Fertile

 

It was 6 ½ miles to the State Park, probably with no place along the way to buy a bottle of water and no vending machines at their destination.  The summer sun was hot and the fields looked dry, seared at their edges, and it would be warm on the hiking trail despite the shade of the trees and the little creeks seeping down the hillsides all poisoned with nitrates and e. coli. 

Trane had a half-bottle of water between the front seats.  An empty pop can was rattling around somewhere in the back of the car.

“I should have stopped and got something to drink when we exited the freeway,” Trane said.

Finn agreed and said that he didn’t want to get dehydrated.

“See that little town,” Trane took his hand from the steering wheel and gestured.  “Maybe there’s store or gas station or something.”

“Doesn’t look like much of a town,” Finn said.  

“I think there’s a gas station,” Trane told him.

Some Coop fuel pumps stood under a flimsy aluminum awning next to the road.  The pumps were card-controlled and there was no attendant.  Trane pulled into the gravel driveway, cratered with potholes gouged out by the grain trucks.  The can in the back rattled.  

“This is no good,” Finn said.

“I’ll go into the town.”

The place was called Fertile.  Two enormous grain bins rose over the village, shiny riveted metal walls flanking the black-top access road.  The bins were disproportionately immense, dwarfing the scatter of old houses and brick commercial structures on the other side.  Most of the village was hidden behind the escarpment of convex steel and not visible from the State highway.

Trane backtracked out of the Coop fuel station and turned onto the two-lane leading into Fertile.

The road ran between the two bins.  The light was blinding on the steel.  On a concrete pad next to the bin on the right, surplus corn was heaped in a golden pyramid, slumped into repose at its edges.  The chasm between the bins was a sleek bright canyon and, overhead, some millwork sutured the two great cylinders together so that they drove into the village as if through a high and splendid gate.  

Fertile wasn’t much more than a single Main Street, wide as half a football field, and, indeed, seeming even broader due to the absence of vehicles parked along its sides.  Most of the town seemed to have fallen down. A couple of shuttered brick storefronts remained upright beside empty lots overgrown with scrub-brush.  Houses stood at the end of gravel lanes, paint peeling off their white walls and barricaded behind junked cars.  A tire swing dangling from a ragged-looking tree peered at them suspiciously.  Once, there had been two competing banks in the village, sternly facing one another across the pointlessly wide street.  The bank on the left seemed hewn from single block of amber-colored rock, a two-story monument with fluted pilasters and windowless ramparts, the sort of place where cash-dollars were not merely protected behind slabs of stone, but, even, perhaps worshiped.  But the place was no longer a bank but a museum of some kind, a yellow pennant suspended from a flagpole next to the carved entrance portico announcing that the building was open.  Across the street, the other bank across the street was a heap of charred-looking bricks, compact and heavy with an arched entry like the door opening into a tomb and some improvised flower boxes on masonry windowsills.   A pickup was parked behind the place where there was a plastic wading pool and a couple of bicycles lying on their side.  

“This doesn’t look too promising,” Trane said.

They drove slowly down Fertile’s Main Street.  In a tangled jungle of half-fallen trees and sumac, an old creamery was shedding bricks from its broken walls.  A pale grey cupola of battered tin stood at the ridgeline above festering shingles.  A school house abandoned for half a century was covered in green vines that seemed intent on tearing the place down.  A swing-set and slide, tilted crazily, glimmered in the underbrush.  An old man on a golf cart had appeared from nowhere and was puttering along behind them, apparently, checking out the visitors to the village.  

Finn said that he had seen a hand-lettered sign on a shack that they had passed.  The sign, he told Trane, said something about a concession.  

“I didn’t see it,” Trane said.  

“It was on the left, next to a booth and some sort of park, maybe a swimming pool,” Finn replied.

“Well, we can check it out.”

They wasn’t any choice anyhow.  The way out of the town was the same way that lead into the place.  The main street dead-ended among some partly burned ruins and so Trane turned around, now facing the golf cart where the old man wearing bermuda shorts and a black elastic elbow brace glared at them.  

“Typical,” Trane said.

“What?” Finn asked.

“This guy,” Trane replied.

Trane rolled down the window.  The air was warm and humid and smelled a little sweet, probably the scent coming from rot within the mountains of yellow corn in the bins.  The concession was on the right, a white-washed shack with a couple of screened windows above a formica shelf.  It was the sort of snack booth that you might expect next to a small-town swimming pool, but there was no pool, just a lawn shaded by some old cottonwood and oak trees with a small playground.  Trane didn’t see any children but there were people sitting together at a metal picnic table.  Trane pulled the car up to the windowless backside of the shack.  The two of them got of the car and walked around the building to the counter.  An old man wearing shabby, frayed coveralls got up from the picnic table, nodded to them, and ambled along the side of the little building, entering through a screen-door.  The other old guy seated on the golf cart stopped in the middle of the street, looked at Finn and Trane for a minute, and, then, shrugging, puttered away.  

Finn went up to the counter and asked if he could buy some bottles of water.  The old man behind the window said that they didn’t have water, but he could sell them Pepsi in a bottle.  “Okay,” Finn said.  He also ordered a grape Slush.  The old man took the money and Trane could hear ice being crushed and spun around in a mixer.  Nothing cost too much.  Finn paid with a five-dollar bill and told the old man to keep the change.  

At the edge of the raked sand at the playground, a flower bed was surrounded by some tilted brick paving stones.  Geraniums were blooming among wood chips.  There didn’t seem to be any honeybees around.  Black and green flies were pollinating the flowers.  Trane waited beside the flowers, idly nudging the salmon-colored paving stones with the toe of his tennis shoe.   

One of the stones fronting the flower-bed felt loose and so Trane used his foot to tilt it forward. Under the scalloped paver, Trane saw some moist soil, black and seething with pale mites and tiny centipedes.  In a round socket indented in the earth uncovered beneath the edger, a grey toad with roughened skin was squatting.  The toad was a fist-sized tumor apparently growing out of the soil, shapeless and inert.  

“You should come and look at this,” Trane said.

Finn was chewing crushed iced.  “What?”

“It’s a toad,” Finn said.

He stooped and touched the toad’s back.  The creature didn’t move.  It’s skin was cool but flabby.  He pressed a finger down on the toad’s head, behind it’s little bulbous eyes.  The toad stirred slightly but didn’t try to hop out of its hole.

When Trane was a little boy, toads were everywhere.  When it rained, sidewalks were covered with them hopping in every direction, ricocheting off the pavement and the curbs.  But he hadn’t seen a toad for several years.  

“It’s not about to hop away,” Trane said.  “This toad’s found a place where it can lurk without moving and eat the bugs that come to it in the dark.  No need to do anything but sit comfortably in its hole under the stone.”

Finn said: “It’s fat enough.”

“Probably hasn’t stirred two inches in a month,” Trane said.  “It feels flabby as if its muscles have all melted away.”

Trane bent over and tapped the toad between its eyes.  It didn’t stir.  He carefully tilted the edging stone back into its place, covering the toad.

The townsfolk at the picnic table were talking about someone’s funeral.  The old man in the coveralls had come back to join the others.  

 

The car was already an oven.  Trane rolled the windows down and set the AC to high.  

They drove back toward the tall columns of the grain bins.  The sun had come from behind a cloud and the towers cast enormous black shadows over the village, abstract hard-edged parallelograms of darkness that seemed to signify something – perhaps, the passage of time or the town’s loneliness or ruin’s inevitable onset.

The banner on the bank converted to a museum had a cardboard panel clipped to it: OPEN from 2:00 to 4:00.  Trane pulled the car into a diagonal parking space by the building’s portico.  Above the door-lintel, the stone was cut into the shape of a bull’s skull surrounded by a ribbon from garlanded wreath. 

The old woman in the bank sat on an old, salvaged church pew behind a folding card table.  She smelled faintly of lavender.  Two wood-framed teller’s cages flanked her but, otherwise, the bank’s furnishings and interior walls had been removed.  High windows, cut into the masonry like rifle slits, let some abashed light enter and mark the tile floor.  The old woman grinned at them.  She had a glass cookie jar in front of her containing a scatter of five-dollar bills. 

“What does it cost to see your museum?” Trane said.

“It’s free,” she said.  “But wiill you put your names on this registry?”

Finn and Trane wrote their names and the town from which they come.  Finn put a ten dollar bill in the cookie jar.

“Thank you very much,” the woman said.  She was wearing a name-tag below her collar that said Volunteer.   “We have some pioneer life exhibits,” she told them.  “Then, there’s a special traveling show from the State Historical Society.  It’s in the old vault.  Out back, there’s a one-room school house and a restored settler log cabin.”

“Great,” Trane said.

Some headless figures, without arms, displayed old clothing.  A high-wheeled bicycle sat in a corner.  Some arrowheads and shards of pottery were in a glass case next to the big, steel disc of the open vault door.  A curtain hung down over the opening into the bank’s vault.  Old photographs on the walls showed families standing in front of sod houses on the naked prairie.  The people in the pictures had strange, half-crazed eyes.  A calendar embossed with the name of an implement dealer showed a battleship exploding – in a spiky orange star rising from the prow of the ship, Trane saw the silhouettes of little sailors blown sky-high.

Trane pushed through the curtain and stood in the vault.  On a small pedestal table, there was a doctor’s bag full of sinister-looking barbed instruments. Some big photographs with explanatory text were installed against the bare concrete walls of the old vault.  The air was stagnant in the vault-chamber and Trane felt a little faint.  The exhibition, courtesy of the State Historical Society, was entitled Diptheria and the Spanish Flu on the Prairie.

“What’s back there?”  Finn asked when Trane emerged.

“You don’t want to go in there,” Trane said.  “Some very disturbing pictures.”

“Unpleasant?”

“Very unpleasant,” Trane said.  

Finn didn’t like to see things of that kind.  “Can’t be unseen,” he always said.

They pretended to look at an old Family Bible and a baptismal font from the country church that had been torn down.  Then, they nodded to the old lady and went back outside.

“There’s a log cabin and one-room country school out behind,” Finn said.

“I’ve seen enough,” Trane replied.

They got into the car and drove out of Fertile.  It was six miles to the State Park.  A trail led along a wooded hillside terrace.  The Civilian Conservation Corps had built some fieldstone bridges on the trail, arching them over little streams that trickled down over dark stones in the shadowy, moss-overgrown ravines.  They saw a deer with a white tail standing next to two dappled fawns.  The animals had huge black eyes and seemed entirely unafraid of them.