Chapter 1

My brother and I had inherited the ninety acre pistachio farm in the high desert near Barstow three months before. After my father took early retirement, he and my mother used up all their savings to buy this farm. My father had only lived there for two years before dying from a massive stroke. He was only fifty three when he died.

Rob, my brother, was a year and a half older than me. I had just turned twenty when my mother passed away from a blood infection. She had lived alone for the two years since my father had died. If she had gotten herself to a hospital in time, they could have saved her.

After mom died, I dropped out of college and moved to the farm, planning to try to keep things going until Rob and I could decide what we wanted to do with it. There were two houses on the property, one for the family that helped with the harvest to stay at, during the harvest, and the bigger one, where my parents had lived. The smaller house was really a single wide fifty foot mobile home.

Rob had two years left on his Army enlistment when mom died, and still wasn't sure yet whether he wanted to stay in, or else get out and start doing something else. He was planning on coming home that summer, on thirty days leave, so that the two of us could discuss all our options.

There is pretty decent money to be made in growing pistachios. The problem is that you need to stay on top of everything, and either know what you're doing, or else find someone who does to take care of things for you. Rob and I had no knowledge of how to manage a pistachio farm.

The farm had a five acre man made lake, and the water was pumped up from an underground aquifer. The desert heat evaporated standing water, but my parents had invested a considerable sum in irrigation equipment and machinery. All this equipment needed to be moved around and maintained. I had spent enough time on the farm to know how to keep things irrigated, but wasn't capable of performing any maintenance when equipment broke down.

There were other pistachio farms in the area, usually smaller, and less well equipped, than the one my parents had left us. I had been back for less than a month when someone in an old black Ford step side pickup came driving up to the front of my house. Two dark haired young women exited from the truck and came toward my front door. They looked like they might be related, maybe sisters or cousins I thought at the time. They were young, neither much more than seventeen or eighteen. They looked Hispanic.

I went to open the front screen door when they stepped onto my front porch.

"Hello, can I help you?"

"Maybe. This your farm?"

"Mine and my brother's. Used to belong to our parents, but they died."

"Mrs. Torres told us you might be looking for someone to help you take care of everything. She said we should drive out here and ask you about it."

Mrs. Torres was the woman who used to come out to the farm to arrange migrant workers for the nut harvest. My mother had needed help for about six weeks of the year, during the harvest and packaging cycle. Usually, the deal was for one family to come move into the trailer and stay until everything was harvested and bagged up. The job paid room, board, and ten cents a pound for every pound of harvested product. Mrs. Torres took her cut from whoever she sent out to the farm to do the work.

According to the records my parents had kept, our net harvests were increasing every year as the trees matured and the yield grew. The year before, the harvest had come in at around fifty thousand pounds of nuts in the shell. That yield should continue to grow at about ten to fifteen per cent a year for the next few years, then it would remain fairly constant for another six to ten years. After that, it would slowly decrease each year, unless new trees were planted to replace the old.

I knew that both my parents had been pleased with the help Mrs. Torres had sent out for each harvest. It was usually a new family each year. I also knew it was far too early for anyone to be coming out for the harvest that was a good six months away.

"A little early for her to be sending anyone out here, isn't it? Besides, she usually sends out a family with at least six or seven people. This includes the children who can all do some of the easy work, like bagging."

"We aren't looking for harvesting work. We're looking for something permanent. The two of us could run this farm by ourselves. At harvest time, we could bring in people from our family, everything you'd need to get the crop brought in."

"What would something like this cost us?"

The two girls spoke quietly together. The taller one, she'd introduced herself to me as Anita, seemed to be the main spokesperson of the two. The shorter, prettier one, seemed mostly to go along with whatever Anita said. It only took a couple minutes for them to agree on something.

"We can do all the work for our room and board, and one thousand dollars a month. We also get a quarter a pound for the total harvest."

I knew, from looking at the records my parents had kept, that they were lucky to net out eighty cents a pound from the gross harvest, after all expenses were paid. That didn't even take into consideration the amortized value of the farm itself, or the annual depreciation of the irrigation equipment. These young girls were more or less asking me to make them partners in the farm.

"That wouldn't work for us, I'm afraid. The two of you would wind up making more than my brother and me."

As soon as I said this, Anita took the other girl by the arm and drew her back away from my front door. They spent five minutes or so, talking things over amongst themselves. When they were finished talking, Anita again stepped forward to speak to me.

"Let us live in the trailer until right before the harvest starts. We'll take care of all the things that need taking care of. You pay us five hundred a month, and we'll move out when the harvest workers get here. If you like what we do, we'll move back here after they leave, with the same deal as before."

"Are you sure you even know how to do all the things that need to get done? It might be worth it to me to hire you on until we get to harvest, if you could show me how to do everything around here. I know how to irrigate, but I'm not too familiar with maintaining the pipe, pumps, pulleys and hoses."

"We know how to do everything. We lived over at the Gates place for four years. Their set up was mostly the same as yours is. The people they sold out to didn't want our help. That's why we're both available for you to hire us now."

I had no idea who the Gates family were, or where their farm was located. What I did know was that I didn't yet have sufficient knowledge to care for the farm, and I didn't want to ruin anything expensive because of this ignorance. I wasn't even sure of all the care the pistachio trees might need during the growing season.

"How old are you two?"

"I'm eighteen. Tina is almost seventeen. We're old enough."

"What about school?"

"Tina has one more year. I graduated last January. We can still do all the work, even when Tina's in school. We'll schedule things to make sure it all gets done."

"I'll need to check on some things with Mrs. Torres. If your story checks out okay, I guess it wouldn't hurt to give this a try. If you live on this property though, I'll expect you to obey my rules. No parties, no drinking or drugs. No boyfriends staying over either."

I saw a momentary frown on the younger one's face, but Anita nodded her head in agreement with everything I'd told them.

After they drove away, I got in my own car and drove over to Mrs. Torres's place. She was sitting out on her porch, fixing some vegetables, getting things ready for her family's dinner.

"Hi, Mrs. Torres. Did you send some girls out to my mom's place today?"

"Si, Kyle. I tell them go see you for the job. Good girls. You give them job?"

"Not yet, but I'm considering it. They claim they know everything about growing pistachios, and how to maintain the equipment too. You think they really do?"

"They know some. It no hard to figure out what not know. I have people help them if trouble. You no worry, okay?"

I knew my mother had set a lot of store by Mrs. Torres after my father had passed. She told me often enough about how problems that came up got solved right away when she let Mrs. Torres know she had some. In the back of my head I'd been counting on being able to go to her if I had problems at the farm too. In many ways I could see how me cooperating with what she wanted by hiring those two girls could work out in my favor. I knew for certain that I wanted to stay on her good side.

"I guess I'll give them a try then if you say it will be okay. Thank you for sending them out to see me."

"You no take advantage of those girls, Kyle. They good girls. Their Mama good friend to me when she alive. See me first if problem, okay?"

The next morning my two new farmhands moved all their things into the trailer. Anita came over as soon as they were all moved in to ask me if she could get a hundred dollar advance on their wages to pick up a few things they still needed. I let her have the money without asking her questions about what those needed things were.

Two hours later the two of them came back with seven or eight bags of groceries from Food 4 Less. I watched them hauling everything inside the trailer. It was already after two in the afternoon and I still hadn't seen them doing a single thing around the farm.

Maybe they were planning on getting a fresh start in the morning. I went out and started moving some of the irrigation equipment around. I was done by five o'clock. My boots were muddy and my back was tensed up from the hauling and the tension of worrying about whether or not I was being taken for a fool by those girls. They better be hard at it by the next day. That's what I was thinking.

I woke up at around eight the following morning. I heard the noise of an engine spluttering. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere off towards where the farm equipment was kept. It took me a short time to figure out it had to be the tractor running.

In the month I'd been on the farm, I'd tried eight or nine times to get the small tractor running. I never had any success getting it started. I pulled on my jeans, a shirt, and my boots and went out to the equipment shed to see what those girls were doing. When I got there, Anita was by herself, poking around under the engine compartment on the tractor. Whatever she was doing seemed to be working, because the sound of that engine was already smoothed out considerably.

I stood there watching until Anita must have noticed me standing there by the open doorways.

"How come you dragged all that pipe yesterday? Lots easier if you pull it like you're supposed to."

She closed the engine cover and climbed up on the tractor. I saw her shifting gears and the vehicle started backing out of the shed, slowly. Five minutes later, she had ten or twelve sections of irrigation hose joined up and attached to the rear of the tractor. Quick as you please, she jumped back on the tractor and headed off towards the back of the farm. I watched her leave, then went over to set up a second run of hose, just like she'd done with the first. I had everything coupled together when she came back and attached this one to the tractor too. In an hour, we had five different irrigation runs hooked up and watering the back twenty acres of the farm. Doing that would have taken me two full days the way I'd been doing it. I hadn't seen that tractor running since right before my dad died. After what I'd just seen, watering the trees was going to be a lot easier, and a lot less time consuming too.

"You didn't need to help, you know? I could have managed all right by myself." Anita had just come out of the equipment shed towing out the machine they used to shake the nuts off the trees during harvest. I knew, from what my mom had written, that the machine needed to be replaced. I'd been meaning to look into trying to get some information together about what a new one would cost us. "What's the story on this nut harvester?" she asked me.

"I'm not sure. I think my mother said something about it not working. As for you managing by yourself, I thought our deal was you were going to teach me whatever I still needed to know about running this farm?"

"I'll go move the pipe and then I'll take a look at the harvester. It might be better for now if you just left me alone to get to know the equipment, and to see how things need to be done to cover everything. After Tina gets home, I'll show you anything you see me doing out here you aren't sure about. There are things I need to figure out by myself now though."

With that, Anita uncoupled the nut harvester and drove out to where she'd left the irrigation hoses. I watched her leave, a little unsettled by her attitude towards me. It seemed that she was getting a lot less accommodating, now that I'd hired her and her sister and let them move out to the farm. I didn't much care for it either, but I'd wait and see how things were working out otherwise. I still needed to write to Rob to let him know about me hiring someone to help me out with the farm operations. I knew he'd leave everything about the farm up to me until after he decided whether or not to stay in the Army. I was fairly sure that he was probably going to opt to continue on in the Army unless something happened to change things. Rob liked having things as simple as he could get them. That was one of the reasons he'd joined the Army after high school.

I kept myself busy by going over the account books for the farm until around four o'clock. That was the time that a green Honda Civic came barrelling up our driveway. The driver slammed on the brakes, skidding his tires the last fifty feet towards the trailer. There was dust and pieces of loose dirt and gravel thrown all over the place from that stupid maneuver. I got up and walked quickly out to my front porch.

Inside the Honda, Tina and some high school boy were in the midst of a passionate clinch. I could see one of his hands pulling at her chest, squeezing her breast while they kissed. This went on for another two or three minutes before the two of them finally came up for a breath of air. By then, Anita had come out from the equipment shed and was hurrying over to the boy's car.

"Tina, get your dumb ass out of that car! As for you, Tommy, I thought I told you to stop sniffing around her? Am I going to have to go have another talk with that father of yours?" Anita really sounded angry as she spoke to them. Her anger went a long way towards lessening my own. Tina hurried out of the boy's car, and he backed it up quickly, spinning his way around as he went, before peeling out of there, just as quickly as he'd come in.