Swallowing Stones (25 page)

Not that I haven’t been kissed a few times. I have. Even been French kissed by Bobby McNeill in eighth grade at Donna Redfern’s party when we were dancing and somebody turned the lights out. I was expecting a plain old spin-the-bottle kiss. The next thing I knew, I thought I had a raw oyster stuck in my mouth.

I am absolutely positive that kissing gets better than this. Otherwise I would lie down right here next to Charles Henry and pull the sod up over my head.

I rest my shoulder against the chiseled curve of his tombstone. Poor Charles Henry. He was so young when he died. This is why I read poems—love poems mostly—to boys like him, boys who most likely passed on before they ever had a
chance to fall in love. If I were in their shoes, I would certainly be most appreciative of any visitors stopping by my final resting place to read a poem to me now and then.

A wind suddenly kicks up its heels and tears the pages from my hand as I’m flipping through
Selected Poems
, trying to find something a little more cheerful to read to Charles Henry. It sets the Spanish moss into frenzied flapping over head in the trees. A storm is coming. They have a way of springing up unannounced on steamy afternoons in Florida.

A loud crash of thunder rumbles through the trees, sending me to my feet. Dark clouds tumble all over each other. I smell the rain in the air, a chilled metallic smell, even sense it on my skin. But I can’t see it. It is as if the rain is stuck in some kind of purgatory between the earth and the sky.

The Austrian pines have stopped their whispering and are beginning to moan—loud eerie moans that burrow into my bones. The first bolt of lightning makes a beeline for the woods behind the church.

The sky turns the color of lead. Everything around me blurs into tones of gray, except for a large splotch of red in the distance. The red splotch zips along a few feet above the earth, picking up speed. A flash of lightning outlines everything in sharp blinding white. I recognize that faded red T-shirt and the person wearing it. I watch him stop to fold something and stuff it into his back pocket. Then he takes off running through the cemetery toward the road.

I don’t move from my place beside Charles Henry. When the blob of red is only a few yards from me, it stops. We stare at each other. The wind blows sand in my eyes, making them tear.

“Gator?” I shout above the roar. This is what goes through my mind faster than the next bolt of lightning can streak to the ground:
Why aren’t you in the groves picking oranges? Travis Waite is going to fire your hide for sure if he hasn’t already. And what, for heaven’s sake, are you doing in a cemetery that’s for white folks in the middle of the afternoon with lightning bolts looking for any moving target in sight?

I shout his name again, but Gator doesn’t answer. The wind beats at his red T-shirt as if it is trying to tear it right off his body.

The thunder seeps into the soles of my penny loafers. It rumbles through my body. I pick up my books, tuck them close to my chest, and keep my head down. I have to find someplace to get away from the storm. I head across the cemetery, walking as fast as I can in a pencil-straight skirt with nothing but a tiny kick pleat for maneuvering.

By now the wind has whipped itself into a frenzy. Flying sand stings my legs. A streak of lightning zigzags into the meadow across the street. When I look back, the red shirt is gone. Gator has disappeared.

This is what I am puzzling over, in between rumbles of thunder, when I hear another sound: the piercing honk of a car horn. I look up to see Chase Tully, grinning at me from his silver-blue T-bird convertible.

Chase Tully is one of those boys whose eyes glaze over whenever I try to read him a poem
. Although the last time I tried to do that was four years ago.

Chase leans into the steering wheel and shouts, “Come on, Dove, get in! You’ll get soaked.”

Back when we were kids I would have yelled something smart-alecky at him, like “Well, riding in a convertible with someone dumb enough to leave the top down in the middle of a storm isn’t exactly my idea of an improvement.” I don’t say that now. The truth is, even though I’ve known him all my life, I’m not sure how to act around Chase anymore.

Chase and I practically grew up together. Our fathers’
groves bump right up against each other. Jacob Tully has over a thousand acres, the most groves of anybody in all of Panther County. My dad has about seven hundred.

Chase and I used to play in my dad’s groves every chance we got. If I had something on my mind, Chase was usually the first to hear it. Straight out, no holds barred. Back then, he was about as wide as a yardstick, with these large ears and a goofy-looking crew cut.

Then he went and turned thirteen and everything changed.

For the next three years he acted as if he couldn’t remember my name. Depending on the occasion, I was Twerp or Squirt—usually in front of his girlfriends. Around the guys he hung out with I was Spaz or Kid. The rest of the time he made up whatever name struck his fancy: Mouse, Noodlehead, Beanpole. The list was irritatingly endless.

It wasn’t until I came to Benevolence High last year that he finally stopped calling me names and telling me to get lost every chance he got, and started giving me that lazy grin of his again. He still teases me, though, which is why I don’t know what to make of him these days.

The wind cranks it up a notch, pushing me away from the car. “Come on!” Chase shouts over the thunder. He lifts his leather jacket from the passenger seat and tosses it in the back.

The top whirs as it climbs up from the back of the car. Chase reaches up and locks it in place.

Drops of rain tickle my arms and run down my nose. I hunch over my books, trying to keep them dry just as the sky opens up and sends a waterfall roaring down on my head.
Like any sensible person, I lunge for the door handle and slide into the soft leather bucket seat.

Chase glances in the rearview mirror and smooths the sides of his dark hair back with his hands. He’s got sideburns now. No more crew cut. And his body finally caught up to those ears.

He flicks on the windshield wipers but keeps his foot on the brake. We sit there with the engine purring. “So, where we headed?” He doesn’t look at me. His eyes are glued to the dashboard. He licks his thumb and rubs at a smudge of dirt by the radio.

“Just home,” I say.

He grins and shakes his head. “That’s it? Home?” He reaches across my lap and opens the glove compartment. A whole pile of road maps tumbles out. “Dove, jeez, where’s your imagination?”

For as far back as I can remember, Chase has had the largest collection of maps of any person I’ve ever met. Probably more than the whole state of Florida put together. He reads maps the way other kids read comic books.

“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.