Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [23]
“Smokes,” Red said and reached for the flying pack of Pall Malls. “Thanks.” He still had to step forward to pay.
Billie slid off the counter, moving to one side. She was quite tall and fit. Muddy clothes only underscored her imperious, pedigreed good looks. Her neurasthenically pale skin was scrupulously covered even in this dry summer heat.
“What brings you to town so early?” Victor said.
“On my way to pick up an auger,” Red answered quietly.
“What do you need an auger for?” said Billie.
“I ordered a couple hundred trees to fill out a few groves and I need to dig the holes.”
“I thought you were raising souls out there, not fruit.”
“Hopefully, the souls will raise the fruit.”
Billie stared at Red and pulled absently at her springy black hair. She harvested a few long, curly strands in her fingers, then dropped them on the old wood floor. “If I remember right,” she said, “Sally had a couple augers in the warehouse.”
“They went at the auction.”
Billie painstakingly dropped more hair onto the floor.
“I’m gonna make you sweep before you leave,” Victor said.
She ignored him. “Okay, Red.” She sighed as if accepting an endless, onerous task. “I’ll bring you an auger.”
She came that very afternoon, and after a twenty-minute walk down the roadway, she told Red he had to lease the groves if he wanted to save his shirt. “You don’t seriously think,” she said, “you can run a drunk farm and a major citrus ranch?”
“That’s the whole idea. The men work the farm.”
“C’mon, Red. You’re too nonprofit to be a farmer. You can’t make money and help people at the same time. And even if you could, farming’s not the way to do it. Now, you can lease ’em to me or you can lease ’em to Sunkist.”
He leased them to her; she, in turn, hired her work crews off the farm. Given her reputation for machismo and slave driving, any resident who worked for Billie soon called her, among other things, the Amazon Next Door.
LEWIS didn’t want to work for any Amazon, especially one he pictured as a steely older woman wearing jodhpurs and carrying a quirt. Neither did cultivating the organic vegetable garden appeal to him, nor joining the grounds crew. That left the garage.
In his twenties, at a loss at what to do with a B.A. in European history, Lewis had worked in a friend’s garage in Monrovia. Karmachanics hadn’t lasted long; instead of recycling the proceeds, the owner spent them on cocaine, which he ingested or sold to his employees at cost. When the business went under, right about the same time Lewis’s marriage ended, he found a job in an auto parts store in Pasadena.
To be a good parts man—and Lewis had been an excellent one for five long years—you have to be a demon for details and compulsively, even supernaturally, tidy; otherwise chaos boils up so fast that you might as well shut down the store as try to find a Volvo alternator. While Lewis wasn’t particularly neat about his own person or living space, he was used to a workplace where everything had—and was in—its designated place. The Round Rock garage, then, was a version of hell.
On the far end of the farm, near the workers’ village, the garage was an old-fashioned setup with two wide bays that originally served the tractors, trucks, spray rigs, and forklifts of Sally Morrot’s ranch. Instead of hydraulic lifts, each bay had a narrow trough where a man stood to work beneath a vehicle. “It’s like a grave,” Lewis complained to Gene, the only other mechanic. “You know how monks used to sleep in coffins? Well, we get to work all day in graves.”
They were to perform simple, tax-deductible tune-ups and oil changes for the few patient locals who brought in their cars. Since both Lewis and Gene had less than thirty days of sobriety, neither could leave the farm for parts; they had to phone in their orders, then ask someone else to pick them up. Gene liked handling this procedure, having quickly figured out that by asking the wrong people, he could delay a single parts delivery for days, during which time he could watch TV in the parlor with impunity.
While