The Winemaker's Daughter, page 11
“Why keep it going if it can’t stay alive on its own?”
Ethan serves the flank steak on paper plates, cuts open the plastic pouch of green beans, and pours water from a container with three inner filters.
“I don’t share any of your . . . consuming passions, Brunella. I’m not hardwired for that kind of impulse attachment. You fall in love with things too easily: ideas, people, broken-down piers.”
“It gets me in trouble.”
“As it should. What you need is a better filter.”
“A filter?”
“You know, I’m not without a sense of altruism.”
“Oh?”
“After some deliberation, I’ve decided I’m going to adopt a stream,” he says. “In Niccolo’s honor. I would endow habitat preservation for perpetuity.”
“And what is perpetuity selling for these days?”
“I don’t have to do it, if you’re offended.”
“No, that’s sweet of you.”
He chews very slowly, eight times per bite.
“Why do you chew that way?”
“I’ve read three biographies of John D. Rockefeller. He was a stickler for precise mastication. He believed, and I think he was right, that it was a way to keep the stomach settled. He lived to be ninety-seven.”
“How much are you worth, Ethan?”
“In money terms?”
This brings a faint smile to her face. “Yes. In money terms.”
“I’m not sure. Between twenty and seventy million. Another thing Rockefeller did, he insisted that all his dinner guests chew in the same way he did. I think that’s a little odd, don’t you?”
She rises, wanders around the kitchen and out to the living room, and collapses on a couch. She sleeps until midmorning the next day.
A week passes in which Brunella tries to disappear within the city. Phone messages go unreturned. When the doorbell rings, she ignores it. She takes long walks in the sunlight that coats Seattle just before the wet season. Still, she craves the rain, the months of darkness, the boiled-spinach greens and metallic sheen of Lake Washington in winter. Bring it on. Hibernation is restorative, time to cook and read and make love, very slowly. She strolls along the lakefront, startled once by a great blue heron that waits until she is nearly upon it before it lifts off, retracting its long slender legs, displacing air with a slow unfolding wingspan the length of a bed. The autumn light has always been her favorite, angled and soft, the air full of hurried purpose. Rowing crews glide across the lake in the morning; sailboats are out riding the northern breezes in the evening. And the birds, the clacking masses following the Pacific flyway south. She hikes around Alki Point in West Seattle to the place where the city’s founding party landed in 1851, the women crying at the thought that anyone would try to craft a city under skies so funereal. They huddled in a roofless cabin as the men fed them dreams of tomorrow in this place they wanted to call New York Alki, the last word a bit of Salish Indian jargon meaning eventually. She heads for the bistros and condos near downtown. In Belltown, where the hills were leveled, she sees the long-gone cliffs, the old ridgetops, the Victorian hotel that was destroyed a century ago, the Indian camps with their fish-drying poles. Because she knows what came before, she can walk the same neighborhood a dozen times and never see the same thing. She is a tourist in her own town, never bored.
She walks uphill and strolls the length of Capitol Hill, one of the few original nubs the city engineers did not try to shave off during the epic civic face-lift of the early twentieth century. She walks by the body-piercing shops, boulangeries, Thai restaurants, flower stalls, and gay book-stores to the north end at Volunteer Park, where she watches the sun duck behind the Space Needle, brass-tip the mountains, and disappear. In the muddy light, three boys in hoods and baggy pants approach her in menacing fashion. She picks up a rock and hits one of them with a quick throw. They scatter, and she thinks, Not a bad shot.
One night she wants to cook something earthy and rich, with chanterelle mushrooms from the Olympic rain forest and Barolo sauce, reduced and thick so it is like slow-moving blood. She spends a long hour in the organic food store as people with loose-fitting clothes and gray faces float around her in varying states of earnest fussiness. She gets stuck in a long checkout line, behind a woman who questions a teenage clerk about the origin of every bit of food in her cart, and tries not to be impatient, not to curse the dangling earrings, inverted shoes, and threadbare wear as a statement of solidarity with weavers somewhere in a warmer climate. She opens a magazine and gets engrossed in an article on tantric sex, which she imagines is to lovemaking what wheat germ is to dessert. But she is fascinated, reading about closing your eyes to let the other senses come alive, about slow touch, about building and channeling the slow buzz of the orgasm, about a transfer of energy from loin to loin without actually connecting, about men holding and sustaining but never exploding.
She meets a man in a coffee bar who talks about frescoes, telling her how the paint has to settle in with the wet plaster to create the image, but if you do it right the image will live for centuries. She tells him about her father’s paintings in the coulee and about the erotic frescoes just uncovered in Pompeii, at least two thousand years old, the oldest surviving depiction of cunnilingus in Europe. She goes home with him, walking up the cleats in the sidewalk to get to his tiny house on the edge of an impossibly steep hill overlooking the distant lights of Husky Stadium. This city, it never fails to take her breath away. She spends most of the night discussing Giotto. She argues that Giotto, credited with the frescoes in Assisi, deserves more praise as the main designer of the campanile in Florence. He is Chinese-American, second generation, with a terrific laugh, hairless arms, and a smell like lavender, and he makes Brunella forget about her prison, though they never make love. In the morning, on the way out, she asks him his name.
She spends one long day at the fishing pier that Waddy Kornflint has already posted with official billboards notifying the public of change. A letter-writing campaign, timed volleys to the newspapers by reasoned citizens, has not moved Kornflint an inch. He does not read newspapers. Her appeals to the museum boards, the arts councils, and the preservation groups has been even more frustrating. All she wants is a chance to make her case, but they will no longer talk to her.
A short path from the pier leads Brunella to the locks, where boats pass from the freshwater of Lake Union in the city to the saltwater entrance of Puget Sound. She takes in a parade of vessels. When the gates of the locks close and water pours in to allow incoming boats to float up to the level of the lake, she crosses over on the footbridge and steps underground to a thick window with a view underwater. She stares at battered coho salmon swimming by, working against the current, oblivious to human eyes, to the three million people turning over dollars in the new metropolis all around them.
She ducks inside the Purple Door Tavern—instant night, circa 1962— to ask about Duff Almvik. The bartender tells her Duff was in for breakfast, and would she like some sausage floating in brine? Duff’s boat, the bartender says, is across the bay, in drydock.
She finds him at the marine repair hangar. He takes a long pull from a beer, burps, offers Brunella a sip. She refuses.
“It’s only backwash—and a bit warm—so I can see why you wouldn’t want a swig,” he says. “If I can get set up just south of Whidbey Island by tomorrow night, I should be happy drunk by Sunday night, closing down the Purple Door.”
“Can I go with you?”
“No, ma’am, you cannot. I like to free-range when I’m on the water. And God knows what I’d be like if had to hold my farts in on account of a woman.”
“I wouldn’t want you doing that. But let me go with you, Duff.”
“It’d be wet, dark, and cold, like an armpit in winter.”
“That’s what I need right now.”
“You get me some cash?”
“Just . . . a little nothing.” She hands him three hundred dollars. “It’s diesel money, I guess.”
“That shows you got more than a grandstander’s heart, Brunella Cartolano. And I do thank you. I still can’t let you go with me. You might spook Loki.”
“Your partner?”
“Loki is the Norse god, best friend a fisherman can have, long as you stay on his good side.”
“Has Loki done you any favors lately?”
“No, ma’am. But he’s gonna grease my passage to other side.”
“You mean, help you live a long life and die in your sleep?”
“Fuck that. Norse warriors were ashamed to die of natural causes. It was a chickenshit way to go. These guys would take a knife to themselves tryin’ to make the entry guards at Valhalla think they’d been killed in battle. You stroke Loki’s back, he’ll take you in without your having to carve yourself up at the end.”
She takes out an object wrapped in newspaper inside her pack and hands it to Duff. “I got you something. You can offer it up to Loki if it helps.”
He opens it and spits by the side, excited. “A sextant! Well, shit shanks!”
“From the late nineteenth century. You’ll never get lost now.”
“That’s half the fun of fishing.”
“Duff, aren’t you worried?”
“ ’Course I’m worried. I miss this run, and I’m drinking Buckhorn instead of Red Hook, and the SoundGardener goes another year without fresh paint.”
“I mean, about what happens if this line of fish goes extinct because there isn’t enough water on the other end. About Svenson’s deli and that rust bucket of a dead ferry. About what happens when Kornflint takes over and the fishing sons of Almvik disappear from the water.”
“I thought you were going to do the mental whining, and I was going to catch the fish.”
“I am.”
“Then let’s get to it.”
“But we have to find someone. Just one . . . other . . . fisherman. Somebody who does what you do. We have to show a community.”
“This is some kinda crusade for you now, isn’t it? It’s personal.”
“Your father—he was part of the biggest home port for salmon fishermen on the entire West Coast. Where did they go? They didn’t just dry up overnight.”
“There is one old dude—Tork Tollefson—used to fish outta here, left for Alaska, shit, ten years ago. I hear he’s back.’’
“Where, Duff? Have you seen him?”
“He and I don’t get along.”
“Why?”
“A long story, one you don’t wanna hear.”
“I do, I do! Who could hate a fisherman?”
“Another fisherman. Hold your hopes. I’ll do some sniffing around, but you keep your distance. I got enemies, lady—mile-back enemies.”
Leon Treadtoofar has a corner office in the Forest Service regional headquarters in downtown Seattle. The building is a clump of Art Deco stone, designed to match the color of the rock on Mount Rainier. Leon seems surprised to see Brunella. He stands and extends both arms, a big smile.
“I’d written you off,” he says.
“That wouldn’t bother me, not one bit.”
“You’re hostile still. I don’t know where that came from. Can I get you something?”
They drink herbal tea but she refuses to sit, prowling his office, fingering the different kinds of evergreen cones that line a windowsill. One of the smaller ones, though charred on the outside, has opened like a rose.
“Do you know what tree that came from?” Leon says.
“Pine.”
“Lodgepole pine.”
“It’s been in a fire?”
“Yes, otherwise it wouldn’t open. That cone is from Yellowstone, the big fire.”
“The park has recovered.”
“Because of fire. Lodgepole pine will not reproduce without it.”
“So why have you people spent the last century trying to put out every fire in the West?”
Leon fiddles with a small machine. “Ms. Cartolano, I’d like to run a tape recorder.”
“Fine. Strip-search me and videotape me, if you want.”
“So you trust me now, enough to invite me to touch you?”
“I don’t know you, so I don’t trust you. And I certainly haven’t invited you to touch me. But I want to believe what you have said from the start: that you will help me—us—find the truth. My family name is at stake. Niccolo’s honor.”
“You’ve got honor. I’ve got honor.”
“And something more, Mr. Treadtoofar. There’s some liability issues that could mean my family vineyard is on the line as well.”
“An Indian doesn’t break a promise.”
“Oh. You’re an Indian now? Not the government?”
“I’m going to start the tape. Someday I’ll tell you what it’s like to move between worlds.”
“Tell me now.”
“Will you come to dinner tonight?”
“On the Forest Service?”
“On me.”
“Sorry.” Brunella points to one of many pictures on the wall, this one a framed black-and-white shot of an Indian man in shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair, standing next to a white man in a suit, in bright midday sunshine at a dusty locale. “Who’s this?”
“That’s Chief James with Governor Clarence Martin. The picture was taken in 1933, the day they turned the ceremonial first shovel to build Grand Coulee Dam.”
“Look at him, wearing a suit in that glaring desert sun. That land looks like Mars.”
“That’s what the basin looked like in the summer, the shrub steppe ecosystem of the upper Columbia. Most of it’s gone. They turned that shovel, and before long they were digging up Indian graves. Twelve thousand Indian graves. Think there’s another cemetery in America where that many bodies have been yanked from the ground?”
“And this picture?” She points to a football player in purple-and-gold uniform, number six, signed at the bottom.
“How long have you lived in Seattle, Ms. Cartolano—ten years, something like that—and you don’t know who that is?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sonny Sixkiller, the Washington quarterback. He’s the reason why I left the reservation. I came to Seattle, to the university, because of him.”
“Were you a football player? You seem tall enough to play any sport.”
“Never played anything but the twelve-string guitar, which I learned in Missoula after college, my entry job with the Forest Service. Sonny Sixkiller was the first Indian I ever heard do something great—who wasn’t dead. First Indian I ever saw on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Probably the only Indian. Take away the fact that he was an Indian and you got something else: He was the greatest quarterback in this state. Okay, let’s get started, please. Relax. Your hair is very nice today.”
“My hair?”
“That’s off the record. Here we go: Your brother, Niccolo Cartolano, had a late dinner at the family residence on Sunday the fifth of August, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And he consumed a quantity of alcoholic beverages?”
“He drank some wine. My father opened a special bottle.”
“You had been at the rodeo that evening, the Omak Stampede?”
“Yes, with Teddy Flax. Have you heard from him?”
“I have not. He was badly burned and seems to have left the region. Nobody has seen him since the hospital.”
“I know.”
“And did you observe your brother consume a quantity of alcoholic beverages at the rodeo?”
“He may have had a beer. Do you mind if I stand while I talk?”
“Why?”
“I need some room. I . . . uh . . .” She unrolls the fingers of her right hand, looking for the word.
“You’re very expressive with your hands, I notice.”
“It’s Italian. I can’t fight it.”
“Please remain seated, if you will. So by this time it’s late, you’re at your family home, and he’s had how much to drink?”
“Nothing, a couple of beers. And my father opened a bottle, a 1978, I think, which was an extraordinary year for the Cartolano Nebbiolo.”
“Nebbiolo, that’s a wine?”
“It’s a grape, used to make the great northern Italian wines. You’ve heard of Barolo, also known as the King of Wines? They said you couldn’t make a Barolo in the New World. My father pioneered the American version in our coulee.”
“What would be the specific quantity that Niccolo consumed that night, Ms. Cartolano?”
“He had two glasses, I would guess, maybe less.”
“And then what?”
“And then he . . . and then we sat around the kitchen table and laughed about what it used to be like when we were younger. Niccolo never had much of an appetite as a kid, which is hard to believe now, because he’s a such a big vacuum for food. My father would not let him leave the table until he finished the meal. Roberto and I would go off and do our homework, or play outside, and Niccolo would still be at the table. And one time my father put a blanket over his shoulders and set a pillow down on the table, right next to his pork chops. He slept there.”
“And did you observe him consume a quantity of alcoholic beverages during this reminiscence? Or, later, pack any bottles into his smoke jumper bag?”
“No. No! This is torture. I observed him laughing, and I saw my babbo laugh, and for the first time since before my mother died we were a happy family, and then we all went to bed, and I have no idea how long he slept or whether he slept well. But the next day we went for a walk in the vineyard and he looked fine and then he was gone and I never saw him again and I love him so much that the pain will never go away. So fuck you.”
He turns off the tape and grabs her by the arm, forcefully marching her out of the office, past a secretary, several cubicles, to the stairs. They walk to the basement, and he guides her to a locked door. Inside are shovels, chain saws, pumps, all of them blackened by fire and marked by tags. He pulls one pump forward and tells her to stand back as he fires it up. He lets it run, though the sound is painfully loud. He turns it off and faces her, his lip trembling.
