Valley Fever (28 page)

*   *   *

The table grapes were all off the vine. Raisin trays were laid between rows. The landscape had started its seasonal shift from green to gold. The wet ground had gone from orange to yellow—that dry, dark yellow dirt that means the very center of the harvest has arrived.

Wilson came over to play backgammon with Mom. Lately he would come over in the afternoons, around teatime, around the time I came home for a snack. Backgammon was the only thing that could distract Mother from her cards. Mother never played with the doubling cube unless she was playing with Wilson. She nearly always beat him.

“I don't like how he's letting the cab hang out there,” Mother said. “It's time to pick them.” She gammoned Wilson, who was quiet.

“The sugar's on the low end,” I said. “Is Felix waiting for the sugar to go up or the weight to go down, Willy?” I refilled his gimlet while I asked him. It was a trick I had learned from Felix himself—always refill a person's glass as you're asking him questions.

“Felix isn't thinking about anything except the wine,” he said.

“The business,” Mother said, “not the wine.”

“The wine is the business,” Wilson said.

“You kids,” Mother said. “Everything is easy for you. Why don't you go out there and plant a vine? See how you like working in the dirt.”

“I'm working in the dirt,” I said.

“You don't know what working in the dirt is,” Mother said.

“Like you've worked in the dirt,” I said.

“Don't patronize me, Ingrid, I'm your mother. I know more than you do. I've lived longer.”

Wilson smiled and reset the game. “I'm going to owe you a lot of money,” he said to Mother.

“We're not playing for money.”

“Oh yes, for money. Today we play for money.”

“What's different today?” Mother said.

“Today we play for money, tomorrow we play for Ingrid's hand in marriage,” he said, giving me a sideways wink.

Mother said, “What do I get?”

“We don't place bets in this house,” I said.

“In the Central Valley, every day is a bet,” Wilson said. It's legal in central California to put your own and your family's and your ancestor's labor on the line in a gamble, but putting nickels into a slot machine is not.

“And the bank isn't gambling on us anymore,” Mother said. “What they need is for someone to reassure them what a good bet we are. They need to hear it from Felix, who is keeping his mouth shut. I have never known Felix to keep his mouth shut. Have you, Wilson?” She carefully moved wisps of bangs from her forehead. Mother had been seeing the hairdresser once every two weeks, and she tried to keep her blow-out shape for as long as possible. After a week, Mother's hair still looked all right, but she started to get that stink of an unwashed scalp.

Wilson tossed his dice across the board. “You know Felix doesn't listen to me.”

“I don't feel like playing, really,” Mother said.

“That was only two games,” said Wilson. “I came all the way out here for two games?”

“That's not why you came out,” Mother said. “Ingrid, will you pour me a glass of wine? I can't drink the lime in those gimlets.”

“I can't afford to be caught gambling anyway,” Wilson said. “Every time he stops me, the cop at the corner of the 99 and Ashlan pretends he doesn't think I've been drinking.”

“A warning every time?” I said.

“It's the Semper Fi sticker on the back of my truck,” he said. “I'd rather not use up all my luck on backgammon.” Wilson had bought the truck from an ex-marine.

“You've had no luck in backgammon,” Mother said. “You'd better figure out some other way to get Ingrid to marry you.”

“I'm not getting married,” I said. “I'm a woman of the land now.”

“Women of the land get married,” said Wilson. “Farmers need families. That's the way it works.”

“Families do nothing but split farms,” Mother said.

“When you have a family, you have more people dedicated to the same venture. You have a team,” said Wilson. He swirled his drink. “I'd like a team.”

“You'll have more adversaries,” Mother said.

“A family is a gamble, too,” I said.

“Not with me,” Wilson said. “My family's not going to be like that.”

“Like what?” said Mother.

“Splitting things apart,” he said. “My family's going to make wine and eat peaches.”

Mother said, “That's a very nice thought, Wilson. Where did you get it?” She kept her eyes on the board. She smoothed an eyebrow with her index finger.

“And no one's going to build a shopping center,” he said. “Because it won't be as lucrative as wine grapes.”

“Right,” said Mother.

I filled Wilson's glass with more ice. “I like these notions, Willy.” I patted his damp back. “I like your plans.”

“I need to find a good girl,” he said.

“You will,” I told him.

He said, “I already have. But you don't like me back.” He filled his mouth with ice and began to make windy sucking sounds.

“Ingrid likes you,” Mother said. “But Ingrid can only fall in love with men who have no love in them at all.”

She said these things while counting the number of spaces her checker could move. “Thank you, Mother.”

She said, “Ingrid doesn't understand a man whose life is ruled by seasons and crops.”

“Mother, please stop.”

Wilson watched my mother count spaces. He nodded along. He said, “Ingrid's life is run by crops right now.”

In two more rolls, Mother managed to lift all her checkers from the board. “Look at that,” she said. “Good luck.”

 

22.

Beneath the arbor next to the house, beside the vineyard, Mother lined jam jars filled with sunflowers along a rectangular table seating twenty on each side. We used Grandmother's Metlox grapevine dishes, as we always had for harvest parties. Beside the table, set on top of the weeds mown down: a bar with rows of wine bottles and a drinks dispenser full of sidecars. Anne draped white Christmas tree lights across the top of the arbor.

Daddy slept late into the morning while Mother ironed white napkins. On the porch in the back of the kitchen, Miguel assembled and scrubbed clean his old red barbecue and the two we kept in the garage. Dad, with his lungs, wouldn't oversee the roasting of the turkeys, so I'd promised to do it for him. It would give me a reason to sequester myself on the back porch. At parties anywhere, I always preferred to be in the kitchen or a back bedroom or outside with the smokers. I preferred to sort of linger on the edge, where the party really isn't a party. Often I would take off my glasses so that everything was a soothing blur, and in this way people really had to make an effort if they wanted to speak to me. I didn't want to have casual conversations with neighbors and acquaintances about what had brought me back to Fresno, what had happened with that genocide comedy I'd been writing, whether that had been me in the truck last night following the harvester from row to row.

There is little more comforting than following a harvester from row to row, watching all those grapes pour into the bin, watching all that work come to fruition, and all the hope and anticipation of the money that will come.

That day, I had gone to sleep after breakfast and then slept past lunch. This was not my normal sleep pattern, but I had never had much of a normal sleep pattern. The harvest had gone on until seven or eight in the morning, when the day and the grapes began to warm up.

*   *   *

“What are you smoking?”

“Well, God, it's a cigarette.” Anne was arranging dozens of white votives between the jars of sunflowers. The brilliant thing about sunflowers is their interminable-seeming life span in the Fresno summer devil-heat. Nothing is more cheerful in 105 degrees than a sunflower refusing to shrivel.

“At nine in the morning?”

“Don't force me to tell you how much I smoke now.”

“I have to go to bed.”

“You always have to go to bed.”

“I haven't been to sleep yet. At one point I fell asleep in the truck and lost the picker.” I'd driven up Avenue 7 and found Kappas's pickers, but I couldn't find ours and I had to call Miguel.

“They have drugs for that, you know. Prescription drugs. They give them to astronauts.”

“I know,” I said, “but you can't drink on them.”

Anne dropped the end of her cigarette into an extra jam jar. “You can drink on anything,” she said.

Anne's auditions had gone well. She would know in weeks whether to have the air-conditioning fixed in the Beachwood house. She had now begun to think of herself as an Artist and smoked cigarettes before breakfast.

“Mom gets these ideas in her head,” I said.

“She's making very little sense these days.” She opened a box of votives and began to pull the wicks up straight. “But so little makes sense, having this party doesn't seem like the strangest of all.”

*   *   *

That evening, Uncle Felix brought Debby to the party. We hadn't seen her since the night he had dumped her in the canal, and I guess we all assumed he hadn't seen her, either. She didn't look so bad this time: she'd worn a simple cotton sundress printed with blue moths, tied with a ribbon at the waist. She'd shaved down her talons and painted them a muted pink. She wore her curls loose and she looked pretty, almost girlish, and younger than I remembered.

They were among the first guests to arrive.

“Oh!” Mother said, taking Debby's hand in hello. “The manicurist!”

“Debby,” said Felix, flat.

“Ned! Felix has brought his manicurist.” She winked at Debby. “We thought we'd seen the last of you after Felix tried to drown you!”

Dad gave Debby a genuine hug hello. All Dad's hugs are genuine.

Mother kept on, “I don't think we've ever had a manicurist at the harvest party. A real working girl! Felix loves working girls, don't you, Felix?”

“Evelyn,” just saying her name was an admonition.

“I'm just being silly.” Mother smiled. “You know that, Felix, I like to tease.” Mother kept that bright, delighted smile. Her lips were vibrant red, a glamorous shade called Flame she ordered directly from Sweden and wore only a few nights a year. “We're so glad you could come, Debby. Hands are always very rough in the harvest season. You could be very useful around here tonight,” she said, and moved on, giving Felix a quick pat on the arm.

Later, even Mother would wonder why she had been so awful.

The Vocis were there, floozing all over, pretending to be a little bit drunk. Mrs. Voci had worn high heels and wobbled uncertainly on the dirt beneath the arbor, beside the bar, along the vineyard. Bint and Clara Masterson came together, confirming the rumors of their reconciliation, and brought an ostentatious bottle of champagne. (Felix and others would later complain it was in bad taste not to bring a California wine.) That terrible Chris, the angry man in the lobster pants from the dove dinner, had been invited by his golf buddies and wouldn't leave Anne alone. We had to set an extra place for him at the table. He asked for vodka, but Mother told him to drink the sidecars. Eventually he got too drunk and fell asleep in a lounge chair by the pool.

“You'll miss all the small dishes,” George said when he found me at the grill, wearing that white wraparound dress my mother loved but that I hated, which is why I was wearing the dress to barbecue three forty-pound turkeys. “And scintillating gossip.”

“Someone has to cook dinner in this family.”

George and I had hidden from everyone at these harvest dinners since we were fourteen. Then, the harvest dinners were much more elaborate, more densely populated, all the intimidating wine people and farmers had attended, and George and I would hide out on the bench beside the tennis court or down at the river, drinking the dinner wine straight from the bottle.

Tonight he helped me monitor the turkeys, which had been slow-roasting since two. He wore a soft pink linen shirt with the cuffs rolled up to his elbows. His hands were tanned and scarred by injuries I didn't recognize. Bee scars, probably. Vine and tree scars.

“How much tonnage do you think you lost?” he said.

“Oh, George, I don't want to talk about the farm. I don't think either of us has good news to share.”

“I'll bet he got you for bunch rot, too, didn't he?”

“George.”

“He'll add water to that wine, you know.”

“I think Daddy just didn't have the right contract, because it's Felix, and he didn't think Felix would nail him on these things. Daddy's big on gentleman's agreements, and Felix isn't much of a gentleman.”

“There was no bunch rot on those grapes.”

I turned to him. He sweated slightly from the heat of the evening. Beads of perspiration formed against the hollow of his throat, and I wanted to touch him, to wipe the slick of sweat off his throat, to lick and bite and devour him. Sometimes the thrill of seeing George next to me became so physically overwhelming that I had to step away. I moved back from the grill. “I have this feeling that everything is going to be okay,” I said. “The cabernet is gorgeous, I mean really beautiful, plus there's a lot on the vine.” Usually it was one or the other: a small yield of beautiful fruit or a large yield of an average-tasting crop. “You've seen the cab, right? I know Felix won't let those grapes hang.”

“That's going to burn,” he said, pointing to the bird.

“It's not going to burn. I've done this before.” I moved one of the turkeys toward the side of its kettle, away from the center of the heat.

“It's like, with these guys, you have to learn the same lesson over and over and over,” he said. “But truly, I will never sell to Mello again. I'd rather sell to one of the small guys and wait until April to get paid.”