Naked (20 page)

I was out in no time, waking minutes later to find her rapping on my skull with a tube of toothpaste. “Hey, wake up.”

I pretended to sleep through it, figuring she’d give up sometime soon.

“Hey, this son of a bitch took my seat,” she shouted. “I went to the ladies’ to freshen up and now I don’t got no god-damned
place to sit.”

“You can sit on me,” I heard someone shout from the back of the bus. “I’ll give you the ride of your life!”

“All right now, you’ve had your fun.” This was a man’s voice but it couldn’t be the driver, as we were still moving. “Come
on now, half pint, give the lady back her seat.”

A hand grabbed me by the collar and lifted me effortlessly to my feet. This hand was blistered and meaty, matching both the
face and personality of its owner. The man asked no questions and delivered no threats. He didn’t need to. Once the seat was
empty he wiped it free of crumbs and gestured for the young woman to make herself comfortable. I thought briefly of taking
my case to the people, but this was clearly not my crowd. They leaned forward, craning their necks to whisper and laugh while
I stood in the aisle pretending to be a foreigner, unfamiliar with the customs of this magnificent country. I might have accidentally
taken someone’s seat, but, oh, look at the way I seemed to appreciate the rugged landscape the rest of them took for granted.
I bent at the waist, lowering my head to peer out the window and raising my eyebrows in delight at every passing boulder.
Look
! I seemed to say.
That one resembles a cardinal nesting on the rim of an enormous pancake! And here we have what appears to be an overturned
clog, lying beneath what closely resembles the pocked, flat-featured head of the ignorant hillbilly occupying my rightful
seat!

Someone disembarked about noon, and I settled into his seat exhausted but unable to sleep, distracted by the courtship taking
place across the aisle. After turning ten thousand times to thank him for his valor, seats were swapped so that Lord Beefy
and Lady Laundrybasket might sit side by side and get to know each other better. Within minutes, they had their heads beneath
a sweatshirt, where they were either practicing squirrel calls or sucking the acne medication off each other’s faces. The
sound of heavy-metal music on the radio, the piercing squall of a restless infant, the endless chatter of the nattering fogeys
seated up front: I could endure anything but the noise of this couple nipping and kissing and crying out in pleasure.

She wept when he reached his stop. The sound of her muffled sobs was an absolute tonic, sending me into a deep, impenetrable
sleep that lasted all the way to Reno.

This would be my second visit to the Hood River valley. The first had been an accident. My friend Veronica and I had been
living in San Francisco when she laid down her copy of
The Grapes of Wrath
and announced that we’d had enough of city living. It was her habit to speak for the both of us, and I rarely minded as it
kept me from having to make any decisions of my own. “We want to head up north and join our brothers and sisters in the orchards,”
she said, adjusting the scarf she’d taken to wearing on her head. “Migrant labor, that’s the life for us.” The good people
of this country needed us, and we pictured ourselves reclining in sun-dappled haystacks, eating hearty lunches prepared by
the farmer’s gingham-clad wife.

“It’s hardworking people like you that make the world go round,” she would say. “Here, have another piece of my prize-winning
chicken; you folks need to keep your strength up.” After lunch the gentle farmer would take up his fiddle and kick up the
dust with a rousing rendition of “Turkey in the Straw” or “Polly Wolly Doodle.” Late afternoons would find us back at work,
picking apples off the ground and lobbing them into adorable crates labeled “Li’l Redskin” or “Teacher’s Pet.” Our lives would
be simple but unspeakably heroic. How she’d gotten this impression from a Steinbeck novel is anyone’s guess, but I went along
because, if nothing else, it was guaranteed to drive my father out of his mind.

We hitchhiked up into Oregon, leaping out of the car after spotting snowcapped Mount Hood, a perfect symbol for the majesty
that was to become our lives. The first farmer refused to hire us because we had no experience. The second and third turned
us down for the same reason. We lied to the fourth, a small elderly man named Hobbs, whose crew of Mexicans had recently been
carted away by the INS.

“At this point, I’d take anyone who could pick their god-damned nose.” He stared at the trees, their branches bent with fruit.
“I thought for a while that maybe my wife could help me out, but she’s up at the big house dying of cancer. What do you say
to that, Ringo?”

If Hobbs’s wife was dying, his ancient beagle couldn’t be very far behind. The animal wheezed and groaned, worrying the bald
patches that festered at the base of his arthritic tail.

“Goddamnit, Ringo,” Hobbs would say, tossing his glowing cigarette butt onto the wet grass, “I sure am glad you’re out here.”

There would be no picnics taken in haystacks. No gingham, or fiddle playing. Hidden behind a thick layer of permanent storm
clouds, the sun dappled nothing. Contrary to what we’d assumed, apples were not picked off the ground but from the limbs of
hard-to-reach trees protected by a punishing bark that tended to retain a great deal of water following a good twelve-hour
rain. This was a seven-day workweek, sunup to sundown, gentle rain or driving rain. If people like us made the world go round,
it was a highly guarded secret. As pickers, we were provided with one of the half dozen cabins that formed a row alongside
the gravel driveway. There was no electricity, and outside of the shower located in the barn, our only source of water was
one frigid, rust-caked tap. The cooking was done on a wood stove, and we slept on mattresses stuffed with what I could only
begin to identify as high-heeled shoes. These hardships were played to our favor. We took to wearing overalls, admiring our
somber reflections in the candlelit windows as we huddled over steaming bowls of porridge. This would do. We were pioneers.
People like us had no need for pillows or towel racks. We wore our bruises like a badge, and every chest cold was a testament
to our fortitude. I was on the verge of buying myself a coonskin cap when the season ended and we traveled back home to North
Carolina, where I quickly re-adjusted to a life of hot water and electricity. We’d made plans to pick again the following
year, but when the time came, Veronica was forced to back out of her commitment. It seemed she had found herself a boyfriend.
Boyfriend.
The word stuck in my throat like a wad of steel wool. “It won’t last,” I said. “You’ll see.” What did she need with a boyfriend?
I pictured the two of them rolling around the floor of her apartment, specks of dirt being driven into their bare backs and
pale, quivering buttocks.
Boyfriend.
She’d never find anyone as good as I was, I told her that. When she agreed, I got even angrier, storming off her front porch
with a ridiculous, “Yeah, well, we’ll just see about that.”

I told myself that it was my destiny to walk alone, but the cliché provided no comfort. Given the choice, I would much rather
walk alone with someone who can cook, and I worried about spending so much time by myself. The remainder of my bus ride put
the latter fear to rest. I reached Odell convinced that if I never spoke to another human being for the rest of my life, it
would be too soon.

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.