Like his late father, Bobby had  never let Susan talk him into anything.  He had refused her pleas for donations to Peruvian rebels in the Andes (by then Central American rebels had become passé), for ending incidental cetacean kills, to her friend’s feminist-oriented Girl Scout troop.  It wasn’t that he and Jeremy hadn’t believed in her cause for the week, Bobby simply feared that by giving to her he was giving in to her, showing a weakness that she would exploit for life.  As Tobie’s on-again/off-again girlfriend, Susan had been a fixture around the ranch for years, and both Bobby and Jeremy had secretly enjoyed having her about; she kept things interesting.  She was eight years Tobie’s senior, and at first Jeremy had hoped her age might help mature his youngest son, but he had long given up on that whimsy.

The last years of his life Jeremy had great fun telling of one of her run-ins with her ultimate nemesis, the automobile.  Her Mustang had died of thirst; she had driven it without water for days, with the red light on her dashboard a distraction, like a mosquito, to be dismissed with a wave of the hand.  Her father lent her his new BMW, his pride and joy.  Jeremy had been out front of Mount Vernon puttering around in the yard that long-ago Sunday morning.  Susan, who had spent the night at the Barnes with Tobie, came bolting from the front door in a rush; she had failed to tell her son’s sitter she’d be out all night.  She hopped into the expensive car and sped off down the drive.  Jeremy often said that he knew at that moment what would happen next.  He had installed a locked chain across the entrance the week before her flight.  It was a desperate measure done to repel the siege of tourists after the wine country periodical had published a detailed map pinpointing the famous Jeremy Barnes vineyard.

Susan flew through the obstruction, uprooting the four-foot posts connected to the chain that clung like braces to the teeth of the radiator grill.  Jeremy dropped his trowel and let out a great holler as the car disappeared from view.

The sound of the two posts pounding against the rear quarter panels of the 630i had no apparent impact on Susan’s mission, for if she made it to Healdsburg by ten she’d shave an hour off the sitter’s fee.  Finally, two miles from the ranch, Gilberto flagged down the obsessive Susan.

Gilberto had been on his way home from Mass and thought he had apprehended a fanatical tourist with a souvenir, a paranoid thought brought on by two incidents at the ranch earlier that year:  Gilberto had caught a tourist at the road cutting down a mature sauvignon blanc vine with a chain saw, and he had discovered early one morning a home winemaker and five accomplices up from Walnut Creek busily picking several rows of prime chardonnay vines.  Their feeble excuse – that they thought the vineyard had already been harvested – didn’t hold water; the fools were out there in early August.  The benevolent Jeremy had dropped the trespassing and felony theft charges against the perpetrators, but he asked the prosecution to go after them for violating a state statute prohibiting “attempted chaptalization” – adding sugar to the unripened grapes for fermentation, a minor misdemeanor under the alcoholic beverage code.

After Susan’s mishap, Jeremy had loaned her a rusted pick-up kept running only for inspecting the vineyards during the rainy season.  Susan had it stolen that evening in front of Healdsburg’s supermarket.  She had left the keys in it, running, while she went in to do her weekly shopping.  Her excuse was that she was afraid the battery might go dead.

Later as a joke, Jeremy had purchased an old civil defense siren from a surplus store in Oakland; it was during the time of his recovery from heart surgery, when he would relax outside on the porch swing.  He spotted Susan whipping into the drive in her rental car, and to warn of her approach he let go with the ear-piercing siren that Gilberto had secretly mounted on the rooftop the night before.  Jeremy had it dismantled after Gilberto lost half his pruning crew; they had mistaken it for a sneak attack by the Border Patrol.  It was one of Bobby’s favorite stories of his late father.

But Susan had finally made a request of Bobby that he couldn’t refuse.  She had asked him to escort her to an invitation-only party in Timberrrville, a little community out on The River that rapidly was becoming the hip suburb to the county’s growing metropolis of Santo Dinero, the amusing name tagged on Santa Rosa by some rural locals.  Susan had pulled out all the stops; she told Bobby it was his final chance to alter his fate as a social hermit.  Susan had flatly refused to take Tobie; Bobby was her stand-in, her way out, her escort faute de mieux.  Tobie had not been asked by her for the simple reason that The Insect would no doubt tag along and vomit in the corner of their hosts’ home before passing out.  It was one social blunder Susan wouldn’t commit.

The night of the party Bobby stumbled up the steps to Susan’s cabin on “The Mountain,” a hill of granite behind Healdsburg that caused The River to abruptly change its course.  Technically the hill was a dozen feet shy of being classified a true mountain by Rand-McNally, but that was the name tagged on it by the townsfolk.  Two years before Susan had persuaded her father to purchase the old summer home on The Mountain’s north slope – as an investment, of course.  Her father, an apple cannery owner in Gravenburg, readily agreed; it fell outside the ten-mile limit he’d imposed in the treaty agreed upon before she went fishing for her own home.

The winter after she moved into the cabin was called the Year of the Deluge by the locals.  Sixty-five inches of rain fell in five months.  Her home didn’t catch a ray of sunshine all winter in the canopy of the slope and the trees, and she swore that on the bathroom walls she could actually stand there and watch the mold grow.  It was no wonder to Bobby that now she spent so much time with Tobie in the warmth of the sunny deck of Daniel’s old place.  If it hadn’t been for the fight with Tobie that erupted over the party, no doubt Bobby wouldn’t have been standing on her porch cleaning his shoes covered with the mud of The Mountain.

“Hey, Little Ronny, where’s your momma?”

“She went to pick up the sitter.  If she doesn’t come back in, tell her the drugstore called.  They found her purse.”

“What’ve you been up to?”

“I didn’t have to go to school this week.”

“Were you sick?”

“No.  My daddy took me to a Mensa convention in Los Angeles.”

“Now what is it your daddy does?”

“He used to be vice president at Grandpa’s cannery.  Now he’s a parapsychologist.”

“That’s nice.  Was it fun – your trip?”

“Boring.  All I could do was sit in the hotel room or play computer games.  I don’t like computer games.  I’d rather play soccer or Scrabble.”

“Why didn’t you stay with your momma?”

“She said she was too busy to drive me to school in Gravenburg every day.  She’s been real busy with her job.”

“Busy with Tobie growing roses?”

“I dunno.”

Susan burst through the door in a rush trailed by a 15-year-old girl.  Susan had on a wildly striped miniskirt that appeared to be made from a T.G.I. Friday tablecloth; it was the first time in five months that Bobby had seen her in anything but jeans, a T-shirt and flak jacket.  He was impressed.  Ronny addressed his mother in a resigned tone.

“The drugstore called and said you left your purse.”

“Shit!  Oh, damn it!  I can’t believe it.  How could I do such a thing?”

Ronny looked at Bobby through his thick rimmed glasses and rolled his eyes.  Her diatribe continued.

“We’ll have to get the goddamn thing, Bobby.  I have to pay the fucking sitter.  Kimberly, this is Bobby.”

“Hi.”

“Hello.”

Susan turned to her son.  “Now you be a good boy for Mommy and don’t give Kimberly a bad time.”

“Yeah, okay.  When does Daddy get back from skiing?”

“Tomorrow night, baby, if the roads from Tahoe are open.”

“Can I walk down to The River tomorrow and watch the naked people?”

“Only if it’s nice like today.  And only if you promise not to throw rocks.  Really promise this time.  Those people enjoy their privacy.”

“Oh, okay.  I promise.”

Bobby ran right into it as he walked in front of Susan’s car.  He fell face down in the driveway of pine needles; the bumper had nearly ripped his kneecap off.  Susan sat in the passenger seat, combing her hair in the mirror of the visor, oblivious to his fall.  Bobby struggled to his feet.

“What in the hell happened to your bumper?”

“Nothing.  Come on, get in.  We’re late.”

“Turn on the headlights, Susan.”

In the beams of light Bobby saw half of the front bumper bent three feet straight out like the lance of a knight or the bill of a swordfish.  Susan stepped out of the car and marched up to inspect the damage.

“When did you do this?” Bobby inquired.

“God if I know.  I – I do remember hearing something when I pulled away from the drugstore.”

“I wonder what their car looks like.”

“Whose car?”

“Never mind.  Let’s take mine.”

“No, that’s okay, let’s just go.”

“I can’t drive this.  Halfway through an intersection I’d skewer a pedestrian.”

“Whatever, Bobby.  You’re making me late.”

“Where have you been?  Get lost?”

“I was distracted by Christmas festivities.”

“In Guerneville?  Whatever you say.”

Shaun hopped off the hood of his Porsche and grabbed the daypack, and the two friends walked through the entrance into the park.

“We could drive through here and to a pond about halfway up, but it’s free to walk in.  Besides, I don’t think anyone can experience the redwoods encased in plastic and glass.”

Because of the recent rains and it being the off-season, the redwood grove was pristine.  Rust-colored needles covered the black-top road that wound through the majestic trees.  Bobby felt as if they were the first two humans to ever have stepped into the gulch of first-growth, thirty-story trees.  Well into the ravine, under the darkening canopy, the two came upon a monstrous tree that had fallen during the recent storm.  The length of the tree raced back into the distance across the gulch and up into the brush covering the opposite bank.  The felled giant had taken out several smaller redwoods in a final act of strength.  In falling it had blocked the road, but the rangers, working like wood ants, had cut a swath in the seven-foot diameter trunk to open access to the remainder of the park.  As they passed through the opening, they paused to examine the concentric rings of the tree.  Through their rough calculations, they determined that the tree had sprung from the earth during the fading moments of the Roman Empire.  Bobby felt a sudden sadness as he looked at the majestic being.  He felt an embarrassment – as if he were an insensitive tourist gawking at a beached, bloated whale.

Soon they were through the park and into the preserve, a protected watershed area above the grove.  They scooted off the road onto a climbing, switchback trail, which shot them up several hundred feet to a higher trail hugging the ridge of the blue-green forest of trees.  As they rose up the path, Bobby turned and looked down on the stand of the modern dinosaurs of the plant world, surely dinosaurs if the lumber companies continued to destroy the first and even second growth stands and replace them with their genetically engineered seedlings of other evergreen species that grew faster and turned a quicker profit.  As they ascended into the preserve, the forest gave way to more of a chaparral country, with the hills covered in isolated stands of madrone, manzanita and brush oak, and, on the northern slope, an occasional redwood.

After a steep and trying climb, Shaun led Bobby to a promontory with a panoramic view of the county.  Shaun dropped the daypack beside a lichen-covered boulder and sat down beside it.  These were to be their seats for the evening’s sunset.

Bobby absorbed the scene before him.  To his left and below was what he assumed was the stream bed, the lowest and darkest band of trees winding through the carpeted hills.  And suddenly rising out of the bed was the preserve of first-growth redwoods, giants even from his vantage point high above them.  The creek bed curved through the meadow and into a hamlet, what surely was Guerneville.  From a distance it appeared so peaceful nestled in the trees and hills, yet he remembered what a strange little spot it was.  Behind Guerneville, The River could be made out.  Not the water, only the broad expanse between the closer and further ridges that were separated by a finger-like bank of white fog drifting in from the coast.  The fingers of fog spilled over the low hills and around a bluff that in defiance held out for sunlight with but a few of its ridge top trees protruding, silhouetted, above the swirling mist.  The encroaching fog could be traced back to the wide bank that earlier had invaded the coast and driven them inland that afternoon.  Bobby looked stage right, far to the north.  On the horizon a bright white anvil of a distant storm rose in the azure sky.  Behind him, in the farthest balcony of this natural theater was the extinct volcano to the east, and hiding at its base were the foothills that gave way to The Valley – his home.

Ahead, center stage, the meadows they looked upon were covered in dry, tan grass and scarred by outcroppings of exposed rock.  Only a few clumps of trees hugged the protective slopes of the steep hills.  Bobby found it hard to believe that just those few miles – those few miles away from the cool fog moving up The River – could make such a difference in the microclimate.

Shaun pulled the cork on the pinot noir and poured two glasses as he spoke.  “This is supposed to be some wine.”

“I’ve heard it is.  I know the owners of the winery, Shaun.  They said it comes from thirty-year-old vines growing on a non-irrigated slope near The River.  I think that’s the key, this pinot noir comes from mature vines.”

“You don’t grow any pinot noir, do you?”

“Hell, no.  Jeremy was too lucky for that.”

“Lucky?”

“For some time now, American wine writers have been writing an annual column about how bad California pinot noirs are.”

“Why?”

“Mob hysteria.  It may take a quarter of a century, Shaun, but I believe someday California pinot noir will get their due,” Bobby added.  He turned to look at a ground squirrel a few yards away.

“Bobby, do you ever talk to Carin?  Have things ever gotten any better?”

“No.”

“Do you want to know if I have?”

“Have what?”

“Talked to her.”

“No.  Not really.”

“Okay.”

Bobby wanted Shaun to talk, but not about that.  Bobby focused on Guerneville, about to be invaded by a white tentacle of fog.

“Shaun, what did you think of living in Guerneville?  Wasn’t it strange?”

“For the six months I was there, Bobby, it was fascinating.  Like stepping back a decade – two decades — and seeing what it was like when we were kids.  That town has some of the most unique, iconoclastic individuals in the world.  It’s a marketing surveyor’s nightmare.  I’ve got stories, have I got stories.”

“Tell me one.  I can’t think of anything I’d rather hear than one of your yarns.”

Bobby remembered the long tales that Shaun wove on their hikes in the Smoky Mountains.  Shaun had inherited the trait of yarn-spinning from his Tennessee grandfather, and he could ramble on in a fascinating way about even the most mundane subject.  Bobby had always found the stories to be soothing, like the smell of pine needles or the crackle of a campfire on the beach.

“Have I told you about Albert the Fishmonger?”

“No.  Let’s hear it.”

“When I first moved to Guerneville, I found a place on The River outside of town.  It was a dilapidated, turn-of-the-century summer home built into the side of a steep hill.  Beautiful place.  I had a dozen hundred-foot redwoods in my yard.  I had to climb fifty-four steps to my front door.  The landlord was a dry waller in The City who’d bought the place as a refuge for the coming nuclear war.  It definitely was a fixer-upper.

“I’d head into Guerneville for groceries once a week.  The town only has one big supermarket, but I always bought my fish from Gladys’ Sea-Fresh Seafood stand.  The stand was nothing more than a small, one-room portable building with a collapsible awning that opened up to protect the customers from winter rain while they bought their fish.

“I called it Al’s, because Al sold me the fresh fish they brought over the fifteen miles from the little fishing village by the bay.  It really wasn’t Al’s place, because Gladys was the owner.  I’d rather have bought my fish from Al, though, because he was so much friendlier.  Gladys was grouchy, and I always had the feeling that she put her thumb on the scale when she weighed out my red snapper.

“So I always tried to drop by when I saw Al’s bicycle parked out front.  Al had one of those ancient Schwinns.  Had those big fenders and a large sheet-metal tube between the handlebars and seat that had all the utility of old Cadillac fins.  But his bike had a new red paint job, and the headlight still worked.

“Al was a short, stocky man in his late 40’s or early 50’s, I’d guess.  He had an intense look on his face, and a well-trimmed beard and stout build.  His face was dark and had these shiny red splotches – they were noticeable but not disgusting – that I only saw when he was excited or working hard.  In a way, he reminded me of Luciano Pavoratti, except that Al had a squeaky voice with a Brooklyn accent.  I still have this amusing image in my mind that I conjured up of Al – closing his fish shop and peddling through the redwoods on his ancient red bike, all the while booming out Nadir’s aria from Bizet’s opera, The Pearl Fishers.

“Al was a good fish salesman because he was opinionated about which fish were good that day, and because he told me what it was like to work on a fishing boat in the ocean.  Al’s biggest problem in life, besides not working on a boat anymore, was Gladys.  He could talk for hours about what a crab she was, or about the gaff he had to take from her and how it had driven him to the brink.  Yet I never saw him look crosswise at her when she was around.

“Al was the perfect shopkeeper.  Even when I moved away from here out to the restaurant, whenever I was near Guerneville I’d always stop in to see him and buy something from him.  I even made it a point to give him a bottle of wine – your wine – at Christmas.  But there was one thing that bothered me about Al that I only noticed after I’d been to his fish stand many times.  When he gave me my fish one day, I noticed his hands were covered in warts.  Not outrageously, but I’m sure there were twenty or so on each hand if I had tried to count them.  It didn’t bother me too much because I didn’t think I could catch warts from the fish he gut or the crab he boiled.  But one thing was for certain, Bobby – “

“What?”

“I never bought frog legs from Al.”

Bobby opened one eye and looked at Shaun sipping his wine.

“I think I saw your friend Al listening to the carolers this afternoon.  Fat guy with a short beard holding onto an old red bicycle.”

“I’m afraid not.  Al was killed in an accident a couple of months ago.”

“No, you can’t be serious.  This man I saw fit your description perfectly.”

“Al was run over on his bicycle about a block from the fish stand.  It was a big story in the local papers – a hit and run.  A lot of people, including myself, were extremely upset.”

“I swear I saw him today.”

“An imposter.”

Bobby felt the hairs on his neck rise up.  He closed his eyes and tried to take in the warmth of the last rays of the declining sun.

“You know we’ve been through a lot together, Bobby.  The formative years.  The fun years.  Remember when you and Carin came to see me in Paris that summer?  What wonderful memories.  What was the name of that Champagne house we visited in Rheims?”

“Pommary.”

“Do you remember that day?”

“How could I forget?”

“Your father had that man, Mr. Bergen, from The Winery write a letter of introduction for us so we’d be given the grand tour.  And we went down into those catacombs – or chalk caves or whatever – filled with mile upon mile of bottles in those racks.”

“Pupitres.”

“Yes.  And while we were talking to the guide Carin backed up and tripped and knocked one over.”

“How could I forget?  It was so embarrassing.”

“Do you remember the sound?  It was like a glacier falling into the sea.  It echoed off the walls for an eternity.  And those two Frenchmen – “

“The little one with the moustache screaming at her in French.  She’d only broken a couple cases of wine.”

“And she cried until we left.”

“How about the time she cooked that fancy dinner at our apartment?”

“Oh God, yes.  She’d planned that meal out for a week.  I’d volunteered to help her, Bobby, but she wanted to go it alone.  She’d forgotten to soak the eggplant in salt water and it was incredibly bitter.  Then she made those French-fried mushrooms – “

“A disaster.”

“ – and she was using one of my large plastic spatulas.  When she pulled it out of the boiling oil only half the handle was left!”

“Remember the black smoke that came out of that pan?”

“My spatula was melted on the ceiling!”

“The smoke alarm went off and she bolted from the kitchen –“

“And we ended up taking her out for Chinese food.”

“And the night she put the pizza in the oven and went to bed.”

“And the potatoes!”   Shaun shouted with a laugh.

“You came home from class and the fire department was there.”

“Waiting for one of us to come home.  They’d kicked the door in with axes in hand.  Can you imagine?  They rushed out with those three little burnt potatoes and foamed them down!”

“Three pieces of charcoal on a potato skewer.”

“And the smell!”

“She wasn’t much with a frying pan, Shaun, but she was wicked with a pen.”

“Yes, she really is a talented writer.”

“Shaun, did I ever tell you the story of why she quit her sorority a week after she had pledged?  It happened before we knew her.  It all was such a big secret back then.”

“No, I want to hear.”

“She had pledged one of the more exclusive sororities at Vanderbilt, one with a really good bloodline.  Their sorority house was one of those southern mansions that makes Mount Vernon look like the servants’ quarters.  You’d remember it.  At the first meeting all the pledges were to walk down the big winding staircase in the foyer to meet the members down below.  Carin caught her heel on a loop in the carpet and tumbled half the length of the stairway to a sprawl at their feet.

“My God, was the hurt?”

“She sprained her ankle.  They had to carry her to the student hospital.  She was too embarrassed to go back.  She depledged.  That woman had a lot of pride.”

“Poor Carin.”

“God, how I loved her.”

“So did I.  Bobby, I’m sorry she came up.  She was taboo.”

“That’s alright.  We can only talk about the fun times.”

The two let the conversation fade in the hushed silence before the evening’s performance began.  For the second time that day the tiny congregation, minus Amelie, performed their sacrament.  Bread was broken, the wine poured, and the sacrifice made to the God responsible for the pastoral scene.

Bobby looked to the brilliant orb of light on the horizon as it passed behind a patch of high wispy cirrus that he knew was many miles out to sea.  At his feet were the dried wild oats that covered the knoll and upland meadow before them.  A deep orange tinge ringed the tops of the golden grain silently nodding in a light breeze.  Between the dried sprouts and the sky were the tree-covered hills rolling away toward the sea.  The dark verdant peaks in the foreground gave way to the successfully distant ridges, each higher and lighter and more lavender than the one before, until a final ridge, jagged with the silhouettes of a few lone trees on its precipice, gave way to the blazing stage for nature’s grand finale.  Bobby’s eyes met the sun, blazing at him in a ball of explosive fury.  As the sun met the horizon the circle became an octagon, and finally it took the strange shape of a glowing mushroom.  It appeared to increase its size and intensity in that instant before it was snuffed out by the sea.

All was quiet but for the faint flapping of a lone turkey vulture overhead.  No sound came from the silent screen before them, yet if the event, the sunset, could have made a noise, Bobby thought it would have been a loud, glorious trumpeting.  Finally the last ray disappeared from view.

Suddenly there was a brilliant green flash.  Bobby opened his lips to speak, but he couldn’t bear to intrude on the scene.  He wondered if he had really seen it.   A gust of wind blew past, causing the shoots of wild grain to nod rhythmically.

With the curtain closed, Bobby finally looked away from the stage and gazed down upon what had been tiny Guerneville, now covered in a down-like blanket of fog.  Shaun spoke.

“Do you know what is the most wonderful thing of all?  Not that we were able to witness such a thing, but that we’ve been given the ability to appreciate it.”  With his statement made he poured the last few drops of wine, including the grains of sediment onto the ground.  “We’d better be getting back.”

Bobby and Shaun policed their camp, placing all the appurtenances of the good life back into Shaun’s day pack.  They began the anticlimactic trek down from the mount, both quietly reflecting on the spectacle they had just seen.  When they reached the grove of towering redwoods, only a faint glow filtered through the enormous trees.  As they walked over the path of dead needles, they saw the redwoods rise from the roadside, ominous black pillars disappearing into a canopy overhead.  Bobby realized why the Native Americans of the area had called it The Forbidden Place.

Shaun stammered with an inaudible word or two, and from his tone and actions, Bobby knew immediately that Shaun was about to talk about something he had put off until it could wait no longer.

“Bobby, there was a reason I called you yesterday, besides wanting to see you – to have you come out for a visit.  There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Yes?”

“In truth, it’s probably nothing that concerns you, but I still felt you should know, should be aware.”

“What?  Tell me.”

“I have this friend.  A very close friend, who’s a regular of the bar scene in Guerneville.  To the point:  My friend met a man, a tourist, or so he though, at a pot-luck held at the resort in Guerneville last week.  They hit it off and soon found themselves in one of those ‘by-the-hour’ cabins.  I won’t give you the intimate details, but they were using poppers.”

“Poppers?”

“Come on, you know what they are.”

“You’re forgetting I was raised on a ranch.”

“Well, you are into mushrooms in sheep shit, right?”

“Funny.”

“A popper, lad, is also called amyl nitrate.  It’s an inhalant that prolongs and intensifies an orgasm.  Anyway, back to the story.  My unnamed friend said he wasn’t sure if it was the poppers, the coke, the drinks – or all three, but his partner in this affair began to talk as if he were on truth serum.  The simple question, ‘What do you do?’ got quite a response.”

“What is this leading to?  End the suspense.”

“I’m getting there.  This ‘tourist’ turned out to be an undercover agent for the DEA, the hypocrite.  My friend said he should have suspected something, because he did look like one of those straight-arrow feds.  He wasn’t out here to bust anybody, he was in Guerneville on his night off.  He told my friend he was up from LA to work a sting on some of ‘those pot farmers’ around here.  The exact location he named was your valley.”

“Do you think I’m growing pot between rows of my chardonnay vines?”

“No, not you, but what about that space-cadet brother of yours, your business partner.”

“Tobie?  Are you serious?  Do you know how much trouble it is to grow enough plants to catch the eye of the Drug Enforcement Administration?  If Tobie tried to grow ten plants they’d be dead in a week from neglect.”

“You’re probably right.  It’s just that my friend remembered his partner saying one thing that was a bit disconcerting.”

“Yes?”

“He said that he mumbled something about how they were going to nab themselves one of the big boys.  And your family has the largest ranch in your valley, right?”

“Yes.  But he must have meant the biggest pot grower.  Come on Shaun.  Tobie and The Insect partners in crime?  Those two on the ten most-wanted list of the DEA?  They couldn’t scheme their way out of a paper bag.  Forget it.”

“I guess so.  But you might want to alert any of your neighbors who might be trying to supplement their income.”

“I’ve got no idea who that’d be.”

The two friends reached the entrance to the park and their cars.

“Shaun, I wonder if living in isolation on the coast hasn’t given you cabin fever – a mild case of paranoia.”

“Could be.”

“Have you ever seen that DEA man again?”

“Of course not!” Shaun paused, seeing the trap a second too late.  “Ah, very clever.  You should have been a Red baiter.”

Bobby unlocked his car door and looked to Shaun.

“I can’t tell you how much fun today was.  I had a great time.”

“Same here.  Let’s not wait so long next time.”

“I’ll have you out to the ranch in a couple of weeks.  Tell Amelie I enjoyed meeting her, and I’ll hug her again anytime – under different circumstances.”

“I will.”

“There’s one thing I’ve been meaning to ask you.  What was she shouting when I was falling down the cliff today?  I meant to ask you that earlier.”

“It was French.”

“Of course it was.  What did she say?”

“A quote?”

“Yes.”

“She said, ‘Help him, save him, he’s dying.’”

Shaun loaded up a day pack with two loaves of French bread and a bottle of rare, old pinot noir from a winery not far from Guerneville.  Before the two hopped in their cars for the winding drive inland to the redwood park, Shaun told Bobby to stop in Guerneville so they could grab a block of cheese.  The town was nestled five miles downstream from the upland redwood grove.

When Bobby reached Guerneville and the small health food store tucked into part of the town’s commercial district, Shaun was emerging from the store.

“I didn’t know this was going to be a road rally to the redwoods.”

“I know that stretch of road like the back of my hand.  Ready to go?”

“I want to run in and get a mineral water.”

“Meet you at the park.  I’ll have everything ready.”

Bobby came out of the store, his bottle of mint-flavored geyser water in hand.  When he threw back his head to pour the cold, sparkling water down his throat, he saw one of Guerneville’s firefighters high up on the utility company’s cherry picker.  The fireman was carefully placing one of several dozen Christmas decorations on a light pole.  Bobby gazed at the little ceremony, then walked across the street to join a group of bystanders whose attention had been drawn to the rite.  At the base of the pole an elderly woman was placing a wooden sign naming the civic organization responsible for the decoration.  The decoration wasn’t one of those sets of red and white lighted plastic bells that adorn many of urban America’s main streets, for it was of nature, the top of a local fir tree that had been trimmed and decorated by a local group.  Bobby looked down the street at the other decorations.  The ornaments were clusters of wild holly berries, or small bells and stars shaped from tin foil, or red bows tied into interesting shapes.  Each decoration was different, each unique.

Bobby’s gaze was diverted by the singing of carolers down the street in front of the town’s bookstore.  It so contradicted Bobby’s conceptualization of this odd little town – carolers in Guerneville? – that he found himself drawn to the music like a magnet.  Bobby joined the multitude gathered to hear a band of twelve disciples from a local church sing what were for him the first Holiday carols of the season.

In the group of a dozen singers was what he believed to be the perfect cross-section of that crazy town.  There was the choral director, a woman in a rust-colored, double-knit pantsuit, who would have had white hair except that she dyed it red.  From her animated way of playing the guitar while she cajoled her group to belt out another verse, it seemed obvious to Bobby that she was the aging third-grade teacher at the Guerneville school.  He could be wrong.

In the choral group were the other slices of the Guerneville pie.  There was the young earthy woman in homemade clothes, with no make-up on and a cute baby in her stroller, representing many of the women who had created homes and families up in the surrounding isolated forest hills.  There was the short, white-haired grandmother, hair pulled back tightly in a bun held by a band of real holly berries, who reminded Bobby of a smaller version of his late grandmother.  There was the heavy-set Chicano woman in an authentic peasant dress who strummed along on her family-heirloom guitar.

And there was the rather ordinary middle-aged man with moustache, one of those big, bushy moustaches that so many men who have them hide behind, whom Bobby hypothesized was one of the many who escaped The City by being washed up on the shores of the town beach.  There were the two gays with the required close-cropped hair, obviously partners, who must have enjoyed church as youngsters when they grew up in a small town like Wally and The Beave’s, but who had fled to The City to avoid the fate of leading a double life – or half a life.  Then they discovered Guerneville with its pace so much slower than that of The City, and it became the substitute for the hometowns they had left.  The shorter of the two, the Jerry-Mathers look-alike, sang with an unmatched, uncapped effervescence, as if he hadn’t sung Christmas carols for some time.

Bobby turned and looked at the faces of the audience.  There were more canyon ladies, in town to make their sporadic forays for essential food items that they couldn’t grow up on the hills.  Their babies were held tight to their breasts in canvas papooses.  At their sides were their bearded and spectacled husbands, escaped physicists or some such, with their hands callous from chopping wood for their cast-iron stoves.

Bobby examined the people on the periphery of the crowd.  There was a portly red-faced man with a neat Van Dyke beard and in his grip were the handlebars of an ancient bright-red bicycle.  Far behind the man, alone, was an attractive woman leaning against an old VW, her chin resting on its discolored roof.  Unknown to Bobby, she was the woman who ran the herb and stationary shop out of the tiny house behind the hardware store.  She held her place well behind the rest of the audience, and on her face was the most distant smile Bobby had ever seen.  He wondered what was going through that mind:  Were they clear thoughts of childhood – as virgin as her clear, makeup-free complexion – or were they muddled as she tried to reason how those naïve childhood days of Christmas bliss could have faded into such obscure memories?  No matter what, she appeared to be on the verge of tears, causing Bobby to continue his secret study of her.

He wondered if she wished for a return to those simple days of adolescence when she would bake Christmas cookies with her mother as they listened to the Perry Como Singers harmonize on those same tunes.  Or was she sad because of all the unfortunate experiences that had occurred in the post-adolescent years, those years when the growing pains were almost unbearable, when life suddenly became so complicated as to be unthinkable, and how those events were like fallen trees now that blocked her from ever returning to the days when she was a happy, albeit naïve suburban child in LA or St.  Louis or wherever?  If only he could see into her mind and live just that fraction of her life that she was flashing before her eyes, then he would surely be able to cry with her, or hold her as she released those feelings that only she knew about.  But he knew that her sharing with him what she was reliving was not meant to be; he just couldn’t walk up to her and say, “Explain.”  So he removed his eyes from her and looked above the decorations and Main Street and up into the ever-present hills. 

It was a brisk, cool afternoon by then, and low, pink patches of fog were moving in from the west.  Sunset was still more than two hours off, yet the sun already had hidden itself behind a redwood-lined ridge of one of the hills that stood over Guerneville and made it such a reclusive, odd little speck on the earth.  As he walked back to his car, he tried to pigeon-hole the scene in his memory.  He momentarily stopped and turned for a final look at the carolers.  He was being serenaded with the song, “Oh Little Town of Bethlehem.”  He felt very warm inside.  And the thought occurred to him:  Living back here in The Valley on the ranch, first at Daniel’s place and now alone in Janie’s house, he had turned into something of a recluse.  He hadn’t had a television in his home since his move back, so he hadn’t seen the Budweiser beer wagon being pulled through the snow by Clydesdales once that holiday season.  Yet to him as he stood there on the sidewalk in Guerneville, it still felt – perhaps it had never felt – so much like Christmas.

Shaun packed their lunch in a wicker basket that Amelie had bought for just such an occasion.  Bobby brought in two cases of the new release of “Jeremy Barnes Vineyard” chardonnay produced by The Winery.  A bottle was iced down in a plastic bucket, the car was loaded, and they were off.

Ten minutes later, Shaun whipped his ancient convertible into a turn-out by the winding coastal road.  With Shaun leading, the three plunged into the dense forest of pine and occasional redwood.  The woods shrouded a steep ravine as it fell from the coast hills to the sea.  Two hundred yards down the creek bed they heard a rushing sound, not of the surf, but of a waterfall.  The canopy and brush parted, revealing a granite chute over which a small stream cascaded.  Thirty feet below, a quiet pool momentarily collected the water before sending it on its final rendezvous with the sea.  Beside the pond was a flat carpet of sun-drenched grass.  And providing an almost vertical backdrop to this idyllic setting was a steep, curved embankment covered with four-foot high ferns.

Amelie and Bobby knew immediately that this was Shaun’s chosen spot for their picnic.  They set up camp on a wool blanket spread on the damp grass.  From his vantage point, Bobby could look down the falling stream that again was covered by the converging trees.  But Bobby also could see a tiny opening in the trees above the stream, and through it the vivid blue and white of the moving surf.  Overhead, the sun blazed in a brilliant azure wash.  Already it had begun to take up its winter residence in the southern sky, and the light it radiated gave a warm, golden tint to the surroundings.

The first late-autumn storm of the season had blown through three days earlier, cleansing the ferns and combing the trees of their dead needles.  The bare patches of ground now held that rust-colored cover of needles, providing a natural complement to the lush green tones of the ferns and grass.  And the norther had left in its wake incredibly clear skies, strong surf, and a faint wind.  The breeze would rise intermittently and cause an eerie “swoosh” sound as it flowed through the needles of the overhead trees.  Every few minutes a redwood would sway in the wind, emitting a slow resonant creak, a sound akin to that made by opening the heavy door of an ancient crypt.  The sound wasn’t at all frightening to Bobby; instead he found it perversely soothing.

Bobby checked his breathing and realized that it was heavy.  He was subconsciously taking slow, deep breaths so the rich ocean air could linger in his lungs.  He turned his attention to the data being processed by his olfactory sense.  The virgin air was crisp and clean, having traveled across over the Northern Pacific before filtering through the spicy trees; it made him incredibly hungry.

Shaun took the sandwiches from the wicker basket and divided them.  Amelie removed the crystal glasses from their wrappings of table linen, and Bobby opened the bottle of wine.  Shaun had prepared turkey sandwiches for the three.  Inside of Amelie’s sourdough rolls were turkey breast, cream cheese and cranberry sauce.  And on their plates were French-fried sweet potatoes.  Bobby wasn’t sure if the setting or the sea air was responsible; but the ingredients blended together to make the simple meal into an incredible sensory experience.

“This sandwich is excellent.  It reminds me of Thanksgiving dinner,” Bobby commented.

Shaun raised his glass.  “Then we’ll toast to the memories of that first Thanksgiving dinner you and I spent together with your family years ago at your ranch.”

“To Thanksgiving.”

“And reunions.”

The three held up their glasses and the etched diamond pattern of the crystal stemware sparkled in the sun.  The warm fall sunrays made the chardonnay appear even more golden than it was.
Wonderful wine, Bobby.”

“It’s a special bottling from a small vineyard that the winemaker kept separate.  Extra oak-time and bottle-age before release.  It represents the last harvest of Jeremy Barnes.  It is special.”

“Yes, it should be.”

“Stan Bergen gave the unpressed juice six extra hours of skin-contact time because the fruit was in such good condition.  We began picking the vineyard – the one right behind the house – at five-thirty on an unusually cold morning.  When we dumped the gondolas at The Winery the juice was 48 degrees.  Even the smell from the crusher told us we had a great wine.”

Amelie had been quiet through the meal, but finally she volunteered her opinion.

“Bobby, what is so appealing about your wine is that it is such a perfect complement to food.  It is rich, yet crisp.  The taste is so intense that to take a sip clears – awakens – my palate.  The wine makes each bite of food taste as if it were the first.”

Bobby looked at Amelie for a long moment before he replied.  “That’s one of the best descriptions I’ve ever heard for my father’s wine.”

Amelie blushed and looked away.

Shaun stood up, ending the awkward moment.  “What do you say we all hike down to the beach for a bit?  And on such a perfect, warm day I vote on making the trek au natural.”

Before Bobby could respond, Shaun had begun undressing.  And despite her verbal shyness, Amelie quickly followed Shaun’s cue.  Wearing only their shoes and socks, the three trudged down aong the tiny creek bed, having stashed their clothes near the pool.  Halfway down, the pines made their final stand against the forces of the wind and sea.  The creek opened upon a stark ravine separating two grass-covered knolls, both dotted with grazing sheep.

Shaun stopped suddenly and, mimicking the guide of an Audubon bird watch, signaled for his companions to carefully approach.  He was crouched over a small pile of excrement obviously left by the nearby sheep.  He pointed at several tiny orange objects protruding from the sides of the mass.

“Do you know what these are?”  Shaun asked as he plucked out three of them and held one out for Bobby.

“Um – orange-flavored truffles?”

“Close.  They’re psilocybin mushrooms.  Magic mushrooms.  They pop out of sheep shit a few days after a rain.”

“How do you know they’re not poisonous?”

“I knew someone in Guerneville with a picture book about them.  He was a ‘collector’ and told me what exactly to look for in the perfect ‘shroom.  Try one.”

Shaun popped one in his mouth and gave one to Bobby.

“Are you sure about this?” Bobby asked.  “What will they do?”

“One little one will only cause a mild sensation.  An increased awareness.  Any effects will wear off before we leave.  Trust me.”

Bobby put the tiny cap in his mouth and swallowed.  The taste was horrible.

“Amelie?”

“Perhaps one of us should refrain, Shaun.  That way I could call the Coast Guard and they could send out the big helicopter to save you two.”

“Amelie, trust me.”

She held the mushroom to her lips and flashed a pleading look to Bobby.  He hoped she knew Juliet’s death speech in case this became a very poignant moment.  Stoically, she put it in her mouth.

The three adventurers clambered down several large boulders and found themselves on the beach.  Only a small trickle dug a shallow canal through the sand to meet the surging salt water; most of the stream fled underground for a private reunion with the sea.

Shaun had begun walking up the beach to search for abalone and sea anemones in a protected cover hidden behind a solitary land mass – a flat-topped, steep-cliffed peninsula connected to the headlands by a narrow land bridge.  Amelie had paused and bent down to watch the slender stream race down the beach.  Bobby approached and knelt beside her.

“Bobby, do you comprehend the significance of this little scene?’

“And what’s that?”

“We are watching the fulfillment of the life of every raindrop, the realized potential of every stream and river.  We are seeing the moment of procreation for the major ingredient of our planet.”

“Yes, it’s beautiful.  You certainly have an excellent command of the language.”

“My mother was an American.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“That she’s deceased.”

“She’s not.  She revoked her citizenship.”

“Were you raised in America?”

“No.  France.”

“How did you come here?”

“I came over to work.  I married and stayed.”

“Here on the coast?”

“No, in New Orleans.”

“And then you came here?”

“Yes.”

From the inflection in her voice, Bobby could tell he was approaching too close.  He rose and began to walk in the direction of Shaun.  Amelie stood and scurried up so that she could walk beside him.  Together they combed the beach for shells, pausing to examine driftwood and sand dollars and the blooms of the succulent plants clinging to the cliffs buttressing the narrow beach.

Eventually Amelie drifted away from him, and the three were each in their own little world.  Shaun was far ahead in the protected inlet created by the sea butte rising out of the ocean thirty yards off shore.  The short walk and the sea air had tired Bobby and he found a dry patch of sand on a wind-whipped berm.  He sat down and assumed a cross-legged position facing the surf.  Amelie had spotted a flat granite rock jutting out of the sheltered, complacent water only a few yards from the shore.  She stepped out through the chilly water and climbed atop it.  She lay prone, gathering the warmth of the sun.

Bobby closed his eyes and for the first time perceived the effects of the orange mushroom.  Listening to his surroundings, he concentrated his hearing on a small spring gurgling out of the cliff at his back.  He focused forward to the sound of the water splashing around the protected rock on which Amelie sat, then still further out to the roar of the omnipresent surf.  Manipulating his mind without moving his body, he changed the plane of focus from horizontal to vertical, as a studio photographer would by tilting forward the lens plate of a view camera.  First he focused at ground level and listened to the buzz of the sand flies in the clumps of kelp and sea grass strewn at his feet.  At head high, he could hear the light breeze whip past him, the sound reminiscent of the flapping of an unsheeted jib.  At thirty feet above sea level he heard the piercing cry of an osprey and the roar of the surf as it was carried by gusts over the cliff.  At infinity, directly above his head, he heard the faint rumble of what must have been a silver speck, a distant jet as it began its descent into The City.

How odd, he thought, to be able to choose what I want to hear.  To be able to focus on a sound, examine it, turn it around in my mind.  A piece of fungi growing in sheep shit can do all that?

Bobby opened his eyes.  Directly in his field of view was Amelie lying on her rock intently watching a tiny sea animal in a pool carved into the rock’s base.  Her pose reminded him of the fairy in Stars, a Maxfield Parish poster.  The late-fall sun backlit her body, creating a halo – a golden radiation around her.  For the first time he appraised her in her nakedness.  She had a stunning figure.  He had no idea how old she was.  She was one of those rare women who are ageless between the years of 20 and 35.  She wasn’t what he would call thin, but she was firm, athletic.  Her healthy tan told Bobby she sun-bathed nude at her home that was behind the first ridge, sheltered from the summer fog.

Bobby was beginning to realize the beauty of what lay before him.  Two hues dominated the scene.  The azure sky with brush strokes of high cirrus blended into the deeper blues of the North Pacific.  Contrasting the backdrop were the intruding earth tones:  the dark brown of the rock, the deep tan shades of Amelie, the golden reflection of her skin exposed to the sun.  The colors were intense, almost gaudy.

He felt the scene could not be improved upon, that he beheld perfection, but then his eyes darted left to observe a flock of a dozen brown pelicans lumbering into view.  They flew in a perfect “V” formation behind Amelie, further out to sea.  From his view they were between her and the brush-stroked clouds.  Just as Bobby composed himself to record this moment, as the pelicans approached above and to the left of Amelie, a mischievous wave hit the base of her rock and sent a white plume – a fan – of spray into the air, a translucent sheet behind her.

“Click,” he whispered, and he quickly shut his eyes.  It took a minute to develop and fix in his mind the image he had projected on his mental picture screen.  It was, he thought, an award-winning photograph that he alone could savor and never have taken from him.

After what seemed an eternity Bobby felt a shadow pass by.  He opened his eyes to see Shaun looking down at him, the sun blazing around his silhouette.

“Hey, guru, let’s go explore.”

“What?”

“Let’s go climb up the cliff of that island and see what’s on la mesa.”

“How do we get out there?”

“We’ll hug the beach out and find a trail up the cliff.”

“And if the tide comes in?”

“We can walk back over that land bridge.”

Bobby pulled out of his trance and followed Shaun.

“Amelie!  Come hike out to the island with us!”

“No, go ahead you two.  I’ll meet you on top of the headland in a bit.”

Bobby contemplated their little adventure.  The island was a plug of granite that rose high above the surf thirty yards from the shore.  It wasn’t a true island, for a narrow column of clay connected it with the mainland.  The eroding land bridge rose fifty feet above the rock-strewn beach that was exposed only at low tide, and the tide was out as Bobby and Shaun hiked over to examine what in a few more seasons of winter storms would be a completely isolated island.  Shaun found a narrow path leading upward, and after a strenuous climb the two were on the flat parcel of earth sixty feet above the sea.  They were amazed at the amount of bird life on the budding refuge.  Dozens of oystercatchers and cormorants and petrels had built nests in crags of rock or in the low bushes on its flat top.  Bobby found an empty nest on the ground and studied it until two birds appeared, creating an intense commotion.

“Bobby, we ought to be getting back soon.  Amelie has to bake the pastry shells for tomorrow and we still have the real hike on our agenda.”

Bobby looked across the land bridge to Amelie, who had climbed up from the beach onto the mainland cliff.

“Are we going to have to climb all the way back down and up again?”

“No.  We’ll take the land bridge over since she’s already up there.”

“Are you sure we can cross that?  It looks pretty narrow.”

“I was out here last spring and saw some hikers crossing it with backpacks.  We can make it.  Trust me.”

Shaun led the way.  The land bridge was an eroding umbilical cord between the receding mother cliff and the defiant child island.  The cord was nothing more than a ridge – a long, pinnacle-like band of soft dirt that, with a few more tempestuous assaults, would crumble and wash away.  Shaun crawled a dozen feet down the island cliff to begin the walk across the path.  Bobby followed.  Shaun stepped lightly and quickly over the roller-coaster, foot-wide path – a thirty-yard trek between the outpost and the safety of the waiting Amelie.  Bobby hurried to keep up with Shaun, who was intent on making the crossing as quickly as possible.  Bobby riveted his attention on the tennis shoes of Shaun, for he felt no desire to see the boulders scattered on the beach fifty feet below; he had never been completely comfortable with heights.  Bobby, who at first was relieved that he had on his hiking boots, realized that this precipice was more for a mountain goat – or a 150-pound man in tennis shoes – than himself.  Bobby also noticed that what he thought was an optical illusion – that the path maintained its width, it only appeared to converge in the distance – was not true; it really was becoming narrower.

Shaun had begun to slow his pace and be more careful in placing his feet.  He turned his head slightly, and without taking his eyes off the path, spoke from the side of his mouth. 

“This isn’t quite what I expected, Lewis.”

Bobby took his cue.  “Right you are, Clark.”

The inverted “V” on which they trod was not made of granite or sandstone as were the island and cliff.  It was made of crumbling clay and bits of rock that had withstood the forces of erosion only because of the protection offered by the sheltering island.  Bobby had begun to notice that chunks of dirt on the edge of the eight-inch path beneath them were giving way and dropping out of sight down the almost vertical bank of the ridge.  Bobby lifted his eyes momentarily and saw Amelie watching them from the cliff twenty yards ahead.  Her expression he caught in that instant was not so much one of disdain at their attempting this foolish escapade, but of resignation; boys will be boys.

Shaun quickened his pace, apparently realizing that to dwell at a particular spot on the path was dangerous, for the sustained weight on the weakened clay-dirt soaked in the rains earlier that week could cause a sudden landslide.

Bobby felt a minor tremor under his feet and looked ahead to see the patch of ground under Shaun shift.  Shaun paused in a moment of disorientation.  Realizing his predicament, he bound like a gazelle the final half-dozen yards to the safety of the opposite cliff.  In his wild flight, Shaun had begun to veer to his left.  Only his forward momentum and the nearness of the cliff kept him from plunging down its face to the rocks below.

Bobby had paused when Shaun faltered under the landslide, and suddenly he felt the earth at his feet begin to let go.  Bobby leapt face forward onto the spine of rock and clay and dug his hands into the dirt, his face pressing against its back.  He was riding the cliff as a child would ride an old nag bareback.   He looked up and over to Shaun and Amelie, both kneeling in the asylum of the cliff twenty feet away.

“Come on!  Move it, Bobby!  Before it gives way!”

“Hurry!  Please hurry!” Amelie pleaded.

Bobby began to inch forward; it was impossible to turn around and flee back to the island.  He put his hands forward and placed his weight upon them and dragged his body over the dirt and rock.  He gave a second’s though to his situation.  Here was Bobby Barnes, a grown person in charge of one of the best vineyards in the world, dragging his exposed genitals across a pinnacle of sharp stones and dirt clods.  He wondered how he got himself into these situations.  A small, involuntary laugh escaped as he continued to pull ahead.  Shaun and Amelie glanced at each other in wonder.

Ten feet from the open arms of Amelie and Shaun, Bobby felt his support crumble and give way.  He could feel his feet seem to come together beneath him where the dirt had eroded and fallen away.  In slow motion, as chunks of rock slipped away, Bobby began to sink.  He looked up at the two, their arms outstretched, on their faces the look of useless non-swimmers watching a child drown in the surf.  In that moment he felt a pang of guilt for upsetting Amelie and Shaun, for ruining their day.  In a perverse attempt to cheer them up he raised an arm bronco-rider style and let out a half-hearted “yee-ha!” – an interesting response for a man in the throes of death, but not original; Slim Pickens had used the line when he rode the A-Bomb down in Dr. Strangelove.

As chunks of earth fell away under one cheek of his ass and then the other, Bobby leaned from side to side to keep from being thrown off his natural saddle.  Eight feet down and a ton of fallen dirt later Bobby’s ride stopped.  He now appeared as a naked baby on an outrageously sway-backed Trojan horse.  He looked up to the two and smiled.  Amelie was hysterical.

“Shaun!  Aidez-le!  Sauvez-le!  Il se meurte!”

“Bobby, don’t move!  I’m going to run back to the car and flag down someone with a rope and call the Sheriff.  The Coast Guard!  They can get you off there in their helicopter.”

Shaun began to step back from the cliff.  In a determined voice Bobby answered, “No!  Shit no!  Stay here.  I’m either going to be on that cliff or on the beach by the time you get half-way there.  Just get ready to grab me if I make it up.”

Shaun knelt down.  Bobby went to work digging steps in the perpendicular wall on which he sat.  Intermittent small slides caused him to pause in his digging.  He was able to push and punch against parts of the weakened dirt, sending it careening off the ridge, making him wonder how he ever made it that far in the first place.  Slowly he raised himself up on his man-made steps, dragging his naked scrotum up and over the narrow blocks of ground.  Bobby wondered if he’d be charged with self-abuse if he made it out off this alive.

Soon he was only six feet out and three feet down from his companions.  He could almost reach up and touch Shaun’s outstretched hand.  He continued to dig his crude steps until his fingernails hit a large rock mortared into the dirt.

“Shaun, I’m going to try and put a foot on this rock and make a leap for it.  I’ll grab your hand.  You pull me up as hard as you can.  Got it?”

“Yes.  Be careful.”

Shaun had Amelie anchor his legs by sitting on them.  Bobby made his final preparations.

“Are we ready?”

“Yes.”

Bobby quickly knelt up, planted a foot on the rock, grabbed Shaun’s hand and pushed off of his primitive step.  The dirt at his feet gave way, but for an instant provided the support needed for him to spring up off the stone.  With Herculean strength, Shaun catapulted Bobby over his shoulder – into the open arms of Amelie.  She hugged him as a mother would her child, his dirty face at her naked breast, her soft hand stroking his disheveled hair.

“You little boy.  You stupid little boy.”

The import of his predicament began to sink in.  Bobby held her tightly and hoped never to let go.

 “Why did you do it?”  She said, including Shaun in her scolding.  “You fools.  Did you have to prove you were men?”

Bobby pulled away from Amelie and stood up.  His legs wobbled beneath him.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

“I think so.  I, I only followed Shaun because he said we could make it.  I always trust him.  Why not now?”

Bobby took stock of his body.  He was covered with gray dirt.  He looked down and noticed dozens of bright-red superficial cuts and scratches on his penis and scrotum and inner thighs.

“I’ve failed in my attempt at self-mutilation.”

“You’re sick, Bobby,” Shaun mumbled.

“If you two will excuse me, I believe I’ll perform the ancient ritual of those who have battled and conquered the elements.  I’m going to go over there and take a piss into the wind off that cliff.”

Bobby hobbled off over a slight rise to find the privacy to relieve himself.  Amelie continued to scold her friend.

“Why did you take such a silly risk?  You could have been killed.”

“I don’t know,” Shaun said in a bewildered voice.  “It didn’t seem dangerous at first and then we couldn’t turn back.  I’m sorry I did it.”

Amelie accepted his apology by changing the subject.

“Shaun, have you ever seen one so close to death, yet so calm as him?  He – he was laughing and joking when he began to slide down.  If what I saw was bravery or heroic resignation, then it is all so stupid.  A waste.”

“I don’t think what we saw was bravery, Shaun replied, pausing as Bobby returned.

Bobby strolled toward them.  His body was still grimy from the ordeal but his attitude had changed to one of nonchalance, as if it never had happened.

“I have an idea.  Let’s celebrate the joy of living by holding hands and running through this meadow.  It’ll be a good way to release some of the stress.”

Amelie took Bobby’s suggestion and grabbed her children in each hand.  The three ran across the green oceanside pasture, scattering the puzzled sheep in their path.  Amelie sang her babies a French children’s song until they reached the place where their little stream emerged from the trees for its final sprint to the sea.

They were a short distance from the pond when Shaun raised his hand and crouched down.

“What is it?”

“I hear someone up at our camp.  Our clothes are up there.  Stay quiet and keep down.”

The three crept along the stream toward the clearing.  Amelie acted as if she were a member of the Hmong Hill tribe on the hunt for a rabid tiger.  Bobby acted as if he felt very naked.

Shaun hugged the bank and stopped in the safety of tall ferns at the edge of the pool.  He pulled back on a giant frond.  The intruders were three deer:  a six-point buck and two does.  The does fed on the grass while the buck kept watch.

The ferns, the deer, and the falls together made the scene appear prehistoric, pre-man.  The three were speechless.  They remained motionless for a long time.  Bobby glanced at Amelie and noticed a single tear sliding slowly down her cheek.  From their perspective below looking up toward the glen, the image was reminiscent of a Minor White photograph.  But from up in the trees looking down on both the deer and the human spies, the sight was comical.  For there were the three people, naked but for their shoes and socks, observing the deer from their hiding place behind the ferns.  The deer, unaware of their visitors, continued their picnic on the lush grass just a few feet from the blanket and wicker basket.  The picture was a cartoon – if  it had been painted by Courbet.

Slowly the deer wandered off up the fern bank.  The humans invaded the glen bathing briefly in the pond before they put on their encumbrances and broke camp.  No one said a word.  The sight had such a lasting impression on the three that the incident at the cliff seemed to be a day-old memory.

By the time they arrived at the car after their climb upstream, the fog bank that lingered offshore had crept close enough to send its white fingers inland over the coastal road.

At the end of their drive back Shaun performed his patented skid in the gravel drive of the café.  They piled out and trudged inside for hot coffee.  From the same window he had peered out at the sea earlier that day, Bobby gazed at a gray blanket of fog rolling up over the cliff and into the garden.  Amelie’s children, glowing in the muted light, appeared so different, yet still as beautiful as ever.  Shaun brought each of them an espresso and revealed his plan for the rest of the day.

“Are you still up to a trek in the redwoods?  With this fog rolling in it will be an unbelievable sunset up there.  Amelie?”

“I’d love to, Shaun, but I have so much to do for tomorrow.  You two go ahead.”

“Bobby?”

“If you promise it won’t be a exciting as our last Great Adventure, I suppose I’m up to it.  I get out this way so little.  I always forget how beautiful it is.”

“I remember something an old beachcomber told me a couple of months ago:  To live fifty miles from the ocean is to live a thousand.  I suppose there’s something to that.”

“You bet there is.  Let’s go.”

Finally Bobby rumbled into the tiny parking lot of the Pereguin Post Office, exhausted.  The Pereguin Café, sharing the same roof with the post office and grocery store, was located in back.  When Shaun had first described the location of his new restaurant over the phone, Bobby had expressed concern.  But at the opening-day festivities a little more than a year before, Bobby had seen why Shaun had snatched up the tiny, weathered-wood building.  The back wall – what was now the restaurant’s wall of windows – stood twenty feet from a steep cliff that fell straight to the sea.  The windows opened upon a cove of granite boulders jutting up out of the surf.  Shaun’s restaurant was L-shaped.  In the bottom leg a cluster of six tables looked out upon a small courtyard and the sea beyond, and also into the other leg, the kitchen, which was open and an integral part of the café’s ambience.  In a fit of selfishness, Shaun also had put large-pained windows down the wall of the kitchen.  The life-giving sea could provide the chef with the inspiration needed to make a superb dish, or so Shaun had written tongue-in-cheek in his cafe’s brochures.

Bobby parked his car in the gravel lot and trudged to the picket gate of the entrance.  His nostrils were immediately overwhelmed by the honey-like scent of sweet alyssum growing around the gate.  There was a serried bed of flowers in the garden that rounded the corner into the courtyard.  Bobby thought that it must be the maritime climate that allowed them to bloom so late in the fall.  He tiptoed on the stepping stones past the plantings of orange rudbeckia, deep purple asters, and brown and maroon chrysanthemums.  The courtyard was even more spectacular than the entry way.   Each grouping of flowers complemented its neighbors, and each was in full, wondrous bloom.

Bobby turned his head slightly and focused upon the lithe body of a woman wrapped in a shiny burgundy Danskin.  The woman was on her knees and had a wooden-handled trowel in her hand.  She was so busy turning a tiny patch of dirt that she had not heard his approach.  Bobby hesitated to speak so that he could dwell on her image.  Surrounded by bright cape daisies and calendula and lace-like cosmos was the most beautiful woman.  Yet it was the scent of the flowers, each vying for notice in his mind, but all blending together as one into an incredibly unique perfume, that turned it into such a sensual moment.

The moment savored, Bobby resumed his approach.  His model looked up in a startled state and then smiled as if she recognized him.

“Yes?”

“I’m Bobby Barnes – a friend of Shaun’s.  You must be Amelie.”

“Yes.  I’ve heard him talk of you.  What brings you to the coast this morning?”

Her heavy French accent, the soft morning light, the garden and the pounding surf made Bobby hesitate momentarily.  He felt as if he were in a dream – or a Truffaut film.

“Shaun called yesterday and said he’d like me to come out and visit.  So I thought I’d drive out and spend the day with him.”

“Is Smash over?”

“Smash?”

“Your grape smash?”

“You mean Crush?”

“Yes.  I’m – I’m sorry.  Well you take Shaun and you two get away from here.  Even on his day off he comes here and fiddle-faddles around.  He needs a rest, too, Bobby.”

“I’m sure.  How’s the café?”

“Very busy.  But with the rains, it will begin to quiet down.”

Bobby knelt down beside Amelie in the hope that if he were closer to her he would feel some of the warmth she radiated.  He looked into her garden.

“Amelie, this is breathtaking.  Is it yours?”

  “Yes.  These are my babies.”

“They’re gorgeous.”

“Thank you, Bobby.”

“How do you find time to garden and bake and do everything else?”

“I arrive an hour early each morning.  This soil is so rich and the weather is so perfect that I don’t garden.  I simply conduct.  Each plant knows how to play its own little instrument.  Mostly all I do is take away the snails.  They are so bad here – and big.  Escargot!  Do you know what I do with them?”

“What?”

“I gather up a handful at a time and I walk to the cliff and turn my back and throw them over my shoulder – into the sea.  That way I don’t have to watch them die.  I pretend they are lemmings.”

“That’s cruel.”

“But they ruin my garden!”

“I’m just joking with you, Amelie.”

“I still feel bad about doing that.  I’ll eat snails, but I can’t crush them and watch them die.  Strange, isn’t it?”

Bobby heard the high-strung whine of a Porsche pass by and the sliding crunch of gravel under the locked brakes of the car.  He stood and looked down upon her.

“That must be Shaun,” he said, “I’m sure I’ll see you later.”

“That’s him.  Nice meeting you, Bobby.”

He stepped through the garden and met Shaun at the fence.  They embraced over the picket gate and spoke.

“Good to see you, Shaun.”

“Well, aren’t you looking good.  You’ve lost weight, Bobby.” 

“I’m running like a madman.  I’ve got my first marathon in three months.

“Good for you.  Come in and I’ll make us some coffee.”

They entered the tiny café and Shaun pointed to a table.  Bobby sat down and looked around the room.  It appeared so small even with the half-dozen tables empty.  Bobby looked out the picture windows.  He realized why Shaun had pointed at that particular table; it had the best view.  And today that view was special because there was a beautiful woman in the midst of the sun-drenched garden curtained by a deep blue sea and sky.  This has to be heaven, Bobby thought to himself.

“What kind?’

“What?”

“Au lait?  Espresso?  Cappuccino?”

“Cafe au lait.”

Bobby looked into the kitchen.  On a stand next to the teakwood wine rack was an elaborate brass and copper Italian coffee machine that must have cost a fortune.  His host brought over two cups and sat down.

“So how goes it, Shaun?”

“No complaints.  We had an excellent summer.  We were booked two weeks in advance in August and September.  Excellent reviews in a couple of Bay-area magazines.  I’m happy.”

“Good.  Can you make it with just six tables?  Can you turn them often enough?”

“Bobby, I thought you knew our concept.  We have two seatings, six-thirty and nine.”

“I remember.  I just wasn’t sure you were still doing that now that you’re so successful.”

“We have to because I only prepare two entrees per night.  The patrons proceed as a whole through the meal.  That way Amelie and I can prepare the food and serve them ourselves.”

“Still just you two?”

“Yes.”

“How is your partnership with her working out?  She came here after the opening, after the last time I was in.”

“She’s wonderful.  Excellent.  She’s a jewel that I found and I covet.  She’s also one of the best pastry chefs I’ve ever worked with.”

“How did you meet her?

“She walked into my café one day and talked to me.”

“Do you know much about her?”

“Some.”

“I noticed she answered the phone when I called back.  You live together?”

“We share a house.  I burned out on the commute from Guerneville about the same time she appeared, so we combined our resources and bought a place nearby.  She’s the perfect homemate.  What a joy to wake up to – I shouldn’t say that.  Most of the time she’s left for here to start baking – and gardening — hours before I’m even up.

“Is she attached?”

“You mean, ‘Does she have a lover?’”

“Yes, that’s what I mean.”

“A boyfriend?”

“Yes, Shaun.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“A – a girlfriend?”

“No.  I don’t think she likes men, Bobby, and she doesn’t like women, either.  Look at her out there.  She oozes sensuality from every pore, yet I’m afraid she’s . . . asexual.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Tell me.”

“I’m her confidant.  She’s mine.  We lean on each other a lot.”

“You can tell me.”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be her confidant, I’d be her publicist.”

Bobby knew when not to press Shaun, so he dropped the line of questioning and silently gazed into the garden.

“So how’s life on the ranch?” Shaun asked.

“Busy.  But now with Crush over I’m going to take it easy for a week.  I’ve got a party in Timberrrville tomorrow night and lunch with Janie the next day.”

“That sounds fun.  How is your mother?”

“She’s fine.  Her bed-and-breakfast inn is doing a land-office business.  It’s the showcase of Healdsburg.  She’s really proud of it.”

“I’ve got to get over and see it.”

“Do so.  She gives tours at ten, two and four.”

“Ha!  Does she enjoy living in the city?  If you can call Healdsburg that.”

“I think so.  She’s closer to most of her friends.  Her garden club holds their meetings at The Inn.  Have I told you she made a youth hostel out of the small guest house in back of The Inn?”

“No.”

“She thought of the idea when she read an article about hostels in Burgundy.  She rents out each of four rooms and a kitchenette for five dollars a night.”

“Is that safe?  It seems like the price would attract some skuzzy types.”

“She requires them to have a passport and citizenship of a foreign country, and they have to call a day in advance to reserve a room.”

“That’s a wonderful idea.  What a special person she is.  And she’s so strong.”

“I think all the work she has put into that inn has been therapy.  A way to get her mind off of the ranch and Jeremy.  And it keeps her in contact with the human race.  She’d have gone crazy if she had stayed out there.”

“Does she come visit you at the ranch?  You’re living in their – what was their — house now, aren’t you?”

“I’m there.  She took most of her antiques to use in the inn, so the place is empty.  I have a maid stay over one day a week, but that’s all of us.   The entire upstairs is closed off except for when I have guests.  You know how big the place is – you were the one who named it ‘Mount Vernon.’”

“Tobie’s not living with you?”

“Tobie?  You mean Tobie, my business partner?  No.  He took over Daniel’s place once I moved out.  It’s like a commune up on the ridge.  I call them the Gang of Four:  Tobie, Susan, The Insect and Tobie’s three-legged dog.  To answer your question about Janie:  She comes out for coffee or to visit, but she never stays there.”

“I don’t blame her.  I still can’t get over how strong she is.  Bobby, this is the first time since Jeremy’s death that we’ve been alone together to talk – did they ever decide what happened?  Was it an accident?”

“No, they decided it was negligence – at least the hospital’s lawyers did.  You didn’t read about it in the papers?  Janie’s lawyers settled out of court with the hospital for three million dollars.”

“My God!”

“The hospital should be relieved.  A jury might have given her twice that after deliberating five minutes.  You know that was the highest settlement ever awarded in this county in a malpractice case.”

“That’s an incredible amount of money.”

“Jeremy’s name was worth a lot to the ranch.  His presence was worth even more.  We had an excellent attorney from The City.  He knew how to use California law.  But all that money doesn’t bring Jeremy back.”

“What exactly did happen?”

“Bitter irony was what it was.  Jeremy had been terrified all those years – since The Old Man had died – about his own heart.  His attack and the bypass didn’t exactly allay his fears.”

“I would think not.”

“He had fallen off a tractor about six weeks before his death.    Tore his ligaments and cartilage.  He went into his operation thinking it would be a breeze – his knee is pretty far away from his heart.  And the operation went well – until he needed a transfusion in post-op.  The nurse must have been in another world, because the guy gave him the wrong type of blood.  And fate was cruel enough to have Janie in the room during all of that.  My mother hopelessly stood there as that errant pouch of blood entered Jeremy and poisoned him.  By the time Jeremy began to scream in pain and Janie ran for the nurse, it was too late.”

“Poor Janie.  Poor, poor Janie.”

“Can you imagine the guilt she’s put herself through?  She watched that fluid trickle into his arm.”

Shaun stood up and paced over to the coffee machine to refill their cups.  He was careful to keep his back to Bobby, who was intently watching a pelican lumber through a trough of a distant swell.   Bobby rambled on.

“Shaun, I remember seeing an article in the paper on the day after he died.  It was about a duck in LA that had its beak torn off by a coyote.  A team of surgeons replaced the beak with an orange plastic prosthesis.  The operation was filmed for showing on one of those awful Incredible People shows.  We can do that, yet why couldn’t we give my father the right type of blood?”

“That’s a three-million dollar question, Bobby.”

The morose turn in their conversation was interrupted by Amelie, who had come in to find a sparkling water to quench her thirst.  Bobby followed her movements through the room.

“So what are we going to do today, Shaun?” he asked.

“I thought the three of us would go up the coast a couple of miles and have lunch at a little spot I found.  It’s on a creek that isn’t a stone’s throw from the surf.  I know the sheep rancher who owns the land and I have the okay from him.  Then we’ll drive back here and drop off Amelie, and you and I can go hiking up in Salmon Creek Reserve and catch the sunset.  Did you bring your hiking boots?

“Got ‘em on.  Can you believe it?  We’re going to hike together for the first time since college.”

“But no Great Smoky Mountains this time.”

That’s what Bobby thought about most when he went to the coast – the drive.  The trek, despite its beauty, always had held the stigma in his mind of being a test of endurance.  It was a stigma developed in childhood.

His mother had not seen the coast since Bobby was eleven.  He remembered Janie’s – their – last trip vividly.  Jeremy was driving the family out in his new Cadillac convertible to hunt for abalone at low tide.  A perfect Sunday outing.  But when the family had rounded the hundredth-odd curve and finally beheld the first glimpse of the Pacific, little Tobie, unable to contain his car sickness any longer, threw up in a “world-class” heave on the back of his father’s head.  This immediately set off a chain reaction among the other queasy passengers in Jeremy’s rocking boat.  Jeremy deftly pulled over at a scenic turnoff, and the entire family returned their smoked-salmon sandwiches to the sea.  The barnacle that refused to pry off that whale of a memory in Bobby’s mind was the drive back, and how he had dreaded it on the beach that long-ago afternoon.

His father took mercy on the motley crew and had driven at a snail’s pace on the long trip home.  Bobby remembered the immense logging truck tailgating his father, who had no place to pull over on the narrow, winding road to let the logger pass.  The impatient trucker finally swung around Jeremy on a long, blind curve.  Bobby remembered his father’s reaction:  Jeremy went totally berserk.  He pulled up behind the trucker and honked and flashed his lights.  Realizing the insignificance of those actions on the giant rig, Jeremy sped alongside the truck, came up off his seat and, in the open air of the convertible with three terrified, screaming children and his wife beside him, proceeded to shout and gesture at the driver in the worst language Bobby had ever heard.  Bobby remembered it being the first time he had ever seen his father openly hostile or angry.

The logger had apparently heard of vehicular manslaughter because he complacently observed Jeremy’s diatribe and slowed, and the family survived the ordeal.  But on that day Bobby and Daniel christened Jeremy’s Caddy The Titanic, and the Sunday outing was forever referred to as “Voyage of the Damned.”

Bobby found the ride so different on his trip to see Shaun.  It really was a beautiful drive.  The route wandered through The Valley toward the coastal highlands.  The view for the first fifteen miles was spectacular.  The vineyards fanned out in neat rows before the rising sun.  The large plain — the last true valley before The River veered to the west into the redwood-covered hills — held 75-year-old plantings of zinfandel and obscure Italian grapes.  An early morning fog hung over The River in the distance.  It looked like a suspended cotton snake winding its way through the vines.

Bobby passed the ranches – not true working ranches, more retirement estates – owned by the former stars of Perry Mason, M*A*S*H, and My Three Sons.  Bobby wondered what involuntary reflex caused him to rubberneck when he passed by, and if he’d pay the same attention to the hideaways of the inventor of the micro-chip, the modem or the ah-so.

The vines abruptly gave way to a grand entrance of redwoods rising from hills eroded by the anxious river.  Day versus night.  The canopy of tall trees darkened the sky, the temperature dropped a half-dozen degrees, and the air smelled of evergreen spice.  It was the distant outpost to Shaun’s fortress by the sea.

The road curved tightly beside The River, hop scotching over it when the steep banks fell straight to the water.  At times the forest would open upon a small clearing and the size and density of the tree-covered hills could be seen.  Ten miles into the redwoods, Bobby approached the only stop sign on the road that linked his valley to the ocean.  It stood in the middle of the town of Guerneville.

Guerneville and Bobby’s valley were located in the same county, but he thought they could just as soon have been on different planets with as much as the two had in common.  Guerneville was a tiny town tucked in the coastal redwoods that had suffered from exploitation and identity crises since its inception.  It had prospered at the turn of the century on what was a new principle of the lumber companies:  “Conquer, then divide.”  The lumber concerns had pillaged the area of almost all its best first-growth redwoods – trees up to 300 feet high – before the appetite for lumber in The City drove them northward.  The lumber companies then sold the ravaged land in small parcels as vacation-home lots to the upper middle class of San Francisco.  Guerneville’s popularity as a summer retreat grew – until the Era of Mobility arrived in the 1950s.  The freeway and the airplane made the area’s charm pale to that of other areas that were only a half-day’s ride (or flight) away.  Guerneville wasn’t in the same league with Lake Tahoe or Yosemite or Hawaii.  So the paint began to peel and fade.

In the late-‘60s the walls began to crumble.  The area became a cheap place to hang out for bikers and flower children.  And crime skyrocketed.  Anything went, anytime.  Formerly pleasant subdivisions were renamed with titles like “Heroin Hill.”  A decade later the burgeoning gay community in The City discovered the quaint spot hidden in the redwoods where tolerance was king and non-conformity, queen.  Although the town that Bobby drove through was still mostly Keasy-generation hangers-on, the place had gained a reputation as being the Fire Island of California, the West Coast gay Mecca.

Bobby thought that superficially, Guerneville seemed like any other small north coast lumber town.  The new residents were pumping some needed money into refurbishing much of Guerneville’s dilapidated downtown.  But even a quick recognizance turned up the incongruities:  An old man with Rip Van Winkle beard sitting in a doorway playing the accordion to his audience – a pair of arthritic Dalmatians; a “Poodle Lines” vacation charter bus unloading a platoon of close-cropped young recruits at a local gay resort; a middle-aged hitchhiker wearing her pink-tinted granny glasses, gauze dress, and on her legs what resembled designer ace bandages.

Just as soon as Bobby had begun to play deluxe highway bingo with the unique characters, he was out of town and again into the redwoods that cloaked the fleeing river.

Eventually the canopy gave way once more, the road flattened out, and the forest opened upon the grass-covered headlands.  The River was a wide aquamarine expanse, and hundreds of sheep stood motionless in the gently rolling fields at its banks.  The air took on the crisp, salty bite of the sea.  At last the tidelands came into view, and the white-streaked rock at the mouth of The River rose up in the mist.

The journey seemed to be over – Shaun’s café was only fifteen miles north of The River’s mouth, but those fifteen miles were a stretch of climbing, curving road that at one point hugged a high cliff more than 1,400 feet above the surf-line.  From the scenic outlook above the cliff, on a clear night the lighthouses in the two adjoining counties could be seen, a distance from point to point of 80 miles.

Part Two:  False Hope

The following year:

It was an unexpected phone call.  Whenever Bobby talked to Shaun he felt a strange twinge of guilt for not having kept in closer contact with him.  Shaun lived on the coast, only 40 miles away as the crow flies, although the winding road that followed The River to the sea made it a trek that took almost three hours.

When he heard the news two years before, Bobby was pleased to learn that his former college roommate was moving to California.  Bobby in chamber-of-commerce fashion had encouraged Shaun to make the move after hearing of his decision to leave Tennessee.

Shaun had come home with Bobby the Thanksgiving of their freshman year at Vanderbilt and Shaun had fallen in love with San Francisco during the holiday.  He vowed to Bobby at the time that someday he would live there.  Now Shaun did, almost, for he had found his own bit of heaven on the rugged windswept coastline 75 miles north of The City.

Bobby had met Shaun their first day in college.  He had been late in arriving at the dormitory, having stayed at the ranch until the last moment to help Jeremy and Daniel prepare for Crush.  Shaun was Bobby’s pot-luck roommate, and Bobby had thought his fellow resident was the stereotypical Tennessee native.  Shaun was from a tiny town in eastern Tennessee, and with a single utterance from his lips, it was apparent he was Rural South.  Bobby at first thought Shaun’s father was a coal miner or sharecropper because Shaun was so thin – almost emaciated.

Only on closer inspection at dinner that first distressful college evening did Bobby realize the complexity behind Shaun’s Huck Finn appearance.  Shaun was tall – at least six-two – and attractive, yet his gangling movements and thatch of sun-bleached hair gave him the disposition of a boy not yet comfortable with his adult shell.  But Bobby knew that a year or two in college would melt that outward impression.

Behind Shaun’s piercing blue eyes Bobby had found an intent mind and subtle wit, both tempered by the overriding trait of compassion.  And it soon became apparent that Shaun was the more worldly of the two.  His father was the banker and principal landowner in their little county in the southeastern corner of the state.  And Shaun, not the California rancher’s son, was the one to have spent his summers in New York with an uncle, a well-known artist living in SoHo.  Despite the Southern drawl, which slowly had disappeared in the seven years since they first met, it was Shaun who had spoken to Bobby of the mysterious East, of life in the Big Apple, of the Theater and the Arts.  Shaun was the one who seemed to be the exchange student from another country.

After their first year in college, the two decided to live together in an off-campus apartment.  Bobby had met Carin by this time and fallen wildly in love with her.  So had Shaun, and Carin and Shaun became close friends.  The three of them were for all purposes roommates Bobby’s second year, with Carin spending most nights at their apartment and storing more clothes there than Bobby and Shaun combined.  The three went to plays and movies and dinner together.  If Bobby had to study, the other two would hit the town without him.  Shaun and Carin were so close that they were roommates that summer when Bobby had gone back to work at the ranch.  It was fine with Bobby, although Carin had to hide the arrangement from her parents.

One night that summer, as the fall term approached, Carin called Bobby to tell him that he needed to find a new roommate when he returned; Shaun was moving out.  Bobby was in shock.  Carin explained that Shaun had found a new roommate, and that Shaun’s relationship with that person – with “him” – was to be more than just friends.  Bobby wasn’t shocked anymore.  He had finally “discovered” what he had long “suspected,” and that Shaun until then had not “admitted,” even to himself.  Shaun was gay.  The news would have had no effect on the trio’s friendship.  Unfortunately, the first real relationship in Shaun’s life didn’t last long, and two months into the fall semester Shaun was living alone in a tiny efficiency.

Bobby and Carin both thought they were the losers in Shaun’s moving out because they dearly missed Shaun’s constant company, and they could no longer be tasters in his cooking experiments, for he was quite the budding chef.  Where he found the time to fit in the hours needed to learn the skill was a mystery, although Bobby knew Shaun’s mother had passed down her considerable talent to her son.  Shaun had found time between his endless activities – an internship for the local office of a Tennessee congressman, an assistant editorship of the student newspaper, second-chair cellist in the university symphony – to work two weekends per month in a local French restaurant under the chef.  His hectic schedule made Carin once laughingly ask Shaun if he was trying to be a role-model for gays.  Shaun was not the least bit amused by her comment, saying he had no desire to be either stereotyped or “packaged.”

After his first year in graduate school at Columbia, Shaun was sent on scholarship to the American University of Paris to study public affairs.  While there he was able to work his way into a part-time apprenticeship to a renowned chef of Cuisine Nouveau.  Upon returning and eventually completing his thesis, Shaun squirreled away his diplomas and moved himself and his belongings to San Francisco; the move coming only a short time after the death of his uncle, who had left behind a considerable nest egg to his favorite nephew.  Shaun quickly tired of the wild scene in The City and located and purchased a tiny dilapidated café in the middle of several dozen lodges and inns scattered on the isolated coastline forty miles west of The Valley.  Shaun’s tiny restaurant catered exclusively to the tourists who stayed in the rustic inns nearby, and to the few artist-types who made their homes in the clumps of sea dwellings of that picturesque coastal area.

Despite their collective past, and that Shaun and Bobby lived in the same county, the two had seen each other only three times since Shaun moved to the coast.  Bobby tried to rationalize the infrequency of their visits.  First, they were both so busy with their new respective careers.  Bobby had been inundated since he had taken over full responsibility of the ranch.  And Shaun’s restaurant continued to be a magnificent critical success.  Second, Shaun and Bobby each had their own circle of friends.  And finally, there was the drive.

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

Baker’s Camp, the Moon(p)ies’ indoctrination center, was a large tact of rugged riverfront property that once had been a summer camp for juvenile delinquents.  The drought years in the mid-seventies had resulted in serious discipline problems at the camp when the young offenders grew bored and restless without the diversion of water sports in the dried-up river.   The camp was sold to a real estate agent fronting for Martin Petersen.  His lieutenants had been impressed by the security of the place, although their main concern was with keeping people out.

Residents of The Valley had no idea what went on behind the barbed wire fences of their new neighbors.  Press releases to the local media describing the compound of the Moon(p)ies as “a  retreat for a baker’s apprentice to learn the challenging skill of doughnut-making” and “the West Coast’s answer to McDonald’s fast-food college back East – the Stanford of junk food,” did little to quell the rumors.

But the Playboy article did set the record straight with the locals.  The Healdsburg newsstand even ordered a hundred extra copies, and reading – between two pictorials of the Grand Tetons – of the goings-on at the camp was the rage in The Valley for weeks.  Some of The Valley’s folk were shocked, and some relieved – at least it wasn’t some commune of sex-crazed burn-outs from The City who wore red robes for only a portion of the day.

Over another pint, Tobie, in half-drunken braggadocio, had told the weeping Irishman that he could get his daughter safely out of Baker’s Camp.   After his talk with his girlfriend Susan the next day, Tobie located the Irishman at the same bar to inform him that Tobie’s team would handle not only the abduction of the man’s daughter, but her subsequent deprogramming as well, Susan having convinced Tobie that she could conduct the returning of the man’s daughter from the Pastry World. 

Susan based her conviction on the fact that she had read a “how-to” book on deprogramming, and that she had worked for a month at the local state mental hospital and seen “weird people just like that.”  In truth, she had read the book while working at the admissions desk of the mental hospital – that was but one of the reasons for her dismissal.

Tobie’s abduction plan was simple.  He would parachute into the rear of the compound near sunset, when most of the detainees were involved in the daily communal observance the Playboy writer had called “Naptime.”  At the same time The Insect would create a diversion at the bridge, the front entrance to the camp near the highway.  Susan, pretending to be a tourist paddling past the fortified land fronting The River, would head a canoe toward shore at the predetermined time to retrieve Tobie and his captive and deliver them to safety.  The subsequent deprogramming would take place in the isolation of Daniel’s old place, since Bobby, its current resident, had temporarily deserted it for a brief vacation in Tennessee.  It was the sort of plan that could only be dreamed up by those exposed to excessive doses of prime-time television radiation.

All had gone as scheduled through the first phase of the operation.  Just before sunset, the light plane made a single sweep over the Moon(p)ie encampment.  The Insect, feigning car trouble at the Moon(p)ie’s gate, lit a road flare to give wind direction to his co-conspirator overhead.  Susan pushed off the bank in her canoe a half-mile upstream.  Tobie leapt from the open door of the plane and maneuvered into position.  At 3,500 feet, he pulled his ripcord and guided his hydrofoil chute toward an isolated clearing.

The Insect had created quite a scene at the front gate, diverting every member of Moon(p)ie security away from Tobie’s landing zone.  The Insect was dressed in the garb of a small band of Hare Krishna outcasts, in the clothes of a pariah that was a bitter enemy of the Moon(p)ies.  The outcasts had left the Krishna’s over a philosophical disagreement some years before for holding radically capitalistic beliefs.  The banished clan simply considered themselves to be realists following their twin spiritual leaders of the Srila Prabhupada and Milton Friedman.  The outcasts manifested their beliefs by opening a small chain of financially successful all-night food stands specializing in veggie-burgers and frozen faux-yogurt, placing them in direct competition with the Moon(p)ies.  Their costume, which The Insect had donned for his performance, was a cross between a Tibetan robe and a Denny’s waitress outfit.

The mere sight of The Insect in the uniform of the Moon(p)ies’ nemesis at the very entrance to their fort was enough to send the entire camp into an uproar, for The Insect unwittingly represented to them the cause for two alarming figures in the Moon(p)ies’ latest P & L statement:  Recruits down forty percent in cities in which they no longer held a monopoly, and overall doughnut sales off twenty-five percent for the past quarter.  By wearing that costume, The Insect had put his life in danger.

 Tobie touched down in the clearing and gathered in his chute, hiding it and his jumpsuit behind a nearby Manzanita bush.  He donned the white apron and baker’s cap he had packed, and soon was lost in the crowd of Moon(p)ies stampeding toward the bridge.  Tobie began his frantic search for the Irishman’s daughter.  Besides a few outdated black-and-white photographs, the only lead to her identity was her father’s detailed description of the clothes she was wearing when he had spotted her through his high-powered binoculars from outside the camp the week before.  Tobie was to look for a young woman in a white apron, white sneakers and baker’s cap, the exact description of every female doughnut hole and creampuff in the camp.

“That stupid, red-headed Irish asshole,” Tobie mumbled to himself as he milled through the flock of flour girls.  “Red-headed!” Tobie said to himself.  “She must be a flaming redhead!”

And there, not ten yards from him was a timid, freckled woman with crimson hair.  Tobie approached.

“Kathleen?”

“Why, yes,” she said in a heavy Dublin accent.

“I’m here to tell you about Pete.”

“Pete?  And what do you know about Pete?”

“I saw him yesterday, Kathleen.  He’s very sick.  He’s here.  In this valley right now.  They don’t expect him to live.”

“This – this is a trick!  My father sent you.  I’m telling my pastry chef!”

“Kathleen, don’t!  If you expose me, they’ll never let you out to see Pete.  You’ve got to trust me.”

“What proof do I have that Pete’s here.”

“This.”

Tobie held out a worn, heavy neck chain with a brass medal on it.  She snatched it from him and held it to her cheek.  Tobie knew his plan was working.

“Oh, poor Pete.  Pete’s really here?”

“Yes.  He’s deathly ill.  They think it’s a type of Alzheimer’s.  He was flown in yesterday.  Let me take you to him, Kathleen.”

“But I must tell my chef.  He wants to know everything we do.”

“If you say one word to him neither you nor I will ever get out of here.  Tell you what.  I’ll take you to Pete and bring you back here tonight if that’s what you want.  They’ll never miss you.  Okay?”

“Well . . .  .”

“Now.  Decide now.”

“Yes.  I have to.  I have to see him.”

Tobie grabbed her hand and pulled her away from the mob, and they turned and headed in the direction of the drop zone.

“We’re not supposed to walk together.  To hold hands.”

“Uh, yeah, sure.  Do you know where the prayer beach is down by the River?  I’ll meet you by the fence – by the flood gauge.  Okay?”

“Yes.”

The two split up.  Tobie ran to the bush, stripped off the coat and hat and retrieved his pack.  He met Kathleen at the barbed wire fence and, taking a pair of wire cutters from his pack, began to cut through the rolled concertina wire blighting the beach.  Tobie worked furiously to cut through the tangle of spiked fence; he didn’t have the moment to reflect on his situation:   He was involved in a very real war game less than ten miles from where he was born and raised, from where his parents were at that moment sitting down to a comfortable evening of reading in their den.

At last he had a narrow passage cut through the spiral.  Kathleen bound through, tearing the hem of her standard-issue apron.  Tobie pulled through and was but a step from the public domain of the stream when his shoulder was jerked back by the pack.  A few tufts of the chute spilling out of the pack were hopelessly snagged on the wire.  Tobie crawled back inside and tried in vain to tear the chute free, only compounding the problem.  He heard voices from up on the bank in the heavy brush leading to the compound.  He pulled out his knife and hacked away at the snagged pieces of his chute.  He could hear the dull thud of footsteps running toward him.  One more snag kept him from being free.

“Hey, get out of here!”

“You’re trespassing!”

“This is private property!”

Tobie looked up to see two young male recruits moving toward him.  The knife in his hand made them keep their distance.

“Go fuck a doughnut hole, Moon(p)ies!”

The bigger of the two looked up to see one of his kind, white apron and all, stepping into the waiting canoe downstream.  Tobie cut the last swath free, put away his pocket knife and lunged for the hole in the wire.  In an act of zealous fury, the bigger recruit lunged forward, grabbed Tobie by the pants leg and tried to pull him back.

“You’re evil!  You’re the devil incarnate!” he yelled as he tugged on Tobie.

Tobie jumped up and landed one punch on the cheek of the baby-faced recruit.  The young man spun around and landed unconscious in the narrow passage through the wire, creating a human plug in their defenses.  Tobie waited momentarily to see if the other cream puff would try to fight him.  The pimply-faced teenage boy stood motionless.  Tobie thought he caught a spark of enthusiasm – almost a pleading expression, as if he wanted to be a part of Tobie’s exciting world of intrigue. 

“I wouldn’t take you even if I could, you little prick.”

The boy’s face became a mindless blank.  He turned and fled, screaming, back to those who – for a price – had shown they cared for him.  He ran at breakneck speed to those who wouldn’t reject him.  Tobie pulled the human plug out of the fence, crawled through and trotted down the stream bank to join Susan and Kathleen in the canoe.  In the deepening gloom of the summer dusk, he guided their raft through the crimson-and-blue glass sheet of The River.

As they rounded the first bend, the three could hear a calm, modulated voice over the loudspeakers in the camp repeating, “Code Three.  Roll call please.”

Tobie’s Ranger was parked a few feet from the opposite bank.  They loaded up Kathleen and their canoe and sped back to the solitude of Daniel’s old place high up on the ridge.  The truck hadn’t stopped before the young girl was bounding out of the door and up the steps to the house.

“Hurry!  Open it, please.”

The door swung open, and there lay Pete shrouded in blankets on the couch.

“Oh, Pete!  Pete, old boy!”

Kathleen hugged him around the neck and planted a kiss on his warm nose.  She gently stroked the white hair on his forehead.  With all his energy, Pete opened his eyes and lifted his head and licked her face.  Tobie smiled.  The doggie downers he had talked Watson out of were working perfectly; the old Irish Setter was in the ozones.

Only Tobie could have come up with such an ingeniously simple plan for winning the trust of Kathleen, the woman who as a young lass had romped with her setter, Pete, in the same fields of James Joyce’s’ childhood.

“The veterinarian says he only has a few days left to live,” Tobie lied.  “You and Pete can stay here until it’s over.”

“That’s so nice of you.  Who brought him?  My father? He’s not here, is he?”

“No, he’s in San Francisco.  He had your brother fly over with him and gave Pete to us at the airport.”

“Was that safe?  He looks so sick.”

“Your father felt that Pete should spend his last moments with you.”

“Where’s my brother?”

“He flew back to Dublin.”

“Why?”

“He was afraid you wouldn’t want to see him.”

“He shouldn’t have,” Kathleen replied.

Susan flashed a brief smile at Tobie.  He gave a quick nod of his head.

Kathleen and Pete spent the following day sunning on the deck of the home.  Susan and Tobie took turns sitting beside her and talking to her, attempting to gain her trust.  Holly the three-legged collie stood guard outside the front door, on the lookout for unwelcome strangers.  But as the day wore on, the plan of the self-proclaimed deprogrammers began to unravel.  No one had seen or heard from The Insect since the great escape.  Tobie feared that he might have become an  MIA in the raid.  Pete was refusing to eat his Seconal-laced dog food, and already he was showing signs to Kathleen of a miraculous recovery.  Tobie also noticed that Pete’s interest in Holly was more than just a little platonic dog sniffing; it was obvious that the old dog still had something in him.

In the early evening, Tobie and Susan were shocked to see a caravan winding up the steep road leading to their ridge-top hideaway.  In the procession were several sheriff’s patrol cars and Jeremy’s Rolls.  To an unknowing observer, it looked like an Arab oil sheik on a land-acquisition spree.  Tobie herded his flock inside.  A deputy on a bullhorn repeatedly ordered them to come out with their hands up, but it was Jeremy who drew them out without resistance.  Tobie was arrested for assault, kidnapping, and trespassing.  Kathleen was taken into custody, and Susan and Holly were left to look after old Pete.

It took two days for Jeremy to negotiate his son’s release.  After overcoming the initial shock of the bizarre tale – all happening with him completely oblivious to the whole mess, Jeremy did everything he could to free his son.  A command post was set up at the ranch.  Negotiations with Moon(p)ie leaders lasted through the night and into the next day.  The Moon(p)ies finally agreed to drop charges against Tobie and release The Insect, held captive at their camp, in exchange for Tobie’s written promise to desist from further guerilla operations against Baker’s Camp.  Jeremy also had to provide the Moon(p)ies, through a tax-deductible donation, with a new electronic security system, including a set of carbon-arc searchlights to prevent any future nocturnal attacks.

Jeremy was willing to concede The Insect’s release for the spotlights – in order to keep the costs down, of course.  But from the Moon(p)ie’s commitment to the imposed conditions, it was obvious to Jeremy that they were quite ready to be rid of the pest.

Three days after the attack, Tobie was out of jail a free man, all charges dropped.  Kathleen was returned to the Moon(p)ies and The Insect was released to Jeremy in a dramatic exchange of prisoners at the bridge leading into the Moon(p)ie camp.  Jeremy thought that the scene was reminiscent of the release of the Pueblo crew by the North Koreans, with Jeremy on the side that was getting the raw end of a lopsided deal.

The Irishman’s melancholy drinking bouts began anew at the Healdsburg bar, although he eventually fled to his homeland when he realized that he was developing a taste for those god-awful American beers.  His sole consolation was the brief meeting with his daughter at the county jail, and the hope that she might drift away from the group now that a seed of doubt had been planted.  The Insect was in good spirits despite the fact he had been given only doughnuts and water for the three days of his captivity.  He told his liberators how he enjoyed the ones with the sprinkles the best.  Bobby arrived home from his vacation one week after the episode had been resolved, after the ranch had returned to normal.

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.”

If Bobby stretched his imagination far enough, he could come up with an analogy to explain Tobie’s close friendship with The Insect.  Bobby likened their relationship to that found in a medieval romance.  In this modern version of the ancient tale, Tobie was the king’s care-free son whose life is saved by a young, local peasant.  As a reward, the prince appoints the bumbling pauper to the court as his personal valet.  But in this modern tale, there were a few unusual twists, beginning with Tobie’s childhood.

Tobie had been a surprise gift to the Barnes family.  Jeremy and Janie had believed their family was complete after Bobby; they were positive when Jeremy had his vasectomy following Tobie’s birth.  There was a considerable age difference between Tobie and Bobby, and Janie had been perplexed when Tobie complained as a boy that he had no playmates on their isolated ranch.  So for his seventh birthday, Janie gave Tobie a tiny Collie puppy, the first pedigree dog on the ranch, the first dog to have access to the Barnes home.  Tobie and the dog, named Holly, became inseparable.  Most visitors to the ranch jokingly  called the pair Timmy and Lassie; the similarity was there.  Janie had put her foot down when Daniel and Bobby began tormenting her by calling her “June” instead of Mother.

No one in the family was sure what came first, Tobie’s love for Holly, or his love for all the animals that seemed to gravitate toward him.  Despite him being such a problem for Janie – Tobie was a misfit in school and constantly behind in class – he was a gentle, quiet boy around Holly, or his rabbit, or the pet doe he fed each morning on the back porch while he was in junior high.

In his teens, Tobie became even more schizophrenic.  His grades plummeted, he was a worthless, inconsistent hand on the ranch, yet he still fed and cared for his menagerie like clockwork.  Janie eventually tried to blame his problems on puberty.  Jeremy just considered him a typical teenager, although a bit lazy; besides, he and Daniel and Gilberto were too busy with the ranch to give it much thought.

Tobie scraped by with the grades required for graduation, and both Jeremy and Janie were shocked when he announced that his vocation was to be a veterinarian.  They weren’t surprised with his choice considering his love of animals, but they were unsure if he had researched the grade requirements needed for admittance into post-grad vet school.  Nonetheless, they were pleased with his choice and supported him in what they knew would require a Herculean effort on his part.  Tobie enrolled at a local community college to acclimate himself to college life as his counselor suggested.  But near the end of his first semester, a term filled with drunken debauchery, Tobie withdrew from school and fled home to the protective umbrella of the ranch and the unspoken loyalty of Holly.  That December he received a slip of paper in the mail with the words “Withdrew Failing” beside each of his classes, including golf.

Back at the ranch, Tobie took a sabbatical from academia and began to write his life script based on a simple premise:  maximum base gratification with a minimum of thought and effort.  He had tried to emulate his two brothers and he had failed miserably.  His quest now was to show them what they were missing – the freedom of irresponsibility – because of their success.

Soon after Tobie moved home, The Insect appeared on the scene.  It had been a sunny, mild day in February when Tobie found Holly missing.  She was a mature dog by then, and it was very unlike her to not be there for feeding, the sole responsibility remaining in Tobie’s life.  Tobie made a cursory search for her earlier in the day, but work on the new jet boat Jeremy had bought for him had kept him from doing anything but have an unpleasant, anxious feeling in the pit of his stomach.  Before supper, Tobie had stood out on the porch of the palatial Barnes home.  A bizarre version of Tulia fog had crept into The Valley, making any search for the dog that evening a futile effort.

The fog was a low, heavy mist that hugged the ground, obscuring the trunks of the vines but not their bare canes.  Tobie could see the rooftop of the tool shed and the silhouetted props of the wind machines in the vineyard; the fog lay like a down blanket three feet off the ground.

Tobie was absorbed in this strange scene when he first heard it, a scraping sound off in the distance.  It sounded as if someone was dragging a fence post down the middle of the asphalt road that ran past the ranch.  Janie had come to the door and paused to watch her son lost in concentration.  When she heard the noise and failed in her attempt to identify it, she joined Tobie on the porch.

“What is that?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but it’s coming this way.”

They stared down the drive to where it disappeared under the fog.  Below, where the farm road would have been, the unceasing noise grew in intensity; Tobie and his mother were held frozen by the crude sound.  Slowly, Tobie raised his hand and pointed down toward the hidden drive.  Through the pink-tinged, back-lit mist, a small dot bobbed up and down in the fog.  Soon they could discern that the dot was a wide-brimmed hat, and below that, the small, rounded shoulders of a tiny man – or boy – who was moving slowly toward them.  Because of the fog neither of them could see what it was making the irritable, grating sound, but it obviously was whatever the figure was dragging.

The outline grew larger, and the two, still transfixed, saw a scrawny young man in an outrageously gaudy black-leather gambler’s hat and matching leather vest.  But for those two items his clothes were grimy and worn.  He had a wispy moustache that appeared to have never felt a razor since puberty.

Emerging through the mist, the source of the horrible noise could be seen.  It looked to be a homemade stretcher, the kind that only Boy Scouts on survival trips knew how to make.  The young man stopped ten yards from the veranda and the grating noise finally abated.  His name, unknown to them at the time, was Harold Mudd, a name no one would remember after Tobie had later knighted him “The Insect.”

The thin young man squatted and let go of the two wooden poles on which he had been tugging.  And without changing the stupid, exhausted expression on his face, he looked up at them through the thick lenses of his unstylish glasses and said simply, “Hey there.”

The words broke the ice for the frozen pair on the veranda.  He wasn’t a badly disguised alien who fell to earth as Janie had suspected.  Mother and son walked down the steps of the porch together.  Tobie was the first to spot the familiar sable coat showing through an opening of the blanket covering the stretcher.  Tobie ran toward the boy’s contraption and spotted Holly on the stretcher, her head poking out from under the blanket that was carefully tucked under her.  He could see her nostrils flare slightly, rhythmically; she was alive.  Janie saw the patch of fur a split second later, and assuming Holly was dead, ran into the house calling for Jeremy.  Tobie looked up at the startled boy, who appeared surprised for being responsible for all the commotion.  In a fit of uncontrolled despair, Tobie commanded the timid boy to tell him what had happened.  Harold’s expression turned to that of the accused.

“A Porch.”

“What?”

“A Porch.  A tourist in a Porch hit her.”

“Where did you find her?”

“By my house.  I was out at the road lookin’ for beer cans.  I saw the whole thing.  This black Porch, a two-eleven ‘essie,’ was racing by.  Your dog was crossing the road.  They skidded and hit her and stopped and then they just sped off.  I don’t think they saw me.  I was in the ditch.”

Harold had spoken as fast as he could so he wouldn’t have to hear the sound of his own voice.  Janie and Jeremy ran out of the house and stood over Tobie, who knelt with his hand on the blanket, afraid to raise it.

“Where is she hurt?”

“Her back leg.”

Harold pulled back on the blanket.  A slight cry came from Janie as they looked at the collie’s grotesquely contorted hind leg.  A feeble attempt at a crude splint was wrapped around the blood-matted fur of her leg.  A ragged tourniquet was tied around her thigh.

“How far did you pull her?”

“From my uncle’s house, ‘bout two miles.  I don’t have no phone and no car.  So I used my stretcher to bring her here.”  Harold pointed at his inquisitor, “I seen you drivin’ her around in your Ranger, and I knew you lived here.”

Jeremy thought it was unusual for the boy, who must have been out of high school, to not have a car.  Tobie turned to his father and began to plead his case.

“We’ve got to do something.  We’ve got to try.”

Jeremy told Tobie to call Watson, the veterinarian, and Tobie flew into the house.  Jeremy bent down and stroked the dog’s forehead as he looked over to the boy.

“What’s your name?”

“Harold.  Harold Mudd.”

“I haven’t seen you around The Valley before.”

“I moved in with my aunt and uncle about six months ago.  The Baileys.”

“Yes.  I know them.”  Jeremy knew of the old couple that lived in a dilapidated trailer house on a tiny patch of ground down the road.  The Baileys had retired – survived – for more than fifteen years on the pension of a career Naval NCO.  The postage-stamp lot in The Valley had become their little plot of paradise.

The vet was pessimistic after he examined Holly.  “I don’t think she’ll make it, Jeremy.  And if she does, she’ll surely lose that leg.  She’s not a young dog,” Watson had confided.

Jeremy turned to Tobie to discuss what he thought was inevitable – humane.

“No you don’t!” Tobie pled.  “Damn it, she’s all I’ve got.  She can make it.  Call Daniel.  Call somebody!  We gotta try.”

Jeremy always had found it impossible to say no to Tobie.  Perhaps his belief or his fervor in discipline had eroded over the years, or maybe he was trying to alleviate the guilt from feeling that Tobie was unwanted, a feeling that in truth wasn’t really there.  Or perhaps it was simply because Tobie only asked for easily obtainable, material things.  The vet suggested that they call the hospital of veterinary medicine at UC-Davis and arrange for the dog to be operated on the next day.  It was decided that Tobie could stay with Daniel, who was in Davis for a week-long viticulture seminar.  The doctor did what he could, and they carefully loaded Holly into the wagon.  With everything set, Tobie jumped in the Ranger and sped off into the night.

Janie insisted that Harold spend the night after she learned that he was alone at the trailer house, the Baileys having left to visit relatives in Arizona.  Harold was too overwhelmed at the offer to stay in a stranger’s home, such a fancy home, to refuse.  Exhausted from his trek and at the same time terrified that he might have to carry on a conversation with his hosts, Harold went straight to bed.

Jeremy and Watson, an old family friend and their vet for decades, stood in the kitchen drinking coffee when Janie entered, having completed her role as hostess.

“Do you know that boy, Janie?” Jeremy asked his wife.

“I might have seen him in Healdsburg, but I can’t really say that I recall him.”

“Well, I remember him, Jeremy,” Watson had said.  “And you won’t believe the circumstances.  About three months ago I was in my office when this kid comes in.  It was Harold.  He had on that same crazy gambler’s hat and was carrying a shoebox.  He opened the lid and there was this sparrow inside.  One of its wings was broken and had been for some time.  The bird was half dead.  He asked me something like, ‘Hey, man, do you think you can fix this little bird’s wing?’  I told him I wasn’t sure if the bird would live, but he was quite adamant about the bird being treated.  He told me he’d found it while walking to town.  I asked him if he was going to pay for my services.  He said no, it wasn’t his pet and he didn’t have any money.  I said I’d do what I could and he left.”

“What happened to the bird?” Janie asked.

“Now Janie, I was really busy then.  It was a week before the track opened at Bay Meadows, and I had horses to treat.  So I stuck a cotton ball of formaldehyde in the shoebox and threw it in the trash.”

“Oh!  How could you?”Janie cried. 

“Now Janie — ” her husband began  in a mock-scolding tone.

“Another crazed idealist,” Watson replied.  “That bird wasn’t eating, it was sick, it – it was a sparrow!”

“Did Harold come back to visit his bird?” Janie asked.

“No, and I don’t think he recognized me tonight.”

“That’s strange.  I wonder why he wears that silly hat.  He still had it on when I showed him to his room.”

“I think when he puts it on and looks in the mirror, he sees the High Plains Drifter,” Jeremy interjected. 

“But that we could all have his heart,” the vet added.  “Do you realize that Holly would have bled to death without that tourniquet?  That bone had broken an artery and gone clear through the skin.”

“And he pulled that wooden frame all this way!” Jeremy noted.  “Why didn’t anyone stop and help him?”

“You know that since the cult moved in, no one stops for anyone walking in this valley anymore,” Watson replied.

The following afternoon, Tobie called home to say that the operation was a success, but that now they’d have a three-legged dog hobbling around the ranch.  Janie told Tobie that the Good Samaritan had left after breakfast, and she told her son what the veterinarian had said about Harold’s tourniquet.

After bribing her guest with pancakes, Janie had drawn from Harold that he had learned to make the stretcher and apply the tourniquet while in the Boy Scouts.  He failed to tell her that Outdoor Safety was his final badge as a scout before he was hounded out of his troop by the constant tormenting of his peers, who found him too slow, to uncoordinated, too stupid.  It was a recurring pattern in Harold’s young life.  He had withdrawn into himself, slowly, and seldom ventured from his room but for school.  His hobbies became his obsession.  For hours he would sit and construct model cars from their plastic kits, or look at the pictures in Hot Rod or examine the diagrams in his father’s auto repair manuals.  His love of toy cars was soon surpassed only by his love for the glue with which he put his models together.  He found that breathing the fumes dulled his sense of loneliness and made him forget his social ineptitude.  Unfortunately, it also diminished the gray matter in his head.  He dropped out of high school at age sixteen.

Harold did tell Janie over his third helping that his father, a truck mechanic, was transferred from their small town in western Kansas to Des Moines, and that his parents told him because of their distressed financial situation, he wasn’t going to Iowa with them.  They put Harold, age seventeen, on a bus to California to live with his relatives, the Baileys.

Three days after Holly’s operation, Tobie brought home the recuperating dog.  The following day he stopped by the Bailey’s mobile home and thanked Harold for all he had done.  Tobie invited Harold, three years his junior, to dinner at the ranch.  Thanks to Tobie’s generosity – and Janie’s tolerance – Harold ate five hot meals at the Barnes ranch over the next week.  At first Tobie had instigated the Barnes’ contact with Harold.  Two weeks after Holly’s operation, Harold was riding a bike over each day to check on the old dog.  The bike was a rusty ten-speed Tobie had found in the garage and given to him.  Tobie never once discouraged Harold from his visits.  It wasn’t really a friendship that developed between the two.  They seldom discussed politics, or sports, or for that matter, anything.  Harold never had much to say and neither did Tobie.  Bobby had been dismayed, yet somewhat amused to come home from college that Easter to find Holly with three legs and Tobie with an odd little shadow.  He thought Harold was just another part of Tobie’s menagerie.  Bobby teased Tobie about Harold’s constant buzzing around him, which led the younger brother to dub his shadow “The Insect,” a name Harold would take to the grave.

The Insect’s adopting of Tobie as his spiritual leader did much to bring him out of his shell, although he still would be like a hermit crab all his life, dragging the shell that others had created.  Unfortunately, The Insect had learned his social skills from Tobie, who definitely was not the Emily Post of The Valley.

Tobie was the one to discover The Insect’s potential as a mechanic.  And Jeremy had given Harold the title of assistant mechanic for the tractors, irrigation pumps, and wind machines on the ranch, a position he held for only a short time, since The Insect’s ties with Tobie had slowly turned the business relationship sour.

Jeremy spoke to Bobby of The Insect’s most recent termination, this time by Jeremy.

“I suppose one of the hardest things I’ve had to do was take away The Insect’s job, Bobby,” his father said as he gazed out toward the waning sun, its rays penetrating the furrows trailing from his squinting eyes.  “And to know it’s my own son’s influence over the boy that’s made him so – so irresponsible.  But damn it, I think Tobie’s getting better.  I think his two days in jail had a big impact on him.  Gave him time to think — like Thoreau.”

“Thoreau?  Come on, Jeremy, don’t you think that simile is a bit grandiose?  I think the last six months have only been a lull before the storm.”

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. 

“So what happened?” Bobby asked as his father brought to a close his epic tale of revenge.

“Bobby, it’s more what hasn’t happened.  Reginald Sebastian Heath hasn’t written a word about what I said in my exposé.  But do you know what’s even more interesting?”

“What?”

“Reggie must have put the word out to his contemporaries to not mention that new Schloss wine or else.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because not one of those wine writers who came here that weekend has mentioned a word about the new Schloss wine.  I guess Reggie felt that it was the least he could do, and yet the most he could do.  It’s strange, son, but I’ve come to kind of like and admire Reggie Heath.”

“Oh, come on now, Jeremy.  He sounds like a pompous ass.”

“No, not entirely.  I really think he did what he could do to affect a change – and still survive in ‘The Industry.’”

“Do the people at Schloss know about your exposé’?”

“No, I don’t think Delaney does.  I’m sure he’s wondering what the hell happened to their brilliant plan.  It has produced a big fat zero in cases sold.”

“What about the General Manager?”

“I think I gave away my disguise when I made my departing comment in the storeroom.  And they fired Gregor’s kid over some petty thing the following week.  But I don’t think those two ever told Delaney, because they’d have to tell him about getting caught with their pants down.  They know better than that.”

“So you survived your escapade without any serious repercussions.”

“Except for my heart attack.  It was just too much excitement.  You know, Bobby, the strange thing is that I believe the GM thinks I was involved in all that in retaliation for what happened to Tobie years ago.”

“When he quit Schloss?”

“Yes.” 

Jeremy waited anxiously for Monday morning to arrive.  He hadn’t heard a peep out of the people at Schloss.  When Jeremy arrived promptly at nine that morning at the Happy Trails Inn, the soft-lit, well-kept grounds were serene, with a group of robins cavorting around on the manicured lawn.  Quite a contrast to the scene of Friday night.

Reggie and the impeccably groomed Alex emerged from the house.  Stephanie and Pete were nowhere to be seen, and no mention was made of their disappearance.  Jeremy felt it would be rude to make an inquiry, or to report the missing persons to the police.  At the airport, with the commuter plane’s props whirring in the background, Jeremy sat in the Rolls and listened as Heath thanked him for his hospitality.  Jeremy knew it was his final chance.  He grabbed the folder beside him and handed it to his guest.

“Reggie, you saw some rather strange things at Schloss Friday night.  I’ve done some research into the operation, an operation in which I’m a co-op member but play only a very, very small part.  I’ve recorded what I’ve discovered in that folder, and all I ask of you is that you take the time to read it.”

“Why Jeremy, I had no idea you were the Deep Throat of your valley.”

It’s a situation I don’t like seeing exist here.  All I ask, Reggie, is that if you read it and find it interesting, that you don’t attribute anything to me – don’t use my name.  And if you feel it would be best not to write anything about what you’ve read, I will, of course, understand.”

Reggie flipped through the surprisingly thick typewritten file, what had been a tremendous effort on Jeremy’s part.

“I’ll certainly honor both of your requests.  You just make sure, Mr. Barnes, that you save time from your writings to keep growing such fine chardonnay.  Take care, Jeremy.”

“Thanks, Reggie.  And goodbye, Alex.”

Jeremy didn’t know why he bothered to address that piece of furniture, that tete-a-tete at Reggie’s side.  Reggie put the folder in his brief case on top of the Schloss press kit that concerned the new dba wine – the packet that had been delivered by one of Ms. PR’s lackeys the day before.  Reggie and Alex hopped out of the limousine and were gone.

Jeremy never knew exactly what happened to the only copy of his exposé.  He didn’t know that on their flight southward, Reggie had carefully read both items, Jeremy’s and Schloss’.  After rereading parts of each of the dissertations, Reggie had returned them both to his briefcase.  While waiting for his baggage at the LA airport, Reggie made his decision.  He pulled both folders from his satchel and handed them to his companion.

“Alex, dear, will you please walk these over to that receptacle and deposit them?”

Alex obediently stepped over to a nearby trash can and dropped the folders into the plastic bag inside the can. 

With purpose Jeremy stepped toward a door at the opposite end of the room.  Not the door opening upon a long hallway leading to the other wing of the winery, the restaurant, and that night’s festivities, but rather the door he knew from the map Sammy had drawn earlier that week.  The door Sammy had taped the jam of earlier that evening.  The supposedly locked door to the storeroom that held, in carefully arranged boxes, every phony label Schloss glued on its wines.

As Jeremy approached the storeroom, he thought about how he would handle the situation if he found the door could be opened.  He had no speech planned; he figured he would wing it.  He didn’t know a speech wouldn’t be needed, for behind the door were two unexpected surprises, Ms. PR and the GM, both in the final moments of passion before they were to reach a mutual, cocaine-intensified orgasm.

Jeremy burst into the dark room and stopped, acting out his apparent mistake.  Reggie bumped into Jeremy and a chain reaction, a human pile-up, followed.  Jeremy reached over to the wall, and there, as he had been told, was the light switch.  He flipped it on. 

Heath was the first to spot the action and spoke, “And what have we here?”

“Mr. Heath!  And Mr. Barnes!” the GM exclaimed.

“Right so far,” Heath shot back at the pair.  “And whom might I say are you?”

“Ah, yes, Mr. Heath.  I’m Gerald Martin, General Manager of Schloss Cellars.”

“And she is?” Heath enquired, continuing the interrogation.

“And this is Paula Robbins, head of public relations and marketing for Schloss.”

For once Ms. PR had nothing to say.

Jeremy put his hand to his forehead and bit his lower lip.  This was true improvisation.  And here were a couple of four-star generals for the other side captured in a compromising position – all behind enemy lines.  In their attempt to maintain corporate decorum, the pair came off even more comical than they appeared.  Here was Ms. PR, sitting on three large boxes of phony wine labels, her dress hiked up over her waist, her bare legs wrapped around the equally bare ass of the GM.  Gerald Martin, for his part, tried to keep his composure, despite the fact that his European cut pants and underwear were pooled around his ankles.  He did have the savvy to know that it would be hard – very, very hard – to withdraw from Ms. PR and maintain his dignity.  Jeremy couldn’t resist the opportunity to comment.

“If you two will excuse us, we’ll let you get back to your discussion of how you’ll screw the consumer with your latest phony wine.”

With that said, Jeremy turned on his heels, and with his tour group in tow, stepped out of the door, flipping off the light switch as they left.  The group was through the proper exit and into the hallway when, of all people, Stephanie spoke.

“You know, Reggie, this really is a fun place.”

“I concur with you, child.  Jeremy, this evening has held too much excitement for me.  If you don’t mind calling for our ride to the inn, I’ll just stop into the party long enough to greet my colleagues and sample a wine or two.  I’ll explain to Mr. Delaney I’m not feeling well – that I’m exhausted from my flight.”

“That’s fine with me, Reggie.”

Thirty minutes later Gilberto arrived in another land yacht of Jeremy’s fleet, a 1938 Lincoln, to ferry the party out to the Happy Trails Inn on The River.  Gilberto had been awaiting Jeremy’s call, having already retrieved the baggage from the Rolls.  The ride out to the inn was much more pleasant than their previous trip.  Pete and Reggie and Jeremy were having a good laugh about surprising two members of the Schloss royal court having a tryst in a secret corner of their corporate castle.  Pete’s graphic account of the replay even had Gilberto suppressing a smile.

The Lincoln finally pulled into the driveway of the isolated inn.  Jeremy noticed a group of motorcycles and a stretch Caddy parked out front, and a large paper banner hung across the entire second story of the cute gingerbread house.  The sign said, “Maneuvers.”  Strobe lights and music blared from inside the house.  Two motorcycles roared across the lawn, and Jeremy thought he saw, in the blur, a young man wearing a pair of black leather chaps on the back of one of the bikes.  Just a pair of chaps.

About that time a figure peered out of a downstairs window, and the door opened.  A soldier, or what Jeremy thought was a soldier, approached the car.  Jeremy knew when the young man addressed Reggie that he was only pretending to be a soldier; besides, a real soldier wouldn’t come out of a gingerbread house dressed for combat.  Everyone disembarked from the black Lincoln, and Gilberto removed the bags from the trunk.  Two couples, including a pair of women dressed in skydiving gear – quite an unusual sight at night – approached.  From their banter with Alex and Stephanie, it was apparent to Jeremy that they all knew one another, and that a party, with Reggie’s group as guests of honor, was in progress inside.  Jeremy bade farewell to Reggie.

“I hope you have a good weekend.   What time do you want me to pick you up for the airport on Monday morning?”

“About nine, Jeremy.  Thank you for a fascinating evening.  I just hope I’m up for the remainder of our stay.  Goodnight.”

Jeremy, feeling somewhat relieved that the first step in his act of revenge was over, hopped into the car with Gilberto.  His hopes for his plan were momentarily dashed when he heard agonizing screams coming from the row of cabins adjacent to the Happy Trails Inn.  As they drove off, Jeremy silently wondered if Reggie’s weekend hadn’t only just begun.

Jeremy led Heath and company through the gate in the high fence and past the hoppers, crushers and the huge horizontal basket press.  Before entering the winery the group filed between two rows of outdoor stainless steel tanks, each with a small sign that said, “Owned and Leased by Grape Rancher Leasing Company,” the name of Delaney’s profit scheme.  They entered through a heavy metal door and descended into the cellar room, a cavernous, temperature-controlled warehouse containing more than a hundred stainless-steel tanks.  Jeremy knew he was to look for Gregor’s son down one of the alleys between the rows of tanks.  He spotted him half-way down the fourth row, and the group veered left into the alley.  The young man waved at Jeremy when he spotted his expected visitors.

“Mr. Barnes, what are you doing down here?”

“A long story, Sammy.  We’re trying to find our way to the restaurant.”

“Let me take you up front.  We’re not supposed to allow visitors to wander around here alone.  I’ll be finished with this in just a second.”

Jeremy and the rest had an opportunity to inspect Sammy and the job he was about to complete.  He was dressed in rubber boots, a full-length plastic apron, and long rubber gloves that went up to his elbows.  He stood next to a hundred-gallon sump that resembled a commercial soup stirrer.  A one-inch diameter steam hose snaked along the ground and up into the sump.  His protective clothing kept the young man from coming into contact with a bright-blue, clay-like gunk that he was adding to the boiling water in the sump.

“Sammy, these are guests of Schloss up from LA for the weekend.”

Sammy put his hand out to Heath but quickly pulled it back after realizing his glove was covered with the sticky blue goo.

“Sorry.”

“Sammy, what are you doing?  What is that stuff?” Jeremy asked.

“I’m making an addition, Mr. Barnes.  We’re adding 75 pounds of potassium ferracyanide to this wine.”

“What wine?’

“The chenin blanc in this tank here.”

Sammy pointed at the shiny 20,000 gallon container that loomed over them.  Heath’s mouth fell open.

“Did you say cyanide?” Heath gasped.

“Potassium ferracyanide.  We have to add it to the wine after we make a big metal addition.”

“Metal addition?”

“Yes, sir.  We’ve put copper sulfate in the wine.”

“Copper sulfate?  Isn’t that poisonous?”

“Well, I guess that’s why one of the lab rats – excuse me, the lab assistants – weighs it out for us.  Plus they put a sign on the tank telling us not to sample it.”

Even Pete’s curiosity was aroused.  “Why do they put copper sulfate in the wine?”

“To get the hydrogen sulfide out.  You know – the rotten egg smell.”

Reggie butted in; he wanted to be in charge of this interview session.  “Now just a second, young man.  This wine has a  hydrogen sulfide problem?  Why?”

“I don’t know.  We just shipped it in from the dessert – the Central Valley – three days ago.”

“So you add a high-level dose of copper sulfate to it, and then you add this potassium ferracyanide to absorb the copper.”

“Yes, sir.  They have us wear this gear because we could burn ourselves on the boiling water – and this gunk is supposed to be bad for us if we touch it.”

“Why do you put it in that hot water?”

“It won’t dissolve in cold water or wine.  It just clumps up and falls to the bottom of the tank.”

“Aren’t the fumes from the boiling cyanide dangerous?”

“I guess they haven’t thought about that, sir.”

The visitors looked around and saw the blue cyanide on everything Sammy’s gloves had touched.

“You mix it in hot water and just pump it into the wine?”

“I’ll show you.  I’ve got one more scoop to go and I’ll be finished.”

Sammy stuck his glove into the five-gallon bucket, scooped out the last gob of muck, and dropped it into the boiling, swirling water of the sump.

“After we mix it up with the water, we slowly pump it in.”

“Besides diluting it, doesn’t it turn the wine blue?”

“We mostly add this stuff to our red jug wines, so you can barely tell it’s in there.  But when we add it to a white wine, it looks pretty wild.”

Sammy walked over and cracked the sample valve on the tank.  Jeremy stepped beside him and put his hand under the spigot.  The liquid flowing out was a brilliant blue.

Pete couldn’t contain himself.  “Looks like that cheap German virgin wine.”

Heath frowned at him.  This was serious.  “And how do they extract the blue color from the wine?”

“We run it through a paper filter.  We used to use asbestos but the government stopped that.”

“And then what?”

“We cold stabilize and – “

“Cold Stabilize?”

“We pump the wine through a heat exchanger overnight and then dump in some buckets of cream of tartar.  Then we chill it some more.  It gets the potassium tartrates out.”

“And then?”

“We bottle it.”

“As what?”

“A jug wine or a Chablis, I guess.”

Jeremy could see a figure approaching from the end of the alley.  One by one, the visitors turned to look at the apparition.

“What is that?” Heath asked to no one in particular.

Pete the comic made a guess.  “It looks like the ghost of Sitting Bull.”

The man coming at them was Theodore Roosevelt Bearfoot, a pony-tailed, six-foot-six, 300-pound Pomo Indian.  The cellar rats called him Teddy.  He was the only seasonal worker from the past year’s crush to have survived the winter lay-offs, mostly because he could drag two fifty-foot wine hoses around the winery without perspiring, and because the cellar sub-foreman, in charge of firings, was afraid to tell him goodbye.  And trudging toward the visitors that night was a very big man covered from head to toe in a fine white powder, and he didn’t look the least bit amused by it.

As the clairvoyant for the group, Sammy communicated with the ghost.  “Hey, Teddy.  What’s the problem?”

“Goddamn shit,” Teddy said in his deep voice.  “I hate putting this crap in wine.  I gotta breathe it and mix it up with my hands and it gets in my lungs and I start sneezin’.  I got it all over me.”

Sammy pointed at Pete.  “This guy here says you look like Sitting Bull’s ghost.”

Teddy flashed a grin showing a gap where his two front teeth had been.  He had lost them in a football game the year before he dropped out of high school.

“Oh yeah?”

Pete stepped behind Stephanie in the hope she would deflect the first blow.  As if in slow motion, a laugh welled up inside of the big man and escaped.  Teddy’s laugh sounded like Jeremy’s fuel-starved Rolls:  “Ah-ha.  Ah-ha.”    As Teddy’s laugh subsided, he turned to stare down at Stephanie.  After setting down the two five-gallon buckets in his hands, he pointed in her direction.

“This chick on the warpath?”

Stephanie’s face turned the color of ming pink.  When Reggie realized that Teddy wouldn’t bite, he addressed the big man.

“By the way, sir, just exactly what is that powder on you?”

“I dunno.  Sammy what do they call it?”

“PVP.  Polyvinylpolypirrode.  Ground-up plastic powder.  We dump it into the wine to clarify it.  They’ve found it’s cheaper than the old natural stuff we used to add, but it’s such a pain in the ass to mess with.”

“Why don’t you wear a mask when you mix it?”

“You’ve never tried to find a mask around here.”

“How do you remove it?”

“Oh, it settles out, I guess.  Plus we filter the wine some more.”

The sulfuric steam rising from Teddy’s other bucket wafted past Stephanie and Alex, causing them to gag involuntarily.  With his hand over his mouth, Pete asked Sammy where the dead smell was coming from.

“That’s potassium metabisulfate.  Sulfur.  We need to add a couple pounds to that zinfandel over there ‘cause someone left the lid open on the tank a couple nights ago.”

“So the wine’s oxidized?” Jeremy asked.

“Yeah.  When I saw the layer of purple scum floating on that tank it looked like the surface of Mars.”

Pete butted in.  “You’re adding pounds of sulfur?  Reggie, aren’t they trying to link sulfites in food products with fatal reactions in asthmatics and others with an allergy to it?”

“Yes.  Using it is such a shame, too,” Reggie answered his companion.  “If they’d just use the care necessary to keep out the air, they wouldn’t need to put all those strange things into the wine.”

Teddy picked up his buckets and headed down the aisle.  Reggie shook his head and turned to Jeremy.  “Mr. Barnes, this is a side of winemaking I seldom see.  For some reason the public relations people at these large wineries don’t take me on the working man’s tour.  This all reminds me of the story I was once told about a large producer of jug wines in the Central Valley.  In the story, the owner, an elderly man, gathered his sons around his deathbed to pass on his secret of winemaking to his heirs.  He had them come close to him, and with the death rattle in his throat, he whispered, ‘The secret, my sons, is that you can use grapes, too.’”

Jeremy let out a hearty laugh and for the first time felt there was hope in his plot succeeding.  Shedding his gloves, Sammy turned off the sump and motioned for his guests to follow him.  He led his guests through the tanks toward the restaurant.  Sammy guided the group out of the tank cellar and into the adjoining room, which was filled with strange-looking stainless steel machinery.  It was the area not on the tourists’ itinerary when they were herded along the overhead catwalks by the minimum-wage tour guides.  The room contained the diatomaceous-earth filter, the centrifuges, the heat exchanger and the sterile filters.  It had been thought that the tourists would find the room contradictory to the image the winery was attempting to project, so it was conveniently excluded from their sight.

As this privileged group filed through, Alex nudged Reggie’s arm and pointed toward one corner of the room.  A short, squatty man lay asleep on a pile of bags of diatomaceous earth.  Reggie couldn’t hold back his curiosity.

“And who is that?”

“Oh.  That’s Herb, sir.  He’s feeling under the weather tonight.”

Like Teddy, Herb wasn’t in the script, but he still was a good cue for Jeremy’s lines.  “Sammy, what are those bags he’s lying on?”

“Diatomaceous earth.  Dirt.  See, over there, Bill is using it.”

A worker was dumping a bucket full of the red powder into a sump of wine.  A cloud of dust enveloped his head.

“We add it to the wine and then filter it back out.  It’s an aid to filtering.”

“Isn’t diatomaceous earth carcinogenic?  Doesn’t it cause cancer?”  Heath inquired.

“I’ve read that it only causes cancer if it’s inhaled.”

“Why don’t you all wear masks?”

“Because we don’t have to.”

Management at Schloss was not strict on the wearing of paper masks, for a recent cost-cutting audit by the new Assistant to the Comptroller had disclosed that they cost a whopping seventy-five cents apiece, and those things add up.  Reggie was still gazing at the sleeping cellar rat when Herb opened his eyes to stare back at him.

“What the hell you lookin’ at?”

Reggie turned away.  Jeremy thought the situation was almost out of control.  With his eyes he motioned for Sammy to get them out of there.

“Forgive him, sir.  He’s not well.”

Herb wasn’t well because, since his shift began, he had consumed two liters of “soda pop,” the cellar rats’ nickname for the semi-popular Schloss white zin, the one that reminded Herb of Nehi Red.  Herb was on his bi-monthly binge.

Sammy led his guest to a door and opened it.  “Jeremy, this is as far as I’m allowed to go after 6 p.m.  Just walk straight through this room to a door at the other end and take a right, and eventually you’ll end up at the restaurant.  Nice meeting you.”

Jeremy knew that Heath was not the perfect person to whom he could expose Schloss, but he recalled the quote of a Texas football coach who once had said, “You gotta dance with who brung ya.”  Giving himself the go-ahead, Jeremy didn’t wait for Delaney to call, he contacted the president a day early and agreed to drive Reggie and his guests to the release party at Schloss, and afterwards, to the inn.  Delaney told Jeremy that Reggie’s plane was to arrive at seven in the evening the following Friday.  Jeremy had a week to plan his attack. 

Jeremy enlisted three people, each oblivious of his total strategy, to help him carry out the final battle of his personal war against Schloss.  Jeremy knew  that it was imperative that Heath not know he was being set up, because if word leaked out that Jeremy was behind Heath’s exciting weekend, the repercussions could hurt not only Jeremy’s ranch, but also the reputation of Stan’s winery, the purchase of Jeremy’s grapes.

First, Jeremy lined up a job for Gregor’s boy at a lumber mill near Healdsburg.  Sammy would probably be a casualty in Jeremy’s raid on Schloss – if everything went as scheduled.  Sammy had been demoted to a cellar rat after the accident, and his future at Schloss had already been decided; he was going nowhere.  The job Jeremy had arranged through a friend, now that the mill was hiring after the latest drop in interest rates, was definitely a step up for Gregor’s boy.  The young man was more than happy to be a part of Jeremy’s conspiracy; he felt it was the least he could do for him under the circumstances.

Jeremy’s other two co-conspirators in the plan were his vineyard foreman, Gilberto, and Gilberto’s cousin, Miguel.  Gilberto had been Jeremy’s right-hand man on the ranch for more than a decade.  When Daniel had returned from Davis, the triumvirate had run the ranch as a well-tuned machine.  Each had his sphere of duties, and each performed them admirably and without dispute.

Gilberto had come from a tiny, impoverished village in Oaxaca, and had been granted American citizenship only after a very costly scam marriage and divorce.   For a person who had not spent a day in a classroom, Gilberto was brilliant, and he held a tremendous knowledge about the workings of plants.  He had an intimate relationship with every vine on the ranch.  He talked and sang to them, cared for them, nursed them back to health.  He easily grasped the concepts from the viticulture classes Daniel spoke of when he returned from Davis.  Gilberto’s hesitation to learn to  read English was all that kept Daniel and Jeremy from providing him with the tuition money for vit classes at the local community college.  Jeremy’s opinion of his vineyard foreman was unparalleled, especially since Daniel’s death.  Jeremy thought that Gilberto was to vines what Luther Burbank was to roses.  And for his efforts, Gilberto was paid very well by Jeremy.  He could send half his monthly salary to his family back in Mexico and still live comfortably, rent-free, on the ranch.

Gilberto was to play a minor role in Jeremy’s plan.  His sole task was to drive Jeremy and Heath’s group from Schloss to the inn after the release party.

Miguel, the third conspirator, was Gilberto’s cousin.  Miguel’s father had immigrated to California in the late ‘50’s, so Miguel and his brothers and sisters were naturalized U.S. citizens.  Gilberto had followed his uncle, Miguel’s father, to The Valley after the man had come home to Oaxaca for a visit in 1968 and described to the gathered multitude the opportunities in California.  Miguel’s father had worked for years at a large winery in The Valley.  His sole job, five days a week, fifty weeks a year was to top off wine barrels – all three thousand of them.  He would remove the bung from each wooden barrel and fill the barrel to the brim with wine and pound back in the bung.  It took one month to complete a tour through the barrel room.  Miguel had once told Jeremy that he found his father’s job as tedious as painting the Golden Gate Bridge.

Miguel’s parents had tried to instill in their children, as best as immigrant Catholics could, the Protestant work ethic.  They had success and a few failures.  One son was a CPA and one daughter a nurse.  Another son, a finance major at San Jose State, and another daughter, a mother of two children with a husband at Soledad on a robbery conviction.  And about Miguel, they harbored some concern.  He had no desire to go to college even though he had graduated near the top of his class at the Catholic high school.  They were also concerned that Miguel fraternized with a group of low riders, but his mother believed that his current phase was only an attempt to discover his heritage and the plight of his people.

Jeremy knew Miguel because the young man was the star of his soccer team, coached by Gilberto.  For several years Jeremy had funded a soccer team comprised of migrants and first-generation Mexican-American winery and vineyard workers.  He provided them with some of the finest uniforms and equipment in the State.  When Jeremy first had agreed to sponsor the team almost a decade ago, he had hit a stone wall with the region’s parks department.  Citing the need for bilingual referees and a multitude of other reasons, the parks director had barred his team from the local league.  For three years Jeremy organized and funded a league composed of four Hispanic teams, going so far as to rent a vacant field on the outskirts of Healdsburg and improving it for soccer play.  They called their league Los Chupones, with Jeremy named El Patron de Los Chupones.

Several of his peers frowned upon Jeremy’s attempt to be the Pete Rozelle of The Valley.  They feared the league could become a hotbed of union activity.  Jeremy saw it as the sole social event provided by the community to the hard-working migrants and winery workers, excepting, of course, the Spanish-named bars that the powers that be had harassed right off the town square and into the unincorporated area south of town, all done after a group of influential Anglos had clamored for downtown revitalization.  Jeremy often wondered why the Healdsburg supermarkets could provide bilingual clerks and traditional Mexican food departments for their migrant patrons, yet the parks department couldn’t find one bilingual referee.

Finally after several years, the new parks director reversed the unspoken policy of her predecessor, who had been fired over a question of missing funds, and Jeremy’s team won the championship its first year in the established league.  A barrier had been broken.

Jeremy had come to know Miguel from the team – and from weekends when Miguel had helped Gilberto in his cousin’s off-h0urs venture, a consulting company for grafting, or “T-budding,” the vines of other growers.  Jeremy had found Miguel to be a fascinating young man.  An enigma.  He was friendly, yet shrewd.  Miguel talked like a socialist and spent like a suburbanite.  He was likable, yet bitter, but definitely one of those rare young people to be willing someday to sacrifice himself for his ideals.  It seemed to Jeremy that Miguel knew this about himself, and that he was only waiting for the day when his own personal challenge would begin. 

Jeremy had recruited Miguel and two of his friends for a simple task in the coming raid.  They only had to drive the Heath party and Jeremy from Healdsburg to the festivities at Schloss.

On the evening of the release party, Jeremy wore his new button-down Oxford shirt and camel’s hair jacket, presents from Janie the day before.  Earlier that week he had asked her to please not worry about attending the release party, with his comment being the first mention of the party to her.  She had other plans and gladly agreed.  During his lengthy debriefing the three previous days with Gregor’s son, he had developed a basic script for their tour of Schloss, guided, of course, by Sammy, who would work the cellar crew’s swing shift the night of the party.  The only snag in Jeremy’s plan had been the new fuel switch for his Rolls.  Fortunately, he had driven out to the River and found a strange, wild-eyed mechanic specializing in English cars who was able to install the switch that Friday morning.  Jeremy now waited outside his polished Silver Cloud for the small turbo-prop to touch down at the county airport.  His plan was about to begin.

Heath’s plane taxied to a stop a full thirty minutes behind schedule.  Jeremy and his Rolls were a few short steps from the parked commuter plane when the door swung open and the flight attendant stepped out.  As soon as she touched the ground, she scooted over to a waiting baggage wagon and picked up ear plugs and the hard-billed hat of a gate agent and placed them on her head.  She assumed her place at the foot of the stairway and greeted each deplaning passenger as if that were their first meeting.  The last group to leave the plane was Heath and his three guests.  Heath paused at the top step and scanned the area in an attempt to acclimate himself to the unfamiliar surroundings.  He had on his face the apprehensive look of an ambassador arriving for his first tour of duty in Zimbabwe.

Jeremy knew the baffled passenger had to be his guests, for who else but Heath would wear an ascot in The Valley.  Having spotted first the car and then Jeremy beside it, the man’s expression changed to one of relief.  Then the Heath menagerie disembarked.  Behind Heath a thin, attractive, impeccably dressed young man appeared.  The young man’s first, natural reaction upon emerging from the plane was to stop momentarily and, hand in suit pocket, head turned to the side, assume the pose of a model on the cover of a men’s fashion magazine.  Behind him was a bald, frumpy man of 50 sporting several gold chains around his neck.  He was exhaling cigarette smoke when Jeremy spotted him, but through the veil he saw on the man’s face a bored, preoccupied look.  The third person was a woman, a young, attractive woman but for the fact that she had on entirely too much makeup and that her close-cropped, winter-white hair sported two wide streaks:  one aquamarine and the other ming pink.  Her lipstick matched the pink streak of her hair.  She was dressed in designer post-punk with a heavy touch of S & M.  On her face was what Jeremy would have best described as a vacuous look.  From the appearance of Heath’s guests, it was obvious to Jeremy that Heath knew this wasn’t to be a working weekend.  Jeremy also thought of the unusual phrase used by a young Santa Barbara winemaker at a wine seminar discussing oak’s effect on wine.  It was the perfect litany for describing the present Heath – that like Limousin oak with wine, California had brought about a “way-rad change” in the former Bostonian.

Heath and his group paused near the luggage wagon to retrieve their bags from the flight attendant, who now was dressed in a baggy pullover jumpsuit and baseball cap as she slung the bags.  Jeremy approached.

“Mr. Heath?”

“Yes.  Reginald Sebastian Heath.  But please call me Reggie.  And you are Jeremy Barnes?”

Heath made his introduction without skipping a beat.  On the East Coast he would have assumed that Jeremy was the chauffeur, but in California, with the residents’ fixation for fancy cars, he knew that once out of The City only the enfeebled didn’t drive.

“Yes.  Yes I am.”

“It is a pleasure to meet you.  I have never failed to enjoy your chardonnay.”

“Why, thank you –- Reggie.”

“Let me introduce you to my party.  This young man is Alex Jag-u-ar.  And my friend here is Pete Williams.  And she is Stephanie Goodson-Michaels.”

“A pleasure meeting you,” Jeremy responded.

“Yes,” “uh,” and “yeah,” were their replies.

Jeremy loaded the bags into the square trunk of the Rolls, and the group climbed into the car with Stephanie next to Jeremy in the front seat.  Jeremy thought to himself that Stephanie must be a great help on board when night sailing on The Bay.  She could stand at the bow with her xenon/neon hair and make a great combination figurehead and running light.

As they drove toward Schloss, Jeremy and Reggie exchanged a few pleasantries about last year’s harvest and the current frost season.  Heath’s companions remained silent, as if pouting over the tedious task required of them – the release party – before they were allowed to go to the county’s version of an adult Knott’s Berry Farm.  Jeremy took the old highway to Schloss, which brought them through tiny downtown Healdsburg.  A block from Main Street and the town square, Jeremy spotted an empty parking space ahead and reached under the steering wheel.  He flipped off the recently installed fuel switch, and the engine of the $75,000 automobile sputtered and died.  Jeremy swung the monster into the empty space.

“Reggie, I don’t know what the problem is,” Jeremy said as he tried in vain to start the engine.  “I apologize.  I’ve never had trouble with this car before.”

Jeremy opened the door and stepped out.  It was his signal to the occupants of a waiting car parked a block away.  Jeremy fumbled with the latches on the hood until a dark, mechanical waterbug, a lovingly restored 1952 Hudson Hornet, rumbled past and shuddered to a stop.

“Señor Barnes!”

“Miguel!  Que pasa?”

“Nada!  What’s the problem?”

“The engine died.  Say, you wouldn’t mind giving us a lift to Schloss Cellars, would you?”

“No problema!”

The Hudson pulled ahead of Jeremy’s Rolls.  Jeremy stepped back to the rear door of his car and addressed Heath.

“Reggie, we’re already late for the release party.  These young men have agreed to drive us up to Schloss.  I’ll call my vineyard manager and ask him to pick up your luggage and take you to the inn after the party.  Will that be okay?”

Reggie looked concerned.  “Do you know those young men?”

“Oh, yes.  One of them has done some pruning for me.”

“Well – we must make do.”

The group stepped out of the car and walked toward their impromptu taxi.  Ten feet from the Hudson they stopped dead in their tracks.  There on the trunk lid of the metallic dinosaur was a life-sized orange,  gold and brown painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe.  Heath’s entourage was about to enter the most notorious, and at one time, the most miraculous low-rider car in The Valley.

The Hudson belonged to Miguel and his brother.  They had found it abandoned in a sheep rancher’s field and spent two years of their spare time painstakingly restoring the rare auto.  As a surprise to their mother, the devout Catholic, Miguel had secretly driven the car to a paint shop in the next valley for the final touch:  an eight-coat, hand-lacquered paint job replete with the facsimile of the famous miracle painting of the Blessed Mother.  The artist, a renowned Chicano air-brush painter, finished his work the day before the Feast Day of the Assumption, and Miguel had parked the car in their front yard that night to surprise his mother.

Early the next morning she discovered the miracle, and without waking her family, went straight to the homes of a few of her fellow parishioners to tell them of God’s work.  By the time a bleary-eyed, slightly hung over Miguel stepped out the front door, the yard was filled with Catholic zealots, Protestant charismatics, newspaper photographers and several people who had mistaken the commotion for a garage sale.  Miguel didn’t have the heart at that moment to break the news to his mother.  She was so sure Our Lady had appeared.

Rosaries were said, Masses were offered, and photographs appeared on the front pages of several local papers, which were soon picked up by the wire services for publication on what was an otherwise slow news day.  It was the biggest “miracle” story since a woman in Louisiana had seen Jesus’ image in her screen door.

The next day Miguel told her the truth:  The initials “J.C.” at the bottom of the painting were the artist’s, Jose Cardenas.  His mother had taken the news wonderfully.  She hugged her son, and said that it was still God’s work to have given her a child so considerate as to think of such a surprise for her.  His car still became a shrine in her eyes, and was the lead automobile when long-time immigrants from Oaxaca made their All Soul’s Day procession to the local cemeteries to honor their deceased loved ones.

Heath’s troop didn’t know what to make of the primitive folk painting on the old car.  With trepidation the four entered the back door of the cavernous Hornet.  Jeremy sat in the front seat with Miguel and his two friends.

“Miguel and Tony and Carlos, these are some of my friends from down south” Jeremy said.

The three youths simultaneously turned their heads and scrutinized their cargo in silence.  Miguel and friends wore dark sunglasses and white T-shirts, and had their thick, black hair slicked back on their heads.  Their guests attempted to communicate with the natives after Jeremy’s introduction.

“Hello,” Reggie volunteered.

“Yes,” “uh,” and “yeah,” the other three added.

Miguel said, “Hola,” and with the final rays fading from the western sky, the waterbug crawled from the curb and into the street.  Heath, as the ambassador, continued to speak.

“It’s so nice of you boys to take us to the winery.”

There was no reply.  Miguel turned right onto Main Street, Healdsburg’s only four-lane road.  The street was packed with honking, immobile cars.  The Hornet was mired in a traffic jam.

“Jeremy, what is all this traffic?” Heath inquired.

“Healdsburg’s the only town in the area that hasn’t outlawed ‘cruising.’  So the kids come from fifty miles around to drive up and down the main drag.”

Reggie stuck his nose up in the air and peered at the stalled traffic and commented, “What a disgusting, vile – ”

Reggie paused as Miguel turned around and stared down his passenger.

“  –  thing for those other towns to do.”

Jeremy glanced back at Pete and saw for the first time the terrified look on his face.  He also noticed that parts of Stephanie’s hair were the same texture and color as the Hornet’s roof liner.  A custom four-wheel-drive pickup pulled alongside; all Jeremy could see through Miguel’s window were the tires.  He heard a shout from above.

“Hey, cockbite!”

“Your motha’!” Miguel shouted back.

“Miguel!  Who are all those old farts?  You runnin’ a Tijuana taxi?”

“Bite it, white boy!  We’re escorting nobility tonight!”

With that comment made, Miguel pushed a button and the entire body of the car hopped up on its air shocks.  Stephanie and Reggie let out small screams.

After they had been mooned by a group of girls in pep squad outfits, passed a six-pack of Oly by a group of Miguel’s friends, and jeered at by most every teenager in The Valley, the Hornet was out of town and approaching Schloss.  Jeremy summed up his guests’ demeanor in a single word:  anxious.  As they pulled up the long drive that led to Schloss, Miguel turned and spoke to Jeremy, as the two had rehearsed it the night before.

“There’s a guard up there.  He gonna  let us in?” Miguel asked.

“Damn it!  I left my invitation in the Rolls.  They’ll never let us into the front lot in this car.  Miguel, why don’t you drive us around back through the employee entrance and drop us off.”

“Sure thing.”

Jeremy turned back to Reggie and said, “We can come into the restaurant through the cellar.”

“If we must.”

The Hornet hummed along the winding drive that surrounded the castle-like façade of the winery and eventually came to the high-tech crush pad.  When Miguel brought the car to a stop, his passengers catapulted from the back seat.

Sheila Burke, in a fashion typical of a member in the close-knit family of wine people in the small, premium wineries of their valley, wrote Jeremy a lengthy letter that afternoon while sunning on the veranda of her rented Mexican villa.  Jeremy received it two days later and read the following:

Dear Jeremy,

I hope that what follows suffices for the information you requested from Stan and me.  I believe the story I will relate of a fellow winemaker’s inaugural encounter with Reginald Sebastian Heath will prove most helpful to you.

This meeting with Heath was told to me during a chance encounter four years ago.  I was on the Larkspur ferry to San Francisco, avoiding the unpleasant experience of trying to find a parking space for my gas-guzzling auto in The City. 

Having retrieved a double-shot Bloody Mary from the ferry’s bar (for nerves:  my fear of water is eclipsed only by my phobia of dying in my car in traffic), I returned to my seat to find the space next to mine occupied by a pleasant, benevolent-looking man of about 35.  Having spied a wine periodical in my lap, and learning that I was winemaker at a small winery in The Valley, the gentleman informed me that he, too, had been in the wine business, having left our field for another type of work.  Upon questioning him, I was surprised to find that he had been the winemaker at a small, prestigious, but recently closed winery in the adjoining valley, for his name did not register in my memory.

He told me that he had been trained in enology at UC-Davis, with a summer internship at Kloster Erback in Germany’s Rheingua, and after a short apprenticeship he had assumed the duties of winemaker at the above-mentioned winery, a position he held for two years.  But he had left the winery and moved to Novato, in Marin County, and become a consulting chemist for several health-food restaurants in Marin and The City.  I posed the inevitable question to him just as we pulled from the berth:  Why did he leave not only a reputable winery, but the entire world of wine as well?  A far-away sheen came over the eyes of my companion.  He said that he unfortunately had left the winery not of his own volition, and that after his termination he had found it impossible to procure employment in any other winery in the state.

A distant look and bemused smile filled his face as I indignantly protested what appeared to be the blacklisting by the industry of my comrade.  He turned, and looking me straight in the eye, said, “You seem like an honest, concerned woman.  Let me tell you the circumstances – the terms – of my release.  It is a chapter of my life that I have tried in vain to forget.  I’ve gone so far as to change my name; my clients, the restauranteurs, aren’t even aware of my past life.  And I want it that way.  I feel it is the same as being kicked out of Harvard Business School for cheating; it’s best not to let anyone know you ever attended.”

Having given the preliminaries, and extracted from me an oath not to share his new name and current profession with any of my colleagues, he slowly reclined against the lower deck window that protected us from the blowing Bay fog and related to me the following tale of one man’s demise:

“It was several years ago when I, in the company of a group of winemakers and owners from a dozen of our county’s finest wineries, left for a cross-country promotional tour.  The trip had been arranged by a grape-growers association of which my winery was a member.  We were to visit a dozen metropolitan areas in two weeks, a hectic pace, but that was the only way the tour could be justified economically.  The final stop of my trip was to be Boston.  My winery had arranged for me to speak on a radio program about our wine.  The host of the program was a man by the name of Reginald Sebastian Heath, the middle-aged son of an aristocratic Boston family.  A limited partner of our  winery – an acquaintance of Mr. Heath – had helped arrange the interview, a fact I, unfortunately, learned much too late.

“My interview was to have been recorded at eleven in the morning on a Saturday, with playback at three that afternoon over the classical station’s airwaves.  Unfortunately, I had to call Mr. Heath at the studio for last minute changes, for by that time I was running almost four hours late.  He agreed to conduct the interview live at three, and if I didn’t appear, he would have ready to replay a tape of one of his earlier wine programs.  Needless to say, Mr. Heath was furious with me.  He did not enjoy changing his schedule, especially for someone on California time.

“It would help if I described what had happened the previous night in New York.  For most of the members of our tour, the Friday night before my interview was the celebration of the conclusion of our grueling, tiresome sojourn.  Only I was to remain the extra day to speak with Heath up in Boston.  The celebration was a rather raucous affair, since we had all felt the tour was a mild success; the people had treated us well and liked our wine, even if they had never heard of our valley before.

“We had gone en masse that afternoon to the Lone Star Café for two reasons:  We wanted to let loose around some rowdy types, and we all wanted to drink a cold beer.  We were sick of the stuffed shirts trying to trick us into giving the wrong pH of one of our wines, and frankly, we were tired of drinking, pouring and talking wine.  We definitely fulfilled both our objectives at that saloon in the middle of Manhattan.

“Later that evening our group split into two.  Half of us went to see the Rangers play hockey, and the rest left for Studio 54.  I was with the former.  At the game we consumed a demijohn of beer apiece.  It was an exciting game against Chicago with plenty of fights on the ice, and – as I shall describe – even one in the stands.  At a questionably legal check in the game, a Chicago fan standing on his seat in the row in front of us threw his empty half-pint bottle at the ringside glass.  Two men, whom I thought to be home-town fans, pounced on him and began to beat him mercilessly.  I had forgotten the old axiom about not getting involved in New York, because I gave the pair a couple of hard shoves out into the aisle, freeing the missile launcher long enough for him to make his escape.  It turned out that the two men were plain clothes detectives moonlighting as security officers at the game.  So off I went to jail.

“A fellow winemaker raced around town collecting bail money, and finally, at 6 a.m., I was out.  But I had already missed my plane to Boston by the time I arrived at the airport.  I called Heath that morning, hopped on a later flight and raced northward.  I arrived at the studio an hour before the live broadcast was to begin.  I went into the bathroom and the mere sight of me in the mirror was enough to make me sick.  I cleaned up as best I could and took two of everything in my shaving kit, yet I still looked bad and felt worse.  And at the time I had yet to realize what a feeble attempt I had made to prepare myself for my public crucifixion by Heath.

“I was the first California winemaker on his program.  He had invited on his show a few visiting wine masters, the difference being that the latter own the winery in addition to overseeing the production of the wine.  Heath had considered the latter interesting enough to interview, since they came from the same economic strata as he did, a premium winery requiring even then at least a two-million dollar investment to produce a decent quantity of high-quality wine.  Before we went on the air, Heath extracted from me the fact that my father owned a sporting goods store in San Bernadino, which elicited a look from him that he used only upon tasting cheap Italian wines with a low level of breed and character.  And of course I did not tell Mr. Heath the true reason for my tardiness.  I simply said that I had been mugged leaving an excellent performance of La Boheme, an opera I could readily identify with.

“The interview did not go well.  You must remember that this was a few years ago, when California wine was still riding in the back of the bus on the East Coast.  And Mr. Heath felt it was his duty to teach this backwoods upstart a lesson.  After the opening claptrap and introductions, a loose transcript of the program went something like this:

Heath:  I have heard rumors that a second American Prohibition might be in the offing, now that alcohol is considered a drug.  How could the neophyte California wine industry handle that?

Myself:  I haven’t heard anything of the sort, Mr. Heath, and I don’t believe it could ever happen in this country again, at least not the prohibition of the making and consumption of wine.  If such a scheme is introduced, I’m sure we could handle it.

H:  Well, there are many who have said that California still hasn’t been able to handle the effects of the last Prohibition.  How many varietals does your winery make?

M:  Five.

H:  And you grow all your own grapes?  Grow them around the winery?

M:  Yes.  All estate-bottled wines.

H:  I find it fascinating that you people out there can grow little patches, one right next to the other, of all these different grapes and sell an Irish-stewpot of wines.  I read somewhere that in the South they call that sort of thing truck gardening.  Why in 1395 Philip the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy, banned the gamay grape from the slopes of the Cote d’Or, for even then they knew what grapes grew best in what area.

M:  Well, perhaps we can appoint someone in Washington to do that out West.  Or wait about 40 years.  I believe that within that time, say about 2010,  we will have realized what grows best in what areas.  And only those varietals which can make the best wine – and consequently command the best price – will be grown in those particular areas.  Forty years is considerably shorter than the centuries it took the French to do the same thing.

H:  Your idea is good so long as all the valleys that grow the best grapes aren’t covered within that time by tracts of retirement homes and suburban subdivisions.

M:  At least we don’t have an expanding oil refinery a mile from our winery such as they have at Chateau Lafite.

H:  What about that one grape in particular, zinfandel?  Most of the new plantings are in that varietal.  Isn’t it odd that the bastard grape – the grape without a traceable European parentage – is the most widely planted grape in California?

M:   When planted in the proper locale and treated correctly, it makes a wonderfully complex wine.

H:  Chardonnay seems to be quite successful in California, if you listen to the people who make it there.  I have had one, though, that was quite good.  From Anthony Collins, a dear friend of mine.  Have you tried it?  The ’76?

M:  Yes.  It’s good.

“I must interject here, Miss Burke, to tell you that I had dealt with Mr. Collins in the past.  He was an obnoxious ass with the same snotty demeanor as Heath.  He also knew very little about winemaking.  And he owed my winery $2,000 for some bulk press wine we had sold him to dilute his awful ’77 chardonnay. But let me resume the transcript of my interview.”

H:  I did have trouble with his ’77.  He said the slightly off smell in the nose – a bit of a burnt-match smell – was caused by too much sulfur in the vineyard; that most wineries had the problem because it was a wet year.  He said that with a short breathing time the smell would disappear.  Does your  ’77 have a similar problem?

M:  No, it doesn’t.  And I don’t think that sulfur in the vineyard was his problem.

H:  No?

M:  No.  I think it was his divorce.

H:  Pardon?  Excuse me?

M:  Collins was in the throes of serious marriage problems after the crush of 1977.  To be truthful, his wife had grabbed the kids and left him.  So he went to Lake Tahoe with a student in his wine appreciation class to tutor her at a remote ski lodge – and to sort things out – and back at the winery his young wines sat on their lees during the entire time forming hydrogen sulfide – a rotten egg smell – in the wine.  He tried to process it out but couldn’t, so he bought some of our press chardonnay to blend in and he bottled anyway.

H:  That’s interesting.  But his first release, the ’76, was good, although I’ve never had a California chardonnay that rivals the buttery richness of a good French Meursault.

M:  Apples and oranges.

H:  What?

M:  You can’t compare the two.  Do you rate Loire River sauvignon blancs with those of Graves?  Of course not.   And don’t some French Meursaults have quite a bit of pinot blanc grape in them?  I believe our wines can stand on their own merits.  By the way, I have a question for you, Mr. Heath.

H:  Yes?

M:  You described in your newsletter our chardonnay as having the nose of a cross between truffles and creosote.  That turned off many readers of your newsletter who otherwise would have purchased our wine.  Could you elaborate on your description?

H:  I don’t recall that particular comment, but I would think that my description is accurate and should  not be taken as a disparaging one.

M:  The blending of the smells of fungi and a telephone pole?

H:  We writers must use whatever word pops into our mind when we taste the wine, no matter how unusual, abstract or subjective that term may be.

M:  It just seems to me to be such a shame that people pay you fifty dollars a year for your newsletter – to have you tell them how good the wines were that you quaffed with their money – that those people don’t take what you say with a grain of salt.

H:  Sir, I’ll have you know that I have a very loyal following of knowledgeable wine drinkers.

M:  Then why do they need to be told what to drink?  Wine knowledge can be a collective experience.  Wine drinking, wine tasting, is done by the individual.  It is not a spectator sport.  Does it matter that you ranked one wine third with one of those bullets like I see in Billboard with a 16.8 rating, and another, made in an entirely different style, fourth with a 16.7?  That’s so silly.  Reminds me of a saying:  Those who can, do.  Those who can’t, review.

H:  For a young man, you certainly have developed strong opinions.  What does your crystal ball see as the future for California wine?  No doubt it is quite interesting.

M:  I suppose you’d want my bleakest view.  At its worst, by the year 2010 we will have only, say, ten wineries in the state – one for each major valley.  And probably just a couple of corporations which own those ten.  At each of those plants a few ‘styles’ of wine will be made, those styles being decided by a trade-association panel of ‘wine experts’ who will be in charge of determining the collective taste of American drinkers.  And although there are only ten basic styles of wine there will be hundreds of different labels dreamed up by the marketing arms of the companies to slap on those wines – so Americans will still have ‘freedom’ of choice, like we now have when we buy auto tires.

Imports will be tightly controlled, with large duties placed upon them so that only the elite, such as the panel of experts, can afford them.  Small, premium wineries will all but disappear for two reasons.  First, because of all the advertising-induced clamor for freeze-dried wines and the like, the romance of winemaking will all but have died.  And second, with the small winemaking operations almost taxed out of existence, the mammoths will control all the vineyards.  What little wine is sold by the small producer will be from the back door of the place, since the same conglomerates which own the ten big wineries will also control all lines of distribution as well as have an exclusive contract with the few remaining chains of retail wine and liquor outlets.

H:  Bizarre scenario.  But returning to reality for a moment, the main complaint I receive from my listeners about California wine is that it is so, um, rustic.  Still so Wild West.  A sort of Gold Rush mentality of the wine people there.  There’s no tradition, no history, no civility – no nobility.  They’ve told me that when they open a bottle of wine from your area that they can actually taste the coarseness of the wine.

M:  I’ll agree that parts of my winery’s county are still untamed.  Right before I left I saw a wild boar on our new grape ranch out at the geyser range.

H:  Grape ranch?  What do you do, herd around little bunches of grapes?  Or your pickers?  You don’t still beat them, do you?

M:  Beat them?  That’s a loaded question.

H:  Please tell our listener more of those bucolic tales of wild boar and tigers and Indians.  I find them so quaint.  It must be hard making wine in such primitive conditions.

M:  Well, I do have an interesting tale for you that happened just before I left.

H:  Do tell.

M:   I had stopped by a bar in Healdsburg after a day in the vineyard.  The bar’s named Pete’s, but everybody calls it Dirty’s.

H:  How gauche!

M:  And I sat down at the bar, and this old sheep rancher from way up in the hills overlooking our valley was on the stool next to mine.  We started talking, and soon he was telling me that he lived up there by himself and that he, ah, would get lonely up there and he would relieve his frustrations – his desires – by cornering an ewe.

H:  You don’t say!

M:  Yes.  And I didn’t know him from Adam, but he proceeded to go into detail about how he did it.  First, he would corner the ewe against the fence, and he would put the hind legs of the animal in his boots, and he would throw a saddle on its back – a regular horse saddle – and he would reach under and grab those two things that hang down from the saddle –

H:  The stirrups!

M:  Yes.  Then he reaches up and grabs that knob on the top, on the front, the, the –

H:  The saddle horn!

M:  You fuck sheep, too, Mr. Heath?

H:  Why! . . . Why!  Ah.  We’ll return in a movement, excuse me, a moment, ladies and gentlemen.

“During the break Mr. Heath demanded that I leave his booth and the studio at once, which I immediately and happily did.  Knowing that I had the last laugh made me feel so much better, physically, as I r0de back to the airport.  Unfortunately, by the time I’d arrived for work Monday morning, a rough transcript of the interview was laying on my desk in the laboratory.  I was told by the president, a close friend, that I had not only embarrassed one of our major investors and the winery, but I had set back the reputation of California wine in New England for years.  I was asked for my resignation, and I gave it to him on the spot.”

By the time my comrade had finished his story, the fog had begun to lift off the choppy Bay water, and both our eyes were filled with tears, only mine weren’t from crying.  My acquaintance finally let out a huge laugh.  I told him that that was the spirit, that we all had to learn from our mistakes.  He said that he was only able to laugh about his tiny token of revenge he took on Mr. Heath for the first few years after the incident.  He had found a set of Christmas cards with a lamb and its mother on the cover.  Each holiday season, my friend would send Mr. Heath a card, and he would write inside, “Wish ewe were here.”  We both had a good laugh and my companion arose, for we had docked at the busy pier.  We shook hands and wished each other luck, and I watched him disappear into the Bay fog.  I have never seen nor heard of the man again.

Truly Yours,

Sheila Burke

Reading between the lines of her letter, Jeremy found a ray of hope in Heath as the unknowing Woodstein of the wine business.  Calls to Jeremy’s other contacts disclosed the recent flight of Reggie Heath to California and his new residence there, but not the reason behind it:  The trust fund set up for Reggie’s family had been completely mismanaged, with its administrator, a former friend of the family, absconding with a large portion of its capital.  Efforts to extradite the man from his Central American hideaway had proven futile.  To continue living in the splendor to which he was accustomed, Reggie was forced, for the first time in his life, to rely on his own efforts to pay his way into the establishments he always had taken for granted.

Heath had been surprised that what was required of a working wine connoisseur came so easily to him.  He also came to admit that many of his prejudices against California and its wine scene were groundless.  Reggie discovered the urbanity of San Francisco, the pockets of civilization in LA, and the country club and health spa located in the county that held Jeremy’s vineyards.

“Yes,” Heath had said to himself in an introspective moment one evening as he quaffed a rare ’68 cabernet from the veranda of a guest-home overlooking the vine-covered valley, “I believe I actually can tolerate this.”  An unspoken factor in his change of heart was that everything, from the glass in his hand, to the pate in his belly, to the marble under his feet, was “comped” by the corporation that owned the winery he presently beheld from his loft.

Reggie Heath had moved to California and become one of the industry’s chief spokesmen.  He herded his considerable flock back East – and his growing congregation in the West – toward a new understanding of California wine and that state’s greatest contribution to Western Society — The Trend.  Heath helped change what had been considered California wine’s greatest liability – lack of history and tradition – into its greatest asset.  With the help of Heath and his contemporaries, the chosen few new wineries of the season became overnight sensations through the media event known as “first release”. 

The newest, most vogue winery, whether it be solar-powered or gravity-fed or owned by a washed-up TV celebrity, was lavishly reported on and praised by the information brokers in their stories on the latest “first release.”  Readers snatched the bottles off the shelves as fast as they arrived at the retailers.  They went so far as to buy futures — if that was what their brokers told them to do.  The infant wineries saw their inventory fly from their warehouses the first year.  Quotas were set.  Distributors begged for more.  The winemakers were astounded by their success, yet subconsciously troubled by the mass clamor to consume their products.  Their young wines were being quaffed within days of release, which, for cash-flow reasons, were only a few days after bottling.  With virtually no time to develop bottle age and bottle bouquet, their chardonnays and cabernets and zinfandels were closed-in, acidic and harsh.  Yet in the hysteria of “first release” the wines were consumed by those who felt the need to be the first kid on the block to have guzzled the newest wine.  Privately, a few of the winemakers likened the practice to infanticide.

Within three years of their first vintage, many of those same wineries that had ridden the crest of the popular wave now found themselves in irons on a calm sea of unsold wine.  They had been forgotten by the writers who had once shouted their name from the crow’s nest.  For now those same writers were too busy reporting – live! – from the Wine Country’s newest three-star French restaurant, the first tasting of the first release of that season’s latest winery.

Ms. PR disclosed to her bosses at Schloss the results of the survey following Saki’s recent wine column.  Fifteen cases of a featured producer’s wine left the Cuisine store in the week following Saki’s review.  None had been sold the week prior to the column’s appearance.  On her cue, Ms. PR had a wine glass placed in front of each of the board members by one of her underlings in the tasting room.  Two ounces of the featured wine were poured into their glasses.

“Now gentlemen,” Ms. PR had said, “this is the wine that Saki described in his column as, and I quote, ‘a fruity, though full-bodied red wine with the positive attributes of the particular style of wine that it is.  This wine will go with practically any fare because of its incredible robustness yet soft and lingering tones of its finish.  I give it my three stars.  An unbelievable value at its modest price, this wine is best served very cold.’”

The board members smelled the red wine – served to them at room temperature – and a quick perusal of their faces left Ms. PR with the impression that several had smelled a black-yoked egg that just hit the frying pan.  The GM, on the cue they had prearranged the night before, piped up, “No wonder he wants this wine served very cold.  It tastes horrible!”  With Pavlovian response, most of the members nodded in agreement.

“Exactly, gentleman.  This wine is horrible.  It was purchased in bulk from a winery that had gone broke and shut down six months before.  This wine had sat in an unblanketed, half-full tank and had been ignored during the entire time, which we know is a shoddy cellar practice.  A group of entrepreneurs – or negotiants – bought it and bottled it, and they put this flowery, six-color label on it.  They spent more on the package than on the wine.  And Saki’s involvement, you might ask?  He was flown to Honolulu at the entrepreneurs’ expense to discuss California wine in general and this wine in particular.”

“Didn’t they laugh him off the island after they tasted this swill?” the GM asked as they had rehearsed the night before.

“No!  I learned that during his week-long stay at the Waikiki Hilton, he showed up for one tasting attended by exactly 17 people – all distributors and sales reps who in my opinion probably don’t have the faculties to uncover a flaw in a wine.”

Ms. PR then added more statistics compiled from her Cuisine survey.  She told them that of the 74 people who had purchased the wine at Cuisine, 37 drove BMW’s, 23 Mercedes and eight Audis.  Of the 48 women purchasers, a whopping 34 of them carried Gucci handbags, 25 smoked cigarettes with the words “deluxe,” “ultra” or “light” on the package, and an unbelievable 92 percent were regular viewers of talk shows.  Most of the grape farmers thought the consumer profile she was giving them was impressive, although they had no idea what it meant.  Delaney thought Ms. PR’s profile was the perfect description of his wife.

“We also found that a majority of the buyers were conservative, upwardly mobile urban dwellers who, when directly questioned, said it was imperative that they, as Americans, preserve the freedom of being told what to buy.  So you see, gentlemen, it is important for us, in order to gain a foothold in the marketplace for our new line, to provide the information brokers with the incentive to tell these people how to think.  And I believe the program I’ve proposed can do just that.”

It was a beautifully presented proposition couched in the terms of corporate lingo.  In other words, they needed to fork over the bucks for a bribe.  Ms. PR thought her fictional mentor, Dagny Taggart of Atlas Shrugged fame, couldn’t have done a better job.

“And what’s the second part of your marketing attack?” her shill, the GM, had inquired.

“I propose that we create our own wine writer for our wines.  I’ve done some research into how much some of those known wine writers and connoisseurs make prostituting themselves on TV for the desert producers’ wines.  Frankly, gentlemen, our ad budget can’t afford it.  So I suggest that after providing the junket for the six writers this year, and before we do it again the following year, that we form a consortium of large wineries of the area – wineries that ‘think’ along similar lines – and we secretly fund an unknown writer – a hungry, unknown writer – that, in essence, is on our collective payroll.”

“I’m not quite following you Miss,” said the current board chairman, whose eyes, Ms. PR noted, had been fixed on the third button of her low-cut silk blouse since she had begun.

“Mr. Bucolietti, we would set up our own writer and provide him with his own newsletter.  He would be fed press releases from the PR departments of, say, six large wineries.  What it means, sir, is that we would have our own ‘wine journalist’ in our pocket, and he would have a tremendous amount of information handed to him requiring a minimum amount of effort on his part to disseminate to his flock.  And he would cost us about one-fifth of adding another person to our own PR department.”

“Miss, I see you’ve already decided this writer will be a man.”

“Yes.  Research shows that wine connoisseurs are perceived by the public as being males.,  If I say a word, such as ‘Archbishop’ or ‘Commissioner,’ does a woman come to mind?  Of course not.  That’s why I don’t think the public would take a woman wine writer seriously.”

The chairman’s stare dropped to the floor.  Another member asked her if she thought other wineries could be signed up for the project.

“I’ve discussed the concept in a round-about way with the PR heads of three large wineries.  They believe that the idea holds definite promise, as long as it’s handled discreetly.”

At the close of the meeting, the board agreed to proceed with Part One of her plan, the six-writer junket, but they tabled Part Two until the results were in from the first prong of her attack.  The board also agreed, as a cost-saving measure, to have board members pick up the writers at the airport and ferry them and their entourage to their respective inns.  And it was that penny-pinching suggestion that had set Jeremy’s plan into motion.

Delaney’s letter was delivered two weeks before the writers were to arrive, seven months after the death of Daniel.  It read:

 Dear Jeremy,

  I hope this letter finds you and Janie well.  As a member of our co-operative here at Schloss and a respected grower in our valley, would you please take the time to consider the following small request from your friend.

 On April 18, a select group of wine writers will arrive at the county airport to attend a three-day conference on wine sponsored by the co-operative.  They will stay at several of our county’s finest bed and breakfast inns.  My request, Jeremy, is for you to drive one wine writer, Reginald Sebastian Heath, and his three guests to an inn on Friday night, and from the inn back to the airport on Monday morning.

Because of time limitations, I will give you a call on Wednesday to hear of your decision.  I was pleased with our recent conversation at the Citrus Festival – that there are no problems with our relationship after the untimely death of your son.  I agree with you, Jeremy, that it was not proper for the representative of our insurance company to approach you so soon after the tragedy.  He certainly was not acting on the behest of Schloss.  Since I have talked to you, I have contacted our insurance company and was assured that the representative would be reprimanded.

 Thank you for considering this request.

 Truly yours,

Tom Delaney

Jeremy thought that Delaney had written the letter to prey on Jeremy’s weakness – fancy cars.  He thought Delaney just wanted Jeremy to chauffeur around this Heath-person in his new plaything, a cream-colored 1958 Rolls Royce Silver Cloud.  He didn’t know that the car was but a small factor in the decision – that Jeremy had been something of a last resort.

The GM and Delaney had problems rounding up a sufficient number of the board to greet the writers, and they ruled out hiring limousines because Ms. PR already was several thousand dollars over her budget for this unusual media event.  When another board member backed out of his role as a ferry godfather to leave on an unexpected Caribbean cruise, Schloss management was in a jam.  And, as they handled most simple decisions couched in the terms of corporate strategy, they wasted a tremendous amount of company time and money deciding not so much on what to do, but what would look best.

The GM wanted Jeremy to use his Rolls.  The GM based his decision on data to which only he was privy.  A half-year after the GM was hired he had gained access to credit information on all the powers-that-be at Schloss, including the most prominent growers.  He had assumed at the time that the famous Jeremy Barnes figured prominently in the Schloss picture.  The GM had obtained the credit information from an old school chum who had worked for the CIA for two years before moving into the “private sector” – in that case a company with the most thorough credit data banks in the world.  And the GM’s chum had brought more than just “government experience” with him to his new job.

The files that the GM obtained in exchange for ten cases of rare cabernet sauvignon from the old Schloss – mysteriously disappearing from the inventory one Sunday – held data he felt was essential for him to do his job.

Inside of Jeremy Smyth’s folder was information that had little to do with the grape grower’s financial status.  The file disclosed not only the amount of Jeremy’s contribution to McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972, but also the comment that it was the largest political contribution to the Senator by a prominent person in California agriculture.  The file did not disclose that Daniel, who shared neither the guilt nor the political viewpoint of his father, had contributed $500 to the Republican National Committee.

The file did tell of Jeremy’s recent contribution to the ACLU (given only after prodding from Bobby) and of an anonymous contribution traced back to Jeremy that went to the Brown Berets, “a radical organization that is contrary to Mr. Smyth’s own agricultural interests,” the file had said.  The novella in the GM’s lap told of “Mr. Smyth’s son, Robert, who currently is a dues paying member of the Lawyer’s Guild, a quasi-communist organization.”  The GM had learned through his late-night reading that the files on other board members were almost as fascinating.

Based on the liberal bent of Jeremy’s views, the GM believed him to be the perfect – or the only – wealthy grower in the co-op to be put in the small confines of a car with the likes of Reginald Sebastian Heath, or Reggie, as he was often called.  The GM thought Jeremy was the only grower who was open-minded – liberal – enough to tolerate him.  Only a week before, the GM had heard from Ms. PR that Reggie had requested to stay at the Happy Trails Country Inn out on The River instead of the Chablis Blanc, a lavish white mansion near Healdsburg.  The GM knew that the Happy Trails had a seedy reputation, and driving past there one recent afternoon, he noticed a group of young, waif-like motorcyclists out front dressed in leather – entirely too much leather.

The GM pushed for Jeremy’s nomination as chauffeur, but his boss, Delaney, was hesitant.  Delaney had seen Jeremy at The Valley’s Citrus Festival, the first time the two had spoken after Daniel’s death.  Jeremy had shown restraint that bordered on hypocrisy, considering that he had already begun his secret war against Schloss.  He did take a moment to chastise the Schloss president for the crassness of the co-op’s insurance representative, who had appeared three days after the funeral – the day before Bobby and Carin had arrived home from Miami. 

It was that visit which had brought on Delaney’s written apology to Jeremy, for the representative had brought with him a three-page, typewritten letter, a waiver absolving Schloss of all responsibility for the accident – a waiver that anyone in their right mind would have thrown back in his face.  Jeremy signed it, and that was one part of his story that he had  failed to tell Bobby.

As the figurehead of Schloss management, Delaney wasn’t sure if it was right to ask the favor of Jeremy at the time.  He felt uncomfortable with it.  The GM persisted, telling Delaney that they had the least to lose having Jeremy drive Reggie.  Secretly, the GM questioned the ability of his boss, for no corporate officer worth his salt would have let emotions such as concern or compassion interfere with a cold, hard business decision.  Delaney eventually conceded and the letter was dictated and sent to Jeremy. 

After reading the letter, Jeremy was unsure who this Reginald Sebastian Heath was, but he thought he had been introduced to an Englishman at a barbeque put on by Bergen’s winery a few years back; perhaps this Heath was him.  Jeremy called The Winery to find out from Stan.  Unfortunately, Jeremy was reminded by Stan’s assistant that he had left the week before for a much needed vacation in Puerto Vallarta with several friends.

Jeremy had five days before Delaney would call back, and he didn’t want to blow what could be an excellent chance to reveal Schloss to a person with the ability to spread the word.  Jeremy called back The Winery and finally drew out of San’s assistant the number of his rented villa in Mexico.  Half an hour later he had Stan on the phone:

S:  Jeremy?

J:  Stan!  I can barely hear you.

S:  Jeremy, is there a problem?  Hail?  Frost?  Earthquake?

J:  No, Stan.  I’m sorry to bother you, I really am.  I’ve just got a deadline on something, and I need your help.

S:  It’s okay.  I’m just reclining on the patio sipping a Bohemia.

J:  So how is it down there?

S:  Perfect.  We’re living like royalty.  What can I do for you?

J:  I just received a letter from Delaney.  He wants me to chauffeur around a wine writer about two weeks from now.  I was thinking that this is the perfect time to expose my friends at Schloss.

S:   I see you’re still fighting your personal war.  What’s the writer’s name?

J:  It’s, uh, let’s see.  Reginald Sebastian Heath.  Have I ever met him at your place?

S:  No, I don’t think so.  I’ve only been introduced to him two or three times.  Our PR department handles him.  He’s quite a character.

J:  So you know him?

S:  Not exactly.  I poured wine at The Wine Spectacle down at Palm Springs last year.  He was there.  In fact, he was seated next to our booth in this high-back, red velvet chair – looked like a throne.  He was autographing posters of himself holding up a glass of wine with our valley in the background.  All of  these people that I once had respect for were kissing his hand and vying for an audience.  It was disgusting.  He’s an Easterner who now considers himself to be the new ambassador of California wine.  He gained title to the crown in a bloodless coup.

J:  Okay, okay, Stan.  Bud do you think he’d listen to me?

S:  Jeremy, I’m not sure.  Tell you what, I’ve got Sheila Burke out here on the patio – she’s the winemaker at Yuban Cellars.  I think she’s had some contact with him.  Let me go ask.  If she knows anything I’ll call you right back.

J:  You don’t have to do that.

S:  No problem.  Talk to you in five minutes.

A short time later the phone rang in Jeremy’s study.

J:  Hello?

S:  Hello.  This is Sheila Burke down in Mexico.

J:  I can barely hear you.  Please speak up!

S:  This is Sheila Burke!

J:  Yes!

S:  Well, I have a fascinating tale to tell.

J:  I want to hear it, but we’ve got a poor connection.

S:  Blame it on the peso!  Listen, Jeremy, I’ll get your address from Stan and write you a letter all about him.

J:  On your vacation?

S:  Sure!

J:  But I need it in five days.

S:  I’ll overnight it to you when I go to the airport.  We’ve got some friends arriving there tomorrow morning.

J:  That would be great.  Thank you, Sheila.

S:  Adios!

Stan the winemaker told Jeremy more about Ms. PR’s marketing study.  She had her two market researchers question purchasers at the Cuisine store about a wine that landed in their basket after being lauded in the most recent wine column by a well-known wine writer.  The column’s author, her research told her, was the former Leonard Bernbaum, who had legally had changed his name to Saki some years before.  He wrote a syndicated column titled, “Saki Is Wine.”

His overbearing manner came through brilliantly in his column.  The public – especially large segments of the wine-drinking public – enjoyed being browbeaten by his aloof prose and haughty phrasing.  The editors of the newspapers carrying Saki’s column were astounded by his success, but they likened him to Howard Cosell or that obnoxious San Francisco weatherman – the one with the dildo-shaped pointer.  Few could stand them or their demeanor and that was why the ratings were so high.

Saki was known by everyone in the wine biz for being on the take.  The amount of kind words he wrote about a wine was directly proportional to the number of free bottles of that wine in his cellar.  Saki referred to himself and his kind in his column as wine journalists.  Yet Saki had no formal training in the Fourth Estate.  Back in his days as Leonard, or Lenny, he had attended medical school.   And it was there that he had fallen in love with wine.  Literally.  No one else would have him.

Early on in med school, Lenny realized he would be a horrible failure as a doctor, even as a dermatologist.  And after his first year, he was positive that he would never have the chance to prove it.  Three months into his first semester, Lenny concluded that he would have to stay afloat on his own; his father, an alum, had known several members of the admissions board, but none of Lenny’s professors.

Lenny insured his demise as a med student by turning to the bottle.  He hit it as hard as his classmates hit their books.  Lenny had good intentions.  He was receiving an education in the social graces that would be required when he no longer was a person, but a professional corporation – or so he rationalized.  At first he had begun studying anatomy in the evening with a glass of wine.  Then two.  Then a half-bottle with dinner.  Then a bottle before dinner.  Soon he was loitering in the wine shops.  He read Lichine and Johnson and Parker voraciously.  He could name the eight villages of Beaujolais, but not the glands of the endocrine system.

An inordinate amount of the monthly stipend received from his father was spent on wine.  He was buying and drinking Dom and Vollards and RC and Lafite.  He was developing a specialist’s taste for wine without having served his required term as an intern.  He was in debt and he was flunking, but in those few moments each night when he first put his nose in the glass and smelled her perfume, in that instant of feeling her warmth as she caressed his tongue, and afterward, in that stupor-like ecstasy he felt after having drained her of every drop of her sensuous juices – for those few moments Lenny completely escaped any thought of his being a spoiled and failing asshole.

In the final days of his plummeting medical career, Lenny had used wine, as he would for the remainder of his life, as a prop for his sagging, beaten ego.  He formed a wine club at the med school, appointing himself Le President de Societe des Medecins Genophiles.  Several of his fellow students and his professors attended the mini-seminars he conducted once a month.  Lenny was shocked at how easily he could intimidate them all by undercutting, with a nonchalant comment couched in the tone of an expert, any utterance that came from their mouths resembling a personal opinion.

Upon receiving his grade report at the end of his first year, Lenny began the westward trek that would eventually take him to California – he wasn’t welcome back at the medical school that fall.  Lenny first moved to Kansas City.  He stayed with an aunt and uncle while he looked for employment in wine sales – and while his father scoured the area for a condominium for him.  It was his father’s idea for Lenny to leave the East Coast; the obvious but unspoken reason being that his father did not want to be constantly reminded of his own failure – the sight of his son.

Lenny moved into a lavishly furnished high-rise and was hired by a gargantuan desert wine producer as a sales rep for Missouri.  At his two-week training session in California, Curtis was flabbergasted at how little his fellow students – even his instructors – knew or cared about wine.  From what he learned during the sessions, he could just as well have been putting potato chips on the shelf.  He found several of his peers were former salesmen for large manufacturers in the aerospace and defense industries, with one a former peddler of napalm before the contracts fizzled out at the tail end of the Vietnam War.

Lenny survived six months with the company.  Constant badgering from his sales manager was one reason for his departure.  But his sales quotas bothered him the most.  He steadily increased sales after taking over  his territory, but never by enough to please his bosses.  One night he sat down and figured out how much wine he would be selling if he extrapolated the increasing sales quota placed on him during the past six months.  After an hour of computations on his calculator, Lenny saw a number that astounded him.  If the state’s population continued to rise at the current rate, within two decades (in about 1995) the average Missourian would be consuming 65 gallons per person, per year of his company’s wine, twice as much as all the wine consumed annually by the average Italian.  Lenny rationalized that by quitting the company he simply was returning to reality.

By a fluke of luck, Lenny landed a job as the wine buyer and in-house wine expert for a dynamic wine distributor with Mafia ties.  It was at this same time that Lenny Bernbaum became “Saki” and wrote his first wine column by-lined with his new name.

Several months into his column at a wine tasting Lenny learned of his plagiarism in his new name.  An English professor at a local university, a fellow wine lover, approached Saki and told him of his amusement of the double innuendo of the pen name.  Lenny smiled and nodded.  At the public library the next day, Lenny learned of the author, H. H. Munro, and as Saki he had a new bit of trivia for future cocktail parties and wine seminars about a fellow author who shared his name.

And Saki was no fool.  He quit berating California wine years before his fellow writers and wine educators east of the Continental Divide followed suit.  He knew that it was the new frontier that held the key to his future, for they both had something in common:  a disappointing past.

Before Saki left for The Coast, he took his long awaited trip to Europe to observe the grape harvest.  The cost of the trip was paid for by his father, a present to Saki for not having come home for four years, especially for his absence after he had relinquished his name and his Jewish heritage.  He heard his father had said more than once, “Oy, Lenny?  The boy is crazy.  He moves to the hinterland and thinks he’s an Oriental.”

Saki found his European wine trip exciting, but exhausting.  His tour group visited twelve major grape-growing areas in fourteen days.  Highlights included a fifteen-minute tour by a French-speaking cellar master of a dilapidated fifth-growth Bordeaux chateau, and passing by on the bus the front gates, so lovingly depicted on the labels, of Chateaux Leoville Las Cases, La Lagune and Canon.  For years after the tour, Saki would pick up a bottle of a particular Chateau and say, “Ah, yes.  I remember that gate well … .”

On the tenth day of the tour, suffering from exhaustion and a light case of the flu, Saki lay in his tiny hotel room in a feverish delirium.  Rain had been his constant companion, leading the French to publicly call the vintage a nine on ten, and privately the worst since 1968.  In the solitude of his dreary cubicle Saki dwelled on how boring his fellow travelers were:  Even he couldn’t talk about wine for two solid weeks, yet it was obvious they could.  That was the moment that he thought about the saying he had once heard, that only difference between an insane person and an eccentric was money.  With that as his base, Saki developed his own theorem:  That the only difference between an alcoholic bag lady and a wine connoisseur -  was gender and money.  Fortunately his fever broke a few hours later, and when he awoke in the morning, refreshed, he conveniently had forgotten his hallucination.

Upon his return, Saki convinced his father to fund his new West Coat venture:  To open a wine store in a Bay Area city.  His father agreed, but not without strings attached.  Saki had to sign a contract to not enter his home state for five years except disguised as an unknown rabbi to attend unexpected funerals.  Failure to live up to those terms meant the immediate calling due of the note on Saki’s loan.

The place Saki had chosen for his shop was a small community on the furthermost point of the inland bay.  Nearby were the vineyards of several pioneering California wineries.  Within a half-dozen years Saki would have a chain of wine and gourmet food shops in the state’s fastest growing city in population and per capita income, in the city with a burgeoning semi-conductor and kiddie-viddie game industry, in a sprawling metropolis that was chewing up those historic vineyards and spitting out tacky subdivisions in their stead.  Saki’s shops grew because the town grew, and he became a local financial success.  But Saki had grown tired of settling disputes with his deli help, of deciding what new video game to place next to the smut rack, really of being a merchant, so he sold his stores at a tidy profit and concentrated on his writing full time.  Saki’s wine column had been carried by the town paper, which became the flagship of a growing nationwide newspaper chain.  Saki’s column was soon in every one of the paper’s affiliates, including the favorite paper of his father back in New Jersey, and Saki basked in his new-found notoriety. 

Stan told Jeremy that Tom Delaney’s new PR lackey had come up with a great ploy to push another line of Schloss dba wine:  invite a half dozen of the state’s most influential wine writers to the winery for a tasting of their new wines.  There wasn’t anything novel about the basic idea – only the implementation of it.  It seems that the woman the GM had hired for public relations had intriguing credentials.  She was the former administrative assistant in PR for a major aircraft manufacturer – during the Japanese bribe scandal.  She learned quite a bit at her former post and believed there was a tremendous opportunity to implement her ideas in the rapidly expanding wine industry; she also had tired of Phase Two smog alerts in LA and needed a job.  The GM had listened to a few of her proposals at her Phase Three  interview,  liked them and brought her  onboard.

Her unusual plan was to rent out six of The Valley’s quaintest bed and breakfast inns and put up each writer and his entourage in a separate inn.  The guests were to be showered with wine and gourmet food for their three-day orgy.  With the exception of a wine-and-cheese party on the first night, when they would taste “selected” bottles of the new line, the writers never had to leave the confines of their castles.  Before they were chauffeured back to the county airport on the final day, they would be given a thick packet of information on the new dba line.  Nowhere in the packet was there a mention of Schloss, the distant Central Valley, or its cheap Italian red and hybrid white grapes, all of which figured so prominently in the wine.  But inside the packet was an invitation to return on the same weekend the following year with the only change being in lodging; the writers would rotate inns.

Ms. PR presented her two-pronged assault to the board.  Part One was the junket for the well-known writers.  Because of money saved in the second half of her hydra-headed attack, she argued that for Part One, no expense should be spared, no amenity not lavished on them, for their guests held an unbelievable amount of power – which Schloss desperately needed to manipulate.  She backed up her statement with a small market test that she recently had completed.

 Ms. PR had hired a small marketing research firm to record sales of a particular wine reviewed in the weekly syndicated newspaper column of one of her targeted writers.  The test was conducted at a new Cuisine store in San Francisco’s Marina Green area.  It was the perfect location.  Six months before it had been a common Saleday supermarket.  Then it was closed for a facelift and a name change.  Now it was a pretentions Saleday.  The management of the chain had conducted its own marketing survey and realized that the image of its stores in wealthy, trend-conscious areas had a direct impact on the volume of affluent shoppers.  So by changing names, deleting products and raising prices, the grocery chain could drive away the cherry-picking old-timers who came in the store only to buy an eighth-pound of lox, a bottle of prune juice or a box of rat poison – all items with a coupon and on sale.  The discerning shopper did not have to stand in line with them any longer.  Saleday, now Cuisine in certain chic areas, had made grocery shopping a pleasant experience for the upwardly mobile.  And Saleday management had the savvy to still call their stores Saledays in the Tenderloin.

“Jeremy, there’s one jerk with a nice spread in the next valley.  You know how he pays the rent?”

“How?”

“By drawing those quaint, fictional settings for their phony labels.”

“Isn’t that false advertising?”

“No.  There’s nothing unlawful as long as they register those phony names in some obscure book in the county clerk’s office and put their four-digit BATF number in microscopic type on the label.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“Pretty obvious, isn’t it?  It pisses me off, Jeremy,  I realize our wines sometimes sell for two or three times the price of those phony-label wines, so we don’t compete head to head.  But those phonies still occupy shelf space and squeeze out the tiny wineries with a good product that really does come from grapes grown and fermented in this valley.”

“I’m no marketing genius, Stan, but I don’t see why that whole thing doesn’t collapse.  Why it isn’t exposed.”

“Jeremy, I’ve thought about it for some time.  I’ve wondered how people that created that monster ever chose the wine business in the first place.  To me a wine label is sacrosanct.  A truthful label is the only way a consumer can know what he is buying.  He can’t take the wine out for a test drive before he buys it.  I read the other day that Customs in New York seized some wine with counterfeit Mouton labels.  Perhaps we ought to look at how our laws are protecting us not from the French, but from ourselves.”

Jeremy had thought it odd that a man in Stan’s position should be asking for more regulation of “The Industry,” but he couldn’t help but nod in agreement with him.

Stan told Jeremy that most of the ‘marketeers’ who had invaded the wine industry had a single task:  To create in a product an  impression or image that in most cases just didn’t exist.  Their bosses at those huge wineries went ga-ga over their ideas, Stan had said, because their bosses came from the same school of thought.  Somehow those corporate players ended up in  The Valley, probably escaping the big cities filled with people like them and with the images and illusions that they were responsible for creating.

“Jeremy, you and I are a vanishing breed,” Stan had said.  “I suppose there might be a couple Frenchmen engaged in this same conversation right now somewhere in Burgundy.  Since I studied winemaking and started this winery, I’ve had a single ideal:  To work for the wine.  We’re craftsmen, artists, if I may say so.  I guess that was why I was so selfishly sad to see Daniel die.  He was just like you.  He worked for the wine.  He was the perfect heir-apparent.

“These other people who are invading our turf seem different.  Hell, I’ve studied them – we have a few of them right here at The Winery.  They only want the wine to work for them.  It’s merely a vehicle.  There’s no love there.  It’s something to exploit before they go peddle jelly beans or designer jeans.  Sorry, Jeremy, but to me they’re whores.

“We have so little tradition in California – especially in the wine biz.  I hate the phrase ‘Wine Industry.’  Hell, your father grew prunes and my father was a San Francisco banker with a taste for wine.  And the marketers think they can create for us some instant tradition.  If anything, this whole marketing wave for the ‘80s’ is going to do more to prevent us from developing that tradition.”

“But we need marketing.  It’s such a big cog in the wheels of free enterprise.”

“Yes.  If it’s a tool to inform the consumer – truthfully inform the consumer.  Granted, there are some people who seem to do everything in their power not to sell their wine.  How about that little place down the road?  Those two doctors who make only Alsatian-style wine.  It’s called Hirshenbienen-Dzinziano Cellars.   Can you imagine asking the waiter for a bottle of Hirshenbienen-Dzinziano gewürztraminer?  They’re either fools or megalomaniacs.”

“You didn’t do too bad saying it,” Jeremy noted.

“I’ve practiced.”

“So Schloss is on your shit list.”

“They’re not alone.  Don’t think Schloss is the only one doing that crap.  Steam Mountain Winery just down the road from Schloss bulks in three-fourths of its finished wine from Desert Valley producers.  Then on the back label they put a big map of this valley with a star for Steam Mountain – complete with arrows and underlined words that leave the consumers with the impression that the grapes and the wine came from here.  Those same folks are putting wine in pop bottles with Styrofoam covers so it can be swilled at the beach before the empties are chucked on the sand.  I’ve heard rumors that there is a Burgundian hit squad – former members of the French Foreign legion now living in Chablis – who are training to sneak over for the public execution of Steam Mountain management.  I’ve put in a request for 50-yard line tickets for the spectacle.”

“I won’t attribute that rumor to you, Stan.”

“And don’t think just our valley harbors those types.  Most of the refineries over in Disneyland don’t have a clean record.”

Stan Bergen spoke the nicknames used by some local growers and winemakers to describe – in condescending terms – the wineries in the rival Napa Valley that lay on the other side of the mountain ridge.  “Refinery” was the name used for a has-been winery – one that a dozen years ago produced a small quantity of premium wine.  Then it was acquired by a huge corporation and expanded until the jug wines bearing the winery’s name – composed of cheap wine from the desert – made up a majority of its sales.  The marketing arms of the refineries dwelled on the fact that their winery had produced great, award-winning wines in the 1960s and early ‘70s, despite those wines not being on the shelf – even in Oklahoma City – in more than a decade.  But it was instant tradition, and it sold.

And “Disneyland” was a term tagged on the Napa Valley after a trade publication had bannered a headline proclaiming that more tourists had crept through the congested roads of the famous valley than had passed through the turnstyles of the well-known amusement park for that particular year.

As jealous neighbors, Stan, Jeremy, and others of The Valley were quick to point out that each succeeding year brought escalating prices for their valley’s wines or for their grapes pillaged by Disneyland wineries.  But all of  The Valley’s residents – Jeremy and Stan included – felt at some time or other that their wineries and their wines were considered stepchildren in the eyes of the general public.

“Tell me this, Stan,” Jeremy had said.  “If Schloss wines aren’t so good, then why have I been reading about all those gold medals Schloss has won?  Their ad in The Wine Light said they had won – I don’t know – I guess about a half dozen golds at some fair.”

“Jeremy, see if you can catch my drift.  First, you know that if I had my way we wouldn’t even enter those silly wine competitions, those lotteries.  The best wines have nothing to win and everything to lose.  Those connoisseurs on the judging circuit have tanned their tongues by the time they get to our wine – the four-hundred-and-eighth for the day.  And which wine do they choose?”

“You tell me.”

“Hruska wine.”

“Hruska wine?”

“Yes, after ol’ Senator Hruska, the guy from Nebraska whose quote legitimatized mediocrity.”

“Your joke, Stan?”

“You bet.  The wines that ‘win’ tend to reflect a style that is the opposite of distinctive.  Mundane is the word I’d use.  From a wide range of styles or personal artistic expressions, they take a democratic vote for the ‘best.’  Obviously, the best wines on each end of the stylistic spectrum lose out.  The least obnoxious wine for the mass of judges wins.  Jeremy, that’s not the method I would want to use in choosing what wine I want to drink.  And one more thing –“

“Yes?”

“I wouldn’t put too much credence in Schloss’ gold medals.  They probably won them at some obscure contest like the Deaf Smith County Fair in the Texas Panhandle.  A contest where 87 percent of the wines entered came back with some sort of award.  And –“

“Yes?”

“Don’t forget that Yum-Yum Donuts and Albertson’s supermarkets both are touting that they won almost a dozen gold medals a piece at a couple of California fairs.”

“What for?”

“Baking goods and dairy products.”

“I see your point.”

“Few do.”

“So tell me this, Stan.  Are all the big wineries like Schloss?”

“Thank God, no.  There are several I can name that put out a consistently good product.  That don’t fib to the public.  That at times take the care and the expense to make a wine that almost rivals a  Jeremy Barnes Vineyard Chardonnay.   Unfortunately, their number dwindles.”

“So, there are exceptions.”

“Yes.  Maybe Schloss is just the epitome of all that can be wrong in a winery.  The extreme.  I have a particular distaste for the place because Schloss is so blatant yet so sneaky, and it’s right here in our own backyard.”

“Isn’t there something we can do about it?”

“Not about them, at least not in this age of laissez faire policies – when the President has gutted the gutless agency that controls the wine biz.  What we can do is educate ourselves and others about who we are and what we stand for – and make the comparisons for them.  So the wine drinkers know there is a choice.  A true choice.”

Having related his conversation with Stan Bergen to Bobby, Jeremy told his son of his interviews with former employees at Schloss, including two winemakers, seven cellar workers, three cellar masters and two accountants.  Jeremy had begun to wonder who in the County hadn’t worked for Schloss at one time or another.  Even Jeremy’s youngest son, Tobie, had been employed for three weeks as a crush worker a few years before.

Jeremy had spoken with the former head of the Schloss public relations department; the poor guy had been fired by the General Manager three days before Christmas.  At his termination, the employee was told that he had performed admirably for Schloss, but that his position was being eliminated to make salary costs look better on a loan request to be submitted to the bank after the first of the year.

Slowly, Jeremy had confirmed Stan’s story – and opinion – of Schloss.  Building up his case against Schloss had the effect of replacing his grief with revenge.  He had collected an inch-thick file on Schloss that he kept in his office, his private office since Daniel’s death.

He felt he held a strong indictment against Schloss, not so much for killing his son, but for simply continuing to blight The Valley’s landscape.  He realized that Daniel mistakenly had stepped in the way of Schloss’ struggle to exist – simply by stepping in front of a Schloss truck bearing cheap desert wine.  Daniel, like any other human being coming into contact with the company, was simply raw material to be consumed, burnt and expelled, and unlike its employees, Schloss just hadn’t had to pay FICA taxes on him.

Jeremy wanted to shout the sordid story of Schloss from the treetops.  But he knew there was only one way to prevent his cry from falling on deaf ears.  He needed to find the appropriate moment and manner to expose the winery.  Ironically, it was a letter from Tom Delaney, the head of Schloss, which gave Jeremy his perfect chance for revenge.

Jeremy had rolled over his epic tale many times within himself, but this was the first time he had spoken of his revenge to anyone.  With Bobby having confessed his darkest secret, Jeremy now felt a need to reciprocate.  He resumed his tale.  Jeremy told Bobby that next he had talked with Stan Bergen, winemaker at The Winery, the buyer of all of Jeremy’s chardonnay grapes.  He had wanted to verify if the sort of thing Gregor’s kid had described was a common occurrence at the big wineries. Over a series of Australian stouts at General Hooker’s Red Light Pub, Stan revealed the dark side of The Valley’s moon.

“Jeremy, I’m sorry to say that it’s true,” Bergen had told him.  “You wouldn’t catch us bringing in bulk finished wine around here.  Our reputation couldn’t afford it.  All of our wines come from grapes we crushed and fermented here.  Even our inexpensive white table wine is really ours.  It’s the heavy press and rackings from your chardonnay and our riesling and sauvignon blanc.”

“So why do the big boys do it?” Jeremy asked Stan.

“It’s simple, Jeremy.  The money.  Don’t you remember the scandal a few years ago, when they found that bunch of Chevy engines in Oldsmobiles?  And the whole time they were working that scam there were ads on TV extolling the uniqueness, the virtues, of driving an Olds.  It’s the same situation here.  Schloss is the epitome of the royal scam.  They haul up cheap desert wine and process and bottle it and try to somehow connect it with wine from our valley.  I’ve got a few old classmates from Davis who were caught in the revolving door at Schloss, so I’m familiar with the situation there.”

“Tell me everything you know about it.”

Bergen told Jeremy the tale of Schloss, a winery that had found itself gravely ill of late.  Management mishandling had turned what once was a small premium winery into a present-day decaying monolith.

Bergen told Jeremy how Schloss had been founded during the great wine boom of the late 1960s, when demand for premium wine – especially red premium wine – far outstripped supply.  Several large corporations joined in the exploitation of the boom.  They either acquired existing family wineries or created new ones on large patches of virgin brush-covered hills of the North Coast Valleys.  Schloss was purchased from an old German family by a large, Texas-based tampon manufacturer.  They had retained the name of the old family’s enterprise, “Schloss,” which meant castle in German.  In 1969 the world was not yet prepared for a wine called “Feminique.”  The corporation had torn down the old barn that had served as the family winery, but kept the family home as a retreat for its executives.  In the barn’s stead, the corporation had constructed a large, ultra-modern winery in a small canyon on The Valley’s western slope.  An adjoining restaurant and tasting room looked out over The Valley, an expanse of vineyards that resembled a patchwork quilt each fall.  It was one of the most beautiful scenes in America.

But within five years, the corporate-powers-that-be had lost their faith in hip agricultural-oriented acquisitions.  They had spent a fortune on red grape plantings and the construction of their grape refinery only to see the market go soft in the recession and wine glut of the mid-seventies.  Plus their short-range planners refused to pour money down a dry hole; they needed the capital for advertising their new line of feminine deodorant sprays that for the first time could be advertised over the public airwaves.  In the boardroom the corporate officers had sat in Solomon-like soberness as they heard of the difficulties of creating a market for their wine in the fickle world of wine drinkers.  That world was filled with second-guessing the consumer.  Often the consumers led the wineries around to their evolving tastes.  That kind of talk terrified these men who had spent their lives developing a total system for “a woman’s special problems.”  These men were used to creating a product – such as a feminine deodorant spray.  Then they had their marketing and advertising departments create a ‘woman’s problem’ for it.

So they sold off the vineyards at a tidy profit and put the huge winery quietly up for sale.  The purchasers were Tom Delaney, whom Jeremy knew, and a large group of grape growers, most of whom owned ranches in the warm, inferior valley in the county north of the winery.  And Delaney had brought in as minor shareholders – and strange bedfellows – a credit union for employees of a string of fundamentalist colleges.  The new owners had a noble concept:  To turn Schloss into a quasi-co-op of grape grower-owners who would have a place to bring their grapes for crushing year after year.  They no longer would have to rely on the big Central Valley producers who bought grapes for bulk crushing and eventual shipment to their distant wineries.

“We all know about the connection,” Bergen had said.  “They always need some of the North Coast’s strong grapes to blend in with that  Algerian swill  they grow out in the desert.” 

Jeremy was already aware of what Bergen told him.  For several years Jeremy had taken his red charbono grapes to a local bulk-fermenting plant controlled from afar by a huge desert producer.  But he had become so perturbed with their slow payment and the seemingly arbitrary penalty-point system they imposed on his grapes that he had let them rot on the vine rather than having to face the hassle – until Delaney talked him into joining Schloss.

Bergen told Jeremy more about the early days of Schloss as a co-op.

To join the co-op, member-growers had to pay $5,000 up front before they dropped off their first load of grapes at Schloss.  A portion of the grape juice pooled together from the growers’ grapes was purchased by Schloss for bottling under its label.  But Schloss wasn’t receiving the best fruit because it wasn’t willing to pay a fair price to its captive members.  The member-growers sold their best grapes to the small premium wineries willing to pay the price; they sent the junk to Schloss.  As a result, Schloss was forced to buy grapes from non-members for what it labeled its best wines.

At the same time, Delaney and several of the wealthiest grape growers of the co-op, whose family members purchased shares to insure that there was a power elite composing the board of directors, formed a separate entity.  They created a leasing company that bought stainless-steel storage tanks and leased them back to the under-capitalized Schloss for storing its ever-increasing inventory of mediocre red wine. 

“Jeremy, when I first heard about that leasing company and who was behind it, it all sounded like some sort of juicy Ponzi scheme,” Bergen had said to his friend.

He explained that there were two basic kinds of member-growers at Schloss:  the big guys who used the co-op as a tax write-off – and then received their check each month as partners in the leasing company – and the little guys who were joining all the time; they hoped for a profit, but weren’t in on the lease-back deal.

“Have you been there during crush, Jeremy?  I was up there for a luncheon, and I saw a dozen trucks in line at the crusher.  A third were new semi’s of the big boys, and the rest were old stake-bed Fords.  What a contrast.  And it’s the idealistic little guys with those old rattletraps and tiny vineyards who’ve had to scrape up five grand that they didn’t have to join the ‘co-op.’  They’re the ones who get the letter every month from Delaney that includes the crushing, processing and storage fees that Schloss charges them for bringing their grapes to the winery, along with the line in the letter that says, ‘Due to the saturation of red wine on the market, the needs for the Schloss line do not include your wine at this time.’  It says they have the wine listed with brokers in the bulk wine market, and that they’ll hold out for a favorable price.  I’ve seen one of those letters.

“Jeremy, why should that son-of-a-bitch Delaney make any effort to sell that pool wine?”  Bergen had asked.  “He and his buddies are making a killing off those small guys.  I hate to see that happen.  He’s got plenty of room out behind the winery for 25 more tanks – Schloss has added 200,000 gallons to their capacity in the past three years by leasing  tanks from Delaney’s company.”

Jeremy was dumbfounded by his friend’s revelations.  He was unaware of the tank-leasing deal, even though he was a member of the co-op.

“Stan, what I don’t understand is why they haul up that Central Valley swill if they already have all that wine in storage at Schloss.”

“Most of what the co-op members have brought to the winery is red wine,” Stan had explained.  “And there has been such a demand these past few years for white – look at our percentages of production here.  Schloss has had to buy white wine just so they’d have something to sell.  And you wouldn’t believe how much red wine they’ve got sitting in stainless steel tanks up there.  I’ve heard they had to move out three-quarters of a million gallons of cheap red wine just to free up the tanks for last year’s crush.  And you know where they moved it?  To some old bacteria-invested redwood tanks at an abandoned winery in Healdsburg.”

“Unbelievable.”

Stan continued.  “This is a bit off the subject, but let me tell you how they sell what little wine they can.  It’s based on a marketing scheme – I guess that’s what you’d call it – that borders on deceit.  That friend of mine who spent a short time at Schloss said they have more than 75 second or ‘private’ labels being cranked out of there.  Seventy-five!  Almost five out of every six bottles leaving Schloss have phony labels on them.”

“I don’t follow you, Stan.”

“A little background.  Back when it was owned by the corporation, Schloss hired a national distributor to market their wine.  The distributor and Schloss had a contract that was automatically renewable as long as the distributor, as Schloss’ exclusive agent, sold a certain number of cases each year.  The deal was still on when the co-op took over.  When the membership pyramid began, inventory increased but sales didn’t keep up – the agent was just barely meeting the minimum quota – and Delaney and friends were in a quandary.

“So first they tried ‘direct marketing.’  They have a phone bank of solicitors – a bunch of old copy-supply salesmen – who call every business in Southern California and New York.  They try to push that crap ‘winery direct’ on some poor, unknowing suckers in LA who think the wine they’re buying at full retail is a real bargain.  What ‘winery direct’ has done is take the Schloss label that a network of distributors and retailers have developed over the years and it slaps them in the face with it.  But that whole scheme didn’t really help sales.  Their other ploy has been second labels or ‘dba’s.’

“Dba’s?”

“It means ‘doing business as.’   You put the name of someone or something else on your product for whatever reason.  When you use several ‘dba’s’ it’s usually as a method of deception or –“

“Stan, I think I know what you’re talking about,” Jeremy said.  “When Bobby worked for a criminal attorney in Houston a couple of summers back, he said that a few bail bondsmen used dozens of phony names in the phone book – all names for the same company.  He said it didn’t matter what name was chosen from the yellow pages because, when the prisoner made that one desperate call, he got one of those same six bondsmen.”

“Exactly, Jeremy.  Only here it’s the consumer at a wine store in Denver or Miami who’s being taken for the ride.  They see a tiny stone winery on a label with a beautiful valley such as ours as the backdrop, and all sorts of catchy words that make them think the wine came from within a mile of right here.  Only the consumers don’t know that it came from that big vat at Schloss.  That wine is two-thirds cheap chenin blanc grown and fermented in the desert, and it probably has a little Thompson Seedless to boot.  Schloss adds some high-sulfur, high sugar juice to sweeten it up a bit – maybe they’ll add a little of their press wine – and they bottle the stuff under that phony label and a couple dozen others for some marketing or distribution company.  Those bastards call themselves ‘negotiants’ – but that’s nothing but another California perversion of a French word.  They’re really nothing but  damn-the-consumers entrepreneurs.”

Stan paused, reluctant to reveal the obvious, but eventually he spoke.  “Those custom labels at Scholl helped kill your son, Jeremy.  The truck that hit him was loaded with hot desert swill they were sneaking in for some phony-label Chablis.”

As the meaning of Stan’s words hit home, Jeremy silently added yet another incriminating piece of evidence in his case against Schloss.  He was surprised to find himself calm, quite the contrary to his friend.  Stan’s face was flush, and he grabbed his pint mug tightly, as if he were about to use it as a weapon on someone’s head.