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CHAPTER 1

Victor Torelli, an old man of almost eighty, bitter in some ways but not in others, rocked forward in his desk chair and fiddled with the remote control device for his VCR. Behind a double-locked door in a cluttered office in the town of Carson Valley, he was watching a porn video on a big Sony monitor this crisp winter morning, squinting through cigar smoke at a pair of sweaty young actors whose energetic performance filled him with wonder. Nothing in his own experience had prepared him for the carnival of miracles he was witnessing on-screen. He was absorbed, transported. It did not seem possible to him that men and women could be so skilled at sex, so robust and acrobatic. Seated close to the action, his lips unconsciously parted, he felt a pang of regret over all the opportunities for pleasure he had passed up on his long march from cradle to grave.

The end of things was much on Torelli's mind these days. His dear wife Claire was in failing health, weak and tired and frequently bedridden. He had accepted the fact that she might be dying, but he was older than her and felt cheated not to be the first to go. He could not abide the thought of losing her, really. They were bound together, fiber to fiber, through forty- two years of marriage. Often he brooded about the injustice of it for hours, looking glumly out a window and studying the flight of birds from tree to tree. He had a keen eye for nature, for its subtle turnings. He was a farmer by trade, although not by inclination, the owner of one hundred supremely productive vineyard acres that his ancestors from Tuscany, early immigrants to California, had acquired through stealth, cunning, and outright theft in the 1890s. Wine grapes had made the family rich and powerful, but Torelli had never enjoyed the punishing solitude of the fields so, decades ago, he had rented his office in town as a cure for his loneliness, doing the farm's accounting and selling some insurance on the side. The office served him as a refuge now.

An unexpected knock on the door, light and tentative, startled the old man and interrupted his intense scrutiny of the tape. He didn't have a clue who the caller could be. His cronies liked to drop in on him for bourbon, gossip, and a game of cribbage, but they never showed up before noon. He panicked for a minute when it occurred to him that someone might actually be seeking his professional services. He had no real clients anymore. His Allstate signs and stationery he had junked at the county dump, and the number of his business phone was long gone from the directory. The very idea that a person should work hard throughout life seemed ridiculous to him now. The world, Torelli had come to believe, needed nothing at all from human beings. It was meant to delight, but human beings were incapable of lasting joy. They couldn't tolerate their own unimportance on earth, so they were purposeful and dutiful and made their existence a misery. People, he thought, admitted the truth too late.

Grumbling and cussing, he rose deliberately from his desk, the sheer bulk of him listing a bit, and undid the two locks with his gnarled fingers. Before him stood Antonio Lopez, a field hand from his farm, who was gripping the brim of a baseball cap and staring dismally at the floor. Lopez had the doomed look of a messenger about to deliver some news that could not in any way be construed as welcome.

Torelli invited him in. "Antonio," he said, with a polite nod.

"Sorry to disturb you, señor." Lopez remained on the brink of the inner sanctum. His manner was very formal and apologetic. "But we got some trouble at the home place. He has disappeared again."

"Who? Atwater?"

"Atwater, yes. He's been gone for four days now."

"You don't think he'll come back this time?"

Lopez shrugged and pinched his cap brim more tightly. "Maybe it could happen."

"Why did he take off?"

"He got some papers in the mail. Legal papers from the courts. His trailer looks empty. No stereo and no TV The only thing left in there is his dogs."

All at once, Torelli became aware of some loud orgasmic moaning and realized that he had neglected to turn off the X-rated tape. Such errors were common to him, a function of his age, but he no longer worried about them. Instead, he was amused.

"You ever watched one of these dirty movies, Antonio?" he asked, throwing an arm around the smaller man's shoulders and drawing him toward the screen.

Lopez stood firm, his feet planted as though to resist an undertow. "I seen one once."

"You don't have to be ashamed of it." Torelli was further amused by Lopez's squirming. "It's not a mortal sin, you know. You afraid you'll have to go to confession?"

"I'm not afraid of that."

"This is the first one I ever watched myself. Usually I go in for westerns. You like westerns?"

"Sure. Everybody likes westerns."

"Everybody but the Indians." The old man tilted his head to examine a huge set of genitals that were on view in a close-up shot. "Is that fellow's dick really so big, or is it the camera angle that does it?"

"Could be it's a camera angle trick," Lopez allowed. An expression of relief came over his face when the old man killed the video. "Ever since Star Wars, they have all kinds of special effects in movies."

"So," Torelli inquired, his eyes twinkling and merry, "you figure it's a dick from outer space?"

Lopez looked puzzled. "I'm just saying about special effects."

"Well, maybe you're right. Come and sit down, will you, Antonio?"

Torelli hobbled back to his chair, favoring an arthritic knee, and gestured for his visitor to sit opposite him. This Lopez did. He was a handsome, copper-skinned man in his mid-twenties with long black hair gathered into a sleek ponytail and held fast with a rubber band. A dramatic six-inch scar ran down the left side of his throat, the souvenir of an adolescent knife fight in his native Guadalajara. He had crossed the border illegally just after his sixteenth birthday to join a distant cousin in Carson Valley where, by luck, he had been hired to pick grapes on the Torelli farm. He had worked the harvest with care and speed, never complaining, and the old man had taken a liking to him and kept him on. Now Lopez had a green card and a permanent job with a small but steady hourly wage. He was very grateful for both and did not get into fights anymore. To honor his good luck, he went to church every Sunday and mailed a check for twenty dollars to his mother down in Mexico at the end of each month.

Lopez sat quietly and waited for whatever came next. He seemed comfortable in the absence of words and unperturbed by the strong odor of the old man's ropey Toscano.

"Goddam that Atwater," Torelli muttered at last, shoving his remote control device to the floor. He sounded more frustrated than angry. "You give a man a chance, and nine times out of ten he'll let you down. Piss on him, I say. You know how hard it's going to be to find somebody to replace him?"

"Very hard?"

"You're goddam right. How many dogs are out there in that trailer?"

"Three, Victor. Two grown-ups and a puppy."

"You want any of them?"

"I got no room at my house."

"All right," the old man said, sighing. "Come on, Antonio. Let's go deal with it. Vamos."

Again Torelli got up with difficulty. He opened a tall metal cabinet and took out a Winchester 30.06 and a fresh box of shells. He had been an avid hunter in his youth, stalking both deer and elk in the Sierra Nevada, but he didn't hunt anymore and used the rifle strictly for target practice at an abandoned quarry outside town. He and Lopez left the office together and stepped into the clear morning light. Though Torelli was big in the belly, his stomach spilling over the fancy silver buckle of a hand-tooled leather belt, he still cut an impressive figure, erect in posture and walking in a haughty and defiant way that exaggerated the broad span of his shoulders and chest. He had the commanding presence of a great building, one that was gradually collapsing from within, ruined by the stresses of time. He wore faded jeans that were loose in the waist, scuffed work boots, and a simple flannel shirt from JCPenney. He went hatless in every kind of weather to show off his single vanity, a full head of wavy white hair.

Torelli's pickup, a Ford V-8, was parked at a curb on the town square, where a few benches were arrayed around an urn-shaped fountain and some ornamental palm trees offered shelter to noisy grackles. Lopez settled in next to him, leaving behind his own battered and rusted Toyota hatchback, its manifold dents a record of minor collisions gone unreported to the police. The farm lay fourteen miles to the northeast, in true Carson Valley, where the land was zoned for agricultural use only and could not be subdivided into parcels any smaller than twenty acres, sparing it from the rampant real estate development that was going on all around it.

Torelli drove with alacrity, an elbow thrust out the window. He followed the roads that he had traveled since childhood and marveled again at how much the town had changed in recent months. On Taylor Street, he passed the old Jolly Donuts shop and saw that it had been magically transformed, almost overnight, into something called Patisserie Parisienne, a bakery and cafe that flew a tricolor from its newly installed flagpole. Henderson's Haberdashery next door had burned down in a freak electrical fire less than a month ago, and Wine Country Woman, a fancy clothing boutique that catered to tourists, had already risen from its ashes. The bowling alley down the block had closed for lack of bowlers. A sun- bleached FOR SALE sign rested in the window of Ed's Sporting Goods, next to a placard of rusty fishing lures, while La Perla Roja, the last rowdy Mexican cantina around, was empty of customers and would probably remain that way until the harvest was in full swing and the seasonal army of pickers that descended on the valley had some money in their pockets to blow.

There was a time when Torelli had railed against such gentrifying, but that, too, seemed ridiculous to him now. It was obvious to all but the self-deluded, he thought, that ceaseless change was at the core of life, and he was doing his best to survive in the midst of it. He had lately been banished from his beloved old home on the farm, in fact, by the demands of Claire's illness. She needed better access to her doctors and the hospital in town, so he had leased a two-bedroom tract house for them on Quail Court, in a newer subdivision. The house was an ugly brown monstrosity that stank of chemical fibers and shoddy construction and induced a terror in the old man. He felt as if he were serving out a sentence, being disciplined for staying alive so long. Never before had he slept in a bedroom apart from Claire, although in truth he did not sleep much. Instead, he lay awake every miserable night and listened helplessly to her cries of pain on the other side of a wafer-thin wall. It hurt her just to shift her weight on a mattress.

Torelli couldn't bear to think about it. He closed his eyes against the terror and let his mind drift. Images from the video he'd been watching filtered unbidden into his head and triggered a string of sensual memories, and soon he was chuckling to himself as he reminisced about his very first girlfriend, who was blessed with the most perfect breasts he would ever see or touch or lick, although he didn't know it then, of course, and was still innocent enough to believe that he would be awarded such bounty on a regular basis.

"How would you like to hear a story, Antonio?" he asked cordially.

Lopez sat up to demonstrate his interest. "If you like to tell it, Victor, I like to hear it."

"It's about how I lost my virginity. You know what that is, don't you?"

"Sure, I do."

"Well, when I was a junior in high school I dated a girl named Lucy Carpenter," the old man began, his lips curling into a smile. "She had a reputation as a hot one, but she wouldn't take off her pants for me no matter what I did. She kept saying that I had to get some protection. I was slow on the uptake back then and didn't understand what in the world she meant, so one night when we were necking in our barn, she wrote the word Trojans on a matchbook and told me to bring it to the pharmacy in town. I caught on pretty quick after that, but there was still a hitch. The pharmacist was a deacon at our church, you see." He paused to check on his audience. "They have condoms in Mexico, don't they?"

"Not too many," Lopez told him. "The priests are against it."

Torelli's smile widened. He was enjoying his memories, the salt and spice of them, the warp and weave. "Anyway, the day finally came when I worked up enough courage to go into the pharmacy. I was shaking in my goddam boots! I picked up every pill bottle on the shelves and pretended to read all the labels, and when I went up to the counter at last — the Trojans were in a drawer behind it — I took one look at that deacon, lost my nerve, and asked him what was the best medicine he had for a case of the runs."

"Did you get to do it with the girl anyway?"

"Praise the Lord, Antonio, yes, I did! The very next morning, I borrowed a car from one of my brothers, drove all the way to Santa Rosa, and stopped at a drugstore where nobody I knew had ever been. I was still shaking in my boots, but I got what I needed."

"Did you love Lucy Carpenter?"

"That's a funny question," Torelli said, pondering it, his brow furrowed. "I guess I did, all right. But it wasn't a big love."

"More like a small one?"

"That's it. More like a small one."

"How did it feel with that thing on?"

"I didn't have much to compare it to," the old man answered, with a laugh. "But at least it served the purpose. Lucy didn't get herself knocked up. How's that little girl of yours, by the way?"

Lopez glowed with a sudden burst of pride. "She's really fine, Victor. She's almost ten months old, and already she can walk pretty good. You want to see a picture of her?" Without waiting for a reply, he pulled a snapshot from a wallet that also held some tapped-out lottery tickets and a religious medallion pinned to the imitation leather. Dolores Lopez was posed in a frilly white baptismal gown and was beaming angelically at the camera.

"She's a beauty," the old man said, whistling between his teeth. "She looks just like you, doesn't she?"

Lopez nodded. "And she's smart, too. She could grow up to be somebody special, maybe." He put the photo back inside its plastic envelope. "Probably we might have some more children real soon."

"Well, I goddam commend you on that!" Torelli rewarded his grinning passenger with a high-spirited clap on the thigh. "You people do things the right way. A Mexican is not afraid to be natural. Us white people, we get all tangled up in our brains." He was cogitating, making connections. "Did I tell you my daughter's coming out here to help with her mother?"

"That's good, Victor. Where's she going to stay?"

"Out at the farm. There's no room for her at the house in town."

"I like Anna," said Lopez, with genuine fondness. "She's a nice woman."

"Sure, she's nice, but she has some crazy ideas." Torelli, too, spoke with affection and good humor. He loved his daughter, although she had put him through many trials. "When I talked to her on the phone the other night, she was carrying on about her biological clock. 'My biological clock is ticking.' What person in their right mind talks like that?"

Lopez seemed to find this very funny. "I never seen any biological clock," he joked. "We don't have any bio-logical clocks in Jalisco. What's that clock supposed to look like?"

"How the hell should I know?" Torelli growled at him. "It's her way of saying she wants to try and have a baby again. Why can't she just say it that way? 'I want to have a baby.' 'Course, she's divorced now, so it's going to be a little tougher for her."

"That's what Atwater was. Divorced. It could be they said in the mail they were going to put him in jail or something."

"Piss on Arthur Atwater," the old man reiterated with disgust as he turned onto Carson Valley Road, the main arterial into vineyard country, where the value of the wine grape had been raised to its highest power. "Everybody's divorced, except for me and Claire and you and Elena. Nobody sticks to the bargain anymore."

"Me and Elena, we're not exactly married," Lopez said quietly.

Torelli scarcely heard him. "The thing with Anna is, she's never had her feet on the ground. She graduated from Berkeley summa cum laude, she had a whole bright future ahead of her, and what does she do but insist on marrying that asshole lawyer from Palo Alto! She goes off to New York with him, she gets pregnant, she loses the baby, then she can't get pregnant anymore, and Bud-fucking-Wright deserts her for another woman. That's ten years of Anna's life in a nutshell. At least she's got a good head for business. She and that partner of hers have made a success of their bookstore. You know what my other kid is doing?"

"Roger?"

"Yes, Roger. He's a forty-year-old soupmaker at a vegetarian restaurant up in Mendocino County."

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Excerpted from "Carson Valley"
by .
Copyright © 1997 Bill Barich.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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