In the Tall Grass Read online

  Don’t trust him.

  She didn’t, but followed just the same. At what she hoped was a safe distance. “You have no idea where you’re going.”

  “Becky? Becky!” Cal. But far away. Somewhere in North Dakota. Maybe Manitoba. She supposed she should answer him, but her throat was too raw.

  “I was just as lost in the grass as you two,” he said. “Not anymore. Kissed the stone.” He turned briefly and regarded her with roguish, mad eyes. “Hugged it, too. Whsssh. See it then. All those little dancing fellas. See everything. Clear as day. Back to the road? Straight shot! If I’m line I’m dine. Wife’s right up here. You have to meet her. She’s my honey. Makes the best martini in America. There once was a guy named McSweeney, who spilled some gin on his ahem! Just to be couth, he added vermouth. I guess you know the rest.” He winked at her.

  In high school, Becky had taken a gym elective called Self-Defense for Young Women. Now she tried to remember the moves, and couldn’t. The only thing she could remember. .

  Deep in the right pocket of her shorts was a key ring. The longest and thickest key fit the front door of the house where she and her brother had grown up. She separated it from the others and pressed it between the first two fingers of her hand.

  “Here she is!” Ross Humbolt proclaimed jovially, parting high grass with both hands, like an explorer in some old movie. “Say hello, Natalie! This young woman is going to have a critter!”

  There was blood splashed on the grass beyond the swatches he was holding open and Becky wanted to stop but her feet carried her forward and he even stepped aside a little like in one of those other old movies where the suave guy says After you doll and they enter the swanky nightclub where the jazz combo’s playing only this was no swanky nightclub this was a beaten-down swatch of grass where the woman Natalie Humbolt if that was her name was lying all twisted with her eyes bulging and her dress pushed up to show great big red divots in her thighs and Becky guessed she knew now why Ross Humbolt of Poughkeepsie had such red lips and one of Natalie’s arms was torn off at the shoulder and lying ten feet beyond her in crushed grass already springing back up and there were more great big red divots in the arm and the red was still wet because. . because. .

  Because she hasn’t been dead that long, Becky thought. We heard her scream. We heard her die.

  “Family’s been here awhile,” Ross Humbolt said in a chummy, confidential tone as his grass-stained fingers settled around Becky’s throat. He hiccuped. “Folks can get pretty hungry. No Mickey D’s out here! Nope. You can drink the water that comes out of the ground-it’s gritty and awful damn warm, but after a while you don’t mind that-only we’ve been in here for days. I’m full now, though. Full as a tick.” His bloodstained lips descended into the cup of her ear, and his beard stubble tickled her skin as he whispered. “Want to see the rock? Want to lay on it naked, and feel me in you, beneath the pinwheel stars, while the grass sings our names? Poetry, eh?”

  She tried to suck a chestful of air to scream, but nothing came down her windpipe. In her lungs was a sudden, dreadful vacancy. He screwed his thumbs into her throat, crushing muscle, tendon, soft tissue. Ross Humbolt grinned. His teeth were stained red, but his tongue was a yellowish-green. His breath smelled of blood; also like a fresh-clipped lawn.

  “The grass has things to tell you. You just need to learn to listen. You need to learn how to speak Tall Weed, honey. The rock knows. After you see the rock you’ll understand. I’ve learned more from that rock in two days than I learned in twenty years of schooling.”

  He had her bent backward, her spine arched. She bent like a high blade of grass in the wind. His green breath gushed in her face again.

  “Twenty years of schooling and they put me on the gray shift,” he said, and laughed. “That’s some good old rock, isn’t it? Dylan. Child of Yahweh. Bard of Hibbing and I ain’t ribbing. I’ll tell you what. The stone in the center of this field is a good old rock, but it’s a thirsty rock. It’s been working on the gray shift since before red men hunted on the Osage Cuestas, been working since a glacier brought it here during the last Ice Age, and oh girl, it’s so fucking thirsty.”

  She wanted to drive her knee into his balls, but it was all too much effort. The best she could do was lift her foot a few inches and then gently set it down again. Lift the foot and set it down. Lift and set. She seemed to be stamping her heel in slow motion, like a horse ready to be let out of a stall.

  Constellations of black and silver sparks exploded at the edges of her vision. Pinwheel stars, she thought. It was oddly fascinating, watching as new universes were born and died, appearing and winking out. She would soon be winking out herself, she understood. This did not seem such a terrible thing. Urgent action was not required.

  Cal was screaming her name from very far away. If he had been in Manitoba before, now he was down a mine shaft in Manitoba.

  Her hand tightened on the key ring in her pocket. The teeth of some of those keys were digging into her palm. Biting.

  “Blood is nice, tears are better,” Ross said. “For a thirsty old rock like that. And when I fuck you on the stone, it’ll have some of both. Has to be quick, though. Don’t want to do it in front of the kid. We’re Baptists.” His breath stank.

  She pulled her hand out of her pocket, the end of her house key protruding between her pointer and middle finger, and jabbed her fist into Ross Humbolt’s face. She just wanted to push his mouth away, didn’t want him breathing on her, didn’t want to smell the green stink of him anymore. Her arm felt weak, and the way she punched at him was lazy, almost friendly-but the key caught him under the left eye, and raked down his cheek, sketching a jaggedy line in blood.

  He flinched, snapping his head back. His hands loosened; for an instant his thumbs were no longer burrowing into the soft skin in the hollow of her throat. A moment later he tightened his grip again, but by then she had drawn a single whooping breath. The sparks-the pinwheel stars-bursting and flaring at the periphery of her vision faded out. Her head went clear, as clear as if someone had dashed icy water into her face. The next time she punched him, she put her shoulder behind it, and sank the key into his eye. Her knuckles jarred against bone. The key popped through his cornea and into the liquid center of the eyeball.

  He did not scream. He made a kind of doglike bark, a woofing grunt, and wrenched her hard to one side, trying to yank her off her feet. His forearms were sunburnt and peeling. Close up she could see his nose was peeling too, badly, the bridge of his nose sizzling with sunburn. He grimaced, showing teeth stained pink and green.

  Her hand fell away, let go of the key ring. It continued to dangle from the welling socket of his left eye, the other keys dancing against each other and bouncing against his stubbly cheek. Blood slicked the entire left side of Humbolt’s face, and that eye was a glimmering red hole.

  The grass seethed around them. The wind rose, and the tall blades thrashed and flailed at Becky’s back and legs.

  He kneed her in the belly. It was like being clubbed with a piece of stovewood. Becky felt pain and something worse than pain, in a low place where abdomen met groin. It was a kind of muscular contraction, a twisting, as if there were a knotted rope in her womb, and someone had just yanked it tight; tighter than it was supposed to go.

  “Oh Becky! Oh girl! Your ass-your ass is grass now!” he screamed, a note of mad hilarity wavering in his voice.

  He kneed her in the stomach again and then a third time. Each blow set off a fresh, black, poisonous detonation. He’s killing the baby, Becky thought. Something trickled down the inside of her left leg. Whether it was blood or urine, she could not have said.

  They danced together, the pregnant woman and the one-eyed madman. They danced in the grass, feet squelching, his hands on her throat. The two of them had staggered in a wavering semicircle around the corpse of Natalie Humbolt. Becky was aware of the dead body to her left, had glimpses of pale, bloody, bitten thighs, rumpled jean skirt, and Natalie’s exposed grass-stained gran
ny panties. And her arm-Natalie’s arm in the grass, just behind Ross Humbolt’s feet. Natalie’s dirty, severed arm (how had he removed it? had he torn it off like a chicken drumstick?) lay with fingers slightly curled, filth under her cracked fingernails.

  Becky threw herself at Ross, heaved her weight forward. He stepped back, put his foot on that arm, and it turned beneath his heel. He made an angry, grunting cry of distress as he spilled over, pulling her with him. He did not let go of her throat until he hit the ground, his teeth coming together with an audible clack!

  He absorbed most of the impact, the springy mass of his suburban-Baptist gut softening her own fall. She shoved herself off him, began to scramble on all fours into the grass.

  Only she couldn’t move quickly. Her insides pulsed with a dreadful weight and feeling of tension, as if she had swallowed a medicine ball. She wanted to vomit.

  He caught her ankle and pulled. She fell flat, onto her hurt, throbbing stomach. A lance of rupturing pain went through her abdomen, a feeling of something bursting. Her chin struck the wet earth. Her vision swarmed with black specks.

  “Where are you going, Becky DeMuth?” She had not told him her last name. He couldn’t know that. “I’ll just find you again. The grass will show me where you’re hiding, the little dancing men will take me right to you. Come here. You don’t need to go to San Diego now. No decisions about the baby will be necessary. All done now.”

  Her vision cleared. She saw, right in front of her, on a flattened bit of grass, a woman’s straw purse, the contents dumped out, and amid the mess, a little pair of manicuring scissors-they almost looked more like pliers than scissors. The blades were gummy with blood. She didn’t want to think how Ross Humbolt of Poughkeepsie might have used that tool, or how she herself might now use it.

  Nevertheless, she closed her hand around it.

  “Come here, I said,” Ross told her. “Now, bitch.” Hauling on her foot.

  She twisted and shoved herself back at him, with Natalie Humbolt’s manicure scissors in one fist. She struck him in the face, once, twice, three times, before he began to scream. It was a scream of pain, even if, before she was done with him, it had turned into great, sobbing guffaws of laughter. She thought: The kid laughed, too. Then for quite a while she thought nothing. Not until after moonrise.

  In the last of the day’s light, Cal sat in the grass, brushing tears off his cheeks.

  He never gave way to full-on weeping. He only dropped onto his butt, after who knew how much fruitless wandering and calling for Becky-she had long since stopped replying to him-and then for a while his eyes were tingling and damp, and his breath a little thick.

  Dusk was glorious. The sky was a deep, austere blue, darkening almost to black, and in the west, behind the church, the horizon was lit with the infernal glow of dying coals. He saw it now and then, when he had the energy to jump and look, and could persuade himself there was some point in looking around.

  His sneakers were soaked through, which made them heavy, and his feet ached. The insides of his thighs itched. He took off his right shoe, and dumped a dingy trickle of water from it. He wasn’t wearing socks, and his bare foot had the ghastly white, shriveled look of a drowned thing.

  He removed the other sneaker, was about to dump it, then hesitated. He brought it to his lips, tipped back his head, and let gritty water-water that tasted like his own stinking foot-run over his tongue.

  He had heard Becky and the Man, a long way off in the grass. Had heard the Man speaking to her in a gleeful, inebriated voice, lecturing her almost, although Cal had not been able to make out much of what was actually said. Something about a rock. Something about dancing men. Something about being thirsty. A line from some old folk song. What had the guy been singing? Twenty years of writing and they put you on the night shift. No-that wasn’t right. But something close to that. Folk music wasn’t an area of expertise for Cal; he was more of a Rush fan. They had been surfing on Permanent Waves all the way across the country.

  Then he heard the two of them thrashing and struggling in the grass, heard Becky’s choked cries, and the man ranting at her. Finally there came screams. . screams that were terribly like shouts of hilarity. Not Becky. The Man.

  By that point Cal had been hysterical, running and jumping and screaming for her. He shouted and ran for a long time before he finally got himself under control, forced himself to stop and listen. He had bent over, clutching his knees and panting, his throat achy with thirst, and had turned his attention to the silence.

  The grass hushed.

  “Becky?” he had called again, in a hoarsened voice. “Beck?”

  No reply except for the wind slithering in the weeds.

  He walked a little more. He called again. He sat. He tried not to cry.

  And dusk was glorious.

  He searched his pockets, for the hundredth hopeless time, gripped by the terrible fantasy of discovering a dry, linty stick of Juicy Fruit. He had bought a package of Juicy Fruit back in Pennsylvania, but he and Becky had shared it out before they reached the Ohio border. Juicy Fruit was a waste of money. That citrus flash of sugar was always gone in four chews and-he felt a stiff paper flap and withdrew a book of matches. Cal did not smoke, but they had been giving them away free at the little liquor store across the street from the Kaskaskia Dragon in Vandalia. It had a picture of the thirty-five-foot-long stainless-steel dragon on the cover. Becky and Cal had paid for a fistful of tokens, and spent most of the early evening feeding the big metal dragon to watch jets of burning propane erupt from its nostrils. Cal imagined the dragon set down in the field, and went dizzy with pleasure at the thought of it exhaling a destroying plume of fire into the grass.

  He turned the matchbook over in his hand, thumbing soft cardboard.

  Burn the field, he thought. Burn the fucking field. The tall grass would go the way of all straw when fed to flame.

  He visualized a river of burning grass, sparks and shreds of toasted weed drifting into the air. It was such a strong mental image, he could close his eyes and almost smell it, the somehow wholesome late-summer reek of burning green.

  And what if the flames turned back on him? What if it caught Becky out there somewhere? What if she was passed out, and woke to the stink of her own burning hair?

  No. Becky would stay ahead of it. He would stay ahead of it. The idea was in him that he had to hurt the grass, show it he wasn’t taking any more shit, and then it would let him-let them both-go. Every time a strand of grass brushed his cheek, he felt it was teasing him, having fun with him.

  He rose on sore legs, and yanked at the grass. It was tough old rope, tough and sharp, and it hurt his hands, but he wrenched some loose, and crushed it into a pile and knelt before it, a penitent at a private altar. He tore a match loose, put it against the strike strip, folded the cover against it to hold it in place, and yanked. Fire spurted. His face was close and he inhaled a burning whiff of sulfur.

  The match went out the moment he touched it to the wet grass, the stems heavy with a dew that never dried, and dense with juice.

  His hand shook when he lit the next.

  It hissed as he touched it to the grass and it went out. Hadn’t Jack London written a story about this?

  Another. Another. Each match made a fat little puff of smoke as soon as it touched the wet green. One didn’t even make it into the grass, but was huffed out by the gentle breeze as soon as it was lit.

  Finally, when there were six matches left, he lit one, and then, in desperation, touched it to the book itself. The paper matchbook ignited in a hot white flash and he dropped it into the nest of singed but still damp grass. For a moment it settled in the top of this mass of yellow-green weeds, a long, bright tongue of flame rising up from it.

  Then the matchbook burned a hole in the damp grass and fell into the muck and went out.

  He kicked at the whole mess in a spasm of sick, ugly despair. It was the only way to keep from crying again.

  Then he sat still, eyes shut
, forehead against his knee. He was tired and wanted to rest, wanted to lie on his back and watch the stars appear. At the same time, he did not want to lower himself into the clinging muck, didn’t want it in his hair, soaking the back of his shirt. He was filthy enough as it was. His bare legs were striped from the flogging the sharp edges of the grass had given him. He thought he should try walking toward the road again-before the light was completely gone-but could hardly bear to stand.

  What caused him to rise at last was the faraway sound of a car alarm going off. But not just any car alarm, no. This one didn’t go wah-wah-wah, like most of them; this one went WHEEK-honk, WHEEK-honk, WHEEK-honk. So far as he knew, only old Mazdas wheek-honked like that when they were violated, flashing their headlights in time.

  Like the one in which he and Becky had set out to cross the country.

  WHEEK-honk, WHEEK-honk, WHEEK-honk.

  His legs were tired, but he jumped up anyway. The road was closer again (not that it mattered), and yes, he could see a pair of flashing headlights. Not much else, but he didn’t need to see much else to guess what was going on. The people along this stretch of the highway would know all about the field of tall grass across from the church and the defunct bowling alley. They would know to keep their own children on the safe side of the road. And when the occasional tourist heard cries for help and disappeared into the tall grass, determined to do the Good Samaritan bit, the locals visited the cars and took whatever there was worth taking.

  They probably love this old field. And fear it. And worship it. And-

  He tried to shut off the logical conclusion but couldn’t.

  And sacrifice to it. The swag they find in the trunks and glove compartments? Just a little bonus.

  He wanted Becky. Oh God, how he wanted Becky. And oh God, how he wanted something to eat. He couldn’t decide which he wanted more.