Mother Nature

by Sarah Andrews

  The man froze, eyes locked in fury. What had Liza said his name was? Martinez? This man could be a cousin of Jaime’s, if not his brother.

  Liza spun on her heel and closed on him. “About time!” she scolded. “Back there drinking coffee, weren’t you? Who do you think is paying your salary?” She started toward him, Trudy still trailing from one shoulder like a pennant. The planner waved a limp hand, guiding them toward an office.

  I jumped up. “Trudy, wait,” I cried. “How can I reach you?”

  Liza wheeled on me, her eyes narrowing to venomous slits. “You work for the paper? Or perhaps you’re CIA! Hah!”

  The planner rolled his eyes.

  Trudy released Liza’s shoulder. “You go ahead,” she said. “I’ll be there in half a minute.” This last she said as much to assure Martinez as to calm Liza. When Liza and the planner had disappeared behind a room divider, Trudy came back to me, her body tense with indecision. “If you really want to help, come for Janet’s drumming,” she said.

  “Her what?”

  “Drumming. Wednesday evening, seven o’clock. The solstice. At Suzanne’s.” She shrugged her big, meaty shoulders. “You seem to really need one, and your energy will provide the negative ground for the event.”

  * * *

  WHILE I CONTINUED to wait for a planner myself, I got to looking through a copy of the County Plan. It showed everything from zoning to hundred-year flood levels.

  The patterns of rivers and floodplains on the hundred-year flood map fascinated me. A floodplain is just that, the plain bordering a river that floods. The channel down which a river flows is formed as the water scours away at the banks. This process of erosion proceeds laterally as well as downward, usually forming a much wider valley than the width of the river channel itself. Then, when the vagaries of climate—the patterns of rainfall, heating, and cooling—overload a river with water, it swells and spills out over its banks, inundating this surrounding lowland.

  The hundred-year flood level is that line of equal elevation to which the supposed biggest flood expected within a hundred-year interval might rise. Planners love this line. It’s a line above which it’s considered okay to build, because gosh, you’re above the highest line a river will rise to in a hundred years, and who lives even that long, right? Wrong. These predictions are based on limited data; and, every once in a while, perhaps every three hundred or a thousand years, even if global warming wasn’t changing our climates anyway, that region could see an even more unusual climatic event, and the river could rise even higher, and how do you know where you are in that cycle? So building near a floodplain is like everything else in life: just a crapshoot.

  The old Ferris place sat right along the edge of the floodplain of the Laguna de Santa Rosa, right near those fertile, water-rich soils farmers have always loved. Farmers are philosophical; they’d rather risk the occasional flooding of their crops and grazing lands than farm dry, stony, hillside soils. The forty acres of the Ferris place had plenty of each. As the topographic overlay on one of the maps showed me, the house and barns sat at the point where the hills and lowlands met, about two feet above the hundred-year flood line.

  I traced Santa Rosa and Piner Creeks, which emptied their waters directly into the Laguna right near the old Ferris place. The Army Corps of Engineers had straightened them and ramped their banks into an engineering-approved angle designed to deliver water downhill faster so that during heavy rains the upper end of the drainage—in this case the City of Santa Rosa—wouldn’t flood. But everything downstream from these creeks would. Faster. Deeper. And carrying more sand, gravel, brush, old tires, couches, and runaway Buicks. So if the Laguna, Mark West Creek, and the Russian River ever backed up at the same time some thousand-year freakish amount of water charged down the channelized creeks, the Laguna could flood to a higher level.

  Maps are such fun.

  At last, a slender young man with a vanilla-pudding face and polyester slacks called my number. “How can I help you?” he inquired blandly.

  “I’d like to know more about the zoning of this property,” I said, pushing the County Plan his way and tapping old man Ferris’ parcel. “It says urban residential, but everything around it is zoned rural residential or agricultural. Am I reading it correctly?”

  “Yes you are. That’s a special zoning for mixed usage. See, it’s almost contiguous with Miwok Mills”—he tapped his finger at the crossroads—“which is zoned urban.” He squinted at the parcel. “But this parcel you’re interested in must have been grandfathered in, because the way the plan’s set up now, we wouldn’t have allowed that.”

  Grandfathered. How appropriate. “What kind of building is being proposed for this parcel?” I asked.

  The vanilla-pudding man shuffled away from the counter for several minutes. When he returned, he held a roll of blueprints and plot plans, outlining existing structures and those to be added. Slowly rolling the rubber bands to the end of the bundle, he opened it up and spread it out on the counter. “Looks like town houses,” he sighed. “Rentals.”

  A raft of town houses all along Janet’s sacred stream. I uncurled the rest of the plans so I could see the logo printed on the corner of the top blueprint. Reeves Construction, it read, and I thought, Looks like our boy Valentine figured out a loophole in Grandfather’s will.

  * * *

  THE SONOMA COUNTY Water Agency was a monument to that place where governmental spending and architectural vanity sometimes meet. Two-story atrium. Volumes of space with no one in it. Blond wood and extralong counters.

  Bartolo Colotti was a robust man of Italian descent, scant on height but not on breadth of shoulders. He was at that forty-something age when his eyebrows were just starting to sprout rogue bristles a twisted inch long, and his hairline was starting to slip backward like he was losing his hat. “What can I help you with?” he asked.

  As I explained my quarry, I was picking at the bandage on the heel of my right hand. The adhesive tape had begun to itch.

  “Just north of Occidental Road, west of the Laguna?” Barto asked.

  “Yes. There’s a property on Ferris Road that interests me. I understand you used to work in the orchards up around there.”

  Barto pulled bundles of twenty-seven-inch square blowups of aerial photographs out of his vertical files. “There was a special survey flown in the fifties. Part of the planning for channelizing the creeks.” He laid everything open on a large light table and bent over them. “The old Ferris place,” he mused. His smile tempered a little. “Are you one of those environmental people?”

  “No. Or not exactly. Why?”

  Barto seemed about to say something, but then changed tack. “Oh, there was another woman came around looking at these same photographs a while back.”

  “About my size?”

  “Yeah, kind of looked like you. Or your younger cousin.”

  “Did she ask you about tanks, too?”

  “Sure. That’s what you’re all doing, right? Looking for tanks?”

  I nodded. “Anything you can tell me about the old Ferris place would help. That other woman was—couldn’t finish the job.”

  Barto regarded me for a moment, seemed to make a decision about me. “My dad worked for old man Ferris some, and my brothers and I used to go along during the harvest. Dad drove a truck, hauled the big crates of apples over to the packing plant. Picked a lot of apples on that ranch myself, but not until after the old man died.”

  “So you grew up here.”

  “Sebastopol born and bred.”

  I took a look at the laugh lines around his eyes and the gray hairs in his sideburns, trying to guess his exact age. “Then maybe you knew Matt and Sonja Karsh in school.”

  “Of course. Sonja was my year at Analy High.”

  I smiled at the tone of his voice. “You liked her.”

  “Sure,” Barto said, turning shyly away from me as a blush bloomed on his swarthy face. “She had spunk. Real smart, too.”

  “I
hear her dad favored her, too.”

  “Oh, yeah. He’d ride her around with him while he made the rounds to check the harvest, always showing off how smart and charming she was, always hoisting her onto his shoulders so’s she could pick the best apple on the tree. Talk about the apple of his eye.”

  The image was a rich one, opening doors to memories of my own father, of riding on his shoulders so I could see beyond the sagebrush, of accompanying him to town to buy wire and staples for the fence. I understood the Sonjas of the world. Especially the Sonjas who had older brothers who were a shade too rough with them. “How about her grandfather?” I asked. “He liked her too?”

  Barto laughed. “Yeah, that surprised everyone. He didn’t generally have much use for the female persuasion. Dad used to cuss about that. He said Ferris asked him to ‘put his woman to work’ in the packing plant, but Dad would have none of it. Said Ferris treated his dogs better than those women. Heck, one woman got a sleeve caught in the paring machine one time. It ripped her arm right off. She nearly bled to death, but the old man seemed more concerned that work was interrupted. The men at least he’d address by name, like they were human.”

  “What became of his wife?”

  “I don’t know. Died young. He didn’t want another, Dad said.”

  “And his daughter, Mrs. Karsh?”

  “He all but ignored her. It’s funny, every other female in the county, I know by her first name, but she is always Mrs. Karsh.”

  This bit of gossip clicked neatly into place, fitting smoothly with everything else I’d heard. “I read his will.” I pointed to the old Ferris place on the 1971 aerial photograph. “He left his home, the whole parcel, in trust to Sonja.”

  Barto raised his eyebrows. “You don’t say? Well, there you go, she just had a charm about her, you know? And she had a mind for business, showed it really young. If anything would melt that iceberg’s heart, that would.”

  “He left the rest of his estate in trust for Mrs. Karsh, with her husband as trustee.”

  “Well, we always presumed … But no, I didn’t know that about the trust.”

  “I’ll bet people wonder why Dierdre Karsh lives so poorly, if she inherited so much land.”

  Barto’s deep olive complexion grew rosy with another blush. “What do you mean? Property’s not money, not if you can’t sell it. It’s hard to make money at farming and apple processing. It’s not like it’s a guaranteed living. You hear about government subsidies, but not everybody gets in on that game. Far from it. I hear Will had everything but his socks mortgaged to pay for replanting so much of the orchards to grapes and switching the apple plant over to a winery, and then the phylloxera came and—”

  “The what?”

  “It’s a plague of mites. Kills the vines, right down at the roots. No, it’s tough sometimes making a living in agriculture.”

  I saw my informant veering into the dignity of communal sadness and away from the joy of gossiping. “This barn here,” I urged, pointing to the photograph. “Was this where the tractors and trucks fueled up?”

  Barto squinted. “Yeah, right there. The pump’s gone now, but that’s where the tank was.”

  My heart leapt into my throat. I could practically feel Janet looking over my shoulder, getting as excited as I was, saying, Yes, there it is.… “Is the tank still there?”

  “I’d be surprised if it wasn’t. It costs to dig those things out. Even if you have your own backhoe, it’s a couple days’ work.”

  “How big was it?”

  “Thousand-gallon gasoline. He had one at the apple plant—that’s where my dad gassed up—but he put this one by his house, too. He was real proud of that, said he got the stuff real cheap from the old bulk plant on Abbott Street. Kept his drivers from spending time going into town to fuel up, the tight-fisted old so-and-so. They say the Grand Canyon was just a gopher hole ’til Ferris saw someone drop a nickel down it.”

  I laughed. “So you remember a gasoline pump right there by the barn.”

  “Yeah, right there. Yeah, I remember the location especially, because the summer Sonja ran off, I’d gotten my license and could drive one of the stake-beds during the Gravenstein harvest instead of just picking—they’re the first apple in, usually they come ripe mid-August. Anyway, that was the summer we had the gas shortages, with everybody lining up at the pump, and Will Karsh swapped that tank out. There was a big hole in the ground for a while before they got the new one in, because everyone else wanted a tank that summer, too, and the supplier had to reorder. Big hole, with a pile of gravel. You had to swerve to miss it. And it stank.” Barto wrinkled his nose.

  “Stank of gasoline?”

  “Yeah, the old tank looked like Swiss cheese. The water table’s shallow there—just a few feet—so the old tank had been sitting in water and it rusted through and water was getting in. Dad said no one had used it since the old man had died, but then that gas shortage hit and they started using it again. Pumped as much water as gas. Dad said he had to pump it into a barrel and let it sit for a while, then he’d siphon the gas off the top and filter it through an old sock. My dad told Will he didn’t need to go to all that trouble and put in a new tank, like the drivers could stagger their times at the pump at the plant, but you see, Will had bought Sonja this little red sports car for her sixteenth birthday, and—”

  “And she needed a place to fill it up.”

  “Apple of his eye.”

  “I’ll bet Matthew was jealous.”

  Barto shook his head and smiled at the memory. “Oh, boy, was he! He couldn’t drive, you see.”

  “Couldn’t pass the test?”

  “No, he’d get all tense and mixed up and fail it every time. His behavior was getting pretty strange by then, anyway. He’d dropped out of school, and they kept him pretty close to home. Boy, he’d get into the machinery, though!”

  “Like forklifts?” I asked, remembering the sound of machines echoing through the warehouses at the winery.

  “He was a terror. Knocked over cases like it didn’t matter. And that backhoe. He loved the backhoe, wanted to dig the old tank out so bad he had a fit. They had to sick Jaime Martinez on him. Jaime could always control him. You should have seen that little guy order Matt around!”

  I grinned, thinking, And men think women are gossips. “Jaime worked for them back then?”

  Barto thought. “He started about then, I’d say. He was a picker at first, but he seemed to like it there. Found ways to make himself pretty indispensable.”

  I could only imagine how useful he could make himself if he could control Matthew Karsh. “So they put in a new tank.”

  Thoroughly engrossed in his story, Barto continued. “Yeah, and like I say, Matt just had to get at that backhoe. The morning the men came to put in the new tank, Matt was already on that backhoe, shoveling the pea gravel into the hole—you know, the ballast for underneath the new tank—and Jaime was right there barking at him, telling him what to do. Lousy job Matt did.”

  I imagined Matthew Karsh in the backhoe, pounding at the controls with his enormous, clumsy hands, working furiously to be the big man, shooting nasty looks all around. How awful it must have been to be his little sister. “Why did Sonja run off? Really.”

  Barto’s smile faded. “Well…”

  “Please, it would help me understand a lot.”

  Barto rubbed at the back of his neck. “Well, that was a bad summer for her. You’d think it was a good one, because she’d just turned sixteen and had a job and that new car. To think we all envied her. It sounded real racy; you know, living by yourself … a red sports car…”

  “But you knew things were rough for her.”

  “Well, her dad had moved out, and her ma was being pretty difficult, and—”

  “I thought he left after she did.”

  “Yeah, well, I think it was a gradual thing. Will and Natalie—his secretary—had been friends for a long time, and who knows what happened when.”

  “And Mr
s. Karsh was getting suspicious and getting on him about it?”

  “Well, now, Mrs. Karsh would never say anything like that where any of us common folk could hear it. No, you know how people are, they can’t fight about what’s really going on. They get on each other about something smaller like it was the end of the world. And it was all over town that Will was treating Sonja better than his wife, so Mrs. Karsh would make comments about that car, really taking bites out of Sonja, making suggestions about what kind of female drives a red car, that sort of thing. I guess Will kind of threw in the towel and quit trying to keep up appearances. And then when Sonja was gone, I guess he really didn’t see any reason even to visit.”

  “And what was it like for Sonja with him staying away more and more?”

  Barto said simply, “Matt treated her worse and worse.”

  “You mean getting physical?” A memory of my own brother popped into my mind, of his face contorted with hatred as he pinned me to the floor of the barn and threatened to drip spit into my eyes. I grabbed the edge of the counter, took a breath. The line that divided Janet’s life from my own had long since blurred, and now I was beginning to melt into Sonja’s.

  “I never saw anything.”

  “But you suspected.”

  Barto’s face stiffened. “Oh, looking back, I can see all kinds of things, but you figure kids are always getting hurt. But not adults, and let me tell you, that summer Sonja was a woman.” He shook his head at the bitter endings adolescence can bring. “One morning I came to work, and Sonja had this big bruise on her cheek.” He touched his own face, tenderly, like it hurt. “But then when she left for her job a few minutes later, she’d covered it all up with makeup.”

  “Did Matthew otherwise get in fights a lot?” I asked, leading the witness. To hell with the scientific method, multiple working hypotheses, and all the rest. This was war.