In the Tall Grass Page 2

  “Oh, that’s charming,” he said. Now directly behind her, almost close enough to reach out and touch, and why was that such a relief? It was only a field, for God’s sake.

  “Hey, you guys!” The kid. Faint. Not laughing now, just sounding lost and terrified. “Are you looking for me? You there, Captain Cal? I’m scared!”

  “YES! YES, OKAY! HANG ON,” her brother hollered. “Becky? Becky, keep talking.”

  Becky’s hands went to her bulge-she refused to call it a baby-bump, that was so People magazine-and cradled it lightly. “Here’s another. There once was a woman named Jill, who swallowed an exploding pi-”

  “Stop, stop. I overshot you somehow.”

  Yup, his voice was now coming from ahead. She turned around again. “Quit goofing, Cal. This is not funny.” Her mouth was dry. She swallowed, and her throat was dry, too. When it made that click sound, you knew you were dry. There was a big bottle of Poland Spring water in the car. Also a couple of Cokes in the backseat. She could see them: red cans, white letters.

  “Becky?”

  “What?”

  “There’s something wrong here.”

  “What do you mean?” Thinking: As if I didn’t know.

  “Listen to me. Can you jump?”

  “Of course I can jump! What do you think?”

  “I think you’re going to have a baby this summer, that’s what I think.”

  “I can still. . Cal, stop walking away!”

  “I didn’t move,” he said.

  “You did, you must have! You still are!”

  “Shut up and listen. I’m going to count to three. On three, you put your hands over your head like a ref signaling the field goal’s good and jump just as high as you can. I’ll do the same. You won’t need to get much air for me to see your hands, ’kay? And I’ll come to you.”

  Oh whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad, she thought-no idea where it had come from, something else from Freshman Lit maybe, but one thing she did know was that he could say he wasn’t moving but he was, he was getting farther away all the time.

  “Becky? Beck-”

  “All right!” she screamed. “All right, let’s do it!”

  “One! Two! — ” he cried. “THREE!”

  At fifteen, Becky DeMuth had weighed eighty-two pounds-her father called her Stick-and ran hurdles with the varsity team. At fifteen, she could walk from one end of the school to the other on her hands. She wanted to believe she was still that person; some part of her had honestly expected to remain that person for her entire life. Her mind had still not caught up to being nineteen and pregnant. . not eighty-two pounds but one hundred thirty. She wanted to grab air-Houston, we have liftoff-but it was like trying to jump while giving a small child a piggyback. (When you thought about it, that was pretty much the case.)

  Her eyeline only cleared the top of the grass for a moment, affording her the briefest glimpse back the way she had come. What she saw, though, was enough to make her almost breathless with alarm.

  Cal and the road. Cal. . and the road.

  She came back down, felt a shock of impact jolt up through her heels and into her knees. The squodgy ground under her left foot melted away. She dropped and sat down in the rich black muck with another jolt of impact, a literal whack in the ass.

  Becky thought she had walked twenty steps into the grass. Maybe thirty at most. The road should’ve been close enough to hit with a Frisbee. It was, instead, as if she had walked the length of a football field and then some. A battered red Datsun, zipping along the highway, looked no bigger than a Matchbox car. A hundred and forty yards of grass-a softly flowing ocean of watered green silk-stood between her and that slender blacktop thread.

  Her first thought, sitting in the mud, was: No. Impossible. You didn’t see what you think you saw.

  Her second thought was of a weak swimmer, caught in a retreating tide, pulled farther and farther from shore, not understanding how much trouble she was in until she began to scream and discovered no one on the beach could hear her.

  As shaken as she was by the sight of the improbably distant highway, her brief glimpse of Cal was just as disorienting. Not because he was far away, but because he was really close. She had seen him spring up above the grass less than ten feet away, but the two of them had been screaming for all they were worth just to make themselves heard.

  The muck was warm, sticky, placental.

  The grass hummed furiously with insects.

  “Be careful!” the boy shouted. “Don’t you get lost too!”

  This was followed by another brief burst of laughter-a giddy, nervous sob of hilarity. It wasn’t Cal, and it wasn’t the kid, not this time. It wasn’t the woman, either. This laughter came from somewhere to her left, then died out, swallowed by bug song. It was male and had a quality of drunkenness to it.

  Becky suddenly remembered one of the things Weirdo Mom had shouted: Stop calling, honey! He’ll hear you!

  What the fuck?

  “What the FUCK?” shouted Cal. She wasn’t surprised. Ike and Mike, they think alike, Mrs. DeMuth liked to say. Frick and Frack, got two heads but just one back, Mr. DeMuth liked to say.

  A pause in which there was only the sound of the wind and

  the reeeee of the bugs. Then, bellowing at the top of his lungs: “What the fuck IS this?”

  • • •

  Cal had a brief period, about five minutes later, when he lost it a little. It happened after he tried an experiment. He jumped and looked at the road and landed and waited and then after he had counted to thirty, he jumped and looked again.

  If you wanted to be a stickler for accuracy, you could say he was already losing it a little to even think he needed to try such an experiment. But by then reality was starting to feel much like the ground underfoot: liquid and treacherous. He could not manage the simple trick of walking toward his sister’s voice, which came from the right when he was walking left, and from the left when he was walking right. Sometimes from ahead and sometimes from behind. And no matter which direction he walked in, he seemed to move farther from the road.

  He jumped and fixed his gaze on the steeple of the church. It was a brilliant white spear set against the background of that bright blue, almost cloudless sky. Crappy church, divine, soaring steeple. The congregation must have paid through the nose for that baby, he thought. Although from here-maybe a quarter of a mile off, and never mind that was crazy, he had walked less than a hundred feet-he could not see the peeling paint, or the boards in the windows. He couldn’t even make out his own car, tucked in with the other distance-shrunken cars in the lot. He could, however, see the dusty Prius. That one was in the front row. He was trying not to dwell on what he had glimpsed in the passenger seat. . a bad-dream detail that he wasn’t ready to examine just yet.

  On that first jump, he was turned to face the steeple dead-on, and in any normal world, he should’ve been able to reach it by walking through the grass in a straight line, jumping every now and then to make minor course corrections. There was a rusting, bullet-peppered sign between the church and the bowling alley, diamond-shaped with a yellow border: SLOW CHILDREN X–ING, maybe. He couldn’t be sure-he had left his glasses in the car, too.

  He dropped back down into the squidgy muck and began to count.

  “Cal?” came his sister’s voice from somewhere behind him.

  “Wait,” he shouted.

  “Cal?” she said again, from somewhere to his left. “Do you want me to keep talking?” And when he didn’t reply, she began to chant in a desultory voice, from somewhere in front of him: “There once was a girl went to Yale. .”

  “Just shut up and wait!” he screamed again.

  His throat felt dry and tight and swallowing took an effort. Although it was close to two in the afternoon, the sun seemed to hover almost directly overhead. He could feel it on his scalp, and the tops of his ears, which were tender, beginning to burn. He thought if he could just have something to drink-a cold swallow of spring water,
or one of their Cokes-he might not feel so frayed, so anxious.

  Drops of dew burned in the grass, a hundred miniature magnifying glasses refracting and intensifying the light.

  Ten seconds.

  “Kid?” Becky called, from somewhere on his right. (No. Stop. She’s not moving. Get your head under control.) She sounded thirsty, too. Croaky. “Are you still with us?”

  “Yes! Did you find my mom?”

  “Not yet!” Cal shouted, thinking it really had been a while since they had heard from her. Not that she was his main concern just then.

  Twenty seconds.

  “Kid?” Becky said. Her voice came from behind him again. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “Have you seen my dad?”

  Cal thought: A new player. Terrific. Maybe William Shatner’s in here, too. Also Mike Huckabee. . Kim Kardashian. . the guy who plays Opie on Sons of Anarchy and the entire cast of The Walking Dead.

  He closed his eyes, but the moment he did he felt dizzy, as if he were standing on the top of a ladder beginning to sway underfoot. He wished he hadn’t thought of The Walking Dead. He should have stuck with William Shatner and Marvelous Mike Huckabee. He opened his eyes again, and found himself rocking on his heels. He steadied himself with some effort. The heat made his face prickle with sweat.

  Thirty. He had been standing in this one spot for thirty seconds. He thought he should wait a full minute, but couldn’t, and so he jumped for another look back at the church.

  A part of him-a part he had been trying with all his will to ignore-already knew what he was going to see. This part had been providing an almost jovial running commentary: Everything will have moved, Cal, good buddy. The grass flows and you flow too. Think of it as becoming one with nature, bro.

  When his tired legs lofted him into the air again, he saw the church steeple was now off to his left. Not a lot-just a little. But he had drifted far enough to his right that he was no longer seeing the front of that diamond-shaped sign, but the silver aluminum back of it. Also, he wasn’t sure, but he thought it was all just a little farther away than it had been. As if he had backed up a few steps while he was counting to thirty.

  Somewhere, the dog barked again: roop, roop. Somewhere a radio was playing. He couldn’t make out the song, just the thump of the bass. The insects thrummed their single lunatic note.

  “Oh, come on,” Cal said. He had never been much for talking to himself-as an adolescent, he had cultivated a Buddhist skateboarder vibe, and had prided himself on how long he could serenely maintain his silence-but he was talking now, and hardly aware of it. “Oh, come the fuck on. This is. . this is nuts.”

  He was walking, too. Walking for the road-again, almost without knowing it.

  “Cal?” Becky shouted.

  “This is just nuts,” he said again, breathing hard, shoving at the grass.

  His foot caught on something, and he went down knee-first into an inch of swampy water. Hot water-not lukewarm, hot, as hot as bathwater-splashed up onto the crotch of his shorts, providing him with the sensation of having just pissed himself.

  That broke him a little. He lunged back to his feet. Running now. Grass whipping at his face. It was sharp-edged and tough, and when one green sword snapped him under the left eye, he felt it, a sharp stinging. The pain gave him a nasty jump, and he ran harder, going as fast as he could now.

  “Help me!” the kid screamed, and how about this? Help came from Cal’s left, me from his right. It was the Kansas version of Dolby Stereo.

  “This is nuts!” Cal screamed again. “This is nuts, it’s nuts, it’s FUCKING nuts!” The words running together, itsnutsitsnuts, what a stupid thing to say, what an inane observation, and he couldn’t stop saying it.

  He fell again, hard this time, sprawling chest-first. By now his clothes were spattered with earth so rich, warm, and dark, it felt and even smelled like fecal matter.

  Cal picked himself back up, ran another five steps, felt grass snarl around his legs-it was like putting his feet into a nest of tangling wire-and goddamn if he didn’t fall a third time. The inside of his head buzzed, like a cloud of bluebottles.

  “Cal!” Becky was screaming. “Cal, stop! Stop!”

  Yes, stop. If you don’t you’ll be yelling “Help me” right along with the kid. A fucking duet.

  He gulped at the air. His heart galloped. He waited for the buzzing in his head to pass, then realized it wasn’t in his head after all. They really were flies. He could see them shooting in and out through the grass, a swarm of them around something through the shifting curtain of yellow-green, just ahead of him.

  He pushed his hands into the grass and parted it to see.

  A dog-it looked like it had been a golden retriever-was on its side in the mire. Limp brownish-red fur glittered beneath a shifting mat of flies. Its bloated tongue lolled between its gums, and the cloudy marbles of its eyes strained from its head. The rusting tag of its collar gleamed deep in its fur. Cal looked again at the tongue. It was coated a greenish-white. Cal didn’t want to think why. The dog’s dirty coat looked like a filthy yellow carpet tossed on a heap of bones. Some of that fur drifted-little fluffs of it-on the warm breeze.

  Take hold. It was his thought, but in his father’s steadying voice. Making that voice helped. He stared at the dog’s caved-in stomach and saw lively movement there. A boiling stew of maggots. Like the ones he’d seen squirming on the half-eaten hamburgers lying on the passenger seat of that damned Prius. Burgers that had been there for days. Someone had left them, walked away from the car and left them, and never come back, and never-

  Take hold, Calvin. If not for yourself, for your sister.

  “I will,” he promised his father. “I will.”

  He stripped the snarls of tough greenery from his ankles and shins, barely feeling the little cuts the grass had inflicted. He stood.

  “Becky, where are you?”

  Nothing for a long time-long enough for his heart to abandon his chest and rise into his throat. Then, incredibly distant: “Here! Cal, what should we do? We’re lost!”

  He closed his eyes again, briefly. That’s the kid’s line. Then he thought: Le kid, c’est moi. It was almost funny.

  “We keep calling,” he said, moving toward where her voice had come from. “We keep calling until we’re together again.”

  “But I’m so thirsty!” She sounded closer now, but Cal didn’t trust that. No, no, no.

  “Me too,” he said. “But we’re going to get out of this, Beck. We just have to keep our heads.” That he had already lost his-a little, only a little-was one thing he’d never tell her. She had never told him the name of the boy who knocked her up, after all, and that made them sort of even. A secret for her, now one for him.

  “What about the kid?”

  Ah, Christ, now she was fading again. He was so scared that the truth popped out with absolutely no trouble at all, and at top volume.

  “Fuck the kid, Becky! This is about us now!”

  Directions melted in the tall grass, and time melted as well: a Dali world with Kansas stereo. They chased each other’s voices like weary children too stubborn to give up their game of tag and come in for dinner. Sometimes Becky sounded close; sometimes she sounded far; he never once saw her. Occasionally the kid yelled for someone to help him, once so close that Cal sprang into the grass with his hands outstretched to snare him before he could get away, but there was no kid. Only a crow with its head and one wing torn off.

  There is no morning or night here, Cal thought, only eternal afternoon. But even as this idea occurred to him, he saw that the blue of the sky was deepening and the squelchy ground beneath his sodden feet was growing dim.

  If we had shadows, they’d be getting long and we might use them to move in the same direction, at least, he thought, but they had no shadows. Not in the tall grass. He looked at his watch and wasn’t surprised to see it had stopped even though it was a self-winder. The grass had stopped it. He felt sure of it. Some malig
nant vibe in the grass; some paranormal Fringe shit.

  It was half past nothing when Becky began to sob.

  “Beck? Beck?”

  “I have to rest, Cal. I have to sit down. I’m so thirsty. And I’ve been having cramps.”

  “Contractions?”

  “I guess so. Oh God, what if I have a miscarriage out here in this fucking field?”

  “Just sit where you are,” he said. “They’ll pass.”

  “Thanks, doc, I’ll-” Nothing. Then she began screaming. “Get away from me! Get away! DON’T TOUCH ME!”

  Cal, now too tired to run, ran anyway.

  Even in her shock and terror, Becky knew who the madman had to be when he brushed aside the grass and stood before her. He was wearing tourist clothes-Dockers and mud-clotted Bass Weejuns. The real giveaway, however, was his T-shirt. Although smeared with mud and a dark maroon crust that was almost certainly blood, she could see the ball of spaghetti-like string and knew what was printed above it-world’s largest ball of twine, cawker city, kansas. Didn’t she have a shirt just like it neatly folded in her suitcase?

  The kid’s dad. In the mud- and grass-smeared flesh.

  “Get away from me!” She leaped to her feet, hands cradling her belly. “Get away! DON’T TOUCH ME!”

  Dad grinned. His cheeks were stubbly, his lips red. “Calm down. Want to get out? It’s easy.”

  She stared at him, openmouthed. Cal was shouting, but for the moment she paid no attention.

  “If you could get out,” she said, “you wouldn’t still be in.”

  He tittered. “Right idea. Wrong conclusion. I was just going to hook up with my boy. Already found my wife. Want to meet her?”

  She said nothing.

  “Okay, be that way,” he said, and turned from her. He started into the grass. Soon he would melt away, just as her brother had, and Becky felt a stab of panic. He was clearly mad, you only had to look into his eyes or listen to his text-message vocal delivery to know that, but he was human.

  He stopped and turned back, grinning. “Forgot to introduce myself. My bad. Ross Humbolt’s the name. Real estate’s the game. Poughkeepsie. Wife’s Natalie. Little boy’s Tobin. Sweet kid! Smart! You’re Becky. Brother’s Cal. Last chance, Becky. Come with me or die.” His eyes dropped to her belly. “Baby, too.”