by Paul Theroux
“I didn’t come up here to discuss the ethics of farming, Mr. Fox. I’ve got a problem and you seem to have the solution, so will you please stop this nonsense?”
Polski had turned green. He was suffering.
Father said, “You were cool to my cooler.”
“It doesn’t seem practical.”
“If you think that, you’re out of touch with reality. It’s the most practical invention in the world. And it’ll run on anything—not only range oil, but methane gas bubbled out of a solution of raw chicken shit, and there’s plenty of that around here. Furthermore, although there’s a little more plumbing in it, there’s absolutely no wiring.”
“How long would it take to set up?”
“A jiffy. You said money wasn’t a problem.”
“A reasonable amount.”
“Don’t back away,” Father said.
“You’d be willing to install a firebox refrigerator, would you? For the overspill?”
Father hesitated before he replied. I had never seen him hesitate before. I guessed he was doing a calculation.
He said, “I sure am tempted to try.”
“This is your chance, Fox. You’d be doing both of us a favor.” Father looked up at the parlor ceiling and said, “I see a vast cooling plant and cold store. It’s on seven or eight levels, the size of two barns and then some, with your catwalks inside and your reflectors and insulation outside. Looks like a cathedral, with a chimney for a steeple. What’s that bulge in the ground? That’s your power unit, the main hardware, the worm tubs, the tanks of coolant, the heat supply. All your pipes and tanks are underground, sheathed in lead, in case of nuclear war, accidents, and acts of God. Your chimney has baffles and coils to conserve heat and redirect it back to the main supply, the fire itself—recycling the heat, so to speak. But there’s waste heat—there always is—and that’s why we have ducts built into the chimney. Now this is blown across a grid, and that’s where your incubators come in. That’s your battery in both senses—your egg hatchery, your heated runs for young chicks and chickens that are going to supply you with fuel in time to come. Methane gas. Nothing wasted. You’ve got your refrigeration. You’ve got your ice. You’ve got your heat. Sell the eggs you don’t need and have the rest for breakfast. Cool down your vegetables. Use your chicken shit for methane. It’s a perpetual-motion machine. Run a duct to your house and you’re air-conditioned—cool in summer, warm in winter. Cheap, simple to operate, no waste, foolproof, and profitable. There’s only one thing.”
Polski had crept out of the hydraulic chair like a raccoon out of an unsprung trap. He was watching Father with a gentle hopeful expression, smiling sadly as Father described this vision of the cooling plant. In an uncertain voice, and clearing his throat, Polski said, “What’s that?”
“I don’t want to do you a favor. You just want this thing to cheat people and put up prices and starve the market.”
I thought Mr. Polski was going to cry.
“You can’t make me sell that asparagus.” Polski glanced around, as if looking for a place to spit, and still puckered he said, “I only wish I knew what to do with it.”
“Eat it.”
“You’re talking yourself out of a job, Mr. Fox.”
“It’s better than you talking me into one, seeing as what the job is.”
Polski said, “Keep talking. I might have to let you go.”
“Careful now.” Father crossed the room, fished a cigar out of his humidor, and took a long time lighting it. When it was smoking he stared at it and said, “I’ll go where I’m appreciated.”
Polski had turned away from Father and now he was talking to his own two feet. He said, “I don’t want to make things tough for you.”
“People who say that always mean the opposite. That sounds like a threat.”
“Take it any way you like.”
“Mother!” Father called out. His shout made Polski jump. “He just threatened me!”
Mother, wherever she was, did not reply.
Polski said, “I knew it was a mistake to come over here.” He shuffled slowly to the door. I felt sorry for Polski just then, looking so small, with Father trumpeting cigar smoke at him and the little man’s wrinkles of defeat on the shoulders of his jacket, and his tiny head going through the door. I had wanted Father to make peace with Polski, and for things to continue as before. Now, I knew, something had to happen.
I went back to my room on all fours, wondering what.
The next thing I heard was Polski starting his Jeep, and Father muttering “Grind me a pound,” and then very clearly, like a moo in a stall, Mother’s voice.
“You fool.”
“I’m happy, Mother.”
“What do you want?”
“Elbow room. I just realized it.”
“Please, Allie—”
And Father said, “I never wanted this. I’m sick of everyone pretending to be old Dan Beavers in his L. L. Bean moccasins, and his Dubbelwares, and his Japanese bucksaw—all these fake frontiersmen with their chuck wagons full of Twinkies and Wonderbread and aerosol cheese spread. Get out the Duraflame log and the plastic cracker barrel, Dan, and let’s talk self-sufficiency!”
“You’re talking nonsense.”
“Listen,” Father said, but I heard nothing more.
6
WHEN FATHER said, the next day, “We’re going shopping,” I was sure we were going to the dump. We seldom went store shopping. There was little need—we grew practically all our own food. Hard work kept us at Tiny Polski’s, and there was a danger in being in stores during the day—we might be collared by policemen or truant officers for playing hooky from school. “Then you’ll be in school,” Father said, “and I’ll be in its rough equivalent—jail. What have we done to deserve that punishment?” Secretly, I wanted to go to school. I felt like an old man or a freak when I saw other children. And secretly, I preferred factory-made cakes, like Devil Dogs and Twinkies, to Mother’s banana bread. Father said store-bought cakes were junk and poison, but I guessed that his real objection was that the few times he caught me sneak-eating, I had to tell him that I paid for the food with money that Polski had given me for doing odd jobs. And Polski told me that Father was peculiar, which was another secret to keep.We bought salt, brown flour, fruit, shoelaces, and other small things in Hatfield or Florence, but shopping usually meant a trip to the dumps and junkyards around Northampton, where we helped Father pick through the poisonous piles of trash for the wire and metal he used in his inventions.
There were seagulls at the dump. They were fat, filthy squawkers, and they roosted on the plastic rubbish bags and tried to tear them open. They chased each other, and they fought for scraps, and they rioted when the garbage truck came. Father hated them. He called them scavengers. They squawked, and he squawked back at them. But struggling up the loose hills of bags and crates, with a pitchfork in his hand, and screaming at the birds that hopped around him and nagged over his head, it sometimes seemed as if Father and these lazy fearless gulls were fighting for the same scraps.
“Now there’s a perfectly good set of wheels,” Father would say, scaring the gulls and forking an old baby carriage out of the reeks and shaking off the orange peels. Other people took things to the dump—Father hoicked stuff out and carried it away. “Some jackass junked that.”
But today, a normal working day, we raced past the greenhouses and rose gardens in Hadley, and hurried through Northampton, and sped toward the pike. Mother was in the cab with Father, and I crouched in the back with the twins and Jerry.
“I’m going to look at ten-speed bikes,” Jerry said.
Clover said, “We can buy ice cream,” and April said, “I want chocolate.”
I said, “Dad won’t let you. And we’re not going shopping—this isn’t the way.”
“It is,” Jerry said. “It’s Dad’s short cut.”
No—we were far from Northampton, in the country. We came to the Connecticut River and followed it. It was
wide and greasy and less blue than it was near Hatfield. There were brick buildings on the far side, and soon the city of Springfield. We crossed the bridge and had to hold to the sides of the pickup truck because of the strong mid-river wind. In the river were bits of plastic foam, gone yellow like slabs of ham fat.
We had never shopped in Springfield before. People on the sidewalks seemed to know this. They stared at us standing in the back of the pickup and holding to the roof of the cab. We kept going until we came to a shopping plaza, where we parked—people still staring. Father got out and told us to follow him and stay together. He was in a good mood, but as soon as we entered the K-Mart store he started muttering and cursing.
Mother said, “Are you sure about the hats?”
“You kidding? It’s a hundred in the shade. They’ll get sunstroke if their heads aren’t covered.”
We tried on fishermen’s ventilated hats and sun hats and sailor hats. The prices infuriated Father. He said, “Baseball hats are good enough,” and bought us those.
Wearing these hats, we trailed after him like ducklings in a file. Here, in this one store, they sold everything—popcorn, rubber tires, rifles, toasters, coats, books, motor oil, palm trees in pots, ladders, and writing paper. Father picked up an electric toaster.
“Look at it. Isn’t even earthed right. You’d electrocute yourself before you got any toast. You’d be toasted yourself on that faulty wiring—”
He was talking loudly and attracting attention. “Kyanize!” he said. “Congoleum!” I had the idea that the people who were staring at us knew we seldom went out shopping. Father was embarrassing in public. He took no notice of strangers. A few days ago in Northampton Hardware it was, “Are you working for the Japanese?” and I had wanted to hide my head in shame. Today he was even jumpier.
“Call this a can opener?” he was saying. “You’d lose a finger with that, or gash yourself and bleed to death. That’s a lethal weapon, Mother!”
We trooped to the Camping and Outdoor Department. A man in shirtsleeves approached us. He had a smooth face and flat hair and did not look like a camper, but he said hello to all of us and winked at the twins and remarked, as everyone did, on their alikeness.
“What can I do for you today?” he asked, and nodded, giving me a better look at his hair. It was combed up from beside one ear and was stuck down in neatly arranged strands across the top of his head, making you look not at the hair but at the baldness between.
Father said he wanted to look at some canteens.
Jerry shaped the word camping with his lips, but I mocked him by wrinkling my nose.
The man handed one over. Father put his thumbs on it and said it was so flimsy he could squash it flat if he wanted to. He looked at it closely and laughed out loud.
“ ‘Made in Taiwan’—a lot they know about canteens. They lost the war.”
“It’s only a dollar forty-nine,” the man said.
“It’s not worth a nickel,” Father said. “Anyway, I’m looking for something bigger.”
“How about these water bags?” The man dangled one by its nozzle.
“I could make one of those myself out of a piece of canvas and a needle and thread. Where’s this turkey from? Korea! See, that’s it—they’ve got sweatshops and slave labor in Korea and Taiwan. Little coolies make these. Up at dawn, work all day, never get any fresh air. Children make these things. They’re chained to the machines—feet hardly reach the pedals.”
He was lecturing us, but the man was listening and frowning.
“They’re so undernourished they can hardly see straight. Trachoma, rickets. They don’t know what they’re making. Might as well be bath mats. That’s why we went to war in South Korea, to fight for labor-intensive industries, which means skinny kids punching out water bags and making tin cups for us. Don’t get heartbroken. That’s progress. That’s the point of Orientals. Everybody’s got to have coolies, right?”
The water bag now looked like a wicked thing in the man’s hands. The man put it away and patted his hair, and we stood there silently—Mother, the twins, Jerry, and me—while Father grumped. I had put my shirt collar up to hide my poison ivy.
“What’s next on the list?”
Mother said, “Sleeping bags.”
“On the rack,” the man said.
Father stepped over to them. “Not even waterproof. A lot of good they’d be in a monsoon.”
“They’re for use in a tent situation,” the man said.
“What about a rain situation? Where’s this thing from? The Gobi Desert, Mongolia, someplace like that?”
“Hong Kong,” the man said.
“I wasn’t far off!” Father said, twitching with satisfaction. “They do a lot of camping in Hong Kong. You can tell. Look at the stitches—they’d fall apart in two days. You’d be better off with a plain old blanket.”
“Blankets are in Household.”
“And where are they made—Afghanistan?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
Father said, “What’s wrong with this country?”
“It’s better than some places I could name.”
“And a damn sight worse than some others,” Father said. “We could make this stuff in Chicopee and have full employment. Why don’t we? I don’t like the idea of us forcing skinny Oriental kids to make junk for us.”
“No one is being forced." the man said.
“Ever been to South Korea?"
“No,” the man said, and he took on the hunted expression that people did when Father spoke to them. It was the one Polski had had on his face last night.
“Then you don’t know what you’re talking about, do you?” Father said. “Let me see some knapsacks. If they’re from Japan, you can keep them.”
“These are Chinese—People’s Republic. You wouldn’t be interested.”
“Give us here,” Father said, and holding the little green knapsack like a rag he turned to Clover. “A few years ago, we were practically at war with the People’s Republic. Red Chinese, we called them. Reds, slants, gooks. Ask anyone. Now they’re selling us knapsacks—probably for the next war. What’s the catch? They’re third-rate knapsacks, they wouldn’t hold sandwiches. You think we’re going to win that war against the Chinese?”
Clover was five years old. She listened to Father, and she scratched her belly with two fingers.
“Muffin, I don’t care what you think—we’re not going to win that war.”
The salesman had started to grin.
Father saw him and said, “You won’t be smiling then, my friend. The next war’s going to be fought right here, as sure as anything—”
It was what he had said in the winter, those same words, although I thought he had only been ranting. Today he was in the same mood. I almost expected him to tell the salesman, “They’ll get me first—they always kill the smart ones first.”
He pushed the knapsack aside. “Do you sell anything like compasses, or have I come to the wrong place?”
“I do a complete range of compasses,” the man said. He smoothed the knapsack with the flat of his hand and folded it like laundry, giving a little moan as he put it away. He placed a box on the counter. “This is one of my better ones,” he said, taking out a compass. “It’s got all the features of my more expensive models, but it’s only two and a quarter.”
“Must be a Chinese compass,” Father said. “It’s permanently pointing east.”
“One of the features is a stabilizing control. When you release it, like so”—he flicked a catch on the case—“the needle swings free. See, that’s north, over there by Automotive. As a matter of fact, this compass is made right here in Massachusetts.”
“Then wrap it up,” Father said. “You just made yourself a sale.” He put his arm around Mother. “What’s the list look like?”
“Cotton cloth, needles and thread, mosquito netting—”
“Fabrics,” the man said. “Next aisle. Have a nice day.”
Father said,
“We’d be better off in the dump,” as we walked away. In the next aisle, he took hold of a length of material that looked like a bridal veil and said, “That’s the stuff.”
The saleslady said, “Seventy-nine a yard,” and snapped her scissors. She was old and trembling, and the way she scissored the air made her seem evil.
“I’ll take it.”
“How many yards?” Snip-snip. She was impatient. She had light webs of hair on her face and almost a moustache.
“Give us the whole bolt,” Father said. “And if you really want to make yourself useful,” he added, grabbing a fistful of Jerry’s hair, “give this kid a haircut. Put him out of his misery.”
But the old lady did not smile, because she had to unroll the complete bolt of mosquito netting in order to measure it and arrive at a price.
We set off in search of other items. I had never seen my parents buy so much in one morning, not even at Christmastime. We left K-Mart and went to Sears and the Army-Navy Store. We bought flashlights and American-made canteens, knapsacks, hunting knives, rubberized sleeping bags, and new shoes for all of us. Spending money made Father cross. He haggled with the salespeople and complained he was being robbed. “I can afford to be robbed,” he said. “But what about the poor wimps who can’t afford it?” I had no idea why he was buying these things, and it was embarrassing to hear him argue. Even Mother was getting fussed.
At the drugstore, filling a wire basket with things like gauze and ointment (“For our first-aid kit”), he broke off comparing the prices of aspirin and went to the rack of magazines for a copy of Scientific American. He was annoyed that it was stacked with girlie magazines, and said, “That’s an insult.”
“Look,” he said, gesturing to the rack, “half of it’s hard-core porn. There are married men who haven't seen things like this. It’s news to medical students! Can you believe this? Kids come in for Tootsie Rolls and this is what they see. But ask any grade-school teacher and he’ll tell you it’s just what the doctor ordered. Charlie, what are you staring at?”
