Strawberry Sunday Read online

  The only other customers were three young women giggling at a corner table and an elderly couple holding hands across a booth. The young women were clearly talking about men. The grave intensity of the couple’s engagement sparked the hunch that one of them had just learned he or she was dying.

  I sat in a booth and waited to be served. Five minutes later, I was still waiting. I looked at the bartender until he looked at me. “Sherry don’t come on till five,” he explained over the tune in the jukebox, which was sung by Dwight Yoakam and involved a white Cadillac. The scars on the bartender’s face were from burns or the acids of acne. In the haze off the neon behind him, they looked like active arachnids.

  I walked to the end of the bar and waited till he wandered my way. “Beer,” I said. “In a bottle.”

  “Bud or Miller?”

  “Miller.”

  He went to the cooler then slid one my way. I beckoned for him to come closer. “I’m meeting a guy named Carlos Reyna in a few minutes,” I said.

  “Yeah?” His eyes narrowed. “You union?”

  “What if I am?”

  He hooked his thumbs in the knotted towel that made do as his apron. A tattooed hula dancer gyrated near his bicep, decapitated by the hem of his T-shirt. “You’re union, you leave,” he said righteously. “I don’t let politics come through that door. Especially not union politics.”

  “What’s wrong with union politics?”

  “Trying to destroy the Gelbrides, aren’t they? Which means they’re trying to destroy the town. Put us all out of business if they do and there ain’t no kind of politics worth that.” His wave encompassed everyone within a radius of a dozen miles.

  “I’m not union,” I told him.

  “I better never hear otherwise.”

  “You won’t. Can I buy you a drink?”

  He shook his head. “Never touch it.”

  “Wise move. What kind of kid is Carlos?”

  The bartender shrugged. “He’s okay. Trying to make a buck like the rest of us.”

  “But not with the union.”

  “Naw, Carlos goes it alone. Admire the bastard for it, truth be known, even though the sad fact is he’ll never make a dime.”

  “Why not?”

  “The Gelbrides won’t let him get far enough ahead to do anything but work for shares to pay off his debt. That way they can take him to court any time they have an inkling and slap a lien on everything he owns. It’s the way they work; it’s why Gus is still king of the valley.”

  “The Gelbrides are really that powerful?”

  He nodded. “Maybe not statewide, but they’re the cocks of the walk around these parts. Hell, they even got a deed of trust on this place. Which means I ought to be keeping my mouth shut.” Despite his words, his expression didn’t seem to encompass intimidation.

  “If the Gelbrides keep everyone so far down, why wouldn’t the union be a good idea?”

  “Because any time the union takes over, the owner plows under the fields. Happened down in Oxnard and Santa Maria a few years back, and over in the Pajaro last season when the Milton place got certified. Will happen up here if they win.”

  “You’re saying the Gelbrides will shut down their farming operation just to keep out the union?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. Got developers lined up from here to Denver wanting to move into the place. Retirement communities is what they want to put in down here. Ever seen one of them? Might as well be buried alive.”

  “So a guy like Carlos has no chance to make it.”

  “No one in Haciendas can make it unless his name is Gelbride.” His grin turned evil. “They’ve got it covered on both ends—Gus Gelbride is God and his son is the devil himself.” With that he walked off, leaving me with images out of myth and hellfire.

  Time drifted by, fuzzy and indistinct, the way it does in bars. People ducked in for a quick beer, then ducked out on other errands. The regulars stayed put, their intake as measured as an intravenous drip. I felt slightly drugged myself—the next time the door opened I didn’t turn to see who it was.

  She sat three stools down, wordless and impatient and intense. The bartender sidled her way in a hurry. “The usual, Larry,” she said as he wiped a beer glass with an off-white towel and waited to speak until spoken to.

  “Coming up.”

  Larry bent below the bar, found a thick tumbler that looked to be Waterford crystal, filled it with Absolut vodka and added a lemon twist, then put it in front of the woman. The only thanks she gave him was a deep drink of clear liquid, followed by a lick of her lips that on anyone else might have been suggestive but on her was just another letter in the No Trespassing sign.

  She was dark-haired and dark-eyed and large but not fat, a big woman with a big thirst and maybe a big problem with booze. Her clothes were expensive—black linen slacks and gold silk blouse and jewels every place that would hold them—and she was clearly someone special—even the regulars seemed spry in her presence and the bartender was alert to her whims. She glanced my way once, with a look that advised me to stay put and let her drink, then returned her gaze to whatever was fascinating about the row of liquor bottles lined up like lollipops behind the bar.

  She was the kind of woman who’s intimidating to look at and even more so when she opens her mouth. It didn’t make me timid but it did make me careful. “You must be Missy Gelbride,” I said the next time Larry had business down-bar.

  She rotated twenty degrees my way. “And you must be nobody.”

  “True, but I’m also a friend of Rita Lombardi’s.”

  “Who?”

  “Rita Lombardi.”

  “The dead girl.”

  “Right.”

  She shrugged. “Too bad, but she shouldn’t have been walking around town all alone at that hour.”

  “Is that what she was doing?”

  She gave me thirty more degrees of her presence. “How else would she end up at the high school?”

  “I can think of several ways.”

  She shrugged with unconcern. “You get the prize for most creative. Larry, give the man some more of his poison.”

  I thanked her for the gesture. “I’ve been wondering if anyone in the Gelbride family was upset with Rita for any reason.”

  She took another healthy gulp of vodka. “Upset? Why would we be upset?”

  “Because she was trying to improve the working conditions of your farmworkers.”

  Her laugh was cynical and cruel. “If we got upset at liberal crap like that, we’d never draw a peaceful breath.” She knocked back the last of her drink. “Next time you see me in a place like this, remember I’m not there for a sermon.”

  She swooped out of the bar without paying for her drink, taking every eye in the place with her as far as the door, provoking an elaborate shrug from the bartender when she was safely gone.

  Carlos Reyna came in when I was on my third beer. By then the Cantina had nearly filled with people off work, diluting the aches and pains of the day with the help of distilled spirits. There were men in suits and men in Levi’s so filthy they could have come out of a coal mine. There were women of culture and women who could have been whores. There were three cocktail waitresses on duty and they needed two more. The music was country and twang; the smells were of fajitas and fries.

  Carlos looked as if he’d picked a load of berries himself—his pants were dusty, his hands were stained red to his wrists, his straw hat was soaked with sweat, his skin was so hot it steamed in the cool of the air conditioning. But the smolder in his eyes was from something far more complex than weather.

  “You look like someone who just lost his dog,” I said.

  “One of my families didn’t come in today. I had to do their job.”

  “Does that happen often?”

  “With Homero Vargas? Never.”

  “Can you give him a call?”

  Carlos laughed. “Homero hasn’t owned a phone in his life.”

  “I thought
your workers made decent money.”

  “Some of them do, sometimes. But last year the rains came late and sliced open the fruit and the molds set in and ruined the berries. Last year no one made money, not even the Gelbrides.”

  “Would the union have made a difference?”

  He wrinkled his lips. “Rita thought so. But the union can’t change the weather.”

  “Did Rita work for the union?”

  His voice firmed to match his jawline. “Rita worked for me.”

  “Could her death have anything to do with union activity?”

  “I don’t see how. She wasn’t in the union and she didn’t organize for them and no one thought otherwise.”

  “But she sympathized.”

  “She thought the union was the only force powerful enough to make owners like the Gelbrides change their ways. But even when Cesar was alive, the Gelbrides didn’t change, except they had to put out toilets and keep kids out of the fields during school. So now they put the toilets out but they don’t put shit paper in them. Like I said, nothing changed.”

  I shifted direction. “I was wondering how you felt about Rita’s new look?”

  Carlos frowned. “How do you mean?”

  “I thought maybe you were worried you might lose her now that she was more attractive.”

  The implication made him angry. “She wore my ring. She said she was happy, happier than she had ever been.” He frowned. “Why? Did she say something different to you?”

  I shook my head. “Not at all. She was as eager to get married as she was to dance the night away on her new legs.” I smiled at the image. “Did she get the job done? With the dancing, I mean?”

  He shook his head. “She was waiting for you.”

  “I’m sorry.” I let Carlos finish his beer then bought him another. “Did Rita seem worried about anything when she got back from the hospital?” I asked.

  Carlos shook his head. “What can I say? She could walk without crutches for the first time in her life and she was going to be married. She kept singing stupid little songs all the time.”

  The image of Rita singing and laughing was as concrete in my mind as the barflies across the room. “Was there anything different at all in her life, that you know of?”

  “Not yet, there wasn’t.”

  I perked up. “What do you mean, ‘not yet’?”

  Carlos lowered his voice until it was just audible above the languid laments from the jukebox. “She said she was going to make big things happen.”

  “Happen where?”

  “In the fields. She said things were going to be different real soon.”

  “Different for whom?”

  “For the workers. And for me.”

  “How was that going to happen?”

  Carlos shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess she was going to push harder for the union. I guess she still thought that would matter.”

  His persistent pessimism was the only flaw I’d seen in Carlos’s armor. It occurred to me that Rita might have gotten tired of the gloom and decided to look for someone with a more upbeat view of his life.

  I was trying to decide how to get to the truth of their relationship when Carlos looked at his watch. “I have to find Homero. He may be sick. He may need help.”

  “Where is he?”

  Carlos pointed west. “Twenty minutes from here. Up in the hills.”

  He got up and started to leave. “Let me come with you,” I said quickly. “If he’s hurt, you might need help getting him to a hospital.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But when you see where we’re going, remember it was Rita’s idea, not mine.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  We left the bar and climbed into Carlos’s pickup, a dilapidated Ford long bed that had once been dark green but had been sun-bleached to the color of dirt. The bed was full of farming equipment, everything from rakes and hoes to white fiber dust masks and sets of muddy rain gear. Two of the devices looked like small wheelbarrows and another looked like a bomb but was probably a spray canister of pesticide or something similarly toxic. Several lengths of white plastic pipe were wound up next to a roll of plastic sheeting that had the sheen of a space suit. Several pairs of rubber boots covered in mud baked to the density of granite gave the impression that a war had recently been fought and lost somewhere in the vicinity.

  Carlos ground the truck into gear and headed west out of town. A few blocks later we lurched to a stop. “I think I know what he needs,” he said, and jumped out of the truck and trotted into a small market. A moment later he was back, toting a small white sack.

  “Kaopectate,” he said. “They get so hungry they eat green berries. Then they get sick. That plus the chemicals,” he added ominously.

  “What sorts of chemicals?”

  “Pesticides, fungicides, herbicides—the fruit has lots of enemies. The only way to make money is to kill them quick.”

  “Is that why the women are wearing masks out there?”

  Carlos’s face closed like a fist. “They aren’t masks, they are scarves. To protect from the dust. They have to be careful, is all,” he said, and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, impatient with me and my questions. A good man in a tough position, where the best path for himself and for his workers was seldom a clearly marked trail.

  We left the town. For as far as the eye could see, the highway split flat fields of produce or ground that had already been picked and plowed and prepared for the next crop. Some of the fields were simply squares of flat soil; others were entirely covered with shimmering translucent plastic that looked like a lake of mercury. I asked Carlos what the plastic was for.

  “The fields are replanted each year. When the old plants are ripped out, the soil is tilled, the beds are raised and shaped, then the field is covered with plastic and the soil is injected with methyl bromide and oxydemeton to kill the little ones: nematodes, cyclospora, mottle virus, verticillium wilt, xanthosis—plus pesticides for aphids and eelworms and spider mites. When the microbes and the pests are gone in about ten days, we take up the plastic and install drip irrigation pipe under the soil. Then we put down more plastic and plant the seedlings right through the plastic ribbons and begin to tend the crop.”

  “Why the second plastic?”

  “It keeps the soil warm and moist—the best growing conditions for berries. And keeps out weeds and pests. We plant twice a year, in August and November.”

  “A lot of work,” I said.

  “And a lot of money. The average cost per acre is close to twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  I whistled. “How’d you learn so much about strawberries, Carlos?”

  He laughed. “Experience. My parents were braceros. I worked in the fields when I was six. Plus I went to the Hartnell ag program for two years.”

  “Were you born in Mexico?”

  “In the state of Jalisco. We moved to the States when I was ten, for the whole family to work in the campo. We lived in La Posada, the labor camp near the highway.”

  “You got a good education somewhere.”

  “My parents began as braceros then went over to Driscoll a few years later. They earned enough to buy a home in Pajaro and put us in school in Watsonville. I graduated from high school in 1987. My parents died the next year. Cancer. Both of them.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “There are not many happy endings out here,” he said, and turned off the highway onto a winding dirt road that took us toward the Santa Lucias along dry creekbeds and gentle hillocks. The truck bounced and bumped and assaulted its springs. Carlos’s eyes blazed as bright as the sun that was starting to sink beneath the horizon ahead of us. If the truck had an air conditioner, it had surrendered in the last war. I wanted him to talk some more about Rita, so I asked him if he missed her.

  “Like I would miss my eyes,” he said. “She was so alive, so confident. Rita thought anything was possible if you set your mind to it. I need that,” he added. “This business can make you loco.”r />
  “How?”

  “The union says it’s servitude. They say guys like Homero Vargas are slaves and I’m an overseer and the patróns like Gus Gelbride are the slave masters. I don’t like that idea, but in some ways it is true.”

  “Do you use illegals in your fields?”

  “You have to have illegals this time of year if you want the fruit picked in time. On my farm, that takes about sixty good workers. So in July and October I take who I can get.” He laughed wryly. “Once in a while college kids come down from Stanford or Berkeley to work. Solidarity with the working class and all that; earn big money for school.” He chuckled again. “They never last a day. Bending over, sorting and packing the fruit, working ten hours in the sun, breathing the dust—they look at us like we’re crazy to do this when they climb in their fancy cars and go back to the pretty campus. And maybe we are,” he added after a minute.

  “But the workers work for you, not Gus Gelbride.”

  “Right. I’m an independent grower.” Each time he said it I was impressed by the gravity with which he pronounced his profession. I wish I still felt that way about mine.

  “Whose idea was that? To have you employ the workers and not the Gelbrides?”

  “It’s what it says in the contract.”

  “What contract?”

  “The one Gus’s lawyer invented. It’s based on the system they used over in Watsonville for a long time, only after a court decision in a case against the Driscolls, Gus’s lawyer made changes. The purpose is to make men like me independent contractors, not employees. That way it is me, not them, who has to provide worker benefits.” Carlos shook his head. “There is a twenty-page document we have to sign. Most of the growers can barely read. But they sign it anyway.”

  “What’s the lawyer’s name?”

  “Grayson Noland.”

  “Where’s his office?”

  “Salinas, I think. I have never been there. They send someone out with the paper for me to sign and that’s all I know.”