by Spain, Laura
I woke up at three in the morning. If they searched the house again and found my stash, would they let me off with another warning if I were the prime suspect? So up and out to the backyard to dig another hole, then another five minutes washing up and back to bed, so exhausted it took me another hour to get back to sleep.
If I had had to go to work the next day, I wouldn’t have made it. When I finally woke up, I turned on the radio to see what they were saying about the dead drug dealer run off the road in a ditch. At the end of the local news, there was a short report of an unidentified man found dead in a truck along a county road. That’s exactly what they’d say if law enforcement had released only part of the story. I had another very bad night.
But something more terrible than dead drug dealers was happening. Sunday afternoon they interrupted the most popular country radio station in Eastern Indiana to say three people state-wide had died vomiting blood. It wasn’t an epidemic, according to the State Health Commissioner, just some crazy coincidence. When I went back to work Monday, I was relieved not to find a Sheriff’s car waiting for me. It was just another fall day, with a few seniors wanting to walk outside and see the battlefield, and leaves and trash to clean up. The director told me she’d put an ad in the paper to find someone to take Gary’s place.
Then the national news got the story. That evening all three networks plus Fox News were talking non-stop about the strange bleeding disease that had been affecting Indiana wildlife for the last two years, and the unexplained human deaths with similar symptoms over the weekend. Was it like AIDS? Had a virus crossed the species line and was now infecting human targets?
Five more deaths were reported that week, ranging from Vincennes to Bloomington. Before a phalanx of microphones, the Health Commissioner and an official from the Center for Disease Control announced that they were close to identifying the virus. Soon they would have an antiviral vaccine, and everyone would be vaccinated. Don’t worry.
The talk shows went wild. It took months to manufacture an antiviral and then, like the flu shot, who would be sure it would target the right strain? Nationwide seventeen deaths were reported, and wildlife officials from other states called press conferences and said that they had been investigating the bleeding disease, too.
* * * * *
“Tom, I have to see you,” Karen said.
I had never expected she’d call me again.
“I’m so scared.”
What can you say to a woman who nearly got you killed?
“Tom? Are you there?”
“Is Willy still around,” I asked, pretending I didn’t know.
“He’s dead,” she said bitterly. “They found him in his truck along the highway.”
So I went to see her, pretending that I didn’t know she had betrayed me. We met at a table in the library.
“Oh, Tom, I’m so glad to see you,” she said, squeezing my hands.
“What did he do to you?” I demanded.
“It wasn’t me. It was what he said he’d do to the boys.”
She started to sob and sat down. I was so glad Willy Louton was dead.
“Now what will happen to them, if . . .” she couldn’t finish the sentence.
Parents all over the country were asking the same question.
“If I’m here, I’ll take care of them,” I promised her.
“Can you come by and see them sometime?”
“I’ll come by and see them.”
I left her with her head down on the table, sobbing.
The Governor called a press conference to assure worried citizens that he was on top of it. The President called his own press conference to say that he was on top of it, too. He even flew to Indianapolis for a joint press conference with the Governor. When they came out and shook hands before going on the air, they were both wearing gauze masks. The media went ballistic. As hundreds more deaths were reported, the country’s alarming lack of enough gauze masks to protect 300 million people became a political issue.
When I made my weekly beer and food run to Lafayette, half the people I saw were wearing masks. Karen and the boys had them on when I went to their apartment.
“Why aren’t you wearing a mask?” Kevin asked as soon as he saw me.
“It’s not a virus, buddy. The masks won’t help.”
“How do you know?” he demanded.
“Gary told me.”
“The Indian? Where’s he?”
“He died.”
Karen caught her breath when I said that. She offered me a soft drink that I refused. So we sat around talking about Indians and bows and arrows and camping out under the stars, all the things little boys dream about doing. Then we had spaghetti and did homework. When they were finally in bed, Karen looked at me as if it were okay if I stayed.
“I had a long day at work,” I said.
“I signed a paper making you their guardian, Tom.”
“Maybe next week I’ll come by again,” I said.
“I’d like that.”
The next night the CDC reported unusually good progress toward identifying the virus. There was absolutely no need to panic. So across Indiana and the rest of the country, tens of millions of people drank millions of gallons of high fructose corn syrup and ate millions more tons of corn-fed beef. Three thousand new deaths were reported the next day.
People stopped coming to the memorial, and they never did hire a replacement for Gary. One afternoon in December the Sheriff drove by just to talk. It was a little hard to understand him through his mask.
“I still miss Gary,” he said, when we were sitting in the empty museum drinking coffee.
“If he were here, we wouldn’t have all this bullshit about viruses and masks,” I said bitterly.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the corn. First it started killing the field mice and raccoons and the deer that ate it, then the foxes that were eating them, and now us when we drink the stuff or eat it in our meat.”
“Why are they all saying it’s a virus?”
“Who do you know who will take on agribusiness?”
So the deaths continued, but seemed to level off over the winter. The CDC announced that it was safe to start the NBA season and for people to go to the Super Bowl, as long as they all wore masks. It was a good, clean game if only one or two people out of thousands had to be taken away in an ambulance. In the spring, the farmers who were still alive were back in the fields spraying herbicides and planting corn. Then a TV reporter from PBS came to Tippecanoe County to do a story on the place the epidemic began. She interviewed the Sheriff.
“I think it’s the corn,” he said, and the story went viral.
The average American drinks 48 gallons of soft drinks a year and eats 200 pounds of corn and pork raised on corn. At some point, a new crop of experts announced, the genetically engineered insecticide built up in their systems to do what it was designed to do to insects: dissolve their digestive tracts. No one could calculate individual tolerances; all we knew was that tens of millions of people were going to die, and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. Over the summer, the media had to consolidate stations and programs because so many of their staff were dead.
By harvest time I was the last one left at the memorial. I still saw Karen and the boys every week. She was becoming hopeful that she’d escape because she had made it so far. I guess we all thought that it would pass us by. Then I got a call from the only other librarian still going to work. Karen had collapsed that morning. Could I help with the boys?
I don’t think it will get them. They’re still so young, and their mother was very careful about what they ate and drank. Me, I’m not so sure. I’ve preferred beer to soft drinks since I was a teenager, but I’ve put away my share of steak and hamburger.
Sometimes at night I go outside with the boys and teach them the names of the stars. We talk about what the country looked like when the Shawnee built Prophetstown, and Tenskwatawa their great prophet dreamed of an Ind
ian nation spanning the continent. When day comes and we look out back, all we can see is the rotting corn standing brown and dead in the field. The farmers are all dead, and nobody wants to buy it anymore. So the battle may not be over, and the Prophet may not have lost. Can you imagine what this land looked like, when it was prairie and copses of trees, before we came and plowed it under for the corn? Maybe it will come back, but I think not. After all, Gary said that when the last Shawnee died, the world would end.
The Melody of a Willow’s Memory
by Laura Spain
Laura’s pencil moved quickly over the page as she rushed to gather her thoughts. She had an interesting way of seeing the world, and an even more interesting way of describing it. Her passion was the English language and the way the language itself allowed her to manipulate simple moments and ideas. The words within it were like puzzle pieces to her. She saw their simplistic order and attempted to recreate the simple idea they produced by poetically altering their structure. Her laptop sat next to her and, despite how much easier it made writing for others, she needed the entire picture of the words before her: no scrolling necessary. She also believed that every true writer should have silver-stains hiding the details of their white knuckles; stains from moving the hand to the right side of the page while writing, and white knuckles from the strong grip of the pencil every writer secures when excited or rushed to capture an idea. Her thoughts had momentarily fleeted and she discontinued her writing for a moment in order to regain some of her momentum.
She was at home with no one but herself. This home was not the home she had grown up in. It was the temporary home she had created for herself on the East side of Nashville: the yippy side; the hipster side; her side. She sat on her couch, or her roommate’s couch to be more specific, in an attempt to discontinue her usual reclusive nature of being alone in her room. This was a problem she had always had, even at her “real” home, and at this point a change in scenery was necessary to assist the process of sparking new ideas. The truth of the matter was, that despite her being 23 years old, she was homesick. There was something comforting about knowing her father was lying on the couch in the next room and that her sister may or may not make an appearance once the clock struck 7 pm when she would get home from work. She missed these things, but a girl at 23 should have a place of her own, society says. The time of being a child and feeling comfortable had come and gone. College students do not need that kind of luxury anyway. They need to struggle so they are more motivated to succeed, or she did at least. She could easily hop in her car and drive across the towering bridge that had become a Nashville tourist attraction, and then up 1st Avenue until she reached Cottage Lane, a magical street name in her mind: the street that fostered her home. This trip would only take about ten minutes, but her father had created an idea in her head since she was sixteen years old that she should not put unnecessary miles on her car. Was this trip necessary now? Idealistically, she would get to her real home and her father would be smoking a cigarette on the front porch. She would walk past him and a nice “hello” would take place. She would then open the screeching front door and be attacked by the loud yelps of Snookems, the “so-ugly-he’s-kind-of-cute” Chihuahua/poodle breed of a dog her sister had gotten as a gift so long ago that Snookems was in fact his real name. After the yelping creature calmed down her father would open the screeching door, sit down, and constructively criticize her livelihood. Despite the insecurities this would produce within her, she would be home and be with her Daddy, the man she strove to make proud of her. Hopefully, maybe, one day soon, she would succeed in accomplishing this.
The trip, after all, was unnecessary. She decided to obey her father’s wishes and not add to the miles of her beat up old ’98 Toyota Corolla, which already had almost 300,000 miles on it. She thought for a moment about how much she missed her Dad and how unfair time had been to her. She missed the days of falling asleep in his arms on the couch while heavy baby rested soundly in hers. She missed racing the lawn mowers with her little sister down the driveway and how though the newer one was greener and faster, she always chose to drive the older black and grey one. She missed her dad being able to help her with her homework and having snacks ready for her and her sister when they stepped off the bus after school. She missed his approval allowing her to play outside. She missed him clapping his hands for her as she rode the mini red jeep he had gotten her for Christmas one year around in the yard until the battery would die. Those moments seemed to be the days of innocence and the days she remembered being truly happy. She smiled and then her pencil began moving once again. She wrote:
What is time and why does it have the ability to control every detail of an individual’s life? Why must human beings be so bound to time and why must memories be a thing of the past? Memories are born from a previous moment, sure, but why are they looked at as something that has since fleeted? Memories are circumstances that create an individual’s persona. They assist in creating both the good aspects of a person as well as the bad ones. People see a memory and they see themselves, but they sometimes remember themselves as an onlooker instead of a main character. My memories are a part of me. They are my past, my present, and my future. They are the first person to my person . . .
Her pencil stopped.
The ideas had vanished once again, so she decided to walk outside and sit on her front porch. The weeping willow in her yard inspired her on most occasions and she wondered how long it had existed to inspire others before her. The wind began to blow and the branches began to dance beautifully to a melody she could not hear. “What’s your story,” she asked the elegant willow. And then, her mind began to work again.
What’s your story?
Memories.
Youth.
Home.
Daddy…
Her father had grown up in this part of town! He had driven down the road she lived on, the road currently in front of her, when he was a teenager. He had attended the school down the street as a child. He had walked the train tracks that were perched upon the grey and rocky hill behind her house. These tracks that allowed trains to keep her awake at night were the same tracks that would allow trains to keep him awake at night back in the day. He had lived on Delmas Avenue in a house near the corner of Cherokee Avenue, before moving to his house on Burchwood. This was exactly three miles from where she currently lived in her “temporary” home, and three miles from where she was currently standing, seeking ideas from a weeping willow tree. She did not know much about her father’s childhood because he never really spoke about it, but she knew he was part of a much older generation than were most parents of the children her age. This made his childhood interesting to her. It seemed mysterious and as though it was an adventure she yearned to be part of. Historically, his childhood was the era of James Dean and the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was the era of doing the twist and other Motown grooves while Jacki Kennedy’s fashionable class was mocked by the ladies, and bright suits and wide ties were worn by the gentlemen. “The Andy Griffith Show” aired new episodes on Monday nights and Alfred Hitchcock had his own hour starting at 10:30 p.m. on Thursdays. This era seemed elegant and smooth, as if everything moved to the same rhythm, as if it moved to the rhythm of the willow tree. This historic era was the embodiment of her father’s youth. It encompassed moments and memories for him that made him who he was in the present, therefore creating certain aspects of her. These ideas were flowing rapidly in her brain. They would come to center stage with a strong presence, but then she would lose them and have to re-sculpt them with her imagination. All of this was taking place when she heard a sound that altered her train of thought. She looked up and saw an old Chevy that was racing down her street. The muffler was creating a loud noise that would usually frustrate her at any other time, but at this moment she realized that her contemplation of the past had somehow briefly brought the past to the present. She blocked out most of her surroundings using her two hands and cupping them around the sides of her
face in an attempt to rediscover a past she had not actually been a part of but wished to experience. She stared and watched the car drive down the road. She dared not blink because blinking would take away from the focus she had on this car from the past, the same car her father had driven many years ago but in a bluer color. She stared, eyes moving with the car towards the left. She watched as it drove quickly down her street. Its red paint looked sparkly and new. Her peripheral vision was slowly adhering to her self-made peripheral blockers and as everything around her seemed to go black, the one thing she did notice was that her weeping willow no longer wept. Instead, it disappeared.
The year was 1964. “Another Saturday Night” by Sam Cooke vibrated lightly from the humming lips of a romanticized culture while elders left a ghostly presence behind in their rocking chairs on 6th Ave. across from the state capital. Lovers Lane was not sought out until after the sun had set and the moon had peered out from behind its coat of darkness. All the while, the youths of society mingled gregariously at Ford’s Drive-In on Gallatin Road just past the high school, sipping chocolate milkshakes and eating charred hamburgers that never had enough cheese to suffice the appetite created from a seven-hour day at school. The girls would all ride together, seated in the nicest cars with the top up so as to not misplace a strand of hair engaged in the production of the bouffant hair façade that created the “pretty and classy” look most of the boys were interested in. It was, however, only a look. It did not define a young woman’s character during this time, but assisted in misleading the populous as to her level of sought after adventure. As they pretended to be too proper for the fun that the boys envisioned, there was a hint of jealousy in their eyes. Only a few girls agreed to happily travel over to Riverside Drive with the boys, while the others secretly wanted to jump at the opportunity, but insisted on persuasion in order to also find excitement within the attention they received from their decline. They had a reputation that demanded this sort of behavior, and by abiding by it they were able to perceive a false sense of a higher hierarchical position. It made them feel wanted, which was a feeling that the age of 16 and high school was unable to currently offer them. The boys rounded up the female companions they fancied, and those being fancied hoped for a fancy from someone else. The social interaction that took place was all a game until the sun went down and the masculinity of the boys were on the line. They would playfully ignore their other halves, pausing momentarily to make sure their other halves were paying attention. The popular and “must have” fashionable saddle shoes stung the pavement below as a rush of teenage angst overpowered the need to be noticed. The sun began to set and the evening’s festivities drew closer and closer until one by one each car left the drive-in lot and headed over to Riverside Drive. It was time to begin.
