The Winemaker's Daughter, page 18
She takes him on a cautious traverse, the snow like a blowtorch on her cheeks. Now it’s dark and they can see nothing. The feeling has gone from her toes.
“If we just keep going downhill, we’ll be all right,” she says.
He is still trying to force a whistle; it sounds choppy, as if he has popcorn in his mouth. His pace has slowed; one leg is stiff and unbending. He stops and falls to his knee, folds, drops facedown in the snow. Brunella slogs on, following a vague outline in the storm. She holds her gloved hand outward, reaching for the image, and feels stone. She rubs the snow, up, down, and across, feeling a wall.
“Leon, I found shelter! It’s the chapel.” Drifts have piled up at the base of the chapel, obscuring the door. She brushes back snow, working ten minutes to clear it. “Come inside here, Babbo’s chapel; we’ll be all right.” Her words fall away in the blizzard, not carrying in the storm. “Leon?”
She backtracks, clawing at the slope. She finds Leon in a fetal position, his face covered by snow. He has stopped trying to whistle. She falls to the ground and brushes the snow back. “You’re hypothermic.”
She pulls him up like a boat popping a skier out of the water and leads him down to the tiny chapel, one room with stone walls, stone floor, and rough-cut timber beams arched overhead. He collapses on the floor, shivering violently. She takes the matches that Angelo keeps for his prayers and lights a row of candles. It brings a glow to the frescoed walls, an Italian vineyard scene, transplanted to America, the Columbia River in the background and, behind that, the North Cascades. In the chapel are blankets, water, wine, and wood for the small stove in the corner. She starts a fire, which brings an expanded glow to the room. Leon’s eyes are moving back and forth, unable to focus. His entire jaw moves up and down, chattering, and his tongue is bleeding.
“Lie against the wall,” she tells him, but he stays on the floor, curled in a ball. She pulls his boots off and strips away the wet socks, pulls down his ice-encrusted pants. His bare legs and butt are as cold to the touch as meat from the freezer. She opens a blanket, rolls him into it, covers him. She rubs the outside of the blanket, moving herself closer, feeling Leon’s full-body shiver. She unpeels her own pants and sweater and wraps her nude body around Leon as he rests on his side. She pulls the blanket over them and rolls with her life-giving heat, as the light from candles bounces over the frescoed walls. She tells him again, in greater detail, the story of Angelo Cartolano’s journey to America, the trip across the Atlantic, the odd time in Bushwick, internment at Camp Missoula, his discovery of the coulee. If Leon is listening, she cannot tell.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ON THE OTHER SIDE of the Cascades, the clouds cling to the land and the seas are high, with an uneven roll, making it difficult to find anyone in the waters off Whidbey Island. The storm blows freezing rain and wet snow, no breaks between sheets of moisture. The Coast Guard helicopters cannot see anything, and the patrol boats are doing little better. They fight the current in Deception Pass and search along the base of the high rocky cliffs, looking for any sign of the lost fisherman. For three days they look, circumnavigating Whidbey, peeking into the harbors of the San Juans, testing the wall of waves in the Strait of Juan de Fuca to search around Port Townsend, into the entrance of Discovery Bay, off Protection Island. The storm is a weeklong lash.
Brunella is in the bathtub of her home in Seattle, well past midnight on day three of the search, when a call comes from a Coast Guard lieutenant.
“Fishing boat washed up on shore, broken trolling pole on one side, spotted by the watchman at the Dungeness Spit lighthouse. There’s a crew on the ground hiking out there now.”
Brunella is still awake in the predawn hours when the second call comes in.
“SoundGardener. Registered, Washington State, to Almvik, Shepson D., address unknown.”
“That’s Duff. Oh, Jesus. How is he?”
“He’s gone. Lost at sea.”
“You mean you didn’t find a body? You couldn’t tell if . . . he went down fighting? Like a warrior?”
The dispatcher explains that Duff was reported by witnesses to have disappeared late on the night the storm first rolled into Puget Sound. Apparently he fell overboard; he was never seen again.
“Witnesses?”
“Yes. His passengers. Two women, mother and daughter. Cindy Godden, age fifteen, and her mother, Nolanne, age forty-one. They were with him at the time he fell overboard.”
“But that’s impossible. Duff always fished alone.”
Brunella wants a last look at the SoundGardener, which has been towed to a Coast Guard dock on the waterfront south of downtown. At midmorning, she finds Duff’s boat among a dozen or more vessels behind a fence at the Coast Guard pier. The hull is scuffed and scraped, two windowpanes are broken, a trolling pole has snapped off, but she still looks seaworthy.
“We should hold on to the boat,” says Brunella. “It’s got historic value.”
“It’ll be in impound for most of a month,” says the duty officer at the dock. “And then they’ll probably auction it off.”
“Mind if I touch?” she says.
“I don’t get your drift, ma’am.”
“I want to touch the boat.”
“Help yourself. You’d think somebody who’d been fishing that long could keep the prop lugs snug and his main blade sharp enough to give him an even steer.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The prop was so loose it’s a wonder he made it out there. One blade was folded clear back, like it’d been bent.”
“You think somebody deliberately sabotaged it?”
“I can’t say that. But that’s one guess. Still, even with a mangled prop, he hooked himself one helluva last catch.”
“The salmon,” she says. “I almost forgot. What happened to all the fish?”
“Those two gals we found on board—mother and her kid—we let them have it. Said they were going to sell the fish from an ice tub at the pier. I think that’s illegal.”
When Brunella arrives at the dock near Duff’s shack, she finds no sign of Cindy and Nolanne. She checks inside the Purple Door Tavern; everybody shrugs. She drops into Svenson’s, asking about the other fisherman, Tork Tollefson.
“Popular man,” says Svenson the elder.
“Why? Is he in trouble?”
“Far from it. You want to try a herring mini-taco? It’s part of the new menu.”
“I thought you were going with pocket pitas?”
“They didn’t work out.”
“Stick with lefse, Svensy. When did you see Tork Tollefson?”
“About a day and a night ago, or maybe it was two nights and a day— it all runs together—two dudes in sweatshirts and briefcases came in here, asking about the same. Old Tork is setting on the side, pulling tabs and taking bets on Dogs and Cougs, when those boys in sweatshirts walked over to him and made him a very happy man. He says, ‘Yabba-dabba-doo,’ like Fred Flintstone when he gets off work, and he’s yammering on about getting a place on the Baja, down the tip, and how there ain’t no Red Finns down there—or any of ’em left up here for that matter.”
“Red Finns?”
“You know about the Red Finns, don’t ya? Everybody in Salmon Bay knows about the Red Finns. They been going at it for a long time with the Tollefsons and his kind. It’s one of those powerful feuds stuck in gear that makes no sense to nobody but guys like Tork, who live and die to settle the score.”
She feels sick, numb, and stupid. A sequence of random events makes horrid sense now: her telling Tork Tollefson about Duff’s whereabouts; the day he showed up to “fix” a nonexistent problem; the loose lug nuts and the mangled prop. Outside, she stares at a billboard-sized drawing of Kornflint’s French waterfront complex; it shows canals, walkways that match those along the Seine, cafés, patisseries, boulangeries. She wants to hide. How could she see everything in Salmon Bay except for the oldest presence, the ghosts of Red Finns and dead men in a sauna, stirred up by her meddling? She had been trying to save Salmon Bay for the surface charm, the eccentrics and rituals, the lefse deli, the condemned ferry, the live-aboards, the last gill-netter, but not this, not the encrusted hatreds.
She drives to Kornflint’s office near Lake Union, about a mile from downtown, running two red lights. She rides the elevator to the top floor, walks into a lobby under a dome of Chihuly glass, and asks to see Kornflint. The secretary, a middle-aged man in a T-shirt, restrains a laugh and explains that Mr. Kornflint is not in.
“When will he be back?” says Brunella. “I can wait.”
“You could have a long wait. Why not call one of his assistants?”
“I want to talk to him.”
“He won’t be in.”
“Not today?”
“No.”
“Not tomorrow?”
“No.”
“Next week?”
“No.”
“Next month?”
“Ma’am, I’ve never seen Mr. Kornflint.”
“How long have you worked here?”
“Three years.”
“And this is his corporate headquarters?”
“Oh, yes.”
She drives to the freeway, crosses the floating bridge over Lake Washington, and heads to the south end of Mercer Island, toward the construction cranes, the ones that are visible from her house across the lake. Everyone in the city knows about Kornflint’s personal palace, a daily source of fresh-spun rumor and curiosity. The cranes were planted on a site that used to be the home of a Japanese-American blueberry farmer. Kornflint bought the family’s single-story home and the houses on all three sides; he tore the houses down, ripped up the two acres of blueberries, and started to build. That was eight years ago. He built a full-size National Basketball Association gym, though nobody ever plays basketball there. He built a gallery, though no one is ever allowed to see the art that hangs inside. He built a cathedral, modeled after the Palace of Popes in Avignon, though no services of any sort have ever been held there. He built a library with forty-foot-high ceilings, but without a single book— it is devoted entirely to electronic media, compact discs and DVDs. After going through three complete design overhauls, the main house is still under construction. Boatloads of tourists on Lake Washington cruise to within video-camera range of the compound, while an announcer thrills them with details of Kornflint’s possessions, his sports teams and companies, his artwork, the musicians whose song lists he owns, the ranches in three Western states (one of them half as big as Delaware). The latest version of Kornflint’s home was nearly finished last year, but then construction came to a sudden halt and the entire project was torn down. He complained that it looked too much like a manse in the Hamptons.
Brunella follows a lane of tall cedars and Douglas firs to a chain-link fence and a gate at the end of the driveway. A sign points construction vehicles one way, all others to the guard gate.
“Kornflint!” Brunella shouts from the edge of the fence. “I want to see Waddy Kornflint!”
Two guards in baby-blue jogging pants and matching jackets approach the fence. They are smiling, each carrying a palm-sized portable computer.
“Can we help you?”
“I want to see Waddy Kornflint.”
“Doesn’t everybody.”
“He lives here, I know that. Tell him it’s Brunella Cartolano. He knows who I am.”
“We can’t confirm or deny that he lives here,” says the smaller of the guards, a cute boy in his early twenties, California-friendly. “But if he did, Ms. Cartolano, I’m sure he would want you to have a terrific day. You can find your way off the Rock, can’t you?”
The phone in the cramped office she keeps near Salmon Bay never rings anymore. The fax is quiet. The FedEx truck no longer stops by. The room is just another space without purpose, holding the miscalculating energies of Brunella Cartolano and a complete set of the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica, in mint condition. All the money has dried up; the check for $100,000, written at the Belltown fund-raiser, has bounced. This morning, the newspaper carries a story about Duff Almvik and the mother and daughter found in his boat. They wanted to honor Duff’s memory, the Goddens said, and that’s why they decided to sell his catch from the dock. The fish sold out in hours. There is no mention of a mangled prop.
Brunella calls Leon. He tells her the snow has been too deep to get back to the coulee and check the water.
“The wind will come through and melt everything and you’ll see that pipe, Leon, same as before,” she says.
“I’m not sure what we’ll see. I lost my camera in that well.”
“Did you . . . recover?”
“Allowing myself to get hypothermic, that was a terrible lapse on my part. A weakness. I don’t remember much.”
“Do you remember anything?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t worry, Leon, you didn’t do anything to dishonor the United States Forest Service. Can I come by?”
“I’m really backed up. I’ll call you.”
She goes home but never enters the house. She sits on a cold cedar bench out back, soaking in the somnolence of the season. The garden is most alluring now, a time when only imagination can bring it to life. She is thinking a stone path would be nice, lavender on either side, leading to an archway covered by a climbing rose. She is going to drop dahlias everywhere and watch the big flowers stretch for light in the long days of July, and maybe trail some more clematis along a sunny porch rail. The deadest patch of earth is looking today as if it needs columbine, the fine-featured flowers on delicate stems, and a border in the front. She needs to trim back the raspberries and hack and uproot the predatory blackberries. And she will make another try at producing the full Mediterranean raised bed: four tomato hybrids in the rear, basil in front, cukes and zukes spilling out the sides. There were still people who believed it was impossible to grow a good tomato in Seattle, an idea that Brunella always considered both insulting and a challenge. If August and September held up as usual, she would not taste a supermarket salad. For now, it all looks a little sad: the woody fingers of a big fuchsia bush, the lilacs bare and brown, tulip heads poking up through wet earth.
In late January, Brunella closes the office, packs her camping gear, and travels to the desert. She arrives in Las Vegas, wins seven hundred dollars playing blackjack at a casino modeled after the gardens on Lake Como, spends an hour staring at two paintings by Monet in the oddest art gallery on the Strip. She drives north, past still-drying foundations of gated communities named for hill towns in Tuscany and villages in Provence, farther north into the public land, where the Mojave meets the Red Rock country near Mount Charleston. At last, the desert without cosmetic surgery—windy, open, not easy to love, harder still to comprehend. She hikes through scruffy yucca plants at the lower elevations, moves up toward red and white sandstone, a thrust fault rearing its spine in the high rumpled desert like a well-fed dinosaur. “Hey.” She slaps the hide of the rock, sixty-five million years old, and sits for a pull of water at midday. There are pockets of snow in shadowed draws, but it seems warm in the dry air. She hikes through a canyon and finds a place to camp next to a spring with a sliver view of the Mojave. The light is clear, and a half-moon gives her some illumination for dinner. She cooks pasta over her stove, mixes it with a sauce of white wine, butter, parmesan cheese, and strips of a chicken breast she picked up at a gas station minimart. There is no wood for a fire, but as long as she is eating she stays warm, rocking back and forth. She is barely twenty miles from the Vegas Strip, from Paris, New York, Venice, and Luxor, but here she is alone, under an infinite ceiling, cold and exhilarated. The next day she hikes a loop, down through a wash where juniper and pinyon pine grow in the margins of seasonal water, and with each step she feels less burdened by the tangle of her life, the failures of the last year, her blindness. Near the end of the loop, she marvels at the Joshua trees, arms crooked in Dr. Seuss fashion, and just before the trail’s end she stops and figures out what she has to do.
Brunella calls the Coast Guard to make sure the SoundGardener has not been sold and then hurries out to Salmon Bay, looking for Cindy and Nolanne. She finds mother and daughter, late in the afternoon, in the disheveled bar with the six a.m. happy hour and the purple door, now posted with a notice of pending condemnation. She pays the tab and promises Nolanne she will not tell the Liquor Board of her daughter’s violation if they agree to help her.
“So listen, cutie. You were with Duff at sea. How much did he tell you?”
“About what?” Cindy asks.
“About fishing, working the net, icing the hold—whatever it is he does when he’s bringing in a haul of salmon.”
“Didn’t tell us nothing, darlin’,” says Nolanne. “That’s ’cause he didn’t have to. I know all there is to know about fishing. Pinks, chums, humpies, kings, silvers—you name ’em, I’ve slayed ’em. My daddy was a fisherman in Coos Bay.”
“Perfect!” Brunella leads them across the street to Svenson’s. “I was thinking you two girls—I mean, you brought those fish home.”
“In a way, I guess, sorta,” says Cindy. “Is this going to take much longer?” And then her cell phone rings, to her relief.
“And you live down here, right?” Brunella asks Nolanne.
“All my life. It’s the only place I can afford in Seattle.”
“Excellent. Oh, one more thing. Do you have any secrets I should know?”
“Yeah, like I’m going to tell you anything,” says Cindy.
“No, I mean deep, hidden kinds of family secrets,” says Brunella. “Red Finns. Sauna bath wars. Ethnic stuff. I’m Italian. I don’t understand people who never emote except with a gun or a knife.”
“Me and Cindy, we’re open books,” says Nolanne.
On Valentine’s Day, she surprises Leon Treadtoofar. He looks embarrassed when she walks in unannounced. He stiffens his shoulders, sitting behind his desk, trying to put the Forest Service between him and her. She moves closer to him, a coil of cryptic intentions.
