Strawberry Sunday Page 9

  “How much do your piece workers make?”

  “I pay twelve cents a pint. That’s two cents more than most, though the union is trying for fifteen. If they are fast and work hard, they can earn fifteen thousand a year. My regular workers earn three dollars an hour plus a bonus for picking. The ones who have homes and families in the area and stay with me the whole season can make thirty thousand a year.”

  “In a good year.”

  “Yeah. Not like last year.”

  “Rita told me you have a big debt to the Gelbrides. Because of the rains.”

  “Yeah. Plus costs keep rising.”

  “How does that happen, exactly?”

  “I borrow money from the Gelbrides for the chemicals, for irrigation pipe, for plastic, for fertilizer, and for the new plants.”

  “How much do you have to borrow?”

  “Two hundred thousand, sometimes.”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “In a good year I pay it back from my share of the sale of the berries, no problem. But if it rains like last year, or freezes too late or too early, then I always owe more than I make.”

  “Seems like the risk of bad weather ought to be on the Gelbrides, not on you.”

  “It used to be that way, but not now. Not with the new contract.”

  “Why do you borrow from the Gelbrides and not from the bank?”

  “The contract says I must.”

  “How much interest do you pay?”

  “Eighteen percent.”

  I swore and shook my head. “No wonder you’re in debt.”

  “That’s what Rita said,” Carlos murmured as he wrenched the truck around an abandoned hay barn. “But she said that wasn’t going to happen anymore. That from now on it would be fair.”

  “Sounds like whatever she had planned wouldn’t make the Gelbrides very happy.”

  “No one can hurt the Gelbrides,” he said. “Not even Rita.”

  We drove into the hills, the dry grass a perpetual fire hazard to our flanks, the live oaks seeming to scream out for water even though they’d survived without it for scores of arid summers. I was soaked head to toe but Carlos seemed to stay cool even though he wrestled with the truck as if it were an alligator lunging up out of a Florida swamp. Just the thought of the swamp cooled me down a little.

  “Rita said you want your own farm,” I said after a while.

  “Yes.”

  “How long do you think it will take?”

  “I used to think ten years. That was my plan. To pay off the Gelbrides, work for Driscoll for a while, then have enough to buy fifteen or twenty acres.”

  “Who’s this Driscoll you keep mentioning?”

  “Driscoll Strawberry Associates, the biggest strawberry cooperative in California. If I work for Driscoll I can save maybe thirty thousand a year. I can live on five thousand easy.”

  “Do you think they’ll hire you?”

  He nodded. “Unless I get into trouble with Gus.”

  “That’s why you stay away from the union people.”

  “That’s one of the reasons,” he said. “I just wish I knew what Rita was going to do,” he added.

  “How do you mean?”

  “When she came back from the hospital, she said she’d learned something that would help us. She said they couldn’t stop me from becoming an owner now. She even said the Gelbrides would cancel my debt.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know. But she was so certain, I began to believe her. I became excited. And impatient. It is not good for a Latino to be impatient,” he added dolefully. “It is not our nature to want more than we have.”

  “What kind of information was she talking about?”

  “I don’t know. When I asked, she said I didn’t have to do anything but wait. And then she died,” he concluded mournfully, in as tactful a description of her fate as I could conjure.

  A mile or so later we turned off the dirt road and headed cross country, down a steep saddle, then up a rocky draw. My teeth banged together like a Krupa rim shot; the previous portion of the ride seemed silky smooth by comparison.

  “What kind of housing is way out here?” I asked.

  “It isn’t a house,” Carlos said cryptically.

  He pulled to a stop two hundred yards later, next to an abandoned Pontiac of early seventies vintage with a tire flat and the hood up. We got out and hiked for a half mile, up a crusty hillside and around a slick rock outcropping, until we came to a stop in front of a thin blue blanket that had been tacked to the side of the hill.

  “Homero!” Carlos called loudly.

  A moment later the blanket was drawn aside and a woman appeared from behind it. She looked to be forty but was probably much less. The baby in her arms was naked. Her dress was thin and shapeless, but flattering to her opulent figure. When she saw Carlos, her smile was as wide as the madonna’s.

  “Ola, Maria,” Carlos said.

  “Buenos dias, Señor Carlos. We were hoping you would come. Homero is sick and the car will not start. He is too sick to walk to town,” she added, to make clear all the options were covered.

  “Let me see him,” Carlos said, then gestured toward me. “This is my friend. He came to help.”

  “Buenos dias, señor. Welcome to our home.” She held back the blanket and we entered the small cave that seemed to serve as a residence for the woman and her family.

  The sole interior light seeped from the mantles of a battered Coleman lamp, casting shadows all around, yet somehow making the place feel cozy. The floor was dirt, the walls and roof were lined with black plastic sheeting, the furnishings were little more than produce boxes and old mattresses. Most amazingly of all, the temperature was surprisingly cool.

  There were four more children inside the cave, ranging from about three to about fifteen. The oldest, a barefoot young girl dressed in cut-off Levi’s and a Pebble Beach T-shirt, was so impossibly lovely I couldn’t stop looking at her. She was a child, I suppose, but I wasn’t regarding her as such and she wasn’t, either. Our eyes met, then hers slid away. It made me feel guilty, but not enough.

  My look lingered so long, Carlos noticed. “Consuelo is the reason they live here,” he whispered when he saw my fixation. “Rita thought it would be best.”

  I started to ask why, but from the back of the cave came a low groan and an agonized prayer for deliverance. Carlos rushed to the source of the suffering and knelt next to a man who was lying on a thin mattress, clutching his belly and moaning and writhing in pain.

  “Homero,” Carlos said. “It’s Carlos Reyna.”

  Homero opened his eyes. “Señor Carlos. We prayed you would come.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “My belly.”

  “The tourista?”

  “No. A pain. Here.” He pressed his hand over his lower torso. As Carlos bent to minister to him, I saw a photograph tacked to the wall with a nail. Even in the dim light of the cave I could see it was the same snapshot of Rita that Carlos had on his shirt that morning. The only other icons in the cave were a statue of Christ on the cross and pictures of Jerry Brown and Cesar Chavez hung on nails on the opposite wall.

  Homero groaned again. Carlos looked back at me.

  “Could be appendicitis,” I said.

  “You sure?” Carlos asked.

  “Pretty sure. He needs to get to a hospital.”

  “We have no money for doctors,” the woman began.

  “I know someone at the clinic in Salinas,” Carlos said. “She will help you.” He turned to the wife. “I’ll take Homero with me. You and the children stay here. I’ll come back when he’s been taken care of.” He held up a hand to her protest. “We can’t all go; there’s not room in the cab of the truck and it isn’t safe to ride in the back. Mr. Tanner can drive while I help Homero with the pain.”

  “We should leave now,” I said, looking at the slant of light off the sweaty sauce that bathed Homero’s contorted face. The fever danced as
brightly as brush fire in his eyes, even in the gloom of the cave.

  We carried Homero to the truck and wedged him in the cab. Carlos cradled him in his arms as I slipped behind the wheel and started the engine. At our back, Maria sobbed softly but the kids were silent and stoic.

  Without thinking, I gave one last glance at the oldest girl, Consuelo. When she sensed my stare, she returned my look with an expression that could be interpreted as saying that if anything bad happened to her father, she would hunt me down and kill me.

  The trip down the mountain was excruciating. Homero moaned with every bump. Carlos urged me to drive faster. There was so much play in the steering wheel I could barely keep us on the road even when I could find it. It seemed to take a day to reach the town, but it took only forty minutes.

  We entered Salinas by a back road, drove through a neighborhood of small bungalows occupied by persons who seemed exclusively Latino and excessively devoted to cars, and pulled to a stop in front of a small white building with LA CLINICA DE SALUD DEL VALLE DE SALINAS painted above the door. It was a handsome new structure on North Sanborn Road, decorated in blue pastels and no doubt financed in part with federal monies that weren’t fully budgeted anymore.

  Carlos helped Homero through the front door, then I parked the truck. When I returned to the lobby there was no one in sight, not even at the reception desk in the center of the room. A stranger in a strange land, indeed.

  A few minutes later, a nurse came through a side door. She was brusque to the point of insult. “Are you Señor Tanner?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Reyna said for you to wait here for him.”

  “Fine. Is the man with the appendix okay?”

  “They are not okay,” she said bitterly. “None of them are okay. But he is alive. For now.”

  She disappeared the way she’d come. A receptionist came in and nodded in my direction, then began talking on the phone in Spanish. Behind her were row upon row of medical files, a history of illness that for some reason seemed both universal and inevitable.

  Ten minutes later, Carlos returned. “You were right about Homero—it is appendicitis. They are taking him to the hospital for surgery. I should go back to the cave for Maria. I’ll drop you in Haciendas on the way.”

  “You’re a good man, Mr. Reyna,” I said.

  “A thousand good men would not be enough for one like Homero,” he answered bitterly. I led Carlos to his battered truck. Both of us stayed silent as he drove me back to the bar.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Carlos dropped me in front of the Cantina, then wheeled his truck toward the glowing horizon in the west, where Maria Vargas waited within her cave for news of her husband’s health. Thanks to Carlos and his friend at the clinic, the news would not be as bad as it might have been. But that was little solace, at least not for me.

  The music from the Cantina was gay and lively, almost manically so, as though to make light of the data I’d acquired during the day. Rita and Carlos should have been in there dancing, holding hands across the table, laughing with their friends, basking in the glow of young love, dreaming of a future full of hope and happiness. Rita should not have been dead and Carlos should not have had to spend the day prodding a social system to provide minimal medical treatment for a person who came to this country to work incredibly hard at an impossible job under conditions that most of America cannot imagine exist in this day and age. And the deepest sorrow is not that we can’t imagine it, it is that we no longer try.

  I leaned against the car and tried to decide what to do. My gut hurt from bouncing down the mountain in Carlos’s truck, my head hurt from the assault of the sun, and my spirit ached from the sense that things were happening in these farmlands that I should do something to stop. The exploitations seemed akin to the Jim Crow era in the South, where one class of people was considered less than human by another class and thus beyond the reach of both the law and the largesse of the majority. It was unhealthy then and is unhealthy now, making us less honorable than we should be as a people, making us hardened against any ethic that teaches us to act to the contrary, in order to avoid feeling ashamed of what we have done.

  I wanted to go back to Salinas and drink my way out of my depression but I couldn’t justify the indulgence because I hadn’t made any progress toward what I’d come to Haciendas to do. I’d learned a lot about Carlos Reyna during the course of the day, but not that much more about Rita Lombardi, except that she seemed to have acquired some magic powers up in the hospital that were going to make big changes out in the field. Other than a new pair of legs, I had no idea what that might be.

  I flipped open my notebook and went over my notes. The first name that jumped out at me was Scott Thorndike, Rita’s high school English teacher, the man who felt she had talent as a writer. I got out of the car and went into the Cantina and found a local phone book, but there wasn’t a listing under that name. When the bartender saw the scowl on my face, he asked if he could help me.

  “I’m looking for a man named Thorndike,” I yelled over the noise of the bar.

  “The teach?”

  I nodded.

  He pointed left. “Above the laundromat around the corner.”

  I leaned closer, so he was the only one who could hear me. “Do you know him?”

  He nodded. “Comes in for a beer after work some days. Sits in a booth and writes in a notebook. Women buy him drinks; far as I know, it doesn’t get them much except ‘thank you.’”

  “How old is he?”

  “Thirty-five, give or take.”

  “He have a steady girl?”

  The bartender shrugged. “Not that he ever brought here. Course that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”

  “Anything going on between him and Rita Lombardi?”

  He shook his head. “Rita’s Carlos’s girl. Or was,” he amended soberly. “Rumor has it Thorndike and Missy Gelbride get together Monday nights over in Carmel. Meet at the bar in the Pine Cone Inn, is what I hear, then go off to make out in some motel. But gossip is all it is.”

  A waitress called his name and he looked to his right. “They’re backing up on me,” he said, and went down to mix drinks. When I could see a path to the door through the crowd, I went outside and shivered. The fog had rolled in and the temperature had dropped thirty degrees. I went to the car for a jacket, then walked around the corner to the laundromat.

  It was full, with both singles and with families making a ceremony out of doing the weekly wash, most of them Latino but not all. Several families huddled around cars in the parking lot, eating fast-food meals while waiting for the wash to dry. Others sat inside, the heat of the dryers an antidote to the foggy cool of the evening, reading or watching the TV that the management had placed high in the far corner of the room. Someone had a radio tuned to a Spanish language station. Someone else had a baby who was crying. And beyond it all, a steady stream of cars crammed full of teenagers swaggered through the city streets. Chopped low and lightly muffled, scraping along the pavement as their occupants slumped in their seats and scoped out the action, the cars were the only menacing elements I’d seen in Haciendas, other than the barbed wire fences around the cooling sheds east of town and the white Dodge pickup I’d seen lurking near Mrs. Lombardi’s house when I first got there.

  A door to the left of the laundromat led to the apartments upstairs. I expected it to be locked, but when it wasn’t, I shoved my way into the stuffy foyer, climbed a steep set of charmless stairs, and knocked at the first door I came to.

  The man who answered was tall and exceedingly slim, with clear blue eyes separated by an aquiline nose that suggested a hatchet had been buried in his forehead. His cheekbones were high and prominent, pink ledges below his azure eyes. The cheeks themselves were recessed as though scooped out with a spoon; the chin was sharp and thrusting. His clothes—a rumpled chambray work shirt and faded Levi’s with tears at the knees—hung on him the way they would hang on a nail. His belt was cinched to the las
t hole; his shoes were huaraches that curled under his heels at the back.

  He looked at me over a pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses that seemed to magnify his bloodshot eyes. “Yes?”

  “Are you Mr. Thorndike?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Tanner. I understand you knew Rita Lombardi.”

  “Yes, but what does that—?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about her for a few minutes, if you don’t mind.”

  He frowned in deep vertical divides that slit his features like the scars of a knife fight. “Are you the police?”

  “No. Just a friend.”

  “Then why are you—”

  “I’m also a private detective.”

  “So this is a business call?”

  I waited till I had claim on his eyes. “I spent three weeks with Rita in the hospital. If you knew her at all, you know it’s a lot more than that.”

  He nodded in agreement, then looked at his watch. “I guess you can come in. I’m supposed to meet someone at nine, but since it’s Rita …” He shrugged and stepped back and I joined him in his apartment.

  It was as much a library as a home, with books piled on and around every surface—books squeezed into brick and board shelves, books stacked on the hardwood floors, books tossed atop the waist-high refrigerator, books abandoned on the unmade bed. Next to the bed was an upholstered armchair worn to the nap, a green-shaded banker’s lamp that lit both the desk and the chair, a metal trunk that served as both coffee table and footstool, and a file cabinet that looked to have been dropped off a truck and sold for a substantial discount. A spiral notebook lay open on the desktop, its pages blackish with handwriting courtesy of the golden fountain pen that lay atop it. Beside the notebook, a computer that seemed jealous of its venerable neighbor was animated by a screen saver starring the Simpsons.

  The kitchen was barely that: the table folded out from the wall, the stove had only two burners, and the basin seemed attached to the wall as an afterthought. The bathroom was presumably beyond the door by the fridge, but that may have been the clothes closet with the toilet down the hall. In sum, it was a scholar’s refuge, a monastic’s cell, an ascetic’s bed-sitter, except the prints on the wall were geometric abstracts by Still and Diebenkorn and Rothko and the books I could see were mostly modern novels.