So Brave, Young, and Handsome (27 page)

“But you have had quite a life,” said Claudio, for word of Glendon’s exploits and the company he kept had drifted back from time to time.

“No, I expect yours has been the life,” said Glendon. He then described how Blue had ridden into his mind, persisting there day and night, carrying her rifle. He described the dread and regret that came over him. “Now I am getting old and wish to lay things down. I came to make apology.”

“Apology.”

“That’s right.”

Claudio appeared to think about this for a while. He had gotten the habit of thinking a long time before he spoke. Sometimes he seemed almost to go to sleep.

“She will be home by dark,” he said. “I will talk to her then. Don’t come up to the house until I put a light on the porch.” He turned, then added, “The bunkhouse is empty. Go clean up if you like. There is a well in the back.”

Glendon washed and put on a clean shirt he had carried all the way from Minnesota folded in tissue paper. He shaved the whiskers from his face and took the end of his whiskey and poured it on the ground outside the bunkhouse. He had nothing left to eat in his panniers, but after a while Claudio hobbled down with a covered plate. Glendon said it wasn’t necessary but Claudio left the plate in his hands
and went back to the house. Lifting the lid Glendon found cold chicken and green beans and two slices of Spanish bread flavored with anise seed. At this all his nervousness went away. He sat down saying over the food a blessing taught to him by Crealock the preacher, whom he suddenly missed. He took the plate to the back door of the bunkhouse and ate standing outside, looking up at the hills while the shadows lengthened. Afterward he returned to the well and pumped up some water and cleaned the plate and the knife and fork, then sat down to wait for nightfall.

“It’s peculiar, to reach your destination,” he told me. “You think you’ll arrive and perform the thing you came for and depart in contentment. Instead you get there and find distance still to go.”

I nodded and he went on. Sitting in the darkening bunkhouse he could hear noises from the house—a gramophone, a pan being scraped. Then a horse entered the yard trotting. He knew it was Blue. He didn’t go to the window but sat in the bunkhouse knowing she was there. He felt something he couldn’t identify, as though he might be someone else entirely from the man he had become.

She left the horse tied in front of the house and went in. Forgetting his clean shirt Glendon walked out and patted the horse. He unslung its reins from the porch rail and led the animal to the barn. It was a compliant bay a full hand taller than his Sparrow, and it nudged him forward to a tie stall where he removed its saddle and lifted its feet one at a time. He spoke to the horse in congenial tones—there were oats in a canted bin and he measured some into a bucket and brushed the horse while it lipped the oats. When he got back to the bunkhouse his shirt was full of horsehair and he had no other to put on. He looked out the window and saw Claudio stepping out on the porch to hang a lantern on a nail. Glendon crossed the yard brushing off his shirt and saw Blue standing in the lit entryway behind her husband.

I said, “Was she glad to see you?”

Glendon smiled. “She didn’t honestly say much to me, Monte. No—up to now, Claudio has pretty much done the talking. He’s a rare fellow. I hadn’t reckoned on it.”

“And what have you been doing, these two weeks?”

He nodded round us at the lopped and suffering grove. “Working. They employ this fellow Joaquin who shows me what to do. He’s got one arm and talks Spanish twenty hours a day. I can’t hardly keep up with him.”

“How long will you stay?”

“Until she lets me talk to her. Or until she tells me to go.” There was a cumbersome pause, then he said, “What about you, Monte—how come you’re here? Ain’t you going home to Susannah?”

“Yes, pretty soon I think.”

He held my eye. “Oh, now, Becket.”

I dropped my gaze.

He said, “You know what I’ve discovered?”

I shook my head and he said, “The world’s unkind to fools.”

He seemed altered, as I said; taller, even. His motions more exact.

I said, “Glendon. You are sober.”

“Yes, I gave it up.”

“Are you glad?”

“Sometimes.”

“I have heard it is a tough habit to leave behind.”

“Tougher to keep up,” he replied.

“Are you a bandit too?” said Claudio Soto.

I stood on the lamplit veranda shaking hands with our vivid and crumbling host. His hands were purple and his hair a white phantom. He wore the cavernous pants of declining men.

He said, “This is your plan, Glendon? Fetch up all your
compañeros
and rob an old man of his orchard?”

I said, “I’d be grateful for a place to stay a few days. I’ll work with Glendon if I may sleep in your bunkhouse.”

“It’s more and more interesting,” said Claudio. “Who will walk in next?”

We followed this old ruin into his house. It was adobe and cool as a shovel of earth. When my eyes became accustomed I saw patterned rugs, furniture of massive build, on the west wall Christ crucified, and a low bookshelf on which half the volumes were dictionaries and reference works in diverse languages. Later I would discover biographies of poets and musicians, histories of conquest, theoretical investigations into alchemy and the physics of time and the character of God, but for now Claudio pitched away toward his kitchen and we followed out of fear he would crash to the floor.

“Sit and rest,” he said. He opened the icebox and got down on one knee and selected a clay pitcher of water and two ripened limes. Slowly and at some cost he stood and retrieved three crystal glasses from an open shelf; he wiped them with flour sacking, sliced the ends off the limes and with startling vigor in his purple hands squeezed the limes over the pitcher until their juice slid into the cold water. The clay
sweated and ticked. Claudio wiped his hands on the sacking and filled the glasses and set them before us.

“How have you arrived here?” he inquired of me.

I never tasted better water. It made my words run together. “Glendon’s my neighbor up in Minnesota. He asked me to come along but we got separated. It’s taken me some time to catch up.”

“You are not one of his friends from the earlier days?”

“No.”

“What do you know of those times?” Claudio seemed amused.

“That they are long over,” I replied.

“They have no bearing on your friendship, these bygone sins?” I was quiet and looked at Glendon across the table. Clearly he had told this man something of me already, for Claudio said, as if to clarify, “That your friend was something besides his appearance—this was not important to you?”

“It seemed important, once or twice.”

On the kitchen wall hung a painting in a gilt frame. It was large for kitchen decor and represented a melded geometry of parabolas and planes. Its colors were reds and browns and there was a gold hoop at the bottom like an eclipse. Watching my gaze Claudio said, “My grandfather is responsible for that. Do you like it?”

It is better to say I aspired to like it. It was a peculiar painting—though it first seemed a portrait of confusion, it soon began to take the form of a landscape with trapezoidal fields, wishbone rivers, and orchard trees standing straight out from the curve of the world. The gold hoop was not the sun but a solar reflection in a pond or ocean.

“Was he famous?” I asked, to gain time. For the old man’s sake I wanted to like the painting, and felt it beginning to happen.

“Only a little, and too late to make him rich. Fame arrived when his worship Porfirio bought several of his works, but by then my grandfather was old, he was practically Moses.”

Glendon said, “Monte here, his wife is an artist too.”

Claudio nodded at the picture. “What would she think of this, then?”

“She would enjoy it,” I said, with increasing certainty.

“He spoke with an angel once—my grandfather,” mused our host. “The angel told him there were colors deep in the heavens that have no correlatives on earth.” He watched me with his merry weasel eyes. “Your wife the artist, has she spoken to angels?”

“Not that I know of.”

“God Himself loves artists,” said Claudio, adding, with a wince, “However, He is ambivalent about doctors.” He sighed and tottered with us back to the porch, where he lit two additional kerosene lanterns and lifted them onto ceiling hooks with his cane.

He was hoisting the second lamp when we heard the horse coming into the yard. Claudio was holding Glendon’s arm for support. Glendon himself wore a paralytic expression, and I knew I was about to meet the woman for whom he had crossed a country to express regret.

She cantered into the light on a leggy bay mare.

She was in her late forties, a little slumped, her silvering hair roped up in a braid behind her brimmed hat.

“Hello,
carina
,” said Claudio.

“Who is the visitor?” she briskly replied, looking me over. I confess to being surprised by her plainness. In all Glendon’s telling, Blue had appeared as a snap-eyed Guinevere, yet here was an ordinary round-shouldered woman with a lined and skeptical expression.

“This is my friend Monte Becket,” Glendon said. “Monte, here’s Blue.”

“Call me Ar
ā
ndano,” she said.

“I’m glad to meet you.”

She smiled and swung down from the horse. She wasn’t plain to Glendon, of course; she was the most gracious part of his long history and evidence of the life he might have lived.

She half-hitched the reins to the porch rail and climbed the steps to Claudio, where she took his arm in a way that made him appear the strong one. She stood at his side with her arm around his waist. I felt a mighty sadness for my friend.

Claudio said, “Monte would like to stay with us a day or two.”

I said, “If it’s not convenient I’ll be on my way.”

But her eyes softened toward me and she said, “The writer of
Martin Bligh
.”

“Why, yes.” I was only startled for a moment—by Glendon’s sidecast eyes I understood he had given over his copy.

“I read your book,” Ar
ā
ndano said. “You describe horses fairly well, Mr. Becket. Do you enjoy riding?”

“Honestly, no, ma’am. Horses don’t think much of me, as it turns out.”

She said, “Are you writing another story?”

“I’m afraid not, ma’am. That was the end of that.”

Nodding as though this were probably for the best, she shifted suddenly and said, “You arrive at a busy moment. Tomorrow my tenacious Claudio must cook supper enough for twenty men working at Pond’s. If you are rested, I will ask you to help.”

“Thank you, of course,” I said, and watched Ar
ā
ndano grip her husband’s arm as he moved back into the house. When the door shut I turned to see what Glendon made of this request, but he had disappeared.

Pond’s was another frostbitten orchard a few miles up the Rienda. If anything it had suffered worse than the Sotos’ because, according to Claudio, it was another hundred feet above sea level where winters were incrementally colder. The twenty men were neighors from other farms and fruit concerns who threw in together when need occasioned. Sometimes the needs were fortifying ones such as a heavy harvest, but not lately. As Claudio remarked, “Turning a citrus grove into bonfires is depressing work all by yourself.”

Glendon was gone with the ox and flatbed before I woke. The world seemed old and in disrepair as I walked through heavy dew to the house, where Claudio had already set round loaves to rise under a floury cloth.

“Do you want breakfast?” he inquired, by way of greeting.

“I’ll wait.”

“Good. There’s an oven in the yard. Clean it out and make a hot fire. Wait—where are your shoes?” he demanded.

“They were wet.”

“Put on your shoes, then start the fire,” were his stern instructions.

The oven looked like a clay beehive or troll hut with its black chimney hole and scorched iron door. Ash ghosted out when I opened it; when I reached in with a shovel two pale scorpions slid into the sunshine. I felt a little sick—I’d gotten all the way to California without seeing any scorpions; honestly, a Midwesterner isn’t accustomed to scorpions. Peering into the oven I could see there was also a robust tribe of spiders in residence but hard luck for them.

I made the fire, watching where I knelt and where my hands went. Claudio had pointed out kindling and the woodshed, and I found an old bellows on the shed wall and wheezed at the flames until they drove me back. Leaving the iron door open an inch I returned to the house, where my host was stewing hens.

“Is it lit?”

“Yes.”

He nodded toward a counter. “There is a knife. Quarter the peppers and leave the seeds in. I am cross this morning, thank you.”

The directions seemed urgent so I blistered along, chopping and quartering until we had a pot of gravy to water your eyes. I said, “Did you always cook?”

“No. Ar
ā
ndano used to cook; then she began taking in bookwork and left the kitchen to Joaquin. Now Joaquin works with the trees.”

“A big job, it appears.”

“Not as big as it used to be,” Claudio said. He touched a loaf under its sheet. “Go check the fire.”

It had burned to mostly white ash which he had me shovel out. We then lifted the loaves one at a time into the oven with a longhandled implement like an oar. It worked reasonably well, though one of the loaves tipped off and deflated on the earthen floor.

Claudio said, “Now the pies.”

Peach, blackberry, apple—he set me to peeling while he cut lard into flour with a pair of knives held between his fingers. While we worked he explained his orchard. Seven years earlier, “in fat times,” he’d read in a newspaper that a man near Sacramento had imported some dozens of young citrus from Tahiti. The trees were described as dwarfish with shiny leaves and knobby twigs; the oranges they bore had a greenish tinge but were dawn-sweet, with so much juice they burst when dropped. Claudio at that time was well-off enough to fund intuitions. He sought out the captain of a trade barkentine running salt pork and liquor to the Cook Islands, sandalwood and native exotica back. The trader agreed to deliver three hundred saplings in watered burlap but required a stiff deposit. Five months later the bark arrived from the island of Rarotonga. The trader refused to see Claudio
but sent one of his crew to demand he pay in full before the trees were off-loaded to the dock.