Pasadena (40 page)

“You never met him?”

“Not then, not when we were so young. Sometimes Lolly would wake in the middle of the night and say she heard something, some sort of noise on the trellis, and she’d run down the hall and jump into my bed crying, certain it was El Brunito.

“Then one day, when Bruder was just leaving his boyhood behind, he was helping with the ice delivery at the City Farm. He was working the iron tongs, and the next thing that happened—but how, no one really knows even today—the delivery boy was dead beneath a block of ice. They say you could see his red curls and his broken nose through the three-foot slab.

“It was in the newspaper. Every day for a month another article, more speculation, interviews with Mrs. Banning, quotes from the manager of the Pasadena Ice Company, a picture of the poor kid’s grave. The police determined it was an accident, but it was a fishy accident, and there was no one’s word to go by but Bruder’s. The police believed him but no one else did, and once the whole thing died down, for a few years after, he stopped talking altogether. He’d plow the fields and pick the lettuce and the grapes and the lemons, and he said nothing all day and stayed up all night with a book borrowed from the library. They never ran his picture or used his name, but most people thought they knew who he was. Women would cross the street to avoid passing
any dark boy who they thought might be El Brunito. Men, too. The only one who knew anything about him was the librarian, Miss Westlake, who checked out book after book for him—one a day, as I’ve heard her tell it.”

“Doesn’t it make you feel sorry for him?” said Linda.

“Lolly and I used to send books to the Training Society. He never knew who they were from. Probably doesn’t, to this day.”

Willis explained that he first met Bruder in a beechwood forest, not far from the banks of the Meuse. “That was the summer of 1918. When the mechanic in line next to me said that he was from Pasadena, immediately I figured out who he was, and I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you it made me a little scared. I thought he might kill me.”

“But he didn’t kill you.”

Willis hesitated. “No, he didn’t.”

“Did you save his life? Is that how you got your medal?”

“We were all saving lives.” And Willis fell silent.

There was a step up in the path, and he offered his hand, and his palm was slick and left a ripe scent on Linda. At last they had reached Paradise Canyon. It was a narrow blue cleft between two peaks in the Sierra Madres, bottomed by a dry wash glittered with mica. A wall of granite headed the gulch where, Willis said, in spring a waterfall rushed white and cold and deadly. “You should see it in April, everything alive and in flower. Every fall, before the harvest, I hike in here to see the dead gully. Then in the spring, after we’ve picked the last orange, I return. We’ll come back, Linda, you and I, and I’ll show you. Look at it now, remember what it looks like now, dead like this, dried up like this. In April, you won’t believe it. There’ll be thickets of sweetbriar and masses of feathery greasewood and wild buckwheat and prickly pink phlox.” He moved and she felt something near her, his shifting heat. “We’ll come back and you’ll see the larkspur and the Indian pink. And hundreds of mariposa lilies and thousand of golden poppies. Poppies everywhere, in the ravine and in the crook of a tree and peeking from the crag. Everything bursting and alive, and in April you forget that rain is half a year away, you forget that everything shrivels and dies, every last thing.”

The shade of the canyon wall reached them, sending a chill across her neck. His shoulder touched hers, and she smelled a blend of musk and tonic. The part in his hair had disappeared, replaced by a tousle of
blond falling into his eyes. He smiled, and she wouldn’t know it then—how could she know it then?—but his eyes were alive with plans for her, and even Linda couldn’t explain or reclaim the forlorn, desperate sigh that just then pressed from her chest. If she’d ever doubted what she wanted for herself, it was now, and Willis found a dry wild rose, its heart brittle and white, and pinned it at the throat of Linda’s blouse.

The following morning
, at shortly after seven, the ranch hands divided into teams of four and walked down the grove lanes. Each team propped its bamboo ladders against a quadrant of trees and stacked its field boxes, their identification numbers painted bright on the sides. The buckskin picking gloves cost each man seventy-five cents, and at night they slept with them beneath their pillows, because the first thing to tempt a ranch-house thief was a pair of picking gloves. A pair of citrus clippers cost $1.75, and the hands would sharpen them before bed and then chain them to their cots. From time to time a representative from the Growers Exchange would arrive unannounced, and Bruder would scramble to find Willis, and together they would walk the man—typically, Mr. Griffith—through the groves to inspect gloves and clippers. There was a mandated method to picking a navel orange, whose easily damaged rind, if bruised, could succumb to decay spores, spoiling an entire box and then a ranch’s reputation. It was the job of Slay and Hearts to make sure the boys knew how to handle the oranges, and on that first day they walked up and down the rows and shouted into the trees. “Clip it off, don’t pull it. Be sure not to cut the stem’s button. And don’t dare pack an orange with a stem longer than half an inch.”

The ranch hands wore burlap trousers held up by suspenders and solid-colored shirts to mask the dust. Everyone but the youngest boys wore a workman’s coat or vest, and some wore aprons; some carried more than one gunnysack over the shoulder; they hauled crates that could hold twenty pounds of fruit when the oranges were neatly packed like eggs. Each man had his own ladder, and a bamboo prodder, and
they worked in rows, their faces only partly protected by thin-brimmed bowler hats. The occasional hand wore a loose bow tie, as if expecting something great to occur in his day.

One team of hands, boyhood friends from the orphanage of the Catedral de la Ascensión in Hermosillo, called themselves the Naranjo boys. They were seventeen or eighteen—even
they
didn’t know—and they traveled from ranch to ranch, picking the navels in the winter and the Valencias in the summer, and they made only one demand of the foremen: four beds in a row. They would climb the trees and clip the oranges and pull their floppy, feathered hats down against the sun. Throughout each day they would chatter as if they hadn’t seen one another in weeks, amusing themselves with stories about their unknown mothers. Pablo was the smallest, with a moony forehead and a corn-silk mustache of six or seven limp whiskers. His hair was mysteriously blond, and he told his friends that his mother was a Pima princess and his father an admiral in the Spanish navy, cousin to the king. Juanito was the oldest—or at least his beard suggested that—and he had luxuriant, wavy hair and a bump on the ridge of his nose, and he’d tell the others, from his bamboo-ladder perch, that the actual explanation for the blond hair was that Pablo had been born into a family of yellow-headed blackbirds, one of the thousands roosting in the trees of Plaza Zaragoza back home. The Naranjo boys would laugh, even Pablo, and Linda would find them giggling in the branches, their picking sacks full, when she arrived at noon with the crew lunch. She brought a chicken
tamale
to each boy and an orange soda and a single
polvorone
wrapped in white kitchen paper. They’d descend their ladders for the noon rest, their picking hands swiftly replaced by gray-rumped mockingbirds. With the Naranjo boys she’d sit in the shade and share a
tamale
and assure them she’d say nothing as they quartered a pint of white tequila—for by now Linda knew that if she were to report the alcohol on the ranch, every last man and boy would be thrown out. “No one’s dry,” Slaymaker would say. “How else could we accept our fate?” The first time the Naranjo boys offered Linda a sip of tequila, she declined; and the next day they offered again, and she declined again; and every day it was like that. Bruder had told her to watch out for them (they told her the same about him), and she sat with the tequila fumes itching the tip of her nose, confident that there was no one she had to watch out for—nothing could infect her; she thought of what Willis had said
on the hike out of Paradise Canyon: “I’ll keep an eye out for you.” She thought of Edmund’s letters, growing in desperation:
Who will look after you, Linda?

Bruder’s job was to oversee the hands in the groves and the gossiping girls in the packinghouse and just about everything else during the harvest and to report to Willis the daily yield. “What do I care if the girls don’t like me much?” he said more than once when Linda pointed out that he should be careful not to shout so much: “Nobody likes to be barked at.” The identification numbers painted on the field crates helped Bruder figure out who was clipping carelessly and packing sloppily, and nearly every day as she delivered lunch to the teams Linda heard his voice rising above the trees: “That’s coming out of your wages!” He told her to cut down on the lard in the
polvorones
and the chicken in the
tamales
and the ice cooling the sodas, and when she asked what he cared about it, he said he cared about everything at the Pasadena: “Everything here is my concern.” He said this with that familiar look in his face, his eyes narrowed and nostrils flaring, and Linda couldn’t interpret it any more now than she could years ago at Condor’s Nest—that hard gaze that seemed a terrible mixture of love and hate, all of it shadowed by his patchy beard. She wondered where his loyalty to the ranch came from; his love for this particular stretch of land in this particular valley was too specific for it to be merely professional fidelity. Certainly Willis didn’t return the sentiment: after all, hadn’t he said, “Sometimes I think Bruder isn’t quite from this world.” Hadn’t Willis leaned in and whispered to Linda, “Isn’t quite human, do you know what I mean?” But Bruder wasn’t thinking of Willis; no, Bruder was concerned with himself and his future, and if ever he was going to have a tract of land to call his own—for was there a greater security in California than a V-shape fold of fertile soil?—it would be the Pasadena. It was owed to him, he reminded himself often, and sometimes he’d take the piece of paper from beneath his mattress and reread Willis’s childlike scrawl. But when Bruder said things about the land becoming his, Linda would ask, “What on earth are you talking about now?”

Mrs. Yuen, old but strong, helped Bruder oversee the packinghouse. Every morning she welcomed the girls to the ranch with a dish of burning incense and a gleam in the braid coiled atop her head and a little yellow steaming bean bun. She assigned packing stations to the girls, most
of whom traveled by truck and wagon each morning from Titleyville or the Webb House, an orphanage and boardinghouse that each Christmas raised money by sending to the finer Pasadenans, including the Poores, pamphlets describing the home as a place where “everything is done to develop the Little Mexican Women into useful American citizens.” At the height of the season the packinghouse would employ more than fifty girls, and Linda would stay up late each night stuffing the
tamales
for the next day’s lunch. It shocked her the first day she went to the packinghouse and found Bruder yelling at one of the packers, a girl with frizzy hair around her brow. Her name was Constanza, and she held down her pear-bottom chin as Bruder complained about undersize oranges slipping into a packing crate. When at last he stopped she lifted her head, and her watery eyes, lit by the slender shaft of sunlight coming through the window beneath the eave, made Linda think of diamonds, like the teardrop stones she’d seen pinned to Lolly’s ears.

“Do you have to yell at everyone?” Linda asked one afternoon in the ranch-house kitchen.

“If they don’t do their job.”

“I’m sure at least once someone’s yelled at you, and I’ll bet it didn’t make you feel all that good. I should think you’d try to remember that the next time.”

“No one’s ever yelled at me. No one but you.”

But Linda knew this wasn’t true, and she said, “What about when you were a boy? I’ve heard the stories.” She added, “Sometimes I think I can’t believe you.”

She wasn’t sure who was more startled by her having said this, Bruder or herself. He was holding a glass and his knuckles whitened as anger ran through him; she flinched, knowing that the glass would momentarily shatter, but then Bruder set it down and left her. Since her arrival in Pasadena, so many people had told her so many things about Bruder—shards of history that contradicted his own version—that she wondered if she could ever believe him again. “You’ve succumbed to gossip,” he said when she asked him about his life at the Training Society. “Did they really used to call you ‘El Brunito’?” “No one’s ever called me anything but my name.” But this, too, wasn’t true—he just
wished
it were true, and he wished that Linda knew him only as the man he was today. The shame that came from memory struck Bruder, and he was sorry that Linda couldn’t perceive it blowing him about; if she
were to stroke his cheek she would have felt the heat in his flesh, the blood rising in concussion. He was a wounded man, and sometimes it was all he could do to protect himself.

“I’m just trying to run the ranch,” he’d say.

Every morning before dawn Bruder picked up most of the packing girls at the Webb House and drove them to the Pasadena. The girls were fifteen or sixteen years old, many of them born in East Pasadena and abandoned at the Pasadena Settlement House because their mothers, whoever they were, knew that the Pasadena Hospital not only refused adult patients whose flesh wasn’t dairy-white but also turned away babies with any flecks of cocoa in their skin. The Settlement House was at California and Raymond, and its black-clothed administratrices prayed at Our Lady of Guadalupe and arranged for milk for any and all babies of Pasadena no matter the origins of the suckling mouth, and eventually these ladies—who prayed for a sighting of the Virgin Mary in their wall mirrors—placed the infants in the orphanages around town. This was how most of the packing girls first came to the Webb House, and even though they were natives to Pasadena, no one who ran the city considered them as such—for the girls were familiar with little beyond the orphanage and the neighborhoods of Lamanda Park and Eaton Wash, where Spanish floated from
casita
to
casita
through the jacarandas. The girls who packed the oranges weren’t refined enough to work in the mansions along Orange Grove and Hillcrest—or so they’d been told most of their lives and now they believed it. “I’ve raised my girls to be workers,” the
Star-News
quoted Mrs. Emily Webb, the Webb House’s headmistress, in an article about the Community Chest. Along with the girls from the Webb House, there were packers from all over the valley, from the Junior Republic and the Rosemary Cottage, where girls of a certain slowness studied kitchen crafts; from the Altadena foothills, where adobe houses burrowed into the chaparral, abutting mountain-lion dens; from East Pasadena bungalows where every child, no matter the age, contributed to the shallow, well-scraped pot. They came from the cottages tucked behind mansions, where extended families slept in bunks and hammocks and bedding rolls, and where a grandmother with arms as soft as avocados woke everyone before dawn to send them off to their jobs: the men to the citrus ranchos and the alfalfa and corn fields that still grew along the underbelly of Pasadena, the women to hotel laundries and galleys, through the back doors of mansions,
down to basements where washtubs waited, spitting suds. But the girls with the strongest arms and the ugliest hands and the faces that didn’t look pretty beneath a maid’s pastry-puff cap met up with Bruder’s truck at the Raymond Street Station and rode out to the Rancho Pasadena, where a long day in the packinghouse paid slightly less than a chambermaid’s wages at the Hotel Vista.