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Show Acting Alone Page 2 on warm nights there would be a solid green column of grasshoppers and God knows what other million kinds of bugs, all drinking themselves bloated, all of them alien to a former desert/mountain dweller like Sam. His mom, who once did a little time around here during the dustbowl days, pitied him for "living so aridly." And they had all the birds here that Audubon leers about in junior high students' ears: meadowlarks, bluejays, cardinals actually existed here. There'd been a recent irruption of seagulls, too. Sam must've brought them from the Beehive State. They lived at the dump, congregating in millions of white rings around the dead animal pit, looking like pingpong balls. They screeched a welcome when Sam came to dump his load of quarter-pounder-with- cheese boxes from the passenger seat of the car on those rare occasions when he had to prepare himself for a date. A large percentage of Sam's students had terminally bad complexions. The late-teen infection had seeped into the bloodstream, osmosed by the water vapors, aided by the unusual preponderance of fast-food outlets which sprouted up in the jungly air around here as lushly as the local breadbasket crops. Sam became an aimless cruiser among such people, in such a climate. And he soon found that if the car cruised for more than five minutes in any direction, this college town quickly pissed out and he wound up in farmers' fields. They grew popcorn here, and hedgeballs, also millet for pet canaries - all fertilized by sweet-smelling mutagens that made the dew bead up and roll away in copper-colored pellets. Such a place easily sank into November. And in no time at all Ronald |
