Here There are Strawberries

The morning that I first saw Godja, it felt like the sky were trying to punish us for something. It had felt that way for days. Low-hanging clouds blanketed the Okanagan Valley from one side of the horizon to the other, leaving what I knew was hundreds of feet but what looked like no space between the tops of the trees and the clouds above them. Over the course of three days, rain had slowly washed the colour out of the world.

It had come down biblically on the first day; streaming like waterfalls from the roofs of the houses, gathering in pools beneath the apple trees and overflowing the shallow banks of the ditches to either side of the road. Now, on the third day, it was little more than a mist. A damp, hanging presence in the fields around us.

We'd come to the Okanagan Valley to pick apples, my two brothers and I. Charlie and I were twins; not identical, but fraternal. I'd been born three minutes later, a fact that he never let me forget. But of the two of us, I was the taller. Charlie stood about 6'1", while I had taken after our father and added an extra two inches. Our third brother, Phoenix, was nine years younger than us--headed into his final year of high school, having only just turned eighteen.

We were sprawled in the back of a picking truck; a white-painted GMC Sierra heavy-duty that my brother and I had bought the year before. Two metal poles had been latched to the back hatch, and we'd stretched a green tarp over top of it. Despite that, the wetness was unavoidable. Our clothes stuck to our bodies, and small pools of water collected in the rivets of the cab. At the moment, all of our possessions were piled behind us. Phoenix was leaning against my packed-up tent, a joint pinched between two fingers. It glowed briefly a hotter, brighter orange as he drew through the rolled-up paper, and dimmed as he lowered it, exhaling a thin stream of smoke. He tilted his head up, and the smoke quickly faded, joining with the heavy mist.

"Pass," Charlie held out his hand, and Phoenix passed him the joint. Vance Joy played from a cellphone in his pant pocket, the music quiet and slightly tinny through the phone speaker. A song I didn't recognize.

"I'm thinking we pack up," I said--voicing the thought we'd all had for the last week.

The picking had been descending gradually in quality, for the last two weeks. At the beginning of the summer, we'd each been able to fill about nine bins each--eleven, in Phoenix's case--making somewhere between two and three hundred dollars a day. Now, we were lucky to get nine between us. Partially due to the lack of pickable apples, but mostly because of the weather. It had alternated between punishing heat, which could be picked through but wasn't pleasant, and a combination of storms and drizzles, which couldn't.

"What's the plan, then?" Charlie glanced in my direction. He handed me the joint. I didn't smoke nearly as much as either of my brothers, but I took a small drag on it; feeling the hot rolling of smoke over my tongue and exhaling quickly before passing it back to Phoenix. I shrugged.

"We could--" I began.

"Too early for the salmon run," Charlie cut me off, "We could look for some trout in the creeks nearby. First season for the planters is finishing up in a couple days. They usually head out to the island--we could join them there for a bit?"

"I wouldn't mind making some more cash," Phoenix interjected.

"Yeah," Charlie nodded. We shared a glance. We'd made decent money over the summer, but we both knew that it wouldn't last long if we were travelling, "Me neither."

"Third," I nodded, "What about--"

This time, I cut myself off. The road that we were parked on was quiet, but a couple of vehicles had passed us over the last two hours. The sound of this one caught my attention; a deeper, slightly rattling rumble. At first I mistook it as a truck, one of the ones with a wooden box on the back that were used for picking up apples. As I glanced over the side of the cab, I realized I was wrong. It was a tractor. Small and open; John Deere, with a curved back seat. Behind it, on a hitch, rolled what looked like a cross between a trailer and a wagon. It had once been painted red, but years of weather had stripped most of the wood back to brown; only streaks of red paint now hinted at what it had once looked like. It was empty.

I barely saw any of this, because the moment that my eyes found the driver, I forgot to look at anything else. At first, I mistook the brown of her skin for merely a tan; it wasn't until she got closer, and I saw the clothes-marks where she'd been covered, that I realized it was her natural colour. She could have been South American, or Middle Eastern, but as soon as she glanced over and caught my eye, I knew she was Indian. At least--partially Indian.

She rode comfortably, leaned slightly forward with both arms over the top curve of the steering wheel. A knit beige sweater had been tugged up around her neck, and the way that the arms only came down to just above the bones of her wrists hinted at tallness. A pair of jean suspenders covered the rest of her body, one side unclasped and hanging loose, the other buckled over her shoulder. Just like the rest of us, she was wearing a pair of steel-toed work boots.

When I failed to finish my sentence, the other two boys sat up a little taller and followed my stare over the side of the truck. On the tractor, the young woman raised a hand. Her voice was just audible over the rolling wheels and the rumble of the engine.

"Hey boys! Enjoying the day?"

"Could be better," Phoenix called back.

"Always could," I was stunned by the whiteness of her teeth, which were only made to look whiter by the slightly darker skin toward the bottom of her cheeks and the edges of her lips, "And could always be worse!" She almost had to yell over the sound of the machine.

I nodded in agreement.

"Last house before the turn--!" She pointed down the road, turning slightly in her seat as she passed us, "If you're looking for rainy-day work!"

"Okay, thanks!" Charlie shouted back, giving her a wave. She returned it, resettling herself in her seat as she drove on.

"Wonder what kind of work it is," Phoenix mused as the sound faded down the road.

"She said rainy day..." Charlie began, and then trailed off as he stared at me. He was looking at the side of my face, because I had turned to watch the figure of the young woman and her tractor growing smaller. The tires of her tractor left deep ruts in the uneven gravel of the country road. I could actually feel the grin on Charlie's face, even before I turned to meet his eyes, "Well, it seems like Thomas found something he wants to do."

"We could use the work," I said, a little too quickly. I knew they'd both heard the defensiveness in my voice, because both Charlie and Phoenix grinned at me.

"We sure could, pal."

"Shut up."

"Oh, leave the poor guy alone," Phoenix tucked his smile away, but it remained in the corner of his lips as he addressed Charlie, "You had your French girl--"

"Samantha."

"Sure, and I've got Carla at home. Thomas' has been out here for nearly three months, without the touch of a woman--"

"Uh, fuck off," despite the words, I could feel myself stifling a laugh, "neither have you, pal."

"Phone sex--" he began.

"Doesn't count," Charlie spoke over him, "And even if it does, from what I've heard from your tent, I wouldn't exactly call that phone sex." He fell into a pantomimed version of Phoenix's voice, "Oh baby, I miss you so much. How's the SAT prep?"

"Shut up," Phoenix raised his middle finger, "at least I've got a girlfriend. You two have had an extra five years, and where are you?"

"I had a girl whispering French into my ear for the last week," Charlie raised his eyebrows.

I glanced at Phoenix, "Oui, Char! C'est si petit--".

Phoenix fell back against the bag of my tent, barking a laugh. Charlie shot me a glance, but I could tell that he was grinning. We all spoke enough French to be passably conversational, but none of us felt comfortably referring to ourselves as fluent. Just enough that we'd fallen in with a group of four apple pickers from Quebec and spent most of our time with them; Samantha, Eloise, Jacque, and Peter. They had been good company, but they'd left four days previously. Too much rain and not enough money--similar thoughts to the ones that we had.

"You guys want to go check it out?" Charlie asked.

"Tomorrow," Phoenix nodded, "I'm too high to think about work right now." He held the joint up between two fingers and turned it over, "This stuff is good."

"British Columbia, baby." Charlie took it from him and gave it a long drag, pinching the final embers out of the roach and flicking it over the side of the cab as he exhaled. Not that we had to worry about fires, on a day like today, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

***

The next day, we went for a walk down the dusty road. It didn't take us very long--about fifteen minutes by foot. The rain had finally stopped, and the sun had already begun to dry the dirt and gravel road back to dust. The grass on either side still shimmered with wetness. Just before we reached a turn-off in the road, we came to a gate. It stretched for about a hundred yards in either direction; to the left, through a sparse gathering of apple trees, we could see a collection of living spaces. Tents and RVs stood beside fold-out truck beds. About a dozen in all. The space was empty of people, but the tools of everyday life--cookstoves and supply barrels and trays of burnt-out cigarettes--told us that whoever lived here would be returning.

Going through the gate, we followed the long driveway down. As we walked, a house came into view. It was two-story, brick, and topped with a red slate roof. A barn, the roof matching but the sides made of weathered wood, peaked out from behind the house, from further down a slight slope. We walked passed rows of apple trees, most of the fruit now littering the grass beneath. Some was half-rotted, while some were still hard, red knots.

A rumbling drew our attention, as we approached the house. We turned as one, just in time to see a figure coming down the path. It was, of course, the young woman from the day before. She was dressed similarly to before; similar turtleneck beneath half-undone overalls, black hair held back by a strip of fabric, golden earrings glittering down the outside of either ear. It gave her a vaguely pirate-y appearance. An appearance not dimmed in the slightest by her half-mouthed smile, upon seeing us.

This time, the wooden box behind her tractor wasn't empty. It was full, almost to the point of overflowing, of small cardboard boxes full of... It took me a moment to see them, but strawberries. The tractor rolled to a stop in front of us, and she swung down with a one-handed grip on the steering wheel. Stepping forward, she offered a hand to each of us in turn. I was the first.

"Hey, you guys again! Come to give us a hand? Not nearly enough to go around, these days." I immediately noticed an accent, in her voice. East Indian, I thought.

"Thomas," I replied, shaking her hand. I was surprised by the strength of her grip, and quickly switched my almost dainty moderation to match it. If anything, it only made her off-kilter smile grow wider.

"Godja," she replied, moving on to Phoenix. Then Charlie.

Introductions finished, she turned and waved us over her shoulder, "Got stuff? Get set up later. Follow me--the day's a'wasting. I'll get you guys some boxes and show you the fields. It's ten a box, but I'll give you eleven-fifty because I like the look of you three."

"Thirteen," Charlie answered back, immediately.

Godja pulled up short, glancing back at us. By the flash of light in her dark eyes, I immediately questioned Charlie's wisdom in questioning the price; of course, bartering is what fruit-pickers did, but that didn't mean it was always the way. It was only when I saw the touch of laughter in the corner of her lips that I realized she'd been testing us.

"Really? Most people go to at least fifteen. You guys are a cheap lay," she laughed, "Thirteen it is."

"Any chance I can run that back and say fifteen?" Phoenix asked.

"Too late, kid. Tell you what though, you can have one glance at my ass as you follow me."

She turned, dark hair flicking around her shoulders as she strode away. Phoenix looked dumbstruck for a moment. Over his head, Charlie and I shared a glance that said what have we gotten ourselves into? He shook his head slightly, and then followed the young woman--Godja--passed the brick house and down the hill beyond. I matched my stride to his. We passed the barn, seeing a wooden outhouse and a wash-station sitting on the other side of the road, and out into the fields.

They were impressive. They stretched for nearly a mile, in every direction except toward the house. The people from the campsite were all here, I noticed; working close together as they moved in a crouch down the rows. Five women, between the ages of twenty and forty, and nine men of similar ages. A larger group picked together, while an older couple--two men--picked side-by-side a couple of rows away.

I started slightly as Godja handed me a stack of cardboard boxes. She pointed down a row, "Start here." She did the same for Phoenix and Charlie--I had no idea where she'd retrieved the boxes from. Beside the barn, perhaps? I didn't have much time to think about it, because Godja was already speaking again, nearly spinning away from us as she did so, "Got markers?" She passed two out to each of us, black Sharpies, "Mark your boxes, just first and last initial. I'll pick with you guys, sometimes, just to make sure you're doing it right. I collect them every couple of hours with the wagon. Anyways... that's about it."

Before she walked away, she leaned a bit closer to me. Her voice was a conspiratorial whisper, loud enough to carry to Charlie and Phoenix, "By the way, that was two glances, mister. I'll have my eye on you."

I stood, like a pole-axed cow; my eyes equally wide. Her laughter seemed to carry the whole distance across the strawberry field as she walked away.

***

She was mesmerizing. For the entirety of the first day, and most of the second, I did my best to pretend that I was working. I managed to fill about ten baskets with strawberries. The rest of my time, in glances that lasted no longer than the space of a heartbeat, was dedicated to watching her. Stealing snatches of sight from between the sideways-slanting beams of the sun.

That first day, on the tractor, I'd thought that nobody else could look so properly relaxed; on anybody else, it would look slovenly. Not Godja. Each in their own glances I studied the looseness of her shoulders, the slight sway of her knees that kept her upright, the curve of her back. She squatted three rows away, the round point of her chin lowered nearly between the larger, rounder points of her knees. Every so often, the palm of one hand would go into the dirt in front of her, bouncing her slightly as she readjusted her balance. The position should have made her appear like a frog--like the rest of us--but it was an impossible analogy to make.

Not when she leaned forward and, for a moment, the posture accentuated the long lines of muscle that made up her slim limbs. How the length of her legs, beneath the cut-off blue of her jean shorts, was a slightly paler brown than that of her arms and chest, which had obviously seen a fair amount of sun. A thin film of sweat crept up the bottom of her neck toward her chin, and inward from either side of her forehead, just below the pulled-back strands of her hair. She didn't seem to notice. Her hair wasn't brown, but perfectly black. It took me until the middle of the afternoon to realize that it was likely much longer than I'd first thought; hanging as a hefty, braided rope over the line of her right shoulder. The only part of it that was brown, or appeared so, were the dust-marks on the braid where she, every so often, reached up to adjust where it hung or to push it back over her shoulder.

I spent a fair amount of time trying not to look at her chest. It was a losing battle. When she crouched, the inside of her thighs pushed her breasts together, deepening the divide between them through the rough fabric of a sky-blue sun shirt. It had obviously been too large for her, because the bottom hem and the ends of the sleeves had been cut away, leaving slightly jagged lines in the fabric, by a pair of scissors. In the hollow between her breasts, I once more caught the distracting sheen of sweat. It was enough to make my mouth water.

In the first two hours, I nearly emptied my metal canteen. Standing near the back of the wooden wagon, I raised the round opening of the bottle to my mouth. When the water touched my lips, tasting faintly of the saltiness of my own sweat that gathered above and below them, I fought an internal battle against my own fantasies. Reaching down, I adjusted the front of my jeans surreptitiously. I could feel the beginning of an erection, pressing against the back of the zipper at my crotch; I returned to the rows quickly, squatting to hide it before anybody could notice.

As I returned to my spot, Godja glanced up--only a brief raising of her face and a flicker of dark eyes, but I saw the partially-formed smile on her lips. There was no mistaking how her eyes settled pointedly just below my raised knees before flickering up to meet my own. How she knew, whether she knew, I had no idea. And I had no time to ask, because the very next moment she was turned once more to the strawberry plants in front of her feet. I felt a warmth in my cheeks and chest that had very little to do with the sun that beat down from overhead. The smile could have been one of a simple welcome back, which would have been more then enough in its own way; but the way the faint lines around her eyes and mouth had deepened for a fleeting moment made the unfinished smile appear somewhere between the beginning of laughter and a hinting, teasing knowingness.

The next time I glanced up, she was already looking at me. Her dark eyes flashed, matching the brief lift of her eyebrows. Raising one hand, she held up her first three fingers. This time, even though I turned back to the plants almost immediately, I knew I wasn't fast enough to hide my blush.

***

Saturday. Most of the other pickers had gone into town, to restock on supplies--which really meant buying a sparse few groceries, a couple cases of beer, and a couple of the pre-rolled joints from the dispensary on the corner. Charlie and Phoenix were gone fishing, a little river under the bridge that Charlie's River Guides and Tributaries of Northern British Columbia had told them contained brown trout and perch.

I'd opted to remain behind. Both to keep an eye on our tents and supplies, which we could have packed up and taken with us, but mostly because there was nothing I wanted more than to lay in my tent and read. One arm tucked beneath my neck, I flipped through the final fifty pages of The Poppy War. Underneath me, I could feel the rough ground even through the plastic bottom of the tent and the puffy material of my sleeping bag. Behind my hand and head, most of my clothes had been rolled together, my pillow a makeshift cover pulled over my travelling bag.

And she would call the gods to do such terrible things.

Reading the final line of the book, I exhaled softly and closed it. Setting it beside the haphazard stack beside my clothes, I pushed myself up on my elbows. Now that I was finished, I felt the fullness of my bladder, pressed by the loose band of my sweatpants. Unzipping my tent, I crawled out into the bright afternoon sunlight. The grass was still faintly wet under the palm of my hand and my knees, as I pushed myself to my feet and stretched. It took my eyes a moment to adjust from the dim, orange light of the inside of the tent to the blinding white light outside of it.