the window, a bright wash of moonlight cascades across her pale legs and onto the splash of white cotton sheets around her feet. Breathless, panicked and alone, Jennifer shivers in the air-conditioned chill and draws the sheets around her body.
It is the first clear night in a week. The moon, pale and bloated, sheens down through the silence. She rolls away, grasping the sheets in her hands and drawing her knees to her chest. She begins to sob silently, shaking with remorse and fear. The dream continues to play out as her thoughts ebb and flow between wakefulness and sleep. The girl’s frightened, lonely cries echo in her mind, even as the silence pulses in her ears.
After her dreams, Jennifer begins to count, as she used to when she was a child. She counts quickly, silently, her lips barely moving, as she feels herself trapped between her desire to lose herself in sleep and her fear that the nightmare will return. When she reaches one hundred, her breathing still has not calmed. She is too afraid to close her eyes. Exhausted, she begins to count again, backwards now, winding down to zero.
It had been a quiet summer morning in the warehouse. Ben Taylor had just finished repairing a loose conveyor belt on the tomato sorter in preparation for the day’s run when Randy Caines, the warehouse manager, arrived. Taylor was still on his knees beneath the steel rollers when Caines told him to hitch a wagon to the old Kubota tractor, empty the old pump-house, then tear it down.
“Get a move on,” Caines bellowed, pointing a meaty finger at Taylor. “I want that piece a shit torn down by the end of the day.”
“What for?” Taylor asked in surprise, crawling out from under the conveyor belt.
“In case ya didn’t notice,” Caines said, “it got hit by lightning.
Night before last. It’s a mess and it’s gonna take you most of the day to take it down.”
“No, no.” Taylor rose to his feet, shaking his head. “That thing’s mostly brick and stone. Even for two men, that’s a couple days work.”
Taylor towered above his turnip-shaped manager. He wiped the oil from his hands with an old rag he had found jammed under the sorter’s fuse box. Covered in grease and what appeared to be dried blood, the rag was still cleaner than his hands.
“Where the hell is Scotty then?” Caines demanded.
“I’ve no idea,” said Taylor, patting the dust from his jeans.
“Fine,” Caines snorted, turning to Juan Reger, who had just punched in and was sliding his time card back in its metal slot. “You’re late!” he shouted across the warehouse floor.
“Like hell,” said Juan, angling his thumb at the clock. “It’s still a minute to eight. I haven’t even started yet.”
Caines turned back to Taylor. “Take the kid with ya. It’ll do him good to try some real work for a change, instead of tinkering with his toolbox all friggin day long.”
Taylor grinned once Caines had turned away. After a week of steady drizzle, the prospect of working in the sunshine where the flowers were beginning to bloom was a welcome reprieve from another monotonous day inside, packing boxes and loading trucks with a forklift.
Juan was not nearly as pleased. He kicked the steel support of the conveyor belt with his torn running shoe. “I wanted to help with the bottling today,” he muttered.
Taylor grinned at his young friend. The bottling room was where the young girls Juan’s age would be working today.
“You’ll have more fun with me,” said Taylor. “It’s demolition work.”
“There aren’t any girls out there,” Juan said. “Just bugs and weeds.”
Taylor grinned. “Girls just get you in trouble anyway. Trust me on that, okay?”
Juan was still sullen after they’d finished hooking the wagon to the small Kubota tractor. His interests were limited to fixing machinery and girls. More precisely, he enjoyed taking machinery apart and trying, with limited success, to put it back together again.
As far as the girls went, he enjoyed watching them and doing things to try to get their attention, but did not yet have the confidence to have a genuine conversation with them. At the prospect of doing anything else, he reacted with undisguised boredom or contempt.
While Juan maintained that he was eighteen years old, Taylor figured sixteen was closer to the truth. Juan had come to work at Tanglewood Vineyards when his parents had signed him out of school a year ago, just a few months before Taylor had arrived. With blonde hair, blue eyes, and a Spanish first name, Juan was a German Mennonite whose parents had moved to Canada from the drought-ridden region of Chihuahua, Mexico, three years ago. His first name was Johann, but because he spoke Spanish so well, the Mexican workers on the farm had always called him Juan. He had happily adopted his Spanish name as an act of defiance to his father, who was the mechanic at the Weber farm a few miles down the road, and whose name was Johann as well.
Taylor piled two long chains into the wagon as Juan dropped a sledgehammer beside them.
“Why do we have to waste our time tearing that stupid thing down for?” Juan asked. “No one uses it.”
“Well,” Taylor began as he looked for more tools to load. “I guess it got hit by lightning the other night, so now they want it taken down.”
“I don’t remember any lightning,” said Juan.
“It was probably after you went to bed. It was late. Sunday night.”
Taylor remembered the storm. It had been the violent climax to a week of daily showers, as cool western winds fought with a warm front coming up from Lake Erie. Before the warm front finally prevailed, the first thunderstorm and tornado watch of the year were announced. There were no actual tornados reported, but the wind and rain had been violent at times, waking Taylor throughout the night with long swells of thunder stretching out from the south until they finally faded towards the east around three in the morning. Ben had heard of a few lightning strikes and some toppled tree branches in Thamesville and Ridgetown, but he hadn’t heard of any damage here.
The pump-house lay at the end of a narrow gravel laneway that separated the vineyard from a few dozen old apple trees. It had been constructed at least sixty years ago, at a time when both sides of the lane had been used for tobacco and when a river could still be trusted as a healthy source of irrigation. In recent years it had been used only to store irrigation pipes and a few supplies that came in handy when workers were this far from the winery and the warehouse. The pump-house was situated in a remote corner of the vineyard, hidden behind the small apple orchard. There was no reason for any of the workers to come by this area so early in the season. If it had been hit by lightning, it was doubtful anyone would have known for a day or two, unless they had seen the flames that night.
“So why make us take it down if it’s wrecked already?” Juan complained. “Doesn’t make any sense. Just let nature take its course, and it’ll all fall down anyway.”
“I imagine they’ll plant some more vines there, or a couple more apple trees. Besides, if the building is structurally unsound, they’ll want to make sure it’s down before some school kids sneak inside and have it collapse on them.”
“School
