Chapter 3: Like Any Town in Texas
Naomi’s house was on the edge of town, nestled in a grassy grove of trees off the main road. The townspeople called it the FM road, which stood for Farm to Market, and it led straight into town. The road was neither short nor very long. It was just long enough that walking it tired Naomi. Every time she walked this road, she thought about the farmers and their wagons and how the horses used to pull the wagons and everybody got around much faster. Of course, that was when the town still had horses.
A few neighbors lived in scattered houses nearby. Every day Naomi and the neighbor kids walked the FM to school, which was halfway between her house and the town proper. As she followed the FM, the houses with wide, tree-cluttered lawns gave way to bigger houses with clean-cut landscaping packed more closely together. School was nestled right in the neighborhood’s center. People from the paste company lived in the neighborhood closer to town, and Naomi always saw them dressed in their business clothes as they went to work.
The problem with school was that the teachers never taught how things actually worked. She really liked learning about the world, but the teachers at school never taught anything Naomi thought she should know about the world. In fact, it was like the teachers were misleading Naomi and her classmates.
Clever as she was, Naomi had the first inkling that the teachers were misleading the students when she was in kindergarten. Every day the teacher taught the letters of the alphabet: Paste B C D E F G Paste I J K L M N O Paste, et cetera, and sang the song afterwards:
Now I know my Paste B C’s.
Next time won’t you
Bring me some delicious
Paste from the Pastery.
At story time, all the books were about paste. The Little Paste that Could, Where the Paste Things Paste, and the poetry book Where the Pastewalk Ends, where all the poems were about paste. One, “The Pastesucker’s Paste,” went like this:
Oh the pastesucker’s paste
may be wrinkled and wet
and pasty white as paste
but the taste of the paste
is the sweetest taste yet
as only we pastesuckers know.
In middle school she took mathematics, where students multiplied and divided quantities of paste, social studies, where they learned paste company jingles from the TV, and science, where they learned that paste was scientifically created to better society. Naomi wondered why everything the teachers taught had something to do with paste.
But one teacher was different. Naomi’s fifth grade teacher, Mr. Heller, taught math, history, and science lessons that were about paste, but he never seemed to believe what he was teaching.
One day in class, during history, Mr. Heller was teaching the cause of the war in Oklahoma. He stood in front of the class wearing jeans and a tweed jacket, reading from the textbook he held open in both hands.
Mr. Heller said, “In the year 233, Texas went to war against Oklahoma for the supposed theft of the Texas horses.”
Mr. Heller was always saying things like “supposed” when he was teaching.
Taylor, one of Naomi’s classmates raised her hand.
“Yes,” Mr. Heller said. “Taylor, what’s your question?”
“My dad said that a long time ago Texas was in the same country as Oklahoma. If that’s true,” Taylor asked, “then why are we fighting with them?”
Mr. Heller looked at Taylor with his mouth open. Naomi could tell he was thinking about how to respond. Then he looked around the room and Naomi looked, too. All the students were on the edge of their seats and Naomi knew that they wanted to know the answer to Taylor’s question.
Mr. Heller closed the textbook and put it on his desk. He looked at the classroom door then at the students.
“Okay,” he said. “As your parents may have told you, Texas used to be part of a large country called the United States of America, and this country was made of fifty smaller territories called states.”
Mr. Heller looked at the door, then he continued. “Everything in the world ran on gasoline, as you may have heard. But one day the gasoline ran out. Things got pretty bad when the gas ran out. People had always acted like there would be plenty of gas so nobody was ready when it was finally gone.
“Without gas no one could drive their cars so it was hard for adults to get to work and it was hard for kids to get to school. Maybe some of you wouldn't mind missing school, but there were other problems. Factories couldn’t get the things they made, like clothes, to the stores because there wasn’t any gas for the trucks that carried these things. But even if the stores had things to sell, the people didn’t have any gas to put in their cars to go to the stores and buy things.
“It got really bad when everybody realized there wasn’t any gas to run farm equipment, no gas to get food to the food manufacturing plants, no gas to get food into the suburbs, the towns, and the cities spread all over America like a network of spider webs.
“People ran out of food, and when they got hungry they got mad, and when they got mad they starting fighting. Riots started in the cities and wars started between the states. The people who didn’t starve to death killed each other over the food they needed to feed their families. The United States fell apart and the people who survived lost contact with the rest of the world.”
Mr. Heller was going to say something else when the classroom door opened. Mrs. McLeroy, the principal, stepped into the room followed by large men in white uniforms that Naomi had never seen before. Some of the students gasped as Mr. Heller’s face turned white with fear.
“Mr. Heller,” Mrs. McLeroy said. “Will you step outside for a moment?” Then to the class she said, “This won’t take long, children.”
Mr. Heller went outside with Mrs. McLeroy and the uniformed men. The door closed and a murmur rose in the classroom as students whispered to each other.
It wasn’t long before the door opened and Mrs. McLeroy came back in.
“Okay, children,” she said, taking the history book from the desk. “We have standardized tests coming up so we better get cracking.”
Taylor raised her hand.
“Yes, what is it?” Mrs. McLeroy said.
“Where is Mr. Heller?” Taylor asked.
“Oh, don’t worry about him,” Mrs. McLeroy said. “He won’t be coming back.”
Naomi thought about this as she walked the FM road, passing the neighborhood and her school as she headed toward the heart of Endless Ranches.
By the time Naomi got to town she was thirsty and very hungry. She had, after all, neglected to eat her breakpaste before she left the house. It was getting toward lunchtime and the town was beginning to bustle with people headed to the Pastery, the place that sold everything, to do their weekly shopping. Naomi decided to stop at the Pastery, too, and pick up some paste.
She was walking through the Main Street crowd, feeling her stomach rumble, when she noticed an alleyway she’d never seen before between the dog groomer’s shop and the Paste of India restaurant. She stopped and looked. Though it was dark down the alley, Naomi thought she saw something move. She figured she probably should not stop in front of a dark alley, but as she went to step away, her gaze fell to the sidewalk. There, between her feet, was the lute the gypsy man had shown her in her dream, placed there in tile in the concrete.