Valley Fever (25 page)

“Oh. I don't, though.”

“You think he's just terrific, do you?”

“He is.”

“Well, I think you're probably lying. No one can be that loved by everyone and by his family, too.” He stirred his drink with his hairless finger. “Why doesn't anyone tell the truth anymore?”

Mr. Boschetti was still talking about Lewis, about the voice mail he'd left. “He was apologetic. He said he'd killed Emory and couldn't live with himself.”

No one wanted to hear many more of the details. I kept wondering about the wives: these two widows who now had to live next door to each other, women who had been married to angry, explosive men. Women who in any other circumstance probably would have had a lot in common, but who now had a personal obligation to despise each other. Would one have to sell her condo in this depressed real estate market? I thought a lot about real estate then, and the physical and financial realities of having a place to live.

The dove was served: roasted, with wild mushroom rice. Poor bird.

Chris got drunker and drunker and stopped speaking before the affogato.

“I've seen you at the Vineyard lately,” Mr. Boschetti said to me, across the table after our dinner plates had been cleared. “How long are you here?”

“I'm not sure yet.”

“Everyone thinks it's nice you're here,” he said. He had that straightforward, gruff voice all the farmers have. He could say something so kind and generous as “Everyone's glad you're here,” and it came out sounding like an order.

“I think it's nice to be here,” I said. He turned back to his friends, and I wished that I didn't sound so very much like a little girl, a songbird. I should have barked a thank-you at him and looked away. I would try that in the future.

At the end of the evening, Dad's friends called this service the club recommended where they drive you back home in your own car. I wasn't the only one who needed to get to their vines that night.

For at least two weeks after Lewis shot Emory, no one drove himself home from the club. The authorities did, in the end, investigate how much Lewis had been served by the club the day he shot his neighbor: they could find no one willing to state they'd seen Lewis drinking, and the club records showed he had paid for just one gin and tonic.

*   *   *

“I wonder what will happen to the dog,” Anne said later that night. She stayed up to keep me company while I waited for Miguel to phone. We waited for the night to cool down enough that the sugar in the grapes would be stable and we could pick. He and his crew had driven the pickers and the bins out to the southernmost vineyards this afternoon.

“Mrs. Lewis will keep the dog.”

“I don't know if I could bear to keep the dog, after something like that.”

“The dog's not to blame.”

“Blame isn't reasonable,” she said. “If he loved the dog so much, she probably hated it.”

“No one hates a dog called Tutu.”

“You don't know how irrational marriage can be until you've been in one,” she said. “Charlie hated Elroy, and Elroy is stuffed.”

After our parents had gone to bed, Anne and I would wander down to the pool, where she could smoke cigarettes undetected. I kept my mobile between us, waiting for word from Miguel. The night was still too hot. “Charlie just hates to see you shower affection on anything that's not him.”

“No,” she said. “It's because he wants a child.”

“What's happening with Charlie, it must be more than just this thing with having children,” I said. My entire adult life, my idea of relationships and love and how fidelity could endure was based largely on Anne's loyalty to Charlie, and his love and admiration for her. “One thing like that doesn't change the entire life you've had together.” It was a question more than a statement, a question I asked her out of fear.

“The life we've had together, I'm not sure he and I were sharing the same thing. What the priest says about being one, that's not how it is at all, Inky. It's two people, with two different experiences of the same thing.”

“Two people experiencing love for each other.”

“No.” She shook her head. “Not really.” She dropped her cigarette into the wine bottle we kept by the pool as an ashtray. “I'm not the person Charlie wants, and he's very angry with me for not being what he expects me to be.” When Anne tries to keep herself from crying, her voice becomes very even, like a flat line.

“What does he expect?”

“And I have tried really hard, Inky, to be just so. To be wifely or something.”

“I think you're wifely.”

She didn't respond. She stared into the algae pool, transfixed. I could see she was trying to keep herself as still as possible. Even her sweepy hair was still. If your body doesn't move, doesn't feel anything, it's possible for you to not feel anything, either.

I said, “I mean wifely in a good way.”

“I don't want to be a wife,” she said. “I want to do my work.”

“And sit with me in the summer. We'll keep each other company.”

“For now,” she said.

“You don't think I'm good company long-term?”

“I was a much better catch ten years ago,” Anne said. “When Daddy was rich and I stood to inherit lots and lots and lots of money.”

The night cooled and the sound of machines began. In central California, March through December, something is always being harvested. There are very few silent months, and September is the noisiest. Mile after mile in any direction, all you hear are birds and the gunning of machines.

*   *   *

By the time I reached the vines, Miguel had the harvester well into the vineyard and the bin in the row beside it, catching the grapes. There was a gondola truck at the opposite end. He gave my hand a shake. The air smelled like diesel.

The ground along the vines was wet with grapes that had fallen and been crushed.

“How you got this done, I don't know,” he said. “I thought Felix would let this go to rot.”

“What do you think he did? Contract to buy too much?”

“He doesn't want to pay for this,” Miguel said. “He only wants the cab. There's so much white juice this year. It's going to sit in tanks way past next season.”

“He should sell cheaper wine,” I said.

“I don't know his wine could get any cheaper.”

There were two crews, one at the vineyard here and another a couple miles east.

“It's better if you sleep,” Miguel said. “You don't need to stay.”

“I'd like to stay.”

He laughed the wide, wholehearted Miguel laugh, a laugh full of tenderness and a lot of big teeth. He put his hand on my shoulder. Miguel had strong, sinewy hands with long fingers. He had work hands, athletic hands, musical hands. Well-used hands.

“You can stay,” he said, “but you'd better sleep sometime.”

“When?”

“It's beginning of summer, Ingrid.”
Ehn-greed
. “Sleep, so later you can be sharp.”

“Sharp for what?”

“Negotiations. With your uncle,” he said.

No one in the valley felt fondly about Uncle Felix. No one but Mother and Dad and me and possibly Wilson. Maybe not even Mother. “He can talk about rot with you, too,” I said. “I'm not the only person who knows when grapes are ready.”

“Yes, but Felix knows I have no power to pull the cab,” Miguel said quickly, naturally. “So you will have these conversations with him from now on, not me. With you, he's afraid. You'll see I'm right.”

We stood still for a moment and watched those brilliant vehicles do all the work for everyone, slice and dice and pick and harvest. The picker moved slowly, almost imperceptibly, down the vine, shaking clusters of grapes onto the trays and into the conveyor cups below, transporting them through fans and magnets to remove the debris, and depositing a cascade of grapes into the catch bins in the next row. Those vehicles didn't exist when I was a little girl—Dad had paid all his workers one by one, in cash. He had checked their identifications himself, in the beginning.

“Afraid of what?”

“Afraid of you. Afraid you'll sell that cabernet to Napa. He wants those grapes because he wants them, yes. But even more, he doesn't want those guys up north to get them.”

I patted Miguel's hand, still resting on my shoulder. “He's afraid of me,” I said, to hear how it sounded. Uncle Felix was afraid of no one. “And it took just one conversation.”

“Not too afraid,” Miguel said. “But still, better that you talk about when to pick than me. He knows with me that he's in charge.”

“You want him to think that I'm in charge?”

“You are in charge.”

Miguel's big open face is soft and says everything before he says it. I get embarrassed by Miguel's big open face. It makes me nostalgic. “I'm happy you came back,” he said. “I feel like everything is going to be okay.”

It was late and I was full of dove-dinner rice and prosciutto and booze. “Everything is always okay,” I said. “You farm people are always hopped up about something.”

“You farm people,” he said, “is you.” The yellow picker came back toward us, and he motioned it to slow down. “Have you been on one of these?” he asked me.

“I have never seen this in action.”

He helped me onto the ladder, so that I could climb up the metal grate to sit with the driver. “Take a look,” he said. “I'll meet you at the end of the row.”

Miguel got into the truck, and I stood on the small platform behind the young man driving. Over the hills beyond Firebaugh, the ambient light would keep the sky slightly orange all night. Just past midnight, there was a dull orange tracing the waves of the hills to the west.

The picker turned right around and I went back with it, watching that machine crush everything in front of it. So many wasted grapes. I knew then, I know now, it's economical to use those harvesters, and financially unviable to pick by hand. Still, to watch all that lovely fruit get crushed into the dirt—it made me hungry.

Sitting in that picker and seeing Dad's little truck at the edge of the vineyard, I began to feel slightly overwhelmed, the kind of panic that feels a lot like exhaustion. There were how many rows to pick? Thirty thousand? Three million? I had no idea. I had no idea about anything, and here Miguel wanted to put me in charge.

At the end of two rows I climbed off the picker, and there was his familiar posture, his familiar red flannel jacket, his happy teeth. “I don't know what I'm doing here,” I said.

“Call me when you don't know something,” he said. “You know everything already.”

“Everyone says that,” I told him. “My mother keeps saying that. But then I get into the picker and I don't know the details. What if I don't know how many vineyards there are? I don't know the names of the new managers. What happens when something goes wrong with the trucks? What if a truck breaks down in the middle of a shift?”

“Just worry about your Felix,” he said quietly, handing me a dish towel. My hands had gotten all sticky, hanging on to the railing of the picker.

“He's not mine.”

Miguel poured from his water bottle over my hands to get them clean. “Did you see the light in the west?” he said.

“What does that come from?”

“City and smog,” he said. He took my palms and scrubbed them with the towel. If you grow up on the easy side of a vineyard, you think you only need to wash your fingertips. Lately every gesture was a small humiliation. “It makes the most beautiful vineyard.”

“Dad always got the most beautiful vineyards.”

“Why do you talk in the past tense?” Miguel said.

“I'm sad.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Sad people talk in the past tense,” I said.

He walked me out of the vines, toward Dad's truck. “You don't have a reason to be sad.”

I have always had trouble telling the difference between sadness and anxiety, especially when they're my own.

I got back into the truck and Miguel knocked on the window. “Go slow,” he said. “These tractors don't look, they just pull right out in the middle of the road. You have to see them first.”

“I'll be careful.”

“You don't always see them coming, even if they go slow.”

“Call me when you're on your way to Griffith tomorrow morning,” I said.

“Ingrid. I call you tomorrow afternoon.” I didn't even realize then that only the gondola drivers actually go to the winery. “You worry when you don't need to worry,” he said.

“Does this face look worried?”

“Go slow,” he said again, and rapped his knuckles on the side of the truck. “No one looks out for the other around here.”

I drove back to the main road, past the limit of light from the halogens over the vineyard, and headed north. There were no streetlamps, no traffic lights, no painted lines in the center of the road. Just dark country and the thick smell of ripe fruit, like driving through a vat of fresh juice. I drove past acres of dark orchards and vineyards, dark intersections with two-way stops, past closed gas stations and closed bait shops and boarded-up-for-the-night fruit stands. I drove past acre after acre after acre of fields left fallow for the drought, toward home.

Naturally, Felix did not try to negotiate the price, or claim the grapes weren't what he expected. He paid exactly what he said he would, which is what I knew he would do.

*   *   *

I knew Uncle Felix didn't want to appear to the guys in the bar at the Vineyard that he and I were having any sort of conflict. So the next afternoon I stalked him there at lunch.

“I'm going to pick the Thompsons all this week,” I said to him and Gale Macpherson over fried artichokes and crispy, overchilled viognier. “The tops of the vines are shriveled, Uncle Felix, but the juice is going to be sweet and clammy, just like you like it.”