by Alison Stine
The buried gun waited beneath a jewelweed bush, the plant dead and pale as a puffball, a tumble of sticks beside a stump, the stump that marked the calf’s grave. I remember when I had found those bones, I had thought they were human at first, a child’s bones. I had thought Lobo had done something. I would not, though my mama loved him, put it past him, not the slender, knocking bones, laced with moss.
He was capable of violence. I had seen him smash a man’s nose, blood spraying across the dining room wall. I had seen him punch and keep on punching, kick and keep on kicking.
I kept the jewelweed in the corner of my eye.
But I dug elsewhere, in a different place—closer by the house, near the pillars for the back porch. I saw the green plastic of the first canister, and let the shovel fall, pulling the canister out with my hands. We always buried the money shallowly.
“What’s that?” Grayson said.
I shook off the dirt. “My inheritance.”
* * *
On the farm, it was easy to forget the world. But the closer we drove into town, the more it came back: how everything had changed. How everything kept changing. A kind of empty feeling had settled over the landscape. Even the foothills of the mountains, crenulations in the distance, seemed hollow, too cold even to hold animals. The playground at the elementary school looked like a cemetery, the seesaws shovels of white. The doors to the building had been chained. The gas station at Crossroads, where I sold weed, had a large, spray-painted sign: NO MORE GAS TODAY.
“How can they be out?” Grayson said.
“Everybody stocking up.”
I was taking Grayson home. First I was taking him to run errands: to the bank to get cash, to get propane for the heater I was letting him borrow—to wherever he wanted to go, really. It was the least I could do. Should I have given him money, let him stay on at the farm alone? What were the rules now that the late-summer sun seemingly set at three in the afternoon—the clouds looked so low and thick it might as well have—and we passed more than one house, where family members were roping suitcases to the roof of their cars? I drove by a house whose windows were blank and wooden, boarded up since the last time I had passed.
I thought of something. “It’s Friday, right?”
“Yeah,” Grayson said. “So?”
* * *
The line at the bank was long. The wait for the drive-through snaked into the road, trucks idling, tailpipes gummed with slush. In the lobby we found a similar scene as in the clinic. People filled the room to the corners. The heat was on in the bank, but barely. Some of those waiting were wrapped in blankets. The tellers wore fingerless gloves, skin flashing as they counted out bills.
I told Grayson to get what he needed. I told him I would buy the propane for his heater, then meet back up with him.
It was Friday, and that meant the Filthy Flea: the market in the parking lot of the old roller rink. Usually it stretched clear to the road. I had checked and the tents had been pitched, and I saw a hum of activity near the rink. The market was on. Maybe I could buy ammo for the gun there.
But in the bank lobby, someone was jiggling a shrieking baby. An older woman wept, slumped in a chair, her hand fluttering over her eyes like a handkerchief. I heard one of the employees counseling an elderly couple about their overdrafts.
I changed my mind. “Grayson, get out everything, everything you have,” I said. “You should close the account.”
He was filling out a slip. “I don’t need all that.”
“Not now.” I tried to keep my voice quiet. “But you might not be able to get it later.”
There it was, the way I was raised: distrust running through me dirty and clouded as a creek in the holler. Get paid in cash. Bury the money.
I glanced away from the table with the slips and pens. I felt eyes on me, felt the baby’s crying and, even worse, the old woman’s crying shake something loose deep inside me. I didn’t know if Grayson would listen to me. Maybe the banks were in trouble. Maybe everyone in line wanted to close their accounts. The pharmacy was in trouble. The gas stations had closed.
“I’ll go get the propane,” I said to Grayson.
But the attendant at the station wouldn’t unlock the cage. “Propane is rationed,” she said. “Don’t you read Facebook? One tank per household every week.”
“I guess I’ll buy that, then,” I said.
“Great. Line starts over there. We start selling at three o’clock.” She pointed to the side of the gas station, where I could see it now: another line. Stamping, shivering people in boots and blankets. They glared at me.
I checked my phone. “It’s not even two-thirty.”
“Some people have been waiting since yesterday. They sleep here, out on the sidewalk.”
“Why?”
“When we run out, we run out. That’s it until next week.” The attendant stared at me. Her hair was crispy, the bags under her eyes sunk so deep they looked like pockets. “Do you want some propane or not?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then you best get in line.”
I moved to the back of the line, past the women sitting on the sidewalk, wrapped in sleeping bags, and all the men in hoodies, looking down. A group was playing cards, huddled on lawn chairs. I got into place behind two men watching a video on a phone. The man holding the phone turned to me, tilting the screen, so I could see the video, see the bare limbs. They were watching porn.
I heard grunts on the screen, the slapping of cards from the bullshit players. Someone won and someone else threw their hand down, disgusted.
Grayson came up behind me. Seeing him, the man with the phone turned back around. “What do you need at the flea market?” Grayson said cheerfully. “You should go get it. I’m done at the bank. I did what you suggested. I can wait here now.”
“Are you sure? This line is going to take forever,” I said. I lowered my voice. “These guys...”
“I can handle it,” Grayson said. “It’s easier for me to just stand or sit here on the curb, not walk around. And if anybody gives me any trouble.” He knocked on his boot. It sounded hollow, like a plastic drum. “This thing’s sole is stainless steel.”
I left Grayson in line. The card players were passing a thermos around, something steaming that smelled medicinal. Grayson gave me a little wave. It was strange to leave him there, his boot oversized as a cartoon. I thought that was why I felt a little sad, a little lonely, to walk off without him, because I was worried about his foot.
* * *
The flea market had changed. For as long as I could remember, there had been stalls selling airbrushed T-shirts, birdhouses, sparkly phone covers. Mama had taken me there to buy my birthday present one year. We had just moved in with Lobo. I remember her telling me to pick out whatever I wanted, anything, even a rabbit fur coat—we could afford it now. And I hadn’t. I hadn’t wanted anything, not from his money. Not as a bribe.
Trucks had hawked elephant ears and French fries then. Now, I was surprised to see canned goods were for sale, hard sausages, dried meat. Camping gear. The flea market had become a somber, muted place. Even the tents looked gray. Snow pooled in their sagging tops. And the faces of the people, hard and searching, who walked, hands in pockets—they were gray, too.
I passed a stall selling root vegetables. A woman in a matted fur coat, which smelled like it had been in a basement for a decade, picked up a potato from a bin. The potato looked wizened, old and undersized. “How much do you want for this?” she asked.
The owner of the stall hurried to her elbow. “I’ll trade you two dozen for that coat,” he said.
Before, sellers at the flea market had accepted cash only, cold hard cash, no cards. Checks were unheard of. Even if you knew the person writing the check, even if they lived down the holler from you, you could never really know a person. You could never trust what they might do, what dru
gs or hunger might lead them to.
But two years running of extreme cold, and bartering had become a system. Along with cash, I saw blankets exchanging hands, food, live chickens squawking in a wire box.
Walking among the tents, with sellers pushing squirrel meat and mess kits and knives, I felt as if I had gone back in time. I walked through a Civil War camp, or one of those pioneer festivals Mama always swore she would take me to but never did. I had gone back, further than my childhood, further than I meant to. I was lost. A cooking smell of onions and garlic drifted from one of the tents. Something sizzled in a huge pan. I bought two bags of roasted chestnuts, thinking I would bring them back to Grayson. I was not even sure what chestnuts tasted like, but at least they warmed my pockets. I hadn’t seen any ammo.
I passed a stall selling garlands, festooned with red bows and sleigh bells, and stopped.
“Christmas decorations?”
The woman in charge of the stall said, “Might as well make the best of things. It feels like Christmas, don’t it?”
“What happened to Halloween?” I asked.
It was just meant to be conversation, but the woman pointed across the parking lot, to the end of the aisle of tents. “For that, you want the Pumpkin King.”
“The what?”
“If you want a pumpkin, you need the Pumpkin King. He’s the only one who grew them this year. All mine died.” The woman fingered the bows of a garland, her hands going down the row, like a rosary. “Everything I tried died.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
I walked on, past bows and kayaks, cider and corn. I bought a bag of apples, cringing at the price and at the small size of them: almost as wrinkled as the potatoes, with spots of green and cracked brown skin. A man who sold military surplus items had a stand at the end of the row. My mama had bought me a pocketknife from him that year I had refused to pick out my own present with Lobo’s cash.
I knew that a knife was a bad luck gift. It severed the relationship. That was the superstition.
But though the man had backpacks and canteens for sale, though there were duffel bags and utensil sets, I didn’t see any boxes of ammo.
The man—I thought I remembered his name was Phil—nodded at me from a folding chair. “Wylodine,” he said. “Good to see you looking well.”
“You got any ammo?” I asked.
A slow shake of his head.
I was surprised to feel relief. Maybe I should have it, but I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to have to figure out what the gun took, how to load it. How to use it.
“Try the Walmart,” Phil said.
“I don’t want to go back there. What about MREs?”
“Sold out of those weeks ago. Your best bets are canned goods and dried food at this point. Do you have vitamin C?”
I thought back to the clinic pharmacy. “Why?”
“To prevent rickets, child. Scurvy, if we don’t have any oranges this year. Don’t you read the internet?”
“We don’t have internet at the farm.”
“Oh.” Phil was sucking on a toothpick. “How’s your mama?”
My hand stopped on a canteen. The leather casing felt like a living hide under my fingers, bunched with wrinkles, dry rivers of skin. I thought of the calf skeleton again. “Great,” I said. “She and Lobo are doing real good.”
I drifted away past Phil’s stand, and though he may have called something to my back, I ignored it. We were fine; I was fine. I was certainly not out there alone on the farm. I was certainly not thinking of leaving it all behind, leaving the farm unprotected, driving away and locking the gate forever.
I was sure Phil was one of Lobo’s customers, or had been. Maybe one of the men who came up to the farmhouse to visit with him and Mama after I was shut up in my place for the night. Was Phil one of the men who had angered him somehow, asked for too much, paid too little, tried to touch something that wasn’t his?
Lobo called these customers problems. He solved problems with his fists. Sometimes that’s the way you’ve got to do it, he said. People need a lesson they can see on their skin.
The smoke on those evenings was so thick it drifted down like mountain fog to my door. I swore I could taste it in my sleep. I was surprised the drug dogs didn’t come after us those nights, alerted to the scent as they stuck their heads out of windows, riding in the staties’ cars down the road.
Frost whitened the pavement. I glanced behind me and could see, at the other end of the parking lot, the overhang of the gas station. The line for propane slunk around the wall. I checked my phone. Grayson would still be waiting.
The roller rink was ancient. A friend of Lisbeth’s and mine had had a birthday party there when we were in junior high. I couldn’t remember the girl’s name. Kids would smoke in the bathrooms of the rink, and we came back stinking. After that, her folks forbid Lisbeth from skating again. Or maybe The Church had banned it—along with YouTube, women and girls driving, shorts. Later on there was a fire, but the rink had reopened quickly afterward, tinged with an ashy smell that we found exciting, like riding in fast cars, sticking five sticks of gum in our mouths at once, the choking game. The fire-ghost scent hung around the rink, skulking like a boy. It never went away. I wondered if the weather had finally closed the rink.
Then I found the Pumpkin King.
It was the orange that drew me in. Amid the gray of the tents and snow, in the drab of everyone’s coats and the ashen casts of their faces, the pumpkins, small and stunted as they were, glowed like beacons. Orange in the dark.
The pumpkins were stacked in piles in the woods at the edge of the market. I felt myself pulled to the glow.
I ducked into the woods, stepping around blown bits of trash, newspapers, and fast food bags. I wasn’t sure why the Pumpkin King, if that was what he was called, had chosen to sell his fruits here in the trees, except he didn’t have very many, and like all the other fruits and vegetables for sale at the market today, they looked paltry. He had scattered the piles around to make them seem more impressive.
Coming upon the first stack of pumpkins felt like discovering a prize. I thought of chicken of the woods, the bright orange mushrooms that grew wild in the forest around the farm. Mama and I would hunt for them in the fall, fry them up with butter. They were easy to spot because they were so bright, as orange as Halloween, almost pulsing with fluorescence. But they hadn’t come up this season; there hadn’t been a season.
I picked up the top pumpkin off a little stack. Tiny as my palm, and spotted with dark, raised warts.
“Those ain’t for eating,” a voice said.
I hadn’t noticed the man. From deeper in the trees, he stood up and came toward me, tall and lanky, moving as stiffly as a marionette. He wore a wide straw hat, better suited for summer.
“Decorative only,” the man said. “They ain’t even pumpkins. Those are gourds.”
“I know. Why are you selling them?”
He grinned, strangely white. Maybe false teeth. There was a funny clicking from his head. “Idiots will buy anything. Especially now. Now’s the time to unload all your shit.” He tilted his head, studying me in the shadows. “I know you. I know your folks.”
“Lobo’s not my daddy.”
“I know.”
Grayson had probably bought propane by now, and was waiting for me. All I had to show for the flea market was a bag of old apples and chestnuts. I shouldn’t have gone into the woods. “I should go,” I said.
“Wait a minute. I have something better than food.”
He would show me a knife, a gun. Something worse.
But the Pumpkin King didn’t move a step. He stretched out his arm. When his fist was below my face, he opened it, and I saw, in the cracks of his palm: seeds.
“Pumpkin seeds,” he said.
There were six of them, like large pale tears. He saw that
I saw them, then he closed up his fist and shoved his hand in his pocket. “Those ain’t just any seeds. Those are from a monster, the biggest specimen I got last year. Connecticut Field. Introduced 1800. People bake ’em in pies, but they can get huge.” He patted his pocket with his other hand. “This one sure did. Pretty good eating. And they’re keepers. You don’t have to grow ’em right away. That’ll be important now.”
I must have looked at him strangely.
“Girl,” the Pumpkin King said. “Ain’t your mama and stepdaddy telling you anything? Ain’t you preparing?”
“For what?”
“These are the only seeds at the market today. The ones folks planted last year died. Froze in the ground. Never sprouted.” The Pumpkin King shook his head. “These are from the year before, when we had a season.”
“They’re old, then.”
“You should know better than that. Shit, seeds can keep for years, if they’re dry. These seeds are good,” he insisted. “They’ll grow in the right conditions, grow a monster, feed a family, I guarantee it.”
“I don’t have a family,” I said.
The flea market soldiered on at my back, just a few feet behind me, in the parking lot. Tents flapped. The breeze carried the smell of sausages and oil. People called out the prices of things, and yes, the prices were a tank of propane or diesel or deer meat or a sweater—but I could almost pretend the world was the same, at the edge of the market. In the trees with the Pumpkin King, though, we lived in another time, a changed time, one with gourds for sale, priced like jewels; seeds hawked like magic beans.
“Girl,” the Pumpkin King said. If he knew my name, he didn’t use it. “If anyone could find the right conditions, it would be you. You know how to make things grow under piss-poor conditions, under penalty of law. It’s in your blood.”
“Lobo’s not my real daddy.”
“It’s in your blood,” he repeated.