NORMAN’S JEEP ROARS TO A STOP, a beast who, like a marijuana harvest, doesn’t want to go quietly. Returning to Weckman Farm is like stepping from midday summer into a darker indoors. I have to blink a few times to see anything, this world draped in the cloak of purple afterimage. Everything is drastically mellow—the low drone of Charlie’s one-seat tractor, Lance’s voice rising from the fields in calm, disjointed syllables, Lady Wanda tucked into her envelope of mansion, probably rehearsing her next torch song.
Norman rolls from the driver’s seat without vocal ceremony.
“See you later, dude,” he calls thickly, the dude encompassing both Johanna and me.
Like rawhide, he’s rollin’-rollin’-rollin’ toward his lawnmower, an engineer who has found nirvana behind a humbler machine.
Johanna tells me she wishes that, from the beginning, she’d told everyone here she had a different name.
“But it’s too late now,” she says, “to be someone else entirely.”
“We could always tell them that Johanna isn’t your real name. That way your real self could be the fiction.”
She takes my hand.
“It’s something to consider,” she says.
In the way she says it, she sounds like she’s been cheated. At least for a harvest season, she could have been a broker consultant from Lodz. Does her accent really preach Scandinavia to the masses? And as you know: because Johanna isn’t her real name, and she isn’t really Scandinavian, this section was written fill-in-the-blank style. After this, feel free to blindfold the prefix meta, give it its last cigarette, and fire away.
Johanna—still Johanna, always Johanna—surveys Weckman. No one has come from the fields to greet us, ask us about our trip from the frying pan to the fire. The food tent angles into the wind, convinces us it’s going to capsize before righting itself. The same wind snakes through the Residents’ Camp, as if from the depths of a bear cave, as if we’d now need headlamps to find our way among the tents, illuminate the true nature of hibernation as something that can kill us. Johanna squeezes my hand in a way that’s either thankful or rueful.
“We should go home,” she says.
My heart sinks, its blood draining.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
She sighs.
“What, babe?” I ask.
She’s not looking at me, but at the fields, and the stink that they hold; the good people who give themselves over to sweat, reeking with season.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I feel like we’re breaking the rules.”
“Well, fuck the law, Johanna.”
She drops my hand.
“I’m not talking about the law, and you know it. You know. It’s like we’re having jobs we can’t even pronounce, you know? Like we’re choosing a lifestyle we can’t pronounce.”
“Well, it’s just for the season,” I say, but know what she means. She means, we’re homeless. I think also she means, though I hope not, and I’m unsure if I’d wholly agree, we’re heartless.
“I think finally it’s time for us to go. There are rules,” she says.
I have to laugh now, a little.
“There are?” I ask.
She smiles now too, also just a little.
“Definitely,” she says.
“So is going back to Chicago conforming to the rules?”
Her smile drops.
“Shit,” she says. “You know, I don’t really think so.”
I nod.
“But it may be closer to the rules,” she says.
Charlie’s one-seat tractor shoots from Tractor Alley and tears across the volleyball court. Johanna and I decide not to decide for a few more days. Together, we walk toward the fields, and Charlie, even at all the good speed a one-seat tractor can muster, spots us and spins his wheel. He bellies up.
“’Bout time, brother,” he says. “Some of us been pullin’ double-duty. Like Wanda says, the work will get done, one way or another.”
“Are you giving us shit, Charlie?” Johanna asks.
He smiles. His splotchy orange beard spreads like marmalade.
“Shit,” he says. “We all get out in stages. Just glad you’re back. How was town? The full scene, I’ll bet.”
We tell him about the Slip ’n Slide and the dice-juggling, the man with the beanless maracas, the squatting over the mirrors.
“Yep,” Charlie says, his voice even raspier than usual. “The freaks and the geeks. These are our people.”
He starts to spin the tractor away from us.
“Gotta get this shit to the Bat Cave,” he says. “Meetchya at dinner. Watercress quiche, I think it’s gonna be.”
He steps on the gas. The tractor coughs into forward motion.
“Watercress fucking quiche,” Johanna says, her vulgarity heading straight to my pants.
We kiss, impatiently, but we kiss.
BEFORE DINNER, still reveling in our day off, Johanna and I walk into the kitchen, where Alex, Emily, and Antonio are busy whipping, chopping, and scrambling, in search of some coffee. Our trip into town has left us exhausted, especially in the eyes.
Under the shed’s blue roof, eight deep skillets sputter an egg and cream mixture on eight burners, eggplant lazes on the grill, the chest freezer stands open a crack like a coffin in a zombie movie, the commercial mixer pirouettes its paddle, and a walk-in refrigerator tries to keep its secrets.
The chefs nod to us.
“There,” Alex says curtly, gesturing to the coffeemaker and its three-quarters-full pot.
“If you finish it, please make another,” Emily says.
Antonio says nothing. He flips the eggplant slices, brushes them with an ancho chile spiced oil, and disappears into the walk-in.
Under these fluorescent lights, in the middle of this gleaming silver equipment, Alex and Emily lose their look of placid hippie chic, replaced by something vaguely militaristic. They strangle the handles of their whisks. In here, their features harden. In here, they know what has to be done. All malaria can be beaten. All great literature can be burned to start a cook fire. Only Antonio maintains a consistency. Both in and out of the kitchen, he shuffles the shuffle of someone who has been there, done that.
In the time Johanna and I have poured our cups of coffee, Antonio has been in and out of the walk-in three times. Each time, he emerges empty-handed. Alex and Emily say nothing. The fourth time Antonio starts for the walk-in, Johanna and I give in to our curiosity. We follow him, our coffee sloshing up over the lips of our cups, reddening our wrists with a sweet burn.
Peeking into the walk-in, we watch Antonio press his fifty-year-old paunch against a white bucket of vegetable stock. Amid the shelves, strewn with open-topped cardboard boxes of celery, carrot, yellow squash, buckets of pickling juice, olives, and oxtail stock (which I think has likely gone unused for the season), Antonio puffs marijuana from an apple. In an act common in restaurant kitchens, Antonio has fashioned a makeshift pipe from a partially hollowed-out Granny Smith. Part of me wishes he’d noticed our spying, said something goofy about keeping the doctor away, but alas . . .
He holds his lighter to the top and puffs from the side, passing the fruit to a set of much skinnier fingers. This second set of hands emerges from behind the stock buckets. We can see only up to the wiry wrists, decidedly female tendons poking through the gristle. Johanna and I sip our coffee and know these are the stringy wrists of a yoga instructor.
It is Robbi, Johanna’s childhood friend, not with her giant man in Fort Bragg at all, but finding her off-duty refuge in a walk-in refrigerator, pulling weed from an apple. She steps from behind the buckets but still does not see us. She is wearing a baby blue jacket with a white fake-fur-lined collar. She passes the apple back to Antonio and leans into his neck. Her tall stork’s body presses against his roundness, the pink tip of her tongue finding his ear.
Johanna and I look at each other. Antonio and Robbi? This is definitely a breaking of the rules. We will talk later about all of the secret lives at Weckman, about the trysts we never discovered, the conversations gone unheard. This cute, married speculation is something I will spare you.
Robbi mews something to Antonio. In her voice, hoarse from god-knows-how-long of hiding out in a refrigerator, the only word we can make out is abundance.
THAT NIGHT, at dinner, Bob inhales his quiche, and Hector’s absence has us worried. Crazy Jeff and Gloria are gone too, but at least we know where they are—fighting the Squareheads (as Lady Wanda calls them) in Sacramento.
I listen to everyone talking, just stare at them as if in front of a bathroom mirror, shaving.
“What are you doing here?” I ask myself, but it isn’t my voice. It’s a caring voice, a voice maternal or paternal, one that is trying very hard to avoid saying the word stupid.
I listen to Charlie chastising Bob for his table manners.
“That’s some abysmal shit, brother,” he says, as Bob spews crumbs of egg custard back onto his paper plate.
I listen to Lance discussing the logistics and speed necessary in tomorrow’s picking, Ruby answering his every utterance with something affirmative. I listen to Johanna biting her lip, trying her damnedest not to tell everyone about what we saw in the walk-in.
I think about Johanna’s assessment of our lives; about some future home of ours filled with the luxury of thick bath towels and expensive dish soap, the middle-of-the-road holiness of a picket-fence mouse pad and a living room full of IKEA.
Sometimes I feel as if everything people say is holy. Other times, I feel as if I’ve heard it before. Tonight, our meal is draped in redundancy—Lance and Ruby tickling one another’s hands on the picnic table bench; Bob and Charlie adopting their sidekick/leader roles; the usual absences; the food disappearing from our plates. I’m starting to feel antsy, as if trapped in a droning classroom, ready for the bell to ring. Tomorrow, we will pick, massage, cook, eat, talk, mow, and not move on. Or does the moving-on lie in the picking, massaging . . .? I can’t believe we still haven’t figured these things out. Can’t believe that we likely never will.
Bob, without meaning to, answers, “It’s all a steaming pile of bullshit!”
He’s telling Charlie about the “real” lack of security at Weckman Farm, doubting Hector’s resolve.
“I mean, where is he?” Bob continues. “Where does he go?”
“His business, brother,” Charlie says.
“We need some kind of rule here,” Bob says, “otherwise . . .”
Lance pulls a strand of his hair from his mouth and counters.
“Shit, man, we’re all here to escape that kinda shit . . . Come and go as you please, you know,” he says.
“Oh, fucking child prodigy here,” Bob says. “Little Boy Blue, boss of the fucking fields.”
“Fuck you,” Ruby pipes in a small voice, a mouse, microphoned.
She shuts everyone up. No one expected this from her. Her eyes harden. She threatens Bob with the most Medusa-like parts of herself. Lance touches her leg and her jaw unclenches. Johanna touches mine and I sigh. We finish dinner in silence, Bob sulking with his elbows on the table, Charlie staring at some silent thing hidden in the distant redwoods.