Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  Atwater stopped before the assembled company. Everyone was staring at him in silence. He felt their sharp scrutiny and the unspoken challenge in it. He composed himself as best he could, trying to look stern and unforgiving, the absolute embodiment of any picker’s nightmare vision of an overly demanding boss. With a flick of his wrist, he had them all in line and took down the information that he was required by law to record.

  “Name?” he asked the first man.

  “Rudolfo Mendez.” Mendez had a mustache and above it a splayed nose that could have been flattened by a stiff jab in a prize ring.

  “You live here?”

  “No, señor. In Durango. But I have Social Security.”

  Atwater took his card and jotted down the ID number. He did not look too closely at it. Mendez grabbed a plastic tub and jogged into the vineyard. The tub held a lug of grapes, or about thirty-five pounds, and he would be paid a dollar every time he filled it. Next came a hefty woman who carried a tin lunchbox with the Power Rangers on it.

  “Serena Cedillo, señor. Social Security 243-62-7115.”

  Then came Tomaso, Alberto, and Roberto Hernandez. They lived near Lopez in Santa Rosa and sang out their numbers like an a cappella tune.

  “Very nice, Hernandezes,” Atwater told them with a smile.

  “Thank you,” Roberto said. “We didn’t plan it out. It just comes natural to us like that.” They grabbed their tubs and ran into the vineyard.

  Next, Omar Perez presented himself with red eyes and a runny nose. “How are you today, boss?” he asked merrily. “I pick real good for you. I love to pick a grape!”

  Atwater saw some bandages speckled with blood on his right hand, a hospital dressing. “What happened to you?”

  “No comprendo,” the boy said, shrugging.

  “Go pick, Omar.”

  So the harvest was underway. The pickers wrangled about seniority and who would get the choicest positions, those that were shady or flat or both. Whenever they had filled a tub, they dashed with it to the end of their row, sometimes balancing the load on a shoulder or on their heads, and dumped it into a steel harvest bin. Eloy Hidalgo, who was trustworthy and good at math, tallied the lug on a paysheet he kept. The pickers were pushing themselves too hard, Atwater thought, impatient after their long wait in the dark. They were uneasy, too, wanting to rely on the others on the crew but also guarding against the effect an enemy among them might have, someone who was slow, lazy, or lacking in dexterity. Often in their haste they bumped into one another and caused traffic jams and accidents—a collision, a tub dropped and spilled—that were impediments to the beneficial harmony they all hoped to achieve in the great green labyrinth in which they toiled.

  Here at the fulcrum of the harvest, Antonio Lopez truly earned his keep. He was a respected crew boss, considerate, firm, and never less than fair. Observing him from afar, Atwater was again taken with his management skills. Antonio seemed to be everywhere at once, his eye on every picker. He showed one Hernandez a better way to cut through a cluster stem, passed a paper cup of water to another Hernandez who must have closed down a cantina the night before, and settled an argument between two geriatric pickers who were about to come to blows. His most careful attentions he saved for his struggling cousin. The boy appeared to be fighting against the tedium of dealing with so many tricky little grapes concealed beneath so many interfering leaves, and he was already sweating profusely and had thrown down his yellow jacket in frustration.

  “Is Omar going to make it?” Atwater asked when Lopez jogged over.

  “Yeah, he’ll make it. He just wants everything to happen fast.”

  “That’s how you used to be.”

  “Not anymore, man. I got too many responsibilities.”

  Atwater arched his back and luxuriated in the fragrant morning air. “Well, we’re off to a fine start here, anyhow. I have an excellent feeling about this harvest.”

  Lopez looked at him in disbelief. “Pretend you never said that, Arthur. Take it back right now.”

  “Why?” Atwater said amiably. “You afraid I’ll jinx us?”

  “I’m serious, man.” Lopez made a prayerful sign of the cross. “You never said it.”

  “Okay, I never said it.”

  Obstreperous shouts from the vineyard interrupted them. The pickers had filled a harvest bin to the top with fruit and were yelling for the boss to haul it away and empty it. When Atwater rode up on his tractor with a hydraulic loader hitched to it, he was met by a knot of grumbling men. They seemed to regard him as a cheat who had contrived to screw them for reasons they would never know. He even heard a picker call him cabrón behind his back, an insult commonly applied to employers, although seldom while they were around. He chose to ignore the slur rather than run the risk of alienating his crew and just gripped the bin with the loader—it worked like a forklift—ferried it to his truck, lifted it up, and dumped the fruit into one of two steel tanks called gondolas that were mounted on the flatbed. Each gondola held five-plus tons of grapes.

  His rhythm for the day was established now. He would remove full bins, empty them, and replace them, a job that appeared very simple on the surface and yet had to be integrated into the more complicated rhythm of the entire harvest, not only on the Torelli farm but all through the valley. It was a matter of the parts meshing smoothly with the whole, of things fitting together in a dovetailed way that had more to do with instinct than with any conscious intent. Atwater’s anxious flutter and his rusty touch with the hydraulic controls vanished as he worked on. Three more times before noon he made trips to the flatbed truck, and then four times after lunch, unloading more than eight tons of supremely sweet Chardonnay grapes bleeding juice and circled by squadrons of drunken bees.

  Atwater swatted at the bees with a wrinkled old towel he kept in the cab for just that purpose and stepped up on a tire to raise himself to the level of his cargo. He inhaled the winey aroma, ate a few grapes for an energy boost, and saw from his lofty perch that Lopez was gazing up at him from down below.

  “We got a problem, Arthur.”

  “Of course we have a problem.” Atwater jumped down, his fingertips stained. He patted Lopez on the back. “This is the harvest. Have we ever had a harvest without problems?”

  “It’s those chemical toilets. The company, they didn’t put in any toilet paper.”

  “Ah, for crying out loud! How could they forget a thing like that?”

  “It’s probably a mistake,” Lopez told him.

  “There’s a couple extra rolls in my trailer. You can go on and get them.” Atwater stopped and pondered. “What about my grapes here, Antonio? Are they riding right?”

  “Real good. You got some room left, too.”

  “Yeah, I do. But I’ve been thinking I might make a trial run over to the CV outlet. See what the drill’s like over there.”

  “A trial run, it couldn’t hurt.”

  “You figure that’s the best option?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I already told you what I think. Why in the hell don’t you listen to me?”

  “I did listen,” Lopez complained. “You’re all wound up, man. You better take a blood pressure pill or something. Else you might explode.”

  “I give up.” Atwater climbed into the cab and slammed the door. “You’re in charge while I’m gone, Antonio. Anything bad happens, and it’s your fault.”

  “Why is it my fault?”

  “Because I said so. Hasta la vista!”

  Atwater drove off with a wave. These jaunts to town with a loaded truck were like a little holiday for him. They gave him a break from the monotony of the fields and refreshed him, at least when the harvest was going well. The tight focus of his individual concerns opened onto a comforting panorama of the valley under siege, and he felt less solitary in his obsessions and connected to a giant machine that was operating of its own accord. All along the road, he saw cars parked by vineyards and crews with tubs inching devotedly across the fields
. He stopped at Roy’s for a cold soda and more toilet paper and read with wry amusement a new sign by the register, TODAS MOCHILAS DEBEN DEJAR ENFRENTE. Drop those backpacks at the front counter, you Mexicans.

  At the north end of town, he turned onto Black Oak Road and drove west for a few miles through some heavily wooded land. The road dropped down into a gulley and followed a streambed caked over with a whitish crust. The winery was an old stone building covered with ivy across a one-lane bridge. CV had bought it a couple of years ago to expand and modernize. Some old oak wine barrels had been sawed in half and used as planters, and they spilled over with sapphire blue lobelia, pansies, and violas in many different colors. There were no visitors around because the winery wasn’t open to the public. It did no retail business and dealt strictly with growers under contract to CV, accepting loads of grapes from seven in the morning until nine at night, six days a week.

  Atwater sounded his horn as a precaution and went over the bridge and around a bend to the main winery entrance, where four flatbed trucks, each mounted with gondolas and loaded with an early ripening varietal, not only Chardonnay but also some Gewürztraminer and some Gray Riesling, waited in line at the sugar shack. He set his emergency brake and got down from his cab. He didn’t know the man ahead of him, who was red-faced from the sun and wore a painter’s cap with polka dots on it. Some drivers were true growers like Atwater, while others were just employed for the harvest. Brothers, uncles, and friends were also pressed into service sometimes.

  “You got some good-looking grapes there,” he greeted the fellow. “Where you from?”

  “Up Cloverdale way. The Zambrusco ranch. We’re just about done pulling off our Gewürz. We’ve been at it for a week solid.”

  “Any red grapes ready yet?”

  “No, they’re a month or so away. Maybe three weeks if it stays this hot. Next we’ll pull off our Chardonnay. Is that Chardonnay you’re hauling?”

  Atwater nodded. “This is my first run. We pulled these off this morning.”

  “Count your blessings,” the man said, lifting his cap to scratch at his matted hair. “That’s one less run you’ve got to make before you’re finished.”

  The trucks moved forward, and Atwater returned to his cab. In another five minutes, he had inched his way up to an open-sided shanty on stilts. The floor of the sugar shack was not quite level and fell a few feet below the tip of his gondola. A tester stood there as on the deck of a ship and lowered a tubular, stainless-steel coring device to collect a sampling of the load. The cored fruit he tossed into a hopper that fed into a grape press. The press made a grinding noise, and Atwater listened intently to it and felt his nerves go jangly again as the juice trickled into a bucket, his year’s labor concentrated in those few leaky drops. Here was the first in a series of tense and quietly dramatic moments he would have to endure until every vine was picked clean, a procedure cold, precise, scientific, and ultimately no more inviting to him than a triple bypass.

  He watched as the tester dipped into the rendered juice and took a reading with a refractometer.

  “Chardonnay?” the tester asked.

  “Yes, sir. From over at the Torelli place.”

  “Twenty-two-point-three.” The tester wrote the number on a slip and handed it down. “You hit it right on the nose, bud.”

  Atwater resisted an urge to cheer out loud. “I guess I wouldn’t complain if it went like that every trip,” he said, almost bashful.

  “I don’t guess you would. You’ll earn you a little extra money on that load. That’s about as close to perfect as it gets.”

  Atwater put the paper in a pocket and got back in his cab. The truck stuttered forward, and he braked to a stop on a scale and weighed in. Next, he parked by a crusher in the winery, where a worker with a hoist lifted one gondola and then the other to send his grapes showering down a chute. He started the motor again and weighed out. He made one more run to the winery that evening before the gates were locked and again logged in a top-notch score for his grapes. On the drive home, he felt a welcome fatigue all through his body and congratulated himself on not being able to think beyond the moment. He would sleep the dreamless sleep of the righteous tonight. Tomorrow would be a day much like this one, and that seemed to him a useful circumstance. He wanted nothing more from life just now than to be suspended in the hypnotic effort of the harvest.

  20

  The little bookstore Anna Torelli held a share in, a hole in the wall on the Upper West Side, was sandwiched between a relic candy store that still flew a Brooklyn Dodgers pennant over the cash register and a Korean greengrocer who stayed open until midnight. The shop consisted of four small, cramped, overstocked rooms that caused first-time visitors to describe it as “quaint,” “old-fashioned,” and even “Dickensian.” That wasn’t the effect its owners had intended, but since they had gone into business with no retail experience at all, armed only with a love of books and literature—the worst possible qualification, Jane would later quip—they settled for any compliments they could get. If a customer pressed them about the decor, they would claim to have borrowed it from a shop they’d stumbled on in the English countryside in Shropshire, on Housman’s home turf.

  To the good, their rent was very low by Manhattan standards. They also had a generous ten-year lease with an option to renew. Still, Anna had been convinced at the start that their doors would close in under a year, but they had flourished instead, largely due to the loyal patronage of a quirky market sector composed of yuppies, aesthetes, single women, and elderly gentlemen of character, all of whom were dedicated to boycotting the giant chains and franchises that threatened to ruin the atmosphere of the neighborhood. By happy accident, Jane had pushed for them to deal in both new and used books, and when they learned how high the markup on their used stock could be, cycling toward the paranormal, they began scouring the city for modern literary classics that would appeal to collectors.

  Anna in particular enjoyed this aspect of the game. There was a definite buccaneering thrill for her in unearthing a valuable novel tossed away in a discount bin at somebody else’s store. Fine poetry could always be found at a bargain, too. She and Jane learned to purchase multiple copies of any promising first book and bank them against an author’s potential fame in the future, they went to auctions and honed their bidding technique, and they earned a reputation for paying top dollar for private libraries. Some of their competitors made the mistake of trying to cherry pick, but Anna was willing to acquire ten Floyd Dells and eight Pearl Bucks to get the lone F. Scott Fitzgerald in the lot. Her most treasured first editions were displayed in a glass case up front, locked against thieves and surrounded by framed photos of such immortals as Joyce, Pound, and Hemingway, who, by virtue of their position, had the look of house security.

  Anna was putting in long hours at the store, partly to repay Jane for all the favors and partly to keep herself occupied. Her first month or so at home had passed pleasantly enough as she inched back into her familiar routine, but her forward progress had stopped abruptly in August when she fell into a mild and lingering depression that she had yet to shake. She was bored and irritable and thought about Arthur Atwater far more often than she wanted to, still troubled by the horrible way their affair had ended. Given some distance from it, she could see how traumatic the miscarriage was for her and how much she had read into it, honoring it with a mystical significance. Atwater, too, had overreacted and lost his bearings, Anna felt. It was as if they’d both been waiting for a symbolic event to prove how wrong they were for each other and had relied on the same natural forces that had brought them together to tear them apart. Neither of them had been brave enough when the chips were down, she thought.

  But at the same time Anna had become absolutely certain that the farm was not for her. She could never have adapted herself to the quirky rhythms of Atwater’s life, to his intensity or his inflexibility. As for the daunting beauty of the valley, it had indeed helped her to heal, but she believed that her p
owerful response to it would eventually diminish. And she had no serious interest in growing wine grapes either—that was just another fantasy. When she and Roger inherited the vineyard, hopefully many years down the line, they would hire someone to manage it for them, an Atwater type. Arthur himself would surely be gone by then. It was inevitable that he would butt heads with her father and do his final disappearing act. How could she ever have imagined that she was in love with him? It seemed preposterous, and yet there were moments every day when he was so vividly present that she could feel him on her skin, when she ached for him, when he was the only possible one.

  These visitations had a paralyzing effect on Anna. They kept her from going forward. Lately she’d been so desultory that her friends had taken to lecturing her on the importance of a fresh start. That was the best method for beating the blues, the quickest tactic for mending, and so on and so forth. She resisted their advice, of course, until she caught herself browsing in the store’s self-help section and searching for answers in the collected works of Deepak Chopra, after which she agreed that some decisiveness on her part was definitely appropriate. What she needed at present was not another wild fling, though, but rather a bit of basic cheering up; so when Sam McNally phoned to chat, she accepted his invitation to lunch. Sam was nothing if not upbeat and couldn’t last more than two minutes without making a joke or pointing out an absurdity.

  They set a date for just after Labor Day. Anna left the store about noon to meet McNally across town, stopping at the front counter to check on Julie, her head clerk. Julie’s eyeliner was smudged again, probably from the tears she was shedding for a Princeton boy who had wooed her all summer, and then had dropped her instantly when he went back to college for the fall term.