HEATWAVE
Image licensed through Adobe Stock. Edited.
Vicky Carrillo
Vicky Carrillo, Carlos Carrillo, and their two kids had been living in their little rental house for five years when Gloria Donne bought the house next door, along with the field behind it, and started her organic tomato farm. For months, you could see her out there working by herself, building the raised beds and planting them all on her own, but by harvest time, she needed help, and Vicky jumped at the opportunity. A job so close to home was a lucky break for her, even if Carlos and most of their neighbors thought Gloria Donne was crazy to start her fancy farm right there on the street, with store-bought soil in beds built of new pine boards. It was only an acre, but she’d jammed in a lot of beds.
After washing up the supper dishes, Vicky sat outside trying to cool off. A walnut tree shaded part of the yard. Barely June and a web of cracks spread over the rest of the sunbaked earth. Behind her, the screen door squeaked shut, and Carlos joined her on the cement steps. Vicky took his hand, felt for the calluses on his palm.
“I been thinking.” She’d been waiting for the right time to bring up her plan. “First pay I get goes to Uncle Oscar. After that, we’ll be out of debt.”
“Maybe we could neaten up this place. Paint the trim, plant a lawn.”
“Sure, but I want Kenny to start Catholic school this fall, instead of going to public and getting in a gang like the other boys on this street. Maybe Marcia, too.”
“I only been assistant crop manager three months.” Carlos pulled his hand out of Vicky’s. “Give it time. We’re doing okay.”
“Catholic-School-okay?”
Carlos moved his shoulders, shaking off her question.
Monday morning, Vicky woke Marcia with a kiss on her damp forehead. Marcia propped herself up on an elbow in her bottom bunk and brushed her hair out of her eyes.
“You leaving, Mama?”
“If you need me, I’m just next door. There’s donuts on the kitchen table. Just this once.”
“Yay, donuts!” Kenny shouted down from the top bunk.
“Drink some milk, too.”
Vicky left the kids and walked out into the warm morning, down to the street and up the driveway next door. Gloria looked at Vicky from under her battered straw hat when she unlocked the gate.
“You’re going to swelter in those jeans.” Her own shorts and tank top barely covered her muscular body. “The big tomatoes still aren’t ripe,” Gloria went on. “But there’s tons of cherry tomatoes and little pears.”
Vicky followed Gloria up the driveway, taking care on the rutted dirt, while Gloria strode ahead. The sun beat down hard for seven in the morning. Sweat already trickled over Vicky’s scalp.
Gloria stopped outside the barn. “Grab some trays. You pick, I’ll fertilize.”
Gloria marched away with her bucket. Vicky caught up with her by an oil drum filled with scummy brown liquid. Gloria swung her bucket into the muck and pulled it out, dripping. “Manure tea.”
While Gloria slopped the manure stuff around the plants, Vicky worked her way along the rows of raised beds, filling trays with little round and pear-shaped tomatoes, tossing the split ones into a different tray. After fifteen minutes, her thighs ached from squatting. If she bent over, her back hurt instead.
They quit at noon, before the heat of the day.
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Gloria Donne
Gloria wanted to get out of the sun, but first she moistened the dried-out compost piles, breathing the familiar, earthy scent of water hitting brown leaves and over-ripe vegetable matter. Funny that the compost she added weekly never raised the soil level above the beds’ wooden sides. Why was that? What was the earth underneath the soil like now? Had the compost, sinking down through the bottomless beds, softened the concrete-hard earth, the nutrients percolating down into the great Central Valley? Each six-by-ten-foot bed was a tiny print on the land. Small, but real. Not pretend. Not to the beetles and pill bugs living in the beds. They had nowhere else to go. The other yards on the street around her field sheltered ants, maybe, and spiders, but that was all.
Gloria turned off the hose. On her way across the field, she swept her fingers over a tomato plant’s foliage, sniffed the powerful living scent. Back in January, the seeds of the tomato plants had fit in the palm of her hand. And now look at them. From dead-looking, papery white specks to vigorous green shrubs.
Gloria tromped down the dusty driveway, quiet, with just the sound of her work boots crunching dirt clods, and locked the gate. The street was hot and airless. Parked cars glinted in the heat waves off the asphalt. On her front steps, Gloria yanked off her black work boots to free her bare feet. She wiggled her toes, moist and pale as grubs. In the kitchen, she turned on the hot water, bent and scrubbed the dark green crust off her hands and arms under the sulfurous stream. She was hot and tired, but the season ahead looked good. The tomatoes would go into October, then she’d plant cool weather crops: lettuce, carrots, peas. In the winter, if she had the money, she might plant a row of bare-root fruit trees.
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Vicky Carrillo
At four, when Carlos got home from his own job at the cornfields down south, he asked Vicky, “Have fun today?”
He peeled off his clothes in the kitchen and headed for the shower.
“Fun?” Vicky stood in the bathroom doorway, her hand on the frame. Her low back twinged, her biceps throbbed, and maybe she was too old and out of shape for the job, but she wasn’t going to tell Carlos that. “It’s work. You know what that’s like.”
“Never worked for a girl.”
“She’s not real friendly,” Vicky said, as Carlos stepped into the shower. “But she works hard”––the water streamed on, and Vicky raised her voice above the noise”––and pays a fair wage!”
That first week, Gloria showed Vicky how to mix liquid kelp and use the sprayer to wet the tomato foliage with the stinky liquid. She showed Vicky how to turn the half-rotted compost with a pitchfork.
“Why’s it steaming?”
Gloria gulped water out of her bottle and wiped her chin with her dirty hand, leaving a smear. “It’s hot because it’s decomposing and releasing energy.”
Vicky nodded.
“It’s the smart way,” Gloria said. “Keep the pH balanced and the soil full of microorganisms and how can you go wrong?”
Vicky had a lot riding on Gloria, but that was okay, because the girl knew what she was doing. Listening to her, Vicky felt good, almost mean. Like she was a teenager again and no one was going to mess with her.
Working five days straight, Vicky got sorer and sorer. Her muscles ached, and her hands stung from the plant juice getting into the new cracks in her knuckles. At night, she lay awake beside Carlos while her body screamed at her. She got so she hated the sun, too, always there, blazing down. She made it to Friday, though, and at noon Vicky and Gloria stood in the barn’s shade while Gloria counted a pile of bills into Vicky’s hand.
“Getting hotter,” Gloria said. The red line in the wall thermometer had nudged past ninety-five and was rising.
That afternoon Marcia and Kenny begged Vicky to drive them across town to the air-conditioned party place with pizza and video games.
“Please, Mama?” Marcia lay her hand on her heart. “They got Slurpees. I want a Slurpee so bad.”
“They got Space Racers, Mama?” Kenny barely remembered the place, it had been so long.
“Yeah,” Marcia told him. “And Toy Chest and Whac-A-Mole.”
Kids needed treats. Vicky knew that. But if you weren’t careful, your wages could float away from you.
“I seen gopher holes in the yard. You go wait by one of those, you want to whack something.” Vicky gave Marcia a weary smile. “It’s too hot to cook, though. We’ll grill some burgers outside when Papa gets home.”
The kids sulked a little, but Vicky was firm. She wanted more from her money than fun for the kids. Vicky wanted to change their lives.
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Marcia Carrillo
Marcia was so hot, she was dying. She lay on the floor, dying.
A breeze picked up in the late afternoon, carrying the stink of lighter fluid, along with the scent of grilling meat. Marcia sat up. She rested her chin on the sill of the open window. Outside, kids were goofing off while their suppers cooked. A group of boys trailed down the street, kicking a ball around. Some girls whispered together under the walnut tree on the corner. One of the taller girls, in shorts and a little crocheted T-shirt, was passing around a bottle in a paper bag. Marcia watched them all, while Kenny played with his truck on the carpet by her feet.
“What’re you doing down there on the floor?” Marcia’s mama asked her.
“Spying.”
Out in the street, a big white car drove past, scattering kids. Marcia stuck out her tongue at the blond lady driving the car, then ducked, giggling, next to Kenny on the carpet.
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James Donne
“What a shantytown, begging to be bulldozed.” Angelica Panofsky gazed out at the street through sealed windows, the air conditioner fluttering her skirt.
In the car beside Angelica, James looked out for his daughter. He saw her filthy work van in the driveway leading to the field behind her house, but no Gloria. Lots of other people were idling outside their houses and milling around in the street.
“Jesus H.,” Angelica muttered, as she slowed the car to a crawl. Beyond the gleaming front bumper, a clutch of ragged brats scattered and ran in all directions. At the corner, Angelica turned the car onto the levee road.
“We’ll be there in a sec, James, then you’ll see what I’m asking you to invest in.”
James shivered, turned the air conditioner’s nozzle away from himself, and leaned back in the leather seat. Decades ago, a farmer had planted walnut trees along the road to mark a property line but most of them had died. James flinched away from their witchy fingers reaching into the hot, white sky, each tree nearly the same as the last, as though a single tree were following them, repositioning its branches, twisting its limbs into new agonies.
“See that field?”
“What?” James turned his head. “Oh, yes.”
“We could pick it up cheap. Not much money in onions. We’d have no problem getting it rezoned for tract homes. City Hall doesn’t want agriculture out here, it wants suburbia.”
Near the canal, the road deteriorated. They bounced forward, stopping when the nose of the car nudged up against the levee. Angelica threw open her door, and the heat surged in, the car’s cool air escaping into the hot late afternoon. Her red skirt flashed by the windshield as she scaled the bank. James trailed behind, his black shoes scuttling on the hard bank. When he reached the top, with its view of the canal’s brackish water, he squatted and wiped his shoes with a tissue. Beside him, Angelica stood panting from the climb, her stomach pulling in and pushing out against her cinch belt, her full skirt flapping in the hot wind. She put a hand on James’s arm and they turned toward the development in the distance.
“In the nineteenth century, a single farmer owned all the land in this area, including your daughter’s place. He lived in that Victorian farmhouse, his workers lived in those shacks, see, and he stored his crops in that brick warehouse before sending them down the canal to San Francisco. Before trucks and freeways.”
A new road, still unpaved, connected the development to the street down there. Next time they’d be able to use that and get a closer look at the progress being made on the development. Even from this far away, the plumber’s van was visible, parked beside a pair of construction workers’ trucks in front of the tall Victorian farmhouse.
“They’re putting in new wallboard, pipes, wiring,” Angelica said.
James nodded. The old farm workers’ shacks were, he believed, still being cleared of rats’ nests and squatters’ trash. As far as he knew, the old brick warehouse remained untouched.
“What will you do with the warehouse?”
“Might turn it into an antiques barn,” Angelica told him. “We got a restaurant going into the farmhouse and we’re turning the workers’ shacks into bed-and-breakfast cottages. I asked your daughter to put in a kitchen garden by the farmhouse.”
“Gloria? Has she agreed?”
“Not yet. She will. I want you guys in on this. I want all my friends to benefit. This development will bring people in, James. The right kind of people. And money!”
“Has it occurred to you all this might be underwater when the delta rises?”
“Actually, it has. I’m just the facilitator, honey. Trust me, we’ll have banked our profits long before the water rises.”
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Carlos Carrillo
Inside the stuffy brick warehouse, flies buzzed in the still air, tracing figure eights. In a corner of the large, unfinished room two dogs ate meat out of a bucket, grunting and slobbering. A third guzzled fresh water out of a plastic tub, then nosed over to the meat bucket. The pit bulls stood heads together under sunlight pressing in through a hole in the wooden roof. The hot air stank of meat and dog, so thick Carlos could taste it. He’d grown up with hot summers, thought he was used to it, but this heat felt different.
Carlos stepped out of the warehouse into the wind and construction clamor: the screaming disk saw slicing through a board across two sawhorses, the repeating thump of a nail gun. On his way to his pickup truck, Carlos raised his hand to one of the construction workers smoking in the shade of the palm tree by the big farmhouse. All the workers knew about the pit bulls in the warehouse. Some even came to the fights.
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Kenny Carrillo
All day Kenny stayed inside the house by the electric fan on the kitchen floor. At dusk he went out into the yard behind his house. The scent of fresh-baked apple pie wafted over to him on the hot wind. Barefoot, Kenny climbed the fence into the place next door where his mama worked weekday mornings. By a big bamboo clump, he stopped and stood on one foot, brushing painful dirt clods off the other foot, then repeated the process with the opposite foot. While he did this his tummy grumbled. Some apple pie would taste good. But who would turn on the oven to bake pie on such a hot day?
Kenny walked around the bamboo clump into the big field filled with planter beds. The baked apples he smelled lay scattered all over the ground around the planters. He sneaked closer. The apples were green tomatoes. When he picked one up, his thumb sank into the flesh. He cried, because the scalding juice burned his skin.
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Gloria Donne
The tomato plants wilted, beginning at their feathery tips where the clusters of yellow flowers crisped. Gloria stood with her hand on her pitchfork, her heart thumping in her chest. In the heat, the sharp ammonia of the manure tea burned her nostrils. She rubbed her sweaty forehead, staring at the plants slumping on the hay mulch, their ropey branches drooping over the sides of the beds. She ached to protect her plants, but the sun defeated her. After covering three beds with the last of the shade cloth, she gave up and stayed inside, blotting her face with a cool, damp washcloth. She couldn’t afford to cover the rest.
The heat wave broke during the night, dropping from triple digits to the mid-nineties. In the field after breakfast, Gloria walked fast down one aisle and then another. Hundreds of green tomatoes had fallen off the plants.
“Oh my god!” Gloria croaked in disbelief. She ran around the field. “What the hell?”
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Vicky Carrillo
While Vicky stood at the stove scrambling eggs for breakfast, Marcia went to the kitchen door, open to catch a breeze, and giggled. Vicky peered out of the kitchen window at Gloria Donne dancing around her field, cussing. Carlos came into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee.
“What’s Gloria Dung freaking out about?”
“Not sure,” Vicky said. “I’m worried.”
“I’m gonna have to find another place to keep the dogs. Too much going on around the warehouse.”
“That ain’t Gloria’s fault.”
“You sure? You seen her dad visiting. I heard he was spotted with the lady from the real estate office the other day. They’re all related, those people.”
“Maybe.”
In the field next door, Gloria bent over behind a bed and stood up with a big green tomato in her fist. She threw it at the fence: Splat! The tomato exploded like a water balloon.
“That looks bad,” Vicky said.
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Gloria Donne
The dropped tomatoes were bleaching yellowish as they deflated and soaked into the ground. Gloria gathered up the squishy, fallen fruit, chucking them into a bucket, sometimes throwing one against a fence post and cursing the waste. When the bucket filled up, she dumped the brimming load into the compost pile, then trudged back to the beds. She wiped the sweat off her face with the bottom of her T-shirt. When she lowered the grimy blue cotton, the damaged tomato plants confronted her again. In the pit of her stomach, she felt a pang.
The sun was high and hot again, though not as hot as before, when Peter Panofsky drove up to the gate in his ancient VW Bug. Gloria tramped over to unlock the gate. She was tired of gathering dropped tomatoes, ready to take a break.
“I figured you’ve been too busy to cook.” Peter climbed out of the driver’s side, heaved a straw basket of clanking mason jars and tins out of the back. “Farro salad and lentil curry, a big tin of plums and a small tin of my special stuff.”
Sitting hip to hip on Gloria’s unpainted steps, they shared a joint, eyes narrowed in the sun’s glare.
“My mom told me about the landscaping job she’s offered you. Tell me you won’t do it.”
“Is that why you’re here?”
“I’m terrified my mom will brainwash you: The land must be exploited, tamed, tarted up.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Aren’t you both already imposing yourselves on the land for profit?”
“Not much profit right now,” Gloria said. Peter hadn’t even asked about the tomato crop. “I lost all the big green fruit, have to wait for the main harvest to grow back, put off paying some bills.”
“Do you know when your talk grows mundane, I gaze at your body and let your words wash over me?”
“That’s rude.”
“Come to bed.”
“Not now. It’s too hot. I’m too pissed off. Do you even know how much this means to me?”
“I know how much you mean to me.” Peter stroked Gloria’s tanned forearm until she turned her head and smiled at him. He stubbed out the remains of the joint, picked up the basket of food. They went inside and undressed under the sheet on Gloria’s mattress, flinging out their shirts and shorts and underpants onto the bare floor. Naked, they rolled toward each other. Peter caressed Gloria’s brown arms, stroking the muscles in her forearms, biceps, shoulders. He scrunched down under the sheet and kissed her soft, pale belly.
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Vicky Carrillo
After breakfast, while Vicky vacuumed the living room and then mopped the kitchen floor, she often glanced out of the open door. Gloria’s bent back moved above the shaggy tomato plants. Some of the fallen tomatoes still littered the ground near the fence.
“Already hot out there.” Carlos came inside from watering his backyard melon patch.
“Think she’d mind if I went over and asked how bad it is?”
“You should ask. Maybe she won’t need you Monday.”
“You think…” Vicky trailed off. Gloria had said the summer harvest looked good. What now?
Vicky went into the bathroom to clean in there and when she came out, the little orange car belonging to Gloria’s boyfriend was parked in the street. Gloria had gone inside with him. Vicky would wait until she came out again, then she’d go over and ask about the tomatoes.
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Gloria Donne
Gloria lay in the crook of Peter’s arm, the fingers of her left hand on his smooth, sweaty chest.
“Magical.” Peter nuzzled her hair. “Even on this lumpy mattress.”
“You don’t like it here,” Gloria said, and waited for him to contradict her.
“You spend money on dirt and sleep on the floor.”
“Not dirt, soil.”
“What about art, literature, beauty?”
“We’ve been over this before.” Gloria reeled off her answer: “I’m trying to create a place that runs efficiently, does no harm, and produces pure, delicious food. That’s beautiful to me.”
“You don’t sound sincere.”
“Okay, the toad the size of an old telephone that appeared in the compost and ate the flies. That’s beautiful.”
“Ugh.”
“The dragonflies that eat the mosquito larvae in the rain barrels?”
“Better.”
What would become of all the little creatures if Gloria gave up? What would the aphid-eating ladybugs do without her plants?
“But it’s too much work. It doesn’t make sense. I wish you’d come live in town with me—work with me.”
Gloria reached out for her clothes. “Work at an independent bookstore slash art gallery. That makes more sense than farming?”
“You’re right. Nothing makes sense. But you have to live somehow.”
Gloria and Peter dressed and went back outside to sit on the steps.
“Maybe my mom’s right,” Peter said. “The time for farming around here is over.”
Gloria stared at him. “It’s the fucking Central Valley. Where else are you going to farm?”
Peter shrugged. “We can’t stop her development, but you don’t need to be involved. Yes, I’m bringing it up again. You haven’t promised.”
A door banged somewhere out of sight.
“I don’t know. A kitchen garden might be fun, and I could use the extra work, especially now, with this setback. Money—yes, Peter.” Gloria pointed with her chin. “Look, there’s Vicky.”
Vicky walked in the street past her mailbox, along the asphalt to Gloria’s open gate, and stood with her hand on the post, squinting.
Gloria raised her voice. “Hi!”
Vicky came up the driveway to the porch steps. “Are they okay? The tomato plants?”
Gloria stood. “I wasn’t expecting it. It’s lousy, for sure.”
“You still need me Monday?” Vicky stuffed her hands into her shorts’ pockets and stood with her shoulders near her ears.
“Yeah, we can keep picking the small ones until the big ones grow back.”
“Good. I’m real glad to hear that.”
“When I saw all the green things on the ground, I thought someone had been lobbing tennis balls over the fence, but who around here plays tennis?”
Vicky smiled.
“I wonder if it’s climate change. I’ve read about farmers choosing new varieties bred to withstand heat, drought, crazy hailstorms, downpours, or whatever, but I’ve stuck with the old heirlooms so far. Stupid, huh?”
“Seems like there’s a lot to know. See you Monday.”
Gloria sat down next to Peter, who was lounging on the stairs watching Vicky return to the street.
“You two are getting along,” he said.
“She works hard. Wants the tomatoes to do well, so she’ll do well.” The money Vicky was making now was helping her family now, even if the future was uncertain. “The tomatoes did look like tennis balls. I wonder if your mom will build a tennis court for her fancy B&B.”
“I’ll get the food.” Peter stood.
“And spoons!” Gloria called after him.
Alone, Gloria turned and looked out at her field. In the beds, the Big Boys, Kellogg Breakfasts, and the rest were heat damaged, but not fatally, not this time. She’d have to adapt, work out how to grow tomatoes here, with the heat waves and all.
When Peter sat beside Gloria again, with the basket of food on the step between them, she said, “Know what? I won’t plant your mom’s garden. The point of it is to funnel rich people from the bed-and-breakfast to the restaurant so they won’t see where they really are: in the middle of a desert, surrounded by poor people.”
“Thank you,” Peter said.
“Sure.” Though he should’ve thanked Vicky for showing up just then, reminding Gloria that—for now, at least—this was a place for tomatoes, not tennis balls.
“People need to eat. You have to grow food someplace. I’m doing it here. Anyway, I can’t believe Angelica thinks tourists will come. Building here makes no sense,” Gloria said. “At least farming’s not crazy.”
Peter raised his eyebrows.
“It’s not crazy.”
Simone Martel is the author of a novel, A Cat Came Back, a memoir, The Expectant Gardener, and a story collection, Exile’s Garden. Simone was born in Oakland, CA. After studying English at University of California, Berkeley, she created and operated an organic tomato farm in the Central Valley. This experience inspired her novel-in-progress, Zarzamora, a finalist in the Grindstone International Novel Prize.