In the Tall Grass (3 page)

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 Dalí 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 malignant 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.”

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 . . .