Читать книгу Red Earth White Earth - Will Weaver - Страница 9

Prologue

The letter came to his office. Its writing, in pencil, wobbled diagonally across the envelope, fell over the edge, came back on a new track. No return address but the postmark was from Minnesota.

March 15, 1984

Guy—

Trouble here. Come home when you can.

Sincerely,

Your grandfather, Helmer Pehrsson

Guy Pehrsson, thirty, tall, fair-haired, with wide, bony shoulders, turned off his phone. He swung around in his chair to look out the high window of his office. His view was east. Across the blue end of San Francisco Bay were the inland foothills. It was March in California. The air was rain-scrubbed and clear. The hills rose up rounded and green. A thin blanket of gray clouds drifted just above their summits. Beyond the hills two thousand miles were Minnesota and the farm Guy had grown up on.

Guy looked again at the letter. He was surprised his grandfather could write. Twelve years ago Helmer’s stroke had left him as stiff as a garden hose left outside in December. But some parts of him must have thawed.

Trouble.

Guy had left Minnesota because of trouble. Trouble with Martin, his father.

Trouble with the farm, with the bank, with Helmer.

No trouble with Madeline, his mother. But in the twelve years Guy had been gone she seldom wrote. The first year in California he waited for his mother’s letters. When they did come he was always angry at their brevity. Her notes told of early killing frosts. Of Guy’s classmates killed in farming or trucking accidents. Of the need for rain.

Guy wrote equally short notes in reply. After a year he stopped writing at all. Madeline’s notes continued to come, usually around Christmas, his birthday, Easter, and other holidays, but Guy did not bother a reply. He had his own life now. A new life. He had nothing to say to his family.

He left his office early and drove home. His house sat in the foothills above Palo Alto. It was a square, steep-roofed house made of redwood with a glass front. As Guy pulled into his garage, inside the house Kennedy began to bark. Kennedy was his dachshund.

He fixed Kennedy a bowl of food and poured a glass of cold Chablis for himself. He stood with the wine, reading the letter again. Afterward, he looked out his picture window. The sun shone. Three houses down the hill, alongside the blue kidney bean of her swimming pool, the red-haired lady sunbathed topless while two Mexican men mowed her lawn. She always sunbathed when the gardeners were there.

Farther down, cars moved silently on Highway 280 toward Sunnyvale and San Jose. Down there beneath the flat lid of city haze was Guy’s company, a white, supermarket-size building. Inside, a hundred men and women rolled carts of green and copper printed circuit boards from station to station. Outside, pink Toyota speedy-delivery trucks came and went like tropical ants as they shuttled Guy’s circuit boards to the receiving doors of the big computer companies in the Bay Area. Doors and mouths. His company spit out circuit boards as fast as it could make them. The large electronic factories of Silicon Valley swallowed them up in great, endless gulps.

Guy was glad he could not see his company from his house. He did not like to think about it when he was not there. He paid people to do that. Paid them well. Well enough that they took care of everything. Guy usually worked a half day, then drove up to the library at Stanford to read, or else up to the city, San Francisco, to the art galleries or to concerts. California had been good to him.

He unfolded his grandfather’s letter again. The writing was as faint as sparrow tracks in sand. He ran his fingers across the words. Below on the page was a faint baby’s foot of oil from the side of Helmer’s hand. Guy held the smudged page up to his nose. When he closed his eyes he smelled straw, old wool, cows.

Come home.

He looked about his house. He was home. On one wall were his books, the rolling oak library ladder that reached the top shelves.

On another wall were his paintings. Centered was a wide oil entitled “A Thousand Cows.” The cows were black and white Holsteins, the cow lot was walnut-brown mud with a chartreuse June hillside behind, and every cow had turned its head to look out of the canvas into the room; when he first saw the painting in a gallery, Guy imagined that someone near the cows had fired a gun. Beside the big oil was a print of Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s Der Traum des toten Indianers; its Indian lay dreaming at the bottom of a city.

On an opposite wall were stereo gear and shelves of records. Alongside the turntable were two albums, B. B. King and Strauss. He put on the Strauss. Some waltzes. Strauss was music to think by.

He sipped his wine, which outlasted the waltzes by a full hour. When he swallowed the last drop he stood up, called for Kennedy, and began to pack.

He would not stay long, two weeks at most. He took jeans, sweaters—there would still be snow in Minnesota—heavy socks. Leather gloves. Boots. A down jacket. More.

Music for the trip. He paged through his cassette tapes, picked out Strauss. Haydn. Gershwin. Brubeck. B. B. King. Duane Allman. Boz Scaggs. Lynyrd Skynyrd. The Who. Bob Dylan. Leo Kottke. Emmylou Harris. Buffy Sainte-Marie.

He took his briefcase. Inside were miscellaneous company papers. From his coffee table he added a couple of books, plus the latest issue of Rose Grower’s Monthly.

He called Karen, his secretary. He called Mrs. Cadillo, his housekeeper. He called Susan, a dark-eyed, black-haired Ph.D. candidate in literature whom he had met not long ago in the Stanford stacks. He told them he would be gone on business for two weeks.

He talked longest with Susan. They had dated enough times to sense that each saw large flaws in the other, but flaws not so large as to prevent them from sleeping together when either of them wanted to. Dating a grad student was like making hurried-up popcorn: lots of butter, high heat, instant noise. He thought briefly of seeing her before he left, but the faint puzzlement in her voice told him she was studying. She would finish her degree in the spring. There would be more time. They would see what developed then.

Last, he inspected his plants on his deck. The knobby jade plant he moved a bit more to shade. His tubs of roses he pushed farther into sunlight. The Simon Bolivar was past prime, and he cut away one of its orange-red blooms and two suckers. His Flaming Peace was only now opening, blood red inside with gold reverses. It would be in full bloom when he returned.

Fifty hours, a quarter gram of cocaine, and three speeding tickets later—one in Reno, a second near Idaho Falls, the third somewhere in dark North Dakota—Guy drove across the bridge in Fargo and entered Minnesota.

It was just after midnight. He held his gray Mercedes sedan carefully at ten miles over the speed limit. The oncoming headlights in Moorhead burned behind his eyes. Without slowing, he tipped back his head for more eyedrops, then blinked into the mirror. Oncoming headlights gathered in his white-blond hair, then slid down the long thin slightly bent line of his nose. Closer, the headlights revealed his eyes, small and blue in daylight, squinted and dark tonight. In their eclipse, the headlights illuminated his sharply Nordic features.

He blinked and rolled his eyes to see if they still worked. For a moment in the dark glass of the mirror he saw his father’s face. He looked away and concentrated on the road.

On the outskirts of Moorhead he drove beyond the last streetlight. He thought of the Robert Frost poem “Acquainted with the Night,” of the line about outwalking “the furthest city light.”

His mother had read him that poem once when he was young. Guy did not understand it, but the poem felt lonely. Madeline began to talk about the poem, but then Martin, his father, came in from the barn. She put the book away.

Beyond Moorhead the darker landscape and the eyedrops soothed his vision. But then the ache behind his eyes slid to his belly. He had not eaten since Salt Lake City. Yet there were only sixty miles left to drive. Then the farm. He could eat there.

The Strauss tape ended. He had forgotten it was playing. He replaced it with a Buffy Sainte-Marie tape. For a few miles he listened to her high, wailing songs, the Indian drums behind. It was good night music, full of bonfires and torches and dancing, music to stay awake by. But soon he turned that off too. There was always a point on a long trip when one drove beyond music or talk or even sleep. It was the point at which he drove from the present into the past.