Author Bio

PETE DUVAL

ORCHARD TENDER

      
A week before the owner of the orchard died, Larry whistled for me above the rumble of the tractor, and I lowered myself from the tree I’d been pruning and walked to where he stood with his arms crossed in the grassy margins of the orchard, where we dumped branches and grass cuttings. The fawn hadn’t been there more than a day. Its brown-red hide had been torn back like the skin of a vinyl couch, its organs still slick as eels. In July the carcass would have been thick with flies, but here we were in February.
       Larry told me to throw it into the woods. He always initiated such requests with the phrase Let me make a suggestion. He was about fifty years old and had thick, cracked hands. The small finger of one of them was just a stub he screwed a gold wedding band down onto every morning, even though he hadn’t seen his wife in twenty years. He never wore gloves, no matter how cold. “No big deal,” he said, toeing the animal’s hoof and sucking at his teeth, his voice, as always, level and dry. I’d worked with him for five summers and for five winter breaks, so I thought I knew how to interpret what was in his eyes. But it was like reading the names on worn gravestones in the cemeteries that lay scattered throughout the countryside. His discovery bothered him; that much was clear. The way the deer’s long head flopped over when I lifted it, the blackness of its eye, its tongue pink between dry black rubbery lips.
       “Coyote did this,” Larry said.
       “In Connecticut?” I still knew how to give good son back then. I was twenty-four, young enough to be the illegitimate child of one of the many encounters with women Larry no longer bothered to brag about. The idea seemed ludicrous to me, though, that he might be related to anyone other than himself.
       “They’re reclaiming their old territory.” He climbed onto the tractor. “Moving back in from the north.”
       “You’ve seen them?”
       He put the tractor in gear and drove away, his shoulders bouncing with the dust.
       I crouched to marvel at the fawn’s short hair and weird soft ears. Then I dragged the thing by one of its hooves for a few yards, its head catching in the brambles. When I tried lifting it, the insides didn’t ooze out, because they were frozen. I started spinning. I had the thing by the legs, my boots doing a tight little dance. When I let it go, one of my gloves went with it, and I almost fell back, the corpse snapping in the underbrush as it came to rest. Out in the orchard again, I found my hand shears and climbed back into the tree. For the rest of the day I was on edge, keeping off the ground longer than necessary, lingering over the view. Listening for a sign.
       During August in the orchard, the world was moist and spiraled out green and ripe from your mount in the flat crowns of the trees. You watched cloud shadows slide over distant hills. In the rain it didn’t matter; you just stayed up there, even though the owner didn’t require it, because the water rinsed the powdered pesticides from the crannies in your skin. The summer before, I’d been up there pruning with Larry, balancing in a tree of Fuji apples adjacent to his, when out of nowhere he said, “Yeah, well, I like you.” As though we’d been having a discussion all along. As though we talked every day, like two normal guys who worked together.
       I waited until I was sure of the evenness in my voice. “And why’s that, Larry?”
       He didn’t pause in his work. He didn’t look at me. It was like a window opening, but only for a moment. “You’re not afraid of being alone.”
       I wasn’t sure what to say.
       “That’s rare.” He let a sucker fall to the grass, fat end first, the leaves shedding their dusty coating of pesticide on impact. “It’s good practice, too.”
       We’d continued working in silence, surrounded by the dense greens of late summer.
       But here, now, in February, everything, not just the deer, seemed dead. Below me, the edge of the woods kept pulling my eyes, and I waited for the insouciant lope I associated with all things feral, with dingoes and wolves, tongues tasting the air, heads riding low between their shoulders.
       After sunset and a few beers, I rode my ten-speed back to the orchard, and searched the underbrush with a flashlight shaped like a fat yellow pistol. The woods were brittle-cold and quiet, the upper limbs rasping in the breeze. I found the deer carcass and, after listening to the darkness for a moment, sat cross-legged with my sketch pad and the warm light in the crook of my neck. The animal’s left hind leg was hung up in a wrist-thick hanging vine, its face folded under its torn chest as though shying from me. I sketched it as-is. New material, something I hungered for. I’d painted the Simms factory at the edge of town too many times, its arched windows broken and dark for years now. On Sundays in June and July, I’d ride out after work and set up my homemade easel in the gravel parking lot, fascinated by the play of shadows on the red bricks as they faded to pink and orange in the last light. It was an expensive hobby, and I didn’t make much. I cut corners by stretching my own canvas over scraps of wood from the orchard, but oil paints weren’t cheap. If I could have phrased it correctly, the power those dead walls had, I would have given up trying to paint them: a sort of hardness born of sunlight and texture of red brick, the shadows lengthening. My grandmother, who’d died when I was a child—I’d never known her—had worked a loom between those walls for decades. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, this desolation—that’s what troubled me. Tonight I sat in a cone of moist calm with my dead fawn and the thought of coyotes out there prowling, picking up the scent of rotting meat, circling in.
       The next morning I found Larry at his usual spot before work: sitting on the lowered gate of the old Roadmaster station wagon the owner let him drive. He was gnawing an unripe peach and wearing the same dark mustard insulated overalls he’d worn since the day I first shook hands with him. All February, we’d been pruning. I’d been in the trees, snipping and dropping shoots. My wrists and forearms were ropy with sinew. Larry had gathered up the branches, loaded them on the wooden flatbed trailer, and driven them to the corners of the orchard to dump. The owner left the details to Larry, who’d worked the orchard for twenty-nine years, earning his wages since day 1 under the table, without a contract or health insurance or a pension. Larry lived in a dented 1954 Airstream, another perk. It sagged on flat tires out of sight of the road. The silver plating had cracked and curled, and often, during his dealings with the owner, I’d see Larry lean against it absently peeling away large patches of foil-like chrome. He and the owner knew the contours of their relationship so well, what it would and would not consist of, that it seemed they barely spoke. From afar—I always left them alone—the owner communicated with hand signals, pointing this way and that, making zipping motions, chopping motions, all of it unnecessary, because Larry knew what needed to be done before the owner did, knew the orchard better than anyone, every inch of it, so the signals themselves were like the signs a third-base coach flashes a veteran batter. I brought it up once in the barn, and Larry hawked and spit and said I ought to be thankful he’d spared me the sound of a boss’s voice. “You just don’t know how lucky you are,” he said. “You’ll learn.”
      
***

As far as we knew the owner had been in northern California. He never went into much detail about his travels, which were rare. On a Thursday at about two o’clock, Larry was leaning against the trunk of an Idared tree that I was pruning. That morning I’d scraped a knuckle, and it was still bleeding. He gave me his signal whistle, an annoying whip-poor-will. “Company,” he said. “Look there.”
       “Anyone you know?”
       He shook his head. “Suits.” Like a synonym for the clap, the way he said it. He’d been cleaning his fingernails with the broken blade of his jackknife. He took his time folding it up and slipping it into his pocket.
       I lowered myself through the bare branches, and together we watched a black Mercedes sedan with Rhode Island license plates slow to a stop just inside the wrought-iron archway at the entrance to the fields. Two slender men in identical camelhair overcoats got out and stood on either side of the car.
       “I knew it,” said Larry.
       One of them wore wraparound sunglasses that glinted in the afternoon sun. “You Gary?” he called to us. Larry didn’t move, his hands at his sides, ready. I could see they were trembling, but his voice revealed nothing.
       “Who wants to know?”
       “Yourbossdied.”
       “And?” he said, after a pause.
       “Out in San Fran. Heart attack.” The lawyer came around the front of the car and stood with his hands crossed in front of him, a vaguely military posture. He wore expensive leather gloves and narrow leather wingtips with thin soles.
       Larry continued to stare the men down.
       “All right,” the lawyer said, “here’s what you’re going to do: just keep working until the estate is settled.”
       “He said that?”
       “I’m saying it.” The lawyer bared his teeth and tightened his gloves. “I just told you. He’s dead.”
       The other lawyer was shorter and younger, with more hair. He was probably just out of law school. “You just keep doing what you’re doing, and we’ll let you know when to stop. We’llsend word.”
       “It took two guys to deliver that message?”
       The first lawyer scratched his neck and checked his watch. “Right. Any questions?”
       Larry scooped an armful of suckers and heaved them onto the trailer. “If something comes up, I’ll have my lawyer drop you a line.”
       The younger one pointed at me and said, “How about you?”
       I shot Larry a glance, making sure he was listening. “Where’d you get those shoes?”
       Larry gave me a constipated look. “That’s enough.”
       The lawyer with the sunglasses surmised the property, chin raised. “The sister’s coming up from Tampa.” He took in the house and the barn, the long line of chicken coops and the array of dilapidated machinery in the shadow of the oak tree. He was glad not to be us. “She’ll square things away.”
       “The sister,” said Larry. “Got it.”
       Though I knew next to nothing about the owner, it didn’t seem possible that he could have a sister. He was more of a force of nature, as inevitable as the rain or the passing cumuli.
       The lawyers glanced at one other with mild annoyance and got in the car. It had been running all along but was too expensive to hear. We watched it back out of the gravel drive, through the iron archway—the film of their advent running in reverse now—and pull silently onto the asphalt. The lawyers smiled and shook their heads behind the tinted windows as they drove away.
       Larry busied himself. “So.”
       “I don’t believe it.”
       “What is it you don’t believe?” He paused to look at me. “Time is passing. Surprise.”
       “Jesus,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”
       Larry put his hands on his hips. “Let me make a suggestion.”
      
***
Two months passed. My head down, I worked on into a silence that seemed to mount with the days. Nothing else seemed to change. Larry and I pruned, endlessly. We went back over the rows of Empires and Cortlands and Red Delicious again and again until it became impossible to maintain the fiction we were doing useful work. The orchard was pruned out, the trees more streamlined than they’d ever been. Perfect. So I mended wooden apple crates. I stacked them in rows ten high, more wooden crates than anyone could ever use. Work for work’s sake. Fine with me. Larry removed the blade from each of the mowers, in service or scrap, and sharpened it manually, the hollow scrape of metal on whetstone issuing from the recesses of the barn, and laid each shining blade on the greasy workbench. He grew even quieter than usual. Weeks passed without a word. He began to break the engines down, examining pistons and cranks for wear, rinsing everything in a tray of oily gasoline, drying and putting aside parts that might require replacement. The sharp tang of petroleum eddied in his wake whenever he passed. Every fourteen days, our checks appeared in the orchard mailbox, signed by the CFO of a law firm in Providence.
       In April, when we’d usually begin our weekly mowing of the orchard grass, another car appeared. I’d just driven the tractor into the maw of the barn and cut the ignition. In the delicious silence, I heard tires crunching the gravel driveway of the owner’s house. Larry was off somewhere in the orchard. He’d been disappearing for whole days at a time without explanation, reappearing, whenever he did, without warning. I knew better than to say anything. I was fine with it—the solitude. That’s what I called it in my mind.
       Out of the barn in the afternoon sun, I saw two women stretching their arms and legs near a black Volvo station wagon with Florida license plates. “Hello,” said the older of the two, a bit startled when she finally saw me. She was trim, tan, leathery, her neck skin taut; handsome, you might say—I’d never known how well the word could apply to a woman—and in good shape for someone who looked to be in her mid-fifties. Confident in a way I associated with time spent on expensive boats sipping cocktails with sexually suggestive names. “Are you Larry?” she asked.
       “No,” I said wiping my hands on my greasy jeans. “Larry’s out in the orchard.”
       “I don’t know who you are.” She was looking past me at the barn, the diesel pump, the cracked filthy windows of the greenhouse. “What’s your name?”
       I told her.
       “OK, well, I’m Lillian.” She smiled thinly, her eyebrows penciled half-circles. “Would you be a champ and help us with our luggage?”
       Before she could finish, I’d walked around to the back of the car, past the younger of the two women, a girl, really, and was opening the hatch.
       “June’s in a poor mood,” she said. “June is pouting. Say hi, June.”
       June paid me no mind. I began lugging their bags up the walkway to the house, returning several times for more. These people didn’t travel light. June gave no indication I was even there. She was wandering around the yard, throwing her arms out in mock-rapture. At first, watching covertly, I felt embarrassed for her. She looked about seventeen or so. She wore loose Day-Glo orange shorts that showed off her paste-white thighs, a turquoise halter sweater I found myself growing fonder of with each return trip to the car.
       “Oh, I just love it,” she said, addressing the breeze and the rows of apple and peach trees and the very air. Who was she performing for? I’d been invisible to girls her age for some time. Maybe forever. Lillian ignored her daughter for as long as she could, but then she stopped short on the walkway.
       “We’ll be here for a while,” she said. “So knock it off.”
       “No, but I love it.”
       “You wanted to come.” Lillian was fishing in her purse. “You didn’t have to come.”
       I realized with horror what she was doing. “That’s not necessary.”
       “No, no,” Lillian said. “I don’t expect you to—”
       I was already walking away with my hands in my pockets.
      
***
From the bucket of the cherry picker, I thinned peaches and watched June sunbathe on the south-facing slopes of the orchard, the straps of her lime-green, one-piece bathing suit loose as she lay on her stomach, her breasts bulging visibly white on each side. Though this went on for weeks, she seemed unaware of my fascination. Whenever she did notice me, I’d wave or nod, as professionally detached an acknowledgment as I could muster. I knew how to play the roles well: Manual laborer. Orchard tender. Background worker. On my trips to the orchard after dark to sketch my dead deer, I began lingering in the deep shadows of the barn with a set of binoculars the owner had years before left hanging from a nail. Those windy nights, the corner window of June’s room seemed to float above me as though the darkness itself were a wall you might look through. But the blinds never opened. I never caught more than a hint of shifting form or color beyond the horizontal slats. To be ashamed of yourself, you need a self. You need to be someone. Watching through those binoculars for hours, waiting for the rectangle of whiskey-tinted cream to go black, I was nothing but a pair of eyes. As invisible as the gulf of air above me. Navigating the roads home each night, I resolved to go straight to the fawn the next evening, but I knew this was nonsense. I’d be back in the shadows of the barn twenty-four hours later.
       One night the binoculars were gone. I crept out of the barn and lay in the dry grass listening for a sign of movement. For hours there was only the rub and rattle of the broken weathervane to texture the silence.
       The next morning Larry sat on the lowered gate of the station wagon, its wheels almost completely lost in clouds of Queen Anne’s lace. I hadn’t seen him in two weeks. He’d shaved his head. His scalp was pocked and sunburned, his eyes red-rimmed. The binoculars hung from his neck on their frayed leather strap. “She’s an eyeful,” he said, smiling to himself as I passed. “Yessir.”
       I was wheeling my bicycle toward the barn. I stopped. “Excuse me?”
       “I said, she’s a looker. Easy on the eyes.”
       “I’m going to give the northeast corner another pass today with the mower.” The grass in the northeast corner, like the grass in every corner of the orchard, would not need mowing for a week. Grass didn’t grow that quickly. We weren’t dealing with putting greens.
       “You go right ahead.” Larry swung his legs from the gate of the station wagon. “As long as that money’s coming in, might as well make yourself useful. If you ask me it’s a matter of self-respect. Like so much else.”
       “Don’t talk about her that way.”
       “Don’t talk about who that way?”
       “Let’s cut the crap,” I said. “You know who I mean.”
       Larry scratched his white whiskers with the stump of his finger. I’d never seen him go so long without a shave. He looked like some weathered wise man. He smiled and squinted. “Oh, no, no, I was talking about Lillian.” He pointed his chin past me.
       Here came Lillian across the gravel driveway carrying an enormous jar of pickles in both hands. “Gentlemen,” she said, presenting the jar as though it were some supreme test, “help me out, will you.” What would we idiots do? Larry nudged past me to take the pickles from her. But Lillian recoiled from him. Embarrassed, she handed the jar to me. I managed to loosen the lid. She thanked us and started for the house, her narrow well-kept haunches mincing efficiently.
       Larry slipped the binoculars from his neck. “Here,” he said, still squinting. “I know you’ll get much more use out of them than I would.”
       “Knock it off,” I said, taking them.
       Here Lillian came again, walking much more quickly this time. She paused some distance from us with her wrist cocked on her jutting hip. “Just to clarify where we stand at the moment,” she said, “because we haven’t really had the chance to articulate anything long-term.” She explained that she had, as we might have guessed, “no real interest” in maintaining an orchard, so, sadly, this year’s crop would be the last. She didn’t seem very sad. She and June would be leaving before the end of the summer. The orchard had been listed with a local realty. After the harvest, there’d be a modest severance payment for both of us. She didn’t know how much yet, but it was the least she could do, her brother would have wanted it that way. The trees would be cleared. The land would be graded and subdivided. The lots would be sold for residential housing. That’s what she did down in Florida. She was a realtor. I imagined her standing at the edge of the Everglades in khakis and a hardhat, a rolled set of blueprints in her fist. She’d even offered a tentative title for the properties: Applewood Estates.
       Without thinking, I looked at Larry.
       “I like it,” he said, his eyes moist and bright.
       Lillian did that thing with her mouth that passed for smiling. “Well, then,” she said after a moment. We were to stay focused, we were to maximize the harvest, we were to keep on keeping on. As events warranted, she would “touch base.” She lifted the lid-loosened jar. “Thank you again, gentlemen.”
       “Thank you,” Larry said. He watched her walk away. Then, avoiding my eyes, he raised the gate of the station wagon and pressed it shut. I heard the screen door of the Airstream clap twice.
       That morning I lingered in the barn pretending to fill the gas tank of the mower and fiddling with the oil cap, willing June to appear. Finally, after an hour, I felt I must commit to starting the engine and to driving off into the orchard. I did so. As I swung the mower into the row of Granny Smiths that had always offered the best view of her usual sunbathing spot, there she was, lying on her side on a huge beach towel, her head propped on her elbow, reading. I let up on the throttle, and the mower rattled in neutral beneath me. I looked around for Larry. I cut the engine, climbed off into the sudden silence, my heart racing, and crossed a row of Lodis, their branches already heavy with yellow-green fruit, then two rows of immature peaches. “Excuse me,” I said, too softly. She gave no indication she’d heard me. Then louder: “Hi.”
       She startled. “Oh, God, you scared me.”
       I apologized, mindful to keep the distance between us. I asked what she was reading; and when she told me, her voice laced with fatigue and annoyance, I nodded as though I’d heard of the author. “You seem pretty bored,” I said.
       “Well, yeah.” She held up the book.
       I reached for a branch of peaches in the tree above me and fell to thinning a few from the dense clump. The peaches didn’t need to be thinned. The clumps were thin enough. “There’s a bar in town, you know.”
       She looked at me over the book. “And?”
       “Just a dive, but—”
       “You’re not doing what I think you’re doing,” she said, the curve of her hip accentuated beautifully by how she lay. “What’s your name again?”
       I told her again. “What do you think I’m doing?”
       “Asking me out.”
       I tossed a hard peach into the distance. At the far end of the row, Larry sauntered past with an antique scythe. He paused when he caught sight of me, the blade over his shoulder, then continued on.
       “How old are you?” she asked.
       “I’m in college.” Technically that was no longer true. I wasn’t going back in the fall. I owed the university money. I had none. “Jesus, how the hell old do I look?”
       “Don’t get your shorts in a bunch.” She sat up. “I’m just asking. I can’t ask?”
       “How old do I look?” I asked again.
       “I don’t know. I don’t want to say.” She looked down the row of trees and spotted Larry wandering with the scythe. “How old is that guy?” she asked, fussing behind her neck with the strings of her bathing suit.
       “Fifty or thereabouts,” I said. I held up my hands. “Hey, never mind.”
       “Never mind what?”
       “About that bar and whatnot.”
       “You sound old,” she said. “Who says whatnot? Who says thereabouts?”
       “Well.” I gave her a corny salute and turned to leave. “Thanks for your consideration.”
       “So, you draw?” she asked.
       I turned back. “When I can find the time.”
       “I’m not saying no about the bar and whatnot.” She lay on her stomach again and opened the book. “Not that I’m technically old enough to drink.”
       “You don’t drink?”
       “Bye,” she said.
       Back at the barn, as I switched off the tractor’s ignition, Larry materialized from a small room that had once served as an office. He held the scythe in one hand, the whetstone in the other. “Backdoor man,” he mumbled. “Hoochie coochie man.”
       I walked to the red refrigerator I stored my beer in. Beneath the rust you could still make out the Coca Cola insignia, the words ICE COLD. The thing hummed and vibrated. Larry spat on the whetstone and shuffled out squinting into the bright sunlight.
       Later, when I heard the screen door of the owner’s house, I stood beer in hand to press my face against a crack in the barn’s withered boards. Lillian walked to the Volvo, her cadence smart and confident. She got in and drove off. I finished the beer. Then I dusted my hands on my jeans. Then I set out across the gravel parking lot. I climbed the stone retaining wall and crossed the lawn to the house. After knocking, I waited a long time before June came to the door. Her mouth wasn’t smiling but her eyes seemed glad to see me.
       “Mr. Whatnot.”
       “June,” I said. There was a tinge of danger in the whole business. It had nothing to do with her age, which was just a technical matter. A number. I wasn’t that much older than she was. “I want to—” I said, my voice rusty from disuse.
       “Spit it out.” June pressed her forehead to the screen. “What do you want?”
       I stood there in filthy cutoffs. “Jesus, you’re fantastic,” I said. I was still wearing my work gloves.
       She burst out laughing and shook her head. She wasn’t beautiful, really, not in any ordinary sense. She was tall and big-boned with a too-short haircut. But she had large clear eyes, and an odd cherry mole on the side of her neck. Something small that anyone else might overlook. I wanted to draw her. Not only that, I wanted to paint her. To break out some of those expensive oils I’d been saving up. Cadmium Red, Titanium White.
       “Can I come in?”
       “I’m sure you can,” she said, “but you may not.”
       “Thanks for the grammar lesson.”
       “Where’s your friend?”
       “My friend?”
       “Larry.”
       “What the hell does Larry have to do with anything?” I said. “I don’t keep tabs on Larry.”
       “You don’t like Larry, do you?”
       “I just don’t want to talk about him.”
       “He’s a little weird, isn’t he?”
       I climbed the bottom step then bent my knee. “May I come in?”
       She stood barefoot on the cracked linoleum of the kitchen, still in her bathing suit, a thin gold chain around her ankle that I hadn’t noticed before. How could I have missed it? It made me want to enter the house all the more. “My mother should be home in a minute.”
       “Then meet me tonight.” I pointed at the barn. “There. At 1:00 a.m.”
       She doubled over, her hand to her face, laughing so hard that I almost started laughing myself. That’s how she closed the inner door, in a gust of laugher.
       Turning every so often so as not to break my neck, I walked backward to the barn as June watched from the window.
       The rest of the afternoon I spent on the cherry picker, moving from peach tree to peach tree, my least favorite job. The fine fur of the peaches rubbed off and settled into the moist crooks of my arms, which burned and itched with the heat. This part of the orchard afforded no view. With each bundle of small hard peaches I pinched, I thought of June, that gold chain against her smooth white ankle.
       Around 6:30, I lowered the bucket of the picker and steered the machine back to the barn, its bulking black wheels chewing the terrain below me. I washed off with the hose, scraping the peach fuzz from my forearms with what fingernails I had. The cool well water felt like a measure of paradise as it rippled along my neck and back. I drank from the nozzle.
       “You think I don’t know what you’re up to?” Larry was sitting on a blue bench seat that had been ripped long ago from a wrecked Thunderbird. “Better stick to peeping.”
       I turned off the spigot.
       “Leave her be,” he said.
       “Tell me something.” I pulled on my T-shirt. “Who died and left you boss?”
       Laughing silently, he pointed his finger at me like a gun.
       “You’re not hearing what I’m saying. You don’t listen.”
       “Knock it off,” I said, taking them.
       Here Lillian came again, walking much more quickly this time. She paused some distance from us with her wrist cocked on her jutting hip. “Just to clarify where we stand at the moment,” she said, “because we haven’t really had the chance to articulate anything long-term.” She explained that she had, as we might have guessed, “no real interest” in maintaining an orchard, so, sadly, this year’s crop would be the last. She didn’t seem very sad. She and June would be leaving before the end of the summer. The orchard had been listed with a local realty. After the harvest, there’d be a modest severance payment for both of us. She didn’t know how much yet, but it was the least she could do, her brother would have wanted it that way. The trees would be cleared. The land would be graded and subdivided. The lots would be sold for residential housing. That’s what she did down in Florida. She was a realtor. I imagined her standing at the edge of the Everglades in khakis and a hardhat, a rolled set of blueprints in her fist. She’d even offered a tentative title for the properties: Applewood Estates.
       Without thinking, I looked at Larry.
       “I like it,” he said, his eyes moist and bright.
       Lillian did that thing with her mouth that passed for smiling. “Well, then,” she said after a moment. We were to stay focused, we were to maximize the harvest, we were to keep on keeping on. As events warranted, she would “touch base.” She lifted the lid-loosened jar. “Thank you again, gentlemen.”
       “Thank you,” Larry said. He watched her walk away. Then, avoiding my eyes, he raised the gate of the station wagon and pressed it shut. I heard the screen door of the Airstream clap twice.
       That morning I lingered in the barn pretending to fill the gas tank of the mower and fiddling with the oil cap, willing June to appear. Finally, after an hour, I felt I must commit to starting the engine and to driving off into the orchard. I did so. As I swung the mower into the row of Granny Smiths that had always offered the best view of her usual sunbathing spot, there she was, lying on her side on a huge beach towel, her head propped on her elbow, reading. I let up on the throttle, and the mower rattled in neutral beneath me. I looked around for Larry. I cut the engine, climbed off into the sudden silence, my heart racing, and crossed a row of Lodis, their branches already heavy with yellow-green fruit, then two rows of immature peaches. “Excuse me,” I said, too softly. She gave no indication she’d heard me. Then louder: “Hi.”
       She startled. “Oh, God, you scared me.”
       I apologized, mindful to keep the distance between us. I asked what she was reading; and when she told me, her voice laced with fatigue and annoyance, I nodded as though I’d heard of the author. “You seem pretty bored,” I said.
       “Well, yeah.” She held up the book.
       I reached for a branch of peaches in the tree above me and fell to thinning a few from the dense clump. The peaches didn’t need to be thinned. The clumps were thin enough. “There’s a bar in town, you know.”
       She looked at me over the book. “And?”
       “Just a dive, but—”
       “You’re not doing what I think you’re doing,” she said, the curve of her hip accentuated beautifully by how she lay. “What’s your name again?”
       I told her again. “What do you think I’m doing?”
       “Asking me out.”
       I tossed a hard peach into the distance. At the far end of the row, Larry sauntered past with an antique scythe. He paused when he caught sight of me, the blade over his shoulder, then continued on.
       “How old are you?” she asked.
       “I’m in college.” Technically that was no longer true. I wasn’t going back in the fall. I owed the university money. I had none. “Jesus, how the hell old do I look?”
       “Don’t get your shorts in a bunch.” She sat up. “I’m just asking. I can’t ask?”
       “How old do I look?” I asked again.
       “I don’t know. I don’t want to say.” She looked down the row of trees and spotted Larry wandering with the scythe. “How old is that guy?” she asked, fussing behind her neck with the strings of her bathing suit.
       “Fifty or thereabouts,” I said. I held up my hands. “Hey, never mind.”
       “Never mind what?”
       “About that bar and whatnot.”
       “You sound old,” she said. “Who says whatnot? Who says thereabouts?”
       “Well.” I gave her a corny salute and turned to leave. “Thanks for your consideration.”
       “So, you draw?” she asked.
       I turned back. “When I can find the time.”
       “I’m not saying no about the bar and whatnot.” She lay on her stomach again and opened the book. “Not that I’m technically old enough to drink.”
       “You don’t drink?”
       “Bye,” she said.
       Back at the barn, as I switched off the tractor’s ignition, Larry materialized from a small room that had once served as an office. He held the scythe in one hand, the whetstone in the other. “Backdoor man,” he mumbled. “Hoochie coochie man.”
       I walked to the red refrigerator I stored my beer in. Beneath the rust you could still make out the Coca Cola insignia, the words ICE COLD. The thing hummed and vibrated. Larry spat on the whetstone and shuffled out squinting into the bright sunlight.
       Later, when I heard the screen door of the owner’s house, I stood beer in hand to press my face against a crack in the barn’s withered boards. Lillian walked to the Volvo, her cadence smart and confident. She got in and drove off. I finished the beer. Then I dusted my hands on my jeans. Then I set out across the gravel parking lot. I climbed the stone retaining wall and crossed the lawn to the house. After knocking, I waited a long time before June came to the door. Her mouth wasn’t smiling but her eyes seemed glad to see me.
       “Mr. Whatnot.”
       “June,” I said. There was a tinge of danger in the whole business. It had nothing to do with her age, which was just a technical matter. A number. I wasn’t that much older than she was. “I want to—” I said, my voice rusty from disuse.
       “Spit it out.” June pressed her forehead to the screen. “What do you want?”
       I stood there in filthy cutoffs. “Jesus, you’re fantastic,” I said. I was still wearing my work gloves.
       She burst out laughing and shook her head. She wasn’t beautiful, really, not in any ordinary sense. She was tall and big-boned with a too-short haircut. But she had large clear eyes, and an odd cherry mole on the side of her neck. Something small that anyone else might overlook. I wanted to draw her. Not only that, I wanted to paint her. To break out some of those expensive oils I’d been saving up. Cadmium Red, Titanium White.
       “Can I come in?”
       “I’m sure you can,” she said, “but you may not.”
       “Thanks for the grammar lesson.”
       “Where’s your friend?”
       “My friend?”
       “Larry.”
       “What the hell does Larry have to do with anything?” I said. “I don’t keep tabs on Larry.”
       “You don’t like Larry, do you?”
       “I just don’t want to talk about him.”
       “He’s a little weird, isn’t he?”
       I climbed the bottom step then bent my knee. “May I come in?”
       She stood barefoot on the cracked linoleum of the kitchen, still in her bathing suit, a thin gold chain around her ankle that I hadn’t noticed before. How could I have missed it? It made me want to enter the house all the more. “My mother should be home in a minute.”
       “Then meet me tonight.” I pointed at the barn. “There. At 1:00 a.m.”
       She doubled over, her hand to her face, laughing so hard that I almost started laughing myself. That’s how she closed the inner door, in a gust of laugher.
       Turning every so often so as not to break my neck, I walked backward to the barn as June watched from the window.
       The rest of the afternoon I spent on the cherry picker, moving from peach tree to peach tree, my least favorite job. The fine fur of the peaches rubbed off and settled into the moist crooks of my arms, which burned and itched with the heat. This part of the orchard afforded no view. With each bundle of small hard peaches I pinched, I thought of June, that gold chain against her smooth white ankle.
       Around 6:30, I lowered the bucket of the picker and steered the machine back to the barn, its bulking black wheels chewing the terrain below me. I washed off with the hose, scraping the peach fuzz from my forearms with what fingernails I had. The cool well water felt like a measure of paradise as it rippled along my neck and back. I drank from the nozzle.
       “You think I don’t know what you’re up to?” Larry was sitting on a blue bench seat that had been ripped long ago from a wrecked Thunderbird. “Better stick to peeping.”
       I turned off the spigot.
       “Leave her be,” he said.
       “Tell me something.” I pulled on my T-shirt. “Who died and left you boss?”
       Laughing silently, he pointed his finger at me like a gun.
       “You’re not hearing what I’m saying. You don’t listen.”
       “Don’t I?” I was trying to match his thin smile, trying to cover the sadness that had thrust up inside me. He’d taught me everything I knew, about the orchard. “What’s it to you?” I said.
       “I don’t want you wasting the owner’s time like that.”
       I laughed, dry, mirthless, then walked to my bike, mounted it, and pedaled away. I allowed myself one last glance from the road. He hadn’t moved.
      
***
That night I set my alarm for 12:30. When it sounded, I rose and showered in the darkness of my apartment. Fifteen minutes later, I was rolling past Larry’s Airstream. He would sometimes read all night; on my trips to sketch the fawn’s slow decomposition, I’d see his bent head framed by the small windows of the camper, like squares of gold or butter against the black of the orchard. Tonight the Airstream was dark. I got off my ten-speed a hundred yards from the owner’s house and wheeled it into the driveway, where I removed my sneakers and shouldered the bike and silently crossed the gravel in my bare feet.
       The orchard was quiet, the night without a moon. The humidity of the day dripped in a kind of black coolness from the leaves whenever the wind stirred. No lights in the owner’s house. I stood looking for a moment, trying to imagine it long abandoned and collapsing into itself. On the far side of the barn, I dropped the bike and sat in the grass to wait. I told myself whatever happened was fine with me. Five minutes passed, then fifteen. I listened to the hollow scrape of jet engines six miles overhead. The green dial of my watched still glowed faintly—1:21. I got to my feet, my knees aching, and walked to where I could watch the screen door of the house and listen. Nothing. I moved a short distance to the stone retaining wall that ran the length of the yard. There Lillian had planted a line of chrysanthemums that seemed to shimmer, ghostly spheres dissolving and reappearing. Since she’d put the house on the market as a separate property, couples, the women often pregnant, would pull into the driveway to stand with their hands on their hips, exchanging looksbefore climbing back into their cars and driving away. No one had been inside. Some just slowed and moved on. Lillian and June were flying back to Florida before Labor Day, whether the house, or the orchard, had sold.
       Now I saw June drifting toward me across the lawn. Like the chrysanthemums, her skin seemed to glow, her hands and face trailing a faint residue of green light.
       “Hey,” I whispered, afraid for a moment that she wasn’t real.
       “Hey.” We stood about four feet from each other. She was shivering. “Where should we go?”
       I took her hand, and we started out through the middle orchard, down Main Street, as it had been called once. I was shaking now too, which was embarrassing. I walked ahead pulling her gently along as though clearing a path.
       “I don’t even know you,” June whispered.
       “I don’t know you either.” I had in mind a corner of the orchard that cut slightly into the woods to form a brief peninsula of short grass, where I knew we couldn’t be easily seen. But the closer we got, the more I began to feel there was something almost incestuous about bringing her there.
       “I forgot to tell you,” she said. “Larry came by the house tonight.”
       I stopped. “What?”
       “Yeah, he told my mother you’ve been hitting on me.”
       “Hitting on you?”
       “He said she might want to know some things. But he was drunk. He seemed drunk. So I’m not sure if my mother really listened. When he finally left, she gave me this look like what was that all about? I don’t think she took it seriously.”
       “Some things?” I asked. “Like what?”
       “I didn’t know you’d been arrested.”
       “Jesus Christ.”
       “He said you stole equipment.”
       I was stinging now, my eyes burning.
       “Because she owned the orchard now and all that, and she should know, he said.” I could barely see June’s face, but I knew she was smiling. “Like, hinting that she should find someone else to finish out the season.”
       “I get the picture,” I said.
       “I told her later we were just talking. You and me. I said you were too old for me anyway.” She pulled me closer. Her jacket hung open, and when I slipped my arms in around her I could feel the heat of her ribs and the disembodied pressure of her breasts against me. At college, I’d had a brief series of dates—if one could even call them that—with a Chinese exchange student from the dorm next to mine, but in all it had lasted less than a month, just a series of sterile flirtations. Once when my roommate was away for the weekend, we spread a blanket on the floor of my dorm room and watched election coverage on a cheap black-and-white TV, and then rolled around for some time while the returns trickled in, running our hands over each other.
       June and I lowered ourselves to our knees in the grass. I lay back and she climbed on top of me. I didn’t mind that I could barely breathe. We were kissing now. Her taste was complicated, of lip gloss and cigarette smoke, and a staleness that shouldn’t have been there.
       We heard the sound, at the same time, clearly, and we lay rigid, listening for more.
       “What’s that?”
       I was thinking coyote, but I didn’t say anything. I’d never heard one before. We heard it again, this time closer. Or was it a silly, drunken imitation of a coyote?
       “All right,” I said, rolling from beneath her. “This is ridiculous.” The thought of Larry out there watching us was more than I could take.
       “No,” she said. “Be quiet.” She was still on the ground, kneeling, her blouse undone, her bare stomach and hip bones faintly smooth and white. “Don’t leave me alone.”
       At the hem of the orchard, where the rough grass and high weeds ended and the woods began, I pulled the trigger of the flashlight. A yellowy bloom illuminated a skein of brambles and dead cuttings, the trunks of white birches and spruce festooned with vines. The coyote sound stopped. “Follow me.”
       “Are you for real?”
       “OK. Then I’ll be right back.”
       She stood. “No, I think I’ll come with you.”
       “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” I said.
       “They’re not that lovely.”
       “You don’t know Frost?”
       “I’m from Florida. Remember?”
       I led her in among the trees, scanning the darkness with the cone of light. “Look,” I said, then regretted it immediately. Something large, like something in a bag, hung from a low branch. I wanted to direct the light away from it, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t look away. There Larry hung by the neck from a length of binding cord, his bare white feet dripping dew into the undergrowth. I stepped closer. Something had come out of the woods to keep him company, and ended up gnawing at his heels and ankles. His blood-fattened face looked over our heads, and the whites of his eyes bulged, sightless as golf balls.
       June drew a breath to scream, then another. Again and again I thought she’d let loose into all that blackness, but nothing came out. She could run away if she wanted. I wanted her to run away. I wanted her to leave me there with him. Just me and Larry, as always. The cord chafed and creaked as it twisted. Though he seemed to turn slowly from me, I could not stop staring. His hands hung straight down at his sides, the ring on his stump of a finger catching the light, his shaved head glistening with dew. What I was waiting for, I didn’t know. But I felt as ready for it as I’d ever been—as I’d ever be again.