He pulls back then, dropping Anise’s hand to raise his own, two fingers spread in the victory sign. “Uh-uh,” he says, shaking his head so that the dreads stir and rise in bristling affirmation, “not while the FPA’s on the watch.”
PART II
Santa Cruz
Scorpion Ranch
Rita was newly separated from a man who’d hurt her in so many ways she’d lost track of just how and why she’d ever gone with him in the first place, her car was in the shop with some sort of systemic failure she couldn’t begin to fathom let alone pay for, her job was inadequate to her training and expectations, and she had a ten-year-old daughter to feed, clothe and educate. It was May of 1979, and all the good feelings—the vibrations, the groove—of the shimmering bright era that had sustained her through every failure and disappointment had dwindled and winnowed and faded till she was angry all the time, angry at Toby for leaving her, angry at her daughter, angry at her boss and the landlord who wanted two hundred fifty bucks a month for a dreary clamshell-gray walkup over a take-out pizza shop on Route 1 in downtown Oxnard, where the fog hung like death over everything and the trucks never stopped spewing diesel fumes outside the window, which might as well have been nailed shut for all the air it gave her. So when Valerie Bruns, her best friend from work, told her she knew of an opening—of a chance to get out, get away, change the scene as if this were Act II of one of the plays she’d been in in high school—she came back to life. Instantly.
“It’s on an island,” Valerie said.
“An island?” she echoed. “What do you mean, an island?”
“Santa Cruz.”
She’d called Valerie because it was Friday night, thinking they could go someplace for a drink, listen to music, hang out, but Valerie was going to her mother’s for dinner and didn’t know if she could. Then they’d got to talking about work—they were both aides at Point Hueneme Junior High—and what an uptight bitch the assistant principal was, and Mrs. Paris, the special ed teacher, and how they’d both like to quit, when Valerie mentioned the job.
“I thought Santa Cruz was a city—we played there once, I think. They’ve got a college there, right?”
“No, Santa Cruz Island.”
“Where’s that?”
A long exasperated sigh. “You know Henderson’s, in the marina? Where we went for margaritas that one time?”
“Yeah, I guess. Why?”
“Remember we sat out on the deck and we could see Anacapa? Remember I pointed it out to you and you made a big deal out of it?”
“Yeah, sure. Maybe.” She’d been drinking too much lately, drinking out of rage and regret and boredom, and she had only the vaguest rattling recollection of the place—it was on the water, that much she remembered.
“Well, the island next to it, the big one—four times as big as Manhattan—that’s Santa Cruz. It’s like this brown blur most of the time? You’ve seen it. Everybody has. You probably just didn’t notice, is all.”
She was sipping vodka, no ice, from a glass she kept in the freezer beside the bottle, Absolut, her one concession to extravagance—that and smokes. It burned her lips, caressed her tongue. “So what’s the job?”
“It’s this friend of mine, Baxter Russell? He needs a cook out there. He’s got a lease on a place they call Scorpion Ranch—sheep, he’s raising sheep—and he needs somebody to cook for him and I think like six or seven other guys. Cowboys, or whatever you call them . . .” Valerie let out a laugh. “Sheepboys, I guess. If that’s even a word.”
And though the first thing she said was, “I’m no cook, I’m a musician,” the idea of it—an island full of cowboys, and out in the middle of the ocean, no less—was already developing pictures in her mind, a whole montage of them, the wisteria-hung ranch house, the salt-sharp tang of the horses after they come in off the range, and How you want your steak done, fellas? Their shoulders, their eyes, bandannas, broad-brimmed hats, tall men, sinewy, lonely. Anyway you like to do ’em, ma’am.
“But I want to talk to him,” she was saying, hasty now, afraid Valerie would shift the subject, drop a see-you-later into the conversation and head out for her mom’s meat loaf and her stepdad’s strawberry margaritas. “Definitely. Tell him I definitely want to talk to him.”
So Valerie gave her his number and she liked his voice over the phone—a baritone with a ragged huskiness scraping the edges of it, a preacher’s voice or a country singer’s—and agreed to meet him the following day for a sandwich at a place on West Fourth Street, which was only five blocks away and didn’t require vehicular transportation, and a good thing too because the car was as dead as the iron ore they’d dug out of the ground to give it shape. The sky was overcast—fog breathing up off the water like steam rising from a teapot, a million teapots, a hundred million, and why couldn’t it ever rain? Or thunder. She’d settle for a good old-fashioned East Coast thunderstorm, anything to break the monotony. She watched herself shift, vanish and reappear again in the storefront windows, the trucks easing past like walls on wheels, pigeons and starlings scrabbling over the remains of a McDonald’s Happy Meal splayed out on the wet pavement and the sad miniature plastic child’s toy—Ronald, with his painted grin—cast away with it. Before she knew she was going to bend to retrieve the toy and slip it in her pocket she’d stopped to flick her hand at the birds and glance round her to see if anyone was looking, thinking of her daughter and the sitter she’d got in for an hour, just an hour, because how long could lunch take?
He was waiting for her in a booth by the window, a newspaper spread out on the table before him, and at first she didn’t recognize him. I’ll be the one with the beard, he’d said, but he’d also told her he was fifty-five (a quick calculation: twenty-four years older than she), which had her expecting a stringy old man with turtle skin and impacted eyes, white hair anyway, overalls, maybe a straw hat. But this man wasn’t like that at all. He wore his hair long and it was streaked with blond where the sun had caught it and when he glanced up at her the look he gave her was anything but the look of an old man. “Mr. Russell?” she tried, still ten feet away, hesitant, uncertain of herself, because this couldn’t be him . . . could it?
But it was. And he had a smile that was like an erasure, no worries, no fears. “Rita?” He pushed aside the paper and lifted his eyes to her (blue shading to gray with flecks of gold fracturing the field) over the lenses of his reading glasses. “Is that you?”
She’d dressed in jeans, flip-flops, a turquoise blouse with short sleeves and a scooped neckline, and she’d done her face and eyes, not knowing what to expect. She wore her hair up, thinking that was how a cook would wear it, and she made a point of getting there at the stroke of noon, rehashing in her mind the few recipes she knew, a handful of curry dishes their drummer had taught her, chicken cordon bleu, scallops in a wine reduction, but she really didn’t think anything would come of it. If he asked her about experience she’d have to be honest with him and say that she’d never done anything professionally, just whipping up things for her daughter and her ex-husband and once in a while a dinner party, but if truth be told they wound up eating out about half the time, fast food, pizza, chicken wings—she was a fool for chicken wings. “Yeah,” she said, giving back his smile, “it’s me.”
“Well, sit down,” he said, folding up the newspaper and handing her the menu. He took a moment, realigning the silverware on the paper placemat that featured the name of the restaurant and a picture of the owner—a fat man, bald—printed on the front and puzzles for kids on the back. “Two things,” he said finally, his voice a rumble, his cracked blue eyes fixed on her as if he was afraid she was going to get up and flit away like a bird. “Call me Bax. And lunch is on me.” Another pause. “And I have to say I didn’t expect anybody so, so—what am I trying to say here?”
That was when she began to feel uneasy all over again: was he hitting on her, was that it? Was this just going be some sleazy proposition? An island? With cowboys? What had she been thinking?
“I don’t know,” she heard herself say. And now she was the one toying with the silverware, fork, knife, spoon, shifting the mug and paper napkin like chess pieces. She looked up at him, trying to inject a little brightness into her voice: “What’s good here?”
He seemed to have lost his train of thought, but he was still staring at her, reading her, giving her a look that was hard to mistake. It took him a moment. Finally he said, “I like the Reuben. But you aren’t one of these types that don’t eat this, that or the other, are you? I mean, meat or whatever?”
She shook her head.
“And you can cook?”
She began ticking off recipes—anything she could think of, from macaroni and cheese to lobster thermidor—before he cut her off.
“You don’t understand. It’s lamb we’re talking about. In a stew, fricasseed, roasted, barbecued—with a pot of beans, raw onions, a stack of tortillas. Flapjacks in the morning, eggs, more lamb. There’s seven of us. At shearing you can double that.”
“Cafeteria style,” she said, and he laughed.
Then the waitress was there and they both ordered Reubens and he asked for iced tea and she a diet Coke. They watched the waitress recede, looked up in unison as an elderly couple shuffled in the door as if concrete blocks were attached to their feet and settled into the booth across from them, heaving for breath. There was a counter running the length of the place, half a dozen disconsolate men there, propped up on their elbows and staring into the distance, truckers maybe, rejects from the naval base, the perennially laid off, people with time on their hands. A chalkboard over the soft-serve machine advertised the spaghetti special, with tossed salad and garlic bread. She felt the tug of hopelessness.
“Three meals a day,” he said, his tone business-like now, admonitory even. “Up before dawn, to bed at dark. What I’m hoping is to pick up a generator.” He paused, dropped his eyes. “If not this trip, then the next one.”
She let nothing show on her face. What she wanted was an adventure, what she wanted was out, but she could detect the makings of a long grinding disaster spinning out before her. What did she know about sheep, cowboys, ranches, islands, cooking even? “What about water? You have running water, don’t you?”
He ducked his head, then lifted his chin and ran the fingers of both hands through his hair, which fell forward, thick and thickly greased. “We’re working on it. It’s all part of the plan. And if things might be a bit rough now, I tell you, it’s worth it. I mean, if you like the outdoors—you do, don’t you?” His eyes jumped at hers but he didn’t wait for an answer. “And a cook—a cook is going to really help because it frees up a man so we can put all our energy into getting the place up and running. And improved. Livable, you know? Or more than livable: cozy. Cozy’s what we’re shooting for.”
“O-kay,” she said, very slowly, drawing out the vowels. “But we haven’t talked salary.”
He waved a hand as if to say nothing could be simpler or more amenable. She watched him lift the glass of iced tea and take a long leisurely drink. He was laughing suddenly, his eyes retreating into the hallway of some private joke. “Hell, we got Francisco cooking for us now—he’s a sheepman and he smells like it too, no matter how many bars of soap I bring back for him, not to mention Old Spice. I gave him the biggest bottle I could find, but you couldn’t tell the difference—I wouldn’t put it past him if he drank it. The man burns everything—coffee, beans, meat. And I tell you, you lift your fork to your mouth and it all tastes the same. I swear—and I’ve been meaning to do this, just for the satisfaction of it—you do a blindfold test and you wouldn’t know if you were chewing lamb or a heel of bread or a sawed-off hunk of the cutting board.”
“Sounds like a nightmare,” she said, smiling now. “But what are you paying?”
“Does it really matter?”
“Yes,” she said, “it does.”
Another wave of the hand. “Minimum wage. But that’s for eight hours and no overtime. Room and board. A chance to live in the most beautiful spot on the face of the planet and see the stars the way nobody sees them anymore, all the way to the deep white creamy heart of the Milky Way.” He turned up the smile. “And all the lamb you can eat.”
“I have a daughter,” she said.
“I know.”
“Valerie told you?”
“Valerie told me, yeah. But you can homeschool her—in an atmosphere which, let’s face it, is going to be a whole lot healthier than where you are now, what with the gangs, drugs, teen sex and all that. Mexicans. Crime. You don’t want her exposed to that kind of thing if you can help it, believe me—”
“You have kids?”
“Two girls, Marty and Fredda. They’re all grown up now.” He set down the glass. His hands were battered, the skin rough, the nails like horn. “I’m divorced. I used to have a drinking problem. Now I don’t.” In the next moment he was leaning back to dig something out of his pocket—a wallet—and she thought he was going to show her pictures of his daughters, but that wasn’t it at all. He patiently extracted three bills and laid them on the table. Hundreds. Three one-hundred-dollar bills, as pristine as if they’d just come off the press at the mint back in Philadelphia. “Here,” he said, his voice touching bottom, “you take this . . . Wait”—he groped in his pocket again until he came up with a set of car keys and slapped them down on the table—“you can drive a stick, can’t you?”
She nodded, the bills splayed out between them like an insanely generous tip for the waitress who hadn’t even brought their sandwiches yet.
“You know the Safeway up the street there?”—he was pointing down the length of the restaurant, beyond the counter, the dust-flecked windows and the macadam road glistening with moisture, his eyebrows lifted interrogatively. “Yeah? Well, take this and go buy us groceries.”
“Groceries? What do you mean?”
“You’re going to drop me down at the harbor is what I mean. I got about six thousand things to remember before the boat leaves . . . I mean, enough for a week or maybe a week and a half, and after that we’ll take you back to shore and think about the long-term stuff, fifty-pound sacks of rice, beans, that sort of thing. You know the marina, right?”
“Well, I . . . I’ve been there, but—”
And now the waitress appeared with their sandwiches and they were both momentarily distracted as she set down the plates, extracted a bottle of ketchup from the pocket of her apron and asked if she could get them anything else. “A refill?” he said, rattling the ice in his glass. “What about you, Reet? Ready for another di-u-retic?”
There was a moment of silence as they both bent to their sandwiches and she felt as if she were already on the boat, out at sea, lurching with the waves, so hungry suddenly she could barely think. What was happening to her? Had she agreed to some sort of pact? And if so, when had that happened? She became aware of the music playing then—the jukebox, a tune she’d always loved, Neil Young’s “Helpless,” which she’d covered with Toby in a radically slowed-down version, their two voices enfolded on the chorus and Toby pounding down those chunky chords on the piano as if it were made of concrete, bliss, pure bliss—and she took it as an omen.
“So listen,” he was saying, “eat up and then you can drop me at the marina—the boat’s a friend of mine’s, the Side Pocket. Just ask. Everybody knows it.” He was wiping his lips, chewing. “Damn good sandwich.”
She closed her eyes a moment, trying to picture things, the way they would evolve, because her mother was going to have to watch Anise, that was for sure, at least temporarily, at least till school was out, and she’d have to call in sick at work, maybe permanently sick—
“Oh,” he said, waving the sandwich, which ran with its juices, his right hand slick with thin runnels of Thousand Island dressing and the liquefied fat of the Swiss cheese, “I just wanted to remind you—”
“But listen, I don’t even know what I’m supposed to buy, and I can’t, I mean, I have to—”
“Vegetab
les,” he said, dabbing at his beard with the wet-through and stained remnants of his paper napkin. “Jug wine. Couple cases of beer—make that five cases, and the brand doesn’t matter, whatever’s on special. Condiments. You know,” and he paused, deadpan, “whatever goes with lamb.” And now the other hand came into play, held palm up so that the calluses shone with grease and the deep gouges of his lifeline leapt out at her like a map of her future. “But what I wanted to say, to remind you, that is, is that the boat leaves at five.” He leaned into the table, leaned in close, and gave her a wink. “Don’t you be late now.”
And that was how she found herself hunched over the stained dried-out planks of the long sheepman’s table in the mud-tracked kitchen of an adobe ranch house so far out from the coast and life and the morning paper she might as well have been marooned, propped up on her elbows and blowing the steam off a cup of coffee at the first turning of dawn some four and a half years later. Where those years had gone, she couldn’t have said any more than she could have said where the wind went once it tired of raking the canyon behind the house. Her hands were tough as wire cutters, her hair hung limp for lack of shampoo and she hadn’t seen the inside of a restaurant of any kind in as long as she could remember. Not that she was complaining. She had Bax and Anise, half a dozen ranch hands and upward of four thousand sheep to keep her company, and she was so absorbed in the workings of the ranch—in the details, everything inhering in the details—that all the rest of the world seemed to dwindle down to nothing, as if she’d dreamed it, as if the whole town of Oxnard had been thrown up like a movie set or hardened in place out of a shower of fairy dust. And the news—what was the news anyway but a long continuous trumped-up shriek of impending doom and current disaster that just made everybody sour and distrustful and hateful of their fellow man? She didn’t need it. Didn’t miss it. The news for her, the news that mattered, was written on the wind and it dripped out of the fog and bleated from the throats of the sixteen hundred ewes about to drop their lambs in the rain-fed grass of the lower meadow that she could hear and smell and taste even as she got up to feed more wood into the stove.