By Owen Thomas

My father told me the story of this big-time gangster from Georgia. The guy ran the streets of Tbilisi but left in the 1990s. He was running from something. He ended up a trash collector on the streets of New York City. I used to imagine this gangster’s thick gloved fingers wrapping around the handles of the plastic bins, lifting them up and flipping them into the back of the truck.  

For a while when I was younger my dad and I had an apartment in a triple decker at the top of Ibbetson Street—right over the park. 

Sometimes, if it was quiet in the house, I’d catch the sounds of the trash truck climbing up the block—the engine rumbling, the pulling of the levers, the plastic wheels of the cans grinding against the sidewalk. I’d run to the window and watch the truck climb the street, waiting for it to make the turn and stop right in front of the house. Little kids love to watch the trash truck. Big truck, I said, standing up on the couch and pointing through the screen. My father nodded.  

One morning when I was nine, too old to be watching the trash truck for fun, I stood by the window waiting for it to creep up the block. I was older, taller, and didn’t need to climb on the couch to see. Besides, the couch was down there in the street, nestled between the black bins for trash that my father filled with recycle and the blue bins for recycle that my father filled with trash. Bursting garbage bags lounged on top of the cushions. The room around me was empty, just my bare feet on a wood floor and the sun and the sounds of a truck pouring in. The whole house was empty. I was home from school and my dad was at work. Make sure they take everything, my father had told me that morning, we can’t afford to lose the security deposit. I watched the pile of garbage and waited. What was I going to do if the truck drove up, took a look at the pile of stuff and kept going?  

My father thought God was a waste so I didn’t pray, but I knocked on wood. When I saw the truck coming I almost hid, almost went into the kitchen and turned on the sink, just so I could tell him, honestly enough, that I didn’t know why they hadn’t taken the stuff—I was washing dishes when it happened. But I stayed by the window and grimaced. The guy—not a Georgian gangster, just a regular guy—hopped down from the truck. He didn’t flinch when he saw the pile. He grabbed bags, two at a time, and flung them over his shoulder. Then he grabbed the whole couch at once in a bear hug and heaved it up and over. He pulled the lever on the side. In a poof of white stuffing and crunch of wooden slats the couch disappeared, eaten up by the orange truck, fed to the machine by the big man who could lift the whole thing up with a hug, like he loved the couch and wasn’t afraid of any dust or disease it might hold. Like he could hug anything he loved that tight, and then just toss it in the back of a truck to be crushed. 

We got the security deposit and, a few days later, we moved into a tiny apartment off of Pearl. 

The Georgian gangster-garbageman and my dad could have been on the same flight from Tbilisi to Poland in 1993. They might have taken the same busses across Europe, trying to figure out Berlin and Paris before saying fuck it and flying to New York, where the trash man stopped and my father decided to keep going. I asked him once why he chose to be the only Georgian in the Boston area when he could have stayed with the rest in New York or gone to Chicago. He only shrugged. 

* * *

“I’m going to call your father,” the teachers said to me.  

On the third warning—for talking to the person next to you, or for squirming in your seat too much—they threatened to call home. It was always the third warning. “Alex,” they said, “I’ve already had to talk to you twice.”  

The school teachers were one of two people: the young white woman, came here for college, fresh out, skinny and sharp, with straight brown hair—or curly brown hair it didn’t matter—and a lanyard with keys and public school teacher ID hanging around her neck. Or they were the old white woman, the townie, who had started skinny but had grown wide and who you could see bite back the “shut up” that she wanted to throw at the class when we acted up. Sometimes, toward the end of the year, she’d let it slip and we’d oooo and ahhh.  

Older teachers didn’t actually pick up the phone. They would yell from across the room. But when they walked over and looked down at me they saw a pair of sad brown eyes. The boy doesn’t have a mother, they would reason. Don’t do it again honey, they’d say. Watch out who you hang around with, one of them told me, and she sounded so much like my father that she could have been speaking Georgian. 

The young teachers called. They needed to bridge the gap, they said, between home and school, especially, especially, for the most vulnerable students (the little boys with no moms, the poor kids, the immigrants). 

“If you keep it up, you won’t be able to come apple picking.” Ms. Trent, my fifth-grade teacher, was young. “And I’ll have to call your father.” 

At my elbow Darius kept whispering, his voice a giggling remake of Rihanna’s “Umbrella”—you know Fatima used to look a little better / but now she’s dressed in chains and leather / and now she looks just like the fellas, fellas, fellas, fellas. Eh! 

He’d had a crush on Fatima until she cut her hair and started wearing hoodies with System of a Down written on the front. None of us knew what System of a Down was.  

When he’d first seen it, Darius tried to get me to ask her if she had “down system.” I laughed at her instead of him, even though I knew there was no such thing as down system, and tried to pretend that I wasn’t afraid to talk to Fatima, who lived next door to me and had smiled at everyone in the class until she chopped her hair off and started staring at the wall. She wore eyeliner too, and I spent whole class periods looking at it, trying to figure out what was the real shape of her eyes because once she put it on I couldn’t remember what she looked like without it. 

When Ms. Trent spoke, I kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t talking, I could have defended myself. I was listening to Darius. It would have been accurate. I wasn’t talking. My mouth was shut and his was open. But I knew better than to snitch. 

“Your classmates are trying to learn,” she said. 

Ms. Trent stood above me, red-cheeked, clutching her lanyard like an orthodox priest holds his cross.  

Next to me Darius, the boy who laughed so much that he had to grab his inhaler and who was finally starting to be my friend, opened his eyes wide, sarcastically afraid. 

I giggled. And then, when I looked across the room and saw Fatima with her pale brown scalp visible through her buzzed hair. I laughed louder. Not because she was funny, but so she would hear me. 

“Alex, that’s enough” Ms. Trent raised her voice.  

Fatima stopped staring at the wall. She was watching, her eyeshadow like the thin black outline that frames a camera lens.  

I wanted to let Ms. Trent, and everybody else, know that I wasn’t afraid of her. If I could say, out loud, something like: I didn’t say nothing or you can’t get me in trouble for laughing or since when is it against the law to laugh, or I wasn’t even talking, the class would gasp in admiration. 

I looked at Darius. He was turned toward me, wearing the same scowl as Fatima, lips stuck together in a straight line, eyebrows furrowed.  

I raised my cheeks and pulled the air up from my belly. I laughed again. 

“That’s it!” She shook her lanyard. “You’re not coming with us on Friday.” 

Immediately I shrugged, like boys do, and sucked my teeth. 

On Friday everyone else in this room would be out picking apples. Darius would run down the lines, pulling pieces of big red fruit off of the trees taking one or two bites before tossing them to the ground. In one empty row he would happen upon Fatima. He would tap her shoulder and she would turn around and smile and they would walk the rest of the row together. I wanted her to smile, not at Darius who teased her, but at me, who flashed her smiles all the time when the other kids weren’t looking, at lunch when she sat at the table next to mine and when we both got off the bus at the same corner. 

I wanted her to smile at me and to ask me to buy her a caramel apple—the ones that look like they will be delicious, but the caramel is so sweet that it makes the crisp white flesh on the inside taste bitter. I wanted the chance to end up with her alone in a row of trees and search nervously for something to talk about.  

Instead, I was going to be stuck inside, while the sun shined through the chilly air and warmed everyone in New England up to the perfect temperature. 

“And I’m going to call your father.” 

“Fuck apple picking!” I said. 

I looked across the room as I said it to see if she’d heard me. Darius howled, gripping my knees like they were his. 

* * *

My father was skinny, but his hands were thick. Not the type that could lift up a couch, but the type that could grip a trowel and spread plaster on walls from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. without loosening their grip. 

“FUCK? You said to her FUCK?” His fingers were wrapped around my wrist. “You have one job,” he pulled me forward and pushed me back. The dried-up plaster crusted up in the pads of his fingers dug into my skin. “It is an easy one. Go to school. Do your work. Listen when they tell you to do something. Do what they say. Don’t tell your teacher fuck. That’s it.” 

I didn’t tell him that he’d just listed four different jobs, but I defended myself. “I didn’t say it to her,” I tried to explain, minimizing the incident, “Not about her. I just said it out loud. About picking apples.” 

I had been pulling steadily against his grip so when he let go I had to catch myself. 

“About apples?” 

My father never asked questions. 

I explained apple picking to him—the sun shining through trees laden with fruit while flannelled dads pull their children in bright red wagons. The moms wear flannel too, green ones that compliment that dad’s classic lumberjack. They have matching boots—dad, mom, child who sits in her wagon and never complains—and there is a dog too, a golden retriever with a bandana tied around its neck. 

“I don’t care about stupid apples,” I whined. 

My father hated whining.  

“In 1992 . . .” he started.  

Every Georgian story starts in the either 1990s or the 1920s.  

I scurried around him, out of the kitchen and into the living room. I stood by the front door. On the other side people walked down the sidewalk. Darius was out there, throwing a football or dribbling on some piece of concrete. Fatima was a few walls away. I tried to imagine what she was doing but I had no idea. Maybe she had the door of her room locked, the rock music turned up, drawing on her arms with thick sharpie. 

“You are going apple picking,” he called out. “You are going apple picking.” 

I peered back into the kitchen. His phone was out of his pocket. He was clicking buttons. I’d never seen my father initiate a phone call. He was a phone answerer. If it rang, he picked it up—it could be a job—but he didn’t dial. 

“Hello, teacher? I’m very sorry . . .” He didn’t introduce himself. He was apologizing. “Alex must go to pick apples.” Go to pick. It’s pick. Just pick. My father scratched his stubble with his free hand. The hair on his head was thinning. His nails looked like they were painted white. He wore his work boots, his jeans, and his jacket even though he was in the house, as if at any minute the heat might give out and winter might blow in. 

“Yes. I see . . .” 

After the call he said nothing, but I found out the next morning, when Ms. Trent smiled at me. “Your father doesn’t want you to miss this experience,” she smiled. They would let me go. But my father was coming along too, the sole parent chaperone.

* * *

None of us wore flannel. The bus was full of jackets and sweatshirts. They started out the day attached to their owners. By the end though, they’d be strewn throughout the orchard—hung up on the branches of the trees or tossed aside on the grass—like breadcrumbs helping us find our way home. Ms. Trent fought the impossible fight. When we got off the bus in the dusty parking lot she was holding up Daruis’s Champion.  

“Whose gray hoodie? It was left in the twelfth row on the right side . . .”  

Darius looked at the hoodie. I looked at him. He knew it was his, but he said nothing.  

Ms. Trent stood in front of us, holding up her hands. “The right side if you were facing forward . . .” 

She closed her eyes, like she was trying to remember which screaming student had been sitting in that exact spot. It is a bad idea to close your eyes around fifth graders. Kids strained against her order to “group up.” Maybe she thought my father, the only other adult, would say something. He didn’t. He stood next to me silently instructing me to look at the teacher. He wasn’t responsible for the other children. He’d come there for me.  

When she opened her eyes Oscar and Malik, led by Darius, were already sprinting through the parking lot. “Stay together,” Ms. Tent shrieked. On any other day I would have been running with them. On any other day Darius would have grabbed my arm and nodded his head to the side and whispered, come on. But my father was there, standing next to me, like a pillar of crumbling concrete, tired and hunched, quiet and solid. 

There’d been no way to escape him on the bus.  

When we sat down he reached up and fussed with the window like he was going to open it, but he didn’t know how and so he sat back down. 

The bus pulled off. 

“Your grandfather grew apples,” he said.  

I almost asked him if they had school buses in Georgia, and if they were yellow, and if they had green nylon seats with chewing gum stuck to the bottom and the wheel wells that mean anyone who sits in that row has to pull their feet into their chest to be comfortable. 

“Get out of the aisle!” Ms. Trent called to the back of the bus. 

I turned. Darius, Malik and Oscar had claimed the back two rows. The three of them leaned their heads together, and when they laughed they flopped back into the seats and pounded their fists into the nylon. 

All three of them looked up at Ms. Trent. They kept talking and dug their feet into the floor of the bus. What was she going to say? I kept looking back. Darius saw me and nodded, but Oscar whispered something and the three of them lost it.  

“He had an orchard in Kartli.” 

The bus merged smoothly onto the highway. Behind me kids shrieked their laughter. In front of me Ms. Trent turned around in her seat. She lifted her finger and opened her mouth. Then she sat back down, facing forward. My father tapped his fingers against the window and talked about apples.  

I strained my ears against the rumbling engine and the words of my father and tried to make out the jokes that Darius and them were telling. If you aren’t there when the joke starts you can’t laugh at it later. Everyone will roar and you will sit there looking stupid, forcing out a chuckle that they know isn’t real. If you weren’t there you don’t get it. 

I kept turning to look. 

“Your grandfather . . .” My father said. 

Fatima sat a few rows back, right in the middle of the bus. She was alone in her seat, chin resting on her knees. The sun poured in from her side of the bus. The thin shadow from the bus’s windowpane crossed her forehead diagonally. She was quiet, her headphones in her ears. Outside the trees were already yellow and orange. They didn’t quite blur together, but they weren’t fully distinct from each other either. Every once in a while a big burst of red would fly by like a silent firework going off behind her. Her seat looked warm even though the air from a few open windows had everyone else shivering. 

I studied her new buzz cut, her scalp, and remembered the first time my father had given me a haircut. “Alexandre, your hair is too long. Come sit.” He covered the kitchen floor in newspaper, sat me down on a chair and plugged in the clippers. The next day at school Darius had roasted me. “Look at your line up!” he’d shouted, tracing a line like a bell curve through the air. Everyone died laughing. My father didn’t understand that a haircut was something more than a pair of clippers running over your head. 

Fatima’s hair looked like that—sloppily cut, too short for a girl. From across the bus I leaned toward her.  

When I’d gotten home that night, after all the kids at school had clowned me, I retreated to the dark of my room and rubbed my hand against my head. The hairs were soft needles pricking and tickling the palm of my hand.  

I looked at Fatima and scratched the center of my hand with my fingertip. Then she looked up and even though she half-smiled I dropped down into my seat, quickly facing forward. 

* * *

“The apple trees in Georgia are not like this,” my father said. I followed him down a row of Mutsu. We were supposed to be in groups of six. Ms. Trent wanted us to tackle the orchard as a team. Group one was tasked with the Courtlands and the Macouns.  

Nobody listened.  

My dad had refused to step up onto the hayride. Why take a tractor in a circle when the trees are right here? He started walking. Darius and a few others had taken the opportunity to run off. Ms. Trent huffed. Group two was supposed to be grabbing the Empires. 

“Look at how big this apple is.” He shook his head, “back home . . .” 

The skinny trees sagged under the weight of the fruit. My dad looked at the apples, searching for the ones that had the best shape and skin that would shine after you rubbed it against your shirt. 

He instructed me in the finer points of apple selection. He knew this one was going to be sweet because . . .He held it up and took a bite. See? The juice dripped down his chin. His grandfather’s apples, he said, had a better taste, but this wasn’t bad. 

I looked down toward the end of the row. Four kids were carrying a metal ladder horizontally, Darius had climbed up on top of it. He sat in the middle, his feet dangling a foot above the ground. 

“Be careful!” he yelled, “watch out! My balls!” He winced and rearranged himself and laughed while he did it. 

My dad looked up at the kids and shook his head. 

I waited for him to start—this is who you choose to spend your time with? This is what you think is funny?—but he didn’t. “Go ahead,” he said, “you want to go, go,” and he waved the back of his hand toward their laughter.  

* * *

I caught up to the boys. 

“A!” Darius yelled. 

“Yo!” I ran up and grabbed onto the back of the ladder. I shook it a little. Darius held himself up with his arms and laughed, “chill!” 

“Over there!” Darius pointed to a spot next to a tree. 

We put the ladder down. I looked up at the tree. It was almost empty of apples, completely picked, except for a tight bunch of yellow at the very top.  

“Who’s gonna go get those?” Darius pointed to the clump of fruit. 

Oscar grabbed the ladder and propped it against the thin branches of the tree. He put his foot on the lowest rung, but it wobbled and he hopped off.  

I stepped forward, but before I could get close to the ladder Darius was already up to the third rung, “Hold on,” he shouted, and we all reached out our hands and held it steady. 

If it had been me up there I would have held the ladder with one hand and reached out with the other, struggling to pull the apples off of the tree—twist my father had said. 

But Darius didn’t care. He reached out with both hands like he couldn’t fall, like he was daring gravity to fuck with him. He pulled the apples off—one, two, three—dropping them down on our heads. We ducked and covered and let go of the ladder. 

“Yo!” Darius called down, and we all reached our hands out again to steady it. He hadn’t even flinched. He was sitting on the top rung, with his legs hanging down on either side, one hand free, the other clutching the last apple. 

He bit it. “These ain’t bad,” he said, “y’all should try ‘em!” He lifted the heavy fruit up high above his head and whipped it down toward us. It thudded into my shoulder and I laughed even though my arm went limp. 

Everyone else on the ground laughed too. Darius repositioned himself up there, scooching a little more to one side. I thought about how easy it would be to kick the bottom of the ladder, to just lift my foot and tap one of the legs with enough force to knock the whole thing down. But I didn’t move. My feet stayed stuck to the worn down grass.  

The ladder shook anyway. Something else moved it, slow but hard. I was looking up at Darius, and I felt the whole thing lean and watched his eyes get big. 

“Yo!” he yelled again, and I wasn’t sure what was happening but the mass of bodies around me all pushed against the leaning ladder, trying to angle it toward the tree. It wasn’t easy. The ladder moved fast, and it was heavy with him way up there at one end. 

We caught it, made it stable enough for him to scamper down, and he was fine, but I wished I could have frozen his face in that one wavering second. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” 

It only took a moment to figure out what had happened. Fatima was there, standing next to this group of boys. She’d been passing through the rows, headphones on. She hadn’t seen the ladder.  

“I’m sorry.” She pulled her headphones out of her ears. 

“You could have killed him,” Oscar said. 

“Yo, look at my shirt,” Darius was holding the front of his shirt out. He’d had his mouth full of an apple when Fatima had knocked him off balance and he’d spit some of it out. There was a thick wet blob on the chest of his white tee. 

Fatima didn’t say anything; she kind of smiled. Darius didn’t say anything either. He stood still, and then stooped down. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but he came back up with an apple in his hand—the one he’d bitten and spit out and then dropped onto the floor. He reached his arm back and whipped it at Fatima. 

It missed. The apple went flying over her head.  

She stood still, looking at us, this pack of boys crowded around an empty ladder and a scattered pile of apples. 

Darius grabbed another apple off of the floor and held it in his hand. This time she moved. The apple would have hit her but she stepped to the side, a little step, like all she had to do was let it fly by. 

It flew by.  

He picked up another one. 

Fatima looked at Darius. She really looked at him. She forced open her eyelids, opened up her pupils, and looked. I don’t know if she saw us, but she saw the next apple in his hand. She stepped aside again, but this one hit her chest. She coughed. 

Sweat dripped down my temples. I could feel where it ran against my eyebrows. 

Darius grabbed another apple and threw it. It hit her again, this time in her thigh.  

I shifted my weight and felt something next to my right foot. It was a round, yellow, once-bitten apple. 

Darius’s hands were empty. He looked down. There were no more apples on the ground in front of him. 

I tried to block the apple at my feet, but it rose up over my shoes. I was sure he could see it. I knew, in that moment, that I could do several different things. I could step on the apple or kick it, or I could pick it up and throw it at Darius, or I could hand it to him. 

I didn’t move. He took the step over toward me and reached down between my legs. 

He grabbed it and, biting his lip, whipped it at Fatima, who finally covered herself with her arms. The apple slammed into her elbow and broke open. 

“Somebody could have gotten hurt,” Darius yelled when he was done, and I was surprised at how much he sounded like Ms. Trent. 

* * *

After she walked away, hunching her shoulders and turning, everybody laughed and joined Darius in his singing of the Fatima song. Like a fella, like a fella, fella, ella, eh.  

Ms. Trent came stalking down the row. 

“Snitch,” Darius whispered. But Fatima hadn’t snitched. Ms. Trent was mad because we weren’t in our assigned groups and her perfect picking plan was falling apart. 

She told us what she wanted us to do but no one moved. 

She walked away, muttering. 

“Y’all wanna play hide and seek?” Oscar asked. 

“Hide and seek?” someone said. We’d lifted the ladder for Darius another half dozen times.

“Nah, hide and seek is for suckas, let’s play manhunt,” Daruis said. 

Nobody spoke. 

“Alright put your feet in,” Oscar offered. 

“Alex is it,” Darius said. He looked right at me. 

I shrugged, “I’ll be it.” 

* * *

I was hiding in between two trees, trying to make myself as thin as possible when I heard my father’s voice. “Where are you from?” 

“I was born here.” It was Fatima. 

“Yes, but where are you from?” 

“My parents are from India.” 

“India is a big place,” my father said. 

“Bangalore.” 

I peeked out. The two of them walked next to each other. Every few trees they stopped while Fatima grabbed an apple off a tree and handed it to my father who placed it gently in a bulging bag. 

“I go back every summer,” she said, “for a few months.” 

My father nodded, “That’s good.” 

“Where are you from,” she asked. 

I leaned back, behind the trees again. 

“I am from Georgia.” 

She didn’t confuse it for the state. Fatima was smart. “Next to Russia,” she said. 

“Exactly,” my father smiled and rubbed his free hand against his stubble. 

They kept walking. Closer to me. I closed my eyes. 

“My father grew apples,” my father said. 

“Were they good?” 

“Yes.” 

I stepped back, away from their row, fully into the next one. They passed where I had been and I worried that my father would look down under the trees and recognize my shoes and call me over. 

They kept walking. 

They were quiet. 

“What do you remember about them?” She asked. 

I crouched and moved up the row, following parallel. 

“In the 1990s we had nothing,” my father began. “The economy fell apart. No one had work. There was war. The kids in our apartment block played on an abandoned tank, hanging off of the big gun barrel. That was their playground.  But my father’s family still had an orchard in their village and the apples grew regardless. My father would go out to the village and come home with sacks full. Then for weeks we ate nothing but apples, for every meal.” 

“You must hate them,” Fatima said. 

They both stopped, my father first, then Fatima. 

He doesn’t hate apples, I thought.  

“I don’t hate apples,” he said. 

“But you ate them every day,” Fatima said. 

I was a few trees behind them, but the leaves were thick enough that they couldn’t see through. On the tree in front of me an apple was growing. It wasn’t pretty, it was asymmetrical, one side of the fruit had grown round, the other slanted in. The skin had a few dots. My father wouldn’t have chosen it. But it was the only one I could grab without reaching up and shaking the tree. 

I picked it and put it to my mouth. 

“I know apples,” my father said, “that’s all.” 

“What else do you know?” she asked. 

I chewed quietly, so that I could hear him, but a voice from behind me called out, “Yo!” 

At the far end of the row Oscar and Darius turned the corner. I looked back at them. They were already running toward me. 

---

Owen Thomas is a father, educator, and writer based in the Boston area.