All Over Creation (59 page)

“Ready?” he asked.

I nodded. They moved slowly so as not to jostle Lloyd or startle him. Lilith took the spoon from his lips. Melvin eased him back against the pillows and raised up the bed to relieve his sodden lungs. My father looked stricken. He sensed that something was up.

“We have to go now,” Melvin said. “Yummy wants to talk to you. But we'll be back.”

“We'll bring you more ice cream,” Lilith whispered, stroking his sunken cheek. “Chocolate next time.”

Charmey held up Tibet in front of him, so he could see. The baby gurgled at Lloyd. Lloyd gurgled back at the baby.

They trooped out of the room. A band of anarchists. A caravan of gypsies. A posse of saints. It was so easy for them to offer comfort, to tap compassion. He wasn't their father. Silently I cursed them.

“Dad?” I said.

The whites of his eyes had yellowed, and his nostrils flared with each breath. The tip of his nose had turned bluish, too. His extremities were dying. His gaze settled on me, and he gave me the sweetest smile.

“So good . . .” He sighed.

“What's good, Daddy?” My heart was pounding.

“Ice cream. Most delicious thing . . . I ever tasted.”

Ice cream. Why hadn't I thought of that? It was hopeless. I would never please him, and I might as well accept it. Really, it was a relief. I felt efficient. A bit brutal even.

“Dad, I have to talk to you.”

His eyes fluttered open.

“Do you know where you are?”

“Of course,” he said. His voice sounded perfectly normal, and for a moment I almost believed that everything was fine, that my father would be back on his feet in no time, and I would be free to run away again. Leave Liberty Falls. I wanted to dash to the parking lot, gun the Pontiac toward home, and get the kids packed for the trip back to Pahoa. Then he spoke again, breathless and gasping. “I'm in the damn hospital. They're killing me! Get me out of here!”

My heart sank. Not this time.

“Dad, the doctor told me—”

His hand twitched impatiently against his thigh. “Doctors . . .” he said.

“I'm supposed to ask your wishes.”

“Wishes?”

I was doing it all wrong. He didn't know what I was talking about. But I couldn't bring myself to say it. Not the D word. Not to Daddy.

He giggled, and the sound unnerved me. “If wishes were fishes . . .”

It was the morphine talking. The doctor had warned me. His mouth opened and closed. A salty tear leaked from the corner of his eye. “Take me home,” he pleaded, and now his voice was so weak and sad that, in spite of myself, I reached out and touched his forearm.

“I can't, Daddy. You need to be here. They can take care of you better. They can help you.” I really wanted him to understand, but he closed his eyes.

“Melvin will take me home,” he said. “I love Melvin.”

“That's good,” I said, accepting this information and withdrawing my hand.

“I love Lilith, too,” he confided.

“That's just great.” Still I waited, but it seemed like that was all he had to say to me. It made what I had to say a whole lot easier. “Dad, you're dying.”

The minute the words left my mouth, I wanted to snatch them back out of the air. “I'm sorry,” I added.

He opened his eyes wide and stared at me, and then suddenly his body went stiff. I reached for the call button to summon help, but he clutched my arm. “He's coming,” he gasped, looking wildly around. “My seeds. I have to save them!”

“Who's coming, Dad?”

He was panting hard, gaping at something that loomed over my shoulder. “Him! The Terminator! . . . I have to save them!”

“Dad, your seeds are fine. . . .”

The delirium subsided, and he fell back. “It's too late,” he whispered. “Too late.” His eyelids fluttered shut again, and for a while he just lay there letting the breath shudder through him. When he finally spoke again, his voice was so low I had to lean way down to hear.

“I don't want . . .” he said, but his mouth was dry and gummy, and the words got stuck. He reached out a trembling finger toward the water jug on the side table. I supported his head, held the cup to his lips. The back of his neck was as hot as a child's. He took a sip.

“I don't want . . .” he repeated, but still the words wouldn't come. It was horrible to see him struggle. Of course he didn't want to die. He couldn't say the word either.

“I know, Dad,” I whispered, stroking his hand. “It's okay. You don't have to tell me. I know.”

He pulled away and shook his head. He opened his mouth, and his wish leaked from his lips like air from a punctured tire. “No . . .” he said. Then, “I don't want . . . to be a vegetable. . . .”

I looked at him, deflated and waxy against the pillow.

A vegetable?

I might have laughed if I hadn't been crying.

The Spudnik was trashed. The sheriff's department had ransacked it several times, then the state prosecutor's office, possibly even the FBI.

“They just kept coming,” Phoenix said. “I didn't know who they were. I don't think they found anything.”

“That's because there was nothing to find,” Geek said. He was lying on his back by the Winnebago, trying to track down the damage to the propane line. “Thanks for keeping an eye on them.”

Phoenix shrugged. “I tried. Mostly they told me to get lost. There was one guy who came back a couple of times, who talked to me sometimes.”

“What were they thinking?” Geek said. “That we had heroin stashed in the propane tanks?”

“I believe it was the plastique, dude,” Y said. “The TNT. The blasting powder.”

Lilith giggled. “No, it was the manifestos.”

“The one guy, he kept asking me about dirty pictures,” Phoenix said. “That's what he wanted. And the computer. They all wanted your computer.”

“Fucking cops,” Lilith said.

“I don't think this guy was a cop. He seemed kind of old. He was wearing those sunglasses with mirrors, but he didn't have a uniform or anything.”

“Mirrored sunglasses?” Lilith frowned.

“Well, he didn't find anything,” Geek said. “Since there was nothing to find. But they sure managed to screw things up.”

“We gonna have heat for the winter?” Y asked.

“You could come back to Hawaii with us,” Phoenix said. “You don't need heat there. Mom's taking us back there as soon as . . . you know . . .”

He kicked at the dirt, sending a spray of gravel toward Geek, who was still lying on his back. “Hey!”

“Sorry.”

“You sad about your grandpa?” Lilith asked.

Phoenix nodded. “He's all freaked out about his seeds. Mom's all freaked out about him.”

Geek sat up and looked at the boy. “I know,” he said. “We're working on it.”

 

 

Throughout their incarceration the computer had stayed hidden deep inside a small lava tube on the back acres of the land where the foothills started to crumble. Wrapped in layers of plastic, then packed carefully in a high-impact, shock-resistant, waterproof case, the top-of-the-line Macintosh PowerBook had frustrated searches by the various engines of the law.

As soon as they were released, Geek went for a long nighttime walk through the potato fields and liberated the computer from its rocky nest. He brought it back, hooked it up, and got to work. A few days later he walked next door to the Quinns' place with the PowerBook under his arm and confronted Will. The two men sat down together in Will's office.

“Listen,” Geek said, “I want you to know that we appreciate you dropping the lawsuit. We know you don't agree with what we did, and we can respect that. We don't even mind the time in jail, because we ended up getting some good publicity out of it.”

Will sat back in his chair. “I dropped the charges out of consideration for my wife. Now, what's your point?”

“We're hoping we can put all that aside and do something for Lloyd.”

Will frowned. “You got him pretty upset with all that Terminator nonsense. He thinks it's real.”

“I know,” Geek said. “Ironic, isn't it?” But he didn't say anything else, and Will continued.

“Just wish we could do something about the old man's seeds. Normally there's an offspring who takes over the operation, but, hell, that Yummy—”

Geek leaned forward. “There is something we can do.” He turned on the PowerBook and started to explain the idea. Will listened, nodding every now and again and asking a few questions.

“It's kind of a long shot,” Geek concluded. “But when you think about it, the Internet is a perfect vehicle for dissemination. All I need from you is some desk space and access to your high-speed line. Once the site is up, and the initial distributions are made, it'll be easy to maintain. We can do most of it remotely.”

“It's nuts,” Will said. “But if it'll set the old man's mind at ease, it's worth a try.”

“Excellent,” said Geek, beaming.

Geek moved his base of operations to the Quinns' office, and by the end of the week the New Garden of Earthly Delights was up and running and open for business. This time there were no nude pictures of Lilith. There were no sex acts or mudwomen against swags of burgundy velvet, no pagan feminist texts or shamanic discursions or anything that the Tri-County Interfaith League of Family Values could find even remotely offensive. But there were still zucchinis. There were cucurbits and lots of squash.

It was like a party in Palliative Care, with my dying father as the center-piece, lying in bed like a long white cake. Geek was leaning over him, doing something with a laptop computer, which sat on the tray table where dinner would have been had Lloyd been eating. Momoko stood next to his pillow, and all the rest of the Seeds were crowded around. Frankie and Charmey were sitting on the end of the bed with their baby. Will and Cass were there, too.

We were the last to arrive, which was Ocean's fault. Ever since Cass had told her that Chicken Little was old enough to start laying, she had been driving me nuts. She'd gotten it into her head to take an egg to her grandpa—maybe she thought it would cure him or something—and she was practically living in the greenhouse. She followed the hen around, picking her up from time to time and flipping her over to inspect her underneath.

“Wanna see her vent?” she asked anyone who ventured in, brandishing the upside-down chicken. “That's where the egg's gonna come from.”

Somehow, despite these levels of surveillance and harassment, the little hen hunkered down just before we were about to leave for the hospital that afternoon, and there was no prying Ocean away.

“She's doing it!”

“Ocean, come on!” Phoenix shouted. “Geek said we don't have a lot of time. He's going to tell us something important.”

“Wait! I want to bring Grandpa the egg.”

“If he dies before we get there, it'll be all your fault.”

Mercifully, a few minutes later the unflappable chicken rose to her feet and hopped off her nest box to resume her pecking and scratching, and we were able to reach the hospital in time to save Ocean from a lifetime of guilt and recrimination from her brother. Now the two of them ran up to their grandfather and kissed him.

“We're late,” Ocean announced. “Because of this!” She reached into her pocket and, with greatly exaggerated care, drew out a very small egg. “It's from Chicken Little. I brought it for you, Grandpa. It's her first one ever!” She took his hand and opened it, then slipped the little brown egg onto his hardened palm, curling his stiff fingers around it.