"The way yellow fever and smallpox killed off your Native Americans," he says, "we brought Dutch elm disease to America in a shipment of logs for a veneer mill in 1930 and brought chestnut blight in 1904. Another pathogenic fungus is killing off the eastern beeches. The Asian long-horned beetle, introduced to New York in 1996, is expected to wipe out North American maples."
To control prairie dog populations, Oyster says, ranchers introduced bubonic plague to the prairie dog colonies, and by 1930, about 98 percent of the dogs were dead. The plague has spread to kill another thirty-four species of native rodents, and every year a few unlucky people.
For whatever reason, the culling song comes to mind.
"Me," Mona says as I pass her back the book, "I like the ancient traditions. My hope is this trip will be, you know, like my own personal vision quest. And I'll come up with an Indian name and be," she says, "transformed."
Out of his Hopi bag, Oyster takes a cigarette and says, "You mind?"
And I tell him yes.
And Helen says, "Not at all." And it's her car.
And I'm counting 1, counting 2, counting 5 ...
What we think of as nature, Oyster says, everything's just more of us killing the world. Every dandelion's a ticking atom bomb. Biological pollution. Pretty yellow devastation.
The way you can go to Paris or Beijing, Oyster says, and everywhere there's a McDonald's hamburger, this is the ecological equivalent of franchised life-forms. Every place is the same place. Kudzu. Zebra mussels. Water hyacinths. Starlings. Burger Kings.
The local natives, anything unique gets squeezed out.
"The only biodiversity we're going to have left," he says, "is Coke versus Pepsi."
He says, "We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time."
Just staring out his window, Oyster takes a plastic cigarette lighter out of the beaded medicine bag. He shakes the lighter, smacking it against the palm of one hand.
A pink feather from the book, I sniff it and imagine Mona's hair has this same smell. Twirling the feather between two fingers, I ask Oyster, on the phone just now—his call to the newspaper—what he's up to.
Oyster lights his cigarette. He tucks the plastic lighter and the cell phone back in his medicine bag.
"It's how he makes money," Mona says. She's picking apart the tangles and knots in her dream catcher. Between her arms, inside her orange blouse, her breasts reach out with their little pink nipples.
And I'm counting 4, counting 5, counting 6 ...
Both his hands buttoning his shirt, his mouth pinched around the cigarette, and his eyes squinting against the smoke, Oyster says, "Remember Johnny Appleseed?"
Helen turns up the air-conditioning.
And buttoning his collar, Oyster says, "Don't worry, Dad. This is just me planting my seeds."
Looking out at all the yellow, with his yellow eyes, he says, "It's just my generation trying to destroy the existing culture by spreading our own contagion."
Chapter 20
The woman opens her front door, and here are Helen and I on her front porch, me carrying Helen's cosmetic case, standing a half-step behind her as Helen points the long pink nail of her index finger and says, "If you can give me fifteen minutes, I can give you a whole new you."
Helen's suit is red, but not a strawberry red. It's more the red of a strawberry mousse, topped with whipped creme fraiche and served in a stemmed crystal compote. Inside her pink cloud of hair, her earrings sparkle pink and red in the sunlight.
The woman's drying her hands in a kitchen towel. She's wearing men's brown moccasins with no socks. A bib apron patterned with little yellow chickens covers her whole front, and some kind of machine-washable dress underneath. With the back of one hand, she pushes some hair off her forehead. The yellow chickens are all holding kitchen tools, ladles and spoons, in their beaks. Looking at us through the rusted screen door, the woman says, "Yes?"
Helen looks back at me standing behind her. She looks back over her shoulder at Mona and Oyster ducked down, hiding in the car parked at the curb. Oyster whispering into his phone, "Is the itching constant or intermittent?"
Helen Hoover Boyle brings the fingertips of one hand together at her chest, the mess of pink gems and pearls hiding her silk blouse underneath. She says, "Mrs. Pelson? We're here from Miracle Makeover."
As she talks, Helen throws her closed hand open toward the woman, as if she's scattering the words.
Helen says, "My name is Mrs. Brenda Williams." With her pink fingertips, she scatters the words back over her shoulder, saying, "And this is my husband, Bobert Williams." She says, "And we have a very special gift for you today."
The woman inside the screen door looks down at the cosmetic case in my hand.
And Helen says, "May we come in?"
It was supposed to be easier than this.
This whole traveling around, just dropping into libraries, taking a book off the shelf, sitting on a toilet in the library bathroom and cutting out the page. Then, flush. It was supposed to be that quick.
The first couple libraries, no problem. The next, the book isn't on the shelf. In library whispers, Mona and I go to the checkout desk and ask. Helen's waiting in the car with Oyster.
The librarian's a guy with his long straight hair pulled back in a ponytail. He's got earrings in both ears, pirate loop earrings, and he's wearing a plaid sweater vest and says the book is—he scrolls up and down his computer screen—the book is checked out.
"It's xeally important," Mona says. "I had it before that, and I left something between the pages."
Sorry, the guy says.
"Can you tell us who has it?" Mona says.
And the guy says, sorry. No can do.
And I'm counting 1, counting 2, counting 3 ...
Sure, everybody wants to play God, but for me it's a full-time job.
I'm counting 4, counting 5 ...
A beat later, Helen Hoover Boyle's standing at the checkout desk. She smiles until the librarian looks up from his computer, and she spreads her hands, her rings bright and crowded on each finger.
She smiles and says, "Young man? My daughter left an old family photograph between the pages of a certain book." She wiggles her fingers and says, "You can follow the rules, or you can do a good deed and take your pick."
The librarian watches her fingers, the prism colors and stars of broken light dancing across his face. He licks his lips. Then he shakes his head no and says it's just not worth it. The person with the book will complain and he'll get fired.
"We promise," Helen says, "we won't lose you your job."
In the car, I waiting with Mona, counting 27, counting 28, counting 29 .. ., trying the only way I know not to kill everybody in the library and look up the address on the computer myself.
Helen comes out to the car with a sheet of paper in her hand. She leans in the open driver's-side window and says, "Good news and bad news."
Mona and Oyster are lying across the backseat, and they sit up. I'm on the shotgun side of the front seat, counting.
And Mona says, "They have three copies, but they're all checked out."
And Helen gets in behind the steering wheel and says, "I know a million ways to coldcall."
And Oyster shakes the hair off his eyes and says, "Good job, Mom."
The first house went easy enough. And the second.
In the car between house calls, Helen picks through the gold tubes and shiny boxes, her lipstick and makeup, her cosmetic case open in her lap. She twists a pink lipstick up and squints at it, saying, "I'm never using any of this again. If I'm not mistaken, that last woman had ringworm."
Mona leans forward from the backseat, looking over Helen's shoulder, and says, "You're really good at this."
Screwing open little round boxes of eye shadow, looking and sniffing at their tan or pink or peach insides, Helen says, "I've had a lot of practice."
She looks at herself in the rearview mirror and pulls around a few strands of pink hair. She looks at her watch, pinching the face between a thumb and index finger, and she says, "I shouldn't tell you this, but this was my first real job."
By now we're parked outside a rusted trailer house sitting in a square of dead grass scattered with children's plastic toys. Helen snaps her case shut. She looks at me sitting beside her and says, "You ready to try it again?"
Inside the trailer, talking to the woman in the apron covered with little chickens, Helen's saying, "There's absolutely no cost or obligation on your part," and she backs the woman into the sofa.
Sitting across from the woman, the woman sitting so close their knees almost touch, Helen reaches toward her with a soft brush and says, "Suck in your cheeks, dear."
With one hand, she grabs a handful of the woman's hair and pulls it straight up into the air. The woman's hair is blond with an inch of brown at the roots. With her other hand, Helen runs a comb down the hair in fast strokes, holding the longer strands up, and crushing the shorter brown ones down against the scalp. She grabs another handful and rats, teases, back-combs until all but the longest hairs are crushed and tangled against the scalp. With the comb, she smooths the long blond strands over the ratted short hairs until the woman's head is a huge fluffed bubble of blond hair.
And I say, so that's how you do that.
It's identical to Helen's hairdo only blond.
On the coffee table in front of the sofa is a big arrangement of roses and lilies, but wilted and brown, the flowers standing in a green-glass vase from a florist, with only a little black water in the bottom. On the dinette table in the kitchen are more big flower arrangements, just dead stalks in thick, stinking water. Lined up on the floor, against the back wall of the living room are more vases, each holding a block of green foam pincushioned with curled, wasted roses or black, spindly carnations growing gray mold. Stuck in with each bouquet is a little card saying: In Deepest Sympathy.
And Helen says, "Now put your hands over your face," and she starts shaking a can of hair spray. She fogs the woman with hair spray.
The •woman cowers blind, bent forward a little, with both hands pressed over her face.
And Helen jerks her head toward the rooms at the other end of the trailer.
And I go.
Pumping a mascara brush in its tube, she says, "You don't mind if my husband uses your bathroom, do you?" Helen says, "Now, look up at the ceiling, dear."
In the bathroom, there are dirty clothes separated into different-colored piles on the floor. Whites. Darks. Somebody's jeans and shirts stained with oil. There's towels and sheets and bras. There's a red-checked tablecloth. I flush the toilet for the sound effect.
There's no diapers or children's clothes.
In the living room, the chicken woman is still looking at the ceiling, only now she's shaking with long, jerking breaths. Her chest, under the apron, shaking. Helen is touching the corner of a folded tissue to the watery makeup. The tissue is soaked and black with mascara, and Helen's saying, "It will be better someday, Rhonda. You can't see that, but it will." Folding another tissue and daubing, she says, "What you have to do is make yourself hard. Think of yourself as something hard and sharp."
She says, "You're still a young woman, Rhonda. You need to go back to school and turn this hurt into money."
The chicken woman, Rhonda, is still crying with her head tilted back, staring at the ceiling.
Behind the bathroom, there's two bedrooms. One has a water bed. In the other bedroom is a crib and a hanging mobile of plastic daisies. There's a chest of drawers painted white. The crib is empty. The little plastic mattress is tied in a roll at one end. Near the crib is a stack of books on a stool. Poems and Rhymes is on top.