by Tim Westover
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I’m riding in the back of a red Ford work truck, passing lines of orange trees. This time of the year, the fruits swell, growing to the size of Christmas ornaments, their golden hues sharpening, fluorescing in the sunshine. If you stand here alone in silence at night, you will actually hear the grove ripen. It groans, slowly, like a building on the verge of collapse. Once the truck hits the main path, the driver accelerates, and we rush along the smooth dirt trail wide enough for three cars, racing falcons beneath the sun. The shadows of these birds outpace us, patches of shade flying above like the shadows of sharks in distant oceans. We’re too far away to hear them wailing, but they can surely see our truck from the distance, blooming dirt and mud in a cloud behind us. Old men and children picking oranges glance over their shoulders, anxious to walk home, to eat, to make obeisance, and to sleep. We turn from the path, and I swear the birds change direction to follow us.
I wonder if we’re rousing the mice. Or is there something else behind us? Something ahead?
It’s Thursday, the last shift of the week. I am not a creative man. You could say my dreams of higher arts died in prison. I still read books sometimes, like you. I do all the other things a normal person would do. Two hours later, I’m leaning against the counter at Poco’s, avoiding the gaze of a lonely woman near the corner. We make eye contact, and the night fades into a warm buzzing haze.
Three hours later, I vomit when a fist slams into my stomach, contorting the organs beneath. The lonely woman runs forward, yelling about the police. Someone backhands her, the flat sound of the slap echoing across the room as she falls. My head spins on its own accord, and I cannot turn to see what happens next. The bag falls over my head, threads cinching tight along the seam of my Saint Simon hoodie. I kick a leg behind the strangler’s calf and jump back, my hands struggling at the cords. We crash onto the floor, and I headbutt his skull until his grip falls slack. I’m slipping the bag but too slowly entangling my fingers. I wrench it away and face the barrel of a gun, close enough to smell the warm burn of ignited powder, to see the thumb pressing on the trigger. Time slows, and I’m lingering on just the barrel of the gun, the top whorl of the fingerprint on the thumb, the part visible over the trigger until the gunman presses down. The click echoes through the barroom as the jukebox plays merrily on. You know how those moments feel in the movies—the big showdown, the fight scene, and so on? At some point, you have seen these things. We both have—who hasn’t? You must have sat in your home so many times, perhaps with a glass of orange juice, watching a showdown or a fight scene and saying to yourself, “How unrealistic. What an unrealistic break in the movie.”
This moment is exactly like that, like all those bad movies I know you hate. I’m staring at this gun, and I’m thinking of you saying, “How unrealistic,” and I agree. This is unreal.
The man holding the gun comes into focus; he wears a pin on his shirt. A Mexican. Worse. A Californian. I have just enough time to notice that I don’t hear a gunshot when the butt of the pistol hits square above my left eye, and all the world falls dark, even darker than the bar.
Let me explain the Californians. You’d think we’d be friends, right? Of course. Most people, when they imagine other industries, picture laborers as colleagues. I have done the same. I picture autoworkers banding together and doctors, cops, criminals, and even politicians or professors. But in the orange business, things are different. I have killed many Californians. Given the chance, I hope to do it again. I like to spit on Californians before I kill them, not after. I like them to know it’s happening, and I like to watch their faces as they go.
Perhaps this is not a higher art so much as a recurring dream.
All to say that when I do wake up, I am hungover and alarmed to be alive. When I stir in the back of the van, one of the Californians—look at that, an honest-to-God Indian—holds a finger to his lips. The bag is gone. I’m lying across the floor. I smell the carpet, the scent of rancid oranges and speed and laugh. The Indian kicks me toward the wall, along the baseboard, and I’ve cracked a rib but feel tremendous. No plastic on the carpet means they will not kill me now. I say as much to the Indian, and he looks down at me with an absent smile, like I’m some yearling doe wandering out of the woods. After a long moment, he nods. The other Californians sit along the edges of the van’s shadows, unmoving beneath the dislodged swinging light. We drive a long way. They do not let me out of the van, and I don’t want to leave. When the van stops for good, I think, I will die. Or at least they will try to kill me. These Californians are lazy and maybe inexperienced.
Who else would duct tape my hands in the front? Don’t they know who I am?
They pull me out of the side door, blindfold me, and push me to my knees in the hot dust.
“¿Es esta el?” says an unfamiliar old man’s voice.
“Claro que sí,” says another.
They throw me back into the van and argue. I loosen the blindfold and tear at the duct tape with my teeth, pulling off strips of flesh along with sticky ragged tape fibers. A gunshot shatters the air. I fall to the floor and wriggle to the space between the front seats, praying the gunfire doesn’t hit the engine or the gas tank.
Gunfights rarely follow movie scripts; they happen so quickly—in a film, even the minor characters move past crippling injuries for as long as the story or the contract requires. But in real life, everyone, and I do mean everyone, is continually startled by the genuine pain of a gunshot, and a great many bullet wounds are fatal within moments. The side window shatters, and I curl in a tight ball beneath the cascading shards of glass, uncertain if the van is running or if I’m in shock. Something sharp and hot explodes like sunshine through my shoe, through the flesh and bones beneath. I pull my left foot closer as the last two surviving men shout until gunshots interrupt their conversation. Pulling onto the driver’s seat, I peer over the window’s rim—all dead.
Mostly dead. The van is running, but I have to lean down into the floorboard and pop the emergency brake. More gunshots. I follow the trail in the van, driving carefully until I near the dirt road and see another car wheeling out from behind the shack, giving chase.
