Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  He could not have done otherwise. He held her tightly and brushed his lips against her hair. He thought that he would feel a surge of joy, but instead he felt an odd but not disagreeable emotion that combined sorrow, loss, and resignation, as if he were embracing those very qualities and not the woman he had loved and probably still did love, although that love was more complicated to him now, not so pure or easy to pin down.

  “Did you think about me?” Anna asked quietly.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “I wrote you a hundred letters in my head. I must have picked up the phone to call you fifty times.” She was suddenly fretful. “This is a mistake, isn’t it, Arthur? I shouldn’t have come. I should have left well enough alone.”

  “I don’t know,” he said honestly.

  “You won’t be angry with me, will you? Promise?”

  He stroked her shoulders. “I won’t be angry.”

  “I couldn’t bear it anymore. I couldn’t bear to have it end that way between us. I tried hard to forget you, but I couldn’t. And I missed you so. Are you upset with me? You look upset.”

  “I’m just sort of surprised,” he told her.

  She drew back from him. “I tried to think things through and make a rational decision, but it didn’t help. I kept going around in circles.”

  “Those circles are real familiar to me,” Atwater conceded.

  “A couple of weeks ago, I woke up in absolute despair and bought a plane ticket. I didn’t think I’d really use it, but here I am.”

  “Here you are.”

  “I want the pain on my own terms.”

  He failed to understand. “All right,” he said anyway.

  Anna seemed to need something more from him, some reassurance. “Do you still care about me?” she asked in a small voice.

  “It goes beyond that.” There was an awkward pause. He thought for a second or two, and said, “Are you hungry?”

  “Hungry?”

  “Yes. Would you like something to eat?”

  “Oh, my!” Anna laughed in delight. “I really am here.”

  Atwater wouldn’t ride up to the house with her. He was too filthy, his clothes were too shoddy. He felt apart from her, as though she had dropped in on him from a parallel universe. He gave the rental car a wide berth and trudged along behind it. His feelings were in a boil, hot and soupy, spilling over. There was a key to the door under the mat, and he bent to fetch it and stepped aside so that Anna could enter before him. She gasped at the mustiness and went straight to the kitchen, where the counters were again peppered with mouse turds and the stove gave off a stink of gas. She was equally distressed when she looked out at her ruined garden and saw the cornstalks brown and crippled, the cantaloupes split, rotting, and drawing flies, the green tomatoes never to ripen, and the bean runners coiled up and strangling themselves.

  Atwater tried to cheer her up. “Your melons came in nice and sweet, Anna. I ate them right through October.”

  “That’s something, at least.”

  He opened the fridge and found a jar of peanut butter that had not gone bad, spread it on a few Saltines from a sealed box in the cupboard, and felt as he set the plate in front of her that it was the single most ridiculous gesture he had ever made.

  “This is stupid,” he said, tired of his lifelong ineptness at such moments. “I’ve got plenty of food up at my place.”

  Anna grabbed his hand. She stung him with her eyes, and he fell into her once more. “It doesn’t matter, Arthur. Sit down with me, will you? I just want to be close to you. Tell me everything that’s happened. Tell me about the harvest.”

  Here was a narrative that Atwater had rehearsed late at night as he lay sleepless in the churning hours, a tale of treachery and even villainy that had served him as an emblem for all the miseries attendant to the human condition, but he found that he could not relate it to Anna with any degree of conviction. The moral of it had evaporated on him as his life had slipped back into a common groove, tracking along again with billions of other lives, invisible and without impact, so he only alluded to the trouble that he’d had with his pickers and failed to summon the outrage he needed to paint Wade Saunders as a monster. He omitted his crazy run to Laytonville altogether. Time had pulled another trick on him, it seemed. It had stolen his ability to complain.

  The light in the kitchen had grown dim. “It’s getting dark so soon, isn’t it?” Anna said with a shiver. “Winter will be here before you know it.”

  Atwater woke to his whereabouts and eyed the clock. “Jesus! I forgot all about Salazar. I’d better go deal with him. He’s probably standing around out there with nothing to do.”

  “But you’ll come back when you’re finished?” She sounded anxious.

  “I’ll come back. Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good.” Anna smiled at him. “I’m going to build us a fire.”

  They made love at twilight on some couch cushions arranged before the fireplace. Atwater shook with desire at first and fumbled with Anna’s clothes, but he relaxed when she rolled over on top of him. Her eyes were shut, her lips were wet and parted, and there was such evident release in her expression, such utter abandon, that he could see right into her. Consciously or not, she had dropped all her defenses to show him a face that was remarkably innocent, the face that must have been hers as a child, before anything had ever hurt her—blissful, unlined, without any edges. He saw how much she trusted him, although he might never hear it from her in words. The fire was reflected in a gallery of windowpanes, and he watched it flicker and spoke her name twice, petting her and believing that she might never get enough, but she did at last and sank toward him as he came, her body against him all down the length of his own body, the full weight of it upon him and welcome, welcome.

  Now she was ravenous, of course. Atwater had to dress and dash down to the trailer, where his neglected dogs accused him with baleful whimpers, as if he were about to abandon them again. He threw some cheese, some bread, and a couple of apples into a paper sack and returned to the house in a sublime state of wonder. Anna had put the room back together while he was gone and sat on the couch in her shirt. The fire was roaring, and she was smiling at him in a way that was better than nourishment. They had a little picnic and chatted, and he had to bite his tongue to keep from asking, Why did you really come back here? What’s this all about, Anna? Can I count on you to stay? Wrong questions, every last one.

  Instead he said, “How is New York?”

  “Awful.” Anna helped herself to more cheese. “Well, maybe not awful. But very strange.”

  “In what way?”

  “I couldn’t fit back into my life. It was like some other person had taken over for me.”

  “It’s those body snatchers again,” Atwater joked, high on the miracle before him.

  “No, I don’t think so, Arthur,” she said. “I doubt that aliens were involved.”

  “They can be tricky, Anna.”

  “I’m sure they can. But this was something different. Everything felt weird and wrong to me, and I got so bored. Even the bookstore doesn’t seem to mean that much to me anymore.”

  “Does Victor know you’re here?”

  Anna shook her head. “Not yet. I’m going to surprise him for Thanksgiving. At least that was my excuse for buying the ticket. I missed him, too.”

  “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?”

  “I suppose I am.” She was quiet for a moment, then plunged ahead. “There’s something I have to tell you, Arthur, and you’re not going to like it. But I made up my mind on the plane. There can’t be any secrets between us anymore. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Another reason New York was so strange,” Anna said in a halting way, “was because I took up with an old lover of mine. It’s over now.”

  “You did what?” he asked mildly, thinking she had a punch line to deliver, a follow-up that would put things back in the proper perspective.

  “I got involved with an
old lover of mine. He should be the ideal man for me, but he isn’t.”

  Atwater saw that she was serious and swallowed hard. “Well, that’s very nice to know. Thank you for sharing it with me, Anna.”

  “If you’d had an experience like that,” Anna said, “I’d want to hear about it. Secrets always explode. Look what happened to us. I’d prefer to know if I were you.”

  “But you’re not me, are you?” he protested. His voice rose an octave. “Because if you were me, you wouldn’t have gone to bed with him.”

  “Haven’t you been seeing anyone?”

  It took him less than a split second to decide that his companion from The Rib Room would go unmentioned. “No, I’ve been pining,” he said with a vengeance.

  Anna, unmoved, stood her ground. “I’m sorry, Arthur. I knew you wouldn’t like it. But it was necessary for me. I had some things to learn.”

  “What a fine way to get a lesson!” Atwater was on his feet, his mind ablaze with horrible carnal images. “I’ll bet he gave you a good grade, too, didn’t he?”

  “We approach things differently.”

  “I’ll say we do!”

  “I thought you’d want me to be honest.”

  He sat on the couch again. His brain ached. “My head is made of wood,” he said, cradling it in his hands.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My goddam head is made of wood.”

  Anna put an arm over his shoulders to console him. “What do you want from me, Arthur? A pledge of undying love?”

  He looked at her. “Yes.”

  “I can’t give that to you. I nearly ruined my life with pledges.”

  “I understand.”

  She eyed him with suspicion. “Do you really?”

  “Yes, I do. But I don’t like it, not one bit.”

  Anna ran a hand along his thigh. “Will you come upstairs and make love to me one more time before we sleep?”

  “Not just now,” Atwater said evenly, although he was about to self-destruct and fly apart into bits. “I’ve got to see to my dogs first.”

  He left without another word, liberated Prince and Rosie from his trailer, and let them run free. They were glad for the exercise, spirited in their play. They caught the scent of a deer on the other side of the vineyard fence and chased it downhill for a hundred yards until it vanished into the willows and cottonwoods by the river, a good-size buck with prominent antlers. Atwater had enough light to see it clearly and admire its leaping, muscular flight. He whistled for the dogs after a while and jogged home with them, his breath visible in the cool autumn air. In his kitchen, he filled their bowls with food and water and listened to their lapping pleasure, thinking he would sleep in his own bed that night because to sleep elsewhere would only lead to further complications.

  He did actually go into his bedroom, but he kept his clothes on and stood staring at the lights up in the big house as he had done so often in the past. He let it sink into his wooden head that Anna had truly come back to Carson Valley and largely because of him. He had missed her so terribly, and yet he hadn’t confessed it to her, not even once. All the imaginary and loving dialogues he’d had with her during her absence had added up to one long silence! Oh, Arthur, will you never get it right? He, too, had lessons to learn. Atwater heard old Victor Torelli’s railing admonitions ringing in his ears and wondered exactly who he meant to punish. There was no love without risk, of course. He knew that and had known it all along, and he was swept up from his quandary and dismay and delivered to Anna on a surge of emotion as powerful as wings.

  She was already upstairs, asleep in her bed. Atwater undressed and slipped in next to her.

  “Is it you, Arthur?” she asked in a drowsy whisper.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Dear Mr. Atwater.” She reached behind her to touch him. “Will you stay with me all night and keep me warm?”

  “I will.”

  He drew close to her and felt with utter gratitude her body next to his. Thankfully he embraced her, an arm around her waist. If life could never be made right, he thought, it could at least be made rounder and richer for a time, almost whole.

  28

  The year turned in Carson Valley, its muted passage marked in the usual way by the starling flocks out to glean the last of the vineyard chaff. The birds were as black as grains of pepper against the sky and moved about in huge wheeling arcs that brought forth an audible crack of cartilage from a multitude of wings. Angry field hands shouted and threw stones at them whenever they settled among the rows, but the starlings were scarcely bothered. So many farms did they have at their disposal that their response amounted to little more than a shrug in the face of folly. They just pecked and scratched and waited for a signal that no human being had ever heard, and then rose together in a pack with their wings cracking and flew off again, as if to taunt all those still earthbound, left below.

  It proved to be a rough winter for grape growers. Storm after storm crested the coastal mountains and often made the ground too soggy to be tilled with heavy machinery. Thirty-one inches of rain poured down in January, followed by another twenty-seven inches in February, and the pruning crews fell far behind. A few old footbridges washed out, and some streams were in a constant state of flooding. Only the local fishermen had any praise for the weather. So many steelhead were spawning in the river that even the dullest, laziest, least-motivated anglers caught one to enter in the Ace Hardware derby. The early front-runner was a sophomore on the varsity basketball team, who had the prize money sewed up until his best friend revealed that he’d actually bought his trophy fish, an eighteen pounder, from a Yurok gillnetter up north.

  The boy’s trickery led to quite a scandal, as well as a concerned editorial in the Valley Herald titled “What’s Wrong With Our Youth Today?” Victor Torelli read it with amusement in his hospital bed at Carson Valley General. He didn’t know or care what was wrong with our youth today and honestly believed that they were no different than ever. Famine, pestilence, bloodshed, lust, despair, crop failure, and teens who committed petty crimes in imitation of their greedy elders could not be said to surprise. The right question to ask, the old man felt, was “Does One Rotten Apple Really Spoil the Barrel?” The world had been going to hell in a handbasket since the very moment of creation, he thought, and if the speed appeared to be picking up, that was probably because of TV, special effects, or some other type of filter thrust between what people truly perceived and what they hoped or expected to be true.

  Torelli had entered the new year in declining health. He had lost two molars to softening gums around Christmas and later suffered a couple of blackouts that scared him enough to consult a cardiologist, who informed him that he was an ideal candidate for a pacemaker. He resisted the idea, of course, and argued that technology couldn’t be trusted, but his friends and family finally won him over, and he submitted to the surgery. The pacemaker turned out to be utter magic. The old man could barely credit the positive changes it made in his poor circulation and fluttery heartbeat. How could a chip so tiny have such a profoundly beneficial effect on an organism as big as he was? The only mark on his entire body was a minuscule four-inch scar above a pectoral muscle that he gladly showed off even to strangers without being asked. He was a goddam miracle of modern medicine, all right, and never once did he complain about having his vital organs hooked up to a computer somewhere in the galaxy.

  After his release from the hospital, Torelli began walking for exercise. He was tentative at first, measuring out his steps with care and pausing frequently so as not to overexert himself. It spooked him to have no tightness in his chest and no shortness of breath, but he got over it presently. The crick in his arthritic knee improved, too, and soon he could walk all the way from his house to the town square, where his elderly brethren were often resting on benches, their aged heads sinking toward their rheumy chests. They looked to him like sepia-toned photographs now, apparitions from the past, and he would stop to knock on wood—a tre
e, a sign, a wall, it didn’t matter—to insure his own continued good health. It was a riddle to him how suffering got parceled out, why one man endures and another doesn’t. I’ll die for sure, he told himself, but not just yet.

  In a month or so, he had developed a strict training regimen. He walked two miles after breakfast and another two miles in the late afternoon. His toes became blistered from the extra effort, and when he checked his shoes, he saw that he had practically worn away the soles. At a sporting goods store in Santa Rosa—Ed’s had been sold at last and was now a Radio Shack—the old man shopped for some proper footwear. He had not been aware that sneakers of such intrepid design existed, every pair tailored for a specific game, pastime, or aerobics routine, and all endorsed by famous athletes and manufactured in artsy, futuristic styles that enhanced the very concept of feet. With the help of a young clerk who quizzed him closely about his activities, he chose a spanking-new white pair of Reeboks and winced as he paid for them with three twenty-dollar bills.

  The Reeboks seemed to lift Torelli into the air. He floated along on pillowy cushions, his arches fully supported for the first time in his life. He walked with his own peculiar grace, often thinking about Michael Jordan and wondering what quirk of tendon, ligament, or bone permitted a person to soar to such improbable heights, up there among the clouds. He had known only one black man well, a dapper fellow named Frank Hawley, who had driven a truck for a dairy back when dairies were still plentiful in the valley and then had quit his job and disappeared. Although Hawley was tall and lanky and a star pitcher on La Bella Italia’s softball team, he had never demonstrated any superior jumping ability and needed a folding stepladder to haul the aluminum milk jugs down from his flatbed.

  There came a day in early March when the old man woke to a curious but satisfying sense of possibility. The rain-washed streets outside his house looked fresh and clean, and he could smell a good grassy scent that signified a warming trend. He ate his regular bowl of grape-nuts, laced up his sneakers, whistled for his dog, and hit the sidewalk, treading cautiously around some bloated earthworms and a banana slug dazzled by the sun and dozing in his driveway. At the end of Quail Court, he made a sharp right turn instead of his customary left and headed north, away from town. It gave him a small but definite thrill to be breaking a habit that he had formed for no particular reason. He passed two real estate offices, a Chinese restaurant, and a mill yard stacked with lumber and plywood, and went on for a mile or so until he reached Carson Valley Road.