Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  “Suppose there isn’t a catch? Suppose it’s all on the up-and-up?”

  “Well, I guess I’d be a fool not to take advantage of it, wouldn’t I?”

  “Goddam right you would be.”

  Vescio’s brow was furrowed in an effort to ferret out the nature of the scam. “Do you get to choose which wines you buy? Is it any old wine, or just a certain kind?”

  “Fred, you can be pretty clever for a dumb fellow,” Grimes said, with grudging praise. “The customer gets to choose one bottle. The other I pick for him.”

  “It wouldn’t be that old Burgundy blend you got in your cellar, would it?” Torelli asked. “That vinegary stuff?”

  “It might could be.” Grimes produced from somewhere on his person a copy of the ad he planned to run. “It looks real nice, doesn’t it? I paid a professional to do it on her computer.”

  “Computers rule the world now,” said Vescio.

  Grimes touched a finger to a blank corner. “I’m tempted to put in a little Dumbo over here, just for the hell of it.”

  In the glare of the sun, Torelli made some not-entirely-heartfelt remarks about the elegance of the design and the sensitivity of the layout, as impressed as he always was by the sheer amount of deception in the world, people being deceived, deceiving other people, and deceiving themselves. There’s no end to it, he thought as he rose from the bench achingly to make his way home.

  14

  In those slow blue ripening days of early June, Arthur Atwater pushed himself to the limit, heeding the demands of a clock whose ticking only he could hear. He was on the alert, ever vigilant for the tiniest sign of trouble, the first cane tip to wilt for lack of water or the first leaf to show the blotchy scabs caused by feeding thrips. He walked the vineyard rows and plucked the shot berries from his riverside Chardonnay, those seedless specimens that had died from an undetectable virus—plain misfortune, but just an ounce of it and not enough to cause alarm. Always he gave pep talks to the grapes and inquired after their health, remarking on how good they looked and wondering aloud if he could do anything to make their brief lives on earth a little better.

  THURSDAY, JUNE 8TH. Hot enough to fry eggs. Dragged the disc all day cutting down weed seedlings, Bermuda grass and Johnson grass. Big pain in the butt, there’ll be new seedlings in two weeks. Ate a ton of dust, too.

  Atwater didn’t have much company in the fields now. There wasn’t enough work to support a full crew. Only Antonio Lopez still reported each morning as usual and then, with his boss’s approval, left in the early afternoon to earn some extra cash clearing the land for a new vineyard going in off Carson Valley Road, up in the scrubby chaparral. The job was tough and crude. Lopez had to chop back prickly tangles of chamise, manzanita, and toyon by hand, roll around boulders, and dig up stumps six feet in diameter. His list of grievances was long and consistently expanding.

  “Look at this, Arthur,” he said that Friday while they were taking a break. His forearms were raw and blistered. “You ever seen it before?”

  “I’ve seen it, and I’ve had it.”

  “Poison oak. This itching is too much. I’m burning up, like with a fever. Tonight I got to stop at the clinic.” Antonio picked up a clod of dirt and tossed it morosely at a lizard, who darted away. “There goes half the money I already been paid.”

  “They’re running you guys hard, aren’t they?”

  “Too hard for five dollars an hour. They treat us like Mexicans, man.”

  “Nothing worse than that.”

  “When I’m rich,” Lopez said, his gloom receding as an invigorating fantasy blossomed in him, “I’ll hire a whole bunch of white people to work for me. Really old white people with arthritis. They’re going to scrub my floors and clean my bathroom.”

  “Who owns that vineyard, anyway?” Atwater asked him. “Somebody over at Roy’s told me it’s a Hollywood producer.”

  “Could be somebody from Hollywood. Could be just another dentist, too. They got a name for their wine before they even made any.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “Hawk Wind.”

  Atwater shook his head in dubious tribute. “Hawk Wind. That has a certain ring to it. Kind of like Thunderbird.”

  “I drank that stuff once,” Lopez told him, shuddering at the memory. “It made me throw up all over the place.”

  “Better stick to the Budweiser, then.”

  “I do. Hey, you want to come up and have a look around tomorrow, Arthur? Their winery building, it’s becoming like a castle.”

  “Can’t do it tomorrow. I have plans.”

  “Yeah, sure, I know,” Lopez joked. “You got to ride around on your tractor some more.”

  “No, I don’t, Mr. Smart-ass. I’m taking Anna on a canoe trip down the river. We’re having ourselves an excursion.”

  “You don’t sound too excited about it.”

  “Well, I promised her a long time ago, and damned if she didn’t remember.”

  “Cheer up, Arthur. It’ll be fun for you. A lot of fun.”

  Atwater regarded Lopez with a skeptical eye. “I sincerely doubt it. It’s supposed to be in the nineties again. Maybe you ought to go instead of me.”

  “She’s your lady.”

  “Sort of,” Atwater said distractedly. “How’re things between you and Elena these days? You patch up your problems?”

  “Yeah, we did,” Lopez said. “Since Elena quit her job, she’s being like a housewife. It makes her happy.”

  “Don’t you miss the money she made?”

  “A little bit. But we’ll be okay once the harvest comes, and I get my bonus.”

  Atwater stood up. “Can you spare a minute before you go up to, ah, Hawk Wind?”

  “Sure, amigo.”

  “Come help me with the canoe.”

  They headed for the barn, a pair of slump-shouldered figures nearly lost in the swirling greenery. The sun bore down on them, and Atwater thought with extreme distaste of the broiling that he would get on the river the next day during this ill-conceived trip he had offered up in an instant of passion and had done his best to avoid and postpone ever since. He stopped as they passed a particularly handsome row of vines and lifted some leaves to show off several plump and lustrous clusters of Zinfandel.

  “The harvest’ll be early this year,” he predicted, cupping the grapes and admiring the heft of them. “I’ll need you full-time before long.”

  “One thing, Arthur?” Lopez shuffled his feet as he always did when he wanted something. “There’s some good workers on the crew up there. They could be good pickers for us.”

  Atwater looked at him sharply. “Not Ernesto Morales, by any chance?

  “No, not him. But maybe I might hire a cousin of mine? He might be coming up from San Diego.”

  “As long as he has his papers.”

  “He does.”

  Some violet-green swallows sailed out of the barn when they entered it. The canoe rested on a plywood platform that rested in turn on rafter beams draped with cobwebs and dotted with owl pellets. Where the canoe had come from Atwater didn’t know for sure, although he suspected it had washed up in the willows by the river years ago, abandoned by some rowdy frat boys or a poor tortured sunburned soul such as he imagined himself soon to be. It was old, aluminum, and about seventeen feet long. On its stern, it still had the faintly lettered insignia of the company in town that rented canoes. It seemed paltry compared to the first canoe he had ever set foot in, his grandfather’s Hiawatha, a beauty made in Canada of clear-grained Ontario white cedar. As a boy paddling down the Napa River in it, he had felt positively princely.

  He climbed a ladder and wrestled with the prow of the canoe, sliding it forward at an angle and gently easing it along. He aimed it at Lopez down below, who stood with his arms awkwardly outstretched, as if to receive manna from heaven. Atwater balanced the weight well enough until more of the canoe was off the platform than on it, at which point gravity set in and caused him to lose his grip. He watche
d in horror as it hurtled toward the barn floor like a silvery missile. Lopez jumped out of the way just in time and let it crash. It rolled over once and rocked for a bit before coming to a stop. Atwater climbed back down, crouched low to inspect the damage, and found a huge new dent in a hull that was already dinged, epoxied, and scratched beyond belief.

  “No holes, anyway,” Lopez said, probing the aluminum with a finger. “What if this thing had landed on me?”

  “I’d be very sorry. And so would you.”

  “Can I go now?”

  “Yes, Antonio, you can go.”

  Atwater spent his evening in the barn, a radio plugged into an overhead socket so that he could listen to the Giants’ game while he made provisions for the trip. He could by no means address all the dents, but he pounded out some of the major ones with a rubber mallet and applied duct tape to the splintery handles of three warped paddles. With some garden shears, he cut in half an empty plastic bleach bottle and threw it in as a bailer, adding a coil of rope and a faded orange life preserver. He liked the comforting background noise of the ballgame and the oblivious snoring of his curled-up dogs, recalling how in his Boy Scout years he would put his gear in order with a similarly rapt attention. What a sober, industrious lad he had been, the winner of countless merit badges and a budding anti-Communist in the service of God and country. It was an image of himself that gave him pause.

  The lights were still on in the big house when he went to bed a little before ten. He faltered easily toward sleep and smiled to think of Anna in the kitchen tending to the last details of the grand picnic she had agreed to provide as her part of the bargain. She was roasting a chicken for him, his avowed favorite from her culinary repertoire. Love resided in the honoring of such pacts, Atwater supposed, and in the keeping of such promises, but she had never spoken the word love to him and had resisted his few fumbling attempts to speak it to her. That didn’t bother him so much anymore, although he wished it could have been otherwise, even knowing as he did how absurd any declaration of love could prove to be. But he knew also that he loved her absolutely, with a painful intensity he could not in the least control.

  He lived in utter terror of her leaving the valley, but he felt that he had no right to try and stop her. A part of him understood that Anna had obligations to fulfill, an entire life that she had deserted in a moment of crisis, deadlines to meet, and a business partner to placate, yet there was another part of him that resented her for not giving him something to hang onto. In his blackest hours, he accused her of being cowardly and escaping from her emotions. But who was he to know what was truly in her heart? He had no markers to call in, no IOUs. Anna had made him no promises. When he considered all that, he would change his mind and decide that he was the coward for not declaring himself more boldly. His only course of action now was to steel himself against her departure. He would be the still point, the solid center. It wasn’t impossible that she would come back to him someday if he could stand his ground.

  Yeah, right. Good luck, sucker.

  So Atwater tossed and turned through a restless night, woozy from an overdose of circular thinking. He had planned on an early start in the morning to get a leg up on the heat and found Anna waiting calmly for him on her porch at seven o’clock. He was awed by how perfectly composed she was, a wicker picnic basket at her feet. She wore a blue cotton shirt, white shorts and socks, and new white sneakers without a single scuff mark. The sight of her, so simple and right, was doubly poignant for him because he already knew how its absence would affect him, depriving him of a joy that could never be repeated.

  “Hello, Skipper,” Anna said brightly. Her face looked freshly scrubbed, and the tips of her hair were still damp from the shower. “Fine day for a cruise, isn’t it?”

  “You smell great.” Atwater came nearer and kissed her. He breathed her in. “All soapy and clean. Did you bring a hat?”

  “It’s in the basket.”

  “Sunscreen?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you study your canoeing manual?”

  “I’m ready for my test.”

  “What about Victor? You sure he doesn’t mind meeting us in town and driving us back?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Then let’s hit it.”

  He carried the canoe from the barn down to the water, jerking it up and ducking his head under the gunwales, so that the center thwart came to rest on his shoulders. Arms flexed and knees bent, he resembled a lost and struggling Atlas. Anna followed him with the picnic basket, a spin-fishing rod, and his rusty tackle box. The river where they put in was a dull green color and flowing slowly, ebbing toward its summer low. Killdeer dashed away with a frenzied piping as Atwater edged the canoe into the stream, steadying it for Anna to board. She grabbed the gunwales for support, stepped in, and sat in the bow, and he went up the hill again and returned with their other gear and the paddles. Then he pushed them off.

  The canoe eddied into the current. Atwater felt a little flutter of excitement at their surrender. They were swept from their solid underpinnings into a world that was fluid, were ferried through it at a pace that was not of their own devising. Although they were undeniably in motion, it seemed the other way around at times, as if shore-bound things were gliding by them, unspooling like a ribbon of film. The trip from the farm to town would cover about eleven miles, and he counted on it taking about seven hours, including their stop for a picnic. He anticipated no danger. They had no rapids to run and only a few tricky stretches of white water. Instead, they would skim along on the surface of quiet pools and let the tractable current guide them around wide bends and through narrow, tree-sheltered channels, relaxing all the while.

  Atwater oared with a basic power stroke as they set out. He switched to a J-stroke, digging more deeply into the water and twisting his paddle to apply some torque when they rounded the first bend and began a lazy glide down a still stretch that went on for several hundred yards. He saw to his surprise that Anna was paddling on the opposite side of the canoe, exactly as she should have been doing, in flawless harmony, without any instruction from him. The look that she gave him when he glanced at her let him know that he ought to have expected as much. It was a look familiar to him now, at once daring and playful. He watched the landscape unfold and heard the rattling cry of a kingfisher and the bleating of some grazing sheep. No other boats were afloat, and there were no houses in sight.

  Midway through the glide, Anna put down her paddle and reversed herself. She sat with her legs extended toward Atwater and a hand trailing in the river. Her head was pillowed on the bow, and her eyes were shut.

  “You’re right out of a painting,” he complimented her as he paddled. “A French painting. One of those impressionists.”

  “Which one?”

  “Now you’re pushing it.”

  “How about Monet?”

  “If you like.” He smiled at her. “You look like a Monet, Anna.”

  “Thank you. The water’s warm,” she told him, swirling her hand about.

  “It’s warm on top. Not down below.”

  “We should swim later. Will you go swimming with me?”

  “I forgot my suit,” he lied.

  “Then you’ll just have to swim naked.”

  “Maybe.”

  “This is really excellent, Arthur.” She opened her eyes to look at him, and he fell into the depths of them again. “I don’t know why I haven’t done this more often. I was about ten the last time I was in a canoe.”

  “The last time for me was when I was a Scout,” Atwater said. “Troop Forty-eight from Napa, California. Panther Patrol.”

  “Did your blood brother come along?”

  “Junior Thompson? No, he had the measles. Do you want to hear our patrol call?”

  “Nothing would please me more.”

  Atwater put a fist to his mouth and blew through it. “Keeok! Keeok!”

  “You don’t put much punch into it, do you?”

  “
I did in the old days. Somehow it’s not the same.”

  They passed a snowy egret stalking the shoals, unblinking in its concentration, all feathery and focused. The egret didn’t spook when they drifted by but rather dipped its long black bill into the stream and came up with a mouthful of fingerlings. One little fish dropped free, spared from the bird’s throbbing gullet. Rounding another bend, they entered a faster section of the river, and Atwater sculled them carefully around a big rock and along a bleached log where a turtle was sunning itself and probably had been for centuries. To the west, a vineyard ascended a hillside in tiered rows. The bodies of old cars and trucks formed a barrier at the base of the property, dumped behind a mesh of fence to keep the valuable soil in place.

  Atwater quit paddling for a moment to wipe the sweat from his face. The heat was every bit as bad as he’d figured it would be. He dipped a bandanna in the river and wrapped it around his neck, another trick he’d learned in Troop 48. “It’s amazing how much of that Boy Scout crap I still remember, Anna,” he said, enjoying a trickle of water down his spine. “I was thinking about it in the barn last night while I was getting us ready.”

  “Be prepared, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So what else do you remember?” she asked.

  “Well, you take that manual I gave you. I remember the first damn sentence in it: ‘The canoe was handed down to us from the Indians.’”

  “Bravo, Arthur. You really are the weirdest man. What I wouldn’t give to have a peek inside your head.”

  “You’d be scared silly in there.”

  “Did you earn a merit badge for canoeing?”

  He checked to see if she was poking fun at him, but she didn’t appear to be. “Of course I did. I had the most badges of anybody in my troop. Rabbit raising, mammal study, wood carving, you name it.”

  “Any others?” Anna took off her shirt to get some more sun. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

  “Jesus,” Atwater said, flattered by the display but unwilling to share it with anybody else. “Are you just going to ride along like that?”