The Winemaker's Daughter, page 24
Tozzie moves to the edge of the high rock, stares straight ahead, and mutters a prayer for his soul. He opens his eyes wide. But he can’t jump. He appears scared of the height. One more time with the eyes closed, the hands outstretched, the prayer, a move closer to the edge, knees crouched, down, up and—no. He can’t do it. A failure, even, at suicide.
Now he crawls back down the rock, cursing himself for his cowardice, loud enough that it echoes across another beacon of rock. Crawling down, not paying attention, he misses a foothold and slips, falls back and tumbles, hits the rock hard, and bounces into the water. One of the pleasure boats picks him up. His heart is beating, but his eyes are closed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
LEON TREADTOOFAR goes to Missoula on the last flight from Seattle, arriving at the small airport in the clearing north of town. On the descent, he keeps his face pressed against the window, taking in the sight of the Blackfoot, the Bitterroot, and the Clark Fork rivers as they converge, noticing the green on the prominent mountainside with the big M on its flank above the University of Montana. In the airport he pauses to see if any new stuffed animals are on display in the glass cages; they have added a cougar, to go with the grizzly bear and the bobcat. He walks outside and down the road a few hundred feet to smoke jumper headquarters, picks up a Forest Service car, and drives north to Saint Ignatius. At the mission church, he searches for Teddy Flax, calling into the murals, shouting at the rafters, impatient.
“Where the hell are you?”
An elderly priest in golf shirt and checkered pants tells Leon he will not find Teddy in the church, nor will he find him in the orchard. Teddy is gone, he says. He will not be coming back to Saint Ignatius. No reason.
Returning to Missoula, Leon goes to the jumpers’ hangar, moving as if he has run out of time. He is greeted by old friends, men from his rookie year in the Forest Service, still trim and chasing smoke, women who left administrative jobs to dance with Big Ernie. They want to gossip and complain about senators who know nothing of the ways of silviculture. Leon is impatient.
“You won’t see Teddy Flax around here,” says Hank Shipley, a veteran jumper. “Look for yourself. You won’t see him, Leon.”
He hustles into a room where three men in running shoes and shorts sit at ancient Singer sewing machines, their bulging thighs bumping up against the bottom of the sewing table. They are running thread through jump chutes, repairing rips and reinforcing weak points. Above them is a poster of Richard Widmark from a movie about the 1949 Mann Gulch fire, Red Skies of Montana.
“Hey, Leon. Looking for Teddy Flax, are you?”
“Did somebody put the word out?”
“Everybody knows you’re in the endgame.”
“And what else does everybody know?” Leon sits down on a stool next to the Singer. “Let me have a rip at this thing.” He runs a section of the jumper’s suit through the machine, sewing two even lines.
“Now watch me,” he says, peeling off his jacket and falling to the ground. He does twenty-five push-ups, stands, gets his breath, and walks over to a bar. He does ten chin-ups, “Three more than required,” he says.
“Leon, you don’t have to—”
“I’m not done yet.” He falls to his back and curls up, elbows behind his head, repeats. Fifty sit-ups.
“Now all I gotta do is run the mile and a half in under eleven minutes. I can do that too.”
“You don’t need to. I believe you can still qualify.”
“I don’t want to hear any more talk about hanging a smoke jumper,” says Leon, rebuttoning the top of his shirt. “I am one of you, okay? I want to get this thing finished and close it out for all of us. I just want the record to show what happened. Now, where is Ted Flax?”
The jumpers hold up their hands, bewildered.
“All right. One last question: Would you tell me if you knew?”
In unison they answer. “Never.”
Brunella follows Leon by a day. After watching the mob outside the Indian construction site, Leon told her he was cutting her loose to finish the job on his own. It was a mistake, he said, to let her help in any way. She knew he was going to Missoula because that was his only lead. He needed a survivor of the fire to confirm that there was no water in the basin when Niccolo tried to run the pumps. A witness who would take some pressure off the Indians would be even better. With Tozzie in a coma, Teddy Flax was the sole remaining voice.
At smoke jumper headquarters, Hank Shipley guides Brunella around the big hangar, showing her the memorial in honor of Niccolo and the other jumpers who died in the Johnny Blackjack. The dead will remain heroic in this lair of fire gods, joining the pictures of victims from Mann Gulch and South Canyon. As Brunella stares at her brother’s image, it strikes her that the Cartolano family story now has a certain symmetry. Angelo began his real American journey in Missoula, at the World War II internment camp with his uncle, and now here is Niccolo’s picture in the same western valley, eight thousand miles from the Italian Piemonte.
“Everybody loved Niccolo,” says Hank Shipley.
“Now tell me something I don’t know,” Brunella says, turning away from the wall. “Where is Teddy Flax?”
“He’s . . . nowhere in particular.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Hank.”
“I’ve seen him playing softball,” he says, “but then maybe it wasn’t him. He’s been at the bookstore every other Thursday for the poetry slam, but it could’ve been someone else, you know, with the lights dim and all and his face such a mess from the fire. He’s the guy I saw on the ski slope one Monday morning a couple months back, on my day off, ’cause no one else skis like him, with that silly-ass jump-step turn—or maybe not, you know?”
“Hank . . . I’m tired. My father is old and he talks to coffeepots more than to people. One of my brothers is dead; the other one wants to sell the house out from under us. I’ve got a government agency trying to pin the deaths of all those jumpers on Niccolo, and the guy running that investigation has a valley full of people ready to shoot anybody who’s got water. On top of that, I’m trying to keep the fifth-richest man in the world from trashing the fishing culture of the city I love. Or maybe he’s third-richest. Please don’t fuck with me.”
Hank tries to stifle a grin. “God, you’re a feisty one. You doing anything tonight?”
“Where’s Teddy?”
“He’s everywhere and he’s nowhere, like I said. Nobody knows where he hangs his hat. And nobody’s gonna tell.”
In the evening she climbs the switchback behind the university, a brisk jaunt to the big M on the mountain flank. At the top, she feels the wind on her wet skin and watches the course of the river as it spills out of a canyon and turns through the center of Missoula. The water is clear enough for dry-fly fishing, and she wonders what the best men of Missoula are using to lure fish to the surface tonight. On the way down, she tries to think like Leon. She knows that he stays in the same hotel chain, that he prefers the ground floor, with views of the parking lot. She knows that he gets up early, skips breakfast, does not drink coffee; that the only thing he will watch on television is the Weather Channel; that he likes Mexican food. He is thorough to the point of being plodding, which means he probably also saw the notice on the wall just below the pictures of dead smoke jumpers, telling Forest Service employees that Dr. Gilbert Pedecana, the renowned plastic surgeon, was coming to Missoula. Next to that was another notice urging donations to the Intermountain Firefighters Skin Bank.
She stalks the hospital for two days. Some of the nurses know she is part of the Forest Service family, and they allow her to roam the halls. On her third day in Missoula, Brunella corners the doctor in the cafeteria. He tells her skin grafts are painful and sometimes never take, and there is a chronic shortage of donor skin.
“Have you seen Teddy yet?”
He will not divulge anything about the burn victims who have been brought here from all parts of the West for another chance at transformation. “Which one is he?”
“You’re being coy, but I’ll play along, Doc. The boy with the burned face.”
“He’s a boy?”
“I always think of him that way. We grew up together. He suffered second-degree burns over more than half of his face.”
“Do you know what a second-degree burn is, Ms. Cartolano?”
“Below the epidermis.”
“Yes. A skin graft for that sort of burn must be deep. Infections develop. Complications follow, and sometimes the complications are fatal.”
She falls asleep on a vinyl-topped bench in a hallway on the third floor of the hospital, a book of Emily Dickinson’s poems in her lap. She dozes off with a line in her head: “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”
In the middle of the night, a male nurse crouches over Brunella and shakes her awake. She is startled by this balding, muscular man in his blue outfit, two beepers attached to his belt. He scolds her, saying visiting hours are over and she must leave the floor. She promises to depart but begs for a moment to go to the bathroom. She stays in the toilet stall for several minutes, then pokes her head out, making sure the nurse is gone. Quickly, she tiptoes past several of the post-op rooms. In one, she finds a long slim figure covered in sheets, an IV tube overhead. The patient looks big enough to be Teddy, but she cannot make out a face. She walks closer, wondering what he looks like now, nearly a year after the fire remade his face. Gently, she tugs at one of the sheets, pulling it back just a few inches.
“Oh, my God!”
She falls back against the sink in the small room, horrified by the sight: the face of an old woman, hairless, lines like a web of canals.
Two doors down, she sneaks into another room, banked with electronic monitoring equipment, a steady beep coming from a digital blood-pressure monitor. She hears a slight high voice come from the bed, a woman. “Something, please . . . I’m so thirsty.” Brunella gets a glass of water and puts a straw in the mouth of the patient.
A third room on the floor is meat-locker cold, as if somebody has been trying to drive down the temperature. Brunella shivers as she walks slowly to the bed. The patient smells of antiseptic and pus. She notices two big tubes draining fluids. Most of the patient’s face is wrapped in gauze, everything obscured but the nostrils and the mouth. The rest of the body is covered by sheets, except for the right leg, which is exposed. She listens to the labored breathing and sees that, even in the chill, sweat has seeped through the sheets. The patient must have been burning with fever. But when she touches a part of the skin, it feels icy cold. This cannot be Teddy either, she decides; the person looks too slight. On her way out the door, she pauses, returns to the bed, and covers the leg. Then she sees it: the scar, a pink curving line that looks exactly like the Nike swoosh, and she remembers.
She reaches for another blanket from the closet and covers Teddy. She rests her head on his chest, summoning images: the kid racing with him in the coulee; the only guy in high school who didn’t look at the world as a hostile place; Teddy at timberline last summer, the West in his face, just the right kind of swagger. She sees him in the alpenglow of that evening after fishing, stripped to his shorts, the son of a bitter woman who had, himself, yet to be poisoned by cynicism or hate.
Hearing footsteps, she dashes into the bathroom and crouches in a narrow space between the wall and the toilet. A nurse enters—the balding man who tried to chase her from the floor. He changes some outer-layer gauze wraps that are yellowed and damp. He checks blood pressure, body temperature, empties one of the drainage containers, puts a drink with straw next to his head. When he leaves after nearly fifteen minutes of adjustments, Brunella has fallen asleep.
She wakes in watery predawn light, her legs cramped, a quirk in her neck from the awkward nap. Back at Teddy’s bedside, she notices liquid around the edges of his mouth, in the opening in the gauze. The straw in the drink is damp. But if he is awake, she cannot tell by his face, for his eyes are covered.
“Teddy . . . Teddy, this is Brunella. I’m so glad I found you.”
He does not move. She talks to him in a rambling whisper, telling him the story of her last few days in Missoula, about the river running clear and what it would be like to wade into a pool just outside the college campus, a feeder convergence for trout where oxygen bubbles and riffles carry fresh-hatched bugs. He lifts a bandaged hand slowly from beneath the sheets, startling Brunella. She sits back down on the bed, reaches for the hand, folds it in hers, and holds it close to her breast.
“Can you hear me, Teddy?”
She feels life in his hand, a slight squeeze of his fingers around hers. The three fingers that were badly burned when he ran through the fire are pink, like new flesh, but oddly without lines of age or wear. He runs his hand to Brunella’s face, contouring over her features, lingering at the mouth, then down, gently, touching the nape of her neck. He drops his hand away and taps on the table.
“Drink? You want to drink?”
She puts the straw to his lips, but he spits the water out, shakes his head, and taps the table again. Beneath the napkin are three books. One of them she recognizes: It is the leather-bound book that never leaves Teddy’s side. The cover is scarred from the fire, and the paper edges are blackened.
“Ah, you want me to read?” She opens the book. “ ‘I am haunted by waters. . . .’ ” And with those few words she knows Teddy will slip away from the hospital bed to a place in the river where the riffles meet the smooth.
She stays with him for two days, making an agreement with the nurses— even the crank with two beepers—that she can visit anytime during the day so long as she leaves him alone at night. She keeps the room clean, brings smoked salmon for him to eat between meals of creamed spinach and oatmeal, and goes through all the book, though she reads it slowly, knowing how he likes to hear the language. She has brought in some lilacs; the fragrance fills the room, replacing the smell of pus and sweat. He is heavily medicated for pain, which makes him thirsty, woozy, and only periodically coherent, but on the second day he sits up, face still wrapped like a mummy, his chest clean and untouched by fire.
“Why is the food always mush?” he says, in midafternoon.
“They think you’re nauseated, Teddy. They think you can’t hold anything down.”
“I have teeth. They should let me use ’em.”
“Will you tell me about Niccolo?”
“Sit closer. I want to touch you.”
She sits on the bed, staring into a head that resembles a volleyball. He tours her face with the back of his fingers.
“You’re so pretty,” he says. “You’ll never want to look at me.”
“Is that why you fled?”
“When you’re invisible, it’s a powerful freedom.”
“You’ll never make a good phantom.”
“They’re going to take the bandages off my eyes on Thursday, next week.”
“What do they expect?”
“I expect to look in the mirror and see a face. Not my old face, but a face. I don’t know what they expect.”
“Then what are you going to do with the rest of your life?”
“What are you going to do?”
“Maybe I’ll run away. Try to be invisible, like you.”
“Where would you go?”
“Home.”
“To the coulee? That’s not running away.”
“No, home. The place where the Cartolanos belong, in the Piemonte south of the Alps, or maybe in the Dolomites, hiding in a valley like the Ladins. Or maybe to a village on top of a hill, in a small house of ancient stone, surrounded by ancient footsteps, with grapes sloping to eternity and a festival for every major food group, and a miracle reenacted twice a year in a thousand-year-old church. Away from all the shit—this daily storm.”
“Where did you say this place was?”
“Then again, maybe I’ll just dig in. Be a stubborn ass and not apologize for it. Maybe I’ll become a winemaker like my father. I swore I would never do it. Still, perhaps I was born to the grape. I have a lot of shortcomings, so much to learn. I don’t have Babbo’s palate. I know very little about viniculture. I still don’t know if an oak barrel should be charred or kiln-dried. I never understood when to start a second round of fermentation. Winemaking is a glorious mystery, so much of it. Babbo’s got some years left, and he can teach me.”
“Like he was going to do for Niccolo. You could take his place.”
“And you could come help me.”
“For pay? You mean I’d work for you?”
“Or just stay in the stone chapel if you want, make it your temporary home. There’s always a place for you in the coulee.”
“There’s no place for me there.”
“Didn’t your family leave you something after they sold out?”
“My family? I’m alone in the world, Brunella. And no, Mr. and Mrs. Flax gave me nothing after selling, not a penny. But I didn’t expect anything. Could you rub my leg, please?”
“Which one?”
“By the Nike scar. You’ve been there. It’s starting to cramp.”
She kneads the muscles in a gentle fashion.
“That’s very nice, Brunella.”
“Non c’è problema.”
“Could you get me my drink?”
She brings the straw to his dry lips; he takes in a long pull, adjusts his body in the bed.
“Describe the day.”
“It’s wonderful. A few clouds floating past, a light breeze. And I can see snow on the highest part of the Bitterroots. What would you use today if you were on the river, Teddy?”
“Caddis, probably, some garden-variety year-round fly. Too early for the stone-fly hatch. I wouldn’t get too fancy with the rainbows of western Montana. They’ve seen it all. Down a little lower, Brunella, that’s where the cramp is.” He reaches for his drink but knocks it to the ground.
“Are you hungry?”
“Starved.”
“I wonder if they would let me cook. I brought something.”
