The boy who stood before him was a teen, his head topped with a tousle of yellow hair. “It’s me,” he said when Ray did not respond, his mouth curling into a full broad smile. “Bish ­Kenner. Bishop, I mean. You forget me, Ray?”

“Bish,” Ray said quietly. “Sure. You’re just a lot bigger than the last I saw you.”

“Well, I am,” he said. “’Most fifteen.”

“Well, good,” Ray said.

“You were in the fightin’?”

“Some.”

“In Japan?” The words came quickly but then the boy seemed embarrassed, for he looked away quickly, his sharp shoulders seeming to jump up and down for a moment, a kind of oblique apology.

“No, not in Japan,” Ray said. “Italy and France, mostly.”

“No kidding,” the boy said, his embarrassment gone now. “My brother went to the Pacific. Okinawa.”

“That so? How’s he?”

“Got back about a month ago. Japs took his leg.” He paused. “Ah jeez. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“You don’t gotta apologize,” Ray said. “Goddamn Japs took Chet’s leg. To hell with them, I say.”

The boy laughed at this response, relieved. In the group behind the boy Ray could see a few others smiling at his words. “Yeah, to hell with the goddamn Japs,” Bish said with apparent glee. “To hell with them.”

“Listen,” Ray said, “you tell Chet I said hello, would you?”

“I will,” the boy said, still smiling.

“What the hell’s going on?”

“Ray’s back,” Bish called into the trees.

“I don’t care if Jesus himself has returned,” the voice came, closer now, heading down through the hot rows of pear trees, “you all’d better get moving.”

The pickers—young men and women, most of whom Ray recognized in one way or another from the high school—had already begun scrambling back into the trees or to the truck to gently spill their loads into the pears already waiting there. Bish was the last to flee, finally waving silently and disappearing just as the foreman—for of course it was the foreman—appeared from between the rows.

Ray did not recognize him at first, a thin, gruff-voiced man of perhaps thirty-five, clean-shaven and wearing a tan cap upon what appeared to be a stubbled scalp. But then the features came into focus and he said the man’s name: “Bob Campo.”

“That’s right,” Campo said. “What’s your business?”

“Heading up to the house,” Ray told him.

“I’m gonna give you one more chance to tell me what you’re doing here and then . . .”

“And then what, Bob?”

Ray did not wait for a response but turned and continued on his way.

So quiet were the orchard rows. So fired with summer heat. It came up from the earth. It flooded through them all.