big Tahitian. “Tari's the wave of the future,” she said to Gideon. “He's a role model for every Tahitian employee we have.'
Tari glanced uncomfortably around, and Gideon caught the tail end of a scowl he cast at one of the workers, who had paused in his manhandling of the bags to eavesdrop with undisguised amusement. Obviously, being a role model to his fellow Tahitians was not something to which Tari aspired.
'Gideon is a friend of John's,” Maggie told him, “and Poppa wants him to see the farm. Can you take an hour or so and show him around?'
'Sure, you bet,” Tari declared, practically rolling his eyes with relief. Rattling around the plantation was clearly more to his liking than talking about accounts payable.
They started with the drying shed itself, a single room about eighty feet by a hundred, a good ten degrees warmer than it was outside, redolent with a pungent smell that Gideon associated more with wineries than with coffee plantations, and suffused with a milky glow from the light coming through the translucent walls and ceiling. The floor was made of wood planking, but except for a couple of cleared aisles down the center from each side, most of it was three or four inches deep in a sea of coffee beans ranging from greenish brown to palest beige and separated into different-colored sections by movable lengths of white plastic pipe. Workers shuffled slowly, sleepily, through them in the heat, spreading and rearranging the shallow heaps with homemade, blunt-toothed wooden rakes.
Tari, now in his element, was an enthusiastic and knowledgeable guide. Gideon learned that the beans varied in color because they lightened as they dried, that drying took ten days to two weeks, depending on the weather, that they had to be raked and turned over three or four times a day to keep them from drying unevenly. He learned that when the coffee berries came in from the field they were loaded into the pulper, a gleaming, stainless-steel contraption of belts, pulleys, gears, conveyors, and tanks that took up one end of the shed, and then, via conveyor belt, into several large vats, where they fermented for two or three days—that was where the winery-like fragrance came from—before being washed and spread on the floor to dry. And that was it. They were then bagged and shipped to warehouses and masteries around the world.
'Interesting,” murmured Gideon in the sober, receptive tone one uses at such times. “And so this is the pulper. Impressive piece of machinery.'
'Plenty bells and whistles,” Tari agreed, looking at it fondly.
'Looks as if you must have to be pretty careful around it.'
He was fishing again, but Tari wasn't biting. “Oh yeah, you bet,” he said amiably. “You sure don't want to get no parts caught in there.'
'Mm. Seems to me I remember hearing that one of the men was hurt a while back.'
'Yeah, two fingers chopped off, but now we got a training program. Nobody losing parts no more.'
'I'm glad to hear it,” Gideon said, speaking with a personal stake in the matter. Opening a bag of Weekend Blend some morning and finding somebody's parts in with the beans would be a hell of a way to wake up.
When they left the shed, Tari drove him up the mountain in one of the white Toyota vans, and with Gideon hanging on to the window frame to keep his seat—Maggie proved right about the goat-track roads—they bucked and wobbled over sinkholes, rocks, and streambeds. A fifteen-minute drive took them past neatly tended plots of Chinese vegetables and banana and breadfruit trees and up into the wilder, more spectacular vegetation of the interior: tall, arching acacias with their naked pink trunks wreathed with moss; flame trees alight with brilliant, red-orange flowers; a thousand kinds of ferns growing anywhere there was space. The temperature cooled when they moved underneath the cloud cover that hung about the top of Mt. Iviroa most afternoons. At about the two- thousand-foot level, Tari pulled over at the base of a hillside that had been cleared and replanted.
He waved an arm. “Coffee trees.'
They didn't look like trees to Gideon. Bushes, maybe, and not very impressive ones. Eight or nine feet tall, straggling, droopy, and undernourished-looking, they seemed like poor cousins to most other growing things on the mountainside.
Tari looked at him with amusement. “Sure, man, you bet. Big, fat trees—lousy berries. Crummy, skinny trees— berries taste great, all the flavor goes into them. This part here, we on the Blue Devil farm. Best damn coffee in whole world,” he said reverently, and then a moment later: “Bar none, man.'
The trees didn't look like trees and the farm didn't look like a farm; not the farms Gideon was used to (admittedly, not all that many) There were no neatly laid-out rows, no straight lines of furrowed earth. The spindly coffee trees were planted helter-skelter on the hillside, with other plants—banana, papaya, avocado—growing among them, seemingly at random.
But there was a reason for the apparent disorder, Tari was quick to let him know. Coffee trees did not replenish nitrogen in the soil, but banana, papaya, and avocado did. It was all a matter of conservation.
'Ah,” said Gideon.
Tari plucked a berry from one of the trees, a little red fruit about the size and color of a small radish.
'Hey, Gideon, how many these buggers you think it take to make one pound coffee?'
'A hundred?” Gideon said, trying to please.
Tari, pleased, threw back his head and laughed. “Guess again, man.'
'A thousand?'
'Wow, no wonder it's expensive.'
'You bet!” Tari plucked a ripe berry from the tree and squeezed it between thumb and forefinger. The coffee bean itself, a relatively large seed with a white, fibrous covering, burst from the berry into the palm of his other hand.
