by Ruth Ozeki
The problem was, their mother just couldn’t handle things. The house was a mess. She could hardly get three meals on the table in a day. Often Cass Quinn would come over with a casserole, and the two of them talked and smoked cigarettes at the kitchen table. He could smell it from upstairs. Occasionally late at night, he could hear her on the phone. She kept her voice low, but sometimes she’d laugh, and the sound always startled him. He wondered who she could be talking to at that hour. Couldn’t be anyone in Liberty Falls—people here had to work and didn’t stay up late. It had to be long distance, and he fretted about the phone bill. He felt sorry for her, sorry to be such a nuisance, sorry to have disrupted her nice life in Hawaii. He felt sorry for everyone. He wished he could just hurry up and get well so she could leave, but with Melvin gone, the past few weeks had been trying, and he felt weaker than ever.
He heard her harried footsteps coming up the stairs. She kicked the door open with her heel and backed into the room, carrying a tray with a plate and a glass of milk.
She looked around the cluttered room. “Now, where am I going to put this?” Lloyd struggled to sit up in bed. She put the tray on the chair. She had her coat on, ready to leave.
“I . . .” He paused, unable to go on.
“What?” She pushed the button to raise the back of the bed. “Dad, what is it? Is it your bag?”
He shook his head. “The bag is fine.”
She shoved the pillow down behind him and deposited the tray on his lap. “Good. I’ll help you change it when I get back. I have to take Ocean to school. She missed the damn bus again.”
“Wait, I . . . I have to urinate.”
“Oh, Dad! Why didn’t you tell me before I got you settled?”
She removed the tray. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed until they touched the floor. He tried to push himself up to a standing position, but he couldn’t shift his weight off the bed.
“I need help,” he said.
“But you could do it yesterday! Here, take your walker.”
“It’ll be quicker if you help.”
Together they inched down the corridor. Her fingers clenched his arm so hard he thought the bones there would snap. When she released him, he closed the bathroom door behind him, but he could feel her fretting outside. He unbuttoned his pajama bottoms and let them drop. He sat down on the toilet like a woman, hanging his head and covering his face with his hands.
“Yumi,” he said through his fingers.
“You ready to come out?”
“No.” He took a deep breath. “Bring my walker. Leave it outside the door. I’ll get myself back to bed.”
It took all his strength just to talk. He could get the boy to help. If worse came to worst, he could sit there on the toilet until she got back.
“You sure?” He could hear the relief in her voice as she headed down the corridor toward the bedroom and then came back again. “Okay, the walker’s right here. Eat your breakfast before it gets cold. I’m going into town for groceries after I drop Ocean off. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. I’ll help you with the bag then.”
“Yumi . . .”
“What?”
“Is the boy going with you?”
“His name is Phoenix, Dad. Yes. I promised him a new videogame.”
“Oh.”
She hesitated. “You going to be okay?”
“Yes . . . Yumi?”
“What?”
“I’d like to go to the garden. . . .”
“Oh, Dad!” she said as if he’d asked to go to the moon. “You’ll have to wait until I get back. Or phone Cass. Maybe she or Will can come over and help you.”
He listened to her clatter down the stairs yelling to the kids. When the car pulled out of the drive and the noise of the tires on the gravel grew faint, he started to urinate. Somehow he made it back to his bedroom.
The plate of eggs was sitting on the small bedside table. They were hard as rubber, swimming in congealing butter. He bounced the back of his spoon on the yolk. He drank the milk and wished he had another glassful.
He managed to change into his clothes. His bag was almost full, but it would have to wait. He knew better than to try to change it on his own. He put his shirt on carefully over it.
He used his walker to get as far as the window. Outside he could see Momoko, kneeling in the dirt, roguing a bed of transplants. He couldn’t see what she was working on, though. Lettuces probably. It was high time for lettuces. He knocked on the windowpane with his knuckle, then tried to open it. The sash was stuck, the wood swollen. He gave another rap. She was bending over, inspecting the plants, pulling out the off-type shoots. Finally she looked up. He waved, and she waved back, then returned to her culling. The broad brim of her straw hat covered her face.
He rapped the glass again, harder this time, and when she looked up, he waved his arms wildly. Come here! Come up! She put down her trowel and got to her feet. He met her at the top of the stairs.
He made her stand behind him on the landing.
“Look!” he said as he held on to the banister and pushed the aluminum walker over the edge. They watched it clatter down the stairs, tumbling to the bottom, where it came to a stop with its feet in the air. Momoko clapped her hands. Certain kinds of chaos thrilled her. Lloyd sat on the top step.
“Now, you come down after me. Hold on tight in case I slip.”
She sat on the step above him and gripped the frayed collar of his coat with both hands, like she was trying to rein in a mule. Holding on to the balusters, he inched himself forward to the edge of the step and then over, down to the next, landing hard on his hindquarters each time. Step by step. Stopping to rest.
“How you get so old?” he heard her whisper when they hit the bottom. He looked up.
“I don’t know, Momo,” he said, but his answer seemed to confuse her.
“No,” she said, shaking him by the collar. “How you get so old?”
He smiled. “Well, how’d you get so pretty?”
She chuckled. She righted his walker and helped him to his feet. He followed her slowly out the back door and into the garden.
He was sitting on a bench by the peach tree, in a small patch of sunlight, when the Pontiac pulled up the drive. He heard the car door slam, and then the trunk. He stood up. He wanted to tell Yumi where he was, to show her what he’d accomplished with Momoko’s help, but mainly he didn’t want her to be mad. He took a few steps, then realized he was starting to sweat. He took the pillbox from his coat pocket and shook a nitroglycerin tablet from it. His fingers were trembling. The little white pill fell onto the dark earth. It lay there like a seed.
He turned and looked for Momoko. He thought he saw her hat among the snap-pea vines on the opposite side of the garden, but he couldn’t be sure. He squared off his walker and started toward the house. He could make it, if he just took it slow. But the next minute he felt the rubber-tipped aluminum legs sink into the soil, pitching him forward off the garden path and into the squashes. He lay there. The smell of the soil tickled his nose and felt cool against his forehead. It was his soil, built up carefully with generous rotations of nitrogen-fixing crops, year after year. Recycling nutrients. Never taking out more than you gave back. So different from the way they farmed potatoes now. This soil still had life, Lloyd thought, and with his face down in it, he took a handful in his fist and squeezed it tight and waited for his daughter to find him.
“It was the bats, Dad.”
He opened his eyes.
“When you found me in the lava tube, remember? I was afraid of the bats.”
She hadn’t said a word when she discovered him in the squash patch, just helped him to his feet and back upstairs, and now he was sitting on the edge of his bed holding up his shirt while the angry nub of his stoma dried. She was standing by the window looking out at the fields, and she smiled. “You never asked, and I was grateful.”
He smiled, too. “You were mighty scared, all right. Shaking like a leaf.”
<
br /> “Then we went inside, remember?”
“Saw that big old stalactite. That was quite some cavern. Went on for about three miles.”
“Someone explored the whole thing?”
“The farmer who was selling off his farm that day, he realized that old tube was on his property, so he held on to that bit and developed it into one of those roadside attractions. Opened it that same summer when the crazy fellow tried to jump over the canyon on his motorcycle. Made a bundle off all the thrill seekers who came to watch.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Nope. Turned it into their retirement plan.” Lloyd raised his eyebrow. “Guess they owe you.”
“I had a talent for real estate even back then, huh?”
For a moment he just nodded, but in the end he couldn’t let it pass. He shook his head. “Can’t say I hold much store with real estate developers,” he said. “Buying up all the good farmland, turning it into malls and parking lots. Next crookedest thing to lawyers, if you ask me.”
But she hadn’t asked, and now she turned her back on him and stared out the window while he waited, wishing he’d kept quiet after all.
“I think it’s dry enough,” he said finally. “Let’s finish up.”
She came back over and squatted in front of him, lining up the new flange around the stoma. She applied the adhesive and pressed it to his skin. She was wearing latex gloves, and when he looked down, he realized that her hands were trembling. Her head was bent, and she wouldn’t look at him.
“How come we never talk about what happened?” she asked.
“What happened when?”
“When I left. When I ran away.”
He held his breath as she eased the new bag onto the flange, working from bottom to top. When she was done and the bag was in place, he breathed again.
“Oh, Yumi,” he said, “I just don’t recall. It was so long ago.” He gave the bag a tug, to make sure it was on tight and wouldn’t slip off. “Where’s Melvin anyway? When are they coming back?”
She peeled off the latex gloves with a snap and dropped them in the trash. “They’re not coming back,” she said. “You’re stuck with me.”
frisco
Frisco was fucking awesome.
Frank had never seen anything like it. They crashed at an anarchist house in Oakland, a bad-ass scene with people cruising by and hanging out in the kitchen and camping on the floor. The Seeds knew everyone, and all these people were their friends. Frank was wary at first—he knew about group homes—but within minutes he felt welcome.
He was happy to be away from the fucking farm and hungry to check out the skate scene in the city, but just as he was about to take off, Geek handed him a spade and a garbage bag full of composted manure, and the next thing he knew, he was toting the shovel and the shit and a five-foot peach sapling through the dusky streets of Oakland. He followed the crew, dressed all in black, to a median strip in the middle of a busy road. They scoped the area for signs of the Man, and then the leader gave the word to dig. Frankie had gotten pretty good at digging and generally hated it, but this was different. Here, in the twilight, under the streetlights, with traffic moving by him in both directions, it was exciting. Quickly he broke the sod in a neat circle and excavated a three-foot hole, then gently lowered his peach tree into the center. He filled in the hole with soil and the compost he’d been packing, tamped it down, and mulched it. The leader looked at his work and nodded. “Right on, dude. You know your shit.”
Down the strip the rest of the crew was planting other trees: a pear, a persimmon, some nut trees, and a couple of figs. In a few years they’d be bearing fruit. Food for the people, the leader explained. They were liberating traffic strips and other public land sites across the city. As long as they were neat, the city workers never noticed. Mostly they just mowed right around the trees.
When the eight saplings were planted, the crew shouldered their shovels, and the timing was unreal, because a moment later the automated irrigation system on the median strip kicked in, and it was like a welcome-to-the-neighborhood party for the new transplants. The crew high-fived, then slipped into the shadows.
“We’re hacking the landscape, dude,” they told Frankie. “Bringing back the commons. We are politically opposed to lawns.”
They had torn up the lawn in front of their house and planted a vegetable garden. They kept bees in the backyard. They reclaimed straw bales from the racetrack to use as mulch and ran bicycle posses across the city to tend the vegetable gardens they’d planted in the yards of elderly neighbors.
They did puppet shows for kids. Planted butterfly gardens.
They hacked the plumbing of the house, rerouting the runoff from the showers and the sink into filtration ponds in the garden. They grew water lilies and bulrushes. Willows and water chestnuts. They wanted to farm edible catfish one of these days, but for now they were raising huge ornamental carp for the Chinese market.
Golden Luckies.
Two-toned Prosperities.
They made seed bombs to lob over barbed-wire fences onto the tightly cropped lawns of military installations and corporate headquarters. Packed with the seeds of native flowers, the bombs would take root and grow. Little clumps of vegetative anarchy.
This was agriculture that Frankie could get his head around. Guerrilla gardening. Defiance farming. Radical acts of cultivation. “Dudes,” Frankie said, pacing up and down the Spudnik one night, “this shit is awesome! How come you’re not part of this scene?”
Y smiled. “We are. We started this house.”
Frankie stopped short. “So how come you left, then?”
“Time to move on,” Geek said, rubbing his glasses. “We’re a network of cells, Frankie. We’re part of the underground. There are houses like this in cities and towns all across the country. The Spudnik’s one of the links, keeping people connected, you know? Keeping information and energy flowing, but most of all working on outreach. It’s all about dissemination, Frankie.”
“Dissemination?”
“We’re like a seed bomb, dude.”
It wasn’t Geek who threw the tofu crème pie at the CEO of Cynaco. Geek and Y both had police records, having been busted on a number of occasions for disorderly conduct, demonstrating without a permit, and various degrees of assault. It was more trouble than it was worth, getting them out of jail in Frisco, so they’d retired and now just ran backup.
“I propose the honor go to Frankie,” said Geek. “He’s from out of town, and he’s got a clean record here. Plus he’s still a juvenile.”
The commander in charge of the pie operation looked skeptical. “He’s a novice,” she pointed out. “You think he’s experienced enough to pull it off?”
“Totally,” said Y. “He’s cool and fearless. We’ve done some gnarly actions with him before.”
They were sitting in the kitchen of the Oakland house. The commander was cutting butter into a large bowl of pastry crust. She pushed the hair off her forehead with the back of her hand, leaving behind a dusting of flour on her eyebrow. Next to her, Charmey was mashing silken tofu.
“Et tu, Charmey?” the commander asked. “Qu’est-ce que tu penses? Il est très jeune, n’est-ce pas?”
“Oui, d’accord,” Charmey said. “He is young maybe, but his timing is superbe.”
So Frankie was elected to be one of three pie bearers, each belonging to a faction of the Pastry Platoon, which was a detachment of Operation Dessert Storm, launched by the International Food Liberation Army. On the day of the action he was dressed in the bottom half of Mr. Potato Head’s heavy burlap costume, hiding behind a large potted palm in the hotel lobby. The top half of Mr. Potato Head was on the floor by his feet. Charmey and Lilith, acting as field agents, were standing by with a walkie-talkie, the pies, and Frankie’s skateboard.
The walkie-talkie crackled out the intelligence from the commander: The keynote had ended; the target was on the move. Charmey stepped forward to initiate the action. She was dress
ed in pink maternity clothes and was pushing a baby stroller, all of which they’d bought at the Salvation Army earlier that week. In the stroller was a backup pie. She headed in a wide arc around the perimeter of the lobby, circling the oncoming CEO, who was crossing the marble foyer surrounded by his posse of bodyguards and underlings.
A flanking guard of hecklers, mingling with journalists and the press, closed in from the direction of the elevators. The hecklers initiated destabilization tactics.
“Sir! How do you justify your claims that genetically altered crops do not need labels because they are safe, when there’s no research or evidence to support this?”
“Could you comment on the revolving-door relationship between Cynaco and the FDA, and the fact that so many of your former lobbyists have ended up in key positions in government regulatory agencies?”
“Is it Cynaco’s long-term policy to mine Third World genetic resources, engage in globalized biopiracy, and rob developing countries of their ability to produce food independently and sustainably?”
The walkie-talkie crackled again. Lilith dropped the skateboard and helped Frankie flip on the top half of Mr. Potato Head and fasten it down with Velcro. Mr. Potato Head had undergone some further modifications since the Pocatello action: He now had two bolts stuck in his neck and a badly stitched scar on his forehead. Lilith adjusted his tin skullcap and looked at her handiwork with satisfaction.
“Break a leg,” she whispered, and handed Frankie the pie.
