by Dana Mentink
“Er, I was just wondering.”
“Yes?” she prodded.
“Why are you dressed like a hubcap?”
Ruth sighed. “It’s a long story.”
Ed was as blindingly luminous in the afternoon sun as he had been in the morning. The light shone off his bald head like the coronas that surrounded the saints in old religious paintings. It was startling to see such display of scalp on a man still in his thirties.
Standing with him, arms crossed, was a tall woman with skin the color of the crystallized top on a crème brûlée. Ruth could not decide if she was African American or perhaps of Indian descent. She wore a cropped yellow shirt and low-slung jeans. Ruth didn’t think her own stomach could ever be that flat, short of extreme liposuction and an industrial iron.
“Hello, Mr. Honeysill. Did you get settled into the hotel okay?” It was not a luxury hotel by any stretch of the imagination, but on weekday mornings, the nearby Buns Up Bakery whipped up a batch of their delectable apple fritters and the hotel patrons were treated to an onslaught of delirium-producing fragrance. Other than that, an extra roll of toilet paper and a free copy of the Finny Times were about the only amenities.
“We’re all checked in. Ruth, this is my wife, Candace. She decided to join me on this trip to spend some time on the beach. We live in Arizona, so beaches aren’t easy to come by.”
The woman smiled and pushed a fringe of long straight hair from her eyes with a French-tipped fingernail. “Pleased to meet you. Where is the beach, by the way? All I’ve seen so far is fog.”
“It dissipates in the afternoon usually. The fog, I mean,” Ruth said. “I’m afraid our beaches might not be what you’re expecting. They’re mostly gravel, and the water is only suited for the supremely committed.” She had to admit gleaning a certain perverse amusement from the tourists who came to this tiny corner of California expecting to bask in sunshine but instead immediately dashing off to buy sweatshirts. “You have to go farther south to find tanning rays and sunny beaches.”
Candace nodded. “I guess I should have checked my AAA manual before I packed my bathing suit.”
Ed kissed Candace on the neck and pulled the shirt up around her shoulders. “I’ll make sure my next business trip puts us around Pismo Beach.”
Ruth noticed a faint look of annoyance steal over the woman’s face.
“Well, shouldn’t we be getting to the top of this nose thing?” Candace asked.
As they walked, the sun gradually emerged until only faint whispers of fog remained. The slope was graveled and muddy in places. Wild mustard blanketed the hills between clusters of twisted oak and cedar trees. A sweet smell of new blossoms greeted them. Ruth paused occasionally to act as tour director.
“Frederick Finny settled here after his ship ran aground trying to deliver a load of bootleg Canadian liquor. He tried dumping the rum into the water to lighten the load, but that only resulted in drunken crabs.”
They continued on until they reached a flat, grassy plateau buzzing with activity. On the perimeter of the area, people were constructing booths and tacking up signs. Farther away, a group of men wrestled what appeared to be a giant sleeping bag. One man fought with a green fabric mountain, while another tinkered with an enormous wicker basket.
Ruth saw Maude deep in conversation with a third man who stood away from the group. Her mouth fell open as she watched her friend finger her hair and giggle. Yes, it was definitely a girlish giggle, emanating from the mouth of the Wicked Witch of Whist.
Maude looked less than thrilled when she noticed the group of three approaching. Eyes narrowed, she asked, “What are you doing here?”
Ruth said sweetly, “Don’t you remember? I’m giving Mr. Honeysill a tour of our wonderful hamlet. We’re heading up nose. This is his wife, Candace. Candace, this is Maude Stone, chairwoman of our festival. Would you like to introduce us to your friend?”
The man standing next to Maude was, Ruth had to admit, very pleasing to the eye. He had close-cropped blond hair, wide shoulders, and muscled arms straining against the confines of his T-shirt. She thought he looked like Superman, only slightly less inflated.
“Hello. I’m Bing Mitchell. I’m the owner of this balloon company, Phineas Phogg Hot Air Adventures. I’m here to do a few demonstrations for your festival.”
Ruth introduced her two traveling companions. Bing took Ed’s hand and then his wife’s. “I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Candace before.” He gave her a warm smile.
Ruth thought for a moment that it was a shade too warm.
“Are you both here for the festival, too?” Bing asked.
Ed nodded. “Sure are. Just checking out the local fungus. You do look familiar to me. I think we saw you when we were up in Oregon. Isn’t that right, hon?”
Candace nodded. “Yes. I got to watch him inflate the balloons while you were networking,” she said.
Ruth noticed a tiny stroke of sarcasm in the woman’s tone. “Is this where you launch the balloons and land them?”
Maude piped up. “Oh, that’s not how it works. It’s practically impossible to land a balloon in the same spot it was launched from on account of the wind and all. Isn’t that right, Bing?”
He smiled, dimpling. “It’s largely improvisation and luck. We can generally land in the right vicinity. Don’t worry, we won’t take your visitors to Kansas or anything. We’re just going to anchor the balloon and send it up so people can get a bird’s-eye view of Finny and the ocean.”
“Sounds like a popular attraction to me,” Ruth said. “We’re on our way to tour Pistol Bang’s.”
He laughed. “I just love this place. It’s a slice of life, all right. I really need to shoot some video. It’s a hobby of mine.” He looked toward the open field where two men in Phineas Phogg T-shirts were starting the long process of inflating the balloons. “Well, I need to get back to work. It was a pleasure meeting you all, and seeing you again, Candace.”
Ruth watched Maude follow Bing’s departing form, a dreamy expression on her face. Then she realized that the Honeysills had continued meandering their way up nose. She left Maude to her ogling and hurried to catch up with the Honeysills, nearing them just in time to catch the hint of anger in their conversation.
“—just saying maybe there is a way to be in the black without threatening your high moral fiber.” Candace snapped out the words like rubber bands.
“Quality and integrity—that’s how to build a business, Candy; you know that,” Ed said.
“Didn’t you ever just do something without thinking of the morality or sensibility of it? Just do it because it feels right?”
He stopped and turned to face her. “As a matter of fact, yes. I married you. Just because I love you, and it feels right.” He reached out a hand to her.
Ruth saw her fold her hands across her chest. She almost didn’t catch her response.
“Maybe it doesn’t feel right to me anymore,” the young woman whispered.
Ruth cleared her throat as she caught up. “Well, that was interesting. I’ve never met a balloonist before. This fog festival is really opening up our world.”
Candace nodded faintly, and they resumed their walk.
“How far up nose are we headed, Mrs. Budge?” Ed asked.
“Call me Ruth. It’s just another mile or so, but it’s an easy walk. I take the birds up here all the time because there’s a pond where they can get their water fix.”
“You have more than one bird?” he asked.
“Yes, currently I’ve got seven of the feathery monsters. One was delivered to me from the animal clinic just last week, minus a gangrenous leg and an eye that he lost tangling with a cat. Milton is doing well, but he’s going to have to toughen up a bit to get anything to eat in my backyard.”
Candace slowed to walk next to her. “Where did you come up with that name?”
“My first husband, Phillip, named all our birds after the presidents. I decided to carry on the family tradition.”
“Ed told me that you have a business—Phillip’s Farm or something like that?” Candace said.
“Phillip’s Worm Emporium. My husband, Monk, and I raise worms for commercial sale.”
Candace looked at her as though she were speaking in tongues.
Ruth felt the strange intermingled pride and sadness that came when she told people about the farm. The ridiculous name emerged from one of their running jokes. At the same time, she embraced the strength that began to grow when she dove into the silly idea and made it a profitable business. Phillip would be proud of her, and it felt good. She knew he also would be happy she had found a good man to share it with, an amazing man of tireless strength who rubbed her feet and knitted sweaters. She enjoyed, too, the knowledge that she and Monk were partners, each helping the other’s business to succeed. Monk embraced his worm-tending duties as cheerfully as she did her work at his catering business.
“I hear you’ve got someone in the truffle business here,” Ed said. “That’s a specialty of mine.”
“Hugh Lemmon. He’s just starting a new venture.” Ruth paused for a moment. “How does a truffle grow, anyway? I only know about mushrooms and worms.”
“They live in symbiosis with the roots of specific trees. The truffle passes nutrients and water to the tree and in exchange absorbs sugars for itself. The rarity comes in because there are many fungi that can provide the same service to the tree, so they all compete for space in the root system.” He scratched his shiny scalp. “The truffle fungus doesn’t win out all that often.”
“So it’s a truffle-eat-truffle world out there?”
“If you’re lucky. You can’t really weed out competing fungus species, so the only two choices are trying to provide hospitable conditions for the truffle fungus to take hold, or finding them in the wild.”
“That’s where the pigs come in?”
Ed laughed. “Actually, dogs do better because they don’t gobble up the prize.”
They emerged from a copse of trees onto the driveway of the Pistol Bang Mushroom Farm. The first building to greet them was a stone structure, with two small panes of glass serving as windows and a thick wooden door. The shingles were covered with a veneer of grizzly moss. A mushroom-shaped mailbox stood on a post off to one side, flowering clematis vines doing their best to smother it.
“Dimple must be in the back. Let’s go around and see.” She led the way into a burgeoning garden area. An irregular stone pathway ambled hither and yon through a collection of flowering shrubs and spiky grass mounds. The newly emerged sun bathed the whole mélange in dazzling light.
“Oh, it’s gorgeous,” Candace said. She stooped to finger the lacy white hydrangeas twined over a rough pine bench.
“Dimple is an amazing gardener. She studied botany in college.” Ruth was surprised to hear an almost maternal tone in her own words. “She took over the property two years ago and began a complete overhaul, starting with building the tunnel. It’s quite an astonishing place, really. Those logs over there standing next to each other are oak, waiting to be inoculated.”
The logs stood close together but not touching, like miniature sentries alongside the ten-foot-tall polytunnel. A delicious smell of sawdust and hot wax hung in the air as the threesome made their way to a small workshop on the far side of the garden.
Two heads were bent over the rough workbench, Dimple’s long blond hair obscuring most of Hugh Lemmon’s unruly black mop.
“Hello,” Ruth called. “We’re here for the tour.”
Dimple and Hugh lifted their heads in unison.
“Greetings,” Dimple said. “You must be Mr. Honeysill. I’m Dimple. We’ve spoken on the phone.”
“Yes indeed, and this is my wife, Candace. Thank you for giving us the grand tour.”
“You are very welcome. This is Hugh Lemmon, a dear friend of mine.”
Hugh shook Ed’s hand.
“I’ve heard about you,” Ed said over the handshake. “You’ve got a line on some imported truffles. I’d love to see them. They’re sort of a specialty of mine, and I’m always looking for new sources.”
“That would be great.” Hugh put down the metal gadgets cradled in his long fingers.
Candace spoke up. “What are you two working on in all this sawdust? I thought mushrooms grew in soil.”
“Actually, my mushrooms grow on logs. Hugh is helping me with the inoculator.” Dimple held up a metal contraption that looked like the leftover parts from a bicycle overhaul.
“Amazing.” Ed’s eyes shone with excitement.
“Yes. Hugh can do anything related to plants. Do you know he almost produced a blue geranium for his senior high project?”
Candace blinked. “Is that hard to do?”
“Have you ever seen a blue geranium?” Hugh wiped sawdust off of his long neck.
“Uh, no. Come to think of it, I never have.”
“Well, Hugh almost did it,” Dimple continued.
“What happened?”
“Cutworms,” Hugh said shortly.
“What a bummer,” Ed said. He picked up the inoculator from the table. “This is excellent, a real work of genius.”
“We use it to drill holes into the log and impregnate the wood with mycelium. Then we cap it with hot wax,” Dimple said.
Ruth struggled through her winding corridors of memory to recall what exactly mycelium was. Candace came to her rescue. “What’s mycelium?”
“Mycelium? Don’t you remember, honey?” Ed regarded her with surprise. “It’s the mass of microscopic threads, the body, if you will, of the mushroom.”
Candace raised her delicate eyebrows. “Now how could I have forgotten that?”
“Most edible fungi are saprophytic.” He looked up and noted his wife’s narrowed eyes. “Er, they get their nutrients from decaying matter.” He fingered the inoculator gently and examined it from all angles. “You know, this is really something. Where did you come up with it?”
Dimple smiled, patting Hugh on the shoulder. “It’s his design. He is a whiz at anything mechanical.”
A blush crept over the young man’s face.
It was not unusual to find Hugh at Pistol Bang’s, though his efforts were purely voluntary. Ruth had not noticed before the level of intimacy between Dimple and the young man. Well, why couldn’t there be? They were the same age, more or less, and what were the odds of finding a partner with a common passion for fungus?
“I learned a few things to help out my dad. He can grow anything green, but when it comes to machines, he can’t figure out how to plug in a toaster.” He wiped the sawdust off of his T-shirt. “I’d better be going. It was nice to meet you folks.”
Ed called out to his rapidly vanishing back, “Hey, don’t forget, I’d like to see your truffles.”
Hugh did not turn around as he strode away down the garden path.
“He is very shy, Mr. Honeysill. I’m sure he’d love to show you his truffles,” Dimple said.
“No problem. How about you show me some of your operation here and maybe we can talk about some sort of mutually beneficial arrangement?”
She gracefully shook the sawdust from the folds of her skirt and led them to the door. “Let’s begin in the polytunnel.”
Ruth was often struck by a strangely surreal feeling when she entered the polytunnel, like Dorothy landing in the middle of munchkin country. It was dark and warm inside, the air moist and smelling of verdant forest. She could swear that in the total silence of the tunnel, you could hear the mushrooms multiplying, stealthily adding followers to their fleshy minions.
“Wow,” Candace said. She craned her neck upward to see the top of the neatly stacked log towers, all bristling with tiny soft buttons, like millions of infant fingertips. “How many different types of mushrooms do you grow?”
“Just two. Oyster and shiitake. I have the greatest affinity for these two varieties. We understand each other,” she answered dreamily.
Candace shot Ruth a questioning look.
Ruth whispered in her ear, “She has an unusually close relationship with her plants.”
“Incredible specimens,” Ed said, poking his round head near the closest log. “So you age the logs outside after you inoculate them, close together but not touching to prevent any foreign mold from taking up residence, I would guess?”
Dimple nodded. “Yes. The mycelia colonize the wood for about two years. Then we shock the colonies by submerging the logs in cold water.”
“Shock them?” Candace said.
“It is really very necessary, and not at all unpleasant as it would be to us. In the trials of today are written the fruits of tomorrow.”
Ruth laughed, watching Candace try to decide if she had heard Dimple Dent right.
“They begin to pin shortly afterward.” She glanced at Candace. “That means sprout, and in about seven days they are just about mature.”
Ruth marveled anew at the silky caps of the plump shiitake and the fragile splayed fans of oyster mush- rooms. It struck her as magic, growing edible treasure in near darkness. “How many crops can you get out of one log?”
“I am not positive, as this is a new venture for me. These are on their fourth pinning, and I think they have one more burst in them before they decompose.”
She expected to hear another wisdom-of-the-ages comment, but Dimple’s mental train was derailed by Candace.
“Thanks for the tour. I’m going to admire the garden a little more if you don’t mind.”
Leaving Ed and Dimple to talk fungal facts, Ruth followed her out.
Both women stood blinking in the sunlight, appreciating the cool breeze on their faces.
“She’s an original, isn’t she?” Candace said, gesturing to the polytunnel.
“Dimple? Yes indeed, she’s one of a kind.”
“Is she a local girl?”
“Yes. Her father was a pumpkin farmer in Finny for years before he sold his land to developers.”
“What about her mother?”
She hesitated, not wanting to betray anything too personal. “She left when Dimple was a girl. Her father raised her.” More like maintained than raised, she added to herself.
