The Gold Coast

13

After Jim leaves, Old Tom continues the conversation in his head.

I played in the orange groves as a child, he tells Jim. When you lived on a street plunging into a grove that extended away in every direction, then you could go out any time you liked. Mid-afternoon when everything was hot and lazy was a good time. It was always sunny.

They cleared the ground around the trees, nothing but dirt. Around each tree was a circular irrigation moat maybe thirty feet across, which made the groves look strange. As did the symmetrical planting. Every tree was in a perfect rank, a perfect file, and two perfect diagonals, for as far as you could see. The trees were symmetrical too, something like the shape of an olive, made of small green leaves on small twisted branches.

There were almost always oranges on the trees, they blossomed and grew twice a year and the growing took up most of the time. Oranges first green and small, then through an odd transition of mixed green and yellow, to orange, darkening always as they ripened—until if not picked they would darken to a browny orange and then go brown and dry and small and hard, and then whitish brown and then earth again. But most of them were picked.

We used to throw them at each other. Like snowballs already formed and ready to go. Old ones were squishy and smelled bad, whole new ones were hard and hurt a little. We fought wars, boys throwing oranges back and forth and it was kind of like German dodgeball at school. Getting hit was no big deal, except perhaps when you had to explain it to your mother. During the fights itself it was kind of funny. I wonder if any of those young friends ended up in Vietnam? If so, they were poorly trained for it.

We took bows and arrows out into the groves to shoot the jackrabbits we often saw bounding away from us. They could really run. We never even came close to them, happily, so we shot at oranges on trees instead. Perfect targets, quite difficult to hit and a wonderful triumph if you did, the oranges burst open and flew off or hung there punctured, it was great.

We ate the oranges too, choosing only the very best. The green and slightly acrid sweat that comes out of their skin as you peel them, the white pulpy inside of the peels, the sharp and fragrant smell, the wedges of inner fruit, perfectly rounded crescent wedges… odd things. Their taste never seemed quite real.

I spent a lot of time out there in the groves, wandering in the hot dusty silence with my bow and arrow in hand, talking to myself. It was a very private world.

But when they started to tear the groves down I don’t remember we ever cared all that much. No one could imagine that all the groves would be torn down. We played in the craters, and the piles of wood left when the trees were chopped up, and it was different, interesting. And the construction sites—new foundations, framing thrown up in hours—made great playgrounds. We swung from rafters and tested if newly poured concrete would melt if you held a candle under it, and jumped from new roofs down into piles of sand, and once Robert Keller stepped on a nail sticking up through a board. Fun.

And then when the houses were built, fences put up, roads all in—well—it was a different place. Then it wasn’t so much fun. But by then we weren’t kids anymore either, and we didn’t care.