It was midnight in the central Florida orange grove. The foliage blotted out the night sky, the moonlight only faintly peeking through the leaves. The car’s headlights behind me illuminated the trees lining the narrow little harvest road, reaching up into the darkness and off into space. My twin brother slept it the car while we both waited for our younger brother to come up from the coast with a dozen not-so-empty citrus haulers. Although, tonight, oranges weren’t going to be their only cargo. We’d be loading the trucks the rest of the night and driving through morning. We had miles to go before we were to get any sleep.
Freshly harvested crates of oranges lined either side of the road, marching into the darkness. We’d picked fruit all day. The vine-ripened oranges were at their most pungent. We needed the strong acidic smell to cover the scent of our more precious and lucrative cargo: Cuban whiskey. We could truck the contraband safely enough through the heart of Florida, but we were sure to be stopped by Revenue Agents when got back home and into southern Georgia. That’s what we needed the oranges for; we’d need the cover that we were orange shippers to sneak the booze past the revenooers.
I could hear the caravan coming out of the South before I could see it. A dozen trucks, coming up from the coast, already packed full of cargo boxes. The boxes matched the ones sitting here in the darkness, but they didn’t have oranges in them. The engines growled in the darkness as the drivers picked his way through the groves.
Although I didn’t consciously notice it at first, there was something wrong with the sound of the engines, something unfamiliar. If you’d heard one citrus hauler, you’ve heard them all, I told myself. But the unfamiliarity nagged in the back of my mind as I waited in the darkness.
I felt a sharp pang of fear when I could see the headlights of the first truck as it turned onto the harvest road. The engine gave a not-quite-right grumble as it accelerated out of the turn. It was then that I finally realized something was truly wrong. The lights were much too bright. Those weren’t our trucks. I was sure they were carrying people we did not want to meet.
I hurried back to the car and woke up my brother. “Hersh, wakeup!” I shouted, “somebody’s coming and it aint Bobby.” It was just the two of us. What could we do without our army of pickers? They’d long gone back into Arcadia, exhausted from the day’s picking.
I grabbed my Thompson out of the back along with two big disks of ammo. Were we really going to have to shoot our way out of this? It wasn’t the first time we’d crossed paths with Rum Chasers. But we’d been lucky so far. Fortunately, my twin didn’t ask any questions. He immediately understood we were in trouble and reached for his own tommy gun he kept just beneath the dash.
We walked around from either side of the car and stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the headlights. It was the best place to be to blind your opponents. When the shooting needed to start, we’d just both step a little to the side, blinding the feds with our headlights. We loaded our magazines, clicked off the safeties, and pulled back the firing pins almost in unison. “Those aren’t Bobby’s trucks,” he said. “I hope he’s okay,” I replied. We tried to look menacing as the convoy that-wasn’t-our-convoy approached.
Even in the dark, I could tell the trucks were like no other machines I’d ever seen. They gleamed in the darkness. Now that they were closer, I could hear the engines weren’t grumbling so much as humming. Their headlights pierced the night and made ours look pale in comparison. We were in trouble. Who were these guys? The lead truck came to a halt about twenty feet from where we stood. The whole caravan sort of stopped and settled onto the road.
We could hear more than see a small army begin jumping out of the vehicles, but they didn’t come for us. No. They were taking the oranges. I griped my gun harder and gave a shout. Nobody altered their course, nobody paid attention. I hesitated. We needed those stupid oranges as cover for the whole operation, but they wouldn’t do us any good if they were shot up in a firefight. All we could really do is watch as they loaded up our fruit.
Two people got out of either side of the lead truck, or whatever it was. I was relieved to see our little brother climbing out of the passenger side, but I didn’t recognize the other guy. They met us face to face on that strange little stretch surrounded by trees, darkness, and silence. The stranger spoke up first.
“I’m sorry Mister Sorrells,” he said in a strange accent. He clearly wasn’t from around here. “But my friends and I need your fruit much more than … y’all do” He smiled, relishing his fake drawl. “Your brother was so kind to lead us to some oranges that won’t be missed,” he finished with a smile.
Bobby looked unhappy. “Sorry, Hugh,” he said to me. He simply shrugged to Herschell, meeting his gaze then looking at the ground. We stood in this strange little standoff while the stranger’s crew loaded up the last of our fruit. The odd little man acted as if he were perfectly safe with our little brother on his side of the space, a kind of hostage. As the last of our crop was loaded up, the stranger had a couple of heavy crates brought up front and set at our feet.
“We need your oranges for the long voyage home,” he explained. But it didn’t really explain anything. “However, we wouldn’t want to take your fruit without paying for it,” motioning to the two crates. “Who knows, maybe when we come back next year, we might do business again.” He smiled, turned, and went back to what was clearly not a truck.
Bobby walked towards us, turned, and stood beside us. Together the three of us watched as the row of trucks-that-weren’t-trucks started their engines. The low rumble rose in pitch slowly until it cycled into inaudibility. The vehicles began to lift themselves right off the road. They rose slowly until they could peek just above the trees, and then shot off into the night right over our heads, the woosh of the ships knocking our hats off.
We didn’t really have much to say to each other. We were stunned by the whole strange event. We slowly realized that our whole operation collapsed in front of our eyes. Without the cover of oranges, we couldn’t move our whiskey. Bobby had a lot of explaining to do. “Gone,” he said to our silent questions. “The trucks are gone. The whiskey’s gone. They took everything and threatened to kill me if I didn’t take them to our oranges.”
“Well shit, Robert!” I said quietly. I wanted to shout at him.
“Not stolen” said Hersh as he walked over to the crates left behind. “Gold” he said. “The crates are full of gold,” almost in a daze.
“I’m getting outta here,” Bobby said. “I don’t like Arcadia. I hate Florida. And I don’t even eat oranges” he complained.
“Me too” I said. “The feds and the police I can handle. But this … “I motioned helplessly into the dark.
Herschell said “sure, Hughey.” He and I almost always agreed, but he had the better business sense. “Florida won’t be a safe place for a family of smugglers who lost their shipment and their cover crop. But maybe …” he added thoughtfully, “maybe next year we might want to come back and move some more oranges for these guys.
Scot Sorrells @2024
On the Plate 