“Take your pick,” he says.
“I already did,” I tell him. “Or weren’t you listening?”
He drapes his arm across the back of my seat and starts playing with my damp hair while I pick up the maps and stuff them back in the glove compartment. I don’t have to look in the rearview mirror to know that for all the hair spray I used this morning my hair is now a mess of dark bedsprings. When we were kids, Chase used to tease me, saying I had hair like colored folks, especially when it got wet. I didn’t need him or anybody else to make me feel bad about my hair. I could do that all by myself just by looking in the mirror.
Chase’s fingers have wandered down to the back of my neck, sending little shivers up and down my spine. I don’t let on, though. I know he’s only teasing me. I shove his hand away. “If you don’t get this car moving, I’m going to get out and walk, rain or no rain.”
He laughs, then lifts his foot off the brake. The car jerks forward. “You hear about Silas Beaureve’s groves getting torched last night?” he asks.
“That’s all anybody was talking about in homeroom this morning,” I say. Silas Beaureve has one of the smaller groves in the area, about a hundred acres. I look over at Chase. “Somebody said he lost about two acres.”
“Half acre.”
“Lightning, you think?”
“Maybe.”
“Probably was.”
“Been a lot of lightning hits around here lately,” he says.
It’s like somebody has taken to sliding ice cubes up and down my arms. I rub them to get rid of the goose bumps.
Chase isn’t saying anything everybody else isn’t already thinking. The fires started a few weeks back with Moss Henley’s outhouse going up in flames. Everybody thought it was a good joke on Moss. A week later Travis Waite’s toolshed caught fire. Folks figured it was probably an accident, gasoline leaking from the lawn mower or something. Then the bleachers over by the football field burned down and people started to worry. Now, with Silas Beaureve’s orange groves getting torched—although I am still holding to the lightning theory myself—people have begun looking around for somebody to blame.
“They’re saying it might be one of the pickers,” Chase says. “Maybe more than one.”
“Well, now, that doesn’t make much sense. They need the work. Why would they burn down Silas’s groves right in the middle of picking season?” I bend down to get one of the maps I missed and return it to the glove compartment. “And that doesn’t explain those other fires.”
“Doesn’t it? Think about it. Moss is on the police force. And he’s friends with Travis Waite. Travis is the crew boss for most of the pickers around here.” Chase says this like he knows something I don’t.
“So?”
“Maybe there’s some connection. Somebody out to cause trouble, to get revenge or something.”
“Well, sure. Revenge. Probably one of the pickers burned down the bleachers because some cheerleader wouldn’t go out with him.” I grin at Chase. He doesn’t notice.
After that we don’t talk for the next three blocks. The car picks up speed as we head onto the county road toward home. Chase has the wipers going full blast, but the rain is so heavy I can’t see through the windshield.
I’m getting worried. If I can’t see the road, then how can he? My heart has picked up the beat of the wipers. Swishthunkswishthunkswishthunk. I am having Keatsian fears of ceasing to be.
“Maybe you should pull over until the rain lets up,” I tell him.
Chase ignores me. No surprise there.
“Well, for heaven’s sake, slow down, then.”
He lightens his foot on the gas pedal.
With all this talk about the pickers, I suddenly remember Gator. I look over at Chase. “You see anybody besides me in the cemetery when you pulled up?”
He shakes his head. “No. Why?”
I shrug.
“What were you doing in the cemetery?”
Drat. I knew I shouldn’t have brought that up. I’m not about to tell him I’ve been reading poems to dead boys. “English assignment,” I say.
“Delpheena Poyer.”
It isn’t a question, but I nod anyway.
“Epitaphs.”
Another nod. Chase had Miss Poyer two years earlier. He doesn’t have to know the assignment was weeks ago.
I’ve got Gator stuck in my head. Gator has been working in our groves since he wasn’t much higher than my dad’s knee. He shows up every season, as reliable as lightning bugs in April. Nobody knows who he belongs to, if anybody. Seems like most of the pickers look out for him while he’s here—or used to when he was a kid—but as far as I know, no one’s ever claimed him. Nobody even knows for sure how old he is, not even Gator himself. I figure him to be about the same age as Chase, probably eighteen.
When we were kids, Gator used to play with Chase and me in my dad’s groves. Sometimes we would climb the trees right to the top and pretend we were up in the mast of a huge sailing ship, looking out over our green sea. Those trees were our spaceships, our pirate ships, and our whaling ships. They were always taking us to faraway places, like China or India or Africa. Or Mars, if we happened to be playing Flash Gordon.
Gator liked the pirate games the best. Sometimes we played Treasure Island and Gator always insisted on being Long John Silver He’d carry a big walking stick, pretending it was a crutch stuck under his arm, and hop around on one leg.
Chase liked playing in our groves better than in his own, which made sense, considering his dad, Jacob Tully, was forever yelling at us about one thing or another. He sure as heck didn’t like us playing with Gator or any of the pickers’ kids. As for my dad, he didn’t seem to notice us playing with Gator. That’s because after my mom died, my dad left most of the child rearing up to our housekeeper, Delia Washburn. He’s never paid much attention to what I do unless I get in trouble.
Whenever anybody tried to tell the three of us we weren’t supposed to be playing together, we just took off for another part of the groves and kept right on with our games. Until this one day Jacob Tully made a point of telling my dad. My dad took Chase and me aside and told us it wasn’t a good idea, us playing with the hired help, especially when they were supposed to be working. He said we’d get Gator in trouble with his crew boss. I was maybe seven at the time. Gator couldn’t have been more than ten.
I remember crawling under one of the orange trees and crying while Chase told Gator we couldn’t play with him anymore. From then on we played in parts of the groves where the pickers weren’t working so as not to make Gator feel bad. It was never the same after that, playing those games without Gator.
Chase is fiddling with the radio. I stare at his hand on the tuner and wonder if he ever thinks about those times. Did he miss Gator as much as I did after we stopped playing with him? Chase never talked about it. And I never asked.
We are about a half mile from the turnoff to my house. There hasn’t been any rain here at all, which is the way it is sometimes. A few minutes later we are raising clouds of dust, tearing up the dirt road that becomes our driveway and curves around in front of our house.
I’m trying to decide whether to invite Chase in for some iced tea or something when he says, “Gotta go. I’m meeting some friends over at Whelan’s.” Whelan’s Drive-In is the local after-school hangout. Chase reaches across me and opens the door. Suddenly I get this crazy notion in my head. I want to grab his hand before he lets go of the door handle. Instead I stumble out of the car, mumbling, “Thanks for the ride.” But I don’t think he hears me with the radio blasting as he peels down our dirt road.
Joyce McDonald, Swallowing Stones
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