Pasadena (13 page)

Charlotte handed the first cup to Bruder with something of a leer. “I see you brought your new friend.”

“His name is Bruder.”

“I already know his name.” Charlotte ceased pumping the water to take him in, and Linda nearly expected her to pluck her notebook from her pocket and write a few things down.

“Welcome to Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea,” said Charlotte. “Home of the Navel-Shaped Rock, the Restorative Mineral Spring, the Lagoon of the Hideous Stench, and the Prettiest Fishergirls in the World.”

“I gave you a dollar,” said Bruder. “You owe me fifty cents.”

“Here’s to your health,” said Charlotte. “And here’s your change.”

“What makes this water so special?” he said.

“Depends who you ask.”

“I’m asking you.”

“If you ask me,” said Charlotte, “it holds nothing more than you’d expect. But if you ask Margarita or Mayor Kramer or the owner of the Twin Inn, they might tell you it’ll purify your lungs and cleanse your blood. The Apfelsine’s been known to attract even one or two syphilics, desperate as they are.”

Bruder was standing close to Linda, and the breeze off the ocean was salty and passed through his hair: and she could see how small and pink his ears were, like two tight roses. The wind was whipping Bruder’s trousers, the baggy thighs brushing her yellow skirt, and it felt as if just at that very moment both Bruder and Charlotte noticed that Linda was wearing a Sunday dress on a Saturday afternoon.

“Here’s to the Well of Life,” said Bruder, and he recited.

Upon hearing this, a nervous panic overtook Charlotte—she could hardly believe that someone knew something she did not—and she plucked the pencil from behind her ear. “What’s that? Where’d you hear that? Can you repeat that?”

But Bruder steered Linda away from Charlotte to the other side of the deck. They sat on a bench, and their knees were close but not touching. “Be careful around her,” he said. Linda protested that Charlotte was her best friend, and she couldn’t know it at the time, but these were the first days in Linda’s life when the hand of fate was beginning to swat her around.

It was a bright afternoon, and the lagoon’s cattails bent in the wind. Other than Charlotte, there was no one else on the platform, and Linda and Bruder leaned over the bench and looked out at Agua Apestosa and the schoolhouse on its far shore. Sharp grass stood tall in the black water. In the distance, the hills were yellowing from the early heat; in another month, all would be dry and brown. A pair of yellowthroats flew over the water, and Linda pointed out to Bruder two California least terns, small white birds with orange legs and black-tipped yellow bills.

The wind played with Bruder’s collar, revealing fine wisps of chest hair. His lips were full and faint in color, like an early grape. When his fingers fell to her bare arm, the sensation caused her breath to catch in her throat: as if he’d found a patch of her skin never before exposed to another’s hand. But as soon as it happened, his hand jerked away and he muttered, “Sorry.” It was the first apology out of him, although there were other times when he should have excused himself: the time he spit out the canned tongue and barked, “Don’t feed me this!”; and the evening when he walked in on her preparing her bath: their faces frozen in the instant of orange sunset and gull-squawk outside the window, and had it been a moment later he would have found her naked, a washcloth cupping her breast. So many things Linda didn’t understand about Bruder. The simple question of his age resulted in further misunderstanding: “I’m about as old as Edmund, more or less.” But if that were true, then why did the mat of hair grow on his chest and not her brother’s? And what about the beard that required a blade sharp enough to slaughter fowl? And the odor, unmistakably male, both fruity and rancid at the end of the day? Linda would lie in bed wondering if it kept Edmund from sleeping, that smell and Bruder’s large body cocooned by slumber so close to his own. More than once she had tiptoed across the yard, shushing the goats, to stand on a crate and peer through the window. There she found Bruder, big in her former bed, his heavy face sunk into the hen-feather pillow. And no matter how late it was, she’d find Edmund sitting up in bed, glasses slipping down his nose, the light cast across the volume of Gibbon in his lap. Once she heard Bruder say, “Are you still reading him?” And then, yawning, shifting beneath the blankets, “I finished Gibbon in a week.” Three nights in a row she had stared in at Edmund and Bruder, and her chest had filled with longing, a desire that emerged with the ponderous night surf and the contemplative moon and the sleep-groan of the burro. Finally, on the third night, Edmund looked up from the book and met her eye in the window. He seemed to want to say, “I wish you’d come back, Linda.”

Other things, too, caused Linda to sit on the bluff with her chin in her fist and wonder about Bruder: the burn-scar in his temple, and where it had come from. “The war, Linda,” he’d say. “The war.” Along with the bowie knife, he owned a bayonet that he sometimes wore in his belt; not a month after their first fishing lesson, Linda witnessed
him use it to flay and gut a sea bass the size of a hound. “That from the war too?” If in reply he might have had some story from the front, she couldn’t pry it from him. But once, when Edmund was in the fields, Bruder waved her into the cottage and told her he had something he wanted her to see. He reached into his rucksack and brought out a folding fan with a blue silk tassel, a Bible swollen with warp, and a delicate stick of coral dangling on a leather thong. Carefully he placed each on the bed, and he cuffed Linda’s hand as she reached for the necklace. “They came from my mother,” he said, and Linda screwed up her eyes and said she thought he didn’t have a mother. He said he didn’t, but these were next to him in the orange crate when he was delivered to the Training Society’s door. Again, Linda reached for the coral. It was as orange-pink as a rose’s heart, and this time he let her inspect it, on condition that she never tell anyone what she’d seen. “Something’s written on it,” she said, bringing the coral to her eye. “Pavis?”

And Bruder dreamily reclaimed the pendant and folded it away in his palm. “I only know her name.”

He was the heir of a mother’s name and a few belongings and nothing else. He knew that some took pity on him, especially when he was a boy, but Bruder had always felt blessed to possess no past, no antecedents tugging him down, steering him this way and that. He had been a boy, and now he was a man whose life was his own. Bruder liked to think he was fearless and this was almost true; his only fear was of losing himself to someone else.

Far off in the distance, beyond the village edge, Mt. Palomar was dark in the afternoon shadow, its ridge a lonely peak above the hills. Linda told Bruder the story of the picnic she and Edmund had once made on the mountainside, on a path originally carved out by the Indians who used to call the mountain Paauw. They had hiked through a cluster of waist-high brake ferns and stalks of lupine, and a cloud of gnattish no-see-ums had flown out of the belly of a felled mulberry and attacked Linda and Edmund, whining in their ears. Linda convinced Edmund to continue up the mountain, but soon they smelled a brushfire, and when they looked above them they saw flames leaping across the hairpin road. The fire was burning another thousand feet up the mountain, never putting Linda and Edmund in danger, but now she told the story to Bruder as if they had felt the heat upon their faces. She recounted the marigold-orange flames gnawing at the dry azalea
and chestnut trees, and the abandoned vineyard succumbing in a hot swift
whoosh
, and the tree squirrels leaping from the burning oak branches, and the horrible cackle of the fire’s appetite … and Bruder took her wrist and said, “That’s not the way it happened. Edmund already told me you were safe on the valley floor.”

She was a funny girl, he thought, and a liar too, and a warning signal drifted from her, like early white smoke. But even so, Bruder couldn’t let go of her hand. The journey home from the front had taken months, and Bruder had carried Dieter’s rucksack, bulky with sheets of tin, and every now and then Dieter would speak of his daughter as if she were a princess whose life had already become myth: “She was born on New Year’s Day,” Dieter would say, “with eyes that were both black and blue.” Once, when they were within days of Condor’s Nest, Dieter had said, “Consider yourself forewarned, my young friend. Her heart is her own.” And Bruder had replied, “So is mine.” On the long journey home, Dieter had also told Bruder about Edmund, and once Dieter admitted that Edmund was not the boy he had hoped for. Bruder had made the mistake of repeating this to Edmund one night as they lay in their beds side by side, and Edmund had replied, “One day you’ll regret ever coming to Condor’s Nest.”

Now on the bench, Bruder said, “You realize, Linda, that Edmund and I are enemies.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’re rivals.”

“Rivals for what?”

“Linda. Don’t you see?”

Over at the water stand, business was slow. Charlotte leaned on the counter, her ear pricked up. “You two need more water over there?”

“Where’d Papa find you, anyway?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“I already did.”

“What did he say?”

“He said you’d tell me one day.”

In profile, there was a delicacy to Bruder. Nose sharp along the ridge, eyelashes curled, the throb of a tiny vein in his temple beneath the scar. He brought a foot up on the bench and rested his chin on his knee, and the heft of him touched something within Linda. His pants
stretched tightly around his thigh. She could see the outline of the knife in his pocket, and he sat erect on the bench as the mineral spring trickled down the face of the Apfelsine. Charlotte coiled her hair around her finger and sucked on her pencil tip and thought about her next column. And Linda thought to ask Bruder, “Will you be staying with us for good?”

He said it would depend, and the next morning he set to the task of building himself a cottage at the rim of Condor’s Nest, rising at dawn to clear a plot dense with Our Lord’s Candle scrub.

In the afternoon, Linda followed Bruder to his building site, chasing a fence lizard, her quick hand nabbing its tail, and she climbed a pepper tree and hooked her knees over a branch and hung upside down, the lizard dangling from her fingers as she watched Bruder level the soil. She recognized something in him although she couldn’t name it, and she knew, bright with impatient blood, that the years would have to pass before she would come to understand. “Why would you want to live all the way out here? You can’t even see the ocean.” She released the lizard, and it disappeared down an ant hole. She pulled herself up, taking delight in the muscles in her upper arms—triceps, Edmund had taught her, pointing to an anatomical diagram of a man that had embarrassed him more than her. Once on her feet again she shook out her skirt, a dull thing of iron-stripe sewn from a bolt Edmund had traded a hundred pounds of onions for.

Bruder began to sort the delivery of lumber from the Weltmeer yard. Linda couldn’t guess what exactly he’d build himself with so little plank. Was he building a single room with a tin roof? Way out here on a northern slope, where the afternoons fell with bitter shadow? His face was intent with his task. Linda couldn’t be sure, but she thought she recognized hurt in the fold of his brow. But she was wrong. No, he simply wanted to live alone, it was all he had wanted since the long days of his youth when he shared a dormer room with forty sniffling, smelly boys, their flesh crusted with sweat, their mouths and asses gasping through the night. There were a few years when he was a teenager, after the delivery boy was killed by the block of ice, when Bruder refused to speak, and Mrs. Banning, fearing that Bruder was dangerous, made him sleep in the henhouse, on a bed made from packing crates, and he’d never been happier, alone with the feathers swirling in his breath.
The henhouse smelled, and the birds clucked and cooed through the night, but Bruder didn’t care—at least he was alone, where no one could peck at him, scratching at his heart.

Linda could sense only some of this, and she offered to help him build the shed. He slit his eyes as he ran the measuring cord along the planks of Douglas fir, and his shoulders lifted like wings as he laid the bricks in the foundation; and the shack rose with a tilt, as if grudge and grievance were in its design. On that day in the late spring of 1919, Linda knew that she was capable both of building a tiny cottage, and of love; she had the great desire to risk everything for pleasure and a sated heart. Although she couldn’t articulate her longing, the feeling, the entombing sensation, held her firmly, and again she presented herself to Bruder as his builder’s assistant. This time he didn’t turn her down, and the lean- to went up with the aid of her mallet—Dieter’s mallet—and for four weeks she lived with hard fir splinters sunk preciously into the pink meat of her palm.

Edmund dubbed it “the Vulture House.” He said that the name came to him one day when he saw a condor flying over the onion field out to where Bruder and Linda were busy with mallet and nail. “Those huge wings, almost ten feet across, it’s the most beautiful sight in the sky, and there it was swooping over the field, hunting for some sort of kill, its big head bald and ugly. They’ve been coming less and less, and everyone’s wondering what’s happening to the condor. Margarita says God’s taking them away, and Papa says ‘Good riddance,’ and when I asked Mama she told me that one day we’d understand. And then one appeared out there as you and Bruder were finishing up his crummy little shed. It came out of nowhere. Do you remember, Linda, how they’d swarm when we were little? When it was just you and me and we’d spend the day looking into the sky? Remember how we’d shoo them out of the arroyo? Their nasty beaks stuffed with the gut of a mule deer? I don’t know if you noticed, sister, but we haven’t seen one since Papa came home. And then all of a sudden one appeared low in the sky above you and Bruder.”