Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  Lopez nodded. “And she’s smart, too. She could grow up to be somebody special, maybe.” He put the photo back inside its plastic envelope. “Probably we might have some more children real soon.”

  “Well, I goddam commend you on that!” Torelli rewarded his grinning passenger with a high-spirited clap on the thigh. “You people do things the right way. A Mexican is not afraid to be natural. Us white people, we get all tangled up in our brains.” He was cogitating, making connections. “Did I tell you my daughter’s coming out here to help with her mother?”

  “That’s good, Victor. Where’s she going to stay?”

  “Out at the farm. There’s no room for her at the house in town.”

  “I like Anna,” said Lopez, with genuine fondness. “She’s a nice woman.”

  “Sure, she’s nice, but she has some crazy ideas.” Torelli, too, spoke with affection and good humor. He loved his daughter, although she had put him through many trials. “When I talked to her on the phone the other night, she was carrying on about her biological clock. ‘My biological clock is ticking.’ What person in their right mind talks like that?”

  Lopez seemed to find this very funny. “I never seen any biological clock,” he joked. “We don’t have any bio-logical clocks in Jalisco. What’s that clock supposed to look like?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Torelli growled at him. “It’s her way of saying she wants to try and have a baby again. Why can’t she just say it that way? ‘I want to have a baby.’ ‘Course, she’s divorced now, so it’s going to be a little tougher for her.”

  “That’s what Atwater was. Divorced. It could be they said in the mail they were going to put him in jail or something.”

  “Piss on Arthur Atwater,” the old man reiterated with disgust as he turned onto Carson Valley Road, the main arterial into vineyard country, where the value of the wine grape had been raised to its highest power. “Everybody’s divorced, except for me and Claire and you and Elena. Nobody sticks to the bargain anymore.”

  “Me and Elena, we’re not exactly married,” Lopez said quietly.

  Torelli scarcely heard him. “The thing with Anna is, she’s never had her feet on the ground. She graduated from Berkeley summa cum laude, she had a whole bright future ahead of her, and what does she do but insist on marrying that asshole lawyer from Palo Alto! She goes off to New York with him, she gets pregnant, she loses the baby, then she can’t get pregnant anymore, and Bud-fucking-Wright deserts her for another woman. That’s ten years of Anna’s life in a nutshell. At least she’s got a good head for business. She and that partner of hers have made a success of their bookstore. You know what my other kid is doing?”

  “Roger?”

  “Yes, Roger. He’s a forty-year-old soupmaker at a vegetarian restaurant up in Mendocino County.”

  They were journeying through the heart of the valley now, through a landscape framed by rolling hills and dominated by acre upon acre of neatly staked and planted fields. Only a few dull brown remnant leaves were still clinging to the grapevines, and the rootstock itself looked black and stunted and utterly worthless in this dormant month of January. Crews of pruners were at work in some vineyards, moving determinedly among the rows and using hand shears or lopping shears to thin the twisted snarl of brittle and hardened canes and allow for new growth in the spring. The winter grass was an emerald green and held the last of the morning’s moisture, damp and dewy in spite of the sunshine. They went by ramshackle farmhouses and a couple of grand estates and saw Hereford cattle grazing in pastures and some saddle horses cantering about in a fenced paddock. A peppery scent of bay laurel was in the air, and they could see, looking west, the timbered tips of the Coast Range through a strip of cirrus clouds.

  “Sparrow hawk,” Torelli said, dipping his head to point out a kestrel perched on a telephone wire. The hawk took swooping flight as if at his directive, hovered above a patch of weeds with its wings beating frantically, and plunged at a terrifying speed toward some oblivious creature down below.

  “Poor little mouse,” Lopez said.

  “He’ll never know what hit him.”

  Torelli puffed contentedly on his cigar, taking note of the parcels of land that he was passing. Here, at 13711 Carson Valley Road, the Petersons had once resided, operating a tiny but profitable dairy and producing three children who were famous among their peers for being able to burp at will. Over there, in a wet gulley lined with towering redwoods, lived the Vescios, a foul-mouthed bunch notorious for raising hogs in a fuming backyard pen and carrying around a squealing piglet swaddled in a baby blanket whenever they made the circuit of holiday parties and barbecues. Up on a far ridge, in dense chapparal, Torelli had once cornered and shot a sick coyote with his boyhood pal, Thomas Atwater, who later ran some sheep on the same property and could now be counted among the ever-increasing dead, his brief obituary having appeared in a recent edition of the weekly Valley Herald, where it had shocked Torelli and brought tears to his eyes.

  Old Tom Atwater, now there was a man, Torelli thought with admiration. Old Tom weighed more than three hundred pounds and had a nose that covered half his face, but he could cast a flyline accurately without a rod, using just one bare hand. His friends had mourned openly when he’d sold off his holdings and retired to a ranchette on the fringes of Sacramento to be closer to the blue ribbon trout streams that he loved. Never again would he be seen in Carson Valley, but a grandson of his had turned up not long ago. That was the redoubtable Arthur, who came looking for work as a vineyard manager and canvassed his grandfather’s pals until fate had dispatched him to a logical employer, Victor Torelli. The old man needed someone to act as a caretaker and see to his grapes while he was stuck in town with Claire, and Arthur certainly had the experience to fit the bill, plus he was willing to live in a ratty bunkhouse trailer on the farm and settle for a nominal salary against the promise of a sizable bonus if he brought in a bumper crop. There was no reason to check his references. An Atwater could be trusted implicitly, Torelli had been foolish enough to believe, never bothering to ask why Arthur couldn’t find a job in the Napa Valley, where he’d grown up and surely had plenty of contacts.

  “You ever get the feeling you’re always cleaning up somebody else’s mess?” he asked Lopez.

  “No, señor.”

  “I didn’t think so.” Torelli gestured toward the unstoppable parade of vines. “To be honest with you, Antonio, I’m tempted to sell the whole goddam operation. We very nearly lost money again last year.” For a few seconds, he was overwhelmed by all the variables and combustibles involved in nurturing wine grapes and wondered why on earth he still took any pains with it at all. He had no heir to whom he could pass on the torch. His son had never showed the slightest interest in farming, and Anna—well, Anna was a woman first off and also headstrong and independent, full of her own ideas, and besides she had never heeded a single piece of advice he’d given her. The old man was forced to admit that his family was a total loss when it came to vineyard matters.

  Torelli’s concentration was broken by the sound of Lopez clearing his throat.

  “One thing about Arthur?” Lopez said, in a quavery, ingratiating way. “He’s a good worker. He tries really hard.”

  “Yes, I’ll grant you that,” the old man said distractedly. “But he wasn’t here for a month before he went off on his first toot.”

  “Maybe he shouldn’t be fired. Some people deserve a second chance.”

  “I already gave him that.”

  “Could be he needs a third one?”

  “There aren’t any of those, Antonio.”

  The road into the farm was a ribbon of pocked and rutted dirt. Lopez jumped out of the truck to unlatch a gate, then jumped back in. A creek to his right was running high and muddy from a recent storm. It was known as Wappo Creek, after an Indian tribe that had once camped along its banks, and in a wet year it rose to the very margins of the road and sometimes swamped it. As a child, Torelli had actually rowed down it
once in a skiff. Now, he shifted into first gear and proceeded through a mixed woodland of alders, madrones, and California buckeyes. Blue and live oaks grew among them and were hung with a feathery green webbing of Spanish moss. Threaded among the oaks, too, were wild grapevines that climbed everywhere in ivylike profusion, their little berries eagerly pecked at by finches and scrub jays.

  The trees soon drew back, gave way. Ahead the land was all in vineyard cultivation and offered a vision of space, light, and amplitude. The same hills that flanked the valley on all sides dropped here at a gentle incline to the Russian River, a stream that grew wider and deeper as it flowed on through town and from there out to the coast, where it emptied into the ocean. The steepest ground on the property was planted to Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel, drought-resistant red varietals that could tolerate flinty soil, while the more gravelly and porous soil near the river was planted to Chardonnay. A broad meadow rich in alluvial loam bordered Wappo Creek, but it flooded even in dry winters and was impractical for wine grapes. A few ancient fruit trees, sturdy survivors of an old orchard, still stood in the meadow and always yielded enough pears, peaches, and plums for Claire to put up an annual supply of jams and jellies.

  The eccentric house that Torelli’s forebears had hammered together by intuition rather than by plan occupied the highest rise on the farm. No architect would have approved of its design. It was a three-story, wood-frame place with weather-beaten white clapboards that rested on a foundation of rough-dressed ashlar. The porch wrapped around its front had turned columns and a balustrade and afforded a lovely view of the valley downriver to where the Russian swirled into an oxbow. The dark oak floors inside were worn, spotted, and rarely level, and the wallpaper was peeling away in tattered furls, but the big country kitchen was bright and inviting. There were bay windows in an old-fashioned parlor that looked out on the fields and a pond where coots and mallards were usually splashing. Each upstairs bedroom had its own peculiar history compounded of the secrets of its many past residents, and it was the sum of those intimacies that had made the house so precious to Torelli and his wife.

  A circular drive ran from the dirt road to the front door. The old man parked his truck, set the brake, and paused for a moment to admire a huge Douglas fir spiraling into the sky.

  “You see this tree, Antonio?” he asked, patting the trunk. “I grew it from a seedling I brought back from Yosemite when I was a boy in short pants.”

  Lopez seemed fascinated. He patted the trunk, too, and tested the bark with his fingertips. “It’s a good tree,” he said finally.

  “Thank you.”

  They entered a foyer lined with rubber boots, some of them caked with vineyard mud. The house was cold, and it felt damp and smelled of mold. Nobody had cleaned it for months. Torelli made a melancholy tour of the rooms downstairs, postponing the task ahead of him. Although he did not list thievery among Arthur Atwater’s vices, he was still pleased to find that nothing had been stolen. He stopped to browse among a gallery of family photos that Claire had arranged on one wall as precisely as in a museum. There were his great-grandparents on their wedding day in the Tuscan city of Montalcino. There were his children at different ages, progressing toward adulthood through billowy rings of time. There were his brothers and his only sister, all dead and buried now, gone for an eternity, and he, the youngest of the five, left behind and forced to carry on. He shuddered at the losses.

  In the kitchen, Torelli boiled some water for instant coffee and warmed his hands on the mug. He sat at a table and watched Lopez, who was patient again and waiting for his next set of marching orders. The old man remembered the first Mexican he had ever hired, a Tijuanan called Eduardo Sereno, and saw the faces of all those who had come after that, fifty or sixty field hands down the years—he couldn’t be certain of the total, he kept no such records—an infinite procession of workers, at any rate, whose labors had made his success as a grower possible. Some men had been as close to him as blood relatives, borrowing cash for emergencies and inviting him to christenings and funerals, while others had vanished from the farm after a single morning of picking. There was seldom any explanation either way. Torelli’s only rule of thumb was to try and treat a man fairly. It was all he knew to do. So little could be saved or preserved or protected in the end, he thought. So little could be controlled.

  “You been doing any pruning since Atwater disappeared?” he asked Lopez.

  “We worked yesterday. But the guys, they didn’t show up today.”

  “Chew out their asses, then. You’re the temporary boss, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you using that same crew of fellows from last year?”

  “It’s almost the same,” Lopez said. “Ernesto Morales, though, he’s becoming a problem for us. He’s too slow. The others slow down for him. They don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

  “You sure are a sensitive lot.”

  “We’re all from the same pueblo.”

  “I knew there had to be a reason.” Torelli struggled to his feet and hitched up his jeans. He snatched a dusty bottle from a shelf and poured two shots of the homemade grappa his father had taught him to brew. “Dutch courage,” he said, downing his in a quick swallow. “Come on, Antonio. Let’s go see about those dogs. I hate like hell to do it.”

  “Maybe you can call somebody to take them away,” Lopez proposed. “Somebody from the county?”

  “No, I’ve tried that before with strays,” Torelli said. “It’s all just government bullshit. They stow them in a kennel somewhere, nobody adopts them, and they get put to sleep anyhow. They’re better off this way.”

  Torelli fetched the Winchester from his truck and walked with Lopez to Atwater’s trailer. It was fifty yards from the main house, a single-wide set beneath the spreading limbs of a huge live oak in which some Bullock’s orioles, feathered in brilliant orange and black, were preparing to nest. He could hear the dogs before he could see them. They were yipping and howling in distress, a pair of Golden Retrievers and their pup. He was sure that they hadn’t been fed for a couple of days, at least.

  “Is it locked up?” he asked Lopez.

  “Yes, Victor.”

  He selected a master key from the keyring in his pocket. The dogs reacted to the jangling sound by wailing more loudly. They panted and dug at the carpeting with their paws. When Torelli had the door open a few inches, the bitch stuck her nose into the gap. Her teeth were bared, and the old man had to nudge her back inside with the rifle stock, breathing heavily, his heart pounding.

  “Her name’s Rosie,” Lopez told him.

  “Get back in there, Rosie.” Torelli opened the door a bit more and gingerly petted her head. She did not snap at him as he feared she might. Instead, she began a pitiful whimpering. “Who’s the other one?”

  “Prince.”

  “All right, Prince, just settle down now,” the old man said, but the dog rushed at him anyway, leaping up and landing so hard against his chest that he almost toppled over. He reeled backward and banged into a wall, swinging the rifle stock before him to keep the animal at bay. The pup, very small and furry, cowered under an armchair in a far corner of the room. Prince soon quit his wild gamboling and started whimpering, too, and Torelli ransacked the kitchen until he located a can of food and put it out on plates.

  The trailer was in absolute squalor. The dogs had been drinking out of the toilet, and the bathroom floor was splattered with water and smeared with paw prints. Dog shit was heaped everywhere in mounds. The old man was surprised to discover that Atwater had not moved out all his belongings. His furniture, including his stereo and his TV, was pushed into the bedroom at the rear of the trailer, along with several cartons of books. Torelli searched for a leash in drawers and closets, but he couldn’t find one and had to make do with a clothesline still in its original packaging. He ripped off the cellophane and instructed Lopez to tie the line to Rosie’s collar. The big dogs were both calmer now, more trusting.

  “Tak
e her down to the river, Antonio,” Torelli said.

  Lopez made a mooching sound with his lips, and Rosie ran to him with her tail wagging. He bent to rub the dog’s forehead with his knuckles and led her out the door. The vineyard behind the trailer was fenced against deer, so they took a path at the edge of it downhill through some willows and cottonwoods to a sandy bank. The river, too, was high and muddy, the color of coffee blended with cream. All manner of flotsam was scattered about on the shore, here a hubcap and there a pair of socks that had caught in the bushes when the water was last at flood stage.

  Torelli had trouble getting down to the river. He had to lean on his rifle like a cane and use it for support, the stock pressed to the ground. Twice he almost slipped and fell, and he cursed his age and his bum knee and shook a fist at the heavens. He was thoroughly winded, his chest heaving, when he reached the spot where Lopez and Rosie were playing, and he sat on a rock to rest and collect himself.

  “We’ll just wait for a minute,” the old man said.

  It was a beautiful day. That was the thing Torelli would remember most vividly forever after. He would remember the bright blue sky and the last few gold leaves of the cottonwoods falling all around him. He asked Lopez to tie Rosie to a tree trunk with as little slack in the clothesline as possible. The dog sensed immediately that something was wrong and strained against her tether, standing up on her hindlegs and batting her paws in the air. Her tongue flapped about, and she slobbered and started whimpering again. A stream of urine escaped from her bladder and hissed in the sand. Torelli tried not to think about it. He tried not to think that he was about to shoot an innocent animal because some pitiful human being had let it down, but it did him no good. In a blind and obliterative fury, he shouldered the Winchester and took aim.

  2

  The cottonwoods along the river were stripped bare by the time Anna Torelli finally left for Carson Valley toward the end of January, her emotions in conflict and her bags packed for an open-ended stay. She was in her midthirties, tall and long-legged, with auburn hair that fell to her shoulders and a rich olive complexion inherited from her Tuscan ancestors. There was a simple brightness about her that some people took for confidence and others for innocence. Her eyes were her mother’s, very green and striking, but it was her father that she resembled most, being just as stubborn and defiantly proud. Headstrong, obsessive, impulsive, too smart for her own goddam good—the old man had called Anna all those things and more during the battles between them that had begun almost with her birth.