The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (10 page)

Looking back now, it seems to me that Demeter's joy suffused that whole summer. Vera, after years of cynicism, suddenly got all dreamy-eyed about a man named Pete. We used to keep a suspicious eye on Pete when he first started coming around the Cave because he looked like he probably knew more about the business end of things than we could even imagine. That was true, as it turned out, but it didn't stop him from also being sweet natured and honest and decent. He and Vera took to each other, appreciating a toughness born of necessity and a tenderness earned the hard way.

Commie Tom upped Rosalita's hours to full time and stopped coming by the Cave to drink coffee in the afternoons.
Instead he and Rosalita sat on the front porch of the bookstore and had long, long talks while customers inside helped themselves. Overheard snatches of conversation seemed to indicate that they had moved past the political situation in Central America and the fate of the American Indian Movement in the post-Peltier age and were now discussing whether or not it would be decadently bourgeois to open a joint bank account. She gave him a wallet with a picture of Karl Marx on it for his birthday, and he added a whole section of books on natural childbirth and baby care.

Even Pancho seemed more mysterious and smiled a lot to himself and was seen at the edge of town picking wildflowers.

That summer, I was fearless. This is the prerogative of the young. Later in life, you might have courage, which means doing things in spite of your fears. But never again will you really be without fear—flying above the world in wind-swept delight, close and closer to the sun, heedless of everything that lies below. Maybe it is only ignorance, but it has a remarkable resemblance to immortality, while it lasts.

On afternoons when Danny was working, sometimes I sat at a little table up against the wall of the café and pretended to read a paperback book. But really I just kept the same page open in front of me and looked through my eyelashes at Danny.

I watched his hands, watched him hold a glass—the smooth curve of it against his palm. I watched him lean over to get a bottle from under the bar, watched the muscles of his back
sliding against his shirt. I watched him run his hands through his hair, push it out of his eyes, and had to remind myself to close my mouth. I watched him lean against the bar, rest his weight against the smooth brown oak, and I envied the very wood itself. I watched him take a drink from a glass of water and saw how then his upper lip was damp and how he rubbed it on the back of his hand. I couldn't stop looking at his upper lip.

I sat at the café and surreptitiously watched him, watched the light shift through the ragged strands of his honey hair. My chest tightened, and I found it hard to breathe. I closed the book and went up to sit at the bar.

“At last!” Danny said, smiling. “You've been studying on that book
all
afternoon. What in heaven's name is it about?”

“Sugar,” I said, “I haven't got the faintest idea.”

Jake came around the Cave now almost as much as Danny, sitting at the bar during my slow shifts, sipping on a Natty BoHo and making laconic conversation. Sometimes when I was busy with someone else, I would catch him out of the corner of my eye studying me in a considering sort of way and then looking away and not saying anything. There was enough light, if you sat directly under one of the red bulbs, to read by, and sometimes he sat there lost in his coverless copy of Plato's
Dialogues
for a while in the early evening, before the bar got crowded. He and I talked about mythology and madness and poetry. Once we talked about W. H. Auden (“Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arms”) and then felt very friendly toward each other after that.

“So how did you come to be sitting here reading poetry in a bar?” I asked him.

“Oh, there was this girl I knew once in Asheville.”

“Lover of literature?”

“In a way. We had a slight disagreement once, and she heaved this big anthology right at my head. That sucker would have knocked me cold.”

“But she missed?”

“Thank God she was drunk.”

“And you kept the book?”

“I felt it was in my best interest to disarm her.”

“What were you fighting about?”

“Oh, I can't remember now—I guess the same thing everybody always fights about. Either too much love or not enough. My faithless arms, in all probability. We split up as soon as she got sober.”

“Well, at least you got some good reading out of it.”

“I consider it a good trade, all in all. At least poetry never tries to break my head. My heart, maybe—but not my head.”

That was the summer I decided to grow a garden. My happiness, like Demeter's, had taken a horticultural turn. The joke back home was that the only vegetable anybody around there was interested in was corn—and only then in liquid form. Putting in a garden in the red clay out back behind my little rented house meant that I lived there now, in this new town. It meant that I had gotten out of the hills.

I bought the seeds and baby vegetable plants at a nursery out on the highway toward Millboro. Danny and I drove out together one morning, and I felt very maternal picking out tiny baby tomato plants and strawberry plants and eggplants. We even bought a few exotic things—broccoli romanesco and
artichokes, purple passion asparagus. In my mind's eye, I saw green leafy rows stretching to the horizon. I imagined Danny and me nursing our tiny plants together in the bright summer sunshine.

I did not share this particular fantasy with Danny but kept it quietly to myself—a secret vision of domesticity with him, the least domestic of guys.

The biggest problem you generally face in the warm, wet, fecund climate of the South—when it comes to vegetation, at least—is beating back the rampant growth. A lazy homeowner who neglects a friendly kudzu vine can easily, for example, wake up one morning not only unable to find his lawn ornaments but unable to get out the door of his house to look for them. It is an encouraging climate for beginning gardeners. I once saw a zucchini at the county fair that was bigger than the little girl who grew it. If a six-year-old can grow a fifty-pound zucchini, how hard can it be?

The first plants to die were the exotic ones. Some just wilted and faded away, some got eaten up by bugs, some were just
gone,
shorn off clean to the ground, when I woke up in the morning. The tomato plants were doing well, and I figured that broccoli romanesco was probably beyond me anyway, so I went back to the nursery and bought more baby tomato plants to fill the empty spaces. You can never have too many fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes.

The strawberries died next. I think they got
too
wet. Or maybe they were too dry. It's hard to know. In any case, the leaves all turned brown and dropped off. Danny stood at the edge of my battered garden plot and shook his head and looked sorrowful. Pretty soon, he started refusing to come back with me to the garden store—he felt implicated, like being an accessory to murder. “It's not that I mind gardening,” he said, “but I
put my foot down at wanton killing. A man has got to draw the line somewhere.”

I replaced the strawberry plants with tomatoes. The tomatoes were flourishing.

The gourds withered up, the zucchini turned black, even the eggplants developed spots on their leaves and then returned to the dust. With every death, I put in a new baby tomato plant. It was a ravishing sight—more than forty tomato plants, green and leafy, reaching toward the sun, growing heavy under the weight of the little green tomatoes. You can never have too many tomatoes.

My next-door neighbor, Orla, kept a sharp eye on me from across the fence and felt justified—even obligated—to correct me in my errors.

“You're doing that wrong,” she blatted out one late morning while I was watering the only pea plant, with its single precious pea pod, that had survived. Orla was a transplant from the Midwest and spoke with a flat, nasal accent of certitude. Her face looked like a snapping turtle.

“First of all,” she said, taking my bewildered silence as an invitation to instruct me, “those tomato plants all need to be dusted with Sevin powder to keep off the bugs.”

“It's an organic garden,” I said.

“Second of all,” she went on, after a brief pause of dismissal, “this isn't even the right kind of dirt for a garden. Have you had a soil test done? The whole thing will have to be plowed under and new soil dug in, and you'll have to start all over again.”

She pronounced this, as she did everything, as an accepted fact, and I felt a brief wave of shame on account of my inadequate soil. It had seemed perfectly fine to me—very dirty—and I was embarrassed that I had failed to scrutinize it properly. It occurred to me after a minute, as a counterexample, that the
tomatoes were flourishing, and I started to say so, but Orla had already gone on to her third point, which was basically that it was silly to grow a garden at all when the grocery store had plenty of vegetables of every type, and that frozen vegetables had just as much nutrition as fresh ones, and that although some people thought canned vegetables were less nutritious, that was not true, and you were going to add salt to them when you cooked them anyway, and everything tastes pretty much the same out of the microwave, which is much less trouble, and if you melt Velveeta on it, even men will eat it, which just goes to prove (coming around to the end with a triumphal gleam in her reptilian eye) that it was foolish to grow a garden in the first place.