by Ruth Ozeki
“Sure thing,” he said to the empty doorway. He felt the blood, like wind-burn, redden his face. He heard a noise and spotted Char—the huge, dark eyes watching from behind the curtain of hair, the quizzical smile. Frank scowled and raised his middle finger, flipping the kid the bird, and in response the kid slowly stuck out a slim, red tongue. A silver ball lay on its spongy surface like a shiny offering, then, quick as a wink, the tongue was gone. The kid grinned and slipped out the door, past Geek, who was coming back in.
“You did us a solid, bro,” he said. “We’ll be over in the Kmart lot. Come by after work. Have a meal. Char’s an awesome cook.”
Frankie stood in the doorway like a hostess watching the guests leave the party. He sighed and closed the door. You do someone a favor, he thought, surveying the black boot prints marring the linoleum, and what do you get? A rat in a box and the privilege of cleaning up after. But heading back from school that afternoon, he decided to swing by the Kmart after all. Dudes like that didn’t just show up every day, and anything was better than going home.
Not that it was a home. He lived with an asshole named Nuland, who injured his back in a factory accident and took in foster kids to supplement his disability. Frankie slept on a stinking couch in the living room, but Nuland kicked him off first thing in the morning so he could lie there all day and fart and watch the tube. It didn’t matter. They were just killing time until Frankie was eighteen and out of the system. Nuland had made a pile off him for the last two years, and Frank lived rent free and did whatever he wanted. It was an okay arrangement, but it was not a home.
The Spudnik was different. When the mute kid opened the door for him and let him inside, it felt exactly the way Frankie imagined a home should feel. It smelled like old socks and french fries, young sweat and dander—smells that were familiar and alive, and his penis twitched in response to the burrowlike warmth. There were other smells, too, new and strange. Candles burning. Musty incense. Shampoo. Food. The lights had all been turned down, and candles flickered. Lilith and Y were sitting cross-legged in the corner with their eyes shut. They were meditating, Geek whispered. Frank sat down to watch. A videotape of the ocean was playing over their heads on a monitor set into the transom above the front seats—a long, low, continuous shot of waves lapping gently on a pebbly beach. The watery sounds drowned out the noise of the parking lot and the highway beyond. Frank closed his eyes, too. He had never felt so relaxed in his life.
When they were done meditating, Geek rolled a joint. Char was cooking dinner, stirring a stew pot. The kid’s hair was damp, like a hedgehog who’d crawled out from a shrub into the rain. Warm, fragrant steam rose from the pot.
“Smells good,” Frank said.
The kid glanced up, then looked away, but not before the quick grin, like the beam from a moving flashlight, flickered through the mat of hair.
“Char’s pretty nonverbal,” Geek offered. “Awesome cook, but not much of a conversationalist. From Montreal. Been traveling with us for a couple of months now.”
“What do you guys do anyway? Just bum around?”
“Not exactly. We’re activists.”
“What’s that?”
“You know. Political activists.”
“Oh.” Frank thought for a bit. “You mean, like politicians?”
“Oh, shit!” Y laughed, snorting smoke. “That’s very amusing.”
Frank didn’t get it. Or rather, he got it that Y and the others were laughing at him, and ordinarily that would have made him want to bust someone’s head open, but now, with the pot and all, it really didn’t matter. He figured eventually they would stop laughing, and then someone would explain. Frankie sat back and waited.
“You’re not kidding, are you?” Geek said.
Frank shook his head.
“You’re perfectly serious.”
Frank nodded.
Geek peered into Frankie’s face. “Wow.” He took off his glasses and wiped the lenses. “Check it out,” he said. “We target a range of food-related issues. Right now it’s genetic engineering. We drive around the country to communities and engage with the people and do actions. Basic biotech. Consciousness Raising 101. We’re the Seeds of Resistance—that’s our name. We also publish a ’zine and a Web site. . . .”
“Bio-what?”
“Oh, jeez. Don’t you know anything?”
Frank shook his head.
“Biotechnology,” Geek said. “Robocrops. Frankenfoods. Fish genes spliced into tomatoes. Bacterial DNA into potatoes. Corn and—”
“Cool! You do all that stuff right in here?”
“What stuff?”
“What you said. Splicing, you know, whatever . . . fish genes and potatoes and—”
“No, Frank,” Geek said. “We’re against that.”
“Oh.” Frankie was disappointed.
“You have a lot to learn,” Geek said.
“Yeah,” Frank agreed, taking the joint and inhaling deeply. “You can’t learn shit in Ashtabula.”
They ate the kid’s excellent dinner, and smoked more dube. The kid started collecting dirty dishes, and Frank went to the sink and rolled up his sleeves. He ran some hot water and squirted detergent on a sponge. The kid bumped against him, gently shoving him out of the way.
“Hey, Charlie, dude,” Frank said. “I’m a janitor. I wash things.”
Char stared at him.
“That’s my job,” Frank said.
The kid clicked the silver tongue stud against teeth that were small and perfectly white. Frankie stared. He was still feeling the pot.
Y held out his hand to Lilith. “Bedtime,” he said, pulling her to her feet. He turned to Frankie. “May as well crash here.”
“Maybe Frank’s got a home to go to,” Lilith said.
Frank shook his head. “No way. I sleep on a guy’s couch.”
“Then crash out here with Char,” Lilith said. She spun in a circle, dropping a kiss on Geek, another on the kid, and then she danced over to Frankie at the sink. The Spudnik rocked as she approached. She draped her arms around his neck.
“Night, Frank Perdue,” she sang into his ear, and when he turned to face her, she kissed him for the second time that day. “Mmm,” she said, winking at Char. “Finger-lickin’ good.”
“Night,” Frankie stuttered. He stood there staring as Lilith followed Y into the small bedroom at the end of the trailer. When Char flicked him with a towel, he realized he was dribbling suds.
The kid laid out pieces of foam on the floor, around the base of the dinette table, and piled some blankets on top. Frank crawled under one side of the pile.
“Bonne nuit,” the kid said.
“Huh?”
“Bonne nuit,” Char repeated. “Good night.”
“Oh,” said Frank. “Yeah.” He lay there for a while. “Hey. Thanks for dinner. It was good.”
When Char didn’t answer, Frank closed his eyes. Just as he was drifting to sleep on the last gentle eddies of pot, he felt something wriggling across his stomach.
“What the—?”
He snatched at the movement in the dark and came up with the kid’s wrist in his hand. He couldn’t believe it. He twisted, and Char’s small, pointy face appeared in front of him. The next moment the kid was kissing him on the mouth.
He was being molested by a juvenile punk with a tongue stud. This could not be happening.
He sat up and backed away, underneath the dinette. “Dude! What the fuck—?”
Char sat up, too, then threw back the blankets and started to peel off sweaters and shirts, in layers, like an animal shedding skins. The streetlight shone through the windshield, creating a silvery glaze that outlined the slight body. Frank recoiled into the far corner of the dining nook. The last piece of clothing was a sleeveless undershirt, and the kid ducked, pulling it off quickly. For a moment the shaggy head was caught in the cloth, but after a brief struggle, it emerged again. The slim body unfurled, then straightened and arched, and Frankie found himself sta
ring at a perfect pair of girl’s breasts. Naked, they gleamed in the light—was it the pot or the moonlight now?—and the transformation was complete.
Animal to human. Boy to girl. Girl to fucking goddess.
She took Frankie by the hands.
“Oh, shit,” he said. “I think I’m wasted.”
“Je m’appelle Charmey,” she whispered, leaning forward. “Pas Charlie. Charmey. Tu comprends?”
“I don’t understand,” said Frank. It was such an understatement. It was definitely the pot. Her laughter shattered like glass. She brought her mouth down so that her lips just brushed his. Her lips were soft, and they teased his lips with nibbles until Frank opened his mouth. Quick as a newt, she slipped her tongue inside. He felt her tongue stud click against the back of his teeth. The kiss went on and on.
“What the fuck?” he said at last, when she stopped to catch her breath.
“Pauvre petit Frank,” she whispered, pressing him down on his back, onto the blankets. “Petit Frank, qui est perdu.”
It was Frank’s first fuck. Accomplished by a girl with a pierced tongue, who kissed the length of his body from throat to groin, ran the trembling silver ball up and down his penis, used it to tickle him to the brink, then backed off again, over and over again until finally he couldn’t stand it anymore. And he came, and then they did it again until he got the hang of it, and together they rocked the Winnebago until morning.
In the dull dawn light, filtering through the mists that rolled off Erie, Frank stroked the girl beside him, taking in her sleeping face, her breasts, running his fingers through the thicket of her hair. She murmured and turned over, and he caught sight of something dark on the nape of her pale neck that took his breath away. He brushed back her hair and stared.
Frank was a suburban kid, and a foster kid to boot. He knew that the world sucked. He listened to hardcore. He’d grown up in malls. He worked as a janitor at McDonald’s and would have dropped out of school except he couldn’t think of anything more interesting to do. But all of a sudden things were looking up. He’d just lost his virginity to a girl with a pierced tongue, and if that wasn’t enough, now he’d stumbled onto a political stance he could wrap his mind around, one that bespoke a whole new world order. He traced his finger across the slim bone at the top of her spine.
What had made his heart turn over with a definitive thump was the delicate, two-inch-long bar code tattooed to the nape of her neck.
This, he told himself, was truly fucking radical.
lucky
Spudmen are gamblers, Lloyd used to say. It’s a hit-or-miss business, beset by the usual fluctuations in weather, bank rates, oil prices, random factors, and acts of God faced by any farmer. Getting the spuds safely in and out of the ground is only the beginning. After that you store them and wait. It’s a lot like timing the stock market: If you hit, there’s a lot of money to be made, and if you miss, you can lose the farm. As a result, spudmen are notoriously cagey. They keep an eye on their neighbor. They play it close to the vest.
The rapid growth of the fast-food chains was the random factor that helped fuel the potato boom of ’74. In the 1980s it was McDonald’s introduction of the Supersize Meal. In the nineties it was Wendy’s Baked Potato.
That was the fun, Lloyd always said, in growing potatoes. The randomness. The little bit of luck. In fact, the entire agricultural backbone of the state of Idaho rests on a bit of luck that turned up in a truck garden in Massachusetts in 1872. The garden belonged to Lloyd’s hero, a man known as the Father of the Modern Potato, Luther Burbank. His was an American success story, and Lloyd loved it. He would settle into his big chair and pull me onto his lap and read me Burbank’s own account of how, as a twenty-one-year-old farmer with an elementary school education, he went out to tend his potato patch one day and found a seed ball!
“ ‘I use an exclamation point,’ ” Luther wrote. “ ‘That is because—well, it was what an astronomer would use if he discovered a new solar system.’ ”
“Imagine!” Lloyd would interject, putting the book down. It was Burbank’s autobiography, The Harvest of the Years, and Lloyd would look up from the pages, past my head, marveling at Luther’s metaphor and sharing his vision—an entire planetary system in a small ball of seeds!
“‘A potato seed-ball was not unheard of,’” Lloyd read, “‘but it was a great rarity, and I couldn’t learn of any one who had done anything about the event even when it occurred. I did something; I planted the seeds in that ball.’ ”
And here Lloyd would look at me, to make sure I appreciated the radical nature of Luther’s act. Being my father’s daughter, of course I did.
You see, spudmen don’t propagate potatoes by planting true seeds. They do it by cloning. It’s quick, simple, and reliable, and you can understand its appeal to farmers like my father, who are into total control. First you cut up a potato into small pieces, each containing an eye, and you plant these. The eyes grow into identical replicas of the parent, bearing their bundles of tubers, some of which you eat or sell, others you cut up to clone again. It’s pretty foolproof.
The reason you clone rather than plant from seed is because potatoes, like human children, are wildly heterozygous. Lloyd taught me that word when I was eight. It simply means that if you try to propagate a domesticated potato using seed, sexually, chances are it will not grow true to type. Instead it will regress, displaying a haphazard variety of characteristics, reminiscent of its uncultivated potato progenitors—it may prove superior to the parent plant or may be wildly inferior. At eight, gazing up at my father’s face, I didn’t know which was worse.
After nature offered up her seed ball, Lloyd explained, Luther prepared the ground with great care, then planted each seed about a foot from its neighbor. The seed ball contained twenty-three seeds, so tiny that you could fit ten of them on the head of a pin. All twenty-three seeds produced seedlings, and here is where Luther was twice lucky: Of the twenty-three sprouts from his seed ball, he found two that were superior to the others in yield and size. That was his luck. The rest was history.
“‘It was from the potatoes of those two plants,’” Lloyd read, his voice triumphant, “‘carefully raised, carefully dug, jealously guarded, and painstakingly planted the next year, that I built the Burbank potato.’ ” Lloyd set down the book again. “Imagine!” He stared past me, shaking his head. “Building a potato as fine as that!”
In 1874 Burbank sold those precious potatoes to a seedman from Massachusetts, who paid young Luther $150, which he used to relocate to California.
In 1974, exactly one hundred years later, I slept with Elliot Rhodes and split for California, too, and the price of Russet Burbanks soared. There was no correlation between these events, of course. It was entirely coincidental. Ninteen-seventy-four was a year of rotten luck for me, and Elliot was my random factor, but it was a very lucky year for my father, and most farmers in the state, with the exception of our neighbor, Carl Unger. The Nine-Dollar Potato was the random factor that ruined him.
Because it’s not just about luck, Lloyd would tell you. Potatoes also took guts. Cassie’s daddy was never much of a gambler, and, although greedy, he was a bit of a coward to boot, which was why, early in the year, he thought it safer to contract his entire crop to the processor for a price of $3.25 per hundredweight. It was a sure thing, but where’s the fun in it? Not that my father was anyone’s idea of a high roller, but he did have a stubborn and independent nature, a suspicion of large corporations, and even something you might call vision. He didn’t like to get into bed with anybody for the promise of a safe buck. So he held out, and when the market soared, Lloyd had a mountain of potatoes, free and clear and promised to nobody, piled sixteen feet high, stored at a cool forty-five degrees, in a cellar the size of an airplane hangar. He started to sell.
Carl had his $3.25 contract and a whole lot of envy. He just could not help himself. Nine dollars per hundredweight was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so he reneged on his contract
and sold at the open-market price, incurring the wrath of the processor. Then, desperate to make amends, he tried to buy potatoes from Lloyd. Lloyd refused. Carl offered 250 acres of land for 35,000 bags of potatoes. Lloyd accepted.
This deal must have caused a certain rancor to grow in Carl’s heart, rancor that had been building over the years in proportion to the increase of my father’s acreage. After I ran away and Lloyd had his first heart attack, Carl no doubt felt that it served us right. He went to Lloyd’s hospital bed and offered to lease his fields at a rate that was considerably lower than the going rate, but which was nonetheless determined by the Nine-Dollar Potato. Lloyd, in no shape to run his farm, acquiesced to Unger’s demands.
Not a bad deal, as it turned out. Because by the following fall, when potato prices plummeted to $4.00 a bag, Lloyd made more money on the lease than he would have had he planted the land. Carl Unger, on the other hand, went bankrupt. He was forced to go to work for Lloyd, and the following years were bad ones for Cassie. She and I were best friends, and I ran away without telling her, and she must have felt like I’d fallen right off the edge of the earth. Then my daddy went and ruined her daddy, so in some way my family was to blame for all the lickings she received since that night in the snow. I figured she might have some mixed feelings about me coming home. I know I did.
reunion
After all these years. Cass couldn’t get the phrase out of her head. She stood by the window in the arrivals lounge with her forehead pressed to the glass. The reflection of the red and green Christmas lights that decorated the lounge appeared to be floating against the dark tarmac outside. It was cold, and snow conditions east of the Cascades had delayed the plane. She had driven up from Liberty Falls just after one o’clock, and now it was late afternoon, and the prairie wind was whipping the snow around the tarmac, just mocking the plows.
