Alien Pregnant by Elvis, page 28
Mr. Moffett stared at the picture on the seed packet in his hand. “No,” he said. He sounded angry. It seemed to Betsy that her father was afraid to look directly at the black man’s obviously superior bloom.
“No!” Mr. Moffett repeated. “I prefer a certified product, thank you. Now if you all will leave me alone, I have a great deal of work to do.”
Mr. Moffett lifted the handles of his cart and began wheeling it around the side of the house. He had only a part load of gravel, and that was unbalanced.
Harbie had been lying on her back so that the children could rub her belly. She rolled to her feet and trotted to the wagon.
“Good day, then, sir,” Jake called. He bowed in his seat to the children. “And good day to you, sirs and missies.”
Bobo clopped forward again without a formal order from his driver.
“Let’s go back to Stepan’s and choose up sides,” Betsy said.
“I don’t get it,” said Stepan, looking in the direction Mr. Moffett had taken around the house. “What’s your dad mean certified? He could see the flowers, couldn’t he? They’re real.”
“I don’t know what real means any more,” Betsy answered morosely. She broke into a run to get out of the yard—her father’s yard—quickly.
The school bus stopped half a block up from the Moffetts’ house. There were still hours of daylight left on an early September afternoon. Todd ran past Betsy calling, “Come on! We’re all going to meet at Stepan’s when we change clothes!”
Betsy waved, but she didn’t much feel like playing. With every step toward home she felt less like playing, or starting the leaf collection for science class, or doing anything at all.
The front yard was dug up again. Betsy’s father had removed the bulbs for storage through the winter, then tilled the beds and worked in compost. The rototiller waited beside the house with a blanket over it, ready to finish the job under the yard light above the porch as soon as Mr. Moffett got home.
Because the front yard looked so much like a construction site. Betsy picked her way past bushes to the side door. The hydrangeas were done blooming now, but during their season her father had gotten sprays of pink, white and blue flowers in the same bed by careful liming to lower the soil acidity at one end.
Mr. Moffett was always careful. He didn’t even own a grass-whip for edging, because the spinning fishline wasn’t precise enough. He used hedge trimmers and his trowels instead.
Betsy’s father was always careful with his gardening.
Hollies grew along the side of the house, flanking the doorway two and two. There were three China Girls and a China Boy that Mr. Moffett said wouldn’t form berries but was necessary anyway. The holly leaves were sharp. They crowded the concrete pad in front of the door.
Shrubs concealed the back yard. The top of what had been the swing set was just visible above the forsythias. The bars were now festooned with baskets holding fuchsias and campanula. Betsy didn’t suppose those plants would spend the winter outdoors, but she was afraid to ask her father what he planned to do with them.
Betsy unlocked the door and went into the kitchen. She dropped her jacket on a chair and opened a can of ravioli to warm for a snack in the microwave while she changed clothes.
Three large bird-of-paradise plants grew from a pot in front of the window beside the refrigerator. A pothos sprawled from the tray beneath the sink window and across most of the back wall. The growlight in the ceiling flooded down on them as well as on the cycads and baobab on the kitchen table.
Betsy visualized the baobab spurting up to the size its ancestors grew to on the African plains—seventy feet tall, with a huge water-filled trunk. The house would disintegrate, and the Moffetts would have to move back to an apartment where Betsy’s father couldn’t garden any more.
Oh, well.
Betsy changed her school clothes for worn jeans and a sweatshirt in her room. She had to turn the overhead light on to see, because the basket-hung fern covered the window almost completely. At least the light fixture held a regular bulb. Her father had given up on another growlight when Betsy began to cry.
A free-standing hanger rail holding skirts and blouses filled the space between the bed and the wall. The closet had been converted to shelves to store bulbs through the winter. Betsy’s father had given her a choice. She could have kept the closet, but then her sweaters and underwear would have gone into cardboard boxes while her dresser provided for the bulbs.
Sighing, Betsy went back to the kitchen. The pothos tickled her neck with a pointed leaf as she got a soda out of the refrigerator. She dumped the ravioli on a plate and carried the snack out through the living room to the front door.
The box in the center of the living room holding the datura was four feet square. It would have made the room seem claustrophobically small even without the other plants filling the comers and shelves on all the walls.
Betsy sat down on the front steps and ate her ravioli bleakly. She could hear the other children playing down the street, but she was too depressed to go join them.
“Whoa, Bobo,” a voice said.
Betsy’s eyes focused. Though she’d been looking toward the street, there was nothing in her mind but dull green thoughts. Now she saw that Jake had halted his heavily-laden wagon in front of the Moffetts’ driveway. “Oh!” she called. “Hi, Jake!”
As always before when Betsy had seen him, Jake was carrying a new assortment of plants. This time many of them were completely covered in what looked like blankets and old bedsheets.
Harbie ran to Betsy and began licking her hands. The dog didn’t try to get the last three ravioli until Betsy put the plate down on the step and walked out to the wagon.
“Good afternoon, missie,” Jake said, tipping his hat. “Might I trouble you for a bucket of water for Bobo?”
It was funny: even in Betsy’s present mood, the flowers and bushes in the wagon had a cheerful look to them. Most of the blooms were bigger and brighter than anything Betsy’s father had managed to grow, but the difference was greater than that.
“Sure,” Betsy said, starting toward the shed where she knew her father kept galvanized buckets of various sizes. Then she stopped and turned around again. “Jake,” she said. “Would you like a soda?”
“I surely would,” the black man said. “But let me pay for it, missie. It’s better that I do if anybody should ask.” Betsy still wasn’t sure about Jake’s age. His face was unwrinkled and his mustache was dark, but sometimes she got the feeling he was—old. Very old.
“I—” Betsy said. “Jake, come in the house with me.” Bobo snorted. Jake shook his head firmly. “No, missie,” he said. “That I will not do, nossir.”
Betsy squeezed her eyes to keep from crying. “Will you look in through all the windows at least?” she begged. “You know about plants. I want you to see the house. And the yard!”
Jake got down from the wagon seat, moving with the deliberation of a big cat rather than an old man. He walked to the front window, careful not to step on the low bushes planted along the front of the house. “Pretty enough bog rosemaries,” he said. “A bit on the puny side, though.”
“My dad calls them andromeda,” Betsy said.
“To tell the truth,” Jake murmured, “I thought he might.” Betsy darted inside, ready to move anything that prevented Jake from getting a clear view of the environment in which she lived. He walked to her window after gazing seriously into the living room. Betsy opened the closet doors and swung the fem out of the way so that he could look in.
The spare bedroom had become a hothouse with multiple banks of growlights. Betsy couldn’t get to the orchid-shrouded window, but the mass of variegated green Jake could glimpse was sufficient to give him the picture. Her father’s bedroom was almost as packed, though the plants lowering over the dresser and single bed weren’t as temperature sensitive.
The bathroom window was above head height. Jake could see the begonias in the hanging basket, but the tubbed water lily that turned the shower/bath into a cramped shower was concealed. She could tell him about it, but it was such a drop in the bucket that she didn’t suppose she’d bother.
While Jake peered through one kitchen window, then the other, Betsy flicked her way past the pothos and got another soda. She met Jake again at the side door, where he was fingering the leaves of the China Boy holly. His lips smiled slightly, but his eyes were a cold brown Betsy hadn’t seen before.
“Jake,” she said, “I can’t stand this. What am I going to do?”
Jake sipped the soda, looking over the top of the can as he surveyed the back yard. At last he lowered the can and handed it back to Betsy, empty, without looking at her.
“You know,” he said, “everybody ought to have plants in their life, missie. But they oughtn’t to be your life . . . and sure you oughtn’t to make them somebody else’s life besides.”
“But what am I going to do, Jake?”
Jake suddenly beamed at her. “Come along with me to the wagon, missie,” he said. He waved her ahead of him. Harbie led them up the congested path, barking cheerfully.
“It seems to me,” Jake resumed as he pulled a shovel and a narrow spade from the bed of his wagon, “that since your father likes plants so all fired much, we ought to give him some more plants.”
He handed the tools to Betsy and reached back for one of the larger plants—one completely covered by a stained wool blanket that had originally been olive drab.
Betsy thought about her savings passbook with the—small—amount of her aunt’s Christmas gift in it. “Ah . . .” she said. “How much will this cost? Because—”
Jake looked down. For a moment, he seemed as old as the Earth itself, but he was smiling.
“I’ll barter the plants to you, missie,” he said. “For one Pepsi Cola. And a smile.”
Betsy gave him a broad, glowing smile.
The sky was still bright when Mr. Moffett pulled up in the street, but the ground was a pattern of shadows and muted colors that made the headlights necessary for safety. He’d be able to get the last of the front beds turned, but the remainder of the evening would be spent inside with the orchids.
The air had a slight nip to it. Warm days weren’t over yet, but the nights were getting cool. He’d have to bring in all the half-hardy plants within the month. Locating them indoors would require planning.
Children called to one another down the street as Mr. Moffett followed the walk to his front door. A basketball whopped a backboard, though there didn’t seem to be enough light to play. He wondered if Betsy was among the group.
Something caught at Mr. Moffett’s legs. He’d built the walk of round, pebble-finished concrete pavers, bordered on either side by statice. The flowers were finished growing, but the papery blooms remained on the stems like so many attractive, dried-flower displays.
They should have finished growing. In fact, the plants at the head of the walk seemed to have spread inward during the day. They were sticking to his knees.
Mr. Moffett detached himself carefully. He couldn’t afford to replace the trousers of this suit, not with the bulb order he was preparing for next spring.
The small earth-toned flowers even clung to his hands. Statice didn’t have stickers, so it must be dried bud casings that gripped him.
Mr. Moffett was smiling faintly as he walked to the front door, fishing in his pocket for his keys. He’d dosed his beds with a hormonal additive he’d ordered from Dresden, Azetelia Ziehenstoff. Perhaps he’d been a little excessive with the statice.
He inserted the key in the lock. “Betsy, are you home?” he called.
The rosebushes trained up the pillars to either side rustled. They gripped his shoulders from behind.
Mr. Moffett shouted. For a moment he thought his daughter was playing a joke. He looked around. The bush to his left extended a tendril toward his elbow. The spray of fresh leaves on the end exaggerated the movement like the popper tip of a bullwhip.
“Hey!”
The main stems were biting through multiple layers of cloth and the skin of his shoulders. Lesser thorns on the tendril pricked him as well, almost encircling his arm.
Holding him.
The front door was unlatched. Mr. Moffett hurled himself toward it, but he couldn’t break the thorns’ grip on his back. Another tendril slid dryly across his neck. He wriggled out of his coat, all but the left arm, and then tore himself free of that also. The lining pulled from his sleeve. There were streaks of blood on his polyester-blend shirt. He fell on the living room floor.
The suitcoat writhed in the air behind him as the roses continued to explore the fabric.
Mr. Moffett was breathing hard, A rose tendril waggled interrogatively toward the doorway. Mr. Moffett kicked the door shut violently.
The living room seemed dark. He looked around to be sure the bank of growlights in the ceiling was turned on. It was, but the datura in the central planter had more than doubled in height since he left in the morning. The dark, bluish-green leaves now wrapped the fixture, permitting only a slaty remnant of the light to wash the room.
The plant whispered. The flowers, white and the size of a human head, rotated toward the man on the floor. They were deadly poison, like all parts of the datura. Stamens quivered in the throats of the trumpet-shaped blooms as if they were so many yellow tongues.
Mr. Moffett got up quickly and walked to the kitchen. His right pants leg flapped loose. He hadn’t noticed it being tom while he struggled with the rose.
He was sweating. He wasn’t a drinker, but there was a bottle of Old Crow in the cabinet behind the oatmeal. This was the time to get it down.
The kitchen . . . The kitchen wasn’t right. The bird-of-paradise plants made a thin buzzing noise, and their flowers trembled. They didn’t look the way they—
Mr. Moffett had put his hand on the kitchen table without being aware of the fact in his concentration on the birds-of-paradise. Pain worse than he ever recalled feeling lanced up his arm.
The dwarf baobab had swung down a branch. There were spikes in the bottom of every one of the tiny leaves. They stabbed deeply through the back of Mr. Moffett’s hand.
He screamed and hurled himself sideways. He collided with the refrigerator. The back of his hand looked as though he’d been using it as a pull-toy for a score of insufficiently-socialized cats. He was spattering blood all over the kitchen.
Something dropped around his neck. The pothos was trying to strangle him. The thin, green-white vine was no match for the hysterical strength with which Mr. Moffett tore its stem and leaves to shreds.
The buzzing was louder. He glanced up. The orange bird-of-paradise flowers lifted off their stems. They hovered for a moment, looking and sounding like the largest hornets in the world. They started toward Mr. Moffett.
Crying uncontrollably, Mr. Moffett threw open the side door and jumped clear of the kitchen. He might have been all right if he’d continued running, but he paused to slam the panel against the oncoming birds-of-paradise.
The holly bushes were waiting.
Until the side door banged, Betsy waited in the back yard with the hedge trimmers in her hands. Jake had told her not to move until her father came outside again and shouted. The blood-curdling shriek an instant after the door closed was her signal.
She ran around the comer. The China Girl to the right of the door had her father in a full, prickly embrace. Mr. Moffett had taken off his coat, and his tie was twisted back behind him.
The China Boy on the other side bent sideways. The two bushes on the ends of the border were shivering in frustration that they hadn’t been planted close enough to join in the attack.
“I’ll help you, daddy!” Betsy shrilled. She thrust the hedge trimmers toward a branch clutching her father’s left shoulder. She clamped down with all her strength.
The holly’s woody core resisted the blades. Betsy twisted, worrying at the limb when she couldn’t shear it.
The branch parted at last. Those leaves’ grip on her father weakened, but he was still held by a dozen other limbs. A branch was twisting toward him from the rear of the bush to replace the severed one, and branches reached for Betsy as well.
The tips of China Boy’s limbs bent gracefully toward Mr. Moffett’s face.
“Betsy, get out of here!” Mr. Moffett cried. He pushed away jagged leaves that threatened his eyes, but more poised to engulf his head from all directions. “Run away! Run away!”
An air-cooled engine fired up nearby with a ringing clatter. Doors banged shut as neighbors came out to see what the shouting was about. By the time anybody could tell in the twilight, it would be too late.
Betsy hacked at a twig, severing it cleanly. She was crying. It wasn’t supposed to be like this! She closed the trimmer on another branch, this one thicker than her thumb. The blades wouldn’t cut. She tugged and twisted and bawled.
“Darling, get away!” her father cried.
Something grabbed the cuff of her jeans. She ignored it. China Boy unfolded a limb toward her face. The kinked branch was amazingly long when it straightened to its full length. The touch on her cuff was now a spiky, circular grip that held her like a shackle.
Harbie curved through the air and caught the China Boy branch in teeth that were amazingly long and white. The dog’s weight slapped the spray of jagged leaves away from Betsy’s face an instant before the big jaws crushed through and severed the branch completely.
Jake came around the front comer, guiding the big roto-tiller. The spinning bolo tines chewed into the end China Girl. The engine labored, then roared with triumph as the blades ground free and forward again.
The holly gripping Mr. Moffett shuddered as the rototiller slammed it, shredding roots and main stem together. The limb Betsy hacked at finally parted.
All the holly branches relaxed with the suddenness of a string snapping. Mr. Moffett fell free.
“Watch yourselfs, sir and missie!” Jake shouted over the racket of the rototiller’s exhaust. The tines sparked as Jake drove over the concrete pad outside the door and into the recoiling China Boy.
Betsy sat down abruptly on the gravel. Her knees suddenly wouldn’t lock. Her father crawled over to her.
