The Fiction of Owen Thomas

Photophobia

A Novella

Excerpt C

Iris navigated around Conrad without a word or hesitation or so much as a parting acknowledgement to Jac and disappeared into the house.  Conrad sized up Jac with an overly-familiar stare.

“You do look good in that hat Jackie-O. I think maybe we should work you into our advertising. Whad’ya say?”

A whiff of chewing tobacco explained the slight distension of his lower lip. The smell mixed with his cologne into a sweetly disgusting tang.

“Sorry. I only work on one side of the camera.”

The walk to the Lower-Sixteen was considerably easier than the walk up to the Upper-Eighteen. The first quarter-mile was down along the dirt road they had taken up to the house. As they walked, Conrad kicked every sizeable rock in his path. Every so often he spit a twisting, elongating tongue of coffee-colored chew juice into the low scrub.

Jac said little, letting him drawl on about the business of wine, alternating between the process of making it and the business of selling it, weaving in bits of his own personal experience. He was not born to this business, and he knew it.  He was a late-comer without prior experience, unless decades of drinking wine counted as experience. What he actually knew about growing grapes and selling the juice, he had learned for himself, on the job, doing whatever the Old Man would let him do and then doing the hell out of whatever that thing was until he got it right and the Old Man was pleased. 

He spoke with an aspiring but low-bred arrogance that simultaneously celebrated his humble beginnings and bade them farewell. He had a keen appreciation for his place in the pecking order of California wine makers – somma these boys have been at it so long and have such good real estate that they nearly piss pure Sauvignon Blanc. They could bottle their own urine and still make a fortune. My piss is still piss.  But, at the same time, he spoke as though he had been specially anointed to save a great and dying label.

“Victor Bruno was a great man,” he said, spitting again. A glistening brown strand failed to cooperate and Conrad enlisted the back of his hand to relocate it to his pant leg.

“Taught me everything I know about this business. Everything. He was a better man than my own father and I’m not ashamed to say it.  My daddy was great at being a mean son-of-a-bitch. He was great at being a husband to a crazy woman. And he was great at selling anything and everything Sears, Roebuck and Company cared to put out on the floor. But he was not a great man. Victor Bruno, on the other hand… There was a great man. More like my own father than my own father. And he chose me in this world just as surely as I chose him. See I don’t believe we’re born to family. I believe we end up choosing our family. Our real family. Even if we don’t realize we’re choosing.”

“And you chose Clara,” Jac said matter-of-factly, intending to complicate his simple narrative. “And little Iris.”

Conrad paused and then covered it with another spit.

“I told you her name?”

Jac nodded. “And Iris.”

Conrad nodded and kicked a rock. “Yeah. Okay, I chose Clara and Iris. But I also chose the Old Man. And he chose me. That’s the point.”

They walked another dozen yards and Conrad stopped and turned at the first and only place on the road from which the Upper-Eighteen was clearly, if only partially visible. Jac drew up short and turned as he pointed to the place that she and Iris had just been. He drew his laden ring-finger west, through the clouds, showing her the upper road that traversed from the field of vines across the slope to the plateau where the warehouse and the juice box and the stables and the tractor barn were, and then from that cluster of invisible buildings over to the bunkhouse, also invisible, where Señor and the de la Cruz family lived. From the plateau, he drew his finger further west and up, tracing a road that skirted the slope at a steep incline and then eventually disappeared over the top of the ridge to an even higher, unseen field of vines.

“The Lower-Sixteen is our Cab Sauv. The Upper-Eighteen is our Chardonnay. And High Ridge is our Pinot. The view from up there is unbelievable,” said Conrad. “Makes you feel like God.”

The sun was long gone, leaving the wet air a bloodless white that leached all of the color from surrounding hillsides, as though all of the greens and browns and subtle plums were water-soluble, now burbling away along the valley floor, unseen beneath the cottony cloud stuffing, down toward a rusty aluminum drain somewhere in the basement of the world. The perspiration from the uphill hike and the chill in the strengthening breeze had left Jac cold. But she said nothing to betray her discomfort.