Snowflake, AZ

by Marcus Sedgwick

  ‘’Course,’ he said. ‘’Course I am. It’s what I wanna be. Why?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, so then he said goodnight, but then he stopped again and turned around and said, ‘It’s good to see you, Ash.’

  Then he went off into the dark, with a flashlight to find his way to his shed.

  I felt a bit less lonely then, but and because I was happy to see Bly again. And Mona was real kind, though she did say some stuff from time to time. Such as, I was just taking my clown boots off when she poked her head back out of the house and looked at the boots and said, ‘Kid, you might wanna check inside your boots every time you put ’em back on,’ and I didn’t know what she meant but then she said, ‘scorpions.’

  Then she added, ‘maybe rattlers.’

  Then she went back into the house. And I was just about getting into the sleeping bag when she came bustling back out of the house and said, ‘Darn, I think your dumb brother forgot to close the yard gate.’ She went over to the gate that led from the bit of desert that she called ‘the yard’ and into the bit of the desert that was called ‘the desert.’

  Then she came back and started giggling and said, ‘Because we wouldn’t want a coyote to come in here and, you know, eat your face.’

  Then she said goodnight.

  F

  Fluoxetine

  You may not wonder too greatly when and if I tell you I didn’t get much in the way of sleep. The only good thing about the storm was that I figured the coyotes might stay home. And I wasn’t going to leave my bed for one second with that rain hammering down, so at least I didn’t get to worry about scorpions and rattlers in my boots neither. I don’t suppose there was never a storm like it, not in the history of creation since God made the world, or anyhow, not since last monsoon season, that’s what Mona told me later.

  They’d put the bed right up against the back wall of the house, as far under the porch as could be, but still sometimes when the rain got turned up real high, I felt it splash all the way over onto my face. The first couple times I set up straight thinking ‘rattler!’ but I soon got tired of that.

  Somewhere in the middle of the dark, and the middle of the roar of the rain on the porch roof, I figured I wasn’t going to get no sleep, so I might as well give up trying. Kneeling, I worked my fingers up onto the metal shelves where my (and I mean Bly’s) clothes and my bag were, and felt around and then the lightning flashed and I saw my bag so I said ‘thank you’ and pulled my bag off the shelf and under my blanket.

  First I got my phone and lit up the screen. It still had a mite of juice, a tad. But no signal. Not one bit. I pulled out the postcard. I set there under my blanket, looking at it, hoping Mona didn’t know I had my phone switched on because her bed was just the other side of the wall.

  I guess I’d never really looked at the picture on the postcard before. I guess I’d just been more overly concerned about what was writ on the back. It was from Bly, to Jack, and all it said was ‘this is where I am really’ and he gave the address, Mona’s address, and then he’d put, ‘I’m real sorry. I love you Dad.’ And that was that.

  I’d looked at those words a thousand times and a thousand more. And now finally I had started to learn the other stuff, about how Bly had dropped out of cadet school but had pretended to Jack he was still there. Because he was ashamed. And how Jack had pretended to me that Bly was still there. Because he was ashamed. And no one had told me my damn mother had paid Bly a visit. Probably because everyone was ashamed of her too, but she was still my damn mother. My family. And with all of that, I’d never really looked at the picture on the front.

  It was of a building. And it was a real big building. The building was the color of the desert in which it was set, and I mean red as rust, aside from one or two scrubby-looking plants, and they was dirty green. And the building was put right on top of a hill, and behind it was a sky as blue as the day it was made, with nothing in it but wonder. The building was kinda made of blocks, it had this square look about it, but on top was another block, like a tower, and on top of that was a man of gold, with one arm to the side and the other out front, like he was pointing at something.

  It was hard in the dark, under that blanket, with the light from my phone, but I turned the card over and read the tiny letters printed at the bottom where it said: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Snowflake, Arizona. You know, I guess I had figured it would all make sense when I got there. It didn’t. But there was no time for any more wonder, because the battery went and my phone went with it.

  You always think you ain’t ever gonna sleep, but you do. No matter what. And that storm must’ve kept up through half the night or more and I lay in the dark with my eyes wide thinking over and over Bly, are you really sick? but somewhere and somehow I slept.

  *

  First thing I knew was a buzzing, before I even opened my eyes. No roar of the storm, that was gone, just this gentle buzzing nearby. I opened my eyes and saw something flittering around, hovering no more’n a foot above my head, and at first I thought it was a moth or a big bee and then I saw it was the smallest bird you ever saw. A hummingbird, and now I knew why they call ’em that because the wings just hum away as they flit about. And boy, it was about the prettiest thing I ever saw in my whole darned life. It was about the size of your thumb, and when you looked real close, its feathers had more colors than the rainbow and stranger ones too.

  The sun was shining and then I saw there were more like six hummingbirds, coming and going to a glass ball that was dangling off of a string at the edge of the porch. They was sucking at a tube that came out of the ball and inside was the thing they was getting after, but I didn’t know then it was sugar water.

  I watched the hummingbirds for a time, and I wondered how late it was and was about to look at my phone when I recalled it was dead. The sun was low in the sky, and I had no idea what that meant, but there was no sound from the house, from Mona or Cooper, so I guessed it was early.

  It wasn’t like the storm never happened, because there were pools of rainwater here and there, and everything was wet, but the sun was coming up fast and it was already hot and I started to see Arizona like I thought it would be. As soon as the sun set to work on the wet, things began to steam, like they was on fire. Steam coming off of clothes on the washing line and from the ground, and the tops of fence posts and gateposts, and from the sheds where Bly was keeping. Never seen anything like that, the steam, and the hot sun, and the buzzing little birds, and if I looked in one direction, it was like I was sleeping inside somewhere, with two walls and a ceiling, but if I looked the other direction I was outside in the whole damn state of Arizona, with red desert and blue, blue sky and I realized right there that I had never slept outside in my life, not before, not once. It made me kinda happy to think that I finally had. And been woke by the prettiest thing in the world. I guess it ain’t so long since we all slept out, most every night. Just a few thousands of years ago, which Mona most likely would have called ‘recently.’

  Then from somewhere I heard her screaming.

  ‘Socrates! You… goat!’ and I knew the Capricorn was in a whole heap of trouble for something.

  So, two things happened when Socrates ate something bad. First was something physical. By which I mean that he might’ve liked the taste of my sneakers, but his insides didn’t. So there was a whole heap of mess right by the dang door when Mona went outside and she’d gone and stepped plumb into it. The second was something mental. By which I mean he became the meanest, sorest goat on God’s earth. He was in a real bad mood, for that day and most of the next few too. Mona told me to keep clear of him and that I was happy to do, because there’s something crazed about the eyes of a goat at the best of times and these wasn’t the best of times.

  Did you ever look at a goat? Up close, I mean. Then you’ll know how their eyes are the darndest things. Because goats are a lot like people, that’s something else you’ll know if you’ve hung out with ’em, but the one way
they ain’t like people is their eyes. They got square pupils, well, to be exact about it, what they got is rectangles. While what we got is circles. So that’s funny, but it’s not funny when a goat gets sore, because Socrates started butting stuff with those big horns of his. He was butting the side of the house and then he was butting the front door and then he started on Mona’s little Antarctic car and then he started butting Cooper. Which made Cooper turn from a sweet dog into a real mad mutt and they started going at each other till Mona ran over waving her arms at Socrates and he fell over with his legs straight up.

  Like he was dead. And that morning everyone wished he was, because when Bly came over he stepped in the mess too, and then went about saying ‘darned goat’ a lot, acting like he wasn’t mad with Mona for not cleaning it right up, but I knew Bly and I knew he was. Mona seemed a little grouchy too, and said how her head felt fuzzy like when she’s spent too long near a cell phone that’s switched on and then she looked at me and said, ‘But I know that can’t be, right?’ and I looked away and didn’t say anything but I felt bad.

  Then Mona did her ‘I wonder what will happen next’ thing and what happened next was she made some tea and we sat on the back porch, which had become my bedroom (and I saw how no one looked at my bed), and we drank the tea.

  Bly had been around the side of the house, washing his sneakers under the standpipe, and when he came back Mona made a gun shape with her fingers and pointed ’em at me and said ‘shoes’ and we looked at her and she said, ‘Ash, I’ve been phoning around,’ which was strange because it must’ve been later than I thought and I must’ve slept right through it all because she’d been phoning around and she said she’d found some shoes in my size, so maybe Bly and I wanted to go pick ’em up.

  That sounded good, so I went into the bathroom and took Bly’s clothes off and had a shower and put Bly’s clothes on again, even his underpants (which was funny). I went outside again and found my toothbrush in my bag. I fished out a tube of toothpaste I’d brought with me and was heading back to the bathroom when Mona saw it and said ‘uh-oh!’ She took one look at the ingredients in it and said, ‘I thought so! Triclosan!’ and set it straight in the outside garbage bin.

  Then we went through all the stuff in my bag. She said ‘aluminum,’ so my deodorant went in the garbage too. Then she found me a tube of toothpaste that was okay and she said, ‘This won’t destroy you from the inside out and it won’t upset me neither,’ so I went back into the bathroom and brushed my teeth. I did not stare at myself in the mirror the way some folks did, the way a lot of folks still do, because there wasn’t so much to see that I wanted to see. So I was staring into space, kinda, wondering what was wrong with aluminum and triclosan and what the heck was that anyway and then I saw a little cardboard packet of pills on the top of the cabinet, and it had a name on it that I sorta recalled, but could not.

  Bly and I wandered over to his truck and I saw his sheds—there was a small one he slept in and a small one where he kept his stuff, which was near enough not much. He had a lot of bottles of pills and he looked at me looking at them and said how they helped him to detoxify. In the other shed I saw his bed, which was unmade, and it was a sleeping bag on a mattress set on three wooden pallets, like they deliver things on, laid end to end. He explained how he always aired everything every morning, kept the door open for a while, but how a) it was only safe to do that when he was around, to stop the goat eating his stuff, and b) he figured it might rain again before we was back today, so he shut the door and that was that.

  Bly was in a good mood. He was smiling and laughing a lot with me and he said, ‘You’ll like Finch,’ and I said, ‘Who’s Finch?’ and Bly said, ‘He’s the guy with little tiny feet like you.’

  I said I did not have tiny feet but I didn’t tell Bly that he had giant feet, so I said nothing but I recalled the pills in Mona’s cabinet and I said ‘fluoxetine’ and he said ‘what?’

  I said, ‘Mona’s got something called fluoxetine in her bathroom,’ but of course then I felt bad for snooping, but Bly shrugged. I said, ‘I know it, don’t I? Ain’t it what Mom took one time?’

  Bly nodded and said, ‘Uh-huh. Prozac.’

  And then I was about to say that Mona didn’t look depressed. In fact, I was about to say that Mona seemed like she was one of the most un-depressed people I had ever set eyes on, but I was glad I didn’t, because before I even said it I could imagine Bly saying, ‘Well, I guess that’s for why she’s taking it, dumbass,’ and so instead I said nothing. Nothing at all. And as the years have gone by, I have come to appreciate that that is more times than not the right thing to do.

  Chapter 5

  G

  Glyphosate

  I dunno, maybe it was what Bly said. About how I was gonna like Finch. But I did like him, straightaway.

  You ever had that happen to you? Like we got out of Bly’s truck and by the way it wasn’t far to Finch’s but we figured the monsoon wasn’t done with Arizona yet so we drove, and as soon as we got out of the truck, we saw this guy heading towards us with an easy way about him and a short and tidy beard and a smile for free. And I thought, I am gonna like you, and I don’t know how but I knew he was thinking the same darned thing. So then he said, ‘Morning Bly, morning Ash,’ like we’d done it a thousand times already and we stood there, with our hands on our hips, like three musketeers with all the time in the world and nothing planned for it.

  I opened my mouth to say something about how we came for the shoes, but then that seemed rude to make that the first stuff I said, so I shut it again.

  Finch said ‘coffee?’ and we nodded because tea is fine and all but it don’t get your engine ticking in the same way.

  We set down on Finch’s porch and his house was kinda like the others I’d seen, one story, metal sidings, painted tin roof, wide porches, which are as good for the sun as for the rain. Bly and I just set there while Finch went about on the porch. He had everything: one of those gas stoves you take when you go and camp, and pots of coffee and what-you-got and a barrel of water, and the more I looked the more I got the feeling it was a whole damn kitchen, right there. And Bly and I set and watched the desert and said nothing and that was nice and then a jackrabbit with the longest ears appeared right in front of us, between two scrubby bushes. It stared at us, one two three, and then it vanished as fast as it came.

  ‘Big, huh?’ said Bly, and Finch came over with coffee and said ‘what?’ and we told him about the bunny which he said was either called the American desert hare or the blacktailed jackrabbit and we could take our pick, both were good for him.

  It wasn’t the jackrabbit that got me looking, though, the stuff that got me looking and thinking was Finch’s clothesline. Now, most of us, you got a clothesline, you put clothes on it. Not Finch. He had sheets of paper hung on his. There was a pole about twenty feet out into the desert and from there to the corner of the porch was a line, and on the line was pegged sheets of paper, just like they was his socks.

  ‘What you reading?’ Bly said, and Finch said something I didn’t hear but I didn’t want to come across as rude so I said, ‘Did it get wet? Some rain, huh?’ and Finch shook his head and said, no, it didn’t get wet, and how he keeps his books dry and then he nodded and along the porch I saw all these clear plastic boxes and in them were books and papers and stuff. I was just beginning to wonder why they was all outside on the porch and not inside his house when he smiled and started explaining about ink.

  ‘Printing ink gets to me. Bad,’ he said. ‘At least, when it’s fresh. So I have to off-gas the papers first. A few days is good. Hard when it’s raining all the time.’

  I nodded and he said, ‘See, I’m pretty bad with electrical stuff. I can only read for a little while on the Net. So I email what I want to the copy shop in town and they print it and I collect it. Trouble is the ink, right? But if I off-gas it, well then it’s okay to read. Trouble is, I want to read stuff right away, and I end up reading it on the line.’


  I nodded again, but I was thinking, ‘You are kidding me,’ and then Bly said, ‘What’s with this… glypho…?’ and Finch said ‘glyphosate’ and then he said ‘come have a look,’ so we did.

  Finch put a mask on and I looked at Bly but he said he was okay with ink so we went and peered at the papers like we was inspecting a bunch of new recruits. Now, you gotta understand that Finch was wearing a mask. So it was kinda hard to hear the stuff he said, and what he did say came out kinda funny. So when he said ‘Monsanto’ it sounded kinda like ‘moh-han-ho’ and when he said ‘shitheads’ it sounded like ‘shih-heh.’ And so on. What I’m setting out now is more or less what I think he said.

  ‘This,’ said Finch, ‘is an article about Monsanto. You know about them, right?’ and I didn’t, but then he said, ‘Vietnam, Agent Orange…? Real nice guys…’

  I had heard of Agent Orange. I just never thought that someone actually made it. But Finch was running along.

  ‘Back in the seventies,’ he said, ‘they started making this chemical called glyphosate and it’s about the most widely used herbicide in the world. You know Roundup? That’s glyphosate. And it ain’t just your folks using it in their gardens. Farmers use it. They use tons of it on their crops. On cotton, corn, wheat, sugar beet, you name it. Kills the weeds. And to make sure it don’t affect the crops, well, Monsanto got that covered too, because they’ve genetically modified the crops to be resistant to glyphosate. Smart, huh?’

  I nodded and Finch said, ‘Yeah, but we’re not done yet. What this article here says,’ and he pointed at the papers on the line with his chin, but it was in a mask, so it was like he was pointing his mask at it, ‘is that the World Health Organization has stated that glyphosate probably causes cancer.’

  He said how it was banned in a bunch of other countries that were smarter than we were.

  ‘And it ain’t just a matter of cancer,’ he said, ‘it’s been linked to birth defects and infertility and kidney damage and autism.’