--LOVE IS A MOTHERFUCKER
In
Another Life: Cherries
Last
night my brother slept with a girl. Her
moaning woke me.
At first I thought Travis was
strangling a goat. An unusual amount of
heat radiated from his side of the mattress, commotion, too, and a bit of a
struggle. I pinched my eyes shut even
harder. My teacher, Ms. Nelson, told us
that nightmares are dreams that may have happened to us before, in another
life, so I waited for the wash of blood and when it didn’t come I held my
breath and counted to one million.
A
million is not as much as you think.
Travis says you could have a million
dollars and it might not last until Christmas.
He told me about the guy who won the Powerball, how he blew every cent
and then some he didn’t win, and how he’d hung himself with a rope dangling
from a crystal chandelier. I’m not sure
who found him, if it was a disgruntled servant or relative, but it seemed to
matter to me. I must have imagined that
scene dozens of times, the poor man swaying over a polished mahogany table where
past feasts had once been served up, laughter and drink, the epitome of
merriment and good cheer. When I’d asked
Travis how big the chandelier was, he slugged my chest and said the same thing
he always said: “Idiot.”
I
counted to two thousand and twelve but started losing my place, my brain
stuttering as it’s known to do. I
couldn’t sleep or dream or think or anything.
The ruckus around me picked up volume and speed. It felt like bats were flying around my
cavernous skull, knocking into walls. I
wrapped the pillow over my head as if it was a tourniquet and I was that
fraudulent hero in “The Red Badge of Courage.”
The reality was I just didn’t want any bat getting their clutches caught
in my hair. I found a motion and rocked
along with it. I felt foolish and
abandoned, but the sensation was so familiar that after a moment I did doze.
When I woke up mom was shaking me
and telling me the car was warming up, we were late, get dressed quick, you’ll
have to skip breakfast again.
Mornings
or nights--I could never tell the difference at this hour. Both were black and frigid. By noon the summer sun would be up and we’d
be sweating and the stink under my arms would start to ripen till I’d have to
breathe from my mouth, but now it was nothing other than just damn cold
out. The station wagon heater took a
week to work, and by then we were already at the fields, jumping on a truck bed
along with the winos the orchard owner bused in from skid row.
We
weren’t to call them winos to their faces.
We weren’t to say anything at all, or even make eye contact.
“Are
we some kind of minority?” I asked my brother once.
It
was an honest question, but honesty doesn’t always pay, nor does
curiosity. Besides I had an inkling what
his answer would be, yet even so it was a bucket of ice water thrown in the
face when he said, as calmly as asking that the salt and pepper be passed,
“We’re freaks.”
For
a long time after that I’d sneak to the school library and look up books with
the word freak in the title. What I saw
was bearded women, three breasted women, enormous women the size of small cars,
men with twenty-two inch long fingernails and two headed kittens, every manner
of mutation. Eventually I learned the
noun euphemism, and like a good student, I practiced using the word in every
day speech whenever the moment seemed appropriate, which was never.
Now
as the truck bounced and jostled down the path toward the rows of trees I did
what I always did: I counted my chickens before they were hatched. I pictured myself having a banner day. If the rate was $1.25 per and I picked nine
lugs I’d be rich. Some of those earnings
would go to Mother for gas money and car maintenance, but otherwise it was my
cash to spend how I wanted.
One
of the winos lifted his head when he saw me counting with my fingers. His name was Virgil, a fellow sweet on
Mother. As he grinned, a black tooth
bobbed over his licorice-colored tongue.
Travis
and I were the only juveniles. Mother
had an in with Mr. Lemley. The other
pickers were dark skinned men, Mexican or Indian, I never knew. It could have been their race, or it could
have been all that time working in the sun, or the rivers of booze percolating
in their system, or the sheen of sweaty grime that made them look homogenous:
dark, lonely and untrustworthy.
My mother was Checker. When a lug was filled you yelled, “Checker!”
as loud as you could and my mother would amble over, bowlegged and ornery,
inspecting the rectangular wooden box.
Smart guys liked to try filling the bottom portion with rocks or leaves,
but Mother had a keen eye, and those jackasses were typically thrown out.
The
cherries weren’t good eating. They were
called pie cherries that tasted bitter from so much chemical spray. After they were picked, pitted and pruned,
washed and smashed and stuffed into canisters with mountains of sugar, a person
could stomach their flavor, but not until then.
Travis and I picked together, two to
a tree. The winos were slower, arthritic
and confused, babbling to themselves, still drunk or hung-over, and they
usually attacked a tree four-to-one. We
started before sun up and quit at noon because by then the fruit would split
open in the preposterous eastern Washington heat.
I
never earned more than five dollars at a time, but the fact of it in my pocket
felt liberating and powerful, like a dangerous secret or uncast wish. On the drive home I liked to imagine my
father in present tense, alive, a person I might know or observe from a short
distance. I pictured him a lottery
winner, or even a small time victor who hits triple cherries on slots at Vegas
or Reno. In my mind he was always
youthful, handsome and carefree. He
never tossed his hands up when he won, just clasped them behind his back,
executive-style, sort of saying, “I told you so,” without speaking. I heard bells clang in alarm, a siren
whooping, strobe lights bouncing around the carpeting. I heard the tiny fake coins clatter into the
metallic trough, spilling out around his ankles. Once in a while this man, my father, he just
rose off his stool and walked away, letting the gawkers take what they could
gather, him knowing there was more where that came from, easy pickings, indeed.
That
summer a fight broke out between two drunks.
Virgil was one. He wore his black
hair braided and as I watched him stumble and swing I noticed that his eyes
looked like strawberry milk. The match
began sloppy and harmless until Virgil’s opponent muttered my mother’s name,
saying he’d done something sexual with her for as little as the price of a
frozen TV dinner. He said he wasn’t the
only one. Virgil became electrified, his
movements now sudden and sure. He
unsheathed a Bowie and plunged it into the other guy’s gut, gave it yank. The sound was moist and soupy, both the
ripping of flesh and the disemboweling of that man’s steaming innards. I puked into a shallow ditch, watched the
ground spin and splinter, then fainted.
The
next day mother woke me up as usual and when we got to the orchard we hopped on
the truck bed, picked up our supplies--a ladder, bucket with a harness, a few
lugs--and that was that.
The
following day, though, it rained, rained so hard I wondered if God had just
received reports about Virgil killing that poor loud mouth. When I looked west or east the skies were
clear and Easter blue. Overhead,
however, they were black as soot.
Picking
got called off after an hour. Travis and
I waited for Mother to show and when she didn’t, we slogged back into the
field. I heard her first. It was a sound similar to the ones Jackie
Schell made when Travis snuck her into our bed.
But I didn’t think it could really
be her, mother. That seemed
impossible.
Travis
took a few steps in the direction of the moaning, turned and round-housed me so
hard I still get an occasional migraine to this day.
One
night weeks later I couldn’t take the ignorance anymore. Travis and I were awake on the bed, me
staring into the ceiling. “Is our mother
a whore?” I asked him.
I
waited for it, and when he didn’t shoot out, “Idiot” I sensed we were maybe
stepping up onto new ground. Perhaps he
now thought of me as—not his equal—but at least his half.
I
let the silence swing in the grainy darkness of our room. I held my breath. I started counting. I saw cherries, real ones and cartoons.
Travis
stirred, turned on his side in a short, tender way, studying at me. There was a liquid shimmer in his eyes.
“Well,”
I asked, “is she or isn’t she?”
I
don’t know if he shook his head or nodded because he rolled away from me just
then, drew the majority of the quilt around his bony shoulders. Travis mumbled something. Most of the time when I decode the message in
my memory, he’s saying, “She’s a survivor.”
The
picking season came to a final conclusion around the end of August. The next year they brought in modern
machinery to do our jobs, these long hydraulic units with conveyor belts and
tarps, a metal arm to grab a branch and shake the leaves bare. They looked like parade floats. In two weeks they cleaned over four thousand
trees, doing the work it took a hundred half-good men a month to do.
Mother
never left us for Virgil or Mr. Lemley or any other suitor. She did her business out of a hitch-up
trailer in back. I know I shouldn’t hate
her, but there’s what you know and there’s what you feel, and the thing I’ve
learned is it’s usually what’s inside of you that wins.
The
World’s Fair came to town the year after the cherry picking machines
arrived. The city made quick work of it,
bulldozing the river bank near the falls, abolishing skid row forever. I don’t know where all those people went,
those fruit pickers and drunks, but every day that I get older, I look in the
mirror and gasp, pretty sure I see one of them.
