Pasadena (38 page)

At night, the hands saved a chair for Linda at the table beneath the pepper tree, and she smoked the Vasquez cigarettes that Hearts passed around in a cigar box and listened to the ranch-hand stories, and sometimes she told the boys about Condor’s Nest.

When Linda asked, Davey Hearts said he didn’t have much of a history to speak of: born in Wisconsin’s North Woods and chased out of town by a man with a Stevens tip-up pistol who falsely accused him of pestering his wife. “It couldn’t have been true,” said Slay. “She was a hausfrau,” said Hearts. “Older than my mother. The man was trying to extort me, it’s as simple as that.” Bruder had warned her never to listen to Hearts or Slay once the cap was off the flask, but it seemed to Linda that they were honest men. Once a week, Davey Hearts shaved his head in a mirror nailed to the pepper tree. He’d lather up his scalp and then go around waking up the other hands, and as the dawn cracked he’d whistle “Break Out the Oars!” while he dragged the blade across his scalp. He was strong in a lean sort of way and had a surprisingly small appetite, often turning down Linda’s syrupy curds and returning his plate to the kitchen with his beans untouched. He’d met Timmy Slaymaker on the train to San Francisco and they’d been a pair since the end of the war, when one of them shot a bear-faced man in defense of the other. That was up in the mountains on the road to Tahoe, and the deputy sheriff took a look at the dead man curled at the foot of a redwood and thanked Hearts and Slaymaker for ridding the road of a pirate toll-collector and said, “Self-defense, you say?” Then the deputy sheriff advised Hearts and Slaymaker to get off the Sierras by the end of the day. That’s when Slaymaker led Hearts home to Pasadena. “He told me we could get a pair of jobs in one of the hotels and wear tuxedo uniforms,”
Hearts recalled, but their grimy, worn clothes had prevented them from entering even the back door of the Huntington or the Green, and Slaymaker had taken Hearts instead to the Rancho Pasadena.

Timmy Slaymaker had first turned up at the Pasadena when he was twelve. He said he had no family, but the ranch hands who shared the bunkhouse with little Slay spoke of the boy talking in his sleep in a strange tongue. In the middle of the night, the hands would stand around his bunk and listen to the spitty babbling, trying to figure out what language he was speaking. “I think it’s French,” said one. “That ain’t French. It’s Portugee.” A third said, “It ain’t Portugee either. It’s Irish.” Everyone then agreed that the burbling possessed a Gaelic quality, and the hands returned to bed, relieved to have solved the puzzle. But Slaymaker had never known his parents, and he didn’t know that the language of his peat-farmer ancestors wafted through his memory. The hands told the boy that he was a black Irishman, and for a season everyone at the Pasadena called him “Black Lad,” which evolved into “Black Boy,” and then Timmy Slaymaker—by now a large young man with a boy’s heart buried beneath a stocky hide—quit the Pasadena, crying into his fists on the train to San Francisco. “That’s when I met him,” said Hearts. “We hooked up like a couple of links.”

“You never see them apart,” Bruder would say of the two. “They know something the rest of us don’t.” Sometimes he would join them at the table, listening to the hands swap stories, a knife cold in his palm. Linda would wait for him to tell a story of his own but he never did, and Hearts and Slay knew not to bother asking, and the Mexican boys were too frightened of Bruder to inquire much. One night, Linda said that it was his turn—“Don’t you want to tell us anything? About the war, maybe?”—and the pit fire leapt in his eyes and he turned the deer-foot knife in his hand and told everyone beneath the pepper tree that he’d let others tell those tales. One of the boys asked if Bruder had ever killed anyone, and Bruder said, “You should be asking Captain Poore.”

One boy who liked to slay lizards with a slingshot said, “Captain Poore must’ve killed a million Germans to get a medal like his.” The other boys peeped like kittens, as they were always more interested in Captain Poore than in Bruder—for who would envy the latter’s life over the former’s? The boys had traveled in railcar and buckwagon and pickup truck, and they’d slept in open asparagus fields, their heads resting
on their rolled long johns; in their short lives they’d seen the West, they liked to say, up and down, north and south. Yet they were still young enough to become frightened when Bruder said, as he did around the table, that there wasn’t much difference between killing a man and killing a mountain lion. “If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen,” he would say.

“Is that really true?” the boys would ask. “Doesn’t anything scare you at all?”

And Linda said, her voice light in the dark, “I bet you never killed anyone at all.”

Bruder wasn’t trying to be coy, but he wished Linda would realize that he wanted to say very little in front of the men who worked for him, for Bruder believed that respect came from inscrutability. Once, after the hands had gone to bed, he said to her: “One day I’ll tell you what you want to know,” but it was after midnight and the arm of her alarm clock was turned to five and she said, “What makes you think I’m going to sit around and wait for you?”

She left him, but the next day he came to her kitchen and pulled the butcher knife from her hand and tugged her wrist. “Come with me.” He said he wanted to show her some things on the ranch, and there was a new and awkward tenderness in his voice and in the delicate, tentative way he touched her, his fingers falling to her hand. Rosa had said that Bruder was at heart a shy man, but Linda disbelieved this more than anything else Rosa had said: “Bruder? Shy? That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard,” Linda had said, laughing in a way she hadn’t for several years.

They walked through the grove, and pride was bright upon Bruder’s face, as if the orchard were his, and his vanity surprised her; but if he was proud, it was because whatever order and efficiency existed at the Rancho Pasadena was due to him. She didn’t know this, and Bruder would never say it in so many words, but after the war Willis was slow to return to the ranch; and when he did he thought about shutting it down. But Lolly had cried, “No, no, you can’t!” Months of indecision led to general neglect—mice in the packinghouse, red spider in some of the trees. “In a grove, every day there’s more work,” Bruder would say, and it was his attention—an eye that could be cruel in its relentless exactitude—that had returned the Pasadena to full capacity. He told Linda some of this, as much as a proud but modest man could say, and
she skipped a few paces ahead of him and she was both impressed by the land—at the bottom of the little valley, the ranch felt almost as endless as the ocean!—and unable to fully recognize the intimacy Bruder was offering. She instructed herself to ask Willis for his version of the ranch’s death and rise, and she was pleased with herself to have acquired a skeptical ear. No, she knew enough not to accept one version of events. Only a few weeks in Pasadena had taught her that.

They continued walking, and once or twice his hand dropped to her shoulder or to the small of her back, causing her at once to pull away and then, as she realized that the gesture was gentle and kind, to lean back into him, welcoming him. She didn’t know she was doing this; and she didn’t know that her body was tossing a circle of heat that Bruder sensed, one that betrayed her most private longings. It was a hot afternoon, the sun bare and high, and Bruder stopped to show her the irrigation system, the open flumes that ran along the border and the plowed furrows between the rows of trees and the cement heads and the standpipes. Bruder explained that the ditches ran at a slight downward pitch, thus the water seeped into the earth to the root systems. During the summer and fall they ran the water every three weeks, but now they probably wouldn’t have to run it until spring. He predicted more rains and she asked how he knew and he said he didn’t know, “I just get a sense.” And then: “Don’t you ever feel that way, Linda? Feel certain about what’s to come?”

“It’s like waiting for a flood,” she said, and the past that lay between them opened, deep and exposed, and she peered into it and Bruder stood at the rim and peered over as well. Linda thought to ask why he had left Condor’s Nest so quickly.

“It’s complicated,” he began.

“Tell me.”

“I wanted to earn your affection,” he said. “I wanted it to come from
you
.”

She didn’t understand this. In her pocket she found another one of Edmund’s letters, one of the small spit-sealed envelopes that now arrived almost daily, with a few pleading queries inside. She was quick to tuck them into her pocket and she didn’t read them until late at night, after the boys had gone to sleep and she was lying on her bed, the window cracked to perfume her room with the oranges. Then she would decipher Edmund’s wobbly hand, his notes about loneliness and Palomar,
who, he wrote once, had gotten sick from eating sand. He wrote of the fresh soil atop Carlotta’s grave, next to Valencia’s near the tulip tree, sited by a wooden cross that the first rains had toppled. In each letter Edmund asked Linda to return to the farm: “As soon as you can, or sooner.” He wrote that she didn’t belong in Pasadena, how could she survive so far from the ocean? Each night she meant to write Edmund, she meant to tell him that she would return at the end of the harvest, that living far from the ocean wasn’t so bad. Over and over she would start a letter, “From the terrace of the house you can see the Pacific, far far away …” But almost immediately she’d fall asleep with the pen in her hand, the blue-black ink bruising the breast of her nightdress. And the night would take Linda, its hand upon her.

She said, “Why would you have to leave to become mine?”

And Bruder admitted more: “Some promises made long ago, Linda.”

The sun pressed on their necks, and Linda wiped her lip and felt the heat trapped in her dress. Bruder was walking close to her, his arm swinging near hers, and when she’d take a long step his hand would graze her elbow or her hip and his heat would transfer to her, a spark up the wick of her spine. Again, something was pulling her to lean into him, and as she did he leapt over a puddle, his shoulder out of her cheek’s range. She believed that everything he did was deliberate, which was true, and in his eyes she read a desire to torment her, which was wrong. But she thought she smelled it in the musk seeping from him, and in the way the sweat hung from his short beard, drops suspended whisker by whisker and then lurching down his throat. She didn’t like to admit it, but loneliness would reach her late at night, on the iron-spring bed, where the air from the cracked window ran cool across her flesh; once or twice she had removed her nightdress and let the breeze touch her, the orange oil in the air caressing her; and then her own hand. She would fall asleep like this, naked in the anteroom between waking hours and sleep’s chamber, an eruption of desire overtaking her. But it was no longer clear what Linda longed for; it felt as if her world had doubled, or quadrupled, since moving to Pasadena, and each night as she drifted toward sleep she thought of them: pale Edmund and silent Bruder and the golden hair of Willis Poore and the gems of his eyes.

“And now I’m earning it,” he said. “I don’t need to buy it.”

“What are you talking about now?”

It wasn’t precisely what Bruder had meant to say; no, what he’d meant to say was that he knew Linda would love him. But his words had warped the sentiment, and, embarrassed, Bruder hurried back to the subject of the ranch tour. Oh, Bruder: how often he thought he wasn’t meant to reveal his heart.

“It’s a mature grove,” he explained, pointing this way and that to the ranch’s property lines up in the foothills, a mountain to the east and to the south, a hill like a camel’s hump. “First planted in the 1880s,” he said, and now the best trees rose more than twenty feet. He told her that he and Hearts and Slay had spent most of September erecting canvas tents around each tree, fumigating for scale. “You always have to be on guard for an infestation.” They’d spent most of October hosing down the trees for red spider, dragging the four-hundred-gallon tank through the grove, Slay and Hearts two-fisting the nozzle, its pressure so fierce that their teeth rattled as they held the hose. Each afternoon they’d return to the ranch house drenched, as if they’d spent the day floating at sea. “We’d strip down to nothing but our boots and sit on the bench and wait for our pants to dry on the line,” one would say, and the other would grin.

Bruder stood next to one of the oldest trees, a canopy of branch and leaf and early fruit. “We call this one ‘Decameron.’ There’s always at least two oranges on it, no matter what time of year.” The name meant nothing to Linda, but Bruder continued, “There’s the poem about the pair of lovers who bathed in orange water and a courtesan who drizzled orange perfume into her bedsheets.” He paused as he realized that she had no idea what he was talking about, and it hurt him that she showed no curiosity. At Condor’s Nest, wouldn’t she have inquired?

“It’s just an old poem,” he said. And she said she would have to look it up one day. But she wasn’t the type to look up a poem, and Bruder wondered if she’d ever become such a person; and at the same time Linda wondered where Bruder had read the poem about the bathing lovers. Did Captain Poore invite him into his library? And then a jealous image entered Linda’s head: Bruder following Rosa into the library, silently shutting the door behind him, whispering, “They’re outside. We’ll have to hurry.” And the soft, brown mound of Rosa’s feather duster dropping to the floor.

The orange tree shadowed Bruder, and the sweet perfume was almost
sickening, and the endless rows of trees and the long brown-water ditches and the hard blue sky and the Sierra Madres rising purple in autumn all loomed over Linda, greeting her with pitiless beauty. She closed her eyes, and a view of the San Gabriel Valley came to her, its stretch and reach, the dry rivers and the parched yellow foothills and the dusty arroyos and the red-roofed city with its creeping neighborhoods and spewing cars and the coyote’s cave and the wild grape choking an electricity pole and the two-hundred-year-old live-oak depositing an acorn into broken-up soil, and among it all, here stood Bruder, next to her. He was yet another, but somehow greater, breath among the inhalation and exhaust of nature’s panoply, and so was she. There they were, Bruder and Linda, their eyes locked. The breeze down an orange alley tugged at his shirt and popped a button and exposed the flank of his chest; and nothing had changed since his arrival at Condor’s Nest. Nothing and everything had changed, and Bruder leapt across the running ditch and extended his hand for her, but Linda didn’t take it. She jumped with her hem in her fist and landed, her breast against his, and at last she remembered why she had come to Pasadena, and in the sunlight they kissed.