by Bill Barich
Promptly at nine o’clock, Jack Farrell pulled into the circular driveway. He delivered himself to Anna on a waft of Old Spice cologne, his teeth pearly and polished and the new shirt he wore crosshatched with creases from its cardboard packaging. He humped her luggage down the porch stairs and stowed it in his trunk while Anna shut off the lights and locked up behind her. She was aching inside, lost and broken, fearful of the future, and tired, so tired. “I’ll just be a second, Jack,” she told Farrell, walking to the trailer as she had done so many times before. She could hear the dogs inside scratching and sniffing as she reached up and tacked her note to Atwater’s door, unburdened of its simple, plangent message, Forgive me, love.
16
The first grapes to be splashed with a distinctive varietal color that summer were some nice Gray Rieslings on Dick Rhodes’s farm. He told his wife about them at lunch, and she mentioned them to their teenage daughter, and the girl, who worked part-time at a winery, passed on the news to her boss, three visitors from Seattle, a UPS delivery man, and a tall, handsome boy that she had a crush on, the one in charge of landscaping. That same evening, a handful of curious growers arrived at Rhodes’s place for a tour of inspection. They sniffed the reddish-tan berries, pinged them with their fingers, squeezed them, tasted them, and agreed that these particular grapes were indeed well on their way to ripeness and could be interpreted as either a good or a bad omen of the coming harvest, depending on your orientation. The precise date was August sixteenth.
“We’ll be pulling the crop off early this year,” said Charlie Grimes, a crabbed hand jabbing down the seat of his trousers to explore all the available nooks and crannies. “Did you see the moon last night? There hasn’t been a moon like that since nineteen and fifty-nine.”
“It isn’t moonlight that brings up the sugar,” Dick Rhodes replied, and his comment opened the floodgates of opinion. Soon the men were all talking at once, their voices strictly at cross purposes and none of them doing much listening.
“The linnets will be after those grapes for sure,” whispered Grimes to Pepper Harris. “They favor Rieslings smartly.”
Harris pushed away some leaves for a closer look at the fruit. “Feel this stem here, how woody it is,” he said to Fred Vescio. “I had a Mexican boy one time, his grape knife split from its handle, and he took to biting off clusters with his teeth. That kid was some picker.”
“My Riesling stunted on me,” Vescio confided to the stranger next to him. “The flower thrips got ’em, so I replanted to Merlot, like Pepper here. Bugs won’t eat that grape, and it don’t get sick.”
“German grapes I just don’t trust,” the stranger said to nobody in particular. He was Emory Carter, a retired engineer, who had a hobby vineyard and operated his ham radio at all hours to broadcast the Christian gospel to heathen foreigners across the water. “Those Gewürzs of mine all died on me, and no expert in California could tell me why.”
“You figure it was a plot?” Arthur Atwater asked him.
“I’m not saying that. But it’s a helluva mystery, don’t you think?”
On a signal from his wife that his supper was ready, Dick Rhodes brought out a twelve-pack of cold beer to cut short the conversation. His thirsty brethren guzzled with gusto while offering their hosannas and benedictions, wiping the dirt from their faces, blowing their noses, and helping themselves to a second can for the ride home. Only Atwater abstained, choosing a 7-Up instead. He still felt too unmoored to risk anything stronger.
Atwater’s mood these days was often blue. True, almost two months had gone by since Anna had left, but he still hadn’t recuperated. He thought frequently about their meeting by the river and what he might have done differently to win her over. He had a painful memory of himself walking away from her and driving out to the coast to clear his head, a woeful and panicky flight during which he had taken the curves at a daredevil speed in spite of his Jeep’s rattling camshaft and the knocking complaint of its engine. The two-lane blacktop he followed led him over the mountains, through a forest of pine and fir, along the Gualala River, and across the invisible San Andreas fault to Stewart’s Point, which was not so much a town as a few sheep ranches grouped around a general store and a post office on a bluff above the ocean.
He had tried to lose himself there. He hiked through the coastal scrub in a raging fury, Heathcliff on the moors, absolutely directionless, his collar turned up against a fierce Pacific wind as he tripped on bracken fern and tangled underbrush and talked to himself or to the impervious sea. The great suck and blast of the breakers below roared in his ears like some elemental form of laughter. He hiked to the squawking of gulls and the flapping of brown pelicans until thick wet sheets of fog obscured what little he could make out of the ground beneath his feet, at which point he retired to the shelter of his Jeep and sat vacant and empty through a starless night, ruined by love once more, by the sadness of love, the terror of love, even by the same childish desire for the world to be other than it could be that had foiled him all his life. He slept and woke and slept again, and then at sunrise ate a breakfast of hot coffee and packaged cherry pie at the general store before returning to the farm, certain that Anna would no longer be there.
His blundered affair had made him the object of considerable gossip in the valley, of course. There were many jokes formulated at his expense, generally revolving around his command of birth control, and he received one ugly anonymous letter from a pro-lifer informing him that he would burn in hell through all eternity, but he already knew that. Most people in town were sympathetic, really, and offered their condolences, sometimes pulling him aside and telling him in a hushed voice about similarly awkward episodes in their own lives. They spoke of adulterous affairs, unrequited passions, acts of nonpareil stupidity, alcoholic adventures in gambling towns, liaisons with prostitutes, and bastard children hurried out of the county only seconds after the poor infants had emerged from the womb. Atwater soon grew tired of these confessions and wished he could put his hands over his ears like the hear-no-evil monkey. He was being inducted into a club he had no interest in joining. Loss, loss, and more loss—that was the text and subtext of every tale. When would it all stop, he asked himself, as if the answer wasn’t already etched into his soul: never.
At first, he had expected Anna to call or write, even though he’d forbidden it, but the weeks kept spinning by without any word from her. That had discouraged him from contacting her, as well, and also caused him to abandon the fantasy that he would hold her again someday. Still, he kept her farewell note squirreled inside a book on his bedside table and reread it almost every night. Sometimes the message made him wish he could fly to New York and strangle her, while at others it touched him and raised all the emotions he was trying to suppress. He wondered if he had been too tough on her, if she would have responded to more kindness and less intensity, or if instead he had been too kind and had failed to give her the sort of rotten treatment that she craved. These matters were all relative. What concerned him finally was that she had fled, leaving him to master again the sad art of sleeping alone, more difficult than ever now when she came to torment him, and he remembered the feel of her soft, soft skin. In those sweet, gone moments like no others, he had rested, was complete.
The morning after his trip to Rhodes’s farm, Atwater crouched on a rise to wait out a thunderstorm. Rain rarely fell in August, but when it did it could damage the crop by inducing bunch rot. Bruised-looking clouds blew in over the hills, and there was a trembling sound in the leaves. He chewed a stalk of dry rattlesnake grass and watched the sky, testing the wind direction with a finger. Blow north, goddam it. A north wind would knock a hole right through the storm and open a corridor for some hot weather to hasten the ripening process. On into the afternoon he waited, plotting strategies to deal with the eventualities and thinking back over all the things he could have done but didn’t, involved in his traditional preharvest attempt to get the horse back in the barn. The harvest itself he imagined as
a force of nature that began and ended of its own accord, a creature born of heat and light that would sweep through the valley as a tornado might, with only the slightest advance warning.
He saw Antonio Lopez coming toward him to announce the already known. “I got to go over to Hawk Wind, Arthur,” Lopez said by rote, as he did each day after lunch. “They want me up there at two o’clock.”
“This is the last of it,” Atwater told him peevishly. “Did you give them your notice?”
“They don’t have any notice up there. They just pay us in cash. People can stay or go. Hawk Wind doesn’t give a shit.”
“You be around here full-time on Monday. You understand, partner?”
“Sure.” Lopez gazed at the threatening clouds. “You think it’s going to rain?”
“I don’t know, Antonio. Would I be sitting here if I knew?”
“Probably not.”
Atwater frowned. “I almost sprayed the Zins with captan yesterday, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Did you listen to the weather report last night? ‘We’ll have a beautiful day tomorrow, temperatures in the eighties, time for everybody to go for it!’”
“You sound like a girl!” Lopez told him, laughing at the impersonation.
“Yeah, well. The weather report woman was a girl.”
“You can’t count on those weather reporters, Arthur! They’re just actors.”
“I thought you were going.”
“I am. See you later, man.”
The storm unraveled late that afternoon. The wind didn’t shift, but it stopped blowing so hard, and the clouds lost their look of menace and were shot through with bright and provident columns of sunlight. Atwater, sore in the knees, smiled and repaired to his trailer.
He passed the evening paying bills. He was behind on every account, ten days here, a whole month there. He could not recall when he had last shopped for groceries. His shelves were bare except for two cans of plum tomatoes, a package of Golden Grain macaroni, and a tin of the anchovies his wife had liked and that he must have been carrying around with him since the demise of his marriage. He was behind, too, on his reports to Victor Torelli. He had promised to stop by once a week to discuss the state of the vineyard, even though Torelli ordinarily cut him off in five minutes or less, but he vowed to make amends the next evening and actually did, knocking on the old man’s door right at twilight.
Torelli was in elevated spirits, enthroned in his recliner before his big Sony TV with a glass of wine at hand and Daisy on his lap. “You ever seen ‘Wheel of Fortune’?” he asked, grabbing the pup by its ears and nuzzling her nose-to-nose. “I’ll bet I solve the puzzle before you do. Is a dollar too rich for your blood?”
“No, I can handle that.” Atwater dropped onto the couch, his mind elsewhere. He asked after a respectful time, as he did on each visit, “Hear anything from Anna lately, Victor?”
“Yes, sir. She phoned just the other night. She wanted to know how the grapes are going. She’s doing fine.”
“I’m glad of that,” Atwater said, although he had secretly been enjoying a vision of Anna roaming the streets of Manhattan sobbing and tearing her hair out by the roots because she had been foolish enough to leave Carson Valley and the good, decent, honorable man who loved her. “She must be happy to be home.”
“I wouldn’t say that. Some women, they get so damn emotional! They make up their mind, they change it, and then they cry.”
“She was crying?”
“Well, she wasn’t crying. But she was upset about something. What was the puzzle again?”
“An object,” Atwater told him. “You find it in the kitchen.” He cleared his throat. “Did she ask about me?”
“I’d buy some vowels if I was that lady.” The old man turned toward him, his cheeks aflame. “No, she didn’t.”
“I see.”
“Arthur,” Torelli said, “I hope you understand I don’t hold it against you, what happened. I feel real bad about it for both of you. I’m so old, and I’ve seen so much goddam cruelty in my time, that sleeping together seems about as harmless a thing as two people can do.”
“I guess so.” Except for the affection involved, Atwater thought. Except for what attaches to the act.
“A human being isn’t much different from a dog, really,” Torelli went on. “Take this little mutt here. I’ll demonstrate for you.” He reached down, gripped the pup’s tail, and yanked it hard. Daisy howled, dived off his lap to the floor, and flattened out with a whimper. “See that? We’d all rather be petted, wouldn’t we?”
“Colander!” Atwater yelled.
The old man gave him a cockeyed look and passed over a dollar bill. “You must have cheated when I wasn’t looking,” he said.
Rawley Kimball showed up at the farm the next afternoon, his clipboard to the fore. Atwater had learned over the weeks not to take the criticism personally. He had deduced at last that Kimball’s nature was carved in stone, at once nerdish, neurotic, and compulsive. Kimball was the sort of man who could only cope with the world in measured doses, who set out his clothes for the morning before he went to bed and accepted it as an article of faith that a sense of order could always be salvaged from the prevailing chaos. The only order Atwater had ever encountered was in a vineyard, and even there his grasp of it was slight.
They made their usual rounds. Kimball scribbled notes in a cramped hand such as schoolboys use to prevent laggard fellow students from copying their work. When they were done, he said, “I see some real progress, Arthur.”
“We aim to please,” Atwater told him.
“I have to admit, you were right about your Zinfandel. You might just get six tons to the acre.”
Atwater nodded and steeled himself for the spinsterish faults that were about to be pointed out for his edification.
Kimball ground his teeth a bit, as if it hurt him to even bring up the perceived shortfall. “I’m still a trifle concerned about your Cabs, though,” he said, drumming a pencil eraser on the sheets. “You’re going to have to pull off those grapes right quick when the big heat comes, or else they’ll raisin up on you.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll do just that.”
“Those two rows of Chardonnay nearest the river? You’ve got a few spider mites. I’d send some boys through tomorrow and have them pick and shake.”
“I’ll be damned.” Atwater pressed his knuckles to his lips. “Would you believe that was my exact plan?” He clapped Kimball on the back. “Rawley, I must be getting the hang of this!”
“There you go,” Kimball said cheerfully. “That’s the attitude!”
In the mail, there came some brochures that Atwater had requested from Carson Valley Travel, glossy pictorials of life as it was never lived by the inhabitants of the countries portrayed, the whole of existence reduced to an unblemished Sunday supplement. He sat with tea after supper to consider how and where he might squander his bonus money after the harvest. He was in serious need of a holiday and flirted with the idea of himself as a bohemian gadabout, graying and bearded but not yet stripped of his romantic appeal, with a carefully knotted red bandanna around his neck—jeez, Arthur! He thought Mexico might be the proper destination for such a weary desperado. A brochure called “The Mysteries of the Yucatán” appealed to him the most, rich in Mayan intrigue, with the ruins of a great civilization heaped about like so much trash. He recited the place-names to himself as an incantation, Mérida, Copán, Campeche, dreaming up a storm, until he got to Las Islas Mujeres and, reminded of Anna, threw the brochures on the floor.
Days went by. On the twenty-third of August, Atwater sampled a Zinfandel grape and nearly choked on the sour, astringent taste. He spat out the seeds and pulp and kicked some dirt over them, conducting a burial service for his brash optimism. He had known better, really. Grapes didn’t become edible fruit in such dreary weather as he’d been dealt that afternoon, a second layer of fog piled onto the fog that had been there in the morning, with the landscape wintry and the temperature never
reaching seventy degrees. The junkie robins and finches addicted to sugar were nowhere around either, being wiser than him and content to bide their time and bank their energies against a more certain payoff in the future.
He cleaned up on Friday and went to see a movie at the only theater in town. Santa Rosa showcased first-run releases, but the little valley cinema, a sixty-seater converted from a defunct Woolworth’s, specialized in classics, foreign films with subtitles, and Hollywood blockbusters that had failed to bust any blocks. For a mere $2.50, Atwater availed himself of a double feature and sat all the way through the first film, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, consuming a family-size box of popcorn and trying to orient the mountains on-screen with the Mysteries of the Yucatán, calculating distances in his head and silently aping Bogart’s dialogue, and halfway through the second, a Cary Grant comedy he had watched not long ago at home.
He strolled across the square afterward, past the fountain, the palm trees, and a Mexican couple on a bench. They were madly fondling each other until they sensed a gringo nearby, their embrace instantly dissolving to be replaced by an enigmatic smile and a musical “Buenas noches, señor.” Atwater stopped at The Rib Room and nursed a beer at the bar. The place was packed with upscale revelers who had money to burn—white-collar types, the very people Anna would be reveling with in Manhattan as she hunted for her new lover—and he felt uncomfortable and would have left if the bartender, a shag-haired blond in her late twenties, hadn’t kept circling back to chat with him. Atwater was sure that she would give him her phone number if he asked for it, and she did, and though he knew he would probably never even call her, he took from this tiny triumph a belief that he was at least beginning to be healed.
