The Orchard Read online

  Then someone called my name, and I surrendered to fate.

  I don’t remember whose idea it first was, but after enduring nearly a full month of final-exam threats from cackling professors and sadistic young instructors who knew all the right words to set terror on our heels, it didn’t matter. We had to get away. It was Friday, and we had to try to pretend we really didn’t give a damn, that it was all going to be a snap and graduation with honors was only a matter of killing the next year without getting arrested.

  We decided to have our picnic on the deserted Armstrong farm, in the shade of the orchard that didn’t grow anything anymore.

  What the hell—we were in college and didn’t know any better.

  So Stick Reese brought the wine, Mike Buller the sandwiches, and the others—there were about a dozen—brought the odds and ends, including a case of cold beer. The plans as we had so cleverly figured it would be to enjoy ourselves while studying for the legalized torture that would begin bright and early Monday morning. The collected condemneds’ last meal, and who gave a shit.

  But the not unexpected result was the packing away of the books as soon as they were brought out, and a prolonged bitch session about our classes, the college, and the world that conspired to prevent us from getting rich. There was also a baseball game with acorns, and a scientific experiment to see how far one could shove an arm down a burrow before the gopher got pissed and chewed the thing off.

  Mary had come with Rich Verner, and she spent most of her time sitting under a tree and whispering in his ear.

  I, the stoic and unheralded lover, sat against my own apple tree on the orchard’s rim and dispensed facile wisdom while keeping an eye on the round of her shoulder, the curve of her breast, the way her legs in their jeans seemed never to stop.

  Only Reese knew I was lovesick and thankfully kept his cracks to a minimum; we had known each other since high school, and he had seen me moping and glooming around like this before, and for some damn reason had decided some time ago it was his duty to keep me from slashing my wrists or hanging myself or doing something really stupid, like proposing to the girl.

  “Y’know,” he said, after we had eaten and the others had drifted off, “what you ought to do, pal, is walk right over there, punch Rich out, and drag Mary into the bushes.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, and clamped my teeth hard on a ham sandwich.

  “Hey, I’m not shitting you, man,” he insisted, and squirmed around so he was sitting in front of me, his backwards baseball cap crammed down harder, his right hand—the one without the beer can—flicking at his chin. He was trying to grow a beard; he wasn’t doing very well. “Really. The caveman stuff, y’know?”

  I swallowed and gave him the eye. “Just leave it, all right?”

  He looked at me, testing, then showed me a set of teeth that better belonged on a dumb horse. “Take it from me,” he said. “They like that macho crap. All this stuff about sensitivity and caring and garbage like that—hell, if it was true, she’d be all over you in a minute.”

  There was a compliment in there somewhere, and when I found it, I thanked him, though it didn’t do me a bit of good.

  “Don’t mention it, Herb. No sweat.” He rocked back and spread his hands behind him. “You see, your problem is—”

  “Who’s got a problem?” another voice asked.

  Wonderful, I thought; bring on the United Nations while you’re at it.

  Stick looked up at Mike Buller and nodded toward me. Mike, in turn, looked to the sky and shook his head wearily, as if to tell whoever was watching to look out, the fat boy was at it again with all his whining about unrequited love. A loud and heavy sigh, a drooping of his head, and he looked up at me and winked. He was carrying an overloaded tray of food he’d gotten from his father’s market over on Steuben Avenue, the one that used to be Garland’s until old man Garland ran off with a produce clerk and his wife sold the place and moved down to Georgia. Without dropping a single sandwich, he handed it to Amy Niles and sat down. Amy stuck out her tongue, blew a kiss to me, and walked off to serve the animals their second course.

  Mary was still under the tree with Verner.

  “Don’t tell me,” Mike said, put his fingertips dramatically to his temples, and closed his eyes. He claimed to want to be a stage magician when he grew up, which meant, to me, he would probably end up working behind his father’s counter for the rest of his life. “I see … yes, I see a redhead.”

  “Knock it off, Mike,” I said.

  As usual, he ignored me.

  “I see a redhead with hair down to her ass, legs up to her neck, and a smile that keeps Professor Danvers sitting behind his desk whenever she asks a question.” His eyes opened. “Am I right, or am I right?”

  “A real pal,” i told him.

  Stick laughed with a palm over his mouth.

  “Look,” I said, “it isn’t funny anymore, okay? I’m asking you nice just to knock it off.”

  Stick laughed again.

  Mike slapped his shoulder, hard, and began plucking the grass. “It’s a bitch. Christ, it’s a pain.” He was serious. He knew what I was going through because he was going through it with Amy. And frankly, I was getting a little tired of holding his sweaty hand.

  For a while, shortly after Mary Oster really and truly came into my life at the start of this semester, I had hopes she would see through the weight I was carrying and maybe, just maybe, like what was in there. My uncle, when I thought it was the right time to confide in him, told me straight out I was a jerk, that as long as I kept stuffing my face with everything in the kitchen there wasn’t a woman on the planet who would give me a second glance; my aunt May told me the same thing, but in a way that didn’t make me feel like so much shit.

  “You have to make up your mind, Herb,” she said. “You have to know what you want, and what you think is important. Life isn’t like the movies. Miracles don’t happen on their own.”

  I didn’t like her very much for a while after that, even though I knew she was right. And for the first time in I don’t know when, I found myself wishing my mother hadn’t died and my father hadn’t taken off to god knows where. The Alstars may be family, and the only family I had, but it was obvious to me then that they just didn’t understand.

  So I consoled my miseries with the memory of a film I had seen on campus the month before— Beauty and the Beast, a lyrical French adaptation that haunted me for days … until I decided that fairy tales, for me, were only another form of self-pity. I was fat, not a beast, and flame-haired Mary wasn’t about to be my Beauty, my Esmeralda, or even the princess who could change frogs to princes.

  A breeze began to blow, and Stick wondered if there’d be rain.

  No Beast, but something worse.

  Toni Keane, who was popping grapes under a nearby tree, demanded to know who’d brought the umbrellas.

  No enemy, but something worse.

  I was Mary’s friend, a good friend, and never destined to be more.

  Christ, now that is a bitch. Liberated philosophies aside, being a close friend of a woman you’re in love with is a torture { wouldn’t even wish on my stupid uncle, even if he is a judge.

  I must have made some kind of noise, because Stick looked at me kind of funny, but before he could ask me what I was thinking—I could see the damned question just waiting there on his lips—Amy returned with the empty tray and sat down, close to Mike but not close enough. He and I exchanged glances of the damned, and he started to whistle.

  I felt a chill. I looked to the sky. When I couldn’t find a decent cloud, I looked behind me, into that part of the orchard that had been burned black and stayed that way.

  Then Toni roused herself long enough to crawl over, give us all a disgusted look, and demand, “So when does the orgy start, huh?”

  Amy blushed a little, but she was still a freshman and we managed to forgive her.

  “Well?” Toni said, rising up on her knees, her hands on her hips and her t-shirt p
ulling snug across her small breasts. “God, are you guys dead or something?”

  Suddenly, I started to laugh. It was, on the face and every other part of it, ludicrous. So goddamned ludicrous. Most of us were juniors in college, practically grown up and ready to assault the world, and we were behaving like we were dumbass horny freshmen in search of the perfect lay.

  It was infectious.

  Stick laughed.

  Amy laughed.

  Mike did his best to keep a straight face, but one look at Toni, who was sticking her tongue out at him, and he blew up so loudly a flock of crows took to the air.

  We rolled, we giggled, we did everything but fall into each other’s arms. It was a while before we calmed down, and by then the others had wandered up, looking for something to do now that the food was gone. Before I knew it, they were gathered around me like disciples in front of a blond and blue-eyed Buddha. For a moment, a frightening moment, I thought Stick would say something, or that they’d start in on me, teasing me, offering me advice about the latest fad diets. But Amy, for which I vowed to love her forever, said something about my uncle Gil and the way he had come down hard on some friends of hers in court because of a party the week before, and the bust that followed. No one was jailed, but the people who had complained about the noise and the drinking had insisted the offenders do public service as penance. My uncle agreed.

  “The park,” Amy said, “won’t have a shred of litter in it from now until the Second Coming, for god’s sake.”

  She wanted to know then if I had influence with him, but I couldn’t answer because Toni demanded that I appeal to his better nature and well-known love for students and ask him to close down the campus because conditions there were horrifyingly inhumane.

  “What do you mean, inhumane?” Stick asked, as always about ten minutes behind the rest of the world.

  Amy gave him an example. Mike gave him another. Even Richard yelled something over, and within minutes there was practically a committee set to start the revolution. It didn’t take long to draw up a list of grievances each more outrageous than the last; and when the laughter was over, Amy leapt to her feet, snatched off Stick’s cap and started running.

  He yelled and chased her.

  Rich dove for her and missed.

  Someone else yelled at Stick, and the next thing I knew we were involved in a game that had no rules, had no goals—we got up and we ran, eventually working ourselves into a wild session of tag with no home base and no object other than to let off the steam the bitching didn’t vent.

  Even I did it.

  By definition and point of bulk, I’m not the fastest guy in the known universe. For as long as I could remember, my size has always provoked comments, and I finally decided I wasn’t ever going to play the role of jolly fat man, fat clown, stumbling, bumbling, uncoordinated jackass. I fought back, and did so all my life, and won enough times to let all but the dumbest of strangers know that fat jokes and snide remarks need not apply when if came to needling Herbert Johns.

  I think … I think that’s why I had true friends instead of those who kept me around just for laughs.

  So I was fairly able to hold my own once the chase got out of the field and into the trees. Diabolical shrubs held no terror for me, ambushing branches quailed at my passing, and I managed, once, to get a good hard hand on Rich’s shoulder, hard enough to send him pinwheeling into a thorn-bush whose greeting had him bellowing for revenge.

  I laughed and charged on.

  The light faded as we played, and eventually I followed Mary when we all returned to the orchard, Stick and Amy right behind me, Mike and Rich bringing up the rear. Toni hadn’t even gotten to her feet. She just sat there, grinning like an idiot and finishing my lunch.

  It was chilly in there, almost nightcold under the fire-blackened trees, and the footing was less stable than out in the field. Several times I thought I was going to fall; a couple of times more I thought I could see someone else with us, someone not a kid. But my heart was pounding and my focus not exactly clear, and we finally made it into the open without anyone breaking a leg. The only casualty was me—a scrape along my forehead when I didn’t duck fast enough.

  Mary, by that time, was laughing so hard she could barely move, but she kept ahead of me, and once we broke out into the open again, she headed for the blankets and safety, while the others swung wide to the east, aiming for Mainland Road. I didn’t have a prayer of catching her, and I knew it; but god, it was nice, and there was always that hope that Rich wouldn’t suddenly pop out and call her, put his arm around her waist, and prove to us how he owned her by giving her a light scolding and a long kiss.

  He didn’t.

  Mary fell.

  And I fell beside her.

  “Jesus, Herb,” she said as she rolled out of my way. “Are you trying to crush me to death?”

  “Only in the mad throes of my unbridled passion,” I panted, rolling the other way and sitting up, hands on my thighs, my heart telling me I ought to know better than lug my fat around like that.

  She giggled, coughed, pushed her hair out of her eyes, and pulled a handkerchief from her jeans pocket. With an appraising look that made me feel like a slightly soiled side of pork, she knelt in front of me and began mopping the sweat from my face, the dirt from around my cut.

  “Uh, Mary …”

  “Shut up, Herb. I’m playing nurse.”

  Without moving my head, I glanced around, looking for Rich. He was still involved with Stick and the rest, and I think I saw Mike deliberately leading him farther away. Toni had left; I never knew where she went.

  When I looked back, Mary was staring at me, her head tilted to one side. “Not bad,” she said.

  “I do my best.”

  She sat on her heels and pulled her long hair over one shoulder, stroking it absently as she looked up at the sky over the orchard, at the colors that still clung there stubbornly, ahead of the dark. “Pretty.”

  “Like Hollywood.”

  “Better. It’s real.”

  I agreed, and couldn’t think of anything else to say until, in a flash of brilliance that has been my problem for years, I asked what she was doing for her year-end project.

  “A self-portrait,” she said, and blushed. “You think that’s silly?”

  I didn’t think so, not for her.

  What was silly was that I had been taking art courses since my freshman year, conned into the first one by Stick, who had sworn to me on his dead moped’s grave that it would be so easy I could walk through it in my sleep. Incredibly, he was right. Too right, as a matter of fact, because with the help of my teachers I uncovered a certain amount of reasonable talent I didn’t know I had. Nothing spectacular. I wasn’t going to be the overaged Mozart of the art world or anything. But I was good enough to be truly encouraged, and I improved enough over the next couple of years so that I was beginning to believe I might actually make a living at it in some small way—a commercial artist, maybe, or something like that.

  This year, though, I discovered—from, of all people, my stupid uncle—that whittling was actually a form of sculpture most people ignored because they thought it was only a bunch of old men sitting in old chairs turning sticks into shavings. Before I knew it, I was learning about the best kinds of wood to use, the right kinds of blades for this style and that … and it fascinated me. The trouble was, with oils and acrylics I was comfortable; with the other stuff, though, from stone to wood to collages made from old magazines and old clothes, my projects seemed more like the results of insane demolition.

  So naturally, good old Professor Danvers tells us we were supposed to do our year-end final in whatever medium we were worst at. Pick a subject, he told us; animal or human, and do something unusual with it. It doesn’t have to be great. I just want to see what you’ve learned about technique. And if you’ve overcome your handicaps, as it were, and have conquered the enemy.

  He thought it was funny.

  I saw my average falling
to its death from the top of the chapel.

  Then, in probably what will be the only true inspiration I’ll ever have in my life, I got an idea when I saw a special on Westminster Abbey. If I pulled it off, I’d be a genius; if I didn’t, maybe the old bastard would take pity and not fail me too badly.

  “Damnit, Herb!” Mary said then, seeing the vacant look on my face and knowing I wasn’t listening.

  “Sorry,” I said sheepishly.

  “C’mon, do you think it’s silly or not?”

  “What?”

  She looked at the ground as if searching for something to throw at me. “The self-portrait! Do you think it’s silly?”

  Mary, as much as I loved her, was definitely not an artist.

  “No, it’s not silly. But …”

  “It’s not unusual, I know.” She pushed her hair back and sighed. “I think I’m going to do it in something like glass or scraps of paper.” Her grin was sly. “He’ll think I’m avant-garde or something.”

  “You believe that?”

  She tried to look serious, failed and laughed. “Not for a minute, but I’m no artist, for Christ’s sake. Not like you are. It’s all Stick’s fault anyway. He swore to me it would be a gut course, y’know? I could walk through it in my sleep.”

  I must have gaped, because she started giggling and could barely ask what was wrong with me. When I told her Reese had given me the same sales pitch, she was ready to get up and murder him and the hell with the death penalty. I suggested it would ruin her college career. She suggested I shove it.

  “What about you, Herb? What are you doing?”

  The gold was gone, the rose and the pink. There was nothing left but a hint of the sun.

  “Wood,” I told her reluctantly. “Something in wood.”

  “Really? Some kind of sculpture?”

  “Sort of.”

  She pouted. “You won’t tell me, will you.”

  “I can’t, Mary. I … can’t.”

  Her disappointment was strong enough to cloud her eyes, and I couldn’t help wondering why she was here, sitting with me instead of running off with darling Richard. I shifted uneasily, the damp ground beginning to work its way through my jeans.