Golden Delicious (21 page)

“You’re fine,” said my thoughts.

“I’m fine,” I said.

But I knew Johnny Appleseed wasn’t fooled—he could see the apples in my eyes.

1987 wasn’t an anomaly; the Memory of Johnny Appleseed was wrong. The apples came back smaller the year after that, and smaller still—no bigger than crabs, in fact—the following year. In 1990, no apples grew at all—all the trees in Appleseed were bare. The Board of Select Cones voted to bring in a soil expert from the margins, but all she could do was confirm that the pagesoil was barren—she couldn’t say why or how to solve it. So the Board of Select Cones summonsed the Memory of Johnny Appleseed and demanded a solution. The Memory of Johnny Appleseed held out his hands to them. “I’m really not sure,” he said. “It has something to do with the stories we’re telling. They seem to be sapping the soil.”

The Memory was dismissed, and from then on, vilified. Or is it
villainized
? Cast out, outcasted: turned away at his favorite restaurants, denied meaning at his bank, locked out of his own apartment. Soon he was homeless. Rumor was he was sleeping on the streets or in the deadgroves. Sometimes you’d see him outside the Why, handing out brochures.

A host of theories ran through Appleseed: the blight was a curse, prayed upon us out of spite; it was some sort of
wildword virus; it was a plot, spearheaded by East Appleseed to destabilize us. Meanwhile, we prayed for a different story, or a better ending to this one.

Overnight, it seemed, Appleseed lost most of its meaning. The applers tried swapping out their central ingredients for another—oranges, lemons, pears—but to no avail. Have you ever had a
pear
burger? A raw lemon? Ye—uck. Soon, applers began to leave town, hitchhiking over the margins toward richer harvests. The Planters who stayed in Appleseed gave up on perishables and tried their luck with solidifides: they planted chairtrees, for example, or fields of refrigerators.

It wasn’t long before the town’s appleloss hit home. My Mom lost hours at the hospital and had to pick up a shift at Appleseed Mental. That was the thought of small potatoes, though, compared to my Dad’s predicament. First, his tenants started sending in partial-meaning payments, forcing my Dad to hound them—to drive over to the apartments, knock on their doors, and ask them face-to-face where the meaning was. A few times I went with him. Once, we were driving down Belmont Street when we saw a pair of overalls who owed my Dad meaning walking toward the building. We parked the car and followed him inside. The overalls, who used to pick apples at Berson’s Farm before it shut down, answered the door with a four-foot cigarette hanging out of his mouth. When he saw it was my Dad, he nodded and leaned against the doorframe. “Ralph,” he said.

“It’s the ninth, Jaime,” said my Dad.

“Yes, it is,” said the pair of overalls.

“Nine days late,” said my Dad.

“Yes,” said the pair of overalls.

“Where is it?”

“I don’t have it.”

“You have to pay your rent, Jaime,” my Dad said.

“Do I?” the overalls said.

Soon it wouldn’t matter—more than half of my Dad’s tenants stopped paying. Some left in the middle of the night; some stayed behind even when the heat skipped town and the water died in the pipes.

With so few tenants living in the building, my Dad lost faith and fell behind on upkeep. And now that I think about it? That was right around the same time that my thoughts started turning inward, digging into my brain. My Mom took me back to Doctor Coat to see if this might be related to the music pills, and the Coat opened up my head and looked around. When he peered inside, one of my thoughts gave him the finger.

“Hm,” the Coat said. “Where are your other thoughts?” he asked me, his voice echoing off the walls of my skull.

“Out,” I said.

“Out where?” said the Coat.

“
Out
, OK?” I said.

“You see?” my Mom said. “He’s had that puss on his face for weeks now.”

“I have a headache, OK?” I said.

“It’s always something, isn’t it,
?” she said.

At home, our phone rang and rang. We were assaulted with calls and prayers from bill collectors, banks, disgruntled tenants. Soon my Dad stopped praying altogether. One day Mrs. Parker, who always paid her rent, prayed
to me about a leaking toilet. I went to ask my Dad about it and found him on the back patio, picking pieces from a half-rotten Kaddish fruit. I told him about the prayer for service. “Sounds like a serious situation,” I said. “Do you want to go over there?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, looking out into the trees.

“Should
I
go over there?”

“Christ,” my Dad said. “Tell her I’ll get there when I can.”

“Today?”

“When I
can
,” my Dad said.

So that’s what I prayed to her. Hours later, though, Mrs. Parker prayed to me again. “Help!” her prayer said. “The water is up to my knees!”

I didn’t pray back.

“Now it’s up to my waist!” she prayed.

If I was really a good person? I would have ridden out there on my Bicycle Built for Two just to see what I could do. But instead I sat down on the couch with a bag of chips and watched TV, just like the spoiled, selfish piece of shit my Mom said I was. I didn’t move for the rest of the afternoon—not even when Mrs. Parker prayed to me that the water was up to her chin. Not even when the prayers stopped altogether.

As I said, my sister Briana was a towntalent in the arts of ancient construction and antiquing. Before I was even allowed to go with them, she and my Dad would take off for the dump in his truck and return with an overwhelm of strange objects. Growing up with her, I didn’t really appreciate the kind of eye it took to spot meaning—I couldn’t tell the difference between a worba and a forba, between a norch and a nouch—but my sister could spot truth in objects that your standard vulture or scav would look right past: she’d see the old in the warboots, hear the subtle sounds in a dead viola, recognize an entropy as a shrine from a goneby religion. When Bri was twelve, my Dad built a shed in the backyard where she could store her collectibles and tools. Once or a twice a summer he’d load up the truck with her fixed-ups and meaningfuls, drive her to the flea, and set up a table for her where she could sell. He’d subtract the meaning for the table and she’d get to keep the rest.

One day in the summer of her sixteenth year—1989, that would have been—my sister was cleaning out the shed, separating the meaningful from the seemingly-so. I was out in the yard that day, too, sanding window frames for
my Dad. After working in the shed for a while, my sister took some of the less-meaningful objects—a nightstand, a sump pump, a faux-antique mailbox, and some other ifs and ands—out to the treebelt and left them by the road for the taking. Then she helped me with the windows; I taped and she painted. We had the tape deck blasting from the front steps. “Who is this?” I asked Briana at one point.

“UCs,” she said.

“Who?” I said.

We were midway through the stack of windows when a Pontiac pulled over in front of our house. A scarf stepped out of the car, walked over to the pile, and picked up the sump. He turned it over, held it up, and shouted out to us, “How much?”

My sister put her hands on her hips.

Before she could answer, a woman in an old, leaning veggiecar pulled up in front of the scarf’s Pontiac. The woman rolled down the window and said, “That sump pump for sale?”

My sister looked at me, and then back at the scarf and the woman.

“How much are you asking for it?” the woman said.

It felt to me like all of Appleseed stopped at that moment—even the clouds and the air and the prayers.

“How about,” Briana said, her voice pivoting, “two concepts?”

The woman got out of the car; she and the scarf looked at each other. Then the woman said, “Two, yes.”

“I’ll give you two and a quarter concepts,” said the scarf.

I saw a flash in Briana’s eye. “Do-I-hear—” she said, “—two-and-a-
half
?”

“What?” said the scarf. “What is this, an—”

“Two and a half,” said the woman.

“Three,” said the scarf.

Just like that, the Auctioneer was born. “Four?” she said. “Do-I-hear-four?”

I remember the music in her words. That first call wasn’t perfect—her bidding responses were mumbled, hesitant—but I think all three of us heard the natural rhythmic tumble in her voice. It was as if she’d been waiting for this page all her life, and finally you turned to it.

“Four,” said the woman.

“Five,” said the scarf.

“Do-I-hear-six?” said Briana.

The scarf and woman looked at each other.

“Six? Going-once? Going-twice?”

“Six,” said the woman.

With every bid, it seemed, the Auctioneer found more of a foothold. “Six. Seven? Do-I-hear-seven? Going-once! Going-twice?”

The scarf shook its head.

“Sold-to-the-woman-with-the-angry-ears!” said the Auctioneer.

The woman frowned.

That was the beginning of a new chapter for my sister. When she told my Dad what had happened, he set up a piece of plywood on some sawhorses in the backyard and she rifled through the shed for more items to sell. The next day, people showed up in our driveway as if driven by
some external force; they sat in the grass while my sister stood on a chair and called the auction. She held auctions the following day, too, and all day that Saturday. Soon, she was skipping school so she could focus on building an inventory for her backyard auctions. She replaced the plywood with folding tables and the chair with a beat-up lectern. Within a few weeks, everyone in Appleseed knew about my sister and her auctions—there were always ten or eleven cars camped out in front of 577, waiting for bidding to begin. Every afternoon of my fourteenth year I’d pedal home from school, sit on the roof with a bag of chips, and watch the bidders shouting and arguing.

“Don’t-tell-me-good-people-that-twenty-four-is-the-best-you-can-
do
!” my sister shouted, standing at a lectern. “I-thought-you-were-serious-and-meaningful!”

“Twenty-six!” someone hollered.

“Still-an-insulting-amount-of-meaning-for-this-particular-washboard,” my sister shouted. “It-is-an-ANTIQUE-after-all—”

“Thirty!”

Soon, people started telling stories about my sister’s gifts: her discerning eye, the cadence and precision of her voice, her ability to engage with a crowd and elicit meaning. One night that fall, my sister sat down at the kitchen table for dinner and said she had an announcement. “I-will-no-longer-respond-to-the-name-Briana,” she said.

“Oh, yes, you will,” said my mother, without looking up from her plate.

“I think she can decide what she wants to be called, Diane,” my Dad said.

My Mom glared at him.

“As long as it’s within reason,” my Dad said.

“How about dumbface?” I said.

“
,” my Mom said.

My sister didn’t seem fazed. “From-this-day-forward,” she said, “I-shall-be-known-as-the-Auctioneer.”

“Auctioneer?” I laughed. “That’s so stupid.”

“
The
. I-am
-the-
Auctioneer,” she said, and turned to me with eyes like arrows, “and-don’t-you-forget-it.”

I walked that sentence all over Appleseed—he was my true good friend. In the cold months, I’d just lead him out across the street to relieve himself in the margin, but in the spring and summer we’d zell all the way to the Town Green and back, or out to the Amphitheatre, or sometimes to Wolf Swamp. I even put a basket on the handlebars of the Bicycle Built for Two so “I am.” could ride with me and the Reader. I remember the way Sentence would rest his chin on the front of the basket so the wind would push back the serif on his “I.”

That was right after the blight, when everything changed in our house. My sister was consumed by her auctions and my father was always out trying to scrape together some meaning. And I hardly saw my mother either—she was training harder than ever. So I basically raised that sentence myself—I fed him and walked him. If his words were tired, I carried “I am.” in my coat pocket. I took him to school with me, and to the buildings after school, and to Oh Death for food—everywhere I was, “I am.” was, too.