NECTARINE PIE by Michael Czyzniejewski
We were driving down through Georgia, Interstate 75, talking about killing and eating each other, when the subject of nectarines came up. I was in the back seat and, since Chattanooga, was holding a full tank of piss. I couldn’t be sure if we’d passed Atlanta or not – I’d fallen asleep after crossing the state line – but I knew I wanted Fred to stop the car, let me hit the head. I’d volunteer to drive, buy a box of donuts for the road. I’d even buy dinner, if dinner cost less than $20 for three people, which seemed unlikely.
“We stopped when you were asleep,” Fred said when I asked. “I called your name, even shook you, but you didn’t wake up.”
Fred was either lecturing me on heavy sleeping or he wasn’t going to stop. I hoped it was the former.
“Have a peach,” Estrella said. Her eyes were dark and full like coal, or prunes, eager, like she really wanted me to have a peach. A full bushel of peaches sat on the floor behind Fred’s seat. I’d been awake for over an hour and never noticed them sitting there, not even the smell. Estrella continued: “They’re not sweet – someone just picked them, didn’t give them time to get juicy. But you can have as many as you want.”
I thought about that, eating so much of something that wasn’t good. Fred asked me to pass him six peaches and he proceeded to eat them, the first thing I’d seen either of them eat all day.
“I don’t think I’ll kill you now,” I said to Fred and Estrella. Estrella laughed, closing her eyes. Fred threw a pit out the window. His face was covered with juice and a stringy piece of peach meat sat at the tip of his collar. I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me, that I wouldn’t kill them, because he didn’t say anything. He just put another peach up to his mouth.
“It’s a good thing you’re not going to kill us,” Fred said a few miles later, finishing that peach. “We only picked you up so we could kill you.”
* * *
The yellow and black sign for the peach-cured ham made me hungry, but not hungry enough to eat a peach. I had to go to the bathroom so badly that the thought of eating something made of so much water made my bladder hurt even more. I was convinced we were well past Atlanta and almost in Florida, three states and half a day since I’d peed. There would have been billboards for things in Atlanta if we were coming up on it still. Instead, there were only billboards for things made of peaches and pecans, but mostly peaches. Bushels of peaches, like the one half-empty next to my feet, but also peach cobbler, peach pie, peach candy, peach salsa, and peach ice cream, too. That’s what Georgia had to offer the world, peaches. I wondered if Georgians, the people from Georgia, ate as many peaches as they sold. I pictured a family sitting down for a Sunday dinner, a mom in a nice house dress – she looked like Estrella – bringing out a roasting pan, and the dad with the horn-rimmed glasses and the white button-down shirt – Fred – opening it to a steaming goulash of peaches and pecans. The children smiled and inhaled the aroma, each with a fork in one hand, a knife in the other. I’d never been to Florida before but wondered if it was the same with oranges there – orange everything. It probably wasn’t, but then again, I’d lived in Chicago for most of my life, and people ate a lot of pizza and hot dogs. Still, Illinois wasn’t the Hot Dog State or the Deep Dish State. They were the Land of Lincoln and that seemed honorable. Better than peaches everywhere, kids taking field trips to orchards instead of Springfield to rub Lincoln’s nose. It hit me then how I couldn’t remember the taste of pecans at all, though I knew I’d had them, at some point, probably in candy bars. Peaches, though, I could taste as we drove. I couldn’t not taste them. They were part of the air.
“You’d taste good with peach syrup drizzled over you,” Fred yelled back to me. Georgia was in the eastern part of the time zone, and I figured that it had to be near 8 o’clock with this amount of light in the middle of July.
“We’ll have to stop for some before we get to Florida,” Estrella said. “I don’t think he’d taste as good with orange marmalade.”
I thought it was funny, how Estrella was thinking the same thing I was, about the oranges and Florida. The hitchhiker/murder jokes were still funny, too, in a ghoulish way, something we’d started in Kentucky, Fred insisting they were the ones with bad intentions, claiming they’d kill me before I’d kill them. Cannibalism wasn’t too far behind, having come up somewhere around Knoxville, the last time I’d gone to the bathroom.
Fred, finishing off the umpteenth peach and tossing the pit out the window, made this revelation: “How come there’s not all this stuff but with nectarines instead?”
We were silent. I watched the billboards as we drove and thought I saw a road sign that said, “Tampa 111.”
“What do you mean, nectarines?” Estrella said.
Fred looked back at me for another peach, but there weren’t any. He’d eaten the entire bushel, minus at least one, the one Estrella bit into to determine they weren’t sweet.
Fred said, “There’s peach pie, and apple pie, and strawberry and blueberry pie. There’s raspberry, even something called ‘gooseberry’ that I don’t personally believe in. There’s banana cream pie and coconut cream pie, and I’m pretty sure I had a pineapple pie once, somewhere out West. There’s even pumpkin pie – you can buy it anywhere – but you’d never eat pumpkin alone, just in pie. It’s basically garbage, good for jack-o’-lanterns and pig slop. Rhubarb’s the same way.”
“But no nectarine pie,” Estrella said. “Or nectarine anything. Huh.”
“Why do you think that is?” Fred said. Nobody answered, not out loud.
This was not sitting well with me, either. For some reason, I became angry, angry for nectarines, how they’d gotten the shaft. Maybe it was the pain in my groin from having to piss, but I was becoming emotional. Why wasn’t there any nectarine pie? Or candy? Or popsicles? Yogurt or baby food, either?
“Nectarines are better than peaches,” I said several miles later. Both Fred and Estrella turned around. It was the first thing I’d said since asking to go to the bathroom some hours earlier, in Macon, I think. They looked at me for as long as Fred could keep his eyes off the road.
“How so?” Fred said. He said it like he wanted me to go on, that he knew I was agreeing with him, not as if to start an argument.
I considered saying that I’d tell him only if he stopped so I could go to the bathroom, just on the side of the road, near a ditch, maybe a place where we could get something to eat besides peaches. But I wanted to tell him about nectarines as much as I wanted those other things. More.
“Nectarines are smoother, no fuzz. I hate the fuzz on peach, how it tickles my lips – plus it makes me feel like I’m eating hair. They’re usually darker than peaches, too, which means they’re sweeter. Hey – why isn’t there a color called ‘nectarine,’ either, or a Crayola crayon? There just isn’t. It’s not fair.”
Fred was nodding, to the point where he should be hurting his neck. He asked again for a peach, and Estrella reminded him that he’d eaten them all. I expected a joke about him eating me instead, asking me to send forward a finger, even a forearm. But it didn’t come. He was really on the nectarine kick. And gaining steam.
“I can’t believe how fucked nectarines are, Estrella. They’re a good fruit,” Fred said, and then he said it again: “They’re a good fruit. A delicious food.”
“And don’t forget the wood,” Estrella said. “I don’t think we own anything cut from the wood of a nectarine tree.”
At that point, it was dark and the top tip of the sun had finally sunk into the horizon. Fred was losing the lines on the road, almost clipping a station wagon in the left lane, the next moment riding the berm and rolling on the sleep strips. If I didn’t go to the bathroom soon – in a toilet, on the side of the road, or in my pants in the back of the car – I was going to pass out.
“I’m going to plant a nectarine tree when we get home,” Fred said. He sounded as sure about that as he was his name was Fred. “We’ll harvest the fruit for a few years, then cut it down and build something from its wood. A chair. Or maybe something bigger, like a dining room set, a table and four to six chairs.”
“Or kitchen cabinets,” Estrella said. “I’d like to be the only woman in our building with fresh nectarine cabinets.”
I thought of the randomness of fruits, especially pertaining to wood. I knew they made things out of cherry wood – my father, before he left us, had a Murphy bed made from cherry wood, a cabinet frame the size of two of him. I couldn’t think of other fruit wood, though, no pear park benches or plum rocking chairs. Nectarines weren’t the only ones who were screwed – but we were talking about nectarines, and I didn’t think it was a good idea to get Fred started on other fruits. I looked up and saw that Fred was perspiring even though it was cold from the air conditioning, from the sun’s having been set for hours. My skin felt like a corpse, but there he was, sweating.
“I’m going to write my congressman,” Fred said. After a few seconds, he laughed, and I thought we were done talking about nectarines, moving on to politics, some joke about this or that asshole from his state. But then Fred said something else about nectarines getting fucked, and I knew he wasn’t close to being done.
* * *
We still hadn’t crossed into Florida at midnight. I remembered a trivia question from a game show asking what was the biggest state east of the Mississippi. I thought the answer was b) Pennsylvania, but it was d) Georgia. A) New York and c) Virginia were the other choices. I wouldn’t have won the money on the show, but I wasn’t on the show, so it didn’t really matter.
“Don’t forget we have to stop for that peach syrup for your thighs,” Fred said. I’m sure he was talking to me, but then again, maybe he wasn’t.
Estrella then said something that made me feel better: “He’s got to be starving, too, Fred. We don’t want him to be skin and bones.”
I was beginning to wonder when Fred’s car would run out of gas, how stiff each of them had to be, how neither of them had to ever eat, drink, or urinate. Just gripe about nectarines and make allusions to eating me.
“We’ll be in orange country before long,” Fred said. “Oranges, they have everything. They focus their energies on juice, but they’re everywhere. You use them as garnish, put slices in beer, make all kinds of shit. I wrestled in high school, and the only thing I ate my whole junior year was oranges. Not only are they low in calories, but the acid burns away at your body fat. I dropped three weight classes by Halloween.”
“You should have seen Fred in his uniform,” Estrella said. “It was tight and he looked like a baby in a red diaper out on those mats.”
Fred was a large man now, as if he really had eaten me or someone else. But I could picture him eating only oranges for a year. He’d eaten a whole bushel of peaches that day alone, with no intention of getting any other food. No protein, no carbs, nothing. He was just wired that way, I guessed.
We saw signs for an exit two miles away with gas, lodging, and restaurants: a McDonald’s, a Wendy’s, a Cracker Barrel, a Waffle House, and a Krystal, the South’s White Castle knockoff. I pictured myself ordering at any one of those establishments after using their facilities, a smile on my face, my $20 bill in hand. Fred’s gas light was on, too, and had been for a lot of miles.
“The funny thing about Florida oranges is that they’re for juice only,” Fred said. “California navels are what you eat. These oranges are for juice. That’s why they all say ‘juice oranges’ on the billboards. No one wants to get sued for passing off juice oranges as eating oranges. They’d go to jail.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Estrella said.
“Look it up when we get home,” Fred said. “If you eat a Florida orange without juicing it first, it’ll taste like shit, like a glorified, round lemon. Something to do with distillation, I think.”
The exit with the restaurants and gas and bathrooms was coming up in half a mile. Estrella pointed to the sign, but Fred ignored her. I could see its lights in the distance, golden arches, golden shells, the whole lot. I pictured myself going to the bathroom and couldn’t believe a half mile was so far.
“At least we’ll be done with those fucking peaches. No peaches in Florida – I think it’s illegal to grow them there. At least to transport them. You have to declare your fruit at the border. It’s easier to transport drugs than fruit in Florida.”
The illegality of peaches seemed dubious to me, but then again, I remembered I’d heard something about fruit flies destroying entire crops of this or that. Maybe it was taking oranges out of Florida, the vice versa. Maybe that’s why they could only leave in juice form – to keep the flies from infesting Georgia peaches and pecans, and whatever they grow in Alabama, maybe cotton. Juicing strained the bug eggs out.
“Peaches are pathetic, really, when you think about it,” Fred said. “Some king.”
“What’s that?” Estrella said. We passed the exit, along with a sign that said, “Next Exit 33 miles.” I wouldn’t be able to make it that long. Passing the last exit seemed wrong. I couldn’t believe it’d really happened.
“Peaches are king here. You can find them anywhere in Georgia, buy them by the bushel. They probably fall from the trees like leaves and nobody in Georgia bothers to pick them up. Mangos are like that over in India – littering the streets and rotting but no one cares. You know, it’s illegal to sell mangos because the idea is so preposterous. You can have your hands cut off for selling a mango in India.”
I looked to Estrella to say something but she didn’t.
“Peaches are the true king of their state, but some king – they can’t even leave their own kingdom. It’s like that movie about the Chinese emperor, the kid who could have everything – and I mean anything, a hundred women at once if he wanted – but he can’t leave the castle. Otherwise, they’d cut off his head.”
Involuntarily, I started to hit my fist against the side of the door. I asked Fred to stop his car, to pull over right away or I was going to pee in my jeans and all over his seat.
We passed another road sign that said, “Tampa 111.” Either I was wrong before, or somehow, we’d gotten turned around . . . then back again. Tampa couldn’t be 111 miles away forever.
Fred drove on. In fact, just as I was thinking about opening the car door, barrel-rolling out, he sped up. In the dark, I couldn’t get a sense of the road, how to land without breaking my neck, and so I decided to stay where I was.
“Fred,” Estrella said.
We progressed onward, the car starting to shake from extending itself, the speedometer maxed out at 130. It seemed like the mile markers were visible from one to the next, Fred eating up miles one after another, like peaches. We passed a Georgia State Trooper lurking in the median and I thought I was saved, but he, for whatever reason, didn’t follow us. Maybe he didn’t see us. We could have been a blur.
“Fucking peaches,” Fred said, and that did me in. I pissed. I was in a car, with complete strangers, sitting in their backseat, and I peed my pants. Estrella and Fred had to know it, too, because it made a sound against my jeans like a kitten stuck in a canvas sack, clawing every which way. But neither of them said anything. Nada. Estrella rolled down her window to cover the smell, pure death and only getting worse, while Fred asked for another peach, for me to check under the seat. He told me he really did love peaches then, that when it came down to it, they were good fruits, too. When I said there were no more peaches, that he’d eaten the whole bushel, he said out loud, “Fuck peaches,” and drove on toward Florida, laughing and laughing at the poor excuse for a soon-to-be-dead king.
Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of the collection, Elephants in Our Bedroom, due from Dzanc Books this spring. His recent stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Bellingham Review, The Cincinnati Review, Barrelhouse, and Monkeybicycle.