by Bobby Adair
Most of that bare dirt was lined with booths owned by people who’d still been optimistic enough to think customers would show up to the Semiannual Americana Scamarama Craft Show—not the real name, but what the fuck—despite the way the world was turning into Shroomageddon outside.
So many acres. So many dreams. So many wasted dollars.
I’m kind of an ass about it. Unfairly, I know. Plenty of real artists sold actual, real, attractive shit they’d crafted themselves. Maybe if the eventual ex had scraped our bank accounts of the last of our disposable dollars to buy that kind of stuff, I might have had different feelings about the place.
But that’s not what happened. Ever.
Before she’d set up housekeeping with Mr. Golfyballs Glimmer-Teeth, she used to drag me on her pilgrimage to the Scamarama in the spring, when the temps were already in the nineties, and the dirt floor was at least fifty-percent farm animal shit from the last blue-ribbon pig festival, or whatever the hell they used the show barn for. The place smelled like scented candles, candied pecans, and sweaty goat assholes.
Me and Miss Double-E—eventual ex for those you not keeping up—would stay all damn day. Hell, it cost ten bucks to get in unless she had a buy-one-get-one coupon out of the paper. It felt like you were cheating yourself if you left early. Kind of a wicked joke when you think about it, because the longer you stayed, the more of your money stayed, too. We always remained long enough for my clothes to steep in that smell, and then it would get in my car on the hour-long drive home and every time I got in to go somewhere for the next week, the baking funk would make me think I’d stepped in a pile of shit left by some hipster chick’s foofy purse-pooch.
And that was just the spring event.
By the look of the booths with signage and decorations still up, I was gazing down on the Thanksgiving show, the one with all the Christmas crap. An extra handful of real artists showed up for that one every year, but so did twice as many kitchen-table entrepreneurs evangelizing multi-level-marketing dupe-bait, and the real go-getters who’d geniused their way through a Google search and discount-bulk-purchased-nickel-a-piece whatchamathingees they’d found on a Chinese plastics manufacturer’s website on the way to fulfilling their 10,000%-return-on-investment dreams.
Five bucks each, or three for ten. Slap Rudolph on the ass and pull that moving van. We’re buying a big house in Plinko Ranch. Yippee-ki-yay, Santa Claus!
Nutmeg-scented, stripper-dust glittered pinecone crucifix sculptures stood mostly undisturbed at the end of the nearest aisle below me. Past that, living room-sized wall art framed in recycled cedar fence boards showed colorful Christmas elves dancing across black & white photos of famous European cityscapes. The third booth must have been stocked with a tasty treat of some sort. It had long since been obliterated, sorted through, and re-sorted by starving scavengers. Most of the booths had been more than rummaged through, they’d been vandalized by frustrated hands, looking for something that might give them one more day of life in a world that didn’t seem to like people much anymore.
Life gets hard when God turns off the Starbucks spigot.
The bottle cap necklace booth went relatively unscathed. Everything near the network-marketing mushroom coffee-and-opportunity booth looked to be in order, like maybe the smell was enough to keep all creatures at bay. The singing Christmas tree booth halfway up the aisle looked to have fared well. Most of the trees were still standing. It made me wonder if those worthy gifts were just as ignored by shoppers when the show was still open.
And there was Amelia moving through the debris down one aisle, just past the caroling trees.
Not wanting to call out, I slipped my knife from its sheath and tapped the back of the blade lightly on the metal rail three times. It wasn’t a loud sound, and it wasn’t the kind of sound that would attract a Shroomy, but it carried through the space, echoing off the vast sheet-metal roof.
Amelia looked up, saw me, and waved me down.
January 12th, second entry
Shuffling through the debauched Christmas market, I couldn’t help but think how much it looked like a Walmart the morning after Black Friday. All in my imagination, of course. I haven’t been to a Black Friday sale in over twenty years. Maybe since before they even called it Black Friday. I mean seriously, waiting in line overnight to wrestle-mania my way through a horde of grabby shoppers trying to be the first to reach the $299 wall-sized flat screen TV in the ad, knowing there’s only one there, and knowing it’s hidden somewhere in the back of the store behind the double-priced toaster ovens or some such shit, but believing the store is a trove of price-saving treasures, anyway. Nope, not for me. I’d rather stick my dick in a light socket.
“Hey, Mr. Grumpy Gills.”
I looked up from the mess on the floor. A little bit offended. “You’re the surly one.”
“Whatever.” Punctuated with an eye roll.
Teenagers. Ugh!
“Find anything?”
Amelia kicked her way through boxes of remote-control cars. All still packaged up. Most of them, anyway. “Nothing yet.”
“You sleep alright?”
“Yeah. You?”
I drew a long comfortable sigh and admitted to both of us, “Yes. Yes indeed.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I’m feeling a little antsy about sleeping in the wild so far from home.”
Amelia kneeled down to examine a piece of jewelry she found beneath a box. “You get used to it.” She looked up at me. “I guess.”
“Yeah.” My eyes followed my curiosity across the floor and into the booths nearby, looking at all the stuff, and trying to figure out what it was about everything that seemed off. “This place.”
“Yeah?” Amelia stood up and went back to shuffling through. “What?”
“It doesn’t give me the creeps or anything. But something’s not right.”
“What do you mean?”
I spotted a stepladder and waded through the wares on the floor of a booth to get to it. I climbed up two steps. Adding that to my substantial height, I was able to see across the endless floor, remembering what the market looked like when it was thrumming wall to wall with shoppers hunting for that most special of special dick-socket deals.
Nothing moved. Not even one of the eye-popping trees in a double booth on the next aisle over. They were covered with so many ornaments, all handmade by Maggie Brown and her “Secret Elves,” that you could barely see the fake green pine needles on the branches underneath.
I said, “I can’t quite—”
“What?”
That’s when it occurred to me. The place looked to have been scavenged, more than once, but not by Shroomheads. I hopped off the ladder. “That’s weird. Every house I’ve been in. Every store. It’s like Shroomies like to tear stuff up. They shit everywhere. Piss on things. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear none of them have been in here. This doesn’t look like their doing.”
“It’s not,” Amelia told me. “It’s why I chose this place.”
I looked toward a bank of metal doors on one wall, all closed, thinking of the old carnage outside the Target where we’d stayed the day before. “Outside last night. I don’t remember seeing any signs of a battle. Was there one here, too, that makes the Shroomies afraid to revisit?”
Amelia shook her head. “I don’t know, but I have a guess.”
“About a big fight?”
“No,” she answered. “I don’t think anyone made their stand here, but I wondered the same thing when I found this place. Why wasn’t it destroyed by the infected? There was no battle. Nothing I could think of except for something ridiculous.”
That piqued my curiosity. “What?”
“You’ll say it’s stupid.”
I spread my arms wide to take in the acres of the unexplained. “This has to be this way for some reason, right?”
Amelia stomped away from the boxes she was rummaging through and said, “C’mon.”
January 12t
h, third entry
Amelia led me to the door we’d entered through the night before. It was one of only a few that weren’t locked. That was a surprising fact all by itself. Shroomies hated doors. In my experience, they liked to break each one they came across—usually. No rule ever seemed to stand fast in the spore-twisted mind.
Stepping outside, I paused. The sky was still lost in the mist above me. It was an hour or two before sunset. Fog still blanketed the land. Visual details in the distance faded to gray. Way out across the endless asphalt, some cars sat, lonesome and dusty. A few windows were broken, yet they hadn’t been mauled like most others parked in driveways or abandoned on roadways. Through the chain-link fence on the other side of the parking lot, and out on the road, across the street and in the trees and bushes, I didn’t see a thing moving.
“It’s okay,” Amelia told me. “It’s not just the show barn. They don’t come into the parking lot. They don’t climb the fence. They don’t cross the road to this side of the street. They avoid this whole area.”
“Why?” I asked, sure that I’d see something out there, maybe a Humvee with a fifty-cal mounted up top and a mountain of spent casings piled around it, evidence that a slaughter had happened. Maybe a big, burned spot in the parking lot, the remains of a pyre where the infected bodies had been torched, leaving a perma-stink on the place that kept the Shroomies away. But nothing like that. It might as well have been a Sunday morning at the fairgrounds on a weekend with no events planned. Just a huge, empty space, waiting for people to show up.
“That’s what I think it is,” said Amelia.
I turned to see her pointing at a thirty-foot-tall fiberglass Santa Claus standing in the parking lot just outside the entrance on this side of the building. It was layered with a few years of dust. The paint was chipped and faded. Nothing unusual about that. It always looked that way. Every year I saw it here with the eventual ex tugging me past to pay our ten bucks at the ticket window for the privilege of going inside. The only time Santa looked jolly and clean was the season after a fresh coat of paint, which happened every five or six years.
Amelia said, “There’s a snowman this big by the entrance around the corner, and an elf on the other side of the building and—”
“And a giant Rudolph on the other,” I finished. “You think the Shroomies are afraid of Santa and his helpers?” I laughed out loud. Too loud, considering we were out in the open in Indian country.
Amelia stomped past me to get back through the door. “Asshole.”
I grabbed her by the arm and immediately let go as she swatted my hand away with a karate move and spun around to glare at me.
“No,” I told her. “I’m not laughing at your theory. I’m laughing because if you’re right, you gotta admit, it’s funny as hell.”
Amelia surveyed the parking lot quickly and softened as she said, “We should get back inside.”
I followed her in. “You really think that’s it?”
“I don’t have any other explanation.”
January 12th, fourth entry
I’d found a booth that was in pretty good shape, which as I’d learned in an hour of scavenging, usually meant everyone who’d come before me knew at a glance how worthless the contents were. The banner pinned above declared:
HOMER’S CHRISTMAS CAVERN
HOME OF THE ORIGINAL INFLATABLE YARD DECORATION
WE LEAVE THE CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS
I had no guess as to what Homer’s cavern had to do with the holiday season, and found his claim to being the Home of the Original Inflatable Yard Decoration to be dubious at best. But you never know. Homer might have been a consumer products genius. The Made in China labels on every package made me doubt it. Maybe he was just a flea market conman looking for an angle.
Oh, and I didn’t see an inflatable Jesus. Maybe Homer was sold out of those.
On the pagan side of the scoreboard, I found inflatable Santas, and elves, and trees, and presents. A sleigh, beach-ball-sized tree ornaments, various reindeer—some lit from the inside, others not. And an out-of-place rubber chicken with a Close-out Sale! sign on it. Homer had boxes of electric air pumps, all rated for outdoor use. Not an Underwriters Labs label anywhere to be seen. Plenty of Chinese small print on the boxes, though. And odd descriptions like:
HOLIDAY FUN MAKE REINDEER TOY.
OUTDOOR FOR YOU ABODE TODAY FUN HAVE FOR CHILDREN SMILE.
DOG ANTLER PET.
FUNNY SHRILLING YARD CHICKEN.
HOLIDAY!
All written in big letters, right on the front of a box over the face of a Rudolph with a glowing, green nose.
Green?
Maybe it was an easy mistake in translation. What do I know?
I was sorting through the packages, trying to find the biggest one, trying to guess whether the sound of an electric inflator would draw more Shroomies than an eight-foot happy snowman would frighten away. Or would it have to be thirty feet tall?
“A-tisket, a-tasket, Amelia finds a basket.”
I looked across the aisle intersection to where Amelia was smiling at me, apparently having found a prize while rooting around the remains of Grandma White’s Homemade Soups booth. That booth covered a square the size of four normal-sized vendor booths. I was familiar with Grandma White, and I despised her the way only a working man on a budget can.
Grandma White was a netherworld succubus who lured in many ‘o unsuspecting housewife with her charade of soupy-warm love for women grasping at an illusion of having her shit together by putting a home-cooked meal on the table once a week. You know, the modern-family equivalent of the unachievable Leave-it-to-Beaver dream. Multiple packets displayed in a clear plastic shopping bag was some sort of weird status symbol among the housewife shoppers.
I overheard Grandma talking once to another vendor about how she recently had a slow weekend in one of her five booths in statewide shows—it only brought in forty thousand bucks.
What the eventual ex never realized when she queued up—and yeah, there was always a line—to drop a hundred bucks on packets of soup mix that would ring in at eight bucks a pop, was that she wasn’t buying what she’d just been given a mouthful of. She’d just been scammed, and she never caught on to it.
She was a true believer, and that blinded her.
Grandma White’s big square booth was built like an ancient fortress. A tall square table ran around the perimeter like a stone wall. It was lined with three dozen crock pots, each bubbling with ladle-fulls of her own grandmother’s family recipe of heartwarming, rib-sticking, creamy, chunky, wholesome, healthy, homemade, family love. Fucking soup.
Stone soup. That’s what I called it.
Each crockpot was manned by a happy black man wearing a crisply ironed white shirt and bowtie—It sounds like BS, but I swear to God, you can’t make this shit up. I saw it with my own eyes. It was like it came from an era sixty years earlier, and that she was daring the world to say something. It made me uncomfortable, but every Scamarama Saturday, there they’d be, strapping, young black men making minimum wage at Grandma White’s Soup Plantation.
Damn, they were a friendly bunch, though, always smiling and all but shoving samples into your hands, urging you to luxuriate in aromas that smelled like your own granny’s kitchen, seducing unsuspecting housewives to let that creamy love flow over their lusty tongues.
And it worked.
The eventual ex loaded up a grocery bag full of packets of seasonings and dehydrated vegetables—with a big maybe on the veggie part. To make the soup, you simply had to plop the thirty-five cents worth of seasoning that you just paid eight bucks for into a pot with butter you bought somewhere else, chicken stock you purchased at the grocery store, chicken or ground beef you bought at your neighborhood market, a pound of cheese, cream, a gallon of milk, and fresh veggies. All things you had to add yourself.
I argued with the Double-E about that one time, asking, you know, ‘What the fuck?’ She had all those seasonings in the spice cabinet
at home already. She could download a recipe off the Internet. And why was the damn packet so expensive if you had to add all those other ingredients yourself? Hell, for the final cost of a few steaming bowls, I could have taken her to the Outback Steakhouse and bought a couple of steaks instead of having fucking soup for supper.
“But, that makes it homemade,” she told me. All those ingredients she added. That’s what she meant. It’s like the argument that biscuits made with Bisquick are homemade. Horse shit.
Ugh!
Double fucking ugh!
Maybe Grandma Whitey is still around. I need to add her to my list of dipshits along with the Toe Fungus Fuckers who I hope to run into during my apocalyptic travels. I’d love to stomp her dentures on the asphalt and stick the broken pieces up her ass.
“Are you paying attention?” asked Amelia.
“What?” That’s such a useful word when you’ve been daydreaming and need to get back in the game. “What’d you say? There’s an echo in here.” I waved a hand at the metal roof twenty-five feet overhead.
Amelia looked around like I was maybe a little off-kilter. “I found a package of soup mix.”
January 13th
Amelia stashed a few handfuls of Grandma White’s soup packets in her bag. Out of spite, given my strained financial relationship with Grandma White, I passed on the offer to take my share. Amelia stashed the rest of the box in a steel-doored utility closet that appeared to be one of her remotely located pantries. There looked to be enough food inside to sustain her for a few months.
The more time I spent with her, the more it seemed she was going to do well in the twilight of humanity’s dominion. Following on that, it occurred to me that staying with Amelia wasn’t just about the company, she was a survivor, good at this shit. Together, we’d both live longer. If I couldn’t convince Aunt Millie to take her back in, a new choice was going to come up for me.
