too? That's one mean-spirited staircase; tell me where it is so I can avoid it."
Jack, veteran of many a low-county barfight, was evidently unmoved by his son's state. Sometimes a man needed to get out there and chuck a few knuckles—it was cathartic. Afterward the winner bought the loser a pint.
"You planning to see a doctor?"
Paul waved the question off. "I possess inner resilience. I am Zen."
Jack nodded. "Well, it's like they say in poker, son: can't win them all, otherwise it'd be no fun when you did."
"Who says I lost?"
Jack laughed. Over the years he'd developed what Paul thought of as his Businessman's Laugh: boisterous and patently phony, it began as a Kris Kringle-ish chortle before segueing into an ongoing staccato hack that sounded like a Nazi Sten gun. Oooohohohoho-aka-aka-ak-ak-ak! His father turned it on and off at will, like a faucet. On those rare occasions when Paul found himself among businessmen with everybody's fake laughs ricocheting off the walls, he got the feeling he was deep in the forest primeval surrounded by screeching monkeys.
Jack's mirth subsided. "Well, if the other guy lost I guess the police'll be showing up any minute now—you must've murdered him."
"You're a laugh riot."
"Speaking of laugh riots, that client you showed around yesterday, did you say that bambino line—the dirty feet thing?"
"I guess."
"Well then that was awful dumb. The guy's Italian."
"He say something?"
"Yeah, he said something—why'd I bring it up, he didn't say something?"
Paul shrugged. "Some people like the joke."
"Who, some people?" When Paul didn't reply: "Idiots, that's who. It's a lead balloon."
Paul was getting pointers from a man who trafficked heavily in knock-knock jokes and dried-up puns: Hey, did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? He's all right now. Oooohohohoho-aka- aka-ak-ak-ak!
"Ah, what does it matter?" Paul wanted to know. "Some pissant buyer who owns a pissant boozer in Welland." He snorted. "Who drinks wine in Welland? Grape juice cut with antifreeze is more like it. I fail to view it as a big loss."
His father kept his gaze on the floor for several seconds before tilting his chin toward him. His eyes were a pair of hard wet stones.
"We exist but for the grace and patronage of our buyers. Whether it's a hotel chain or a family-run restaurant, we treat them all with the same respect—you get me?"
Paul nudged his Ray Bans down over his eyes. "I get you."
"Take those off while I'm speaking to you."
Paul leaned back in his chair and knitted his hands behind his head.
"Take those ...off'
Paul took the sunglasses off. "There. Satisfied?"
Jack's expression attested he wasn't at all satisfied. "Now tell me: who do we work for?"
"Oh, come off it."
"Who do we work for?"
"The buyer."
"You got it, Pontiac."
They stared at each other across the desk. Paul saw a man who had never grown into his wealth; a man who'd never forget how his feet looked stained with newspaper ink. What did Jack see? Perhaps something he couldn't quite reconcile: his own flesh and blood, yet at the same time a deeply mystifying creature who stood outside his understanding. A son who'd been given everything—higher education, a life of the mind—and yet frequently struck him as frail and useless. And while he loved Paul deeply, Jack couldn't help but think this was not at all the son he'd envisioned.
"How was your date last night?"
"How do you figure?"
"That Faith is pretty sweet, isn't she? Her dad's done well for himself. She'll inherit quite a fortune." Jack lowered his voice on the last word, as though he were detailing some seductive quality of her physique. "Nice ass, too."
Paul groaned. "Don't talk to me about her ass."
"Take a bite out of it, like a juicy apple—rowf!"
"Oh, my...god."
Jack chuckled, easing himself off the desk. "Ah, come off it—your old man's married, not dead." He frowned. "Get your damn teeth fixed, will you? Look like you ought to be offering hayrides through Appalachia."
The offices connected to the distillery down a stone corridor.
Paul walked down rows of gleaming steel tanks. Back in high school he'd snuck in here with his buddies; they tapped the spigots and guzzled Merlot until their teeth were stained the color of mulberries before stumbling out into the vineyard to reel through the darkened rows. The evidence was damning—smashed glasses on the distillery floor, vines trampled by clumsy drunken feet—and surely his father had known, but his only comment was that the Angel's Share had been uncommonly high those seasons.
A door gave onto a small portico overlooking the vineyard. In the summertime it was a spectacular view: vines unfurling over the gullies and rises in lines planted straight as the hairs on a doll's scalp. On early spring nights you could actually hear them growing: a faint creaking like worn leather stretched over a pommel.
A group of men moved along the trellis lines at the vineyard's far edge.
Every spring Paul's father hired a crew of Caribbean fieldworkers. He wasn't the only one: most Niagara wineries hired crews from Jamaica, Cuba, Haiti, Ecuador, supplementing this core with university students who were generally shiftless and unreliable, prone to begging off on sunny days better spent at the beach. Paul once accompanied his father to Pearson airport to pick up a crew of pickers. They'd shared the Arrivals lounge with the owners of several local wineries,
and as the pickers disembarked, calls of Pillittieri crew, here! and Stonechurch, over here! rang out while the workers stood around, dazed and jet-lagged, trying to recall the name of the winery that had hired them.
Today they were picking frozen grapes for ice wine. Winemakers waited until frosts hardened the grapes into withered purple pellets before harvesting.
"I thought you guys might like some help," he told them.
Nervous glances passed between the pickers. The owner's kid standing there in his eight-hundred-dollar suit. Was he joking? White folks had such an odd sense of humor.
Paul cinched a red kidney-shaped bucket to his hip. The black nylon strap, crusted with dirt and crushed grape skins, left muddy streaks on his jacket. A picker with a mess of dreadlocks pinned atop his head said, "Is okay, okay," a gentle dissuasion, "go on back, mahn."
The cold drew Paul's face in, thinned it down, tightened the skin to the bone. Anger twined around his brain, a thread fine as catgut slowly tightening. What the hell were they looking so damn sullen for—he was offering help. His father owned the goddamn place, he'd flown them up here and wrote their checks, and if Paul wanted to pick a few grapes he could fucking well pick grapes.
"Where should I start?"
The guy glanced at the others, shrugged, pointed to a far row.
Paul worked his way down the trellis line, stumbling over the frozen earth, knocking his bucket with a knee, wincing. Grapes hung in shriveled clusters, touched with a glaze of frost that looked like powdered sugar. They landed in the bucket with a metallic clink. Some broke open: their insides resembled a geode, all those sparkling sugars. The sweat on his back and chest cooled, sending a chill through his body. Vine ends punched through his fingertips like blunt needles.
A picker crossed over the rows and gave Paul his toque: bright orange with SUNOCO woven across the front, topped with an orange and white pompom. It stunk of dirt and sweat and of the picker himself. Paul couldn't recall the last time he'd worn clothes that weren't solely his own; he'd never worn a black person's clothes, not once. The picker made Paul hold out his hands while he wrapped strips of duct tape around his fingers to protect them from the sharp vines. He wrapped with his head down: Paul glimpsed his shaven head pitted with gouges and dents and a scar that curled halfway round his skull. He wondered how the man acquired those wounds: accidents, surgeries, fights? That night, before falling asleep, he would pass a hand over his own scalp, dismayed to find it smooth and featureless as an egg.
The Fighter Page 3