Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  She was momentarily gratified, then reminded herself that this was a man who lived in a trailer. “I’m running a little late,” she told him, brushing her hands on her thighs, unaccountably nervous. “Excuse me while I change, will you? I won’t be a minute.”

  Upstairs, she took a quick shower and ran a brush through her hair. Her nervousness had tipped her off to the fact—one that might never have arisen consciously—that she was again feeling a physical attraction toward Atwater, as implausible as it seemed. Probably it was just loneliness, she thought, or maybe a simple biological urge for some intimate human contact after the distancing effect of the past few weeks, so she warned herself to be careful. On the other hand, though, she hadn’t been to bed with anyone except Sam McNally recently, and that prompted her to do some mental arithmetic and add up all the lovers she’d ever known. The disappointing total was six, most of them during an experimental period immediately after her divorce, when she was determined to compensate for what she believed she’d missed by squandering her youth on Bud Wright. Not much, as it happened.

  Anna saw the knit dress where it was hanging, and the matter was decided. She would not play it safe tonight. She slipped into it for fun to see if she could make Atwater’s eyes pop. It wasn’t a problem.

  “Wow,” was all he said.

  “I’m just fooling around, Arthur.” His enthusiastic response made her shy. “I’m pretending to be a teenager again.”

  “I’d say you’re doing a real good job of it.”

  Anna led him into the kitchen. She had fixed them a supper of roast chicken and mashed potatoes with a salad of mixed greens and a crusty baguette from the French patisserie. She directed Atwater to the table and passed him a wedge of Brie and some crackers. Without any hesitation, he fixed himself a little sandwich and consumed it in two rapid bites, crumbs falling in chunks down his shirt.

  “Sorry,” he said, looking sheepish. “I skipped lunch today.”

  “Will it bother you if I open some wine?” She had brought up a bottle of Zinfandel from the basement rack.

  “No, it’s fine. I’ll even have a glass with you. I can drink a little wine when I’m not feeling crazy.”

  “And you’re not feeling crazy now?”

  He shook his head. “No, I’m way too busy.”

  Anna still had trouble reading him. He played it so deadpan and close to the chest that she never knew whether or not he was being serious. “You are a man of many mysteries, Mr. Atwater,” she said, toasting him with a clink of her glass. “You must tell me the story of your life sometime.”

  He surprised her by saying, “Would you like me to do it right now?”

  “By all means. What better time than the present?”

  Anna leaned forward on her elbows to listen. She would never have taken Atwater for a college graduate, but he swore that he had a degree in English from San Francisco State. He had lived in the Bay Area for a while, he said, and also in Truckee, Big Sur, and Juneau, Alaska. His work experience was extensive, spotty, and entirely uninspiring. He claimed to have been a roustabout, a carpenter, a cabbie, and a plumber. He had no ambition at all, he said, although he confessed with some embarrassment that he had tried to write a novel once. He had done a lot of traveling as a young man, often to escape from one misadventure or another, and had spent a whole summer exploring Canada and later a winter bumming around the U.S. in a beat-up VW van. As he warmed to his tale, he described for her the high points of that journey, like the snowy morning in Boston when he had strolled around for hours on Beacon Hill among the lovely old brick buildings and felt a contentment he could hardly believe.

  “You make me so envious.” Anna carved the chicken. “All that experience. I haven’t been anywhere since college.”

  Atwater refused to accept any credit. “I was just lost, really. Whatever I was looking for, I never found it. I always came home to the grapes.”

  “Did your family own a vineyard?”

  He laughed. “No, they didn’t own much of anything. My father was an auto mechanic who played the horses. I was lucky to have a pair of trousers! It was my grandfather who got me started in the fields when I was fourteen. A friend of his over in Napa hired me to sucker some vines and do all the shit work.” He dabbed at his lips with a napkin. “Pardon my language.”

  “What was your novel about?”

  Atwater groaned theatrically. “Do I have to answer that?”

  “Oh, yes. Absolutely. That’s the deal.”

  “This is pretty terrible,” Atwater said, squirming a bit. “I wrote it when I was down there in Big Sur. Everybody I met was some kind of artist or other, so I figured I might as well be a novelist. Why not? I had a journalism class to my credit.” He took a sip of his wine. “I set the thing in Spain. I’d never been there, of course. My hero was a bullfighter.”

  Anna clapped her hands in delight. “A bullfighter!”

  “Yeah, Juan Romero was his name.” He was getting his teeth into it now, she could tell. “Born in Seville to impoverished parents. That’s the exact first line: Juan Romero was born in Seville to impoverished parents.’ Juan, he kept getting gored. He just couldn’t get out of a bull’s way come hell or high water. He got gored in Madrid and Barcelona and Málaga. I must have gored that poor bastard about twenty times before he finally died, but he never stayed on the floor of the bullring for very long. It was a novel about courage, see?”

  “Did you ever submit it to any publishers?”

  Atwater looked at her skeptically. “No way. I may be crazy, lady, but I’m not insane. I stood on a cliff and fed it to the ocean, page by page.”

  After dinner, Anna sat with him in the refurbished parlor. She had made coffee for herself and a pot of tea for him. Atwater seemed touched that she had remembered his preference. He was acting restrained again and all talked out, back on his best behavior. She liked his presence in the house, the simple fact of his company, and she was reminded of the comforting times she had spent with other men, with Bud and Sam when things were going well, those evenings when they had settled together into an enveloping silence and all was right with the world.

  “You really did a super job on the house,” Atwater said, complimenting her again.

  “Thank you, Arthur. I enjoy being here. I feel useful and connected.”

  “Those are nice feelings to have.”

  Anna spoke with him about the vineyard. She had been studying the pamphlets her father had given her and asked whether it might be worthwhile to diversify into some of the newer varietals. “Like Mouvedre,” she said. “Or Sangiovese or Cabernet Franc. They’re in demand, aren’t they?”

  “It’s worth considering,” Atwater said. “We’ve got a block of older Chardonnay down by the river that isn’t producing the way it should.”

  “Would it be difficult to do?”

  “Not difficult. But expensive. It can run you up to fifteen thousand to replant an acre. Victor might not go for that.”

  “Let’s look into it, anyway, shall we?”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “No, I’m the boss’s daughter.”

  “So you are.” Atwater finished his tea and got to his feet. Anna wondered if he would try for a kiss. That was the most she would reward him with for now. “It’s time for me to go, but if you come outside with me, boss’s daughter, I’ll show you something special.”

  She didn’t hesitate. If this was his romantic ploy, it wasn’t bad. “Let me get a sweater.”

  He walked with her out to the porch and down the steps into the vineyard. The moon was almost full and held them in the light. He touched her arm to stop her in the middle of a row and motioned for her to be quiet. But that was all he did. “Can you hear it?” he asked her. “That little rustle? It’s the sound the vines make when they’re growing.”

  “Oh, please!” Anna couldn’t contain herself. “I’m not that naive! Charlie Grimes used to pull that on me when I was a kid. It turned out he was just rubbing his f
ingertips together.”

  “No, no, it’s true,” Atwater insisted. “Listen, will you?”

  Why didn’t he come any closer to her? “I am listening. I hear frogs. That’s what I hear, Arthur. A bunch of frogs.”

  “There’s another sound underneath them. Really listen, Anna.”

  “You better not be joking.”

  “I’m not.”

  Once more Anna listened, a hand cocked to her ear. She was aware that Atwater had not moved toward her, aware of his breathing and the steady pulsing of her heart, and she heard it then at last, a barely perceptible rustle of the grapevines as they grew.

  6

  It would be well into March before a bud showed itself on the Torelli farm, in a block of Chardonnay planted to riverside ground. Atwater found it while touring the vineyard in his Jeep and searching for just such signs of life. He bent to examine the little knot of tissue and nudged it with a finger, glad for its appearance but also numbed by the thought of how much work lay ahead of him over the next few weeks. Soon buds would be popping everywhere like firecrackers, and they would require his constant attention and protection. He passed the day on his tractor dicing between the rows and almost fell asleep at the throttle during the afternoon, veering ever so slightly off course before the screeching cry of a red-tailed hawk woke him. He could have used a nap, but he was out of luck. There would be no rest for him now, not with the great cycle of growth underway. He would spin with the sap. He was its prisoner.

  Trudging home at twilight, he sat on his ruined, bat-haunted deck to update his log.

  TUESDAY, MARCH 17TH. Budbreak, riverside Chardonnay. 62 degrees at noon, everyone can feel the push coming on. Talked to D. Rhodes in town today. His hilly ground all dried out and Zinfandel breaking. Ours next. Must get the pump into the creek in the morning. A frost would be a killer.

  He limped going inside, having stepped in a gopher hole and turned an ankle. Rosie, his dearest dog, licked his hand when he came through the door, while Prince snorted and ignored him. The puppy merely dozed. Atwater sat for a time before dinner pondering the intricacies of the CV contract that Victor Torelli had recently sent him. It was a document dense with language and numbers, scientific as all get out and specific in a way that grated against his own style of vineyard management. He hated science, really, and he also hated math and had flunked both chemistry and geometry with aplomb. Measure this, measure that—it struck him as such rudimentary bullshit. He preferred to rely on observation, intuition, mojo magic, and the techniques he had acquired not in high school but in the School of Hard Knocks, so he was distressed that the contract spelled out everything in such petty detail. The vision at its core bothered him, too, with its suggestion that every variable involved in the risky craft of growing wine grapes could be controlled. Yet for the old man’s sake, he had promised not to stage a revolution. He would cooperate and do his best.

  He ate and read and slept. Dawn woke him before he knew it. His bedroom was alive with birdsong, goofy mating tunes being crooned in a tangle of branches against a vibrant blue sky. He plucked his jeans and socks from the carpet, put on a ratty wool sweater, got an aromatic whiff of himself, and vowed to take a shower that evening, regardless of how tired he might be. He opened a package of glazed doughnuts and ate two for breakfast, then wrapped another pair in a paper napkin and stuffed them into his jacket pocket as a snack for later. He added a small box of raisins, gazed at the comely Sun Maid, and was distressed to find her so fetching. Before leaving, he dialed the National Weather Service in Santa Rosa to get the forecast. It would be mild again, the taped recording said, with temperatures in the high fifties and showers developing in the early afternoon. The chance of a freeze was only 30 percent, but a clearing trend would follow. That was not good news. If the sky was clear on a cool and windless day in spring, a farmer could be fairly certain of a frost.

  Atwater gimped his way over to the barn, favoring his puffy ankle. The barn served not only as a machine shop and a storage space but also as a reliquary for the pack rat Victor Torelli, who was as acquisitive and tenacious as any other hoarder in the valley. Rusted harrows, cultivators missing teeth, a dented canoe, pitchforks with bent tines, they were all accorded a place of honor in the old man’s grand design. His collection was a tribute to wrongheaded preparedness. He had refrigerator coils for a Kelvinator, spark plugs for a Kaiser Vagabond, and a ream of carbon paper. He had saved beer cans from defunct breweries, a few buffalo nickels in a glass jar, and the skulls of several small mammals, all unidentifiable to Atwater. There were honest trophies, too, racks of antlers and photos of giant steelhead and, most striking, the stuffed head of a marauding wild pig that Torelli had shot in 1953, his feat celebrated in a yellowed press clipping that was still on display, tacked up next to a mottled toilet seat that bore the caption “Italian Life Preserver.”

  The frost-protection pump was on an elevated wooden platform in a corner. It was a fairly expensive Berkeley model about fourteen years old that ran on diesel fuel through three-minute cycles. The pump showered the vineyard with water during a frost, creating an artificial rain that raised the ambient air temperature and prevented the delicate cells inside the vines from dying. Thermometers mounted at strategic points on the farm triggered an alarm whenever the mercury fell to 34 degrees, and Atwater would hear it buzzing in his trailer and have to drag himself from bed to switch on the system. He regarded the pump as his nemesis and not only because it would cost him some sleep. It was just too worn out to be dependable. He had lobbied for a new pump—he could have used two or three of them, really—but Torelli, trained by his stingy forebears, believed that any skilled vineyard manager ought to be able to hold his equipment together with chewing gum and baling wire. The Berkeley only ran for ten or fifteen hours each growing season, so it ought to last forever, according to the old man.

  While Atwater was checking over the pump a final time, oiling it and testing the couplings, he glanced up and saw Antonio Lopez loitering by the barn door. Something was wrong, he could tell right away. There are men for whom work is as essential as blood, and Lopez was among them. Antonio was never desultory and always ready to get his hands dirty—tough, skilled, and dogged. He simply never quit. Today, though, he looked preoccupied and out of sorts. His robust face was pale, and his ordinarily buoyant spirits were nowhere in evidence.

  “’Morning, Antonio,” Atwater greeted him. “How’s it going?”

  “I started the crew hoeing,” Lopez replied dully. “You didn’t get all the weeds, man.”

  “Nobody gets all the weeds, my friend. The weeds always win.” He offered a sympathetic smile. “Sit down, why don’t you? Take a load off your feet and relax. How’s life been treating you?”

  Lopez grabbed an old milk crate from Carson Valley Dairy, a long-gone enterprise, pulled it close to Atwater, flopped it over, and sat. “I don’t know, Arthur,” he said, sounding fatigued. “I think I got some problems at home. You still worried about that pump?”

  “You want to know the truth?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’d like to drop this pump off a bridge somewhere.”

  “That’s not a good solution.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “My stomach hurts,” Lopez complained. He lifted his shirt and indicated a spot above his navel. “You ever have a pain right here?”

  “It’s all those beans you’ve been eating,” Atwater told him, venturing a joke.

  “It’s not any beans, man. Elena, she gave me this pain. It’s from stress. She wants to quit her job and only be a mother.”

  “When did she say that?”

  Lopez was downcast, invested in his perceived abuses. “Last night. And on Saturday. And on Thursday.” He spoke with anger. “You can name any day, Arthur, and she said it then. She doesn’t understand anything about money. She thinks it’s just laying on the ground for me to find.”

  “Women have their moods,” Atwater advised him, edging toward a topic
he could not in good conscience claim to have mastered. “I went with a girl once who cut me off for a whole month because I said her cat was ugly.”

  “Was it?”

  “Let me put it to you this way, Antonio. If you were driving down the street and you saw that cat, you’d go out of your way to run it over.”

  Lopez wrung his hands. “Sometimes I want to run over Elena.”

  “You’re taking it too hard, amigo. Give her some space. Leave her alone for a while. Don’t be messing around in her kitchen. It’ll probably blow over.”

  “You ever met a woman, once she has her mind set on a thing, it goes away?”

  “Nope.”

  “At least you’re honest.” Lopez slumped forward on the crate, his elbows on his knees. He was sullen, brooding. “It’s a good thing for her that I can control myself. Some guys, they wouldn’t put up with her shit.”

  “Well, you don’t want to resort to violence.” Atwater gave him a severe look. “That’s for the monkeys.”

  “I’m not a monkey, Arthur. I never hit a woman in my life. I never hit anybody at all unless he hit me first.”

  “That’s the noble way.”

  Lopez grinned self-consciously. “I stabbed a guy once, though.”

  “Did he stab you first?”

  “No.” Lopez fingered the scar on his throat. “That was another guy.”

  “How about a day off?” Atwater asked with a burst of enthusiasm, seized by his own brilliant stroke. “We’re going to be real busy around here pretty quick, and you won’t be worth a damn to me if you’re sick. Why don’t you go home and take it easy? Do some recuperating.”

  “It could be a good idea,” Lopez said haltingly.

  “Sure, it is. Go on home, sleep a little, and have yourself a bath. Tonight you’ll be nice and fresh. You and Elena can have a talk.”

  “What’s left to talk about?”

  “Soften her up a bit, Antonio,” Atwater coached him. “Ask her to a movie. Buy her some flowers or some candy. Surprise her with some fancy underpants. There are a million things you can do to cheer her up.”