The Winemaker's Daughter, page 6
“We have our water allotment,” Niccolo says. “If the drip irrigation works, we’ll be fine. If not, we’ll punch in a couple of new wells. I’m sure the water table is in semidecent shape.”
“You always have so much hope, Niccolo. You’re the American. Nella, you’re different. You are the Italian. You have my mother’s old-country fears in you.”
Brunella knows it’s time to escape to the high country, near the eternal ice of the North Cascades. The coulee heat makes Ethan cranky; he has been complaining about wanting to get back to Seattle, in the comfort beneath his cloud cover. They pick up Teddy Flax Monday afternoon and drive to the east flank of the mountains, just outside the national park. Brunella has chosen one of the highest lakes in the range, a deep pool of snowmelt cradled by granite, nearly a mile and a half above sea level. At the trailhead, Ethan slips away to a Forest Service toilet shed. When he emerges, he looks as if he has just stepped from a catalog, wearing purple plastic boots, stiff and unscuffed.
“They’re supposed to be breathable,” he says. “Whatever that is.”
His legs are covered with pants made of a billowy odd-looking fabric, and he has a matching top with full-length sleeves, the price tag still attached.
“The sun protection is built right into the fabric—an SPF factor of forty-five, even when it’s soaked with sweat,” says Ethan. “So while you’re risking malignant melanoma with your skimpy little tank top, I have protection.”
“You look like a walking condom,” Teddy says.
“You’re not so pure yourself,” Brunella says to Teddy. “What’s that?”
“My beeper—the long arm of the Forest Service. It’s the only way I can get away.”
“And this book?” She fingers a tattered leather-bound volume sticking out of one pocket of his pack. “Couldn’t you take a paperback?”
“I’ll chuck my sleeping bag before I throw out this book,” says Teddy.
The trail is eight miles, gaining nearly four thousand vertical feet. They start in a valley of big cedars and Douglas firs along the Twisp River, then rise through ponderosa pines, following the switchback of the trail along a flank of the mountain. At two miles they reach a waterfall, a torrent of several hundred feet that levels into a narrow canyon of deep green and moss. Brunella takes off her pack and puts her face in the froth at the edge of the falls.
“This feels wonderful,” she says.
“Ethan, my man, put your head in that waterfall and take a long sip,” says Teddy. “That’ll give you the baptism of the Cascades.”
“Drink that water? Are you crazy? I’ve got one of these.”
He takes out a pump and filter from the side of his pack.
“Every sip of this waterfall contains millions of microscopic bacteria from the feces of who knows what, and I for one am not going to let the collective sewage of the animal kingdom put me at risk of five to seven days of hospitaliza—”
Brunella cups her ear. Zeee-eeet. Zeee-eeet. “Do you hear that?” she says. “Dippers. God, what a life.”
They enter a place of water and extravagant color, a meadow ringed by larch trees and wildflowers of lupine and Indian paintbrush. Big firs and perpetual shade give way to smaller alpine trees. In an opening from an old burn, the flowers are waist high, asters and daisies, fireweed of deep lavender color, and the breeze is stronger at every switchback. With the pack rubbing against her shoulder blades, her boots blistering heels, cramping toes, Brunella has slipped beyond the pain barrier, using a technique she has been working on for years, a way to transcend the cries of her body during long hikes or runs. It is also a way to get closer to God, she explains to Teddy. He says it is the endorphins, the body’s natural morphine.
The last two miles are brutal, as if the trail builders had run out of patience and simply carved a path straight up, with no back and forth. She is thinking about what Teddy said of the woman from Manhattan he nearly married. We could never be equals, he said. Women marry for money, security, and a gene pool. Matches born of pure love are doomed. Brunella did not believe it, did not believe people were prisoners of encoded natural history, even as evidence mounted that there were biological reasons for selecting the richest man in the cave—survival, the oldest imperative. She could love a teacher because she would love a man first. That’s what she told herself.
A slight breeze blows from the waterfalls. The jays follow them up, cawking, hovering close. The trail levels, just at timberline, and opens to a turquoise-colored lake fed by a small glacier in the shade on the side of the mountain. The water is dimpled by fish, just starting to feed as shadows move over the surface. Ethan looks drained, his face gaunt. He walks very slowly, lifting his legs in an awkward, deliberate fashion, as if he were forcing the muscles to contract. He stops and retrieves a small device from his backpack. He never looks at the glacier, or the deep blue-green of the lake, or the distant brown hills to the east, or the haze from the fires to the north. He punches in some numbers on his device; the result— flashing on a small screen—confounds him.
“Where are we?”
“We are at a jewel of a lake in the American Alps,” says Brunella.
“No, but where are we?” says Ethan. “My GPS says we’re seven thousand feet above sea level.”
“Your GPS?”
“I didn’t want to get lost.”
“I wouldn’t let that happen.”
“This isn’t right. I knew it. I probably shouldn’t have come with you. I should not be socializing with the help.”
“The help?” says Brunella. “Is that what I am?”
“Well, technically I could fire you.”
Brunella grabs the Global Positioning System from Ethan and spins him around. “That ridge just above us is the Cascade Crest. One side drains to Puget Sound, the other to the Columbia River. That’s all you need to know. Cut the tether to the wireless world for a second. Breathe, Ethan. Open your eyes.”
In the evening, Brunella and Teddy go fishing. The water is clear to the bottom, in the deep center of the lake, so they have to keep their distance, crouching as they approach to avoid scaring the fish. They are not sure what bugs are hatching, but Teddy catches a few insects and suggests several matches. They can see smoke now coming from the east, in the direction of the Cartolano home, but their attention is on the lake. Brunella does not bother to match her fly to the emerging hatches. She does not care for all the fetish bundle iconography of fly-fishing. She fishes for the company. It has been her experience that the best men are fly fishermen. Brunella ties on a hardy caddis, claiming it has always worked for her in the past. Teddy decides on something smaller. The lake is full of cutthroats rising, as if the dinner bell has just been rung in the high Cascades and the trout sense the brevity of the feeding season. Stripped to his shorts, Teddy wades into the lake. His initial casts are quick, in a sidearm fashion.
A large trout jumps from the center of the lake, and they watch the fish dart back down to shallows beneath a rock.
“He’s yours,” Teddy says. “But first I have a gift for you.” He presents her with a royal coachman made of fine strands of elk hair, four colors. “Take it and prosper, Brunella Cartolano.”
Brunella’s casts are old-school, in the arc between ten o’clock and two o’clock. Her line stretches out like a lizard’s tongue. She waits only a few seconds before pulling the rod up in response to a bite. The fish shakes her fly loose.
Teddy sidearms a short delicate cast, ahead of the rock where the fish has gone for cover, and waits. The trout makes a line from beneath the rock to Teddy’s fly, and the surface breaks with a splash. The fish hits the fly so quick, Teddy does not have time to set the hook. But the fish is on, swimming to the other side of the lake, Teddy’s reel singing with the action. Brunella pulls her rod back and winks at Teddy as he brings his fish in. She has on a fighter, which jumps above the surface in mid-struggle, something cutts rarely do after taking a fly. She strips in her line slowly, keeping the tension just right, and lands the fish. It must be twelve inches, large for a high alpine lake.
“I’ll let mine go,” she says, “if you cook yours.”
A breeze riffles the water, making it hard to fish. Brunella motions for Teddy to come sit next to her on a flat rock at the edge of the lake.
“You know why I fish?” she says. “That connection to the other side. Most of the time, we’re little more than observers of nature. We watch. When you get a fish on, you’re pulled into the world.”
“And eating fresh trout instead of freeze-dried crap has nothing to do with it.”
“Listen, Teddy boy.” She rolls over on top of him, pinning him, licking his nose, his smooth face. God, he’s pretty. She wants all of him.
“Hey, let me read to you,” he says.
“Now?”
He dashes to his pack and returns with the weathered leather enclosure of an old man’s prose. She tilts her head to catch the title. “Norman’s book,” she says. “I should have suspected.”
He begins reading: “ ‘My father was very sure about certain things relating to the universe. To him all good things—trout as well as eternal salvation—come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.’ ”
She rests her head on his chest as he continues. After he reads the opening chapter, she feels roused in the way that a man and literature and alpenglow in the Cascades—this convergence of indigenous passions— can cause. “You know I come from a long line of dark-haired women who feel better with their clothes off.”
“Then don’t let me stop you from following the genetic impulse.”
She reaches into his wet pants. “This needs to dry,” she says. He is stiff. She runs her tongue down the front his body and tickles the top of his belly button. She feels her own body start to loosen.
“Didn’t you used to have an inny?” she says.
“How do you remember that?”
“I was jealous. I had an outie.”
She pulls his shorts down and licks him all over, around the edges, up and down, taking his penis in her mouth and giving him a long massage. The sun disappears from the rock. She keeps him wet, sucking softly, running her tongue all around, then stopping abruptly.
“What?” he says, looking down.
“This.” She is laughing as she points to something on the inside of his leg. “The scar—it’s the Nike swoosh.”
“Oh, that. I cut myself four years ago on a hiking trip in the Mission Range. I know, I know, it looks exactly like the goddamn Nike logo.”
“It does!”
“I’m the only guy in the world branded with a swoosh who isn’t getting paid for it.”
The shadow of the mountain covers the valley below, an outline of dark shade all the way down to where the Twisp River cuts through the cedar grove. They remain on the rock until they are both chilled, neither wanting to move. They keep each other warm as fish jump at the last chance for flies before dark.
At dinnertime, Brunella breads the cutthroat in flour and readies the pan with oil.
“Use butter,” Teddy says. “This trout has given up its mountain lake for you. The least you can do is let him leave the world with a decent bath.”
They make a pot of rice, flavored with saffron and bits of dried shrimp. They drink ice-cold white wine with the dinner, and it tastes clean—a perfect match.
“I’m sorry, Ethan,” Brunella says. “I left you alone.”
“I’m perfectly fine.”
“I haven’t been a very good guide. Are you upset?”
“You’ve been occupied.”
“Tomorrow we’ll find a little perch with a view you won’t forget. Once you’re up there, you’ll never look at the world the same way.”
“I doubt that.”
After swatting at mosquitoes, Ethan sets his food down and goes inside his tent. He returns with a box the size of a small matchbox, sets it nearby, and turns it on. A low zzzzzz sound comes from the box. He smiles at Brunella and Teddy.
“It simulates the sound of a dragonfly,” Ethan says. “That scares mosquitoes.”
“And this came with the GPS?” Teddy says.
“It was extra.”
Brunella puts water on the small stove for tea, just as a beeper goes off in the tent. It is Teddy’s call from the Forest Service. He says he will be gone before dawn and tries to convince them how lucky they are to stay another day in the high Cascades without having to look at the mountains as the enemy.
CHAPTER FOUR
THEY FALL OUT of the plane at first light, the ride so bumpy on the convection currents that the jump is a relief. On the way to the fire, the boxy Sherpa has been rattling more than usual; it’s like white-water rafting without advance notice of the rapids. A dozen and one smoke jumpers—each loaded down with seventy pounds of chute, food, rope, radio, and padding for the most vulnerable areas of the body, all wrapped in Kevlar skin—want out. Tozzie Cresthawk looks sick. Teddy tosses his copy of The New Yorker. Niccolo tries to stand, working the bounce in his legs. When Teddy rises he is slammed against the ceiling, and Niccolo calls him a “Ned,” the jumper word for rookie.
Teddy clips into the line and jumps. Tozzie and four other Indians follow, and then comes the Old Man, two veteran women jumpers from Pendleton, Oregon, three Neds, and finally Niccolo, the crew boss. Floating, his legs bent at a slight angle, his head against the big collar that protects his neck from a snap, staring through the caged mesh of the face shield, Niccolo feels the surge that always comes with a jump—a minute, rarely more, of descent into this small crowded world. Look out for the trees, avoid the snags, angle-angle-angle away from the cliff, make the currents work for you, and beware the downdraft, the squeeze of air that could slam you hard. Now here’s the smoke, heavy like a tangle of witch’s hair over the ground.
It is that time of year when a mountain range that normally bleeds water turns to the opposite extreme. Fires are burning throughout the Cascades. The ground pounders with their Pulaskis and chain saws are trying to contain the biggest of them, the Johnny Blackjack. The fire has skipped over ridges, hopping from crown to crown, spreading ten miles or more in a day, blotting out the sun. They say it is not a normal beast and does not behave as it should; it is hotter, faster, with an oversize appetite. The smoke jumpers are deployed strategically. Their job is to contain a fresh small fire that could join the Johnny Blackjack and open a flank through a valley with cabins, orchards, and summer homes in the lower elevations. Last night, somebody had written on the chalkboard WE ARE FIRE GODS.
Down, down, down, seventeen feet a second: Watch for rocks, aim for the small dried-out meadow at the edge of a grove of towering larches, watch for holes in the ground burrowed by marmots and rocks covered by bramble. Legs flexed, loose, Niccolo hits the ground—no give from this baked earth—rolls over, and springs up to corral his chute. The Indians make it, same with the Neds, the women from Pendleton. The Old Man’s landing is formulaic. Head count. Six, a dozen . . . one missing: Tozzie Cresthawk.
“He’s in the tree,” says Teddy.
Tozzie radios Niccolo that he won’t need help. He can manage. He reaches into his leg pocket and removes his let-down rope, rigs the rope to the tree, and cuts his chute. He breaks loose from the high canopy and falls, hitting a lower branch hard, a hot sting felt through the thick padding in his seat. He tumbles another twenty feet and drops headfirst, hands scraping bark, banging against the sharp ends of tree limbs snapped in storms, no sound coming from him but the phfflmmp, phffllmmmp of branches slipping away. His front gear bag, draped like an apron above his knees, snags in midfall, catching him head down about thirty feet above the ground. He swings back and forth. Two of the Indians climb the tree and help him down. His face is bleeding; part of his Kevlar suit is ripped.
“Big Ernie nearly got me,” he says to Niccolo.
“Big Ernie ain’t coming to the Cascades this year,” says Niccolo.
By late afternoon, the jumpers have hiked two miles over scree to the edge of a spot fire—their target. It is burning the nubs of decapitated trees, heather shrubs, and some stubby high-alpine larches and moving like a sea tossed by cross-current winds. Niccolo’s orders are to backburn just ahead of the fire’s front line, starving it of fuel. Then they plan to traverse to the advancing high edge of the Johnny Blackjack fire and lay down another buffer line. The yellow-shirted jumpers go quickly about the backburn, splashing the brush with flaming diesel from their portable fusees. They have a good fire going when they retreat to watch it come together. As planned, the other fire dies when it meets up with fresh-burned area. The jumpers feel triumphant. Teddy is full of bluster and high energy, slapping Niccolo’s gloved hand.
“We are the fire gods.”
Niccolo takes out a stack of topo maps, each showing a square mile in the high eastern edge of the Cascades. He’s a soldier. Choke the fire, stay out of Big Ernie’s way, demobe, and go home. No other thoughts are allowed.
They walk downhill at a slight traverse until they come to a broad flat area atop a series of cliffs. The smoke, carrying the smell of boiled pine sap, is too thick to allow them to see much below. Every few minutes, they hear loud pops—the cannon fire of trees as they break open, the superheated sap swelling up fast and furious. At the rest stop, they eat nut-filled candy bars to bring their blood-sugar levels back up and drink electrolyte-replacement liquid to prevent cramping. The sweat never stops pouring out of them, and the ash never stops raining down. Niccolo takes a vacuum-wrapped hunk of dried meat and sets it on the rock. He cuts it with his knife, spreads little puddles of ketchup and mustard from small packets, and sprinkles sesame seeds on the side.
