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In the middle of July, the turnips were lush. They grew alongside the entrance to the plant, bright green fronds waving in the afternoon heat like feathers of a peacock’s tail. Bryan Thurmond had seen dozens of peacocks in the parking lot of the zoo where he drove Jenny, his daughter—peacocks strutting like they were collecting fees. Nothing scared them except for the sound of a car’s ignition. The turnips survived in the dirt like that. They didn’t care if the groundwater or the soil were polluted. Turnips hugged entrances and exits and tempted employees to pick them for the dinner table—plants that grew in spite of everything. And who knows, maybe he should’ve joined the crowd. Why not? He’d never seen such tall, beautiful plants. They thrived in muck. He pulled his Toyota Tundra into the parking lot. A lot of guys laughed at him, didn’t understand why he chose to ignore nature’s free bounty. They were like teenage boys who believed nothing could ever happen. They didn’t see the green fronds as a warning.

Management got it. They knew he was a single dad and couldn’t afford to step away from a full-time job with benefits. Six months ago Rand-Atlantic had promoted Bryan to Lead Environmental Officer. But he was getting pressured to overlook certain safety readings. Not directly pressured, of course. The company wouldn’t be that stupid. Encouragements to step over the line came in the form of free passes to the Rodeo Club, and murmurs of a scholarship for his daughter to attend junior college. They had him by the balls.

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WHERE WERE YOU when Kennedy was killed?

It is destined to become the most famous question of the last decades of the twentieth century, but Leo Green can’t answer it to anyone’s satisfaction, let alone his own. He is already dead to himself by the time the President’s open limousine makes its way from Love Field into Dallas . . .

He is nineteen years old, a sophomore at Colonial College, one of those small elite New England men’s schools that would go co-ed at the end of the sixties, and he has no idea what is happening to him. The truth is, he’s in the depths of a severe depression—a term he’s always associated with United States history, economics, and the stock market crash of 1929. Yet no one applies that term to his case, nor does he ever think of applying it to himself. A “nervous breakdown” is what one had in those days, but he’s never known anyone who’s had one, except for an old friend of the family who owns a local garage and had so many cars to work on that he became unable to pump gas or even check a customer’s oil. Leo can pump gas, if he has to, or check the oil on his father’s old Chevy. The problem is his mind. It is hamstrung, stuck in the past, even as he functions in the present like an automaton. His past has become his present, his present his past. He can no longer concentrate or put two thoughts together or remember anything he’s read or said. He spends his days watching himself watch himself. And now it’s November and he is paralyzed by an all-consuming, hyper self-consciousness that overcomes him the instant he wakes in the morning and leaves him only when he manages to escape into sleep.

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Tarantula

The owner of a spider had no idea his pet was the problem when
he came to an eye clinic for treatment.
When the doctor told him she saw tiny hairs sticking out of his
eyeball he remembered cleaning the terrarium of his Chilean
Rose tarantula.
While his attention was briefly focused elsewhere, he sensed movement
in the terrarium.
The tarantula had released a mist of hairs which brushed his eyes
and face.
The hairs have multiple barbs encouraging them to migrate through
the eye tissue to various depths.

Doctors advise anyone working with tarantulas to wear eye protection.

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Four days after the big event, Sharon continued to tally the compliments she’d received as hostess and mother of the bar-mitzvah boy. Her repetition—a meditation, a prayer—helped her to preserve it, to let it wash over her in hues of green, of deepest blue (her color scheme, of course) replaying like a saturated dream montage from a film.

Three guests had told Sharon that “Camp Cameron” surpassed all bar-mitzvahs they’d ever attended. Four had called it this year’s nicest. That totaled seven superlatives, as Cam, studying Latin, would tell her. True, most of the superlatives had come from friends with young children, out of competition range. No matter; it had been a coup. And that was French.

Sharon cleared the mail off the table and continued down her mental list:

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Chapter 1—After Bean Hollow

Gravel Lot Dining, Warehouse Studio Dancing

It was Artland’s idea to eat outside in the gravel lot on the 44 x 32 inch dinette table they had used for non-performance dinners throughout the summer. For this first meal with Amanda Moskowitz, Artland needed something to take the pressure off. Something to talk about if words withered in the fever of her arrival. His mother and Seymour had reluctantly agreed to the arrangement, hoping that Artland might change his mind once they were all inside. But when Amanda arrived with a tight bunch of pink shell azaleas and a suspicious look on her seasoned-sixth-grader face, there was no turning back.

“Aren’t you going to take my coat?” she said to Artland, pulling off her turquoise shell, sweeping strands of strawberry hair off her shoulder as she pushed it into his chest. The jacket dropped awkwardly in Artland’s arms. He glanced up at his mother who was straining to hold a smile.

“We can hang it in the closet,” Berni offered. “You get a hanger for Amanda’s coat,” she said to her son, “and I’ll put these beautiful flowers in water. Did you see what Amanda brought us?” she asked Seymour who was rooted beneath the threshold of the kitchen, smothering the stubble on his heavy chin with a wide, sweaty hand.

“They’re from my auntie’s store,” Amanda declared.

“They’re lovely,” Berni said.

“Indeed,” Seymour confirmed.

“My auntie said they could brighten up even the dirtiest places.”

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  1

September 5, 1953

Dancer Stonemason drove through Maple Springs headed for Rolla. His left hand rested gentle on the steering wheel, and in his pitching hand he held a baseball – loose and easy – like he was shooting craps. The ball took the edge off the queasy feeling he got on game days. His son, Clayton, sat beside him and made sputtering engine noises as he gripped an imaginary steering wheel, while Dede, Dancer’s wife, stared out the window with other things on her mind.

They cruised down Main Street, past the Tastee-Freeze and Dabney’s Esso Station and the Post Office and the First National Bank of Maple Springs and Crutchfield’s General Store. At the town’s only traffic light, he turned left toward the highway. At the edge of town they passed the colored Baptist Church with its neatly-tended grid of white crosses and gravestones under a gnarled willow. The graveyard reminded him of the cemetery up north, near Festus, where his mother was buried with the rest of the Dancer family. She’d been gone fifteen years now and some days Dancer had trouble remembering what she looked like.

Across from the Baptists, A-1 Auto Parts blanketed the landscape with acres of junked automobiles. His father’s Buick was out there somewhere. Walt Stonemason had been a whisky-runner for Cecil Danforth. He knew every back road and trail in southern Missouri and there wasn’t a revenue agent in the state who could catch him.

At his father’s funeral Cecil told Dancer that Walt was the best damn whiskey runner he ever had. Dancer wanted to ask Cecil if his dad was so damn good how’d he manage to run that Roadmaster smack into a walnut tree with no one chasing him. But Dancer knew better than to ask Cecil those kinds of questions.

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