Johnny Appleseed

reckoning

afterward

Close the book! Do it now!

Seriously, stop; just stop reading. Tear out the pages and feed them to a hungry shredder. Close up your car keys in your fist, stiffen your resolve with a double shot of Jack, and gouge out those baby blues. For your soul, for your sanity, for the love of God, close this book while you can.

Still with me? No surprise there. Temptation is your birthright, as a child of Adam. It titillates at a primal level, awakens your senses. Temptation enters your brain through the holes in your face and burrows there a place for itself, a little black hole of appetite, gradually collapsing your morality into its ravenous self.

Is not this worm a most extraordinary creature, ladies and gentlemen of the jury? Silent and invisible, like the wavy scent-strands in cartoons, curling into nostrils and lifting the hungry off their feet, guiding them bobbing and insensate toward that bulging pic-a-nic basket. And temptation has one pointed purpose: to wrestle your attention away from the contemplation of the divine, and toward the shit of the world.

I cannot tell you how liberating it is to know the exact moment of your death! Free at last, and bound no more by the rules of the Great Monkey-Dance. In one hour and twenty minutes exactly, I am going to see the face of God.

And you will not be so far behind, I think.

Fellow custodians of the Garden of Eden, it is almost over now. We have fouled all the rivers and fished out the sea; we’ve melted the icecaps and torn holes in the atmosphere. The old forests are gone now, and the last of Noah’s ark cattle-prodded into death camp zoos, or boxed into McNuggets. What evidence were you waiting for that the apocalypse had begun? Must the rivers literally turn to blood?

Glance up from your smartphones for just a moment, you blissful idiots, and spare a last glance at the dying world. Your girls are tossing newborns into trashcans on the way to the prom; your boys are stockpiling automatic weapons. Around the world, murder and mayhem are slowed only by access to technology. Well-heeled Persian plutocrats can bargain for nukes, but poor African warlords must hack up villages manually, swinging the sweaty machete all the live-long day at blood-sick fly-swarming roadside checkpoints. No papers, ma’am? Please to stand in that line over there, next to that pile of hands.

Apologies for my rambling; I seem to have lost the ability to self-censor. The sugar walls of pretense have burned to treacle and collapsed. What’s left behind is the truth, and the truth is this: God has already abandoned this world.

But you knew that already, didn’t you? In your heart?

The bloody harvest is upon us now, ready or not. That’s not blasphemy, that’s scripture. It was always just a question of when.

Apocalypse now, baby!

This is not some dreary wakeup call…it’s far too late to save this dump. We are deep inside the event horizon already, spiraling in toward the noisy conclusion. War, pestilence, famine, fear: Which of the great plagues will take us? All of them, of course…just like the Good Book says.

Which brings us back to you.

Don’t read this book! Just close it; put it down. Don’t hazard your soul for a few hours of dubious pleasure. I tell you this: If you have trouble kicking Camels, or resisting the charms of that married girl in accounts payable, it’s unlikely you will prevail against the Father of Temptation, the archangel who boxed with God.

The book that follows is not mine. I have hijacked this space, at no small cost to myself, to try my hand at deterring you. I am not trying to save you, not exactly: My goal is merely to place your salvation firmly in your own hands, so you can answer for your decision later. If you are reading this, you had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to walk away. Now do what thou wilt, and let the record stand.

There’s a thought to comfort you through an eternity of torment and lamentation: What could have been easier than closing a book?

Enough; it is done. This is the end of all things, ladies and germs. Already are the righteous being called to glory. In one hour and fourteen minutes, the lights will dim and flicker all along the cellblock in electrostatic celebration, as the wormhole opens and closes. And a sea of grunting simian faces will hoot and cheer, insensible, believing they are witnessing the end of something, even as my heart leaps to behold the infinite glory of Heaven, even as this blood, all this terrible blood, is washed from my hands.

Where will YOU be, I wonder…sitting in traffic? Deleting spam emails? Tapping a Doritos bag up into your mouth to catch one last taste of this wonderful, salty dust?

Enjoy the bloody endgame, you poor, doomed motherfuckers. I am the instrument of the end of the world, and this is your final bugle call.

Sincerely,

The Right Reverend Simon Jarrett, Th.D

Cellblock C101/CodeRed Sector [Death Row]

Maricopa County Correctional Facility

Phoenix, Arizona

cookie truck

I’ll learn to work the saxophone

I’ll play just what I feel

Drink Scotch whiskey all night long

And die behind the wheel.

—Steely Dan, Deacon Blues

For what it’s worth, I’ve thought quite a lot about where to begin. I hope it makes sense later that I started here, but ain’t no way of knowing til it’s done, of course, and by that time, it’ll be way too late to start it any other way. Maybe it’s already too late to start it any other way, now that I’ve started this way. I’m no writer, not that you’d have guessed THAT already; only an observer. And what I see, here, after all that happened, is that it’s going to take ages to get it all down, and I sure as hell don’t want to spend the next six months working out the first paragraph. So there, bleagh, it’s done.

I’m probably going to screw the whole friggin’ thing up anyway. I told Johnny there ain’t nothing to be gained from writing it down, that all this adds is risk. I’m gonna drop someone’s real name, or a critical identifying detail, and get someone snatched back from the great home free, and slammed into jail or shot dead after all. This could all end here with those who survived and the memory of who didn’t and that’s just how it should be, but Johnny didn’t want to hear about that, and a promise is a promise, so here goes.

So here goes.

It all started at dawn. You would’ve called it noon, more or less—dawn was just our word for it, that priceless moment when you jolt the grid, and kick people’s nice little world out of focus. Wake ‘em up from that institutional stupor we all stagger around in, most of our lives. Dawn is when something unusual starts unfolding around you that you simply can’t process. Is this a crime? alien invasion? delirium tremens? All you know is it’s three steps out of the ordinary, and it’s happening, as the old-time magicians used to say, right before your very eyes.

For ninety-nine out of a hundred people, any disruption to the predictable pattern of things, any glitch in the matrix, is totally paralyzing. They can’t do anything but helplessly watch the phenomenon play itself out, or maybe throw a glance at each other: you seeing what I’m seeing? Hell, I’d pause right there with the dumbstruck bystanders more often than not, jeopardizing the critical onset of an operation just to watch ‘em glance around, and the concern knitting up their puzzled little faces.

Dawn.

It’s a powerful thing, choosing to be a bringer of the dawn. If you ever want to see a crowd of fully operational humans turn to stone, just scream at the top of your lungs in a hotel lobby. It’s a crack high, I swear to God: Crazy makes you unchallengeable, invincible. Nobody will even look you in the eye. There’s no downside to speak of; worst case scenario an apologetic doorman will politely hustle you out. Don’t be surprised if you find that you literally can’t do it, though. Society survives by cleansing individuals of such disruptive fancies, breaking you like a stallion when you’re young. Chaos is unacceptable to the system, and the system always wins.

But it is still just possible to live outside the system, though maybe for the last time in human history. And maybe, in the end, that’s all this was all about.

Oh, for Chrissakes. Where was I?

Dawn broke at noon, more or less, on a dusty rural Tuesday way off in the ass-end of eastern Arkansas. Where the lid meets the rim, if you picture that state as the bowl of a toilet. I was alone in the grooming aisle of this grocery store, trying to look casual as I adjusted a pair of mutually interfering rubber bands on Owen’s Zapper. The Zapper was essentially two ten-dollar presentation-pointer lasers strapped to a science-kit astrolabe, adjustable in three dimensions to spike a store’s security cameras. It was a homemade piece of crap, and it was giving me fits.

See, there’s always a coverage overlap when you have multiple closed-circuit cameras. They don’t want a spot in the room that can’t be seen, and that means, if you are inclined to turn someone’s tech against them, that there’s always at least one spot from which you can hit both cameras. I was being recorded right until the aiming of the lasers, of course, but that don’t signify; it was just going to a sad old DVD nobody was going to see until we were long gone. And when I got it to obey me at last, I concealed the ornery piece of shit in a top-shelf nest of shampoo bottles, waved to both cameras, then took them out.

The customers were wandering around at three-quarter speed, oblivious, like smoke-lulled worker bees. Scanning ingredient panels, scratching items off their wrinkled little lists, merging into the logjam of carts bumping slowly downstream to checkout. I gave a nod to the Asshole, on the far side of the store, who flipped me off. So far, so good. Time to move.

At the center of the store, by the baked goods, a pinched little college theater type in the official store uniform doodled his way down the check-boxes of a requisition slip. Before him a bearded, heavyset Brawny commercial in a faded Tennessee Vols cap rolled a hand truck, piled high with fruit pies and the like, slowly back and forth. He was a titan of fleece and flannel, shifting in the silence, whistling gamely but clearly impatient for this pencil-neck to get the hell on with it.

I lowered my gaze and relaxed a bit, to slow time down. A dust-webbed fan rattling in the corner stirred up a halfhearted breeze; the air conditioning concept hadn’t really caught fire yet, in these latitudes. My index finger dutifully strummed the rainbow of bottles before me: shampoo, crème rinse, conditioner.

A century ago, you know, a bar of soap sufficed to clean a human head. And those were dirtier heads by far: coal miners and street butchers and notorious outlaws, caked with mud and soot and blood and shards of busted whiskey bottles. Somehow, now that we spend most of our day sitting motionless, enthralled by TVs and laptops, now we need a three-step process. Our grandkids will no doubt ratchet it up to some seven- or nine-step ritual, queasy at the thought of our swinish generation’s filthy wigs.

I suppose I should mention that I was high. Not sneak-a-nip-of-a-stranger’s joint at the concert high, not half-baked: I was tunnel-visioned, hyper-aware, primed for hilarity. I was a silvery weather balloon upside down in the stratosphere, raining donut sprinkles on the clouds below. This was Johnny’s Texas Red, after all: the #33, kinder than Mother Theresa in a children’s burn ward.

Then a bell clanged on a string, and the front door swung wide, and in walked the Distraction.

She stood there, framed in the entrance with her fists on her glorious hips like goddamn Wonder Woman, poured into a pair of black-and-white checkered short-shorts she had apparently been hiding from us. It seriously cracked me up, because we’d been calling her Checkered Flag for days, since her entrance meant the race was on. My secret schoolboy crush only deepened; I had to fake a coughing fit or the gig was up.

Someone was always pulling this sort of shit. No matter how high-wire the gig, some joker on the team would feel compelled to throw in a wrench just to surprise everyone, to add some spice to the story for the fireside later. It was horribly undisciplined, and seriously spiked the paranoia level. I don’t know why Johnny never cracked down on it, although I suppose it’s not a bad thing, training-wise, to expect the unexpected.

With a fine show of oblivion, she glided through the aisles, scooping up random items—nail clippers, bleach, Gatorade—it was all a cheap red herring to throw the cops off our stink later. Hips moving slightly upward with each step, a genteel hula dance, choreographed to catch every eye she could. I was the Lookout, and the Distraction’s entrance was my signal to step outside the store and take up a relay position by the front. Yet I tarried, happily putting the operation at risk, just to watch this girl move.

Her name was Shannon, and she hailed from the coast of Alabama, as deep south as you can go without backing your balls into a gator’s snout. Her phrase, by the way, not mine. She was a brash Southern white-trash cutie, all tits and tirades and tater tots, absolutely top-line entertainment whatever the weather. A sweet southern elixir of textbook accent and acidic humor and great sweeping mood swings that took her from charm-school serenity to foot-stomping petulance at the slightest of slights. Sexy in a lazy, unathletic way, with biggish arms and legs undermining her tight little torso, and smooth, pale skin, and long, straight coffee-colored hair pulled back in one of those ponytails that the window at the back of a baseball cap is made for. A flash of her tailfeathers could send a busload of monks over the guardrail.

Shannon had just graduated from ‘Bama, and man, was she fresh out of school. Still very much in that navel-gazing dormitory mindset, where you shuttle back and forth among frat parties and Renaissance poets and basically withdraw from your home planet for four years, until its wars and news seem like so much TV fiction. This after four years of private high school, learning to conjugate Latin verbs, and cut coke with the edge of a meal card, and whatever else it is the pups of privilege do.

Out of the nest now, Shannon was naivete’s wide-eyed poster child. The world’s competing philosophies clamored for her bosomy embrace, and she tried to find room for them all, like a toddler gathering an armload of balloons. Shannon had a notion, for example, that you always ought to be barefoot on grass, because evolution had not prepared grass for the 20th-century’s clunky shoes. That kind of crap. It was going to take years of focused effort to sort a personal ideology out of all that raw material, which is maybe why she took to the road with us, instead of interning at an insurance agency or whatever.

Shannon did command respect, however, for all her innocence. She had clearly had to fight off brothers as a kid, and maybe worse; somehow you knew that if you crossed her, she had it in her to grab the back of your head and stub out a Virginia Slim in your eye. Bill was the only one who dared to attack her head-on: Something about her country-sampler simplicity rang false to him, and he went after her out of some twisted sense of duty, the British naturalist joyfully snapping the neck of the last dodo.

Ah, Bill…We’ll get to him.

Even hungry and pissy and soaked in mud after a long hike Shannon was sexy as hell, but this morning her look was calculated to appeal: white sneakers and pom-pom socks, the checkered shorts, as I said, and a threadbare white T-shirt through which could be glimpsed two of the perkiest protuberances south of the Mason-Dixon line. It would probably raise suspicion not to stare at the smoky girl tripping along the aisles, I rationalized as I joined the gentlemen of the grocery in a discreet group gawk.

And then I caught the evil eye from Bill, deep in character as the Asshole, and snapped out of it. I crossed toward the exit, and as I passed the giant five-foot-tall gumball machine they have by the front doors I laid ahold of the high-test fishing line threaded through the top of it, like a lobsterman checking his traps, and let it run through my hands as I pushed my way outdoors. The door closed behind me, its hanging bell clanging in an accidental dramatic flourish.

For the record, Bill really was an asshole. He had been one swanky dude back in the real world, apparently: he never made it to millionaire, I don’t think, but he’d been firmly on the track before he ditched it all to come with us. Wall Street was paying him sacks of gold to do one of those jobs that makes your mind glaze up: something to do with carving up investments to sell the fat parts to some people and the scrapings to others, blah, and trying to minimize the blah-blah between the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

In New York, mother of all urban jungles, Bill had been a true predator, perpetually scrawny and hungry and merciless: a master of camouflage and subterfuge, constantly, desperately on the move. His metabolism was core-of-the-nuclear-plant hot—he shoveled junk food into that furnace all day long, from alarm-clock donuts to midnight burritos, and you could still play the xylophone on his abs.

Bill was the asshole who dashed in front of you and stole your taxi; the schmuck having the loud, off-color conversation at the next table over, the unbalanced jerk in the elevator, jumping up and slapping the walls as his service fades in and out between floors. ("Hello? Hello? Goddamn it!")

Maybe you’ve seen him around.

He had been just wealthy enough to be able to live life completely out of touch with the real world. Assistants managed his schedule and reserved his lunches; dry cleaners folded his socks. Delivery trucks brought him stuff and garbage trucks hauled it away. He didn’t have the handyman skills God gave a bowl of soup, but Bill knew all about everything that wasn’t real, like investments, and taxes, and politics, and business. He knew why people did the things they did—he could predict the behavior of groups to a fair degree of accuracy, and, even better, make them do things they otherwise wouldn’t do. And that side of things, it turns out, pays a lot better, and keeps your shoes clean.

And Bill knew how to lie—to a woman, a boss, a friend, the Archbishop of Rome. He was the preeminent casual con artist of our time. There will be a statue of him someday in the cobbled courtyard of the Bullshit Hall of Fame: proudly staring into the sun with a stethoscope around his neck, a director’s megaphone in one hand, an astronaut’s helmet tucked under an arm. For six years he worked the Big Apple, moving around from one bit of high-paid foolishness to the next, securing successive posts with connections and charisma, not caring much about much. And then his ass fell off the grid with a loud thud, and he was all ours, this horrible man-child: a jackass on the lam in a doomed quest to clear his soul of various white collar crimes against humanity.

That’s not a pretty picture, I guess, but let’s be honest: Nice people are boring as shit. Show me a party with no loathsome jerk, and I’ll show you a roomful of people glumly plotting exit strategies. Bill was endlessly amusing in the way that only the purest, most unrepentant dickheads can be. And he brought a perspective none of the rest of us had, which I suppose is the point of having traveling companions in the first place. He could put you right there in the back of the limo with him, watching the flickering postcard lights of the New York skyline on your way home after closing a six-hundred-thousand dollar deal, or accidentally hitting the emergency button in the elevator to pin your boss to dramatize an important conversation. He was easy to hate, but entertaining, too.

Anyhow, as I stepped outside the store and into that mosquito-muggy Arkansas death heat, I almost faltered. There she lay before me, our target: a bone-white stepvan double-parked right in front. Bright and virginal in the midday light, with her rear to me like that, and her driver’s side pocket door slid open wide in a most unladylike way. A delicious five-foot chocolate chip cookie tattooed her flank.

Time to focus. I checked my watch and paced off the ten yards to the phone booth alongside the storefront. As I sidled in I deftly pulled out a half-joint from my pocket and pinched it between my lips, and dug in for the lighter. Alaskan Thunderfuck, they were calling it down here, and while it wasn’t the real thing, it was a fully acceptable red-bearded skunk-junk wonderweed, light on the draw and bitter, almost hoppy, with a very introspective high, like a third drink of scotch.

I picked up the payphone’s handset and began giving holy hell to every ex-girlfriend I could think of, for the benefit of passersby, as I scanned the lot for trouble. A soothing dial tone massaged my inner ear. Cathartic.

Smoking a joint at a pay phone in a convenience store parking lot may sound sort of bold to the uninitiated, but hell. We’d crossed over to cocky thousands of miles back. I wasn’t smoking to prove a point, or to tug the Man’s balls, or any of that crap: I was smoking because I wanted to be just a little higher than I already was. Buzz management, plain and simple.

It’s actually quite fun to get high, although we’re supposed to pretend that isn’t true these days I guess. That’s one genie they managed to get back in the bottle. Look at these earnest public service ads telling kids that drugs are uncool, that they make you a loser and an addict and wreck your relationships and shrink your cock. You know, the ads sandwiched in between the coffee ads and the beer ads and the cigarette ads and the potato chip ads. That bald hypocritical shit used to really piss me off, but now I just chuckle and shine it on.

Anyway, Owen was on this sort of grassy knoll off the parking lot to one side like a cleanup sniper, under a tree feeding nonexistent pigeons or some damn thing and watching me for an abort signal that was never going to come. I touched the ‘send’ button on the cell in my pocket and leaned lightly against the phone booth wall, crossed my feet, exhaled some of my carbon to mingle with the world, and let that wonderful white whale of a cookie truck fill my sights.

She was gigantic and dreamy, the fat girl at the end of the party, and oh, how I longed to climb aboard. But that was not the plan.

Inside the store, my call triggered a vibration in the front pocket of Shannon’s pants…the closest I’d had to sex in a month. She left off foraging and moved toward the center of the store, where Cookie Guy and the Manager were conducting their inventory.

Cookie Guy, forty-something and unhurried, tapped his thumbs to a private tune on the handle of the handtruck. He had his back to the great glass storefront, and Shannon angled her approach to keep him that way.

The Manager glanced up just in time to see her pinch a fruit pie off the rack atop the dolly. He continued chewing his pen, thoughtfully, as she slowly tore open one end and fish-hooked a finger inside, emerging with a red dollop that disappeared between her exquisite lips. But he was immune to her charms. That’s a dollar ten, he groused, returning to his checklist.

"Yeah, well, it don’t belong to you yet, buttercup, said Shannon, shaking her head. See?" She pointed her pie to the side of the plastic crate, where white letters declared: ‘Property of Entenmann’s.’ She peeled back the paper and took a real bite now, cleaning her top lip with the bottom one like a chimp, and shooting Cookie Guy a look as good as a wink.

He took the bait, chuckled. Technically she’s right, Mickey—you haven’t paid me yet.

The Manager ignored them both: whatever. As Cookie Guy fought a losing battle to keep his eyes off Shannon’s merchandise, behind him, in plain view out through the storefront window, a chunky young fellow jogged across the parking lot and began furtively tying the other end of the fishing line to the back of the step-van.

"What do I owe you, sweetie?" Shannon wondered, confounding the laws of physics by worming a hand into her tight back pocket. But Cookie Guy waved her off with a magnanimous smile.

Not a thing, baby. What’s your name?

And…cue the Asshole.

"Hello? Hello? shouted a mysteriously apoplectic customer, over by the deli counter. Could I get some fucking help over here, please?"

A scattering of onlookers watched in mingled amusement and disapproval as Bill banged a pair of long, plastic-wrapped submarine sandwiches on the counter like oversize cartoon drumsticks. The hapless sandwich-girl shifted nervously. Somebody tell my story, said Bill, playing the crowd. Tell the children how I starved to death in the middle of a goddamn grocery store.

The Manager drew up his full five-foot-six authority, and left Shannon and Cookie Guy to their commerce, crossing bravely toward his antagonist with palms outstretched.

He said he wanted it with everything, the sandwich girl offered meekly.

Not everything on the planet, pumpkin, said Bill. Look at this shit, he continued, furiously tearing off the plastic. Whadda we got here. Mustard, mayonnaise, salad dressing…I don’t even know WHAT the hell THAT shit is. No wonder everyone in your state’s so Goddamn fat. He looked up from the sandwich, caught a white-haired old lady staring. "What’s your goddamn problem, Mrs. Claus?"

And so on. The customers were hooked: united in a private prayer this thing would escalate, maybe even into (oh please oh please) violence, or an arrest—something to break the monotony of the everyday, and provide an anecdote for the dinner table. The last thing on anyone’s mind was taking a look out the front window.

Dawn had broken.

Holy crap, hissed Shannon conspiratorially, and leaned into Cookie Guy, keeping his attention. That guy looks dangerous. And Cookie Guy reassured her, and cracked his knuckles absently, using his thumb to hide his wedding ring.

And as the Asshole raged, and exhorted the manager to go on, call the goddamn cops, there was still such a thing as free speech in this country, Owen completed his steering-column-jamming thing, and released the parking brake, and the step van started to roll.

Owen. Owen was an ex-Marine, but not the kind you’re thinking of. He was a big kid, strong but flabby, jowls just saggy enough to keep his mouth ajar in an expression of mild perpetual shock, as if he could never quite believe what he was hearing. He was young and introspective and graceless to the point of black comedy: always nervous and frustrated, rarely clearing a doorway without bashing a knee. Anyone could tumble down a flight of steps, but Owen would lose his pants halfway down, and then step on a hoe at the bottom and split his lip. A grim history of social ineptitude had left him reserved and distrustful; there was always a telltale pause between your punchline and the nerdy snort of Owen’s laugh, as if he had conducted a quick background check to make sure the humor wasn’t at his expense.

Owen had not joined the Marines to defend his country, I think, or to whack his undisciplined life into order, or for the frank joy of killing enemy combatants. I believe he was searching for brotherhood, a place where hard work and sacrifice might earn him the fellowship his suspect personality had denied him.

But whatever he was looking for, he didn’t find it in the barracks of the USMC. He stuck it out until he finished his tour of duty or whatever it is they make you do there, but on returning to the world he found, as so many do, that civilian life had mysteriously lost its charms. So Owen quietly packed up and stepped off the face of the earth. He closed out the checking account, sold his apartment, and traded his crappy worldly goods for a sock full of cash and a used van to truck it around in.

We found him, or more correctly he found us, in St. Louis, after we’d put a police car into a public fountain filled with bubble soap. The spinning lights and blaring siren (and locked doors, to keep the magic going) made quite a beautiful spectacle, and we had gotten away clean. We were rather proud of that one, in those heady early days. Owen, however, figured out exactly how we must have done it from the bare-bones account in the online news, and showed up just as we were returning a critical piece of rental equipment. It was a quick lesson in humility, and he wanted in, and what choice did we have?

Once he threw in his lot with us, though, Owen’s skills quickly became apparent. His value to our little organization cannot be overstated. Borrowing vehicles, bypassing alarms, improvising stink bombs—you name it, Owen could get it done. He was the diabetic love child of Archimedes and MacGyver, forever pulling off these amazing little local miracles of physics, and it was exciting just to watch his mind click into a higher gear, winding copper wire around a carrot, say, as he set to turning your salad into a working radio.

Owen’s skills opened up new worlds of possibilities for us, which endeared him to Johnny, and therefore to the rest of us. He quickly became central to our gang, to the point where you could overlook that he was too loud and too brash, prone to geeky bouts of enthusiasm followed by long, sullen funks, and otherwise annoying in every possible way.

The cookie truck rolled, and the engine coughed to life. It was ours, now, and the dance was in motion…time to get the team out, and cover our retreat. So I dropped the phone and headed for the store’s doors, pulling a bright green ski hat out of a pocket and putting it on. The coil of string unspooled fast, and went taut just in time for me to look through the storefront glass and that giant gumball machine by the door began its exquisite slow skyscraper topple. Cookie Guy was still fifteen steps away when the giant plastiglass bubble crashed to the ground inside the doors, shattering on impact, spraying its hundreds of gumballs bouncing and skittering all over the floor. Cookie Guy skidded to a prudent stop, and the string snapped, and his truck was gone.

He stared out the window at me, amidst the rolling minefield, a statue in confusion. I pointed to my bright green hat—that was the point of the hat—and ran out of view, around the far corner of the store, where I tossed the hat on the roof and jogged across the back lot and up a small embankment to the highway on-ramp, where Owen was already idling with our delicious new cookie truck.

It was the perfect crime. The store emptied carefully, as Shannon reported later; a dazed and speechless Cookie Guy turned slow circles where his truck used to be, frantically scanning the horizon, as if hoping his ride would embark on a series of unfortunate turns that would route it back into the parking lot.

Shannon and Bill would soon slip away, unsuspected and unmissed in the chaos of the milling bystanders. And one helpful witness came forward who had seen the truck roll out of the lot, hang a louie, and cross over the highway, to head south. The specificity of this evidence reminded the Manager to call the police, which he did.

Unfortunately for justice, the truck had actually gone north, not south, and this witness, soon to disappear mysteriously from the scene, was a willful prevaricator of our acquaintance: none other than the famous Johnny Appleseed.

Now how do I begin to tell you about Johnny Appleseed, the most singular soul I have ever met? Johnny was a farmer…maybe the greatest farmer who ever lived. Plants more or less sprang out of the earth at his touch. He was attuned to the natural world in a way that was nothing short of magic: He could predict the weather from the miniscus on his coffee cup, could hunt and trap like an Eagle scout; could find his way through tangled forest paths or big-city cloverleafs like a bloodhound.

Johnny hailed from southern Texas, just inside the Rio Grande, though he had to be seriously challenged for the official state swagger to come out. He grew up wild, wading barefoot through green grass and river rocks and good, honest horseshit, in a typical small-town border oasis of irrigated fields petering out into desert scrub.

South Texas’ climate is about as extreme as