The Fiction of Owen Thomas

Photophobia

A Novella

Excerpt A

It was almost two hours up to the winery. Conrad, wrist draped over the top of the wheel, elbow out the window, body swaying and bouncing with the buckled and puckered dirt road beneath them, was in no hurry.  Conversation had dropped off after the first hour and he had taken to humming something vaguely reminiscent of Home on the Range. Jac popped the pressure in her ears and watched the brown cloud of wheel-spun dust kick up behind them in the rearview mirror.  It curled into the pale fog like chum into a frothy wake, losing its identity completely twenty yards or so behind. The lengthening hillside unrolled steeply beneath her into the valley like a spongy, mottled green and brown carpet. The air was wet and white and gauzy, hanging low, filling the valley like a bandage staunching a greenish wound.

“Is this common?” she asked.

“What’s that?”

“Driving into cloud.”

Conrad shrugged. “Foggy mornings are pretty common, but it burns off. This isn’t fog. This is weather. Whenever the Santa Cruz range gets any serious weather we’re pokin’ our nose right up into it. That’s for sure. We’re at about thirteen hundred feet right here.”

He looked at her, waiting to see if there was more. He turned forward just in time to steer up onto the lip of a deep rut, then looked back over at her. This time he was looking at her glasses.  A soft black leather, fan-shaped blind connected the left lens with the left stem, blocking his access to her eyes even in profile. His brow pinched in irritation. He went back to humming and driving.

Jac was convinced that she could have made the trip in half the time. Conrad, though, had insisted on driving, telling her that the road was bad enough when the weather was hot and dry. He had pointed to the slabs of broken slate up in the sky out behind the café and arched his eyebrows. He had leaned in until she could smell the eggs on his breath and told her that it would get messy up in the hills before the day was over.

At that point he might still have been persuaded to let her drive herself. But when he saw her little white Yugoslavian tuna can of a car he was adamant.

“No way, girly. You’re riding in the truck with me. You’re just asking for trouble in this thing.” He kicked the tire with the toe of his boot.

“I’ll be fine.”

“I insist,” he had said, bowing toward her, bending over his forearm. She supposed that thirty years ago his hair would have been an irresistibly thick tangle of chestnut. What he presented to her now was a thinning oily mat flecked with dandruff. “Why, it would be my honor, Miss Jacqueline,” he had said, laying on the drawl.

Jac had considered balking at the counterfeit chivalry. She might have proposed that she wait; that she come back and call him when his vineyard could offer a clear sky. But she had already told him that she was looking for some weather. Rain paints with a soft light that you can’t get any other way, she had told him. She liked dusk. She liked dawn. She liked clouds. She liked rain. Garishness was not an artistic sensibility. Full, brutish illumination was simply painful; an ice pick in the eye of the beholder.  The sun needs a filter.

No. The sun needs nothing. We need the filter.

She might also have said something about her suspicion that his true intention was to keep her stranded up at the winery over night with no way to get back to town. It’s getting dark, he would say. The road is a mess with all of this rain. I’ll take you back to town in the morning. Have another glass of wine, I’ll make you a bed.

Jac was no stranger to predation. She had that look to which certain men are drawn from a long ways off. Without a father, the look had developed at an early age. It was in her eyes, mostly, but also in the way her mouth slipped out of a smile, and the way she moved through a crowded room, and the way she coaxed the last drop of anything from a glass. A longing, barely contained. Loneliness wrapped in a tough but threadbare self-sufficiency. That was the look.

But nature provides. With the look had come the vision. Jac could sense dark billows roiling just beneath the horizon of seemingly good intentions. The years of trying and failing had been good for something at least. She had learned to ignore hope and to heed instinct. The hope was always that here was a man who was different. The instinct was that here was a man who was just the same as all of the others.  There may as well only be one man in the world. One man with a lot of different clothes and a lot of different smiles and smells and a lot of different ways to say he wanted her. Needed her. Loved her. A lot of different ways to say he was sorry. But still the same man, said the instinct.

Jac had opened up her car and fished out the three backpacks—one for clothes and personals, and two for camera gear – as Conrad had gone to fetch his oversized diesel pick-up, a Limited Edition Erebus V.8 Charger according to the chrome scrawl beneath the side mirror. The truck gleamed a dark, midnight black, snorting and hissing behind her like a bull pawing at the ground. The Sol Ridge Vineyards logo sprawled in purple and silver along the length of the bed. Full, pregnant grapes tumbled off the top of the ‘S’ into a barrel. Conrad had hopped down and come around the back of the truck to help with the backpacks.

“Not this one,” she had said at the last second, tightening her grip on the shoulder strap of the pack full of clothing. “This one stays.” She had unlocked her little Yugoslavian housecat and returned the pack to the floor of the back seat.

She had felt him watching her from behind as she bent into the car. When she extracted herself and closed the door, locked it and turned, Conrad had extended a hand to help her up into the truck. She had lightly gripped the red raw-looking fingers and Conrad had cupped his other hand against the lower small of her back. As is almost always true when two bodies make first contact, the sensation was electrical in nature; a low-voltage thrumming in the central nervous system acknowledging the significance of the first contact and, simultaneously, anticipating the next.

The truck jolted sideways. Jac’s head knocked against the window. The higher they climbed, the farther they traveled from the last main turn off, the more the road seemed to degrade into a pair of hard, not-so-parallel ruts in the dirt that were either too narrow or too wide for the wheel base of the truck.

Conrad was waxing philosophical about extended maceration. Skins and seeds and stems mixed in with the juice, softening tannins and allowing extraction of color and flavor. He spoke in pseudo-paternalistic terms of maintaining character, as if the juice was some essence-of-child to be refortified with the memory of its upbringing; only not so much the memory as the actual detritus of the transformational carnage – the torn skin and crushed seeds and broken limbs.