The Year Money Grew on Trees - Aaron Hawkins [43]
Since I didn't have any money, I said, "Maybe I could charge it."
"Do you have an account set up already? Or maybe your parents?" Jimmy looked hopefully at me, trying his best to be helpful.
"Can you check for my dad's account? Dan Jones?"
Jimmy turned around and grabbed what looked like an old shoebox. Inside was a collection of cards with names and numbers on them. He thumbed through looking for Dan Jones while Sam and I waited nervously.
"Ah, here it is," he said, pulling the card out. "Hasn't had anything charged in a long time," he said, inspecting it. "Shall I put the Diazinon down?"
I turned to look at Sam, but he quickly turned away, trying to avoid any involvement in what I was about to do.
"How much is it?" I asked Jimmy weakly.
"Twenty dollars."
"Yeah, I guess you better put it down," I said slowly. "How often are you supposed to come in and pay that, anyway?"
"I don't know," said Jimmy starting to write. "From the looks of some of these cards, not very often."
That cheered me up a little.
"Do you have any tools that you could use to do the actual spraying?" I asked Jimmy, looking at the bag. "'Cause this is like a powder that I would pour into water and mix up, right?"
"I know we have some hand sprayers I can show you."
He led me to where a couple of the hand sprayers were sitting on a shelf. They looked to hold about two gallons of water and had a handle that you could pump to pressurize the liquid inside. There was also a little nozzle attached to a hose.
"I think people mostly use these to spray around their houses, to kill ants and things like that," Jimmy said, demonstrating how the pump worked. He let me try too.
"How many trees do you have to spray?" he asked.
"Three hundred."
"Oh, man, it'd probably take a year with one of those," he said, shaking his head. "I think most people doing that kind of job have big tanks and pumps."
I looked around the store feeling discouraged. "I guess I'll have to figure something else out," I finally said.
As we walked back toward the front, we passed the cold case holding the cans of pop. Sam motioned toward it and gave me a begging look.
"Better get one for Amy and Michael too," I said to him.
"Can we charge these four pops too?" I asked Jimmy when we got to the counter. "Oh, and we might as well fill up the tractor with gas."
"Anything else?" he asked as he wrote on the card.
I looked at the bag of poison again. "Any idea how much water to mix up with it?"
Jimmy turned to the fat man sitting on the stool.
"Mr. Sherwood, how much water should you mix with this stuff?" he called out, holding up the bag.
"One bag to about two hundred gallons," the man yelled back very loudly, eyeing me closely.
"How much should you put on a tree?" I asked Jimmy.
"How much should you put on a tree?" he called out to the man again.
"About half a gallon."
"Should be good for about four hundred trees, then," said Jimmy.
We filled up the tractor with Jimmy's help at the old gas pump outside.
"Thanks a lot," I shouted to him as we drove off with Sam sitting in the wagon to make sure the Diazinon and pops didn't fall out. "We'll be seeing you again."
I placed my hopes in there being something in Mr. Nelson's old shed that could be used for spraying. My cousins and I had taken quite a few things out of the shed already, but there were still lots of cardboard boxes and bags around and various mechanical parts scattered everywhere. I rummaged through them, not really sure what a pump would look like. My eyes kept coming back to a coil of black tubing that looked like a long garden hose. I grabbed the tubing and started to unravel it. At one end was a metal gun shaped just like a big water pistol. It had a trigger and everything. I pulled the whole contraption out of the shed to investigate.
The other end of the hose was attached to a round metal piece with a hole in the middle that then led to a long straight pipe. I laid the hose out in the driveway next to my house and tried to figure out how the thing