The Perk (8 page)

His father started chuckling.

"Chair dancing's not that funny, J.B."

"Pretty damn funny, but I'm not laughing
about that. I'm thinking about that election, for judge. You could win, Beck."

J.B. returned to his paper, and they sat quietly
for a time until Beck said, "J.B., just so you know … I forgave you a
long time ago. I just wasn't man enough to tell you."

J.B.'s jaws clenched. "Appreciate you telling
me now."

"Can you forgive me?"

"A man never has to forgive his son."

"Maybe not, but I'm still sorry. I'm sorry
I left here hating you and I'm sorry I didn't bring Annie here, so she could've
known you and you could've known her. She was a woman worth knowing."

J.B. sighed. "I knew her."

Oh, Beck … I love you … I
love what you do to me … God, I'm so wet … We're so wet …

"We're wet."

Beck woke. And Annie was gone. Again.

"What?"

"We're wet."

Meggie stood beside the bed, holding her doll. She
smelled of fresh urine. She had wet the bed again.

"That's okay, baby."

He now kept a damp towel and clean clothes for
her next to the bed. He changed her clothes, and she climbed into bed.

The sunlight through the blinds woke Beck.

He checked his
watch: six-thirty. He climbed out of bed, quietly so as not to wake Meggie,
then walked down the hall and checked on Luke; he was still asleep. Beck took
the wet sheets off Meggie's bed and carried them to the laundry room. In the
kitchen, he found fresh coffee and a note from J.B.:
Gone to town, then down
to the winery. Bring the kids after breakfast. Pancake batter—blueberry—Annie's
recipe—in the fridge.
He had placed utensils and syrup on the counter. The
sun was just rising, but J.B. Hardin had never wasted a minute of daylight in
his life.

Beck poured a cup of coffee and went out onto
the back porch. He stepped into a pair of J.B.'s rubber boots and walked outside.
He was wearing only pajama shorts, but there wasn't a neighbor within two miles
of where he stood. Peggy Dechert had been the girl next door, even though next
door had been a mile away. When she and J.B. married, they and their goat
ranches had become one.

Beck admired the land.

All eight hundred acres had long ago been cleared
of brush and Ashe juniper trees, known as cedar to Texans; Beck had cut brush
and chopped cedar from sunup to sundown more days than he cared to remember.
J.B. Hardin hated cedar like the plague, and in the ground it was just that, with
its deep roots sucking the groundwater like a thirsty kid sucking a big soda through
a straw. Water had always been scarcer than oil in Texas, and now it was more
valuable.

Cedar was a water thief.

When goats had free range on this land, they ate
the grass, plants, and brush down to the bare ground and even the shoots six
feet up the trunks of the cedar and shin oak trees—the "goat line."
But with the goats gone, the native grasses had made a comeback. The land
looked good.

There had been a brief rain overnight, not
enough to end a drought, just a spit really, but enough to tease the grass into
giving off a hint of green hope. The rain droplets on the blades of grass shimmered
like diamonds in the first light of the sun over the eastern hills. By mid-morning,
the sun would burn off the water and all hope; but now Beck welcomed the sun.

He didn't dream of Annie while he was awake.

He sipped the coffee and inhaled the morning air.
The birds were awake and singing, and just past the house fawns were standing
on shaky legs and foraging for breakfast. Beck walked down the gently sloping
land and across a wood bridge that spanned Snake Creek; it was bone dry. He went
down to the river. Cypress trees and willows lined the near riverbank; the far
side was a sheer white limestone bluff fifty feet high. Growing up here, this had
been his back yard, this land and that river.

The Pedernales River—named "River of Flint" because the Spanish explorers had found flint arrowheads along the
riverbank—had its headwaters in springs out one county west and flowed east a
hundred miles to Lake Travis. The river was eighty feet wide here but not two feet
deep. The clear water coursed gently between large flat rocks that spanned the
river and formed a natural bridge; Beck stepped from rock to rock until he was
in the middle of the river, where he had often found himself as a boy.

The wind had yet to pick up, so the surface of
the water was still as smooth as glass. Beck bent over and grabbed a small
flat rock. He hefted it and decided it would do. He gripped the rock between
his thumb and index finger just as J.B. had taught Beck the boy; he threw the rock
sidearm. The rock flew low then skipped across the surface of the water four
times before disappearing from sight. Beck watched the ripples spread out
until they blended back into the water and the surface became smooth again, as
if the rock had never been a part of the river's life.

His life had been perfect here, for a while, and
then he had found perfect again in Chicago. Thirteen years here, twelve years
there; maybe twenty-five years of perfect out of one lifetime were all a man
could rightfully expect. Maybe it was more than a man should expect. And so he
felt lonely and afraid but not cheated. It was his children who had been
cheated.

"We're hungry."

Meggie was standing on a big rock on the
riverbank in her white nightshirt with the doll tucked under her arm.

"You kids like those pancakes?" J.B. said.

"Yes, we did," Meggie said. She was
carrying the doll.

The Trail's End
Winery was exactly what Beck would have expected of his father: built to
perfection. The front and back sections of the building were one story, constructed
of limestone, and angled up about forty-five degrees to meet a two-story
all-cedar center section just below a row of windows that ran the length of the
structure under a green standing-seam metal roof. They had found J.B. inside, behind
a long wooden bar that looked like it belonged in an old western saloon; a
mirror on the back wall stretched the length of the bar. Under the mirror were
neat rows of wine glasses; on the bar were a dozen bottles of wine. The floor
was pine and cedar beams spanned the open space. The limestone walls came
together in one corner to form a fireplace fronted by a leather sofa and chairs.
Stacked on wood shelves were tee shirts, sweatshirts, and caps in all colors with
Trail's End Winery, Fredericksburg, Texas
stenciled across the front.

"I don't remember you ever drinking wine,
J.B.," Beck said.

"Never touch the stuff."

"You don't drink wine?"

He shook his head. "Don't like it."

"You own a winery but you don't like
wine?"

"I own a winery 'cause I like the wine business.
I like the pace of it, the order, the vines in perfect rows in the vineyard. I
like planting new growth, tending to it. I like the harvest, crushing and
pressing the grapes, fermentation, aging, bottling—it's got a rhythm all its
own. I like that. I like people who like wine. I just don't like wine."

"You're a piece of work, J.B."

A door next to the bar opened, and a middle-aged
Hispanic man walked through just as J.B. added, "And I like Hector."

The Hispanic man stopped, cocked his head, and smiled.

"I like you too, J.B."

"Hector, meet my son, Beck. The
lawyer."

Hector turned to Beck.

"He says this as if he has another son who
is 'the doctor.' " He stuck his hand out to Beck. "I am Hector Aurelio
… the winemaker."

Hector was a short
man with a pleasant face. He wore khaki shorts, huaraches without socks, and a
yellow
Trail's End Winery
shirt. He smelled like wine.

"J.B. says you're the best winemaker in the
Hill Country."

Hector smiled again.
"My family first came north from Matamoros to pick the peaches and stayed to
pick the grapes. I discovered that I have the taste for wine. So now I make
the wine. But I still pick the grapes." He glanced down at Meggie.
"And who is this beautiful little
señorita?
"

"My daughter, Meggie."

"
Señorita
Meggie, perhaps you would like to meet Josefina … she is my daughter. She
is six."

"Can she play with us?"

"Us?" Hector appeared confused, then
he realized. "Ah, the doll. Yes, J.B. said you might need a playmate."

Meggie glanced up at Beck.

"It's okay, honey."

Hector turned to Luke. "And you must be
Luke. So you would like to learn to make the wine?"

Now Luke glanced up at Beck.

"J.B. thought you might like to work down here,
Luke, learn a few things."

Luke shrugged his shoulders. Hector looked at
Beck and nodded, then he held his hand out to Meggie. "Come, let us find
Josefina. She is in the vineyards, with Butch."

Hector, Meggie, and the doll walked off hand in
hand in hand.

J.B. came out from behind the bar; he was
wearing a gray-blue Tommy Bahama shirt with a red, yellow, and orange jungle floral
print stretching from shirttail to shoulder.

"How many of those shirts you got,
J.B.?" Beck said.

"One for every day of the week plus a few
spares. This one's called 'Rum Punch.' "

" 'Cause you'd have to be drunk to buy
it."

J.B. gestured at the room. "This is our
tasting room. We got the Harvest Wine Trail end of next month, pretty big deal
around here. Tourists drive from winery to winery tasting, like in that movie a
few years back. A dozen wineries in the Hill Country now. They say we're the
next Napa Valley."

"Santa Fe."

"That, too."

J.B. led them into the two-story section of the
building. Massive wood trusses and cross beams overhead were supported by
floor-to-ceiling rough-hewn logs embedded in the foundation. Sunlight shone
through the row of windows on each side of the top wall. Six stainless steel
tanks stood in two rows; above the tanks was a catwalk. At one end of the room
were barn doors.

"Vat room. Each vat holds fifteen hundred
gallons."

"That's a lot of wine."

"Takes a lot of grapes. Right here is
where the winemaking happens. Hector'll take you through the whole process,
Luke—it's like a science experiment. You like science?"

Luke said nothing, but Beck caught a spark of
interest in his eyes; he had made As in science.

"Come on, I'll show you the barrel
cellar."

They followed J.B. down a set of stairs into a
basement dug out of the limestone bedrock. Hundreds of wood barrels stacked on
metal stands filled the cool cavern.

"We keep it at sixty degrees down
here," J.B. said. "While the wine ages."

"How do you know when the wine is
ready?"

"When Hector says it is. Winemaking's part
science, part art. There ain't no gauge or computer program tells you when wine
is ready. Takes a vintner with the taste. That's the art of it."

J.B. led them back upstairs into another room
with a stainless steel contraption stationed in the middle.

"Bottling room. Each barrel holds fifty-nine
gallons. Standard-size wine bottle holds seven hundred fifty milliliters.
That comes to twenty-four cases per barrel. Each case is twelve bottles, so
that's two hundred eighty-eight bottles of wine per barrel. We'll bottle
twenty thousand this year."

"Bottles?"

"Cases."

"
Cases?
That's …"

"Two hundred forty thousand bottles."

"That's a lot of wine, J.B."

"Nah. Big wineries here, they do twice
that. And that's nothing compared to the California outfits."

"J.B., you've got quite an operation
here."

"Me and Hector, we've come a long way in
ten years."

They followed J.B. up another set of stairs to
the second story of the building. Hanging on the walls were antique implements.
J.B. stopped and removed a hammer from a hook.

"Bung hammer. Five pound cast-iron head.
They used to stuff a leather roll into the end so it wouldn't break the wood
bung. We use silicon bungs now."

J.B. replaced the hammer and led them into an office
with a wall of windows overlooking the vineyards and the river beyond.

"This is my office."

Beck looked out the windows at the uniform rows
of thick green vines. Meggie and Josefina were playing in the shade of the vines.
The white lab lay nearby.

"Now Butch's got two little gals to watch
over," J.B. said. "Makes him feel useful." He gestured out at
the vineyard. "Fifty acres of vines, ten different varietals … types
of grapes. We harvest a little later here, so the sugar content of the grapes
is higher. Texans like their women and wine sweet. First harvest will be in a
few weeks, last harvest first week of September. We throw a big party. Lots
of folks come out, we pick till sunset, then we eat Mexican food and Hector plays
the guitar and everyone dances. The kids'll have fun."

Southwestern style
paintings signed by "Janelle Jones" hung on the walls, a leather
couch sat along one wall, and a leather chair was behind a big wood desk. On
the desk were a stack of invoices, several unopened bottles of wine, a ledger
book, a framed photograph of the Hardin family of Chicago, and a computer. Beck
stared at the computer:
Were Annie's emails still on that computer?

Beck looked up and saw J.B. looking at
him.

Beck turned the Navigator north and drove into town. Luke
was sitting in the passenger's seat and staring out the window; he hadn't said a
word the entire morning. Beck stopped for a red light at Gallopin' Goat Drive,
the intersection fronting the high school. He instinctively glanced over at
the adjacent football stadium. It was only the fifth of July, but the team was
already practicing for the upcoming season.