BY NECESSITY it became my turn to drive, with Zarlingo back in the wheelbarrow and my father up front between me and Cavallaro. We left the hill country, the orchards and the vineyards, and began to climb toward the Sierra peaks. The old man slept deeply on my shoulder, his breath as sour as one of Angelo Musso’s barrels.
After a while the air grew colder, and lowering, white mists rumbled down to the highway. I opened the window and tattered pieces of clouds whisked through my father’s hair. The air was good for him, cold in his nostrils and lungs, and he wakened and looked around, his eyes like crushed cherries. He wanted a cigar.
The road dipped and it was on the downgrade a couple of miles to a place called Alp Hollow. There was a grocery store and one small cabin. I stopped in front of the store and my father and Cavallaro rumbled out like sacks of kindling—you heard the crackle of their bones. Growling like a beast, Zarlingo crawled from the camper. The three bumbled their way into a cathedral of superb pines, in different directions, and urinated, each against a tree, secretly, furtively, swaying like sleepwalkers, their backs to one another, too modest to flash their cocks.
Zarlingo and Cavallaro returned to the truck, but my father marched stiffly into the grocery store. He returned puffing on a cigar, a package under his arm. With grotesque drunken dignity he came to the camper and nearly fell on his face as he climbed into the seat.
“Let’s move!” he ordered, like some fool in command of other fools. I gave him my ugliest glance, sickened by his glut for booze, his abuse of his last handful of days.
With a demonic smile he opened the paper sack. It was a pint of brandy. He looked at me and laughed at my loathing of him, and I felt anger and disgust. As he put the bottle to his mouth I snatched it from his hand and flung it out the window. It exploded against a stone. He was surprised, but he didn’t breathe a word. Flicking the ash from his cigar, his crazed red eyes drilled at the windshield as he slashed off a slew of soft Italian curses, something about America and dogshit.
It was six o’clock now, the sun long gone from Alp Hollow, and it was cold with the quickening night, but as we climbed out of there sunlight made a wedding cake of the snow peaks as Highway 80 snaked eastward and up to 7,000 feet. The dying sun at our backs, we cruised through lonesome mountain hamlets—Emigrant Gap, Cisco, Soda Springs, Donner Pass.
Beyond the pass my father cautioned me to slow down. “It’s up ahead a little ways.”
I scanned the terrain for signs of the Monte Casino golf course—the greens with waving flags, the golfers, the rolling fairways, the clubhouse. Truth was, in the back of my mind the most compelling reason for making the trip was the golf course. Looking around, all I saw on both sides of the highway was a vast ocean of pines, tall and impenetrable, flowing into infinity.
“I don’t see the golf course, Papa.”
He looked ahead without speaking.
“Where’s the golf course?”
“They ain’t any.”
“You said there was a golf course.”
“No golf course.”
“How come?”
“So I said so. So sue me.”
“Why did you say it?”
“’Less I said it, you wouldn’t come.”
He turned to me in pain and embarrassment, battered eyes, battered man, and I had a sudden flashback, and he was nine years old in an impoverished Italian village, trapped by his father in some boyish fabrication, with the same injured expression his face now showed. A sad business, the way the creases shaped themselves on the face into unerasable furrows. I hated the sorrow upon his face. I liked him better when he was arrogant, selfish, tough, a bastard to the core. I slapped his knee.
“It’s okay,” I smiled. “I would have come anyway.”
His hand trembled as he struck a match and put it to his cigar that was already lit.
“No tennis, either?” I smiled.
“No tennis.”
“No swimming pool?”
“Nope.”
“How about the bears, and the timber wolves?”
He tried to laugh and almost succeeded.
The Monte Casino Lodge was not a lodge at all. It was a motel. A quarter of a mile down a side road off the highway we came to a clearing in the deep woods. A dozen log cabins were scattered among the trees, most of them with cars parked alongside. But for the cars, the scene could have been a settlers’ village a hundred years before, smoke trailing from cabin chimneys and hanging heavily among the trees, the odor of bacon and beefsteak permeating the chilling air. A red neon sign spelling OFFICE Over the porch of the far cabin spoiled the primitive scene.
We pulled up before the porch and my father hit the horn a couple of times. It brought Sam Ramponi from inside. He was a squat, balloon-bellied man of seventy with the body of a bear and the face of a wolf. With a yell of joyous recognition he rushed toward us as my father and Cavallaro got out of the car. No doubt about it, Sam Ramponi belonged to the brotherhood of the grape, his heavy face streaked with purple cobwebs of broken blood vessels, his grinning mouth sporting big, repulsive dentures. There was much laughter and handshaking, and when Zarlingo dropped from the camper the jollity began again, backslapping, guffaws, embraces—a class reunion—for Sam Ramponi was a San Elmo man, a retired brakeman who longed for the good old days when the Café Roma was the center of the universe and the world had not turned into merde.
He stared warmly as my father introduced us.
“My oldest boy. He’s my helper.”
Ramponi grabbed my hand.
“Hello, Tony. I remember you now! The best football player San Elmo ever had.”
My name wasn’t Tony and I had never played high school football, but the man was only trying to be friendly.
“You, boy!” my father barked. “Get this here truck unloaded.” It was his ugliest flaw: the boss, the big-shot syndrome. “Drive around back of those cabins. You’ll see some stone and a pile of sand. Unload there. And be careful with my tools. Cover them up, in case it rains.”
His three friends were impressed, staring in silence. “Righton, sir!” I saluted, and climbed into the truck.
Ramponi herded his friends toward the office.
“Come on, you suckers. Let’s play cards.”