Tangerine

by Edward Bloor

  It was all the same to Wayne. He smiled. "Yeah. I'll take you. I gotta go right back to work, though. There's emergencies all over the county on account of the freeze. I don't know when I can pick y'all up."

  "That's all right, Wayne. We don't need to be picked up. We're gonna help them out in the groves tonight."

  Wayne looked at me with genuine surprise. "Is that right? You're gonna get out in that nasty cold?"

  Wayne wouldn't say it, he was too polite, but I knew what he was thinking: How come you're not back at Lake Windsor Downs with the rest of them, complaining about the mosquitoes, and the termites, and the muck fire?

  We pulled off Route 22 at the Tomas Cruz sign and bumped down the dirt road. The cattail pond now had steel gray and rust brown pipes running up from it toward the groves, like someone had connected straws together in four crooked lines. Wayne pointed at them. "Looks like they're icing down their new grove."

  "What's that?"

  "They'll pump water over the trees all night long, probably a quarter of the grove at a time."

  This was all new to me. I shook my head. "Why is that a good thing to do? Won't that kill the trees sooner?"

  Wayne answered patiently, "If you cover 'em with ice, their temperature will never drop below thirty-two degrees. Thirty-two degrees won't kill a tree; thirty-one degrees will, if it stays that cold long enough."

  "So why don't they just ice all the trees and be done with it?"

  "Probably 'cause they don't have the water, or the pumps, or the sprinklers to do it all. It's expensive enough to do one part. Even then it might not work. The ice has to be kept just like slush. If ice gets thick and hard on a tree, that thing'll crack in half like a Thanksgiving wishbone."

  "So what if they start this slush thing and they run out of water?"

  "That won't happen. That there's a spring-fed lake. It'll just keep fillin' up. Now they might run outta diesel fuel. Water won't do you any good if you can't pump it where you want to. Look over there." Wayne pointed at something that I hadn't noticed before. On the rising ground behind the house, barely visible from the road, was a vertical orange tank twenty feet high. It looked like a giant can of frozen orange juice stuck there on its side. "That tank's full of diesel fuel. That diesel's your life's blood tonight."

  We drove around the house and stopped outside the Quonset hut. Luis and his father were standing by the back door. They were both dressed in layers of old clothes, and they both had blue knit ski caps pulled down over their ears. Wayne waved to them and pulled away. Luis said, "What can I do for you guys?"

  I thought of Luis facing down Erik and his gang at the high school. I answered earnestly, "We want to help you fight this freeze tonight. We'll do anything we can."

  Luis looked at Henry, then back at me. His doubts seemed to be directed at me. So were his words. "Why do you want to do that?"

  I didn't know what to say. Was he looking at me as Erik Fisher's brother? Was I now the enemy? Tino came out of the house, and I thought of Henry D.'s line. I said, "Because we're all War Eagles."

  Luis turned to his father and said a few words in Spanish. Tomas Cruz walked up to me immediately and stretched out his hand. He said, "Thank you for your help." He shook hands with both of us and continued on into the Quonset hut.

  Luis said, "Our daddy thinks that's great. But he doesn't worry about the insurance and stuff. Do you guys have your parents' permission to do this?" We both nodded. Finally Luis shrugged. "OK. You're on Tino's crew. He'll show you what's up." He looked directly at me, like I was the one who was a potential lawsuit. "But you're responsible for your own health and safety. Right? If you get too cold, you come into the hut here and you warm up. If you get too tired, you come in and lie down."

  Luis went inside, leaving us with Tino. He was dressed like I was, but his sweatshirt said MIAMI DOLPHINS. He had a walkie-talkie in one hand and a white bag from Kmart in the other. He was all business. He said, "There ain't no lyin' down on my crew. You got that?"

  "Yeah."

  "Anybody has to do any bathroom stuff or anything like that, you do it now."

  I half raised my hand, like I was in school. "I have to make a phone call."

  Tino opened the door and led us into the Quonset hut. It had been transformed. Most everything that had been in there last week was gone, replaced by hundreds of baby trees, each about a foot high. We marched through them to the far end. The desk was still there, but now it had a big aluminum coffee urn sitting on it, with Styrofoam cups, creamer, and sugar spread out around it.

  I picked up the phone and called Mom. I said, "I tried to call before. Were you out at the storage bin?"

  She didn't sound too happy. She said, "Yes. I was."

  "Did you need Erik's key?"

  "No. I filled out a form and the manager let me in."

  "Uh-huh." Mom didn't say anything else. Was she angry at me? Was she going to come and drag me home? I changed the subject. "So what's happening there?"

  She paused a moment, as if thinking the whole thing over. Then she changed gears and answered conversationally, "Your father bought a case of those fake logs. He's going to get the fireplace going. And we're going to break out the Christmas music."

  "Uh-huh."

  "We'll probably make hot chocolate, too. Too bad you're going to miss it."

  "Yeah."

  "Now, what is this thing, Paul? A sleepover party? Why didn't we have any notice about it?"

  "I wasn't invited until today." I half covered the mouthpiece and whispered, "I don't know. Maybe I was an afterthought."

  "You don't have a change of clothes. You don't have a toothbrush."

  "I'll use my finger."

  There was a long pause, and then a long sigh. "Paul, I trust people. I trust them until I have a reason not to. Do you understand me?"

  "I understand."

  There was another long pause and some mumbling. "Your father says you have to be back here by nine tomorrow morning. It's Erik's last game."

  "OK. You can pick me up at eight if you like."

  "I hope I can find that place."

  "Look for the sign that says TOMAS CRUZ GROVES."

  The door at the far end of the hut burst open. Victor, dressed in black sneakers, pants, and hood, like a cat burglar, walked in, followed by his boys. I said, "I have to go now, Mom. Enjoy your fireplace and all." She didn't say anything else, so I cradled the phone.

  Victor, Hernando, and Mano went right to a stack of shovels that were piled up next to the baby trees. Tino said to Henry, "You should have been here last night. We must have hauled a ton of dirt from the old grove to the Golden Dawns." He pointed to the stack and said, "Grab a shovel." Then he held up his Kmart bag. "Check it out." Tino dumped out a pile of thick black work gloves onto the desk. Everybody grabbed a pair and pulled them on. Tino was smiling. "I bought twenty pairs of these gloves, for you boys with delicate hands."

  Victor said, "Yeah? I'll mess up your face with some delicate hands."

  Tino said, "My daddy and my Uncle Charlie are out in the Cleopatra grove startin' the fire. They're gonna call us out to haul tires and brush. Luis is gonna stay in the new grove and run the pumps. He's gonna call us to chop ice off the trees." He smiled at Victor. "In our spare time, we're gonna do what we did last night. We're gonna keep the Golden Dawns packed with dirt."

  Then Tino extended one gloved hand toward us and held it there, just like Victor did before each soccer game. We crowded in and put our hands on top of his. He said, "You know what's up. Time and temperature. Luis says it's gonna be ten hours of hard freeze tonight. Trees are gonna die no matter what we do. We gotta save what we can."

  Victor said calmly, "Let's do it," and the circle broke up. We filed outside with our shovels into the cold sting of the wind. The sun was dropping in the sky. The temperature was dropping, too.

  We headed into the old grove of trees, now bare of fruit, the grove of the Cleopatra tangerines. Their leaves seemed to be withering, shriveling. W
e walked through the sights and smells of last night's battle, to a high point of land. Tino gestured in a slow circle. "Check this out."

  The trees in this spot were tall, weathered, and cracked—haunted-house trees. "Luis says to use these to keep the brushfire going. Daddy and Tio Carlos will do the chopping, and we'll do the hauling." Tino looked at Henry D. "These trees are all dead. We call them the lightning trees. They're at the highest point in the grove, so they get zapped by lightning. They've been dead for years. We don't chop them down, though, 'cause they act like lightning rods. I hope we'll get away with just chopping down one or two for the fire tonight."

  Tino started downhill and we followed. Henry pointed out a line of metal contraptions that were about four feet high. Each had a wide, round base and a narrow stovepipe sticking up from it. "Those are the smudge pots. Wait'll you see them when they're burning. Fire comes shooting out of the tops of them." He called out, "Tino, are we gonna be haulin' the diesel for these smudge pots?"

  "Ain't nobody else gonna do it." Tino turned at the end of the row and stopped. He pointed out a skinny three-sided wooden box, about five feet tall. Henry and I looked inside. It was a glass thermometer, attached to a white metal plate that had PEPSI written across it. The temperature read thirty-five degrees. "You'll see these at different spots, high spots and low spots inside the groves. I call Luis with the temperatures, and he calculates what we have to do and how much time we have to do it in. Time and temperature."

  As we approached the lowest point in the grove, the trees began to look scorched; they smelled like smoke and rubber. We reached a clearing that had obviously been the site of a fire the night before. Tomas Cruz and his brother were placing dead branches in a crisscross pattern, laying the foundation for tonight's fire. A revolting smell of burnt rubber seeped up from the debris.

  Tino poked at his uncle as we passed by. "¿Quépasa, Tio?"

  "Tu saves," he replied.

  We emerged from the old grove into the wide, square field of the Golden Dawn tangerines. How different this field looked now! Tino and his crew had dumped a thousand small mounds of dirt in here. Like a thousand giant anthills, they covered up all of those black irrigation hoses. Each little tree was now packed with dirt about a foot high, with a few green leaves sticking out at the top.

  Tino spoke again to Henry. "We have to make sure that these trees are packed above the bud union, right here." He pointed to a spot halfway up one of the dirt mounds. "If we don't, the Golden Dawns are dead, and we got ourselves a thousand rough lemon trees." He paused for emphasis. "That can't happen."

  We continued along the back of the square field until we entered the new grove. There were twice as many tall, skinny sprinklers as last time. In the distance I could see that one part of the grove was already being watered by them, from high above.

  We walked toward the sound of a diesel pump until we came to a rickety corrugated-iron shed, kind of a lean-to that was open on one side. Luis was inside it, looking at the dials on a pump and making notes. We formed a group around him, and he said, "Tonight's the night, homeboys. All over this town, all over this part of the state, people are gonna get hurt by this freeze. It's a killer. It's gonna kill right down to the wood, right down to the ground."

  He looked up at us. Actually, he looked up at me. He said, "You understand the plan, right? We're icing the new grove, we're packing the Golden Dawns, and we're burning the old grove. What's alive in the morning is what's alive in the morning." He pointed at Victor. "Did you guys get some rest?"

  "Yeah, we crashed all day."

  "You ready for another night of this?"

  "Sure. You know we're always ready to rumble."

  "Yeah. I know that. Just be careful. All of you."

  Luis looked to the west, so we all turned to look with him. The sun was sinking low. The Cleopatra trees stood black in the orange light, like Halloween cutouts. The temperature was dropping by the minute, and the wind was whipping up.

  I thought about my phone call to Mom. In Lake Windsor Downs, the people were inside, welcoming the freeze with hot cocoa and fake logs and Christmas CDs. In Tangerine, the people were heading out to fight it with shovels and axes and burning tires.

  That turned out to be our last moment of peace. For the next twelve hours, we waged a fierce and increasingly desperate battle to save the Cruz family's trees.

  We began with the smudge pots in the old grove. A hundred smudge pots had to be filled with fuel, fired up, and kept burning all night. We set out in pairs to do it. Henry and I were given two gas cans and a lighter, and we soon figured out what to do with them. The smudge pots were hellish machines, belching foul-smelling smoke and shooting a dangerous wild flame out the top, like upside-down rockets.

  We made hundreds of trips to the big orange diesel tank. Diesel generators pumped the water that Luis spread over the new grove. Diesel generators lit the new grove and the Golden Dawn field. Whenever we weren't responding to a crisis, we were hauling diesel.

  But there was one crisis right after another. A crisis might begin with a call from Tomas that the brushfire was going out. We'd take off on the run through the Cleopatra grove, choking on the smoke, tripping in the dark. Tomas would be there hacking apart a lightning tree, and we'd drag the dead limbs to the bonfire. Then we'd run back to the diesel tank. Soon Luis would call, and we'd take off for the new grove. We'd use our shovels to scrape at trees that were getting too heavily coated with ice, trees that were about to crack.

  On and on it went like that, repacking dirt, hauling tires—we battled against the ever-dropping temperature: thirty degrees, twenty-eight degrees, twenty-six degrees.

  But we were losing. The fire in the old grove was blazing high and wild, scorching the leaves off anything near it. By midnight we had chopped down four lightning trees. The ice was forming too rapidly in the new grove; the coatings on the trees were too thick. The loud cracking sound of trees splitting off branches like amputated limbs, or splitting in two like they'd been pole-axed, hung horribly in the frozen night air. We were losing.

  For all of our frantic efforts, the temperature continued to drop. It must have been about two o'clock when I saw Tino and Victor standing in front of one of those Pepsi thermometers. Victor was screaming at it, "Twenty-four degrees! Twenty-four degrees!" It was like his frozen breath was spelling out the awful words.

  Tino got off the walkie-talkie with Luis and announced, "Luis says this: If it stays twenty-four degrees for ten more minutes, then it's all over. He's calling it off. We're all going home."

  I stopped in my place, in a row of Golden Dawns, and I set down my can of diesel. One by one, I pried my black-gloved fingers back, trying to straighten out my warped hand. For the first time that night, I felt the cold. And I felt exhaustion.

  I dropped to my knees on that frozen piece of earth, weary to the core of my body. I looked over to my left. The new grove was glistening like an angel on a Christmas tree, lit from within by the light of a diesel generator. Every tree dripped frozen icicles, from the top down to the ground. And the glow of all of them together was more beautiful than anything I had ever seen.

  To my right, the smudge pots and that bloated bonfire were spewing out over every living thing. I saw Tomas and his brother emerge from the black and billowing smoke, marching toward Tino. I turned back and saw that Luis was coming down, too. They all met at the thermometer and talked for five minutes. Finally Tomas and his brother broke away and marched back into the scorched grove. Luis said one more thing to Tino and then went back to his duties.

  I got back up on my feet as Tino called us to him. He announced, "Our daddy and Tio Carlos are going to keep trying. Luis says that the rest of us have to go inside. Right now. He'll call me when we can come back out."

  We all trudged obediently over to the Quonset hut. I walked inside, felt the blessed heat, and collapsed on the floor. Victor picked me up into a sitting position. Then Theresa appeared in front of me with a cup of coffee. She said
, "Do you like cream and sugar?"

  I shook my head dumbly and said, "I don't know."

  She smiled. "Let's find out." I tried to take the cup from her, but my fingers wouldn't close around the handle. Theresa stooped down, held the cup up to my mouth, and I took a sip. It made me shiver. I took another one. And then another. Finally I was able to hold the cup in my hands.

  Tino said, "Fisher Man, last time you were here you collapsed because it was too hot. Now you're collapsing because it's too cold? What's up with you?"

  I couldn't even think of a reply, much less make one. I sat there in a kind of coma for a long, long time. Finally Tino's walkie-talkie crackled to life. I heard him say, "All right! That's what we're waiting to hear." He turned to Victor. "Luis says the new grove is holding steady at twenty-nine degrees, and the high spots in the old grove are showing twenty-eight. He says that the worst is over; the temperatures are goin' back up."

  Victor and Tino clasped hands, but Victor was solemn. "So how much dead wood you got out there?"

  "I don't know, man. Anything in those low spots has had it." He turned to include me. "It got too cold down there for too long. But, hey, we're still in business." Tino, Victor, and the boys got up to go back out, so I struggled to get to my feet. Tino turned to Theresa. "No way he's going back outside. Orders from Luis."

  Theresa pointed a stern finger at me. "You heard that. Now don't move from here. I'm going to go get you some blankets."

  I could barely move. I could barely speak. But suddenly Luis entered, and I knew I had to.

  He said, "Paul, are you all right?"

  I looked up at him and tried to focus my eyes. I stared hard at his left temple. There it was! I could see it in this light. It was a dark red bruise, deep set, like a birthmark. It curved over his eyebrow like a dark red crescent moon. I whispered, "Yeah."

  "Tino said you were in bad shape."

  "I was a little frozen. I'm OK now."