John Adams - Wastelands 2

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Jenna said. “We’ve noticed you sulking around the last couple months. I figured that I could bribe you and you’d quit pissing around.”

“Did you grow these ?” I said.

“No, I pulled them out of my ass,” Jenna said, and ate a big, fat strawberry.

Timson fed Hambone a few strawberries, and that signaled the beginning of a chowdown that went on and on until we could hardly move. My hands stank of a wondrous cocktail of strawberries and herbs and onions. It had been a long time since I’d put fresh vegetables inside my body. I felt like I was sweating green .

“Sun’s going down,” Timson said. “Showtime. I’ll catch up.”

Jenna and Hambone and I climbed slowly up the hill, luxuriating in satiety. Hambone’s smile was a new one, pure joy.

Timson met up, lugging more sacks. He shelled them out before we started playing, and I never saw more snaggletoothed grins. Even Steve had some. He made a crack about the wisdom of handing out fruit to an audience before a show, but no one was going to waste any of that beautiful food by throwing it.

Between sets, Timson stood up. “Jenna’s been growing this food for the last couple months. I think you’ll agree that it’s pretty goddamn good.” There were hoots of agreement. “So here’s the deal. We’ve got some plots over on the south, ready to be hoed and planted. We’ve got seeds. But we need people to work the plots and gather water. Anyone who’s interested can meet us tomorrow morning.”

Well, that kind of put a damper on the celebration. I felt a little down, realising that this wonderful chow meant stooping in fields, hoeing and planting like some kind of Dark Ages peasant. In the back of my mind, I still thought that I could just keep on prospecting for cans until someone rebuilt civilisation and started making more cans. Rebuilding civilisation was going to take a long, long time. Then I burped up an onion-basil-tomato-tasting burp, and knew that I’d be out the next morning, anyway.

We kept on playing, and people kept dancing, and I may have been the only one who noticed Lyman and his boys shaking their heads and stalking off into the night.

Nearly everyone showed up the next morning and collected a precious handful of Jenna’s seeds. She explained that she’d been hoarding them for years, looking for a place to plant them. The way she said it, you got the feeling that she was trusting you with her children.

We attacked the plots. They were rocky and rubble-strewn, and the poles were poorly suited to hoeing. People improvised: empty bottles became scoops; flattened cans, blades.

We worked, and Jenna came by and kibitzed, pointing out rocks that we’d missed, and generally being a pain in the ass. Eventually, enough grumbling got grumbled, and she went and tended her own garden, so to speak.

The work got hypnotic after that. The roar of the planes, the sounds of digging, it all blended into a deep rhythm. Hambone meandered by and idly tapped out a beat, and I found myself singing “Minnie the Moocher,” and everyone joined in on the call-and-response. It was great, until I realised that I was singing for a crowd and shut my mouth. I didn’t like singing for other people.

Not everyone was cut out to be a farmer. Good thing, too, or we would’ve starved to death waiting for the harvest. Still, there were people down at the gardens from sunup to sundown, clucking over their veggies.

The shit hit the fan one night as we were setting up to play. Lyman was sitting on Timson’s piano, grinning wide enough to show us all his rotten chiclets. Three of his boys hung around close, and another four or five stood at a distance, sniggering.

Timson gave him a long, considering look. It was the kind of look I’d seen him give a humongous hunk of concrete in his plot one day, before he squatted down and hauled it out of the earth, like a 100 kilo spud.

Lyman grinned bigger. “I wanna talk to you,” he said.

Timson nodded slowly. Hambone rapped out a nervous tatter with his fingernails on a beer bottle he’d been carrying around, but I didn’t need his help to know that things were getting bad.

“This gardening thing is getting out of hand,” Lyman said. “People are neglecting their duties.”

“What duties?” Timson asked, in a low tone.

“Drilling with us. We got to be ready to defend our land.”

Timson gave a little shake of his head.

Lyman jumped in with more: “People’re getting too attached to this place. We’ll have to move when the food runs out, and we can’t take no garden with us.”

Timson’s look got more considering. He cocked his head. “Why do they have to defend it and get ready to leave? That seems like a bit of a contradiction to me.”

Lyman’s brow furrowed. If I’m making him sound a little dim, that’s only because he was. “We’ll defend it until the food runs out, then we’ll move on.”

Jenna snickered. One of Lyman’s boys reached out to smack her. Hambone drummed louder; Jenna batted his hand away.

I found myself saying, “What if the food doesn’t run out? What if we grow enough of our own to stay alive?”

Lyman glared at me. “Is that how you want to live?”

I said, “Sooner or later, all the cans will be gone.”

Lyman waved a dismissive hand. “Someone will take care of that. I’m worried about this group. This city.”

“So why not let us make sure we’ve got enough to eat?”

Lyman started forward and I jumped. “I told you! We need to defend the place! And we need to be ready to go if we can’t!”

Timson interceded. “What does this have to do with me?”

Lyman spread his hands out. “I want you to shut down the garden. We were doing just fine without it. I don’t like to see people wasting their time.”

Timson said, “It’s not mine to shut down.” He nodded at Jenna, who was glaring daggers at the goon who’d tried to smack her.

“Not mine, either,” she said, with barely controlled fury. “It’s everyone’s.”

Lyman said, “Well, you just tell everyone that the garden’s got to be shut down.”

He slid off the piano and took off, goons in tow. One of them contrived to bump into me hard enough to make me drop my horn, and I had to snag it up quick before he stomped it.

Steve showed up, looking pissed, which meant that he was worried. “What was that all about?” he said.

“What was what all about?” Timson said, and propped a book up on his music stand.

They trashed the gardens two nights later, while we played. I wouldn’t have thought that pack of lazy bastards had it in them to haul enough gravel to cover all the beds, especially not at night, but that’s what they did. They kicked up the plants, and smashed the makeshift tools that the gardeners had left.

They didn’t even have the smarts to steer clear of us the next day. Instead, they waited until a shocked crowd had gathered, and then showed up with big grins. Lyman had a pistol shoved in his waistbelt. I’d seen it before, and I didn’t think it worked, but you never knew.

“Good morning!” Lyman said, stomping across the murdered beds. “How’s everybody doing today?”

Timson hefted his pole and looked significantly at the militia. A number of people in the crowd got the idea. Lyman’s boys looked uneasy.

Lyman said, “We’ve been chasing off rovers to the north every day and more are coming. Things are getting rough. We’ll need volunteers for the militia. You’ve all got spare time now.”

I’d never even harvested a single tomato from my plot. I could see the smashed green buds that I’d been nurturing.

Jenna said, “Who’s got any spare time? It’s going to take us days to clean up this mess.” She stooped and picked up a stone and tossed it away from the beds. “Lucky I got more seeds.”