Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  “Why should I buy her anything? She’s the one causing all the trouble. She doesn’t even appreciate me. She takes me for granted.”

  “Try it, anyway. She’ll fall for it, I swear! They all fall for that stuff.” Atwater wiped some oil from the pump with a rag. “It beats the hell out of me, but they fall for it.”

  “God must have made them that way to torture us,” Lopez said, standing up and smoothing out his jeans. “They’re not stable like we are, Arthur. Everything pulls on them. You ever go to bed with a woman on a full moon night?”

  “Not that I can recall.”

  “If you did, you’d remember. The moon, the stars, the sun, the waves, the comets. Everything in the world pulls on them.”

  “Go on and get out of here,” Atwater ordered him with mock authority. “Vaya con Dios!”

  He tackled the pump again after Lopez had departed and put it through a close-order drill, inspecting the filters, the screen, and the foot valves. He removed the nozzles and cleaned them thoroughly, mumbling to himself, Ah, women! It occurred to him that he hadn’t gotten laid for a while now, not since his wild flight to Redding, and that made him think fondly of his student nurse. She was wholesome, disease-free, barely legal, and exceptionally horny, but all he could recollect of her was the butterfly tattooed just above her pubic hair. Such one-night stands—two nights, in this case—were a rarity for him at present, except when he was whacked out and on a tear. The times mitigated against such risks, of course, but it was actually his wife who had spoiled him for the casual affairs that he used to favor, showing him how love could fan the flames of passion and take it to a higher level. He needed to feel a deeper attraction these days, a special spark, some electricity in the mix. That he felt it for the boss’s daughter was a bothersome sign.

  Atwater had not yet worked up the nerve to make a play for Anna, regardless of his desire. The moment just never seemed right. Often she came to him in the fields with her questions, bright and amiable, and he would ignore her legs and her ass and adopt the icy veneer of a viticultural scholar for whom any pastime as base and squalid as sex was beneath contempt. He told himself he was too old for her, which was false, and that she was too smart for him, which was doubtlessly true. Besides, if he started flirting with her, he had nothing to gain from it but a sticky and potentially destructive situation. And she hadn’t encouraged him either, had she? She had not invited him to dinner again in spite of the superb bit he’d pulled about the sound of grapes growing, a stunt that had worked beautifully for him with other women. The sad truth, he thought, was that Anna was indeed way above him. She could do far, far better than to take up with a guy who had failed chemistry and geometry, and yet at certain times, when the light was right, he had a hunch that she liked him. He saw it in her eyes, a little glow. Probably he could fuck her if he really tried.

  Quit it, Atwater! But people knew these things, didn’t they? There were no secrets in the end. It was a similarly subtle recognition that had led him to his wife—a seductive way she had of inclining her head to demonstrate her interest in him. He still thought of her with great affection at times, although all he had of her now was an address and a phone number in Seattle, where she had moved. Laura was a pretty, intelligent brunette as uncomplicated as any woman he had ever known, and Atwater was convinced that she had loved him much more fervently than he had deserved. He couldn’t say exactly what had gone wrong for him, or why after their six years together he began to stay out late and tell her lies of a sort he’d never told before, except that it seemed to him in retrospect a purely biological uprising he could not have willed himself to avoid. He was, for reasons he could never articulate very well to Laura, all at once bored and unhappy, gone haywire, and he had blown apart the marriage with a dumb and toxic affair conducted in full public view as an irreparable insult. His regret was still profound.

  When Atwater had finished tuning up the pump, he retreated to his trailer and grabbed the insulated rubber chest waders he wore while fishing for steelhead. He knotted together the laces of his cleat-soled wading shoes and tossed them around his neck. In the barn, he uncoupled the disc harrow from the tractor and rigged it for transporting the Berkeley to the creek on a little sled. The trip took about fifteen minutes as he inched forward at two or three miles an hour. He stopped on the bank by a grove of willows and saw to his annoyance that the creek had risen during the night, surely from a storm to the north, where the rainfall was always much heavier. He would need help in placing the pump and wished that he hadn’t sent Lopez home, but he could not postpone the job any longer. Thirty percent chance of a freeze. The weather could really bust a grower’s nuts at this fickle time of year.

  His crew was weeding nearby, four men clinking their hoes against pebbles, stones, and the midden of shells that birds left behind when they cracked open black walnuts against the metal grapestakes. Atwater sized up the men. The biggest was Ernesto Morales, who had arms that were thickly muscled from a lifetime of manual labor and a broad peasant’s chest.

  “Morales!” he shouted.

  Ernesto Morales leaned his hoe against a stake. He did it slowly. He did everything like that, slowly and with infinite attention to the task of not overextending himself. He was the most lugubrious fellow Atwater had ever worked with, greasy haired and shifty eyed, acceptable only because of his bond with Antonio.

  “You will help me with the pump.” Atwater knew that Morales’s English was limited and enunciated each word carefully. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  They walked together to the tractor, Morales staying a diligent stride or two behind. Atwater felt the horrendous weight of the man, his absolute gravity, and attempted to lighten him up. “Qué paisaje—tan bonito, eh?” he said, in praise of the landscape. “La granja, los compos, los pájaros.” The farm, the fields, the birds.

  “Preferesco el mar.”

  That figured, Atwater thought. Of course, Morales would prefer the ocean. Morales would be nothing if not contrary. “So you like to swim?” he asked, doing a breaststroke in the air.

  Morales shook his head. “No, señor.” His eyes were focused on the ground, burrowing into it and worming toward the center of the earth.

  “Ah!” Atwater exclaimed, as if he’d solved a puzzle. “Pescador!”

  “No.” Morales did not fish.

  Atwater gave up. He could do nothing with anyone so lacking in basic bonhomie. When they reached the creek, he stood by the willows and studied the flow. The water was a milky green color, silty and fairly opaque. There were many such creeks in the valley, seasonal streams that roared all through the winter and carried off acres of soil only to be dead dry by June, parched and coated over with a brownish white crust of scum. The riparian rights to Wappo Creek had belonged to the Torelli family for nearly a century. They had shored up its banks by dumping in riprap and bulldozing some grape brush on top of it, creating a mass of rock, chunks of cement, and interlocked canes that gripped the porous earth and held it reasonably fast, but they still lost a little more soil every year, their property vanishing bit by bit, flowing into the river and on into the ocean—a lesson, Atwater thought, in what men could and could not hold onto.

  “You wait here,” he instructed Morales, as he climbed onto the tractor seat. A wide path ran through the willows at a tolerable grade to a flat landing where the Berkeley would sit, and he negotiated it with extreme caution, crawling forward with the pump behind him and idly wondering why it should be his lot to endure such trials. Other growers had cranes to set their pumps, they had guy wires and cables. Unlike Arthur Atwater, they were fully equipped professionals. Still, he persevered. He would have liked the ground to be less wet, but the huge corrugated wheels of the tractor dug in and held. When he got to the landing, he gestured for his assistant to follow him. Morales braced himself against tree trunks as he descended, a look of extreme apprehension on his face. They used wrenches to uncouple the pump from the rig and edged it to the chosen site
above the swirling green stream.

  Atwater started the tractor again and drove it back up the path. He shut off the engine, stepped into his waders, and cinched an old leather belt tightly around his waist. The belt was his insurance against a fall. It would keep his waders from filling up with water and becoming an anchor that might drown him. He took off his rubber boots and put on his wading shoes. “Now comes the tricky part,” he said. “Listo, Ernesto?”

  “I am ready.”

  He gave Morales a rope and asked him to grip one end tightly. The other end he tossed down toward the pump site. “Don’t let go of that. I might need something to grab onto if I slip. Por las manos, okay? Comprende?”

  “I understand.”

  Two suction pipes were on the bank, each about a foot in diameter, flexible and not too heavy. Atwater’s plan was to sink the first pipe into the creek, then attach the second to the pump and couple them both.

  He began his downhill journey with relative ease, his cleats providing traction as he dragged a pipe behind him. He got to the landing without incident and bent to retrieve the rope he’d tossed there, threading it between his belt and his waders. The ground below him was steeper and muddier. His shoes sank into the muck as he walked, one cautious step at a time. He had the pipe in front of him now and let the tip sink in a little, leaning into it for balance. The creek rang in his ears, an ominous noise, and he was briefly overwhelmed and felt his legs shaking, but he controlled himself and continued down to the water. His pulse was racing despite his intention to be calm.

  He pushed the pipe into the stream. It hit bottom, but it wouldn’t stay put. The current was much too strong. Atwater pushed harder, hoping to make it stick in the sandy bottom, but his effort was fruitless. He was forced to admit to himself that he had gone about the job wrong. He would have to reverse the order of things and fit a pipe to the pump first, so he began retracing his steps up the muddy rise. He hauled the pipe along behind him, but it was wet, and it slipped from his hand and splashed into the creek. He scrambled after it as fast as he could and caught it before it was swept away, but the racket of his pursuit spooked a pair of wood ducks from their hideout beneath some trailing cottonwood branches. The ducks honked sharply in alarm and took furiously to the wing, flapping over Atwater’s head, surprising him, and causing him to lose his balance.

  He grabbed for the rope at his waist as he fell, but there was no tension on it, none at all. Then he was rolling down into the creek and watching the entire length of rope tumble after him in slack coils. He saw through spatters of mud Ernesto Morales on the bank above him frantically trying to repossess the end that he had so carelessly released. Atwater crashed into the stream and felt the shock of cold water drench his sweater. The water trickled past the barrier of his belt, spilled into his jeans, and washed over his privates. His balls shriveled up on contact, and the creek turned him over twice before he fought his way to his feet. Miraculously, the pipe had lodged against some grape brush, so he sloshed over to get it, only to fall once more and crack his bad ankle on a boulder.

  With the pipe rescued, he sat down where he was and ordered himself to take it easy. The danger was over. Soon he heard the crunch of twigs and leaves behind him. Morales stood on the bank as wordlessly as ever, incapable of formulating even a simple apology. “Ernesto,” Atwater said quietly, without looking at the man, “I asked you to hold the rope.”

  “I did,” Morales told him.

  “No, you did not. You didn’t hold it at all.”

  “It escaped me.”

  “It escaped you?”

  “From my hand. It escaped me.”

  Atwater didn’t have it in him to pursue the interrogation. “Go do some more hoeing, Ernesto. When you’re done for the day, you come to my trailer, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Atwater stared at the creek. From his stable position, the roar of it no longer seemed threatening. He was apart from it now, saved and spared, restored to his proper element, back on dry land. He felt diminished and cowardly. By worrying about falling, he had caused himself to fall. That was how the universe worked, he believed. It was an immutable law.

  He left the pipe he’d rescued on the bank, securing it to a bay laurel with the rope, and rode over to his trailer, where he stripped off his soaked clothes and took a long hot shower. He wrapped his ankle, purple with bruises, in an Ace bandage, swallowed three aspirin and a Tylenol, and phoned the weather service again. There were no changes on the tape—chance of a frost, 30 percent. He would tackle the pump placement again tomorrow, this time with Antonio’s help. He passed a miserable afternoon hobbling around the barn and mixing herbicides. The showers started at about two as predicted, with clouds in towering gray columns marching across the sky. Atwater welcomed the humidity. It meant that he would live to see the morning.

  He was fixing himself a few peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for supper when Morales knocked on his door at about six o’clock that evening.

  “Come in, Ernesto,” he said wearily. Morales was dispassionate, unmoved, ever silent, his rage buried and probably explosive. “How many days did you work this week?”

  “Dos.”

  “All right.” Atwater went to his bedroom and took fifty dollars from the emergency hundred he kept under his mattress. He did not want to bother with writing a check—he just wanted Morales gone from the farm and preferably from the planet. The old man would reimburse him down the line, anyhow. “Here you go. I’m sorry about this. I know you’re a friend of Antonio’s.”

  “El mismo pueblo.”

  “I know, I know. The same village.”

  Morales stared at the bills in his hand as if they represented some unusual type of currency. He seemed to comprehend that he would never see their like again, and he lifted his head, looked Atwater in the eye, hawked up a lunger, and spat it on the carpet. “Gracias por nada,” he said, with a malign grin.

  “Ernesto, I don’t want to listen to your shit.” Atwater fought to contain himself. “You almost got me drowned today. I want you out of here now. Have you got a ride home?”

  “Hidalgo. He waits me. I ride with him.”

  Atwater pulled another ten from his pocket, his own entire supply of petty cash. “Here you go, Ernesto. Maybe you can come back and pick during the harvest. I really am sorry it didn’t work out.”

  “Por nada,” Morales said again, slamming the trailer door behind him.

  Atwater fed the dogs and ate his supper. Their bowls of chunky Alpo looked better than his sandwiches did, more meaty and substantial. The gradual dying of the light brought him some relief, a satisfaction that this pitiful day was ending. He had known other days just like it and was certain that he would know still others in the future, days when nothing at all went right, when a man felt cursed and blighted and wanted only to sleep. He tried to console himself further by reciting hackneyed proverbs to himself as he cleared the table and washed the dishes: Tomorrow is another day; Seek and ye shall find; God helps those who help themselves. He was exhausted and his guard was down, so it pained him severely when he saw a pair of beaming headlights cut through the dark of the farm and watched Jack Farrell bound up the back steps of the big house and pound on the door with his chubby fist until Anna opened it for him and let him in.

  7

  Antonio Lopez spent his day off moping. He drank some Pepto-Bismol for his stomach, bounced a rubber ball against a wall, said hello to the mailman, helped a neighbor bring down a dead tree with a chain saw, and eventually went into his straggly backyard and began raking such leaves as there were into neat little piles. For this lawn and this house, he and Elena paid nine hundred dollars a month in rent, a fact that caused him to feel both substantial and devastated. He could see the cash that they had given to their landlord over the past two years piled up to form an immense green column soaring into the sky. The column represented more money than anyone in his family had earned in a whole lifetime, a dizzying structure that dwarfed and made ins
ignificant the efforts of those who had labored to build it. He was depressed to think that it would only grow taller.

  Lopez had a twenty-dollar bill in his wallet and took it out to examine it. A president named Jackson was pictured on one side with a rippling banner over his head. Jackson had wavy white hair like Victor Torelli and eyebrows as bushy as caterpillars, but his face was very stern. Jackson was obviously a punishing-type man, and Lopez could easily imagine him wearing a badge, riding a motorcycle, and doling out an endless stream of speeding tickets. Counting aloud, he found that the number 20 was printed on the bill eight times. The White House where Jackson and every other U.S. president lived was depicted on the other side of the bill, a huge palace surrounded by trees and hedges. There were no animals or people anywhere near it. Above the White House it said In God We Trust, which was something Lopez had always tried to do, although he had not always succeeded.

  He was still deeply troubled about his relationship with Elena. They seemed to be drifting apart and he wondered if he had made a bad mistake by becoming involved with her in the first place. In his supreme ardor, he had ignored the great difference in their backgrounds and the problems that it might present. Elena had been born in Santa Rosa, the child of Mexican-American parents, and her father, Ed Rodriguez, had worked for the post office for many years now. The Rodriguezes were comfortably well-off and owned a nice house in a much better part of town, and Lopez felt increasingly that Elena expected the same from him someday. She had an easy part-time job at Kmart herself, putting in just twenty hours a week, yet her paycheck roughly equaled his own. Without it, they might not be able to afford the rent at all, but Elena still kept harping about how tough her life was, on and on and on.

  Lopez returned to the farm on Saturday. He heard from Atwater about Morales’s firing and knew that it must have been fated. Then he and Arthur put in a long depleting afternoon wrestling the pump into position. Lopez wished Elena could be there to see what real work was like. The women in Mexico labored as hard as the men did, Antonio remembered, with the same tireless fortitude. They scrubbed floors, ground corn in their metates, and cooked laborious moles, while simultaneously taking care of their husbands and children. Sometimes they even helped out in the fields, and they were always grateful for the smallest things. In Lopez’s opinion, Elena was spoiled rotten. She acted like some kind of princess. He evolved a delicate way to explain this to her on his drive home and was disappointed to find that she had already gone to bed. He ate the plate of fried chicken that she had left out for him and looked in on Dolores, who was curled up in her crib with a menagerie of stuffed animals. It never ceased to amaze him how tiny and fragile she was, how dependent on him for protection. He smiled as he watched a dream shoot through her. Her body wriggled, her eyelids fluttered, she drooled and kicked her feet, and then, all at once, she was calm again. The dream had run its course.