Round Rock Read online

ABOUT the time Lewis was staggering down the old schoolhouse stairs, Red Ray was trying to coax Frank Jamieson into the cab of his ’46 Ford pickup. Frank was more interested in the sky, which was full of fast-moving horsetail clouds. Frank, it occurred to Red, was looking more and more like Walt Whitman every day: surging gray beard, disheveled, hoary, vaguely vagrant. Unlike Whitman, Frank always had a cigarette in his mouth. Also, Frank never spoke; he hadn’t said a word to anybody in eleven and a half years.

  “C’mon, you old sacka corn.” Red had his arm around Frank’s shoulders and was attempting to steer him over to the truck’s open door. “Upsa-daisy, into the cab.”

  Frank was too big to move when he didn’t feel like it. Even though Red probably matched him pound for pound—they both weighed in at over 230—Frank had a lower center of gravity and a way of turning his weight into concrete.

  “Come on, Franky,” said Red.

  Frank raised his right hand, index finger extended, and touched the unlit tip of his cigarette.

  “I’ll light the damn thing,” Red said, “if you get in the truck.”

  He next tried sitting in the truck as an example to Frank. Closing the driver’s-side door, Red grasped the steering wheel resolutely. “Bus is leaving,” he called, turning the key and gunning the engine. He was parked behind the Blue House, the old Victorian mansion that served as Round Rock’s dormitory. Behind the mansion were orange groves, Washington navels. Plump, ripe, the oranges spun amid dark leaves like spheres of light.

  Red lit a Pall Mall for himself, then extended the lighter toward Frank. Frank pointed to the tip of his cigarette.

  “Jesus Christ on a crutch,” said Red.

  Red used to take Frank with him everywhere—on his morning rounds, to AA meetings, on supply runs, to the Old Bastards Club—but since the farm lost its secretary a few months ago, Red couldn’t take the time. Under the best circumstances, Frank was never what anyone would call Johnny-on-the-spot. Before any outing, he had to be taken to the bathroom, combed, supplied with cigarettes and Life Savers and various other prized items without which he became quite agitated. Red felt bad about neglecting him, but only up to a point, because now, whenever he did try to include him in activities, Frank pulled this kind of stunt, turned into this inert life form.

  It wasn’t as if Frank didn’t want to get out and about: he’d run away from the farm twice in the last month. The first time, a neighbor spotted him sitting on a rock wall about a mile down the road; the last time, Burt McLemoore, the deputy sheriff, found him six miles away, under the Rito River bridge, where he was watching women from the nearby fieldworkers’ camp do their laundry on the big white rocks.

  Red rolled down his window and blew smoke outside. Though he’d never tell anyone, Frank’s escapes hurt his feelings. To take to heart anything a big, mute, brain-damaged man did sounded crazy. Still, Red had kept him out of institutions for all these years, so if Red was a little busy for a change, it seemed that Frank could endure some inattention. Frank didn’t have to answer to the board of directors. He didn’t have to do paperwork or run into town or apply for grants or listen to the endless river of anger and self-pity that flowed from the mouths of the newly sober. Frank didn’t have to write schedules or mop up after suicide attempts or make sure the citrus groves were picked and cultivated and sprayed and irrigated. If anyone deserved to run away, Red thought he himself should have that privilege.

  Red smoked and thought about where he’d run. He’d probably go to the mountains, hole up in a cave or some old hunter’s shack slumping into the ground. He’d avoid people, become a hermit, even a rumor, like Big Foot. Hikers would tell how when they were lost, he materialized and led them back to their trails. They would show off the splint he made for their broken bones, recount how he fed them elderberry juice and watercress salad and smoked squirrel meat. (Red had eaten squirrel, and it wasn’t bad—a little gamy, maybe, but the smoking would help.) The only thing he’d ask for in return would be books—best-sellers, guidebooks, hand-scrawled journals, whatever written matter the hikers carried. He’d accumulate a library, and in the winter he’d read.

  In the army, Red had once spent a winter reading books up in Alaska. On one training maneuver, he and another officer built an ice cave, a six-by-eight-foot room dug deep into the snow. They lived there for ten weeks. The ceiling was a tarp, the entrance an L-shaped dogleg dug off to one side. They carved out little sleeping shelves and niches for their food and gear. On their first day, after the warmth from their bodies made the walls sweat, they rolled back the tarp and the walls froze as shiny and hard and refractive as glass. A single candle then threw enough light to read by. Since either Red or his partner was always on watch, privacy was absolute—at least in the beginning. These maneuvers were all part of a staged war, and after a while the enemy developed the bad habit of showing up and asking for a slug of Red’s vodka. But before the enemy became a nuisance, there was that warm, brilliant cave of pure silence, and Red missed this more than any other part of his life—certainly more than his childhood, his marriage, or even the heady first years of the farm.

  The truck creaked and bounced a little as Frank climbed inside. “Hey, Franky,” Red said. “Attaboy.” He lit Frank’s cigarette, plus a new one for himself, then reached over and closed Frank’s door. Just as Red put the truck into gear, Ernie Tola came out of the Blue House waving his arm. Ernie was Round Rock’s full-time cook. In his fifties, he looked and often acted like a well-coiffed, temperamental woman with a goatee.

  “You might as well bring Frank right back in here,” Ernie called out. “Detox just phoned and they got a live one for you.”

  Red turned to Frank. “Damn it all, Franky, did you hear that?” Then he yelled out the window, “Anybody we know?”

  If it was a repeat customer, Red thought, he could leave Frank in the truck, because they—the drunk and Frank—would already be acquainted. But a brand-new fellow might not appreciate such a dramatic example of what drinking can do to you if it doesn’t kill you first.

  “Naw, just some young drunk who likes his coke,” Ernie hollered. “But Bobby thinks you’ll take to him.”

  “Yeah, right.” That Red didn’t much like cokeheads was no secret. In his opinion, the average alcoholic was above average in intelligence—intelligent about everything, that is, except his drinking. The drug addict, Red found, too often fell into one of two categories: the grandiose, ego-bound hotshot, or somebody so down and out it was hard to locate even a germ of self that could help him begin to recover. On principle, as long as they also identified themselves as alcoholics, Red didn’t turn away drug users at Round Rock. Personally, given his own experience, he’d take a garden variety alkie any day.

  TWELVE years earlier, Red Ray had bought the old Sally Morrot ranch near Rito as an extravagant, hysterical ploy to distract himself from drinking and thus save his marriage.

  The ranch had been part of Henri Morrot’s original holdings. A month before he died in 1915, Morrot parceled out his land, in what he believed to be an equitable manner, to his seven children. Famous for their contentious natures even as infants, six of the heirs felt gravely wronged. Old sibling rivalries intensified in the public arena of the courtroom. Feud fueled feud, hostilities became generational, and litigation replaced ranching as the Morrot family business. The courts impounded acre after acre for costs, and the Fitzgeralds bought up the land at auction for a fraction of its worth. After three generations, the Morrot empire had shrunk like a vast landlocked lake until only a few groves remained in the family name.

  Sally Morrot, Henri’s youngest child, had taken her allotted, lady-sized inheritance of 250 acres without dispute and repulsed all suitors, claim jumpers, and obsequious volunteer heirs for the next sixty-five years. On the west end of her property, she built for “her Mexicans” nine unplumbed, unheated, yet sturdy wooden bungalows, a packing house, outbuildings, and a company store. Her workers lived there year round, raised children, planted perennials,
considered the place home. Half a mile away, on a knoll surrounded by two acres of rolling lawn, Sally Morrot constructed a three-storey mansion as spindly and delicate as a wicker throne. A prototype of already outdated Victorian whimsy, the house sported narrow bay windows, gables, balconies for every bedroom, finials, crest work, scrolls, and a wide portico that wrapped around three exposures. Six chimneys and two turrets were pink limestone block. The architect took lace from his wife’s undergarments, reproduced it in wood, and mounted it along the eaves and ridges of the roof.

  Aloof and iron-willed, Sally Morrot managed her groves like a feudal lord. She made money through both world wars and the Great Depression. When avocados became a viable commodity, she planted 30 acres of the Haas and Bacon varieties. She put over 130 acres in citrus. She gave generously to charities and sent her disenfranchised nieces and nephews through college. She allowed the University of California to use her ranch as a field station and, in exchange, was the first in the valley to implement technological innovations in the citrus industry. She credited her vitality and advanced age to a series of pagan rituals and herb teas provided by her chauffeur, Rafael Flores, who was a curandero—a healer—among his people.

  Sally Morrot was savvy and indomitable and an institution, but old age eventually wore her out. On her ninety-second birthday, deaf and half-blind, she packed a single suitcase, put her bug-eyed papillon lapdog in a picnic hamper, and took a taxi to her favorite nephew’s house in Oxnard, never to return. Even as she lived on, her relatives plundered the nineteen furnished rooms, sold off the valuables, and abandoned the rest, including dirty dishes on the drain board and the dog’s bowl on the floor. When Sally Morrot died at the age of ninety-five, her nephew hired a corporation to oversee the groves, and the first corporate decision was to evict the nine families from the village.

  Organized by a young firebrand in their midst named David Ibañez, the so-called Mexicans—most were third- and fourth-generation Californians—took their case to court in the spirited style of the Morrots themselves. Unlike their luckless Anglo role models, the workers won, in a manner of speaking: though not allowed to stay in their village, they did receive abundant compensation for the inconvenience and trauma of relocating. Many went off and purchased their own land and homes. This settlement put the first big dent in Sally Morrot’s estate. Court battles over the will made further inroads. The corporate overseers continued this downward trend, and in less than five years, the ranch went on the market to pay off accumulated taxes, debts, and court costs.

  An associate in Red Ray’s San Francisco law firm eventually handled some of the more difficult probate proceedings and tipped off Red to what he described as “the steal of the century.”

  The ranch didn’t look like a steal. The trees had been neglected and whole groves had withered. The mansion had been thoroughly ransacked. An attempt had been made to hammer plywood over the downstairs windows, but vandals had pried it off and entered at will. When Red first walked through, it looked like a stage for cult depravities, gang wars, snuff films. Mattresses and sofas were disemboweled. Half-burned clothes and draperies clogged every fireplace. Obscenities were spray-painted on the walls and shotgun patterns pocked the wainscoting and recessed ceilings.

  Such heinous disfigurement of aging beauty caused a great hope to awaken and lumber through Red’s thoughts. His marriage of twelve years was faltering—in fact, his wife was conducting a house hunt of her own—and he saw in Sally Morrot’s defiled kingdom the groundwork of his own salvation.

  Yvette Ray was an urban planner. She sat on the San Francisco planning board and lobbied for historical preservation at any and all costs. A slim, muscular woman with prematurely white hair and a crisp, patrician manner, she had been a promising ballet dancer until family pressure and a foot injury sent her back to college. Thereafter, her histrionics were staged in zoning battles and a few instances of civil disobedience. She’d grown up in the architectural wonderland of Pacific Heights, and as an adult, she fought to restore it to a glory that neither she nor possibly the district itself had ever known. Red had seen her weep with rage at the sight of a bulldozer near the Presidio. Yvette was articulate, militant, and convincing, and her cause was fallen elegance. She was, in short, a rich girl who loved a shambles. Providing, that is, that she could set to and clean it up.

  Red Ray made the down payment on the old Sally Morrot ranch with the fat contingency he’d received from helping a quadriplegic become a multimillionaire quadriplegic. He didn’t breathe a word of his plans to Yvette, just lured her to a spa in Ojai for the weekend and, on Sunday, took her for a drive through the nearby countryside. He drove up the Victorian’s palm-lined driveway and, parking by the sweeping front steps, handed Yvette a key at the exact moment that her mouth started working in silent outrage at yet another crime against architecture. The oxidized, slightly bent brass skeleton key had no function, of course, as there was no glass in any of the windows and any child or dog could’ve pushed open all the downstairs doors. The key, obviously, was purely symbolic, and it inspired Red to an even greater act of symbolism. He reached in front of a shocked Yvette, opened the glove compartment, pulled out a bottle of Dewars, and emptied it out on the ground. Joe, their three-year-old son, was asleep in the backseat; Red woke him to extract a pint of Johnnie Walker Black from the accordion file he’d been using as a pillow. Red poured out this scotch as well. Then, he took the keys from the ignition, went to open the Mercedes’s trunk, and did likewise with another bottle of Dewars and a liter of clear mirabelle brandy.

  Yvette was impressed—stunned, really—by the house, though skeptical about what had already become something of a ritual disposal of booze. She agreed to make the move, take on the restoration, but refused to quit her job, taking a year’s leave of absence instead. She also made Red put their Filbert Street townhouse in her name. “I just need a place to run,” she said, “if you ever start drinking again.”

  Red had no official program, no medically supervised detoxification. He simply hoped that in the shuffle of moving his addiction would get lost, like a misrouted box of books or a disoriented house cat.

  Yvette decided to serve as her own contractor and hired a crew of carpenters. She subcontracted the plumbing and electrical work. In a gleeful fever, she tore up rotten floorboards, sanded and polished mahogany baseboards and cocobolo mantels. She hired five craftsmen to replace the stained-glass work alone, and drove clear to San Diego to talk to a ceramicist who could copy the destroyed Italian kitchen tile.

  Red rented a storefront in the sleepy hamlet of Rito and opened a law office. No more boilermakers for his lunch. He bought homemade tamales and tart pineapple paletas at the Ibañez Grocería and washed them down at his desk with Diet Pepsi and selections from a tattered copy of Shakespeare: The Complete Works, a book he’d always wanted to read. He’d exchanged big-time for simple—simple personal injuries, simple divorces, simple tax work and wills, and just enough of each to keep him busy five or six hours a day. He came in at nine or ten and left his office at three. Sober as God. Yvette met him in the front hall of the house and, after a few weeks, even stopped sniffing at his breath before giving him a quick kiss. That kiss was never quite what he wanted, not as long or as deep as he felt befitted a dried-out man coming home to a ransacked castle: just the taste of a kiss, a vague and disheartening promise. When he lunged for more, she’d slip from his path, fasten onto his elbow, and guide him through the morning’s progress to whatever project she’d singled out as his.

  Sweating copiously in the summer heat, closed in by membranous plastic drop cloths, inhaling paint and varnish and lacquer fumes, he puttied and slapped on latex with furious energy. Renovation! Restoration! Preservation! He worked without pause, through what was rightfully the cocktail hour, and prayed to the forces of parallel development that somehow his home and soul and family would come back into shape. When Yvette finally called him to dinner those nights, he was crazed with hunger: ten thousand little
mouths sagged open in his veins. She cooked out on the porch using an hibachi and Coleman camp stove, and it seemed to Red that the steaks and canned baked beans and sliced tomatoes could taste so good only to a starving man.

  At one time, when they were first married, Yvette used to say Red was the only man she’d ever met to make intelligent use of alcohol. “It brings out the poet in him.” Hah! That was before she saw him pass out and crack his head open on the glass coffee table. Before he slugged her on the ear. Before he ruined the new linen wallpaper in the Filbert Street dining room with an attack of projectile vomiting. Before he began disappearing for three or five days at a stretch. Really, Red was grateful for his twentieth or thirtieth second chance, and he forgave Yvette even if her crispness had turned brittle, if her generosity was now grudging. He forgave her for being unforgiving. Just wait: he’d make it up to her, turn it all back around.

  During the twilights, they took walks in the groves, an ostensible family. Joe raced circles around them, threw fruit, dug into anthills. Red concentrated only on the flex of distance between Yvette and himself. He took her hand and worried over her reciprocal grip. He did battle with an unceasing urge to drag her to him. Even outside, with miles of room, she could make him feel as if he were crowding her. He felt huge as a haystack, a plow horse, a dump truck—stupidly huge. When she sprang from his side to join Joe, he stood bereft until she returned.

  They slept in the spacious parlor of the house on a foam pad with sheets. When he reached for her, she collapsed against his chest obediently, a well-oiled folding chair. This was not the grab and gasp of first love, or even the friendly exchange of familiar intimacy; it was, he feared, good sportsmanship. Afterward, when she curled away from him, he would still be wildly awake, restraining himself from reaching out for her again. He hovered over her instead, paw poised, a bear baffled by a tortoise. He monitored the fluttering of her eyelids, the depth of her breath, and calculated how far she fled from him in her dreams.