Kudzu Review Summer Solstice 2012 Edition - Madison Percy Jones IV (Editor), Arthur Wilke (Editor), Robin Ward (Editor) (readict books .txt) 📗

two rows of trees. The plane buzzed louder, now almost overhead. In Naval Tactical School, back in the Texas desert, Lincoln had learned that in their day the Viet Cong had lit hundreds of smudge pots in ragged circles around their sites. It turned out that the little spittoon-shaped oil burners baffled laser-guided ordnance. Lincoln smiled at the thought of frost and lasers having a common natural enemy. The Beechcraft’s noise soon faded away.


The moonlight, the frost and the smoke reduced the landscape to deep black pockets and shimmering white buds, scenery out of an old film noir, over the hours that Lincoln pedaled, relit the pots, and pedaled again. The black smoke from the three-hole flues of the swinging smudge pots, Model A’s of the censer lineage, rose up thick through the trees and slipped over the young cherry blossoms—delicate and tight as artichoke buttons—and threaded its way up through the circles of condensation and moonlight over the black mirror of the long bay.


The work was repetitive, the orchard course a closed circuit, and Lincoln’s mind wandered. The passing plane made him think of his days in the landlocked Navy. Along with changes of state, the refrigeration school had taught its students the dangers of freezing off a finger during a refrigerant leak, and of grabbing a 220 hot-wire. The newly ecologically aware Navy had also offered handouts about carcinogens in the CFC that made up the refrigerants; footnotes to these articles had discussed the byproducts of the opposite element—fire. Most of his classmates had exhibited a sudden affection for airplane construction, but Lincoln had actually read those handouts. There he had learned that smoke from burning pine contains previously undiscovered alkaloids, powerful mutagens that can affect human health and aquatic and forest ecosystems. Plants often use alkaloids for protection, the footnotes droned on, because they can poison other plants and animals, including humans.


What came back to Lincoln now, pedaling in the frost-bangled dark, was the odd fact that fierce, blazing fires produce fewer of these poisonous alkaloids than do smoldering, controlled burns. So, if one of his pots spilled and the whole damn orchard burned to ash it would in the end be healthier for Lincoln and his grandmother than was his straining attempt to save it. There’s probably a lesson in that, Lincoln thought, but, with the muscles in his thighs beginning to tremble with exhaustion, he kept pedaling. This was not the time for any sudden change of state.


*****
By the time Lincoln ran out of fuel—after the pitch pine had run out he had switched to used sump oil from the recycling tank at the BP; outlay bupkiss—the backs of Lincoln’s thighs were cramped and cold. After he stowed the Maid, Lincoln stood among the trees just uphill from his saw shed, drinking cold coffee and watching the last of the thick smudge coiling toward the circle around the moon. He wondered if he were watching his grandmother’s life float away as well. He was near the crest of the long slope that overlooked the orchard groves. Straddling the hump where the ridge broke before sloping down to the bay shore, stood his grandmother’s tall wood-sided house. Lincoln know she and Robertson, her husband, almost certainly had been standing in the door to the second-story deck, watching him ride up and down the rows like a clumsy needle trying to sew a soot cover over the trees. Grandmother Lakies was probably still standing there, one hand gripping the fore- and middle fingers of the other, the way Lincoln had seen her do so many times. Often enough he had prompted that twisting grip. On nights like this she didn’t sleep, and more than once he had seen her leaning into some window, squeezing with all her might to keep her hands still, cursing a frost in an even, dark mumble. Robertson always stood next to her, near-silent, one hand touching her, watching what she watched.


Lincoln skirted the scraggly windbreak pines and yews, moved through the moonlight past his cabin, and down toward the rubble of the breakwater where he could listen for CFC smugglers and avoid looking toward the orchard. If the small soot excitation hadn’t warmed the filament thin channels inside, the petals would begin to droop, curl and brown when the temperature rose in an hour or two.


At the breakwater, Lincoln tucked his hands into his coat pockets, shrugged to adjust the scrape of Velcro against his wrists. Out across the bay the light from the setting moon blurred and flattened the scallops of the waves. The running lights of the few fishermen's boats coming in or just setting out were smeared in reflection, the reds shifted to an unappealing lipstick shade, the whites twisted, negatives of spilled ink. The green seemed to sink without a trace. March had come and gone like the creatures the proverb assigned to its head and tail, but the lamb had been too comforting, and the orchard people had grown a little drowsy. Then, in compensation of some punishing kind, the trees had turned hyperactive—much too early; and now the frost had come again. As Lincoln stood watching the belt of the Milky Way, the frost was dropping onto the blossoms all up and down the peninsula like salt on a hundred thousand sparrow’s tails. And Grandmother Lakies had said this might be their last year if the crop got stripped off.


North of where Lincoln stood, fifteen more miles of the peninsula stretched into Grand Traverse Bay. On the map, it was a few unraveled threads of rich farmland and beautiful sand caught between the little finger and the rest of the left-hand mitten of Michigan. The winds that surrounded and soothed it from early spring through late fall made for a steady growing season, and rich ripeness in anything that was grown there. Except for the farmers themselves, of course. The old farmers and orchard people were dropping one by one, not dying but selling out and dropping down state.


Some of them flew directly against the usual current of migration, moving below the Dow Chemical line at Midland and recolonizing the crumbling factory towns. But most moved only a few dozen miles southeast and bought cabins in the monotonous jack pine flats near Grayling, bought bird-nest sized cabins within the sound of ordnance on the National Guard firing range. They would lie back in their nylon web chairs, tear up at the smells of propane and bratwurst, and imagine cherry blossoms bobbing in sunlight as stray shells landed on selected roofs in Traverse City. Lincoln tried to imagine his grandmother down there, watching fox squirrels through the window because the TV reception was so bad, with arthritis, invisible as Radon, seeming to rise into her from the ground itself, one hand gripping the fore- and middle fingers of the other. It was easy to imagine. Easy as hell.

“What do you think?” It was Robertson. The smell of cherry-cured tobacco came off his coat. He walked up and stood next to Lincoln.

“I think that being outside in weather like this is very educational. Lets a man discover the shape and full extent of every opening in his head.”

“Every other opening, too.” Robertson was Grandmother Lakies’ second husband. He was only eighteen years older than Lincoln, where his grandmother was nearly forty years older. Lincoln’s grandfather had died, in the good company of his dog, when a power line had snapped in an early March wind and fallen into an old hay wagon, killing man, dog and a Massasauga curled in a number 3 galvanized zinc washtub. A friend of his grandfather, asked to give a eulogy, stepped to the graveside and declared, “Weather up here is so mean it even kills snakes.” Only the seedlings in the wagon bed had survived. Lincoln had never known Grandfather Heath, but Grandmother Lakies had told stories about him. Lincoln had also recently inherited his grandfather’s considerable stack of worn 78s by black blues singers (Charlie Patton out of Mississippi was a favorite: “Come on, Mama, out to the edge of town / I know where there’s a bird’s nest built down on the ground”), because no one else in the family had the patience to change records every three minutes. Or maybe because Grandmother Lakies thought he had the most affinity for the music; he had just said “Thank you,” and asked no questions.


The seedlings that had survived the electrocution now grew all around where he and Robertson stood. Grandmother Lakies had run the orchard alone for a number of years, hiring migrant workers out of Saginaw—she liked the way they sang Question Mark and the Mysterians oldies in Tejano Spanish—and occasionally taking on her delinquent son’s delinquent son Lincoln as a glorified water boy.


Then she had married Robertson. He had had a school-year half-time job repairing the computers and electronic geegaws that flatlanders were always donating to schools for the write-offs, so he suffered more than most when the peninsula cut itself loose from the digital grid a couple years back. But he had once worked at the Newberry Psychiatric Institution, up across the Straits of Mackinaw. He used to escort the patients on buses and helped dunk them in the steady 38-degree water of Lake Superior. Having been a male nurse, Robertson “knew things,” Lincoln’s grandmother had confided to Lincoln. “And I don’t mean about cherries.” She had a firm grip on the necessities of life where winters are long and dark.

“Any smugglers on the water tonight, you think?” Robertson asked.

“There’s a black bar right there,” Lincoln said, and he pointed across the water where the fleecy reflected moonlight had an odd empty fold in it. “Somebody running without lights.”

Robertson nodded. They stood watching the black fold slide along the water, the sound of its engine covered by the thin rustle in the pine cover and the whisk of the ferns that floated like a staked magic carpet some 18 inches above the ground. The high environmental tax on certain classic blends of refrigerant used in air conditioners and chillers had driven the price so high that smugglers were bringing it down out of Canada to sell to people too stubborn to convert to the newer, greener, less efficient gases. Double-inboard cruisers brought in tons of the stuff in fat green DOT 39 cylinders stacked up like watermelons in their holds. Resort areas, where penny-pinchers and luxury lifestyles came together, were said to be favored destinations. So there were often boats without running lights moving through the bay. The rewards for catching these smugglers were exorbitant—in the thousands of dollars. But no matter how difficult things got, even if it meant Grandmother Lakies losing her land, no one among them would try to claim such money. They all had their own reasons: for Lincoln, it would have been an endorsement of the idea that there was a hard line that cleanly separated “the good guys” and “the bad guys.” For others it was the simple biting of the thumb at the government; while others romanticized the smugglers in their invisible black craft as kin to pirates. Still, the innocent game of spotting dark boats on the dark water, intended only to provide Lincoln and Robertson a refuge subject—one having nothing to do with cherries or land—served to remind them of the third element they tried not to think about: money.


They stood a long time without talking, and Lincoln felt himself beginning to twitch. He always had difficulty with silent types like Robertson. Lines of connection between him and anyone else always seemed to go