Bitter Grounds

Russ Schmidt was forty-four years old and his hands had been purple for three days. Coffee cherry pulp did that to you, stained the skin like berry juice and held on through soap and hot water and anything else you threw at it. He kept picking at the skin around his thumbnail out of habit. Tammy said it made him look like he had a disease.

The cooperative sat up a mud road that no truck enjoyed, halfway up a green hill in Minas Gerais where the air was thick enough to chew. The guesthouse was one cement room with two cots and a fan that clicked on every rotation like it was annoyed about it. Russ had been coming to Brazil for buying trips for eleven years. Tammy had come along this time because she was between assignments and because neither of them could stand the silence of the house in Portland anymore, though neither of them said that part out loud.

They had gotten married young, twenty-nine and twenty-seven, met in a café on Hawthorne where she'd been writing a piece she never finished. That was fifteen years back. The last six of those had been mostly logistics.

That morning they'd walked the drying patios with the co-op's lead farmer, an old man named Ermelino who spoke fast and quiet and used his whole body when he talked about soil. Russ had pinched a cherry off a low branch just to feel the give of it, squeezed a little too hard, and the skin split and spit red pulp all over his fingers and the front of his shirt. Tammy hadn't even laughed. She'd looked at the stain on his shirt the way you look at a bill you already knew was coming.

Now they were back in the cupping room, a long concrete space with a row of white bowls on a steel table and the smell of ground coffee everywhere, which was the one smell Russ had never gotten tired of in his whole working life.

Quinn Hyde stood at the far end of the table with a clipboard she didn't need. She was the farmer's daughter, thirty-five, and she'd come back to the region two years ago after some years away, and she did the translating for the visiting buyers because nobody else in the family wanted the job. She wore her hair pulled back and a work shirt with the sleeves rolled and she had a way of standing still that Russ noticed the way you notice a well-built piece of equipment. Solid. Nothing wasted.

She was translating Ermelino's pitch for the second buyer in the room, Reid Nixon, an American expat who'd been in the country so long he affected a slight accent when he ordered lunch. Reid was forty-nine, silver at the temples, and he wore linen like he was on vacation instead of working. He'd lost a bidding war to Russ in twenty nineteen over a lot of natural process yellow bourbon and he'd never once let Russ forget it existed.

"Tell him his fermentation tanks are a liability," Reid said, nodding at Ermelino. "Tell him if he wants American money he installs temperature control or he sells to the co-op floor at commodity rate."

Quinn translated it, and her voice didn't change, but she looked at Russ when she finished. Not at Reid. At Russ. She held it a beat longer than she needed to, and Russ, who was forty-four years old and had been married for fifteen of them, felt something move in his chest that he hadn't felt in a long time and didn't have a name for and didn't want to examine.

He didn't look away either. He didn't know why. It just seemed rude to, like she'd asked a question and he owed her an answer even though no words had passed.

Ermelino was talking again, fast, hands going. Quinn's translation came out level and exact. "He says temperature control costs eleven thousand dollars he does not have, and that Mr. Nixon's money buys coffee, not opinions."

Reid laughed. Russ didn't. Quinn's mouth did something at the corner, not quite a smile, and Russ thought, well, there it is. Whatever that was.

The cupping went on for an hour. Slurping, scoring, scribbling. Russ gave the lot an eighty-seven and wrote "stone fruit, clean, long finish" on the form in his blocky handwriting. Reid gave it an eighty-five and a half and a smirk. The numbers were close enough that it would come down to money, and Russ had more money this year, and they both knew it, and the knowing sat in the room like a fifth person.

Tammy didn't come to the cupping. She'd said she had emails to answer, which was true in the sense that all her excuses were true. She was a travel writer, forty-two, good at her work, and she'd spent three days in this guesthouse writing pieces about places that were not this place, and Russ had understood that too.

She told him that night, on the second cot, while the fan clicked.

"I'm flying home tomorrow. The commercial flight out of Varginha. There's a morning one."

Russ was unlacing his boots. He stopped with one boot half off.

"Okay," he said.

"I mean I'm flying home and not coming back. You finish the trip. I'll take my stuff."

"Tammy."

"I've thought about it for a while. It's not a fight. I don't want a fight." She was already pulling her pack out from under the cot, unzipping it, folding with the flat efficient motions of a woman who had packed and unpacked a hundred hotel rooms for work. "I haven't loved you in years, Russ. Maybe six years. Maybe more. I kept waiting for it to come back and it's not coming back and I'm tired."

He sat there with one boot on and one off and the fan clicked and clicked. Outside, somewhere down the hill, a dog was going at something. The stain from the cherry juice was still on his fingers, dark under the nail of his thumb.

He didn't say anything. He couldn't find anything that wasn't a lie or an insult, so he said nothing, and Tammy packed in the silence like she was packing around him, like he was furniture.

At some point she said, "Say something, at least."

"I don't know what to say."

"That's about right," she said, but there wasn't much poison in it. There wasn't much of anything in it. That was the worst part, how little was left in it.

She slept on the far cot with her back to the room. Russ lay awake on his, listening to the fan and the dog and the frogs in the dark, looking at the ceiling that some former guest had hung a woven hammock hook in, and thinking, of all the stupid things, about a woman at a cupping table who had held his eyes one beat longer than she needed to.

* * *

The morning van came at six to take Tammy down the mud road to the highway, where she'd catch a bus to the Varginha airport, and Reid was up drinking bad instant coffee on the step and watched her load her bag with the polite blank face of a man who knew exactly what he was seeing and found it useful information.

"Safe travels," Reid said to her.

"Thanks, Reid."

Russ stood in the doorway and didn't come down the steps. Tammy looked back at him once from the van window, and her face wasn't angry or sad, just tired, and then the van pulled away and the red dust hung in the air a long time after.

He went back inside and sat on his cot. His plane wasn't for three more days. The coffee was mid-cupping and the money wasn't settled and he had a job to do, and he was alone in a cement room in the hills of Brazil with purple fingers and a marriage that had just ended in four sentences, and the thing he felt most, the honest ugly truth of it, was relief. Relief, and under the relief, faint as a smell through a wall, that beat longer of eye contact from yesterday.

He got up and washed his face in the basin and put on a clean shirt and went to work. Down at the cupping room, Ermelino's crew was laying out the morning's samples, and Quinn was already there, sleeves rolled, bent over the grinder, and when Russ came in she looked up at him and didn't look away.

"Your wife left," she said. Not a question. The whole hill knew already. News traveled faster than vans here.

"Yeah," Russ said. "She did."

Quinn nodded, slow, like he'd answered something bigger than what he'd said. Then she went back to the grinder and Russ took his place at the table, and the morning went on, and he kept noticing, all through it, that she was there.

The co-op kept a kind of bar, which was a stretch. It was a concrete counter in a back room with a card table, four plastic chairs, and a shelf of cachaça and warm beer and one bottle of something yellow that nobody could identify. The power went out at eight, which was normal, so the room ran on two bulbs strung off a generator, and the generator coughed every forty seconds like it was dying in instalments.

Russ went down there because his cot was unbearable and the fan was unbearable and the silence after Tammy was unbearable, and silence had a way of filling up with everything he hadn't said. Reid was already there. Of course Reid was there. Reid was always there when Russ was at his worst, some kind of weather pattern.

"Schmidt," Reid said, and tipped his chair back against the wall. "Rough morning. Heard the missus caught the early van."

"Yeah. She did."

"Shame." Reid poured himself a beer and pushed a second bottle across the table toward Russ, the way a man does when he wants to buy something that isn't for sale. "Eleven years coming down here, I always figured you had the whole picture. Business, family. Steady hands." He gestured at Russ's purple fingers with his own clean white ones. "Well. Two out of three."

Russ picked at the skin around his thumbnail and said nothing. That was becoming a theme.

"Varginha flight, was it? Commercial?" Reid took a long pull. "Because I'll tell you what I see, from where I sit. I see a guy who gave a lot an eighty-seven and gave his wife nothing. Six years of nothing, I hear. And now she's gone and you're still up that hill grading samples like it matters." He smiled with all the warmth of a clipboard. "No offense, buddy."

"Plenty taken."

"Hey, I'm just saying what everybody's saying. Half the hill watched her load that bag. You know what they're saying in the cupping room?"

"They can say what they want."

"That's the spirit," Reid said. "That's exactly the attitude that lost you nothing yet but the day's young."

The door scraped and Quinn came in, and the room changed temperature in a way Russ felt in his chest before he understood why. She had her hair tied back and a flashlight in her hand, and she looked at the two of them the way a person looks at a spill she's going to have to mop up.

Reid said something in Portuguese, lazy, a joke shaped like a question, and Russ caught the shape of it if not the words. Quinn answered without sitting down. Her voice was flat and fast and quiet, the way Ermelino's was, and whatever she said, it had a blade in it. She looked straight at Reid while she said it, and Reid's smile stayed on but his eyes went somewhere else, and he lifted his bottle a centimeter like he was conceding a point in a game nobody had agreed to play.

Then she turned to Russ, in English. "He's done. Come on. You need air."

"He's got beer," Reid said. "Air's free but it's overrated."

"Come on," Quinn said, to Russ only. "Before you say something you'll bill him for later."

Russ stood up and left the beer on the table, warm and unconquered, and followed her out into the dark.

* * *

She took him down past the drying patios and up a cow path he'd never noticed before, flashlight low so the beam just found their feet. The frogs were deafening. The air was thick enough to chew. Neither of them talked, which suited Russ fine, because talking was the thing he'd failed at for six years and he didn't trust himself with it tonight.

Twenty minutes up the path the sound changed, and she clicked the flashlight off, and there it was. A waterfall, small and loud, falling maybe eight meters into a black pool that held a little of the sky. The rocks around it gave off the day's heat like they'd been saving it.

"There's a spring up top," Quinn said. "Cold. The co-op guys come here on Sundays when there's no buyers around to watch them act human."

"Why'd you bring me here?"

She thought about it. He could hear her thinking, under the water sound.

"Because you had that face," she said. "The face you had all morning at the table. Like a man doing arithmetic about his whole life and not liking the total."

Russ laughed, and it surprised him, coming out of a body that hadn't laughed since the van left. "Yeah. That's about the size of it."

"So get in the water," she said. "It fixes the arithmetic for a while. Trust me. I've done a lot of arithmetic in that pool."

She started unbuttoning her shirt right there on the bank, no ceremony, and Russ stood there a second like an idiot before his hands caught up. He got his boots off, his shirt, his jeans, wet and stiff from the day, and left everything in a pile that a passing farmer would find hilarious in the morning. He heard her steps go in first and heard her hiss at the cold, and then he followed, and the water hit him like a verdict.

It was freezing. It was exactly what he deserved. He went under all the way and came up gasping and pushing his hair out of his eyes, and the waterfall thundered on his shoulders, and somewhere in the shock of it his whole marriage seemed to rinse off him a little, like cherry pulp, like everything else that stained his hands this week.

Quinn was standing waist deep near the fall, backlit by a shred of moon the clouds kept letting through and taking back. Thirty-five years old, two of those years back on this hill after everything it had cost her to leave it and cost her more to return. He knew the outline of her story from Ermelino's rambling and from the co-op gossip, and he knew better than to ask about it tonight. She'd tell him or she wouldn't.

She came closer through the water, no hurry, and put her hand flat on his chest.

Her palm was cold from the pool and his skin was hot under it, and she spread her fingers out over his sternum like she was reading something there. His heart was working