Valley Fever (22 page)

“Maybe we should.”

“Why isn't Charlie coming?”

“Maybe he will.”

“I mean with her, now.”

“Someone has to work in that family.” That was my favorite line. “If Dad has any old Mondavi, he should bring that out, or ask Felix to bring his. Anne loves the old Mondavi.”

“Oh, Dad's got cases and cases of that stuff.” Mother didn't consider old Mondavi nice wine. Mother thought all the really nice wine came from France, and all the nice cheap wine came from California. The plonk came from Germany or South Africa. This is how all the farmers' wives think. The farmers themselves love their California wine. Fortunately, we farm kids learned to drink by drinking everything from the Blue Nun to the To Kalon to the really old Inglenook, because we'd just steal it from our parents' cellars; we'd mix Lodi plonk or Figeac or Lafite with ice and Sprite, not knowing what was what. It's when you have no idea what's what and you drink it all with impunity that you learn a lot about wine, and why some is good and some is not. That old Mondavi is wonderful.

“And just be nice to Anne. Don't interrogate her,” I said.

“I would never interrogate. I have never interrogated.”

“Order crabs, get the wine.”

“I'm going to call Charlie and ask him to come.” In the background I could hear the channels switching rapidly on the television.

“If you like.”

“It won't be a party without Charlie.”

“We'll see.”

For the first time since my grandmother was alive, Mother would have both me and Anne here for the harvest party, but without Charlie, you see, it wasn't a party.

Mother said, “I'm going to call Charlie and speak to him. He just hates driving over that Grapevine.”

I said, “All right,” when I should have said, “Leave it alone.” But I'd been preoccupied, busy looking out for sprung leaks, fallen branches, grapes hanging too low to the ground. I'd been working and half listening, just as my father had been his entire life. Just as everyone else I had ever known had always been. It felt wonderful.

*   *   *

Off Avenue 24 in Madera, between his vines and a vast swath of pomegranates owned by Paramount, I ran into George Sweet. I expected to—I'd practically driven around looking for him.

“I wondered how long it would be before I saw you out here,” George said. He wore old corduroys and a white button-down pitted yellow under the arms. Even when I had been in love with him, even for the time we lived together in New York, George's shirts had always been yellow under the arms.

“Today's my first day.”

“I mean I wondered how long before you took over.” His cigarette voice sounded, as it always had, as if he'd just woken up from a nap.

“It's a favor to Dad. I'm not really taking over.”

“You're modest.”

“No.”

“I'm going to give you unsolicited advice,” he said. “Don't be modest. No one in this valley gets anything done with modesty.” He squinted at me. George had never worn sunglasses. “Just brawn and swagger.”

“All right. Thank you.”

“You're welcome.” He smiled. “Fresno's not so bad when you've got work to do all day.” He leaned against his truck. We'd pulled up beside one of Paramount's water filtration systems, a gated collection of tanks and pumps half the size of a soccer field. Our trucks were almost exactly the same. The farmers and their white pickups. “I'm going to smoke,” he said.

“Smoke,” I said.

He had the same lighter, the same plain silver Zippo in his pocket. His father's lighter. George's father had died of heart failure when we were in high school.
Click-clack.
“How long are you staying?”

“Through the harvest, I guess.”

“Which harvest?”

“All the harvests.”

“You'll stay through the cab?”

“I guess so. I think so.”

“Long time, Inky.” He inhaled. Even his inhale was the same, as if he were in a hurry. Two hurried seconds while you waited for what he had to say next. “That's a lot of work, you know.”

“Dad asked me to.”

“I knew from how slow that truck was going that you weren't him.”

“I don't want to get dust on your grapes.”

“You're polite.”

“Anyway, I was looking for you.”

“Were you?”

“I was. Mother says if I have any questions I should ask you.”

“Your mother said that?”

“She likes you.”

“Your mother?” He laughed. He put the cigarette out on his shoe, smashing it until he knew it was out, and tossed the butt into the bed of his truck.

“But this place runs itself,” I said.

“Your dad's already sold everything to Felix.”

“It's all juice this year.”

“No one's getting anything for raisins anyway.”

“Where's your juice going?”

“Mello. At least I can predict exactly how they'll fuck me.” He took his cigarettes out of his pocket and tapped the package and put them back. “With your uncle Felix, it's always a surprise.”

“He's very creative.”

“How does your dad feel?”

“He's got a cough, you know.” The open heat felt pure, almost as if dust were sterile. “He has to see some idiot doctor.”

“No, I mean about having all his juice with Felix.”

“Fine, I think.” No one felt fine about anything. “I don't know,” I said. “Maybe nothing is fine.” As always, George gave me that feeling of comfort, the kind of feeling where you end up talking too much.

“It's all right,” George said. “No one is fine this year, which means everyone is. They can't foreclose on everyone, can they.”

“Pistachios are fine.”

“This year, they're not too bad.” He scratched the back of his head, another of his mannerisms that was exactly the same. “What question was it you wanted to ask me?”

“No question,” I said. “Just an excuse to find you.”

“You could ask your uncle Felix questions.”

“Or I could ask you.”

“I can't see you staying here too long.” We'd both tried to get away from this place. We'd tried to get away from this place together.

“Maybe I'll surprise you.”

“Your Fresno State T-shirt surprises me,” he said.

I had forgotten that, even in the summer, you wear long sleeves on the ranch. Otherwise you come back for lunch burnt up to your biceps and crusty with dirt. That day I started a farmer's tan that wouldn't go away until October. “I might want to ask you when to pick the grapes,” I said.

“Oh, Inks,” he said, half laughing, “it doesn't matter what I think. You know Felix is going to pick when he wants to.”

“But still, I want to learn things. I want to know what you think.”

“I'll tell you what I think,” he said. “I think you better not let those Fiestas hang one more night. You're going to lose that crop.”

I knew that. I knew it. “What do I do?”

“You tell Felix to pick or you'll take all your juice someplace else.”

“I can't take it anywhere else. There's a glut, Wilson told me.”

“Felix wants that cab, Inky. I'd call his bluff early on if I were you.”

“Dad has this thing about contracts. He won't back out of a contract.”

George nodded. “That's not going to do you much good this year.”

“It never does us much good.”

“I'd talk to Felix. If you're asking my advice.” He ran his hands through his shorn curls. I knew the tiny dips shaped like oysters at the base of his back. I had to shake those oysters out of my imagination.

“I was. I am.”

“You have a little while before you have to think about the red grapes.”

He got back in his truck and drove on. People didn't really say goodbye around here. We'd all see each other again the next day, or the day after that.

*   *   *

Anne thought my tan was hilarious.

“You look like a cartoon.”

“Why are you always such a bitch?” I had been in the truck nearly all day, and still I had a sunburn and dirt beneath my nails.

“I don't mean you're a cartoon in a pejorative sense.”

She was sitting at the kitchen table by the time I got home. She smelled like cucumber perfume and cigarette smoke. She looked tired; her peachy cheeks sagged just a little and she had a line where her dimple usually is. There was a cystic pimple forming beside her nostril, and she kept touching it. The smoking, especially, is how I knew that Charlie and she had decided to separate.

“You don't like my Fresno State T-shirt?” I said.

“We're excited about the Bulldogs,” Dad said. “Aren't you excited about the Bulldogs, Anne?” He had a big book about the Vanderbilts in front of him. Dad liked to read about rich families. Earlier in the day he had been to the oncologist, and they had scheduled a small surgery the coming week to look at the spots on his lung. The whole episode felt like air. Just something else happening.

“Go 'dogs,” Anne said obligingly.

Mother started to set up the backgammon board. “Who's going to play?”

It was early evening, when out in the country the sound of trucks passing had stopped and the crickety sound of night hadn't yet started. It's quietest at dusk. Soon the harvests would start in the surrounding vineyards and then the grinding of harvesters and tractors and gondolas would fill up the silence.

There was polenta on the stove and saut
é
ed mushrooms—cremini mushrooms dropped off by Clara Masterson in the afternoon.

“Ingrid said to ask you about the Vocis,” Anne said to Mother. The Vocis were swingers, which I'd heard at the Vineyard that day during lunch, where I'd eaten quickly at the bar.

“That's not true,” said Dad. “It's just not true.”

I said, “Do you know Jack McGourty? He's an appraiser. I sat by him at lunch.” Jack McGourty would tell you just about anything if you engaged him in chitchat.

“Tell me about them,” Anne said.

“Nothing to do but swing,” I said.

“It's quite disgusting,” Mother said.

“It probably goes on everywhere,” Anne said. “This is the only place people actually care to gossip about it.”

“Inky,” Mother said, “what else have you learned over lunch?”

“The Vineyard is where you go to learn things,” I said. “Why didn't you tell me that, Dad?”

“We've learned plenty at the Vineyard,” Dad said.

“I didn't know there was more to learn every day.”

“Always more to learn,” he said. “I prefer to come home for lunch.” He didn't take his eyes off the Vanderbilts. “Your mother cooks better than the Vineyard.”

“One night Jackie Voci came over here for drinks,” Mother said, “wearing a sweater over her nightie.”

“Aha,” Anne said. “I knew you had more information.”

“We're all lazy, though,” I said. “I sometimes wear my pajamas in public.”

Mother continued, “Then she took off the sweater and said she was too hot. ‘I'm having hot flashes,' is what she said. ‘Oh, I'm so hot!' she said.”

Every day you were confronted with these tiny examples of what the boredom of Fresno could do to you.

“Maybe she had hot flashes,” Anne said. She took the dice cup and rattled it. “I'll play,” she said.

“Your father shared his drink with her,” Mother said, emptying dice across the board.

“That's a good story,” Anne said.

“Dad,” I said, “you won't even share your drink with me.”

“Yes, Daddy, gross.”

Dad looked up from his book at the window for a little while and then said, “You know fishing in Alaska a couple years ago, I was carded.”

“How many years ago?” Anne said.

Mother said, “He was forty. You were forty when that happened, Neddy. Not a couple of years ago.”

“It doesn't seem that long ago,” he said.

“What kind of bar was that where you were carded?” Mother said it like she already knew. She tossed out that question like a toy Dad would wind right up.

“That was a bar with naked girls in it,” he said. Both of them smiled. They laughed together just briefly, a secret laugh that left me and Anne out.

Anne said, “You let Mrs. Voci come on to you?”

Mother said, “He encouraged it.”

“Anyway, your mother doesn't allow me to see them anymore.”

We had the television going in the kitchen, a very old rerun of
Three's Company
. All four of us knew the lyrics to the theme song by heart. Anne sang loud and clearly, as if this were an audition. She still needed to show the rest of us how talented she was. Later I would tell Bootsie, “She blow-dries her hair every single morning,” and Bootsie would look at me like she felt sorry for all of us, for the whole town, for everyone who'd ever read the news or had parents or needed to leave the house.

Dad said, then, “I got carded because your mother takes good care of me.”

I could see Anne vibrate with something to say that she would not say. Instead she said, “Oh, Mother. You do take such good care of us all.”

Mother just rolled the dice.

“Such warmth and care,” Anne continued, as if to herself.

Daddy read his book. Mother studied the board, visibly counting with the staccato nod of her head.

It took me a long time to realize that Anne's and my estrangement from the place where we grew up wasn't so much the the fault of the town itself—what William Saroyan called “the terrible boredom and stupidity and meanness of Fresno”—but more the repellent magnetic force between our mother and us.

*   *   *

Later Anne came to my room while I was changing, of course. It's like she knows exactly when I'll have no pants on. This is one of the things Anne does to make sure she's in control: she barges in on you at your most vulnerable. Actors are all very cavalier about nudity.