Snowflake, AZ Read online

  So then Mona and I decided to move me into Bly’s shed, the one he’d slept in, and move all his stuff into the other. I said I could just about fit me and all my accoutrements and what-have-you in there, seeing as I was smaller than Bly. And had few accoutrements. But it didn’t feel right, somehow, like I was taking his space. It felt like stealing. But it was that or freeze all to death, so I moved into the shed. Bit by bit I was shuffling between my old room and my new one, and I was coming back over to the back porch when I saw Socrates.

  He was standing at the back door, and he was looking at something. He was acting kinda funny, and then two things happened at once. Cooper came trotting around from the far side of the house, and he trotted right over to where Socrates was fussing. And then Socrates rolled on his back with his legs pointing at the sky and Cooper started barking at something by the back-door step.

  Somehow I knew it wasn’t Cooper barking that had scared Socrates, and I shuffled over and by then Cooper was in the house going crazy at something under the refrigerator. He was snapping and snarling and barking, and Socrates had recovered some and come inside and was butting the side of the fridge for good measure.

  So I stood there and wondered what all to hell and then Mona come out of nowhere and stood with her hands on her hips.

  She said something I couldn’t hear on account of all the racket, and so she said it again and it was one word and that was ‘rattler!’

  I stepped back but Mona didn’t seem too scared, she just pointed at her dog and her goat and said, ‘Well, isn’t this a fine example of interspecies cooperation!’ But then she started fretting about her goat damaging her icebox, and I shouted what are we gonna do and Mona pointed one finger at the sky like she’d had an idea cartoon-style and marched off somewhere. When she came back she had a snake-wrangling tool, which was a long stick with a loop of cord at the end that you could tighten from the end where you held it, nice and safely away from any snakes you had wrangled. She plopped down on her hands and knees and started fishing around under the refrigerator while Cooper ran around in circles like it was Christmas and Socrates alternated every two minutes between butting things and rolling on his back with his legs stuck in the air.

  Mary came by and Finch was with her, and so then I was shouting ‘rattler!’ at them and they nodded like it happened every day, which it didn’t, and it was right in the middle of all of this with Mona wiggling her tiny little butt in the air that my stepfather arrived.

  We didn’t see he was there at first, but Cooper did. He was most often the friendliest resident of the Forties, and maybe the most observant too, and he was the first to notice Jack, because he was running in circles around the kitchen and on one of his circles he didn’t come back.

  I turned and saw Jack standing there with a funny look on his face and when I say funny I mean he was as confused as a pigeon, but Cooper was licking his hand, real friendly. I guess Jack was more confused when Socrates got bored of butting things and wandered past him and back outside into the yard, and then Mona shot upright shouting ‘yee-ha!’ and she had a four-foot rattlesnake dangling from the end of her stick.

  She took one look at Jack and said ‘oh’ and went outside and after a few moments came back and said, ‘Who might you be?’ So I explained who he was and everyone said hello and then Mona explained to Jack that they would require him to come and sit outside on the back porch since he was so fond of fabric conditioner. And you can imagine for yourselves what his face was like when Mona said that.

  So Mary and Finch took him and I asked Mona what she’d done with the snake. She said she had a bin out back for folks like him and later on she’d drive him way into the desert and let him get on with his rattling. I was happy, because even though the snake was dangerous and had scared the hell outta me, and more besides outta Socrates, I didn’t like the idea of killing it. That just seemed mean.

  Then of course you know what Mona said, and after she’d said I wonder what will happen next she had me take glasses and a jug of ice water outside while she made the tea.

  By the time we got outside, Jack had got well into business.

  ‘What do you mean? Ash is sick?’ he was saying and Finch was nodding in somber fashion and Mary started talking about venting and Jack’s eyebrows were moving steadily up his forehead. Back in the day, Bly would often joke and say that Jack didn’t have a forehead, he had a fivehead, so there was plenty of room for his eyebrows still to move into. It would be kind to say he had a receding hairline, but the truth is there wasn’t much of anything left up on top.

  I had a hard time not giggling. I will explain that Jack was tall, real tall and skinny. He was strong though, he was tough. He was a carpenter and worked on construction sites and everyone always said how he was tougher and worked harder than the big guys, the ones with big muscles, and he moved twice as fast as they did too. But now he was set in one of the red plastic chairs and the only thing moving was his eyebrows. Them chairs, they was real low to the ground. Like, they was good for lounging with old friends and staring at the desert but they were not designed to hold business meetings in or aid with the rescue of stepchildren from desert communities. So Jack was trying to perch on it, with his gangly old legs bent and his knees somewhere near his ears while he listened to Mary saying how sick I’d been but how I was a little better now.

  The other thing about them plastic chairs was this: if you moved in ’em too much they built up static electricity. And though Jack was trying to perch on the edge of his seat, he kept sliding back into it because the chair very much preferred its customers to lounge around, just like old friends. And each time Jack slid himself back up to the edge of his seat, he rubbed up a tad more static. So now, little by little, the remaining hair on his head was standing on end.

  And that was why I had to stop myself giggling, because after ten minutes of this with his eyebrows all raised and his hair standing on end, it looked like Jack had seen a ghost, or at least a rattler under a refrigerator, and all he could manage to say was ‘what?’ or ‘I beg your…?’ or ‘do you mean to say that…?’ before someone would chip in with something else they thought he needed to know about poor little Ash.

  Finally Jack turned to me and said, ‘Well, have you been to see a doctor, Ash?’ and I thought uh-oh, let’s not speak about the snow that fell in the fall, but I nodded and of course he asked ‘and what did he say?’

  So I said she told me there’s nothing wrong with me and anyway it’s all in my mind.

  He started saying, ‘But look, if the doctor says you ain’t ill…’ and then Mona was near enough the maddest I’d ever seen her because she just said, ‘If the doctor says you ain’t ill, that makes you feel better, right?’

  Then she shut up and stared into the desert, but Finch chipped in and started explaining to Jack again about MCS.

  He told him how it was only just starting to be understood, and that there was some recent research into negative programming of the amygdala, which is in the brain, and that perhaps the role of infection of the vagus nerve and a collapse of tolerance for certain pollutants was about to be understood.

  So you can imagine then that Jack’s eyebrows finished raising. He made a big effort and lowered them and looked at Finch. He said, real polite (because he was always real polite), ‘That all sounds grand but with respect, Mr. Finch, Ash has been told by a doctor that this sickness ain’t real and, with respect I mean, you are not a doctor.’

  ’Cept then Finch went and told Jack that actually and as a matter of fact he was a doctor. Leastways, he had been until he’d got sick and had to give it up. And that was news to me. I stared at old Finch with new eyes, and then he explained to my stepfather how he had been a ‘tenured professor of immunobiology’ at a certain medical school and when Jack asked where, Finch said oh, Boston, and when Jack asked where in Boston, Finch said, real quiet, Harvard.

  ‘Harvard, sir,’ he said, and then Mona turned and smiled at Finch and it was the saddest and at
the same time the sweetest smile you could see, and it meant a whole lot of things and some of ’em I could work out and some of ’em I could only guess.

  Then there was silence for a good amount of time.

  Everyone stared into the desert, even Jack, who was getting the hang of things quick. The silence was complete, and the only sound was when Cooper went up to the bin the rattler was in and started growling and Mona said ‘hush, sweet mutt’ and he climbed up into her lap instead.

  As she tickled Cooper under the chin, she turned to Jack and spoke to him. She smiled and she spoke gentle and what she said was about having EI. She said it was no easy ride, and that I was setting out into a new world. She said I was gonna have to stay here a while, maybe longer’n a while. She said I was gonna have to learn to be someone else. And I listened to Mona speak on my behalf and maybe you think I oughta have spoken for myself. And I guess maybe I could have, if I’d really needed to, but right then, I just let Mona roll right on, and it felt good to have someone on my side.

  ‘At first you’re afraid you’re gonna die,’ Mona was saying to Jack. ‘Then you’re afraid you won’t. I think I can say that goes for all of us.’ And she nodded at Finch and Mary and they both looked at the ground like it had suddenly got real interesting, and there was a tear on Mary’s cheek that just appeared.

  ‘So your Ash here,’ said Mona, ‘well…’

  She turned to me.

  ‘You’ve done the easy part,’ she said. ‘You got yourself sick. Now comes the part that’s much harder. Getting well again.’

  And she explained how I had to stay in Snowflake, out here, away from flatland, till I got better, or at least till I could cope with it my own way.

  ‘But you got no money,’ Jack said to me. ‘You can’t—’

  ‘Sir,’ said Mona, ‘that’s okay. Ash don’t need money. We look after each other here and those of us that can help those of us that can’t. I ain’t just talking about money.’

  Jack tried to say how he didn’t like the sound of charity for his family and Mona asked him if he was a religious man and he said, ‘Yes ma’am.’ So then Mona said, ‘Faith, Hope, and Charity. And the greatest of these is Charity,’ and Jack was fresh out of arguments.

  Mona asked him if he’d like to stay for lunch and he mumbled yes. Then Mary started asking him about where he worked and the construction sites and if he’d ever heard of EI-friendly houses and did he know how they used Reynolds Wrap to make their homes safe if they couldn’t build new ones and did he know what kind of chemicals was on the construction sites he worked on?

  Finch leaned over real quick and before Jack knew what was happening, Finch pulled his lower eyelid down and inspected it. Then he looked at Mary and nodded and Mary shrugged and Jack said what?

  ‘You could maybe wear a mask when you’re working,’ Finch said, and Jack said what? and Mary said, ‘You don’t wanna end up like your son, now? Or Ash? You wanna keep working, right? So you gotta protect yourself. And you might wanna quit using that fabric conditioner too.’

  By the time Mona came out back again with lunch, Jack said actually thank you very much but he had changed his mind about eating and he oughta get on the road.

  I walked with him around front to his truck.

  He climbed in and wound the window down.

  ‘Listen, Ash,’ he said. ‘You ain’t said nothing. You let them do all the talking for you, you think I didn’t notice?’

  I raised my shoulders a tad.

  Jack looked at me again, harder.

  ‘You’re sure about this?’

  I nodded and asked him how Bly was doing, and he put a smile on his face that didn’t really belong and said, ‘He’s gonna make it. He’s doing good. Phones every week to tell me so.’

  Then he said, ‘Listen, I heard some news,’ and he told me about my mom. Seems the trucker from Nashua, New Hampshire, was a Mormon, which is what he was doing stopping in on Snowflake in the first place, visiting that big place of worship with the man on top in gold. Jack explained how my mother had become a Mormon too, and when I asked Jack how he knew all this, he said how she’d written him to forgive him.

  ‘Forgive you for what?’ I asked, and he said ‘search me’ and shrugged, which it seemed was infectious in Snowflake, even after as little as forty-five minutes of being there.

  So now I was thinking ‘and she couldn’t write to me?’ but I didn’t say it. Anyway, I guess it was obvious because Jack put his hand out the window and on my shoulder and said, ‘She loves you, Ash. I know she does. She just has a real funny way of showing it.’

  Yup, I thought. Like not at all.

  Then he cracked a smile.

  ‘Maybe she didn’t write to you because you have nothing to forgive.’

  And then he drove away.

  M

  Metronidazole, God of Pharma

  For three billion years, Mona told me, there was only bacteria.

  ‘Imagine that!’ she said, one evening, at what-did-you-learn-today time. So I tried, but I gave up because I didn’t know whether I was supposed to be imagining three billion years or there only being bacteria on the whole face of the Earth—the only living thing, she meant. Or maybe I was supposed to do both, but that seemed to me impossible. For one thing, I don’t believe you can imagine three billion years, any more’n you can imagine one billion, or even just a plain old million. It all starts to get meaningless pretty darn quick. Time, that is.

  When you think about time it never works out in any logical way. For example, the evening that Mona told me that the only living thing on Earth for three billion years was bacteria, I had been living in the Forties for about three months. But it felt like three years. To say the truth, I was having a hard time remembering life before Snowflake, and the whole of my life before, all eighteen years of it, seemed to me to have lasted about as long as the three months. And then, at exactly one and the same time, I felt like I’d only just arrived at Mona’s. So that makes little sense, and then when someone asks you to imagine three billion years, well, that makes none, don’t it?

  A few days before, Mona had started going on about bacteria. She’d ordered a couple books on the subject and no one had seen her face since they arrived. Bacteria was her new favorite subject, and I’ll say this for Mona, it didn’t matter how old she was, she kept on learning. There’s always something more to know, she would say, almost as often as I-wonder-what-will-heck-you-know-the-rest. That is not to say, however, that it didn’t get a mite tiresome at times, like when she had a new favorite subject, and right now her new favorite subject was bacteria.

  After we’d eaten, Mary stopped by. She had a whole bunch of letters in her hand, as usual, and she’d come to ask Mona something, as if Mona was some kind of legal expert. And I guess Mona kind of was, because she’d been through it herself, and had helped a whole bunch of people. The problem was that after years of paying out, Mary’s insurance company had said they were reviewing her case and it looked like she was going to lose her benefits.

  But this evening, Mary didn’t even get her letters out before Mona was telling her everything she’d already told me about bacteria, and some more for free. Bacteria were simple, she said. They were just one single cell, whereas we had zillions of cells in our body, but that shouldn’t make us go getting all superior, she said.

  ‘Guess how many cells are in your body!’ she said, so I mumbled ‘twenty-five’ under my breath, while Mary had a real guess.

  ‘I dunno, maybe ten million? No, a hundred million!’ she said, and this is what I mean about numbers that don’t mean anything after a time, because Mona told us the actual answer was about ten trillion. Ten trillion. But before we got a chance to figure out what that meant, she said, ‘Now guess how many bacteria you are carrying in your body,’ but she couldn’t wait to tell us.

  ‘One hundred trillion,’ she said. ‘One hun-der-ed tri-llion! That means there are ten times as many bacteria in you as you have cells in your body. So who
’s the boss, huh? If only ten percent of you is you, then who’s really in charge here?’

  I said that must be a misprint or something, and she said no, and explained how you had 900 different species of bacteria living in just your nose, and other powerfully tedious facts like that.

  Then she told us how human beings have 21,000 genes, while the combined number of genes of all the bacteria living on your skin and inside of you came to about four and a half million. And that meant that of all the genetic programming going on in your body, only a half percent of it was human. Only a half a percent of you was you.

  Then she said there was even a theory that these guys called mitochondria, which are tiny things inside our body’s cells that make energy, were originally bacteria. So they’d got themselves a permanent hitchhike through time by becoming part of us.

  So I said, ‘Well, just because these bacteria are along for the ride doesn’t mean they affect us much, does it?’ and I can tell you what that got me. What that got me was a long discussion, and when I say discussion I mean Mona talking at me about how bacteria can control our behavior.

  ‘There’s the one called toxoplasma,’ and she started giggling before she even got any further. ‘This one’s great. See, if you’re infected with it, well, what happens next depends on what sex you are. If you’re a man it makes you more risk-taking. It makes you less pleasant, and less moral too. And it’ll make you do things that aren’t so safe. For example, it’s proven to make you three times more likely to have a car accident. If you’re a man, that is. Whereas if you’re a woman, it makes you more trusting and more easygoing. It makes you wanna play house, make nests, have babies, and be generally nurturing. Toxoplasma! It’s a gender-stereotype-reinforcing bug! A sexist bacteria!’