Page 53 of Red Mountain Burning
A Gentleman’s War
Two days after the bastards at Drink Flamingo poisoned Otis’s vines, Otis decided it was time to strike back. He’d been watching to see if anyone had noticed the pinotage taking root; his sabotage had apparently gone unnoticed. The first sign of a poor farmer is one who doesn’t walk his vines. Unless they were spraying chemicals, it seemed Bellflour and his team never set foot down the rows.
Still, his little prank wasn’t enough to satisfy his need to beat Bellflour. Though Otis hadn’t seen any damage to his own vines from the spray drift, the chemicals had seeped into the soil and tarnished the land he’d tended with great care for many years. His virgin soil had been spoiled by the chemicals of lazy farmers. Otis could only hope that his land was strong enough to fight off this and future attacks.
And that’s what it had been, a full-on attack. Otis wouldn’t have been surprised if Bellflour had demanded that the man spray on a windy day. Anyone certified to spray chemicals knew about drift. Surely Bellflour knew too. And as much of an idiot as Bellflour was, nothing he did was without calculation.
The same went for Otis. If Bellflour wanted war, then by God, Otis was ready to do battle. Creeping out of bed again well past midnight, he tiptoed out of the house and rushed under a fingernail moon to find Jonathan before any heavy barking broke into the night. Once his dog was happy, Otis hiked up to the winery. It was an eerily quiet night, and the big, inky sky was so vast it looked like it might swallow the earth at any minute like a hungry black hole. Otis found the great star Spica and made out the rest of the Virgo constellation—his sign, his arrangement up in the heavens.
Working his way past the vines, he reached the gravel road leading to the back of the winery, where he’d left the wheelbarrow full of the equipment needed for his next strike. He pushed the wheelbarrow up the hill. He stopped when he reached the chain-link fence markedNo Trespassing. Drink Flamingo had recently put up deterrent lights that shined brightly over the growing McMansion, the future pool, and the vines. When Otis looked up, he could no longer see the stars.
What a perfectly awful omen for the future, he thought.Drink Flamingo and snuff out the light.
With a flashlight shining at his feet, he watched for animal holes as he pushed the wheelbarrow off the road and along the fence line, circling the property. A lone coyote howled in the silence. When he reached the section where he’d broken in last time, he was happy to see the door he had made in the fence was still there. Waging war on these people was too easy when they weren’t even paying attention.
Tugging on the square of fence he’d cut, he peeled it back. One by one, he tossed the contents of the wheelbarrow through the hole: a shovel, a pipe saw, a bag of irrigation parts, a smart valve, and PVC primer and glue. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, he crawled under the fence.
He avoided the spotlights as best he could as he snuck to the edge of the vineyard and then up ten more feet toward the pool. He could see they were working on an outdoor kitchen to feed the drunks spilling out of the hot tubs, of which he now knew there were three. Three effing hot tubs! It was hard not to think Bellflour was doing all this just to piss Otis off.
Otis had been watching the vineyard workers for weeks and had seen them dig other holes where he had to assume the main irrigation line ran west from Sunset Road. From what he could tell, the line feeding the vineyard broke off the main line near where the tractor was resting and ran directly under where he was currently standing.
Pulling on his leather gloves, he thrust the shovel into the soil, carefully moving it into a nearby pile to be reused later. Though he could feel his age, he could have dug all night. Add all the feet he’d dug as a wine farmer together, and it might be enough to break through to the other side of the globe.
His research paid off quickly. The shovel hit something with a ping, and he saw the white of the pipe flash in the light. “Only three feet, you lazy shits. You should have gone deeper.”
To his delight, he saw that he’d guessed the correct width of the pipe. Everything was going as planned. He widened the hole, still careful to save all the soil he was extracting. When he was finished, the hole was about four feet by four feet, and he’d dug enough under and around the white pipe to easily manipulate it. Dropping down, his knees falling into the dust, he grabbed his saw and cut through the pipes slowly and methodically. He was in no rush. Having infiltrated the enemy’s camp, he needed to revel in the victory.
Once the line was prepared, he primed and glued the necessary surfaces and then lowered the smart valve down and fitted it to the pipes. He had to pull both pipes up some, bending them, but once he had it where he wanted it, the valve snapped into place. He held the valve upright for a few seconds as the glue dried. The last thing he did was take a rag and wipe down any possible fingerprints.
Connected to the smart valve was a wire leading to a small, circular antenna the size of a hockey puck. It was through this antenna that Otis would send signals to the solenoid, telling it to open and close the valve, controlling the amount of water going to the vines. He could kill the vines if he wanted to, but for now, he was thinking he’d just make them weak. Every wine farmer knew that baby vines needed an excess of water the first year or two in order for them to produce good fruit and to thrive for years to come. Otis had learned the hard way that if the young vines didn’t get water in the early years, they would often produce overly tannic, nearly undrinkable grapes for the remainder of their years.
Stretching out the wire, he set the antenna to the side and filled the hole. The only questionable part of this particular mission was that the hockey puck antenna had to be above ground so that it could communicate with Otis’s phone. But Otis was confident in their laziness.
Feeling a surge of pride, he let out a little howl, not loud enough to draw attention, but a call of victory out into the night.
This might be the greatest thing I’ve ever done for this mountain.
* * *
Harry Bellflour couldn’t sleep.He tugged open the refrigerator door and searched for something in the sparsely covered shelves to occupy his mind. Nothing interested him. A jug of low-pulp orange juice. A stick of salted butter. A dozen jumbo eggs. He definitely didn’t feel like cooking. Smoked fish spread. A box of leftover pizza. Thai leftovers from the place in West Richland. Four bottles of white wine. Time to get more. Coke Zero. Why was he still drinking that stuff? No matter what he did, his damn belly wasn’t going away.
He pulled out a bottle of wine and the box of pizza and headed for the back door. He’d been so hot lately, barely able to sleep. If he went back to the doctor, the know-it-all would just tell him stop drinking and eating so much, to exercise more. Oh, screw it. Under the fingernail moon, he took his midnight snack out to the deck that overlooked Red Mountain. Dropping into the Adirondack chair, he poured himself a glass of wine and took a long sip.
If it wasn’t the heat, it was the loneliness that kept him up. He’d never married, but he’d fallen in love and fallen hard. This view over Red Mountain would be so much more beautiful if his ex, Charlotte, were sitting next to him, but she’d chosen to end their relationship instead of following him from California to Washington State last year. He reached for a slice of sausage and onion pizza and shook his head. Was he that difficult to live with? Yes, he worked too much, and he had issues controlling his temper, but he’d tried his best. If only he didn’t have so much of his father in him.
Harry had promised himself his whole life that he’d do anything not to be like the man, who had never hit him but might as well have. If Harry had a dime for every time his father had called him a disappointment, he could buy the whole damned mountain. Emotional abuse often cut deeper.
“Look at these grades,” the old man used to say with frustration that cut like a chainsaw. “You’re a disappointment!”
There was ten cents.
“What’s wrong with you, Harry? I find it hard to believe you’re my son.”
“Harry, I’ve never been so disappointed.”
A couple more dimes.
Why was the man’s angry voice still in his head? It was probably why Bellflour worked so damn hard, still trying to please he who’d been dead for twenty years. He wished his father could see him now. He’d helped build an empire. Maybe he owed his father for that. There were probably better ways to raise a child, but if he’d done nothing else, Harry’s father had given him the drive to work his ass off.
