The Winemaker's Daughter, page 16
The apartment seems to have no walls, no ceiling, no linear limits. The central room expands outward to a glimmering pool of water that drops over the edge, a cascade tumbling out of sight. In the kitchen, all burled maple and Italian granite, are glass-blown life-size depictions of all species of Pacific salmon: chinook, coho, sockeye, pink, chum.
When a man with a sprig of facial hair and a smell like licorice bumps into her, Brunella rubs his shoulder with her hand. The touch feels good.
“I’m sorry,” he apologizes, in the quick-draw Seattle manner, where no offense is ever intended.
She is surprised to find her father’s Nebbiolo, the limited-bottling 1994 vintage, atop a table of inlaid walnut. The young man pours himself a glass and turns to Brunella.
“This bottle got a ninety-three from the Spectator,” he says. “It’s impossible to find.”
“Is it?”
“I managed to cellar a case. It was an extraordinary year for the Cartolano Nebbiolo.”
“Yes, I know,” she says. “The bud was fine, even though there was concern about late frost. Summer temperatures slightly above normal. Harvest was terrific. But it was a terrible year for the family. Excuse me.” She backs away to answer her cell phone. “Yes . . . Duff! Oh, fantastic . . . uh-huh, uh-huh . . . Speak up, I’m losing you. . . . That’s wonderful news. . . . Wait, I’m losing you again.”
They nibble on oysters from a silver tray, milling around this high perch built on ground where longshoremen once slurped bivalves from stools. They sample asparagus wrapped in prosciutto, and Dungeness crab-cakes, and then come to attention when the host introduces Brunella. She gives her pitch, more refined than her stumbling first effort atop the Smith Tower, about holding on to what is real in a city, looking for authenticity in the modern age. How could a city by the sea survive without its rituals? As the Sicilians welcomed home their tuna fleet, as the Japanese ritualized the abalone divers, as the Hudson River fishers carried firmfleshed striped bass to dinner plates in Manhattan, so the gill-netters of Salmon Bay have always had their place in our lives, she says. Most of these people in the room are not from Seattle; many of them arrived with the same missionary impulse that led another group of nouveau North-westerners to spend thirty years tearing down the hills of the city in the last century. But she needs them, the philanthropists who look barely old enough to drive, the people with money who defy Kornflint only because it’s a sport.
The current is going the other way now, with the winds, the big push from the Pacific through the strait. The seas are rolling: eight feet, twelve feet. Two anchors strain to hold SoundGardener in place just outside Deception Pass. As Duff lets out the net from the big drum on the stern of the boat, the water takes it and quickly pulls it tight against a narrow opening near the pass. Underwater, it would look something like a big volleyball net: a wall of nylon, with corks on the top and lead weights that hold the bottom down about thirty feet. A marker buoy and small lights show the trail of the net. After all the line is out from the big wheel, Duff goes inside the fo’c’sle for some entertainment. He no sooner gets his pants unhitched than he feels the boat rock and shake—thump-thump —like something bumping the boat. He rushes up on deck, wind blowing cold rain into his face. When he pulls on the net, he feels a tug of fortune.
“My sweet mud sharks, I got me the mainline express!” he shouts out, firing up the power reel. Duff works the big wheel with a foot pedal, which frees his hands to shake fish loose as the net rolls in. The old-timers in Ballard used to say that a good gill net set would bring in two hundred fish or more at a time. What Duff sees now is a net so clogged with salmon he cannot reel it in evenly. Fish fill the deck. He pauses the foot pedal to sweep them into the ice hold.
“Must be five hundred of these suckers,” he says. “Whoooeeeeeee!”
He fills the hold and then slides into the frozen tomb to pack the ice tight against the fish. He flops, wallows, slips among hundreds of fresh-killed coho. He could not be more ecstatic, though his legs have lost all feeling in them.
Back on deck, he unspools the net again for a new set, letting the current pull it out. Even with two anchors, the SoundGardener has been yanked closer to Deception Pass, near the high rocks. The rain is turning to wet snow, blowing sideways, pinpricks against the skin. He kicks open the hatch into the fo’c’sle and slides back down into the warm berth.
A few minutes later Duff is back on deck. He calls Brunella on the cell phone.
“Jackpot, baby! Jackpot!”
She tells everyone about Duff’s bounty, but the partygoers look at her in silence, not sure what to make of this announcement.
“It’s good news,” she assures them. “Our gill-netter is catching fish. Lots of them. This is a good thing.”
They applaud, tentative at first, then a ripple.
“And there’s more good news,” she says. “We have a lead on another fisherman, an older gentleman who has returned home. With your help we will not lose this part of our heritage.”
Among the oldest human artifacts ever discovered in the United States, Brunella tells them, are scraps of a skeleton and some stone fishing tools that were compacted in a cave in the coastal rain forest north of Puget Sound. The bones were found to be more than nine thousand years old, which means people have been fishing in this part of the world since before men camped along the Nile or built weirs next to the Danube for the same purpose. What followed were winters of brutal efficiency, summers without sun, a small ice age, volcanoes in full fury, earthquakes that brought down five-hundred-year-old trees, and death by toxins in the shellfish or from disease delivered by people with different immune systems. And there also followed—much later—leveling of the hills, cutting down the forests, draining the tidelands, to be replaced by indoor wonders, palaces where a person could satisfy every need without ever leaving a screen.
“Through it all,” she says, as some guests start to glance at their watches, “people looked for sustenance from a fish that returned every year to the waters of its birth. Some of these fish, as it turns out, come home to the waters of my birth—a desert coulee in the Columbia basin. I have a special affinity for this run.”
“Whatever,” she hears somebody say. Brunella thanks the donors as they drop their checks in a bowl and drift away, chatting about vacations over the coming holiday, the drudgery of philanthropy. When Brunella empties the bowl, she finds a check for $100,000—easily enough to keep the Salmon Bay campaign alive for another six months. It is from a foundation she has never heard of. Attached to the check is a note: Good luck and Godspeed in finding our Puget Sound salmon community.
She rushes up to her host. “Hey”—she flashes the check—“who’s this?” The host has not heard of the foundation. Wet snow hits the wall-sized window and disappears, creating an illusion of movement, as if the apartment were floating in space. Brunella stands next to the great waterfall that flows out of the living room.
“Brunella.” The man with the sprig of facial hair approaches. “You doing anything? Some of us are going to this club for body shots.”
“Body shots?”
“Tequila from the navel. Join us.”
“I have to wait for one more call from my fisherman. And I have an outie.”
For the third time that night, Duff works the foot pedal as he hauls in an immense catch. Snow covers his cap. He works the numbers in his head as he shakes fish onto the deck—plop, plop, plop—and the volume is so great that now he is thinking Mexico, the beach town of Puerto Escondido, a room with a view of the crashing Pacific for only twenty-five bucks a night, red snapper grilled whole, slathered with salsa and vegetables, washed down with Carta Blanca, and the next day a snooze in the hammock, warm winds rocking him back and forth, babes on the horizon, the topless women from Germany who love the beach town of Escondido.
“Oh, sweet mud sharks,” Duff says, shaking in the last of the net— plop, plop, plop. And look at those fish, firm with the best color of the year, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. Maybe three months in Puerto Escondido instead of two. Sure, why not? Plop, plop, plop. The engine he uses to reel in the net is smoking, strained to the limit. He is just about done. Now he uses a push broom to shove the fish into the hold, swept away with the bloodstained snow. God, what a mother lode; the hold is nearly full. So, maybe five months in Puerto Escondido, take the whole goddamn rainy season off and stare at topless German babes and sway the days away in a hammock.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Duff says, closing the hatch on the fish hold. He tosses his wet snow-covered cap into the sea—the one with the words BITE ME—and sidles into the foc’s’cle. He laughs as the SoundGardener bounces with the hard current, trying to ride the enlarged seas and the winds from the strait. Duff uses a utility wrench to loosen the lag bolt that holds in place the one-liter bottle of Jack Daniel’s and the candy bowl of multicolored condoms. Nirvana busting through the speakers, the saintly junkie Kurt Cobain, poor lovely local kid, the pride of Grays Harbor County.
“A celebration is what we need,” Duff says. “A party!” He takes a long pull of the Jack and puts it back in place, his cheeks puckered.
“Ice!” Duff says. “We need ice from the storm. From the sky to us, that’s the way it works, ahah! Whoooeee!” He crawls back on deck and walks unsteadily toward the bow. The SoundGardener struggles to stay atop the seas, like a horseman trying to ride a bucking bronc.
“Steady, girl,” Duff says. “We’ll get you home.”
The boat lunges with the punch of a big wave. Duff falls flat and laughs. He backs up to the wheelhouse, sets the engine on a steady idle, and crawls back to the bow, where ice has formed around the tip. He knows the idle will hold the boat in place, but still it does not sound right. The SoundGardener is laboring. He leans over with a screwdriver and starts to chip a piece of ice for his celebratory drink, his mind on Puerto Escondido again and the topless German babes. The ice slips away. “Damn!” He crouches and edges forward, chipping now at ice on a trolling pole, almost out of reach at the edge of the boat. He chips with one hand, and when the ice breaks away, he reaches out with the other hand to grab it. Just then the boat bucks and lurches. A gagging noise comes from the prop—as if it has seized up or choked on something, as if the prop is snagged and laboring to do its basic function. The lurch throws Duff overboard. He reaches for the thin wire line from the trolling pole, but it does not hold; it sags deep in the water. Duff clutches the line as he thrashes. He is grabbed by the Deception Pass current, and then he’s gone, carried into the froth and darkness and high chop as it pours between the two rock walls separating Whidbey Island from Fidalgo. He is tossed underwater, in the grip of the eddy, a hydraulic cyclone. Round and round it spins him, and then another force, the undertow, grabs him and pulls him down to the polished ancient rocks at the floor of the sea, over which fishermen dating back to the late Pleistocene have passed. The SoundGardener is orphaned, left without her master, her hull full of fish, serenaded by the sweet heroin addict of Nirvana, the patron saint of all the not-lost young who despair under perpetual gray skies.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IN THE WINTER of his eighty-first year, Angelo Cartolano feels certain he can climb Mount Stuart once more, though not by the route he had pioneered with the Yakima alpine club more than sixty years earlier. There is another approach, following a long couloir and then traversing over scree and heather to the final pyramid of granite, a class-four climb at the end, meaning a fall could kill you or at least snap a bone or collapse a lung. In the last days of November, a time when daylight falls away like hair off a cancer victim, Angelo broods over the big mountain to his west, watching as the knitting of snow extends day by day over its flanks. He is fired up by the idea of going back to drink once more the potion of risk. And why not? he tells himself. His legs are oaken, hardened by a lifetime of clambering up and down the terraced hills of the vineyard. He spends days by himself looking out the window to the Cascades, letting his thoughts roam, imagining how he will do it again. Follow Ingalls Creek to the base of the big couloir. Spend a night there nestled beneath solid larch trees. Morning, go right up the belly, careful not to grab any loose boulders, slow, deliberate. Midway up the couloir, track east, find the bench, and put up the tent. Second morning, on to the small glacier, blue ice beneath fresh snow. Crampons in the higher reach, where the snow has not held because of the winds. Walk along its far edge, planting the ax with every step. Off the glacier, drop pack and ax. Crawl on cold granite, three points touching rock at all times, to the top. He has made this climb in his mind now, the complete ascent, at least four times. He knows he can get himself to the summit of Stuart. He sees himself so clearly, with absolute confidence, on top of the small piece of the earth overlooking the land where he has spent most of his life.
Brunella arrives after a drive that took the entire morning; she was slowed by fresh snow in the pass. On a day when the sun rises just before eight a.m., with a muddy dusk at four, Brunella feels in sync with the moods of the season. The wintering snow geese on the west side, settling in after a long flight from Russia’s Wrangel Island, the steelhead trout rushing up thin-veined rivers, the grebes and dunlins, and then a herd of elk just east of the pass in a meadow, chased from the high woods by heavy snow, the diminishing light setting off a hormonal thermostat that causes the males to shed their antlers. She finds Angelo sorting through his climbing equipment, museum-quality gear from a distant era: a wood-handled ice ax, a leather-reinforced backpack, a headlamp connected to a fanny-pack battery holder, and, nearby, a little jar filled with fluid that looks like apple juice. She tells him he cannot be serious; the snow will be too deep, the ice treacherous. It would be suicide.
“You’re not Reinhold Messner, Babbo.”
“Nobody can be Messner. But once . . . I was as free as Messner.”
“Okay, Messner, what’s in the jar?”
“Pee.”
“Whose pee?”
“Mine. It saves me a trip down the hall.”
“So you’re going to climb a ten-thousand-foot mountain, but you can’t make it to the toilet.”
He says he will not be home for dinner; the managers of the irrigation district are holding a strategy session, gearing up for a fight. The hotheads are in control now. Some of the irrigators have fired shots near Fish and Game biologists—warning shots, they say.
“If you can drive me there, I’ll get a ride home.”
“You can’t drive?”
“They took my license. And you know what, Nella? I shouldn’t tell you this because it will only make things worse, but it was Roberto who told them I couldn’t drive.”
“That son of a bitch.”
“Your mother was not a bitch.”
“I’m sorry. He’s driving his own father off the land.”
“If it isn’t him, somebody else will. The government’s turned on us, Nella.”
“You believe that?”
“Why are they trying to take back our water and give it to the Indians? When I came here, they told us we could have it all, the water, the land, the fruit, the electricity—come and make something of this land and you can have it all. That’s what they told us. They were going to make some salmon for the Indians at the hatcheries. We would all be happy. Now . . . look how they’ve turned on us. They’re going after all the water rights. They can’t do that. Once you get hold of some water, doesn’t matter how, they can never take it away from you.”
“First in time, first in line.”
“When I settled in this coulee, Alden Kosbleau told me those very words like it came from the Bible. One of the Commandments. He said, ‘This is the West. That’s how we do things.’ ”
“You haven’t heard from the Forest Service? I’m expecting a call.”
“Is there something new about Niccolo?”
“They’re trying to put all the pieces together.”
“God took him.”
“So now you believe?”
“I have decided I cannot believe that God can order a miracle unless I also believe he can direct a tragedy. This God has many bad moods, and I’m not sure I can live with him.”
Brunella sifts through a pile of unopened mail on the cherry-wood kitchen table, pausing over one official-looking envelope. She reads the notice from the sheriff’s office: a lien has been placed on the Cartolano land. A lawsuit claims the family is liable because of Niccolo’s role in the fire.
“A lawyer’s fantasy,” Angelo says, waving his hand.
“How could you let this slip?”
“Mount Stuart this time of year: You think it’s below zero, with the wind?”
“I won’t let them do this. We’re going to fight these people. We’re going to keep the Forest Service looking until they find the truth about the fire. They will never get this land, Babbo.”
“There’s something there for you.” He points to a small box. Brunella peels away the brown paper to find another box, which is gift-wrapped with a bow. She gasps: Inside is a four-color dry fly.
“Looks like a . . . a mayfly or some kind of stimulator.”
“No, Babbo, look closely. It’s a royal coachman. I was fishing last summer in one of the lakes above the Methow, using this fly.”
“Coachman. Good for catching cutts. Who’s it from?”
“No return address. And there isn’t a note.” She lifts the coachman to her lips, kisses it.
“Make a wish when you do that,” says Angelo. “Esprimi un desiderio.”
“I did.”
In the morning, Angelo is in the cellar with Niccolo’s vintage. The wine has been moved to the small oak barrels. He is extracting samples, moving it around his tongue, trying to gauge the direction of the wine, sniffing, swishing, and spitting, working the palate through delicate refinements. Brunella walks in with coffee.
“Put that down and try this,” says Angelo.
“It’s far too early in the wine’s life to tell anything, isn’t it?”
