The Scooter Preacher's Daughter - Match 6 - Round 1
The Scooter Preacher’s Daughter
The first time Theresa ran into him was at Spencer’s Drug near the checkout lane. She was carrying an armful of mama’s supplies: Zarqa fungicide, Peppermint Odor-Destroying Foot Oil, and Dr. Scholl’s Massaging Gel Inserts (mama was SO not gellin’).
Everything fell. There was a terrible clatter – she hadn’t heard anything so loud since she dropped her bookbag while mama was praying and the romance books and tarot cards spilled out. The Zarqa bottle shattered, of course, and the medicine odor of the fungicide set up a holy reek right by the rubber bouncy ball bin.
Sandy from behind the counter rushed out with a mop. There were polite mutterings, and worried titterings, and later Theresa remembered, through the red haze of her embarrassment, that the man was nice about it. Naturally what she remembered best was what made it the worst.
He was picking up his Cracker Jacks and his Bic lighter and maybe a prescription slip when she realized what he must have thought. She said, “Oh! They’re not mine,” and regretted it as soon as the words left her lips. She should have just sucked it up and soldiered on. Why did she always say things like that? It’s not like he would believe her anyway. Now she just looked desperate. So what if he had a flat stomach. He was older than her, and even a little bald in front! Who cares what he thought?
“Right. No problem,” he said. He was smiling like “shya right,” or “shya who cares?" When it was all cleaned up, he was still smiling. He said bye and left.
Sandy chuckled. “Wow, girl. Stare much?"
***
Home was a trinary star system in a galaxy of misery. The trinary star system was her little room in the basement with its three points of light: her computer, her lab, and her magic table. The pain was everything else. Her downstairs room was cool, even now in the late spring. The lab’s dirt box diffused a fresh earthy smell. The hard disk rattled like a fragment of angry candy in its drive, but the computer didn’t finish booting before mama was yelling for her.
“I’m coming! In a minute!”
She made mama wait until after the shroom data from the dirt box was in and the updates were on the Crystal Falls news page (weather, fishing contests, no obits today).
Upstairs, the house’s one bedroom smelled like sweat and feet. Mama’s stupid feet. Mama had been the office manager at the hydro plant when the storm of ’99 hit. Lightning everywhere. Lightning is supposed to be an outdoor phenomenon, but mama swore she was inside when the flood waters came in. Sparks hit the water and fried her feet. There was nerve damage. Now mama couldn’t walk. She lived on disability and cruised Superior Street on her scooter, scolding shopfolk and tourists alike, issuing philippics like traffic tickets. Right now she was tearing into Theresa as if the girl had double-parked too long in the Not Honoring Your Mother spot and the Thou Shalt Have No Other God Before Me spot.
“Mama, honestly. I’m 19! I have a right to be interested in men. And I only told you about him to explain what took so long. Don’t you want me to talk to you?”
“Interested in men! Ha! Were you there when my feet were melting? Were you? Were you?”
Theresa kept rubbing the peppermint oil into the woman’s feet and waited. She had stopped answering that question long ago.
“No, you weren’t there. Well that was a message from God, Theresa! We have work to do in this town. Important work. But not at the hydro plant. No, not there.
‘You’re the strong one. You have to take care of me while I do my work. So many people are leaving this town, Theresa. So many. I have to minister to the ones that are left, and you have to help me. And that doesn’t involve you throwing your hussy self at men in the drug store! Lord, we thank you that Spencer’s has a No Shirt No Service policy or else my daughter’d be topless and shaking her little treasures at every man that walked in the place!”
It went on like that.
Theresa finished the peppermint foot massage, apologized for being late, and finally retreated to her trinary star system when Judge Judy came on to command mama’s attention.
After a good long cry,
Theresa lit the vanilla candle on her magic table. Magic was nonsense, she knew, but she found some sort of peace in the ceremony. And she always felt like there was more, somehow, to this life. There had to be. What if magic were real? The vanilla scent keyed her meditation. She was deep in the trance when the computer pinged.
Today’s dirt box data run had finished. The data didn’t exactly fry her feet, but it was shocking enough. Ended the trance right quick.
***
“Something’s happening!” The keys clicked rapidly under Theresa’s fingers, like a machine gun. “Remember how I told you that strange stuff always happened in Crystal Falls?
Like the Navy and their ELF testing. I’m still convinced that that led to the
Humongous Fungus. Anyway, it’s happening again! I’m forwarding you the mycology data from today. The armillaria is off the charts!
“There’s something else. A plant, like a fern or something, has appeared in the dirtbox along with the honey mushrooms. There’s a nit or a cyst or something on it. I’m attaching a picture
here. I don’t know what it is, but it’s growing at a phenomenal rate, just like the rest. I think it’s going to hatch something soon.”
Theresa was writing to Parad. Technically, he was her internet not-quite-boyfriend. Unfortunately, he hadn’t answered emails for the last month. She gradually stopped sending them, but the new data spurred her to try one more time.
“Anyway, Parad, if you get this and I don’t come back, call my mom. I sent you our number before. Because I’m going out to track down that guy. That one from Spencer’s. I don’t know how, call it intuition, call it candle magic, but I’m sure that he’s the one behind all this.”
***
It took a week to find him. A week is a long time in a town as small as Crystal Falls. Theresa noted the man’s uncommon anonymity as just another example of the weirdness that was cropping up.
He was at the car show. Here is how you go to a car show in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula: You get as many friends and stocked beer coolers as possible. You go out to the highway. You sit on the guardrail or on top of your cooler as your friends drive their cars up and down in front of you. That’s it. There’s no grand marshal, no floats, no firemen throwing candy, no blue ribbon judges panel.
He was at the tent city for all the folks who come from Ishpeming and Marquette and even down from Duluth. People love their cars at the North Country Cruisers car show, and no one wants to drive drunk. So they set up tents in the state park and break out the bikes. It’s a giant automotive Woodstock for one weekend to kick off summer.
More weirdness: for the first time since 99, the spring run-off from the river had overflowed the dam at the hydroelectric plant. It swamped the tent city in the state park.
Theresa was walking by the state park, not really on the search, when she spotted him (they always say you’ll meet someone when you’re not looking). It was the morning after the car show. The flood had hit at sunrise, and people were cleaning up now. Already the stagnant water smelled like swampgrass with a hint of sulfur and acid. Theresa tried not to look in the flood waters at the slicks that she suspected were vomit. Everyone had a hangover. The whole park was moaning under so much unfairness of things.
But not him. Theresa heard a laugh. She looked. It was him.
He had a beer and he was smiling. Despite the flood waters, this man was actually smiling. And – holy frakking Zeus and Athena and so say we all – he was looking right at her!
Theresa looked down and hustled on. Did he recognize her? Was he drunk? If he recognized her, did he think she was just another drunk Yooper? With foot fungus?
Maybe she should give up on this. But the nit on the fern stalk in her dirtbox at home lolled in her memory. It was swelling, fit to burst, and it reminded her of all the urban myths about girls with cold sores that pop open and spill out baby spiders. Something about that nit itched her.
She turned around and ducked behind the VFW pancake breakfast tent. When her man finished packing his tent, she trailed his friends and him as far out Fettig Street as she dared. When she had a general idea of their direction, she returned before getting caught.
***
Naturally, Mama objected.
“Were you there the night my feet got fried? I don’t think so! They were fried, Theresa! Fried! It was a sign from God. To help people! Not to go traipsing off into the woods at night on your two non-fried feet to find some jack-a-ninny hambone to fornicate with! That’s not why god gave you non-fried feet, Theresa. You’re the strong one. You need to help me! God demands that we help people!”
“I’ve got my cell phone, mama. And here’s the remote. I love you.”
Theresa was not certain the cell phone would be useful. Fettig Street led pretty far up into the Porcupines. The hills played hell with reception.
A quick trance with the vanilla candle to center herself, a note to Parad in case she didn’t come back, a check on the nit (still growing!), an update pass on all the websites she worked for, and she was off to catch the man in his lair.
It felt GOOD to be doing something. Too bad about mama. But Theresa had given enough time to her mom, and she would give as much more as the woman needed. The woman was her mom, after all. It’s just that it was sometimes such a burden. Whatever. Life was life, and if it meant Theresa had to stay home and help her mom instead of going off to college, well, there were people starving in Africa and people back in the Middle Ages getting frakking impaled, for the gods’ sakes, and if you were a geek like Theresa you actually knew what true impaling meant, so in the end what did she have to complain about? Life was tolerable. It beat getting impaled.
Still. It felt real good to be doing something.
The leaves crunched under her feet whenever she turned off Fettig to investigate a side-road, a two-track, a snowmobile route, or just a trail. The moon was high in the sky and lit the UP forest well. Cicadas buzzed and the occasional rustle of leaves betrayed an opossum or porcupine or restless squirrel.
The moon was low in the sky when she started to give up hope. She was high enough up now that she could smell the wind coming all the way in from Lake Superior, fresh and wet and full of secrets. But nothing in the wind led her through the darkness to the mystery man’s house. She couldn’t go too far off the road easily because the branches scratched and tugged. Staring at the ground by her cell phone light – even going so far as to brush dirt and leaves out of the way when she thought she saw a trace of the man’s red shirt, or a beer can of his brand – Theresa realized she was no tracker. Where was Strider when she needed him? Shya right. As if she hadn’t asked herself that five million times before!
She tripped on a root. Everything fell. There was a terrible clatter as her cell phone hit a rock. Her shin was burning. Nix that – bleeding. She felt the moisture with her right hand while her left hand scrambled for her cell phone.
It was there. Please work… please work… please work. Blue LED light. Thank you Nokia engineering!
The LEDs lit up more than her bleeding shin. They illuminated the root that she tripped over. Only it was not a root, but a mound of some vegetable material, almost like a landscaped berm, or a tremendous snake covered with soil and last autumn’s leaves, smelling of ozone and decay. She waved the cell phone.
The mound curved around and around in the clearing, making a spiral pattern in the moonlight, hypnotizing Theresa for a split second with all of the possibilities. Snake mounds. Native American burial sites. Crop circles. Colonization.
It enthralled her. A dream in the moonlight. She had to tell herself, “Get up, Theresa, get up,” to snap the spell.
The cabin was nearby, one-story, wood, with a pole barn behind it. Theresa wasn’t surprised to smell wood smoke even in the late spring. It got chilly at night, especially up here in the hills. Some people used wood stoves to run their generators now, too, thanks to gas being more expensive than mama’s foot oil. There were no lights anywhere.
Later, Theresa could not say why she went to the pole barn first. She had no real plan, at least to her recollection. She just wanted to find out who the man was. Maybe talk to him, if he turned out to be a non-psycho.
The door pushed open with a hushed woosh. The odor of fresh earth wafted out… she recognized it. It smelled like her lab’s dirt box back home. She knew it! The guy was up to something. She had been cultivating the humongous fungus for years, using her own antennae to simulate the Navy’s ELF radiation. All kinds of electromagnetic bombardments had produced some interesting effects, but nothing as dramatic as the nit that was ready to pop any day now back in her lab. And now – she smelled the same odors here. The man. Was he in the Navy? Was he one of the scientists who had initially started the ELF experiments and covered up its effects?
The cell phone’s LEDs lit up the barn’s interior like a spotlight. Dirt boxes covered the floor. Some covered, some uncovered, some with worms, some peat, some graysoil. Almost every box was teeming with fungus, mushrooms, or ferns. She knew she would find it, and she did: her nit. There was an entire box full of fern stalks with eggs on them, just like hers. Funny that she had never found the insect that lay the eggs.
Now wasn’t the time to worry about it. It was time to pick up the box and take it home to study.
“I’m afraid you can’t leave with that.”
The lights came on, blinding her for a moment.
It was him. Red shirt, beer in hand, just like she had seen him at the flooded tents in the state park. But now he wasn’t smiling.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“You’re the one in my pole barn! Who are you?”
Like any geek, during the long hours in algebra class waiting for the rest of the class to finish, Theresa had spent time daydreaming about turning mundane situations into life-threatening ones and planning accordingly. She almost forgot to use her training now. But it came back to her while he attempted to parley. That would be his downfall.
She remembered now: throw something at the bad guy, and while he’s distracted, make your escape. Even if he shoots, he’ll be distracted by your missile, and he might miss (not that he had a gun, and his beer can didn’t look like it was designed by Scaramanga).
Theresa heaved the box full of ferns and nits.
“No!”
There was a bang, and more shouting, but Theresa wasn’t listening. She was dashing out the door. She vaguely noticed the man stooping and trying to salvage the plants.
“I said you can’t leave!”
Another loud bang, but this one sounded like a potato gun. Compressed air. Theresa wondered about that curious sound for the split second that she had before it hit her.
The sensation was warm and sticky, spilling over her arms and legs, slowing them, trapping them to her body. Before she passed out, she had time to look down. It was like a web-bomb had exploded on her. Sticky strands everywhere.
***
“Let’s have a more civilized discussion.”
Waking up, Theresa swung her head around. Her eyes were gritty, but through the blear she made out a cabin kitchen, walls lined with canned food, a wood stove burning, and on top of the stove a bowl of oatmeal, maple by the smell. Beyond the kitchen was a room with a bank of computer monitors. Looked like they were running some sort of protein-folding program; she recognized it from a distributed computing screensaver she once participated in. Beyond that, there were windows out into the bright morning forest.
It was light! Mama would be waking up soon and worried to death. Oh god, the poor police chief is going to get an earful.
The mystery man was at the breakfast table, ignoring the maple oatmeal in favor of a Schlitz beer, and staring up at her. Sticky strands webbed her to the wall tightly, making the sand in her eyes unreachable. She flailed.
“Easy. A civilized discussion, remember? So. You want a beer?”
He looked just like she remembered from the tent city and the pole barn last night. This cabin was looking more and more like a lab as she woke up, and she had never been more sorry to be right. Think, girl. If he is working in a lab, then he must have backing. Probably the US Navy, if there history in the area is any indication. At any rate, he’s not a psycho acting alone. Maybe you can use that. Somehow.
“Look, just calm down and tell me what you were doing out there last night. My roses – I’m a rose dealer, you know? – my roses didn’t come out too well. You dropped a whole box.”
That was the worst lie that Theresa had ever heard, and once she told her algebra teacher that she paid attention every day. But she didn’t know how to use the lie to her advantage. “Roses. Yeah. Whatever. Look, I told everyone where I was, so if you don’t want to go to jail for any more time than you’re already going to get, you should let me go know.”
“No. I found your cell phone. I texted Parad and your Mom and even Sandy. They all think you’re staying at someone else’s house. The old round-robin trick. What? I watch Gossip Girl. I know how it works.”
Well switch my body and call me Faith, Theresa thought, that’s the last time I’ll store my contacts by their real names. Not to mention a note to self: never save old calls or texts. Or else, password protect everything (but who does that on a cell phone?). Damn, this guy was good, sort of. And – he mentioned Sandy. Did that mean he remembered that day at Spencer’s?
He said, “I’m waiting for an answer.”
“You watch Gossip Girl? You don’t sound like a psycho killer.”
“And you don’t look like a Chinese spy.”
“So there’s something about your supposed roses that would interest a Chinese spy?”
Blank stare. Then the guy took a shot of Schlitz. “Aw hell, this is why I’m not in intelligence. That was a pretty good trick I thought of with the cell phones, though, don’t you think? My name’s Johnny, by the way.”
“Theresa.”
“I know. From your cell phone. What I don’t know is what brought you out here.”
“Let’s just say we raise the same kind of roses.”
There was a long pause. “You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not kidding. You think only the Navy can grow crazy stuff based on the ELF waves you’re pumping through here? You are from the Navy, right?”
“I can’t tell you that. It’s classified.”
“Classified. That’s military speak. So you admit you’re from the military?”
“Listen, I can’t tell you that. It’s classified.”
“So, what, there’s no protocol to cover me finding out about you? Isn’t that a little short-sighted?”
“We pay $400 for a toilet seat. You think we can plan on high school kids duplicating PhD-level mycological research?”
“I’m not in high school. I’d be in college now, if mama didn’t need me.”
That’s when the story came out. Theresa was crying by the end of it. Johnny seemed like he cared. But he didn’t cut her down from the webs. And mama was not what he asked about.
“Wait,” he said. “Just wait. You said – you said not only did you get the web ferns, buy you also had a cocoon on one? How far along was the cocoon?”
“I duplicate mycological research. Some botanical. Entomology is for the birds. Well, that’s ornithology. But you know.”
Blank stare.
“I mean, Johnny, the nit – the cocoon – I don’t know. It looked like it was going to pop any day now. I don’t know what kind of bug laid it there. It’s just –“
That’s when he started cutting her down. “We have to get back there,” he said. “Now.”
***
Mama didn’t like the first man she ever brought home.
“Not in my house! Fornication! Not in my house! You two running around both with non-fried feet and you can’t think of anything better to do than fornicate in my house! Get out!”
They raced downsairs. “It’s here –“
Johnny pushed her out of the way. “There!”
The cocoon hatched just as they reached it.
It was fascinating, really. First a slice of orange appeared, the color of a creamsicle in the white egg casing. Then a faint popping sound like a Whoville-version of a 4th of July champagne popper. The white strands sproinged after that, snapping like over-tightened violin strings, bulging from the thing underneath hatching. It was purple with orange spots, and it fluttered and flopped over to the computer keyboard, where it fanned its wings free of the cocoon goo.
Johnny was rapt. “Oh my god. Do you know what that is?”
“Looks kind of like a butterfly but –“
“It’s hell!” Mama cried. Like an angel of vengeance descending in her welfare-funded stair chair, she had come down behind them.
Slam! She banged her hand down on the keyboard, crushing the baby butterfly. Proud of herself, she held up her hand to show them the smashing. “And that’s what god is going to do to you, mister!”
She tried to lift herself up out of the stair chair and over to the roller computer chair.
And faltered.
“Mama?”
“Oh god…” Johnny said. “Theresa, listen, I… you might want to…”
“Mama!” Theresa shouted as her mom collapsed. Her head clanked on the lab table as she fell to the cold cement basement floor.
Theresa cradled the old woman in her arms. She shouted, alternately at her mom to wake up and at Johnny to explain. She could feel her mother growing cold and limp in her arms.
“I don’t know, exactly, what it was,” Johnny said. There was fear in his voice. He probably had never killed anyone before, despite being in the armed services. “It was a research project. The ELF radiation that we put through here… the humongous fungus, the 40-acre armillaria… yeah. It’s not actually 1500 years old… more like 15 years old. Once we noticed that ELF radiation could do that, not to mention the effect it has on honeybees, well, we decided to test it on other stuff.
“Test being the key word. Oh my god, Theresa. I am so sorry.”
Theresa wept over her mom for a long time.
Johnny finally said, “Theresa, the fact that you could do all this – what the - ?”
Theresa screamed and went flying across the room. She crashed into her trundle bed and slumped to the floor. Her mother was standing up. Her eyes were wide and there was spittle at the corner of her mouth.
“Theresa! God has given me strength, Theresa. Stay where you are. Keep away from the fornicator.”
The woman was transformed. The scars on her legs and feet were gone. Her housecoat was ripped at the seams in a couple of places. Theresa had two thoughts: mama is the Incredible Hulk, and Johnny is going to pay for his experiment’s success with his life.
“No. I didn’t do anything wrong with your daughter. We actually – we can help you.”
“I don’t need your help! I’m strong now!” The mother spared a glance for Theresa. “I’m the strong one now, girl.”
She advanced on Johnny.
But the scientist was ready with his air-powered web-gun. He shot the woman from point blank range, the fwoosh of the gun followed by the splat of the webs. Theresa was amazed that mama could continue advancing. Those webs were strong.
The third shot finally stopped her.
***
The military came for mama. “It’s ok,” Theresa said. “You’re the strong one now, mama. You need to help us. The best way you can help us is to let the Navy boys study you. Good job, mama.” Mama was flailing in the webs, still, when they carried her away.
***
A few days later, the VFW had their pancake tent up again for the Humongous Fungus festival. None the wiser, the townsfolk and tourists were enjoying their Fungus Fudge waffles and honey mushroom syrup on hotcakes.
Theresa and Johnny had just finished agreeing in principle to an adjunct naval research contract for Theresa. Now they were seeing if they could agree in principle to something more personal.
Theresa sighed. “You know Parad is an anagram for DARPA, right? We’re gonna have to go over and straighten those boys out.”
“They’ll wait. What’s important now is getting you some foot fungicide for that problem of yours. Because I really want to ask you out, but -”
“THAT WAS FOR MAMA! It wasn’t –“
“Kidding! Kidding!”
