Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [114]
Sticking his arm out the window, trying to scoop enough breeze inside to cool off, he wondered about his body—its sensitivities and weaknesses—and then about Libby’s attraction to it and to him. This morning he’d held her close against him, inwardly chanting her name, and the willingness and affection of her response again made him ache with longing. How did it happen that she wasn’t repelled by his cumbersome gut, his age, his indissoluble shortcomings? If anything, his character defects engaged her curiosity: “I wonder why you have such trouble firing and hiring people,” she’d said with no trace of an edge in her voice. Where Yvette had seen parental failure, Libby merely said, “You’re so sweet and shy around Joe, as if you can’t believe he’s really yours.” She even appeared to love his mild but stubborn dyslexia; he often set a table backwards, or had to stop and think which was his right hand, which his left. Red had lived all his life waiting for such endless, generous interest.
Turning onto the Santa Bernita Highway, he felt the caffeine in a tidal rush of jittery energy. His hands were sweaty again. It had been so long since he’d been dosed with the stuff, he was definitely buzzed, even dizzy. Powerful drug, caffeine, though he’d hardly noticed its effects back when he poured gallons of coffee into his system. Now, eight or ten ounces generated an anxiety attack, complete with nausea.
Red caught himself patting his pockets for a cigarette. The caffeine, he thought, jump-starting that old craving as well.
Bamboo thickets flashed by. Round rocks. Smudge pots. All the many things he’d done wrong in his life. He embarrassed himself all the time. Talking a senile streak while slapping on stain up at the new house—God, he’d never talked so much to anybody. Poor Lewis. Red resolved to make amends for those sentimental benders. And to tell Libby again that he wants Lewis to come to supper. If necessary, he might have to put his foot down—especially since Libby’s grudge against Lewis lately appeared more a source of amusement than a necessary distancing.
He slowed for road construction, Cal Trans workers taking down a whole screen of eucalyptus trees to widen the highway to four lanes. Red downshifted with an ominous grinding of gears, and he had to fish for second gear. Now, it seemed, the truck’s transmission was going.
Several huge, shaggy old trees lay toppled, their roots tangled in snaky whorls, which, given the size of the trees, were smaller than he’d expected. A difficult sight, those toppled trees—they signified the end of this quiet, untrammeled agricultural landscape.
The first time he saw the valley, Red had flown down in secret on a February workday. Landing in Santa Barbara, he’d rented a big Buick, bought a bottle of Dewars and a sack of ice, and glided on the scotch’s smooth edge into this land of old home places, purple peaks, and the citrus-soaked air of his childhood. By then freeways and housing tracts had swallowed up Pomona, Ontario, and Rancho Cucamonga. But time had moved more slowly in the Santa Bernita. A more rustic, genteel, and politically backward era had persisted for decades, although development’s tendrils were now becoming visible. Walnut groves in the eastern end of the valley had given way to row crops, the first step in the developers’ process—hadn’t Beverly Hills arisen from lima bean fields, Orange County from celery? A city planned for the east end would put eighty thousand people where a hundred scattered souls now lived.
Coming up behind a dump truck, Red had to downshift again. Another moment of mechanical suspense before, ah, second. He could put the truck in the shop next week; they would take the Mercedes to Yosemite, anyway. He hadn’t been up there since he’d gone with Frank years and years ago, even before he was married to Yvette. Late in the fall, they’d rented a tent cabin—two cots with stiff white sheets and green army blankets, a small tin woodstove, with a tidy stack of split pine and aspen