Naked

  The road to Hobbs’s orchard wound past a dairy farm where several dozen speckled cows passed the time grinding wet grass with their blunt teeth. I’d tried making friends with them a year earlier, standing by the fence and waving sandwiches until their owner informed me that they didn’t eat chicken or pork, not even as a snack. They were dumb, these cows. Picking season began in mid-September and lasted through the end of October. Within the course of a few weeks, frost would appear and we’d awake to see our breath shooting forth in dingy clouds. I’d always thought that cows spent their winters in some sort of heated barracks; instead, it was their fate to remain outdoors, no matter how cold it got. Did these animals have any idea their summer was coming to an end? Could they remember their lives as young, carefree veal? Did they ever look forward to anything or entertain regrets? I dropped my duffel bag and approached the barbed-wire fence, hoping they might rush forward, wagging their ropy, shit-smeared tails in recognition, but they just stood there, methodically working their jaws.

  Hobbs reacted in the exact same manner. “Well, look who’s here, Ringo. If it isn’t… Dennis, right?” He tossed a lit cigarette onto the grass and stepped out onto his porch, saying, “I’d invite you in, but the wife’s still dying of cancer. Clifford’s got it, too. You remember him, don’t you? Big fat guy, used to be my foreman. He’s over in Portland now, tumors up his ass the size of young Bartlett pears.”

  Seeing as Clifford wasn’t expected back anytime soon, Hobbs offered to put me up in the foreman’s trailer, which sat between the barn and the long row of cabins.

  “Funny thing, cancer.” He lit a cigarette, and considered the spent match. A crop duster flew overheard, and he waved his arms in greeting. “Yes, sir, it’s a real mystery.”

  He led me to the barn, where a Mexican man stood waiting for his turn at the shower. “Whole-aah, Toe-moss,” he shouted.

  The man tugged at the towel he wore like a skirt around his waist and nodded his head in greeting, “Hola, Señor Hobbs.”

  “You speak some Mexican, don’t you, Daniel?” Hobbs asked. “Well, by God, I’m learning a few words of my own. A person has to in order to get along in the modern world! You get me going, and I’ll speak like a regular Topo Gigio, right, Ringo?”

  The dog knelt at the base of a tree, doubling over to lick its blistered anus.

  “These are different times we’re living in, a whole new set of rules. The kids around here, they think they’re too good to work. Only choice left is either trash or Mexicans, and I’ll take the stupid Mexicans any day.” He prodded me in the ribs, “Watch this. ‘Bueños Dios, Miguel.’”

  A small, dark-eyed man looked up from his wood splitting, alarmed.

  “They spook easy,” Hobbs said.

  Yes, well, people tend to do that when you come up behind them shouting, “Good God.” It’s just a habit, I guess.

  Hobbs unlocked the door of the trailer, a bulbous, aqua tankard set upon cinder blocks. It worried me that the moment I crossed the threshold I might become the sort of person who lived in a trailer. A trailer, the very word set off alarms in the base of my skull. People who lived in trailers called the police to break up violent family fights. They peed in the sink and used metal buckets to barbeque tough purple steaks marked “reduced for final sale.” Who did this man think I was? Did he know I’d been raised in a house with a dishwasher and central air-conditioning? It was one thing to play pioneer in a rustic cabin. This place, on the other hand, had all the charm of an oversized gas can. I hung back, watching Miguel fill his arms with firewood. He piled on the last log and then screamed, dropping his entire load to swat at his chest, calling out the words “big spider, big spider.” A lot came back at that moment. I considered the row of shoddy cabins before peeking inside the trailer, where I noticed a gas stove nestled between the sink and a humming refrigerator. Miguel stood beside the barn, kicking each piece of firewood before picking it out of the mud, and I climbed the stairs to my trailer.

  Apple picking is mindless work. When I’d done it with Veronica, we had worked together on the same trees, running down the names in our mental address books and discussing our friends in alphabetical order. Pickers are paid by the bin, a large wooden crate that, when full, holds roughly fifteen hundred pounds of fruit. You climb the ladder wearing a canvas sack and when it is full, you empty your load carefully into the bin. Then you climb your ladder and do it again and again and again. With two people, the time manages to pass quickly. Veronica and I might start our day recalling the false pregnancy of Beverly April and by the time we got to Lucinda Farrel’s obsession with turquoise jewelry, we were ready for lunch. I tried doing it myself, speaking out loud in two distinct voices but stopped after Hobbs caught me defending Gregory Allison’s use of LSD as an appetite suppressant.

  Without Veronica’s company, it just wasn’t working. Left to my own devices, I proceeded slowly and methodically to drive myself crazy.

  Once a bin was full, Hobbs would arrive on his tractor and randomly pull out three apples. If none were bruised, I would receive nine dollars. If one was bruised, I would receive eight, then seven. On a good day in young trees, it was possible to fill up to eight bins. The next day, who knew? You could spend ten hours yanking the stunted fruit off one stingy tree. Even sleep offered no relief. Night after night I dreamed of picking apples and awoke exhausted, my shoulders bruised from the heavy canvas sack. A Friday was no different from a Monday or Wednesday; with no day off, there was nothing to look forward to. During the first few weeks, Hobbs would turn off his tractor and we’d talk for a while before he carried off the bin. Once he realized just how much I had to talk about, he took to leaving the motor running. “Gotta go check on the wife,” he’d shout. “You keep up the good work.” The Mexicans were now jogging past my trailer on their way to the shower. A cat showed up at my doorstep, an orange tom with a neck as thick as his waist. I’d never cared for redheaded cats, always associating them with Brian O’Shea, my overbearing seventh-grade lockermate. Neither did I have a particular soft spot for male cats, who tended to spray and show up in the middle of the night, tattered and bleeding. Still, though, I was in no position to judge. The cat offered companionship, and I took him in, figuring that if he was going to have his ears chewed off, I might as well be the one to do it. I fed him sardines and stroked him until he set off sparks. He ran away.

  With no one to talk to, I began putting my various thoughts and opinions into letters that were weighty in the literal rather than figurative sense of the word. I wrote my friend Evelyn a seventeen-page letter describing how I’d felt after the cat ran off. Two weeks later, having received no response, I crossed her name out of my address book. One by one, I eliminated them all. Eight pages to Ted Woestendiek on what it’s like to wash your hair with laundry detergent. No answer. Twelve and a half pages to Lisa, forgiving her for being born. Nothing.

  “Dear Miss Chestnut, You’re probably wondering what I’ve been up to since the third grade…”

  I might spend an entire evening on a single letter, but with the exception of Veronica — “No, my boyfriend has not left me yet, but thanks for asking” — nobody responded to any of them. This understandably put me in a foul mood. I’d thought I would return to North Carolina after the season ended, but once we moved into the Golden Delicious, I started having second thoughts. What was there to return to? How had I ever considered those people to be my friends when they were too lazy to pick up a pencil and write a letter? Surely, they missed me. Perhaps the best strategy was to see that they missed me even more. I’d live under a bridge before I’d ever go back there. Oh, they’d talk about me, wondering where I was and what I was up to. Someone would hear a rumor that I was skating my way across Europe or sharing a penthouse apartment with Michael Landon, but they’d never know anything for certain, I’d make sure of that. They’d had their chance to share in the fascinating details of my life and had blown it, every last one of them except for Veronica, who I planned to forgive
as soon as she broke it off with that troglodyte.

  When the last bin had been carted away, Hobbs asked if I might be interested in a job at the local packing plant. They were looking for people, and he could put in a word with the manager and let me stay on in the trailer just so long as I paid for my own electricity and promised not to knock on his door.

  “It’s nothing you’d want to make a career out of,” he said. “The job is good for a few months, but after that I’ll guarantee you’ll never want to see a goddamned apple for the rest of your natural life.” He studied the tip of his cigarette for a moment before lighting it. “A peach maybe, but, no sir, not an apple. Nope, no way.”

  The plant was located midway between town and the farm. A corrugated, ramshackle eyesore of a building, it housed an archaic network of shuddering conveyor belts that moved as if they were powered by a team of squirrels running a tread-mill somewhere in the basement. Nothing about the place was inviting, but I suspected that might change the moment they handed me my union card. I would soon be a Teamster, a title guaranteed to cost my father a good three nights’ sleep and to drive my former friends wild with envy. In time, everyone would be affected. Looking out upon the busy plant floor, I imagined all these people seated in folding chairs as I addressed them from the stage of the meeting hall. “Brothers and sisters,” I would yell, clutching a bullhorn in one callused hand and a stack of documents in the other, “the time to act is now! They call this a contract? Well, I call it a contrast, the difference between the way things are and the way things ought to be!” I would need to pause here, as the applause would be deafening. “It’s us, the working people of this country, who make the world go round, and until management opens their eyes to that fact, until the fat daddies upstairs are ready to park their Cadillacs and negotiate a decent wage, this is what I have to say to their contract.” My fellow Teamsters would stand on their seats and cheer as I ripped the contract into pieces and tossed it over my shoulder.

  I had never organized so much as a dinner party, but surely that would change as soon as my fellow workers recognized my way with words and the natural leadership qualities I had suppressed in the name of humility. I’d always had a way with the little people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted, empty lives. If these people wanted to make me their leader, I had no choice but to accept with my own brand of quiet dignity. “Dav-id, Dav-id, Dav-id.” The convention floor would quake with their chant.

  If on the off chance these things didn’t happen, at least I’d be working alongside other people. They might not be as perceptive as I was, but still I welcomed the opportunity to speak to something born without a stem or a tail. Somewhere in this room, a friend was waiting. “I knew it the first time I saw you,” this person would say over dinner some night. “I took one look and said to myself, ‘Damn, that guy is someone I’d like to know.’”

  I was hired for the second shift, which began at 3 and ended at 11 P.M. My job was to stand in place and pull the leaves off the apples as they passed before me on the conveyor belt. There was a woman standing no more than four feet away from me, but the constant rattling din made it impossible to carry on a discussion. Forklifts droned in the background while men sawed and pounded wooden pallets. Sprayers, belts, and generators; the noise was oppressive and relentless. The doors to the loading dock were left open, ensuring that we’d never find ourselves complaining about the heat. I picked the leaves off the passing fruit and tossed them into a cold, wet pile that quickly grew to cover my numb feet. During my first hour I made the mistake of biting into one of the apples. Fresh from its chemical bath, it burned my lips and the flesh at the corners of my mouth, leaving a harsh aftertaste that lingered long after I’d run to the bathroom and washed my mouth out with soap.

  Hobbs had been right about never wanting to see another apple, but his timing was off. I was ready to banish them from my sight after my first forty-five minutes. They were merciless, pouring down the belt without interruption twenty-four hours a day, turning the concept of world hunger into either a myth or a very cruel joke. During a single half hour I had surely handled enough apples for every man, woman, and child with the teeth to bite them or the will to mash them into sauce.

  It occurred to me that everything we buy has been poked or packaged by some unfortunate nitwit with a hairnet and a wad of cotton stuffed into his ears. Every ear of corn, every chocolate-coated raisin or shoelace. Every barbeque tong, paper hat, and store-bought mitten arrives with a history of abject misery. Vegetarians look at a pork roast thinking about the animal. I’d now look at them wondering whose job it was to package the shallow Styrofoam trays. That’s where the real tragedy lies. Cigarettes, crackers, gum: everything I saw would now be tainted by the reminder of my job. “Brothers and sisters, RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!”

  The time crawled by. I’d lift my rubber glove and scrape the frost off my watch, discovering that the last hour amounted to nothing more than seven minutes. We were given a half-hour dinner break and three ten-minute rest periods, which seemed to pass before my hands regained enough feeling to hold a cigarette. Dinner was taken from coin-operated machines in a lounge overlooking the plant floor, so you could chew your sandwich without forgetting where you’d be when the time came to digest it. Except for me, all the belt workers were middle-aged women who endured the packing season and then stayed on for the canning. Their ringleader was a stocky, no-nonsense woman named Dorothy, who wore her son’s football jacket beneath a soiled apron reading SHUT UP AND EAT!

  “Alls I can tell you about the union is they better lay off monkeying with my benefits or they’ll find themselves picking their teeth from out between my bleeding knuckles,” she said. “And I’ll see to that personally!”

  She led me to a bulletin board posted with the minutes of the last meeting. Every sentence included a long list of initials, and after a while I stopped asking what they stood for. Compared to a roll-call vote on severance payments, anything, even my job, seemed exciting. By the time I qualified for dental insurance, I’d be so old we’d be talking dentures, not fillings. “You’d be surprised,” Dorothy said. “The years have a way of adding up.”

  I was sure they did, but couldn’t they add up to something more than this?

  We were taking our break one evening when I asked if anyone happened to speak Italian. “I studied it for a year back in college,” I said. “And now I’ve completely forgotten the word for ‘tragedy.’ Oh, I know Spanish, too, and a wee bit of Greek, but Italian is just so, well, bellissimo, isn’t it?”

  My attempts to impress them failed miserably. The women took to calling me Einstein. “I could tell you were a smart one the first time I saw you bite into one of those apples,” Trish brayed. “I said to myself, now there’s someone with a good head on his shoulders.”

  The break room filled with laughter. “Hey, Einstein, what’s the Latin word for ‘blowhard’?”

  “Tell me, Einstein,” Dorothy asked, “for five bonus points, which local high-school football team is headed for the state finals?”

  “Aw, leave the kid alone.” This was a man’s voice coming from somewhere behind me. “The guy’s got better things to think about than your fat-assed son running interference for those sorry Polecats.”

  “My boy’s a quarterback,” Dorothy shouted. “And for your information those are the Catamounts, and they’re regional champs! So put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

  The man thumbed his nose and gestured for me to join him at his table. “Goddamned flock of silly hens is what they are, but don’t you worry, they’ll get what’s coming to them. Once they get too old to lay eggs, we take them out back and wring their necks.”

  “Watch it, buster,” Dorothy said, tugging at the strings of her apron.

  The man introduced himself as Timothy, adding that all his real friends refer to him as Curly, a curious nickname given that his thin, wheat-colored hair fell straight down from his balding scalp. “It m
ust be hard, a person such as yourself stuck in a place like this. These morons resent any-one with brains and a decent education; it makes them feel trapped and threatened and, oh boy, we can’t have that, can we! Heavens no, they can’t staaannndddd that.” He shuddered and hugged himself, pretending to be frightened.

  “I know just what you’re going through because you and me are a lot alike,” he said. “I’m probably a good fifteen years older and nowhere near as smart as yourself, but come January I’m enrolling in a management class over at the community college. It’s time I put on the old thinking cap and hitch this nose to the grindstone. I’ve wasted enough time as it is.”

  Curly was sort of hokey, but I was in no position to refuse anyone’s friendship. I grew to appreciate his company, sometimes almost wishing we could talk about something besides me. “Say, Dave, tell me once more about that dream you had last night, the one with the shrunken heads lined up inside the egg carton. There’s some powerful symbolism there, let’s see if we can’t figure it out.” He wasn’t the brightest person in the world, but his heart was in the right place.

  Curly worked the first shift as a forklift operator, often staying late to collect overtime. Other nights he sometimes drove back to the plant just to join me for dinner. He spoke to the foreman and had me promoted to the position of sorter. The leafless, glistening apples passed along the belt, and my job was to separate the fancy from the extra fancy. At no point did anyone point out the distinction between these two categories. I tried asking Gail and Dorothy, but angry that I had been promoted without seniority, they ignored me. I observed and did what they did: working a stick of chewing gum, I crossed my arms and sat on a stool until a manager came into view, at which point I would rapidly and randomly discriminate, placing this apple on the fancy belt and its neighbor on extra fancy. Rotten fruit was thrown down a chute, where it would be mashed into baby food. The raise was twenty-five cents an hour. This was drier than my earlier job but no more exciting.