The Winemaker's Daughter, page 23
“You didn’t make me cry.”
The biggest house on the reservation sits on a dun-colored hill surrounded by a curve of Ponderosa pines. It is a three-story, three-garage, cedar-shingled home with river-rock chimney, a long driveway, a Grand Cherokee in the front.
“Who owns the starter castle?” Brunella says, as they pull up.
“We do.”
“Who’s we?”
“Mom, my sister, and her family. You remember I told you about the black flies? Mom came up with a potion. Can’t tell you all the ingredients, but it has a couple parts balsamwort, couple camas, some home heating oil. She hardened it all off like a wax. Flies love it, and they die on contact.”
“Indian Flykill! It’s in every store.”
“We got a patent on it. Sold it to one of them petrochemical companies. Bought this house, bought some Cisco before it tanked, got college funds for the boys, lotsa toys for every cousin on three reservations. Hey . . . kid!”
Leon’s sister runs from the front door to greet him, her four dogs following her. Esmerelda Treadtoofar is thin-legged, her hair tied back, wearing shorts, Hawaiian flip-flops on her feet. She seems taken aback to see Brunella.
“She’s helping me,” says Leon.
“But you always work alone.”
Inside, a grating sound comes from a large sun-filled room off the main part of the house. A pair of boys with green spiky hair are going at it, fingering controls that direct a big screen where two combatants are trying to lance, bleed, and behead each other.
“Nuke ’em!” one of the boys shouts. “Nuke ’em!”
When Leon pokes his head in the room, the boys look up for an instant, then return to their mortal clashes. On their wall is a signed poster of Sherman Alexie.
“Aren’t you boys gonna say hi to your uncle?” Esmerelda asks.
“Hi, Uncle.”
“Hi, Uncle.”
When Leon is alone with Esmerelda, he tells her the boys ought to be outside, doing something useful, catching fish, chasing rabbits, riding their bikes.
“It’s okay,” says Esmerelda. “Video games keep ’em off Aqua Net.”
“The hair spray?”
“The drug of choice on the rez. They banned inhalants on the Colville, but that stuff is too easy to get.”
She serves them steak fajitas, the meat spicy, with grilled sweet onions and peppers, a pitcher of iced tea. Brunella asks Esmerelda what Leon was like as a boy, what kind of teen he was, what he wished for when he was little, but Esmerelda will not give up any of the family stories. She invites her brother to stay overnight, though she does not look at Brunella when she makes the offer. Leon defers. After dinner he tells her he must go, they have a long drive.
“Our house is too good for you?” Esmerelda says, and turns away, not saying goodbye.
At dusk, they drive back through Indian country, stopping at the commodities exchange for gas. A huddle of sunken-faced boys pass hair spray back and forth, sniffing and drifting away from the reservation, in the same spot as they were before. One of them looks familiar.
“Tozzie?” Leon shouts through the wind. The sniffers scatter as he calls out, leaving an empty can of Aqua Net behind.
Inside the commodities exchange, the clerk, a middle-aged man in a Seahawks jacket, scrutinizes the name as Leon signs the credit card.
“Leon Treadtoofar? Son of a buck. We went to high school together.”
Leon doesn’t recognize the man. “You sure?”
“Sure as shit. What I hear, only you, me, the Get-Me-Home twins, and Sactooth are left alive from our senior class.”
“That’s something,” says Leon, averting eye contact, turning to leave.
“Yeah, that’s something,” says the clerk, who appears hurt. “I guess what they say about you’s true.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“They took the Indian out of you.”
Leon bolts for the clerk, grabs his shirt, sticks his nose in his face. “Say that again.”
The clerk does not back down. “You heard me.”
Leon takes a step back, releases his grip, but keeps his face hard on the clerk. “Just because I left this place doesn’t mean I’m any less Indian than you.”
As they head toward Grand Coulee, the land is softer in dying light that conceals the scraps of an unhappy place: empty plank houses without roofs, abandoned schoolhouses where grass now grows in place of classroom floors. A few halfhearted thunderheads scoot by.
“Why didn’t we stay at your sister’s house? Was it because of me?”
“It was because of me. I love Esmerelda, but she probably thinks the same thing about me as that dude at the minimart. I could never live on the reservation. If you leave and make some success for yourself, they won’t let you forget it. It’s like you did something wrong. What that man said to me—that’s the worst thing you can say to somebody who comes from here.”
“Is it true?”
“Now you disrespect me as well?”
“Leon, I have at least three thousand years of the Italian peninsula running through my blood. Some days I can feel the Piemonte in my hands. I know the Roman side of my brain. And on days like that, I still don’t know where I belong. Have you ever heard of the Ladin?”
“No. It’s a family name?”
“The Ladin are the descendants of the last Roman soldiers. After the empire collapsed, they fled from the Visigoths and wandered back and forth across the Alps, hiding in the valleys. They ended up in the Dolomites. My fantasy—well, I’ve actually thought about it quite a bit—is to go back to Italy and trace the lineage of the Cartolano family, because I’m sure we have some blood link to the Ladin.”
“You sure they aren’t Indians?”
“Leon, let’s not drive straight through to Seattle. Take me someplace that still has magic in it for you.”
Leon falls silent for several moments. “I have a place,” he says, “but I haven’t been there for twenty-five years. Maybe it’s gone.”
“Take me.”
They walk over scablands under a thin moon, and then along a rise, until it starts to drop beneath columns of stacked basalt. Leon appears uncertain but never lost. He smells for sulfur, listens for a sound. A few sandhill cranes, the last to migrate north, lift out of the brush as they approach. Leon spots beer cans and markings on a rock flank—initials—and then stops at a hot spring: a natural pool cradled by rock, steam rising above, the water trickling away as it boils up to the level part of the ground. Drifts of gray ash from the Mount Saint Helens eruption have hardened in one corner against the rock. Brunella unbuttons the top of Leon’s shirt, and when he does not resist she pulls down his pants. He slips away, seeming embarrassed, slides into the steaming water, wincing at first, then immersing himself to his chest. Brunella removes her clothes slowly, standing in the silver light. She walks around him naked, tiptoeing on the edge of the rock, her legs beaded in mist. She knows he is admiring her, but he tries to keep some distance. She tests the temperature of the water with her toe.
“What is it that makes hot springs so alluring?” she says. “Something about how the earth opens up to embrace you, don’t you think?”
“Are you going to get in?”
She lies on a slab of flat rock next to the springs, on her side, cupping the water with her hand and pouring it over her breasts, her legs. Leon wades over to her, his eyes meeting her body, and she cocks her leg at an angle, opening up, inviting him. He is close enough for her to smell the blend of sweat and sulfur coming off his body. She rubs his neck with the heel of her other foot, and his presence, so near in the hot water, makes her wet and sets her heart racing. Her breathing picks up, and then she slows it deliberately, exhaling with her lips pursed as she becomes more aroused. She closes her eyes and appears to go into a trance, pulling his head in between her legs with her heel. She wants him to bury that Nez Perce nose inside her. But he gets out of the water abruptly, turning his back to her, though she can see he is erect. She tells him to come back, to lie next to her, to relax, to think of floating away.
“Fare l’amore, per favore.”
“Speak English.”
“Make love to me, Leon. Take your time.”
“I can’t. You and I could never—”
A coyote starts to howl, setting off an echoing round of other howls, the sound carrying over the scablands.
When they are dressed and walking back over the plateau to his car, he guides her by the hand. She feels close to him in this wordless stroll, wishing they could walk until they collapse of exhaustion. He unrolls two sleeping bags on dry grass next to the Suburban.
“Promise me something, Brunella Cartolano,” he says. “Promise me that tonight is off the record.”
“I don’t know what that means, Leon.”
“I’m still the Forest Service.”
“You’re always the Forest Service.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE RUMORS started at Forest Service regional headquarters in Seattle, moved quickly across the mountains, trickled out to a talk radio station in taffy pulled from truth, and from there were broadcast as bible into the pickup trucks of irrigators looking for something to blame, into cafés where pink-faced men passed around petitions, into windowless bars where the stories fattened with every new round of beer. By the time Brunella and Leon arrive in midafternoon, a phalanx of sheriff ’s deputies guards the Indian construction site; they can do little but hold a line at the entrance gate, clutching shotguns. People clank bullhorns of logging trucks, long-beds, and assorted eight-cylinder workhorses, muscle vehicles made obsolete by land that produces little now but government checks. They shout through megaphones and cheer when someone stokes their sense of righteous victimhood. It all makes sense to them now, the swift and spectacular crash of their lives, the dry fields and withered orchards, the recoloring of the land—it makes sense in the way that bad times must lend themselves to a tidy scheme. They hear it on the radio—everyone is talking about it—and here it is in the hot light of the afternoon: a reservoir, still filling, drained from the most productive fruit-growing area in the world. The heart of the Planned Promised Land has been sucked dry by the Indians. Farming is dead. The Indians are hoarding all the water, so the rumors go, because they had a master plan all along, and the evidence is this pit, this graveyard of accumulated water rights. And for what cause have these irrigators lost their water, what new enterprise will replace the people who made the desert bloom? One story making the rounds says all the water is going to be pumped out of the pit and used as a thirty-story hydro show—a Grand Coulee spillway in reverse—an upthrusting fountain that will draw millions to the tribe’s new casino.
And so what if the water had been purchased legally from one failing irrigator after another, the tribe taking advantage of good market conditions, buying in a time of panic. Did Solvan Flax or Arnie Petersen know then that these buyers never intended to put another sapling into the ground? Yesterday, the federal government announced plans for the biggest bailout yet. Gregory Gorton was right. Anybody who could prove they owned a farm for at least twenty years, and still had sufficient irrigation water, could set themselves up for a lifetime of “market adjustment” payments. It was said to be temporary, a moratorium. But everyone knew it was the beginning of a lucrative charade. The government would pay the irrigators to pretend, reasoning that this would prop up prices for farmers in other states, while preserving rural culture in the irrigated steppe. This bonanza for the imagined agrarian was coming too late for the majority of the Columbia basin irrigators, who had already sold. And there are few things worse than seeing all the pieces fit together after it is too late to get in on it.
A rumble of mutterings comes from the hot pavement outside the construction site. Sweat drips from baseball hats, the rage ramped up a notch with every incantation.
“Take a look at it,” says Mrs. Flax, screaming through a megaphone, pointing a withered finger at the pit, about three acres in size, more than a hundred feet deep. She is draped in cats—around her shoulders, on her lap, around her feet.
“This is rural cleansing!” They bang baseball bats on buckets. They whoop and they drink beer. For most people, what burns is simply the sight of all this water—the liquid nutrients of their livelihoods—drained from the land they transformed and now pooled in one spot.
“They’ve taken it all,” Mrs. Flax shouts. “They are driving us out!”
In every water fight, in every parched and pebbled valley west of the one hundredth meridian, the Indians have never won; even when they seemed to have won, it was temporary, cast aside by senate amendment or executive order. Mrs. Flax reminds the mob of this history now: The Biggest Thing Ever Built by Man was not meant to right an injustice or settle a century-and-a-half-old slight written into treaty. It was built to choke off the River of the West and channel water onto prickly ground, to create something from nothing, to transplant Arcadia to the desert. In the West, they all knew, water flowed uphill to money, not downhill to the dispossessed.
Among the scattershot of suggestions is the idea—which quickly becomes a demand—that the water be given back to the irrigators, that the government force the Indians to stick with fireworks and untaxed cigarettes and cancel all the sales. How the irrigators can get the water back, or how they will reconstruct their lives at a time when nobody wants to pay them at least as much as it costs to grow fruit in a dry land, nobody knows. But government created the Planned Promised Land, and they expected government to restore it.
The Indian construction manager in gray braids appears at the gate, behind the fence, a sheriff ’s deputy on either side of him. Danny Red Thunder is booed and hissed as he tries to speak into a megaphone.
“Let him talk,” Mrs. Flax says. “Then we’ll decide what to do.”
“I have nothing to say except we will not waste this water—”
“Bullshit!”
“Why are you hoarding it, you son of a bitch!”
“We will not waste it.”
“You’re lying! Just like you lied when you starting buying up everything.”
“You sold your water rights to us fair and square,” Danny Red Thunder says. “How can you say we have taken it against the will of—”
A teenage boy launches a beer bottle; it hits the Indian construction manager on the forehead, shattering the glass. Danny Red Thunder falls to the pavement, blood pouring from a gash. The deputies scan the crowd, but they do not dare wade among the people. Two other beer bottles follow, and then a full volley of rocks and glass. One man climbs over the fence, storms up to Danny Red Thunder, and throws a handful of gravel into his bleeding face. The deputies try to drag the wounded Indian away from the mob.
Brunella and Leon have been watching from a corner of the parking lot, out of the crowd’s view. As they listen, Brunella feels Leon recoil, senses his panic. And she feels as if the bottle thrown at Danny Red Thunder came from her hand. She wants to tell Leon everything, but now it seems too late. Events have passed her by. A force borne on one perception has taken hold and assumed the form of the mob.
“How did this happen?” Leon says. He is sweating profusely, his Forest Service shirt drenched. “These people need to know the truth. They can’t just blame the tribe.”
“The tribe’s got the water, Leon. These people see that, and it makes them mad. They think they were duped into selling.”
“No!” He slams his fist against the door of the Forest Service truck, hard enough to make a slight dent. The temper: Here it is again, a flash of violence so sudden it scares her. “That’s not it! These people are mad because they can’t stand to see Indians have power over their lives.”
“You need to have an open mind.”
“Open mind!” He raises two clenched fists, tries to catch himself, to exhale slowly and bring this fury down. “I kept this report on the Johnny Blackjack open because of you. I could have closed this thing out last fall. But I kept it open, and look what has happened. Look! This mob . . . who are these people?”
“They’re the people I grew up with. That woman with the megaphone, Mrs. Flax—Teddy’s mother—you should have known her when she was young.”
“She scares the shit out of me.”
The man who threw gravel at Danny Red Thunder starts to tug on the wounded Indian, pulling him away from the deputies. He brings Danny to his feet and throws him against the fence. As he holds him there, two other men poke at his knees with a baseball bat through the fence.
“Take the water back!” comes a shout. Several men charge over the fence and break for the pit. They open a valve at the head of the reservoir. Cheers of victory go up, as if a goal were scored in a hockey game. A stream of water—born in the sky, leached through the ground to a deep aquifer, and then sucked from beneath a forest and into a pipe for settlement in a bank of Indian dreams—now leaks onto the hot pavement, where it starts to evaporate.
Tozzie Cresthawk is alone at the river in the last light. He is wearing a headband, nothing else, standing atop a high cliff at the foot of a canyon overlooking the Columbia. The towering rock was deposited in this slot canyon during the last Ice Age flood, and Indians have come here for centuries to check the downstream passage of small salmon, to watch the future pass by, to see the bounty of four years ahead. All afternoon, Tozzie has stood atop this rock, looking for young fish migrating to sea. His dreams through the winter have been of swarms of tiny salmon moving like a steady wind down the River of the West and away to the world. In the last light, he hears the hornet buzz of a pair of jet-skiers, slicing over the pane of the river. He hears laughter and loud chatter from big pleasure boats. No sign of migrating salmon. The fish have to make it here by the end of this week, he knows from the elders, or they will die, unable to live in bodies answering to a growth schedule rooted in ten thousand years of predictability. Since grade school, teachers, priests, elders, and family have all warned Tozzie not to give in to the despair that drapes this landscape. He had diversions and his pride, tied to horse races and smoke jumping and, most of all, fishing. There is nothing to hold him now.
