In the Tall Grass (2 page)

The phone rang once, then a robot voice announced that her call was being recorded. Becky took another step, not wanting to lose sight of the blue shirt and light-brown shorts. Cal was always so
impatient.
Of course, so was she.

Wet grass began to whicker against her blouse, shorts, and bare legs.
From the bathing machine came a din,
Becky thought, her subconscious coughing up part of a half-digested limerick, one of Edward Gorey’s.
As of jollification within. It was heard far and wide and the something something tide blah blah.
She had written a paper on limericks for her Freshman Lit class
that she had thought was rather clever, but all she got for her trouble was a headful of dumb rhymes she couldn’t forget, and a C+.

A real live lady-voice supplanted the robot. “Kiowa County 9-1-1, what is your location and the nature of your emergency, caller?”

“I’m on Route 400,” Becky said. “I don’t know the name of the town, but there’s some church, the Rock of the Redeemer or something . . . and this broken-down old roller-skating rink . . . no, I guess it’s a bowling alley . . . and some kid is lost in the grass. His mother, too. We hear them calling. The kid’s close, the mother not so much. The kid sounds scared, the mother just sounds—”
Weird,
she meant to finish, but didn’t get the chance.

“Caller, we’ve got a very bad connection here. Please restate your—”

Then nothing. Becky stopped to look at her phone and saw a single bar. While she was watching, it disappeared, to be replaced by NO SERVICE. When she looked up, her brother had been swallowed by the green.

Overhead, a jet traced a white contrail across the sky at thirty-five thousand feet.

•  •  •

“Help! Help me!”

The kid was close, but maybe not quite as close as Cal had
thought. And a little farther to the left.

“Go back to the road!”
the woman screamed. Now
she
sounded closer, too.
“Go back while you still can!”

“Mom! Mommy! They want to HELP!”

Then the kid just screamed. It rose to an ear-stabbing shriek, wavered, suddenly turned into more hysterical laughter. There were thrashing sounds—maybe panic, maybe the sounds of a struggle. Cal bolted in that direction, sure he was going to burst into some beaten-down clearing and discover the kid—Tobin—and his mother being assaulted by a knife-wielding maniac out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. He got ten yards and was just realizing that
had
to be too far when the grass snarled around his left ankle. He grabbed at more grass on his way down and did nothing but tear out a double handful that drooled sticky green juice down his palms to his wrists. He fell full-length on the oozy ground and managed to snork mud up both nostrils. Marvelous. How come there was never a tree around when you needed one?

He got to his knees. “Kid? Tobin? Sing—” He sneezed mud, wiped his face, and now smelled grass-goo when he inhaled. Better and better. A true sensory bouquet. “Sing out! You too, Mom!”

Mom didn’t. Tobin did.

“Help me pleeease!”

Now the kid was on Cal’s
right,
and he sounded quite a lot deeper in the grass than before. How could that be?
He
sounded close enough to grab.

Cal turned around, expecting to see his sister, but there was only grass.
Tall
grass. It should have been broken down where he ran through it, but it wasn’t. There was only the smashed-flat place where he’d gone full length, and even there the greenery was already springing back up. Tough grass they had here in Kansas. Tough
tall
grass.

“Becky? Beck?”

“Chill, I’m right here,” she said, and although he couldn’t see her, he would in a second; she was practically on top of him. She sounded disgusted. “I lost the 9-1-1 chick.”

“That’s okay, just don’t lose
me.
” He turned in the other direction, and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Tobin!”

Nothing.

“Tobin!”

“What?”
Faint. Jesus Christ, what was the kid doing? Lighting out for Nebraska?
“Are you coming? You have to keep coming! I can’t find you!”

“KID, STAND STILL!”
Shouting so loud and so hard it hurt his vocal cords. It was like being at a Metallica concert, only without the music.
“I DON’T CARE HOW SCARED YOU ARE, STAND STILL! LET US COME TO YOU!”

He turned around, once more expecting to see Becky, but he only saw the grass. He flexed his knees and jumped. He could see the road (farther away than he expected; he must have run quite some way without realizing it). He could see the church—Holy Hank’s House of Hallelujah, or whatever
it was called—and he could see the Bowl-a-Drome, but that was all. He didn’t really expect to see Becky’s head, she was only five-two, but he
did
expect to see her route of passage through the grass. Only the wind was combing through it harder than ever, and that made it seem like there were dozens of possible paths.

He jumped again. Soggy ground squashed each time he came down. Those little licking peeks back at Highway 400 were maddening.

“Becky?
Where the hell are you?
”

•  •  •

Becky heard Cal bellow for the kid to stand still no matter how scared he was, and let them come to him. Which sounded like a good plan, if only her idiot brother would let her catch up. She was winded, she was wet, and she was for the first time feeling truly pregnant. The good news was that Cal was close, on her right at one o’clock.

Fine, but my sneakers are going to be ruined. In fact, the Beckster believes they’re ruined already.

“Becky? Where the hell are you?”

Okay, this was strange. He was still on her right, but now he sounded closer to five o’clock. Like, almost
behind
her.

“Here,” she said. “And I’m going to
stay
here until you get to me.” She glanced down at her Android. “Cal, do you have any bars on your phone?”

“I don’t have any idea. It’s in the car. Just keep yakking until I get to you.”

“What about the kid? And the crazy mom? She’s gone totally dark.”

“Let’s get back together—
then
we’ll worry about them, okay?” he said. Becky knew her brother, and she didn’t like the way he sounded. This was Cal being worried and trying not to show it. “For now, just talk to me.”

Becky considered, then began to recite, stamping her muddy sneakers in time. “There once was a guy named
McSweeney,
who spilled some gin on his
weenie
. Just to be
couth
he added
vermouth,
then slipped his girl a
martini
.”

“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.