“It’s pretty hard to get to,” he’d said, and his voice was calculated exactly so that this would only egg on the dreamers and the hard-headed. “I can show you on satellite photographs.”
The pineapple farm was in the middle of one of the most desolate stretches of the American Southwest. Surrounded by howling desert on all sides, it was a two-day drive from the nearest town, and then a day-long walk from where the road was abruptly abridged by a set of iron spikes planted deep in the sand. “You can try to drive on it,” he said, nonchalantly twisting the stem of his cocktail glass in lazy loops, “but you’ll sink, and the vultures love shiny things.” Instead there was a makeshift track, miles of weatherbeaten planks that pilgrims trod grimly, gritting their teeth against the onslaught of blowing sand.
It was a marvel of engineering, the pineapple farm, rooted as it was to some of the most unforgiving land around. He had bought the property specifically because of its harsh remoteness, but his motives had never been made publicly available. Some speculated a failed love affair with a Hawaiian princess, others the madness that comes of great wealth acquired too quickly, but few could resist the curiosity. Fewer still had made the attempt; barroom boasts were as frequent and empty as their proclaimers’ beer bottles, but there were three known expeditions, of which only two returned.
Nobody knew what was so compelling to those who set out to see for themselves the pineapple farm’s miraculous workings, but it was generally agreed that the sorts of people who would be lured by such things were the sorts of people who tried for them, so nobody was impressed by the two gritty, sunburned tales of failure on a fool’s errand, and nobody was particularly upset at the loss of the third, a known idiot. Still, the occupants of the tavern nearest the pineapple farm still found time to speculate about his fate.
“Damn fool got hisself stuck in the quicksand they got up there.”
“You’re the damn fool, there ain’t no quicksand in this desert. You gotta have water to have quicksand.”
“You gotta have water to have pineapples, too, and that old loon up yonder’s got a whole field of ‘em.”
“Ain’t nobody ever seen it for themselves. I think it’s just stories.”
Around and around, their curiosity unfulfilled, impossible to satisfy. One evening, after recounting a well-worn version involving bandits, coyotes, and a Gypsy queen, a voice spoke up from the back of the room.
“You’ve got it all wrong.”
Heads swung around in shocked unison. The voice emanated from the darkest corner of the shadowy end of the dim bar, seemed to come from the darkness itself.
“Well, just what do you think happened then, smart guy?”
There was a low chorus of half-menacing agreement. The voice in the corner shifted, rather, its owner shifted, but it seemed only to be a rearranging of the shadows.
“The path leads to a lake so big it might as well be the ocean.”
The murmurs escalated, a few jeers punctuating the tension that grew despite the most practiced nonchalance of the tavern’s inhabitants. “A lake? You know we’re talking about the desert here, son.” “A lake? Maybe a dry one.” Not known for their fancy talk to being with, even the most eloquent among their number could not seem to overcome their astonishment to deliver a satisfyingly demeaning dismissal.
“It’s a lake. A big one. I saw it.”
“Bullshit you saw it!” shouted one indignant young pup. The sausage-fingered bar matron shushed him with a whip of her towel.
“I went out looking for the pineapple farm a long time ago,” the voice continued. “I can’t rightly say what it was made me go looking, only I had a dream that wouldn’t stop coming, every night. In it I was sailing through the golden waters of Paradise, and there were flowers and trees and all sorts of wonders, and I looked down and my boat was a hollowed-out pineapple, and I knew right then I had to find the pineapple farm.”
A few of the more religious congregants murmured their assent.
“So I set out from my home, with a full tank of gas and a pair of good shoes.”
The members of the first expedition looked down shamefully. They had worn only flip-flops, and the sting of that innocence still burned in each of their souls.
“I made it to the end of the road, and set out along the path. I brought a full flask of water and a compass, because the sand had blown over the planks but I knew I had to head north, because that was the direction I had been going in my dream.”
The leader of the second expedition bit his lip hard. They had worn sturdy leather boots but had been given no premonitions and had left their map in the car.
“After what seemed like a lifetime of walking through the desert, you can imagine my surprise when I fell headlong into the vastness of that body of water. I tell you all, I swear to you on my life, it was the coolest, freshest, purest water I have ever fallen into.”
By now even the most outraged had lost their enthusiasm for bilious disagreement and were leaning in close to hear.
“I thought I had died, and was on my way to my reward, whatever that may be. All around me I heard the songs of birds, and I could smell the sweetness of pineapple in the air. It was the Paradise of my dream, and I had reached it.”
“Well?” demanded the young pup. The matron whipped her towel at him and he whimpered.
“I didn’t know what to do, if I should swim toward what I thought was Paradise, or if I should wait and see what happened. I was just about to start swimming when something came up from the depths and pushed me toward the far shore.”
The occupants of the tavern were silent. The silence overwhelmed the room until it became a palpable force, squeezing at the throats of the patrons until one let loose a wild half-cough, a strained and guttural exhalation of suppressed anticipation.
“The strange beast—for it was a beast, no question—pushed me across the clear blue waters of the lake until I was thrown hard against the shore. I rubbed my eyes to clear them and I found myself staring at two of the cleanest, most well-tended shoes I’d ever seen in my life.”
A low shuffle permeated the room for a moment as the assembled townsfolk tried to hide their shoes out of embarrassment.
“Before I could speak, I heard the soft sluice of water as my unknown conveyance revealed itself. The sun was so bright I couldn’t make it out, only that it must be very large from the way the mysterious figure before me looked up to receive it.”
The voice paused, the darkness wavered for a moment as a single match illuminated only an indistinct palm, and the tip of a waiting cigarette. There was a half-breath of smoke before the flame was extinguished and the voice continued, unencumbered by the light.
“The man—for it was a man standing in front of me—asked the great beast why I had been spared, and only then was I able to see it. Rising out of the waters was a monstrous dragon, a serpentine monolith with a fierce beard and razor-sharp claws.”
It was at this point that the least credulous in the bar let out a sharp cacophony of disbelieving snorts, though they were quickly reprimanded by the matron and several others more devoted to the possibility of the fantastic. Don’t forget, their stern, reproachful glances seemed to say, this man is talking about the pineapple farm.
“The dragon reared back as though it was about to strike my name from the book of the living,” the voice continued. “But at the moment I was certain I was to truly enter the Paradise of my dreams, it stopped its fearful motion and pushed back away from the shore. I tell you all, its words to its master, as the man before me certainly was, have stayed with me all these many years.”
“What were they?” the young pup whispered as the matron hushed him with a half-conscious flick of her towel.
“The dragon doubled back as though it were making sure it had me fully in its sights, then turned first to its master and then back to me, hissing such a condemnation that at the time I wished it had done as it was intended and killed me at the outset of this insane journey.
‘I can really see what you tried to do with that outfit,’
and it slid languidly beneath the waves, the poisonous disdain of those words rising to the surface in unhurried bubbles, bursting bright as the scouring lights of the Rapture, exposing my weakness, my most secret shame.”
The voice fell silent. The crowd vibrated with the impulse to gasp but none dared draw breath. Finally, after several tortured minutes, a young barmaid ventured a stuttering query.
“What-” she began, then took a moment to collect herself before continuing. “What were you wearing?”
The voice did not resume for a long time. The darkness layered upon the shadowed darkness shifted uncomfortably, yet nobody else dared speak.
“You know,” came the voice after a desperate eternity. “The usual.”
There was a communal release of breath, sharp as a pistol crack. A low rumbling of voices became an increasing cacophony of pity and disbelief until a loud whistle from the corner stopped the blare.
“It was gone. It had spared my life but had taken a terrible toll on my soul. I no longer cared for the golden pleasures of that pineapple-studded dreamscape. I had squandered my time on this Earth, and was unworthy of such treasures. I knew this deep inside. The journey had been a failed undertaking from the start. I had felt, as I was packing up my Taurus, that I should be better-prepared for the splendor of what I might find, yet I had neglected even that duty in my rush to acquire Paradise.”
The weary nods of the older, less idealistic patrons were almost audible.
“But what about the man?” the barmaid whispered, clutching at her ample bosom.
“The man,” the voice said, and then trailed off before returning at its full strength. “The man held out his hand to me. He congratulated me on my having survived this final test of the will, that I had not succumbed to the monster’s searing insight, that my mettle was of a kind worthy of the metaphysical pleasures he had spent his lifetime devising. Yet I knew within myself that the opposite was true, that I had been proved unworthy. The man seemed to sense this resignation in my soul, for he looked at me intently for a few moments before speaking.
‘Don’t mind Betty. He can be a real bitch sometimes.’
No matter how I tried to convince myself of the man’s honesty of intention I felt sullied, unbecoming of Paradise, so I thanked him for his implicit hospitality, then confessed my feelings. This man, this madman or this angel, who had created a pineapple farm to rival any in Heaven here at the center of a ravaged Hellscape, held out his hand to me, and told me there was a boathouse about fifty yards from where we were standing, and that I could take his outboard as long as I tied it up to the dock across the lake. With those words, he was gone, a retreating figure of mystery, of veneration, a pineapple-scented God on Earth, whose folly had shown me the folly of my own trembling and inconsequential humanity.”
With that, the dim amber searchlight of the cigarette was extinguished. The patrons were silent, anxiously searching each others’ faces for how they were meant to feel, to perceive this new life.
“So you didn’t even get to see the pineapple farm?” the young pup asked, only a hint of disappointment. The matron waved her towel, signaling her shared curiosity.
“No,” the voice said, heavy with sorrow. “I never did.”
“Then how do you know it was even there?”
The voice was silent for a long time. Finally, the hand that had heretofore only been seen as the chiaroscuro windscreen to a cigarette emerged from the darkness, clutching something as though releasing it would engender a terrible strife upon the world.
“Here,” the voice said, before it was absorbed back into the shadows for eternity. The hand released its precious cargo with a dull thud upon the tabletop.
Several of the more daring occupants immediately crowded around the table.
“What’s this?”
“It’s–”
“It can’t be.”
“But it is.”
There, illuminated by a soft corona of its own generation, lay a single pineapple ring, fragrant as Paradise, fringed with regret.
Nobody said anything for the rest of that fateful night, nor for a long time after. Whispers of expeditions to find the pineapple farm were met with a sad resignation that outsiders could not understand, nor could they fathom why the townsfolk, so eager to assist them in any way, pointed so dejectedly toward the last building on the way out of town on the road that lead to the pineapple farm. The pilgrims would approach this last structure before the trials that awaited them with trepidation, with a penitent’s fearful devotion, unsure of their need for diamond-studded cufflinks but certain of the path to Paradise.
