A Dime a Dozen

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “We gotta go give the foreman a lift. Then we can officially start your tour. Are we done here?”

  “Sure,” I said, climbing into the cart. “Thanks for showing it to me anyway.”

  “You’re welcome. Hang on.”

  He put the cart in gear, and we sped back down the dirt path at top speed. The ride was actually quite fun, with a few dips that left my stomach in my throat. By the time we got down to the bottom of the hill, the beautiful Tinsdale home was plainly in view. Danny slowed and turned onto the long driveway that led up to the house.

  Up close, the place was still impressively large, but it held signs of wear I hadn’t noticed from the road. Weathered paint. A rotted window frame. Weeds in dried-up flower beds. The orchard was thriving with activity, but I had to wonder why the mansion was in such disrepair. Lack of money? General neglect? It didn’t make any sense.

  Alongside the house, in the middle of the driveway, sat a huge green John Deere tractor. Nearby, a man was leaning against a wall, and when he saw us coming, he held up his hand. Danny pulled to a stop near him and got out of the driver’s seat to climb into the back. As the man sauntered toward us in jeans and dirt-covered boots, I thought the foreman looked vaguely familiar, as though I had seen him somewhere before. With a dark tan, weathered features, and sun-bleached hair, he was a picture of the rugged outdoorsy type. As he climbed in behind the wheel, Danny introduced him as the foreman, Pete Gibson. I had been planning to speak with him soon and get more information about Enrique’s last day, so I was happy to make his acquaintance.

  “Pete, this is Callie Webber,” Danny continued. “Dean Webber’s daughter-in-law. She’s here learning about the migrants, and Karen suggested we give her a tour of the orchard. I was just gonna show her around.”

  Pete looked at me for a long moment, the expression on his face unreadable.

  “Karen suggested it, huh?” he said finally.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve been doing some research on the different migrant charities in the area, so I’m interested in how they all come together.”

  He studied me for a moment, working his jaw.

  “Well, I think we can give you an idea,” he said finally. “Danny, how’s SR3 doing?”

  “It’s at thirteen percent.”

  “Then I guess it won’t be ready till tomorrow. That gives us plenty of time for a tour. Sure, we’ll give you a nice tour.”

  He turned forward, put the cart in gear, and took off up the drive-way. Somehow, I had the feeling that Pete had now become my selfappointed tour guide, though he didn’t seem very happy about it.

  “You know anything about apple growing?” he asked me loudly over the noise of the wind rushing past. He was driving much faster than Danny had, and I held tightly to the rail.

  “Not a thing,” I said.

  Making a sharp turn to the right, he headed down toward the lowest field, the one with what looked like the youngest, smallest trees. Pete slowed the vehicle and began talking in mostly scientific terms about the variety of growing methods the orchard employed. He pointed out the distance between the tree trunks, telling me that the close proximity was a new approach, something they hadn’t done before.

  “You’ll see the older trees in the middle block,” he said. “They’re much farther apart than these will be. These will grow up so close together they’ll almost be more like apple bushes than apple trees. It’s a new method we’re trying, but it’s supposed to be very land-use effective.”

  He continued to talk about width and height and separation, and I finally realized this was going to be a much more thorough tour than I had bargained for. I glanced back at Danny, who rolled his eyes.

  Pete was onto the subject of the bees they brought in annually for pollination when I stopped listening and decided simply to look around and enjoy the drive. At least, the more he spoke, the more my eyes were being opened to the complexities of growing apples. I also hadn’t realized what a cooperative effort was involved, as several different sections of the orchard had been given over to the University of North Carolina for research and testing.

  “It’s a very symbiotic relationship,” Pete said. “We provide the land and the trees, they do the research, and we all benefit from the knowledge.”

  Once we had made the rounds of the trees, Pete drove us back up to the compound of buildings and slowly pulled through the open center aisle of an equipment shed. Looking around at the big machines housed there, I felt positively dwarfed on both sides.

  Pete drove out the other end of the shed before pulling to a stop beside the door of one of the bigger buildings.

  “Now I’ll show you the storage,” Pete said. “Danny, you can check the Orstat while we’re here.”

  “Sure,” Danny said, giving me a wink as he walked away.

  “Karen said something about a controlled atmosphere?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Pete replied. “Here, I’ll show you.”

  He pulled open the door of the building and we stepped inside. As we did, I was hit by a thickly sweet apple smell, as if the air were filled with a concentrated apple perfume. We found ourselves in a long corridor lined with odd-looking doors on each side.

  “When the apples are first picked, the ones we don’t ship out right away get put into this building,” Pete said. “At the beginning of harvest, these are all just a bunch of big empty rooms. But after we fill a room with apple bins, we seal it up airtight, lower the temperature, remove most of the oxygen, and pump in nitrogen.”

  “Really.”

  “Once we’ve controlled the atmosphere of the room,” Pete continued, “the apples stop ripening. They’re kind of like in suspended animation. Then, later in the year, when it’s time to ship more apples, we unseal the room, which means we bring the temperature back up a little, pump out the nitrogen, and bring in oxygen. At that point, the apples are at nearly the same level of ripeness as they were when we first picked them. That’s how you get fresh-tasting apples year-round.”

  “Fascinating. What’s an Orstat?”

  “It’s a tool we use to check the air quality of the room. It lets us remove an air sample and then test it for the right chemical balance.”

  “Kind of like using a chemical kit to check for chlorine in a pool?”

  “Exactly. See, we’ve got fans going that pump out the nitrogen and bring in the oxygen. But we can’t open the sealed door until the room gets up to twenty-one percent oxygen, or it wouldn’t be safe for the workers to go inside. Once we get the right atmosphere, we break the seal on the door, and then the men start unloading and packing the apples.”

  “Fascinating,” I said.

  “This is the room we’ll be opening tomorrow morning,” Pete said, pointing to a nearby door with a tiny porthole-like window in it. “Storage room number three, or SR3 for short. If you look through this little window, you’ll see that the room’s completely full. It holds twenty thousand bushels.”

  “Wow! That’s a lot of apples.”

  “We’ve got eight rooms that size in this building alone,” Pete said. “That’s one hundred sixty thousand bushels—just under this roof.”

  I peeked in the doors of several of the sealed rooms, and I could see wooden apple crates, one on top of the other, stacked within a few feet of the high ceilings.

  “Let’s head outside,” Pete said when he saw me pinching my nose. “The smell will get to you after a while. That’s the ethylene gas the apples give off.”

  Feeling a little punch-drunk, I followed him back to the golf cart. Danny came out a moment later.

  “The air mix in SR3 is rising fast,” he said to Pete, looking worried. “A lot faster than usual. It’s already up to fifteen percent.”

  “Probably because of the new fan,” Pete replied. “That’s okay. That’s good. Excellent, actually. Don’t worry, Danny. It won’t hurt the apples to bring the room up quickly.”

  “If you say so.”

  I thought we were going to get back
in the golf cart, but Pete took my elbow and guided me in the other direction on foot.

  “Danny, if you wanna work on the tractor,” Pete said, gesturing toward the cart, “I can finish the lady’s tour myself.”

  “Okay,” Danny replied, looking hesitant and a bit disappointed. Nevertheless, he gave me a handshake and a dimpled smile before jumping back into the golf cart and driving off.

  “Nice guy, but this is all still kind of new to him,” Pete said once Danny was out of earshot. “I hardly think he’s qualified to give a tour.”

  “I don’t know,” I said in Danny’s defense. “Karen Weatherby seems happy with him as the orchard liaison.”

  Pete snickered.

  “Sure, that’s just a bunch of glad-handing. Danny’s great with people. It’s the apples I worry about.”

  He directed me toward the nearest building, and as we walked I stole a few glances at his strong profile. I could almost swear I knew him from somewhere. I tried to picture him younger, but it wasn’t until I noticed the small tattoo of a rose on the back of his hand that it hit me: Pete was P.J., the boy who used to serve me ice cream sodas at the drugstore in town!

  “Hey, I know you!” I cried, grinning in spite of myself. “Didn’t you go by the name ‘P.J.’?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I used to come to Camp Greenbriar when I was a kid. You worked at the drugstore in town, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, a lifetime ago,” he said.

  “I went there every summer! Isn’t that funny? I knew you looked familiar. You’re P.J., the soda jerk.”

  “Yeah,” he said, rolling his eyes, “emphasis on jerk.”

  “No, please, all the girls used to think you were so cute. We’d all order the most complicated thing on the menu just to watch you make it.”

  He studied me for a moment, the stern exterior finally cracking the slightest bit into a smile.

  “The giggling girls from Camp Greenbriar,” he said finally, shaking his head. “Y’all made me a nervous wreck.”

  “Oh, but you were so handsome and so worldly. That tattoo—that was just so…so shocking to us. We were absolutely enthralled by everything about you.”

  He glanced down at his hand and grinned.

  “At the age of seventeen, I made the great mistake of falling in love with a girl named Rose,” he said. “She stayed with me exactly one week after I’d branded myself for life.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Now from what I hear she’s got four kids and lives in Raleigh with a man half her height and twice her age.”

  “Serves her right, I guess.”

  We smiled at each other, bonding over this interesting coincidence. Maybe he wasn’t such a tough guy after all.

  “You gotta be at least eight or nine years younger than I am,” he said. “So when I was nineteen and slinging ice cream sundaes, that means you were one of those ten-year-old prepubescent nightmares who drove me nuts?”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “I’m sorry I don’t remember you specifically,” he said, studying my face. “But the summers were long. We got girls like you in there week in, week out for three months. From the attention they gave me, you would’ve thought I was the Fonz or something.”

  “Oh, but you were, Pete. To us, you were.”

  He grinned, looking up at the sky.

  “Ah, the bad ol’ days,” he said. “That was back before my mom married Lowell.”

  “Lowell?”

  “Lowell Tinsdale, the man who owns this orchard. He’s my stepfather.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t realize that.”

  He looked at me suspiciously.

  “Yeah, right. Well, he’s a good guy. I was well on my way to being a street-tough hood, but Lowell brought me here, put me to work, and set me straight right fast. In a way, the orchard saved my life.”

  “And now you’re the foreman.”

  “Now I run the whole joint. But I learned this business, as they say, from the dirt up. There’s not one single job at this orchard that somebody does now that I didn’t do myself at some point along the way.”

  “You must be a very empathetic boss then.”

  “Not really,” he said. “If anything, I’m way too tough on everybody. If they complain, I say, ‘Hey, if I could do it, you can too.’”

  We continued on the tour, much more relaxed than before. Eventually, I shared with Pete that my husband was Bryan Webber, the Webbers’ son who was killed. Pete had heard of the incident, of course, but he said he had never known Bryan very well.

  Now his focus was fully back on the apple business, and he showed and told me much more about apples than I really needed to know. Mainly, I had just wanted to see the place, to get an idea of what it must feel like to work there, and see if I could gather any information about Enrique. Instead, I was shown the inner workings of all of the buildings one after the other. We saw the room where the bruised and battered apples were separated out for cider, tanks where the apples were cleaned, conveyor belts where they were sorted by size. After a while, it became one big jumble of conveyor belts and workers in shower caps and hundreds upon hundreds of apples. There were so many apples already being processed, in fact, that I wondered where they were going to put the ones coming out of the storage room.

  At one point, Pete got word over the walkie-talkie that the SR3 was now at 21 percent and ready to unseal. I was hoping that might cut the tour short, but he simply gave the go-ahead for his men to handle it and continued on with me.

  Surrendering to the process, I followed along, watching as dusty, dull-colored apples rolled on a conveyor belt that carried them under a sort of liquid shower. As they continued on the other side, I could see that they were now beautiful, shiny, and red.

  “Is that some special kind of cleaner?” I asked Pete over the noise of the machines.

  “No, they’ve already been cleaned back there. This is like a shellac.”

  “Shellac?”

  He nodded.

  “Most people want to buy their apples shiny, so growers have to pass them through an edible shellac to give them that glow.”

  “That’s odd,” I said.

  “I know, but the grocery stores won’t buy them from us if we don’t do it. So we have no choice.”

  Still surprised by that thought, I was glad when we made it through the last building and went outside. I glanced at my watch, wondering how Harriet had made out at MORE.

  “I thought farmers’ hours started early and ended early,” I said.

  “We’re all working overtime tonight,” he replied, “’cause we gotta clear the way for the apples coming out of storage.”

  Together we headed toward the parking lot.

  “Tell me about the people who pick the apples,” I said as we walked. “I mean, you’ve got a lot of folks working here now, but they aren’t migrants, are they?”

  He shook his head.

  “No. These are the locals that work here year-round. They do the packing and the orchard maintenance but not the picking. The migrants will do that when they get here in July or August.”

  “How many migrants do you use?”

  “Well, when the season first starts, we need about ninety workers. After a few weeks, that drops down to about seventy, then later to about twenty, then those last twenty dwindle down to none.”

  “You had a bit of trouble with one of the migrants this year,” I said. “Enrique Morales?”

  Pete nodded.

  “Yeah, that was very sad. I woulda never pegged him as the kind of guy to go off and abandon his wife and kids.”

  “From what I understand,” I said, “he didn’t necessarily abandon them. Something might’ve happened to him that was outside of his control.”

  Pete looked at me, eyes squinting.

  “You’ve been talking to Luisa, haven’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “The poor girl. She just doesn’t want to face facts. But I can tell you this:
We mounted a search of this entire orchard, and I mean we combed it good. If something funny had happened to him here, we would’ve seen something or heard something.”

  “Did anyone look in the woods above the high block?”

  “Are you kidding? We went up to the dirt road behind the woods, formed a line of about fifty people, side-by-side, and then we just moved forward, slowly, in a giant sweep. Through the woods, across the fields, and all the way down to the creek. There was not an inch of this place that someone didn’t check.”

  “It sounds very thorough.”

  “Well, the cops came back and did the same thing the next morning, and they didn’t find anything either.”

  I opened my mouth to ask him another question when I was distracted by a beat-up old pickup pulling into the parking lot. Behind the wheel was the white-haired Zebulon Hooper, the man I had seen on the road this morning and then met up with again at Su Casa.

  “Howdy, Pete!” he said, waving out the window.

  “Zeb?” Pete asked. “What are you doing here?”

  “Pickin’ up a bin of apples. Should I back up to the loading dock?”

  “No, just turn it around right here and you’ll be fine.”

  We both watched Zeb turn his truck around, and when he shut off the engine, Pete called out to him.

  “Now, what are you gonna do with an entire bin of apples, Zeb? You going into the pie-making business or something?”

  “Nah, I’m buying cider apples. Thought I’d try my hand at a batch of apple wine.”

  Pete laughed as Zeb climbed down from the cab.

  “Well, hello again,” Zeb said, noticing me. “I guess I’m just gonna keep running into you all day.”

  “I guess so.”

  Pete’s walkie-talkie crackled at his hip. He grabbed it and pushed the button.

  “This is Pete,” he said.

  “Uh, Pete? This is Sam. I think you need to get to SR3 right away.”

  “You got the room unsealed okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Uh…well…I think maybe you’d better call the police.”

  Zeb and I looked at each other, eyes wide.

  “The police?” Pete barked, already walking away from us and toward the storage room. “Why?”