'Charley! Get up!' he said, wheezing, but Charley didn't move. Melony rolled Charley over on his back and {345} undid his belt. She tugged it roughly through the loops until she had the belt off him. The big man, the driver, was now only three or four apple trees away frdm her. She wound one end of the belt twice around her wrist and fist; when she let her arm hang at her side, the buckle end of the belt touched the top of her foot. The big man stopped, only two trees away from her. 'What'd you do to Charley?' he asked her, but Melony started swinging the belt; she swung it around and around her head, faster and faster. The square brass belt buckle began to whistle. Melony advanced on the heavy driver, a man in his late forties or early fifties; his hair was gray and thin, and he had quite a paunch thrust ahead of himself. He stood his ground for a moment and watched Melony come; nearer to him. The belt was a broad strap of sweat-and-oilstained leather; the brass buckle was the size of a man's palm; with its square edges, it hummed through the air like the north wind-it made a sound like a scythe.

'Hey!' the fat man said.

'Hey what, buster?' Melony said. She suddenly lowered the belt and cracked the buckle across one of the man's shins, where it lifted up a flap of blue jeans and skin that looked like a torn dollar bill. When the man bent over to grab his legs, she swiped the belt buckle across the side of his face. He sat down suddenly and put his hand to his cheek, where he discovered a gouge the approximate length and thickness of a cigarette. He hadn't the time to contemplate this wound before the belt buckle smacked him squarely across the bridge of his nose-the force of the blow, and his pain, temporarily blinded him. He tried to cover his head with one arm while he groped for Melony with the other, but she found it easy to hit him everywhere, and he quickly drew up his knees to his chest and covered his face and head with both arms. The buckle raked and nicked his spine for a, while; then she stopped using the buckle end to him-she just strapped him with the flat end of the belt across the backs of his legs and his ass. It seemed she would never stop. {346}

'Are the keys in that truck, buster?' she asked him between blows.

'Yes!' he cried, but she hit him some more before she left him. She took the belt with her, walking back through the first orchard, occasionally taking a swipe at an apple with the tip of the belt, with which she had developed some skill.

The man called Charley regained consciousness, but he didn't move or open his eyes. 'Is she gone, Charley?' the fat man asked after a while, because he hadn't moved or opened his eyes either.

'I hope so,' Charley said, but neither of the men moved until they heard Melony start the truck.;

It crossed her mind that she was in debt to Dr. Larch for once getting her a job where she had learned to drive, but it was a passing thought. She turned the truck around and drove back to the apple mart, where the foreman was surprised to see her.

She told the foreman, in front of the women who were working on the sign, that two of his men had tried to rape her. One of the men, the fat one, was married to the woman who was hand-lettering the sign. Melony said to the foreman that he could fire those two men and give her their jobs. 'I can do whatever the two of them do, and better than they do it,' Melony said.

Or else, she said to the foreman, he could call the police and she'd tell the police how she'd been attacked. The woman whose husband had assaulted Melony was pale and silent, but the other woman said to the foreman what she'd said earlier. 'She's just a tramp. What do you want to listen to her for?'

'I can do everything you do, too,' Melony said to the woman. 'Especially everything you do on your back. You look like you're shit on your back,' Melony said, and she flicked the flat end of the belt toward the woman, who jumped away as if the belt were a snake. -

'Hey, that's Charley's belt,' the foreman said.

'Right,' said Melony; this echo of Homer Wells nearly {347} brought tears to her eyes. 'Charley lost it,' she added. She went to the truck and took out her bundle-her few things, which were all wrapped in Mrs. Grogan's coat. She used the belt to cinch the coat and its contents more securely together.

'I can't fire those guys,' the foreman told her. 'They've worked here all their lives.'

'So call the police, then,' Melony said.

'She's threatening you,' the fat man's wife said to the foreman.

'No shit,' Melony said.

The foreman got Melony settled comfortably in the cider house.

'You can stay here, at least until the pickin' crew comes,' he said. 'I don't know if you want to stay here when they're here. Sometimes there's women with them, and sometimes there's kids, but if it's just men, I don't think you want to stay here. They're Negroes.'

'It'll do for now, anyway,' Melony said, looking around.

There were fewer beds than there were in the Worthingtons' cider house, and it was a lot less neat and clean, York Farm was a much smaller, poorer orchard than Ocean View, and there was no one there who cared very much about the style and shape of the quarters for the migrants; York Farm was without an Olive Worthing ton. The vinegar smell was stronger in the York Farm cider house, and behind the press were dried clots of pomace that clung to the wall like apple scab. There was no stove in the kitchen section-just a hot plate, which tended to blow the old fuses. There was one fuse box for the pump and grinder and the low-watt, overhead bulbs; the light in the refrigerator was out, but this at least made the mold less visible.

It was fine for Melony, who had contributed, lastingly, to the history of the many wrecked rooms in both the abandoned and the lived-in buildings of St. Cloud's.

'This Ocean View-the one you're lookin' for?' the {348} foreman asked. 'How come you're lookin' for it?'

'I'm looking for my boyfriend,' Melony told him.

She has a boyfriend? the foreman wondered.

He went to see how the men were doing. The fat man, whose wife had accompanied him to the hospital (although she had not spoken to him, and wouldn't for more than three months), sat rather placidly through his stitches, but he grew quite excited when the foreman told him that he'd fixed Melony up in the cider house and had given her a job-at least through the harvest.

'You gave her a job!' the fat man cried. 'She's a killer!'

Then you better keep the fuck out of her way,' the foreman told him. 'If you get in her way I'll have to fire you-she damn near made me, already.'

The fat man had a broken nose and needed a total of forty-one stitches, thirty-seven in his face and four in his tongue where he had bitten himself.

The man called Charley was better off in the stitches department. He required only four-to close the wound in his ear. But Melony had cracked two of his ribs by jumping on him; he had received a concussion from having his head stamped on; and his lower back would suffer such repeated muscle spasms that he would be kept off a ladder through the harvest.

'Holy cow,' Charley said to the foreman. 'I'd hate to meet the son-of-a-bitch who's her boyfriend.'

'Just keep out of her way,' the foreman advised him.

'Has she still got my belt?' Charley asked the foreman.

'If you ask her for your belt back, I'll have to fire you.

Get yourself a new belt,' the foreman said.

'You won't see me askin' her for nothin',' Charley said. 'She didn't say her boyfriend was coming here, did she?' he asked the foreman, but the foreman said that if Melony was looking for her boyfriend, the boyfriend must not have given her any directions; he must have left her. 'And God help him if he left her,' the foreman said- over and over again.