Apophenia Sequel, Chapter Three

 

The writing is going slowly on my sequel to Apophenia, a novel I've yet to release in its entirety. Why don't I get the hell on that? Time, my friend. Time, and the general business of my life. Here are chapters one and two. 

...

Three

There’s something I forgot to mention about Dave. He only has one hand. This is due to an unfortunate incident involving myself and Arnold that occurred when when I was in college. Those days were so long ago that they seem to have been chiseled into a cave wall somewhere by a hand other than my own. Anyways, I’ve always felt guilty about Dave’s missing hand, and so I feel I owe him a debt, since I can’t replace his missing appendage. So I take his advice and drive out to the apple orchard he mentioned.

The town of Hillsdale is a peaceful, river-front village with a classic Main Street lined with little shops that seem to flicker in and out of business. From the gazebo you can watch the waters of the Ohio flowing downstream, carrying huge chunks of driftwood, plastic bottles, and other pieces of human refuse. The Kentucky hills across the river are sparsely populated, with woods covering their rolling geography. I cruise by and glance out the window, traveling past a park where a mulleted child climbs up a slide while a hooded figure thumbs through his phone. I’ve taken the children here a couple of times and let them work out their manic energies in a futile attempt to preserve the sanctity of my home. It never works; their energies are limitless, they being youths invigorated with the joy of living free from fear, anxiety, and other dark emotions that plague adulthood. A small, dingy part of me desires to sit on a park bench and nurse a flask while watching the endless procession of muddy waters. I’ve never quite reached that level of alcoholism, however, and my social responsibilities dictate certain levels of public decorum, despite what I do secretly for a living, and so I banish the thought and continue my drive.

Rockman’s Orchard lies just outside of town traveling west on a piece of riverfront property that slopes upward. As I go up the driveway, a modest farmhouse greets me on the right, an ancient barn clad in age-blackened wood looming ahead, its one great window staring like a cyclopean eye. I park, get out, and look around. It’s quiet here, the peace only occasionally interrupted by the passage of a muffler-less truck or a semi air-braking into town. I don’t know whether to wander around or to knock on the door of the house. There’s a sign that says apples in crude, dark-green lettering, with an arrow beneath the words pointing toward the back of the barn, so I follow directions like a good little sheep. I find an overhang built into the back of the barn, with an apple washer and an insulated door beneath.

“Well, I tried,” I say, and turn right into the leering visage of the Goon.

Up close, he looks stranger than he did on video. His face is long and wan, with a big mole protruding from his right cheek like a parasite determined not to be removed, and a piece of straw juts from his lips, as though he is a bovine creature stubbornly chewing his cud. A grass-stained John Deere hat rests on his greasy head, long strings of his hair sticking out from beneath it like clumps of dried grass. As he measures me with dark eyes, his sinewy hands are planted on his hips, giving the impression of a disapproving mother about to scold a wayward child.

“Can eye help yah?” he drawls.

“Yeah… umm,” I murmur, suddenly at a loss.

Why am I here? To buy apples? Should I admit that the only reason I came was because my hippie brother-in-law gave me this quest?

“I’m looking for a job,” I say, marveling at the words coming out of my mouth.

“A jawb?” asks the Goon, clearly incredulous.

“Yeah, you know, an occupation, an exchange of labor for monetary compensation. What we all waste our lives doing.”

“Well, eye do all the work ‘round here,” he says, matter-of-factly.

I look around him at the sprawling rows of trees continuing as far as the eye can see.

“You do all this?” I say, making an expansive gesture. “Wow. I’m impressed.”

“Look at my hands,” he states, and holds out his palms, which are callused and cracked like dry earth.

“Hey, what did I tell you about talking to customers?” says a voice.

An elderly man emerges from the house, his leathery skin and flannel shirt revealing him as a farmer. He walks up to us, leaning forward somewhat, his short legs making small, tiny steps.

“This here lady wants a jawb,” says the Goon.

The old farmer examines me head to toe like I’m a horse flaunting my derriere. I’ve been checked out before by older men, but it’s uncomfortable to be examined so obviously by someone who seems to regard my physical form as an object to be analyzed and measured for weaknesses.

“You’re little but you’re in good shape,” says the farmer. “You ever work in the hot sun? I don’t pay much. It’s hard for him to do it all, though. I ain’t who I used to be.”

There is a bitterness there, clinging to his voice, that stirs my soul. This is a useful man, a practical fellow who has watched time take his body along with his purpose, and while he’s accepted the fact of entropy, he hates its existence with every fiber of his being.

“I can work eight to two, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,” I say. “You can pay me what you think is fair. I just want to get out of the house.”

The old man stares into my eyes, his visage impassive, his gaze that of a frozen statue.

“Okay,” he says, and he sticks out his gnarled hand, and I take it.

“Show her around,” he says to the Goon, and so I follow him around as we walk up the tractor-paved dirt road.

“Those er the pears,” says the Goon, gesturing to his left at rows of skinny trees with lots of vertical branches. “There’s the Enterprise apples. They ripen late. Good fer sauce, cider, stuff like that. Real thick skin. Real hard ta prune. And those er the Jona-free. Little Jonathan’s free from scab.”

He continues like this, spouting off apple facts, relating various characteristics that I’ll never remember. Of course the Goon knows I’ll never remember, but he spews his knowledge anyways, deriving pleasure from the act of vomiting up information and displaying his expertise. I get it. We all like to show off every now and again, and how often does such an opportunity come to an isolated fellow like this? So I play the part of the interested listener, dutifully performing my role, until we reach the back of the orchard.

“Well this is pretty much it, Miss,” he says as we look out over six rows of peach trees.

“Leona’s my name. How many acres?” I ask.

“Bout ten. It’s as much as we can handle.”

I keep waiting for him to formally introduce himself, but the Goon gets a far-away look in his eyes as he stares out across his domain, and I don’t interrupt his contemplation.

“Well, we can’t stand here jawin’ all day,” he says suddenly. “There’s still prunings to pick up off the ground.”

“Prunings?” I ask.

“Branches eye pruned in the winter. They gotta be picked up and stacked so we can mulch ‘em or take ‘em to the dump.”

“You want me to pick up sticks?”

“That’s right.”

And so I spend three hours bending down under apple trees to pick up sticks. By the end my back is so stiff that any movement of my spine brings tendrils of pain. The monotony of the whole enterprise, along with my degraded physical state, gives a poor impression of this job I’ve just obtained.

“Ya did pretty good picking up ‘em sticks,” says the Goon.

I suddenly notice that his back has a slight curve that never seems to straighten.

“Why am I doing this?” I ask.

“Yew can go home now,” says the Goon.

I don’t go home. Instead I pick up my kids from school. I am able to pick up Halfthor in person since he’s only in preschool, and he walks dutifully to my vehicle, muttering about how he wants a bagel with cream cheese when we get home. We have to get back in line at the elementary school to pick up Arne, and when I see him, he’s in his usual post-school ebullient mood, swinging his coat around his head like a mace while the handler desperately tries to grab his hand.

“He’s a bit of a handful, isn’t he?” she asks, as Arne hops into the car with his coat wrapped around his face.

“You don’t know the half of it,” I say, as good-naturedly as I can muster.

“Mommy, can I get some Pokémon cards?” asks Arne.

“Get in buckled in your car seat, Arne,” I ask.

“Andy brought Pokémon cards to school and he was giving them away.”

“Car seat. Buckled.”

“If I get sixty of them, I can have a whole deck!”

“Okay, I have to stop the car until you get buckled.”

“Can you get some when you go to the store?”

I moan, a deep reverberating expression of exhaustion. If I buy Arne Pokémon cards, they will inevitably be discarded within a day, if not an hour. Pokémon cards might be cheap, but my children do not understand that you cannot waste cash on frivolous purchases, and that they don’t need to have everything they want. This common-sense mentality is not universally shared amongst the parents of their peers, however.

Arnold greets us at the door, clad in a sweaty tank top and a pair of blood-stained sweatpants. I know from being married to a weightlifter that he’s been deadlifting and that his shins aren’t taking it very well.

“Boys,” he says.

“I want a bagel,” says Halfthor.

“I already got one waiting for you, buddy, toasted and covered in cream cheese. Forty-eight grams of carbs to power your destructive energies.”

“Daddy, can I have Pokémon cards?”

“Nope! Let’s get in the house, I can tell that mommy doesn’t want to stand in front of the door while you guys take your sweet time.”

Arnold and I embrace shortly. His smell is a heady mix of body odor and iron, and though it offends my nostrils, it does have a certain attraction, a certain musky quality that makes me think of a lumberjack or a grease monkey. His temples are tinged gray and there are flecks of sliver in his beard, and I think of the years he spent in prison and what that must have done to his soul, not to mention his body. The one thing I want my children to understand is that life isn’t fair and you should never expect it to be.

The kids consume their post-school carbohydrates, and then start running around the house like monkeys injected with pure adrenaline. This will last approximately five minutes, which is the amount of time Arnold and I have to converse without being interrupted by either Arne’s incessant questions or Halfthor’s brutal demands.

“How was work?” I ask my husband.

“Still working on a long video, but I uploaded a short one of my workout,” he replies. “The t-shirt revenue was better than I expected.”

Arnold sells a t-shirt that says “get swole, dig holes” with a crude illustration of a jacked grim reaper digging a grave. I think it’s based off of a video he did for Halloween where he dug several graves at the local graveyard while being timed until he had to flee from the police.

“Yay we can pay the mortgage!” I say with false enthusiasm.

“How you doing?” he asks.

“I dunno. I got a second job at the apple orchard, so that good.”

“With the fucking Goon?”

I stare at my husband in amazement. Every so often, probably once in a blue moon, we intersect on the same wavelink. This connection, however tenuous, is likely the reason we married.

“Yeah, I want to work outside. I’m tired of doing the internet thing.”

“How much are they going to pay you?”

“A pittance. But it’s cash.”

Arnold shrugs. I have a feeling that there’s more there, if I pry and dig, but I have no desire to potentially start an argument, so I say nothing and we go back to our routines. My husband dicks around on the computer, the boys eventually start watching tv, and I bustle about the house, picking up after them. The money sits upstairs like a treasure chest full of loot, and I keep thinking about it without really thinking about what to do with it. It’s becoming a fetish, not in the sexual sense, but in the anthropological; an object of obsession imbued with supernatural powers. In the foggiest dimensions of my mind it hovers, whispering of its power to change my destiny. I have to do something with it before it drives me insane.