All Over Creation (45 page)

Lloyd broke in. “What do you want from us?”

“We were hoping you'd support the idea, sir,” Geek said. “Enough to let us hold the event here on your property.”

Geek ignored me and continued to address Lloyd. “It's the perfect place. A small, family-run seed operation. We thought maybe you and Momoko could teach people about seed-saving techniques. . . .”

Lloyd frowned. “We tell folks about our seeds all the time. They see the sign on the roadside and drive right on in. Get a lot of new customers that way. And as for that other stuff, I've made my opinions about big corporations known in this community and never needed a party to do so. A lot of the spud farmers think I'm nuts, but a lot of them don't, I'll tell you.”

“Excellent! You can be a spokesperson.”

“Can't say I'm much of a speaker,” Lloyd said, but his eyes were glittering, and he rocked a little faster. “What would I have to say?”

“Well, you could talk about the butterflies for starters.”

“Butterflies?” Lloyd looked bewildered. “Well, we have a nice assortment of seeds for starting a butterfly garden. Buddleias and—”

“Actually, I was thinking about this,” Geek said. He had a folder in front of him, and now he took out a news clipping. “This is from the
New York Times.
‘Pollen From Genetically Altered Corn Threatens Monarch Butterfly.' ”

Geek handed the article to Lloyd. Lloyd squinted and rubbed his eyes. He was on a new medication that blurred his vision and made his thinking foggy, but slowly, as he read, the meaning penetrated. “Oh, no!” he said. “Not the
butterflies!
”

Geek pulled out another clipping. “Here's one about the new Terminator technologies.”

“Terminator?” Lloyd shook his head.

“It's like a death gene, sir. A self-destruct mechanism. They splice it into the DNA of a plant and trigger it. The plant kills its own embryo.”

“But that's madness! Why on earth . . . ?”

“To protect the corporation's intellectual property rights over the plant. To keep farmers from saving and replanting seeds. To force them to buy new seed every year.”

“But to develop a trait like that? On purpose?”

Geek nodded. “Crosses the line between genius and insanity. Think what could happen if that gene escapes.”

Lloyd closed his eyes. I watched him with a growing sense of foreboding. His elbows were braced against the chair arms, and now he laced his fingers and let his forehead drop to his hands as though praying. For a while the only sounds we could hear were the creak of Lloyd's rocker and the hissing of the sprinkler jets. Then Lloyd spoke.

“Not a lot of time before the Fourth,” he said. “What do you need from us?”

“You're not actually going along with this?” I said.

“Damn right I am. Never heard of anything more frightening in my life.”

It was like popping a cork. “A party!” Ocean yelled. “We're having a party!”

Lilith ran over to Lloyd and hugged him. Phoenix held up his palm to high-five his grandfather, who fumbled, then shook it instead. Momoko started clapping, although she didn't seem to know what for.

I couldn't believe it. “This is insane! You don't know what you're getting into, Dad. We can't have lots of people swarming all over the place. You're supposed to be getting rest.”

“I get plenty of rest. Now is the time to act, right Momoko?”

Momoko blinked, then nodded.

I turned on Geek. “You've brainwashed my father! You're turning him into a goddamned poster boy for your politics—”

“He's doing no such thing,” Lloyd said. “This is not about politics. This is about life!”

My face was burning. “Oh, for God's sake, Dad. It's just plants.”

Geek said, “Plants have a right to life, too.”

And then I lost it. I looked at Geek, and then at Lloyd, and then back again. The two of them—the young radical environmentalist and the old fundamentalist farmer—made a ridiculous alliance, and I started to laugh. “Oh, wow! That's the kind of pro-life bullshit that drove me out of here in the first place!”

Lloyd brought his fist down on the arm of the chair. “A
life
is a
life!
” he said. His eyes were bloodshot, and he could barely choke out the words. “It is God's gift! How can you be so careless?”

It wasn't funny any longer. You can't argue with fanatics. I turned and walked away. Certainly no one thought to stop me. I felt them watching as I crossed the yard.

“Oh, buggah,” I heard Phoenix whisper to his sister. “She's plenty
huhu
now!”

A full moon was rising over the barn, still low in the sky and so bright it stretched my shadow out long. I walked to the end of the dirt road where the cluster of mailboxes stood, silhouetted in the moonlight like crooked sentries guarding the adjacent potato field. I sat on a rock nearby and smoked a cigarette, watching the smoke dissipate into the silvery air.

After a while I heard footsteps behind me, but I didn't turn around. Then I heard Geek's voice. He spoke quietly.

“Sorry about all that.”

I didn't answer. I heard him shuffling his feet in the dirt. I thought he was going to leave, but instead he sat down by the side of the road, just at the edge of my line of vision. He started scooping up handfuls of sand that had blown out of the field and letting the grains trickle through his fingers.

“Look at this,” he said. “Amazing that anything can grow here at all.” He looked out over the neat rows of potatoes, row after parallel row, that went on until you got dizzy from the sheer geometry of it. The sprinklers were off for the night, but drops of water glistened on the plants' dark leaves. Geek started to talk.

“The wondrous thing about nature, her gift to us, is her wanton promiscuity. She reproduces herself with abandon, with teeming, infinite generosity. The first knuckle-dragging humanoid to realize this became the world's first farmer, and all the farmers who came after for thousands of years knew this, too. They saved seeds from their harvest, planted them, harvested them, and so it went, on and on, in a perfect, perpetually interconnected wheel of life. Until now.”

“Now?” He was making me nervous.

“Now.” His voice was tight and his face haggard. He turned, and the moonlight reflected off his round lenses. He looked like a madman with wild, bouncing eyes. “Now it's too late.”

I shivered. “You really believe that, don't you? That these are the end times? That basically we're fucked and it's too late to save the world?”

He looked away and shook his head. “Can't afford to believe that. Despair is not a morally acceptable choice.” He smiled, and the madman was gone. “I'm not a religious fanatic, and I am pro-choice, you know.”

“Listen,” I said, “I can't stop you from doing this action, and God knows I can't stop Lloyd, but please understand that he takes this right-to-life stuff seriously. A lot of people around here do. Don't get him all riled up about it. It's not a joke.”

“Believe me, I know it's not a joke.” He sat there tossing pebbles from the road into the field.

“Why did I let you come back here? You were planning this whole thing from the very start, weren't you?”

He didn't answer, just stood up and offered me his hand. He was whistling “Sweet Leilani.”

I ignored his hand and got to my feet. “I should just pack up the kids and take them back to Pahoa, before any more trouble starts.” I started walking back toward the farmhouse. Geek walked beside me.

“Hmm,” he said with a quizzical smile. “It must be nice to live in paradise.”

Cass and Will sat on either side of Geek in front of the monitor, watching his fingers fly across the keyboard. Cass had taken typing in high school, so she was fairly fast, but the commands were a challenge. Will was even slower—he still pecked. He had resisted when Cass suggested they ask Geek for help. He prided himself on being able to figure things out. But she said it wasn't every farm that had a computer whiz living next door, and in the end he relented, muttering all the while that it was a sad day when you had to have a Ph.D. from MIT to farm potatoes. And although Geek laughed and reassured them that he was a dropout, his expertise was obvious. He typed something and sat back while the printer whirred. Will just shook his head.

“That should take care of it,” Geek said, retrieving the printout and looking it over. “Appears you have a slight dip in elevation at the edge of this field that led to the drainage problem.”

“Already knew that,” Will said. “So what was wrong with the computer?”

“Bug,” Geek said, shrugging his shoulders. “In the software. Thought it might be a virus at first, and I ran a bunch of diagnostics. Then the guy at tech support had me download a patch that seems to take care of the problem. It's a cool program. You can do all kinds of stuff.”

Will shook his head again. “I'm still trying to master the basics. Managed to pull up some soil analysis and yield information last year, but I loaded in the data wrong, so my results came up all screwy.” He pulled out a couple of maps and showed Geek.

“Wow,” Geek said, studying them. “That GPS generates some really detailed information.”

“Sure, but all the computer data in the world won't hold back an early frost. It still comes down to weather. And acts of God.”

Geek nodded and looked closer at the edge of the map, where Will had scribbled some planting notes. He frowned. “Which field is this?”

“Fuller West Four,” Will said. “The one just behind Fuller's greenhouse. Right across the road there.”

“Are you planting NuLifes there?”

Will nodded. “Got 'em in the fields closest to both houses. We're trying them out this year for the first time, but we're optimistic. Seem to be doing pretty well so far.”

“Do they do what they're supposed to do?”

“Seem to. We're seeing the first of the adult beetles now, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed.”

“Do you mind if I take a look?”

Will shrugged. “Sure. We can go over right now if you want.”

Cass went with them. She felt uneasy. The sun was high over the potato field in question, one of two separating the Quinns' house from the Fullers'. They walked along the dirt road. The sunlight was shimmering on the glossy surfaces of the leaves. The solstice had come and gone, and now it was the end of June and the rows were closing, forming a single unbroken expanse of green speckled with clusters of pinkish flowers. They followed Will off the hard-packed road.

“There's one,” said Will. “Watch.” He pointed down to the deep green leaf of the NuLife. A mature Colorado potato beetle had just cruised in for a landing on the leaf's shiny surface. The beetle had a humped yellow carapace, striped and sporty. It ambled to the edge of the leaf and took a nibble. Nothing happened.

“Just wait,” said Will.

They waited. The beetle wandered around for a bit.

“Here,” Geek said. He pointed to another beetle, staggering drunkenly across the surface of a leaf. He reached out to pick it up, but it tumbled and fell to the ground. He retrieved the beetle from the dirt. “Wow. He's a goner.”

Good, thought Cass. She watched Geek's gloomy face as he inspected the wiggling legs of the dying bug. He was a nice guy, she thought. He knew computers, but he sure didn't know much about potatoes, or life for that matter. The fact was, some things had to die so that others could live, and the idea was to try to maximize your chances of staying on the living side for as long as you could. She wiped a leaf with her fingers, crushing a newly hatched clutch of feeding larva, then rubbed the orange smear on her jeans.

“What's amazing about the NuLife line,” Will was explaining, “is that it manufactures its own insecticide. The idea is to cut back on the chemical applications we'd be using otherwise.”

“When you say it makes its own insecticide, where does it do that exactly?”

“In the cells of the plant.” Will spread his arm to encompass the hundred-acre field, a vast sea of green stretching out around him. “Every leaf and flower and stem . . .”

“In the roots?”

“You mean the potatoes? Sure.”

“But we
eat
those.”

“It's harmless to humans,” Will said. “It's a bacterial toxin called Bt. It's used in organic farming. It works on the digestive tract of the insect. Turns it into pulp—”

“
Bacillus thuringiensis,
” Geek said. “Organic farmers use it topically, and very sparingly, and that's the point. These are very high concentrations you're talking about. Do we know what happens to people who ingest that much?”