Valley Fever (17 page)

Dad must have got overleveraged twenty years before, when he started buying all the cheap land that no one else knew was any good. As the land got more valuable, he could buy more on the cheap side, still soil worth more than anyone knew at the time. I had known all this for a long while. But Anne and I had always assumed Dad bought this land with the Napa money, the money from his cabernet.

At some point last year with the water restrictions and then a Malaysian strain of fruit flies and then a light but destructive late summer rain and then this year's unprecedented peach fungus and now a bit of a glut for common grapes, the banks began to call in the loans.

“Is all the land in debt?”

“Land in debt? Inky, make sense.”

“How much does Dad owe?”

“Oh yeah,” Wilson said, “all of it.” He spat sunflower shells and then looked at me with his stupid, plain look. “I guess if you don't know that already I'm not supposed to tell you.”

“I did know,” I fabricated a little. “I'm just making conversation.”

“Uncle Ned doesn't have to worry. What would the bank do with all that land? There's no one to buy it.”

“But seriously,” I said, “do you just tell anyone who asks whatever they want to know?”

Wilson cracked a seed and spit the shell. He didn't answer me. Crack, spit. Crack, spit. The crash of pads and helmets, the far-off yelling of the coaches down the field on the opposite sideline.

“I know you're the town cryer,” I said.

The banks only ever called in loans from the small farmers. Then they gave that land for cheap to the big players: Uncle Felix, Mello, Paramount. Dad would have been one of those big players, too, but he didn't need a bank to tell him which land was undervalued. Dad didn't have time for things like being on the board, endowments, trusteeships for Fresno State or Davis or USC. He never went to the society wine auctions in Napa. He knew nothing about “marketing to the consumer.” The things he should have been bothering with, Dad paid no attention. All his attention was on the land.

Wilson said, “I'd be so good to you, Inky. I'd take care of you.”

“You've said that before.” I accepted a swig from his flask. “It's getting tiresome.”

 

13.

The Palamede Farms offices were constructed, loftlike, on the upper half of the lot and warehouse that stored the trucks and harvesters. Through large windows you could, through a film of dust, look out from your desk to see tractors coming and going. Part of Dad's business for the past several years had been renting equipment to smaller farmers. This was something Phillip had taken care of.

“Where's Miguel's office?” I said.

“Miguel?”

“Where does Miguel work?”

“Miguel doesn't have an office,” Dad said.

“Phillip needs an office but Miguel doesn't?”

“Miguel likes to do his work in the field.”

“How does he keep track of everything?”

“How do you? Paper, your head.”

“No,” I said. “I don't keep track of anything on paper.”

Phillip's office was cold and dark and empty, and I wrote perfectly there. Too perfectly. In ten days I finished my screenplay—it was a very silly screenplay—and used Dad's FedEx account to send it off to the foundation that had given me the money.

“Didn't Phillip have a computer?”

“He kept records on paper, too.” He nodded toward a stack of binders on an extra chair against the wall.

“What is all that?”

“Invoices, work orders, contracts. I haven't gone through it entirely.” Dad scraped dry skin off his lower lip with his thumb.

“This is a mess.”

“It's fine, Inky. We'll get to it after the harvest.”

“Let me create a database for you.”

He nodded toward the chair. “You go ahead. Make something of those records, will you?”

Databases I could do. I knew databases from every assistant job I ever had.

Phillip's records were a catastrophe, scattered and incomplete, probably deliberately kept to confuse. There was no way to tell, for example, whether an invoice had been paid and when, how long farmers had had equipment, or which farmers had which trucks at the moment. There was no record of when Palamede had used vehicles and equipment and when trucks were used by other operations. This was information Phillip kept in his head, I suppose. I opened a simple series of spreadsheets and began entering information as I found it. Possibly an order would emerge. I didn't have much hope. Stupid people could be so clever. Phillip had been more of a disaster than I knew.

The cool of the air-conditioning had been set on high, too high, so that condensation blew from the vents in the floors and ceilings, and these sad laminate-wood-paneled rooms with the big dirty windows were quite chilly, almost to the point of discomfort.

The discomfort of the air-conditioning made me feel at home, sort of like the forced heat inside German buildings at the nadir of winter had made me feel at home. Maybe it's just the discomfort itself that seemed so familiar.

Here in Dad's ordinary office with the California Ag Grower of the Year award yellowing in the frame on the wall, the California Grape Growers tear-off desk calendar ready to be torn on every day of the week, the stapler made to look like a bunch of grapes, and those stacks and stacks of completely miscalculated and discombobulated and sneakily manipulated files, for the first time in a long time I had something to do. Inside that icebox of a loft-office, I was necessary. I was useful.

The raisin guys were cutting canes, so those machines were all rented out. We hadn't produced raisins for many years, so I started by trying to document that equipment: who had the harvesters and who had the cane cutters, which machines were going where in just the next two weeks. Phillip had scribbled records and reservations on the backs of receipts, on invoices for fertilizer, and occasionally on a more cohesive list he kept at the front of the newest binder. Phillip's system, if he'd had a system, made no sense.

“You want a job?” Dad asked from the doorway.

“Please don't ask me that again.”

“I've got to pay someone to do this, and you're doing it.” Dad ruffled his hair all over his head, like a happy dog, like a human being unable to contain his excitement that his dreams could possibly, with love and willingness, come true. There wasn't so much hair to ruffle—it came up in these lovely generous wisps of dry curls along the sides. Daddy is so handsome, but his hair disappeared anytime things got stressful. Hair is so unfaithful! (So is health.)

From the Formica wood-grain desk I could see the machines used for picking up the trays parked at the edge of the warehouse. Those vehicles wouldn't go out for another two or three weeks. Eleven pickup machines. “Do you have the same number of harvesters and cane cutters as you do pickup machines?”

“We bought those in clean sets as we needed them. I think we might have an extra pickup tractor.”

“You might?” Pickup tractors retrieved the dried raisins from the ground.

“For the years the weather looked like changing and we needed to pick up quick.” Dad loved to talk about the machines almost as much as he loved to talk about the fruit itself. He'd grown up pruning and caning and harvesting by hand; now there were trucks to do all of that, in a tenth the time. “Those machines shred the paper after drying, so the farmer doesn't have to burn anything. They just disk the trays back into the ground.” As with the land, Dad had been one of the earliest to realize which technologies would work. Some people would call him an early adopter, but I'd call him a visionary. There was no doubting Dad's genius.

“I don't know how to find records of which equipment you have. Do you have in your head all the machines you own?”

“Let's get some lunch.” He tapped his knuckles against the door frame. “Let's go see the boys at the Vineyard.”

We walked down through the warehouse. The old dust made me sneeze and sneeze, the kind of sneezes that make you momentarily blind: full blow-out sneezes in shades of white and yellow. The first sneeze made my hand completely wet. Dad always carried tissues in his pocket. He handed me a fresh one without remarking.

“You want me to come work with you, but you can't answer half my questions,” I said. I wiped my hand with Dad's tissue.

“You have a lot of questions.” The seats in the pickup were sticky-hot to the touch. “We'll find the records we need, Ingrid. Right now I need to get through the harvest. If we can't rent out the trucks this year, we won't rent the trucks. Why don't we just give 'em to people when they call?”

“Is that how you run this operation?”

My father's face was soft and stuffed pink with wine, but it was exactly the kind of face I knew a person could trust. He had a gentle, round face, a high-cheekboned and open-eyed face, which I have read is scientifically trustworthy.

“A lot of guys are going to make raisins last minute. Mello's coming in with an offer of two fifty a ton for juice. That's a hundred less than last year.”

“What about you, why don't you make some raisins?” I said.

“I've got a contract with Felix.”

“Felix is going to get all the Thompsons he needs. He doesn't need your Thompsons.”

“I've got a contract. We honor our contracts.” He wiped dust from the dashboard with a handkerchief from his pocket. With the drought, there was more dust everywhere, constantly. “Some guys are delivering their crop to the wineries without a firm price. We have a firm price.”

“A firm price on small grapes with not enough acid, if he keeps letting them hang.”

“The grapes are fine, Inky.”

“Annie doesn't trust Uncle Felix.”

“Annie's spent too much time in Hollywood.”

I did love lunch at the Vineyard in Madera, where all the farmers eat. When I was little, during school breaks, Dad would take us there on days he let us ride with him in the truck. I had a pair of embroidered pink cowboy boots we'd bought at the Golden Stallion on Blackstone, and I thought all you needed to really care for the land was an eye for broken irrigation lines and a pair of good boots.

Even now, the Vineyard felt like entering a special adult world understood only by the gruff men who inhabited the place, a secret society of farmers and the structure around them. The parking lot was full of clean white pickups.

Jack McGourty sat at the bar, with no one next to him. All the men in here had known Jack as long as they'd known anyone, but Jack was an insurance adjuster and a Democrat and so he sat by himself.

Jim Demerjian, the state assemblyman, and Gale Macpherson, former Kingsburg High quarterback and scion of three thousand acres of pistachios, sat at a circular table in the middle of the bar room. Nick Angelico was there too, the box manufacturer who had extorted his daughter to dump her girlfriend and return home, and Harry Cline, who grew a couple thousand acres of grapes and ran Cline Packing.

“You want to eat in the restaurant or the bar?” Dad said.

When I was a little girl, we always ate in the restaurant, with its white tablecloths and red leather armchairs. “I want to eat with the boys.”

The bar was dark wood with no tablecloths and it smelled slightly of the cigars that had been smoked just outside.

The boys all raised their hands to Dad. Gale tipped his cowboy hat and stood to pull out my chair. “Living proof that farming's getting younger,” Jim said.

“I'm just visiting,” I said.

Harry Cline laughed that deep, rough farmer laugh, a laugh with dust in it. “They all come back,” he said. “Right, Nick?”

“All you kids come back.”

“If labor stays twelve dollars an hour, you'll all come back to build shopping malls,” Gale said. Gale, still tall and broad, still held his team together like a quarterback.

Dad said, “Not this one.”

“I'm not the shopping mall type,” I said. “I'd rather see crops.”

Nick said, “Have the salmon, Ned. I caught it myself last week.” Other men, men with far less money than Nick Angelico, came back from fishing trips to Alaska and made gifts to their friends of long salmon filets. Nick Angelico was so cheap that he traded salmon he caught fishing in Alaska to the Vineyard for a dining credit.

“Jim was giving us a finance lesson,” said Harry.

“Oh good,” said Dad. “Politicians have such a firm grasp of money.” He gave Jim's shoulder a pat. These guys depended on Jim for water from the state.

“He says we all ought to be drying our grapes,” Harry said.

“Turkey had more than three hundred tons of raisins last year,” Jim said. “They've got just under half that this year, and that's a huge opportunity for us in Europe.”

“Us,” said Dad. “You growing grapes, Jimmy?” The Demerjians had always been lawyers, not farmers.

“Doesn't make a lot of sense to harvest green,” Jim said.

“You have something against wine?” said Dad.

“I have an interest in you boys making money,” Jim said.

“Ingrid, what do you think?” Harry said.

“I think you guys should lay out half your crop.”

“Ah, Ingrid likes to diversify,” said Gale, leaning far back in his chair and crossing his big arms over that huge football chest.

“Higher risk, lower reward,” Harry said, shaking his head, waving me away. “Two labor crews, two sets of machines. You don't diversify one crop.”

“I would,” I said. “Mello's tanks are still full from last year. Isn't that right, Dad?”

“And juice from overseas,” Dad said.

“Still, Griffith is buying your juice. So why lay out to dry?” Harry said.

“Just in case,” I said.

Harry laughed his rough laugh again. “You'll learn,” he said.

“All right,” I said. “Wait until the wineries start cutting off your deliveries.”