In the Tall Grass (6 page)

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!”

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.