The Year Money Grew on Trees (20 page)

Michael's box was almost full. I looked through the apples inside.

"Where are the stems? Not one of them has a stem!" I said very loudly.

"It's easier to pick them without stems," he said with a shrug.

"Yeah, I know it's easier, but it's the wrong way! Lisa, remember this box. It's the one that says 'pears.' You should try to sell this first so they don't sit around very long. And please, Michael, pick them with the stems!"

I looked over at Sam, who had been watching with a guilty look on his face. When I saw his almost-full box, I could see he had a good mix of apples with and without stems. I looked at him, shaking my head.

"I'll be more careful," he said, looking away.

"It is kind of hard," I replied. "The girls seem to be better at it."

We continued working around the first three trees until they were almost cleared of apples. By the time it got dark, we had filled sixteen boxes with Golden Delicious, which had turned from green to a yellow-green color.

"I'm starving," said Amy, and that was the cue for everyone to stop working.

I left my bag on a ladder. "I guess that's a pretty good start and we got a lot more boxes per tree than I was expecting. At least you'll have something to sell tomorrow," I said to Lisa.

"What price are we going to start with, then?" Lisa asked.

This felt like a very big decision. It all seemed like guessing and hoping. "Let's go with $12 like we talked about and see what happens."

***

On Tuesday we all helped load the sixteen boxes on the wagon and walked alongside as Sam drove the tractor to the road. Lisa unrolled her banners and set them up next to the car, and we arranged a few boxes facing the road with their tops off.

"Okay, well, this is it," I announced. "We're ready for customers. It kinda feels like we need a drum roll or a ribbon to cut."

"So good luck, you guys," said Amy, cutting me off. She waved to Lisa and Jennifer, and then started walking toward the orchard. "I'm getting off the road before my friends see me."

"Just yell if you need anything or have any problems," I said, trailing Amy.

"So $12, right?" Lisa asked.

"Yeah," I replied, shrugging.

Amy, Michael, and I followed the tractor back into the orchard and started picking again. "You sure the girls can handle everything by themselves? I mean Lisa's only eleven, and that could be a lot of money," said Amy.

I gave her a troubled look. "I'm sure she can keep track of it all. As long as someone doesn't try to steal it," I muttered. It was something else to worry about.

We kept listening for what might be happening up at the road, straining to hear any cars pulling over. After about thirty minutes, the suspense became too much.

"Michael, go find out if anyone has stopped and if they've sold anything," said Amy.

Michael ran off eagerly to check while we waited nervously. I was having even more trouble than usual keeping the apples attached to the stems. In a few minutes, Michael came back breathing hard from running. "Three people stopped, but nobody bought anything."

No one was sure how to take the news. Was it more important that people were stopping or that no one
was buying? "Okay, thanks," I said. "We'll have to send you back every once in a while." Michael ran back and forth about every thirty minutes. On his third trip, he reported the first sale and we all gave a little cheer.

"Hope it was that pear box," I said, smiling at him.

The second sale didn't come until a couple of hours later, about the time we decided to pack things up for the night. We drove the tractor back up to the road and greeted Lisa and Jennifer.

"So how was it?" asked Amy. "We heard you sold two boxes," she said encouragingly.

"Well, for one thing, we didn't have any change," said Lisa. "We could have probably sold another two or three more if we would have had change."

"Oh man, I didn't even think about that," I groaned.

"Yeah, I know," Lisa replied in an irritated voice. "Another thing is that everyone said that someone else was selling them down the road for $8, so we might have to lower our price."

"How many would you have sold for $8?" asked Amy.

"Probably a lot more," Lisa answered.

"Well?" Amy asked, looking over at me.

It was an easy calculation: charging $8 per box for a thousand boxes would not cover the $8,000 plus expenses. All the money we earned would go straight to Mrs. Nelson, and we'd end up with nothing, not even the orchard. Then again, if no apples sold, we wouldn't
even get close. "Let's try $8 tomorrow, then," I said. Since the trees seemed to have produced more apples than I anticipated, if we could just get more boxes, maybe we could push past the $8,000.

"Did people like the apples, though, when they saw them?" asked Amy.

"They seemed to," said Lisa. "The Navajos called them white apples, and they wanted to check the box to make sure we didn't put wormy ones at the bottom."

Fruitland was right across the river from the Navajo Indian reservation, so there were lots of Navajos driving back and forth on Highway 550 in front of our house. They would be a large percentage of our customers, so it was important that they liked the apples.

"Some people asked for a sample, but I didn't know what to say," Lisa continued.

"I think you should just give them one and let them try," said Amy.

I nodded in agreement.

"Let's try to borrow some money from our parents tonight so we can get change. It sounds like we can sell a lot more with the right price and with change," Amy concluded with a little anticipation in her voice.

We rolled up the banners and stuck them into the station wagon along with as many apple boxes as would fit. The rest we loaded behind the tractor and drove back home.

My mom agreed to lend us ten $1 bills for Wednesday, and my aunt lent us five more. Before going to bed, I made a sign out of a piece of cardboard that said $8.

***

On Wednesday afternoon business was a lot different. While Amy and I picked, Michael ran back and forth with reports. Within the first hour, four boxes had sold and then six in the next. Sam had to pile more boxes into the wagon and take them up to the road. Amy and I kept guessing as to how many boxes would be sold by the end of the day. At dusk we threw the picking bags on the ladders and walked out to the road.

Lisa looked flustered but happy. "Today was much better!" she said when she saw us.

"So how many did you sell?" asked Amy.

"Twenty!" replied Jennifer.

"The price made a big difference," said Lisa. "We also started letting people taste an apple and that seemed to convince most of them."

"Yeah, that's a good idea," I said, thinking of how sweet they were. "They'll sell themselves. Did anyone care that they aren't in apple boxes?"

"They asked why they weren't, but I don't think it stopped anyone from buying," she replied.

"I hope you didn't tell anyone we got them from the dump," said Amy.

"I just said they came from some other fruit growers," said Lisa.

"If you sell that many every night, we should be done in how long?" asked Amy.

Lisa's eyes drifted up toward the sky as she calculated. "About fifty days."

"How many weeks?" asked Amy.

"Eight if you don't count Sundays," said Lisa.

Amy looked at me the way my mom usually looked at my dad when he forgot their anniversary.

"I'll bet we'll sell a lot more on Saturdays," I said, trying to sound positive. I really hoped we would. The clock in my head was beginning to tick too fast. Eight weeks was too long. According to Brother Brown, we maybe had five weeks before the apples were overripe and no one wanted them.

We pushed the unsold boxes into the station wagon and walked home together. After a hundred feet, Lisa said, "Oh, yeah!" and ran back. She returned carrying a glass jar with money in it. She held it up to show us.

"So is the jar part of your system?" I asked Lisa with a smile.

"Yeah, but just one part," she replied secretively.

We quickly discovered that with an $8 price, we could sell apples faster than we could pick them. I told Lisa to try $10 to see if we could get more dollars per box. She reported that sales slowed to a trickle and customers complained that they could buy them cheaper down the road. Years later I learned this had something to do with supply and demand and that people would go to college for four years to learn about it. We didn't know what to call it, but seemed to be stuck with $8 boxes. On Saturday we unloaded all that we had at that price
by the early afternoon and moved our salesmen back to the orchard for picking.

Lisa liked to announce running totals every day for the number of boxes sold and dollars collected. She put our weekly total at $720. It was a lot of money for a bunch of kids who had never held a $20 bill before, and Michael knew enough math to let us know we could buy 2,880 candy bars with it. Still, we only had maybe six more weeks to sell, and I knew it wasn't enough per week to come close to $12,000, or even $8,000. In a way, the trees had grown money like Mrs. Nelson predicted. She was going to get it all, though, unless we could pick faster and get more apples out on the road.

That Saturday the new boxes from General Supply arrived on a flatbed truck that drove up to my house. Lisa, Jennifer, and Michael helped stack the new boxes, which were white with bright red lettering that said "New Mexico APPLES." The boxes looked so clean and crisp, they almost seemed too fancy after using the dump boxes. After covering them with plastic, we decided we would save them until all the others were gone.

The arrival of the boxes reminded me that even if we could fill and sell the thousand we started with, at $8 a box there wouldn't be enough money to even pay off Mrs. Nelson after clearing the General Supply bill. By then, I knew that each tree produced at least four
boxes of apples, so there was enough in the orchard to fill at least twelve hundred boxes. On the way home from school the next Monday, I was deciding whether to place an order for two hundred more from General Supply when Lisa said, "It's too bad we don't have some smaller boxes too."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because a lot of people don't want a whole bushel box, and they ask for something smaller."

"Really? Like how many apples do they want?"

"Maybe a dozen. I guess like what you would put in one of those plastic bags that you use at the grocery store."

"Hmm. So do you think they would buy them in those kinds of bags?"

"Probably."

When my sisters and cousins had all gathered around the old station wagon later that night, I brought up the possibility of using the bags.

"They're just sitting out at the supermarket. Why don't we just get some there? They don't charge you for them," said Amy.

"But we would need hundreds. Don't you think they'd care?" I asked.

"Can't hurt to try and see how many we could get," said Amy. "Someone should go with one of our moms the next time they go to town."

"Okay, who?" I asked.

Amy looked around. "Michael, because he wouldn't be afraid of anyone working there."

Michael didn't disagree, and it was decided he would go with my aunt the next time she went grocery shopping. When my aunt heard the plan, she thought it was funny and even agreed to make a special trip the next day. She mentioned something about paying Safeway back for their high prices and agreed to give Michael time to collect bags by staying extra long.

***

After school on Tuesday, the two of them left for town, and the rest of us started picking and selling. Michael returned about two and a half hours later and ran out into the orchard with plastic bags clenched in his fists.

"I got 'em!" he yelled as he ran up to us. "Look!"

"How many did you get?" asked Amy.

"I don't know," said Michael, "a lot, though. At first I thought of just taking a couple of rolls, you know still rolled up. But I didn't think they would let me out of the store that way."

"So what did you do?" I asked.

"I just started tearing them off the roll one at a time. I figured once they were torn off, no one else would want to use 'em, so they wouldn't stop me."

"So you just stood there tearing off bags? Didn't anyone say anything?" asked Amy.

"Whenever anyone came close to me, I would move so they couldn't see what I was doing," Michael said very proudly.

"And you went through the checkout line with all the bags?" I asked.

"Yeah, with my mom."

"Did the checker say anything?" I asked.

"She asked what all the bags were for, and I told her I needed them for a project and said, 'They're free, right?' She didn't seem to care."

"Wow, I can't believe you did it," I said. "Take them up to Lisa and tell her to see how many bags you can fill from a box."

Michael ran up to the road and then came back about half an hour later. "She says about fourteen or fifteen bags for a box," he said when he returned.

I looked at Amy. "If we sold them for a dollar a bag, that's $14 a box, and we get the box back," I said.

"Sounds good to me," she replied. "Michael, go tell Lisa to try and sell them for a dollar."

"And tell her to really push the bags," I said as he turned to leave.

***

Over the next few days, the bags proved to be a hit. Lisa reported that she sold about two bags for every box. She had also counted all of the bags Michael had taken from Safeway and came up with 715. Soon Sam was bringing
empty boxes back to the orchard after they had been used to fill up bags. I hadn't figured out things exactly, but I suddenly was confident that if we could just fill all the bags and boxes, we could at least get past the $8,000 hurdle. Filling them all was going to be a problem, though. I felt like I was picking faster and faster all the time, but there were just not enough hours in the day. With Lisa and Jennifer selling and Sam hauling boxes around, picking came down mostly to Amy, Michael, and me.

I became so obsessed with picking apples that I hardly noticed anything else once I got home from school. This included Mrs. Nelson's house. I had stopped glancing in the windows to see if she was watching us and just raced by on my way home. I could hardly remember the last time I had seen her. I was lost in picking one afternoon during the second week of apple harvesting when her son, Tommy, sneaked up on me. I was concentrating on stems so hard that I didn't hear him until he was standing next to my ladder.