Lullaby

Chapter 19

Everywhere outside the car it was yellow. Yellow to the horizon. Not a lemon yellow, more a tennis-ball yellow. It was the way the ball looks on a bright green tennis court. The world on both sides of the highway, all this one color.

Yellow.

Billowing, foaming big waves of yellow move in the hot wind from the cars going past, spreading from the highway's gravel shoulder to the yellow hills. Yellow. Throwing yellow light into our car. Helen, Mona, Oyster, me, all of us. Our skin and eyes. The details of the whole world. Yellow.

«Brassica tournefortii,»Oyster says, «Moroccan mustard in full bloom.»

We're in the leather smell of Helen's big Realtor car with her driving. Helen and I sit up front, Oyster and Mona in the back. On the seat between Helen and me is her daily planner book, the red leather binding sticking to the brown leather seat. There's an atlas of the United States. There's a computer printout of cities with libraries that have the poems book. There's Helen's little blue purse, looking green in the yellow light.

«What I'd give to be a Native American,» Mona says, and leans her forehead against the window, «to just be a free Blackfoot or Sioux two hundred years ago, you know, just living in harmony with all that natural beauty.»

To see what Mona's feeling, I put my forehead against my window. Against the air-conditioning, the glass is blazing hot.

Creepy coincidence, but the atlas shows the entire state of California colored this same bright yellow.

And Oyster blows out his nose, one quick snort that rocks his head back. He shakes his face at Mona and says, «No Indian ever lived with that. »

The cowboys didn't have tumbleweeds, he says. It wasn't until the late nineteenth century that tumbleweed seeds, Russian thistles, came over from Eurasia in the wool of sheep. Moroccan mustard came over in the dirt that sailing ships used for ballast. The silver trees out there, those are Russian olives, Elaeagnus augustifolia. The hundreds of white fuzzy rabbit ears growing along the highway shoulder areVerbascum thapsus, woolly mulleins. The twisted dark trees we just passed,Robinia pseudoacacia, black locust. The dark green brush flowering bright yellow is Scotch broom,Cytisus scoparius.

They're all part of a biological pandemic, he says.

«Those old Hollywood westerns,» Oyster says, looking out the window at Nevada next to the highway, he says, «with the tumbleweeds and cheatgrass and shit?» He shakes his head and says, «None of this is native, but it's all we have left.» He says, «Almost nothing in nature is natural anymore.»

Oyster kicks the back of the front seat and says, «Hey, Dad. What's the big daily newspaper in Nevada?»

Reno or Vegas? I say.

And looking out the window, the reflected light making his eyes yellow, Oyster says, «Both. Carson City, too. All of them.»

And I tell him.

The forests along the West Coast are choked with Scotch broom and French broom and English ivy and Himalayan blackberries, he says. The native trees are dying from the gypsy moths imported in 1860 by Leopold Trouvelot, who wanted to breed them for silk. The deserts and prairies are choked with mustard and cheatgrass and European beach grass.

Oyster fingers open the buttons on his shirt, and inside, against the skin of his chest, is a beaded something. It's the size of a wallet, hanging around his neck from a beaded string. «Hopi medicine bag,» he says. «Pretty spiritual, huh?»

Helen, looking at him in the rearview mirror, her hands on the steering wheel in skintight calfskin driving gloves, she says, «Nice abs.»

Oyster shrugs his shirt off his shoulders and the beaded bag hangs between his nipples, his chest pumped up on each side of it. The skin's tanned and hairless down to his navel. The bag's covered solid with blue beads except for a cross of red beads in the center. His tan looks orange in the yellow light. His blond hair looks on fire.

«I made it,» Mona says. «It took me since last February.»

Mona with her dreadlocks and crystal necklaces. I ask if she's a Hopi Indian.

With his fingers, Oyster fishes around inside the bag.

And Helen says, «Mona, you're not a native anything. Your real last name is Steinner.»

«You don't have to be Hopi,» Mona says. «I made it from a pattern in a book.»

«Then it's not really a Hopi anything,» Helen says.

And Mona says, «It is. It looks just like the one in the book.» She says, «I'll show you.»

From out of his little beaded bag, Oyster takes a cell phone.

«The fun part about primitive crafts is they're so easy to make while you watch TV,» Mona says. «And they put you in touch with all sorts of ancient energies and stuff.»

Oyster flips the phone open and pulls out the antenna. He punches in a number. A curve of dirt shows under his fingernail.

Helen watches him in the rearview mirror.

Mona leans forward over her knees and drags a canvas knapsack off the floor of the backseat. She takes out a tangle of cords and feathers. They look like chicken feathers, dyed bright Easter shades of pink and blue. Brass coins and beads made of black glass hang on the cords. «This is a Navajo dream catcher I'm making,» she says. She shakes it, and some of the cords come untangled and hang loose. Some beads fall into the knapsack in her lap. Pink feathers float loose in the air, and she says, «I thought to make it more powerful by using some I Ching coins. To sort of superenergize it.»

Somewhere under the knapsack, in her lap, the shaved V between her thighs. The glass beads roll there.

Into the phone, Oyster says, «Yeah, I need the number for the retail display advertising department at the Carson City Telegraph-Star.» A pink feather drifts near his face, and he blows it away.

With her black-painted fingernails, Mona picks at some of the knots, saying, «It's harder than the book makes it look.»

Oyster's one hand holds the phone to his ear. His other hand rubs the beaded bag around his chest.

Mona pulls a book out of her canvas knapsack and passes it to me in the front seat.

Oyster sees Helen, still watching him in the rearview mirror, and he winks at her and tweaks his nipple.

For whatever reason, Oedipus Rex comes to mind.

Somewhere below his belt, the pointed pink stalactite of his foreskin, pierced with its little steel ring. How could Helen want that?

«Old-time ranchers planted cheatgrass because it would green up fast in the spring and provide early forage for grazing cattle,» Oyster says, nodding his head at the world outside.

This first patch of cheatgrass was in southern British Columbia, Canada, in 1889. But fire spreads it. Every year, it dries to gunpowder, and now land that used to burn every ten years, it burns every year. And the cheatgrass recovers fast. Cheatgrass loves fire. But the native plants, the sagebrush and desert phlox, they don't. And every year it burns, there's more cheatgrass and less anything else. And the deer and antelope that depended on those other plants are gone now. So are the rabbits. So are the hawks and owls that ate the rabbits. The mice starve, so the snakes that ate the mice starve.

Today, cheatgrass dominates the inland deserts from Canada to Nevada, covering an area over twice the size of the state of Nebraska and spreading by thousands of acres per year.

The big irony is, even cattle hate cheatgrass, Oyster says. So the cows, they eat the rare native bunch grasses. What's left of them.

Mona's book is called Traditional Tribal Hobby-Krafts. When I open it, more pink and blue feathers drift out.

«Now, my new life's dream is I want to find a really straight tree, you know,» Mona says, a pink feather caught in her dreadlocks, «and make a totem pole or something.»

«When you think about it from a native plant perspective,» Oyster says, «Johnny Appleseed was a fucking biological terrorist.»

Johnny Appleseed, he says, might as well be handing out smallpox.

Oyster's punching another number on his cell phone. He kicks the back of the front seat and says, «Mom, Dad? What's a really posh restaurant in Reno, Nevada?»

And Helen shrugs and looks at me. She says, «The Desert Sky Supper Club in Tahoe is very nice.»

Into his cell phone, Oyster says, «I'd like to place a three-column display ad.» Looking out the window, he says, «It should be three columns by six inches deep, and the top line of copy should read, “Attention Patrons of the Desert Sky Supper Club.” »

Oyster says, «The second line should say, “Have you recently contracted a near-fatal case of campylobacter food poisoning? If so, please call the following number to be part of a class-action lawsuit.” »

Then Oyster gives a phone number. He fishes a credit card out of his medicine bag and reads the number and expiration date into the phone. He says for the account rep to call him after it's typeset and check the final ad copy over the phone. He says for the ad to run every day for the next week, in the restaurant section. He flips the phone shut and presses the antenna back inside.

«The way yellow fever and smallpox killed off your Native Americans,» he says, «we brought Dutch elm disease to America in a shipment of logs for a veneer mill in 1930 and brought chestnut blight in 1904. Another pathogenic fungus is killing off the eastern beeches. The Asian long-horned beetle, introduced to New York in 1996, is expected to wipe out North American maples.»

To control prairie dog populations, Oyster says, ranchers introduced bubonic plague to the prairie dog colonies, and by 1930, about 98 percent of the dogs were dead. The plague has spread to kill another thirty-four species of native rodents, and every year a few unlucky people.

For whatever reason, the culling song comes to mind.

«Me,» Mona says as I pass her back the book, «I like the ancient traditions. My hope is this trip will be, you know, like my own personal vision quest. And I'll come up with an Indian name and be,» she says, «transformed.»

Out of his Hopi bag, Oyster takes a cigarette and says, «You mind?»

And I tell him yes.

And Helen says, «Not at all.» And it's her car.

And I'm counting 1, counting 2, counting 3 …

What we think of as nature, Oyster says, everything's just more of us killing the world. Every dandelion's a ticking atom bomb. Biological pollution. Pretty yellow devastation.

The way you can go to Paris or Beijing, Oyster says, and everywhere there's a McDonald's hamburger, this is the ecological equivalent of franchised life-forms. Every place is the same place. Kudzu. Zebra mussels. Water hyacinths. Starlings. Burger Kings.

The local natives, anything unique gets squeezed out.

«The only biodiversity we're going to have left,» he says, «is Coke versus Pepsi.»

He says, «We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time.»

Just staring out his window, Oyster takes a plastic cigarette lighter out of the beaded medicine bag. He shakes the lighter, smacking it against the palm of one hand.

A pink feather from the book, I sniff it and imagine Mona's hair has this same smell. Twirling the feather between two fingers, I ask Oyster, on the phone just now—his call to the newspaper—what he's up to.

Oyster lights his cigarette. He tucks the plastic lighter and the cell phone back in his medicine bag.

«It's how he makes money,» Mona says. She's picking apart the tangles and knots in her dream catcher. Between her arms, inside her orange blouse, her breasts reach out with their little pink nipples.

And I'm counting 4, counting 5, counting 6 …

Both his hands buttoning his shirt, his mouth pinched around the cigarette, and his eyes squinting against the smoke, Oyster says, «Remember Johnny Appleseed?»

Helen turns up the air-conditioning.

And buttoning his collar, Oyster says, «Don't worry, Dad. This is just me planting my seeds.»

Looking out at all the yellow, with his yellow eyes, he says, «It's just my generation trying to destroy the existing culture by spreading our own contagion.»