Valley Fever (16 page)

“I'm happy you're here,” he said.

Although I wasn't drunk enough to say it, I said, “You broke my heart so badly that no one else can break it the same.”

“I know,” he said, inspecting his drink casually, as if this were what he had expected me to say. “Elliot,” he called, “may I have a water back?”

“Mom tells me you got married,” I said.

“I did.”

Elliot filled the tall water glass. The soda gun was right in front of us. It takes surprisingly long to fill a water glass.

I said, “Bootsie says that you're not married anymore.” Where had Bootsie gone? She was off on the other side of the room, thirty feet away, practicing her laugh and cheekbones on a chiropractor and his wife.

“I'm not.”

“How was that?”

“It was okay. I did love Ellie.” He drank the whole glass of water in one go. “Also, I did what my mother wanted me to do.”

“I mean what happened?”

“If I start at the beginning,” he said, then stopped. “If I start at the beginning, I won't know where to start.”

“Start at the end.” I knew him so well, I knew exactly where he wanted to start this story of his marriage. I knew he would start with a very specific detail of a morning she was cruel, how her cruelty stunned him like a slap, and how that morning was the beginning of the end, as they say, as I say. No one changes. George is always the last to know something is wrong. Unless he's with me; then I'm the last to know.

“In San Francisco, her mother started introducing me as just George, instead of Ellie's husband, George. And her father was suddenly real nice to me, but he'd never been real nice to me before.” He clicked the top of his lighter open and closed, open and closed. “And then one day we had this fight, this little fight about shampoo. I would always use her shampoo as soap. I don't know, it drove her crazy but I liked the smell. I didn't realize how expensive the shampoo was. The last fight is always a stupid fight, right?”

“It's the only fight we remember.”

He liked that. He gave me his lippy grin. “You remember what you remember.”

“I remember it all.”

“No.”

“Oh, yes.”

“It was harvest so I had been out almost all night long, and she hadn't gone to tennis, she'd waited for me to come back. I hadn't been to sleep yet and the whole thing felt like a nightmare, and for two days after she left I thought maybe I'd had a nightmare.” He stopped for a while. We watched Elliot whisk the frozen mojitos in a large steel mixing bowl. The happy noise of the restaurant started to feel like a party. “She waited for harvest, I think, because she knew I'd be too tired to fight it.” Then he thought and said, “Not two days. For months I woke up thinking maybe I'd had a nightmare.”

“It's harvest now,” I said.

“Harvest of what? It's always harvest.”

“How many years ago was this?”

He looked at me a little surprised that I didn't already know. “Last year,” he said. “Last fall. Like five minutes ago.”

It seemed so soon. It seemed almost as recent as my own breakup. “Did you really love her?” I couldn't imagine someone as delicious and intuitive and hilarious and kind as George actually loving that normal, dumb Ellie Prentiss.

He tapped his empty glass on the bar. “I wasn't just faking.”

I put my hand over his, of course. I knew how stupid it made you feel to be so surprised by an ending. And then I had to bite his shoulder, so I bit his shoulder. That beautiful shoulder, it felt just exactly the same, but with more meat on it.

 

12.

Inevitably, August came, and the grapes continued to hang. They were spectacularly beautiful, full to bursting, as if with just the slightest tap they could explode. The Fiestas were past ready, the sugar was high, too high for table grapes, but apparently they were using anything to make wine these days. Bunches at the top of the vines had started to shrivel. They'd get picked any day, Dad said. When to pick grapes is not a choice the farmer makes. The buyer decides when to pick, and then the buyer buys by weight. This is why people hate selling to Mello, and why they hated selling to Uncle Felix. Mello and Uncle Felix paid in full upon delivery, while smaller producers paid on highly variable and often unreliable payment schedules. But both Felix and Mello had reputations for letting grapes hang until the juice was overly sweet and the fruit weighed slightly less. Or they would find rot where there had been no rot and pay less than what they'd contracted to pay. Sometimes, last minute, they wouldn't buy the fruit at all.

Table grapes in wine. I hadn't decided yet whether I thought this brilliant or disgraceful. It gives the grower more options for sale, at any rate. A grower wants options, like anyone.

“Felix leaves the call to his field guy,” Dad said repeatedly that season.

The longer those grapes stayed on the vine, the worse Dad's cough got.

“Please see someone about the cough,” I said. The cough couldn't be contained by covering his mouth with his hand. With his napkin he wiped little specks of spittle from his place at the breakfast table.

“It always gets worse later in the summer,” he said. “The air gets drier and there's more dust.”

Mother said, “None of that is true. Do you make this up as you go along?”

“There is more dust,” Dad said.

This was true about the dust, but not about his cough and not about the field guy. Dad's cough was usually worse in the fall, when the rain came and the dirt got wet. Felix never left the call to his field guy. No one ever left the call to his field guy. The real guys made the call and stayed in the office; the field guys were just there to get yelled at by the farmers. We all knew this. I had known this since I was seven.

I knew a lot when I was seven. By the time I was seven, I could prune a vine better than anyone else on the ranch. I knew when the sap started to drip from pruned branches that the buds were about to break, and I could time just about down to ten days when we'd be harvesting that fall. Pretty much everything I knew about farming I had learned by the second grade.

Over the phone Anne said, “Get in the car and take him by force to have a chest X-ray. You have to stop giving him choices.” Anne could say these things from Los Angeles. “This is what we call, in the industry, denial.” Anne thought everything in life happened as it did in her life in cartoons: we'd just have a friendly argument and someone would make an idiotic joke and Dad would get in the car for the drive into town for a chest X-ray with a laugh track. In real life, she must have known, there was no possibility of Dad seeing the doctor until Dad decided on his own to see the doctor. Farmers choose farming because they don't like being told what to do.

I said, “Okay, Annie. We'll see.”

She said, “Your name should be Willsee.”

“Okay.”

“Do I have to do absolutely everything in this family?”

Now Dad sat at the breakfast table with his lightly browned toast and butter, eating little bites between large coughs. “I will go,” he said. “Once the harvest is complete.”

“That's October,” Mother said. “You can't wait until October. You can barely eat toast.”

“I like toast,” Dad said.

“What will you be eating by October?” Mother said.

“Toast,” said Dad. “More and more toast.”

“You think you're being very funny,” Mother said. “When I try to be serious, you joke.”

“Don't be serious,” Dad told her. “It doesn't do us any good.”

*   *   *

The beginning of August means not only certain harvests (late stone fruit, green grapes, early almonds), but, equally as important in the valley, the start of Fresno State football. Wilson had been a middle linebacker at San Joaquin Memorial High School and his greatest pleasure, outside of the golf club, was Fresno State football. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon of the fall, Wilson took his flask to the Fresno State practice field, surrounded on two sides by the Fresno State vineyards, to sit on the metal bleachers he called the happiest place on earth.

It kind of was. Fresh and open and empty with athletes smashing.

“Next time I'm going to bring a flask for you, too,” he said.

“Make sure mine has a little lemonade in it.”

He held out a bag of sunflower seeds, which I waved away. He said, “I have pistachios. Do you want pistachios?”

“Pistachios are too much work.”

“That's your problem, Ingrid.”

“I don't have a problem.”

“Uninterested in getting the nut meat.”

“You're a nut meat,” I said.

I joined him for a few practices that season, because in an effort to distract myself from my various failures, I had begun to develop a sort of academic interest in college football. I told myself it was intellectual and not just a form of procrastination. I told myself I might even use this interest somehow, find a way to shoehorn it into the genocide screenplay. Wilson wasn't bad company. He knew a lot about the game and the players. It felt good, at the end of that unhappy summer, to sit on bleachers watching practice next to someone I knew would never not be waiting for me.

“I don't know why you keep asking,” he said, cracking sunflower seeds and letting the shells fly with spit and a whistle. “There's nothing to tell you. Everything will be fine when the money from the grapes comes in.” Wilson knew more about my parents' personal and professional finances than probably even my parents did.

“But what if the money from the grapes doesn't come in?”

“They're contracted to Felix, Inky. Don't worry about it.”

“But say they don't weigh as much as we thought.”

“Have you seen the cab? They're beautiful. And there's a lot of fruit. It's why it's taking the sugar so long to develop.”

“Don't speak to me like an idiot.” I had seen the cabernet. I couldn't remember a year the vines were so full. In the Central Valley, unlike Napa and Sonoma, farmers don't traditionally prune bunches to make room for sunlight. They just let every bunch grow and grow. The weight of the grapes is more valuable than the flavor.

“Look at that running back. He's shorter than you, Inky, but he'll be one of the best in the nation this year.”

“Which one.”

“The short one.”

“But why are the banks so relentless right now?”

“Things are bad.”

“Things are bad every year.”

“It's bad this year, Ingrid. A grape glut after that thing with the peaches. The peach thing was the problem. A lot of people are going to lose their farms.”

“But not Dad.”

“I told you. How many times do you want me to repeat myself?”

“All right. I know.”

“Look at that run! He's so good because he can keep so low to the ground. You can't tackle him.”

He was good, Fresno's little running back. But the season hadn't started yet and you had to wonder how good he would look against a better defense. “I mean, why would Phillip leave like that, so suddenly?”

“Ingrid, your dad knows what he's doing.”

“Not always,” I said.

“Most of the time.”

The quarterback was good, too. He was the skinny younger brother of Norbert Wabnig, a Fresno State legend and former number one draft pick, now sidelined somewhere in Dallas or Houston, or maybe Denver. I am always a sucker for the quarterback. It's adult compensation for being too much of a misfit in high school.

“You think he should get a lawyer?”

Wilson shrugged. “A lawyer can't do him any good. Just wait until the juice gets sold. Why are you worrying about this?”

“I'm not worried.”

“Worry about yourself,” he said, which was not an idiotic thing to say.

“Don't tell me what to do.”

I have always liked the uniquely American crash and smack sound of helmets and pads after the staccato of the quarterback shouting to his team. College football was another glamorous part of regular suburban life I could study but knew nothing about, and now enjoyed being close to: all those beautiful young men suffering the destruction of their minds and bodies to do what it is they love the most. We all do that in our way, suffer if we can find something to love.

Little brother Wabnig wore number 2, which I couldn't help but feel, then, was just too painful a clich
é
to even digest.

“Will you shell me a pistachio?” I said.

“My goodness. What do you want from me?”

“Nothing.”

“I know,” Wilson said. “Which is kind of funny, because I want a lot from you.” He pried open a pistachio and put the meat in my hand.

And then, just beyond the noise of the practice field, was the silence of the vineyards, with all that promise, food and booze and livelihood grown on plants, inescapable even for Norbert Wabnig's little brother or for a short running back, best in the nation.

“When did Dad get so overleveraged?” I said.

“When everybody did. When did he buy all those ranches by the river?”

I hadn't been certain until right then that Dad was overleveraged at all. I knew he'd borrowed against his harvest, as all farmers do, but I didn't realize until that afternoon at the football practice, until Wilson let it slip, that Dad hadn't bought his land outright, or that his debt had lasted longer than a couple of seasons. “I guessed that he paid for all that land with his own money,” I said.

“It is his own money,” Wilson said. “What are you talking about?”

“I mean I didn't know he'd borrowed anything.”

“God, you're out of touch,” he said, and looked at me with his fat pink face, his moist, close-cropped hair all pale and spiky as if he'd been electrified. “I don't even grasp what you're saying.”