Pasadena (12 page)

And this was what Bruder was thinking of when Linda came to him with the news that Dieter’s horse had caught his hoof in a railroad tie and snapped his hock. Dieter would have to shoot Kermit on the track before the 1:52 hurried north to Los Angeles. Linda and Bruder ran across the onion field to witness the execution, but they found Kermit’s long nose resting against the rail, a bullet from Dieter’s Colt Peacemaker sunk into his white-patched haw. Next to him, Edmund was weeping.

“Papa, you killed him?”

“He was almost as old as me.”

“Where will you get another?”

“Another horse? It’s time I buy a car. Ask the mechanic from Pasadena. Nobody’s riding in the cities anymore.” Dieter went on to
say that he’d seen a water-cooled International MW with a blue leather seat and a rear bed that could cart more than old Kermit on his best day, “May he rest in peace.”

“But, Papa?” sniffled Edmund. “Where will you get the money?”

Dieter told his children not to worry about such things. “Let’s get the old guy off the rail.” As the sun shone on the tracks, Dieter and Edmund began to argue about what to do with Kermit. Dieter thought they should leave him to the coyotes—“He’ll be gone by morning.” But Edmund reminded his father about the new regulations against dumping equine carcasses—so many people were doing it in their rush toward the automobile. There’d be a fine that none of them could afford, Edmund warned. “We should burn him down.”

But Bruder pulled from his boot an Ames bowie knife with a sharkskin grip and told the others he’d take care of Kermit. He had quartered horses at the City Farm, and the job was easier but bloodier than it looked. Bruder noticed the way the knife caused a stir in Linda, a flame in her ever-flickering eyes; he slapped his palm with the blade, and the little
smack!
of steel on flesh drew Linda closer to him. She watched the blade slice the horse’s belly from stifle to brisket, and a red jelly mass lurched out. Blood splattered Bruder’s shirt, and a spigot shot Linda’s legs; she was shocked by its salty warmth. “Get me a wheelbarrow,” Bruder instructed Edmund. Bruder sank his hands into Kermit’s gut, scooping out the yards of wormy intestines and the wine-red liver. Then he sliced the belly horizontally and plucked out Kermit’s still-quivering ten-pound heart. “Edmund! Fetch the butcher saw.”

As he proceeded with his work, Bruder tossed the salvageable pieces into the wheelbarrow, where white rattlesnake moths landed on the muscular hamstring and gaskin and loin. It was the knee joint, connecting forearm and cannon, that most impressed Linda: the blade of the bowie
hack-hack-hac
king through it. “Strong bastard,” Bruder said as he tried to rip the knee free of ligament. He looked up from his work and saw her, her toe tracing an arc in the dirt. “Get down and help me,” he ordered, and she sank to her knees as if forced by a large invisible hand and found herself so close to Bruder that his hair blew against her brow. Linda worked her hands around a shank. She didn’t expect Kermit to still feel like a horse; she thought that handling this piece of him would feel no different than handling a quarter of meat. But Kermit’s
coat bristled coarsely, its grain changing hue from brown to cider-orange as she ran her hand over it. She felt the exactness of the tissue beneath the coat, the pads of shifting muscle she had watched for years as Edmund rode around the farm and along El Camino Real.

Now, crouching, the railroad ties pressing uncomfortably into her knees, Linda helped Bruder yank free Kermit’s kneebone. Dieter, impressed, and Edmund, aghast, stood in the shade of a red elderberry. When the bone snapped loose, Linda and Bruder fell down the little hill the railroad track sat upon, laughing as they tumbled, the horse leg between them, finally landing in a thicket of bladderpod. The shrub was heavy with fruit, its green pods resembling two-inch peas, and Linda felt the fruit crack beneath her. She sat up and looked down her chest and down Bruder’s too and saw that they were both smeared with blood. The blood had soaked deeply into her dress, reminding her of what Valencia called
la carga
—an event Linda had done her best to always hide from Edmund. But now she and Bruder looked at each other with open, blank eyes, and he took the leg and hurled it into the air and they watched it rise and arc and fall, like a strange long-extinct bird. When it hit the ground, dust rose and the day was clear and the sun was white and the buzz flies arrived and Bruder’s eyebrows danced and he stared longingly at Linda. He was thinking that she was beautiful when she was silent, and the blood somehow made her seem even more alive, the blood dripping from her hands, and Linda realized that Bruder was the first person she had ever really known from someplace beyond Condor’s Nest and Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea. She had dreamt of the world far from the village, up the coast or down, and she had expected one day to rush off and see it, but now a glimpse of the world had come to her. Bruder had taken pleasure in dismembering the horse, but this didn’t frighten Linda, and only when a cloud passed before the sun and the glint faded from the railroad track did she notice Edmund standing by himself, his finger nervously at his collar. His face had gone pale and he was mumbling, “They’ve gone crazy. He’s turning her crazy.”

Dieter swatted him with his cap. “Leave them alone. They’re learning to live, that’s all.” Edmund’s cheek trembled as he watched Bruder head off to the barn. When he was gone, Dieter added, “He gets more done than you.”

As he said this, Charlotte Moss appeared along the railroad track. Her curls were pushing from beneath her beret, and she tapped her
pencil against her lips. “Is that a quote?” And then, “To make sure I get the facts right, how old was Kermit?”

A week later, “The Whisper of the Sea” ran the following item:

At first Linda took pride in seeing herself thought worthy of the printed word; and if at one time she would have run to Edmund with the newspaper, shouting
It’s me, it’s me!
, now she tore home from Margarita’s with even more speed, in a hurry to show Bruder, who would read the story and crumple it in his palm.

One day at the end
of April, Linda took Bruder into the village to visit the mineral spring. She explained that scientific analysis had long ago determined that the Apfelsine waters were chemically identical to the thermal springs of Hoellgassquelle in Baden-Baden, not far from Schwarzwald. But on the journey home from France, Dieter had already told Bruder about the Black Forest, where the wood was dense with fir and holly underbrush and blackwood and the mouse owls that called sinisterly at dusk. “The tourists would travel from Berlin and Paris and London to rinse away their sooty maladies. I’d sell them little tin cups with the date of their visit imprinted into the handle.” Whenever he told this story, Dieter would hold up his mallet, as if in proof. Since the 1880s, California’s tourists had journeyed—first on horseback, then briefly by stage, then by rail, and now by car—to Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea in the same pursuit. There’d been a hotel built on the bluff just beyond the spring, with gingerbread trim, balconies with views of the ocean, room rates of $1.50 a day, and a motto of “To read, ponder, drink—and Live.” Dieter had worked there before Valencia arrived. He had ported dusty imitation-alligator trunks and delivered ices made with Leucadia lemons to ladies sunning themselves in wicker chaises. “But I lost my job because I’d always arrive at the hotel smelling like onions,” Dieter told Linda many times, the story embellishing itself seemingly at its own accord, so that the final version, the one Dieter had recounted at the supper table just the night before, included a blind widow who wore the world’s largest emerald, a white-blond bachelor with a Siamese butler, and a wirehaired terrier, property
of one Mrs. P. G. Furnass of Pasadena, the dog drinking the lemonade and falling over dead at Mrs. Furnass’s feet, which were crammed into buttonless half-Congress shoes a size and a half too small.

On the Apfelsine platform, Linda said, “Tell me about the war.”

“There’s too much to tell,” said Bruder.

“Just one story.”

He thought about this and then offered a simple tale. “There was a kid in my company, a terrible mechanic, lost every wrench issued to him. Each morning he woke up certain his number would come up that day. At night, he quoted the poets as the howitzers lit up the sky. It was his way of praying, and most of the other boys huddled around him in the dark, listening to the cantos and the couplets. After he was killed, the captain gave me his books, and there’s one thing I read that makes me think of you.”

Linda leaned closer as Bruder began to recite, almost as if it were a song:

Linda thought it sounded nice, but she didn’t understand what Bruder might mean by it, and years would pass before she learned—at the bookstore in Pasadena, where the scent of pine shipping crates drifted up from the stockroom, in the Spanish Library Room—where these words came from. She had never known anyone to memorize poetry, and it left her even more curious. He was both worldly and crude, citing the poets and the saints and staring her down and grunting when she served him
bolitas de masa
and black coffee. When he spoke of the Training Society, she imagined Bruder as a boy in a place similar to Mission San Luis Rey, with its stucco façade breaking apart in great brittle flakes and the two-tiered bell tower shadowing the courtyard; she imagined the light through the rose window above the mission’s double door, the slanted rays falling on Bruder’s young face as he studied silently with nuns in squirrel-gray habits. Once, while Dieter was at war, Linda and Edmund had run in the fallow field abutting the mission, where, years before, grapes had ripened and sheep nibbled the smoke trees; and in the side cemetery, shaded by a small stand of conifers,
Linda had collected golden poppies for her hair. Had Bruder grown up in such a place?

“It was nothing like that at all.”

He lit a cigarette, and the bluish smoke curled around his face as he described the Mexicans and half-Mexicans and slow-wits and misdemeanants and the handful of Negroes and the pair of Chinese brothers he had slept with in an attic dormitory. “We lived in a big house called Casa Angélica, forty boys and four ladies, one who was too fat to walk. It sat at the edge of the City Farm, and after the morning classes, where Mrs. Banning taught us not how to read and write but how to properly grade citrus and grow rootstock, she’d scoot us into the fields to take up picking sacks with the ranch hands. It was a big farm, five hundred and seventeen acres, fertilized by Pasadena sewage, and until nightfall we’d climb the walnut trees and clear the orange groves and harvest the seed potatoes and the alfalfa. The effluent of municipal waste ran around the farm in an open brown ditch, and not a single one of us at the Training Society realized until after we left the orphanage that we had come to smell forever like shit.”

“Are you telling me the truth?” said Linda.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

She proposed that they buy a cup of water and led him to the vending stand. The spring water had etched a pair of oblong impressions into the boulder’s surface, and the villagers had seized upon the indentations’ vague but reasonable likeness to a pair of vigorous lungs.
HEALTHY WATER HEALTHY SUN HEALTHY LUNGS
, proclaimed the banner perpetually draped across the veranda of the Twin Inn, the most recent hotel. A sign next to Margarita’s door read:
CONSUMPTIVES WELCOME ON MONDAYS
. Six-inch pipes hurried the water to a public bath, where Bavarian widows boiled it in bell-shape vats, a towel draped over their lumpy shoulders.
Nein nein nein
, they’d say, a soft arm extended in barricade when a modest tourist tried to enter the bath covered in bathing gown and cap. A three-quarter redwood wall separated the men’s bath from the ladies’, and across it, back and forth, traveled squeals and deep-settled moans of relaxation and regeneration and release.

A platform with a rail surrounded the Apfelsine, and over the years the villagers had built it out toward the sea cliff and the lagoon. There was an arcade for throwing rings around orange-soda bottles and a
shuffleboard gallery where first prize was a baby octopus origamied into a jar of formaldehyde. In the middle of this, the weeping rock stood protected by a small orange tent with a California grizzly flag flying from its peak, and a stand decorated with bunting sold cups of water for twenty-five cents.

Behind the counter was Charlotte Moss, who would say she liked to work at the mineral spring not for the money but for the news. By now everyone in town knew that Charlotte wanted to become a full-time reporter at the
Bee
. Already her column was more popular than the tidal report and the real-estate exchange. She never printed a name—this would become her trademark—and with each new edition her stories set off a sporting speculation over their subjects’ identities. If it’s news, it’ll swirl around the Apfelsine, Charlotte liked to say, and although this may have been true, she failed to add that she needed money for the berets and the smocks she had taken up as her reporter’s uniform and—a secret held even more tightly behind Charlotte’s breast—for food. Her father would go to sea for months with the promise of future fortune, but when he returned his pocket was never lined with wages; no, his pocket was always drained, in debt to the liquor chest, the poker table, and a whorehouse in every north-water port. Early on, Charlotte had gone hungry in life, and as a teenage girl she promised herself that she would never starve again.

“Two cups, please.” Bruder fished through his pocket, produced a dollar, and slid it across the counter.