Golden Delicious (24 page)

“I don’t know,” you said, even though you did.

The TV made a face. “What’s the luggage for?”

Then you heard crying in the kitchen. That was me—I was the one crying. “This isn’t fair!” you heard me say.

“
,” said my Dad.

“It’s
not
, Dad!” I shouted.

Then you heard the slam of someone’s fist on the table, followed by Diane’s voice. “There are bigger problems in the world than what you’re going to have for
dinner
,
!
Appleseed
needs me more than you do.”

Then there was more crying, and the sound of running feet and slamming doors.

“Sheesh,” said the TV. “
That
didn’t sound good.”

You sat in the TV room for a while, being watched,
and watching others being watched, and finally you clicked the remote and walked quietly out into the living room. Diane was smoking a six-foot cigarette and looking out the window. You opened the basement door and went downstairs. I was sitting on the floor in the middle of a paragraph.

You wanted to say something to me, but you didn’t know what. You already understood what would happen next—you’d read the story about Diane flying away to join the Mothers and the missing that followed/would follow.

“You OK?” you asked. When I looked up and you read my face, you knew the answer.

Reeling from a loss of meaning, thunderous debt, and my Mom’s sudden absence, my Dad turned to get-ideas-quick scams: long-shot prospects, wheelsanddeals, outlandish trades. First he tried trapping and selling memories, but no one would buy them. Then The Ear convinced him to invest some socked-away meaning in a new, virtual kind of reading—“People won’t need pages at all!” The Ear promised—but he disappeared two days later with my Dad’s investment. When my uncle heard about The Ear’s scam he came by the house to check on my Dad—he brought my Dad a Kaddish Fruit, and the two of them shared it outside on the back step. I was out there, too, sitting on the lawn with Sentence.

“Found you a job,” said my uncle, biting into the blue fruit.

“Can I have some of that?” I said, meaning the fruit.

“No,” my Dad said. Then he turned to my uncle. “What job?” he asked, spitting out a seed.

Joump just looked at him.

“
Not
Muir Drop,” my Dad said.

Muir Drop Forge, where my uncle worked, huffed on the Kellogg River a mile or so from our house. Muir Drop made work—most of the labor in western Massachusetts
was forged there, in fact. In those days, work was all the rage in America—people couldn’t get enough of it—and so Muir was always looking for people. It was backbreaking work, though—the labor they made was grimy, tar-like, pulled from deep in the page. My uncle worked twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, repairing equipment. The injury rate was high at Muir Drop; there were accidents all the time. One day Joump came over with a big burn across his arm where he’d been splashed with toil. Plus, his hands were permanently black from labor that wouldn’t wash off.

“I can’t think of any place I’d rather
not
work,” my Dad said.

“No shit,” Joump said. “But somanabitch, Ralph. Look around. Just you and the kids now. The banks aren’t just going to stop calling.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” my Dad said. “I’ve still got a few tricks up my sleeve.”

“Tricks,” Joump said. “Like what?”

We found out two days later, when my Dad rounded up me and my uncle in the ropetruck and drove south across Page Boulevard and over Old Five. “OK, I give up,” said Joump. “Where we going?”

“To find the Memory of Johnny Appleseed,” said my Dad.

“Ah, Christ, Ralph—is it too late to turn around and take me home?”

“Yes,” said my Dad, and he drove on.

Since the blight began six months earlier, the Memory of Johnny Appleseed had become a pariah. The Memory didn’t help his cause, either, by proclaiming to anyone
who’d listen—at Town Hall meetings, outside the Why—that salvation was just a harvest away; that he’d had dreams and visions of trees shaped like hands holding giant apples, the biggest fruits Appleseed had ever seen. “The blight is not Appleseed’s, but ours!” he’d preach to passerbys outside the Hu Ke Lau. “It’s a failure of imagination! A blight in our own minds!” Most people would ignore him. “And I have found the way forward,” he’d shout after them. “The new soil. We must shed our fears. Boldly move into the unknown. Only
then
will the apples return.”

We found the Memory of Johnny Appleseed further down Five, walking with his thumb out. My Dad pulled the truck over beside him and rolled down the window. “Where’s your treebike?” he shouted.

“It has—” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed paused, blinked, and sniffed, “—been apprehended.” Then he hoisted his satchel higher on his shoulder.

“What’s in the bag?” said Joump.

“Seeds,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“So this new soil,” said my Dad.

“Yes.”

“Can you show us where to find it?” my Dad said.

“There are groves not yet named,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Pages not yet written. On
these
pages is where we’ll grow the new groves.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Joump.

“Can we go there?” said my Dad.

“Ralph,” said Joump. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I can show you the soil,” the Memory of Johnny Appleseed said.

“Right now?” my Dad asked.

“It’s up on Appleseed Mountain. We can go at first light.”

“Get in,” my Dad said, and nodded to the back of the truck. The Memory of Johnny Appleseed climbed into the bed of the truck and my Dad pulled back onto the old highway.

The Memory of Johnny Appleseed slept at our place that night. My Dad offered him the living-room couch, but he chose to sleep outside instead. Before I went to bed, I looked out the window and saw the Memory, lying on his back in the grass, talking to the stars. He told a joke and all of the stars cracked up laughing.

We were on the road at sunrise. We picked up Joump and drove straight for Appleseed Mountain. That mountain was dangerous: full of haunted memories, false meanings, misfits, bookworms, and wild language of all sorts—rattlesnakes, old drafts, black bears, erased versions, transparent spiders, errors, menasentences, typos, and countless other threats.

It took us about fifteen minutes to reach the foot of the mountain. We drove up one of the mountainsocks, following the tire tracks as far as they went. Then my Dad parked the truck, got out, and lifted two nets out of the back of the truck. He handed one to me. “What are these for?” I said.

“For whatever,” he said.

We started up through the trees. The Memory of Johnny Appleseed led and my Dad followed right behind him; then it was me and Joump. A few minutes into the
hike, I saw a flash of ink to my left: two giant letters sipping something out of cans wrapped in paper bags. “Worms,” said Joump, and he pushed me forward.

A bit higher up, I saw a strange chair-shaped bird. It stood on two spindly legs and squinted in the light.

“How much farther, Appleshit?” said Joump.

The Memory of Johnny Appleseed turned around and looked quizzically at Joump.

“I really don’t care for that shortname,” he said. “You can call me Johnny or Johnny Appleseed or the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. Or just Appleseed, if you prefer.”

“How much farther—
Appleshit
?” said Joump again.

“Joump,” said my Dad.

“Edge of the page in about half a mile,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

Just then I heard a commotion—someone, or something, was coming. We moved off the path just in time to see dozens of figures—maybe two hundred or more—trudging toward us. I looked to the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Old versions,” he said. “Draft refugees.”

The drafts approached and passed. All of us were there—everyone in Appleseed, probably. I saw a draft of my sister, an old version of Large Odor. And soon I saw my father. “Dad,” I said.

My Dad turned, squinted, and saw the earlier version of himself—a man maybe ten years younger, with different glasses and more hair. He was heavier and had more color in his face. “Handsome dude,” my Dad said, and smiled.

Joump followed right behind him. The Joump in that story, though, was clearly kaddished—he wore a blank
blue look on his face. As soon as the now-Joump saw himself he broke into a sprint. His face took on a snarl that could only mean one thing: he wanted a fight. Before anyone could stop him, he ran full-speed at his old self and tackled him.

The rough draft of Joump fell back under the now-Joump, but then he stood up with a grin and a face full of blood. He launched right back at the now-Joump, driving him back against a tree. The now-Joump howled. My Dad pulled them apart. He pushed the old draft back into the past and led Joump over to the path.

Behind the draft of my uncle, I saw an old version of myself—me maybe four years earlier. I had pleats in my toupee, and I wore mismatched Converse hi-tops and a black-and-green cycling cap with pins on it.

The now-me and the draft me looked at each other. “Lose that hat,” I told him.

The then-me wrinkled his eyebrows.

“It’ll be lame in about a week,” I said.

My old self took off the hat. Then he continued down the mountain with the other drafts and we turned and kept climbing.

I could tell that Joump was hurt, though. He didn’t say anything, but he was limping and wincing with every step. My father, meanwhile, was grilling the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “When you say ‘new soil,’ ” he said, “what do you mean exactly?”

“New pages,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed. “Pages not yet written.”

“But what makes them different from the old pages?”

“We won’t make the same mistakes again,” said the Memory of Johnny Appleseed.

“Because I could really use a meaning infusion right about now,” my father confessed.

“Dad,” I said.

He looked back at me and I nodded toward Joump. “I’m fine,” Joump said. “Asshole just torqued my knee or something.”

Then we reached a clearing. Suddenly there was nothing but white space in front of us: no words, no ink at all. “Whoa,” I said.

The Memory of Johnny Appleseed stood at the edge and pointed forward. “We cross through here, over the spine.”

“Dad,” I said.

My Dad took a step onto the new page. His feet sank down. “It’s just the future,” he told me.

“Ralph,” said Joump. When my Dad looked at him, Joump gestured to his knee and shook his head. “I can’t,” he said.

“This is what we came here for,” my Dad told him.

“We either go together or we don’t go at all,” said the Memory.

My Dad leaned over and put his hands on his knees. “Fuck,” he said.

I squinted to try to see across the spine. Through the pagefog I could sort of make out—something. Was it a tree? A person?

My Dad stood up.

“It’s probably bullshit anyway,” Joump said quietly.

Dad started walking back the way we came. We all turned around and followed. The four of us trudged silently back down the mountain, retracing our sentences toward the base.

At the halfway point I kept an eye out for myself. I hadn’t had a chance to really talk to my draft. My thoughts wondered: How did it spend its days now? Did it go to an old version of school? Could it pedal a bike? Maybe the old me and the new me could be friends!

Then we rounded a paragraph and I saw good old Appleseed—all of the stories I knew: Appleseed High; the Big Why; the Mental Hospital; the sad gray patches of deadgroves.

Lumbering toward the car, my Dad’s face was as dark as I’d ever seen it. At one point, the Memory put a hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s going to be OK, Ralph. I won’t stop planting seeds until the apples return to Appleseed.”

“That doesn’t fucking solve my problem,” said my Dad. “I need meaning
now
. Today. Yesterday.”

My Dad dropped the Memory off at the Why and drove Joump to his house, and then we turned toward home. When we pulled into our driveway, though, two banks were sitting on the front stoop.
“Christ
,
”
my Dad said under his breath. He got out of the truck and the banks stood up—they were big and square and terrifying. “Look, Jimmy,” said one to the other. “It’s our buddy Ralph.”