The Perk

by Mark Gimenez

  Beck thought about his father's words for a time. Then he said, "J.B., would you mind watching Meggie in the morning? I'd like to take Luke out to the Rock."

  "Sure, I'll keep an eye on the little gal."

  J.B. went back to the newspaper, and Beck's thoughts went back to his life here. He wondered what his children's lives would be like here; he hoped he had made the right decision.

  "Any jobs in that paper?" Beck said.

  "Diesel mechanic out at the granite quarry."

  "I can't change the oil in the Navigator."

  "You could work at the turkey plant."

  "I don't speak Spanish."

  "Nursing home needs help."

  "I figure watching after one old fart will be enough."

  "That'll be the day. Says here they have chair dancing every Monday night. Believe I'd rather not dance than dance with a chair."

  His father started chuckling.

  "Chair dancing's not that funny, J.B."

  "Pretty damn funny, but I'm not laughing about that. I'm thinking about that election, for judge. You could win, Beck."

  J.B. returned to his paper, and they sat quietly for a time until Beck said, "J.B., just so you know … I forgave you a long time ago. I just wasn't man enough to tell you."

  J.B.'s jaws clenched. "Appreciate you telling me now."

  "Can you forgive me?"

  "A man never has to forgive his son."

  "Maybe not, but I'm still sorry. I'm sorry I left here hating you and I'm sorry I didn't bring Annie here, so she could've known you and you could've known her. She was a woman worth knowing."

  J.B. sighed. "I knew her."

  FOUR

  Oh, Beck … I love you … I love what you do to me … God, I'm so wet … We're so wet …

  "We're wet."

  Beck woke. And Annie was gone. Again.

  "What?"

  "We're wet."

  Meggie stood beside the bed, holding her doll. She smelled of fresh urine. She had wet the bed again.

  "That's okay, baby."

  He now kept a damp towel and clean clothes for her next to the bed. He changed her clothes, and she climbed into bed.

  The sunlight through the blinds woke Beck.

  He checked his watch: six-thirty. He climbed out of bed, quietly so as not to wake Meggie, then walked down the hall and checked on Luke; he was still asleep. Beck took the wet sheets off Meggie's bed and carried them to the laundry room. In the kitchen, he found fresh coffee and a note from J.B.: Gone to town, then down to the winery. Bring the kids after breakfast. Pancake batter—blueberry—Annie's recipe—in the fridge. He had placed utensils and syrup on the counter. The sun was just rising, but J.B. Hardin had never wasted a minute of daylight in his life.

  Beck poured a cup of coffee and went out onto the back porch. He stepped into a pair of J.B.'s rubber boots and walked outside. He was wearing only pajama shorts, but there wasn't a neighbor within two miles of where he stood. Peggy Dechert had been the girl next door, even though next door had been a mile away. When she and J.B. married, they and their goat ranches had become one.

  Beck admired the land.

  All eight hundred acres had long ago been cleared of brush and Ashe juniper trees, known as cedar to Texans; Beck had cut brush and chopped cedar from sunup to sundown more days than he cared to remember. J.B. Hardin hated cedar like the plague, and in the ground it was just that, with its deep roots sucking the groundwater like a thirsty kid sucking a big soda through a straw. Water had always been scarcer than oil in Texas, and now it was more valuable.

  Cedar was a water thief.

  When goats had free range on this land, they ate the grass, plants, and brush down to the bare ground and even the shoots six feet up the trunks of the cedar and shin oak trees—the "goat line." But with the goats gone, the native grasses had made a comeback. The land looked good.

  There had been a brief rain overnight, not enough to end a drought, just a spit really, but enough to tease the grass into giving off a hint of green hope. The rain droplets on the blades of grass shimmered like diamonds in the first light of the sun over the eastern hills. By mid-morning, the sun would burn off the water and all hope; but now Beck welcomed the sun.

  He didn't dream of Annie while he was awake.

  He sipped the coffee and inhaled the morning air. The birds were awake and singing, and just past the house fawns were standing on shaky legs and foraging for breakfast. Beck walked down the gently sloping land and across a wood bridge that spanned Snake Creek; it was bone dry. He went down to the river. Cypress trees and willows lined the near riverbank; the far side was a sheer white limestone bluff fifty feet high. Growing up here, this had been his back yard, this land and that river.

  The Pedernales River—named "River of Flint" because the Spanish explorers had found flint arrowheads along the riverbank—had its headwaters in springs out one county west and flowed east a hundred miles to Lake Travis. The river was eighty feet wide here but not two feet deep. The clear water coursed gently between large flat rocks that spanned the river and formed a natural bridge; Beck stepped from rock to rock until he was in the middle of the river, where he had often found himself as a boy.

  The wind had yet to pick up, so the surface of the water was still as smooth as glass. Beck bent over and grabbed a small flat rock. He hefted it and decided it would do. He gripped the rock between his thumb and index finger just as J.B. had taught Beck the boy; he threw the rock sidearm. The rock flew low then skipped across the surface of the water four times before disappearing from sight. Beck watched the ripples spread out until they blended back into the water and the surface became smooth again, as if the rock had never been a part of the river's life.

  His life had been perfect here, for a while, and then he had found perfect again in Chicago. Thirteen years here, twelve years there; maybe twenty-five years of perfect out of one lifetime were all a man could rightfully expect. Maybe it was more than a man should expect. And so he felt lonely and afraid but not cheated. It was his children who had been cheated.

  "We're hungry."

  Meggie was standing on a big rock on the riverbank in her white nightshirt with the doll tucked under her arm.

  "You kids like those pancakes?" J.B. said.

  "Yes, we did," Meggie said. She was carrying the doll.

  The Trail's End Winery was exactly what Beck would have expected of his father: built to perfection. The front and back sections of the building were one story, constructed of limestone, and angled up about forty-five degrees to meet a two-story all-cedar center section just below a row of windows that ran the length of the structure under a green standing-seam metal roof. They had found J.B. inside, behind a long wooden bar that looked like it belonged in an old western saloon; a mirror on the back wall stretched the length of the bar. Under the mirror were neat rows of wine glasses; on the bar were a dozen bottles of wine. The floor was pine and cedar beams spanned the open space. The limestone walls came together in one corner to form a fireplace fronted by a leather sofa and chairs. Stacked on wood shelves were tee shirts, sweatshirts, and caps in all colors with Trail's End Winery, Fredericksburg, Texas stenciled across the front.

  "I don't remember you ever drinking wine, J.B.," Beck said.

  "Never touch the stuff."

  "You don't drink wine?"

  He shook his head. "Don't like it."

  "You own a winery but you don't like wine?"

  "I own a winery 'cause I like the wine business. I like the pace of it, the order, the vines in perfect rows in the vineyard. I like planting new growth, tending to it. I like the harvest, crushing and pressing the grapes, fermentation, aging, bottling—it's got a rhythm all its own. I like that. I like people who like wine. I just don't like wine."

  "You're a piece of work, J.B."

  A door next to the bar opened, and a middle-aged Hispanic man walked through just as J.B. added, "And I like Hector."

  The Hispanic man stopped, cocked his hea
d, and smiled.

  "I like you too, J.B."

  "Hector, meet my son, Beck. The lawyer."

  Hector turned to Beck.

  "He says this as if he has another son who is 'the doctor.' " He stuck his hand out to Beck. "I am Hector Aurelio … the winemaker."

  Hector was a short man with a pleasant face. He wore khaki shorts, huaraches without socks, and a yellow Trail's End Winery shirt. He smelled like wine.

  "J.B. says you're the best winemaker in the Hill Country."

  Hector smiled again. "My family first came north from Matamoros to pick the peaches and stayed to pick the grapes. I discovered that I have the taste for wine. So now I make the wine. But I still pick the grapes." He glanced down at Meggie. "And who is this beautiful little señorita?"

  "My daughter, Meggie."

  "Señorita Meggie, perhaps you would like to meet Josefina … she is my daughter. She is six."

  "Can she play with us?"

  "Us?" Hector appeared confused, then he realized. "Ah, the doll. Yes, J.B. said you might need a playmate."

  Meggie glanced up at Beck.

  "It's okay, honey."

  Hector turned to Luke. "And you must be Luke. So you would like to learn to make the wine?"

  Now Luke glanced up at Beck.

  "J.B. thought you might like to work down here, Luke, learn a few things."

  Luke shrugged his shoulders. Hector looked at Beck and nodded, then he held his hand out to Meggie. "Come, let us find Josefina. She is in the vineyards, with Butch."

  Hector, Meggie, and the doll walked off hand in hand in hand.

  J.B. came out from behind the bar; he was wearing a gray-blue Tommy Bahama shirt with a red, yellow, and orange jungle floral print stretching from shirttail to shoulder.

  "How many of those shirts you got, J.B.?" Beck said.

  "One for every day of the week plus a few spares. This one's called 'Rum Punch.' "

  " 'Cause you'd have to be drunk to buy it."

  J.B. gestured at the room. "This is our tasting room. We got the Harvest Wine Trail end of next month, pretty big deal around here. Tourists drive from winery to winery tasting, like in that movie a few years back. A dozen wineries in the Hill Country now. They say we're the next Napa Valley."

  "Santa Fe."

  "That, too."

  J.B. led them into the two-story section of the building. Massive wood trusses and cross beams overhead were supported by floor-to-ceiling rough-hewn logs embedded in the foundation. Sunlight shone through the row of windows on each side of the top wall. Six stainless steel tanks stood in two rows; above the tanks was a catwalk. At one end of the room were barn doors.

  "Vat room. Each vat holds fifteen hundred gallons."

  "That's a lot of wine."

  "Takes a lot of grapes. Right here is where the winemaking happens. Hector'll take you through the whole process, Luke—it's like a science experiment. You like science?"

  Luke said nothing, but Beck caught a spark of interest in his eyes; he had made As in science.

  "Come on, I'll show you the barrel cellar."

  They followed J.B. down a set of stairs into a basement dug out of the limestone bedrock. Hundreds of wood barrels stacked on metal stands filled the cool cavern.

  "We keep it at sixty degrees down here," J.B. said. "While the wine ages."

  "How do you know when the wine is ready?"

  "When Hector says it is. Winemaking's part science, part art. There ain't no gauge or computer program tells you when wine is ready. Takes a vintner with the taste. That's the art of it."

  J.B. led them back upstairs into another room with a stainless steel contraption stationed in the middle.

  "Bottling room. Each barrel holds fifty-nine gallons. Standard-size wine bottle holds seven hundred fifty milliliters. That comes to twenty-four cases per barrel. Each case is twelve bottles, so that's two hundred eighty-eight bottles of wine per barrel. We'll bottle twenty thousand this year."

  "Bottles?"

  "Cases."

  "Cases? That's …"

  "Two hundred forty thousand bottles."

  "That's a lot of wine, J.B."

  "Nah. Big wineries here, they do twice that. And that's nothing compared to the California outfits."

  "J.B., you've got quite an operation here."

  "Me and Hector, we've come a long way in ten years."

  They followed J.B. up another set of stairs to the second story of the building. Hanging on the walls were antique implements. J.B. stopped and removed a hammer from a hook.

  "Bung hammer. Five pound cast-iron head. They used to stuff a leather roll into the end so it wouldn't break the wood bung. We use silicon bungs now."

  J.B. replaced the hammer and led them into an office with a wall of windows overlooking the vineyards and the river beyond.

  "This is my office."

  Beck looked out the windows at the uniform rows of thick green vines. Meggie and Josefina were playing in the shade of the vines. The white lab lay nearby.

  "Now Butch's got two little gals to watch over," J.B. said. "Makes him feel useful." He gestured out at the vineyard. "Fifty acres of vines, ten different varietals … types of grapes. We harvest a little later here, so the sugar content of the grapes is higher. Texans like their women and wine sweet. First harvest will be in a few weeks, last harvest first week of September. We throw a big party. Lots of folks come out, we pick till sunset, then we eat Mexican food and Hector plays the guitar and everyone dances. The kids'll have fun."

  Southwestern style paintings signed by "Janelle Jones" hung on the walls, a leather couch sat along one wall, and a leather chair was behind a big wood desk. On the desk were a stack of invoices, several unopened bottles of wine, a ledger book, a framed photograph of the Hardin family of Chicago, and a computer. Beck stared at the computer: Were Annie's emails still on that computer?

  Beck looked up and saw J.B. looking at him.

  Beck turned the Navigator north and drove into town. Luke was sitting in the passenger's seat and staring out the window; he hadn't said a word the entire morning. Beck stopped for a red light at Gallopin' Goat Drive, the intersection fronting the high school. He instinctively glanced over at the adjacent football stadium. It was only the fifth of July, but the team was already practicing for the upcoming season.

  "You want to watch the boys practice?"

  Beck took Luke's shrug for a yes and pulled into the parking lot of the Gillespie County Consolidated School District stadium. They got out and walked through the main gate and past a sign that read DRUG FREE, GUN FREE, TOBACCO FREE, ALCOHOL FREE SCHOOL ZONE. VIOLATORS WILL FACE SEVERE FEDERAL, STATE, AND LOCAL CRIMINAL PENALTIES.

  That was different.

  They continued on past the concession stand and stepped onto the eight-lane running track that circled the field. Drought had turned the Hill Country brown, but the football field was as green as money and carried the same hopes. Twenty-five summers before, Beck Hardin had practiced, played, and dreamed on that field. It seemed like someone else's life.

  Big white boys in black shorts and no shirts were throwing, catching, and kicking footballs; boys were running and balls were flying. The wind was down and the humidity was up; the air in the bowl of the stadium was thick with sweat and testosterone. The boys' voices sounded manly.

  Beck spotted the quarterback at the far end of the field. He was a tall kid. He grunted a deep "Hut!" and the center snapped the ball back to him. Five receivers raced down the field toward the south end zone where Beck and Luke were standing. The quarterback waited for a three-count, then his right arm suddenly shot forward and the ball rocketed downfield as if fired from a cannon; it flew in a perfect spiral on a high arc and dropped right into the outstretched hands of a receiver running full speed down the sideline—and he dropped it. A voice bellowed out from above like the voice of God—"Catch the damn ball!"—except God didn't cuss like a football coach. The boys turned in unison and looked up at a solitary figure sitting on the
top row of the home bleachers in the shade of the small white press box under a black sign: LAND OF THE GALLOPIN' GOATS. The man seemed familiar.

  "Is that … ? Come on, Luke."

  They walked around the track to the concrete bleachers, then climbed the twelve rows to the top and cut over toward the man. He was wearing black knit shorts, a white knit shirt, and a black cap over short blond hair. He was leaning back against the press box with his legs stretched over the bench in front; his thick arms were folded across his chest, and he was studying his players so intently that he didn't notice he had company until Beck called out to him from twenty seats away.

  "Aubrey!"

  The man's head swiveled their way; his left cheek bulged like he had a tumor the size of a golf ball. His face remained blank for a beat, then he broke into a big smile. He didn't stand; instead, he spat a brown stream of tobacco juice in the opposite direction then held a big hand up to Beck. They shook.

  "Beck Hardin. Heard you finally come to your senses and got your butt back to the country where you belong."

  "Word travels fast."

  "Ain't every day a local hero comes home."

  Beck Hardin had been the star quarterback and Aubrey Geisel his favorite receiver; they had been the best players and best friends. Their senior year they had won the state championship for the first and only time in the school's history.

  "Real sorry to hear about your wife, Beck."

  Luke turned and walked back down the bleachers; he stood at the railing and faced the field.

  "I say something wrong?"

  "Luke's having a tough time. We all are."

  Beck sat next to his high school buddy. From twenty-five feet above ground level, they caught a hot breeze and a clear view of the distant hills etched against the blue sky. Beck could see the tall screen of the old Highway 87 Drive-in Theater where he and Mary Jo had made out in his truck. Aubrey turned away and spat, then drank beer from a can. Four empty cans littered the concrete under him.

  "Sign says this is an alcohol and tobacco free zone."