The Orange Blossom Express

by Marlena Evangeline

  So she was glad to see Lucy. To have a girl to talk to. She was tired of boy-talk; she was out of her mind. Bananas. Totally bananas. Lucy had waited tables at The Sportman’s Lodge, too. She was taller than Maggie; Lucy had great cheekbones that framed her dark eyes, and a thick rope of black hair hung across her shoulder. Her skin was the color of the earth and it seemed as if the darkness gave her more significance than Maggie’s own fair skin and pale hair; yet her inside self matched Lucy’s darkness all in turmoil and tossing and turning this inside earth as well as the outside earth that Maggie kept jabbing the hoe into, and Lucy had always seemed more like Maggie should have been, light-hearted and content with herself.

  Maggie tried not to think about the abortion. She pretended it had happened to another girl; the girl from Redlands that wasn’t there anymore. Those Redlands girls were something else. Prim. Proper. They swished around those big Victorians doing the right things. Saying the right things. Learning the right things. Settling into life and then cementing themselves to the side of their pretty swimming pools like barnacles.

  She crumpled that Redlands page up and threw it away, like it belonged to someone else’s story. Then she pretended not to recognize that part of her when it rose to consciousness. She’d turn her head, like a good Redlands girl, snub it, pretend it didn’t exist. Of course, it kept rising against her. She’d fall to moodiness and brood. She’d cry for no apparent reason. But a shadowy substance multiplied inside her, something whelped at the abortion, gestating like a pregnancy. Something growing its own life. Something that grew from her, of her, and against her. She’d slink into her solitary world and spend long hours buried in the pages of some novel with an idea that wasn’t hers. And then she’d emerge to the world again. To Hank. To Patrick. To the dust of the earth and the wind and the fire of the sun.

  Maggie laid the rake against the house. She’d worked on the garden all morning, and rocks now surrounded the gravely area; the poor soil needed manure and compost. That didn’t bother her, she like to work in the garden. She liked the physical part of it, the labor and the sweat. She liked turning the poor soil into rich dark earth. She liked the feel of dirt in her hands. She liked the taste of it. Lucy met her halfway between the garden and the dirt drive.

  “Who’s that with you?” she asked squinting her eyes against the sun.

  “A friend of Gary’s,” Lucy said. “Jackson. He’s just in town for a few days so Gary wanted him to meet Hank and Patrick.”

  Maggie pulled off her gloves and slapped the dirt off against her jeans and wondered why.

  The work finally had made her tired. They walked inside. She laid her gloves on the top of the washer and kicked off her muddy boots. Lucy wandered into the living room and sat down on the floor next to Patrick, leaning into his large quarterback shoulder. Hank offered her a joint and laughed when she coughed.

  “Easy,” said Patrick. His voice had a resonance, something that filled the room suddenly. His eyes were bright and sparkling, a twinkle of fleeting glee that seemed to cast decided lights into the room. A head of dark fierce hair thinning prematurely surrounded Patrick’s face and gave him a startled look as if the loss of it surprised him. But the warmth of his voice swelled into the air like smoke, drifting up into the corners. There was a strength to him, quiet, but decided. Annapolis had been his father’s dream, not his. When he finally came to terms with that, he quit. The family had been devastated. It’s not like they’d been rich. The opposite. Working class. His dad was a fireman and the family couldn’t understand why he quit. He’d been so close. But he couldn’t go through with it. He didn’t know how to live someone else’s dream, he said. He said he was going to find it somewhere in the purple sage, then he’d laugh, and wink.

  Maggie went to the bedroom and got some clean panties, a pair of Levis, her green flowered blouse, the one from India, and back through the sea of horizontal bodies spread over the oriental carpet to the bathroom. She turned on the hot water and dumped some bubble bath in. Even though she wore gloves, the soil seeped through, roughing her hands, making them tougher, not soft girl hands, or healing hands, just working hands, hands that knew the feel of earth. She cleaned her fingernails while she waited for the bath to fill, sitting on the toilet with the lid down and legs stretched and propped on the tub.

  After the bath, she went to the front room and met Jackson. Jackson Samuel Swackhammer was tall and gaunt. Lean and mean. A man machine. Almost handsome. No, handsome. His face seemed nondescript at first glance, yet his jaw line was firm and set. He smiled a slow deep smile. A Mexican shirt fell open to his tanned chest, exposing a single strand of puka beads. She immediately responded to the deepness of his smile, as if he were pulling her to him, and then shriveled against it when he leaned closer into her. She could feel a hunger in him. Something absent in the other men. An insatiable appetite.

  “Your lady is beautiful,” he said to Hank as if she weren’t there.

  “Yeah, Maggie’s alright,” said Hank. He was leaning on a corduroy pillow stuffed up against the couch. He held a burning joint aloft so Jackson could take a hit, then rolled over on the rug and moaned about being hungry. Her cue. Feed these people. Quick! She could trace herself to the kitchen following the flowers in the rug, stepping from the one tinted by woad to one colored in indigo and then to the geometric border full of tendrils of madder bark and squares of saffron and walnut. She’d found the hashish-colored rug at a shop in San Bernardino. The lady said it had been there for years and sold it for fifty bucks. Two more steps and a left took her to the kitchen where she started lunch.

  The bread she’d baked that morning was still warm on the counter. She turned the pan, tapping the whole-wheat loaf out of it and sliced enough bread for several sandwiches. She took some cheese and mustard and butter out of the fridge. Patrick came in the kitchen and put his large arms around her.

  “We’re going up to the spring.”

  “No food?” she asked. He kissed her forehead.

  “Not now. We won’t be in your way.”

  Hank came into the kitchen. “I thought you were going to take them up to the spring,” he said.

  “Get out of here, Maggie’s fixing our lunch, right?”

  “I just need to know how many are eating.”

  “Just you and me,” Hank said. “These guys are out of here.”

  Jackson came in.

  “Lunch?” he asked.

  “Yeah, guess you guys are headed out.”

  “I’m starving,” he said. “I’ll wait here and catch up to those guys.”

  After Patrick left, Hank moved behind her and kissed her head, slipping his arms around her.

  Maggie melted the cheese on the bread open faced in the broiler oven, then sliced tomatoes, and sprinkled alfalfa sprouts over the bubbly cheese and placed the sandwiches on plates. Jackson took two sandwiches for the road after gulping a glass of apple juice. Hank took one of the plates into the front room, set it on the table, and picked up the O’Haus triple beam scale sitting in the corner. He spread some newspaper out on the carpet and unwrapped the pink butcher paper wound around a kilo.

  “Where did you get that?” Maggie asked.

  “Jackson brought it,” he said and took a bite of his sandwich. “Gotta pay the rent, you know.” He laughed and took another bite of sandwich before breaking the kilo apart and lidding it out.

  By the time six months passed, the Rough Rider’s Club looked settled in an offbeat way. Maggie’s influence. She haunted junk stores and warehouses full of antiques to find furniture. Besides working in the garden, she liked wandering in old dusty shops, chatting with wrinkled-faced women, finding good buys. She bought a blue mohair couch and some overstuffed chairs that looked great around the redwood burl coffee table Patrick had refinished, the one that had bird’s-eye grain that swirled in the middle like a giant galaxy.

  Patrick was good with his hands, and everyone flashed on the table.

  In one shop she found a dusty Victo
rian walnut dining table that she rescued from an obscure cluttered corner of oblivion, oiling the beautiful walnut to its original splendor, and polishing the inlaid bird’s-eye maple to its lovely hues. Around the rim of the table were a series of cigar burns in four distinct settings and it was for this reason she bought the table: she imagined ancient poker games, four gentlement, old Victorians, games so intense, played with so much money, they just let their cigars scorch the bullet-like marks into the hard walnut, week after week. She could hear, sometimes, when she was alone, the scuffle of boots under the table, the squeak of old leather, the smell of soggy cigars and the must of cotton shirts and finely woven woolen trousers, and the smell of iron and bullet.

  But it was the Afghani carpet that pulled the room together. Even the slight difference of color from one end of the rug to the other worked in the room. She liked the flawed dyes, the organic randomness. The wool had softened with age, yet it whispered of shifting sand dunes and the desert yurts of nomads who wrapped strands of wool around taut-warp threads. She’d move through the rooms, padding her bare feet against the old Oriental, and imagine the eyes of a sun-parched Persian; she could sense the desert wind of the carpet’s ghosts as if the smell of camel still tinged the ancient wools. She felt its past connected to her present.

  The house was cluttered with tools, saws, Redwing boots, unlaced and muddied, and strong leather gloves, black with grease and the sap of orange and eucalyptus trees. She picked up Hank’s muddy boots and took them outside and thumped them against the house so the mud fell off. She put the boots back and picked up the greasy gloves and straightened them; they smelled like Hank and it smelled like part of her, too.

  Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me …

  CHAPTER 6

  Woodbine, Iowa 1946

  JERRY LEE SWACKHAMMER LIFTED THE LOOP of baling wire twisted around the fence post and the rickety wooden gate and swung it open, pushing against it to make certain it would stay. He got back in the truck and drove through. Once inside the pasture, he stopped, got out of the truck, opened the wide doors, and pulled out a sign that said “Movies Tonight.” He pulled out to the middle of the pasture, through ruts and over cow dung and sloughs where water puddled if it rained. But this was summer, and a drought had parched the Iowa summer green to raw umber. He slipped out of the cab of the truck again and moved with some difficulty; his limp, from an early bout with polio, was an inconvenience, but not a great disability.

  “You okay, Betty?” he asked. The woman in the cab of the truck shifted in her seat and nodded.

  Jerry went to the back of the truck and flung the doors wide and slipped out the movie screen and put it on the ground. Next he pulled out several two-by-fours and a large frame. He moved over the land and looked around for the sun. It was behind him, just where he wanted it; then he went back to the truck for his tools and put the large frame together. He had the process down to a fair science by now. His leg kept him from the war a few years before, but it did not keep him from work. But Jerry liked working for himself and because of it, he moved around a lot. This was the first summer he’d come up with an idea that made him any money.

  The Swackhammers didn’t live in this part of Iowa; they lived in the South. But they’d been traveling from town to town setting the movie screen up in anybody’s pasture who’d let them, advertise for a day or so and show movies outside. Folks would just drive right in to the pasture and park and bring out blankets and kids and watch movies under the Iowa stars.

  Jerry’s cousin had a movie theatre, and through him he had been able to get the movies. He’d bought a projector and Betty made bags of popcorn on the hot plate they carried from town to town. This night, he’d put the frame together and hung the screen over it he set up the projector in the back of the large van, took the movie out of its metal case and threaded it through.

  His wife got out of the truck and walked around to relieve her cramping legs.

  “Do you have enough cord?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I think so.” Jerry looked at the coiled electrical cord and then over to the house. “Should be enough.”

  “You want me to take it over,” she offered.

  “No, you just rest, Betty. I’ll do it.” He got down from the truck and kissed his pregnant wife and walked across the lumpy pasture to the house and knocked on the door. The sun had diminished and a coolness had touched the air. A woman answered and took the cord to plug inside. Three cars and two trucks were coming down the road and Jerry smiled. He walked back across the pasture as the cars parked. One of the trucks had chairs in back, and the driver moved it to where they would have a perfect view of the movie. Two of the families in cars got out with blankets and children and spread the blanket over the hood of the cars excitedly. The man in the Dodge was the town doctor and later that night, when Betty went into labor, they would be grateful he was there when she gave birth to their son, Jackson.

  Sha,la,la,la,la,la …

  CHAPTER 7

  MAGGIE HAD GONE BALLISTIC on the garden, even sifting the rocky soil through a mesh screen to sift smaller pieces of rock out of the dirt, leaving a fine sandy silt. She’d hauled in compost from the ranch next door and spent hours spading the dirt, shoveling the mixture, working the compost in. She added lime and oyster shells to the dirt; and it was good afterwards, sitting on the rocks, sweaty from a day of work. After turning the soil she soaked the whole area and let it sit for a month before spading it again.

  It was really a giant compost pile before it was a garden.

  “The garden looks great, Maggie,” Hank said.

  “It does. Patrick helped me turn the soil.”

  “That was thoughtful. When was that?” He picked a grass and put it in his mouth.

  “When you were in Santa Rosa.”

  “Yeah.” He chewed on the grass. “Nice of him. But the garden looks like you.” He smiled now and pulled her to him. “Just like I like it.” She slipped her arm around him. Hank said he wanted to get married. She had never thought much about marriage. So the idea of it was like a new penny, shiny, unspent. But it wasn’t just Hank she’d be marrying. She’d be marrying a life, the ranch, and even Patrick, in a way.