by Bill Barich
A first streak of dawn light showed on the horizon. Soon workers who’d been tossed unceremoniously from their beds after a few hours of sleep began arriving at the winery again, unlocking the big gates and hosing down the concrete floors, padding around in rubber boots as they racked yesterday’s juice and measured the juice already in their tanks to calibrate its relative acidity and the level of its residual sugar.
At seven o’clock, Atwater pulled up to the sugar shack and lifted his battered and dejected face to Rawley Kimball, who had his clipboard in his good hand and was scribbling away on it.
“Hey there, Arthur!” Kimball yelled to him in a chipper way. “Ain’t you the early bird!”
“It’s because I was the goddam late bird yesterday,” Atwater said, convinced now that the fault was at least half his. “That prick Wade Saunders closed me out.”
“Oh, I am sorry to hear that.” Kimball sounded honestly concerned.
“Not nearly as sorry as I am, Rawley.”
A tester stepped to the platform and went through the usual routine. Atwater awaited a verdict that he already knew in advance. He watched the tester run the sample through a grape press and catch the juice in a bucket before sinking a refractometer into it.
“Cabernet?” the tester asked.
“That’s right.”
The tester left the platform, and Kimball came back out after a little while. Atwater ignored the Brix number scribbled on the slip of paper Kimball gave him.
“Those grapes turned on you in the night,” Kimball told him. “What you’ve got there now is damaged goods.”
“I’m aware of that,” Atwater said.
“I don’t like to downgrade you, Arthur, but I have to. Your grapes aren’t good for much, except maybe our low-end jug wines. That’s B-grade fruit.”
“I’ll go dump the load inside.”
“Listen,” Kimball said to him with some urgency. “I feel real bad about this. I know how hard you worked.”
“Thank you, Rawley.”
“It’s unfair, and I know it. But it happens to a few growers every year. It’s part of the game. Sometimes it’s just your turn to go through it. I still feel real bad for you, though.”
Atwater smiled. “Did you say ‘unfair’?”
“I did.”
“That’s what I thought you said.”
He stuffed the paper into a pocket and got back in his cab. The truck stuttered forward, and he weighed in, dumped his grapes, and weighed out. The difference was about eighteen tons. According to the CV contract, B-grade fruit went for $100 less per ton than A-grade fruit, so that represented an $1,800 loss for Victor Torelli right there, to which Atwater would have to add the extra money he was paying his pickers, another $75 dollars or so a day for about three more weeks—he figured his mistake had cost the old man five grand, or somewhere near it. Torelli would not be pleased. Again, Atwater had let him down.
The crew was already picking at the farm when he drove up, and he spoke to Manuel and put him formally in charge, while he, Atwater, the boss, ran some errands—that was how he phrased it, anyhow. Then he took off in his Jeep without changing his funky clothes and bought a torpedo sandwich, some potato chips, and a six-pack of beer at Roy’s. He had polished off all but one of the beers way before noon and began to entertain a sudden and highly irrational notion that happiness in this life might yet be his. He was about a hundred miles from Carson Valley at the time and traveling steadily north. In Laytonville, he stopped at a loggers’ bar for a shot of whiskey and drank three shots instead, thinking that he ought to check into a motel and get some sleep, but in fact his forehead was soon resting on the mahogany bar, and he slept like that into the early afternoon.
25
The knocking came while Antonio Lopez was resting in bed in a dark and cloistered room, where the blinds had been drawn now for three straight days. He ignored the sound as he had ignored the occasional ringing of his telephone. He was relieved when the knocking stopped, but it began again right away, more insistently and with a loud knuckle-rapping quality that suggested authority, so he swung his legs free of the sheets and rose gingerly and unsteadily to his feet. He had difficulty breathing and sucked in air through his clenched teeth. A messy bandage of gauze and tape was plastered to his rib cage just above his liver, and he moved forward in a hunched and defensive posture to protect the wound beneath it from even the most delicate contact.
He grabbed a shirt from a doorknob and padded down the hallway in his underwear. His house was abnormally quiet, stripped of the forces that gave it life. It seemed as foreboding to Antonio as the still and somehow deathly church his mother used to drag him to for penance whenever he had committed a mortal sin as a boy. He felt weak in both flesh and spirit, in fact. During his recent stay in the hospital, he had suffered through a terrifying dream about losing his daughter to a band of marauding angels who had flown down from a mosaic heaven to steal her away. The angels had clasped Dolores to them and shielded her with their wings, and though Lopez had screamed and pointed to them as they escaped into the sky, no one would help him. A policeman in the same dream told him that he had gotten exactly what he deserved.
Without unlatching the chain lock, he opened the door a crack and peered out with a squinty eye. There stood Arthur Atwater looking shaggy, forlorn, and beat-up. He had an ugly scab on his forehead and appeared to have been in some kind of accident.
“Are you going to let me in?” Atwater asked him. “Or are you just going to stare at me?”
“You can come in.”
“Thank you so much. And good morning to you.”
Lopez was baffled by this visit. He led Atwater into the living room, where the blinds were also drawn, and shoved some crayons and coloring books off a chair and sat down. The TV was playing soundlessly. He could smell the whiskey on his guest, as well as a sour and repellent staleness that was unlike the potent but acceptable odor a man developed in the fields.
Atwater crossed one leg over another, as if to begin a friendly chat. His hair was plastered to his head and had tiny things in it, bits of fluff and even part of a leaf. “I don’t feel as bad as I look,” he said cordially.
“That’s good,” Lopez told him. “Because you look awful, Arthur.”
“You don’t look so hot yourself.”
“I was asleep.”
“Asleep?”
“Yeah, asleep. For three days so far.”
They gazed in silence at the TV for a time. Then Atwater started in again. “You’re a tough guy to get ahold of, Mr. Rip Van Winkle,” he said, not quite so cordial now. “You ever think about investing in an answering machine?”
“No way, man. They cost a lot of money,” Lopez said. “What do I need one of those for?”
“So that people can leave you a message. Then you wouldn’t miss out on anything important.”
“Like what?”
“Like a call from your boss.”
It dawned on Lopez what Atwater was getting at, and he was startled. “Didn’t Elena call you?” he asked. “I told her at the hospital she should let you know what happened.”
“Well, she didn’t. And I was short five pickers.”
“It could be that she did call, and you weren’t there?”
“No, she would have left me a message,” Atwater said curtly. “On my answering machine.”
Lopez hung his head in shame. “There was some trouble, Arthur.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“You remember my cousin?” The boy’s face floated up from the land of ghosts to be present in the room. “He got us into a really bad fight.”
“Ah, shit,” Atwater said with disgust. “Don’t you know any better than that?”
“I do know better. But still it can happen.”
Lopez described for Atwater how the crew members had gone to La Perla Roja to celebrate and how he had joined them on a foray to Santa Rosa against his better judgment. He told about the topless dancers at The S
how Room and how the horny beet-faced picker got them kicked out for feeling up a girl and how after their embarrassing expulsion they went to eat menudo at a big cantina off the freeway and bumped into Ernesto Morales, who insulted Omar and pulled a hunting knife on him without the slightest provocation. None of the pickers wanted a fight, he said, but Morales kept taunting the boy in public and persisted in calling him dirty names, so it became a matter of family honor into which he, Antonio Lopez, was forced to intercede. He told how the knife flew at him and demonstrated how he had blocked its thrust, pushed Morales away, and grabbed him by the throat, only to feel the blade thud against his chest anyway and slip between two of his ribs. Blood was everywhere, he said, and he had fainted then.
“Here’s where he got me.” Lopez lifted his shirt and daintily touched his bandage. “Sixteen stitches. He almost cut my liver in half.”
“Where’s Morales now?” Atwater asked.
“He’s in the county jail. He might never get out. They charged him with attempted murder.”
“What about Omar?”
Lopez looked at the floor. “Omar, he was lucky.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He ran away, Arthur. He got away free and clear before the police even came. Probably he’s back in Mexico by now with all his saved-up money.”
“And he was the one who started the fight?”
“He didn’t start it. But if he wasn’t with us, there wouldn’t have been any fight.”
They were quiet again. Lopez turned moody and a little sad and got up to shut off the TV. He wondered if Elena would come home to him that night, or if she would continue to remain with her parents as she had been doing. He thought that she must be missing him by now and would at least agree to talk with him on the phone, and if that occurred it would only be a short distance from their conversation to complete forgiveness. He could see resolution before him like a path.
“I always knew Morales was a bad apple,” Atwater sighed. “I doubt he ever had a pleasant day in his whole life.”
“How’s the harvest going?” Lopez asked him hesitantly, fearing the worst.
“We got killed.”
“It’s my fault, Arthur.” Lopez hung his head again. “I should have been there.”
“Yeah, you should have been there,” Atwater agreed. “But it’s not your fault. It’s mine.”
“It’s mine, too,” Lopez insisted.
Atwater grinned at him. “All right, Antonio. I’ll give you your share of the blame. How much do you want?”
“Half?”
“No, that’s way too much. Maybe ten percent. Will you settle for that?”
“Sure,” Lopez told him. “Whatever you say is fair.”
“Fair doesn’t enter into it.”
Lopez was quiet for a moment, then said, “Tell me how it went.”
“That prick Wade Saunders screwed me,” Atwater said. “I hauled a double load of grapes over to the winery Tuesday evening, and they were backed up over the bridge and shut me out.”
“No! Saunders didn’t do that!”
“He sure as hell did. He shut out eighteen tons of ripe Cabernet. CV downgraded the whole goddam load. Victor will be delighted, I’m sure.”
“Wade Saunders should be the one to get stabbed,” Lopez said.
“It doesn’t seem to work that way.”
“Son of a bitch!” He punched his palm. “What are you going to do about it?”
“There isn’t much I can do about,” Atwater told him. “I tried running away. I got as far as Laytonville and fell asleep in a bar.” He touched his scab and laughed. “I banged the shit out of my head.”
“You came back, though, Arthur. That’s a good thing.”
“I guess it is. I got back in time to deliver a small load late yesterday.”
“It is a good thing,” Lopez repeated with an enthusiasm he didn’t entirely feel.
“Well, I don’t have it in me to disappear on Victor again. I’ll just have to face the music this time around. At least I didn’t wake up with a tattooed lady.”
“There you go,” Lopez said encouragingly. “That’s another good thing. In the future, everything will be fine.”
“I sincerely doubt it.”
“You got any pickers left out there?”
“I got a patched-together crew working on our Zins. Charlie Grimes sent me old Manuel. He’s a helluva picker.”
“I never picked with him,” Lopez said.
“You ought to try it some time. Old Manuel, he can pick. He even ran the loader and filled the gondolas while I was gone.”
“What about your bonus, Arthur?”
“There isn’t going to be one.”
“Not for me, either?”
“Nope. Sorry, amigo.”
“Son of a bitch!” Lopez punched his palm again. “And all because of Ernesto Morales!”
“Only that skunky little Omar came out ahead this year,” Atwater said.
“Todos nuestros esfueztos no han servido para nada.”
“What’s that mean?”
“All our work? It went down the drain.”
“I won’t argue with that.”
“You want a beer, Arthur?” Lopez asked.
Atwater gave him a funny look. “I don’t think a beer is particularly called for. Do you have any soda? I have to get back to the farm pretty quick.”
They went to the kitchen, but they didn’t talk much anymore, not to any real purpose. It seemed to Lopez that Atwater had emptied himself of all the important stuff and had nothing further to relate. His own melancholy was growing broader, deeper, and more treacherous. He truly did feel responsible for the grapes that had turned, and more than ten percent. He was guilty, too, about an idea that he had been considering since his stabbing and accused himself in private of being a traitor, even though he hadn’t yet committed treason and wasn’t at all convinced that he ever would.
On his way out, Atwater stopped at the door and asked, “Did they say how long you have to take it easy?”
“They pull the stitches out soon,” Lopez said. “But I still got to rest.”
“Does it hurt much?”
“It’s hard for my breathing. And when I cough.”
“What if you laugh?
“I haven’t laughed yet.”
“Elena’s taking good care of you, I hope?”
“Yeah, she’s a real good nurse.”
“Well, come on back to the vineyard when you’re ready,” Atwater told him. “I can always find something simple for you to do.”
“I don’t know, Arthur,” Lopez said, his eyes on the ceiling. “I been thinking maybe I might change my job.”
“And go to work for somebody else?”
“No, not in grapes, man.”
“What kind of work?”
“I been thinking about roofing. They pay good money.”
“Ah, that’s a dirty business,” Atwater said dismissively. “It’s for the monkeys. You don’t want to be a monkey, do you? Frying your butt up on tar beach?”
“I’m not saying I made up my mind for sure yet,” Lopez said, and that wasn’t a lie. “First, I need to be more healed.”
“Don’t do anything without talking to me. Because I’d hate to lose a good hand like you.”
“You won’t lose me.” But maybe you might, Lopez thought.
He crept back to his sickbed when Atwater had gone. He was very tired now and took some Tylenol with codeine and soon was floating on a cloud. He looked around the bedroom and noticed Omar’s yellow jacket draped over a chair. The boy had left it behind at the cantina in his haste to escape. It appeared to be glowing in the dark, and Lopez hated the sight of it. It was as if the jacket were meant to torment him, as if it had been brushed with something of the boy’s soul, dusted with his pollen, so he got up, rolled it into a ball, and threw it into a closet. Then he stepped on it for good measure. He lay down after that and struggled to stay awake, imagining that he w
as high up on a roof somewhere and restored to his rightful place among the fortunate ones, those who were blessed with good luck.
26
When the harvest ended that autumn, Victor Torelli shocked his friends by actually turning over his books to an accountant. Instead of setting himself up as usual at a folding card table with a green plastic visor and a manual adding machine as obsolete as the carbon paper he sometimes used for making copies, he engaged the services of Lloyd Chambers, Betty’s husband. Like any accountant worth his salt, Chambers was a fastidious and devious type, and through some careful manipulation of the numbers and strategic deployment of various loopholes in the agricultural tax laws, he established that the farm would earn a decent profit for the year and owe no money to the government. These findings he packaged in a cardboard binder embossed with his initials and sent them to his client, along with a bill for $750.
Torelli was so happy with the results that he paid the bill on receipt, no questions asked. He wrote a second check at the same time, drafting it with exquisite care in his spidery hand, and then stuffed it into an envelope and left home for an appointment with his vineyard manager. They were to meet at The Country Kitchen at three o’clock, but the old man had misread his watch and got there thirty minutes early. He took a booth at the back to wait. A waitress brought him some coffee, and he heaped it with cream and sugar and watched the dim light of fading afternoon play upon the knotty pine walls. The days were shorter now, more crisp and clear, and the winds from the west were stronger and colder and kept the cloud chamber alive with shifting shapes. Soon the winter rains would start. Torelli welcomed the prospect of a big storm. He had his goddam firewood.
The restaurant reeked of pie. The old man stared with undivided attention at a glass case on the lunch counter where some delicious-looking specimens were cooling—apple, of course, but also blueberry, cherry, rhubarb, and peach. The pies were all missing a wedge or two, and when he saw a waitress take out a gorgeous fluffy lemon meringue job and serve a portion, he gave up on being polite and waiting for his guest and asked for a slice of cherry pie à la mode. He attacked it with a fork and spoon and swore that he had never tasted anything so good in his entire life. There was a time when pleasure had seemed magnificent and even unattainable to him, something he would have to search for in the great forest of the world, but the years had cured him of such ideas. Here he sat at The Country Kitchen with every ounce of desire in his body concentrated on the next mouthful of cherries.
