Valley Fever (32 page)

Dad laughed, so I laughed, and then the three of us were laughing. There was nothing to laugh at. Sometimes there is nothing to do but laugh.

I decided to pick those grapes because leaving the choice to Dad could have killed him, I thought, just then. Already he was so diminished.

*   *   *

Of course Uncle Felix didn't buy the cabernet for the price he had promised. He didn't buy half the cabernet at all, and most of Dad's beautiful grapes went to waste. There was no powdery mildew. There was very little rot. Uncle Felix, like many of the wineries in the valley, just stopped buying fruit.

Uncle Felix knew, of course, as I didn't, that without the money for the black grapes, all twenty thousand acres of vines and twenty-five thousand more of row crops and peaches would go back to the bank. Dad might, if the bank was merciful, get to keep the original hundred left to him by his parents.

Uncle Felix had all Dad's financial information because Wilson had provided it to him.

I couldn't deliver those grapes anywhere. Even if a winery could have paid for them, by the time we had picked everything it was the end of October. The wineries were congested. I called the small guys and the conglomerates; no one had any room left in their tanks.

 

25.

The papers relinquishing the ranch had to be signed in San Francisco, at 555 California Street, by the end of the day on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The building is that fifty-two-story accordion on California and Kearney with the granite courtyard in front; it looks like a prison. The thousands of bay windows look like thousands of cells. The lobby inside is gleaming gold.

Mother wouldn't go, as if by not going to sign the papers, the ranch would stay in the family, as if not going could reverse anything, everything.

“You go,” she told me. The windows were open and for miles you could smell the controlled burns, the damp ashes. A warm wind carried everything with it: across streets and rivers and canals, through orchards, through walls.

“But Daddy needs you,” I said.

“Someone has to stay here,” she said. “Someone has to watch the house.” It didn't need to be pointed out how ridiculous that was.

“What should I say to him?”

“There's nothing to say. Just go with him.”

During the three-hour trip, we listened to Joni Mitchell's album
Blue
, and then listened again, and then listened again. Dad wore his dress shoes and a white shirt stiff from the cleaners.

We parked the car in a cheaper lot up the hill and walked to the building. Waiting for the elevator in the shiny gold lobby of 555, Dad looked small, fragile. Just last week he had been in the hospital, getting fluids by IV.

The Bank of America receptionist was pert and bubbly and we didn't wait long. Dad's banker, a rotund man called Worstley, ushered us in to a back room where his secretary waited with a large file full of paper. Worstley had stubby little fingers and a jiggly wattle beneath his chin. His secretary was short, athletic, too enthusiastic, I thought, for the afternoon's situation.

“Have a seat here,” Worstley said, pulling his own office chair around to Dad's side of the desk. “It's more comfortable.”

“This is fine,” Dad said, and sat in the straight-backed wooden chair in front of him.

“I'll take your chair,” I said to Worstley.

The secretary pulled out her stack of documents and bent over Dad while instructing him where to sign. She had her thick, abundant hair pulled back in a wide clamp, like a fist. “First here,” she said, flipping pages and pointing to where Dad should sign. “And initial here.”

Very quickly it was over. Worstley shook Dad's hand as if they'd happily agreed on a deal. In twenty minutes, everything was gone. Everything was over.

“Come over here for a minute, I want to show you something fabulous,” the secretary said to us. Dad looked half as large as he'd been an hour ago. “I want you to see this.” She motioned us to come to her office. “Look,” she said. It was a Tiffany table lamp. It had blue dragonflies around the bottom of the shade and a base twisted like a vine.

“Isn't it so beautiful?” she said to Dad. “They gave it to me for all the work I've done on your account.”

If Mother had been here, she would have shouted at this stupid, vapid, cruel secretary. If Mother had been here, there may have been a cathartic scene. I said, “Why would you show us that?” and Dad and I left the office quietly, as if nothing had happened in the past hour, as if we were the same people we'd been when we walked into this building.

*   *   *

Dad told Mom about the dragonfly lamp later, while we sat eating peanuts at the Fresno State game that weekend, dropping the shells on the ground. Fresno State football smells like home—coal barbecues and spilled beer and wet grass and cleats. Dad had four season tickets, from when Anne and I were young, but these days we used only three. This would be the last year, we knew, for football tickets. There had never been a year previously when Dad had given up the football tickets. The names engraved on the backs of our seats said Palamede Farms.

The evening was cool and we wore our red Fresno State snap-up jackets. Dad had had the same seats since I was small enough to be carried in, and we knew the people who sat around us. When they asked Dad, “How's business?” Dad said, “Okay.”

Griffith Wine Company had a large tailgate that afternoon, three open white tents and a string-heavy country band. Mexican food on one side, barbecue and burgers on the other. A service bar made from cases of wine.

“Why do you want to do this?” Mother said.

“There's no point in being angry,” Dad said. “It's all done.”

“That is exactly the point in being angry,” said Mother. “He's done what he's done.”

Dad said, “It's not Felix who got us overleveraged, Evelyn.”

“It's Felix who wouldn't intervene with the bank. It's Felix who shorted you for your grapes.”

“He's in business, like the rest of us.”

My mother seemed to shrink with a helpless anger. “Not like the rest of us,” she said.

At home games, Uncle Felix would switch his navy blue V-neck for bright red. He came toward us with a glass of wine in one hand and Debby in the other.

Mother turned from him, toward the drinks.

“A little more corporate than your parties, Neddy,” Felix said.

“Fancy,” Dad said.

“No money to be made in socializing,” Felix said. “But the employees like this stuff. I keep everyone happy.”

“You do,” Debby said, and tilted her head at Uncle Felix to indicate how much she admired him. Debby turned out to be far cleverer than I'd originally thought. She wore an enormous pink sapphire on her left hand. That stone must have been eight carats.

“We went to San Francisco,” I said. The band played an old Nitty Gritty Dirt Band hit, a song Anne loved when she was in high school.

“I'd heard something like that,” Uncle Felix said.

“You could have intervened,” I said.

“All right,” Dad said. “All right, let's just have something to eat.”

I said, “Why didn't you call them off, Felix?”

“Enough,” Dad said. “I'm tired. I'm tired of talking business.” Dad turned toward the bar, as if following Mother, but Mother had moved on to the food.

I said, “I don't understand. I don't get where you're coming from.” Of course, I did understand.

Uncle Felix smiled and reached to take my shoulder. “Why don't you get married and settle down? Why do you keep struggling like this?” He turned to Debby. “Whenever I look at Ingrid, I see her as this little girl with this messy hair.”

Debby said, “Were you a tomboy, Ingrid? I was, too.”

“You're so transparent, Felix. I know, we all know.” I stepped away from him.

“Then why do you upset your father like that? Why do you need to have a scene?”

“This is not a scene.”

“Do you think I got where I am by accident? It's no accident, believe me.”

The loss was so acute, it felt like suffocation. In the middle of the tailgate party, all those salesmen and managers and ag workers with their red polo shirts tucked into their khakis milling around with their glasses of wine and game-day joviality, I felt so full of betrayal and homesickness and disgust, I had no room for anything more. “Believe you?” I said. “You're a thief, a liar, a fraud.” I tried to think of all the words I could right then to describe him. “Duplicitous, deplorable, disingenuous.” Debby stepped away.

“Go on,” he said. “You should say everything you want to say.”

“You're a poison.” Nothing could hurt him. Nothing I could say. “Everything I would call you, someone else has already called you.”

“I'm sure that's right.”

He was my same uncle Felix, but he seemed like an impostor, a new gruesome incarnation. “I wish Aunt Jane were alive.”

“So do I,” he said.

“Annie said you're going to take Dad's land. She says this whole thing was about getting Dad's land.”

“Someone's going to get it,” he said. “Why does that matter to you?”

“Annie says you're the only one who knows every parcel, who knows the full value. You and Wilson.”

“What else does Annie say?”

“Annie says this has been a long-range plan of yours.”

“That Annie has a big imagination. She should write for television.”

“She doubts that land will even go on the market. She thinks you'll snap it right up from the bank before anyone else even knows it's available.”

Felix shook hands with a passing employee and turned back to me, casually. “You ought be thinking less about what's just happened and more about your future, if you ask me.”

“Did I ask you?” The chitchat and shouting and pop-country music of the tailgate seemed to get further and further away, a one-dimensional din, as if it were happening on film.

“I'm telling you. You should listen to me. I've given you excellent advice in the past.”

“In the past I could believe the things you said.” Between us were our drinks, the tailgate noise, and the cold beginning of the end of harvest. Between us was not just the past few weeks, but a warm past, a happy past, a lifetime of past tense in which I really had loved my uncle Felix.

“Why's that?” he said. “I'm the same Felix as always.”

He did look the same as always. The same tough, round torso, the same laughy green eyes. He caused me that feeling of heaviness, the same broken feeling I'd had at the beginning of the summer, when I'd worried the lining of my heart could be suffering irreparable damage. “I thought you were someone it turns out you're not.”

He said, “You have that problem once in a while, I've noticed. Especially with men.”

Whatever the various ways it comes at you, grief always feels the same. Always a sort of physical violence.

*   *   *

Wilson sat several rows behind us at the game and he waved at us happily. He didn't come down to say hello. He sat with drunk Chris and with two women I didn't recognize. The women had frosted lips and brittle hair, and I began to get an idea of how Mother had become so judgmental.

After the game (Fresno State over Nevada, 24–21), on our way back to the car, past the pickups and campers in the tailgate lot, Dad was intercepted by Carlo, one of Miguel's handymen who'd worked on the ranch a long time. “Jefe!” Carlo said. “You owe me five dollars!”

Dad turned, and clearly even turning required an effort. “Why's that?” he said.

“At the car wash, I put in five dollars and no change came out.”

Dad opened his wallet and gave Carlo five dollars.

He took the money and said, “Jefe, your grapes should be picked already.”

“That's all right,” Dad said. “You pick them, you take what you want.”

Carlo looked at Dad and leaned away, the way you look at someone who may be dangerous. “Thank you for my money!” he said.

We walked on, to the middle of the field where Mother's tiny Jaguar was parked.

“I have to get that change machine fixed,” said Dad. “A lot of people in this town are upset with me.”

*   *   *

The bank let Mom and Dad keep the coin-operated car wash. They let them keep the original one hundred acres and the house on the river, though it was clear that without the ranch, Mom and Dad wouldn't be able to keep up the house. Still, it seemed unwise to put it on the market while Dad was still coughing. We hoped, then, that the cough would improve, that the fungus would find his body an inhospitable environment.

Nothing about my father was inhospitable.

We kept the farm equipment and the warehouse with the offices in it. Dad would rent the farm equipment from the office on days he felt well, and from home on other days. He carried records in the briefcase that used to carry nothing but the sports sections from the
LA Times
and
The Fresno Bee
. The antifungal drugs had begun to do their work on the illness, but the side effects debilitated him in their own way: dizziness, nausea, a pain in his back that made it nearly impossible to move.

*   *   *

I wanted to stay, to put things in the soil and to care for them and to produce food. I wanted work that had physical value.

“Come work in New York,” Anne said relentlessly.

“I don't know what I'm going to do yet.”

“What's there for you?” she said. “It's all gone.”

“There's a hundred acres here. It's not just a backyard.”

“Don't be fantastical,” she warned. “Who can make a ranch work with a hundred acres?”

*   *   *

“You can tend bar here,” Bootsie offered. “You could manage this place when I have the baby.”