In the Tall Grass Read online

  He reached to the side and lifted up a bundle wrapped in someone else’s T-shirt. She saw a little snub of bluish nose protruding from the shroud. No; not a shroud. Shrouds were for dead bodies. It was swaddling. She had delivered a child here, out in the high grass, and hadn’t even needed the shelter of a manger.

  Cal, as always, spoke as if he had a direct line to her private thoughts. “Aren’t you the little Mother Mary? Wonder when the Wise Men will show up! Wonder what gifts they’ll have for us!”

  A freckled, sunburnt boy appeared behind Cal. He was bare-chested too. It was probably his shirt wound around the baby. He bent over, hands on his knees, to look at her swaddled infant.

  “Isn’t she wonderful?” Cal asked, showing the boy.

  “Scrumptious, Captain Cal,” the boy said.

  Becky closed her eyes.

  She drove in the dusk, the window down, the breeze fanning her hair back from her face. The tall grass bordered both sides of the road, stretching ahead of her as far as she could see. She would be driving through it the rest of her life.

  “A girl once hid in tall grass,” she sang to herself. “And ambushed any boy who walked past.”

  The grass rustled and scratched at the sky.

  She opened her eyes for a few moments, later in the morning.

  Her brother was holding a doll’s leg in one hand, filthy from the mud. He stared at her with a bright, stupid fascination, while he chewed on it. It was a lifelike thing, chubby and plump looking, but a little small, and also a funny pale-blue color, like almost frozen milk. Cal, you can’t eat plastic, she thought of saying, but it was just too much work.

  The little boy sat behind him, turned in profile, licking something off his palms. Strawberry jelly, it looked like.

  There was a sharp smell in the air, an odor like a fresh-opened tin of fish. It made her stomach rumble. But she was too weak to sit up, too weak to say anything, and when she lowered her head against the ground and shut her eyes, she sank straight back into sleep.

  This time there were no dreams.

  Somewhere a dog barked: roop-roop. A hammer began to fall, one ringing whack after another, calling Becky back to consciousness.

  Her lips were dry and cracked and she was thirsty once more. Thirsty and hungry. She felt as if she had been kicked in the stomach a few dozen times.

  “Cal,” she whispered. “Cal.”

  “You need to eat,” he said, and put a string of something cold and salty in her mouth. His fingers had blood on them.

  If she had been anywhere near in her right mind she might’ve gagged. But it tasted good, actually, a salty-sweet strand of something, with the fatty texture of a sardine. It even smelled a little like a sardine. She sucked at it much as she had sucked at the wet rope of Cal’s shirt.

  Cal hiccuped as she sucked the strand of whatever it was into her mouth, sucked it in like spaghetti and swallowed. It had a bad aftertaste, bitter-sour, but even that was sort of nice. Like the food equivalent of the taste you got after drinking a margarita and licking some of the salt off the rim of your glass. Cal’s hiccup sounded almost like a sob of laughter.

  “Give her another piece,” said the little boy, leaning over Cal’s shoulder.

  Cal gave her another piece. “Yum yum. Snark that li’l baby right down.”

  She swallowed and shut her eyes again.

  When she next found herself awake, she was over Cal’s shoulder, and she was moving. Her head bobbed and her stomach heaved with each step.

  She whispered: “Did we eat?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did we eat?”

  “Something scrumptious. Scrump-tiddly-umptious.”

  “Cal, what did we eat?”

  He didn’t answer, just pushed aside grass spattered with maroon droplets and walked into a clearing. In the center was a huge black rock. Standing beside it was the little kid.

  There you are, she thought. I chased you all over the neighborhood.

  Only that hadn’t been a rock. You couldn’t chase a rock. It had been a girl.

  A girl. My girl. My responsi-

  “WHAT DID WE EAT?” She began to pound him, but her fists were weak, weak. “OH GOD! OH MY JESUS!”

  He set her down and looked at her first with surprise and then amusement. “What do you think we ate?” He looked at the boy, who was grinning and shaking his head, the way you do when someone’s just pulled a really hilarious boner. “Beck. . honey. . we just ate some of the grass. Grass and seeds and so on. Cows do it all the time.”

  “There was an old farmer from Leeds,” the boy sang, and put his hands to his mouth to stifle his giggles. His fingers were red. “He was hungry and had special needs.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Becky said, but her voice sounded faint. She was looking at the rock. It was incised all over with little dancing figures. And yes, in this early light they did seem to dance. To be moving around in rising spirals, like the stripes on a barber pole.

  “Really, Beck. The baby is-is great. Safe. I’m already doing the uncle thing. Touch the rock, and you’ll see. You’ll understand. Touch the rock, and you’ll be-”

  He looked at the boy.

  “Redeemed!” Tobin shouted, and they laughed together.

  Ike and Mike, Becky thought. They laugh alike.

  She walked toward it. . put her hand out. . then drew back. What she had eaten hadn’t tasted like grass. It had tasted like sardines. Like the final sweet-salty-bitter swallow of a margarita. And like. .

  Like me. Like licking sweat from my own armpit. Or. . or. .

  She began to shriek. She tried to turn away, but Cal had her by one flailing arm and Tobin by the other. She should have been able to break free from the child, at least, but she was still weak. And the rock. It was pulling at her, too.

  “Touch it,” Cal whispered. “You’ll stop being sad. You’ll see the baby is all right. Little Justine. She’s better than all right. She’s elemental. Becky-she flows.”

  “Yeah,” Tobin said. “Touch the rock. You’ll see. You won’t be lost out here anymore. You’ll understand the grass then. You’ll be part of it. Like Justine is part of it.”

  They escorted her to the rock. It hummed busily. Happily. From inside there came the most wondrous glow. On the outside, tiny stick men and stick women danced with their stick hands held high. There was music. She thought: All flesh is grass.

  Becky DeMuth hugged the rock.

  There were seven of them in an old RV held together by spit, baling wire, and-perhaps-the resin of all the dope that had been smoked inside its rusty walls. Printed on one side, amid a riot of red-and-orange psychedelia, was the word FURTHER, in honor of the 1939 International Harvester school bus in which Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters had visited Woodstock during the summer of 1969. Back then all but the two oldest of these latter-day hippies had yet to be born.

  Just lately the twenty-first-century Pranksters had been in Cawker City, paying homage to the World’s Largest Ball of Twine. Since leaving, they had busted mega-amounts of dope, and all of them were hungry.

  It was Twista, the youngest of them, who spotted the Black Rock of the Redeemer, with its soaring white steeple and oh-so-convenient parking lot. “Church picnic!” he shouted from his seat beside Pa Cool, who was driving. Twista bounced up and down, the buckles on his bib overalls jingling. “Church picnic! Church picnic!”

  The others took it up. Pa looked at Ma in the rearview. When she shrugged and nodded, he pulled FURTHER into the lot and parked beside a dusty Mazda with New Hampshire license plates.

  The Pranksters (all wearing Ball of Twine souvenir T-shirts and all smelling of superbud) piled out. Pa and Ma, as the eldest, were the captain and first mate of the good ship FURTHER, and the other five-MaryKat, Jeepster, Eleanor Rigby, Frankie the Wiz, and Twista-were perfectly willing to follow orders, pulling out the barbecue, the cooler of meat, and-of course-the beer. Jeepster and the Wiz were just setting up the grill when they heard the first faint v
oice.

  “Help! Help! Somebody help me!”

  “That sounds like a woman,” Eleanor said.

  “Help! Somebody please! I’m lost!”

  “That’s not a woman,” Twista said. “That’s a little kid.”

  “Far out,” MaryKat said. She was cataclysmically stoned, and it was all she could think to say.

  Pa looked at Ma. Ma looked at Pa. They were pushing sixty now and had been together a long time-long enough to have couples’ telepathy.

  “Kid wandered into the grass,” Ma Cool said.

  “Mom heard him yelling and went after him,” Pa Cool said.

  “Maybe too short to see their way back to the road,” Ma said. “And now-”

  “-they’re both lost,” Pa finished.

  “Jeez, that sucks,” Jeepster said. “I got lost once. It was in a mall.”

  “Far out,” MaryKat said.

  “Help! Anybody!” That was the woman.

  “Let’s go get them,” Pa said. “We’ll bring ’em out and feed ’em up.”

  “Good idea,” the Wiz said. “Human kindness, man. I’m all about the human fuckin’ kindness.”

  Ma Cool hadn’t owned a watch in years, but was good at telling time by the sun. She squinted at it now, measuring the distance between the reddening ball and the field of grass, which seemed to stretch to the horizon. I bet all of Kansas looked that way before the people came and spoiled it all, she thought.

  “It is a good idea,” she said. “It’s going on for five thirty, and I bet they’re really hungry. Who’s going to stay and set up the barbecue?”

  There were no volunteers. Everyone had the munchies, but none of them wanted to miss the mercy mission. In the end, all of them trooped across Route 400 and entered into the tall grass.

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  Stephen King

  Joe Hill

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