sandals, and he votes for left-wing causes that my dad says would send the country straight to hell in a handcart if Congress ever got its act together and passed a bill. Also Jim’s farm isn’t like normal farms, which my dad says is a sign of something wrong right there.
Not only does Jim not use chemicals, but he grows all these crops that come in funny colors, like blue potatoes and white pumpkins and black carrots, or in weird shapes, like rattlesnake beans, that coil up like snakes, and these big warty Hubbard squashes that, if you didn’t know they were vegetables, look like something you ought to kill quick with a baseball bat before it eats your house pets. The farm’s name is the Blue Potato, which is also weird, because most farms around here, if they have names at all, are called things like Monroe’s Pigs.
“I need help weeding and watering and hauling manure and picking the bugs off stuff and hoeing the blue potatoes,” Jim said. “If the help could do all that without stomping on anything or killing anything through neglect, that would be a plus. You think you can handle it?”
“I think so,” I said. “Sure.”
“And you’ll have to drink these things that Emma’ll make for you,” Jim said. “They’re all pure vitamins and if you choke one down every day, you’ll live to be a hundred and ten with all your own teeth and hair and your sex drive intact. So just do it, man, and don’t hurt her feelings. Consider it part of the job.”
I said that sounded okay too, though at the time I hadn’t yet come face-to-face with Emma’s black-carrot smoothies.
Emma is Jim’s live-in girlfriend, and she’s another thing my dad doesn’t like about Jim.
Emma comes from River City, which isn’t a city but just the name people give to the bad part of town, that’s all trailers and ratty little falling-down houses with junk cars in the yard. Peter Reilly and I went over there on our bikes once or twice, just to see what it was like, and Peter said that all the guys hanging out were drug dealers, and there was one house with pink Christmas-tree lights that Peter said was full of whores.
He told me to go up and knock on the door, and I said I’d go if he’d go first, and he said I should go because he’d already done it lots of times, and I said, “That’s bullshit, O’Reilly,” and while we were fighting about it and Peter was punching my arm, some lady came out on the porch and yelled at us to get off her front lawn. She didn’t look like a whore. She looked like somebody’s grandmother.
Peter’s brother, Tony, says all the girls from River City are whores. So I figured Emma would be really hot, with tight rhinestone T-shirts and high-heeled shoes and lots of red lipstick and puffy platinum-blond hair.
But as it turned out, Emma isn’t like that at all. Actually, Emma isn’t even exactly pretty. She has this flat, round face spattered all over with freckles, and a lot of reddish frizzy hair, and she wears these baggy jeans. The first thing I thought when I saw her was that Jim really had cooked part of his brain, like in that old fried-egg ad that used to be on TV. Where they had this egg sizzling in a frying pan and a voice-over that said, really ominously,
“This is your brain on drugs.”
Emma made me come into the kitchen and sit down, and she gave me some cookies made out of flax or something that people don’t normally make cookies out of. They tasted funny, but I ate them anyway to be polite.
“They’re my own recipe,” Emma said, pointing at the plate. “What do you think?”
What I thought was that she’d given me way too many cookies, but I didn’t want to say so.
“They’re very healthy tasting,” I said.
“Jim’s real pleased that you’re going to be working here this summer,” Emma said. “I am too. But I think we should get some things straight right off, so you’ll know what you might be getting into.”
“Okay,” I said, but not too clearly,
Not only does Jim not use chemicals, but he grows all these crops that come in funny colors, like blue potatoes and white pumpkins and black carrots, or in weird shapes, like rattlesnake beans, that coil up like snakes, and these big warty Hubbard squashes that, if you didn’t know they were vegetables, look like something you ought to kill quick with a baseball bat before it eats your house pets. The farm’s name is the Blue Potato, which is also weird, because most farms around here, if they have names at all, are called things like Monroe’s Pigs.
“I need help weeding and watering and hauling manure and picking the bugs off stuff and hoeing the blue potatoes,” Jim said. “If the help could do all that without stomping on anything or killing anything through neglect, that would be a plus. You think you can handle it?”
“I think so,” I said. “Sure.”
“And you’ll have to drink these things that Emma’ll make for you,” Jim said. “They’re all pure vitamins and if you choke one down every day, you’ll live to be a hundred and ten with all your own teeth and hair and your sex drive intact. So just do it, man, and don’t hurt her feelings. Consider it part of the job.”
I said that sounded okay too, though at the time I hadn’t yet come face-to-face with Emma’s black-carrot smoothies.
Emma is Jim’s live-in girlfriend, and she’s another thing my dad doesn’t like about Jim.
Emma comes from River City, which isn’t a city but just the name people give to the bad part of town, that’s all trailers and ratty little falling-down houses with junk cars in the yard. Peter Reilly and I went over there on our bikes once or twice, just to see what it was like, and Peter said that all the guys hanging out were drug dealers, and there was one house with pink Christmas-tree lights that Peter said was full of whores.
He told me to go up and knock on the door, and I said I’d go if he’d go first, and he said I should go because he’d already done it lots of times, and I said, “That’s bullshit, O’Reilly,” and while we were fighting about it and Peter was punching my arm, some lady came out on the porch and yelled at us to get off her front lawn. She didn’t look like a whore. She looked like somebody’s grandmother.
Peter’s brother, Tony, says all the girls from River City are whores. So I figured Emma would be really hot, with tight rhinestone T-shirts and high-heeled shoes and lots of red lipstick and puffy platinum-blond hair.
But as it turned out, Emma isn’t like that at all. Actually, Emma isn’t even exactly pretty. She has this flat, round face spattered all over with freckles, and a lot of reddish frizzy hair, and she wears these baggy jeans. The first thing I thought when I saw her was that Jim really had cooked part of his brain, like in that old fried-egg ad that used to be on TV. Where they had this egg sizzling in a frying pan and a voice-over that said, really ominously,
“This is your brain on drugs.”
Emma made me come into the kitchen and sit down, and she gave me some cookies made out of flax or something that people don’t normally make cookies out of. They tasted funny, but I ate them anyway to be polite.
“They’re my own recipe,” Emma said, pointing at the plate. “What do you think?”
What I thought was that she’d given me way too many cookies, but I didn’t want to say so.
“They’re very healthy tasting,” I said.
“Jim’s real pleased that you’re going to be working here this summer,” Emma said. “I am too. But I think we should get some things straight right off, so you’ll know what you might be getting into.”
“Okay,” I said, but not too clearly,
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