Ghost Town Read Free Page A

it qualifies as art.
    And as the life of every great artist proves, once you've finally got it right, you've long since gone crazy.

Fire the First Shot
    GOING CRAZY .
    Is it something that happens to artists because they are obsessed with a subject that's not "real"? Or is it because while they're pursuing their art, they're alone?
    I thought about this while walking through the fields of August, occasionally stopping to pull a bur from my ankle or duck an aggressive grasshopper.
    When you do stop to think about it, everybody lives alone, even the people who are jammed together in cities. I think that's why my mother watches TV all afternoon and into the night.
    She doesn't want to admit that she's alone.
    I found myself becoming somewhat excited about the project that lay ahead. The talisman, or the spirit behind the hand that carved it, had suggested that I begin to notice small things.
    This was ironic, I thought, because here I was in a vast, empty place that stretched in every direction like the Milky Way, with rarely a living soul in sight.
    One small boy in an entire abandoned town.
    One small planet in a solar system.
    But not Pluto, of course. They fired Pluto.
    What jerks!
    (To their credit, though, the astronomers who made the final, fateful decision to downgrade Pluto's former status as the outermost planet in our solar system to that of a wandering dirty iceberg at least had the decency to wait until the Kansan who discovered it had died.)
    As I frequently say, our lives hang by a thread, even after death, apparently, and so, too, do the lives of entire towns.
    This recurring thought brought to mind one of the more outstanding failures in Kansas, a ghost town called Silkville. It is a true story that I read in one of the books left to me by Mrs. Franks.
    Located in Franklin County, Silkville was the brainchild of an unpopular but very rich Frenchman who in 1870 acquired three thousand acres on which he built mansions and factories and planted orchards and grapes and mulberry trees—silkworm food—and to which he persuaded forty families to cross the Atlantic to join him in a vast silk-producing enterprise. For a time his silk business was a major factor in the world market. But bad luck, the bane of all existence, eventually reduced the Frenchman's grand scheme to rubble. Today, all but a few ailanthus trees are gone.
    What remains is less than a memory.
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

—Percy B. Shelley
Easy come, easy go.

—Chief Leopard Frog
Hey, don't look at me. I didn't do it.

—Spencer Honesty
    Today, the world's greatest empire is Wal-Mart, and it was to one of the thousands of emporiums of that grand enterprise that I traveled with my mother to obtain camera batteries and film.
    "We're running out of Windex anyway," she said. "And I'm sure I can always find a few other things we need."
    No kidding!
I thought as I looked around the place, stuffed to the gills with more than forty thousand items.
    Every kid in China must be working day and night to keep Wal-Mart filled with "a few other things we need," a few of which, it turns out, we don't really need at all, like the fish-shaped key chain I bought.
    When you push a button on its right fin, it tells redneck jokes. This extraordinary item on the clearance shelf was only two dollars, and I saved at least that much on the film, specially packaged in a BUY FOUR, GET THE FIFTH ROLL FREE wrapper. The batteries, on the other hand, seemed pretty expensive by comparison.
    I suspect that Wal-Mart knows this.
    Anyway, it was good to get away from the house for a while, and my mother seemed pleased with her purchases. On the long drive home we talked about some of the families who'd moved away.
    "I think the last straw was when they closed the school," my mother observed. "They might as well have ordered every family out of town right then and there. Of course, the handwriting was on the wall