Farmboy - The Novel is a Dream Machine Site The Dream Machine --- The Imagination of the World Wide Web

His breath tasted a bit foul.

"Brush the teeth." he thought aloud. It was his only way of reminding himself to perform the unpleasant task. His dentist had reminded him at his last visit that age inevitably brought length to the teeth and that brushing was the only real way to delay the receding gum line.

He had never gotten into the habit, even though he always kept a toothbrush and toothpaste next to the sink in the bathroom to impress no one in particular. Or maybe that nagging voice that someone, somewhere had once implanted deep in his mind carping, "Brush them well. Brush them up and down. Brush them every day. Blah, blah, blah."

His front teeth, cracked in a long forgotten football scrimmage, showed the brown traces of years of smoking. Cigarettes and pot. That was in his youth. He had long since given up drugs, at least the kind that don't pour from a bottle. Too expensive and hard to get in the country. Still, he couldn't bring himself to regularly brush those damned teeth!

"Maybe, tomorrow." he told himself as he made his way to the kitchen. "Yeah, tomorrow for sure..."

He walked unsteadily down the stairs. He was hanging on to the railing a bit more tightly than the early hour warranted. Here he was, a hundred and fifty miles from anywhere and he had a fucking hangover! Lately, in order to get to sleep more easily, he had been pouring himself a few shots of Jack Daniels every night. Then he would read the newspaper, delivered earlier in the day but left unread until evening. Eventually he would find his eyelids growing heavy and would stumble off to bed. He told himself he didn't really need the drink. He did enough physical work during the day to be plenty tired at night. But it helped with...other things.

The tiniest echo of a headache tried to make its way to the front of his mind, trying to slip in around his morning thoughts. Before it could grab him, he heated some leftover coffee in the microwave, gulped it down and pushed it back where it came from.

He carefully emptied yesterday's grounds into the garbage pail. The pigs would be very disappointed if they didn't get their daily caffeine fix. As he picked it up, he noticed absent mindedly that there really wasn't very much waste in the pail. "One person sure doesn't generate much pig food." he thought. "Used to be a lot more..." and that the thought trailed off into a blank sadness.

As he walked across the barnyard toward the pig pen, the geese and ducks squawked and quacked noisily around him. The chickens held back with all the chicken dignity they could muster. They knew they would be getting theirs soon enough and seemed to disdain the clamor of the more raucous waterfowl.

Pausing at the feed bin, Michael added a few scoops of corn, oats and wheat to the sticky mess in the pail before tossing the whole mishmash unceremoniously to the eagerly awaiting porcine mob. With just as little ceremony, the pigs pushed aside the nutritious stuff as each fought for his or her fair share of the coffee grounds. Michael never got over his amazement at how thoroughly addicted they were. It made him feel somehow more righteous that these animals were as strung out on the South American drug as he was. He had read somewhere that caffeine was more addicting than cocaine. You sure couldn't prove otherwise by him or his pigs! His favorite, a young boar named Joe, got the most of it and oinked a pig greeting at Michael as he left the shed.

"Live it up, Joe." Michael answered. "Soon enough you're going to be pork chops, roasts and barbecued ribs." Joe was going to go under the knife soon. He had knocked up the sow and if Michael didn't butcher him soon, his meat would take on too much of the foul macho odor that hung around all sexually active males. As if in response to that thought, Michael took a whiff of his own armpits and muttered "Time for a shower..."

Next, he returned to the feed bin and parcelled out enough grain to keep the birds going for another day. He knew they rounded out their diets with the insects and grubs they scavenged in the barn yard, so he didn't budget very much for them. He had to save the most of it for his two steers. They had fattened up about as much as they were going to on hay and alfalfa. It was time to "finish" them off. Still, the fowl made a hell of a gabble as he wandered in their midst, tossing grain here and there, idly watching them fight for this or that tiny morsel.

"So it goes..." he thought aloud "...among all God's creatures."

He was remembering the news of the day before. Food riots were erupting throughout South America. Several governments had fired into the mobs with live ammunition and there was a clamp down on reporting the true casualty figures. Some sources estimated the number of deaths in the thousands. Other sources said that estimate was low. All that information came to him via the evening T.V. news.

More ominously, the local farmers were rumoring that some city people, growing tired of food rationing, were hitting the countryside looking for more stable supplies. Soon, it was said, they would be prowling his area. With all the ammunition they could scrape together for their deer rifles. Just enough gas left in their cars for a one way trip to his front door.

"Shit!" he exclaimed aloud, "am I really going to have to arm myself against those assholes?" Then he remembered that, not long ago, he had been one of those assholes.

He didn't want to believe it. He had heard it all before. But, something, deep in his darkest reaches, told him that this time it was serious. His small farm, in southwestern Wisconsin was about as far as you can get from big cities in the Midwest. About equally distant from Des Moines, Milwaukee and the Twin cities of Minneapolis-Saint Paul. But then, there was Madison...and Chicago! And he thought again of all those crazy bastards with their thirty-ought-sixes.

"Fortunately, most of them aren't really good shots, though." He caught this thought and quickly shook it away. "God, what am I thinking about? There's millions of 'em!"

Nevertheless, he had recently purchased a rifle. A friend and neighbor, Randy Carlson, had sold him an old Army M-1 and a bunch of cartridges cheap. Michael had only fired a rifle a few times in his life, but Randy assured him it was easy and that, someday, he would show him how. Randy knew how to use it from his military days. Michael didn't hunt, but there were a lot of deer around lately and he thought of possibly taking one of the "King's" deer for the winter. It was common in this area to poach deer. They ate the grain and, since not too many hunters got out this far during the season, their was an abundance of the critters.

But, all these black meditations burned away as the sun rose higher in the sky. It was going to be hot today, but not too hot. Maybe eighty, eighty five, in late afternoon. The crops could use the sunshine after all the rain they had that spring.

"All in all," he thought, "a good day...maybe even a great day. Might as well enjoy it."

And he set off to finish his day's chores. There were the steers to feed, eggs and stovewood to gather, work in the garden and a couple of tools to fix. Plenty enough to keep his mind busy and his soul warm. So he returned to the house to make himself breakfast and a couple of more cups of coffee, this time fresh, before getting to work. He fried three rashers of bacon, smoked just last spring in a dugout next to his house. He poached one egg, retrieved from the hen house only minutes before. Finally, he added a couple of slices of toast, carved before toasting from yesterday's freshly baked loaf of bread. Always the same. Bacon, one egg and toast. And coffee. He needed that coffee. He only baked bread now every three or four days. "Not like before..." came another unfinished thought, unbidden and unwanted.

The sun was high in the sky before Michael's thoughts strolled from the Zen-like focus that farm work gave him. It had always been like that. He had felt it ever since the first time he had run behind the hay wagon in his father's fields as a young man. The rhythm of the bales discharging from the rear of the baler hypnotized him. He was the shit picker, catching the big square turds the noisy beast contraption was laying on the fields. Pick up and toss, pick up and toss, the hired hand catching and stacking them as they came. A mindless but completely satisfying feeling of well being always filled him when he was in the fields. A oneness with the universe. Total enlightenment.

"Bullshit!" he thought suddenly. He stopped weeding the cabbage plants, sat up and took a sweeping panoramic look around the farm. From the garden, which perched atop a small rise, he could see the house, the corn fields, the alfalfa, the wheat, the oats and most of the animals, quiet now under the midday heat. There were only about 90 acres, but it seemed he was using ever square inch of it. It looked great, but something was definitely wrong. Not with the farm. With him.

The pictures he had seen on the news last night of the new leadership in what was left of the Soviet Union, had sent chills down his spine. He remembered them now.

"These are bad dudes." he had remarked to himself at the time.

Unlike the sweetness and light of the Gorbachev years, these guys were talking and acting tough. They were reviewing troops about to suppress rising unrest among the populace of Ukraine. Having lost the Baltics and most of their Asian republics, the rulers of the new commonwealth were drawing the line. Endless ranks of armored personnel carriers paraded through Red Square. Faceless soldiers, hidden within the bowels of these ominous war machines, passed in review.

"I wonder if they're getting enough to eat?" he found himself musing.

When Gorby introduced Glasnost and Perestroika to the Soviet Union, he didn't realize that he was grasping at capitalism to save the economy of his country at the very moment that capitalism was losing its heart, its soul and its mind. The craziness of the late nineties, with the Great Collapse of the money markets left the stranded remnants of the socialist countries with nowhere to turn. They had been certain that all they had to do was give up Stalinism and the capitalists would overrun them with investments, good will and material plenty. Fat chance!

Instead, the disintegration of the world system of finance capital left the Common Market united in name only, neveer quite making the changes they had promised to the curency and trade rules. Japan, lacking any real wealth, slumped into near chaotic poverty. The great "Shoku," they called it. Canada broke into four parts. Two, the far West and East, associated quickly with the U.S.. Mexico became a gnawing danger at the U.S.'s southern border and the "Taco Wall" of defenses was erected along that long border. Asia and Africa lapsed into the poverty that they had been its lot for so most of modern history. The U.N. was reduced once again to a powerless debating society.

And everyone decided, "Well, let's just keep our weapons."

Nobody talked much about war or weapons any more. One result of the retreat behind national borders of the nineties, was that tremendous stockpiles of armaments were within easy reach of the citizens of almost everywhere. The mere existence of so many weapons in the hands of so many people dampened the urge to international warfare. Then there was the One Day War. It was all just too damned risky! It seemed like every small country had chemical or biological or nuclear weapons. How long this uneasy standoff would continue was anybody's guess. One thing was for sure. There were not too many optimists left in the world.

So went Michael's ruminations as he sat there in his garden, that hot Monday afternoon. After a while, he would return to his work and his no-mind meditations. In the evening, he would return to the house, make a small fire in his wood stove and cook himself a small supper. That night, he had Polish sausages, homemade sauerkraut and boiled new potatoes. After supper, he watched the evening news, washed the dishes and then spaced out on the Monday Night Movie (some Rambo retread). During the movie, he slurped up a few ounces of Jack Daniels. Finally, it was time for bed. Monday night, he lay there only briefly, thinking once again of his departed wife, Miranda, before falling into a deep dreamless sleep.

...the best independent ISP in the Twin Cities