All Over Creation (25 page)

“Let me rub them for you,” Lilith said. “It's good to keep the circulation going.”

She was Ocean's favorite, and the boy liked her, too. Turned red whenever she stood near him. Lilith had started teaching Ocean some kind of dance, and sometimes he'd look out the window and see them leaping and spinning in circles and waving their arms all over, bundled up against the cold. Modern dance, they called it. Expressive. Improvisational.

They reminded him of the Young Potato Growers, the way they watched him as he talked, carefully taking in every word. Young people had such clear eyes. It had been a long time since anyone had listened to him like that. He tried to remember his yearly speech.
Seasonable cultural practices.

“What else?” they urged.

“Too many P's!” they howled.

Lloyd nodded sheepishly.

“Were the agricultural-chemical corporations paying you?” they wanted to know. “Kickbacks? Sponsorship? Is that why you promoted their products?”

“No,” Lloyd said. “They supported our events and the like, but that wasn't it.”

“What was it, then?”

He shook his head and looked at them, eyes clear, brows furrowed, trying to understand. He sighed.

“Well, that's how things were back then. We just believed.”

“But people
still
believe!”

“No,” Lloyd said. “They don't. Not like they used to.”

“But they're still using it! You said so yourself. The chemicals, the poisons—”

“It's more complicated than that. Margins are tight. Prices are down. You need higher yields to make a profit, and inputs maximize your yields. A lot of these fellas, they're cash poor. Got their whole lives tied up in their land and one season's harvest. Not a whole lot of room for error. It takes guts to try something new, far as I can see.”

“But when you listen to these guys, all they do is say how great the stuff is—”

“That's all it is,” said Lloyd. “Just talk. Deep down they know.”

“—all the while it's killing them. It's like they're junkies, man!”

“Well, I wouldn't know about that.”

“When did you stop believing?”

“Well . . .” Lloyd closed his eyes. He didn't know how to answer.

 

 

Any resemblance to the Young Potato Growers stopped with the way they dressed. The Young Potato Growers were a clean-cut bunch, but this lot was a disgrace.

“Are they poor?” he asked his wife. “Are they destitute? Is that why they wear that garb?”

Momoko shook her head. She was wearing a ratty old sweater with holes in the elbows, dotted all over with balls of pilled wool that clung to her like dung to a sheep's bottom. Crusted bits of food and sticks and dirt had become part of the knit. Her trousers had tears in the knees and seat, which she had long since stopped repairing. She took a damp wad of Kleenex from the rolled cuff of her sleeve and blew her nose. The tissue disintegrated in her fingers.

“Momoko,” Lloyd said, “why don't you change your clothes? Let Yumi find you something nice to put on.”

She shook her head and sniffled, then tucked the wad back into her cuff, but it fell out again. Wherever she went, she left behind a trail of soggy tissues.

 

 

“It's the death of the land,” he told them. “Soil's dead now. Water's dead, too. You should have seen the birds when I was a boy! Oh, my goodness, the sky would be black with 'em!”

“Oh, man!” they said. “You are so
cool!
”

I am? Lloyd thought.

He is? his daughter wondered.

She would stand at his bedroom door and hover on the threshold or by the ledge of the windowsill, as though to ensure an escape route should she need one. It made Lloyd nervous.

“Don't they drive you nuts?” she asked.

“No. I like them. You drive me nuts.”

She looked hurt. “Me? Why?”

“The way you're standing there. Either come all the way in or get out.”

She hesitated, then came in and sat down on Melvin's chair. She stared at the same spot on the carpet for a long time, but the effect was not the same as when Melvin sat there. Melvin gave off a sense of calm, which settled around his shoulders as though all the molecules in the air were aligning and coming to rest around him. Yumi's molecules were just twitching and fidgeting all over the place, the way they always had.

“How can you tolerate them?” she asked at last. “You hate hippies.”

“Is that what they are?”

“Of course that's what they are! Don't tell me you didn't notice. Look at Melvin's hair!”

“They are respectful,” Lloyd said. “They listen.”

“They take drugs, Dad. They smoke pot—can't you smell it on them?”

“They smell like the outdoors.”

“Fine. Look at the way they dress, then. You would never have let me out of the house dressed like that.”

“Didn't seem to stop you. You left anyway.”

“I left because you couldn't tolerate my lifestyle,” she said.

“You left because you couldn't face your mother and me after what you'd done.”

 

 

She'd been fourteen years old. How can a fourteen-year-old have a lifestyle? But looking at the boy, Phoenix, he saw that one could. The boy skulked around the house wearing a pair of brand-new Carharts, so big they slipped way down around his hipbones, showing a good six inches of his boxer shorts underneath. What was keeping them up? Lloyd wondered. It made him nervous to watch the boy, worrying that he'd lose the whole lot altogether.

“You steal those trousers off of someone's clothesline, boy?” Lloyd asked, trying to make a joke. “Could fit two of you in there, one in each leg.”

When the boy still refused to answer, Lloyd gave up. “Get a belt,” he said curtly.

The girl was different. She was still just a little thing and dressed in whatever it was that her mother put on her. She was more interested in what was going on inside a person's body than what the person wore on it. She stuck by Melvin like a burr whenever he was changing Lloyd's ostomy bag. The operation continued to bother her, and she bothered Melvin, asking questions incessantly:

“What's a nintestine?”

“Do I have a bowel?”

“How does it get to my butthole?”

Finally Melvin called Lilith, who took the girl into the bathroom. Down the hallway Lloyd could hear them, talking and giggling.

“That
tickles!
” Ocean squealed from time to time, and then their voices dropped down again to a murmur.

He had drifted off to sleep when the door to his bedroom flew open and Ocean burst in, buck naked, covered with paint.

“Tutu Lloyd!” she cried. “Look! I've got
organs!
”

She twirled around as though to show off a party dress, so he could see what had been painted on her skin: great sulfur-colored lungs on either side of a purplish liver; a large, bean-shaped stomach; a loopy mass of gray, serpentine intestine; a pair of small, podlike ovaries.

“I've got two,” she explained happily as she traced the fallopian tubes that sprouted from the pods like tentacles. “Phoenix and Poo don't have any, because they're boys.” She bent over to inspect her belly. “Don't they look like flowers?”

Lloyd averted his eyes. “Put some clothes on,” he said. His voice came out sounding harsh and cruel, and instantly he regretted it.

Ocean froze. Her arms dropped to her sides, but just as quickly they rose again to hug her chest, smudging the greasepaint and smearing the carefully drawn twists of her viscera. Desperate and naked, she looked at Lilith, who stood in the doorway holding a paintbrush.

Lloyd panicked, tried to think of something to say. His mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

“Why don't you show him your heart?” Lilith suggested.

Lloyd looked at her gratefully. “Yes,” he said. “Show me your heart.”

It was bright red and plump and purple veined, tucked beneath her rib cage.

“Can you feel it beating?” she whispered.

“My goodness,” Lloyd said.

“I can feel yours, too.”

Her small hand on his bare chest was warm and light. When she scampered from the room to show her organs to her mother, Lloyd laid his hand on the spot she'd touched, as though to hold in the warmth, and when he removed it, he noticed the stain on his skin. He turned over his palm. It was smeared with the bloodred paint from her greasy heart.

“Waffle Fries.”

“Dinner Browns.”

“Simply Shreds.”

“Potato Zesties.”

“What are we going to tell them?” Lilith asked, peeling off a sticky orange label and applying it to the side of the box of frozen Zesties.

“Depends on what we decide to do,” said Y.

“I'm for staying,” Geek said. “I want to learn more about their seed operation.”

Y closed the freezer door and moved on to the next one. “What about our work?”

“This is our work, and what better place to do it? This is the heart of potato country. Awesome place for actions.”

“Criss Cross Fries.”

“Twice Baked Potatoes, three different flavors.”

Y studied the stacks of newly labeled boxes and shook his head. “So we say like, ‘Hey, dudes, I know we just met and all, but do you mind if we live in your driveway?' ”

“No,” said Geek. “We offer to pitch in and help.” He held out his hand to Frankie for another sheet. The labels were bright safety orange, each carrying Charmey's illustration of a spud overlaid with the skull and crossbones. Underneath the graphic read a warning: DANGER! BIOHAZARD! THESE POTATOES
MAY
CONTAIN A GENETICALLY ENGINEERED PESTICIDE! He stepped back and squinted at the freezer shelves. “Hey, these new labels show up great! They pass the squint test.”

“Golden Crinkles.”

“Curley QQQ's.”

“Lloyd won't mind,” Lilith said. “He acts crusty, but he's really sweet inside. Did you hear what he was saying about the death of the land? That blew me away. I want to use that on the Web site.”

“What about the old lady?” asked Frankie. He was acting as lookout, scanning the aisles for stock boys and supermarket management.

Geek rubbed his hands to warm them up. “She's cool. She showed me the greenhouse and the seed shed. What a collection! It's like a gold mine in there.”

“So who's the problem?”

“Yummy,” said Lilith, making a face.

“Yumi,”
Geek corrected. “You pronounce it ‘Yumi.' She's not so bad. She's just got a lot going on with her parents and her kids.”

“Whatever. She's very uncool. You checked out her Web site.
Yummy Acres?
”

“I agree that's dumb, but I like her. She's a teacher.”

Lilith snorted. “Geek, she's also a real estate agent. She supports the private ownership of land!”

“Tater Tots.”

“Tater Babies.”

“Fast Food Fries.” Y was finishing the last stack. “Can you believe they would name something ‘Fast Food Fries'? Like that's a selling point?”

“I bet they taste great,” said Frankie wistfully.

“I bet all this shit tastes great,” said Y, closing the freezer. “Okay, Seeds. That's all twenty-seven different varieties of frozen processed potato products, not including all the flavor variations.”

“Wow.”

They stood back and admired their work. All the boxes and bags of potatoes, stacked on the freezer-section shelves, now carried safety-orange biohazard labels, permanently and prominently displayed on their sides, facing the consumer.

“Excellent work,” Y declared, clapping Frankie on the shoulder. “What the government won't provide, the citizens must. Stop-N-Save shoppers deserve to know what puts the zest in their Zesties and the curl in their QQQ's, eh, Frankie? How we doing? You think it's safe to hit the dairy section?”

Frankie shook his head. “One of the stock boys is looking at us funny. I think we should split.”

“Hey,” said Lilith, glancing around. “Where's Charmey with my produce?”

 

 

They found her in the Fresh Foods section, pushing a shopping cart and digging through a heap of waxy cucumbers.
“Quel dommage,”
she said, wrinkling her nose. “Not one organic vegetable in all of Power Country.”