by Dan Alatorre
“Well.” I inspected the mud under my fingernails. “Do I get to kiss her first?”
“You sure do.” He was wearing a huge grin now. “Maybe more than that.”
“Okay, then. Hitler lives.”
“Bwah!” Jimmy laughed, nearly falling off the rock. “I knew it!”
That was his goal, to find out if I liked Shelia McCormack. That wasn’t usually how we played the game. Typically, we’d start out by asking if you would, say, rob a bank. You’d say no. Then we’d say, what if bank robbers had kidnapped your parents and they would kill them if you didn’t rob the bank. Maybe you’d consider it then. The goal was to get you to admit that you’d do something that you originally said you wouldn’t. Something you’d never think of doing in a million years, and suddenly in a few questions, there you were, admitting that you’d definitely do it.
But it was a game, a joke. I always knew we had no chance to do something heroic like killing Hitler, the way I knew I probably had no chance of kissing Sheila McCormack. But it was a fun way to trick your pal if he played along. And sometimes it was just funny.
“Would you ever peek up an old lady’s dress?”
“I have peeked up your mom’s dress. Yuck.”
“HEY!”
Sometimes it went off the rails right from the start.
“Would you ever kill a person for a dumb reason?”
“I’d kill you for telling me it was too hot to wear pants today. I tore the hell out of my legs shinnying up that tree.”
Sometimes it tested our limits.
“Would you kill the President for a million dollars?”
Digging clay and sand out from under one fingernail by using another fingernail took it from one and wedged it under the other. “Kill President Ford, huh?” I peered up at the sugar maples, their leaves turning orange and yellow and red with the onset of fall. “He just took over. Would I get caught?”
“Nope. But you’d spend the rest of your life on the run.”
“I don’t know. A million dollars is a lot of money. If I could get a million dollars and get away with it . . . I don’t know.”
Usually it was like Tic Tac Toe—it didn’t get far, and it didn’t get complicated. But sometimes, it opened doors that were better left shut.
“You couldn’t do it.” Jimmy scanned the bank for another baseball-sized rock. Finding one, he heaved it into the deep part of the water. Bloop. “No way.”
I watched the ripples from the splash fade and the water become a clear, blue-green tint again. “I bet I could for a million dollars.”
“No, you couldn’t. Not you.”
“Why not me?” I placed my hands in the grass and righted myself. “A million dollars is a lot of money. My brother said that if you had a million dollars and you put it in the bank, you could spend a thousand dollars a week for the rest of your life and never touch the original million.”
“Yeah?” Jimmy narrowed his eyes. “How do you figure that?”
“Interest. The amount of interest the bank pays you is so much that you could take a thousand dollars a week out and never go broke.”
He stared at the water. “Man, a thousand dollars a week.” That was a lot of money to kids who were lucky if they earned five bucks for mowing the lawn on Saturday—and that took most of the day.
“Yeah, you could have a Corvette and a gullwing Mercedes.” Those were our favorite model car kits to build, so of course we’d buy them for real if we could. Things like food would still be provided by mom and dad, of course.
He nodded. “I’d definitely get a Corvette. Maybe a convertible one.”
“That won’t work.” I smirked. “You can’t fit a gun rack on the back window of a convertible.” He didn’t like redneck references. They hit too close to home.
“The heck with that.” Jimmy hopped onto the midstream rock, throwing his arms out again to balance himself as he eyed the next stony foothold. “Besides, if I had a million dollars, I could get somebody to make me a custom rack for my convertible corvette, that’s for sure.”
“And a CB radio?” Holding a fist to my mouth, I pretended to hold a receiver. “Ten-four, good buddy!”
Finding enough dry rocks so he wouldn’t slip, he bounded over the water and landed near me. “So? What would you put in yours?”
“If I had a Corvette?” I thought for a moment. “I don’t know. They’re pretty cool the way they come.”
“You wouldn’t customize it?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“You wouldn’t.” It was a statement, not a question. Jimmy stretched out on his back, put his hands under his head, and stared up at the tree tops.
I never did that. Bugs might get in my hair.
“Why not?”
“Because you wouldn’t get a Mercedes or a Corvette.”
I put a hand in the grass and turned to him. “Why not?”
“Because you couldn’t kill anybody.”
“For a million dollars I bet I could!”
“No, you couldn’t.” His tone had changed. Now he was almost sneering. Maybe the redneck stuff had been over the top after all. He sat up and eyed me. “You couldn’t do it. You could never do something like that.”
“Why not?”
“You know why.” He spat, not at me, but to emphasize his point. His sneering pissed me off.
“Why not?” My cheeks felt hot with embarrassment.
Just then, the voice of Jimmy’s mom pierced the woods. Supper time.
Hearing it, he took off like a shot. I’d get called soon, too, but if Mrs. Marondeck thought Jimmy was up in the woods somewhere, she would let him stay out for a while. So he scampered off, across the creek and up the hill, disappearing into the woods and the farmer’s fields beyond, allowing me to lie to his mother without really lying. If she saw me coming up from the creek to my house, I could tell her that Jimmy was up in the woods. The kitchen windows of these houses were strategically placed so moms could see the kids in the yard. By the time Mrs. Marondeck saw me, what I’d tell her about her son would be true.
I had to eat fast or I’d be late for swim practice. A whole hour of my head immersed in water, with very little talking. It was a lot of time to think. Too much, really. At least my fingernails would be clean when I got back home.
As I swam, I thought about the game.
Stupid as it was, Jimmy and I liked playing the question and answer game mostly because we had invented it. But there was never a real point in the line of questions, because if you think about it realistically—like considering if you really went back in time to kill Hitler—the game took on a whole other dimension.
You’d have to do it before he came to power, before the damage started. You’d have to do it before Hitler was Hitler. That means doing what most people would consider an insane act, killing a harmless politician. You would become an enemy of the people for killing a person like that. No one else would know what he becomes.
It was a long practice. Mr. Holtzman has us doing sets of 200 yards and distance swims. He must have had a bad day at work. Churning my arms through the chlorinated water at Highcrest Swim and Tennis Club, the questions bounced in my head.
If somebody showed up on your front door on a Saturday afternoon and said, “You have to kill this stranger to save millions of lives . . .” Hell, you’d laugh. You’d freaking call the police on them. Nobody would ever really do such a thing, and the few who did—aren’t they the ones we read about? Charles Manson, Jim Jones, David Koresh . . .
When swim practice finished, I was tired mentally and physically. We drove home in near silence, listening to Easy 105 FM on the radio. An old Carpenters’ tune, done as an instrumental, filled our station wagon. Our little town only got rock n roll on one AM channel, and my parents never played that. I stared out the window and watched the houses roll by in the dark, my cold, damp hair clinging to my head.
After watching some TV, I went to bed and stared at the ceiling of my room. Model airplanes pinned wi
th strings created a frozen dogfight overhead, but the questions wouldn’t let go.
If the bad acts aren’t random, if they're not crazy people going crazy, if that's not what they are, then—what are they?
I rolled over and adjusted my pillow, shoving an arm under it. The headlights of an approaching vehicle shined around one edge of my window shade, casting long white rectangles onto the far wall of my room. As the car rounded the curve on Reigert Drive, Benny And The Jets became audible, fading as the traveler continued up the hill.
In Millersburg, kids had to wait until they were practically sixteen and had a car before they could listen to any good music—unless they stole an older brother’s portable radio for the afternoon. Mostly, we were limited, and we accepted it. We never tried anything. We never stole a car or skipped school or smoked. We rode bikes and played in the woods and climbed trees. We were supposed to be good kids who grew up to be good adults.
We played our little question and answer game to amuse ourselves. We never played it with other kids. We chose to just play it between us.
Until we got too big for it. Then we chose to do other things.
One of us chose college in Florida, graduate school, and marriage. The other chose very differently.
Chapter 5
It looked a like a castle.
At almost four years old, anything princess-oriented was a big hit with our daughter. While Mallory stood at the massive front gate to Hillside Winery and snapped a picture, Sophie bounced up and down in her car seat. The castle was real, and she was finally here.
The morning sunlight sharply illuminated the rows and rows of majestic grape vines leading up to the regal building. Its tall roof and circular front spires were something right out of a story book—which was all Sophie needed.
Her tiny mouth hung open as she gazed at the ornate building. “Does the princess sleep in that tower, Daddy?”
“Hold my hand, sweetie.” I wiggled my fingers at Sophie as I stood in the parking lot, waiting for her small hand to take mine. Mallory shut the van door and gazed at the big building through sunglasses, admiring the winery-castle and no doubt contemplating the many fermented treasures waiting for her inside.
“Let’s look both ways here.” The instruction was for our daughter but a reminder to my wife as well. Either could wander into a busy parking lot while distracted by what lay on the other side. Bold knights in shining armor for one, bold merlots in shining glass for the other.
Holding hands and swinging arms with Sophie, I led the way as we crossed the lot toward the massive wooden front doors. “Cars are looking for parking spots. They aren’t watching out for little girls in pretty yellow dresses.”
With her own face buried in the brochure, Mallory strolled across asphalt, more or less in the general direction of the winery entrance.
“Hey.” I chuckled. “They aren’t watching for pretty ladies in blue jeans, either.”
“What?” Mallory let the brochure flop downward and raised her eyebrows. Her mind was elsewhere. On a vacation, that was a good thing.
I may have suggested to our daughter, through a series of carefully directed questions during our long drive from Tampa, that Hillside wasn’t a winery at all. Instead, it might contain all sorts of magic, good and bad, inside its tower walls.
It looked like a castle on the internet, after all. As my Sophie sat on my lap in her princess pajamas, we scrolled through the pictures on the Hillside website. I didn’t have to do much convincing.
“Is that a Rapunzel tower, Daddy?”
“Hmm. Could be.”
“Oh, and is that there where the princess carriage goes?”
“Wow, I bet it does.”
For my niece’s wedding in Millersburg, we plotted out a meandering, scenic journey from Tampa to Indiana and back, stopping in on Virginia's wine country “on the way.”
We saw a bear cross the road in front of us outside of Nashville, but Sophie had been more impressed by the real cows grazing near the dairy cheese shop near Macon. She also enjoyed spearing assorted cheese samples with toothpicks and offering them to anyone and everyone in the store.
Winery trips and the accompanying excursions were a welcome pressure release from the stresses of Mallory’s job. We even rented a minivan for the occasion—something I originally balked at.
“Why do we need a minivan?” The word invoked an utter lack of coolness that I was not quite ready to embrace.
Mallory raised her eyes from her wine brochures long enough to give me the wife look. “To have some space.” She continued sorting the colorful collection of glossy pamphlets in front of her—an odd paper-bound method for a tech person. “You’ll be driving, but Sophie and I will be cramped into a small back seat if we rent a sedan. After we load in enough suitcases for a two-week trip and start packing in cases of wine, we’ll be sardines.”
Shipping multiple cases of wine gets expensive fast, so on last year’s vacation trip to California, she had to be selective about our purchases.
Our annual vacation had evolved, like a lot of other things, to encompass our young daughter. Kids at that age can only do so much before needing a long nap or food; that left a lot of vacation choices off the table. As Sophie’s endurance expanded, so did our vacations, but there was nothing wrong with folding her interests into ours, or Disney World and Sea World would be the only places we’d ever go.
That compromise eventually led us to Virginia wine country, to round out a trip in our rented minivan to attend my niece’s wedding and to see my family—especially my dad. Sophie’s grandpa had the ability to make each grandchild feel as though they were his favorite.
Sophie generally did fine in cars, so the trek to Indiana went well, but nobody can take a thirteen-hour road trip without stretching their legs. To accommodate that, Mallory arranged for a roomy vehicle and some stops—wineries, usually—along with a few touristy destinations for our daughter. Plus a cooler full of kid snacks. With the van’s DVD player, our daughter was pretty well set.
The routine at a winery varied depending on Sophie’s mood. Sometimes she would fall asleep in the stroller, so I’d park under a tree and read a book. Other times she played quietly in the tasting room while Mallory and I both did a tasting.
The return trip to Florida was well mapped out, designed to sample numerous award-winning wines from Virginia’s wine country.
One winery was like a castle. That alone might be enough to keep Sophie interested for an hour, but mentioning that we’d go there on her birthday made it an over the top exciting event. Was it really an old castle that they made into a winery? Do you think it has a king? Is there a princess in a tower? Only a visit would say for sure.
Each day, as we made our way to other wineries, Mallory primed Sophie. “Pretty soon we’re going to the castle for your birthday!”
Sophie couldn’t wait. Each morning she would wake up and ask, “Are we going to the castle today?”
The newspapers I’d read online said that Hillside Winery had existed for many decades in the wide open spaces of Virginia’s wine country. Beautiful in every picture taken over the years, Hillside was proof its owners, Mr. and Mrs. Hill, had created a winery appealing to the eye as its esteemed wines were to the palate. From the huge iron gates of the entry, to the stone walls surrounding the campus, to the wooden floors of the tasting room, everything was done well.
It certainly appeared to be the result of an owner who loved his winery.
The articles indicated Mr. Hill’s business had prospered along with the growing town over a half century, making him a pillar of the community. He studied what the successful wineries in California were doing, and he did what they did. Tourists wanted a winery to visit, but they needed a restaurant to eat in and a hotel to sleep in, too. A hard worker and a quick learner, Mr. Hill saw to it that partnerships were formed, hotels were built, and the area thrived.
The last article I read was about a traffic accident a year ago—and the lawsui
t that followed. It wasn’t flattering to Mr. Hill.
The police reports blamed a light Virginia rain, or maybe the fog that had burned off hours before, for making the roads slick. A car came through a traffic light and Mr. Hill’s pickup collided with it, smashing the truck and him with it. Doctors feared he would never walk again.
When we finally toured the winery in person that sunny fall morning, I noticed a hallway lined with pictures of his recovery, from hospital bed to standing with the use of two canes. A framed local newspaper clipping noted that getting up and down from chairs was now difficult for the old man, and his new pickup truck had to be fitted with hand controls for the brakes and the accelerator.
I strolled around the winery that morning, holding my daughter’s hand and wondering if he still worked there.
* * * * *
That’s why he walked across the tasting room with the dolly. Loaded with four cases of wine, no other employee would be allowed to do such a thing with paying customers present. Cases for delivery were to go out the back, but Mr. Hill’s car was parked by the front door—in the handicapped spot—closer to his office and closer to the walk up ramp.
“Going over to Bertram’s for their delivery,” Mr. Hill grumbled to his wife, letting Avery stack the last case of wine onto the dolly.
Mrs. Hill looked up from her desk full of papers and peered at him over her glasses. “Bertam’s? That was supposed to be delivered yesterday.”
“Yes, Bertam’s!” He grabbed his keys off his desk. “That moron José missed the delivery. Again!”
Avery patted the stack of wine cases. “I can load these for you whenever you want, sir.”
“I can do it!” Hill narrowed his eyes. “My knees and back might be on fire with pain, but I can still outwork you any day.” He yanked open a desk drawer and pulled out a brown pill bottle, stuffing it in his pocket.
Avery recoiled. “Yes, sir. I didn’t mean—”
The old man yanked the dolly out of his employee’s hands and stormed out of the office.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean to insult him.”
“Go on, Avery. He’s just in one of his moods.” Picking up the time sheets, Mrs. Hill flipped through them. José was scheduled off yesterday.
