Vertical

by Rex Pickett

  “No, no hospital.”

  Within a minute, she had dozed off. I made a mental note to instruct Joy to start weaning her off the Vicodin. Given my mother’s addictive personality, and her total lack of self-control, the last thing we’d need, if we even made it to Wisconsin, was to detox her from a synthetic opiate.

  “Hey, Jack, what about a reality TV show where they try to get stroke victims hooked on Hydrocodone to go cold turkey?”

  Jack flashed me a wicked grin, happy to see I hadn’t lost touch with my sarcastic self.

  I tapped Joy on the shoulder. She popped the earbuds out and turned to me. I handed her an envelope thick with one-hundred dollar bills. “Six thousand. Payment in full, with a bonus. As promised.”

  She took the envelope from me and diffidently said, “Thank you.”

  “You’re doing a terrific job under adverse circumstances.” I couldn’t stop myself from tacking on, “Don’t abandon us.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I also bought you a little present.” I handed her a money belt I had purchased from a travel supplies store I passed on the drive back to the motel from Wells Fargo. It took her a moment to grasp what it was. She broke into a girlish smile. “It’s a money belt, so”–I pointed to my dozing mother and whispered–“she won’t steal from you again.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Then she turned back to the view framed in the windshield, reinserted her earbuds and resumed bobbing to the music, whatever it was. Probably Dengue Fever.

  North of Redding, I-5 snakes through the sometimes-majestic Cascades. The passing landscape grew ever more densely timbered as we tunneled our way through tall pines and colossal redwoods. Even in late July, the highest peaks were snow-capped.

  I didn’t know whether it was because Joy had taken my mother’s diuretics out of the pharmacological lineup or whether the absence of Snapper made her less anxious, but even once she reawakened she was able to hold off on the next pit stop until we reached Grants Pass, a small town just over the state line.

  A sit-down lunch would have been a protracted affair, so we took the first off-ramp and then pulled into the lot of the first supermarket we came to. As part of my strategy to defuse the burgeoning tension, I let Jack stay with my mother as Joy and I went into the store to buy sandwiches and drinks.

  When we returned Jack was sitting in the passenger side, talking excitedly on his cell phone. He concluded his call and said, “It’s looking good, brother. It’s looking good.”

  “The reality show?”

  “Yeah. It’s a go. I don’t know how many episodes they’re going to shoot, and I’m just AD-ing, but at least I’m back in the game.”

  “That’s great,” I said, handing him a sandwich and a brown paper bag clinking with some local handcrafted ales.

  He pulled one out and smiled at me. “Thanks, Homes. I see you’re looking out for me.”

  “I’m looking out for everybody,” I said exasperatedly, opening it for him with my all-purpose key ring corkscrew/bottle opener. “I’m starting to feel like a fucking headshrinker.” I handed Jack his beer. “Could you do me a favor?” I asked.

  Jack looked up at me with a mouthful of turkey sandwich.

  I whispered, “Could you sit in the back and let Joy sit up here with me? As much time as I can keep them apart until this tension eases I think will pay dividends down the, uh, well, road.”

  “No problem,” my wing man mumbled through the half-chewed mess, that cold beer in his hand already improving his mood.

  I piloted us back onto the interstate. Just out of Grants Pass we spanned the scenic Rogue River and seemed to cross the threshold into another world. Suddenly, we were enwombed by jagged, forested mountains whose hillsides were slashed by indolent, molten rivers and gurgling creeks. At this altitude the temperature had dipped at least ten degrees, and the change was having a salutary effect on our beleaguered, road-weary party. That, and the fact that we were coming to the end of the first leg of our greater journey and would all be able to kick back for three days before pressing on for Wisconsin.

  We made one pit stop in Eugene, and another in Salem, where we left I-5 and hooked up with rural highway 221. As soon as we got off the freeway we were back in the heartstoppingly endless verdure of wine country, right in the middle of the famed–and to some, fabled–Willamette Valley. Vineyard after vineyard property rippled over gently sloping hills. It had been a wet spring and the summer greenery of the profusely leafed-out rootstock was everywhere in evidence. The waning afternoon sun slanted through the pines and painted a filigree of gold light over the unblemished landscape. We’d all, including Joy it seemed, had our psyches readjusted with our emergence into this preternatural world. We had reached nirvana, our own collective perception of Shangri-la. Nothing could deter us from three days of fun and exploration. Surely, this was the disposition change I’d been praying for.

  “It’s beautiful,” my mother announced when I informed her we were almost there. “Gorgeous.”

  “Amen, Mrs. Raymond,” Jack concurred, drinking in the vineyard landscape, and another fresh ale. “Amen.”

  “I told you guys.” I turned to Joy and asked, “What do you think?”

  She nodded excitedly, hypnotized by the countryside. Doing the seven-hour drive up front, away from the withering looks and excoriations of my mother, as well as the re-infusion of cash, had undoubtedly mitigated the damage to her pride. And it was nice to see my mother undergo a change of personality, her ululations over Snapper having grated on us and turned this dream trip into a bummer, now mercifully abating.

  We arrived at the Willamette Valley’s Brookside Inn Bed & Breakfast. Set in a wooded enclave, the B&B rose up like some enchanted, fog-enshrouded dominion of a wayward princess. Sunlight rayed through towering trees, casting long shadows across the luxuriantly green, pristine piece of land. As we bumped across a planked bridge that arced over one end of a private pond, a fish leapt clear out of the water and swallowed an insect, disappearing with a splash beneath the charcoal-gray surface.

  Our tires came to a crunching stop on the narrow gravel road at the front of the main house, a beautifully renovated two-story structure constructed of wood and stone. We piled out, weary, but relieved. The quiet was positively deafening, the air redolent of nature in all its glory. Everyone just gazed around in awe of our sublime environs.

  “We made it to the Willamette, god damn it!” I proclaimed, arms aloft in supplication to a god I didn’t believe in smiling down on us.

  As I walked up the short flight of steps to the front porch, the owner came out and greeted us.

  “Miles Raymond?” He was a big man, in his early sixties.

  “That would be me.”

  “I’m Bruce. I see you made it.”

  “Yeah, it was quite a journey,” I said with irony in my voice, too mentally exhausted to elaborate.

  “Why didn’t you just fly?”

  I turned and waved my crew up. Jack pushed my mother and Joy trailed to where Bruce and I were standing. I pointed to my mother in the wheelchair. “Uh, well, we’re taking my mom to Wisconsin after the IPNC.”

  Bruce looked confused.

  “It’s a long story.” I gestured to my mother. “Bruce, this is my mother, Phyllis.”

  Bruce bent forward to greet her. “Hi, Phyllis. I’m Bruce.”

  My mother arose from her spellbound state that the surroundings had induced in her and said, “Nice to meet you.”

  “We’re going to take good care of you.”

  “Oh, that’s such good news.” She crooked her index finger and pointed it skyward. “It’s beautiful here,” my mother said, emotion cracking her voice.

  “Yes,” said Bruce. “Every day is paradise.”

  A gigantic black Newfoundland rose, as if on cue, from the planked porch where he was napping and padded over to my mother and nuzzled his huge head against her chest. She hooked her good arm around him and let him lick her face until it looked like
a glazed doughnut. “Oh, you’re a nice dog. I lost my Snapper.” She burst into tears.

  “He’s in an animal hospital in Northern California,” I clarified for our host.

  “Oh, that’s a shame,” Bruce commiserated. “I guess you’ve had a hard trip, huh?” he said. He turned to my mother. “I’m sure you miss him.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  “Mom, stop crying, please.”

  “Okay.” She turned to Bruce and smiled coquettishly. “Can I get a glass of wine?”

  Bruce looked at me and I shrugged, as if: why not?

  “Well, come on in everybody,” he said affably. “Welcome to the Brook-side Inn.”

  The main sitting room, known as The Great Room, was bigger than my rent-controlled house. It had a high pitched ceiling with wood cross-beams, and comfortable lounge chairs in front of an enormous stone fireplace, where the proprietor had thoughtfully got a modest fire going. Floor-to-ceiling windows, divided by oak beams, looked out onto the surrounding property and all its profuse greenery. Jack parked my mother next to the blazing hearth. The Newfoundland, having made a new friend, lay down next to her.

  Bruce soon came out of the adjoining kitchen with a cold glass of white and handed it to my mother, preoccupied with petting the dog. “Here you go, Mrs. Raymond. It’s a local Chardonnay.”

  “Oh, thank you,” she said, greedily accepting the complimentary refreshment. Her eyes squeezed shut and she held her glass, to the extent her infirmity permitted, aloft. “The angels must be looking out for me!”

  We all laughed.

  Jack and Joy found chairs and practically collapsed into them. Bruce motioned me to follow him into the kitchen–rustic and featuring an antique stove. A small dining room with more floor-to-ceiling windows was dappled with shadows from the nose-diving sun. On the other side of the kitchen sat a small alcove the inn had converted into an office. A middle-aged woman rose and approached.

  “This is my wife, Susan,” Bruce said.

  “He does the cooking and I do the accounting,” she said.

  “From the looks of this place, you make quite a team.” I reached for my wallet, flipped it open and fingered a credit card.

  Bruce held up both hands. “All been paid for by the IPNC.”

  “I thought so. Was just checking. Didn’t want you to think I was a piker.”

  “And a lot of wine has been arriving for you.”

  “We’re not too much in the habit of hosting celebrities,” Susan remarked.

  “Well, if it gets us all free wine, who’s complaining?”

  “Shall I show you your rooms?” Bruce asked.

  “You know what? We’ve just come four hundred miles today. Could you do us a favor and uncork one of those Pinots, pour three glasses? Plus a couple more if you two are ready to get the evening going. I think we’re just going to chill in your splendiferous sitting room there, get our sea legs.”

  “Of course,” said Bruce as he disappeared out the back.

  “Nice to meet you, Susan. You have a truly lovely place here.”

  “Thank you.”

  In The Great Room, Joy sat nestled in a chair as far from my mother as possible–and behind her! The friction between the two had not, alas, yet abated. But I felt confident that Joy would stick it out with the six thousand in hand.

  I plopped down across from Jack. “Libations are en route.”

  “Excellent.”

  Bruce returned shortly with an open bottle. He set it, along with three Pinot-specific Riedels, on the table that centered the room. He poured and handed around to Jack, Joy, and me. Then he held up the bottle and showed me the label. “This is an ‘08 Ayoub from just down the road. Mo Ayoub is a small-production, artisanal maker of only Pinot Noir. No more than a few hundred cases of this stuff. Never gets out of Oregon.” He added with a crinkly smile, “We like to keep the good stuff here.”

  I sipped and studied. The wine was bursting with all the variety’s telltale, sui generis characteristics. “Mm. Nice,” I said to Bruce, who had remained in the room, waiting for an evaluation. I took another sip. “Really nice.”

  “His small vineyard is all red volcanic soil. You get a real mineral thing going on in there. Can you taste it?”

  “Yeah, it’s just all over the map, coming at me from every direction. Big, rich. Nuanced notes of nobility,” I deliberately alliterated, mimicking the purple prose of so much ridiculous winespeak.

  “Glad you like it,” Bruce said, chuckling at my hyperbole. I had switched, without necessarily intending to, into the Martin West persona from Shameless.

  Changing back into the real me, I turned to Jack, “What do you think, big guy?”

  “Oh, yeah, notably nuanced,” he mocked me. He took another sip and sudsed it around in his mouth, extending the impersonation. “And definitely not tighter than a nun’s asshole. And it’s certainly not fucking Merlot!”

  Bruce and I laughed. The party was revving up. We had three unfettered days, sans driving, and the mood was positively buoyant.

  “This is my friend, Jack. He inspired the Jake character.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Bruce said. “That must be quite a compliment.”

  “Well,” Jack said in his stentorian voice. “It is and it isn’t. I mean, how would you like it if every woman who you met, once she found out you were the prototype for Martin’s womanizing accomplice in this guy’s”–Jack jerked a thumb at me–“overrated novel, said, ‘Are you really such a motherfucking, lying, cheating asshole?’”

  Bruce and I laughed again. Joy, who admitted to having neither seen the movie nor read the book, stared at us blankly.

  “But it is true, Bruce,” Jack said, “that I like the ladies.” He extravagantly toasted pussy as yet unexcavated and smiled wryly.

  “Well, I think you’re going to have no trouble finding a few women up here who, for a couple of days at least, take off the wedding rings.”

  “Hear, hear,” Jack said. Bruce was apparently of a liberal bent. And rumor had it that at the IPNC, if you fell in with the wrong crowd–which Jack and I were prone to do–things could get dangerously out of control.

  My iPhone rang. The number was unfamiliar, but the area code was local, so I answered it, “Hello?”

  “Miles?” a woman said.

  “Yes, this is he.”

  “Hi, I’m Julie, coordinator of the IPNC.”

  “Of course. Hi, Julie.”

  “You’ve arrived?”

  “We have arrived. Just a few minutes ago, in fact. And we’re off to a great start. Bruce has poured me one terrific Pinot.” A bit of an exaggeration, admittedly, but I loved its earthiness, its expression of terroir.

  “Well, you’re going to be drinking a lot more over the next three days.”

  “Our livers are ready.”

  She chuckled. “So, you’re coming to the salmon bake tomorrow night, right?”

  “Of course. Aren’t I supposed to be doing a book signing?”

  “That and more. We’ve got four hundred copies all set to go. You’d better be there.”

  “Four hundred? Jesus. I don’t know if my writing hand’ll hold out.”

  She laughed. “Okay.”

  “And thanks for picking up the tab here. It’s beautiful. And thanks to all the vintners who sent me wine.”

  “They love you up here, Miles. We’re sixty-five percent planted in Pinot, so your book and movie did a lot for everybody in the Valley.”

  The cellular meet-&-greet done, I poured Jack and myself another glass of the opulent Ayoub. When I turned to Joy I saw she still had a good bit left. She tapped two fingers to her lips in our familiar code.

  “Apparently, there’s no smoking allowed anywhere on the property, Joy.” She drew an expression of disappointment. “As soon as we finish this wine, we’re going to check in, then go out to eat. I’ll make sure to stop somewhere so you can get an adjustment.”

  She cracked a smile at the euphemism. I wondered whether I should
just say, stoned out of your fucking gourd?

  Jack and I killed the bottle in very little time. My mother tried to inveigle a second glass of the Chard, but I waved Bruce off and said to her back, “Mom, we’re going to check in, then go to a restaurant. You can have two glasses there, okay?”

  She raised her index finger. “Oh, that’s such good news.”

  Bruce assigned her The Rogue Suite, a ground-floor handicapped room in the Carriage House, a separate structure across the expansive lawn. It was a small, but pleasant, room facing the garden. Surmising quickly that Joy wasn’t going to be sleeping with my mother in its queen-sized bed, I asked Bruce to have a foldout brought over.

  As he left to see to that, I noticed that Joy was assaying the bathroom–where most of her duties were performed. It had a handicapped bar above the toilet and three wall-mounted bars in the tub. The room’s doors were wide as well.

  “Are you going to be okay in here?” I asked her nervously.

  “I think so,” she muttered, intently focused on the handicapped apparatuses.

  “Look, if you ever need any help transferring her, just call me.”

  She turned and faced me. “I did one night and you were passed out. Your mom had fallen and I had trouble getting her back in the chair. I had to call the night clerk.”

  I felt guilty. “That was at Justin?”

  She nodded reproachfully.

  “I’m sorry.” The extent of Joy’s duties was just now dawning on me.

  “She’s very heavy.”

  “Well, if you’re worried about transferring her to the tub for her bath, then hand-bathe her.”

  She crossed her arms against her chest and looked at me. “You mom doesn’t like hand baths.”

  “Well, she doesn’t have any fucking choice, does she? And if you have any problems with her, call me on my cell–I’ll wake up eventually, and I’ll come right over. I don’t want you two to start arguing again. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I want this to work. I want you to have fun. So, get the old coot ready for dinner. Jack and I’ll come get you.”

  She looked pleased. Specious or otherwise; hell, I didn’t have time to care.

  I plodded up the narrow flight of stairs to the second floor. Bruce had me booked into The Astoria, the most spacious suite in the Carriage House. Jack was checked into the McKenzie, a smaller suite, but then I didn’t think we’d be spending much time in the rooms anyway, and the time we would we’d likely devote to drinking in my designated crib.