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Jon Boilard | StillwaterSully picked me up after work in his 1974 Charger that was red and we went down to Fat Johnny’s to throw hay for a couple hours. The summer air was still sticky even with the yolk-yellow heart of it dripping quickly behind Sugarloaf Mountain. We filled one trailer and unloaded it in the barn out back behind where they kept the horses. Fat Johnny took us up the road on the hitch of the FarmAll to Sully’s car and gave us a handful of sweaty dollar bills for some beer. He always paid fair. He said Don’t drink it all in one place. We laughed. Then I pissed on an old hickory tree and a fence draped with Virginia creeper.
Sully told me about the glass pack he’d installed over the weekend and he gunned the engine so I could hear it whoosh. He said he had his eye on some chrome rims down to Roy’s Gas & Go and he was pretty sure there were some fat Eagle GT 60s to match. We picked up a case of Bud in the center of town and drove to the man-made pond in Whately to wash off. It was dark and there was a breeze that was thick and the water was warmer than pear cider and we stripped down and did the best we could without soap and got back into our dirty jeans. We balled up our t-shirts and socks and underpants and put them in the trunk with our boots.
Old Man Smiaroski had us cutting field tobacco right off South Silver Lane across from the cattail and red maple swamp. Sully was angry because we were out there with a Puerto Rican who had come up from Holyoke for the harvest. Sully hated the Puerto Rican right away and called him a spic because Sully Senior had been cut in the face by one of them a few years back. He still had a scar that ran pink and jagged from his earlobe to his shoulder blade from a broken whiskey bottle. It was a bar fight at the Bloody Brook that ended up in the middle of South Main Street and Sully Senior had gone back later and run the Puerto Rican over with his brand new Ford F250.
They always showed up at picking time in beat-up cars and worked cheaper than anybody. Mostly Puerto Ricans but also Jamaicans. They stayed at White Birch that was supposed to be for real camping only but Clyde who ran the place said he didn’t give a flying fuck what went on there as long as he got his fee. They would line up at Pioneer Bank on pay day where Sully’s girl named Kay was a teller. She said hardly any of them could talk American. He told her to ask for every other Friday off so she wouldn’t have to deal with that. He said he didn’t want those lowlifes trying to look down her shirt or bag a feel or worse. He said Those animals are capable of anything. He said Look at my pa’s mug for proof of that for Christ sake.
The Puerto Rican was a good worker. Sully said Hey spic until the Puerto Rican stopped pulling and looked up and the three of us rode the John Deere back to have lunch in the barn. I unrolled the garden hose that was wrapped around the rim of an old truck wheel and bolted to the side of the main house. Me and Sully drank right from it and the water was cold and we soaked our heads. Then Sully filled an old hub cap and put it down on the ground for the Puerto Rican like for a dog because he said he didn’t want to catch whatever the spic had brought up from Holyoke. I ate a couple ham and cheese sandwiches with blue Gatorade from Boron’s. Sully ate some kind of leftover casserole his mom had packed in plastic. It was shady in the barn but muggy and dusty and ninety five degrees and the Puerto Rican slept through lunch without eating a thing.
After twelve hours we lifted weights in Sully’s garage with a fan blowing on us and mirrors and a Bon Jovi tape that we played over and over. His mom made stuffed peppers and kielbasa then we took some of his pa’s warm Michelob from the cellar. We gassed up at Cumberland Farms and I bought some Red Man chew and a bag of Rice’s Ice for the beer. We cruised around Hillside Road past Max Antes and the dump and the drive-in theater. The river was running good so we parked and jumped and took a couple turns on the ropeswing. On the way back toward town we stopped at the straightaway that we called the drag strip and a couple smartasses we barely knew from Hadley pulled up alongside us in some four-cylinder rice burner and asked if we wanted to race for papers. Sully said Big joke. Sully threw a full can of beer that hit the driver in the nose so that he drove away bleeding and cursing up a blue storm and we laughed.
We stopped over to the BP Diner for biscuits and gravy at around two in the morning. It was mostly truckers and nose-ringed college kids from Northampton and Amherst at that late hour. There was a shower in the back for the drivers and when I went to use the bathroom I saw the Puerto Rican drying off with paper towels. No showers at White Birch. He nodded at me and I nodded at him. When I told Sully he said We ought to go in there and flush his damn head down the toilet. And he moved like he was going to get up and do it but then our plates of food came.
Then from the window at our booth when we were messing with the jukebox we saw a pickup with its brights on slip behind Sully’s Charger. A couple guys hopped out of the back with aluminum baseball bats and started whaling on it. We went out there and it was the smartasses from Hadley and a handful of their older buddies who had already graduated. Sully got the bat from one of them and almost took his head off but it wasn’t long before they ganged up on us. They had us on the blacktop and they were starting to kick at our ribs and kidneys with steel-toe Dunhams and they were really working us over when I saw the Puerto Rican again.
He came out of the BP and looked at me and Sully and jumped right into the mess like he belonged there. Like he was one of us. Sully was already out cold and I could tell I had some busted bones. From the ground I watched those Hadley boys knock the Puerto Rican around pretty good too and then South Deerfield’s finest showed up with sirens blaring and lights flashing. They called for an ambulance for me and Sully and handcuffed the Puerto Rican to the railing because they didn’t know what he was saying. His hair was still wet from the shower and some was stuck to his forehead with blood and sweat and a bunch of little stones from the parking lot. Then he saw me staring and he grinned. They woke Sully with smelling salts.
It was Saturday night so the drunk tank was already full. The cops put the Puerto Rican in a white van with a dozen other Puerto Ricans and Jamaicans who had been picked up mostly for fighting unemployed locals. Greenfield agreed to hold them overnight. Grady Fillmore offered to transport and while speeding over the Stillwater Bridge a spray of black bats passed before the windshield like windblown leaves. It startled Grady and he spilled hot coffee on his thigh and he swerved and the fifteen-passenger van crashed through the guard rail and plunged into ten feet of water. Grady got out with a gash on his forehead but the others were chained together and trapped and the river soon filled their lungs. At dawn men from Fisher’s Garage wore yellow hip boots and couldn’t get to it with a wrecker because of the muddy banks so they airlifted the van with its bloated occupants undisturbed to Framingham so state troopers could investigate.
We had to get a load of cabbage down to the pickle shop by ten. Old Man Smiaroski drove the old Willy’s along the furrows and me and Sully pitched heads into the bed. Fat bugs got into the black holes of our noses and mouths and made our ears itch. I had my shirt in my back pocket and the sun beat down on me, and Sully said Boy you’re getting just about as dark as that spic. He said Ain’t that right. And he slapped me on the back while I was leaning on my fork and I laughed but I didn’t mean it. Sully laughed too with his white teeth. Old Man Smiaroski spit his cigar stub out the window and said something in Polish that we didn’t understand and he called us lazy sons of bitches. Sully said Jesus Christ. I just closed my eyes tight and a burned breeze rushed up from the Connecticut River. I smelled gladiolus: Green Isle and Billy Lee and Big Time.
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