In the Tall Grass Read online

  “Becky? Becky?”

  Nothing. Overhead, stars were now glimmering.

  Cal dropped to his knees, pressed his hands into the mucky ground, and dredged up more water. He drank it, trying to filter the grit with his teeth. If Becky was with me, we could figure this out. I know we could. Because Ike and Mike, they think alike.

  He got more water, this time forgetting to filter it and swallowing more grit. Also something that wriggled. A bug, or maybe a small worm. Well, so what? It was protein, right?

  “I’ll never find her,” Cal said. He stared at the darkening, waving grass. “Because you won’t let me, will you? You keep the people who love each other apart, don’t you? That’s Job One, right? We’ll just circle around and around, calling to each other, until we go insane.”

  Except Becky had stopped calling. Like Mom, Becky had gone dar-

  “It doesn’t have to be that way,” a small clear voice said.

  Cal’s head jerked around. A little boy in mud-spattered clothes was standing there. His face was pinched and filthy. In one hand he held a dead crow by one yellow leg.

  “Tobin?” Cal whispered.

  “That’s me.” The boy raised the crow to his mouth and buried his face in its belly. Feathers crackled. The crow nodded its dead head as if to say That’s right, get right in there, get to the meat of the thing.

  Cal would have said he was too tired to spring after his latest jump, but horror has its own imperatives, and he sprang anyway. He tore the crow out of the boy’s muddy hands, barely registering the guts unraveling from its open belly. Although he did see the feather stuck to the side of the boy’s mouth. He saw that very well, even in the gathering gloom.

  “You can’t eat that! Jesus, kid! What are you, crazy?”

  “Not crazy, Captain Cal, just hungry. And the crows aren’t bad. I couldn’t eat any of Freddy. I loved him, see. Dad ate some, but I didn’t. Course, I hadn’t touched the rock then. When you touch the rock-hug it, like-you can see. You just know a lot more. It makes you hungrier, though. And like my dad says, a man’s meat and a man’s gotta eat. After we went to the rock we separated, but he said we could find each other again anytime we wanted.”

  Cal was still one turn back. “Freddy?”

  “He was our golden. Did great Frisbee catches. Just like a dog on TV. It’s easier to find things in here once they’re dead. The field doesn’t move dead things around.” His eyes gleamed in the fading light, and he looked at the mangled crow, which Cal was still holding. “I think most birds steer clear of the grass. I think they know, and tell each other. But some don’t listen. Crows don’t listen the most, I guess, because there are quite a few dead ones in here. Wander around for a while and you find them.”

  Cal said, “Tobin, did you lure us in here? Tell me. I won’t be mad. Your father made you do it, I bet.”

  “We heard someone yelling. A little girl. She said she was lost. That’s how we got in. That’s how it works.” He paused. “My dad killed your sister, I bet.”

  “How do you know she’s my sister?”

  “The rock,” he said simply. “The rock teaches you to hear the grass, and the tall grass knows everything.”

  “Then you must know if she’s dead or not.”

  “I could find out for you,” Tobin said. “No. I can do better than that. I can show you. Do you want to go see? Do you want to check on her? Come on. Follow me.”

  Without waiting for a reply, the kid turned and walked into the grass. Cal dropped the dead crow and bolted after him, not wanting to lose sight of him even for a second. If he did, he might wander around forever without finding him again. I won’t be mad, he’d told Tobin, but he was mad. Really mad. Not mad enough to kill a kid, of course not (probably of course not), but he wasn’t going to let the little Judas-goat out of his sight, either.

  Only he did, because the moon rose above the grass, bloated and orange. It looks pregnant, he thought, and when he looked back down, Tobin was gone. He forced his tired legs to run, shoving through the grass, filling his lungs to call. Then there was no more grass to shove. He was in a clearing-a real clearing, not just beaten-down grass. In the middle of it, a huge black rock jutted out of the ground. It was the size of a pickup truck and inscribed all over with tiny dancing stick men. They were white, and seemed to float. They seemed to move.

  Tobin stood beside it, then put out one hand and touched it. He shivered-not in fear, Cal thought, but in pleasure. “Boy, that feels good. Come on, Captain Cal. Try it.” He beckoned.

  Cal walked toward the rock.

  There was a car alarm for a bit, then it stopped. The sound went in Becky’s ears but made no connection to her brain. She crawled. She did it without thinking. Each time a fresh cramp struck her, she stopped with her forehead pressed against the muck and her bottom in the air, like one of the faithful saluting Allah. When the cramp passed, she crawled some more. Her mud-smeared hair was stuck to her face. Her legs were wet with whatever was running out of her. She felt it running out of her but didn’t think about it any more than she had thought about the car alarm. She licked water off the grass as she crawled, turning her head this way and that, flicking her tongue like a snake, snoop-sloop. She did it without thinking.

  The moon came up, huge and orange. She twisted her head to look at it and when she did, the worst cramp yet hit her. This one didn’t pass. She flopped over on her back and clawed her shorts and panties down. Both were soaked dark. At last a clear and coherent thought came, forking through her mind like a stroke of heat lightning: The baby!

  She lay on her back in the grass with her bloody clothes around her ankles and her knees spread and her hands in her crotch. Snotty stuff squelched through her fingers. Then came a paralyzing cramp, and with it something round and hard. A skull. Its curve fit her hands with sweet perfection. It was Justine (if a girl), or Brady (if a boy). She had been lying to all of them about not having made up her mind; she had known from the first that this baby was going to be a keeper.

  She tried to shriek and nothing came out but a whispery hhhhaaaahhh sound. The moon peered at her, a bloodshot dragon’s eye. She pushed as hard as she could, her belly like a board, her ass screwed down into the mucky ground. Something tore. Something slid. Something arrived in her hands. Suddenly she was empty down there, so empty, but at least her hands were full.

  Into the red-orange moonlight she raised the child of her body, thinking, It’s all right, women all over the world give birth in fields.

  It was Justine.

  “Hey, baby girl,” she croaked. “Oooh, you’re so small.”

  And so silent.

  Close up, it was easy to see the rock wasn’t from Kansas. It had the black glassy quality of volcanic stone. The moonlight cast an iridescent sheen on its angled surfaces, creating slicks of light in tones of jade and pearl.

  The stick men and the stick women held hands as they danced into curving waves of grass.

  From eight steps back, they seemed to float just slightly above the surface of that great chunk of what-was-probably-not-obsidian.

  From six steps back, they seemed to hang suspended just beneath the black glassy surface, objects sculpted from light, hologramlike. It was impossible to keep them in focus. It was impossible to look away.

  Four steps away from the rock, he could hear it. The rock emitted a discreet buzz, like the electrified filament in a tungsten lamp. He could not feel it, however-he was not aware of the left side of his face beginning to pink, as if from sunburn. He had no sensation of heat at all.

  Get away from it, he thought, but found it curiously difficult to step backward. His feet didn’t seem to move in that direction anymore.

  “I thought you were going to take me to Becky.”

  “I said we were going to check on her. We are. We’ll check with the stone.”

  “I don’t care about your goddamn-I just want Becky.”

  “If you touch the rock you won’t be lost anymore,” Tobin said. “You won�
�t ever be lost again. You’ll be redeemed. Isn’t that nice?” He absentmindedly removed the black feather that had been stuck to the corner of his mouth.

  “No,” Cal said. “I don’t think it is. I’d rather stay lost.” Maybe it was just his imagination, but the buzzing seemed to be getting louder.

  “No one would rather stay lost,” the boy said, amiably. “Becky doesn’t want to stay lost. She miscarried. If you can’t find her, I think she’ll probably die.”

  “You’re lying,” he said, without any conviction.

  He might’ve inched a half step closer. A soft, fascinating light had begun to rise in the center of the rock, behind those floating stick figures. . as if that buzzing tungsten he could hear was embedded about two feet beneath the surface of the stone, and someone was slowly dialing it up.

  “I’m not,” the boy said. “Look close, and you can see her.”

  Down in the smoked-quartz interior of the rock, he saw the dim lines of a human face. He thought, at first, he was looking at his own reflection. But although it was similar, it wasn’t his. It was Becky, her lips peeled back in a doglike grimace of pain. Clots of filth smeared one side of her face. Tendons strained in her throat.

  “Beck?” he said, as if she might be able to hear him.

  He took another step forward-he couldn’t help himself-leaning in to see. His palms were raised before him, in a kind of go-no-further gesture, but he could not feel them beginning to blister from whatever was radiating from the stone.

  No, too close, he thought, and tried to fling himself backward, but couldn’t get traction. Instead, his heels slid, as if he stood at the top of a mound of soft earth giving way beneath him. But the ground was flat; he slid forward because the stone had him, it had its own gravity, and it drew him as a magnet draws iron scrap.

  Deep in the vast, jagged crystal ball of the great rock, Becky opened her eyes, and seemed to stare at him in wonder and terror.

  The buzzing rose in his head.

  The wind rose with it. The grass flung itself from side to side, ecstatically.

  In the last instant, he became aware that his flesh was burning, that his skin was boiling in the unnatural climate that existed in the immediate space right around the rock. He knew when he touched the stone, it would be like setting his palms on a heated frying pan, and he began to scream-

  — then stopped, the sound catching in his suddenly constricted throat.

  The stone wasn’t hot at all. It was cool. It was blessedly cool and he laid his face upon it, a weary pilgrim who has finally arrived at his destination, and can rest at last.

  When Becky lifted her head, the sun was either coming up or going down, and her stomach hurt, as if she were recovering from a week of stomach flu. She wiped the sweat off her face with the back of one arm, pushed herself to her feet, and walked out of the grass, straight to the car. She was relieved to discover the keys were still hanging from the ignition. Becky pulled out of the lot and eased on up the road, driving at a leisurely pace.

  At first she didn’t know where she was going. It was hard to think past the pain in her abdomen, which came in waves. Sometimes it was a dull throb, the soreness of overworked muscles; other times it would intensify without warning into a sharp, somehow watery pain that lanced her through the bowels, and burned in her crotch. Her face was hot and feverish and even driving with the windows down didn’t cool her off.

  Now it was coming on for night and the dying day smelled of fresh-mown lawns and backyard barbecues and girls getting ready to go out on dates and baseball under the lights. She rolled through the streets of Durham, New Hampshire, in the dull red glow, the sun a bloated drop of blood on the horizon. She sailed past Stratham Hill Park, where she had run with her track team in high school. She took a turn around the baseball field. An aluminum bat chinked. Boys shouted. A dark figure sprinted for first base with his head down.

  Becky drove distracted, chanting one of her limericks to herself, only half-aware she was doing it. She whisper-sang the oldest one she had been able to find when she was researching her paper, a limerick that had been written well before the form devolved into grotty riffs on fucking, although it pointed in that direction:

  “A girl once hid in tall grass,” she crooned.

  “And ambushed any boy who walked past.

  As lions eat gazelles,

  so many men fell,

  and each tasted better than the last.”

  A girl, she thought, almost randomly. Her girl. It came to her, then, what she was doing. She was out looking for her girl, the one she was supposed to be babysitting, and oh Jesus what an unholy fucking mess, the kid had wandered off on her, and Becky had to find her before the parents got home, and it was getting dark fast, and she couldn’t even remember the little shit’s name.

  She struggled to remember how this could’ve happened. For a moment the recent past was a maddening blank. Then it came to her. The girl wanted to swing in the backyard, and Becky said Go on, that’s fine, hardly paying any attention. At the time she was text-messaging with Travis McKean. They were having a fight. Becky didn’t even hear the back screen door slapping shut.

  what am i supposed to tell my mom, Travis said, i don’t even know if I want to stay in college let alone start a family. And this gem: if we get married will i have to say I DO to your bro too? hes always around sitting on your bed reading skateboreding magazine, i m amazed he wasn’t sitting there watching the night i got you pregnant. You want a family you should start one with him

  She had made a little scream down in her throat and chucked the phone against the wall, leaving a dent in the plaster, hoped the parents came back drunk and didn’t notice. (Who were the parents, anyway? Whose house was this?) Beck had wandered to the picture window that looked into the backyard, pushing her hair away from her face, trying to get her calm back-and saw the empty swing moving gently in the breeze, chains softly squalling. The back gate was open to the driveway.

  She went out into the jasmine-scented evening and shouted. She shouted in the driveway. She shouted in the yard. She shouted until her stomach hurt. She stood in the center of the empty road and yelled “Hey, kid, hey!” with her hands cupped around her mouth. She walked down the block and into the grass and spent what felt like days pushing through the high weeds, looking for the wayward child, her lost responsibility. When she emerged at last, the car was waiting for her, and she took off. And here she was, driving aimlessly, scanning the sidewalks, a desperate, animal panic rising inside her. She had lost her girl. Her girl had gotten away from her-wayward child, lost responsibility-and who knew what would happen to her, what might be happening to her right now. The not-knowing made her stomach hurt. It made her stomach hurt bad.

  A storm of little birds flowed through the darkness above the road.

  Her throat was dry. She was so fucking thirsty she could hardly stand it.

  Pain knifed her, went in and out, like a lover.

  When she drove past the baseball field for a second time, the players had all gone home. Game called on account of darkness, she thought, a phrase which caused her arms to prickle with goosebumps, and that was when she heard a child shout.

  “BECKY!” shouted the little girl. “IT’S TIME TO EAT!” As if Becky were the one who was lost. “IT’S TIME TO COME EAT!”

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING, LITTLE GIRL?” Becky screamed back, pulling over to the curb. “YOU COME HERE! YOU COME HERE RIGHT NOW!”

  “YOU’LL HAVE TO FIIIND ME!” screamed the girl, her voice giddy with delight. “FOLLOW MY VOICE!”

  The shouts seemed to be coming from the far side of the field, where the grass was high. Hadn’t she already looked there? Hadn’t she tramped all through the grass, trying to find her? Hadn’t she gotten a little lost in the grass herself?

  “THERE WAS AN OLD FARMER FROM LEEDS!” the girl shouted.

  Becky started across the infield. She took two steps and there was a tearing sensation in her womb and she cried out.

/>   “WHO SWALLOWED A BAG FULLA SEEDS!” the girl trilled, her voice vibrating with barely controlled laughter.

  Becky stopped, exhaled the pain, and when the worst of it had passed, she took another cautious step. Immediately, the pain returned, worse than before. She had a sensation of things shearing inside, as if her intestines were a bedsheet, stretched tight, beginning to rip down the middle.

  “BIG BUNCHES OF GRASS,” the girl yodeled, “SPROUTED OUT OF HIS ASS!”

  Becky sobbed again, took a third staggering step, almost to second base now, the tall grass not far away, and then another bolt of pain ran her through and she dropped to her knees.

  “AND HIS BALLS GREW ALL SHAGGY WITH WEEDS!” the girl yelled, voice quivering with laughter.

  Becky gripped the sagging, empty waterskin of her stomach and shut her eyes and lowered her head, and waited for relief, and when she felt the tiniest bit better, she opened her eyes. .

  And Cal was there, in the ashy light of dawn, looking down at her. His own eyes were sharp and avid.

  “Don’t try to move,” he said. “Not for a while. Just rest. I’m here.”

  He was naked from the waist up, kneeling beside her. His scrawny chest was very pale in the dove-colored half-light. His face was sunburned-badly, a blister right on the end of his nose-but aside from that he looked rested and well. No, more than that: He looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

  “The baby,” she tried to say, but nothing would come out, just a scraping click, the sound of someone trying to pick a rusty lock with rusty tools.

  “Are you thirsty? Bet you are. Here. Take this. Put it in your mouth.” He pushed a soaked, cold twist of his T-shirt into her mouth. He had saturated it with water and rolled it up into a rope.

  She sucked at it avidly, an infant hungrily nursing.

  “No,” he said, “no more. You’ll make yourself sick.” Taking the wet cotton rope away from her, leaving her gasping like a fish in a pail.

  “Baby,” she whispered.

  Cal grinned at her-his best, zaniest grin. “Isn’t she great? I’ve got her. She’s perfect. Out of the oven and baked just right!”