Oranges
Genanne Walsh
The boy was pilfering her tree again. She set down the coffee pot and slammed out the back screen door, ready to scare the kid straight, knowing full well her witchy reputation in the neighborhood. “Hey,” she called. “Hey, thief!”
Startled, he stood in place under the branches, swaying slightly, squeezing chubby thighs together as if pressing hard enough might propel him right off the ground. Muddy brown hair framed his face pale. A pillowcase hung from the waistband of his jeans, holding about a dozen of her late-season citrus.
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Arnold.”
“Good God.”
His eyes weren’t dull, and there was a slyness in them—he may or may not have been lying about his name. For his sake, she hoped so. “Arnold, I am going to give you a present of those oranges. But if you take more without asking, I’ll call the police and you’ll rot in jail until college. Understood?”
He blinked, mute. The trouble with this new generation, among other things, was that it had absolutely no sense of humor.
“Come here.” She turned to the window ledge, where she had set the hard, glossy outer casing of a mole cricket. It was the biggest she’d ever seen, more than three inches long, the small wings on its back dwarfed by monstrous front legs. She’d stepped into her yard that morning and her sandal had come down on the thing’s end in just the right place—or the wrong place, depending on how you looked at it.
Its guts shot forward under the force of her weight, jet-propelled out the mouth with a vital pop, leaving the exoskeleton perfectly intact and empty as a dress-up pocketbook. She’d bent over the thing, shuddering, her blood zinging. Now she held up the husk like a scepter and presented it to the boy.
“No guts but a little glory,” she said, telling him what had happened to the innards, pointing vaguely toward a spot on the ground while the kid squinted suspiciously
At her urging, he took it. “Jane,” the kid said.
“That’s my name.” Her white hair hung in two braids down her skinny back. She favored loose cotton trousers and cork-soled sandals. A relic.
He didn’t say more. She gestured to the husk of the mole cricket. “Want it?”
Arnold held it gingerly and, looking into her eyes, smashed the thing between his thumb and index finger. It crackled dryly.
“What’d you do that for?”
“It was already dead,” the boy said.
She sent him off, then moved quickly through the house to stand at her front window, next to the mahogany table clustered with photos from Steven’s youth. Her boy had nothing in common with this little turd, whom she now watched tripping up the street, pants sagging, belly hanging under his shrunken shirt and dirty pillowcase thumping behind him. She knew where he was headed. He turned up a driveway five houses down. Like all the other houses on the block except Jane’s, Arnold’s was new, oversized, with the faux-Spanish style of the Gulf Coast nouveau riche. A special ed school van picked him up every weekday.
Two other kids lived in that house, quick blondes with silvery voices—they took the regular bus to school. She thought that if he developed homicidal tendencies, he’d probably kill his own family before moving on to the neighbors.
As soon as the sun set she drove out to Lido Key. Not much traffic on the road, which was just as well since she wasn’t supposed to drive at night. Buffeted by balmy air, she streamed past condos and strip malls and houses masked by tall fences, then onto the bridge, wheels trammeling, ending with a thunk on seamless Lido Drive.
To the right, the Gulf swayed in its own darkness and the past swam up through layers of sediment to dart through her head. “Are we there yet?” Steven would ask every time, though he knew exactly how long it took to drive from their house to the beach at the end of the key.
“Yet we are,” she’d reply, as if it were a place and they were in it.
Her son in his perfect boyhood, a sandy stretch of time eclipsed by the blackouts and rages of his teen years, the 2 a.m. calls from jail, from roadside taverns, and her by the phone, helpless. His silences worst of all. Finally, “fixed” by a psychotropic cocktail and living in halfway house for stability. Her boy—middle-aged now—and his half-life. He might lapse, the shrink had warned. Don’t push. And her life: pinwheeling over the days until their scheduled phone calls.
Yet we are, she whispered now. She parked where they always had, next to a dumpster at the far end of the lot, then strode down a small path to the beach. The white sand reflected the moon, and she could see two guys drinking beer. Further on, a couple made out and some kids, probably from the art school, were flinging fistfuls of water into patterns on the sand and giggling. She kicked off the sandals and her calluses hit the powder in squeaky puffs.
She hoisted her pant legs and waded into the Gulf, not shuffling to ward off stingrays, just kicking the water so it loosened and collapsed back into itself in a shimmer. The phosphorescent phytoplankton was out—the art kids had tipped her off. It rode the shore some nights, looking like nothing until, sparked by motion—cupped hands, a swimmer’s arm, a boy’s shoulder blade, a flicking fin—it glowed, then subsided.
In those days, she and Steven would splash in, shuffling until they lifted off, kicking into blackness, the water just an extension of their own aliveness. Once a gray fin had arced two feet from Steven’s head and she’d watched dumbly. A dolphin or a shark, they never knew. He saw it too, and looked at her, both of them treading water and waiting for something else, something definitive that never came. His cheeks were incandescent.
The risks she had taken then had seemed apiece with the water and the light—necessary and benevolent. They’d walked unscathed from the Gulf and her son turned cartwheels on the sand to dry himself while she watched, trembling. Now the beach stretched out like an empty palm and she risked in different ways. She walked, kicking and kicking the sparks along the shore until soon enough she grew tired. Finally she sat in the sand, watching the glow wane, and no one bothered her or said her name.
Driving home, the black road absorbed the moon’s thin light and she imagined what she would say to Arnold the next time—there had to be a next time—she caught him stealing.
“What, do you think oranges grow on trees?” Then him, the kid, pushing hair off his forehead, and grinning.