Page 20 of Red Mountain Burning
No Trespassing
Like a man passing by a bad wreck on the highway, Otis couldn’t help but turn his head toward the Drink Flamingo site every time he left his house. Every day brought a new surprise, another shovel of dirt over the coffin of Otis’s vision for Red Mountain. The giant hole behind the winery was definitely going to be a pool, and it looked like the smaller hole next to it would be a hot tub. Otis could already hear the party music hurting his vines’ ears. If only he could give them earplugs and blindfolds.
The most recent surprise had come when Drink Flamingo had raised a chain-link fence around the entire property. Rings of barbed wire lined the top. It now looked like Otis was a neighbor to a federal prison.No Trespassingsigns hung every twenty feet from the fence, a sentiment against everything Red Mountain stood for. Why Otis had chosen to save Harry Bellflour from the coyotes last year was a mystery to him. Right now, he’d like to beat the moron over the head with one of those signs.
Drifting further away from Joan, Otis’s days were plagued with the question of how to combat Bellflour and how to protect Till Vineyards and the rest of Red Mountain. Even when he spent time with Joan, he wasn’t actually there, and he knew damn well that she could sense his lack of presence. It was as if she’d stopped trying with him, and that idea scared him even more.
A few weeks ago, had she sensed his mind racing, she would have put her hands on his cheeks and made him face her, patiently telling him, “Everything that matters is right here. Right now. Let the rest go.” Joan hadn’t done that lately.
He could only imagine how difficult he was to live with, and the truth of it kept him up at night. How long could Joan tolerate him? How long before he’d come home to find her bags packed in the foyer?
With a trio of chorizo tacos from a taco truck in Benton City by his side, Otis sat in his tasting room watching the men on the other side of the chain-link fence planting Drink Flamingo’s cabernet sauvignon. The solution to all his life’s troubles suddenly hit him. Perhaps it wasn’t the best answer, but even the taste of the notion felt like a cool swallow of scotch burning down his throat, delivering a dose of peace throughout his tired body. Perhaps the answer was much simpler than he’d thought.
No, he couldn’t kill Bellflour, nor could he burn the place down. But hecouldinstitute a much more discreet type of warfare, a grassroots campaign against his enemy—a series of stealthy strikes that could potentially win the war in the end. David versus Goliath.
Otis knew exactly what his first strike would be. He marched with a mission toward his truck. The blue sky seemed more electric and inviting than it had for the last few days. Even the mountain had taken on a new glow. With a smirk, Otis climbed into his truck and pulled out. He took another look through the Drink Flamingo fence. One man worked a hydraulic auger, boring holes into the ground. Another man followed behind, dropping baby cabernet vines into the ground. Oh, did Otis have a surprise for them.
He rode through the heart of Benton City, the kind of one-horse town you could easily miss if you blinked. The newsplayed on the radio—a story concerning an elementary teacher trying innovative techniques in Ellensburg—but Otis was barely listening. He was focused on his mission, working through the details while winding west along the country roads past apple and cherry orchards. He eventually reached the plant nursery where most of the wineries in eastern Washington State bought their vines.
“Otis!” the man behind the desk exclaimed as he rose from his chair. He was a short man and moved in a slow shuffle around his desk. “Haven’t seen you in a long time.”
Otis put up his hands. “I’m mostly planted out, Richard.” After a quick handshake, he looked around nervously. “I was hoping I might look through your list of available vines, though.”
Richard slanted an eyebrow. “Anything in particular you’re looking for?”
Indeed, there was. But Otis needed to be inconspicuous. “Just perusing.”
The man thumbed through a stack of papers and found the latest inventory report. Otis took it, found a seat by the water cooler, and reached for the reading glasses in his shirt pocket.
The list of varieties filled the left column. The available quantity was to the right. It didn’t take Otis long to find what he was looking for. In fact, he couldn’t believe this particular variety was on the list and had a sudden urge to raise his hands up in victory.
Otis pulled off his glasses and did his best to query the man without revealing his conniving pleasure. “Can I have thirty of the pinotage?”
Richard looked over his computer at Otis. “Pinotage? Should I even ask?”
Otis shook his head. “No, you shouldn’t.”
Though he wasn’t one to typically despise a variety, he’d never tasted a pinotage he liked. Pinotage was the laughing stock of the wine industry. If cabernet sauvignon was the most noble of varieties—the king and queen all in one—pinotage was the diseased scum begging for food in the village. Otis had never sucked on the sole of a worn-out shoe, but he imagined the experience similar to drinking a glass of this putrid variety. Or perhaps it paralleled sipping a vile liquid that had been filtered through a dirty gym sock and then aged in the belly of a car tire. He could not imagine how South Africans had tolerated it for so long.
Pinotage was the perfect grape to infest his neighbor’s vineyard.
He could tell Richard was dying to know why the hell the grapefather would plant pinotage, but Otis wasn’t about to tell him the truth. Still, he figured he’d better offer him a bone before all of Washington was talking about how Otis had gone senile, tearing up his syrah and planting pinotage.
Otis racked his brain for an excuse and then spat out, “I’ve a friend in Lodi doing some interesting things with the variety. Thought I’d see how they grow up here. I’ll probably rip them out in a couple of years.”
“Worth trying, I guess,” Richard said. “The only reason I have some is a man over in Sunnyside who’s married to a South African asked for them.”
“I’ll let you know what I find. You never know.”
“Would you like me to send you a bill?” To Otis’s nod, he said, “You got it. Give me about ten minutes.”
He shuffled out a back door, and Otis returned to his truck. He pulled down the tailgate and waited, further deliberating how to follow through with his plan. Drink Flamingo didn’t have a dog, and he hadn’t seen any cameras around the property, but he’d need to double-check. He could take no chances.
Richard came riding up the gravel road in an ATV, stealing Otis from his thoughts. Sliding to a stop, Richard shuffled to the back and pulled two black plastic bags out of the bed. “How’s everything else going over on the mountain, Otis? I hated to sell Drink Flamingo my vines, but…”
“Don’t apologize,” Otis said, reminded of how small the wine world was. “If not you, they’d have found them somewhere else.”
Richard slung the bags into the back of Otis’s truck. “Hopefully, they’ll play nice.”
