Pasadena (14 page)

As he told Linda this, she noticed for the first time a severity creeping into Edmund: a crease at the corner of his eye; a curl in his knuckles, as if he were on the verge of forming a fist. “For a while I thought
Bruder had driven the condors away, but that wouldn’t make any sense, would it? Could he do that, Linda? You two were out there hammering away, nails in your mouths, sun beating your necks, too busy to lift your eyes to see the most beautiful sight in the world flying overhead. Remember how they used to run in gangs off the bluff, throwing themselves down toward the ocean? Don’t you remember, Linda? They’d run fat and slow over the cliff and fall and then at the last possible second their wings would catch the thermals and up they’d go, up and up over the bluff and off into the foothills to find a dead tule elk or a pronghorn. Don’t you ever ask yourself where the birds have gone? Don’t you see things changing, Linda?”

Linda hadn’t noticed this, and the condors were so big and ugly she couldn’t imagine why they’d want them around anyway. “And there that one was, returning to the farm,” said Edmund, “and I don’t know why but I thought it was some sort of miracle, and that just maybe Bruder was responsible for both sending them away and then bringing one back. Can you believe it? Bruder, with those eyes like a pair of sinkholes, bringing us any sort of good! But the bird in the sky told me otherwise, and I hitched the hinny and followed the bird across the field. A Santa Ana was keeping him from flying away, suspending him. He was held aloft as he tried to make his way inland, as if God Himself had run wires through the bird’s wings and was dangling him there for me to see. He flew in front of the sun, and looking at him was nearly blinding, and I thought to myself, This is it, this is it.”

“This was what?” asked Linda. They were on the bench outside the kitchen, and without either of them realizing it, Edmund had taken her hand.

“I didn’t know, but I knew it was something. You know, Linda, those times when you don’t know what’s going on but you know there’s something. That the world is shifting and at first you don’t notice it but then God sends you a signal telling you to pay attention. That’s what I thought, and I’ll never forget the feeling when I headed into the arroyo and walked up the riverbed. It glittered with mica and rock and the day nearly blinded me and there the bird sat, wings hunched up like a pair of great shoulders. I got closer and closer to him, closer than I ever thought it would be possible to get to a bird. I was convinced the condors were all but gone from the farm, but this bird, that just maybe was the biggest God had ever created, was on our land, in our arroyo, there
for me to see. So ugly he was beautiful, that pink bald head wrinkled and tender like a newborn, and as I stepped closer the bird didn’t move and I was nearly convinced that I’d get close enough to lay my palm across his round head. And just then, in the glare of the white sun, I stepped on one of those broken-up planks you and Bruder were dumping in the arroyo, and a nail pushed through the sole of my shoe and I let out a scream. My foot was bleeding, the nail driven up into my heel, and Mr. California Condor turned his horrible head and revealed himself to be not a condor at all but a stupid old turkey vulture hunting for kitchen garbage. He stared at me and cackled, laughing the way you sometimes laugh, Linda, and the vulture swooped, his wingtip slapping my face, and flew away.”

By the late summer
, Bruder was working next to Edmund in the fields, and as the stink of onion seeped deeper into his fingertips, Dieter realized what Bruder had known all along: Bruder was a better farmer than Edmund. Bruder promised Dieter profits he had only dreamed of, “If you let me run the farm for a year. All I need is a year. Just keep Edmund out of the way.” Dieter struck the deal without regret, and went to his son to break the news, but Valencia called him to the kitchen and fed him a
chollo
and a cup of warm milk and soon Dieter forgot about his task. The next day, Bruder stopped Edmund from entering the field by placing his boot upon the irrigation standpipe. “I’ll be running the water from now on,” he said. With his heart rattling, Edmund ran to his father, who said, “It’s just for the year.” “What am I supposed to do?” “Now you have time to build the reservoir you’ve been talking about.” It happened on a day when the winds blew hot down the slope of Mt. Palomar, shifting the sands of Condor’s Nest, and the grit caught Edmund’s eye as he watched Bruder shove his old wheelbarrow into the field.

Linda found Edmund in the shallow crook of the arroyo where the vulture had landed. Linda asked her brother how she could help. She wished she could say that Dieter had made a mistake, but she knew that Bruder would bring the farm greater prosperity than Edmund, who had spent more time studying manuals and encyclopedias and drafting plans in his log than tilling and sowing and negotiating at market. “Do you think he’ll fail?” asked Edmund, and Linda said no. “He’ll do all right, but so will you,” and she touched her brother’s arm, and he let her, and then he sent her to the beach for a load of rocks. “Bring back
anything bigger than a cat,” he said, and together, over the next several weeks, they constructed a small single-arch dam. They bought chipped bricks from Heisler’s masonry and broken terra-cotta pots from the Cocoonery, and slowly the dam rose in a compact but stern mass. It was nothing more or less than a slightly curved wall of boulder, masonry, pine log, concrete dollop, packed earth, and, at its very heart, bales of hay. When they hauled the last stone into place, the dam stood nine feet high and six feet thick, and Linda could stand on one side and Edmund on the other and they could tap the rocks with their hammers and neither would hear the other. “You’re sure it’ll work?” she asked, and Edmund replied, “We’ll have to wait and see.”

Not long after, Edmund took a job as a clerk at the Twin Inn. The hotel was known both for its ocean views and for its pan-fried turkey, the birds freshly slaughtered by Señora Sara de Jesús Robledo in a shed out back. In the kitchen, the lard melted in a skillet as wide as an auto wheel, and Señora Sara—aproned but never without her carbuncle rings—fried the turkey whole with the feet, the giblets, the crimson flabby flesh from beneath the beak, and the beak itself, pulverized in a corn-grinder and sprinkled across the batch with pinches of
buenaventura
. Turkey
escandoloso
, it was called, and combined with mineral water and ocean breeze it brought a swift health to the lungs and soul—or so the tourist pamphlets and the advertisements in the Wisconsin and Indiana newspapers declared. And because of this, more guests visited Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea in the summer of 1919 than ever before.

But Dieter, recalling his own rejection at a hotel, didn’t want Edmund to take the job. There were still plenty of tasks at Condor’s Nest: clearing a fire path from the arroyo, fixing the backshed’s roof, planting a row of grapevines on the hill, building a staircase up from the beach. “You won’t be idle. Bruder will find plenty of work for you.”

But Edmund was determined. “Why do you want to leave us?” Linda asked as he was preparing for his first day at the hotel. He was sitting on the bench in the kitchen yard, proud of his uniform of black gabardine trousers and a matching satin puff tie. A shoe was clamped between his knees, and he was buffing the toe cap.

She asked if she could visit him at the hotel, but he said he’d be busy keeping track of the guest rooms and making sure that everyone had what they wanted. He bent to lace his shoes; they were Dongola oxfords with a military heel, bought at Margarita’s for $1.45. Edmund had
admitted his anxiety over such a steep purchase, but Linda had swatted her hands through the air and said, “Why worry about it?” She wondered where he got it from: his timidity, his caution. He was unlike the rest of them, she knew, unlike Dieter and Valencia and certainly unlike herself. It was as if he had come from a different world, and again Linda was struck by the notion, vague as it was, that another world heaved and cleaved beyond the reaches—the San Luis Rey River, Mt. Palomar, the black lagoons—of Condor’s Nest and Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea.

“Do you have your lunch pail?”

“I get a free turkey dinner with every shift.”

“Can I pack you some
conchas
?”

“Muffins come with every meal.”

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

He said there wasn’t, and just as he was about to depart, Bruder appeared in the yard. His feet were bare, his pants rolled to his shins. He was carrying Edmund’s book,
The Gentleman and His Ranch
, and Linda watched the twitch in Edmund’s face, the blink, the sniffling nose. “Off to the hotel?” Bruder asked. Edmund continued packing his satchel and then set out down the dirt lane, careful to keep the dust from his cuffs, and when he turned to wave good-bye to his sister he found that she was already gone, on her way to the beach with Bruder, nothing in the kitchen yard but the short shadows and the white glare.

It was a cloudless day and on the sand, Bruder stripped down to his tank suit. Linda was wearing her cotton swimming dress, and as she jumped the waves, the water pulled on the frilled trim, and she envied Bruder, free as a seal in his skin. She watched his shoulders turn as he paddled through the ocean. From his mouth he spouted water five feet into the air. He liked to chase her, circling with a shark’s precision, and a dark intensity would hood his eyes and she’d become nervous, a hundred yards out, as he swam, the fin of his arm crooked through the water, around her, and he’d refuse to stop or to speak when she’d say, “Bruder, please let’s float here for a minute. Look up there. You can see the cottages and our dam. Isn’t it a beautiful little dam?” But Bruder wouldn’t stop, and once or twice he would dive, abandoning Linda on the surface, swimming so deep that even his air bubbles disappeared, and then a sudden tight grip would yank her cold foot. Once or twice she felt something soft against her skin, as gentle as a pair of nibbling lips.

They swam for more than an hour and then returned to shore for the outrigger. She had taught him to canoe the waves, the bamboo float facing the wind, and they would paddle until her arms ached and Bruder would yell for her not to stop. There was a ferocity to him as he sank his oar into the water and propelled the canoe through the surf, and it triggered a lurch within her chest. He knew what he was doing to her at moments like this, and it was his intention to make her realize that there was no one else in the world. Before he could admit to himself that he loved her, he wanted to be certain that she loved him. Before he could claim what was already his, he wanted to be sure that she longed to be possessed.

When they finished canoeing, they ran up the beach, to the gully path that led to the farm. Her bathing dress was heavy on her breasts and thighs, and the sun was warm through the cotton, steam rising. As she climbed the path she pulled on the ice plant, its snapped leaves secreting a sticky clear fluid that reminded her of something—something that even the thought of, in Bruder’s presence, caused her to blush. She turned around and he was a step behind her, his arms stretched toward her; was he trying to capture her? With the arroyo dammed up, they now had to climb a steep path up the bluff’s face, and again Linda was saying that they should build a staircase and that she would do it herself, if only someone would volunteer to be her builder’s assistant. She was shouting like a golden eagle
kee-kee-kee
, and as they reached the top, Linda wanted to collapse with Bruder at her side, and just then Valencia called out for Linda, asking her to come help with the wash.

She told her mother she was busy.

“No, no, come now. And leave Bruder alone. He has work in the field.”

Linda bent to catch her breath, and Bruder’s hand fell to the small of her back. The sun burned the water from her skin, and Linda felt the quick rush of blood as she lifted her face.

“Linda!” Valencia called again:
Lean-da! Lean-da!
Her mother appeared with the wooden laundry paddle. Valencia’s skirt ran to her ankles in the old-fashioned way, and she made a face that said she was too busy for games. Linda cooled with the disappointment of daily life. Her mother’s interests were narrow, Linda had observed, her energy reserved for the cooking and the wash, the kitchen garden and the henhouse, the Friday-evening suppers in the schoolhouse where a dozen
hands slapped out the
masa
and the wood smoke mixed with the semisweet smell of
tortillas
cooking on the comal. Valencia wasn’t interested in the world beyond Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea, and as far as Linda could tell she knew nothing of it. Of her mother’s early years in Mexico, Linda knew little. Once, for her birthday, Linda had asked her mother for a trip to San Diego, to ride the trolley and peer into the carpeted lobby of the Ulysses S. Grant Hotel. But Valencia never expressed any desire to step onto city pavement. “Everything I need is right here,” she was fond of saying. That, and “Ay, Linda. You too will come to see.”

Now Valencia was hauling the wash into the yard. There hadn’t been rain since April, and there wouldn’t be rain until November, and the garden had withered into a sandy bed of lavender-petaled horned sea rocket and a thicket of white geranium that lived off dishwater and a patch of scraggly myrtle white with sea salt. Years ago, Dieter had cut a picnic table and bench out of the hull of a schooner called
El Toro
that ran aground in La Jolla cove. The sailor graffiti remained in the plank, and Linda couldn’t count the number of suppers she’d sat through running her finger over their carvings: a crosshatch count of days at sea; a crosshatch count of days since a woman was touched; the sketch of a huge-eyed girl lifting her petticoat. Storm and sun had faded the graffiti, but they remained firm enough in the wood for Linda to imagine the sailors in their canvas hats pulling in a topsail and sleeping four to a bunk. Linda wondered if she was the only one who saw the traces of the jack-tars’ passions, but recently Bruder had said that he saw them too.

Valencia set down the laundry and fetched from the stove the pot of boiling water, pouring it into the half-barrel and instructing Linda to clamp the roller-washer to the rim. It was late morning, and Linda looked to the sun and to the mound of laundry and knew she’d still be washing in the afternoon, and that the day would pass at the washer’s hand-crank. It was a mindless task, and after a few minutes—sorting out the clothes, submerging a checked shirt in the boiling water and wringing it through the roller—she began to wonder if she would stand at the picnic table and wash other people’s undershirts for the rest of her life. “Mama, where do you think Papa met Bruder?”