The Fermenting Rivalry

The thing you have to understand about the fermentation barn at our vineyard in Nababeep is that it hums, all day and all night, a low electric drone from rows of stainless steel tanks that never sleep, and on top of that you have six dehumidifiers chugging moisture out of the air so the must doesn't spoil, and each one of those machines drips into a drain bucket that somebody has to lift and carry and dump, and for five years that somebody has been me, Glen Palmer, forty-four years old, bucket lifter, the bottom rung of a ladder that Beatrice Swenson likes to remind me I will never climb.

I don't hate Beatrice. I want that understood too. Hate takes energy and I save my energy for lifting buckets, but there is a long and stupid history between us that started when she came to work here five years ago as head of barrel management and quality control, a title she says with the full weight of the words, and it got worse three years ago at the spring chili cook-off when her verde beat my brisket chili by one vote, one vote out of forty, and the vote that did it was cast by the butcher's nephew who I am fairly sure had never eaten a chili in his life. She has brought it up at every staff braai since. I have made it a personal project to be better than her at everything else, and so far the score is lopsided in her favor, which is why I keep lifting buckets and trying to lift them better than anyone has ever lifted buckets in the history of drain buckets.

So it was a Thursday afternoon in late March, the air in the barn thick with the smell of grape must and wet concrete, and I was hauling a full bucket from the dehumidifier at the far end, the heavy four-gallon steel one with the bent handle that nobody else will touch, and I had it up at chest height and was mid-step between two tanks when the sound came.

I still don't know what it was. Later we found out that a wedding crew had set up in the dusty yard outside and one of them had plugged a subwoofer into the barn's external socket, and when the DJ tested his levels the microphone picked up the subwoofer and the subwoofer picked up the microphone and the whole loop roared through that building like the barn itself had a throat and had decided to clear it. The tanks rattled. The floor buzzed under my boots. And I stumbled.

The bucket sloshed. Not all of it, maybe a quart of gray drain water, and it went sideways in a flat arc and landed dead on a pair of brown leather boots that had not been there when I started my step, because of course they had not, because of course Beatrice Swenson had appeared behind me at the exact moment of my greatest professional humiliation in five years of bucket work.

"Palmer!" she shouted over the roar, which was still going, that feedback loop holding its note like it had a grudge of its own. "You sloshed me, you absolute ox, look at my boots, look at them!"

"They're boots!" I yelled back, setting the bucket down hard enough to slosh again, which I want noted was not my fault. "They're work boots in a wet barn, what did you think was going to happen to them, a life of leisure?"

"They're leather, you donkey, they were treated, do you know what treated leather costs?" She was pointing at her feet like a lawyer presenting evidence to a jury, and her hair had come loose from its clip and she was shouting without any real anger in it, the way she always shouts, which took me years to figure out, that the shouting was just how she talked when she was enjoying herself.

Then the roar cut off, dead silence, and in the silence there was a small clatter, a tiny plastic click against concrete, and I watched something the size of a matchbox shoot out from under the fold of her apron pocket and skitter across the damp floor and vanish under the nearest tank, a long low stainless thing that went on for fifteen feet in the dark under there.

Her whole face changed. "No," she said. "No no no."

"What was that?"

"Nothing. It's fine. It's fine, Glen, go away."

"It's obviously not fine, you look like I shot your dog." I crouched down and squinted under the tank. It was dim back there, the overhead lights not reaching past the tank's shadow, and the floor was damp and there was a gray film of old must dust down there and somewhere in it, a sliver of soap.

"It's a soap sliver," she admitted finally, in the voice of a woman confessing to a crime. "I keep the ends of the bars and I use them in order, oldest first, and that one has been with me two years and it fell out of my pocket when the noise started and I need it back."

"You have ritualistic soap habits," I said, and I couldn't keep the grin off my face. "The barrel manager of an entire vineyard, the woman who won a chili cook-off by one suspicious vote, hoards soap slivers like a squirrel hoards acorns, and I have to hear about this on a Thursday."

"You have no room to talk, you alphabetize your bucket rags."

"How do you know that?"

"Claudia told me. She said you iron them. She said you iron the rags, Glen."

"They hold a shape better ironed, that's just true, that's just physics," and she laughed then, a real laugh, and something about it landed on me in a way I didn't have time to think about, because she was already dropping to her knees on the wet concrete with her sleeve shoved up and her arm in under the tank.

So I got down there too. It was the only decent thing, and also the only practical thing, because the gap under the tank was long and low and one person's arm didn't reach and I have the longer arms, a fact I stated out loud in case anyone was keeping score. We crawled up on the concrete on our stomachs side by side, shoulders nearly touching, two heads stuck in a dark gap under a humming tank, and the light was so poor I was feeling more than seeing, sweeping my hand through dust and damp, and her hand was in there too, and the third sweep her fingers crossed mine and neither of us pulled back fast enough.

"Sorry," she said, and her voice had gone quieter than I'd ever heard it.

"My fault," I said. "I got in your way."

"You've never once said my fault to me in five years."

"Well don't get used to it."

I drew my hand out into the light with a flat palm of nothing, just a wine cork and a bottle cap and a clot of dust, and held it up between us like I was presenting a ring at an auction. "No soap," I said. "Maybe it rolled to the far side." Beatrice looked at the junk and then looked at me and her face did something complicated, disappointment and embarrassment and something warmer underneath, and she was still on her knees in the dust with her hair hanging down and a smear of must grime across one cheekbone and I was aware, suddenly and uncomfortably, of how close we were, of how I could hear her breathing over the hum of the dehumidifiers.

"You're staring, Palmer," she said.

"You've got dust on your face."

"Do I." She wiped at the wrong cheek. "Gone?"

"Other side."

She wiped again and missed again and finally I reached out without thinking, which for me and Beatrice was unprecedented, five years of rivalry and I had never once touched her, and I brushed the smear off her cheekbone with my thumb, and she went very still, and for a second that lasted longer than it should have we were both silent.

"Well," she said.

"Well," I said.

"Thanks for trying." She took the cork off my palm and tossed it aside, her fingers staying on mine a beat past the handoff. "Two years I've had that soap. I'm not going to explain why, so don't ask."

"I wasn't going to ask."

"You were absolutely going to ask, you were building up to a joke, I could see it loading behind your eyes."

"Maybe I was, a little," I admitted, and I sat back on my heels on the wet floor and she sat back too and we were just two adults in their forties sitting in the dust in the corner of a barn, and out in the yard the wedding crew had started playing actual music, something with a horn section, and Beatrice looked toward the little office nook and then back at me and there was a question forming on her face that I had genuinely never seen there before, not once in five years, and I realized I wanted to hear it.

"Glen," she said.

"Yes."

"How long has it been since somebody did that? The face thing. Honestly."

And I thought about it, sitting there with drain water soaking through my jeans, and the honest answer was long enough that saying the number out loud felt like handing her ammunition, and she saw me do that math in my head and she laughed at me again, but softer this time, and leaned in.

She leaned in and I leaned back, because old habits die hard and also because my brain hadn't caught up to whatever this was, and Beatrice Swenson took that lean back as an insult or a challenge or maybe just an invitation to escalate, which was more on brand for us than anything else that had happened that afternoon. She put one hand flat on my chest and shoved, not hard, nothing that could actually knock a man my size over, just a push with attitude in it, the kind of push she'd probably been saving up for five years.

"Palmer, you are the most infuriating man I have ever worked with."

"And you're a control freak with a soap collection, so we're even."

She shoved again and I caught her wrist, mostly on reflex, and she pulled against my grip the way she pulled against everything, with her whole body, and my boots slipped on the damp concrete and her footing went with mine and we went down together, backwards, onto the stack of burlap sacks that live in the corner by the office nook, the ones they use for covering the crush pads in harvest season. They smelled like dust and old grapes and they broke our fall with a softwhump that I'm surprised didn't bring the whole wedding crew running. We landed half tangled, my shoulder in the sacks, her weight half across my chest, her wrist still in my hand because I hadn't had time to let go, and her face was