Body Surfing

had to do was make a little plant love—i.e., take the stamen of one flower and touch it to the pistil of another, and then gather and grow the seeds that ripened a few weeks later. Cross-pollenization, just like the bees did it, albeit a little more systematically. But if you kept good records and were patient, eventually you would create your very own flower: the color and pattern you desired, the number and type of sepals, the height of the stalk, the frequency of blooms. You could even register its name with the American Hemerocallis Society for the whole world to see. John Van Arsdale had developed dozens of minutely different flowers over the years, but he’d only registered two: H . “Baby Jane Doe” and H . “Amelia V.A.” The former was a simple peony-type double, as full as a rose but much more delicate, with scalloped white petals growing from an iridescent pale yellow throat: a simple, lovely flower, all the more so because it only bloomed at night, opening up like the full moon and withering before sunrise. The latter was much more flamboyant, like Amelia had been: a polysepalous spider, four iris purple petals alternating with four sepals in a paler violet. The sepals were more than six inches long, and—thedetail that had won him honorable mention from the AHS for hybrid of the year—they were tipped with long gold hairs, which gave the blossom an air of peacock pomposity. It had taken him fourteen years to breed that flower. Nearly the whole of his son’s life. Now he planned to dedicate the rest of whatever time was left to him to producing his final hybrid. He hadn’t decided what flower configuration or petal type he wanted yet, but he knew what color the flower would be. The rarest of all daylily hues, the hardest to produce: true blue.
    Jasper blue.
    Hemerocallis “Jasper V.A.”
     
    The morning after he found the stranger sleeping in his barn, he made his way out to the field as he normally did. He got all the way out to the field before he remembered he hadn’t fed Gunther. Van Arsdale had gotten the pup as a present for his son two years ago—what kind of boy didn’t like dogs, right? But that wasn’t fair to Jasper. He liked dogs just fine. But he’d been fifteen, his Timmy-and-Lassie phase long gone. Girls were on his mind now, sports, parties, borrowing the truck. He’d gamboled about with the puppy for a few months but you could tell he was forcing himself, and after Michaela entered the picture Gunther faded from his memory like a Polaroid left in a sunny window. It was all Van Arsdale could do to get his son to feed the dog in the morning.
    Now, as he approached the cage, Gunther began dancing around, a line of spittle stretching from lip to earth. The kennel was twelve foot square, nicely placed under a horsechestnut that used to have a tire swing hanging off it. In the past year Gunther had dug the floor of the cage down a good foot and a half. It wasn’t right, Van Arsdale thought. A two-year-old dog the size of a mountain lion deserved to run free. Deserved to chase birds, rabbits, squirrels, possums, or cars if he felt like it. Dogs were rangers, marking and tracking their territory. They shouldn’t be locked up like this.
    The rottweiler glanced up at Van Arsdale anxiously as he openedthe door, then turned his attention back toward the river. He ignored the scoop of kibble his master dumped in his dish, the bucket of fresh water.
    “Damn it, Gunther. You know I can’t let you out.”
    The dog snatched a bite of kibble, chewed it open-mouthed, his eyes darting between Van Arsdale’s face and the wide gray strip of water. Van Arsdale looked at the river. The dog had never shown much interest in it before. Then Van Arsdale realized Gunther was actually looking at the wellhouse off to the side of the property. He wondered if maybe a raccoon had holed up in there, made enough noise to attract the dog’s attention. Something about the wellhouse nagged at Van Arsdale’s brain, but he was too muddleheaded these days to think what it was.
    Gunther flashed his master another look.
    “Don’t look at me that way, dog. It’s your own damn fault. If you could just stay outta trouble we wouldn’t have to keep you in here.”
    Van Arsdale heard the word. We . He winced.
    Bits of kibble and saliva splattered from the dog’s mouth. He deftly evaded Van Arsdale’s hand when he reached to pet him. He didn’t want a scratch between the ears. He wanted to run. To mark his