Pasadena (33 page)

“What? The house? We have some girls around. Rosa and the others. You’ll meet everyone.”

The driveway narrowed, and the concrete gave way to orange tiles hand-cast in the Teddy Cross Ceramics Studio on Colorado Street, where the kilns burned walnut logs night and day. The car pulled beneath the portico next to a loggia where wicker sofas and a swinging bench waited for lounging souls. Linda next expected Captain Poore—“No, I insist, you must call me Willis!”—to cut the engine and invite her into the house; and a fear overcame her—a fear she didn’t recognize and didn’t like—that she wouldn’t know what to do once inside the house’s great hall or in its library or on the vast terrace where, Linda imagined, a maid with a harelip would serve a lobster-claw supper in the glow of sunset. This was a palace, and Linda worried about the jelly smudge on her coat and the small tear in her stockings, the only pair she had ever owned, bought on impulse in a dress shop across the street from Union Station in Los Angeles and pulled up her legs in the station’s ladies’ room. “Only one pair?” the shop’s clerk had asked. “What about a pair of mocha gloves? Only two forty-five?”

But Willis didn’t stop the car. “We live here, Lolly and I,” he said, accelerating out the other side of the portico, the Kissel rattling as the drive returned to dirt. “I’ll show you around one day.” The car pulled away from the house, and Linda looked over her shoulder and saw, in a small upstairs window, a girl staring at her with moist black eyes; she had a fragile-looking face: bony, breakable nose and cheeks, forehead like a brown-glass bowl. The girl’s white nightdress blew against the windowsill, and she looked as if she might collapse, but her eyes were following Captain Poore’s car, following Captain Poore himself, and Linda too, and Linda wondered if the girl was Lolly; Linda wondered why the girl’s gaze was blank with longing, but then the car passed a stand of yews and the house fell from Linda’s view.

The road descended a hill, and the small valley of orange grove opened before them. Rows and rows of trees, as green as pines, as dense as shrubs, the lowest ground fruit only inches from the hard soil, the
highest and sweetest more than twenty feet above the stubby roots. The grove looked ready for harvest, each tree drooping with a thousand cadmium-orange lamps of fruit. A road and an irrigation ditch surrounded the grove, and every hundred feet or so, ten-foot stacks of cordwood stood as neat as bunkers.

“He’s probably still up with Rosa at the house,” Captain Poore said.

“Will you tell him I’ve come?”

“He’ll be eager to see you.”

“Did he say that?”

“Not exactly.” And then: “But you know how he is.” Captain Poore went on, “I’ve never hired a girl to work in the ranch house. The packers, of course, are girls, mostly hired over from the orphanages, but they’re day workers, gone by sunset, and some might say a ranch at night isn’t a place for a young woman. But Bruder told me you could take care of yourself. I said that you could stay up in the house; there’s an extra bed in Rosa’s room. But for some reason Bruder doesn’t think the two of you will get along. It’s not fair of him, really—to think like that.” Captain Poore paused and then asked Linda how old she was. She told him, and he said, “That’s what I would’ve guessed, but it’s funny: Bruder said you were Rosa’s age, and she’s barely eighteen.”

Linda laughed in a confused sort of way, and for the first time she permitted herself to touch the small pink wound Bruder had left upon her heart by not meeting her at the train station. And as if Captain Poore had been reading her mind, he then said, “He’s a funny one, your Bruder. He wasn’t going to have me come pick you up. He said you could take the trolley and then walk to the gate. I had to insist, because Bruder went on and on saying you could take care of yourself. It’s just the way he is, I guess. Of course you’d know better than I.”

Linda told Captain Poore that indeed she
could
look after herself, but the truth was she was a little worried. There she was, sitting in the car, quiet, and it wasn’t supposed to happen to her: the showy world causing her soul to fold up like a fingered anemone.

Evening was approaching; the sun was bleeding behind the western hills. A purple shadow covered the valley, the orange trees dark and the fruit glowing. The road descended a hillside of chaparral and sumac; the car’s path was narrow and rutted and crumbling at the edge, pebbles shooting from the car’s rear wheels a hundred feet out over the valley and into the orchard. A railroad whistle echoed against the hills. Those
men she had seen on the drive in: for them she’d boil a nightly pot of pink beans and North Burbank spuds, and maybe one of them had been Bruder, and something filled Linda’s chest, pressing urgently. She had grown up since he’d abandoned Condor’s Nest, and she wondered if he would expect this; or if a chilly shock would climb his spine when he saw her. What if he were to say, “You’ve become someone else.”

At the bottom of the hill, Willis and Linda got out of the car. It seemed as if the grove extended forever: the trees lined up in the soil that crumbled beneath her heel; branches curled against the ground like a dragging skirt; a few lime-green oranges on each branch among the flaring ocher globes. On some of the trees were final sprays of nectary white blossom, and bees swarmed the tiny bleeding flowers. A bee sawed next to Linda’s ear and then sat upon her shoulder, and Willis watched her carefully, as if to test her. How would the new girl-hand react to a bee on the shoulder? She’d keep walking, as it turned out, grabbing an orange from the ground and then a second and a third, juggling them as she and Willis listened to an early night breeze rattle the hems of the trees.

“I’ve got a hundred acres,” said Willis. “Eighty-six hundred trees. Last year we yielded nearly eighteen thousand boxes of oranges.”

“One hundred acres?” She thought of Condor’s Nest, a sliver of land, a third of it swallowed by arroyo, the ocean perpetually eroding everything away.

“We’ve got a lot more than a hundred acres. Only a hundred are planted. One day I’ll ride you around and you’ll see.”

His stride was short but he walked quickly and he made Linda think of a schoolboy running to class. He looked too young to be a captain, and she could sense his mild petulance, but at the same time he seemed to know everything, she thought. Here was a man twenty-four or twenty-five years old heading up a ranch, a decorated captain, someone who in the course of his day could go from picking and grading oranges to checking the cylinders in his Kissel to fox-trotting and dancing the Portland waltz around the terrace. She knew so little about this type of man—about this type of world, really—that it was like meeting a foreigner: exotic and charming and unknown.

As the sky saddened with the blue of evening, they continued down an orchard alley. Here the lower branches had been cut back, revealing
white numbers painted on each trunk. They made no sense to Linda, the three numbers stacked:

5
26
7

A code she had no doubt she’d crack in a few days. She wondered what else waited for her in the morning, the tasks at dawn. Would Captain Poore expect her to run the water in the ditch? Would he tell her what she was supposed to do?

Willis held his hand to his eyes, scanning the ranch. “I don’t see the boys.” It felt as if no one had been there in a long time, nothing but the trees and the swelling oranges, nothing but three empty field crates turned on their sides—no one but Linda and Willis. Evening darkened their faces, his dimming like a candle dying in a glass shade. She felt the chill of autumn’s sly approach; and Willis shivered and stood close to her. “It’s not the biggest ranch in California,” he said. “But they love our navels.” His voice snagged and broke, a pip-squeak’s crack, and Linda was touched by this vulnerability, and the way he carelessly rubbed his scar. He wasn’t at all what she had expected: no, she had anticipated a cowboy, a sun-worn face beneath a broad-brimmed hat dull with dust, and maybe a leather vest and a belt buckle forged from horseshoe.

“How many years have you been a rancher?” she asked.

“All my life. I was riding bareback when I was four, and when I was eight I drove the final ten heads of steer out of Pasadena. And I’ve probably picked more than a million oranges since I was a boy.” His suit didn’t fit him especially well, Linda noted; it was a bit baggy in the chest and the thighs, as if he were still growing into it, but it was easy for Linda to imagine his handsome face in the overcoat advertisement she had seen painted on the brick wall of Perkins & Leddy on Colorado Street. She closed her eyes, and already everything about him had burned into her memory.

They returned to the ranch house, where Willis told her that the harvest would begin in two weeks and that once the pickers arrived she’d be cooking for forty. “They get hungry,” he warned. “The Mexicans
want beans, and the Chinese want rice, and everyone wants coffee, and no one’s allowed to drink. If you see a hand drinking, you must report him to me.” They walked in step, the quiet of evening guiding them, the air thick with citrus. A rusty Cooper’s hawk circled above, wings calm in glide. She imagined the field mice scampering down holes as the hawk turned and swooped, and a gray squirrel plucked from a live-oak’s branch. She looked again and saw the prey already in the hawk’s talons, writhing in fear.

By the time they reached the packinghouse, the sky was black. The packinghouse’s side door was open, revealing an idle processing hall of conveyor belts and grading equipment and a pile of crate lumber. “In about two weeks,” Willis said, “all hell will break loose in there.” He said that he liked the ranch this time of year, just before the migrants arrived with their shoulder sacks and their sleeping rolls, and he pointed to a small house nearby with a willow in its yard. “That’s the Chinese house. They like to sleep by themselves.” The house was empty, but it wouldn’t be for long: from all over they’d come, he said, a family named Yuen, brothers and sons and fathers and their great-grandmother, her hair bone-white: “She cooks for them, but sometimes she sleeps through dawn and the Yuen men will come to you for their breakfast.”

Willis touched Linda’s wrist reassuringly, but his fingers were cold. “You’ll get the hang of it,” he said. A breeze ran across the triangle of flesh revealed by Linda’s blouse, and she sensed that the nights were colder here and that frost could arrive in the dark. “Most of the boys sleep in the bunkhouse down there,” Willis went on, “but Bruder and Hearts and Slaymaker sleep in the ranch house, where your kitchen is.” He pointed; the ranch house’s windows were lit, askew squares yellow and bright in the house’s face. Two men were sitting at a table in the yard, their open boots up on a bench and their suspenders hanging from their waists. They were smoking Billy Gang cigarettes, and the glow revealed their eyes as they carefully watched Willis and Linda approach. They acknowledged their employer without rearranging themselves, and Willis said, “Boys, say hello to your new cook.”

The two nodded and continued discussing their plans to win a poolhall tournament. One of the men was tossing and catching a cube of chalk.

“That’s Timmy Slaymaker,” Willis explained, “and the skinny one, he’s Davey Hearts.”

Slaymaker flicked his cigarette and tapped a new one out of its pack and held its tip to the flame of the orchard-heater burning warmly at his side. He glanced up at Linda. “What’s your name?” When she told him, he said, “I hope you know how to cook.”

Davey Hearts rose to his feet and welcomed Linda with a stutter: a narrow nose in a narrow face greeted her, trousers held up by grime, the black of fatigue beneath his eyes. He was young, Linda could see. And then Slaymaker stood too, a hand on the table pushing him up. He grunted, and beneath the layer of muscular fat and the dirt worn into the creases of his hands, Linda could see that he was no more than thirty years old. “You know how to make jellied chicken?”

“Have you seen Bruder?” asked Linda.

“He just came down the hill,” said Hearts.

“How’s Rosa?” asked Willis.

A voice came from the ranch house: “She’ll be fine. A little stomach flu.” Then a silhouette appeared in the doorframe, and Bruder stepped into the orchard-heater’s light. Except for an oily black beard he appeared almost the same as the last time she’d seen him, as if time had held back, and Linda had to stop herself from running to him.

“I see you made it in time for dinner,” he said.

“I’m starving,” said Hearts.

“What’s on the stove?” asked Slaymaker. “You know how to make livers and bacon?” Linda would learn that Hearts and Slaymaker were a pair, and had traveled up and down the San Joaquin from ranch to ranch, strawberries to almonds to green lettuce to avocados, before settling at the Pasadena. They shared a bunk room in the ranch house and a single towel and a cheap long-toothed hair comb, and when one finished the newspaper he passed it to the other, the stories about water supply, raided pool halls, and the program at the Playhouse circled. Neither man was more boisterous than the other; when one was drunk, so was his mate, and the same was true when sadness descended, or when the brittle winter cough lodged in the lung. If one was more pensive it was Hearts, and Linda would soon learn how his thin face displayed somberness more acutely than Slaymaker’s full cheek and jowl. Although both men could be rough—stubbled cheek, orange-bourbon breath, grime capping their fingernails—they were never rough with each other, and what would surprise Linda most about Davey Hearts and Timmy Slaymaker was that with the din of gossip that spun around
the ranch, none of it ever involved them. Later, she’d ask Willis about this, and he’d explain that it was because each man tucked a derringer pistol with an ivory grip into his boot, the two guns identical, a pair. Hearts and Slaymaker had each been known to point his pistol in defense of the other. “Once one of them shot a hand charging them with a pitchfork on a vineyard up north,” Willis would tell her, “and the man fell dead in the dirt, and till this day neither Hearts nor Slaymaker will say which one of them pulled the trigger.”

“Did Willis show you around?” Bruder asked her.