Nine Last Days on Planet Earth Page 2

  “It’s getting worse and worse,” his dad said. “Lord almighty.”

  Now LT did look at the TV. Lord almighty was as close to swearing as his father got.

  The sky over Chattanooga was crowded with spiky black shapes. A reporter asked a question, and a man held out a bloody arm.

  “So much for dominion over the earth,” LT said. At the midweek prayer meeting—they went to services three times a week, twice on Sunday and once on Wednesday night—the pastor had launched into well-worn passages of God giving dominion of the earth to Adam. It came up whenever the invasives or women’s rights were in the news.

  “Don’t be smart,” Dad said.

  “Face it, we’re losing.” Every day the TV showed men in masks hacking down flowers as big as satellite dishes, or Argentinians fretting over alien moss that clung to the hooves of cattle like boots, or Kansas farmers dulling their chainsaws on traveling vines as tough as mahogany. In a lot of places the invasives were just a nuisance, but in some countries, especially the ones closest to the equator, the alien plants were causing real trouble. “They’re trying a million different strategies. All they need are a couple winners to drive us out.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Out-survive us. They’ve got time on their side. We go at animal speed, but plants move at their own speed. Wheels within wheels.” An Elijah reference, just to poke him. “It’s evolution, Dad.”

  Another provocation. His father believed in the Bible. There was no time for natural selection in the six days of creation, and no need for it. Dad’s God didn’t improvise. He was a measure-twice-cut-once creator.

  “They’re better at surviving?” his father said. “These plants?”

  LT shook his head as if disappointed in his father’s stupidity.

  Dad slowly rose from his chair. LT realized he’d miscalculated. “Let’s see, then,” Dad said calmly. He gripped the sides of the ceramic pot, lifted it. It had to weigh almost two hundred pounds. Mo’s limbs curled inward.

  LT yelled, “No! Stop it!”

  His father turned the pot on its side. Dirt spilled onto the floorboards. He stepped toward the fire and pushed the top of the plant into the mouth of the fireplace.

  LT threw himself into his father’s ribs. Stupid, useless. Dad was as squat and thick as an engine block. He turned, swinging Mo’s head out of the fireplace. It wasn’t on fire, but a haze of sizzling mist seemed to shroud the bulb.

  LT burst into tears.

  His father set the pot on the floor, anger gone now. “Aw, come on.”

  LT ran upstairs, threw himself on the bed, awash with embarrassment and anger. He was thirteen! He should be tougher than this. Crying over a damn plant. He wanted it all to end. How much longer did he have to wait for the aliens to come and scrape this planet clean?

  * * *

  The Chattanooga cloud was supposed to reach them that next afternoon. Vernon Beck, Dad’s oldest friend, drove over from Maryville to see it. Jumped out of his pickup and shook LT’s hand. “Goodness sakes, boy, you’re two feet taller! Hale, come say hello to LT and Mr. Meyers.”

  A boy eased out of the passenger side of the pickup, long and lean, hair down to his shoulders. LT hadn’t seen Hale Beck since LT’s mother left. Their families used to go places together, and even though Hale was two years older than LT they got along like brothers. He remembered a long day riding water slides with Hale at a Pigeon Forge park. A hike in the Smokies during which Hale smashed a rock into a snake, the bravest thing LT had ever seen.

  Hale shook hands with LT’s father, nodded at LT. Hale had gotten the growth spurt LT was still waiting on.

  A strong wind was blowing but the cloud hadn’t shown up yet. The men went into the woodshop, and LT stood there awkwardly with Hale, unsure how to talk to him.

  Hale took out a tin of Skoal from his back pocket, tucked a pinch of tobacco into his lip. He held out the tin, and LT shook his head. Hale leaned back on the hood of the truck. Spit black juice onto the gravel.

  LT said, “We’ve got a fern man.”

  “A what?”

  “One of the invasives. Right in the house.” Dad said never to talk about the fern. But this was the Becks.

  Hale said, “The one that moves?” He wanted to see that.

  Dad had returned Mo to his usual spot. There was no visible damage from the flames. Hale said, “Looks like a regular plant.”

  “Watch this,” LT said. He stood between Mo and the window and raised his arms. The fern man slowly shifted to the right, back into the light. LT moved in front of him again and Mo moved opposite. “It’s called heliotropism. Like sunflowers? But way faster.”

  “Can I do it?” Hale asked.

  “Sure. Just don’t tire him out.”

  Hale took LT’s position. They danced in slow motion at first, and then Hale sped up. Mo jerked and flopped in rhythm. Hale laughed. “He’s just like one of those windsock guys at the dealership!”

  LT was thrilled that Hale was impressed, but nervous about hurting Mo. “Hey, you want to see where the space seed landed?”

  He managed to entice Hale to the cattle field. The wind had picked up, turned cold, but the sun was bright and hot. Hale’s hair blew across his face, and he kept pushing it back.

  They walked around at the far end of the field. LT couldn’t find the furrow the seed had made when it hit four years ago. The tall dry grass rattled with every gust.

  Hale said, “Look.”

  In the distance, a dark, churning cloud. Light flashed at the edges of it like tiny lightning. Hale ran toward it, into the wind. They plunged through a line of trees, into the next field—and suddenly the cloud loomed over them. Thousands of glistening tumbleweeds, most the size of a fist, a few big as soccer balls. A sudden downdraft sent scores of them plummeting into the trees. Most stuck in the treetops, others bounced down into the undergrowth, and half a dozen ricocheted back into the air and spun toward them.

  “Grab one!” Hale shouted. He pulled his T-shirt over his head in one quick move. His back was pale and muscled. LT felt a sudden heat and looked away, his heart pounding. Then Hale swung the shirt over his head, trying to snag a thistle ball. It floated just out of reach. He chased it, then jumped, jumped again. LT couldn’t take his eyes off the way his shoulders moved.

  Then a lucky gust sent the ball down and the shirt caught against it. Hale hooted and LT cheered. The thing was hollow, a jumble of flat, silvery blades, thin as the wings of a balsa-wood glider, connected to each other by spongy joints which were decorated with thorns. Hale pulled his shirt free of them, and the cloth tore.

  Then the sun dimmed, and they looked up. LT realized they’d only seen the front of the cloud, the first wave. Thousands and thousands more flew toward them, a spinning mass.

  LT said, “Ho-lee shit.”

  This struck Hale as hilarious, and then LT was laughing too, so hard he could barely stand. Then they ran, giggling and shouting.

  1981

  For months before his summer stay, when he was sixteen years old, LT begged his mother to take him to see the dragon tails of Kansas. Mom worked slow magic on her new husband, Arnaud, a thin, balding, control freak who made a lot of money as a chemical engineer. Eventually Arnaud came up with the idea that he should encourage LT’s interest in science and take them all to visit the most successful invasives in the Midwest. He rented an enormous RV and they drove southwest.

  The first sign of the invasion came just past Topeka, when road crews waved them off the interstate. Arnaud eased the RV into the parking lot of a McDonald’s and said, “There you go.”

  LT walked out of the RV, into sunlight and heat. At the edge of the lot rose an arch of deeply grooved bark. It emerged from the broken cement and came down about fifteen yards away in a field. Large purple leaf blades ran in single file atop the bark like the plates of a stegosaurus.

  LT looked back at his mother. She beamed at him, then shooed him forward. He grabbed hold of the sturdy r
oots of the blades and pulled himself onto the base of the arch. A few careful steps more and he was upright, hands out for balance. The bark was a bit wider than his foot, but uneven. He knew from his books that the tail was not an ordinary trunk, but vines that had twisted around each other as they grew, only gradually adhering to share resources.

  He reached the peak of the arch, eight feet off the ground. Twenty or thirty yards away, directly in front of him, another arch emerged, and another, like a sea monster coursing through an ocean of grass. No, one monster in a school of them. To either side, dozens and dozens of the dragon tails breached and dove. A group of them had burst up through the highway, and there was nothing manmade cement could do to keep them underground.

  These were the aliens’ favorite trees, he thought. How could they not be? They were living architecture.

  His mother called his name. She held the fancy, big-lensed camera Arnaud had bought her. She didn’t have to prompt LT to smile.

  * * *

  The last night of the vacation, Arnaud drove to a campground set among the dragon tails, a farmer’s feeble attempt to recoup something from the land after agricultural disaster. As they ate dinner at the RV’s tiny table, LT showed his mother pictures from one of his books about the invasives. He told her how the dark fans held chlorophyll-like molecules that absorbed a larger spectrum of light than the Earth versions. “If our plants tried to process that much energy they’d burn up, like a car engine trying to run on rocket fuel.”

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Arnaud said. He stood at the galley sink, washing the skillet he’d used to fry the hamburgers. “The photosystems they’re using seem to be variable, sometimes like retinol in archaea microbes, sometimes more like chlorophyll with novel sidechains added, so that they can control—”

  “Take a look at this,” LT said, cutting him off. He showed her a cross section of the dragon tail, and how the vines were twisted around each other. “They call them golden spirals. See, there’s this thing called the Fibonacci sequence—”

  “Dragon tails follow the golden spiral?” Arnaud said. He came over to the table. LT was pleased to know something the chemist didn’t.

  Mom said, “What’s a Fibonacci?” and LT quickly answered. “It’s a series of numbers, starting with one, two, three, five … each one’s the sum of the previous two numbers, so—”

  “That’s a close approximation of the golden ratio,” Arnaud said. He pulled the book closer, leaned over LT’s mother. “The growth factor of the curve follows that ratio. You can see the spiral in nature—in seashells, pine cones, everywhere.”

  “So beautiful,” his mother said. She ran fingers over the glossy cross section. “Like the head of a sunflower.”

  LT, suddenly furious, pushed himself out from behind the table. His mother said, “Where you going?”

  Arnaud said, “Could you put away your plate?”

  He let the door bang shut behind him.

  Outside, the atmosphere was greenhouse humid. He marched away, not caring which direction his body took him. It was nine thirty and still not full dark, as if the sun couldn’t find the edge of these tabletop plains. The air was heavy with a floral perfume.

  He came to the leaping back of a dragon trail, black against the purpling sky, and walked beside it. Gnats puffed out of the grass and he waved them away.

  It had been a mistake to come on this trip. The RV was as stifling as a submarine. Arnaud sucked up all available oxygen, inserted himself into every conversation.

  Eventually the dark came down, and he aimed for the fluorescent lights of the cinder-block building that doubled as park office and convenience store. Inside, a couple kids about his age, a boy and a girl, were glued to the Space Invaders cabinet. Were they brother and sister? Boyfriend and girlfriend? He thought about talking to them. He could tell them things. Like how the speed of the game was an accident; the aliens came down slow at first, then got faster and faster as their numbers were destroyed, not because it had been programmed that way, but because the processor could only speed up when the load lightened. Telling things was the only way he knew how to make small talk. Other forms of conversation were a mystery.

  He bought a Coke and took it outside. Leaned against the wall under the snapping bug zapper.

  A flashlight bobbed toward him out of the dark. He ignored it until a voice behind the light said, “Hello, my darlin’.”

  His mother stepped up, clicked off the flashlight. “Did you see the stars? They’re amazing out here.”

  “Still no meteors,” he said. Six years after the seed storm, everybody was waiting for a second punch. Or maybe the next wave was on its way now, in the void, creeping across the light-years. Perhaps the long delay was necessary because of orbital mechanics. What looked like design could be just an accident of the environment.

  He offered her a sip of his Coke. She waved it off. “You ought to give him a chance. He’s just enthusiastic about things. Like you are.”

  He wanted to ask her why the hell she kept attaching herself to assholes. The self-involved painter, the rage-aholic restaurant owner, and now the chemist, whom she’d had the audacity to marry. Did she love him, or just his McMansion and its granite countertops?

  “He wants to send you to college,” she said. “He thinks you’d be a good scientist.”

  “Really?” Then he was embarrassed that the compliment meant something to him. “I’m not taking his money.”

  “You should think about it. Your dad can’t afford college. And you deserve better than working in a lumberyard.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the lumberyard.” LT worked there three days a week during the school year, sometimes alongside his father. He’d told her he hated it, but hadn’t mentioned the things he loved about it. His herky-jerky forklift. The terrifying Ekstrom Carlson rip saw. The sawdust and sweat.

  But did he want to be there the rest of his life?

  From inside the store, the boy shouted in mock dismay and the girl laughed. They’d lost their last laser cannon.

  “You should study the invasives,” his mother said. “I remember that look on your face when I showed you that seed. And the fern man! You loved that little guy.”

  “I still have him. Dad keeps him in the living room. He’s not so little.”

  “So,” she said. “Think about it.”

  He thought, If the aliens haven’t landed by then.

  1986

  “Where are the space bees?”

  “What?”

  “SPACE BEES!” LT shouted above the music. “WHERE ARE THEY?”

  He was drunk, and Jeff and Wendy too, and their new friend Doran, all of them drunk together. What else could they be, on this final weekend before Christmas break, and where else but at the Whitehorse, which as far as he was concerned was the only bar in Normal, Illinois.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jeff said. “Not the bees again.”

  LT put his hand on the back of Doran’s neck—a sweaty neck, and his hand tacky with beer but he didn’t care, he wanted to pull Doran close. “I need to tell you things,” he said into his ear, and Doran laughed, and then—

  —and then they were in a restaurant booth, the lights bright, Jeff and Wendy across from him and Doran—tall, sturdy Doran—beside him. LT leaned into his arm woozily. God he was handsome, naturally handsome, almost hiding it. How did they get here? He concentrated, but his memory of the past two hours was a hopscotch, dancing drinking shouting singing and then the rude bright lights of last call and a flash of ice and cold—did Wendy drive, she must have—to here, the 24-hour Steak and Shake, their traditional sober-up station.

  He said to Doran, “It’s the flowers that make no sense.”

  Jeff said, “The flowers have no scents?” and Wendy said, “It’s that they have scents that makes no sense.” They both laughed.

  A beat too late LT realized there was wordplay at work. He forged on. “The blooms of flowers are lures.” The word thick on his ton
gue. “Scent and shape and color, they all evolved to attract specific pollinators, the bees and butterflies and beetles.”

  “Oh my,” Jeff said.

  “And you told me he was shy,” Doran said.

  “He can get wound up,” Wendy said. “When he feels comfortable.”

  “Or tipsy,” Jeff said.

  LT felt tipsy and comfortable. Why hadn’t Jeff and Wendy introduced him to Doran before now? Why wait until the last weekend of the last semester LT would be on campus? It was criminal.

  “A pretty flower isn’t just a simple announcement, like ‘Here’s pollen.’” LT said. “Simple won’t do it.” He tried to explain how flowers were in competition. Pollen was everywhere, nestled inside thousands of equally needy plants desperate to spread their genetic material. What was needed was not an announcement but a flashing neon sign. “The flower’s goal,” LT said, “is to figure out what hummingbirds think are beautiful.”

  “Slow down, Hillbilly,” Wendy said. “Eat something.”

  “Hummingbirds have an aesthetic sense?” Doran said.

  “Of course they do! Have I told you about bowerbirds?”

  Jeff said, “Guess what his honors thesis is on?”

  And then he was off, yammering about the bowerbirds of Papua New Guinea. The males of the species constructed elaborate twiggy structures, not nests but bachelor pads, designed purely to woo females. The Vogelkop Bowerbird set out careful arrangements of colors—blue, green, yellow—each one a particular hue. It didn’t matter what the objects were; they could be stones, or petals, or plastic bottle caps even, as long as they were the correct shade. The females could not be coerced into sex; they dropped by the bowers, perused the handiwork, and flew away if they found them substandard. Their choice of mates, their taste in art, drove the males over millennia to evolve more and more specific displays, an ongoing gallery show with intercourse as the prize.