Valley Fever (6 page)

I took Mother's little black Jaguar through the dusty squares of the ranch toward Madera and found Dad riding his tractor through the vines of cabernet, the grapes he would sell to Uncle Felix just before the fall set in. Cabernet doesn't thrive in the Central Valley except on a few thousand acres of Dad's land, land that originally had peaches, and then Thompson seedless, and then, in the past twenty years, cabernet. The climate throughout the valley is too dry and too hot for it. Syrah does well, and merlot does fine, and for a long time those varieties had been shipped to Napa and Sonoma, but cab is more of a challenge. The grapes need moisture and cooler temperatures. Forty years ago, after Dad had inherited his original hundred acres but while he was still scrubbing tanks at Mello to support the farm, he started buying small parcels of land along the river, cheap land no one else really wanted; the humidity and the slightly lower temperatures can be dangerous for peaches or citrus or nuts. Some of this cheap and useless land, Dad thought, might be an ideal microclimate for cabernet.

I saw the top of his red tractor deep in the vineyard before he saw me. He kept his father's original tractor out here in a shed by the river, so he could ride through his favorite vines. He would stop every few rows to check how the bunches were forming, with enough space but not too much, heavy but not too heavy early on. Grapes too heavy earlier in the season need less water as the summer goes on, but watering less in the middle of a central California summer introduces an extra set of risks.

Other farmers, growers far smaller than Dad, were in their pink stucco offices in the center of Fresno, making phone calls to their packing houses, to their buyers, to the chemical people for next season. Only Dad would be out now, checking his grapes.

Daddy doesn't even have e-mail.

From Paso Robles to Lodi and to Napa, people always told Dad his grapes were the nicest. They were: tight and big and deeply colored. Dad was no good at business, but he was good at land. He only bought ground next to good farmers, and he only bought land that came with its own water. When he bought the ten thousand acres of peaches in the early eighties, he knew by then to rip out the trees within view of the river and plant cabernet in the sandy loam. Dad felt something beyond affection for the grapes, something much closer to love.

I worried, then that summer but maybe always, that Daddy could be such a good farmer that he would get ruined. Dad thought farming was about ground and attention. He didn't think quite enough about cost and return. Poor Dad.

He climbed down from the tractor and rubbed dust and yeast from a cluster of young cabernet. I parked the car at the end of the row.

“They're beautiful, Daddy.”

He looked up, surprised not so much that I found him in forty-five thousand acres of vines and trees, but perhaps that I was still here, in Fresno, at all. He didn't ask how I knew he'd be right here. Those few hundred acres were the first he'd bought; he saved checking them for the end of the day. He brushed dust off his pants, off his shirt. “They all wanted dry valley land. By the river you could flood,” he said. This was one of the things he said all the time.

“I know it.”

Dad loved to remind us how well he'd done by buying the land near the San Joaquin. We could hear the air move past the slow river from where we were standing. “So much for flooding.”

Every year in California, the farmers got less and less water from the state. That year the state started talking about opening up the Friant Dam, saving the delta smelt, a tiny fish you can't eat, and the farmers were beside themselves about the loss of water. Farmers get upset when it rains and upset when it doesn't. Two years ago, a light rain fell in June and split all the cherries. Mother said every year, “They're always complaining about something.”

“When do these get picked?”

“Why don't you move back here and work for me, Inky? The business isn't so hard to learn.”

“I have a job, Dad. I don't want to scrub Uncle Felix's tanks.” In fact, scrubbing Uncle Felix's tanks would likely have been more satisfying than the work I was not doing every day. There's something to be said for doing the kind of work you can see. But I wasn't qualified to scrub tanks. It's demanding physical labor, usually done by muscled twenty-two-year-old Davis graduates desperate to work in the wine industry, and I was pretty certainly not capable of it.

“We won't make you scrub tanks.”

Girls I'd gone to school with had come back from their spells in San Francisco or Boulder or New York to work in sales or management for their family farms or shopping centers or packing companies. Maria Angelico, who'd gone to high school and college with me, had given up a career as a talent agent to come back to Fresno and run AngelCo, her father's box company. AngelCo was the only company in the valley still making boxes out of wood. In Los Angeles, representing writers at CAA, Maria had had a beautiful girlfriend, a model with a burgeoning career as an actress. She and Maria showed up in the gossip more than once. A particularly affectionate picture appeared in the
Daily Mail
, which we all thought surely no one in Fresno would ever see. Surely, though, everyone in Fresno did. Soon after, Mr. Angelico sent Maria a copy of his will, which stipulated that in order to inherit anything at all, Maria must be married, “to a white male.” After resigning from the agency and moving back to Fresno to run the family business, Maria married a plain, pale-haired man—an accountant she met on a Christian dating website. She quickly got pregnant. At the wedding, all five of us who had known Maria during the days with her gorgeous girlfriend were seated at the same table in the far corner of St. Anthony's reception hall. To me, nothing could be more horrifying than what had become of Maria. “I'm not coming back, Dad.”

“But it's tempting, isn't it?” He picked a tiny green-purple bulb from the top of a vine. “You can see and smell and feel and taste your work.” This was another one of the things he said all the time.

“When do you pick?”

“Maybe October. You can see veraison's under way.” He cupped a bunch in his hand, as if to weigh it. “Felix likes to let them hang.” He wiped dust from a grape on the shoulder. “I guess we say that all the time, right? Felix lets them hang. That's Felix. He likes the grapes when they're practically dry.”

“Is all the cabernet going to Uncle Felix?” Allowing Felix to buy the whole crop this year was an act of love and fidelity on Dad's part. Dad's best juice had always gone to Napa, Sonoma, or, locally, to Mello. Only a small portion had ever gone to Uncle Felix, and even then he usually bought the cheap stuff.

“He's trying some new things.”

“But why let them hang?”

“That's how Felix likes them.” There's a tense balance when you let the grapes hang—a very tiny window when the grapes stop growing and start concentrating. Uncle Felix had a reputation for buying cheap juice and then adding water to the wine. He'd buy from any producer—big growers with ill-tended vines in bad soil—the kind of hearty grapes used for color. You can mask any flavor by letting the grapes get a high concentration of sugar. But Dad's grapes were not cheap grapes. Even his common Thompsons were the largest and most flavorful in the valley. They were too valuable to let hang. It was nearly criminal to waste Dad's grapes by letting them get too brown and sweet. My hands started to hurt.

“These are your favorite, Dad, aren't they.”

“You're my favorite.”

“I know. Don't tell Anne.”

“She's my favorite, too.”

“But you love me the most.” I kicked up dust just to see it puff through the air in tufts. “I'm the cab and Anne is the Thompsons.”

Dad's smile went wide. “All right.”

I said, “Too bad Charlie's last name isn't Thompson.”

He patted my back. “Why don't you give me a ride home in that fast car?”

“Come on home,” I said. “You'll never in a million years guess who we're meeting for dinner.”

“Your mother doesn't like very many people,” Dad said.

“She doesn't even care for the people she likes.”

My mother's determination to dislike most of the people she met had a manic, devotional quality to it. Not liking people was her hobby. Anything could be cause for disapproval: speaking softly, for example, was a manipulative way of getting people to listen to you closely. Speaking too much meant you were boring, speaking too little was sneaky. People with allergies were control freaks, people with back problems were lazy, more than two drinks meant you were a drunk, but less than two meant you were a judgmental prick. If a wife attending Mother's dinner party didn't offer to help in the kitchen, she was an asshole; if she did offer, she filled the dishwasher wrong on purpose. If the air conditioner repair company sent one man out for the job, Mother was getting bad service; if they sent two, they were trying to overcharge her.

“She's difficult.”

“At least she likes us.”

“Most of the time,” Dad said.

People she'd decided to like, usually because they were especially funny or good-looking or really knew farming, were excepted from her rules for human behavior. She didn't mind when Uncle Felix passed out at the kitchen table, because Felix, in spite of his faults, was truly brilliant. Bootsie's beauty meant her transgressions were probably my fault, and the Mondavis could be excused for being drunks because they were famous.

“You're in trouble if anything happens to Uncle Felix,” I said.

“That's the end of my social life.”

“You'd still have Wilson.”

“Poor Wilson,” Dad said. Nothing was interesting or beautiful or brilliant or famous about Wilson.

*   *   *

The San Joaquin Country Club overlooks the river and the hills and plains of farms on either side. The valley's mostly flat, but on Fresno's east side, at the base of the Sierras, many farms have a slight rise and fall, and the golf club has an excellent view of its members' trees and vines.

“There's Wilson,” Mother said. And there was Wilson, with his fat pie face, returning his cart to the barn. “Go on out and say hello, Inky.”

“I'll see him inside.”

“Go and say hello,” Mother said. “Wilson!” she called and waved. “Go on, Ingrid.”

I wore a pink seersucker dress that tied around my neck and hung loose where just a week ago I'd had boobs. Mother was the first to notice this, of course. As we were leaving the house, she looked at the loose dress and declared without hesitation, “You can't wear that.”

“I shrank,” I said.

“In all the wrong places,” she told me.

“What shall I do?”

“Wear something else. Do you have that white wraparound shirtdress?”

“There's nothing for it to wrap around,” I said.

“Wrap it around your tiny little boobies.”

I wore the loose pink dress. Now, through the car window, I waved to Wilson and smiled.

Mother said, “Get out of the car, Ingrid. Go.”

“Inky P.!” He said, “Inky P. in a pink dress! Hello, friend.” He grabbed me with his enormous hairy bear arms, rubbing all his fat and hair up against my naked back. He was damp and musky. He had the same stomach as Uncle Felix, only Wilson's wasn't tight with muscle. Wilson's stomach was flaccid with booze. I got smushed against it.

“Hi, Willy.”

“Damn, you smell good.” He held on to me too long.

“You got fat.”

Wilson took a flask out of his golf bag. He drank straight from the flask. His face was pink and ugly; sweat rolled off his cheeks, his ill-defined chin, out from the thin remnants of his yellow-blond hair. “Booze weight.”

“I thought alcoholics were skinny.”

“Maybe city alcoholics. Country alcoholics, we just get fat.”

“Something's got to soak it up.”

“You mind if I don't change for dinner?”

“I don't mind.”

“How you been, Inky?”

“I've been better.”

“Uncle Felix says you demolished that guy.”

“Right.”

He gave his bag to Caesar, the caddy with the lazy eye. (For years I'd heard Caesar got extra-good tips by giving blow jobs to all the closeted husbands at the club. I'd decided, long ago, that those rumors were true. In Fresno, persistent rumors are more reliable than a wire service.) “Caesar, Ingrid came back to marry me,” Wilson said. We sat down on the planter outside the cart barn so Wilson could change his shoes.

Caesar's good eye was brown, and the dead one blue. “No,” he said. “Girls like that run off.”

Wilson asked him, “Who am I going to marry, Caesar?”

Caesar shrugged and eyed me with the brown one. “Some younger girl who thinks you're king.”

“Do you think I'm king, Ingrid?”

“Someone's going to think you're king,” I said.

He said, then, “I would never drop you.” Wilson didn't say these things with a wink. He had no cleverness or malice. He looked at me with the wide, sincere gaze of the idiot.

“Oh, Wilson, you know I'll always like you best.”

“No you won't,” he said. “You never did.” He put his meaty arm around my shoulder. We walked up the hill toward the clubhouse. “Come here,” he said, “look at this,” and he turned me toward the putting green, with a wide view over the valley, lush green squares on either side of the river. “Isn't it funny how great everything looks when it's all just green?”

There is nothing more heartbreaking than thousands of acres of trees not producing anything.

*   *   *

Uncle Felix always sits at the head of the table, no matter who's paying. “Hello, Wilson. Too much trouble to ask you to change for dinner?”

The hem of Wilson's white polo still dripped with boozy perspiration. “Then I'd be late, Uncle Felix.” He was looking around for the waitress.