Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  Anna tried to put him at ease. “So you work with Sam, do you?”

  “Yeah, I do the hatchet stuff.” Malcolm had a quality of free-floating moroseness. “I get to tell people when their books are going out of print. Sometimes Sam lets me read a manuscript he isn’t interested in.”

  “Do you enjoy it?”

  “One job’s the same as another to me.”

  “You don’t sound like a go-getter,” she teased him. “Actually, you sound a lot like Sam.”

  “That’s true,” Malcolm said with sincerity. “I don’t have any ambition. But I better find some, or my girlfriend’s going to dump me. She doesn’t think I make enough money.”

  “What do you think?” Anna asked him.

  Malcolm grinned in a way that showed how unnatural it was for him. “If it was up to me, I’d be on unemployment.”

  “You must be devoted to her.”

  “I am. I’m in love with her big time.”

  “How lucky for you. And for her.”

  He shrugged. “Her parents despise me, though. Celeste is Chinese.”

  Anna paused to take this in. She thought of her clerk, Julie, and was tempted to set up an introduction. A match made in heaven, she thought. “Have you two been together very long?”

  “Yeah, almost five months. We’d be married if I didn’t have such a crummy job.” He quickly corrected himself. “I mean, I don’t think it’s crummy, but her parents do. It’s like she has to be with a doctor or a lawyer or somebody like that.”

  “So what will you do?”

  “I applied to med school.”

  “You must really care about her,” Anna said. “I hope she appreciates it.”

  “She’s too young, probably. She’s, like, five years younger than me.” Malcolm downed his drink in a single gulp. “Is that too much of an age difference?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “It better not be. Have you ever been married?”

  “I was once,” Anna said.

  “Was it fun?”

  She laughed. “It can be fun, yes.”

  “But it can also be a pain in the ass, right?”

  “That’s right, Malcolm.”

  McNally spared her any further interrogation by summoning everyone to the dinner table. The guests were a convivial bunch, talkative and witty. Sam served the clams as a starter and next a fish stew and a salad of mixed greens, circling the table to keep the wine glasses filled. Anna found herself relaxing into an entertaining evening of the sort that could be repeated infinitely through a lifetime. Yet it also seemed to her that she had met the guests before and often knew what they would say before they opened their mouths—except, of course, for Malcolm. Again, she was bothered by a lack of impact. Why isn’t this enough? Another in her plague of unanswerable questions.

  “Anna’s family has been in the wine business for almost a century.” Sam touched her bare shoulder with his fingertips on his rounds. “Out in California.”

  “In the Napa Valley?” someone asked.

  “No, in a much smaller valley over in Sonoma County,” Anna told him. “We’re just grape growers, not vintners. The harvest is going on right now.”

  “So you’re the farmer’s daughter?”

  “There’s no denying it.”

  “I could live on a farm,” McNally said, and everybody looked at him as though he were out of his mind. “No, really, I could. I’d go for all that peace and quiet. I’d smoke pot and study my navel.”

  Anna challenged him. “Come on, Sam! You can’t exist without a phone and a fax machine. You’ve never done any manual labor in your life!”

  “Sure, I have. Who do you think built the deck you’re sitting on?”

  “I’ll bet a carpenter built it.”

  “Well, you’re partly right,” McNally conceded, pretending to be downcast. “A carpenter and I built it.”

  They had coffee and dessert inside. The guests lingered and chatted and didn’t leave until after midnight. There were dishes to be cleared after that, and when everything was stacked on a kitchen sideboard, it made such an intimidating mess that Sam refused to deal with it until the next morning. Instead, he opened a bottle of Sauterne and poured a couple of glasses. McNally had always hated for an evening to end. He was the original boy who didn’t want to go to bed.

  “None for me, thanks.” Anna watched as he dumped her Sauterne into his glass. “I couldn’t eat or drink another thing.”

  “Suit yourself. I’m going to put on some music.”

  “It’s late, Sam. I’m ready to turn in. I’ve done enough playing for one day.”

  McNally flopped down next to her on the couch. “I’m worried about you, Anna. You used to be such a wild girl.”

  “Why do people keep telling me how I used to be?” she asked him, honestly curious.

  He didn’t reply. “Did you get a kick out of my assistant?”

  Anna smiled and let McNally take her hand. “Poor Malcolm. He wanted to know if marriage was fun.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “That’s privileged information. Then at the table he said that love must be different when you’re older.”

  “He’s wrong about that.” McNally rested his glass on an arm of the couch. “If you come closer, I’ll prove it to you.”

  “Love, not fucking, Sam. Besides, what do you know about love?”

  McNally’s voice rose in mock outrage. “Oh, I know plenty! I got my heart broken just today.”

  Anna stared at him. He didn’t seem to be kidding. “I believe you’re telling the truth.”

  “Totally. And you’re the one who broke it.”

  “Am I? How is that?”

  “You called me a ‘nice guy!’” McNally snorted with contempt. “That’s the worst thing any woman can say to a man. Check it out in the movies. Check it out in books. A nice guy always loses the girl. Nice guys do finish last.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. You know better than that.”

  “It doesn’t matter how you meant it! It still hurt my feelings.” He had a belt of Sauterne, invested in his role as an injured party. “Malcolm is a nice guy, for crying out loud.”

  Anna tried to lure him away from the subject. “You’re making this up, aren’t you?”

  “Of course not.” McNally brooded. “Nice guys don’t make things up.”

  “You see?” Anna laughed. “You can’t help yourself. Everything turns into a joke with you sooner or later.”

  “What if I told you I loved you? Does that sound like a joke? What would you say to that?”

  “I’d say you’ve had a lot to drink tonight.”

  “I’ll tell you the same thing in the morning,” McNally said loudly, filled with bravado. “I’ll say it stone cold sober. I’ll say it a month from now. I’ll say it in, oh, 1998.”

  Anna was concerned about how worked up he was getting. “Sam,” she said gently, “can we drop it for now, please?”

  But McNally wouldn’t quit. “This isn’t a joke, Anna. I value love too much to debase it.”

  “Come to bed.” She tried to pull him up from the couch. “You’re not making any sense.”

  “Do you value love?” Sam demanded. “Well, answer me! It’s not such a hard question, is it?”

  Anna felt unfairly confronted. “I think I do.”

  “You’d better.” McNally stumbled to his feet. “Because you still have a chance at it.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “No way. I’m too old. I’ll be fifty in three years. Men my age are done for. We’re burned out. We’ve had it.”

  “There’s always hope, Sam.”

  McNally scoffed at her. “Are you really naive enough to believe that?”

  She considered it. “Yes, I guess I am.”

  “There isn’t always hope, Anna,” he told her harshly. “Not when it comes to love.”

  He was calmer in a little while, apologetic for making a scene. Anna stayed the night with him ag
ain, but she was awake through most of it. His words had affected her like a body blow, and she saw with utter clarity that she would never be able to think her way into the future. It was a question of leaping, of risking a dive off a high cliff with no guarantee of safety. What did the old Italians say? Forza! Corragio! Strength and courage. There must be different levels and kinds of pain, Anna felt, but the worst must come to those who refuse to take a plunge. Enough! She listened to McNally’s heavy breathing, as far away from him as she possibly could be, and watched the distant stars framed in the skylight above his bed.

  24

  On Sunday, Arthur Atwater was at peace, thankful for some time off from work. He had no precise memory of his last such break. It seemed as historical to him as the Pelopon-nesian War he had once studied in school. Over a rare unhurried breakfast, he caught up on his mail and browsed through the accumulated catalogs, deciding he would reward himself with a new down vest when the crush was over. He clipped his neglected toe- and fingernails, showered, and put on some clean underwear, then dusted the dogs with flea powder before brewing a second pot of tea. His log was before him on the table, and when he thumbed through his entries for the year, he was impressed by the sheer bulk of them. Here was a literal record of his efforts, testimony to the fact that he had done his job, or at least had tried to.

  SUNDAY, OCT. 6TH. White grapes all in now, with top dollar due on the Chardonnay. Cloudy and cool this a.m., a light breeze from the north. We start picking Cabs tomorrow, tested out at 23.1 yesterday. Zins almost ready, will come up fast if it gets warm, could be trouble. Some pretty color in the leaves. Fall, I guess. I missed it.

  He had no plans for his day off except to relax, but his thoughts kept revolving around the harvest and all those red grapes about to pop. After a while, he copied some figures onto a legal tablet and drove into town to deliver another of his progress reports to Victor Torelli, but the old man refused to even acknowledge him this trip, being hypnotically devoted to a ’49ers football game. His recliner was pushed up close to a fireplace that was throwing out enough BTUs to melt paint. Atwater left him to a mean household temperature of about eighty-five degrees and stopped at Charlie Grimes’s farm on his way home to borrow a back-up fanbelt for his tractor. He found Charlie and a local winemaker sampling some grape juice, green and frothy and fresh from a press. The winemaker passed the beaker under his nose.

  “Go on and taste it,” Grimes commanded him. “It won’t kill you, Arthur.”

  Atwater took a sip and swirled it in his mouth. “Chardonnay,” he said, smacking his lips. “Very nice. The flavor’s real strong. Apples, definitely. Maybe a touch of citrus.”

  “Those grapes were goddam perfect. If you want a thirty-dollar bottle of wine, come back here in three years.”

  “I’ll mark it down on my calendar.”

  “You had better. Because we’ll be sold out in an eyeblink.” Grimes pressed a knuckle to a nostril and blew some snot toward a pumice of grape skins on the floor. “You pull off any blacks yet?” he asked, subjecting his other nostril to the same unblocking.

  “Not yet. Tomorrow we start. I’m itchy about it, to tell you the truth.”

  “How they looking?”

  “The Cabs are just right. The Zins need some more heat.”

  “I don’t envy you, no sir,” Grimes said, clucking his tongue. “I had a year like that in nineteen and eighty-three. Every goddam black grape was ready all at once. They was pelting me like hailstones.”

  “They come at you hard and fast, don’t they?”

  “The co-op I belonged to then, those people were backed up for hours. One fellow, he had a hammock strung under his flatbed so he could take naps. I about expired myself.”

  “But you lived to tell the tale.”

  “Some would have it.”

  They proceeded to a toolshed where Grimes stored a truly monumental selection of spare parts. Atwater watched him rudely tossing aside spark plugs and oil filters to unearth a litter of fanbelts. They moved off into the light and walked past the barn. It was inordinately white and loomed over the property like a hole in the sky that needed to be filled.

  “You going to leave your barn that way?” Atwater asked.

  “No, I’ll do something with it sooner or later,” Grimes told him. “But I’m not about to rush myself. Creative ideas, they don’t come easy.”

  “You’re a true artist, Charlie.”

  Grimes showed unusual humility. “It’s been said before.”

  Atwater motored around his own vineyard that afternoon and tasted some Zinfandel grapes from different rows. One from the inside of a cluster and one from the outside, one from the cane and one from the head. He chewed, spat, and ticked off the seconds to gauge how long the flavor held, how richly it was concentrated—four, seven, even ten seconds. It would be a fine vintage, he thought, and would produce big red wines of a decisive varietal character. He lay down to rest on a hilltop after that, sampling what it felt like to be lazy, his hands cupped behind his head and his imagination streaking toward Anna in faraway New York as it often did at such undefended moments. He saw her striding down a broad boulevard and cutting a swath through the crowd, like a bright flame. He loved how she burned. He smiled to himself and understood to his astonishment that he must have forgiven her. It was possible he’d forgiven himself, too. There was a new clarity in the air, and he allowed himself to think he’d been right not to extinguish that tiny flicker of hope.

  “Oh bullshit, Atwater,” he shouted to an audience of grapes and crows, disgusted with himself. “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!” Besides, he’d been busy in bed with that bartender from The Rib Room.

  Early the next morning, in the gnawing dark, he dressed and listened for the familiar sounds of his crew arriving, the coughing and the joking, but the vineyard was unnaturally quiet. He listened more intently and heard a muted drone and then nothing more. The pickers must be waiting to be told when and where to begin on the red grapes, he figured, so he shot through the door without a bite to eat and hustled toward some human shapes who were still in the process of emerging from the fading night. They were glancing nervously about, as if to locate in the shadows a presence to give them an assurance they seemed to require.

  Atwater saw the reason why. Antonio Lopez was missing. “Donde está Antonio?” he asked them.

  His question was met with shrugs and downcast eyes.

  “Dígame la verdad,” he repeated. “Donde está Antonio?”

  “Not here, señor!” somebody piped up.

  “Desaparecido,” another voice added. Lopez had disappeared, and nobody knew his whereabouts.

  There was no time for further discussion. Every lost second would be tallied on the negative side of the ledger, Atwater knew. He led the crew to the ripest block of Cabernet Sauvignon, distributed the hosed-down plastic tubs, and got everybody started. He noticed then that Omar Perez was also missing, as were all three Hernandezes. He was short a total of five pickers, and that meant he would harvest far fewer lugs on the day. An average of about thirty lugs per picker, so one hundred and fifty times thirty-five pounds a lug—the rough calculation came to about five thousand pounds of grapes. All those grapes would remain on the vine, fruit that was very nearly at its peak and under a threat of raisining if Atwater didn’t correct the shortfall in manpower as quickly as he could.

  The pickers sensed that something had gone haywire. Deprived of their routine, they were acting contrary. They dawdled, cut corners, and competed among themselves instead of helping one another. Without Lopez to supervise them and set a pace, they were in rebellion.

  “What’s going on here?” Atwater asked Rudolfo Mendez, who seemed not to be moving at all. “Que pasa?”

  Mendez pointed solemnly. He had a row that curved uphill and didn’t want to do any climbing.

  “Well, shit, go pick over there, then,” Atwater told him, shoving him toward level ground.

  But Mendez wouldn’t budge. He nodded malign
ly at the picker in the row next to him. “Me esta sigiuendo,” he griped.

  “I won’t let him follow you. Just go!”

  Atwater broke for his trailer and phoned Lopez at home. He got no answer, only a dull, distant, uninterrupted ringing. He returned to the vineyard in a fury and caught Serena Cedillo hastily dumping her full tub into a harvest bin and dashing off before he could speak to her. Hoisting himself above the rim of the bin, he saw why. It was filled with grapes that were mashed, split, and leaking juice. The juice would oxidize and cause some fermentation, so he leaned over and plucked away the damaged clusters. He tossed out the imperfect ones, too, those with shot, puckered, or shriveled berries that should have been left on the vine. The pickers were grabbing anything at all without regard to quality.

  Atwater whistled loudly to call a halt. The crew gathered to face him, dragging their heels. They were cantankerous and wouldn’t look at him when he held up a flawed cluster and ordered them not to pick such grapes. It was useless, he thought. They were beyond caring and would continue to do as they pleased.

  “Ándale!” he yelled with fake enthusiasm, clapping his hands. “Ándale! Ándale!”

  He left the farm to search for some replacements. He scoured Carson Valley Road, but the men who’d been loitering in strategic positions just yesterday had hired on somewhere or had merely given up and gone home to Mexico. Ordinarily, idlers were as thick as flies in front of Roy’s Market, but Atwater didn’t see a single person there. He tried all the cabins as well, banging on every door, and failed to rouse anybody, except for a surly fellow who sat by himself near a window in cabin four, playing solitaire and sipping from a bottle of Johnny Walker.

  “I’ve got work,” Atwater told him, as if that were the best news the fellow could ever hear. “I need a picker.”

  “I am no interest in picking.”

  “I’ll go to a dollar and a half a lug for the right man.”

  “Qué Iástima! I am the captain, señor.”

  Atwater made for the farm again, having exhausted his prospects for the moment. He consoled himself with thoughts of all the things that might have gone wrong for Antonio Lopez, the many minor impediments that could have forced him to be late, an emergency involving his car or his daughter or even his stomach that would surely be fixed by now. So vehemently did he pursue this fantasy that he expected Lopez’s old Toyota to be parked in its usual spot, but he was mistaken. The rebellion in his vineyard had become more entrenched, in fact. Two men had put down their tubs and stopped picking altogether, crouching in the shade as if to set a desultory example for the other crew members to follow. They had not so much quit their jobs as gone out on strike, Atwater surmised, since they were still on the property and so were still open to negotiation.