“I love you, Joshie.”
“I love you too.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Abbie leaned her aching back against the whitewashed wall of the weigh station and stared out through narrowed eyes over the vast flat fields where a hundred hunched figures were still picking the rows, their shadows long and black in the mellowing sunlight. A truck was heading in from the highway, trailing a cloud of luminous gold behind it. Abbie looked at her watch and saw it was coming up to six o’clock. She was going to be late.
There were still about a dozen pickers ahead of her in the line waiting to have their last trays weighed and get their money. Her tray was at her feet and as the line moved forward she shunted it with her boot across the baked earth and one of the supervisors yelled at her and told her to pick it up and she cursed him under her breath but did so. No matter how tired you were or that it was twelve long, hot, backbreaking hours since you’d started work, you weren’t supposed to put your tray down in case the strawberries got dirty. As if they weren’t contaminated enough by all the toxic chemicals they sprayed them with. She would never eat another strawberry in her life.
It was early September and three whole weeks since she had seen Rolf. But she was going to see him tonight and her heart beat faster at the thought of it and at what she had to tell him. She hadn’t taken a test, but she didn’t need to. She was already sure. She was two weeks late and she was normally never late. And this morning, for the first time, she had gotten sick. How he was going to take it, she didn’t know. She was hoping it might make things better between them. Of one thing she was sure, however. Come what may, whatever he said, whatever pressure he put on her, she was determined to have the child.
She would have to find the right moment to tell him, of course. Maybe they could go down the coast, to Big Sur or somewhere, and find some nice place to stay, spend a little of the money they’d earned.
It had been Rolf’s idea that they should spend some time apart. He said he needed space and when she asked him what he meant, he’d just gotten mad at her. He was working on a construction site in Fresno, earning two or three times as much as she was for many fewer hours. At least, that’s what he’d told her he was doing the last time they saw each other. Nowadays she never really knew. She no longer had a cell phone and on the three occasions she’d been able to call his he hadn’t answered. Abbie only hoped he was going to be in a better mood this time, that he would be nicer to her, not fly into a rage with her so easily.
She’d had time to reflect on why things weren’t so good between them anymore. It was more her fault than his, she knew. She was too possessive, too needy and jealous. After that first time she’d found he was cheating on her, when they were living in Chicago, she’d tried so hard to change, not to see it as such a big deal. It wasn’t important for him, so why should it be for her? But in Miami, when she’d actually caught him at it, walked in on him and found him in bed with that little Cuban bitch, all her noble reasoning had collapsed.
If she was honest with herself, she’d known all along that there were other women. Rolf said she should grow up, that she was the victim of her own pathetic bourgeois background. They didn’t own each other, he said, and if she wanted to have other lovers herself it was absolutely fine by him. That hurt her too, though she didn’t really know why. She didn’t want anyone else. Especially not now. Well, tonight and tomorrow and all weekend she would make a special effort and they would find each other again and things would again be good. And when he knew about the baby it would all be different.
“Next!”
In front of her now, her new friend Inez was swinging her tray onto the scales and the sour-faced bastard on the other side was checking its contents and throwing out any berries that in his indisputable opinion had been damaged. Inez challenged him on a couple that looked perfect but he just gave her a blank look and didn’t even bother to justify himself, just yelled out the weight to the guys sitting beyond him at the trestle table, one with the clipboard and the other with the money, then swung the tray off the scales and stacked it.
“Next!”
Abbie always got a little anxious at the weigh station, just as she still did at post offices and banks or anyplace where she felt her identity was being scrutinized. Apart from a handful of students (which was what, if anyone ever asked, she pretended to be), she was the only non-Hispanic and the men at the pay table always seemed to look at her more closely than they did at the other women. Sometimes they tried to flirt with her but she just kept her eyes down and never engaged. She knew she didn’t really need to worry too much. Every single picker here was working illegally. Nobody was going to ask any awkward questions. In any case, today the guy seemed interested only in her strawberries.
“These are all dusty.”
“The hell they are.”
“What did you say?”
“I said they’re not. And if they are it’s because of that truck that went by just now. You ought to tell them to slow down.”
The guy threw most of the top layer of berries out, ignoring her complaints, then gave her a baleful look and yelled out the weight.
“Next!”
The man with the clipboard asked for her name.
“Shepherd.”
He logged the last tray and hit a few buttons on his calculator and the man beside him then counted out her day’s pay: forty-eight dollars and twenty cents. He pushed it across the table and Ann-Marie Shepherd of Fort Myers, Florida, gathered it up and stuffed it into the pocket of her skirt and followed Inez into the shower block.
Inez’s English was only a little less primitive than Abbie’s Spanish but the two of them had become close. They had met on Abbie’s first day of picking when she still hadn’t found anywhere to stay. In the evening Inez had hauled her into the back of a crowded truck that drove them up into the hills above the Salinas Valley. Abbie could hardly believe her eyes when they got there. She knew this was Steinbeck country but not that so little had changed.
There was a whole camp of Mexican fruit pickers, all illegals, living in the woods. The lucky ones had found caves for shelter but most just slept out in the open, with plastic garbage sacks over them to keep off the dew. She couldn’t get over how kind and generous they were. They found her a blanket and a mat to lie on and a plastic sack and gave her food and water. It was strange how those who had the least always seemed to give the most. She spent the night listening to the yip of coyotes and it made her think about Ty.
After a few days, Inez managed to find them somewhere nearer to the fields, a garage with its own sink and toilet, which they shared with ten others, each paying four dollars a night for the privilege. Inez was only a year older than Abbie but already had two kids who lived with her mother back home in Santa Ana. She missed them badly. Their father had run off when she was eight months pregnant with the second but she didn’t seem to hold it against him.
“Men,” she said one night when they were sitting outside under the stars, sharing a cigarette. “They cannot help themselves. They don’t know who they are or why God made them. You cannot hate them for what they don’t know, only pity them.”
Abbie hadn’t told her she was pregnant, though the morning sickness was going to make the secret a tricky one to keep.
Because it was Friday night and everyone felt flush, there was a truck going into Salinas and when the two of them had showered and dressed they climbed up into the back and sat squeezed among a dozen others, all but a few of them men. Abbie wanted to look her best for Rolf and was wearing the pretty black-and-red cotton print dress she’d bought in a street market in Miami. She rarely looked in a mirror nowadays but this evening Inez had forced her to and Abbie was pleasantly surprised. It was like looking at someone she hadn’t seen for years. She didn’t dye her hair anymore and it was longer and going blond from all the sun she’d been getting. She’d never had such a tan in all her life. The only thing that dented the image was the state of her hands. They were
calloused and ingrained with dirt, the fingernails bitten short.
Inez was all dressed up too and so were the three young men sitting opposite. They were flirting with her. Abbie couldn’t understand what they said but she got the drift. One of them seemed more interested in her than in Inez and kept staring. He said something to the others who looked at her with a sort of shy assessment then nodded.
“What did he say?” she whispered to Inez.
“He said you look like a movie star.”
She was supposed to be meeting Rolf at seven-thirty at a bar in the Oldtown district, near the Fox movie theater, but it was half an hour’s walk from where the truck dropped her and by the time she got there it was after eight and he wasn’t there. She found a table near the window so she could see out into the street and ordered a soda and took her book from the old duffel bag that held all her few worldly possessions. But an hour passed and darkness fell and still there was no sign of him. By then the glances of the men in the bar were making her uneasy so she got up and went for a walk, telling the woman behind the bar that if anyone came looking for her she would be back.
Just before ten, when she was half-sick with worry and wondering where she was going to sleep, she saw his car pull up across the street, the little Ford they had bought in Florida with the last of her grandpa’s money. As he sauntered across the street, talking on a cell phone, he saw her in the window and gave a little nod but not a smile. Abbie got up and went out to meet him but had to stand there stupidly on the sidewalk beside him, waiting while he ignored her and finished his call.
“Yeah. Okay. You too. Bye.”
He snapped the phone shut and slipped it into his jacket pocket and she put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips.
“I thought you were never coming.”
“I had some things to see to.”
He didn’t say how pretty she looked, in fact he barely gave her a glance, just walked past her into the bar and said the place looked like shit and they should go someplace else.
They found a restaurant farther along the street, a darker place with wooden booths and little red candle jars on the tables. They sat in a corner and ordered two beers and he drank his in two long drafts and ordered another. The food was poor but Abbie wasn’t going to let it spoil things and she told him all about the fruit picking and the good people she had met and the harsh conditions they lived in. Rolf nodded as if he knew all of this already. He hardly said a word and sometimes didn’t even seem to be listening.
“Are you okay?” she said at last.
“Sure. Why?”
“I don’t know. You’re just kind of quiet.”
“I’m tired, that’s all.”
“Did you miss me?”
Even as the words came out of her mouth, she knew it was the wrong thing to say. He sighed and cast his eyes upward in contempt.
“Yes, daaarling, I missed you terribly.”
He said it with such a sneer that she had to bite her lip and look down at her plate, but she said nothing. Tears for Rolf were simply a sign of weakness and she knew better than to cry. But he must have seen how hurt she was for he reached out a guilty hand and took hold of hers.
“I’m sorry. But you know how I feel about all that bourgeois shit.”
“Like missing someone you care for.”
He moved closer and put an arm around her and kissed her temple.
“I’m sorry. I missed you. Okay?”
She nodded and swallowed bravely and smiled.
“Can we go somewhere? Just for the weekend?”
“Where?”
“I don’t know, someplace by the ocean. I want to walk beside the ocean.”
“I have to be in Seattle on Sunday.”
“Can I come?”
“No.”
He had never told her much but these days told her nothing. But Abbie knew from the newspapers some of the things that had been going on and that he was probably involved. From the Canadian border to northern California there had been a string of arson attacks, mostly on logging and biotech companies, the damage running into many millions of dollars. He said it was too risky for her to be involved anymore but Abbie suspected the real reason was that in Denver she had failed him, shown herself too weak and fearful.
There was a time when the harshness of this verdict had hurt her. But no longer. The truth was, she didn’t want to be involved. She still admired his passion and resolve. But these actions that she had once considered so heroic now seemed only futile and dangerous. And counterproductive too, because all they succeeded in doing was to generate sympathy for the greedy corporations that were the targets. Anyhow, Rolf had no doubt found some other young woman to help him. And probably to fuck as well, but Abbie tried not to think about that. She needed him now, more than ever.
“Then let’s go somewhere just for tonight and tomorrow,” she said. She kissed his neck and put her hand on his thigh. “Please. It’s been so long.”
They drove south for about an hour and just before Big Sur, meandering high around the cliffs, they found a little place that looked out over the highway to the ocean. There was a blue neon vacancy sign in the window and they pulled in and parked. An old woman sat asleep in front of a blurred TV behind the reception desk and they woke her and got themselves a room.
Abbie put down her bag and turned to him and as he shut the door behind him she saw in his eyes a darkening glint she didn’t recognize.
“Rolf?”
He ripped the dress from her shoulders then threw her facedown on the bed and fucked her so violently and unlovingly that she screamed at him to stop but he didn’t. She managed to twist around and lashed out at him and he hit her hard across the face with the palm and then the back of his hand, the first time he had ever struck her. Then he grabbed her by the throat so tightly that she thought he was going to strangle her. And she was so scared, not just for herself but for the child within her, that she stopped struggling and let him do what he wanted to her until he was spent and rolled off her and slumped beside her.
How long she lay there listening to his breathing she couldn’t tell. But when at last she was sure he was asleep and she had summoned enough courage, she edged herself, inch by inch, away from him and off the bed and silently gathered her things, freezing every now and then when he shifted. She took the car keys and a roll of dollar bills from his jacket and thought about taking his phone too but didn’t. The warm, wet run of him on her thigh almost made her retch. She tiptoed naked to the door and let herself out, praying with every quivering breath that it wouldn’t creak and it didn’t.
The moon was angling in along the bleached wood walkway outside and she dressed hurriedly beside her shadow on the wall then walked barefoot across the cool, gray gravel to the car. It was parked on a slope under some ragged pines maybe fifty yards from the room, close enough, she figured, that he might hear the engine start and get to her in time. There was not a breath of wind and the only sound was the distant barking of a dog. She threw her bag into the back then quietly climbed in and put the shift to neutral and the car rolled slowly down toward the highway, the gravel crunching beneath the tires.
As the car nosed onto the highway she turned the key and the engine sputtered to life. Out on the ocean a trail of reflected moonlight shimmered to the horizon. She eased the car out onto the highway and gently accelerated away, heading back the way they had come. How long the journey would take she wasn’t sure. But she already knew where she would go.
She drove all through the night, working her way north until she found I-80 and headed east and watched the sun lift out of the Sierras, hazy and red and implacable. Just after Reno the sickness kicked in and she found a truck stop and threw up and washed herself and sluiced from her body all trace of him. She walked back to the car and lowered the seat and slept until woken by the heat and the glare of the sun.
It took eight hours just to cross Nevada, the names on the signs whipping by, Lovelock, Battle M
ountain, and Elko, the Humboldt River curving and flashing beside her. Sometimes, to get gas or something to eat or simply to break the mesmerizing miles, she would exit the interstate and pass through forlorn and desiccated towns with boarded storefronts and sprawling trailer camps and the plundered carcasses of cars. Then across into Utah, the highway straight as a spear through the flat forever of the desert that glowed pink to each horizon as another night rolled in.
She passed Salt Lake City a little after midnight and by then, even with the windows wide and the night air rushing in about her, cooler now and sweetly laced with sage, her eyelids began to droop and her chin to jolt against her chest and she knew she had to stop. She branched off the interstate and found a cheap motel and was so tired she almost gave her real name but corrected herself in time and the boy at the desk jokingly asked if she’d forgotten who she was and Abbie smiled and said it was true, she had.
She had driven most of a thousand miles and, looking at the map the next morning, figured she had half as many more yet to go. She had considered calling ahead but decided not to. Maybe their phones were still being tapped. And anyhow, maybe he wouldn’t be there and his mother would answer instead and Abbie wouldn’t know what to say. Not that she yet knew what to say to Ty after three long years and all the heartache and trouble she had brought into his life.
She crossed the Continental Divide in the early afternoon and at Rawlins forked north to Casper. And as the sun was starting to slide into the Bighorn Mountains, at last, she turned off the interstate and drove into Sheridan. She cruised along Main Street, past the little plaza where she and Ty had sat that day and talked, the bronze cowboy still standing sentinel with his rifle resting on his shoulder. She found a place to park and on the paper she had picked up at the motel wrote the note that she planned to leave in the mailbox at the end of the driveway. She scrapped her first two attempts. The apologies sounded too futile and self-pitying. At the third attempt she wrote two simple lines.