All You Get Is Me (6 page)

The little girl’s father lowers his menu and watches us. I know him. Everyone does. He’s the ne’er-do-well son of the biggest landowner in the county, Samuel Burk. His name is Brody. His dad used to run cattle but he recently got tired of it. He somehow got his land rezoned, sold off all the livestock, and now Brody is selling the land off like pieces of a patchwork quilt for development into crappy tract homes. He ran for congressman of our district in the last election and lost. He’s still smarting from that. My dad calls him “Big Hat, No Cattle” in reference to the black cowboy hat Brody wears around town. He’s anti-farm, pro-development, and he’s very vocal about his wish to run every migrant farmworker out of here. When the ranch was still running, Brody’s dad, Sam, was forced to hire Mexican ranch hands. Ranch work had lost its appeal to the kids growing up around here. Brody was still working for his dad even though it’s rumored that they never got along. Apparently, Sam used to get blind drunk and knock the crap out of Brody. He ended up in the hospital with a broken collarbone once after Sam threw him down a flight of stairs. Brody took it out on the Mexicans. He refused to learn any Spanish; he taunted them and called them stupid. There was a rumor floating around here that he and his “good ol’ boy” idiot friends got drunk and took a couple of Mexican ranch hands out in his truck, allegedly to work on some water wells. The Mexicans were never heard from again. No one looked for them very hard. Mexicans disappear from around here all the time, and since they don’t technically exist, no one cares too much.

I look right through Brody and he raises his menu again. His long-suffering wife, a former beauty queen who won Miss Something Or Other a decade ago, blots at a puddle of soda with a stack of napkins. The kid who created it, one of a set of twins, dumps more soda on the table and watches his mom defiantly while the other twin laughs.

Two Hispanic men sitting on stools at the counter look over their shoulders at us and exchange glances with the short-order cook, Juan, who’s from El Salvador. Millie is oblivious. When you’re in her diner, you’re in her country and she says what she thinks.

“Can I get you girls anything else?” she asks.

“Nah. Just the bill.” I smile at her.

“You say hi to your dad for me, okay?” she says, dropping the bill on the table.

“I will, Millie, thanks.”

Just as I’m digging around in the pocket of my jeans for my half of the bill, the bell on the front door of the diner tinkles and Storm looks up, amused.

“Well, it looks like your boyfriend found the only edible food in town.” She looks smug. Her point has been made.

I look over my shoulder. Forest makes his way over to a stool at the counter and orders a coffee to go from Millie. He makes eye contact with Storm and nods. When he sees me, he gets up off the stool and walks over to our booth. His book bag is on his shoulder and he’s wearing the Misfits T-shirt again. Millie watches all this with some interest as she puts his coffee near the register and wipes down the counters.

Now he’s standing in front of our booth looking slightly uncomfortable.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” we both say. I scramble for topics.

Storm, a conversational magician, jumps in. “I was just telling Roar here how you’re from L.A. How do you like country life?”

He shrugs. “It’s pretty minimal but it’s okay, I guess. The open space is good for the head.”

It appears I’ve become mute. I rifle through my brain files for L.A. stories. The only one I come up with is the time I threw up on my shoes at Disneyland. No, that’s no good.

“Yeah, I suppose,” says Storm, nudging me with her platform sandal. “I guess I know what you mean, but then I always say it’s a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live here.”

Forest stuffs his hands into the front pockets of his jeans and laughs. He glances at me. I offer up a thin smile. God, I wish I had some fruit to give him. I’m so much better at this when I’m standing behind a bunch of zucchini. It gives me a purpose, something to do with my hands, which are now nervously playing with my hair.

“Well, you must miss your girlfriend. You do have a girlfriend, don’t you?” asks Storm.

“No.” One hand comes out of a pocket and scratches his head.

I kick Storm in the shin. She glares at me, her eyes wide.

Forest nods toward my camera. “What have you got there, a Nikon?”

“Yeah. An FM.”

“Cool. What do you shoot? Color or black-and-white?”

“Mostly black-and-white, a bit of color.”

“May I?” He picks up my camera off the seat.

“Be my guest.”

“Digital?”

“Nah, I’m old-school.” Now we’re getting somewhere.

“Where do you get it processed?”

“I mostly do my own. I have a darkroom. Some of it I take to the Looking Glass in Berkeley.” The truth is I give it to Steve to drop off for me.

The look on his face tells me that I might be racking up some cool points with him. He looks through the viewfinder at me and adjusts the focus. He snaps a photo before I have a chance to make my camera face.

“Nice picture,” he says, laying the camera down carefully. “Well, my coffee’s ready. I’ll see you around, I guess.”

I grope for meaning in his last words but maybe he just meant “I’ll see you around.” Around where? The barn dance? The book club? The Old Timer’s Cookout? Target practice? He strolls over to the register and pays Millie for the coffee. The bell tinkles again and he’s gone, walking up the street the way he came. I crane my neck and watch him out the glass window till he disappears.

“Okay, you really suck at talking to guys,” says Storm, disgusted.

“I know, I know. I never said I was any good at it.”

She shrugs. “Well, he’s weird anyway. He likes you, though.”

“How can you tell?”

“It was pretty obvious. Man, Roar, sometimes it’s really hard to believe you’re a city girl.”

On the way home, riding behind Storm on her scooter, her little skirt flapping in the breeze for everyone driving by to get a good look at her underwear (and by “everyone” I mean four cars), I muse over Forest. How do you figure out a guy like that? Most of the people around here can be sorted into nice tidy categories just by observing a few clues. If a guy drives a truck with nine-foot wheels and a rifle rack, well, I think you can pretty much figure out how he voted in the last election and you could probably even go so far as to say that he doesn’t support feminism. If a person is driving a truck that runs on biodiesel with a Grateful Dead bumper sticker and he or she is wearing Birkenstocks, it’s not too hard to fill in the rest. But Forest? He’s a tough one. He’s not giving me too many clues, and if Storm is right and he likes me, he’s playing it pretty cool.

Storm drops me at my mailbox and I walk up the road toward the house. I’m wondering where Rufus got to until I see a familiar truck parked next to my dad’s. It belongs to Reynaldo Valdez. He’s a grape grower from the next county over and a good friend of my dad’s. Rufus loves Reynaldo more than life itself, which makes me think that he’s a very good judge of character. When Reynaldo visits, no one else exists for Rufus; a gang of wandering thieves could rob us blind and Rufus would just sit there licking Reynaldo’s hand.

Reynaldo came to California from Mexico at sixteen and lied about his age to get a job in the vineyards. He has a third-grade education but he worked really hard. He rode a bike he bought for twenty dollars to the vineyard every day. Now he manages nine hundred acres of wine grapes in two counties. In the last few years, he started bottling wine under the Valdez name. His success story is rare, though. Reynaldo has been a U.S. citizen since 1996 but most of the Latinos who come to California from Mexico to work the vineyards are undocumented and most of them won’t ever be citizens. My dad goes on and on about how congress wants to spend billions to keep these people out. The California wine industry would be crippled without them. Not to mention the agriculture industry. Reynaldo met my dad back when we lived in the city. My dad defended his nephew, who’d been charged with jacking a car in the Presidio. His nephew was in Sacramento at the time of the carjacking. It was a clear case of mistaken identity. Reynaldo and my dad got on like a house on fire and they’ve been good friends ever since.

I pick up my pace and skip up the wooden porch steps and into the house. Reynaldo is sitting at the table with my dad. They each have a glass of red wine in front of them, and a dusty bottle sits in the middle of the table next to Reynaldo’s signature straw cowboy hat. When Reynaldo sees me, he jumps from his chair and gives me a bear hug.

“Aurora borealis! Let me look at you!” he says in his thickly accented English. He stands back and holds my hand up in the air, spinning me around as though we’re dancing. “
Hermosa
, beautiful! Senorita, if I were a young man I would run off with you!”

“Stop it, Reynaldo.” I giggle. He’s been promising to run away with me since I was six. His charm always melts me into a puddle. He has the kind of face you could look at for hours: darkly handsome with intense laughing eyes, broad cheekbones, and dazzling white teeth. I know that he wants to tell me that I look like my mother, who adored him, but he knows better than to say that in front of my dad. Rufus hangs on his every word and tries to situate himself as close as possible to Reynaldo without actually getting in his lap. Reynaldo sits back down in his chair and absentmindedly scratches Rufus’s head.

“Aurora, try our new cabernet.”

He hands me his glass and I take a sip. The deep, woody scent travels up my nose. It tastes rich and grapey and old. It makes me think of cool dark rooms made of oak.

“Delicious.” I smack my lips. “The best so far.”

He beams. “We produced only one hundred cases and all of them are spoken for already,” he says proudly.

My dad leans back in his chair. He sips his wine and grins. He’s watched Reynaldo struggle for so many years and it does him good to see Reynaldo happy and successful. We haven’t seen Reynaldo out here for some time; it’s a long drive over here from where he lives, and I have a feeling he might be here to talk to my dad about the Sylvia matter. My dad respects his opinion and he knows only too well what Reynaldo’s dealt with since he left Mexico.

I leave them alone. I have some film to develop out in my darkroom. Even as I head out the back door, I can hear their voices becoming louder and angrier as they switch back and forth from Spanish to English. I know that this argument will go on for some time and end in hugs and maybe even some tears. I’ve seen it before. Otherwise, the farm is quiet. Bruce crows from time to time, breaking the silence, but Sunday is a day off for Miguel and Steve and it’s the most peaceful day of the week around here. The crickets fill the air with a soft electric buzz. Even the neat rows of vegetables seem to be relaxing, basking in the bright sunlight, their leaves ruffling slightly in the gentle breeze off the delta. The air is perfumed with dill and lavender. I wander over to the Mission fig trees, letting my feet drag in the dirt, kicking up the dust. I pluck a couple of perfect purple orbs. I tear one of them open and study its crimson jeweled interior before I take a bite. It tastes like a faraway place to me.

Chapter 6

T
he first time I saw the farm it was hard to hide my disappointment. Even though I must have had a rough idea of what a farm out here might look like, I’d somehow built a fantasy farm in my mind with pretty wooden fences and sleek horses with billowing manes and tails prancing around their paddocks. I’d pictured a butter yellow farmhouse with white trim and neatly painted outbuildings to match, and an archway over the drive with “Lazy K” written on it and a horseshoe for luck. I suppose I’d probably read too many Pony Club Camp books as a kid. The fantasy farm probably exists in Kentucky somewhere but it has nothing to do with the farm my dad bought.

The first thing I noticed when we pulled into the driveway was a tornado of dust swirling around in front of the car and I thought,
Great, a twister
.
Grab Toto.
I had no idea that it was a sign of things to come. Dust coats everything on a farm: the buildings, your car, your skin, your hair, and even your teeth.

I looked at my dad with what must have been alarm but he was already out of the car, excited to show me “the place.”

The farmhouse looked abandoned, not the kind of abandoned where the windows are boarded up but recently abandoned, and badly in need of a coat of paint. In fact, the entire farm was in need of a coat of paint. Every piece of wood on every building screamed “I’m old and I’m tired.” Rusted out pieces of farm equipment were scattered everywhere and had been there so long that monster weeds were growing up around them. An old truck with no wheels or windows or doors sat next to an outbuilding with springs escaping from the cracked leather on the seats.

Bob Soames, the farmer who my dad bought the farm from, had left the day before. He moved, with his wife, to a retirement community in Phoenix with a nine-hole golf course and an Olympic-size pool featuring Aquacise classes. They don’t allow pets there, at least not mangy farm dogs, so Rufus was the only member of our welcoming committee. He seemed awfully happy to see us and I can’t imagine how traumatizing it must have been for him to watch a moving van full of furniture pull away without being asked to come along. Did he just sit there on the porch all night long, hoping they would come back? We bonded right away, my first farm friend and I.

My dad chose this farm because Farmer Bob was deep into organic farming. The soil was already in good shape and he wouldn’t have to detox the place. He could start farming organically immediately. In other words, he bought this place based on a pile of dirt. Pretty farmhouses didn’t figure into the equation; in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if my dad hadn’t even looked at the house.

We walked through the property with Rufus in the lead. My dad kept trying to make me visualize how it was all going to look when he was finished with it but it only made me tired. I just couldn’t imagine how we could possibly do it all, but my dad was full of energy and ideas and he almost skipped from place to place, talking, planning, and quoting from his sustainable farming books till my head hurt. He seemed to have it all figured out but I was doubtful. I couldn’t recall my dad ever completing even a simple home-improvement project when we lived in the city, and just because you wake up one morning and start calling yourself a farmer, that doesn’t mean you are one.