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  “What’s the hurry?” came a girl’s voice behind her.

  Jett wheeled to face Bethany, who was as cool as Mentos in her short skirt and blue halter top with bra straps showing. “No hurry, I just have to do my homework before math class.”

  “But class starts in four minutes.”

  “That’s what I mean. I don’t want to disappoint Mrs. Stansberry. She’s the only cool teacher I have.”

  “Did you sleep okay? You look like you’re late for your own funeral. Or maybe your eye shadow’s a little thick today.”

  “Thanks for the compliment.”

  “No, you’re good. This Goth thing looks bitching. I wish my parents would let me get away with it.”

  “See, that’s just it. You don’t ask your parents, you tell them. Have to show them who is boss right from diapers.”

  “I’ll bet yours were black.”

  “Well, not while they were clean.”

  “Ooh, yuck.” Bethany crinkled her overly pert nose.

  “What are you doing after school?”

  “Feeding the goats.”

  “I hate those cloven-hoofed little monsters. They scare me.”

  Bethany laughed. “They’re okay. The males, the billy goats, stink unless you cut their balls off. My dad has a metal band that you put around them, then leave it for a few weeks. The balls swell up and turn black and gross, then they fall off. Problem solved.”

  Jett shuddered. She wasn’t an expert in male anatomy, but she was under the impression that the testicles were the most vulnerable spot on their bodies. Which is why you tried to kick there in an emergency. But causing their balls to rot seemed like the sort of punishment that should be reserved for the very worst of them. Creatures like Tommy Wilson.

  Jett decided she wouldn’t complain about her own chores for a while. Sweeping the living room didn’t seem so bad when compared to forking hay to a goat. “Well, I’ve got to get to that homework. Say hi to Chuck for me.”

  Bethany’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “Your boyfriend. The Chuckster.”

  “You don’t even know him.”

  “You told me all about him. Chuck steak, 100 percent lean.”

  “And don’t forget he’s mine.” Bethany frowned and turned, then was swept away in the tide of students. Jett looked at the clock on the wall. Two minutes to solve six math problems. And the rest of her life to solve all the rest of her problems.

  ***

  September was a melancholy month for Alex Eakins. It was the month his childhood mutt rolled himself under the wheels of a Fed Ex van, the month he’d lost his virginity after a high school football game to a girl who later ditched him for a married man, the month his dad and mom separated, the month he’d been kicked out of Duke for lousy grades and poor attendance. Since he’d moved to the mountains and spent his trust fund on a little piece of south-facing land on the mountain above Solom, September had been a time of dying.

  He sniffed the air, which was sweet with the sugar of red maples and crabapples. The stench of decay should have been there, but the only rot came from the black innards of his composting toilet, where bacteria performed its thankless job of turning shit to dirt. Nature was just beginning to accept that winter was on the way, that every living thing would soon be asleep or dead. He wondered which of those he would be.

  Alex had embraced organic gardening as a lifestyle, earning enough by selling produce at the county farmer’s market to pay his property taxes. He had studied all the latest sustainable building techniques, and his own house was a mix of technologies both primitive and new. Since he lived off-grid and wasn’t beholden to the building inspection and permitting process, Alex had used cob and straw bale construction for part of his house, which was cut partly into the bank.

  From the outside, the structure looked as much like an aboriginal mud hut as anything, but it was incredibly energy efficient. A small cluster of solar panels on the roof ran a dorm-sized refrigerator, and a wood stove system circulated hot water through the house. Alex had fixed a generator to a paddle wheel in the creek that gushed along one side of his property. The generator, along with a miniature wind turbine, fed a bank of alternating-current batteries, so he was covered no matter what the weather.

  The system was put together in the aftermath of Y2K, when all the doomsayers had realized the world wasn’t going to end after all and had sold their survival gear. Well, the world may have ended already, for all Alex knew. Because it was autumn again, and the tomatoes were turning to mush on the vines and the corn was getting hard. The cool-weather greens like collards, spinach and turnips still had a few weeks to go, but soon enough the market would close for the season. Alex had a truckload of pumpkins to sell for Halloween, and one more good haul of organic broccoli, but after that, he would have to go back to work. Or else sell a little of the marijuana he cultivated.

  But that meant dealing up with people.

  The same idiotic people who had driven him to the isolation of his mountain retreat. Despite the added pleasure of end-running the government and the lure of the world’s last free-market economy, selling dope was almost as much trouble as having a square job.

  Alex dumped a bucket of table scraps onto his garden compost heap and looked over the valley below. The trees were just starting to turn color along the highway, where the roots were stressed by construction and carbon monoxide. A gravel road ran past the Ward and Smith houses before disappearing into the thicket and winding up to Alex’s house. The road got a lot bumpier and rutted past Gordon Smith’s, because Alex believed in inhibiting curiosity-seekers. Not because he was antisocial as his mom had claimed, or a stubborn asshole as his dad had claimed, but because he didn’t have the patience to deal with accidental tourists and uninvited guests. Plus, the government might have an interest in finding him.

  Besides, he wasn’t antisocial. Just ask Meredith, the earth chick he’d met at the farmer’s market who had occupied half of his bed on and off since April. But April was a green month and October was red and golden, so he expected her to light out before the first big frost.

  Her voice came from the wooden deck. “Honey?”

  Honey. That reminded him, next year he planned on setting up a honeybee hive. With all the pests that attacked honeybees, the real stuff was getting more and more valuable. Alex was sure he could do it right, and have the fringe benefit of his own tiny, winged army of blossom pollinators—

  “Alex?”

  He put down the scrap bucket and picked up the heavy hoe. “Yes, dear?”

  “Are you mad at me about something?”

  “Of course not.” Down below, through the trees, a thread of gray smoke rose from the Ward chimney.

  “You only call me ‘Dear’ when you’re mad at me.”

  “That’s not so.”

  “And you say it out the side of your mouth, like you’re talking on automatic or something. Like you’re miles away.”

  Gasoline was pushing two-fifty a gallon, thanks to the military-industrial complex that ruled the country, and that had to be factored against the profit from a load of pumpkins. Maybe he’d drive the load to Westridge. The college kids had plenty of money. He should know, as much grass as he’d peddled to them over the last couple of years. “Everything’s fine, dear.”

  “See? There you go again.”

  “Huh?”

  “You said ‘Dear’ again.”

  He turned and squinted up at the deck. The day was bright, though cool. Meredith stood in a gray terry-cloth robe, her blonde hair wet and steaming. No doubt she was nude beneath, and Alex thought of those nipples that were the color and consistency of pencil erasers. He could almost smell her shampoo, the hippie-dippy expensive stuff she bought at the health food store. He tightened his grip on the hoe.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was thinking about autumn.”

  “Like, fall?”

  “Yeah. Everything’s dying but there’s a promise of rebirth. It’s meta
phorical.”

  “Alex, have you been in the stash?”

  “Did you know that most leaves aren’t really green? The chlorophyll in the leaves masks their true color, and when the growing process slows down for autumn, the chlorophyll fades and the true color emerges. It’s the process of dying that finally reveals the leaf. So all that green, happy horseshit is a lie.”

  “Alex? Are you okay?”

  Sure, he was okay. He had been okay for years. Marijuana was his antidepressant, and his crop kept him supplied year-round. He also traded on the black market to support his other little hobby-the one locked in the walk-in closet downstairs—but figured he’d probably get caught one day and the cops would seize his land. All because he liked to smoke a little weed, which was none of the government’s business besides the fact that it kept Republicans in office. At least weed was honest, though the system wasn’t. Weed stayed green, even after it was dead, even after you smoked it and it grew a bouquet of blossoms in your head. True colors, for real.

  Meredith smoked it, too, but only before bed, because it made her terribly horny. In fact, Alex often wondered if that was the sole reason she had stayed over that night in April, and then the next night, and before the end of the week she’d begun leaving her clothes in his dresser. And that, as any guy knows, had been the time to say he wasn’t sure they were ready for such a commitment, but another joint and Alex had his head between her thighs and, well, he supposed it could be worse. At least she could cook vegan meals.

  He smiled up at her, or maybe he was grimacing from dawn’s glare in his eyes. “I’m fine,” he said. “I was just wondering whether to take the pumpkins down to the college or try my luck at the market.”

  “The market’s been a little slow, and some of the other vendors will probably undercut you. Better to go where there’s no competition.”

  “Makes sense.” Meredith had been a business major, graduating cum laude the year before with a degree in marketing. Alex had majored in botany, but all he’d learned was how to grow some high-class, kick-ass grass. And how to flunk out and disappoint his parents.

  “Are you going into town?” Meredith asked. “Town” meant Windshake, the Pickett county seat, which was fifteen miles away. No one thought of Solom as a town, though it had a zip code and post office. Windshake was where people did their serious shopping, and the Solom General Store was a place to pop in for vegetable seeds, or a bag of Fritos corn chips and a Snickers bar when the munchies got extreme.

  “Maybe later,” he said. He never wore a watch, and if he had to get a part-time gig for the winter, that meant showing up according to some corporate master’s rigid timetable. Time was flexible and shouldn’t be tied down to numbers. Like, this was now and later was later, and yesterday was like the ashes and grunge in the bottom of the bong. And, tomorrow was, like, maybe a pot seed or something.

  “Well, then, what do you want to do this fine Saturday morning?” Meredith leaned over the deck, letting her robe fall open and offering a generous view that rivaled the glory of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  He grinned, or maybe a gnat was flitting near his eyes. “Roll one and I’ll come up in a minute.”

  She smiled. “Breakfast in bed?”

  “Sure—” He started to add “dear,” but caught himself.

  Meredith padded across the deck Alex had built with his own two hands using wormy chestnut planks he’d taken from an abandoned barn. Maybe Meredith belonged here. She was organic in her way, wasn’t spoiled by modern conveniences, and had grown on him over the months. He just couldn’t understand why, as she’d talked to him, his grip on the hoe had tightened. He looked down and saw that his knuckles were white.

  “Yes, dear,” he whispered, chopping at a plantain that had taken root by the garden. Plantains carried the same blight that killed tomatoes in wet weather. They were evil weeds if God had ever made such a thing.

  Alex lifted the hoe for a second blow when he saw a skewed stand of stalks at the end of his garden. Something had been in his corn. He stepped over the rows of broccoli and walked past the beds of young spinach, his blood rising to a boil. The corn had been trampled and the tops were bitten off a number of the plants. Deer sometimes came through the woods to feast on the garden, though their visits had dwindled after Alex had picked up a tip from a fellow organic gardener. A little human piss around the garden’s perimeter kept deer away, because as dumb as the dark-eyed creatures were, they’d been around long enough to associate people with murder.

  This wasn’t deer damage. Because a slew of stalks were littered along the fence that separated his property line from the Smiths’s.

  Alex was ambivalent about fences, since Starship Earth belonged to everybody, though he’d made sure he knew his property boundaries after the survey was complete. He believed in the laws of Nature, but that didn’t mean the rest of his nasty, grab-assed species did. They believed in pieces of paper in the courthouse, or pieces of paper in banks, or pieces of paper in Washington, D.C.

  But, piece of paper or not, one thing was for sure: goats couldn’t read, and even if they could, Alex would bet a half-kilo of homegrown that they would ignore what was written on the deed anyway. He kept a tight grip on the hoe just in case one of the weird-eyed bastards was still around.

  The wire fence was bent just a little, as if something heavy had leaned on it. Heavier than a goat, by the looks of it. Alex hesitated. He tried to live in harmony with the world, even if six-and-a-half billion hairless apes threatened to make the place uninhabitable. He could either go down and have a talk with Gordon Smith or he could crawl over into enemy territory and administer some mountain justice.

  “Alexxxxxx!” From the purr in Meredith’s voice, Alex guessed she’d already fired up the joint. He dropped the hoe.

  “I’ll be back,” he said to the woods beyond the fence.

  ***

  Gordon sat by the cold fireplace, a book in his lap called “The Airwaves of Zion” by Howard Dorgan. Gordon had explained the significance of backwoods Gospel radio shows on tiny AM stations, but Katy had nodded enthusiastically while her mind wandered to the fresh asparagus and dill weed in the refrigerator. She’d left the room at the earliest opportunity, and she’d returned to find him dozing. His head was tilted back on the Barcalounger, a delicate snore rising from his open mouth. Katy had never noticed how pale his neck was beneath his closely-trimmed beard. His hands were soft, with the fingers of an academician, not a farmer. He had the drawn and wrinkled cheeks of a smoker, though he owned a pipe merely as an affectation. He’d only smoked it a half-dozen times since they had been married, which was good, because the smell of the rich tobacco made Katy’s head spin.

  It was rare that she had a chance to study him in daylight. When they were together, his eyes dominated her, and she felt herself paying attention to his every word. That same power had brought Katy under his spell when he’d delivered his presentation on Appalachian religion at that Asheville seminar.

  Looking back on it, she realized she’d been lectured, not conversed with. And she had been the student eager to please, sitting on the edge of her seat, face warm at the prospect of proving her worth as a listener. She found herself flushing now, standing over his sleeping form, bothered that she was only on equal footing when Gordon was unconscious. Even in bed ...

  She didn’t want to think about bed. Their sheets were way too clean and smooth, each spouse’s side clearly marked. A stack of hardcovers on Gordon’s dresser, a water glass, and a case for his eyeglasses. A box of Kleenex on Katy’s side, along with a bottle of lotion, a candle, and a pack of throat lozenges. In her drawer lay birth control pills, clothing catalogs, Tylenol PM, Barbara Michaels paperbacks, lip balm, and beneath all that feminine detritus, Katy’s vibrator, her longtime romantic partner in Charlotte. A monogamous and loyal lover, always attentive, considerate, and sober. Everything that Mark wasn’t.

  Katy was afraid Gordon would find the vibrator, but Gordon hadn’t exactly set
the marital bed on fire, either. In fact, he’d not even struck a match.

  Maybe professors of religion had to take a vow of celibacy. Though Katy had no moral qualms on the issue, she wondered if premarital sex should perhaps become a legal requirement. After all, you might say “I do” even when the person standing with you before the priest might be thinking “I never will.” Mark had been a real believer in premarital sex, to the tune of two or three rounds per day. He called it the “Protestant sex ethic,” though Mark had been about as Protestant as a Pope. His ardor hadn’t dampened once they had tied the knot and the beautiful miracle named Jett had slid down her vaginal canal. Still, the years had left a growing gap between them, and late-night whispered secrets had given way to accusations and aloofness.

  But that’s not why you divorced him.

  Katy walked away from the fireplace. She had more pressing matters at hand than a good wallow in the swamp of regret. Like the butternut squash in the oven.

  She found herself thinking of it as the “fucking butternut.” Katy made a conscious effort to quit cursing when Jett was a toddler, after the first time she’d heard Jett burp, sit propped up on her wadded diaper, and say “Fuck.” With a toothless grin that melted matronly hearts all the way back to Mesopotamia, Jett had declared her intelligence and the simultaneous importance of surroundings on her upbringing. But Jett was on her way home from school, either by bus or with the trustworthy Mrs. Stansberry up the road.

  So Katy felt comfortable saying it aloud, but not too loudly. “Fucking butternut,” she said, as she grabbed her potholder and reached for the oven door.

  The whisper that skirled from the pantry was probably nothing more than the September breeze bouncing off the curtains and playing around the room, carrying the autumnal scent of Queen Anne’s lace, goldenrod, and pumpkin. But it sounded like a word. Or a name.