Grower's Market

by Michael Baughman

  When Shadow regained consciousness it was past nine o’clock in the morning. He was afraid to open his eyes because he wasn’t certain whether he was dead or alive, and if he was dead he had to be in a strange new place and he didn’t want to find out what it was like there. He was afraid to know. The same thing had happened to him three times in war. Roadside blasts had burned him and ruptured his eardrums and knocked him cold for hours. The last time it happened he had remained unconscious for two days.

  He had never believed in the heaven his father preached about and after all he’d seen at war he became more certain than ever that people didn’t deserve heaven anyway. Many of the dead and mutilated had been his friends. But he didn’t want to believe that eternal oblivion was the only possible end and he couldn’t imagine what else there could be and even if there was something else he could find no logical reason to think it might be better than what he had known before. So now in the morning he lay flat on his back with his eyes squeezed tightly shut and a bitter taste in his mouth and his head pounding horribly and afraid to think or move or try to talk or open his eyes.

  “Are you awake? You’re awake, aren’t you?”

  It was Charity’s voice so he knew he was alive and knew where he was so he opened his eyes and there she was looking down at him and looking as frightened as he had been when he awakened.

  “Good morning,” she said. She tried to smile.

  He wasn’t sure he could talk so he made himself smile back.

  “Can you hear me?”

  He nodded slightly.

  “But you can’t talk?”

  He shook his head.

  “Somebody smashed you from behind on the head with a bottle. A full bottle. Toon saw it happen and Shakespeare and Shrimp saw the guy who did it running out the door right afterwards. Shrimp drove you to Doc’s and he stitched you up. Twenty-three stitches. He had to shave all the hair off the back of your head. It looks kind of like a football back there. Or a baseball. He shot you up with some kind of painkiller. It’ll work till about lunchtime. After that it might start to hurt. You have to go back in to see Doc in three days. He said you should just rest up today.”

  While Charity told Shadow what had happened she looked straight into his eyes and he looked straight back at her with his head gradually clearing as she talked. He could tell she was truly sorry and cared about him. He had known that already but seeing it now allowed him to feel a faint happiness along with his pain and rage. Her long blond hair had been washed and he smelled the shampoo. Her teeth were straight and white and she wore no lipstick. Most of the buttons of her loose blue blouse were undone and she never wore a bra because she didn’t need one so he could see her tanned breasts and her dark nipples. When she bent down to kiss his forehead her breasts disappeared.

  His arms were on top of the blanket and when Charity sat back up he reached with his right hand to gently fondle her left breast.

  “Hey, you,” she said and laughed quietly.

  “I can talk now,” Shadow said. “I’m awake.”

  “I can tell!” Laughing again she pushed his hand away.

  “Take your blouse off so I can really look at you.”

  “Okay.”

  She slid her arms from the sleeves and dropped the blouse onto the bed beside Shadow.

  “You’re a fantastic looking woman,” he said.

  “I know. You’re a fairly decent looking guy.”

  “Yeah, thanks. But my head aches like a son of a bitch. Who the hell did this to me? What the hell happened at the tavern?”

  “I talked to the guys after they brought you back. They think some gang from somewhere, nobody knows where, wants to find grows around here and rip the mature plants off. Sunbeam says they might be from up north. Somebody else, Toon I think, or Shakespeare, says maybe they came from down south. I guess that leaves east and west. I can’t remember who said what. Some shots were fired. Did you know that? I heard it. Nobody got hit or anything. But I’ve been all fucked up worrying about you. I still am.”

  “That’s all you know? All you heard?”

  “Somebody said they think some old dude who lives out by Cedar Creek in the cabin has something to do with it. Case? Is that his name? Hell, there’s rumors everywhere. Somebody said maybe he got that gang up here. Shakespeare told me he heard it someplace. I think it was Shakespeare. Maybe it was somebody else. All Shakespeare ever really worries about is that Superpenis book he’s writing.”

  “Ol’ Superpenis. Oh yeah.”

  “How are you really? How bad’s your head?”

  “You know how your head feels the morning after you drink about three bottles of cheap red wine? Maybe four bottles?”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Well that’s how my head feels anyway. It’ll go away. We got any Advil?”

  “Yeah we do. Sure.”

  “Would you please get me some?”

  Shadow felt the bed move when Charity got up. “Be right back,” she said and turned and walked away.

  Now she wore only her white bikini panties. Shadow was afraid to move his head but he followed her out of the room with his eyes. When she disappeared through the door he closed his eyes and waited for the Advil.

  When he heard Charity walking back into the room he opened his eyes. She was halfway from the doorway to the bed with a glass of water in one hand and a small white plastic bottle in the other. The bed moved again when she sat down.

  “How many you want?”

  “Four I guess. Fuck it. Make it five.”

  Charity put the glass of water in his right hand. He stared at her breasts and heard her rattle the Advil out of the bottle.

  “Here,” she said.

  Shadow took the tablets in his left hand and dropped them into his mouth and tried not to move his head when he swallowed water. Some of the cold water spilled down his chin and onto his chest but he got the Advil down. When the water spilled he remembered trying to feed amber ale to Uncle Sam.

  SHAKESPEARE

  He tried hard not to think about some things he had done as a boy. School was the only world he liked even though he had never been anything but bored in any of the schools he attended. When he was seventeen years old his English teacher Mr. Koch who was of course called Kochsucker by most of the boys in the class explained that William Shakespeare’s plays had appealed to the masses and were bawdy. The boy who would later call himself Shakespeare wrote it off as another lame teacher’s trick and went on daydreaming. But he did remember. A few years later he was riding home from a bar late at night in a friend’s car and after accidentally running over the mayor’s poodle the friend was pulled over for doing ninety in a thirty-five and driving under the influence and reckless driving. Because of the mayor’s dead dog the friend was sentenced to thirty days in the county jail and even though Shakespeare had been asleep when the arrest was made he served five days for “aiding and abetting.” In his cell he discovered a dog-eared paperback edition of three of William Shakespeare’s plays under the filthy mattress on his bunk. There was little else to do so he read through the plays twice and realized Kochsucker had told the truth. William Shakespeare had been bawdy. He had written about sex and had told dirty jokes and hundreds of years after his death millions of people all across the world read and attended his plays and studied them in classes. It could happen again. It was time now for a sophisticated and bawdy novel with relevant modern themes. It was time for a twenty-first-century Shakespeare.

  Not long after beginning work on Superpenis Shakespeare had moved into a residence forty miles directly west of the Bird of Prey. The ramshackle four-room cabin he rented sat deep in a pine forest next to a half-acre pond stocked with bluegills and largemouth bass. The bluegills spawned prolifically and there were also frogs in the pond so the bass fed voraciously and grew large quickly.

  Nearly every day Shakespeare spent an hour or more fishing the pond with top-water plugs and he ate fresh bass fillets for dinner most nights of the w
eek from spring through fall. For an occasional change he fished with Elk Hair Caddis dry flies and ate bluegill fillets instead.

  Shakespeare’s principal reason for choosing the cabin had been that it brought him close enough to civilization to provide a reliable landline telephone. When he wasn’t cultivating or harvesting a grow or fishing or working on Superpenis—writing his first draft with a quill pen he had discovered in an antique shop—he spent hours typing letters and chapters to send to the offices of literary agents and publishers in New York and elsewhere.

  He included his phone number with his return address. He planned on finishing Superpenis in six months or at the very most a year or a year and a half and he felt he had to find a publisher. He knew a computer would have made things far easier for him but he called himself Shakespeare and refused to use one. Working on an old portable Royal typewriter he mailed the letters along with two sample chapters out as quickly as he could produce them. He would have written the letters and copied the chapters with the quill pen but realized it was unlikely anyone would read such copies. The drive to the nearest rural post office was ninety miles on slow roads and Shakespeare had made the trip more times than he could count.

  On the morning after the Bird of Prey brawl he was casting a black and green plug called a Tap Dancer onto the pond and retrieving at various speeds but so far no bass had moved to it. The knuckles of both his hands were sore and bruised from busting heads at the tavern but he had no trouble casting the plug. Maybe the reason the bass weren’t moving was that the fall nights had lowered the water temperature too low for warm water fish but now at 10:35 a.m. the sun had risen well above the treetops and its light and warmth reached the pond. That might help but even if it didn’t the heat felt good on Shakespeare’s back and shoulders. Ten yards behind him the cabin door was propped open with a stove chunk of firewood so he could hear when the phone rang. The editor from Bachus Books in New York was supposed to have called at 10 a.m.

  Shakespeare made an arcing cast far across the calm water and watched the plug drop and land inches from a thick tree stump that protruded from the calm surface. Sometimes turtles climbed to the top of the stump to sun themselves. He let the plug sit until the last ring of water made by its landing had dissipated and then on the second crank of the reel as he began his retrieve a huge silver-sided bass shot up from somewhere underneath the log and flashed past the plug and came all the way out of the water in a long arc and then fell back with a loud splat and disappeared.

  “Son of a bitch!” Shakespeare said.

  Shading his eyes with his left hand he scanned the water where the bass had vanished but saw nothing through the sun’s reflected glare. He reeled in at full speed with the Tap Dancer plug skimming the surface. That had been a ten-pound bass or maybe even twelve. That had been the biggest bass he’d ever seen here in the pond or anywhere.

  With shaking hands Shakespeare aimed carefully and made another cast. He wanted to land the plug next to the log again but this time it hit the log and one of the treble hooks snagged in the porous wood.

  He reeled in quickly and tightened his line and yanked hard but the plug wouldn’t pull free. “Shit!” he said. “Fuck!”

  Then the phone rang in the cabin.

  “Son of a bitch!” he said.

  He threw the rod down and sprinted into the cabin and reached the phone on the fourth ring and said, “Hello?”

  “Mr. Shakespeare?”

  “That’s me!” Shakespeare said. “Speaking!”

  “Well, well,” said the same deep voice he remembered well from yesterday’s voice message. “I never thought I’d actually have the opportunity to converse with William Shakespeare. In fact, I thought you were dead.”

  “Not me,” Shakespeare said. “I’m not William Shakespeare. You know that. I’m not dead.”

  “What is your first name, Mr. Shakespeare?”

  “I don’t use my old names, my regular names. Not anymore I don’t. Just plain Shakespeare.”

  “I see. Well, yes, I do. I think I do. Now. We’ve read your letter along with your sample chapters with considerable interest.”

  Shakespeare didn’t know what to say so he didn’t answer.

  A lengthy pause followed.

  “Hello?” said the deep voice. “Are you still there?”

  “Oh yeah, I am!”

  “My name is Meat. It derives from my career as a performer in the adult film industry, from which I’m recently retired.”

  “Meat?”

  “Yes, as in a prime steak. Meat. So, shall we settle down to business?”

  “Yeah!” Shakespeare’s heart pounded. “Yes!” He had forgotten all about the monster bass.

  “We find your character intriguing. I find him intriguing. Fascinating. Stimulating. I’m a senior editor here by the way. Don’t get sanguine, though, please don’t, but I think it’s possible, not necessarily probable, but possible that we might do some business with you. Superpenis does intrigue us here at Bachus Books. The character does. We just might be able to sell him. If you give us what we need. This book would come out under our Firm Core imprint I should add. Have you possibly seen any of our Firm Core products, such as our current Studley Hungwell graphic novels? We have three different writers at work on that popular series with our art department going overtime! Mr. Hungwell’s become quite the hero! Not just in America either! Have you seen him? Heard about him? There’s no reason your hero couldn’t be next!”

  Shakespeare briefly considered lying but he’d never heard of either Firm Core or Studley Hungwell and had no idea what an art department had to do with novels. He couldn’t conjure up a safe lie so another lengthy pause followed.

  “Are you still there?” asked Meat.

  “Yeah, I am! Yes!”

  “Would you like me to tell you what we need?”

  “Yeah! Yes! Please!”

  “First, a new name for your character. Superpenis needs to become Supercock. You need to work in the commonly used vernacular. Do you follow me?”

  “But it’s crude, sir. ‘Cock’ is I mean.”

  “It’s the standard twenty-first-century vernacular. And we need other substantial changes as well.”

  “Like what?”

  “We need lots of fucking.”

  “Fucking?”

  “Fucking,” repeated Meat. “We needn’t be delicate about this. What are male organs for? Fucking, right? Obviously they’re necessary for urination, and just as obviously a cock can be pleasured in various and sundry ways, but the heart of it all is fucking. Fucking sells books under our Firm Core imprint. If it’s done right, that is. In the material you sent there’s no indication that Superpenis—or let’s now call him Supercock—uses his organ as it’s meant to be used. Tell me what you think. Explain, please.”

  “Explain?”

  “Explain.”

  “I can’t explain exactly.”

  “Why not? Is your character going to use his cock to fuck with, or isn’t he?”

  “He . . . I mean . . . I want . . .”

  “What do you mean? What do you want? Tell me. Please explain.”

  “What I mean is, sir, Mr. Meat, is on one level I want The Adventures of Superpenis to be a parody. It’s like I’m making fun of superheroes, get it? But there’s another level, see? Readers who maybe aren’t so sophisticated can take him seriously too, as a superhero, you know? I mean, I started out taking him totally seriously but then I kind of realized right away it had to be a parody too. It’s got a whole other level of sophistication. Of complexity. Okay? It’s like I’m making fun of all the guys who always worry about the size of their cocks. Their penises. See what I mean? I mean, like, it even has to do with wars. Like when America gets into all its useless wars it’s like the country’s measuring its cock. Its penis. See what I mean?”

  “You’re going to have to explain what the size of a penis—a cock—anybody’s penis or cock—has to do with America’s wars.”

  “Su
re, I can explain! You know about LBJ, right?”

  “I assume you’re referring to Lyndon Baines Johnson, our thirty-sixth president.”

  “Right, Mr. Meat! Exactly! LBJ and the Vietnam War!”

  “Well, what about LBJ and the Vietnam War, Mr. Shakespeare?”

  This was a subject Shakespeare felt secure and confident about. “I bet you didn’t know this, Mr. Meat,” he said. “Ol’ LBJ named his penis, his cock, ‘Jumbo’! I do my research, I read all about it! He even showed his cock off sometimes, bragged about it, to reporters out on his ranch down there in Texas! See what I’m getting at? Ol’ LBJ did some good shit, like civil rights, Medicare, but Jumbo, his penis—his cock—fucked him up in the end. Fucked all of us up. I mean he had this hang-up about how big Jumbo was, so you got to figure that was pure one hundred percent Texas macho bullshit that made him keep going with that useless fucking war. He wouldn’t get out of that war, couldn’t get out of that war, ’cause of Jumbo! Listen to this! One time when a reporter asked LBJ why we were still in Vietnam, he unzipped his fly and whipped out Jumbo and waved it around and told the guy, ‘See this? This is why!’ See what I’m saying, Mr. Meat? Lots of times it’s macho-big cock bullshit that makes wars happen! That proves it! It’s sure as shit what made Vietnam happen! Made it keep going! Iraq too! What I figure about Iraq is, maybe Bush Junior’s cock was too little instead of big, but it all relates! See what I’m saying? It’s complex! See what I mean? So what I’m mostly saying is, a sophisticated parody can get across important stuff about all kinds of subjects, even wars! Different levels of complexity can cover everything. I want my novel to cover it all!”