zin sins

And now, several months after Tobie’s internment, Bobby feared his father was falsely secure in the eye of Tobie’s hurricane.

“Jeremy, you’ve just got to keep Tobie on a tight leash.”

“Shit, Bobby, deep down we both know he’s got a good heart.  But I’m beginning to wonder if the umbrella I provide for him here doesn’t do more harm than good.”

“Don’t you think you’re hurting him more by just letting him run wild?  Are you too weak to stand up to him?  Tell him no for once?  Daniel’s never going to come back and do it,”  Bobby said, looking away from Jeremy; he couldn’t bear to see the pain his words brought to his father’s face.

“You’re right, son.  Ever since The Old Man died I’ve been scared to death of responsibility.  I’ve hated it.  Daniel – he was so much stronger than me.  Hell, even when he was a boy he gave me the strength to go on.  He had what your grandpa had.  I’ve always felt I was the weak link in the Barnes chain.”

Bobby couldn’t handle hearing his father say such things.

“How in the world can you say that?  Look what you’ve done with this place.  What did it take to make this?”

“Fear.  I’ve been driven by fear.  The fear of failing.  And when Daniel came along I was driven by hope – the false hope that he’d take over.”

“Jeremy, he’s dead.  He’s been dead.  Now what?”

“I look at you, Bobby, and I don’t see Daniel and I don’t see The Old Man.  I see me.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you’ve got to hang in there until another Daniel comes along.”

“You mean we’ve  got to hang in there.”

“You.  Bobby, I’m not going to be around much longer.  My pump’s out of warranty.  I once read about a famous psychoanalyst who never overcame his own feelings of inadequacy in the eyes of his father.  That doctor died young – within a week of the same age as his father.  I’ve always identified with what that man said, what he wrote, what he did.”

Bobby was gazing at his father’s profile trying to sort out what he said as the shadow passed slowly over Jeremy’s face.  It was a dark, ominous shadow of what must have been a large-winged predator soaring overhead.  Bobby watched his father’s expression become quizzical as the shadow passed.  Then he heard the motor and turned and looked behind him toward the sky.  A motorized kite or hang glider – he’d heard them called ultralights – was circling the ranch.

Jeremy rose and walked past Bobby to the edge of their small bluff.  He stood between Bobby and the late afternoon sun, his long shadow racing back and covering his son.  In a sudden terror, Jeremy pointed wildly at the western sky.

“Goddamn it!  That’s Tobie up there!  Shit, he never got his pilot’s license.  What the hell’s he doing in that thing?”

Bobby stepped to his father’s side and gazed up at Jeremy’s Icarus.

“Your son, the condor.  Definitely an endangered species.”

The two watched as Tobie made a long graceful dive at their house.  From their high vantage point, they were looking down on both the home and the winged stroller.  A cloud of dust rose from behind the home, and Bobby saw The Insect whip around the house in the three-wheeler that they used to check the irrigation system.  The Insect was trying to follow Tobie on his wild flight, and, in a feeble attempt to keep up, Holly was hopping behind The Insect – another three-wheeler pursuing the craft.

The Insect was so distracted by the joy of watching his mentor in flight that he failed to see the tongue of a grape gondola in his path.  The balloon tire hit the metal bar and catapulted The Insect in one direction and his cycle in the other.  He landed in the dried grass in a crumpled, unconscious heap.  Holly limped to her savior and began to bark incessantly.  Jeremy and Bobby, distant witnesses to the accident, began scurrying down the hill toward the scene.  They froze as they looked up at the descending plane; they realized that Tobie was playing life-flight pilot and attempting to land the airborne go-cart on the drive leading up to their home.

The craft swung around for its final approach.  The plane swooped down over a stand of Eucalyptus trees and precariously hovered over the shrinking drive.  A half-dozen pickers, emerging from the fields after a day of weeding, scattered like ground squirrels in the shadow of death.  In their paranoia they thought Tobie was a part of the new aerial arsenal of the Border Patrol.  Finally the small bicycle wheels touched the asphalt and the ultralight sprung up a few feet off the drive, then met the earth again.

“The plum trees!” Jeremy cried.

Bobby and Jeremy watched as the plane lopped off two dozen of Janie’s plum saplings flanking the drive.  They had only been in the ground for two weeks.  Bobby could see bits of metallic cloth clinging to the splintered trunks of the young trees.  The plane came to a stop fifty feet from the front porch.  Tobie unstrapped himself and leapt from the craft.  The Insect was sitting up in the grass, laughing and clapping and whooping at the safe landing of his birdman, and at his side the old collie paused in the midst of her barking seizure.  Bobby took his eyes from the scene and looked to his father.  Jeremy slowly shook his head and spoke.

“At least he didn’t kill anybody.” 

end of Part One

Tobie’s arrest and brief incarceration had been a great embarrassment to Janie and Jeremy, although Tobie had become something of a folk hero to many of the good citizens of The Valley.  The original charge behind Tobie’s arrest had been kidnapping, and the events surrounding the crime, bizarre.

For some time Tobie had sought a method to break away from the ranch, to add excitement to his life, to pull away from the humdrum profession of watching grapes grow.  And he wanted to do something that required little mental or physical effort on his part.  His brief attempts at careers as a boat racer, crop dusting pilot and whitewater rafting guide had all ended when he either refused to invest the required time to gain an expertise or he had destroyed the expensive toy that Jeremy purchase for him to become the expert.

Jeremy had actually ended Tobie’s latest planned venture – to provide hot air balloon rides at daybreak for tourists in The Valley.  Much to the chagrin of Jeremy, Tobie had left for a hot-air balloon race in Las Vegas the week before the past year’s Crush had begun.  Tobie’s sole job for the previous Crush had been to drive a flat-bed truck with bins of chardonnay grapes to The Winery.  Nothing more had been required of him.  A few days before Crush he had informed his father that he was off to Vegas for the week with his ground crew and servant, The Insect, in tow.  Jeremy threw a mild fit and then wrote out a check for the entry fee to the race.  But Jeremy had refused to pay the bill for salvaging and transporting the half-burnt balloon and gondola back to California after it was trapped in the electric lines coming from the Hoover Dam power station.  Tobie had jumped from the gondola seconds before impact, setting some sort of State of Nevada high-dive record into Lake Mead.

The careers that had caused criminal charges to be filed – and ultimately dropped – against Tobie were skydiving and cult deprogramming.  Tobie’s short-term vocations developed over a series of Guinness Stouts quaffed during a late-night drinking session at a Healdsburg tavern.  His drinking companion was a bereaved Irishman drowning his sorrows over the loss of his only daughter.  The Dubliner had come to The Valley to try to communicate with her, and he had failed.  He feared his daughter was lost forever to an odd cult headquartered in an isolated corner of The Valley not far from the Barnes ranch.

The cult had an official five-word name that sufficiently hid their true identity.  But ever since an article had appeared in Playboy that noted the similarities between the new cult and the established Moonies, and that the founder, a Danish-American entrepreneur named Martin Petersen, had once run a pastry shop specializing in a cream-filled doughnut that resembled a moonpie, the cult had been given a new moniker by the press:  Moon(p)ies. 

Martin Petersen had determined he was a prophet of God in the early ‘70’s, after God had visited him in the wee hours as he was kneading dough in his shop in Springfield, Illinois.  God’s message:  He, Martin Petersen, was the chosen one to provide spiritual guidance to the lonely and undirected of society.  At one time a devout Catholict convert, Petersen came to be a harsh critic of what he found to be a top-heavy, lax, overly liberal church.  Its greatest sin in his eyes was an alarming drift toward humanism, toward allowing the individual some room to think, to decide.  It was in that mood of righteous indignation that Petersen began to hold meetings at his shop for all those he could attract to his teachings, teachings based on a highly disciplined form of siege-mentality Christianity not practiced in several centuries.  He had made several shrewdly capitalistic updates to his reactionary religious rhetoric, and those revisions guaranteed the financial success of his budding church.  The most noteworthy:  He hired on as his behind-the-scenes business consultant – and as his future financial director of the burgeoning church – a man who was a franchising genius.

The two began a program of expansion, establishing doughnut shops near large state universities and in the urban centers of the Midwest.  The chain of doughnut shops and his church grew hand-in-hand out of a simple formula:  The closest devotees to the charismatic Petersen were given franchises in outpost cities.  All profits were directed back to the main headquarters in Springfield although later the headquarters – Petersen’s “Little Vatican” as his critics called it – would be moved to prime ocean-front property near Laguna Beach, California.  The managers of the franchise shops were given a small stipend on which to survive, and a quota for doughnut sales and new converts.  And through Petersen’s proven plan, the quotas were easily met.

It was a brilliant ploy, for all-night doughnut shops were better than either bus stations or airports as the contact spots for recruiting new members, for 24-hour doughnut shops were surely the collection point for the most desperate, pathetic humans in American society.  Marketing surveys commissioned by the church’s financial director had given Petersen the basic convert profiles – those who entered the stores between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m.  The average doughnut buyer during that time period was found by the surveys to be:

A)     A slightly overweight young woman in college or in an entry-level position (usually secretarial) at a large corporation.  She is single and in a new environment.  She generally has been a good student, failing only her aerobic dance class.  She consumes any and all information on diets and exercise found in the dozens of women’s magazines to which she subscribes, but those two programs – diet and exercise – are both treated by her as spectator sports.  In moments of severe depression she enters a doughnut shop, and in her attempt to rationalize her psychosomatically induced hunger financially, she buys the “special” – a dozen doughnuts at a dollar off and consumes them in a feeding frenzy to destroy all evidence of her weakness.

B)     An out-of-shape young man with a heavy bent toward computer games requiring less than two players.  He is in a state college and, for the first time, away from his family and other members of his support group.  He usually has acne or hair that cannot be coiffed into anything resembling a current style.  He usually has spent the hours immediately prior to entering the shop being extremely uncomfortable – and unsuccessful – in a singles bar, or extremely comfortable – and guilt-ridden – alone with a pornographic magazine in the privacy of his tiny room called home.  Doughnuts and milk, with their maternalistic connotations, provide him the sacrament of security he so desperately needs in order to atone for his sins.

Whenever either of the profiled members of the target group was spotted by one of Petersen’s employees/devotees, a simple, friendly, caring conversation was struck up and an extra-fancy doughnut was given free to the patron.  If that customer was receptive to their overtures and returned within the month to the shop, he or she was earmarked as a potential convert, and a tailor-made recruiting and indoctrination plan, using the latest in computer software, was drawn up and put into action.  The end result, if all proved successful, was the convert’s agreeing to travel  – all expenses paid — to a joyous weekend of singing and dancing and group sports and the like at Bakers’ Camp in The Valley.

The author of the expose on the Moonpies in Playboy had amusingly tagged the three ranks of the Moon(p)ie hierarchy.  Those who were potential converts were called “Doughnut Holes.”  Those who had been sufficiently love-bombed at Bakers’s Camp to have forgotten life as they had once known it were called “Cream Puffs.”  And franchise managers and the spiritual and corporate elite were called “Royal Danish.”

Bobby had heard the tale of his younger brother’s short-term employment at Schloss often enough from the victim himself to develop an animated version of the story.  Tobie had quit Schloss after the cellar foreman had fired his closest friend.  Bobby thought the whole episode was a damn good example of the symbiotic relationship that develops between a pair of fast friends – at least in a quaint sort of way.  Bobby briefly replayed his self-produced tape of the incident:

Jeremy had pulled some strings with Delaney to land Tobie a Crush job at Schloss two years before.  And as part of the deal, Schloss also had to hire Tobie’s companion, his shadow, The Insect.  Tobie had been put in charge of unloading grapes from gondolas using the electric hoist.  The crew leader had given The Insect the job of sweeping, cleaning out gutters and the like, the only jobs that the cellar foremen believed  he could be trusted.

The Friday morning of their third week on the job was also their last at Schloss.  Tobie was unloading a bin filled with bunches of zinfandel.  The Insect was down by the row of trucks awaiting their turn to dump their grapes.  His task that morning was to stand over the hydro sieve, a screened sump that caught large objects floating in the winery’s wastewater, and to retrieve the fifty-cent-a-piece black washers that had collected on the screen of the contraption.  The washers were used to connect fittings with wine hose, and without them, work in the winery would have come to a standstill.  The Insect would methodically lower his arm into the smelly, algal water, scooping up a handful of the oozing muck like a steam shovel.  Fishing for washers was the most vile, unwanted job at the winery, but The Insect didn’t mind; it was his chance to observe the tadpoles change in the perfect breeding ground of the sump’s murky water.

The Insect – and Tobie – enjoyed all the animals that lived in the environs around the winery.  On their second day at Schloss, during their lunch they had found a litter of abandoned kittens starving under the old disused greenhouse behind the winery.  They found homes for all the refugees but one, their favorite, the one Tobie brought home for a single night.  In a fit of terror, the wild kitten had shredded the love seat of Janie’s new living room suite, and she had him remove it from her home the next morning.  Reluctantly, Tobie returned it to the hothouse and fed it diligently until it disappeared a week later.

Tobie and The Insect would spend their lunch hour with the deer that lived in the dense woods behind Schloss.  They would hike up through the sloping vineyards surrounding the winery, and quietly sit where the vineyards gave way to the thick underbrush and the few towering redwoods on the steep slope.  Near the end of their break, they would be rewarded for their stillness by the approach of countless birds, a raccoon or a family of deer, all oblivious to their presence.  The deer had been especially plentiful during the harvest of the drought year, when the scent of the sugared berries on the vines would draw them from the woods and into the vineyards.  But the deer had been hiding since the day a bored driver for a co-op grower, waiting in the long line to dump his grapes, zeroed in on a deer from beside his truck.   It was the last day for Tobie and The Insect at Schloss.

Tobie was operating the hoist, scraping out the last zin berries from the bin when he had looked up from his work to see a familiar four-point buck gazing down on him from a high ridge.  A moment later he saw, in what appeared to be slow motion, the young buck’s head jerk violently, its legs pulled out from under it as if by an invisible rug, and the deer fall quietly on the matted grass.  Only then did he hear the loud report of the rifle that seemed to momentarily silence the myriad sounds of the busy winery.  Tobie held his gaze for a moment.  He couldn’t avoid looking down toward the sound to see the proud expression on the face of the marksman.  Then he saw the blur – a small, scrawny blur – collide into the side of the poacher.  The rifle flew out of the man’s hands and skidded along the asphalt.  The Insect did his best to land a second blow, but to no avail; he was being pounded into submission by the angry owner of a damaged rifle.  Tobie arrived on the scene, grabbed the driver, and proceeded to vent his anguish on the man’s face.  By the time the crew leader and cellar foreman had pulled the muscular Tobie off of the man, all three were a bloody mess.

In the brouhaha that followed, the buck privates at Schloss were abandoned by their CO, the cellar foreman, during The Insect’s court martial.  The cellar foreman was a fellow poacher, often “spotlighting” in the vineyard after work, a method of hunting where he would drive his truck through the roads behind the winery until his spotlight flashed upon the red reflection of a deer’s eyes, frozen in the beam of light.  To score a goal in the sport, all he had to do was point and shoot. 

Without support from his superior, The Insect was found guilty as charged, and the sentence received was a quick “Goodbye” and a hastily drawn check from the accounting department.  Tobie, being Jeremy Barnes’ son, was not a part of the official inquiry.   Tobie quit the moment he heard The Insect had been fired.

The final credits rolled through Bobby’s mind as he turned to Jeremy.

“Have you ever talked to the GM about that mess?” he asked his father.

“Sure I did.  He called me before Tobie made it home.  I told him that what Tobie did was his own affair – that Tobie was a young man who had to face the consequences of his actions.”

“So why do you think he believed your scheme with Heath was retaliation for Tobie quitting?”

“Because I don’t think he could conceive of me seeing Daniel’s death as anything but an accident.  And I think he believes that because I’m a farmer, I’d have to get revenge for Tobie’s leaving Schloss.  You know, the ‘Hatfield’s and McCoy’s’ syndrome.  I believe he thinks we’re all hicks.”

“Well, I’m proud of Tobie sticking up for The Insect.  At least it showed some character,” Tobie replied.