Searching for George's Garden

PART ONE

DANIEL AND MARTIN

The earth rotates once in about 24 hours with respect to the sun, but only once every 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds with respect to the stars – the safekeepers of lost time, dispensers of its return.

Chapter One

~23:56:04~

The little girl was lying in a field of tall, swaying grasses the color of wheat with a cerulean sky above her, or was it the sea? Clouds moved quickly past, although they would be waves if she were looking upon the ocean. Very high, it seemed, a bird drifted. But if it were the ocean, she reasoned, it would be a very small fish swimming in the warm currents of the surface. She knew that, down deep or up high, the pretty blue became black, that it was a cold and fearsome thing. She could smell it. She sensed the presence of some large thing behind her, something important to see, but when she tried to turn, her body resisted, the constraints of deep water immobilizing her limbs and she wondered if it would be best to dive into the air. And then standing there before her, in the fair golden field, was Adeline with her big bloody smile. The housekeeper was cradling newspapers in her arms, like babies. The little girl struggled to see the light beyond the red, but it burned her eyes. She beat against the glass for more, but no one could hear her.

Katy awakened with a start. The harsh light of the small Klieg hurt her eyes, which meant she had fallen asleep during the night again and she was not a night sleeper – unless she was dreaming now. Was she? She rolled onto her side, wincing at the pain in her left arm, the thin red line on the smooth skin closest to her shoulder. Not very deep, it would heal quickly. She pushed herself from the floor and switched off the nighttime sun. The real morning sun streamed from the front dormer window onto the paint-spattered newspaper that lined the attic floor. Minus the light of the lamp, she emerged from an aisle of dark garden like a shadow herself, the sunlit rest of the attic room transforming her into something solid. At the worktable – dry, splintered, wobbly – she turned to look back. The large canvas nailed to the walls of the back dormer had been painted over many times, and she felt she might be getting it right, although without the lamp it was too dark to know. What had she been dreaming? Her eyes moved over the aisle of smaller canvases that lead to the big one. These were finished – they practically swayed when the air of her passing disturbed them, row upon row of willow, of lily stacked on top of one another. How did they become flowers for the dead? She did not understand, yet. Katy picked up the coffee can of dirty brushes, glancing once more into the dark at the things she could not see. Ghosts, she thought, and shuddered. Here in this house that was somehow hers, the earth had slowly spun to a brand-new day and it was time for her to sleep. She yawned as she backed down the ladder, pausing only to fold it back in to the ceiling. Everything was quiet in the attic when the sun was out.

DANIEL WAS AWAKE AT dawn, already dressed for work when Katy descended the ladder, anxious for this new day. His coffee was brewed on a rusted cooking element in a battered tin percolator that came with this small room above the garage. He poured a generous cup, then lowered himself into the sag of a moldering recliner that had also been left behind. He blew at the steam and took a cautious sip, tasting bitters, mildew, and earth.

The former occupant’s life was displayed on crudely milled bookshelves across from the chair:  dusty piles of exotic seed catalog, dozens of Ball Perfect Mason jars whose carefully penned labels were faded and illegible. It was difficult to tell what was preserved inside them – twigs and dust. He could feel the effects of less subtle clues: the narrow mattress atop screeching coiled springs, uncomfortable for his bulky frame, room enough for one. This single chair. One. There had been but one. His eyes wandered back to the coffee pot.

Glass bubble top stained from countless brews, wood handle bleached white with age, dents and scratches and furrows. Obsolescence. Endurance. What else was there to learn from this percolator? It would never do justice to the imported fair market beans Daniel curated for himself – a civilized obsession he would not give up. He glanced at the double-sealed packages of coffee on the shelf and briefly mourned the unused French press he knew was in Katy’s kitchen.

Daniel took a final swallow, reminding himself it was not the worst coffee he had ever tasted. He examined the quantity of grounds left in the bottom of the mug. There were fewer today than there had been yesterday – or the day before. Maybe he was getting the hang of it.

He pushed himself from the chair. The cup was rinsed beneath the cold water tap and set aside to dry. He picked up the percolator. The lid had initially been difficult to remove due to a concave depression on the rim of the pot. One morning he’d resorted to using a screwdriver to pry the thing open. To his surprise, the flat-head tip fit perfectly into the groove beneath the rim and the lid slid easily off without jeopardizing either fragile glass bubble or splintered wooden handle. Another clue: he was not the first.

Meanwhile, the clock was ticking, and it was time to begin another day as gardener of this forgotten property. The door to his room opened almost immediately onto steep stairs. Grasping the handrail, he turned to take in the small room. It was like a time capsule, a perfectly preserved couple-hundred square feet of what was important then. Life had never been so simple for Daniel.

IT WAS HARD TO TELL which creaked louder – his knees or the stairs – when Daniel made his way down to the garage. Much older than the main house, it had originally been a small barn with a four-stall stable. Most of the front had been modified to accommodate automobiles, although not skillfully: an early-model Cadillac was parked half-in/half-out one of the shallow spaces, too long to fit. In back were the crudely appointed basics of a bathroom. It would do.

The garage was located behind the main house, at the end of a gravel drive. It bordered the property line to the west, while a great live oak bordered the east – just close enough to offer shade from the afternoon heat without killing the lawn. The boxwood hedge was another matter. Dense and impassible, the hedge was a mountainous shrub that divided the back yard from the wilderness of the north. While he’d barely scratched the surface, restoring it had already become an exercise in archeology, in the recovery of lost gardening implements and several rotting black tennis balls claimed immediately by the dog.

Built facing south, the house was a plain but thoughtfully designed Craftsman separated from the dirt road by another live oak that shaded the entire front yard. Far from any township, this was a house without an address or even a mailbox. Signs of ambitious landscaping were more obvious in the front: mimosa trees abutted the thickets of pine on each side of the property. Untamed azalea and rhododendron dotted the landscape, shocking pink riots of color with the onset of spring. While pleasing to the eye, the front yard was completely unused. Everything happened in the back.

Daniel was about to step across the gravel drive to the lawn when the kitchen door opened. The dog padded across the porch to nose his way out the screen door. It snapped shut behind him. And then Katy appeared, the end of her day at the onset of his. Unaware of Daniel, she removed a handful of brushes from a tin to rinse in the deep, chipped sink outside the kitchen window. An empty easel stood further along, among the ferns and wandering green runners that took up much of the small screened-off space. Sometimes Katy left a painting out to dry, sometimes asking can we put this in the garden? It had been days though. He glanced up at the attic. What was she doing all night?

Good morning, Katy.

She dropped the brushes, whirling at the sound of his voice. Her eyes were hollow, he saw, shadowed crescents of pale skin beneath them. 

I’m calling for supplies, he continued, his tone urging an answer. But Katy stood mute. Daniel cleared his throat. Is there anything you want? He always brought what he considered to be sensible staples: boxed milk, whole-grain bread, some kind of pre-cooked protein – but she seldom asked for anything except M&Ms, and boxes of the kind of instant macaroni and cheese he remembered from his own childhood. Just the thought of powdered cheese made him cringe.

Katy spoke abruptly. I was dreaming about newspaper. I don’t know why. The old dog nosed his way back through the screen door and into the house as Katy briefly met Daniel’s eyes. She scooped up the brushes, rinsed them quickly, then settled them tip-up in another can to dry. At the kitchen door, she turned to him and said, I’m fine. Halfway in the house she turned again. Thank you.

Daniel heard the door lock behind her.

KATY WATCHED THE WATER turn blue as she filled the tub for a bath. Variations of the same dream played over and over lately – newspaper, she remembered, the sound of the wind – maybe someone called her name. But then the light hurt her eyes. She squinted now, at the morning sun in the window as she leaned over to shut the water off. When she took off her clothes the depth of her cutting was fully revealed. From shoulder to thigh, her skin was a canvas of right angles. There was a symmetry to the old cuts scarred in thin ridges across one another, as if by design, as if she were a work of art. The most recent were still raw, red. She lowered herself into the steaming water that burned the raw places on her body and turned the rest of her as pink, she noticed, as the inside of a seashell.

IT WAS EASIER TO SEE, in the afternoon slant of sun, how the extended hours of light and warmth of springtime ignited life. Pollen hung visible in the air while the husks of newly opened buds popped and fell. Yet something about the pine forest troubled him. Daniel knelt in the rich soil behind the garage, where long rows of the winter greens were now large and gangly things near the end of producing food.  He felt inexplicably surrounded by danger, laughable even as the thought it, with the hoary bramble that grew near the boxwood on one side, and the thicket of pine on the other. He’d once walked as far as possible along the line of trees and biting shrub, while thorns and the wild things of nature tore at his pants. Stopping to peer into the maze of pine, he wondered what could be in there, what could possibly grow, except for all the poison things that had figured out how to live without light:  ivy, oak, snakes. What could lead him beyond the relative safety of the garden into those woods? Nothing he could think of.

Daniel reached deep into soil that had been rendered into robust organic matter by the passage of time. He pulled up handfuls and let it fall back through his fingers, then studied the loamy black dirt against his black skin, how it rested in symmetrical patterns on each hand. The dirt found valleys in the cracks of his knuckles, settled into creases in the rough joints of each finger, embedded itself in his cuticles making pink spots of his fingernails.

He reviewed his hands as if he’d never seen them before – as if they belonged to another. What did he know about hands? They were like molecules, snowflakes – none two alike. Hands told a story. Hands didn’t care if you were white, black, red, blue or yellow, man or woman or something in between – they knew what was in your heart – they carried out orders, did the deeds you’d chosen for them, for yourself. In the mountains south of Aiwanj, hands that committed a crime were removed. His own hands had been bound in handcuffs, lingered on the curve of a hip, trembled on the head of a child, helped bury the dead. They had been clenched in fists for so long he hardly knew how to relax them. Maybe that was the perplexing thing, the open palms of his hands, pink amid black – the colored parts of him. How strange he must look, squatting among the collards with his hands covered in soil, like some odd seed quickened by the sun. He stuffed them back into the earth and felt for subtle changes in texture, moisture, composition – this was good land. The forest groaned against a breeze – a reminder: no matter where he dug he would eventually encounter something solid, immovable. Have I become immovable? He had not, he decided. Not yet.

Daniel stood carefully, the pop of his arthritic knees loud in the quiet of early spring. He had just slipped through the slot between the garage and the boxwood when the screen door snapped shut again. Captin nosed his way around the back yard, stopping to lift a leg and urinate on nothing but air. Katy must have awakened.

The dog sniffed the shaded breeze of afternoon light and began to bark at some invisible trespass. A small dark squall hovered in the southern sky of an otherwise beautiful day. They could use some rain.

Daniel looked up to assess the direction of the wind and was hit directly on the left eye by something hard. He twisted violently with the shock of cold, burning pain, covering his face with humus-covered hands, which just made things worse. He blinked away the dirt, tears streaming. A contact lens was gone. He knelt on the ground, patting vainly for the sliver of plastic, finding instead a marble-sized chunk of ice. A hailstone – one piece of hail, aimed right at his face. He looked up at the sky with his one good eye and saw the red plane.

SHE STOOD IN THE MEADOW, and a big wind was coming. She could see it in the grasses and she wanted to run, but her arms were filled with newspaper and it was all too heavy. The wind hit so hard she was slammed to the ground in its turbulence. An acrid smell of fuel and now she was sitting with nothing beneath her seat but air. Above her head were small portals of blue, windows where everything up should be down. Her heart raced with fear as she clutched her mother’s hand, her mother’s face animated, mouth moving, but her ears were full of roar. There seemed no air in the air, in the forsaken, pretty blue of the sea in the sky, no white cotton candy clouds – the waves of up there. Up close, blue was black. It was black without seashells. She could not hear, could not breathe. Up close, blue was terrifying. Where was cool marble, pink hand, dog tree? Where was the glass house, the growing day? Where was George?

Katy’s small body twisted in damp cotton sheets, her hair splayed across the stained ticking of a feather pillow. She twitched and thrashed and gasped awake. Was she awake? She felt the sickness of turbulent air, of black sky. For a moment, she still smelled the fuel. Her heart raced as she took in her surroundings – the bedroom, a late afternoon breeze that gently moved the curtains. At the door of her room she knew she would be sick. She barely made it to the toilet, where her gagging was in vain, producing nothing but long strings of spit and the acid purged from her stomach. She coughed and spat until tears streamed down her face, until the ground was stable again, and the urge to choke on a smell that no longer existed had passed. And then she curled into a ball on the mosaic bathroom tile and cried because she would never be five years old again.

From the hallway outside the bathroom she could see through the kitchen to the back porch, how the shadows that pointed right in the morning were pointed left now, at the end of their day. The flap in the kitchen dog door was pointed out. Captin would be outside with Daniel. Katy pulled the attic stairs down and climbed to her garden.

The afternoon sunlight was filtered through the new leaves of the massive front oak, so big its branches reached over the roof. The angle of this light changed the dimension of the room, the eye drawn to another wall with other places Katy was sure had existed. She clicked on the lamp, illuminating the cemetery flowers that braced the dormer walls of the big canvas. On that canvas, a house, obviously, a very small house at the end of a meandering path. The unfinished trunks of seven larger-than-life pine trees were drawn into the foreground, and the feeling was as if by standing behind them one could look into the painting, observe without being observed.

Katy was startled out of this trick by a loud crack against the attic window. Bird? Rock? She could see no broken glass, but outside, something completely unexpected. As if a mocking reminder of her nightmare, a dark cloud hovered, and a small red plane fell from the sky. She swayed on the floor. The plane banked and swooped and fell too fast, fatally, gratefully, hidden from her by the tree. When there was no plume of black smoke she wondered for a moment if it had been real. Looking around, the sky was blue above her, the flowers in bloom. Her eyes lingered on the big canvas. What could be done to make it right? She tripped over curled-up newspaper in front of her worktable, where she assembled the colors she would need to create texture on the tree trunks, to create the smell of seven pines, because it had to be seven. She looked over her shoulder to the spot on the newspaper where she’d fallen asleep the night before. The bloodstain was small and rusty. The red plane had been real. She glanced again at the uncracked window that was loud enough to get her attention. It was quiet now, but her mind was not.

The first red was made by crushing a beetle. It took about a million cochineal beetles to make a pound of red extract. And they had to be female. What great paintings remained that were composed of them? Then there were the Egyptian mummies, ground into the paints of 18th century masters. Where were the mummies now? On display in the great museums of the world, their quiet sacrifice would live forever. Katy snorted back snot and swiped at her tears, angry at their return. There among the twisted tubes of oil, acrylic and watercolor, was a blade she used for trimming the linen, for scraping the layers of paint away when her palettes were too thick. Red. She was not a beetle and she was not a mummy, but she could give herself purely to the things she created, so that she, too, could be permanent in some way. Katy picked up a palette, lifted the blade and, just beneath the shoulder, sliced her arm open again.

Chapter Two

~The Replacements~

The Cessna picked up the first few bounces of turbulence several miles north of the thunderstorm.  The afternoon sun slanted across the cockpit of the small plane, breaking through dark clouds to form prisms of light that dotted the farmland below. 

The pilot winced as the static of too-close lightning crackled through his headset and pierced his eardrums. Careless, he tore it from his head and tossed the whole set onto the seat beside him, only to be assaulted by the normally comforting white noise of propeller and engine. His left hand automatically went to the speaker switch to assure that it was off as his eyes scanned the control panel.  He reached to the floor of the cockpit and shuffled through his flight bag for some music, something soothing to ward off the onset of what he recognized as a migraine. He squinted against the starburst effect of light, which bothered his eyes – in contrast to the storm into which he was flying, which bothered him not at all. He pressed the earbuds into place and tapped his way through his father’s phone.

Martin Rainer thought his father had impeccable taste in music. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then relaxed into the form of his seat as Barber’s Adagio for Strings replaced the drone. They played it for 24 hours in a loop when JFK died, his father told him. Martin thought it beautiful. Scratching at the stubble on his chin, he slowly released his breath and studied the system that was in his way.  It was one hell of a small storm. Depending on one’s perspective, getting this close to the force of nature was either the closest one could get to heaven and still live or exactly what it must feel like to fly straight into hell.  He’d done both.

Martin soloed as a teenager – flight lessons that were a gift from his father, to the chagrin of his mother – and so took only a moment to assess the situation.  The cap cloud, a classic anvil, indicated possible tornadic conditions, which translated to winds more than 100 mph.  It was typically wind shear that wreaked havoc with smaller aircraft.  Cumulous to the south of the system were white and cottony, while giant gouts of moisture, and probably hail, formed a dense pillar of fast-moving storm to the north, flanked on either side by explosive bolts of cloud to earth lightning. 

He spotted the airstrip to the northeast and wondered what he’d been thinking. He’d holed up in some pretty remote areas, but this one might as well be Mars. What could possibly happen here?  He should have politely declined the job: a remote privately-owned non-commercial strip in need of temporary caretaking. He’d only accepted out of geographical curiosity and the need to keep moving. Considering he didn’t want to be found, the middle of Southern nowhere seemed perfect. Lately, a growing throb under his left knee reminded him he hadn’t been home for more than a year and should have it checked. But he’d committed, and it was only for the summer.

An especially aggressive jolt of turbulence interrupted what peace the music provided. The throb of migraine amplified.  Martin glanced over his right wing to the receding storm before settling again on the horizon. His right hand brushed against the chrome of the instrument panel and found the mags.  He turned them both to the off position, eliminating any charge from the spark plugs to the engine, then pressed the throttle into the panel. He felt, rather than heard, the shudder, followed by the stillness of the aircraft as the engine was robbed first of charge, then of fuel. Drifting over land it was easier to see where the sky ended, but just as quiet. He figured he had less than a minute to safely restart his plane.

Martin closed his eyes for the end of the lament. He swallowed against the growing pressure as his thoughts became a jumble of random images: Christmas tree lights, a pile of leaves, faded blue Keds – flashes of his life, before. Show me more. Airborne mortarboards, handlebar streamers, his mother.

The impact was hard to ignore, like someone slapped the plane. Martin could not initially understand what he was looking at: the windscreen was solid blue. He immediately activated the wipers and was shocked to find himself beneath the storm. Worse, he was 5,200 feet from the ground and losing altitude rapidly.  His right hand moved automatically to the throttle, and then hovered a beat. He swiped at his eyes as a small funnel dipped from the sky in front of him. He managed a chuckle then pulled the throttle out full force. Knowing he was dropping at the rate of 50 feet per second, he quickly turned the mags to the on position and directed both to fuel rich. He popped the ignition into place to power on the engine and waited in vain for the familiar vibration. The plane continued to drop.  How ironic. He’d have to dive to gain enough air speed to spin the propeller. Back over his left wing he looked for the only place he could land and diverted east. He snapped on the radio, assured it was set on a universal frequency and spoke. 

Mayday, mayday. Only, the headset was on the seat beside him. Martin tore out the earbuds and tried again. Two-nine-seven-oh-four, anyone copy?  He heard a crackle in the static, but nothing intelligible. Perfect.

He banked left and dove for the small strip of asphalt cut into the earth beneath him. This was where he’d agreed to spend the summer and he suddenly felt a whole lot more optimistic about it. The propeller spun, but the mags wouldn’t catch. Something was wrong. Ok, maybe less optimistic. Where was the tower? Another hard bank and he had a shot at landing. He spotted a grid tower perched on the western-most corner of the property and manually adjusted the trim, glancing at the altimeter. This was going to be close. There would be no mustering of fire trucks, or any kind of emergency unit – this wasn’t exactly LAX, or even Birmingham’s ugly sixth cousin twice removed. Anyway, if he didn’t get it right the first time, there would be no need for an ambulance. Martin braced for landing.

The plane narrowly cleared the fence before touching down. With no thrusts, it skidded across the tarmac with only brakes to slow it down, burning rubber into the asphalt before limping to a halt just shy of a corrugated steel hangar where the surreal vision of a dark middle-aged man in a black turban stood. The man wore gloves, and had a prayer rug folded beneath his arm, a pink suitcase at his feet. Martin experienced a slightly out-of-body feeling, which he tried to shake off as routine – there was nothing like a rough landing to get the blood pumping. But outside the cockpit seemed the confusing continuation of the sky.  Maybe the afternoon sun was too bright or his migraine worse than he thought, but everything was very blue.

He swung the cockpit door open and stepped out. His head throbbed, and his left leg hurt. The ground felt solid enough – that was something – but it was covered with blue petals, blown gently away by the propeller as it slowed.

The turbaned man squinted as he inspected Martin from head to toe. Quite abruptly, he stepped past Martin to look inside the plane, returning to stand near the pink suitcase with a look of dejection. Could this be the man who hired him? He’d only spoken with him – a Mr. Connor – on the phone twice, but never gotten the impression he was, what? An old girlfriend in college, Persian, bristling at the assumption she was Armenian. His brain flipped through a rolodex of countries, but which?  Arab? He could not think. Probably. Maybe. Martin limped forward and held out his hand.

I’m Martin Rainer.

The Arab did not move, but the look on his face changed from dejection to indifference.

Martin let his hand fall. Mr. Connor?

You are replacement? Heavily accented, broken English. Definitely not Connor.

Martin looked over his shoulder. Are you expecting someone else?

The man’s face shifted for a moment, then just as quickly returned to indifference. Yes. He picked up the suitcase. I think you come tomorrow. You follow me.

The Arab leaned the pink suitcase against a hydraulic tow-bar just inside the big hangar door.

Sleep, he spoke, while walking by a small closed door. Toilet, he gestured down a hallway.

Martin gave the interior a cursory glance, wondering if it had been used in the last century, and followed to a musty little office stacked with old folders. The air was pungent with the smell of something rank. The Arab picked up a brand-new manila envelope from atop a precarious tower of paper and thrust it in Martin’s direction.

For you.

Martin took the envelope. At least he was at the right place. The Arab was halfway back to the hangar door when Martin spoke.

Hey, what’s your name?

The Arab picked up a shovel and walked out without answering.

Martin leaned on the desk and opened the envelope, which contained keys and a couple of pieces of typed paper he wasn’t interested in reading. He set the envelope aside, took out his phone, and, relieved to see he’d had no calls, made one himself. Voice mail, of course. It’s Martin Rainer. I’m here.

With only an hour or so of daylight left, he made his way back through the hangar to check his engine. It took him less than five minutes to confirm it was the carburetor that had failed. Great. He lifted a small cooler out of the cabin, twisted the cap off a bottle of beer and took a rest. Here on the eastern edge, the tarmac abutted a field, into which, presumably, the Arab had disappeared with his prayer rug and shovel. What was left of the blue petals tumbled down the runway. A wind funnel stood in the northeastern corner of the property near the field – its cone puffed lightly up and down in the moderate breeze. The streamers at the end of the cone reminded him of handle bars on a bike. He rubbed at his leg, swallowed the last of his beer, and went for the tow bar. The petals drifted in his wake and he wondered how many of them had been lifted high enough to touch his plane.

THE ROOM ABOVE THE garage felt different after the sun set. Two 30-watt bulbs hung from the ceiling – one over the sink, another over the twin bed – replacing the sunlight with a dim radiance. Tonight, Daniel sat in the spooky chair shaped by the body of another with an ice pack taped above his left eye. He had made but one concession to the antiquity of this humble room: he had, before moving in, paid an electrician to add two wall sockets and a wireless router for his laptop. As it turned out this had required some creative wiring, but the guy was local and didn’t charge much. The likelihood of anything being to code was questionable. None of this bothered Daniel because as much as he reveled in the solitary existence of this place, he absolutely needed to be connected. It was astonishing to him, what technology could do now.  He’d grown up with rotary phones, he and his family used an outhouse for the first ten years of his life, to his everlasting humiliation. Now everything had an app. Reduced to wearing his glasses – hideous industrial frames he’d had for years – Daniel texted furiously into his phone, ordering replacement lenses with next-day delivery. He set the phone aside and smiled.

THE KLIEG WAS POINTED at the floor, disbursing an ambient light free of hard shadows. The cut on Katy’s arm still stung, although it had stopped bleeding almost immediately – she’d only needed a little. Most people would guess her blood was in the dotted patch of strawberries far behind the pines. But her blood was in the bark of the pine itself. The sap, the straw. Was this a memory? For a moment Katy wondered, again, what exactly was real. Everything, she reminded herself. It was all true, all real.

She had no memory of this house that had no garden or greenhouse. She had never lived here. The house where she lived when she was a little girl – that was what she imagined when they found her and told her: you have a home. This was not that house. Somehow though, and this had seemed not-real, George had lived here – that much was known, confirmed to her when all the papers were signed, and the deed done. The house was left to her by a gardener named George and came with a gardener named Daniel. The man looked her in the eye when he said it. The house came with a dog named Captin, who slept at the bottom of the attic steps right now, too. Maybe they didn’t know – but Katy knew: Captin was a name carved on the headstone of a dog that died twenty-two years ago. That was real, too.

Katy backed away from the canvas, almost upsetting a can of white acrylic she used for priming. She placed her brush on the worktable, then leaned against it to stretch the muscles of her neck. The seven pines leapt out, the nearest as big around as her, so real she could reach out and pull the bark off. Had they existed? She knew they symbolized something significant but looking at them now she saw them as obstacles. This was not her garden.

Without hesitation, Katy swept up the primer and strode down the aisle of flowers. She hurled the paint onto the canvas, then cast aside the can and used her hands to cover as much of the mistake as possible. Her arm began to bleed again. When she turned to walk away, she trailed paint along the newspaper, footprints through the row of cemetery flowers.

Chapter Three

~Shitty Day in Shitville~

Mr. Coffee gurgled and spat out the first pot of the day, although it smelled more like burning tires than coffee. Martin was wedged behind the desk in the small office crammed full of unfiled papers, greased-up spare parts and cobwebs. He’d slept uncomfortably in his plane the night before, waking to find the manila envelope duct-taped to his hatch door. He dropped the keys onto the desk, then settled back into the swivel chair to read through the instructions for running the strip. As it turned out, this was little more than a refueling shack, with a once-weekly mail stop and occasional ground delivery for rural addresses – keep the handheld radio charged, fuel as requested: jet, diesel, and leaded gasoline were available. He re-read the last part of his job description with a degree of incredulity: delivery of postal/express packages and orders as requested. Martin lowered the page.

You’ve got to be kidding, he muttered.

Another page rolled up and stuffed inside the envelope: due immediately, deliver contents of truck, located in the northeastern section of the field. Full load. Load? Load of what? The directions were even more vague: six miles east, left at fork/dirt road, about two miles: George Trotter.

The coffee pot gave a final gasping belch at the end of its cycle. Whoever used this suffocating office had arranged everything important within reach, so all Martin had to do was swivel in the chair for the lone chipped mug – Darrell’s Bait Shop and Guns – and the stained brown pot of Folger’s best. He rifled around for sugar, but beyond what was scattered liberally all over the general vicinity, there was none to be found. He looked at the oil slick floating on the surface of the liquid, but who cared at this point? Stupidly, he took a large gulp and immediately sprayed hot coffee onto the floor, tilting the mug wildly, which sent a scalding splash onto his hand. Reflexively, he backward-crashed the chair into the desk causing a precariously stacked mound of paper to fall to the floor. He set the mug onto the desk, wiped his hand against his pants leg and gingerly tongued a burned patch of skin behind his front teeth. It hurt. He leaned down to pick up the paper just as a cockroach scuttled across the floor, sending the chair into the desk again. Martin hadn’t seen a roach since he was a kid. He still hated them. Mr. Coffee hissed for no apparent reason.

Unsettled, Martin snatched the instructions off the desk and read them again, still incensed at the last line. His stomach rumbled in hunger – beyond the beer and what was left of a jar of mixed nuts, he hadn’t eaten since before the storm that landed him at this, this—whatever this was.  He had a few days of canned supplies in the plane, but to hell with it, he’d make the delivery then find somewhere to eat.

The handheld radio was secured in a charger just inside the hanger door. Martin recognized it as the radio the Arab had when he landed yesterday. He supposed it was his responsibility now but reasoned he could not take a call if he were