A Plague Year (21 page)

Then, just to be safe, I rooted under the sink, found a tube of Crest, and added it to my supplies. I couldn’t trust Jimmy, Warren, or Arthur to have toothpaste. Beer, maybe, but not toothpaste.

I zipped the backpack completely closed, slid it over my shoulder, and walked down the stairs like it was a normal school day.

The plan was for Dad and me to arrive at the Food Giant at 6:00 a.m. to help Mitchell defrost and display fifty turkeys in his glass case. I told my parents that Arthur had to drive me to school because we were doing a project for Mr. Proctor’s class. We had to act out a scene from
A Journal of the Plague Year
, but we hadn’t rehearsed it. So Arthur was going to pick me up, and we were going to do that on the way.

I told them that big fat lie, and they believed me.

It was shocking for me, as someone who did not lie, to see how easy it was to get away with one. I must admit I was a little disappointed in them. I thought,
I could be lying to you all the time, and you would never know it
.

When we pulled into the Food Giant lot, two cars were already parked in the outer spaces—John’s old Impala and Mitchell’s Saturn SL. John and Mitchell were standing by the ATM, stamping their feet in the cold and waiting for us.

Dad and I walked briskly to the entrance, nodding hello to them. Dad unlocked the door and held it for us all to step inside.

That was when we got a nasty surprise.

There was a big mess over by the bakery aisle. Someone had been in here overnight and had tried to break down the office door. The doorjamb, the hinges, and the door itself all showed signs of violence.

While Dad dealt with that situation, the rest of us spread out and looked around. I’m the one who discovered how the thief had gotten in. He had sawed right through the storeroom’s ceiling and climbed down the shelves. The Food Giant now had a gaping hole in its roof.

Dad called the police while John, Mitchell, and I cleaned up the office area and the storeroom.

By 7:00 a.m., things were almost back to normal. The police had come and gone, and the store-opening crew was hard at work. (I was hard at work alongside them, but I was not getting paid for it.)

Because of the break-in, and the mess, I felt even guiltier about my escape plan, but not guilty enough to change my mind. At 7:30, I was standing out front with my backpack. Only Bobby was out there with me, and he was preoccupied with the padlock on the propane cage.

Arthur pulled up right on schedule. I hopped in on the passenger side, the Geo Metro peeled out, and I never looked back.

I confirmed with Arthur, “Everybody at your house knows that I’m coming, right?”

“Right.”

“And they’re okay with it?”

“Yeah. I talked to Mom and Jimmy Giles this morning.”

“What did they say?”

“Not much. I reminded Jimmy about you, and the three hundred bucks, and he said cool.”

Now came the hard part.

I asked Arthur to pull over at Sheetz gas. I got out, put a quarter in a pay phone, and dialed the store number. Dad answered on one ring. “Good morning, Food Giant.”

“Dad? It’s Tom.”

“Tom? Is everything okay?”

“Yes, sir. I just wanted to tell you that I’m on my way to Florida with Arthur, Jimmy, and Warren. I’m going to help them sell their Christmas trees.”

After a long pause, Dad replied, “Tom? What are you talking about? Aren’t you at school?”

“No, sir. It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Nothing really happens at school.” I restated, “I’m on the road, heading south to Florida. I’ll be back on Sunday.”

“Sunday! You can’t do that. This is the busiest weekend of the year.”

“Well, sorry, but I need a weekend off.”

“You?
You
need a weekend off? What about me? What about the rest of us?”

“That’s up to you.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he tried, “Why does it have to be this weekend?”

“Because this is when they’re driving to Orlando to sell their trees.”

“Come on, Tom. You’re needed here. What about the carts in the parking lot? Bobby can’t handle them all.”

“So put somebody else out there.”

“Who?”

“Mitchell. Or Reg. Or Gert, for that matter. None of them work as hard as I do, but all of them get paid and I don’t. I deserve some time off.”

Dad exhaled slowly. He asked with resignation, “Does your mother know about this?”

“No. Of course not.”

“She’s not going to like it.”

“She doesn’t like anything.”

“Tom!”

“Sorry, but it’s true. I have to go. I’ll be back home on Sunday. Goodbye, Dad.”

I hung up. I felt bad for a few more seconds, but then I started to feel a great weight lifting off my shoulders. I was free, for the first time in my life. I walked back to the car feeling light as air.

We drove straight up to Aunt Robin’s trailer. When we pulled in, I could see Jimmy’s legs sticking out from under a flatbed truck. The truck looked comfortable enough for a long ride. It had a large crew cab with two rows of seats.

Behind the crew cab was the flatbed, maybe twenty feet deep, with two wooden railings running along the side. The back area was open, except for an orange net hooked across it.

I commented, “No Christmas trees yet?”

Arthur explained, “No. Not yet. We pick them up on the way.”

Aunt Robin came out with Cody in tow. She was lugging a cooler, so I took it from her and set it on the ground.

Jimmy rolled out from under the truck. He called out to her, “Any beer in that cooler?”

“No! Just ice and sodas. You can live without beer on the drive, especially since you got Tom along. You boys need to take care of him.”

“Oh, we’ll take care of him.” Jimmy winked at me. “We’ll take care to get him some beer.”

Aunt Robin fussed, “Don’t you say that, Jimmy Giles! Don’t you even think that.”

Jimmy laughed. “I’m just kiddin’.”

Jimmy stowed the cooler in the truck cab. Then he climbed up onto the flatbed and told Arthur, “You guys start handing me wall stakes, about fifty of them.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but Arthur did. He hurried around the side of Aunt Robin’s trailer, with me right behind him. We scooped up long wooden stakes from a pile that had probably been there since the previous year. The stakes were wet and dirty but still pretty straight. God knows what was living at the bottom of that pile. Fortunately, after three trips, we had our quota of fifty and didn’t have to find out.

After that, all we could do was wait for Warren. I made the mistake of suggesting, “Should we go knock on his door?” and Arthur jumped all over me.

“No! We should not! We don’t go in there. Ever. He’ll come out when he comes out.”

I stammered, “Okay. Okay.” I even added, “Sorry.”

Jimmy smiled kindly. “Warren’s somebody who values his privacy.”

So we just stood and stared at Warren’s front door for five minutes.

I took the opportunity to ask Arthur, as casually as I could, “What’s going on with the play?
The Roses of Eyam
?”

“What do you mean?”

“How are the actors doing with their parts?”

“I don’t know. Okay, I guess. Chris Collier’s pretty useless, and he’s the main guy. He’s married to the Grape.”

“Uh-huh. Do Chris and Wendy have any romantic scenes? Kissing scenes?”

Arthur snorted. “No way, dude. If you kiss somebody in Eyam, they die. Slowly and painfully. You may as well blow their head off with a shotgun.”

Okay. We left it at that.

Warren’s door finally opened. He stepped out wearing his Haven High Football jacket and carrying a backpack. He locked up carefully and sauntered down to join us. “Cousin Tom! You made it.”

“Yeah.”

“You ready to sell some Christmas trees?”

“I am. I’m looking forward to it.”

“Me, too. It beats the hell out of moving college boys in and out of Blackwater U.” He asked Jimmy, “You ready, bubba?”

“Yup.”

Warren thought for a moment. “Now, Tom, are you sure you’re allowed to do this?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Because we don’t have any insurance if … if anything happens to you.”

“That’s okay. Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

“Are you old enough to drive?”

“No, sir.”

“Too bad.” He turned back to Jimmy. “You got all the stuff loaded?”

“Yeah. We got the stakes in the back; the chicken wire’s underneath.”

“Okay. Let’s hitch up Arthur’s car.”

Arthur climbed into the Geo Metro. He pulled it up by the back of the truck and got out. Jimmy reached under the truck and slid out a cable. He knelt in front of the car and attached it to a pair of hooks. Then he reached under the truck again and started cranking a handle. The front of the Geo Metro rose up off the ground until the hood was even with the back bumper. Arthur then wedged a steel frame between the car and the truck, ensuring that the two couldn’t collide.

Jimmy checked it and pronounced it “good enough for government work.” Then we were ready to roll.

Warren pulled himself up into the driver’s seat; Jimmy took shotgun. Arthur and I climbed in and sat on either side of the crew cab’s bench.

Warren summarized, “I can drive, obviously. So can Arthur. If I am in no condition to drive, though, and if Arthur is tired, I guess brother Jimmy can fill in, suspended license and all.” He looked into the rearview mirror. “And if all else fails, cousin Tom, it’s up to you.”

I smiled.

He winked and added, “And with us, cousin Tom, all else fails a lot.”

We drove down from Caldera to Route 16 and started our long trek south, rumbling past a series of tree and shrubbery farms with names like Pioneer Evergreens, Rohrbachs Farm, and
Kilingers Nurseries. We soon pulled into the parking lot of a large barnlike building that had
GROVIANA
written across the top in weathered red paint.

We all followed Warren into a big square space filled with chicken wire, wooden stakes, and boxes. There was a desk over in the far corner, and a man in a blue work shirt was sitting behind it.

Warren called to him heartily, “Hey, my man! How’s it going?”

The man eyed us suspiciously, like we might be there to rob the place.

Warren pointed to Jimmy. “My brother and me bought some trees here last year, right around this time. Sold them down in Florida. Remember?”

The man did remember. He said, “Yeah. Right. Did we ever settle that account?”

Warren looked to Jimmy and then back. “Yeah. We settled it up. We’re good.”

The man shook his head. “That’s not the way I remember it.”

“Well, if there’s still any balance from last year, just add it to this year’s tab. We’re good for it. We got a sure thing going this year. We got a prime lot in Orlando on a main thoroughfare, right on Colonial Drive. That’s the main drag. We’ll be the only tree sellers in a five-mile radius. It’s gonna be all gravy, bro!”

But the man was not buying it. He told Warren, “I talked to Mr. Levans about you guys, too. He said he never got paid from two years ago.”

“No, that’s a mistake.”

The man picked up the phone. “Let’s call him, then.”

Warren backed down quickly. “No. No. Look, all we need is twenty-five Frasiers and twenty-five Douglases to start. Then we’ll take fifty of whatever you got for the rest.”

The man set the phone down hard, like a gavel. He thought for a moment, then told us, “No way. I’m not fronting you any Frasier or Douglas firs. I should just say a flat-out no, but I’m trying to do the Christian thing here. I’ll tell you what I will do: For no money down, I got fifty Scotch pine you can have. They’re already cut and ready to load, but the buyer never picked ’em up.”

Warren sounded offended. “Scotch pine?”

“Sorry, but that’s what I got. You can take them or leave them.”

Warren raised up both hands as if to say,
Whoa
. He told the man, “We’ll take them.”

The man stood. “All right. Who’s loading them up?”

Warren turned to us. “We all are.”

So we trooped back outside. Jimmy and Arthur quickly unhooked the Geo Metro from the truck. We climbed back into our cab while the tree man got into a small white pickup.

He drove over a low ridge and out into the fields, so we followed. We passed many acres of small trees. Soon we were bumping past taller trees, though—very attractive, well-shaped trees that I figured were the Frasier firs and Douglas firs.

The white truck veered left and crawled carefully down a hill to a grove of pine trees. They were not as beautiful as the Frasier firs, but they weren’t bad-looking, either. And they would certainly work as Christmas trees.

Nobody was saying anything. I guess Warren, Jimmy, and Arthur were disappointed at this turn of events, but I didn’t know any better. I was excited.

A row of trees had already been felled—sliced off at the bottom with a chain saw—and were now lying on the ground. The tree man leaned out of his truck window and pointed at them. “There you go, cut and ready. You can take all fifty.”

The four of us clambered out.

Warren shook his head. He muttered to Jimmy, “They’re kinda puny.” To prove his point, he picked one tree up off the ground and hoisted it high over his head. He carried it like that to our truck and tossed it casually over the railing. He came back and told us, “All right. Toss them in there any way you can. We’ll straighten ’em up later.”