Mother Nature Read online

  “Bull-shit I will! He’s probably writing down my license number right now, or worse yet, the name of our company, and he’s going to sue me! Sue me, and I was the one minding my own business and staying in my lane! Goddamn shithead bicyclists think they own the road!”

  I sighed and slumped back in the seat, resigned to my fate. This guy Duke was just going to make me nuts, that was all. Too bad he hadn’t seen me; then he’d follow us to wherever we were going for sure, and I could grab him by his slippery spandex and demand a few answers.

  Adam was still displaying the reeking underside of his paranoia as we turned and dropped down off the ridge of hills toward the east. I watched for glimpses of the Laguna, figuring we were within a mile or two of Occidental Road now. At the bottom of the hill, Adam stopped to open a gate of welded stainless steel that hung between tall fieldstone posts like the ones at Mrs. Karsh’s house, and we passed into a yard full of long, steel-roofed industrial buildings and parked in front of what was clearly the office. A crisply lettered sign set tastefully low to the ground declared that we were at the corporate headquarters of Misty Creek Winery.

  The cement parking bumper nearest the main door read “Karsh.” I turned quickly to Adam. “Is this Karsh any relation to the woman who lives on the other side of the Laguna, down on Sanborn Road?”

  “How the fuck would I know?”

  “But we’re sampling monitoring wells here?”

  “Yeah. Four wells. There was a diesel and a gasoline tank over by the shipping barn. We pulled them six months ago. Bad leakers; six inches of product floating on top of the groundwater. We have a skimmer going in the center well to get what we can.”

  “And the other three wells?”

  “The regulators have us sample them quarterly for a year, to document the level of contamination on the site.”

  “You drilled these wells, too?”

  Adam’s expression darkened from low clouds to thunderheads. “No. Janet.”

  Aha! Janet’s father was right; she worked right here, doing geology. Karshes here, Karshes there. There must be a connection! I went on the alert, head on a swivel.

  Adam’s head was swiveling, too. He was grumbling, “Stay here. I got to check in. And keep the doors closed!” Cracking his door slowly, he peered this way and that, then jumped out and ran toward the office door.

  Before Adam’s skinny legs reached the doorway, a Doberman pinscher darted out from behind the neatly planted shrubberies, blocking Adam’s path. It went into a crouch. A low, full-throated growl resonated from its throat.

  “Git!” Adam shouted, his voice rising frantically to a squeal. “Hey, the dog’s loose! Hey, someone come get this goddamn thing!”

  The office door swung open and a tall woman in her middle years with flame-red hair, a long nose, and plump cheeks stuck her head out. “Tina!” she called. The dog wheeled, braced, looked confused, cowered, and came to her. “Bad girl. How’d you get loose?” she cooed, rattling a cluster of costume jewelry as she stroked the animal’s narrow skull. “Aww, that man yelling at you? Come in here.” To Adam she said, “Sorry,” and tossed him a large, condescending wink.

  Adam lowered his head. “We’re here to do the wells. You’ll keep her in?”

  “Of course. How long will you be?”

  “Out of here by five, trust me.”

  The woman retreated into the office, the dog held loosely by the collar.

  Adam hurried back to the truck and backed it quickly away, turning past the office block toward a cluster of storage barns at the back of the main factory building. “You got to watch out for that dog,” he was saying, gesticulating fiercely with his free hand. “She’s trouble. There’s two of them; sisters. They let them out together at night when the gate’s locked and everyone’s gone, to patrol the grounds. They usually keep at least one in the kennels during the day. You see only one of them, you’re maybe okay, but you ever see them both at once, you jump for the highest spot you can find; they’re attack dogs, and don’t you try to pet them!”

  Sure enough, as we pulled up to the end of the buildings, we were greeted by a second skinny Doberman, this one a brown to the other one’s black. Like her sister, she at first cowered, but this one broke and ran away the instant Adam opened the door. “This one’s okay, but don’t get close,” he cautioned.

  “I’ve never heard of timid guard dogs,” I offered.

  “Dangerous. Worst kind. Hard to predict a piss-head dog with the heart of a fucking chicken. They’re psychotic. It’s like either one of them’s only half a dog, but you get them together, they’ll try anything. Just watch your back.”

  * * *

  THE AIR HAD a slicing dampness to it, threatening rain. Between the buildings I could glimpse the bottomlands of the Laguna, that broad dish of land out there just waiting to flood. I imagined all those steep-sided ditches filling, the water rushing, now brimming over the top and setting the roads awash.… My mind even fed me the image of Janet’s sodden body, swept along by the deluge.

  Give me high ground in a rainstorm. I do not like to argue with water. Most easterners don’t understand water, or know its power. They’ve never seen a landscape hit by the passion of a western storm, seen it shed the waters into steep-sided gullies that are one moment dry and the next shoulder-high in roiling, churning water. Crops are washed out, or rot, when the rains come too hard and too sudden. No one had to explain the image of the biblical flood to me, where farmers saw their lowland universe consumed by waters, and prayed for the salvation of just a spot of dry land.

  Surveying the flat ground around the winery, I told myself that I had just been around Adam too long, and was catching his paranoia. But I did say a prayer that I be allowed to just stay warm and dry until this job was done, and promised the Great Whatever out there that I would buy a good rain slicker over the coming weekend.

  The three wells we had to sample were spaced in a large triangle scattered in between the buildings, such that I could not see from one to the next. Adam did a lot of cussing as he set me up with a whiny little pump and the truck battery that powered it, and with tubing and bailers and leaking drums of expelled contaminated water. My job, he explained, was to watch as the well water was purged into the drums and to monitor a bunch of gadgets that measured the temperature, pH, and conductivity of said water. He handed me another one of his forms. “See, what you do is, every five minutes you take a reading, and mark it down here. See, the water’s really muddy right now. It’ll take a while. When the water’s running clear and the temp and so forth have been stable for three readings, it means we’re getting a true sample from the soil, not just the degassed water that’s been sitting in the well casing. Then you come get me, and I’ll show you how to collect the sample.” Having said this, he got back into the truck and disappeared around the corner, leaving me sitting on an overturned plastic milk crate for a chair, holding the clipboard on my knees as a desk.

  The pump whined away.

  I thought longingly of the nice, warm office, wanting nothing better than to march over there and strike up a woman-to-woman conversation with that redheaded secretary and find out just what had transpired on this site between Janet Pinchon and anyone named Karsh. But no, the readings I was supposed to take were timed too close together, and if there’s one thing I believe in, it’s not screwing up the collection of scientific data.

  It had clouded over again, was beginning to spit rain, and starting to get pretty brisk. I zipped Janet’s jacket up snugly around my throat (wondering how long it would take before its nylon shell wet through and the down fill began to compact), stuffed my hands in my pockets, and began to hum, waiting for the five-minute tinier on my watch to go off. After taking the first reading, I got up and began to do demipliés, kind of bouncing up and down to keep warm. When the freshening breeze began to whip my hair into my eyes, I checked my watch and moved over into the lee of a row of huge wooden brewing barrels that smelled of vinegar, each about a story tall.r />
  I had three and a half minutes to go before my next reading, and the water running into the barrel was still turbid. With the growing chill beginning to ram my shoulders up underneath my ears, I drew farther in among the barrels. The reek of vinegar grew stronger. Beyond them, a door to the adjacent building stood open. I glanced at my watch. Three minutes to go. I went in.

  It was no warmer inside, but at least it was out of the wind and wet. I looked around. The concrete floor had a large hole in it, from which emanated an enormous Archimedes’ screw about four feet in diameter. I followed the screw with my eyes up to the second story of the building, trying to reason out its function. It appeared that the screw would carry materials up to a conveyor that fed a hopper that in turn fed a heavy press. The press stood six feet tall, and was served by plate-steel beds that wheeled back and forth on tracks and a huge hydraulic ram.

  “What you think, young lady?” came a voice behind me.

  I jumped and turned. A short, aging man with a still proud chest but sagging jowls stood between me and the doorway. As I faced him, his eyes popped, and he took an involuntary step backward.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, stepping toward him.

  The man put a hand to his chest. “It’s okay. I—you just look like someone.” He spread his mouth in a wide show of teeth that gleamed here and there with eighteen-karat dentistry. The eyes were feverishly bright, yet sad and pensive.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, making small talk to put him at his ease. I had a strong suspicion who I must have looked like, but I knew better than to jump right in with the obvious questions. “I guess I’m not supposed to be in here, but you see, I’m sampling that well out there, and I just wanted to get out of the wind, and…”

  The man shrugged his shoulders and began to rock back and forth on his well-shod feet. “Oh, it’s okay, dear. There’s nothing going on in here anymore anyway. We don’t press apple juice these days. Only grapes. We’re a winery now.” He looked around slowly, longingly, taking in the pattern of girders in the roof, the stacks of disused pressing blankets on the steel carts, waiting for apple mash that wasn’t coming. “No, just grapes these days.” The man was expensively dressed, his steel-gray hair was neatly combed in tight waves back from his forehead, and his hands looked neatly manicured.

  “Are you Mr. Karsh?”

  “Yes,” he said vaguely, continuing his walk down memory lane.

  “I’m Em Hansen. I met someone named Karsh just last evening. Any relation? She lives down on Sanborn Road.”

  The broad sort-of-smile on the man’s face grew heavy. “Yes,” he whispered. He turned away, starting to leave.

  “So this was an apple-processing plant,” I said brightly, willing him to turn back and talk to me some more. “I suppose a truck dumped the apples into the sump in the floor here, and the screw would grind them and carry them up to the second floor.”

  Mr. Karsh turned back, passed a hand lovingly through his hair, then pointed up toward the press. “Yes. The hopper up there mixed the apple mash with rice hulls to hold the mash up for pressing, then we’d open the chute and fill the pressing blankets there. We’d get a stack of them, see, all held in place by those wooden frames, and then that ram presses the whole stack up from the floor against that head plate, and out goes the juice. There’s a cistern down below that catches it.” His face fell further as he came back to the present moment. “Best juice in the county, we made. Next building, we made apple sauce and canned them both.” He sighed. “Nowadays it’s all grapes.”

  “You talk like you’ve worked the line.”

  The man’s eyes shone longingly. “Yes. Came here fresh out of the army, right after Korea. Worked the line for ten years: machinist, trucking, whatever needed done. It was a young man’s world back then.”

  While we’d been talking, the brown Doberman had wandered quietly in and tucked its head up under his left hand. Mr. Karsh ran his index finger gently along her muzzle and up between her eyes, soothing her.

  My watch beeped at me, time to take a reading at the well head. Torn over whether to stay and keep investigating or go and do a good job on the simple task Adam had set me, I said, “Excuse me, I have to run outside a moment, check my equipment. I’ll be right back. I want to hear more.”

  I was half a minute late taking the reading, but scribbled it down quickly anyway, figuring that it would just have to do. Then I reset the timer on my watch and hurried back toward the doorway.

  Mr. Karsh wasn’t there. I cocked an ear, trying to figure out where he had gone, but heard no one, only the rumble of a distant forklift and the odd groan of a door somewhere moving on rusty hinges in the wind.

  So this was an apple plant that had been retooled as a winery. And this Mr. Karsh, was he a self-made man? The plant had been here since before the 1950s, when he had come to work as a skilled laborer. Had he earned his way in and bought out the owners? Or was he only a manager, perhaps a man so wedded to his job that the history of the plant felt like a litany of his own successes and failures? And just what relation was he to the Mrs. Karsh I had met? Brother-in-law? Cousin? Husband?

  I heard a sound behind me and turned. The woman with the red hair came bustling in through the doorway, her still curvy figure bouncing with bone-deep cheer and enthusiasm for her task. She was carrying a cordless telephone. “Have you seen Wilbur? Mr. Karsh? Man about that tall, with a barrel chest?” She gestured to Mr. Karsh’s height, a few inches less than the altitude she commanded on her spindly high-heeled shoes. “There’s a phone call for him.”

  “He was here a few minutes ago.”

  She sighed in cheery exasperation. “He’s out looking for that boy of his,” she gossiped. “Mama Karsh dropped him off an hour ago, and things always go to hell around here when we have him. You’d think he was five years old, the way he gets into trouble. Will just worries himself sick about him.” She turned to leave, then looked back over her shoulder. “You see him—the boy, not the father—don’t worry, he’s harmless. He looks kind of scary, real big and hulking.” She pantomimed a looming thug, arching her arms away from her sides. “Just ignore him. Well, I better find Will; this call’s important. See ya.” She hurried away, her heels clicking rhythmically across the concrete and crunching as they hit the gravel driveway. I watched her go, a flurry of brightly colored fabric jostling over a supple body that joyously defied the call of gravity and middle age.

  I had a sinking feeling that I knew just the oaf she was talking about. It had to be Matthew Karsh. So Mrs. Karsh had “dropped him off”? What did that mean? And things always went to hell around the winery when he was about? Exactly what kind of trouble was he likely to get into? And where did this “secretary” get off talking about “Will” and herself so proprietarily as “we”?

  I went back outside and stayed close to the instruments until it was time to take the next reading, musing on the relative pleasures Mr. Karsh might find between a bouncing redhead and a graying woman distracted by a damaged son.

  A couple of trucks went past. Somewhere in the depths of a nearby building, I could hear a heavy forklift operating. A moment later, I saw Mr. Karsh in the distance, passing out of one building and hurrying into the one that echoed with the groan of the forklift. The groan stopped. Mr. Karsh came back out of the building, leading his ungainly son. As I had guessed, it was Matthew Karsh.

  The two were downwind of me and quite a distance away, so I couldn’t hear what the older man was saying to the younger, but by his gestures, I gathered that he was cajoling him to settle down and behave in whatever way he hadn’t just been behaving. Matthew was scowling. Mr. Karsh touched his arm one more time, tenderly, even piteously, and hurried back toward the office. Matthew watched him go. He stood with his shoulders slumped, his head hanging, and his lower lip stuck out, just like a little boy who’s had his toys taken away. How interesting it must be to do business with a distraction like Matthew, I thought dryly. And as I thought that thought, he looked up and s
aw me.

  Whatever was wrong with Matthew Karsh, his eyes were as sharp as an eagle’s. His body stiffened from flaccid disappointment to alert, thirsting menace. He kept watching me. And I watched him, nervously, afraid to turn my back to do my job. Several minutes passed. My watch sounded, calling me to take another reading. What to do? I gauged the distance between us, reckoned the time it would take him to reach me, dragged a foot across the gravel to calibrate my ear for the sound he would make on approach, then turned and scribbled the numbers down as fast as I could.

  When I looked up again, he was gone.

  Suddenly I felt silly. Hadn’t the redhead just told me he was harmless? What was wrong with me? Relax, I told myself. It’s broad daylight. Just finish your work, stay right out here where the passing trucks can see you, and do your Goddamn job.

  I turned back to the well, rechecked my work, and noted my observations. The water was clear now, and the last two readings had been nearly identical, so it wouldn’t be long before I could search up Adam, collect the water sample, and get the hell out of there.

  I closed up the clipboard. As it clicked shut, I heard a low growl. I turned. Saw both Doberman pinschers, charging at full speed, shoulder to shoulder, straight at me.

  I turned and ran, dashing for the nearest high place, right through that doorway and towards the Archimedes’ screw.

  The dogs rushed after me, sluicing between the barrels and through the door and scrambling up the steps like they were as flat as the driveway.

  At the top of the stairs above the screw, I grabbed the rungs of a ladder beside the hopper, swung up, and shot into the attic space, ripping one knee of my jeans on a girder as I clambered frantically into the dust and squeaking steel. When I had stabilized my grip on an upright of the roof truss, I turned and looked down.

  The dogs stood at the foot of the ladder, growling from deep in their chests.

  “Git!” I yelled. “Go on! Go on home with you!”

  The black one leapt at the ladder. The brown one whipped around in a tight circle, snapping at the third rung.