The Year Money Grew on Trees (15 page)

"Well, that is two for two for this thing. I can't believe it fits," he said, staring in awe at the piece. "See, I think that shaft spins around on the tractor powering the pump."

"Wow, how did you figure that out?" I asked, sincerely impressed.

"When we were messing around with that plow, I noticed how one of those levers would make the shaft turn but I wasn't sure why. I guess it's to run things like this." He looked very pleased with himself. "Shall we try it?"

"Sure!" I shouted.

We grabbed a five-gallon bucket from inside the house and filled it with water. We figured we were supposed to put the long straight tube into the water source, so we stuck it in the bucket. Dad turned on the tractor and started the shaft spinning. He ran back to the gun and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

"I bet we have to prime it!" he yelled.

He pulled the straight pipe out of the bucket and poured water into it. "Go pull the trigger!" he called to me. When I did, a stream of water shot out. He lowered the pipe into the bucket and called for the gun. After a few shots of water into the air, he said, "Go get your mother," with an evil grin on his face.

I started for the door, but he chickened out and instead shot the rest of the bucket's load onto the side of the house. He turned off the tractor, still admiring his work.

"So how much water do you think this thing can pump?" I asked him.

"A lot. It sucked out that bucket like crazy."

"What if I had to pump out a lot more than just a few gallons?"

"Get a bigger bucket, then. What are you trying to pump?"

"I've got to spray all the trees with something to keep the worms from eating the apples. And it takes a lot of the stuff."

He thought for a few seconds. "You know the cheapest thing to do would be to get an empty fifty-five gallon oil drum. Looking at the length of that straight pipe, I'll bet that's what Jack Nelson did."

"How could I get one? Where do you find 'em?"

He was quiet while he debated with himself as to whether he should get more involved. Eventually, the part of him that wanted to see a fifty-five-gallon water gun won out.

"There's a few of them behind the bolt store. I'll try to bring one home tomorrow if I can figure out a way to attach it to the car."

"Thanks, Dad! It's great to have someone who can build and fix things."

"Yeah, yeah." He ignored my attempted compliment and went into the house.

***

I helped with the irrigation on the following day until I heard my dad drive up. "Gotta go!" I said, and handed my shovel to Amy.

There was a barrel tied awkwardly to the open trunk
of the Dodge Dart my dad was driving. He was untying it and looking very grumpy.

"Wow, you got it!" I said excitedly.

"Barely," he replied in disgust. "One side came untied on the way home. The stupid thing started dragging down the road, sparks flying everywhere. I'm lucky it didn't kill someone."

I could see the deep scratches on one end of the barrel. Once untied, we rolled it over to the wagon and lifted it up. My dad used some wire to wrap around the barrel and the sides of the wagon to hold it in place.

"There you go. There's your barrel," he said, and then started walking away.

"Aren't you going to stay and see it working?" I yelled to him.

"The less I see of that, that"—I could tell he was trying not to swear—"that dadgum barrel, the better," he finally spit out.

"Thank you!" I yelled before he disappeared inside our house.

I attached the wagon to the tractor and pushed the long pipe that connected to the pump into the opening in the barrel. My dad was right—it fit almost perfectly. I grabbed the hose and filled the barrel to the top, hoping my dad didn't notice me using city water.

I wanted to surprise my sisters and cousins, so I drove

the tractor out into the orchard. "Wait till you see what this can do," I said, pointing toward the barrel and spray gun.

I grabbed the gun and flipped the lever to turn on the pump. I squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.

"Impressive," said Lisa, giggling.

"Hold on!" I said, and ran back to the house for a jug of water.

"You've got to prime it!" I yelled as I poured the water into the straight pipe that led to the pump. I put the pipe back in the barrel, flipped the lever, and pulled the trigger. I had the gun pointing at the girls, and they scattered as a jet of water came shooting out.

"Cool!" shouted Sam and Michael. "Let me try!" they yelled together.

We all got a chance to hold the gun and try to spray each other. The gun's nozzle adjusted so it could shoot a stream of water over fifty feet, and there weren't many places to hide. Eventually, we were all standing around the tractor shivering. It was the kind of thing you wished you were doing in July instead of late April.

"So who wants to help me spray tomorrow?" I asked.

"I will!" said Sam and Michael.

"Is it dangerous for people?" Lisa asked.

"I don't think it can be that good for you," I admitted.

We all looked around at each other. "You better do it.
Sam can drive the tractor," Amy said. "And wear those handkerchiefs you used to wear for the manure."

I felt a little nervous as I drove the tractor back toward our house to top off the barrel with water. How dangerous could it be? Brother Brown was still alive, and he must have been doing it for fifty years. For all I knew, though, he was twenty and the poison was just making him look old. Maybe it was affecting his voice too.

***

Sam and I opened the bag of Diazinon the next afternoon. We wore handkerchiefs over our noses and mouths, but the powder inside still had a sickly chemical smell. I poured a quarter of the bag into the barrel and then tried stirring it with a stick.

"This isn't working so well, but I've got an idea," I said, and jammed the spray gun into the barrel's opening. I turned on the pump, and the water in the barrel swirled into a bubbly froth. After five minutes I said, "That's gotta do it."

After following Sam and the tractor out to the orchard, I adjusted the nozzle and took aim at the first tree, directing the stream of water up and down. I had no idea how much to apply, so I just tried to cover all the leaves and branches. Spraying the first row was kind of fun, but then I began to smell the poison through my handkerchief and feel a fine mist of it settle over me.
The gun quickly became so heavy that I had to prop it against my body for support.

The barrel was dry by the end of eight rows and the stream of poison stopped. My head was throbbing sharply, and I felt sick to my stomach. I threw the hose and gun into the wagon and climbed in for the ride home.

Sam looked wet from the poison mist when he climbed off the tractor.

"How do you feel?" I asked. "You all right?"

"Kind of have a headache and a little stomachache."

"I'm going to go in and take a shower and get everything cleaned off me. You should too."

The warm shower made me feel better, but I still felt like I couldn't quite get everything off my skin. I barely ate any dinner and crawled into bed afraid I would wake up a mutant.

On the way home from school the next day, I didn't say anything to Sam about more spraying. Walking past the orchard brought back the sick feeling, and I headed straight for my bedroom and shut the door. Breathing in that poison had to be bad for us. Maybe enough of it would even kill us. I didn't want to see that barrel or gun again, and I thought up ways to avoid them.

The only sure way was abandoning the whole project. I quickly thought up more reasons to justify walking away. For instance, Brother Brown was bound to have
more miserable apple-growing surprises waiting for me even if I could get past spraying.

I pulled the contract out of my encyclopedia and read it over: $8,000. How was that going to be possible? I was killing myself for nothing! Continuing was just going to make it worse and make everyone hate me more when they didn't get any money. Yes. It was best for everyone just to stop now.

There was a knock on my door, and when I answered it, Sam was standing there. "You ready to go?" he asked. He already had his handkerchief around his face.

His eyes stopped me from telling him it was all useless and dangerous. They expected something. I didn't want them looking at me like I was a quitter.

"Yeah, but let's move faster on the next run."

***

The next two days brought the same pain. I stopped being quite as careful, and we finished spraying the remaining twenty-two rows using only two more barrels worth of poison.

"So that's it, right?" asked Sam after we parked the tractor.

"You mean for today or forever?"

"I was hoping forever."

"Me, too, but I'll have to find out from someone how many times we're supposed to do this."

I thought I would throw up when Brother Brown
told me we should spray every other week. Those ladybugs had to be a better idea. Sam and I experimented with different face coverings to keep out as much spray as possible. The best facemasks were the little white ones painters wore. We found them stuffed into a forgotten corner at General Supply.

We also decided it was better to get the misery over all at once, so we started spraying the whole orchard in a single day—three barrels, one right after another. During spray days, I couldn't remember why Slim's scrap yard had seemed so bad.

School got out for the summer in late May. Classes ended on a Thursday, which didn't make much sense to me. The junior high had a big dance every year on the last day of school as a type of celebration. This was especially important for the ninth graders like Amy who would be moving on to high school the next year. It was their last chance for a while to feel big and important. Amy had been talking about it for months and had arranged to go with some of her friends.

"So, are you coming?" she asked me a couple of weeks before. "You can probably ride with me."

"I dunno," I told Amy reluctantly. "I don't really know how to dance."

"Oh, that doesn't matter," she said. "No one does. You just kind of move to the music."

"That's easy for you to say. You're probably good at it."

"Come on, it's fun. You're not still afraid of girls, are you?" she teased.

"No! I just don't wanna embarrass myself."

"What if I show you some moves and you could practice a little?"

"Maybe," I said, feeling a little less anxious.

That night I went to Amy's room to practice. She had recorded some of her favorite songs from the radio using her cassette player, and she started playing the tape. She tried to demonstrate how you should move back and forth and use both your feet and your arms. She looked pretty natural doing it, like she wasn't even thinking.

When I tried, she gave me a doubtful look. "You'll get it. You should just practice more by yourself. Your feet look like they're barely moving. Don't look so stiff and scared."

I promised to practice more. Amy explained that there weren't really many slow songs played at these dances but that we should probably go over slow dancing just in case. She showed me where to put my arms, and we moved around her room to "We've Got Tonight" by Kenny Rogers and Sheena Easton. "Just stay on the
beat," Amy insisted. "Take it nice and slow, and don't get all panicky."

The song ended and Aunt Sandy was standing in the doorway, trying not to laugh. "You two do know you're cousins, right?" she asked with a wide grin.

I practiced a little every night in my room, not daring to let anyone see me. The night of the dance, I ironed my best long-sleeve shirt and church pants and sprinkled some of my dad's English Leather cologne on my neck.

The mom of one of Amy's friends came and picked us up. Four of us piled into the back of her huge Olds Cutlass. Amy had on what she considered her best clothes and even a little makeup. The whole ride to school was a blur because I was so nervous. I mostly kept my mouth shut and hugged one of the doors.

The junior high cafeteria had been transformed into a dance hall by hanging up lengths of crepe paper around all the doors, setting up a table littered with paper cups full of punch, and turning off most of the lights. The effort had taken dozens of teenagers months to plan and execute.

Music was already playing when we arrived, and kids were milling around in various groups with a few people dancing in the middle of the room. Amy was quickly swallowed up by her ninth-grade friends and soon afterward had pushed a large number of them into the dancing area.

I looked around desperately for familiar faces and saw Chantz Eyring and Jimmy Bradshaw near the punch table. I had never had much to do with them before, but it was amazing how much you could find to talk about when you were pretending to not be interested in dancing. It was also amazing how many tiny sips of punch you could get out of one cup when you were looking for something to do with your hands.

Just when I thought I might get away with not dancing at all, Amy sent her friend Paige Manning over. "Would you like to dance?" asked Paige playfully.