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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... Down in the Dirt magazine (v097) (the August 2011 Issue) You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:						This writing also appears in this 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback “Catch Fire in the Treetops” Order this 6" x 9" ISBN# book:

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Hallocks

Toni M. Todd

    A real pair of Levis, not the J.C. Penney brand she always wore. Adidas, too, leather, with green stripes, not the vinyl knockoffs. These were the things Megan planned to buy with the money she earned working this summer’s berry season. She’d been thinking about it for weeks, but her enthusiasm was tempered by an unpleasant surprise. Megan stood, her rear-end to the bathroom mirror, looking over her shoulder. Her eyes flooded with tears.
    “It’s completely invisible,” her mother said. “No one will notice.”
    Two months earlier, Megan and her mom had attended The Mother Daughter Tea. They’d sipped orange pekoe in the darkened, school- cafeteria-turned-theater, a fuzzy projection quivering upon the screen, and watched as serious, demure young ladies learned about their special time of the month. The girls played guitars in their rooms, helped their mothers set the table, all while enduring their periods. See? It’s not so bad, said the film in its corny way. Megan had expected to feel it coming, to sense it somehow, but it had arrived without fanfare. She didn’t feel a bit different than she had the day before, though the blood in her underwear, lots of it, said otherwise. She didn’t feel like those girls in the film, either. She didn’t feel like doing anything.
    “May I be excused?” Megan had asked the night before, a half eaten chicken thigh, full mound of mashed potatoes and a pile of peas on her plate.
    “You’ve hardly touched your dinner,” said mom.
    “I’m not hungry.”
    “Finish you’re milk and you can go. Just be sure you’re back in here in half an hour to help me with the dishes.”
    “But Mom, I can’t.”
    “Why not?”
    Megan gave her mother a stern look, then nodded toward her father, there at the head of the table, reading the paper, lifting forkfuls of peas into his mouth.
    “Do you have cramps?”
    “No. I don’t know. What do you mean?”
    “I mean are you hurting? Does your stomach hurt?”
    “No.”
    “Then I see no reason why you can’t help with the dishes. Life doesn’t stop and your responsibilities don’t evaporate just because you’re ...”
    “Mom, please!”
    Megan dried in silence, the clank of dishes especially loud as she stacked them in the cupboards.
    “How about if I make your lunch for tomorrow? What kind of sandwich would you like?”
    “You know I can’t go.”
    “All I’ve heard about for weeks are those jeans and sneakers you’re dying to buy. You won’t earn any money moping around here all day.”
    “But what about the pads?” Her father was well out of earshot in his favorite chair watching TV in the family room, but she whispered anyway.
    “We’ll put a couple into your lunch sack. You can change it when you need to. Like I said, life doesn’t stop for your period. I won’t make you go, Megan. It’s you’re decision. But when you’re grown, you won’t be able to take time off from work for five days every month.”
    Megan circled the towel around the inside of the frying pan, wiped the rim, polished its copper bottom. Five days.
    “Let me hang that,” said Mom. “It looks dry.”
    Megan made a final swipe of the handle, then passed the pan to her mother. “Do we have bologna?”

    The berry-mobile, as the kids called it, was a dingy, rattle-trap-reject of a bus from the local school district. This was the Queen of All Saints platoon, with all of the strawberry pickers hired from Megan’s school. The farmer was a member of their parish. Most of Megan’s classmates worked the fields. Some needed the money to help their families, but most these days worked to earn spending cash for clothes, skateboards and bikes. Berry picking was a Willamette Valley tradition. Their parents had picked as children, so they picked, too.
    Megan walked her hands along the seat-backs of the bus and stumbled down the aisle toward her best friend, Katie O’Malley. She could feel the pad and was sure everyone could tell, but few kids looked up, most of them with their foreheads rested on the seat-backs in front of them, or leaning against the windows, breath fogging the glass, groggy for the early morning hour. She would tell Katie later, when they were hunkered down in their adjacent rows, close, where nobody could hear. Megan glanced at Jasper Munson as she passed him, then plopped into the seat next to her pal. Katie’s black pony tail dangled through the hole in the back of a tattered OSU Beavers baseball cap. A splay of freckles sprinkled across the short span of her tiny nose, cheek to cheek. Megan could feel pressure from the extra thickness in her pants as she sat on the squeaky bench, springs chirping like chipmunks with every bump of the bus.
    “I’m going to kick your butt today,” she said.
    “In your dreams, slow poke. See these fingers?” Katie wiggled hers before Megan’s eyes in a blur. “So fast, you can’t even see ‘em.”
    “Oh yeah, well look at these,” Megan wiggled back in a tangle with Katie’s.
    Jasper stood and laughed at one of his own jokes, his posse in the surrounding seats cackling along as he high-fived them.
    “What a jerk. I swear, he gets away with murder,” said Katie. Last Friday, Jasper had spent that morning recess chanting, “Kowalski’s germs, no returns,” and tagging other kids. Roger Kowalski came from a family of eight children, one of the poorest in the parish. He was frail and shy with a crew cut, large ears that flapped outward and huge, black-rimmed glasses, the lenses of which magnified his eyes out of proportion to his narrow face.
    “What was Sister Theresa supposed to do? It was the last day of school.”
    “He should have at least gotten detention after school or something.”
    “Sister made him sit out the rest of recess to think about it.”
    “Big deal. Five whole minutes. And she made us all come in.”
    “Well, we were all in on it.”
    “Not me.”
    “ Must be nice to be so perfect.”
    “It wasn’t very nice, Meggie.”
    Megan stared at the dangling S of brown hair as it danced on Jasper’s forehead.
    “He always starts it and nobody does anything about it,” said Katie. “I wish my dad could build a library for the school. Then my you-know-what wouldn’t stink.”
    Megan turned to make a quick scan of the occupied seats on the bus. The Kowalski boy was slumped in a back row. “I can’t believe he came.”
    “His family needs the money. I just don’t see why you like Jasper so much.”
    “I don’t like him. I mean, I don’t like like him.”
    “Yes, you do.” Katie cocked her head toward Megan as if sharing a juicy secret. “You know you think he’s cu-u-u-ute.”
    “Oh, real mature. I’m going to annihilate you today. You are going to eat my dust.”
    “Keep dreaming, slow poke.”
    They poked each other, gentle prods in the ribs and the arms and the knees and Megan forgot, for the moment, about Jasper, and about the trouble between her legs.
    The bus rolled through the early morning blackness, having turned from the main highway to a narrow country road that led to the field.
    “Hey check it out, everyone,” shouted Jasper. “Eberstark’s wearing her over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder.”
    Gretchen Eberstark, a year older than Megan and Katie, had the misfortune of sitting in front of him. The chest of Gretchen’s uniform jumper had grown snug as the sixth grade had come to a close. While the other girls were beginning to bud, Gretchen was in full bloom. She sat tall in her seat, straw colored helmet of hair, a full noggin taller than the children around her. When the boy wouldn’t stop snapping it, she stood and walked to the front of the bus, head grazing the roof, bearing the weight of all eyes as she staggered along. Megan wore a training bra. She hated it, but her mother had insisted. “It’s that or an undershirt, young lady.” She imagined Jasper snapping hers, or better yet, sitting next to her. What if his hand touched hers, or if he held it like they were going steady? What if he winked at her, like he did to his pals, like she was in on his secrets. What if he like liked her?
    “Poor Gretchen,” said Katie.

    The sun peeked over the distant mountains as the bus banged across hard-packed dirt and rocks, mangling dandelions that sprouted adjacent to the berry patch. Megan dropped down the steps into the early morning chill and inhaled the familiar smell of damp earth, wet leaves and strawberry juice. She rushed to the stacks of empty crates and carts, putting quick distance between herself and the line of kids exiting the bus. Lines of green and brown stretched across the field, each bush indistinguishable from the next. There was the giant oak under which she and Katie would break for lunch, shaded from the midday heat. A port-a-potty stood sentinel over the berry patch, at the opposite end from their tree. The checkout stand was near the bus, where pickers would bring their crates to have them counted, their pay tickets punched. At the end of the day Angela, the oh-so-serious platoon leader, a senior at Sacred Heart, would peer through stringy, dishwater bangs to sign off on your card, dock you if you’d committed any infraction, then collect the document to submit to payroll. Paydays were Fridays. Cash. There were those rickety, aluminum pushcarts, like wheelbarrows without bins, rails dented, metal wheels untrue.
    The more you picked, the more you earned. A crate had twelve pint-sized boxes, or hallocks. Kids were paid a buck a crate, eight cents a hallock. The rules of picking were straightforward. No horsing around. No green berries. No dirt clods or rocks in the bottoms of hallocks. No creaming your row. That meant picking it clean, not plucking the fattest, juiciest berries and moving on. Infractions got you docked on first offense, canned if you did it twice.
    Katie and Megan picked side-by-side in adjacent rows. Megan was fast; Katie was faster. They raced, hallock for hallock, crate for crate.
    “On your mark, get set, go!” Katie counted down the first start of the morning, and the girls hands rustled through the bushes. A few kids brought radios, transistors tuned to the same top forty station. The Rascals’ People Gotta be Free blasted, tinny and crackling. The music kept their fingers moving, twisting the stems from the fruit in quick rhythm. Katie finished her first hallock and shouted, “One!” Megan picked faster. Katie’s technique was akin to Schroeder hunched over the piano on her knees, playing Beethoven in the bushes. “We’re in search of berry treasure,” she’d say. Megan had her own, scoot-along style, which didn’t work well with the bulky pad in her pants. She tried to ignore it as she slid her backside along the row, pushing with her legs like a member of a scull crew, the edges of the crate pulled along like oar handles, grinding dirt and squishing fallen berries into denim.
    “Seven!” Katie shouted, still half a hallock ahead of Megan. The sun had risen higher and was beginning to do its job, warming the plants and the ground and the backs of the pickers, their eyes scanning for jackpots of red within the green.
    “My dad’s leaving us,” Katie said, without breaking her pace. Megan’s hands stopped.
    “He’s moving to Seattle. My mom says it’s a trial separation, but my brother Kenny says they’re getting divorced, for sure.” She topped off a hallock. “Eight,” she said. “Don’t say anything, OK? I don’t want anyone else to know.”
    “Remember that time Kenny told us your neighbor, Brody, was in the FBI, and he went on and on about him, but then we saw Brody working at Fred Meyer as a security guard? Maybe Kenny’s wrong.”
    Megan looked out across the field to see Jasper standing in his row. He was weighing something in his hand and was looking her way. Three boys from adjacent rows stood beside him and looked, too. Jasper said something to them, reared back, then hurled.
    “Ouch!” Katie screamed. A fat strawberry hit her hard, splat on the side of the head. Megan hopped to her feet and looked around. Most of the kids stopped picking and looked up, but Jasper and his boys dropped to their knees and plunged their hands into the bushes, heads bobby with laughter. Katie looked like she’d been shot, bloody, berry gray-matter plastered to her hair. Megan pulled a wad of tissues from her pocket and handed them to her friend.
    “Are you OK?”
    “I guess. Was it Jasper?”
    Megan ground the toe of her sneaker into the dirt. “I don’t know.”
    “Come on, Megan.”
    “How could I know that? I was picking. We were talking.”
    Katie wiped the goo from her head, stuffed the tissue into her pocket, dropped to a knee and ravaged the bushes.
    At lunch, Megan changed her pad. How, she wondered, could a person lose so much blood every month and survive? Her morning pad had been soaked, and blood had leaked onto the edges of her panties.
    The girls sat against the trunk of the oak, mouths stuffed and chewing.
    “You’re a strawberry brunette,” Megan said.
    Katie stared at the ground.
    “C’mon. It was just a strawberry.”
    “I thought you were my friend.”
    “I am your friend.”
    “What if he was aiming at you, Megan?”
    “It was just a strawberry. Don’t be such a baby.” Megan instantly wanted to suck those words back in. She rolled the top down on her lunch sack, one cookie and an apple inside, saved for the ride home, tucked next to her last, clean sanitary napkin, which had been folded in half and sealed in a plastic bag.

    Megan did her best to fill the silence between them as the girls picked through the afternoon. “‘If God didn’t make the little green apples...’ Come on, Katie. You love this song. ‘No Disneyland or mother goose and no nursery rhymes...’”
    “Let’s just work, OK? I’m two hallocks ahead of you.” By quitting time, Katie had beaten Megan by half a crate.

    The bus was crammed with grungy children, dirt caked to their butts and knees, red and brown smudges on their sun-burned cheeks. Katie sat quickly, in the front next to Gretchen, forcing Megan to continue down the aisle, where she found a seat across from Jasper, two rows back.
    “Hey everybody. I’m Michelangelo.” Jasper stood, shook a soda can and popped its top, spewing a stiff, purple geyser of Shasta Grape all over the white ceiling. His posse wheezed like a pack of hysterical hyenas.
    The driver’s belly strained his overalls and rubbed against the bottom of the steering wheel as he squeezed into his seat. A horseshoe of white hair surrounded a glistening, bald head.
    “Everyone sit down,” he said, and jammed the transmission into gear. The bus lumbered through the lumpy field, then onto the road.
    “Hey, Flanders.” It was Bobby Norton, sitting next to her, number two man in Jasper’s gang. “How’s O’Malley?”
    “OK, I guess. What do you care?”
    “Jasper didn’t want to hit her. He was just trying to get her attention. He though it would land it in the bushes, to make her jump. Really, he just wanted to make her look, you know? He likes her, but she always ignores him. What is she, some kind of snob or something?”
    “No, she’s not a snob.” Megan flushed.
    “She seems like one.”
    “Hey, look,” said Jasper, “Flanders has leftovers.” His hand darted across the aisle and snatched the sack from Megan’s lap.
    “Give it back!” Megan lunged as Jasper held it out, pulled it back, held it out, pulled it back.
    “Ooh. Must be something good,” he said.
    “Give it back!” Her jaw clenched.
    “I don’t think so. Let’s see.” His fingers pulled open the sack.
    “I know something about O’Malley,” she said. Jasper paused.
    “What?”
    “If I tell you will you give it back?
    “Sure.”
    “Promise?”
    “Yeah, sure. Promise.”
    “Her father’s leaving. Her parents are getting a divorce.” The bus went quiet. Stares shifted form Megan to Katie.
    “Who cares. Let’s check out the mystery bag.”
    “You promised!”
    “Man, this must really be...”
    “It’s just an apple. Give it back!”
    “What’s this? A Kotex? Flanders is having her period!” Jasper pulled out the baggie and removed the pad.
    “Give it back, you ass wipe!”
    “Ass wipe. Sure, I could use it for that.” He waved the pad in front of her face, then stood and mock-dabbed his butt, then under his armpits. Laughter erupted. “Flanders is on the rag, everyone.”
    Megan’s vision blurred for tears.
    “Real mature, Jasper,” said Katie, who had appeared in the aisle next to him. “Give it up.” “Awe. Are you gonna sick your daddy on me? Wait a minute? I almost forgot. You don’t have one.”
    Katie’s hand flew out to grab the bag from Jasper, leaving nothing but a tear of brown paper between his fingers.
    “Now that.” She pointed to the pad. Jasper slouched in his seat. She grabbed the front of his shirt in a berry-stained fist and pulled. “Now!”
    Jasper shrugged and relinquished the pad.
    “What’s going on back there?” The driver looked in his rearview mirror. “You kids settle down.”
    Katie stuffed the pad into the bag and handed it to Megan, then turned and stumbled back to her seat.
    “Wait. Katie?” Her friend slid into the seat next to Gretchen and pretended to tie her shoe. Megan looked down at her own fingers, clutching the bag. They were kid fingers, field dirt in her fingernails, stained black with berry juice. She stared at Katie’s ponytail, the insignia on the back of her hat, and Megan knew Katie would not turn around. Gretchen was consoling her, arm around her shoulder. They were bent forward together, whispering, like friends. Megan stared out the window. Cars whizzed by, buildings, yards, the asphalt below, all solid and discernible when she first focused on them, but quick to blur. She couldn’t get comfortable for the bulk between her legs and shifted in her seat. The pad was saturated, leaking, miserable.

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