Pasadena Page 9

  But Bruder didn’t wait for Linda. He pushed himself into the waves. At once the tide pulled him under, and his fist rose in a way that she interpreted as a call of desperation. She couldn’t believe it: the boy had been at Condor’s Nest not two days and already he had drowned. She ran to the tide, tugging her dress over her head as she went, and in her underwear she swam out to where the waters had closed around him. There she paddled and panted, her underclothes heavy and pulling her down, and then something warm and firm took her by the ankle and climbed the ladder of her body and Bruder’s slick, otterlike head punched through the water. He was gasping, the sunlight flashing in his face. “You’ll give me my first lesson now?” He added, “Linda. It’s a pretty name.”

  The next morning, he pulled her from bed and told her to watch from the bluff. “Don’t rescue me this time,” he said. On the beach, he stripped to nothing and swam jerkily but steadily to the horizon and beyond, hundreds of yards past the colony of lobster buoys, his pale behind humping through the water like a dolphin head. He returned to shore as if powered by steam and shook the water from his wine-blue body and stepped back into his clothes. “Now I’ve learned,” he said when he returned to the bluff, where he found not only Linda but Edmund, who threw a swimsuit at him and said, “We wear clothes around here.” Bruder went to the cottage and reemerged in a worsted-wool tank suit that was so tight across his chest and around his groin that it was more obscene than if he had been standing before Linda with nothing on at all.

  But even if Bruder could now swim, he still didn’t know how to fish. A few days later, Linda led him to the beach, hauling a pair of bamboo casting rods and a tackle box. The ocean was calm, and she baited a hook with a greenish-blue jacksmelt, hung a weight to her line, and waded into the surf. Bruder watched her from the shore. She maneuvered the tide and the rod with skill and experience, and Bruder realized that everything Dieter had promised about his daughter was proving to be true. And more.

  “Just watch,” she cried, casting again. He possessed an unusual reserve of patience, she sensed, but this for some reason made her even more impatient. Soon, however, something yanked her rod, and its tip bent like the handle of a cane. Linda pulled, and the rod curved so sharply it looked as if it would snap. She planted her feet into the sand, bent her knees, and steeled herself against the waves crashing at her thighs. Linda reeled and snapped her rod back and forth, fighting the fish, and after five minutes she cranked her reel one last time and pulled up a brown-back barracuda. The fish, almost three feet long, thrashed in the surf, and Linda held it aloft and walked it over to Bruder, who backed away as she approached. On the shore, the barracuda flopped around and sank its fangs into the sand, and Linda didn’t think she’d ever seen a boy as frightened as Bruder was now. “You’ve got to kill the ’cudas straight off,” she said, pulling a club from her pile of gear and whacking the fish on its long pointed head; the fish flipped itself over and died. “Now it’s your turn.”

  He hesitated, sitting on the rock next to Linda’s outrigger while she rebaited the hook. On the journey home from Europe, Dieter had told Bruder about his children, describing Edmund as impractical and soft-breasted and Linda as a girl with the soul of a diamond ray. Having never seen a stingray, Bruder didn’t know what Dieter could mean, and he imagined a dark-haired girl who was both graceful and wing-fast and who lurked prettily until provoked. He was thinking of this when she startled him by sliding the rod into his hands. She worked her fingers around his wrists and demonstrated how to cup the pole’s handle and spin the reel. She asked him if he understood and prodded him into the water. “Go on, give it a try. What’s the worst that can happen?”

  Bruder waded into four feet of water and stood for several minutes while the waves passed through him, his body rising up and falling with the tide. He had harvested alfalfa and picked a walnut tree clean and fixed a hundred truck engines, but this task with the delicately thin rod felt strange to him, and he worried that Linda hadn’t told him all he needed to know. “Plant your feet,” she called. He ground his feet into the sand, swung the rod back over his shoulder, and then cast, flipping his arms and wrists. Together, Linda and Bruder watched the fishing rod fly out of Bruder’s hands and up over the little waves, hurtling like a javelin fifty yards to sea. Bruder returned to shore, stripped down to his skimpy tank suit, and dove back into the water. He swam to the fishing rod and returned with it held aloft and crawled up out of the waves and slipped it into the hole of Linda’s cupped hands. “Show me again.”

  Linda told him to watch more closely this time. Then she stepped into the waves, planted her feet, called “Here goes!” and cast her line. But as the hook flew back over her shoulder, the gut line an invisible arc, it caught on something and she heard a tiny moan and turned to find it snared within Bruder’s cheek. Who was more surprised by this, neither could say. Their eyes were wide and upon each other.

  But over time, where both Linda and Bruder expected a scar to buckle and shine, instead a scab formed and fell away, and even the most careful eye couldn’t see that a snelled hook had once snared Bruder. Within a month there was no evidence of it except his word and hers, a story that would either tumble around the flatlands and collect into myth, or break up and crumble away.

  It didn’t take long for Bruder to grow used to—and even to look forward to—listening to Linda, to her questions about where he came from and how he had met her father, to her tireless inquiry into what he thought of her. Bruder would listen to Edmund too, as he warned him to stay away from his sister: “She’s not like other girls.” He listened to Dieter tell him not to mind Edmund—“He’s a funny boy”—and slowly Bruder realized that the only one who listened as closely as he did was Valencia, whose face would turn and lean in and betray nothing when the others spoke.

  Bruder had never been like the other orphans at the Training Society, boys who would long for a family and would wet down their hair whenever the Sunday picnickers spread their blankets in the orphanage’s walnut grove. These boys were desperate for a mother and lonely for a father, and in their eyes Bruder had seen a pathetic fear he promised himself, even as a child, never to succumb to. When the other boys whimpered themselves to sleep in the dormitory, Bruder would stay up reading by the lamp. He had always taken solace in the books he stole from Mrs. Banning’s shelf, even greater solace in the comfort of his own quiet mind, and for many years he carried in his pocket a piece of advice he’d written out on one of Mrs. Banning’s alms cards: Dumb’s a sly dog. The same was true for a horse, Bruder often thought, and even though he was a motor mechanic he had befriended more horses than people in his short long years of life, and what was it the poet had said in the book Mrs. Banning had snatched from his sleepy teenage lap?: “My horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day.”

  And this was what Bruder was thinking of when Linda came to him with the news that Dieter’s horse had caught his hoof in a railroad tie and snapped his hock. Dieter would have to shoot Kermit on the track before the 1:52 hurried north to Los Angeles. Linda and Bruder ran across the onion field to witness the execution, but they found Kermit’s long nose resting against the rail, a bullet from Dieter’s Colt Peacemaker sunk into his white-patched haw. Next to him, Edmund was weeping.

  “Papa, you killed him?”

  “He was almost as old as me.”

  “Where will you get another?”

  “Another horse? It’s time I buy a car. Ask the mechanic from Pasadena. Nobody’s riding in the cities anymore.” Dieter went on to say that he’d seen a water-cooled International MW with a blue leather seat and a rear bed that could cart more than old Kermit on his best day, “May he rest in peace.”

  “But, Papa?” sniffled Edmund. “Where will you get the money?”

  Dieter told his children not to worry about such things. “Let’s get the old guy off the rail.” As the sun shone on the tracks, Dieter and Edmund began to argue about what to do with Kerm
it. Dieter thought they should leave him to the coyotes—“He’ll be gone by morning.” But Edmund reminded his father about the new regulations against dumping equine carcasses—so many people were doing it in their rush toward the automobile. There’d be a fine that none of them could afford, Edmund warned. “We should burn him down.”

  But Bruder pulled from his boot an Ames bowie knife with a sharkskin grip and told the others he’d take care of Kermit. He had quartered horses at the City Farm, and the job was easier but bloodier than it looked. Bruder noticed the way the knife caused a stir in Linda, a flame in her ever-flickering eyes; he slapped his palm with the blade, and the little smack! of steel on flesh drew Linda closer to him. She watched the blade slice the horse’s belly from stifle to brisket, and a red jelly mass lurched out. Blood splattered Bruder’s shirt, and a spigot shot Linda’s legs; she was shocked by its salty warmth. “Get me a wheelbarrow,” Bruder instructed Edmund. Bruder sank his hands into Kermit’s gut, scooping out the yards of wormy intestines and the wine-red liver. Then he sliced the belly horizontally and plucked out Kermit’s still-quivering ten-pound heart. “Edmund! Fetch the butcher saw.”

  As he proceeded with his work, Bruder tossed the salvageable pieces into the wheelbarrow, where white rattlesnake moths landed on the muscular hamstring and gaskin and loin. It was the knee joint, connecting forearm and cannon, that most impressed Linda: the blade of the bowie hack-hack-hacking through it. “Strong bastard,” Bruder said as he tried to rip the knee free of ligament. He looked up from his work and saw her, her toe tracing an arc in the dirt. “Get down and help me,” he ordered, and she sank to her knees as if forced by a large invisible hand and found herself so close to Bruder that his hair blew against her brow. Linda worked her hands around a shank. She didn’t expect Kermit to still feel like a horse; she thought that handling this piece of him would feel no different than handling a quarter of meat. But Kermit’s coat bristled coarsely, its grain changing hue from brown to cider-orange as she ran her hand over it. She felt the exactness of the tissue beneath the coat, the pads of shifting muscle she had watched for years as Edmund rode around the farm and along El Camino Real.

  Now, crouching, the railroad ties pressing uncomfortably into her knees, Linda helped Bruder yank free Kermit’s kneebone. Dieter, impressed, and Edmund, aghast, stood in the shade of a red elderberry. When the bone snapped loose, Linda and Bruder fell down the little hill the railroad track sat upon, laughing as they tumbled, the horse leg between them, finally landing in a thicket of bladderpod. The shrub was heavy with fruit, its green pods resembling two-inch peas, and Linda felt the fruit crack beneath her. She sat up and looked down her chest and down Bruder’s too and saw that they were both smeared with blood. The blood had soaked deeply into her dress, reminding her of what Valencia called la carga—an event Linda had done her best to always hide from Edmund. But now she and Bruder looked at each other with open, blank eyes, and he took the leg and hurled it into the air and they watched it rise and arc and fall, like a strange long-extinct bird. When it hit the ground, dust rose and the day was clear and the sun was white and the buzz flies arrived and Bruder’s eyebrows danced and he stared longingly at Linda. He was thinking that she was beautiful when she was silent, and the blood somehow made her seem even more alive, the blood dripping from her hands, and Linda realized that Bruder was the first person she had ever really known from someplace beyond Condor’s Nest and Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea. She had dreamt of the world far from the village, up the coast or down, and she had expected one day to rush off and see it, but now a glimpse of the world had come to her. Bruder had taken pleasure in dismembering the horse, but this didn’t frighten Linda, and only when a cloud passed before the sun and the glint faded from the railroad track did she notice Edmund standing by himself, his finger nervously at his collar. His face had gone pale and he was mumbling, “They’ve gone crazy. He’s turning her crazy.”

  Dieter swatted him with his cap. “Leave them alone. They’re learning to live, that’s all.” Edmund’s cheek trembled as he watched Bruder head off to the barn. When he was gone, Dieter added, “He gets more done than you.”

  As he said this, Charlotte Moss appeared along the railroad track. Her curls were pushing from beneath her beret, and she tapped her pencil against her lips. “Is that a quote?” And then, “To make sure I get the facts right, how old was Kermit?”

  A week later, “The Whisper of the Sea” ran the following item:

  Guess which German farmer, now that his old horse is butchered, is planning to sell some of his land to buy himself an International MW? He desires a blue leather seat, you’ll be interested to know.

  And Charlotte concluded with:

  Guess which fishergirl has recently acquired a new taste for blood?

  At first Linda took pride in seeing herself thought worthy of the printed word; and if at one time she would have run to Edmund with the newspaper, shouting It’s me, it’s me!, now she tore home from Margarita’s with even more speed, in a hurry to show Bruder, who would read the story and crumple it in his palm.

  5

  One day at the end of April, Linda took Bruder into the village to visit the mineral spring. She explained that scientific analysis had long ago determined that the Apfelsine waters were chemically identical to the thermal springs of Hoellgassquelle in Baden-Baden, not far from Schwarzwald. But on the journey home from France, Dieter had already told Bruder about the Black Forest, where the wood was dense with fir and holly underbrush and blackwood and the mouse owls that called sinisterly at dusk. “The tourists would travel from Berlin and Paris and London to rinse away their sooty maladies. I’d sell them little tin cups with the date of their visit imprinted into the handle.” Whenever he told this story, Dieter would hold up his mallet, as if in proof. Since the 1880s, California’s tourists had journeyed—first on horseback, then briefly by stage, then by rail, and now by car—to Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea in the same pursuit. There’d been a hotel built on the bluff just beyond the spring, with gingerbread trim, balconies with views of the ocean, room rates of $1.50 a day, and a motto of “To read, ponder, drink—and Live.” Dieter had worked there before Valencia arrived. He had ported dusty imitation-alligator trunks and delivered ices made with Leucadia lemons to ladies sunning themselves in wicker chaises. “But I lost my job because I’d always arrive at the hotel smelling like onions,” Dieter told Linda many times, the story embellishing itself seemingly at its own accord, so that the final version, the one Dieter had recounted at the supper table just the night before, included a blind widow who wore the world’s largest emerald, a white-blond bachelor with a Siamese butler, and a wirehaired terrier, property of one Mrs. P. G. Furnass of Pasadena, the dog drinking the lemonade and falling over dead at Mrs. Furnass’s feet, which were crammed into buttonless half-Congress shoes a size and a half too small.

  On the Apfelsine platform, Linda said, “Tell me about the war.”

  “There’s too much to tell,” said Bruder.

  “Just one story.”

  He thought about this and then offered a simple tale. “There was a kid in my company, a terrible mechanic, lost every wrench issued to him. Each morning he woke up certain his number would come up that day. At night, he quoted the poets as the howitzers lit up the sky. It was his way of praying, and most of the other boys huddled around him in the dark, listening to the cantos and the couplets. After he was killed, the captain gave me his books, and there’s one thing I read that makes me think of you.”

  Linda leaned closer as Bruder began to recite, almost as if it were a song:

  Her silence, her transfigured face ablaze

  made me fall still although my eager mind

  was teeming with new questions I wished to raise

  Linda thought it sounded nice, but she didn’t understand what Bruder might mean by it, and years would pass before she learned—at the bookstore in Pasadena, where the scent of pine shipping crates drifted up from the stockroom, in the Spanish Li
brary Room—where these words came from. She had never known anyone to memorize poetry, and it left her even more curious. He was both worldly and crude, citing the poets and the saints and staring her down and grunting when she served him bolitas de masa and black coffee. When he spoke of the Training Society, she imagined Bruder as a boy in a place similar to Mission San Luis Rey, with its stucco façade breaking apart in great brittle flakes and the two-tiered bell tower shadowing the courtyard; she imagined the light through the rose window above the mission’s double door, the slanted rays falling on Bruder’s young face as he studied silently with nuns in squirrel-gray habits. Once, while Dieter was at war, Linda and Edmund had run in the fallow field abutting the mission, where, years before, grapes had ripened and sheep nibbled the smoke trees; and in the side cemetery, shaded by a small stand of conifers, Linda had collected golden poppies for her hair. Had Bruder grown up in such a place?

  “It was nothing like that at all.”

  He lit a cigarette, and the bluish smoke curled around his face as he described the Mexicans and half-Mexicans and slow-wits and misdemeanants and the handful of Negroes and the pair of Chinese brothers he had slept with in an attic dormitory. “We lived in a big house called Casa Angélica, forty boys and four ladies, one who was too fat to walk. It sat at the edge of the City Farm, and after the morning classes, where Mrs. Banning taught us not how to read and write but how to properly grade citrus and grow rootstock, she’d scoot us into the fields to take up picking sacks with the ranch hands. It was a big farm, five hundred and seventeen acres, fertilized by Pasadena sewage, and until nightfall we’d climb the walnut trees and clear the orange groves and harvest the seed potatoes and the alfalfa. The effluent of municipal waste ran around the farm in an open brown ditch, and not a single one of us at the Training Society realized until after we left the orphanage that we had come to smell forever like shit.”