Pasadena (46 page)

“Maybe you’re right.” And Lolly tugged a long woven-silk sash that hung from the ceiling, and a tinny little bell, like the kind on a shop’s door, jingled. She yanked it until Rosa scurried onto the loggia, asking what she could get Miss Poore.

Lolly ordered some tea. Before she left, Rosa looked at Linda in a way that embarrassed her, and Linda felt that she was being accused of pretending to be someone she was not. She wanted to defend herself:
He invited me! I didn’t ask to be here!
She wanted to go to the kitchen with Rosa and help with the tea; she wanted to touch Rosa somewhere where her flesh was bare and vulnerable and say, “Promise me one thing? You won’t mention any of this to Bruder? I’m not trying to hide anything, but you know how he is.…” But Rosa had turned on her heel too quickly for Linda to say anything at all. She and Bruder had never discovered how Willis had learned about their night together in
the narrow bed, and Linda had concluded that it was Rosa. “She’s spying on us,” Linda had said to Bruder. “She told him.” But Bruder held her fists and kissed her forehead and said, “Don’t be silly. You don’t know Rosa the way I do.” He said, “It was just a coincidence. He doesn’t know what happened. He’s a suspicious man. He could see something between us, that’s all. That’s why he made you move up the hill. Don’t think about it. And don’t blame Rosa. Linda, she wants to be your friend.” But Linda said, “I know how a girl like Rosa can be.”

It was an unkind thing to say, and Bruder told her so, adding, “I don’t like it when you’re cruel.” And this pricked Linda sharply and she pulled back and said, “I didn’t mean to be. You’re right. I won’t think about Rosa like that anymore.” But Linda couldn’t stop herself; the accusation swelled in her mind every day.

While they waited for Rosa to bring the tea, Lolly and Willis began arguing over what Linda quickly surmised they’d been arguing about for several days: whether or not to pave the road that ran from the front gate up one side of the hill and down the other to the ranch house. “I refuse to live through another year of mud,” said Lolly, folding her arms.

“You make it sound like the mud lasts forever. We have our rainy days, and by February the skies are mostly clear and the mud dries and it isn’t all that bad. We’re not living back east, after all.”

“Even so, when it’s muddy, the road can become
impassable
. Dangerous, even!” Her fingers fell on Linda’s hand in emphasis, or warning.

Willis changed the record again, and soon the Bubb Brothers were singing, according to Willis, “authentic Harlem jazz-a-roo!” The song was about a girl named Maggie who’d been lost on a street corner, and the Bubbs crooned and their voices were more intoxicating than the champagne. When Rosa returned with the teapot, Linda asked if she could help, but it was an ill-timed question, for what was there for her to do now that the tea had been delivered? “I’ll see you in the morning,” said Rosa, and the look on Willis’s face suggested that he thought that was a rude thing to say to Linda, no matter that it was true—unless, of course, something were to happen to Linda between now and the morning. But what could happen? she thought, reminding herself that she’d have to emphasize to Rosa and to Bruder and to Hearts and Slay that it was only by chance that
she
had ended up in the room at the end
of the mansion’s hall, and not one of
them
. It hadn’t been her doing at all.

Once Rosa was gone, Willis pulled Linda up again and held her firmly to his chest. The space between them narrowed to a nearly imperceptible gap, and soon his heartbeat echoed in her breast. Willis said that he wanted to teach her a step called the Grizzly Bear. It involved two or three low sways and then a heavy pounce. “And be sure to curl your fingers like claws.” Together, Linda and Willis swayed and pounced, and he growled like a cub.

She had never known anyone like Willis, and she couldn’t yet anticipate him. Once, Willis left a note on her pillow for no reason at all: “Sleep well. Dawn will be here soon.” The next night he left a second note, and Linda tore it open, her heart racing over their flowering friendship, but then stopping with disappointment: “We’re having sixty for dinner tomorrow night. I’m sure Rosa could use an extra hand.”

They continued to dance, and the wind rose in the yews, and then rain began to patter in the fountain and on the carpet of ryegrass. Rosa emerged from the house and began to roll down the canvas shades that enclosed the loggia like a tent. Linda moved to help, but Willis pulled her and said, “Let Rosa do it.” Linda said that it would take only a minute—the shades needed to be fastened down, like sails, to the floor and to the side pillars—but when she tried to take one of the shade’s corners, Rosa shook her head. “No, keep dancing.”

Soon the rain had turned heavy, pelting the canvas and shaking the fabric in gusts. The loggia had the feeling of a sultan’s grand tent, candlelight flickering against canvas wall and orchids folding demurely in the chill, and as the rain grew in intensity it seemed as if the tent were under siege. It had turned even colder, and Rosa rolled out a heater—the same kind used to warm the orchards—and lit a blue flame in its chimney. But Willis wanted to continue dancing; he riffled through his stack of record disks and held up one and said, “You’ll love it.” And he was right, Linda loved the music, the soft cry of a song called “Valley of the Night” and the harp in the ballad “Mountaintop for Two.”

The storm was pelting the canvas walls so hard that Linda was sure it must be hailing too. She shivered, and Willis rubbed her spine in a friendly way, pressing out the cold. Their bodies touched in many places, their chests and thighs and knees and the simmering skin of their cheeks. The orchard-heater’s gem-blue flame burned clear and
hard, and something warm spread across Linda, a seeping feeling, and Willis was saying something—
Isn’t it nice to have you here
, she thought it was—and for some reason Linda was confused by this: she wasn’t sure if he meant her or Lolly, who remained on the swing enjoying the news, her fingertips now smudged with ink. The record ended, and the music gave way to the blowing night. The rain was falling in waves, and it made her think of the nights she used to lie awake, Siegmund at her side, listening to the surf. A clap of thunder startled her, and Willis too, and they pressed together, and it felt as if something passed from Willis to Linda, nothing more visible or tangible than a current of electricity or the pulsing wind, and whatever it was, it was small and hidden from the eye, but nonetheless it was there and had transferred, between them. The needle continued to scratch, and Lolly got up and changed the disk. “This one’s my favorite.” Soon a creamy-voiced man was singing about the night he found his love,
Up in the air! Up up in the black, black air!
Linda had never heard the song before, but it was beautiful, and Lolly must have sensed the pleasure on her face because she said, “Why don’t you and I dance? It’s time we kick old Willis aside.”

The two girls danced in circles and took turns leading each other, and the song started off slowly but broke into a stomping, giddy cakewalk, and the next song was a Virginia reel. Lolly’s skin was cold, and up close she appeared both old and young at once, and it was easy to imagine sixty years into the future when she would appear, except for her surely sugar-white hair, nearly the same as she did tonight. “You’re a good dancer,” she complimented Linda, the flattery sounding sticky on her lips. “You should teach me some time.” Linda said that she had learned from watching her brother. “He used to go to the dances at the Cocoonery,” she said. The girls said nothing more as the song and the rain continued. The canvas flaps shook somberly, and the wind tried to snap them from their hooks, and Linda worried that the rain was coming down too hard for December. Was the ranch ready? The grove protected? “I should get down to the ranch house and check on things.”

Willis was lying on the swing with a cigar lodged in his mouth. “We pray for nights like this. It’ll be snowing in the mountains.”

Lolly said, “But, Willis, maybe she’s right. Maybe you should look to see if Bruder has everything under control.” And not a single second passed after she said this—not even a heartbeat in the fastest, most excited heart—when one of the canvas shades flapped open and Bruder
appeared, his shirt pasted wet to his skin. His arrival was so abrupt that Lolly gasped, and simultaneously she and Linda let go of each other, as if guilty of something.

“Get your coats,” ordered Bruder; his face was calm but serious, and if the music hadn’t already ended, his grave stare would have brought it to a halt. The rain dripping from his brow smudged his eyes. The scene before him was what he had expected—the stuttering graphophone’s arm and Lolly’s newspapers thrown about and Willis’s champagnepickled breath and the dancing-scuffed tiles—all of it was familiar and expected, except for Linda. He noted the embroidery on her dress and the arrangement of her hair, something she must have learned about in one of Lolly’s beauty magazines. The pink lingering in Linda’s cheek, and the oil on her eyelid, suggested champagne too. If the freezing rain weren’t driving down so hard, he would have accused her then. But with every passing minute the ranch could be losing another tree, and he cared about the land as much as he cared about anything; it was where he believed his future lay
—their
future—and he would confront her later. His hurt would have to wait, as it always would.

“Everything’s freezing over fast,” he said. “We need everyone.”

The road down the hill had already turned to mud, and Bruder’s half-ton truck began to skid, and he and Willis got out to inspect the slick dirt while Linda sat at the idling wheel. They told her to try the truck again, and when she released the brake and pulled the choke, she feared the truck would glide off the road and over the hillside. Even in the dark the icy crystals in the hard mud were bright, and the road looked like a slow, dark river. Eventually she got out of the truck and told them they were wasting time, and the three ran down the hill, hunched in their coats, the balloons of their breath pelted and popped by the rain.

Behind them they heard, “Wait for me!” Lolly was running toward them, her beaver coat swinging heavily. Willis told her to go home, and she said that it was her ranch too and she was going to help, and a tiny
goddammit!
peeped from her mouth, and even Lolly seemed surprised by her assertion. “There’s no time for this,” said Bruder. “There’s no time.”

Down in the yard the hands were busy pulling from the shed the smudgers and the portable tanks of distillate oil, the tanks’ caps lost
long ago and replaced by potatoes. The men tried to fight the cold in their hats, and their tight Stockinette jackets buttoned to the throat, and their ponchos worn over aprons worn over knit sweaters worn over nightshirts on top of their Sunday solesette shirts. They stamped the cold from their feet and stood with their shoulders close to their ears and dragged the smudgers into the yard and up into the wagon’s bed. The base of each smudger was disk-shaped, like a curling stone, and painted red, but the years had dented the steel and scarred the paint. From the base rose a four-foot chimney with a sheet of mesh over the flue. The chimneys were black and, soon, so were the men, the soot imprinting their gloves and their thighs, their guts, the skin around their eyes.

Slaymaker was organizing the men into a line to pass the smudgers along from shed to wagon, but the men wouldn’t stay in place, instead yelling at one another to wrap the horses and the burros, and Hearts was yelling at Slay to tell the boys to keep still. Muir Yuen and his cousins were in the yard as well, but they wore nothing warmer than blue fireman’s shirts as they fastened burlap and rope to each mule’s back. The real work hadn’t even begun, but Linda could see that the men were already angry about the cold and the rain, and she asked Willis if he didn’t have anything warm to lend them—scarves or blankets or anything?

“We’ll need some coffee,” he said, the youth draining rapidly from his face.

The smudgers held two and a half gallons of fuel each, and Slay was complaining that for a few years now he’d been telling Willis to buy five-gallon tanks. “They’ll burn up their gas before sunrise,” Slay warned, and the other men realized it too. Linda could see it in the downward etch in their faces, these men who knew that the long night’s work of distributing the smudgers throughout the groves was only the beginning; by the time they’d laid the last smudger and lit its greasy flame, they’d have to return to the first to refill its tank. Everyone seemed to know that they’d lose trees in the night—many more than they had lost in several years—and quite possibly a hand or two, quitters who’d ice up in the fingertip and walk off in the direction of Los Angeles, where a train would take them to better-managed strawberry fields in the San Joaquin. And each man knew that if he wasn’t
careful, a flame could leap from one of the chimneys to his coat. There wasn’t a hand at the Rancho Pasadena who hadn’t seen a buddy burn from wrist to wrist on a black freezing night.

Bruder was complaining that there weren’t enough smudgers for the grove, and yelling that they’d have to light brushwood fires in the ditches. He ordered Hearts to take five men into the groves and start piling up the cordwood. “Dump a little gasoline on the logs, and let the fires go.” The rain was beginning to stop, which meant that the night would turn only colder, and Bruder predicted that by two or three it’d be so cold that they’d need a smudger for every tree—and at last count they had only a thousand. “It’s going down below freezing. Twenty-seven or twenty-eight,” he said. He knew the San Gabriel Valley as well as anyone, and he knew the way the cold caught in the foothills and the arroyos and how the eucalyptus emitted its green scent as the temperature dipped. “Everything’s going to be ice. The oranges and everything else.” He yelled at Lolly, “You should go back up and wrap your roses.”

But Lolly said that she’d come to help, and at once the men looked at her and took note of her hooded beaver and her velvet slippers peeking from her hem and her fists curled as tight and white as stones. “Then get in the wagon,” said Bruder. She extended her hand, seeking his assistance, but Bruder loaded another smudger and Lolly climbed onto the wagon bench next to Slaymaker. “That muskrat?” he asked.