Truculence

            The transfer had taken all day, and Naomi still wasn’t close to being home as she parked her pickup at the Crossroads Diner. It reeked of piglet manure, even as the buyer had stretched her a hose to minimize the evidence. “Highway Patrol would not turn a blind eye,” she was well aware, yet all her law abiding years had done nothing to prevent these present troubles.

            She sat in the cab for a minute to decide what to do with the dog, travelling along out of habit—more her husband’s predilection than hers; now that he was dead, such habits would necessarily change. “You can’t come in with me, Buck—maybe if I had aimed the hose at you back there, but…” Buck barely looked up from the narrow space behind the passenger seat. “You can lie out on the bed if that suits you better.” Apparently, it wouldn’t; Naomi rolled down the windows a bit for fresh air and headed inside to eat.

            The pocket on the bib of her overalls was zipped shut—her left hand checked that spot often. Her right hand dug into a hip pocket with no zipper to pull out a ballpoint pen clipped to a couple sheets of legal pad paper. She folded strategically what she wanted to review, hiding the rest from the waitress or anyone else passing by. The pigs today covered a single percent of her debt, and a creditor soon would come by to, essentially, unzip that sale from her overalls. Scratch another off the list. Naomi never agreed to those sows when he brought them a few years ago in a fifth wheel trailer that last week she had to sell, stuffed with the full-growns that were headed for slaughter. The piglets today she corralled in the bed of the pickup—by pitchfork and prayer—and bungeed a tarp to keep them from flying.

            At her booth she jotted ideas of what to sell next and how and to whom. Her neighbors were not very helpful, outwardly warm but cold at heart, like the lasagna she tepidly asked the waitress to re-microwave. Folks in their township understood her husband’s suicide as a series of problems solved, not that they’d wish anyone likable to go off the deep end. He and she were liked, if clearly not well known.

            The bill came to $13.90 and the bottomless pot of coffee probably justified the expense. Naomi feared unzipping the pocket for a Ben Franklin, so she did so in the ladies’ room and crunched up the bill to make it seem less part of a stack. She debated on her return if a tip to 15 would make a smooth exit, but the debt… and lasagna was cold…. Her jottings enveloped the $86 in change; she stared at the dime on the little dish, then took that, too.

***

            Buck snored like a heavyset man, though he was really quite thin for a German Shepherd. Naomi turned up the radio to drown him out: Garrison Keillor was on, and that would co-pilot the homestretch. ‘There’s a kind of hush—all over the world, tonight—all over the world people just like us are falling in love,’ he crooned with one of his guests. And of course, the radio waves were joined by many hermits like her.

            That mellifluous mood came to a screech, however, in a kind of hologram a hundred yards ahead of the pickup, forewarned by the headlights. Naomi realized immediately it was a naked man pacing toward her, hampered by asphalt pebbles roughing up his bare feet. “Wake up, Buck,” she called rather calmly: this guy was obviously unarmed and probably in some kind of trouble.

            Nevertheless, she pushed down the lock on both doors before he reached the passenger side. “Oh, Lady, thank you for stopping,” he slanted his voice through the inch of open window. “I can really use a lift.”

            “You been raped, young man?”

            He looked around, causing Naomi to check her mirrors likewise. “No,” still catching his breath, “not exactly.”

            “Where are your clothes?”

            “You got anything to cover me up?”

            “You got a reason for being in this fix?”

            “I do… I’ll tell you the long and the short, if I don’t freeze to death first.”

            “Ain’t that cold.” The dashboard showed 56, not proving anything.

            “The short of it is, I’ve been dumped by my new fraternity.”

            “Which one?” to test out the story.

            “Theta Xi, at Southern,” he responded without seeming to think about it. “I didn’t think they’d haze me this bad.”

            The dashboard blipped 55 and Buck yawned a strange ambivalence to this delay in the overlong day. “I only got the tarp back there as a possible wrap.”

            “That’d do me better than none.”

            “No, wait—” she said, pulling up the parking brake and getting out of the cab. “That’s been through pig snot. I suppose I don’t need this, if it fits,” taking her sweat jacket off and tossing it across the pickup bed.

            “Don’t want to inconvenience—”

            “Just put it around you, maybe without the arms so it slides down where it should.”

            “You sure? I mean, I’d pay you for this if I had any money.”

            “Well, you said you were lookin’ for a lift—I’m not suggesting you keep it.”

            “Campus is a long way away—would you drive me that far?”

            Naomi considered. Not only far, but opposite the angle she’d need to get home. “Tell you what. I got plenty of clothes left from my dead husband. If you want any or all of ’em, I’ll drive you to my farm and you can hitchhike from there, dressed for the occasion.”

            Now he considered. “That’s more than I can ask for.”

            “Not really,” she said, and got in and unlocked his door. He adjusted the hood of the jacket self-consciously, unsure if it should move from codpiece to seat. “Just get in—it’s not like the fake leather cares.”

            “My name is Grant,” he offered as the pickup moved through the low gears.

            “Grant what?”

            “Grant me a wish!—no, sorry—that sounds creepy. Especially…”

            “Grant who?”

            “Grant Cassidy. Technically ‘Junior’, but I never knew my father.”

            “Divorced?”

            “Ran away.”

            “Just like that?”

            “According to my Mom.”

            They sat a half-mile in silence. “That there’s Buck.”

            Grant twisted to try eye contact. “Hello, Buck. You buckled up back there?”

            “No joke—cop stopped me last week and gave me a warning. New state law, apparently.”

            “That’s messed up.”

            “Said it was more to prevent the animal from hurtin’ people, like an internal missile.”

            “Do they let him ride outside?”

            “In the bed? Probably a law on that, too.” And definitely one on loose piglets. She didn’t want to talk about the law anymore, yet also didn’t want to say so. Perhaps Grant read her mind, nodding his head and pretending to look out on the darkened fields.

             A patrol car passed them and U-turned. “Wouldn’t you know it.” Naomi affixed the rearview mirror, checking the tarp as much as the inevitable blue lights.

            “Shit, am I gonna get you in trouble?”

            “In it or out of it—we’ll see.” The lights came on and glided both vehicles to the shoulder. Naomi adjusted her seatbelt to obscure her bib pocket bulge, which she suddenly realized Grant might have seen. It wasn’t exactly a third central boob, but still a small thing to wonder about.

            The trooper approached warily, with a flashlight. He didn’t say a word when Naomi rolled down the window; instead, the beam of light aimed at the hood, the bare feet, the naked shoulders, the lowered eyes, the back of the cab, the snout of Buck, then Naomi’s face. “License and registration, please.”

            Only then it occurred to her that her pocket bulge was not just today’s sale—not so many hundreds, after all—but also her wallet with all her credentials inside. Rather than risking an unzip, she reached over to the glove compartment and found the registration. “This is what I got, officer; I must have left my driver’s license at home—”

            “Which is where?” the officer took the registration under his flashlight.

            “It’s twelve miles away, on County K.”

            “That’s where I generally patrol. Think I’ve seen your truck once or twice.”

            Naomi didn’t respond to that. Anyone could have seen a maroon Dodge Ram, with or without a make-shift tarp to cover its bed. The officer expected some sort of follow—an apology for not having the license; a reason the passenger was like the way he was; a basic acknowledgement that he was in charge. Naomi didn’t respond.

            Grant was less patient. He also didn’t respond, but shifted as if he had to take a quick shit.

            “You okay, passenger?”

            “I am,” Grant responded, giving lie to what idioms mean.

            “And you, Miss—”

            “Call me Naomi.”

            “Miss Naomi, are you also okay?”

            Good question, notwithstanding the source. She could have mirrored it back: ‘what is this okay you’re looking for?’ and ‘how is it with your probable miss’s, wondering how boring or scary tonight’s roads have been…’ She let that rhetorical question hang while the flashlight tried to stay steady, and Buck’s snout went back to the floor, and hitchhiker feigned to be irrelevant. “I’m driving okay,” she decided to say.

            The trooper recorded that somehow in his mind. “So, I’ll tell you why I stopped you,” handing back the registration card, “and you tell me if I was right.”

            Naomi knew he wanted her to say ‘okay’, but, for reasons beyond that, she didn’t. Out of the blue, she heard “Officer, I want to be clear: my name is Grant Cassidy, and this lady helped me a ton—”

            The officer put the full beam of his flashlight on Grant. He still wanted Naomi to weigh in, but all the more now, she’d button her lip. Grant followed her example, so eventually the trooper had to ask, “are you sure?”

            “I am,” Grant punctuated. “Totally.”

            The flashlight clicked off. “Well, the reason I stopped you—” he darted a look at Naomi for some spark of care—“is that someone phoned in that a streaker was messing with traffic, sparse that it is this time of the evening.”

            “If it’s about my appearance,” Grant came to the point, “I can explain—”

            “Well, you better do fast. Another called in some sort of zombie, if that might have been you—”

            “I’m certainly not a zombie—”

            “Maybe you’re not; but what explains you?”

            Grant weighed his options, and glanced at Naomi, as if she remotely would have anything to supply. “I… I’ve been… on the brink of being raped—”

            “By whom?” the trooper seemed to click audio into the flashlight.

            “Only on the brink… I escaped, minus my clothes… and this lady—”

            “Naomi,” the officer said.

            “Yes, Naomi, helped me to get out of that rape, and where we are now.”

            The officer clearly didn’t believe him, and scanning Naomi’s face didn’t help. He might have suggested, ‘we have protocols for victims of rape’, or ‘hitchhikers are technically not under code’, or something else from the rag-tag playbook. “And would you want to press charges on the alleged rapist?” he managed to funnel.

            “Um..., no—I don’t want to go there. I… got away, so… I’m… I’m good as is.”

            “And you, Miss Naomi…, sure you’re doing this alright.”

            ‘This being what,’ she started to smile. “I lost my husband last month,” she decided to say. “I’m driving what used to be his favorite truck. This hitchhiker needs some clothes, which I got a closet-full at the farm. I’m gonna give him some and send him on his way.”

            What else could the trooper say? Remind her of a seatbelt for Buck? He wished them all a safe night and went back to his patrol car.

            As often the case, which to re-entry the road first? Naomi looked in her rearview mirror a full forty seconds, and saw the officer writing half of that time. She cast a glance at Grant, now a proclaimed rape victim, also bending his head as if records were written to account for this all. She checked on Buck, safely asleep, and started the low gears for home.

***

            The next morning was Sunday—no classes for Grant, no transactions for Naomi or hassling phone calls from creditors. There were only chicken and geese left to constitute ‘chores’, the tens of thousands of pre-dawn hours she’d wake to at this farm to milk a hundred head of cows. They and all their maintenance had gradually gone away: a steady, subtle indication that her husband was in trouble. She explained some of this to Grant as he selected the clothes he needed to travel back to campus.

            “Go wild,” she spurred as she headed to the stairs. “I’m taking the rest to St Vincent Thrift tomorrow.”

            “Saves me a trip there, charity case I’ve become.”

            Breakfast, when he ventured down, was a feast of eggs, breads, jams, and garden vegetables. She said there was some back bacon she could defrost if he wanted, which he probably did but politely declined. “You can bring it with you—I don’t think I can stomach much what’s been slaughtered here. ’Cept the fowl and rabbits, I guess.” She smiled at the rise of her coffee. “There’s some hypocrisy for ya.”

            “I saw in your son’s room a lot of portraits of hunting trophies.”

            “Yeah. He high-tailed outta here after he graduated. Went to Southern for a year—maybe even tried out for your frat house. Didn’t feel it was far enough away, so transferred to SUNY and some Wall Street thing or other. Afforded him trips to Alaska and Africa and… I forget.”

            “Looked like Europe somewhere… wild boar.”

            “Figures that one slips my mind.”

            “Funny he went to SUNY—you know which one?”

            “Stony Brook; the out-of-tuition was none too funny.”

            “No, mine neither. I’m from Syracuse.”

            “Also running away from the generation that birthed you?”

            “Well, they keep my bedroom a bit of a shrine, too.”

            Naomi would disagree with that characterization, but instead asked him about Southern and the stuff that didn’t strip his dignity. And Grant offered a few stories of non-sorority dates or discussions with profs surprised he’d use their office hours. He didn’t have a major yet—maybe musicology, if he could complement that with some gigs that so far were not falling in his lap. No guys in the frat house were interested in his ‘Cage the Elephant kind of crap’, which he showed her on YouTube after she’d wiped clean the computer screen.

            “I don’t use this very often—tried to figure out the books and budget of this place, but…. Probably shouldn’t reveal so much to a stranger.” And since that embarrassed him unintentionally, she retreated to gather dishes.

             By the song ‘Take It or Leave It’, Grant decided it was the best time to say thanks and all the best. Naomi nodded without looking at him and said she could drive him to campus if he wanted. Or better yet, he could take the old Nissan she couldn’t find a buyer for, and maybe he could sell it and, eventually, bring back some cash on commission. “It’d actually do me a helluva favor.”

            Grant hadn’t ever driven a stick shift before, but, as morning lessons turned to afternoon competence, they both had pointed out a lot of little projects that could justify a type of rent for another day or two, in part to vex those assholes at the fraternity.

***

            A week went by with some attendance to the creditors—Grant was able to help interpret the chaos of the ledgers—and even better imagination of what could happen with the farm. “I’ve lived here all my life,” Naomi reflected, “and to think I could finally make it my own….”

            Sales of things were turning into salvagings—the bale elevator, for instance, could abandon its scrofulous engine and become a staircase into a refurbished loft, gradually airing out the odors of animals, hay, and oil. The milk shed had the makings of an indoor spa—jacuzzi and sauna—and the milking barn made them joke that the ceiling’s the limit for what it could be.

            Before too long, though, Grant would need to go back to campus and get some items. “My guitar, first of all,” and reluctantly, “my phone…” He came up with a plan that would take some clever timing. Members of the affiliated sorority visited every last Wednesday of the month, ostensibly to organize projects—in reality, parties. “I’ll drive the Nissan to an alley a couple blocks down, take off these borrowed robes and leave them in the cab. They meet around 8, dark enough for me to slink in the way that half of them saw me last. Don’t know if I should ‘hello’ them or pretend the place was empty. Go to my shared room—probably looted—grab what I can and vamoose.”

            “Maybe I give you a haircut to confuse ’em even more.”

            “Yeah—I’ll shave, too, and be the cleanest-cut revenant the world has ever seen!”

            So they did that and he left. Buck went with him sort of for ol’ times’ sake, curling into the passenger seat because the Nissan didn’t have any space behind. Naomi offered to ride along, put Buck in the covered bed; Grant felt the mystery was best served with her out of the picture.

            He did decide, last minute, on one more feature—dark sunglasses that he found in the hunter’s room. Eye contact would be nothing he’d not want to control—he’d trade diminished light for inscrutability.

            Including no hello. There were exclamatives of ‘holy shit’ and ‘dude!’; the girls variously guffawed and ran to some safe corner of the house, if there was one. When it became apparent that this nude imposter was Grant, walking cavalierly by, one of the guys tried to get in front of him. Prepared for this, Grant channeled some sort of zen and imagined himself a mastodon mildly set on emigration. He anticipated a push or a punch that he’d have to absorb, but in the utter confusion of what was going on, the most he received was a grab to his bicep: ‘man, you look out of it—let’s get you some help.’ A mumbled debate ensued among the frat boys, noting how much this could cost them by exposure, one way or another. Brad, in particular, was shrill about ‘loser initiates who’ll fuck our shit up.’ One of the sorority sisters laughed that notion to humiliation. 

            His section of bedroom had been rummaged through, but the guitar was where it should be and some moleskines that oddly weren’t removed for somebody’s sense of investigation. His phone was missing—no big deal—and the drawer where he kept his wallet and laptop was pried open and empty. He gathered an armful of clothes that he wanted, a couple pictures pinned to the wall, and, like a fuller-fed mastodon, went through the common area and out the door.

            He figured, correctly, there’d be some cat calls and entreaties that would follow him down the block. On purpose he took an oblique route to the Nissan, and reaching it, he arranged his stuff quickly around Buck, who made room. He wouldn’t screech out of the alley like a criminal; instead, he geared the pickup as the novice he was, relieved to have a way home.

***

            Winter months proved perfect hibernation. Instead of grooming the land and structures on it, Naomi and Grant hunkered down in the dining room to plan a springtime launch of a campground—easy enough to demarcate areas around the stream for itinerants with tents, and closer to the barns for those with RVs. Tricky to advertise, though, if the proper licensing would require costly inspections and all the ensuing mandates. Grant imagined a way around those: amorphous, open festivals that could justify a crowd without a need to answer as a business. “Like some barn stomp folks would stroll into, stretching out in mini-Woodstock days.”

            “Well, my piano playing wouldn’t make the grade,” demurred Naomi, “you’d need to bring in those who could entertain—”

            “Not necessarily. The whole premise could be ‘open-mic’. Oh, I’d run a set of stuff I could play—maybe even practice with some guys I’ve already met at the Renegade Pub—”

            “I figured you’d find something in that joint. Just don’t go down the road my husband took.”

            “I don’t drink much—maybe that’s why the frat made a unique haze of me.”

            “Less the alcohol than poker games in back. I had no idea how much he skunked the farm away.”

            Grant assured her there was a difference between gambles. Some craftily placed plywood signs could pull people here, whether or not they’d care to sing or dance. They could make a nondescript donation—nothing meriting a receipt—with a moral sense to ‘leave the campsite cleaner than you found it’. They could weed the garden and pick what they’d gladly pay for at the supermarket, but so much fresher off the vine: they’d pay double for the pleasure.

            “Sounds like organic farming,” Naomi mused, recalling its prior impossibility with the amount of cows and hogs they had. Grant heard of WWOOFers and their itinerant effect, and luring them here would require a rudimentary website, some sought-after advocates, a kickstarter or two, some well-timed word-of-mouth. “Like an asparagus festival—earliest harvest, get it before it rots, cook it up on site…”

            “And celebrate with song.”

            It wasn’t that a bank couldn’t be involved—debt reconciliation couldn’t avoid that—but loans for projects or lawyer fees were not going to happen, nor did they want them to. ‘Ask forgiveness instead of permission’ became the bona fide gamble, and even at that, their garden stock would grow to ripeness or rot regardless.

            Naomi affiliated herself with some groups that encouraged organic farming—including one from the university that Grant gave his lukewarm blessing, as long as she didn’t use his name, of course. There were naysayers along the way, like the  grocery store owner in town who heard by-the-by of possible competition for his produce. He wanted to know what quality controls were in place, and whether he could feel free to drop by unexpected, like any potential client. Naomi clarified they wouldn’t have sales per se, but ‘festivals in farming’ that would lend stewardship to the land and only cover costs of production. Not a give-away nor a competing business. The grocer argued only with his eyes, then turned back to his car, bidding her a sardonic ‘good luck’. She was diplomatic in her ‘thanks’.

            Grant also worked the circuit, staying well clear of where Southern students might show up, though he had no misgivings if they did—he had done nothing wrong by turning on his naked heel, yet dreaded the specter of any testimony concerning the conduct of the fraternity. He started dating Melissa, a student at a nursing college on the other side of the county, after she and some friends showed up to a debut concert at the Renegade. Grant hadn’t billed it as a promo, per se, but the crowd seemed to appreciate the idea that more of these kind of tunes could be had for free out on a local farm, BYOB. “That last B’s for ‘boots’,” he sort of joked, “as we’re hoping to have more gardening than we can handle by ourselves.” Melissa asked him after the show who the ‘we’ was, and Grant blushed an answer that apparently satisfied.

            Naomi liked her too, and soon enough encouraged her to move in—“save an extra six miles a day” commuting to the college. More than that, Melissa had a voice like Joan Baez, which Naomi was proud to YouTube and contextualize, child of the same generation. Maybe there’d be barn stomps here, maybe something more like modern flower power; music added to the melt of snow and all the sowing of their plans, inaugurated by some sixty campers celebrating asparagus like never before.

***

            More WWOOFers came, and then the wolves. A reclusive farmer downstream had a complaint about syringes he saw floating by, replete with needles and God knows what. When Naomi asked to see them, out of curiosity, he shot back, “I’m not gonna touch something prob’ly swarming with AIDS. Anyways, I see and hear what’s goin’ on with all these hobos—”

            “They’re not that, Gordon, and as proof: do you recall—rare enough you’ve swung by—this farm lookin’ as ship-shape as it does?”

            “Not the point. They’re strangers doin’ drugs, and my cattle are bound to suffer what comes down the creek.”

            “Lord knows our field sewage was a lot worse. You’d rather go back to having your animals drink pesticides, or our stock’s offal? Cuz those aren’t happening here anymore, Gordon. Look, I’ll show you what we’re doing.”

            “Not interested, really. You made your point and I made mine. Difference is, I got nothin’ to account for and you got waves of strangers.”

            “All respect, you need to ’count for those syringes, but—better than searching for them, why not pick a boxful of eggplant to bring home?”

            “Agnes grows her own.”

            “Has she ever cooked up the pink variety we’ve planted ’side the rhubarb? Have a look!”

            “Pink? That aint what it’s supposed to be.”

            And as Gordon left, Naomi reviewed how it could have gone better. She imagined a conventional box of eggplant already picked for such a visitor, a couple recipes on a print-out she’d lovingly type up with some background of the vegetable’s ‘journey to this farm and to your wholesome table’. She should have gauged the situation and paced the fact that eggplants aren’t just purple.

            The grocer knew as much, but also that the FDA had officers auditing his own stock all the time, while she had nobody. “But I don’t sell them,” she clarified. “I bought the seeds online from a in-state distributor that bet-your-boots has gone through red tape. I grow more than I need to eat—like any farmer—and let others enjoy what they harvest.”

            “But that’s business, Naomi—you can’t play out some sort of shell game.”

            She would have said ‘all respect’ but knew that phrase didn’t go over well with Gordon. “I’m not making any profit—this is retirement for me—a hobby, really.”

            “But you are charging something—”

            She had another print-out ready in her pocket for this very question. It had a modicum of small print recommended for these occasions, but essentially broke down the basic overhead of seed cost, water use, basic tool supply, and packaging option per pound of the various vegetables she grew. “And notice, it says ‘suggested donation’, maybe like they do in church.”

            The grocer studied the sheet. “I don’t see ‘pink eggplant’.”

            “Those seeds were more expensive than the purple. I’ll gladly absorb a nice thing to try out.”

            He didn’t ask if he could take the sheet, and she didn’t offer him a free box of what he might like—giving food to a grocer felt funny. Instead, they parted with a sense of caution, rivals in a small market that could, by-the-by, exploit each other’s success or failure.

            A delegation from a church called Freedom’s Way had picked up on what apparently the grocer let known: donations ‘like they do in church’. They wanted one of those print-outs and a copy of the township license for having such an operation.

            “Show me yours,” Naomi rejoined, editing out the ‘search warrant’ she also had in mind. She and Grant had gone through many helpful exchanges with national, non-profit organizations promoting this kind of venture. They had applied for registration in several, availing themselves to legal inspections and the like, officialdom they knew they’d eventually require. As these arrangements snailed along, Naomi contented herself that ‘pending’ was leading to a license, and such an operation could continue in the interim.

            Freedom’s Way had another bone to pick with Grant’s effect on the youth culture and the general vagrancy he encouraged. Naomi wanted to fish for what they knew about Grant—thought about calling him over from the loft he was refurbishing with a couple of campers, but instead insisted that all visitors on her farm were here to glory in the good earth, not to invade another’s privacy. She assumed the same applied at their parish, to which they said, “you can’t conflate what you’re doing with the work of God.”

            “Damn straight, I’m not God—neither are you. But we all eat the fruits of creation—and I’m not talkin’ what those GM Frankensteins concoct in their labs, which maybe shoulda been your better whistle stop.”

            Handled with aplomb, she walked away feeling zero-for-three. The WWOOFers were great, the wolves greater—these just the sniffers for a ravenous pack behind them—and so she considered the need for a hunter, a phone call she knew she’d have to make eventually.

***

            There’s something on anybody’s farm between inertia and entropy: the former implies a logic of staying put until the time is ripe, the latter a nagging feeling that time tends to dissemble, and staying put is no better than getting the hell out. When Naomi called her son and explained her present self, she looked outside to paradise and knew it could all come to crumble when serious people, like her son, would intervene.

            “Then why did you have to make that call?”

            “I did it, Grant, to alleviate…”

            Grant, cradling Mel’s shoulder, waited for Naomi to find some finish to her phrase, which hung suspended in a sort of truculence. Melissa eventually filled the gap: “we’re gonna try more peace, love, and understanding to those who’ll want to shoo us off.”

            Although Naomi nodded her head, she knew such talk would only fan the fire. Instead, she figured out what she had intended: “I hope Bryan will come to alleviate the business snarls. Co-sign some guarantees. Talk to the Gordons and grocers in a make-sense way.”

            “Did he imply he wanted to do that?”

            “I… don’t know him really anymore. When his dad died he came for a half week, tidied up his room a bit—had to have those pictures pointing just so. Spent some time with the funeral home to make sure things would be controlled—a plot and gravestone, simple ceremony for about fifteen. He gave the hearse driver a hundred bucks—I think that was a tip—and sort of made the whole ordeal just… disappear.”

            Melissa flinched a teardrop and had the guts to grab Naomi’s hand. Grant decided the time was right to say he and Mel would move out of Bryan’s room—now that he knew his name—and occupy a room he’d made in the corner of the hay loft, minus decades of hay that proved a futile cycle in feeding animals to feed their owners’ schemes. “It’s somewhat mice-and-men-ish,” Grant opined when Naomi wondered if the place was fit enough, “when George tells Lennie how it’s gonna be.”

            “I think I saw that movie—Gary Sinise, right?”

            “Among others, yeah.”

            “Didn’t turn out so right, as I recall…”

            Mel elbowed Grant to put a stop to this, and sensing he was tone deaf at this moment, suggested that “a movie doesn’t let you turn the pages back. I saw it, too, and didn’t want to exit when the director told me to.”

            “I agree. I meant to leave things with ‘how it’s gonna be, George’—tending rabbits, living off the fat o’ the land, being our own bosses and all that rhapsody.”

            Naomi noticed that Buck had slunk into the dining room, reminding in his own way that dog food would be nice this time of nearly night. “They had a puppy in the big guy’s arms, if I’m not mistaken—”

            “They did,” Melissa affirmed, “and a promise of more to come.”

            “But that’s not the way the story went.” Naomi opened the cupboard for a menu of items she’d throw together to gratify Buck. “You can’t fool me—somebody shot the smelly old dog in the back of its head.”

            Grant bent down to scratch Buck’s neck. “It’s not the reason I brought it up. This isn’t any literary jaunt, least of all a re-hash of a Steinbeck tale—”

            “Then why’d you bring it up?” Melissa challenged.

            Naomi spoke for him, and herself: “because we’re bouncing into outer space, and asteroids like my son are there to dance around or land on or crash against…”

            “Which gives us nothing but a crap shoot. When’s this gonna be?”

            “He said he’ll come mid-week.”

            “And stay until the weekend?”

            “Don’t know. I suppose that depends on what you’ll do.”

            Grant looked to Mel, who half-smiled back. “What we’ll do is make some silly songs, and pick—I forgot what’s ripest round about now—”

            “Well, begonias, for diets of a different persuasion—”

            “And pumpkins soon. All the stuff for Halloween.”

            “Which could be our biggest windfall yet.”

            “Yeah, could be…. Never liked that word, though—like some kind of accidental fortune.”

            Mel and Grant went upstairs to clear their things from the bedroom and start their honeymoon, so to speak, in the loft. Naomi held back in the kitchen so as not to follow them, then went outside to check on how her visitors were tending to their campfires. She did this every other evening or so, less to regulate than to eavesdrop on their little worlds—a baker’s dozen on both sides of the stream. She didn’t imagine anybody shooting heroin; Gordon hadn’t badgered her on that front lately, if he still threatened action against the bohemian noise. Yes, some songs went well into the night, some she even sat to sing with. One patient strummer learned the lyrics she taught him, from memory of times she followed Baez and Dylan, well before she married. ‘Love is Just a Four-Letter Word’ hadn’t lost a beat. Of course it was different nowadays to sing “searching for my double, looking for complete evaporation to the core”; in some ways she felt more alien to the words, now that she could actually share it with sympathetic strangers.

            She wasn’t able to sing it on the Indian Summer stage, however, when hundreds of people turned up from seemingly everywhere, for purposes as plentied as the steps they all had taken—secretly considered, naturally.

***

            Cars and pickups couldn’t fit in grassy places designated for such festivals, so they lined the shallow ditches of County K in both directions. The roundabout driveway was milling with those who had harvested leeks and broccoli and turnips right up to this crepuscular time of day; they were joined by apple-pickers who also helped build a conveyor press in the erstwhile milking barn; the numbers swelled with friends from Renegade and points less familiar.

            There were strained faces, too. Gordon showed up with what looked like a Geiger counter—music might be radioactive tonight—and the grocer crept around the edges of the garden plots. Members of Freedom’s Way were taking photographs and notes, bothered by the fact that no one gave a shit about consent, as surely they would if the tables were turned. Grant recognized Brad and a few others from Southern, but kept a crowd between them, having lots to do before the show and wanting nothing to do with them.

            Bryan had come two days before and went straight to his room after a Judas kiss for Naomi and a ‘later’ glance at Melissa. He was aware that she and Grant had been in his bed—Naomi had to tell him that when he pressed the point on the phone: “who the fuck is this guy, and how is he staying in our house?” He seemed to have cooled down on the whole scenario—plane trips can help in this regard (or exacerbate). Just a time zone traveled, he acted like he suffered jetlag: sleeping right away, skulking around the house and farm at 3am, making calls on his cell at the break of dawn, going back to his hunter’s lodge to sleep ’til noon, both days. He spoke with his mother behind closed doors, and with Grant only outdoors, mostly about the ways we was re-doing the barn and everything around the campground. To Melissa, who worked in and out of the house, he spoke more with a smile, asking to her shrug, “where were you when I was living here?”

            The festival was informal, as fit the place, but with such a crowd came responsibility to make announcements. The five porta-potties would obviously not suffice, so finding discrete places in the woods, especially for ‘number 1’, would have to be encouraged. Food and drink were what they could be, but compost heaps and plastic bags were there and there and there to help clean up. “Drive safely or not at all—there is still space in the loft for those who need to stay.” And a general call to enjoy the open-mic for everyone else also to enjoy.

            Several modeled that final imperative perfectly, but soon enough a man from Freedom’s Way came up to try to pull folks to their senses; he was shushed  and escorted off the stage by some ZZ Top-looking dudes. Grant saw this as good a time as any to step up for some songs that would appeal to the Renegade base, including ‘Shake Me Down’ with a laugh at “not a lot of people left around”. He further beamed when a bongo drummer drifted on stage as the song intensified, knowing when to decrescendo at the end. “That was Cage the Elephant,” Grant identified, looking directly at Brad. “And,” scanning for better company, “I’d like to introduce everyone to the sweetest voice I’ve ever heard. Mel, this is our time.”

            She was standing by the porchlight and blushed a bit, but needed no extra coaxing to join him at the mic. As Grant rolled some chords between open G# minor to A major and F# minor to E major, she introduced “this song we wrote together, just about the lovely creatures around us, sometimes alone or scared or, to some, scary. I was scared of spiders as a little girl, but one day I saw a daddy longlegs crawling on my dad’s arm—makes sense it was Dad, but it could have been Mom just as easily. I shouted at him ‘Dad, get that off—spiders can kill you!’ but he just looked at it and said, ‘most can’t, and this is not a spider anyway. Just a fellow sojourner.’ Well, that became the idea behind this song we call ‘Serendipity’.” And she turned the mic to Grant for the first verse, back to her for the second, and both for the chorus they sang a couple times, joined by a fiddler who harmonized:

daddy longlegs walkin’ aimlessly

kind of lame for a monster movie

all the same it’s derivative time

you got your fears and I got mine

just in case it's a battle of dreams

creepy crawlin’ aint as bad as it seems

daddy longlegs, you can stay awhile

know you never seen a welcome smile

play you something from Division Bell

none too groovy but it’s just as well

if you envy any webs that you see

call it ennui for the chance to be free

     daddy longlegs—serendipity

     find your momma and a family…

The applause rippled like a drizzle and a breeze, quickly shattered by a gunshot. Grant rocked back and released his guitar, which still hung by the neck strap. He dropped his head to look at it, the stunned crowd thought, but really at his t-shirt turning crimson. Melissa screamed and crumbled with him to the stage floor, the fiddler broke his stun to catch them, and others ran to and from the scene.

            Buck let out a howl that echoed like a siren, pining for an ambulance.

***

            It wouldn’t come in time, if still had reason to stay. Naomi, having witnessed from her kitchen, dashed through the chaos to cradle Grant, despite some sloppy efforts of amateurs conducting CPR. Melissa was praying sobs into her hands, and Buck circled to see what could be done. Some tussles in the crowd attempted to shake out who had done this, but probably the culprit was among the vehicles speeding away, into the cover of night.

            Naomi unfolded herself from the corpse and silently, amidst the wails around her, stepped off the stage and took off one sandal and the other, her apron stained with blood, her sweater and shirt and bra. She walked another stage-length away to shed the remonstrations, then unbuckled her pants to take them off, in one motion with her underwear as well. Oblivious or not, she ambled through advice to get inside, though no one tried to guide her. Like Virginia Woolf, without the trenchcoat or the rocks, she paced deliberately into the pond, devoid of ducks for the noisy night they’d naturally abandon. She was waist deep when Melissa, fully clothed, ran in to shake her out of this stupor. Naomi dragged her to their necks, but Melissa was the stronger one, and by the reedy edge furthest from the roundabout, a couple men waded in to get them to the grass.

            A blanket draped around them as they clasped into an endless cry. Things were said above them, sometimes stooped to whisper assurances that truly could not be. Only Buck intuited the truer need, curling into the tent they had become. The ambulance just watched over them, to be there when they’d wake. 

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2017)