by Ruth Ozeki
Maybe Duncan was right, he thought. Maybe his chi was stagnating in D.C. When the conference ended the following afternoon, he checked out of the Sheraton and rented a car. Filled with a sense of adventure, he headed west. On the outskirts of the city the lights of the fertilizer plant twinkled against the backdrop of a late-afternoon sky, and the tall stacks belched their plumes of ocher smoke. There was a bleak appeal in the stretch of interstate leading out of Pocatello, a tickle of promise, of things hidden, as though his presence here, long ago, had imbued it with a singular and unique significance. He would spend the night, he decided, then drive around the next day and check out the school where he had taught. The landscape seemed alive with memories, lying just below the shimmering surface of asphalt and the surrounding fields.
At the first sign for Liberty Falls his heart started to beat faster. When he spotted the orb of the water tower, looming over the horizon like a moon on stilts, he pulled onto the exit ramp and spiraled down. The town spread out below him, anchored at one end by the courthouse and the top of Main. From there the broad street descended past the four churches at the intersection of Church and, a block farther south, the four banks at the intersection of Commerce, marking the boundaries of what had been a bustling downtown. He drove slowly. Many of the old storefronts were boarded, and a sign on the grocery store that used to be called Earl’s read, WE GIVE UP. A few new businesses—Satellite & Cellular Services, Video Rentals—had taken over some of the storefronts. The camera shop had survived, and so had the Farmer’s New World Life Insurance. From there Main took a dive, bottoming out at Union and the railroad tracks. The grain elevators rose above this lower part of town, looking out over the Snake River, flooded on account of the dam. Beyond lay the fields, still dead looking and bedraggled from the long winter.
In the prairie twilight the town was ghostly and still. He got out of the car and stood by the railroad tracks, bracing himself against a punishing wind. A tumbleweed skittered across the wide street. He hadn’t recalled there being tumbleweed.
He turned away from the wind to face the empty tracks, stretching on forever. The towering grain elevators, branded with the town’s name, provided some vertical relief, rising up off the desert floor to challenge the lowering sky. Liberty Falls—a flattened and relentlessly two-dimensional western prairie enclave. Had he really ever lived here? How could he have forgotten? Or, more cogently, why did he want to remember? It was growing dark. He got back into the car and turned the heater to high, then drove to the Falls Motel, stopping for a flattened hamburger and a bag of greasy fries at a local drive-thru. In Liberty Falls not even the fast food was franchised.
Holed up in his motel room with a six-pack of beer, Elliot was certain this detour was a tedious mistake. He thought about checking out and going back to Pocatello, but it would be stupid to have come all this way and not see the school. He turned on the television, then turned it off again. He took out his laptop and the thick folder provided by the Potato Promotions Council. It was filled with the usual state boosterism. He flipped through the information sheets of yields and profit margins, tossing the charts into the wastebasket. He read the Fun Facts About Potatoes, then checked his watch and phoned Jillie.
“Do you know that the average American eats a hundred and sixty-five pounds of potatoes in a year?”
Over the phone line he heard Jillie sigh.
“That’s how much I weigh,” he added.
“I don’t eat your body weight in potatoes in a year,” she said. “And I doubt you do either.”
“Well, that’s just it. Someone’s eating our share.”
“Oh, gee. Unfair.”
“Do you know that it takes three hundred ninety-three million, seven hundred seventy-nine thousand, five hundred forty-nine four-inch french-fried potatoes to go end to end around the earth’s equator?”
“And?”
“You can get thirty-six fries to a potato.”
“What’s your point, Elliot?”
“No point.” He dropped Fun Facts into the wastepaper basket. Underneath was a photocopied sheet of orange paper, unlike the rest of the glossy presentation materials. At the top was a crude drawing of a potato, with a skull and crossbones through it. The caption read:
CONSUMER ALERT When Is a POTATO not a POTATO? When it is a U.S. Government Certified PESTICIDE!!!
“Oh, fuck,” he said.
“We can’t,” Jillie pointed out. “You’re in Idaho, remember?”
“No . . .” He scanned the rest of the page. At the bottom was the address for a Web site.
Jillie was saying, “Unless you want to have phone sex . . .” Her voice was husky. Lately he’d noticed that she was far more likely to come on to him when there was no danger of actually following through. Now he cut her off.
“Jillie? Listen, I gotta go. I’ll call you later, okay?” He heard her whine as he hung up, but he was already hauling out his laptop and jacking into the phone line. While the computer dialed up, he read the flyer more carefully.
Why does the U.S. government classify CYNACO’S NuLife® potato not as a food but as a pesticide?
Cynaco’s NuLife® potato has the DNA of a bacterial toxin spliced into its genes. The result? The potato manufactures the poison in every one of its cells. This toxin is effective against the Colorado potato beetle. Any unsuspecting beetle who takes a nibble from the leaf of a NuLife® will keel over and die.
Convenient? Yes. Safe? We don’t know. Despite studies suggesting possible hazards to both human health and ecological safety, the NuLife® has never been poison-tested by the EPA.
But poison testing is being carried out at our dinner tables every day. Our government and the Biotech Industry are conducting a massive experiment on unsuspecting, uninformed human subjects—You. And me. We Are Their Guinea Pigs!
Visit our Web site at Seeds-of-Resistance.com for more information on biotechnology and food safety. Food is life. You are what you eat. Demand accurate and responsible labeling on all genetically modified foods! It’s your right to know!
Elliot crumpled up the sheet. How the hell did they manage to slip it into the promotional material? He logged on to the Web site and cursed the crappy motel phone line. It was taking forever to download, and Elliot was used to thruput. Finally the images materialized on his screen, and his eye grazed the captions.
SEEDS OF RESISTANCE. Scrolling past the short mission statement, he came to a map of America. The group was traveling across the country, doing actions along the way. They had posted photographs and descriptions of several supermarket interventions, an arrest in Ashtabula, and a little “night gardening” at a test site in Iowa, where they’d ripped up genetically engineered corn by flashlight. Most recent was a demonstration at a potato-processing plant in Pocatello and a labeling campaign in a local Stop-N-SAVE. That was good, Elliot thought. They must have a base nearby.
He perused the site quickly. They had sections on the history of the WTO, how to convert engines to run off biodiesel, and strategies for mounting safe and effective street actions. There were links at the end, and he followed a couple. The Seeds were plugged into the usual web of anarchists and radical environmentalists, but one link, tucked to one side, stood out from the rest: Lilith’s Garden of Earthly Delights. He clicked it and entered the portal.
Earth Is Life! Love Your Mother!
It was laid out like a comic book or a storyboard from a dirty movie, with stills of a woman, naked and caked in mud.
Get Down and Dirty!
He had to laugh. The pictures were clumsy, and the video clips even more so. The woman had a decent body, but the content was ludicrous. Still, as he clicked his way through the pages, something else, more organic than electronic, started to seep through the glowing digital field and leach into his skin. What was it? A sense, as keen as the primary five, but more abstract. A feeling that flowed through his body, tickling his genitals and quickening his pulse. It ran from him like a dormant taproot, newly awakened, s
tarved and probing deep. He opened a beer and lingered in the Garden, and then it hit him.
It wasn’t lust. It was nostalgia.
He stared at the pictures of Lilith as Mother Earth. Her body was unenhanced, full and natural, which seemed like an erotic novelty. Naked, she reminded him of the earnest hippie girls who’d danced topless in grassy fields in Berkeley during the Summer of Love. He remembered the patterns and textures: the cheap Indian print, the crushed and balding velvets. In a thumbnail video Lilith’s long body was encased in a sheath of leathery clay, and then, like an insect shedding its skin, she broke free into a glorious new instar. Mudwoman in molt. Earth begetting life. It was primal and primeval. Tinny sitar music played from the laptop speakers, and her voice was thin.
“In the beginning,” she intoned, “the Goddess gave birth and form to Herself.”
There were candles surrounding her. An Egyptian ankh hung around her neck, nestling in between her tumular breasts. Each breast was crowned with a sproutlike nipple that broke free from the earth. He could almost smell the incense.
“We honor her fecundity, the spontaneous regeneration of her procreative force, the spark of her being.”
... In those days there had always been a girl like this Lilith in his life. Dovelike girls. Unlike Jillie, who had more of a sneer than a coo.
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He felt a little like he was tripping again, as though entering the Garden had triggered a wellspring of dormant lysergic acid. The pixels lingered on his retina, creating a glimmer like sunlight on water. An icon of a zucchini offered a hotlink to something called the Secret Garden. In the name of research he entered, but before he could find out what Lilith was going to do with the vegetable, the download overwhelmed the puny capacity of the phone lines at the Falls Motel, crashing his computer.
He reached for the beer and realized the can was empty. He went to the window, where the six-pack was stashed. Popping another, he looked out over the highway at the desiccated fields under the streetlights, stretching off into the distance. He remembered the first time he’d laid eyes on this landscape. It looked bleaker now.
Overall, the world was a harder place these days. Maybe the soft, dovelike, pigeon-toed girls of his youth just couldn’t survive.
Like that one. Here. In Liberty Falls.
Yummy.
He said it out loud.
“Yummy?”
He had thought that was her name, but now, saying it, he began to question his recall. How could it be? The more he repeated it, the more improbable it sounded, until he could barely connect the sound with any memory of her at all. Instead, the whine of that song kept running through his head: “Yummy, yummy, yummy . . .”
AM radio crap.
He used to drive a Volkswagen beetle. Baby blue. In the dim winter twilight after school, she would sit next to him and twirl the radio dial.
“I got love in my tummy. . . .”
No. That could not have been it.
He closed the curtains and checked his watch. The NuLife task force was keeping late hours during Potato Promotions Week. He dialed the office.
“Hey,” he said. “Listen, didn’t Cynaco have a Pinkerton operating around here on grain-patent infringements? E-mail me his name, will you? We’ve got a pest control problem. It’s time to get proactive.”
He had trippy dreams that night of walking through a plate-glass window, and he woke each time he was about to fall. He didn’t sleep well. When the sky grew light, he went in search of the school. It wasn’t hard to find. In his sleep-deprived state he drove automatically, allowing his hand to signal the turns, his foot to tell him when to brake, and before he knew it, he was pulling his rental car up to the curb. He turned off the engine and stared at the squat façade. The mild sense of anticipation he’d felt en route now faded. He watched the kids hitching up their backpacks as they moved toward the entrance. They seemed familiar, but he couldn’t imagine knowing any of them, certainly couldn’t imagine standing up in front of a classroomful of them and having anything to say. And yet he had. The school was called Liberty Falls Elementary, but it went through the ninth grade. He watched a group of the older girls cross the street in front of him. They looked so young, their faces vacant and impervious.
The teasing nostalgia from the night before had vanished completely. He watched through the window as the last of the kids straggled by, and then he took out his cell phone. The private investigator was easy to locate. Elliot gave him a rundown on the Seeds, the address of their Web site, and a brief sketch of their activities in Idaho.
“They’re smart,” Elliot said. “I’d love to know how they hijacked that promotional material at the conference.”
“Shouldn’t be hard to find out.”
“They cover ground. You’ll see from the Web site—”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Rhodes. We’ll find them.”
Elliot pocketed the phone and went in search of breakfast. There was a cozy local restaurant he remembered, with excellent eggs, padded vinyl booths, tabletop jukeboxes, and waitresses who’d worked there for years. Only now he saw that it was called Gringo’s. He went in anyway. The counters were the same dull Formica edged in nicked aluminum, but it was staffed by a Mexican teenager in a stained peasant blouse, and the two-egg breakfast special had been replaced by huevos rancheros. A couple of locals looked up from the counter, an older man and a middle-aged woman, maybe father and daughter, maybe husband and wife. It was hard to tell. They watched him for a while, then looked away.
He ordered the huevos and coffee and picked up a copy of the local paper that was lying by the register. Potato farmers were being sued by a local Indian tribe demanding compensation for groundwater contamination from agricultural runoff. Shoshone, he remembered. He ripped out the article. He’d been pressing Cynaco to support InterTribal Agricultural Councils. Maybe he could even get a Shoshone spokesperson to endorse the NuLife—fewer pesticides mean clean water for our people, that sort of thing. Wisdom. Heritage. Indians always made for positive imaging.
He tossed the paper aside as the waitress approached his table. The eggs looked good, but he needed more coffee creamers. When he looked up to call the girl back, he saw the two come in.
They were not from Liberty Falls. He could see that from the reaction of the locals, who had been talking and now stopped and stared.
At first he couldn’t tell exactly what they were. Young and disheveled, but beyond that? They wore their badly fitting clothes the way that only teenagers could, with a seeming disdain for superficial appearances. Their pale faces were androgynous, sullen and bruised, the kind you see advertising underwear on billboards in the city.
They had come in to use the bathroom, and when the smaller one came back without the jacket covering her overalls, he saw that she was a girl, pregnant, and starting to show. She looked a bit unsteady. The other one, clearly a boy, made her sit down on a stool. She leaned her forehead against his stomach and hooked her fingers in the waistband of his jeans. She rested there for a while, fiddling with the buttons on his fly, while he kneaded her shoulders. It was quite a sexy little picture. As he watched them, Elliot felt a peculiar stabbing sensation, located in his solar plexus, which he identified as regret. It took him by surprise. At first he mistook it for the normal regret any man would feel at the sight of a beautiful babe with another guy. But these two were just kids, and this particular regret went deeper, triggered by that burgeoning lump in her belly. He stared at it. He’d seen lots of pregnant women. Most of his friends in the city had had pregnant wives at one point or another. What was it about this girl, here in Liberty Falls?
There. He felt it again. A fluttering sensation in his chest. Not quite a pain. Was it his heart? He started to panic.
Just then the boy looked in Elliot’s direction, and, catching him gawking at his girlfriend’s stomach, he stiffened. To Elliot’s surprise, instead of rising to the challenge and staring the boy down, he found himself dropping
his gaze to the plate of huevos in front of him, which were swimming in a puddle of puce-colored beans. The grated cheese had hardened on top like a melted plastic lid. He frowned. The fluttering subsided. He wasn’t used to rolling over like this, so he looked back up again, ready to assert himself unblinkingly, but the two were already standing, the boy sheltering the girl with his arm as he ushered her out the door.
Elliot gave up on breakfast. He took a last sip of coffee, then went to the cash register to pay. He looked out the window at the two kids cutting across the parking lot. From the back, at a distance, they looked familiar.
“What’s their story?” he asked the waitress. “They don’t look like they’re from around here.”
The waitress took his twenty and punched the keys on the ancient cash register. The drawer made a dinging sound when it slid open. He accepted his change and handed her a five-dollar tip for a four-dollar meal.
She slipped it in her pocket. “Heard someone talking about a gang of hippies staying out at someone’s farm.”
“Oh, yeah?” He sorted slowly through his bills. “You get a lot of people like that passing through?”
“Nah. Not so many. Just the ones who come in the summer for the recreational activities.”
Elliot could not remember any recreational activities. The girl eyed his wallet. “The reservoir,” she added. “They go there for water sports and stuff.”
Elliot took out another five-dollar bill. “Do you know where these hippies are staying?”
“Nah.” She shook her head and started wiping down the Formica as Elliot replaced the bill in his wallet.
The local woman at the counter spoke up. “Heard that Fuller girl’s been harboring them down at her daddy’s place.”
“Really?” Elliot said.
