The Brotherhood of the Grape (9 page)

T
WENTY MILES EAST
of San Elmo the camper slowed as Cavallero made a sharp turn to the right. We were entering the vineyard of Angelo Musso, sacred soil to my father and his friends. For fifty years they had quaffed the genial Chianti and claret from the vines of those rocky hills. Not only were they Angelo’s customers, they were in fact his slaves, anguished when his crop failed, for his wine was the milk of their second childhood, delivered to the customer’s back door in gallon jugs once a month, the empties carried back to the winery.

Every five years or so a freeze destroyed the vines or the new wi
e turned inexplicably sour and the paisani had to switch to another brand. It brought despair among them, and insomnia and rheumatism. To a man, Angelo’s customers lived in dread that he might die before them.

The tires crackled in the gravel driveway as we pulled to the side of the Musso house and piled out of the car. A very nice house it was, a stone house of two stories built by my father a long time ago. Massive grapevines covered it now, climbing up the chimney atop the slanted tile roof. A roar, like the distant sound of traffic, made the air throb. It was the bees, thousands of them, humming moodily in the vines, a funereal mmmmmm sound when you tuned your attention to the mournful cadence of their mysterious dirge that seemed to lift the house off the ground and hold it in melancholy suspension.

Next to the house stood a thick grape arbor, so impenetrable it blocked out the hot sunshine, and beneath it, at the end of a long picnic table, sat Angelo Musso, eighty-four years old, a shriveled, bald gnome of a man, sun-blackened, with tawny muscat eyes. His chair was a beat-up, overstuffed mohair, so low the old man’s chin was barely above the table level.

Angelo Musso could not utter a word, for his cancerous voice box had been excised ten years earlier. Cigarette ash left a trail of gray down the front of his blue shirt, and he coughed intermittently, for he was a chain smoker, with two packs of Camels on the table in front of him, as well as a carafe of wine, a cigarette lighter and an overflowing ashtray.

For my father and most of the old-time Italians in Placer County Angelo Musso was extra special, an ancient oracle who dispensed no wisdom, a sage who gave no advice, a prophet without predictions, and a god who fermented the most enchanting wine in the world on a tiny thirty-acre vineyard endowed with large boulders and sublime vines. That made him divine. So did his enforced silence. Because he could not speak, everyone came to him with their problems. And everyone found solutions in his yellowish eyes.

We approached him reverently, monks in single file paying homage to their abbot, bowing, lifting his mummified, blue-veined hand and kissing it solemnly. The others spoke to him in whispered Italian, congratulating him on his good health, saying he seemed to grow younger with each passing year, causing him to smile with toothless delight.

My father introduced me, and though the old man had seen me many times, he failed to recognize me then. Bowing to the custom, I kissed what seemed only bones and parchment in his hand, noticed the yellowish fingers, and smelled the nicotine-drenched skin.

As we took seats at the long table Angelo tapped the wine carafe with a spoon. At the bell-like tinkle, the kitchen door opened and a woman appeared, carrying a tray of food and wine.

She was short, ponderous, and graceful as an elephant, whirling down upon us quickly, dispensing glass tumblers, two pitchers of wine, and plates of bread and provolone cheese. She looked about fifty, her massive body giving her head the appearance of smallness, and she had hardly any neck at all. Her costume was bib overalls over a T-shirt and a frilly cocktail apron around her waist. She had a mustache too, a dim fuzz that matched her black hair. I stared in fascination. I had never seen her before.

“Odette, the housekeeper,” my father whispered.

Swiftly Odette served the guests, pirouetting around the table and back into the kitchen.

Out of respect for Angelo’s muteness we did not speak as we ate and drank, and this I thought strange; after all, there was nothing wrong with Angelo’s hearing. But we tossed kisses his way to show our pleasure with the chilled wine, the homemade mozzarella and the Italian bread. Now the bees came, one or two at a time in advance parties, then swarms to investigate Angelo’s guests, settling on our shirts, our arms, the rims of the glasses and carafes. They formed a little halo around Angelo’s gray hair and helped themselves to his cheese and wine, and he seemed to enjoy their company.

Soon I too drew their attention, two or three at first, circling, tasting, sniffing, then a howling mob. They were in my hair and on my ears, on my hands and along my neck, and I remembered the crabs and I trembled with a creeping fear and a desire to bolt for open country, holding my breath, resisting panic, knowing they would clobber me if I made a run for it.

Angelo cackled at my plight, a chicken noise in his dead throat, his waning eyes flickering like candles.

“Take it easy,” my father warned. “Be friends with them. Get acquainted.”

They did not sting me, they were simply putting me on, and most of them flew away as suddenly as they had arrived. We got down to deep meditative drinking, the witchery of the wine transcending the miracle of its taste, enveloping our souls within the cocoon of the humming bees, a sweet droning, the vintage plentiful and cool in those warm hills as Hypnos descended and time passed to the drone of the bees.

I slept about an hour, my head in my arms, my arms on the table. Wakening, bombs detonated in my skull and my eyes tried to burst their sockets. My father sat mumbling to himself, dipping a finger into his wine glass and sucking it foolishly. I saw Cavallaro stumbling in the hot sunshine, walking drunkenly toward us in the grape arbor, trying to zip his fly and not succeeding. Zarlingo was gone and so was our ancient host.

I craved water, cold water on my face, on my body, a creek, a pond, a horse trough, cool cleanliness, and I got up and staggered out into the sun toward the winery a hundred yards away, a stone building like the house. What had happened? Why had I drunk so much? To sip a glass of wine, and a second glass, and even a third, yes. But to drown in it, to drink beyond satiety, to gorge in the heat of the day, to tempt death quietly, silently, in the company of drunken old men—mama mia!

The heavy, planked winery door squealed on its hinges as Zarlingo emerged, blinded by the sun, and lurched into me. He was pale, his face textured in misery. Like a zombie he shoved me aside and wandered back toward the house, one hand clutching his belt. I watched him weave away. His pants were on backward.

As I turned, Odette faced me in the winery door and I backed away in surprise. She smiled with her charming mustache.

“Hello, buster…”

I said, “Hi.”

“You want some action?”

She reached for my fly and I backed away.

“God, no.”

“Any way you want it. I suck too.”

“Pass.”

I stepped away and hurried down the path, past the winery and out into the vineyard. On a hill two hundred yards away I saw oscillating sprinklers forming a rainbow as they pulsed jets of water upon a field of grape stumps sprouting new buds. I scrambled up to the section, peeled off my clothes, and stood naked at the end of the rainbow. It was a summer shower, refreshing my soul, nostalgic, a day in Italy, the hills of Tuscany, and I was sober again as I put on my clothes.

Back at Angelo’s house I found Zarlingo and Cavallaro asleep in the cab of the truck. My father wasn’t around. I went to the kitchen door and knocked several times. Finally I stepped inside a large, disorderly kitchen. Odette was not a good housekeeper. The sink was full of dirty dishes, and an open garbage pail occupied the center of the room. Asleep on a studio couch, his dentures and his cigarettes on a table beside him, was Angelo.

I went outside again. Coming along the path from the winery were Odette and my old man. He had the legs of a rag doll. Her arm was around his waist and she laughed as she carried him along. He was sound asleep, his shirttail hanging out. Odette and I boosted him into the driver’s seat, and as his butt loomed before me I slammed him with my knee as hard as I could, and I was glad, glad, glad.

B
Y NECESSITY
it became my turn to drive, with Zarlingo back in the wheelbarrow and my father up front between me and Cavallaro. We left the hill country, the orchards and the vineyards, and began to climb toward the Sierra peaks. The old man slept deeply on my shoulder, his breath as sour as one of Angelo Musso’s barrels.

After a while the air grew colder, and lowering, white mists rumbled down to the highway. I opened the window and tattered pieces of clouds whisked through my father’s hair. The air was good for him, cold in his nostrils and lungs, and he wakened and looked around, his eyes like crushed cherries. He wanted a cigar.

The road dipped and it was on the downgrade a couple of miles to a place called Alp Hollow. There was a grocery store and one small cabin. I stopped in front of the store and my father and Cavallaro rumbled out like sacks of kindling—you heard the crackle of their bones. Growling like a beast, Zarlingo crawled from the camper. The three bumbled their way into a cathedral of superb pines, in different directions, and urinated, each against a tree, secretly, furtively, swaying like sleepwalkers, their backs to one another, too modest to flash their cocks.

Zarlingo and Cavallaro returned to the truck, but my father marched stiffly into the grocery store. He returned puffing on a cigar, a package under his arm. With grotesque drunken dignity he came to the camper and nearly fell on his face as he climbed into the seat.

“Let’s move!” he ordered, like some fool in command of other fools. I gave him my ugliest glance, sickened by his glut for booze, his abuse of his last handful of days.

With a demonic smile he opened the paper sack. It was a pint of brandy. He looked at me and laughed at my loathing of him, and I felt anger and disgust. As he put the bottle to his mouth I snatched it from his hand and flung it out the window. It exploded against a stone. He was surprised, but he didn’t breathe a word. Flicking the ash from his cigar, his crazed red eyes drilled at the windshield as he slashed off a slew of soft Italian curses, something about America and dogshit.

It was six o’clock now, the sun long gone from Alp Hollow, and it was cold with the quickening night, but as we climbed out of there sunlight made a wedding cake of the snow peaks as Highway 80 snaked eastward and up to 7,000 feet. The dying sun at our backs, we cruised through lonesome mountain hamlets—Emigrant Gap, Cisco, Soda Springs, Donner Pass.

Beyond the pass my father cautioned me to slow down. “It’s up ahead a little ways.”

I scanned the terrain for signs of the Monte Casino golf course—the greens with waving flags, the golfers, the rolling fairways, the clubhouse. Truth was, in the back of my mind the most compelling reason for making the trip was the golf course. Looking around, all I saw on both sides of the highway was a vast ocean of pines, tall and impenetrable, flowing into infinity.

“I don’t see the golf course, Papa.”

He looked ahead without speaking.

“Where’s the golf course?”

“They ain’t any.”

“You said there was a golf course.”

“No golf course.”

“How come?”

“So I said so. So sue me.”

“Why did you say it?”

“’Less I said it, you wouldn’t come.”

He turned to me in pain and embarrassment, battered eyes, battered man, and I had a sudden flashback, and he was nine years old in an impoverished Italian village, trapped by his father in some boyish fabrication, with the same injured expression his face now showed. A sad business, the way the creases shaped themselves on the face into unerasable furrows. I hated the sorrow upon his face. I liked him better when he was arrogant, selfish, tough, a bastard to the core. I slapped his knee.

“It’s okay,” I smiled. “I would have come anyway.”

His hand trembled as he struck a match and put it to his cigar that was already lit.

“No tennis, either?” I smiled.

“No tennis.”

“No swimming pool?”

“Nope.”

“How about the bears, and the timber wolves?”

He tried to laugh and almost succeeded.

The Monte Casino Lodge was not a lodge at all. It was a motel. A quarter of a mile down a side road off the highway we came to a clearing in the deep woods. A dozen log cabins were scattered among the trees, most of them with cars parked alongside. But for the cars, the scene could have been a settlers’ village a hundred years before, smoke trailing from cabin chimneys and hanging heavily among the trees, the odor of bacon and beefsteak permeating the chilling air. A red neon sign spelling
OFFICE
Over the porch of the far cabin spoiled the primitive scene.

We pulled up before the porch and my father hit the horn a couple of times. It brought Sam Ramponi from inside. He was a squat, balloon-bellied man of seventy with the body of a bear and the face of a wolf. With a yell of joyous recognition he rushed toward us as my father and Cavallaro got out of the car. No doubt about it, Sam Ramponi belonged to the brotherhood of the grape, his heavy face streaked with purple cobwebs of broken blood vessels, his grinning mouth sporting big, repulsive dentures. There was much laughter and handshaking, and when Zarlingo dropped from the camper the jollity began again, backslapping, guffaws, embraces—a class reunion—for Sam Ramponi was a San Elmo man, a retired brakeman who longed for the good old days when the Café Roma was the center of the universe and the world had not turned into
merde
.

He stared warmly as my father introduced us.

“My oldest boy. He’s my helper.”

Ramponi grabbed my hand.

“Hello, Tony. I remember you now! The best football player San Elmo ever had.”

My name wasn’t Tony and I had never played high school football, but the man was only trying to be friendly.

“You, boy!” my father barked. “Get this here truck unloaded.” It was his ugliest flaw: the boss, the big-shot syndrome. “Drive around back of those cabins. You’ll see some stone and a pile of sand. Unload there. And be careful with my tools. Cover them up, in case it rains.”

His three friends were impressed, staring in silence. “Righton, sir!” I saluted, and climbed into the truck.

Ramponi herded his friends toward the office.

“Come on, you suckers. Let’s play cards.”