each other?”
Dennis shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”
CJ put a twenty on the table, then he and Dennis stepped out into the cold night air. They took Dennis’s truck. CJ thought about running upstairs to get Thor but decided against it, letting the inclination pass. The dog had been all over town the last few days and probably needed some rest. Dennis pulled onto Main and turned onto Eighth, headed west.
Batesville, Adelia’s longtime co-conspirator in this part of the Festival, was a nineteen-mile straight shot west over land made up of steep hills, forests thick with elderly trees, and gorges that seemed to appear out of nowhere. When the first roads went in, their builders avoided the worst of these hazards to wind up with a circuitous route that turned the nineteen miles into forty-one. CJ thought it was a testament to the strength of the Festival tradition that the residents of Batesville made the trip—in the old days by horse and wagon, braving the straight shot between the towns, and now by way of a road trip twice that distance.
By the time they got there, cars lined both sides of the state road for a hundred yards. Dennis parked the truck, and soon he and CJ were walking toward the crowd gathering at the town line. There were so many people, blocking the road to any through traffic, that CJ and Dennis had to go down into the ditch to get around the crowd enough to see anything. They picked a spot near one of the portable light stands that turned night into day for about thirty yards in any direction. In years past, this event would have taken place by torchlight.
As they neared the site of impending warfare CJ heard someone in the crowd call his name. He stopped and scanned the myriad faces until he saw someone waving at him. It was Sr. Jean Marie, who offered him a grin while hoisting a handful of tomatoes. He waited as she worked her way through the crowd toward him.
“Looks like you’re ready to unleash the apocalypse,” he said.
She laughed. “We can’t always wait on God to execute His judgment, now can we?”
“No, I guess we can’t,” CJ agreed.
The nun handed him a couple of tomatoes. “It’s cathartic, isn’t it?”
“I’m not sure; I haven’t been here in a very long time. But isn’t this just for kids?”
“Aren’t we all just kids at heart?”
“I am,” Dennis said. To illustrate, he grabbed a tomato from CJ and looked ready to release it at any likely target that came into range.
“Good man,” the nun said. As Dennis took a few steps away— whether by design or because of the state of things, CJ didn’t know—Sr. Jean Marie looked up from her spot at his side and asked, “Have you given any thought to what we talked about?”
It amused CJ that even a week ago he would have answered that question with his customary avoidance. After a moment of silence he said, “I think I’ve absorbed most of it.”
The nun gave his arm a squeeze. “Good, because we’ve got too much to carry without dragging around anger. The sooner you let go of that, the better you’ll be.”
It wasn’t something he could argue, so he nodded and smiled. She gave his arm another squeeze, turned and disappeared into the crowd.
Over the years the event had developed a set of unofficial rules, one of which was that local farmers spent the few weeks leading up to it collecting the most ripe tomatoes, bringing them en masse for the kids to use as ammunition. From where he stood, CJ saw several bushels of tomatoes in a line across the road, with quite a few more in pickup trucks ready to replenish the young warriors.
“I can’t believe this still goes on,” CJ said to Dennis, who had just rejoined him.
“Last year a citizen c-committee tried to p-put a stop to it.”
“What happened?”
“Have you ever t-tried to remove tomato p-puree from a gas tank?”
It looked as if things were just about to start. CJ guessed there were two hundred kids, forming two opposing groups, each with at least two tomatoes in hand. When CJ looked past the kids, he saw another group of adults, and long lines of cars and trucks. What was interesting to see were the men and women from both towns who mingled near the invisible line that made up the Adelia border. CJ saw a handshake or two, heard easy conversation and laughter.