Golden Delicious (7 page)

“Now it’s running off the page!”

She grabbed the book from me, closed it, and led me down the red-carpeted stairs and outside. And that was the last time she took me to the Library.

I still continued going to the Library myself, though. When I wasn’t kicking around commas or other dead language
out back, I spent almost all of my free time reading in my room in the basement. That basement was dark and cold, and the reading helped me keep warm.

Most of the books in the Library were old, though; for newer trues, the flea bee was a much better bet. All of the local dealers set up tables: Psyches from the Rebel Peddler, Old Gordon from Appleseed Books, Kathy from Sue’s Mysteries, Del from Wilbur’s. They brought bestsellers, overstocks, oddities, you name it. And since I stopped by every week, all of them knew me by name.

Sometimes, though, you found the best fleabooks at the occasionals: a hey who just liked to read; a forget with some swashbidders that they found in the attic and just want to unload. As I was scanning the tables for titles that day, for example, I saw a pig in a van pulling boxes out of his truck. Most of the boxes held tools and old board games, but some of the boxes had books in them. I looked through them, pretending to be only mildly interested. In my skull, though, my thoughts were shouting. “Look—warbooks!” one said. “There’s a self-help!” said another. “And a historical!” said a third.

I held up a book called
The Absolutely True Story of the Northampton-Appleseed War
. “How much for this one?” I said.

The pig was sweating; he winced as he stood. “Two theories for the hardcovers, one for paperbacks,” he said.

“Take one and a half?”

He thought about it. Then he said, “Sure.”

I tried to keep my thoughts cool as I paid the pig and walked away from the table, but I was thrilled. I loved warbooks—the
wars’ personal lives, their political leanings, their dispositions. Wars were mysteries to me, even though I used to see them frequently in Appleseed.

Reader: Wars? In Appleseed?

Sure—you saw them all the time. Most of them were quiet, some so subtle you wouldn’t even know they were there unless you were looking for them. Once, maybe about a year later, I was waiting for my Mom at the hair salon when I noticed a war sitting under one of the hair dryers a few seats over. She was knitting, and when I looked over she smiled politely.

“What are you knitting?” I said.

“A graveyard,” said the war.

Then my Mom stood up from the hairdresser’s chair, studied her buzz cut in the mirror, and told me we were leaving.

I found my sister and father on the other side of the flea—they were carrying the heavy bureau toward the truck. “What’d you find,
?” said my Dad.

I held up my book.

“Grab a corner, will you?” my sister asked.

I put my book under my arm and took a corner of the bureau. Trying to fit in, I said, “Is this oak?”

“Duh,” said my sister.

“Bri,” said my Dad. “Be nice. It
is
oak,
.”

We moved the bureau onto the bed of the truck; then we got in the cab and drove toward the exit. It was later now, seven a.m. or so, and more people were arriving. By now, my Dad would say, all the deals were gone—everything meaningful had already been bought or traded.

My Dad steered the truck onto the dirt road. “Gus and Paul’s?” he said.

“Or Bagel Beagle,” I said.

“Gus and Paul’s,” my sister said.

“OK,
?” said my Dad.

“Sure,” I said.

We drove through West Appleseed and five pages east to Gus & Paul’s, the best bakery in town. As we bumped along the city streets, I leaned my head against the cold window and read the first pages of my truebook.

Gus & Paul’s was humming with activity—it seemed like all of Appleseed was there. We stood in line for twenty
minutes before finally stepping up to the glass case. “A dozen water rolls,” my Dad said to the fluffy hat behind the counter, “and whatever these guys want.”

The fluffy hat moved over to the glass case.

“Cider Creme, please,” Briana said.

“
?” said my Dad.

Everything looked so delicious. “I’ll take one of those,” I said, “and one of those, and one of those.”

“One thing only, Fatty,” my sister said, nudging me.

I looked to my Dad. “Can I get two?” I said.

It wasn’t until years later that I put apple and seed together: that I realized how meaningless we were. I didn’t know, for example, that my Dad skipped lunch all those years; that he had to beg his own truck to get him to work sometimes; that he’d borrowed meaning, by that point, from everyone he knew.

“Whatever he wants,” my Dad told the hat, and I pointed to pastry after pastry. The hat collected them in a brown box, tied them with a small white string, and handed the box over the counter. I reached up for the box and took it.

Sentence was my friend, probably my
only
true friend through the mothering, the forging—most of my high school years, really. Everyone has their pet expressions, but Sentence was something more. For a long time, that expression was the only thing that really understood me.

I found Sentence while working with my father at Belmont, one of the two apartment buildings that he owned and managed. He bought them in the early 1980s, during a meaningful time in Appleseed when the town still ran on apples. Led by the Memory of Johnny Appleseed himself, who once lived and groved here, Appleseed’s apple industry thrived; we sold apple pies, apple cider, appleburgers, applefish, apple chicken, apple pad thai, even apple
art
made from cores and stems. Something like ninety percent of all the apples in Massachusetts were grown in Appleseed, and people came from all over New England in search of meaning in the apple trade.

My father didn’t know the first thing about apples, but he was a skilled handyman, trained by his father—the Rabbit Eater—in the arts of tenancy and the mysteries of landlording. When we first moved to Appleseed, my Dad worked as a caretaker for a local moustache, answering service
calls—heating, plumbing, maintenance—for any one of nine apartment buildings in the downtown. Then the moustache went gray and started selling off his property, and my Dad took out a second mortgage on our house to buy the two least meaningful buildings of the lot. It was a risk—they were located in an iffy neighborhood—but my Dad hoped to translate sweat into meaning.

It didn’t turn out that way, though; the buildings were more stubborn and mysterious than he’d bargained for. Drunk plumbing, missing rooms, snoring wires, you name it—tenants called with problems at all hours of the night. Remember that story I told you a few streets back, about driving to The Ear’s house?

Reader: Sure. To get a “stetch” or something.

A
steth
—a four-meter foundation stethoscope, which we needed to investigate a strange scratching sound coming from the foundation of Woodside. When my Dad put the listener against the rock, though, he frowned and swore. “Christ,” he said. “Something in the soil.”

“What?” I asked.

He put the headphones over my ears. I heard a steady scratching. “What is that?” I said.

My Dad shook his head.

“Termites?”

One of the whatevers burped in my ear.

“Those would be some big fucking termites,” my Dad said.

My Dad prayed to Armin, an exterminator who’d work for meaning under the table, and he tested the soil all
around Woodside. After studying the page fibers, Armin declared the problem to be doubts.

“Sorry?” said my Dad, as we stood on the page.

“Doubts,” Armin said.

“Doubts, are you sure?”

Armin nodded. “You know what’s funny? I’ve been getting more and more of these calls.”

My Dad raised an eyebrow. “I have trouble believing that.”

“It’s true,” said Armin.

Armin had to instill the soil with confidence, which cost a shitload. And that was just one of dozens of mysteries and problems that stumped my father. The buildings were just too much for him to manage alone. Soon he started paying his brother Joump to help him with odd jobs. He enlisted me and my sister, too. My father taught me some of the basic hows—insulation, foyer mediation, missing room listening—but like I said, my sister was the one with the real talent. She really immersed herself in it, reading truebooks on wainscoting and ancient plastering techniques, learning special chants for plumbing and lighting and landscaping, mastering all of the old building arts.

Anyway, I’m getting off track—I was telling you about Sentence the sentence. One day when I was about twelve, my Dad and I were patching up some stucco at Belmont when I saw this eager statement reading through the grass. “Hey,” I said to it, but my Dad stood up and imposed over it. “Shoo!” he said.

“Hey, buddy,” I said to the sentence.

“Git!” my Dad yelled. “You git! Git out of here!”

The sentence skimmed off.

“Dad! What the hell?” I said.

“It’s a stray,
,” my Dad said. “It’s just begging for food.”