The Winemaker's Daughter, page 28
“Easy, Brunella. The locks are always changed in this sort of a deal. It’s pro forma, until everything clears.”
“How could you do this?”
“Well, I called up a locksmith, that’s how. That will—the one you so rudely shoved in my face—it’s invalid.”
“What happened to Babbo?”
“I couldn’t find Father. I’ve got people out looking for him now, and I’ve already paid the first six months’ rent on a residential care facility.”
“He wants this place to stay in our hands. He transferred the whole coulee—”
“Hold it there, Brunella. Take a breath, little girl. As I’ve been trying to tell you for some time, Father is not altogether with it these days. If you would pay attention, you could see what his real needs are. The man cannot urinate without a diaper. Either that or he collects it; have you seen the jars of pee? He cannot drive without posing a hazard to others on the road. He shows signs of midstage dementia—”
“Of what?”
“Midstage dementia. It’s a disease of the mind that eats away at basic cognitive functions, common to octogenarians in a certain risk category.”
“A disease. You mean he’s old. You call that a disease?”
“I’m going to hang up now, Brunella. Before I go, I need to tell you about the will—that bundle of legal kindling you threw in my face. Father never had a witness. Without a signed witness, a notary, it’s no better than a cheap forgery. You own nothing.”
“But don’t you see what his intentions are? Be a man, Roberto. Be a son. Be a Cartolano! Babbo wants to hold on here. Who cares if he had a witness or not. You’re denying him his life request.”
“I’m getting him to the last stage of his life.”
“No, no! This is a crime against our family. I’m going to get Babbo and bring him to you. He’ll tell you exactly what he wants. This time with a witness.”
Two old men have set out to climb the high peak in the eastern Cascades, but first they have to shop. Angelo wants fresh food. He wants to stop at the bakery for scones, to load up at the fruit stand with onions, peppers, leeks, mushrooms, and go down to the butcher for a shank of something they can grill over a fire at base camp, and then stop at the Bavarian-style candy hut for white chocolate. But his climbing partner will have none of it. All the food his partner has packed is surplus from the Y2K storage pile he never used, designed to last decades. They nearly come to blows at the cheese counter in the supermarket. Angelo insists on a quarter wedge of Fontina—the cheese from the Valle d’Aosta, where he climbed as a boy— and a small Romano to whittle onto pasta. But his partner slaps the cheeses down, saying he has packets of orange powdered substance.
At the trailhead, Angelo is stymied again. He plans to take one bottle of the Cartolano Nebbiolo to high camp.
“We’ll drink this after our victory,” Angelo says.
“Are you nuts? That bottle must weigh as much as my stove,” his partner says. “We won’t make it to the first waterfall. The wine stays in the car.”
“Then I’m not going.”
“Fine. Bring it. You can carry the rope as well.”
The trail follows Ingalls Creek, the footing soft with larch and pine needles. Carrying his heavy pack of postwar climbing gear, the rope, and his bottle of wine, Angelo is slowed by the weight. But the months that he spent going up and down the vineyards under a pack loaded with rocks have paid off; his wind is good. Even then, his body can only do so much; it feels like a blade is tearing at his lower back.
Angelo tells his partner they have nothing but time and should enjoy the approach, take it slow, look at every opening in the forest, pause and listen for birds, smell the wildflowers, watch the mood of the mountains change with the light. He was a jackrabbit long ago, springing up and down the Cascades, often getting lost because he believed it was more important to move fast than to know where he was going; the point was to stay in motion at all times. Now he knows he missed a lot.
His partner takes a different view. “We can’t dither,” says Alden Kosbleau. He seems edgy, eager to speed things up; he wants to march the three miles to the first camp in one quick pull.
At camp, Kosbleau boils water and pours it into two red aluminum pouches, then stirs and hands a packet to Angelo. He sniffs, nibbles, and gags.
“I can’t eat this caca.”
“It’s beef bourguignon,” says Kosbleau. “I got a garage full of this stuff.”
Next day they ascend into the higher part of the valley, where Angelo can see the last snow patches on the south side of Stuart. On the other side are the glaciers, bowls of ancient ice. He sits on a salt-and-pepper boulder and takes in the view of Mount Rainier to the southwest, the balding head of the summit with its glare against the hot sky. When they resume, the trail rounds two switchbacks and stops just short of the deep hole of Ingalls Lake, where the boys camped more than sixty years ago. They drop into a small valley, in deep shade, and find a grassy level area next to a fire pit. The pain in Angelo’s lower back has intensified. He rubs it and pinches it, adjusting the pack.
At the second camp, a breeze of cool air keeps mosquitoes away. It also could mean the weather might change. Stuart is a magnet for thunderstorms, and Angelo has prepared himself, mentally, for a hit from the sky. He is ready to sit out for days, if that’s what it comes to. You’re old but you’re smart. Use your age, be patient, take time and do it right. Remember, there are old climbers and bold climbers, but no old bold climbers. Your heart is big. Your lungs work. Your legs are still strong. Savor the high country. Look at the rock: this upturned crust of the planet, superb granite, solid and speckled. Carrara itself is no match for this stone haven. He unwinds his sleeping pad and his bag in the tent. Kosbleau is setting up a bivouac sack behind a tree.
“What—now you’re too good to sleep in my tent?” Angelo says.
“You fart too much. It keeps me awake.”
“It’s that powdered caca of yours from dinner.”
“I need my sleep,” says Kosbleau, “if I’m going to get you to the top.”
The arraignment of Danny Red Thunder was supposed to be quiet and routine: a judge, a defendant, a lawyer, a prosecutor, an exchange of bail requests, an agreement, and a release. But word has leaked out to the mob gathered outside the pit, and they decide, on orders from Mrs. Flax, to make a showing. On this hot day the tiny stone courthouse with the Romanesque trim is packed and surrounded by people whose grievance is directed at a bail hearing on the third floor. When Danny Red Thunder is led into the hearing, the room erupts.
“There’s the son of a bitch!”
“Thief!”
“Try him here,” Mrs. Flax says, which leads to a chant. “Try him here! Try him here! Try him here!”
The judge bangs his gavel and calls for order. There is no air-conditioning inside the stone courthouse, and Judge Kevin Hamilton is sweating under his black robes. When people continue to grumble, the judge orders two sheriff’s deputies to remove the more belligerent ones. Mrs. Flax remains, front and center, fixing her blue-eyed stare on the Indian in orange coveralls. Brunella is sitting near the back. She can see Leon Treadtoofar on the other side of the room, in his Forest Service greens. She tries to catch his eyes, but he will not look her way. Just before the proceedings start, Leon rises abruptly, as if he’s going to make a statement, and leaves the room.
Leon makes his way to the casino construction site, climbs over the fence, and approaches the water pit. A pair of elderly men in white caps are playing chess under a blue tarp at the edge of the gate. No one else is on guard; the mob is still down at the courthouse. Leon ducks inside the nearly completed shell of the tribal casino, traipses through a jungle of wires, down a long narrow room where slot machines are wrapped in plastic, and into a second, larger building connected to the first. He slips past half-assembled blackjack tables and a stack of neon-headed clowns awaiting electronic life, through a sports betting room where the seats are in place but the giant screens are not, through all the accessories of the tribal dream for new life, and out a back door. Leon creeps low to avoid setting off any alarms and arrives at a control room. He finds dials and buttons that connect to gates of the pit and monitor the inflows and overall level of the water. He studies the panel hard for ten minutes. Then he presses two buttons, activating the outflow gate of the pit. A buzzer sounds. A floodgate slowly opens, and water spills out.
With a whoooomphhhhh the water surges out of the pit, breaking down the gate, cutting away an earthen section that has acted as a dam. Now there is a flood of water heading downhill toward the river, a force strong enough to rattle the card table on the pavement where the two elderly men in white caps are playing chess, strong enough to kick open a second floodgate as water stampedes out of the corral.
The elderly men flee, trying to get out of the way of a side flow of water that swamps the pavement.
The pit empties in a hurry, a tidal-like flush of all the water gathered from high in the Cascades, from north-facing draws and seeps in the granite, from aquifers in the desert and the forest, from canals originating in the backed-up lake behind the Grand Coulee, from streams that died in the taking and farms born in the exchange. As the pit water crashes into the Columbia, a small part of the river changes color and then quickly begins to rise and move in a turgid fashion. For this quarter-mile, the flush jump-starts the river, pushing a sluggish reservoir into the arms of gravity, a current as it takes on its own momentum. And for a short time, the Columbia is a river again.
Downstream, millions of young salmon, trapped in early-stage development by the river that would not move, are now given a brisk nudge, a call to advance. The small salmon scoot down the river and out, out, out to meet a biological deadline, out, out, out to sea and to life.
The prosecutor presents the bail request of $100,000 and says the government believes that Danny Red Thunder, who has lived in the Columbia basin his entire life, is not a flight risk. Danny Red Thunder and his attorney whisper back and forth as the prosecutor talks.
“Okay by you, counsel?” Judge Hamilton says.
“No bail, Your Honor,” says Red Thunder’s attorney. “My client wants to stay in custody until Your Honor hears our request for a change of venue.”
“Coward!” one man bellows. Foot-stomping. Hooting.
Judge Hamilton blows a whistle for silence. “I’m going to conduct an orderly proceeding here, or we are going to start making arrests. Counsel, you refuse a chance to have your client released on bail?”
“That is correct, Your Honor.”
Outside, the crowd mills around the front of the stone courthouse under two big oak trees. They don’t trust Hamilton; he is a federal judge, appointed for life, who does not have to face the voters in irrigation country. If Red Thunder is allowed a change in venue, they expect it will be a whitewash. What do city people know about the problems of the irrigator? No doubt they’ll side with the Indian.
Brunella rushes to find Leon Treadtoofar. She spots him walking toward the river. He crosses the main street and follows a side road down toward the water. Brunella rushes to catch up with him.
“Wait for me, Leon.”
He hops over railroad tracks, passes a giant apple warehouse, a windowless cold storage plant with a smiling Indian mural painted on the side, and makes his way down to the river. At the edge of the backed-up Columbia, just above a dam, he turns to face her. His clothes are drenched, his face bruised. “What?”
“Leon.” She touches his chest; he backs away. “Leon, what’s wrong?”
He hits her in the face. It’s a smack, using the back of his hand, strong enough to knock her down.
Leon strips off his wet Forest Service shirt and tosses it in the river. The currents grab the olive-green shirt and drag it under. He removes his shoes, peels away his pants, and dives into the big river. Brunella’s face hurts, the sting from the back of his hand more intense. Her ears are ringing. She wonders if Leon hit her out of impulse, an accident maybe, or because he knows now about everything she withheld. But watching him disappear into the fast-swelling Columbia, she realizes she may never know.
“Leon!”
She loses sight of him as he is carried out by the deep-layered currents. He is underwater for more than a minute before he comes up, gasping for air. She cannot tell if it is a trick or desperation. It makes no sense. She kicks off her shoes and wades in, astonished at how quickly the river level seems to be rising, the current gaining in strength.
Leon is on his back, stroking deliberately, as the currents carry him toward the edge of the dam, toward wires and big orange balloons placed as a warning to boaters and low-flying planes. Brunella tries to swim toward Leon. When she catches up, he does a U-turn and heads back toward the shore. She shouts at him. He grabs on to a big timber caught by one of the cables, in the middle of the Columbia. Brunella swims up to him and gets a handhold on the timber next to Leon. She shivers at the chill. Having tested the tug of the river to get to the timber, Brunella is not sure she can make it back.
“What are you doing?”
“I need a swim.”
“This is suicidal.”
“I need a swim.”
Clinging to the timber, Brunella and Leon see a wave of new water just before they feel it. What had been somewhat flat is now churning and hurried, carrying the contents of the pit, the big flush out of the containment hold. The fast-moving water shakes the timber loose from the cable. Brunella and Leon try to hold on, but the wood is moving too quickly. They separate, each flailing in the water. They are carried quickly to the edge of the dam. Brunella turns on her back and tries desperately to slow the ride. She hears the mad flutter of Leon’s kicking. It is difficult just to keep her head above water. She reaches for another cable, gets a hand on it, and flips her legs over the line. She hangs just above the river. The current never lets her out of its grip. She holds until the blood leaves her fingers, and then holds longer, though she cannot feel anything in her hands. The river takes another swipe and knocks her from the cable. She is twenty feet from the spillway of the dam and closing. She sees the water drop away into mist and blue sky, into a roar as it crashes downward. Feet forward, feet forward, she tells herself. Here is the dam, the spillway. Her arms are pulled back and the roar shakes her. She keeps her feet down in the fall and never feels the concrete wall. It’s a drop of three seconds. At the base, her legs buckle as she is driven down a shaft of oxygenated bubbles and frenzied water. She is conscious of the noise and the cold. She can move. She had not taken a breath before the fall, and her lungs are giving out. Upside down, or downside up? She cannot tell. Her body is hurled forward, underwater still, tumbling, rolling.
Air.
She lies on a slab of river-polished basalt next to the remade shore, alongside Leon. He is scratched and bruised. She thinks her ankle is broken. Her face, where Leon hit her, still feels sore to the touch. None of it matters. Leon’s chest is warm in the sun and a place to hide. What do you say when you’re given a second chance at life? Just hold me, Leon. She stays with him all afternoon, lying on the rock in the sun, but he is a stranger now. And when she has told him everything about Angelo and the coulee, about how she lost a brother because of a sin of her father, she asks him to forgive her.
“È colpa mia,” says Brunella.
“I’m sorry for hitting you,” Leon says. “I have a problem.”
And then he says he cannot forgive her until Danny Red Thunder is out of jail and Angelo Cartolano is taking his place.
Tomorrow is their summit day. This evening, the two old men lay out everything for the climb to the top. The wind is hard, flapping the tent sides, but that is good, Angelo tells himself. It is the stillness, when the air is fat, that scares him. He does not worry about rain, heat, fog. Only thunderbolts. The old men are on a small ledge surrounded by stunted pine and heather. The ground below Angelo’s tent is lumpy, but he does not mind. He lies on his back and thinks of the summit pyramid, the glory of Stuart. All around, the granite is burnished with the fiery light of the end of day. Marmots whistle at one another.
“How did Peter Selworth die?” Angelo says.
“Stroke,” says Kosbleau. “On the golf course. The way he wanted to go.”
“And McLoften?”
“Cancer. It was all over him. The poor son of a bitch looked like he had a basketball in his chest.”
“I still can’t get over Wally Simon. Heart attack, wasn’t it?”
“Massive. Shut him down entirely. He’s the one I expected to outlive us all. Didn’t smoke, didn’t drink.”
“That’s what did it,” says Angelo. “You can’t expect somebody who doesn’t drink to be the Last Man. What would he do with the bottle?”
“It’s better to die in the mountains, don’t you think, Angelo? Better to die up here, as a man, than some drooler in a home?”
“No, it’s better to live.”
“You kept our secret, didn’t you, Angelo? If you want to keep your place, your vineyard, everything you worked for . . . you have to keep our secret.”
“I say we get up at four tomorrow,” says Angelo. “Just before the light. There’s a section up there, very steep. I’m worried. We have to get an early start.”
“Did you ever expect to live this long, Angelo?”
“We are not so old. I expect to live some more. Almost thirty years ago the doctor said I was going to die. High blood pressure, a fat heart, some combination of bad things. He gives me some pills, says they will prolong my life, but you can’t have sex, and you shouldn’t drink anymore. I laughed in his face. What sort of man wants to live so long without the good things in life? So I took my chance, and I’m still here. What do you think has kept me alive for so long?”
“They’ve got better medication now, Angelo. You can drink, get an occasional woody, and still live.”
“I have to go slow on the snowfield tomorrow. That’s the only part I’m not so sure about. Especially when we come down. I’m not so sure about when we come down; that’s why we have to start early.”
