All Over Creation (26 page)

“I can't perform with nonorganic,” Lilith complained, picking up a cucumber and looking at it in disgust.

“Can't be helped,” said Y. “Just wash it real well and say it's organic.”

“I'm not putting that toxic shit inside my body!” she cried. “And anyway, I can't believe you're saying this! Talk about a total sellout! Isn't it?”

Lilith looked around the group for support. Geek studied a squash. Charmey moved on to the bell peppers. Several shoppers stopped to stare.

“Keep your voice down,” Y said. “It's not like you're telling people to
buy
nonorganic. Your message still has integrity. Consider it advertising.”

“Is that what you think I'm doing? Advertising? This work is sacred to me!” Eyes blazing, she hurled the cucumber at Y's head. He fielded it expertly, plucking it out of the air like a football, which seemed to make Lilith madder. She stormed down the produce aisle toward the checkout and the exit.

“I'll talk to her,” said Y. “Go ahead and buy the stuff. She'll use it.” He tossed the cuke to Charmey, who put it in the shopping cart along with the other vegetables.

“What's up with this act of hers anyway?” Frankie asked.

Geek sighed. “It's complex. C'mon. Let's finish up and get out of here.”

They followed Charmey past the salad greens, toward the root vegetables, and paused while she inspected the turnips.

“You know we have the Web site, right?” Geek said. “Mostly to promote our political agenda, but there's also a part that Lilith runs. It was her idea. The Internet is so full of porno for men, she wanted to create an erotic site for women.”

“Wow,” Frankie said. “Cool. Why?”

“She envisioned a women-only space where sex could be both fun and sacred. Where women could log on and look at empowering images and exchange stories and get turned on. She wanted the gateway to be nonthreatening, so she chose food production as a theme, because traditionally that's been woman's work and as such is a good platform for social critique.”

Geek picked up a parsnip and tossed the turnip into Charmey's cart. “The food/sex thing's been done before, but Lilith does it quite literally. The site is called ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights.' I set it up for her. Lilith does her routines, and we videotape them and upload the material from Internet cafés or public libraries, wherever we can find some decent thruput. Then we invite women to respond—”

There were several shoppers nearby. Geek lowered his voice. “I don't know. We get a lot of hits, but I don't know how many are from women.”

From across the aisle, by the onions, Charmey made a snorting sound.

“What do you mean?” Frank asked.

Geek coughed, then wiped his glasses on his sweater. “It's the e-mail. Maybe it's because I'm a guy and I recognize the diction, but ‘Oh, yeah, I dig your melons' or ‘I'm gonna ram my fat yam up your pressure cooker, baby' does not seem like a feminist sentiment.”

“Oh,” Frankie said. “Right.”

Charmey spun on her heel and took off toward the checkout aisles. They followed, standing in line behind her, but she ignored them. She picked up a folded leaflet from a display at the register and read it with her back turned to them.

“Lilith doesn't seem to get it,” Geek continued. “She says I'm sexist. Says it's just healthy role play and that the e-mails prove that women are responding to the site by getting in touch with their machisma.” He shrugged. “Maybe. This year we added the Secret Garden. It's a membership site. We take Visa, MasterCard, American Express. It's pretty unbelievable. We're raking in the dough.”

Charmey turned on him. “
Comme tu est bête!
Of course Lilith gets it! She is not stupid. Except somebody must work and make the money, no?” She thrust the leaflet at Frankie and left them standing there.

The checkout girl was waiting. Geek started to unload the produce onto the conveyor belt. “Charmey's right, of course. The site pays for our traveling and actions and helps with legal expenses.”

Frankie looked down at the paper he was holding. It was an information sheet put out by the Idaho Potato Promotions Council. “Fun Facts About Potatoes.” He stuck it in his pocket.

“I don't get it,” he said. “That's a good thing, right? I mean, Lilith is doing something she wants to do anyway, plus it pays the bills? What's the problem?”

Geek nodded. “No problem,” he said, pulling out his wallet. “Sometimes it makes the rest of us feel a little scummy, is all.”

“Be careful!” Lloyd said. “You'll spill all over the bedspread.”

I held my breath and stared at the hole in his stomach that formed the egress of his intestine. It was bright red and shiny, an angry nub. The skin surrounding it was fragile and my hands unsure. I daubed too hard.

“Don't wipe so hard! Oh, now look what you've done!” It was only the tiniest bit of blood, but it horrified us both. “Where's Melvin?”

I turned away, still holding my breath, and hauled open the window. The cold, fresh air cut the stench from his bowel. I stood there, breathing, while the nub dried, and he lay against the pillows with his eyes closed, recovering from the indignity of depending on his blundering daughter. Looking out his bedroom window I could see all the way from the driveway over to the garden and the greenhouse to the fields beyond. My face burned and the chill air felt good.

“I'm cold,” Lloyd said. “Shut that window and come finish what you started.”

A teal-colored pickup truck with the Sheriff's Department insignia on the door panel turned into the driveway.

“Who's that?” Lloyd asked, struggling to sit up. “Is someone here? Is it Melvin? Tell Melvin to come up here. I need him.”

“It's not Melvin.” I closed the window and stepped away. Two cops climbed down from the truck, scanned the property, then strolled toward the house. The gait was unmistakable, the slow roll of a holstered hip, like they had all the sweet time in the world. Farm bred and big, they were pig-faced motherfuckers—but I was trying not to say this kind of thing out loud anymore. I put my hand to my mouth and bit my knuckle. The children were with Cass, looking at some newly hatched chicks, which is to say they were as safe as they could be and still be on this earth. Poo was napping in my bedroom, still too little to be in trouble with the law.

“Who is it?” asked Lloyd. “Where's Momoko? Aren't you going to go downstairs and see who it is?”

“I can see.”

I turned back to the bed and secured the flange on his apparatus. I snapped the bag on tight.

“Ouch,” he said. “Who is it?”

I tossed a bathrobe at him and headed for the door. “It's the police. Maybe they've come to arrest your hippie friends.”

I have a runaway's fear of the cops. The sight of a uniform triggers a cloaking response—recoil like a mollusk, shrink back against a wall. Cops can smell a runaway, and as soon as they catch a whiff, they start looking. If you let them lock eyes with you, you're toast. I've tried hard to overcome this response. I don't want my kids growing up cowed by the authority of the state. But no matter how often I assert my own authority—that of a parent, a professor, an abandoned Ph.D.—the time I spent on the street overshadows it all. Fear is catching. When Phoenix was little, I saw his face grow cloudy at the approach of a patrol car, and even Ocean, who is afraid of nothing, fidgets in the presence of an officer of the law.

Then again, perhaps this is not about being a runaway at all. Maybe it's perfectly normal—a healthy response, even, to the sight of a man with a club and a gun.

When the knock came, it was surprisingly gentle. I expected the house to shake and the shutters to fall to the ground. I went to the door. The flimsy mesh of the screen obscured the details of their faces but offered me little in the way of real protection; it was as insubstantial as a San Francisco fog.

“Miz Fuller?”

Now, who would that be? I glanced over my shoulder, hoping Miz Fuller would stride forth, drying her hands on her apron, and deal with these thugs.

“Yummy Fuller, ain't it?” said the older of the two. “Mind if we have a word?”

I backed away from the door and let them open it. They followed me into the kitchen. I saw them look around at the stove labeled BREADBOX and the clock labeled MR. COFFEE—the place looked like a nuthouse. Damn Phoenix, I thought, even as the sign reminded me.

“Coffee?” I asked, and was relieved to hear that I sounded almost normal.

They looked at each other. “Yes, ma'am,” said the younger. “If it's no trouble.”

I got two mugs from the cupboard, trying to keep my hand from shaking as I poured the milk into the pitcher.

“What can I do for you, Officers?” Setting the mugs in front of them. Steady. Remembering to give them spoons.

I glanced at their faces as they loaded up their coffees. They could be brothers or cousins or clones, one a bit older, the other still damp. The two of them stirred their coffees in unison. I watched their spoons going 'round and 'round. They were solid-looking men. Pleasant. Respectable. Nice Jack Mormons, sneaking a cup of oversweetened hot caffeine. The older one wore a badge, identifying him as the sheriff. I put him in his mid-forties, balding and thick around what had once been a waist. He had the fair skin of a blond, ravaged by the sun and the wind and a lousy diet. His face was spread with a fine network of exploded capillaries. He cleared his throat.

“Sorry to bother you, Miz Fuller. With your daddy being so sick and all.” I nodded graciously. Of course. They were here to deliver their condolences. On behalf of the entire department.

“I got nothing but respect for Lloyd Fuller,” the sheriff continued.

As it should be.

“Course, some folks had a problem with him over the years on account of those crazy ideas of his, but it ain't him we come about.”

It ain't?

“It's them other people. The ones you been allowing to stay on your daddy's property here. That gang of hippies.”

He said the word “hippies” like he was hawking up a ball of phlegm and blowing it out his lips. I looked at his face again and saw that it was not pleasant anymore, but stupid and cruel. He caught my eye.

“What about them?” I could feel the tremor in my voice, a jaggedy rise in pitch caused by the constriction in my throat, as the whole script unrolled before me: the Spudnik, busted for the narcotics that those hippies were most certainly carrying; me, convicted of harboring drug dealers and being an accessory to the crime; my kids, sent into foster care on some brutal farm, while I served time in the Power County penitentiary.
Oh, please, God, get me out of Idaho, and I promise I'll never set foot here again.

“Well, we're just keeping an eye on them. They were involved in a ruckus at the potato-processing plant over in Pocatello the other day, and yesterday some property got defaced in the Stop-N-Save. We got complaints about them disturbing the peace at the school, too. Maybe you heard about that?”

You could look at it that way. Daisy had disturbed my peace with his basket of flyers, never mind the entire gang moving into my parents' driveway.

“You could talk to them,” I said. “I don't know where they are, but I'm sure they'll be back soon.”

“Oh, we know where they are,” the sheriff said. “They're over at the public library. Right now it's you we want to talk to. The reason we're here, Miz Fuller, is we wanted to know what your connection is. We figured you must know them, since you're letting 'em stay here.”

This was easy. “There's no connection,” I said confidently. “Absolutely none. I don't know them at all. It's my father and mother they came here to see. They're interested in the seeds.”

The sheriff was watching me closely. He didn't say anything.

“You know. Fullers' Seeds.” I was anxious to clear up this confusion, to get the answer right, but I was speaking too quickly. “My parents' business? Of course, it's not much of a business, more like a hobby, really. They're retired. It keeps them busy. . . .”

“Well, Miz Fuller,” he said, “we don't have a problem with your parents' business either. My ma buys kales and lettuces off them, and she gets a good crop of greens, if you like that sort of thing. It's these other folks we're concerned with.” The sheriff grinned then, and I thought I saw a flicker of malice kindle in his pale blue gaze. Like he knew me. Like all of a sudden this was personal. “We thought that what with your
background
and all, you mighta had some previous acquaintance. . . .”