Valley Boy

Book Two of the California Quartet

by

Jack Remick

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Camel Press on Smashwords

Valley Boy

Copyright © 2012 by Jack Remick

Published by Coffeetown Press

PO Box 70515

Seattle, WA 98127

For more information go to: www.coffeetownpress.com

www.blood.camelpress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Cover design by M. Anne Sweet and Sabrina Sun

VALLEY BOY

Copyright © 2012 by Jack Remick

ISBN: 978-1-60381-145-3 (Trade Paper)

ISBN: 978-1-60381-146-0 (eBook)

Produced in the United States of America

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When they came out of the dustbowl, they carried things on their backs. The things they couldn’t carry they left behind for the thieves and the looters of antiques. When they came out of the dustbowl, there was nowhere to go but west because the fruit was in the West and ranchers needed hands to pick it.

They had hands.

When they came out of the dustbowl, his mother was three years old and she had one pair of shoes and one dress and the dress was sewn from a Gold Medal flour sack.

They came out of the dustbowl into the West to get to the sea, to get to wet land, to get to the oranges, to get to peaches and pears and apricots, to get to grapes and almonds and the cotton.

California was as far West as they could go …

* * * * *

Summer

Blood of the Lamb

Sal slipped the tractor in gear and headed for the clearing at the end of the row where the semi waited to haul the last Saturday load to the fruit packer in Centerville. The trailer groaned as Ricky Edwards hopped on the tail end. He smelled the peaches in their ripeness, felt the peach fuzz grind at the creases of his bare arms, peach fuzz clawing at his neck in the heat.

Ricky was riding his last load of peaches. Load them onto the semi and he’d never swamp another peach pick because Linard Polk had been after him to hire on with Ron Drath debeaking turkeys. There was more money in turkeys, Linard said, and you didn’t have to eat peach fuzz.

In a cloud of orchard dust Sal swung out of the row going fast. Ricky shouted at him to slow down, but Sal cut the trailer hard and hit a berm. The load shifted and flipped, tossing Ricky off the trailer and sending all forty peach picks spilling in a crash and snap of breaking limbs.

Ricky rolled into the choking spray of dust, landed on his back, and, staring up at the canopy of peach trees in a swirl, he heard Sal shouting,

Ay carajo, ayudame, Ricky.

Ricky saw the trailer cocked at an angle, its tongue snapped. The tractor was on its side still chugging, the drive wheel gnawing at Sal, who lay in the dust flailing his arms and yelling.

Mouth full of the fine dusty powder, Ricky jumped up on the tractor, kicked it out of gear and killed the engine, but the engine dieseled and belched black smoke before it stopped. The tractor wheel had chewed up Sal’s leg just below the knee. He lay on his back, hands shoving at the tire. There was a lot of blood. Blood and bone and dust and blue jeans ground up in the redness of meat. Ricky, panting, hands out helpless said, Jesus, Sal, and he watched the light in Sal’s eyes go dim. His face lost its color and his skin turned green and the hands that had clawed at the churning wheel fell limp. Ricky squatted, felt Sal’s neck—only a slow beat of pulse—and then he ran.

He ran out of the orchard, out of the heat, out of death to the road where Glen Minter was getting out of his pickup. Saturday, pay day. Glen always came to the clearing where the semis waited to pay the pickers in cash for their week’s work. Ricky shouted,

Glen, Sal’s rolled the tractor. He’s hurt.

Glen climbed in his pickup and cranked it on and headed into the orchard. Ricky ran back to the tractor, back to Sal. Glen came in from the side of the orchard rocking like a ship over the irrigation berms, the top of the pickup ripping limbs from the trees. His peach trees. The branches, thick with peaches, cracked like bones and the peaches smashed with soft plops on the pickup then dropped into the dust with bomb-like thuds. Glen jumped out and ran to Sal. Breathless, Ricky stood beside Glen. Sal’s eyes were open, his hands dusty and raised as if in hopeless prayer and he said,

Glen, I fockin’ sorry, man.

It’s just peaches, Sal.

Glen knelt. He said,

Ricky, go to the pickup. There’s a jack behind the seat. A couple of blocks in the bed. Bring ’em. Let’s get this weight off.

Ricky got the jack. He got the blocks. Glen lay the blocks in the dirt and Sal groaned.

We’ll have you out in a sec, buddy, Glen said.

I focked the whole fockin’ load, Glen, Sal said.

Glen set the jack on the trailer hitch. He cranked the handle.

The tractor shifted. And Sal groaned. Glen ran the jack up a couple of notches. Sal grunted and flopped back in the dust.

Ricky, Glen said, pull him out soon’s I clear this.

Glen hit the jack again and Sal grunted. His eyes fluttered closed. He went limp again. Glen raised the jack another notch. Grasping Sal’s arms, Ricky pulled. Sal slid out of the dust away from the tractor wheel and when Ricky had him clear, the blocks in the dust shifted and the jack collapsed and the wheel slammed to the ground in a shower of smothering dust and Glen coughed.

Ricky looked at Sal’s leg. Blood and meat where the wheel had eaten through Sal’s Levis, the blood turning dirty brown with its caking of dust. Glen said,

Gimme your belt, Ricky.

Ricky unbuckled and stripped the leather from his jeans and he handed the belt to Glen who laced the belt around Sal’s thigh just above the torn-up knee. When he cinched it Sal went very quiet.

Glen moved slow and steady like a machine, like he’d done this before, like he’d seen men bleed and seen bone torn through flesh. No hurry in his hands, none of the jittery rush of fear running through Ricky. Glen unhooked the tailgate of the pickup, locked it in place with the chains. He said,

Now, let’s get him up in here, Ricky.

Ricky looked at the leg, the blood, the dirt ground into the leg and he said,

You think we ought to move him?

Move him or he’s a dead man.

Ricky laced his arms around Sal’s chest, locked his fingers in a good grip while Glen, squatting, held Sal’s busted leg like a man cradling a baby. Glen’s face softened as he hefted slow and easy. Sal puffed like he’d been running hard and gritted his teeth. Ricky synched his lift with Glen’s gentleness and together they laid Sal up in the bed of the pickup. Ricky climbed in beside him.

In the cab, Glen hit the starter but the engine was already running and the starter chattered and Glen shouted son of bitch as he closed the door and slammed the pickup in gear and shot out of the grove and onto the dirt road, bouncing Ricky, who held Sal down in the dust and the blood. Ricky had a thickening knot in his throat as Sal went limp and silent, his left foot twisted, disconnected, the bone jutting out jagged as a broken stick.

Glen drove hard into Centerville. He ran all the stop signs. He ran the lone red light at Academy and Main. The loose peaches that had fallen into the pickup rolled around, banging against the bed. Glen hauled up at the Centerville Hospital. Sal opened his eyes and gripped Ricky’s hand. He said,

Ricky, I fockin’ left my thermos on the tractor.

I’ll take care of it, Sal, Ricky said.

Glen ran into the hospital leaving Ricky with Sal, who looked pale, his breathing shallow. Blood had leaked into the pickup bed, a bright pool of it, and Ricky felt queasy but he held onto Sal, who said,

I don’t feel nothin’, Ricky.

You’ll be okay, Ricky said.

Glen ran back out with a doctor and a nurse who was shoving a gurney. They laid Sal on the gurney and got him inside. For a long time Ricky sat on the curb remembering the churn of the tractor wheel and the sound of the cracking tree limbs and the thud of the peaches hitting the metal bed of the pickup and Sal’s blood in the back. He peeled off his T-shirt and he was going to swab up the blood but through the rear window of the pickup, he caught sight of the leather pouch Glen carried the Saturday cash in.

It was a thick leather pouch with a zipper and money poked out of the mouth of the pouch.

Ricky got down from the bed and he opened the pickup door. Under the pouch lay the tally sheets with the amount due each picker for each thirty-pound box of fruit. At the top of the list was the name Gloria Sanchez.

The pickup smelled like Glen. Sweat. Dirt. Gasoline. Peaches. All that money.

Ricky took a deep breath. Held it. Let it out slow. He looked at his hands. Sal’s blood on his hands, on his T-shirt. He slid the money pouch under the seat of the pickup and he pulled his T-shirt back on and then he buckled.

He dropped to his knees on the curb and he puked until the dry heaves cramped his gut. Pushing himself to his feet, he closed the door to the pickup and sat back down on the curb waiting until Glen walked out of the hospital. Glen’s hat, a gray straw hat with a red tassel at the back like the Mexican pickers wore, was shoved up on his head. He squatted beside Ricky. He said,

Boy’s gonna lose that leg.

Glen, Ricky said. There was nothing I could do. It happened fast.

Glen put his arm around Ricky’s shoulder. Then he jumped and he said,

My pickers. Damn. They’re waiting and here I sit on my butt. Come on, Ricky.

He got in the pickup. Ricky hopped in back.

Get up here, Glen called and Ricky crawled out of the bed and climbed in on the passenger side. Glen started the pickup and headed for the ranch. He said,

You hid the money pouch under the seat.

Yes, sir, Ricky said.

Did you look in it?

Yes, sir. Glen, I’m sorry.

No need to say anything, Ricky.

Yes, sir.

He drove, quiet, his right hand on the wheel, his left arm out the window.

The orchard was already deep in shadows when they got back to the ranch. The pickers were lounging on the hoods of their cars or sitting inside, doors open, listening to the radio and waiting for their money. The women had taken off their scarves and hats and had shaken out their hair and stripped away their long-sleeved plaid shirts. Ricky liked to watch them change from wrapped up, faceless pickers into women with long shiny black hair as they shook it out. In the Centerville heat their skin was covered with a light sheen of sweat. They were out of the orchard, but the smell of peaches hung all around them. Ricky watched them preen and primp as they got ready for Glen with his big fat pouch full of cash.

In the twilight Glen got out of the pickup, carrying the pouch. He walked across the clearing between the road and the grove. It was a slow walk and he was a big man and he kicked up dust until he stopped in front of the pickers. Glen said,

Sal’s hurt. Bad. The boy is gonna lose his leg. I’m sorry that has happened.

He walked up to the closest picker, the Mexican woman named Isabela. He said,

Isabela, I want to thank you for working in my orchard. I appreciate your honesty.

You are a good man, Glen, Isabela said.

He did that for each picker. He walked up to her and laid the cash in her hand and thanked her. It was the first time that Ricky had seen him do that. On other Saturdays, Glen had sat on the tailgate of his pickup while the pickers formed a line and each one took her turn in front of Glen. But that Saturday Glen Minter walked up to each of the pickers and handed them the cash.

Ricky looked at Glen and his pickers and he felt a shiver of shame. He rammed his hands into his pockets and thought about just how in hell he was going to tell Glen he wasn’t coming back on Monday because he was going to go debeak turkeys and he was going to debeak turkeys because he needed to buy a car and he had to buy a car to get into the Lifters car club and that’s what he wanted.

A Plague of Locusts

They swarmed like a plague of locusts—the women in black dresses and black stockings and black shoes. The women with their faces black-veiled, their hair nested up in black nets as they knelt before the cross before descending to their sanctuary in the basement under the altar where they waited and chanted and gave testimony.

Ricky was ten when, after priesthood and sitting under the walnut tree by the tabernacle, he saw them that first time, coming up out of the sanctuary into the sunlight, eyes blinking, arms raised, singing, then dropping to their knees on the lawn as if the sun weighed too much for their frail bones. His heart raced because Teresa wasn’t like that—eyes wild and crazy—and he had been afraid of the women because they were speaking a language he didn’t know.

Now, in the heat of the summer, he watched them in the tabernacle on their knees before the cross while the boy-priests carried the meat and the blood to the congregation. Ricky ate the meat. He found it stale. He drank the blood. It was warm. He did not hear God speak to him but his stomach rebelled and the aching inside him did not feel divine. He watched the church daughters, dressed like white princesses, eyeing him, eyeing the other boy-priests—sons of Aaron, sons anointed with oil and blessed with the rod and sworn to spread the word of the Book unto eternity.

And after the Elders had given testimony and after they had passed the Word to the men and after the men had yielded to the women, they sang. Ricky mouthed the words but he did not sing the music. He watched Teresa at the organ playing without the score and he floated in the music, but he did not feel the fishhook in the heart drawing him closer to the man on the cross over the altar. On the altar cloth were vases and in the vases, roses. Always roses, and Ricky swallowed, choking, as if he had bitten into a hunk of raw red meat.

****

On the way home, late Sunday evening after last service, Ricky drove. Teresa said,

You didn’t sing.

I was listening to you play.

Why didn’t you give Testimony?

Ricky pulled into the driveway of the house on Richard Avenue. The house was dark, the porch light off, the grass black with night. He shut down the Ford. He said,

After tonight I’m not going to church anymore.

Oh Ricky, you don’t want to do that.

Linard did and I will.

Linard stands between you and your destiny.

Yeah. Sure. My destiny.

If you can leave the church, why can’t you leave this Valley?

Say I do leave. You’ll be alone. Is that what you want?

I managed all this time without a man.

And the church women keep their eyes on you because they’re afraid you’ll horn in on their men.

I don’t need their men. I have Mr. Bach.

Maybe you should quit talking to Mr. Bach and talk to Al Tate. He could use a third wife.

Ricky, you’re not their judge.

Well, I’m not going back.

You think you know everything, but the road is long and the gate is strait.

Quoting scripture won’t make me change my mind.

Linard. That boy. You don’t walk out on Jesus the way he did.

Well, there’re some things I’ve gotta do, Teresa and I don’t need Jesus to get them done.

Why can’t you call me Mother? I am your mother.

Teresa got out of the car, but Ricky stayed behind the wheel. At the door, she turned to him. She was small, in black, holding her Book, looking lost. Looking like Beth.

Mr. Bach

Entering the house, Teresa switched on the lamp in the living room and glanced back at the car where Ricky still sat. In the dim light he looked so much like Jimmy Lee that Teresa had to turn away. She glanced at the piano. She remembered the day Jimmy Lee had bought the spinet for her at a yard sale. She remembered being alone for weeks while Jimmy Lee worked in the mountains, in the tunnels, good at what he did with machines, good with his hands, good at making money, coming home every other weekend only to hand her a paycheck and tell her not to spend it all in one place. Sunday afternoons, he left again after warning Teresa to make the mortgage payment because he hated owing money to the god-damned banks, leeches eating his blood. She shuddered, remembering his language. He had left her alone with two babies.

****

Teresa sat in the late Sunday night quiet sanctuary of the piano and she thought of Ricky, seventeen, hungry to be a man. The church wasn’t working for him. There was no fear in him, and for that she was happy, but his fearlessness drove him to the edge and there, she was afraid, he would be lost.

She left the piano. She went into the kitchen, ran a glass of water and carried it to her bedroom, where she took off her black dress thinking that Ricky, if he left the church, might not go on to the water. She unbuckled her black shoes thinking that Beth had left her for a better place but without Ricky she would be alone. She slipped into the gray chenille robe knowing that Ricky had taken up with Linard Polk, a mirror image of Jimmy Lee Edwards, and he was leading Ricky into the same dark places men sought, places where he drank and smoked and defiled his body. Just like his father. Teresa cinched the robe tight to cover the gray garment that she had vowed to wear. She remembered, with reluctance, the touch of Jimmy Lee’s hands on her skin when he stripped the garment from her because he said he wasn’t gonna take a bath with a raincoat on. She loosened her hair and let it fall to her shoulders as she remembered the bite of his teeth on her neck. She heard the door open. Ricky was walking down the hall. His footsteps sounded like Jimmy Lee’s—the same heavy, measured tread. She heard him close the door to his room and there was silence.

She went from her bedroom to the piano. Eyes closed, she dreamed the music, triumphant, presto, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, the way Mr. Bach intended it. In her singing mind, a great light opened and it was pure and true but then the heat rose in her and she snapped her legs together and bowed her head in shame.

Exodus I

Linard showed up at 6:15. He looked tired, worn out. He had a Marlboro in his mouth, unlit. He slouched behind the wheel half-asleep. He said,

Did you get your fill of Jesus yesterday?

Not gonna take the sacrament anymore.

Linard sat up straight, pulled the Marlboro from his mouth and punched Ricky in the shoulder. He said,

You keep that up, they’ll mark your forehead with the same black X they stuck on me.

Doesn’t matter. I’m not going back.

Takes guts, Linard said.

Didn’t slow you down. Ron had you working last night?

Sunday don’t mean shit to a buncha turkeys, Ricky.

Yeah, well, thanks for this. But I gotta tell Glen this morning.

From Centerville the drive to Glen Minter’s ranch took ten minutes. Even with the windows down, the air was steamy. The sun, already pinking the sky, lifted over the Sierra and bled down into the windshield. The humidity made it hard to breathe but it wasn’t the air weighing on Ricky Edwards as he pulled down the visor. Linard turned left on Quality Avenue, pulled up on the gravel shoulder across from Glen’s orchard. Ricky said,

This won’t take but a minute.

Linard pulled out a book of matches stamped with the Blue and Gold Liquor Store logo. He lit the Marlboro. Ricky left him leaning against the hood of the Merc and walked into the orchard past the cars the pickers drove. They were not new cars. They were beat up but they were good. The pickers came one car at a time, parked in the dust, stirring up little dust devils. A picker named Carmen Mendez got out of her Chevy two door with a busted radio antenna and a cracked windshield. Carmen was a tiny woman with straight black hair. She set her straw hat with the red tassel on the hood of her Chevy. She pulled on the long-sleeved cotton shirt. It was light blue. She buttoned it up all the way then tied a red bandana around her neck. She put on the straw hat. The tassel swung back and forth and she was no longer Carmen Mendez but a faceless, nameless Mexican picker wearing the same uniform all the pickers wore to fight off the peach fuzz and the sweat that glued it to the skin. Ricky was watching the other pickers when Glen Minter rode up in his pickup. Glen got out and said,

Ricky, are you okay?

I called the hospital. They said Sal wasn’t there.

That’s right. They took him to Fresno.

How’s he doing?

Okay as a man can be who’s lost a leg.

Glen, Ricky said. I don’t think I can work for you anymore.

’Cause of what happened Saturday to Sal?

No sir. Well. Some. A little.

That’s the nature of things. A man works, sometimes he gets hurt.

I guessed that, Ricky said. But I’ve been thinking about it for a while.

Glen thumbed his suspenders and snapped them. He wore red suspenders with gold buckles. His belly was flat and he hitched his pants with a black belt, but he still wore suspenders. Ricky caught the worry lines on Glen’s face, lines etched deep like he’d been up all night. Glen said,

Well, Ricky. You not working kind of leaves me in a bind, you know?

I don’t mean to leave you in a bind.

I can’t get a man from farm labor out here till noon and in about an hour those pickers’ll have a load of fruit for the semi.

I’m sorry, Glen. I could of called but calling would of been kind of chicken-shit.

Gotta hand you that. At least you came out to tell me man to man.

I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, Ricky said. If you need a hand with the pruning this Fall, I’ll be around.

Look, son. If you walk out on