Christopher Boucher - Golden Delicious

Finally the gate creaked open. Martha Anger turned and said, “Heeeere’s Johnny!” Then his name bolted around the corner and jumped into his arms.

That winter, some pipes froze at Woodside and two sinks cracked and died, so my Uncle Joump and I went out to Wolf Swamp to catch some new ones.

Joump worked with my Dad at the buildings. He was as tough as they come, and I’d never seen him scared of anything. When my Dad walked into the boiler room one day and saw some meaninglessers squatting behind the oil tank? Dad sent Joump in to marcia them out. When we needed to get rid of the “snowmen”—the ancient, obsolete asbestos-covered burners? The hazardous-waste companies would have charged us hundreds of theories, but Joump went in there one afternoon with a sledgehammer and a red bandanna over his mouth and he carried out those burners in pieces.

Joump was always nice to me — he gave me my Walkman and headphones on Core Day a few years earlier, for example, and if he found a book in his travels he’d always save it for me. With most people, though, Joump had a quick temper — I’d seen him get in fights with ricks and edgers way bigger than he was. Joump himself wasn’t big, but he had a bulb-round belly from years of gorging on Kaddish Fruits. Kaddish, which gave you mights and false memories, was abundant in Appleseed; there was a grove in Wolf Swamp, for example, and a cluster of trees out by the Appleseed Prison. Joump grew his fruits himself, from trees that he’d transplanted onto his property and covered with a fake page. He’d show up at the buildings with his eyes smudged and his teeth stained blue, and sometimes he was so blurry that my Dad would have to send him home. The problem got so bad that my Dad and Joump stopped speaking for a while — one day Joump showed up at Woodside too kaddished to work, my Dad told him to leave, and Joump didn’t talk to him for two years.

Then Joump’s wife, Rachel, died. She was a really nice person, too nice, and finally she died of niceness. When my aunt called from Canada to tell us the news, my Dad put me in the truck and we drove over to Joump’s house, a small duplex out near the Mental Hospital. We parked in the street and my Dad and I got out of the truck and walked toward the house. At the edge of the driveway, though, my Dad stopped and looked at the house in the distance. “Go see if he’s OK,” my Dad said.

“Me?” I said.

My Dad stared at the house. The grass was high and the house was dark.

“You do it,” I said.

“He’s your uncle,” said my Dad. “Just go knock on the door.”

I walked up to the door. “Uncle Joump?” I said.

There was no answer.

“Uncle Joump!” I said.

The door opened a little — I smelled the sour burn of rotten Kaddish Fruits. “ ?” Joump said.

“My Dad wants to know if you’re OK,” I said.

The door closed.

“Are you OK?” I said.

There was a shuffling inside the house.

“Uncle Joump?” I said.

“Tell him I’m hanging in,” Joump said. “That I’ll see him at Belmont next week.”

This was later, after Joump sold his house and moved into Appleseed Heights. He’d bought a new car, a Cadillac, and he was dating a woman who lived in the complex. Her name was Dot. I didn’t like her — she wore too much makeup. When she smiled, cracks appeared all over her face.

Joump drove out toward the swamp, the sinknets and the dead sink corpses and Joump’s own sad story sliding around on the plastic lining of the truckbed. When we reached the wetlands, Joump parked and we hoisted the heavy nets on our shoulders. Then we walked down toward the still waters.

That swamp. I love thinking back on it — the way the trees folded their hands together to make shadows over the damp pathways; the sound of porcelain running through the trees; the mildewy smell of the water praying in the sun.

We walked for about half a mile. Then Joump stopped and pointed. There, about fifty yards away, was a standalone old sink grazing in the shallow muck. The sink looked old, but strong — you could see muscles by the drain. Joump flashed me the “OK” sign, and I moved as quietly as I could through the grass, flanking the sink and stepping up behind it.

When I was about twenty feet from it, though, the sink looked up and sniffed the air.

“Crap,” said one of my thoughts.

“Get it!” Joump said.

I ran toward the sink and threw the net at it. The sink flinched, recoiled, and ran.

“Somana bitch ,” I heard Joump say.

The sink turned and fled into the high grass. It was fast —I ran my fatbody after it, my thoughts’ glasses fogging and my lungs a burning house, but after ten seconds the sink just disappeared.

I didn’t slow up; I thought that maybe the sink had fallen, or that it was hiding in the tall grass. I sprinted toward where I last saw it. Then my foot caught on something, and my ankle cried out, and I landed face first in the grass.

“Somanobee!” shouted my uncle. “ ! You OK?”

I sat up. My ankle was weeping. I looked back to see what I’d tripped on. Was it a root?

It wasn’t. It was a — I’d tripped on a—

Reader: A what?

Hole.

Reader: A what ?

A hole.

Reader: What do you mean, a hole ?

My uncle jogged up to me and put his hands on his knees. “That bastard was quick,” he said.

I shimmied back to the spot in the ground — the hole — where I’d tripped.

“Twist your ankle?” said Joump, standing up.

I pointed to the hole. “What is that?” I said.

“Hole,” he said. He motioned for me to get up. “Let’s go — we’ll try again another day.”

“A hole in the page ?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a fucking hole in the page. So what?”

“I think that’s where the sink went,” I said. “Down in the hole.”

“No shit,” said Joump. “Can you walk?”

I stood up and leaned over the hole.

“How far down does it go?”

“Fuck if I know,” Joump said.

We turned and walked back toward the creek and the truck parked in the dirt. I winced with every step. “Easy now,” my uncle said. When we reached the truck, Joump opened the passenger’s-side door and helped me onto the seat. “Listen. Don’t tell your Mom about this, OK?”

“Why not?” I said.

“Because that’s all I need,” Joump said, chewing his lip. “She’s already anti-Joump.”

I snorted. “She’s anti- , too,” I said.

“Don’t say that,” said Joump.

“She hates me, Joump,” I said.

“No, she doesn’t. She loves you.”

“She really doesn’t, though.”

“You think you’re the only one in this book who suffers, ?” said Joump. “Don’t pretend you know what a parent goes through.”

I shrugged.

“ Especially your Mom.”

“She’s just in such a bad mood lately,” I said.

“She’s got a lot on her plate,” my uncle said. “Hey. You hungry?”

When wasn’t I hungry? “Sure,” I said.

Joump didn’t even ask me where we should go — he drove us right out to Oh Death, one of my favorite restaurants in Appleseed. We pulled up to the drive-in and he ordered two sickburgers with diefries and two dementia-flavored shakes. Then we parked in the lot and sucked the food into our mouths.