Pretenders by John Carr Walker
Martín Cordero drove the spray rig in the vineyards where I grew up, a farmhand-for-hire who worked all over San Luis Obispo County, but in my memory he’s a storyteller first, held in the stage lights of my boyhood attention. I listened for his truck slowing on the road, the rig something to behold as it came down the driveway: long metal stomach sloshing with chemicals, carrying dust from other vineyards on its hog back, lashed to the trailer like a dangerous beast. In the clearing, he parked and turned his head left then right, as if checking for eavesdroppers—I loved the theatricality, the secrecy.
“Where’d I leave off?” he asked.
“You tracked it to a cave,” I said.
“You didn’t forget the bear.”
How could I forget? Last time, the young ranch hand Martín Cordero had found the hair of a California Grizzly stuck in a wire fence. He and the other ranch men had formed a hunting party and tracked the bear to a narrow ravine in the California foothills.
“Only it wasn’t a ravine the hunting party tracked the grizzly to, but a shallow cave,” he said. “Those in the hunting party with me would swear I tell the truth when I say we could hear the grizzly clawing at the rock, and then, as if from the pit of hell, its great roar.”
He bent at the waist and released a ratchet; the tie-down went slack over the tractor axle. I followed his loose-limbed, baggy walk around to the other side of the trailer. “Did the other men run away?” I asked.
“Many ran away, but not me. I stood, my rifle in hand, looking into the night darkness of the cave, still shedding dust and loose rock from the great roar, and I won’t lie to you, for a moment I was petrified. I couldn’t have run if I tried. My feet were rooted to the spot, my arms limp as empty sleeves. I feared I would never see my sweetheart again.”
I made a face at the mention of the word sweetheart. I didn’t want the story turning soft.
“I feared I would never see my poor mother again either,” said Martín Cordero. “I feared they’d be mailing my bloody clothes home to her in an envelope. I feared the grizzly would eat my heart and grind my young bones to dust between his huge teeth. But it was my grizzly, you see. I had to face the colossus. Do you remember why?”
“Because you found the hair in the fence,” I said.
“A hair as big around as your finger and just as long, amber at the root. It was almost square to touch, the hard edges biting into the callus grown over my thumb,” he said. “When I plucked it from the barbed wire fence I put my name on the bear.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off Martín Cordero as he walked the trailer edge. To me, he was a master on stage. Metal plates clanked under his steps, but that didn’t crack the spell he cast. He belonged to the story, not the spray rig. To the past, not the present. The way he looked when he talked made it seem this Martín Cordero felt everything the other Martín Cordero saw and heard. Fear. Excitement. Dire responsibility. He knelt and released another tie-down ratchet. I got as close as I could. He lived the story and I was living through him.
“Ranching men were harder men back then, different from today’s men, and being strong and upright among them was the main thing. It was a matter of pride that I shoot my bear, especially now that I felt so scared. So there I stood, bringing my rifle to my shoulder and leveling the sights—” Martín Cordero formed his arms to an imaginary rifle “—and aimed at the shadows and stone, toward something I’d never even seen, but that made my heart pound thinking about. I made myself listen to my surroundings, not to my heart. From inside the cave, I could hear the snapping of twigs. I told the others: ‘You’ll need to light it better, else I’ll be firing blind.’ The other men in the hunting party, the ones who hadn’t run away from fear, brought their lanterns closer. ‘And some of you others have your guns up, for god sakes,’ I told them, and stared into the shadows, waiting.”
Martín Cordero grabbed the knobby chevrons of the tractor tire to help himself into the driver’s seat.
“I’ll tell you the bear’s secret next time,” he said, “which poor Martín Cordero was soon to learn.”
He started the tractor engine before I could beg to hear more. The exhaust stack backfired. A bullet of black smoke shot at the sky. I covered my ears and stepped away. He reversed expertly, and then drove to the vineyards. I was left with my heart thumping in my throat, the waxy tang of chemicals in my mouth. My mother called me indoors before the air turned too poisonous.
The winery where we lived was called Los Tres Tierras—The Three Earths. It was nestled among hills northwest of Paso Robles, California, on the road to the Pacific Ocean. My folks and I lived in the old cooper’s shop, converted to the foreman’s house long before we moved there, although my father, as well as his boss, still called it the Cooper’s Shop. A creek that went dry during summers divided the Cooper’s Shop from The Grand Villa, a stucco mansion with black brick windowsills and door lintels.
I had the run of that whole beautiful place, waging imaginary battles in the vineyards, hunting beasts between the redwood and live oaks, and picturing myself a king surveying his kingdom from the highest window of the Grand Villa. The owners treated me like their own son, bought me the books and pens and paper I wanted, that my parents thought a waste of money. I lived for the days Martín Cordero came. Most of my imaginings—my drawings and captions—came from his stories. I suppose I was pretending to be him.
The vineyards of Los Tres Tierras were old, the vines gnarled and the rows crooked, and they supplied a wine-making operation that remained old fashioned, largely hand-made, purposely small. My father’s boss Henry Iona inherited the place. Silver-haired and plump, he wore wore only white button-down shirts tucked tightly into blue jeans. I always thought Henry Iona belonged somewhere else, but then the central coast began changing in Henry’s favor. Tourists were flocking to San Luis Obispo County for its honest and reasonably priced wines, or so said a magazine article my father read to my mother and me at the dinner table. He was vintner of Los Tres Tierras. His name was Salvador Arias. He worked in thick-soled rubber boots, though his skin still smelled of ripe fruit. He loved his work, but that night at the table, glossy magazine open on his empty dinner plate, my father was talking about the future instead of what he’d done that day. “Henry wants to run tastings like the wineries in this article do, and Lynn,” he told my mother, “I’ve never seen him like this, like he actually cares.”
Of course Henry Iona was instantly in love with the idea of wine tastings, a chance to bask in the glow of beautiful people, their money and minting gaze. My father must have seen a chance to make a name for himself too, to speak with people who appreciated his craft and attention to detail. He and Henry decided to run Saturday tastings all that summer and claim their shares of the spotlight shining on Paso Robles winemakers.
The French doors of The Grand Villa were propped open when I visited after breakfast that first Saturday. Mr. Iona had ordered the walls power washed; the white stucco and black trim—the cornices, windowsills, and gabled eaves—shone like a painting. Inside, trays of finger foods covered the table where Henry and Claire Iona ate their meals. The family photographs that hung on the walls—their daughters were grown—had been temporarily replaced with prints of bottles, fruits, and blocks of cheese posed on carving boards. The kitchen counter was arranged with stemmed glasses. Seeing Claire made up made me want to hide my face.
“Big day today,” she said. “Is your dad ready?”
“He was up early again practicing,” I said. Weeks earlier, my father had started carrying index cards and a pen in his back pocket and writing down anecdotes and metaphors for winemaking as they occurred to him. The last few evenings he’d been talking to himself, memorizing the ideas on the cards and speaking them aloud until they rolled off his tongue. He knew wine at a chemical level, but today would be leading tours, and was searching for graceful ways to explain what was happening in the vineyards, in the barrels, in the stemmed glasses and taste buds. When I left the Cooper’s Shop that morning, he’d been wearing his blackest jeans and a new burgundy shirt, sitting at the table with the index cards as if cramming for a test.
“If he’s as nervous as I am,” said Claire, “he barely slept. When I think what today could mean for us I can’t hardly keep myself still.”
“Is the top floor open?” I asked.
“I can’t have you constantly up and down today. You’ll have to lay low and play quiet.”
She helped me up the stairs with the pressure of her hand in the middle of my back. I walked the length of the hall and opened the door at the end, which led to a narrower, tighter set of stairs. I climbed to the top floor, a small room in one corner of the house, that from the outside looked like a tower; inside, the Iona’s had set up a card table and folding chair, and they kept pads of paper and pens up there so I could sketch and write, and I’d decorated the walls with my captioned drawings of Martín Cordero stories. Now I sat on the windowsill, my shoulder against the mullioned glass, and drew the latest installment of the grizzly story, waiting for the first guests to arrive. I half-expected limousines, tuxedos and ball gowns, a red carpet to be unrolled from The Grand Villa doors and across the bare dirt clearing.
Soon cars were slowing on the road. They turned down the driveway with greater frequency as the day went on: convertibles, motorcycles, clean pickup trucks, an RV that needed its own real estate to turn around in. They filled the clearing tighter all the time. My breath, a circle of fog, throbbed on the glass, waiting for the first Lamborghini or Ferrari I thought must be on the way. Instead, I heard the sound of metal on metal, heavy machinery straining against its leashes. Martín Cordero’s truck and trailer stopped on the road, waiting for the driveway to clear, his arm stuck out of his rusted driver’s door to signal a turn. I went downstairs to meet him.
Murmurings from the wine tasters met me on the stairwell. I could pick out the Ionas voices, question-answering, wine-knowing. Their living room milled with people, the stemmed glasses and finger foods I saw earlier now floating in the soft hands of strangers. Claire met me at the landing. Her fingernails traced chilling targets between my shoulder blades and she lowered her cheek to the top of my head. “I told you, today you have to make up your mind and stay put.”
“I’m heading home,” I said.
“Are you actually?” She peered into my eyes, then gave me a guiding push toward the warm sunlight that filled the French doors.
My father was leading a tour group out of the vineyards. A Cadillac had just parked along the dry creek bank at the other end of the property, and the driver activated the car alarm—two shrill blips—with a remote control as he walked toward me. In the same moment, with a mechanical groan, Martín Cordero pulled his spray rig into the driveway. His truck idled among the cars parked between him and vines. He blew his horn.
Every face turned toward the sound. My father left his tour group to jog toward Martín Cordero, signaling for quiet. Claire stood behind me in the doorway and put her hands on my shoulders. Henry pushed past us. Even my mother, who believed in the gospel of minding-your-own-business, stood in the doorway of the Cooper’s Shop to see what the horn-blowing meant. My father had reached the truck and was speaking through the window, but Martín Cordero kept blasting his horn, insisting he spray the vineyards like aways—a matter of pride, I thought. Henry Iona refused. I could see him refusing from a distance. Everyone could.
Claire Iona let go of me and tried to distract the guests, moving among the crowd with a bottle, filling glasses, but I knew when people thought of this day in the future they would remember Martín Cordero, his dirty rig and blaring horn, not the Three Earths merlot. Henry Iona pulled my father away to say something he didn’t want Martín Cordero to overhear. Martín Cordero sat with his wrist draped over his truck steering wheel. His dirty cap was pushed back on his head and a lock of bronze-gray hair stuck to the sweat on his forehead. I’d never seen him sit still so long. Henry Iona finished whatever he was saying and entered the Grand Villa without looking at me, though I felt the energy of the crowd at my back blacken as he passed through them. On my father’s instruction, Martín Cordero pulled his truck and trailer through a gap in the parked cars and into a vineyard middle where he killed the engine. The silence carried, same as the tang of his chemicals always carried, and the silence drove people away. Guests put down their wineglasses and began to leave. Those that lingered seemed more interested in spectacle than wine, watching to see what the old man would do next.
My father walked toward me swinging his free hand as if walking uphill, full glass of wine in the other. Martín Cordero got out of his truck and climbed up on his trailer’s wheel well where everyone could see him. I heard people in the crowd laugh, looked over to see them whispering behind their wine glasses. My father reached out and ruffled my hair— he never did things like that.
“Is Henry mad at you?” I asked.
“The old man’s dead set on spraying.” My father swirled the wine in the glass, raised it to his nose, and sniffed, as if performing in front of the crowd again, but none of them were paying attention to him. “I do good work, if I say so myself,” he said. “Take this over to the old man. You two are friends. Make a peace offering. Take him home with you for a while.”
“Home to the Cooper’s Shop?”
“Until the guests leave. I’ve got to try and get them back. The day’s actually been going really well.”
My father reached like he wanted to ruffle my hair again, but stopped himself mid-motion, and both of us saw his hand shaking. I didn’t know how to carry the wine glass he’d handed me, whether by the stem or the bowl, and I kept changing positions and passing the glass between my hands as I walked toward Martín Cordero. He must have seen me coming but didn’t look down until I’d gotten close enough to touch the trailer wheel.
“Quite the pachanga,” he said, bending to take the wine.
“Do you want to wait inside? Dad said it’s okay. Come and finish your wine inside.”
From his perch on the fender Martín Cordero nodded. I walked beside him toward the Cooper’s Shop, though I wanted to run. The weight of so many eyes was on us. My mother opened the front door —she must have been watching too. She pulled out a chair at the kitchen table.
“Lynn’s my name,” she said. Offered him a refill, or coffee or tea, or anything he liked to eat.
I’d been trying to think of things to show him in my room, old toys or one of the models I’d been building lately, but couldn’t hold a clear enough picture in my mind to make a plan, I sat across from him in silence. My mother opened cupboards, silent except for the chirping of hinges.
“Where’d I leave off last time?” Martín Cordero said. “Have I shot the bear yet? Let’s just say I shot the bear.”
My mother turned when he spoke, and the strange look she gave him traveled across to me.
“My rifle barrel had gone cool again by the time the other men and I braved searching the shallow cave. We found the colossus—a California grizzly, sure enough—killed up against the back wall. Steam rose from bullet holes in the torso and neck. Jugular blood ran through the fur to the cave floor. I used my jackknife to take a claw from the front paw. It was big as my hand, that claw, smooth as river rock and colored like a gemstone.”
Martín Cordero raised his hand to show me, but I saw no claw, no magic. I didn’t like how the story was going, nor its pace or tone. His voice was missing flair, I thought.
“Ranching men would speak of my shot in the dark for years to come, because when spring returned the California Grizzlies did not rise from their dens. They said Martín Cordero had shot and killed the last of them,” Martín Cordero said.
My mother was staring. It embarrassed me. Martín Cordero didn’t seem to notice, or didn’t care. I got the terrible feeling he’d told this story a thousand times before.
“Couple of winters later, there were rumors of a grizzly stalking the foothills northwest of Lindsay. The animal had been spotted through the gaps between tree trunks, its coat blending into the bark and brown undergrowth then blinking out in the distance. A deep roar had been heard rumbling in the same stand of trees. Tracks were found in the snow. Hairs as unyielding as short whiskers were found caught in wire fences, and animals went missing, snatched from places of protection. I wanted them all to be true, those rumors, hoping someone else would take my place in the story, but there were no new sightings, no more tracks found or hairs plucked as evidence. It’s like I killed them all,” said Martín Cordero.
“Do you still have the claw?” I asked.
“What?”
“The claw. If you shot the last grizzly I want to see the claw.”
Martín Cordero took another drink then pushed the glass to middle of the table.
“I’m sorry I don’t like this wine more,” he said, and looked out the window, his eyes a fiery sheen. I turned in time to see two more cars leaving the winery. Martín Cordero stood, thanked my mother. He thanked me, too, which made me wish I’d kept my mouth shut.
I followed him as far as the threshold, then watched him walk to his rig.
“What’s this about a bear?” my mother asked me.
The engine growl echoed across clearing, the spray rig racing through the vineyard like a scream at the end of the world. Soon I tasted that chemical tang in the back of my throat. Martín Cordero’s yellow headlights rippled on the vines he passed, and I kept watching long after the air stunk of death.
By the end of summer we would be gone from Los Tres Tierras, my father traveling north to find work in Oregon then Washington, while my mother and I waited in Fresno for him to send us our new address. I’ll never know exactly why we left, but I know you can’t stay after the story ends. An ending means there’s nowhere left to stay.
John Carr Walker’s fiction and nonfiction has been appearing in literary journals since 2007. Sunnyoutside published his collection Repairable Men: Stories in 2014. He teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Portland. The newsletter John Carr Walker Sitting In His Little Room appears weekly.
17 February 2023
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