The Harvest

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Then he pried the helmet off his head and Beth relaxed. Just Joey. His long blond hair was matted by the helmet, but it came free in a gust of wind and trailed around his shoulders. He was nineteen years old, but his face looked younger. He had round cheeks and a lingering case of adolescent acne. Joey would have loved to look dangerous, Beth thought, but nature hadn’t cooperated. Nature had conspired to make Joey’s anger look like petulance and his hostility resemble a pout.

  He stood with his bike between his legs and the setting sun behind him, waiting for her to say something.

  Beth discovered her heart was beating hard. She felt as if she’d had too much coffee. Light-headed. Nervous.

  The silence stretched until Joey took the initiative. “You sounded pissed off on the phone.”

  Beth summoned all the blistering accusations she had rehearsed since she left Dr. Wheeler’s office. Eloquence fled. She struck to the heart of the matter. “You gave me the clap, you asshole!”

  Incredibly, he smiled. “No shit?”

  “Yeah, no shit, you made me sick, no shit!”

  He stood there absorbing the information with his lip still curled in that faintly insolent smile. “You know, I wondered…”

  “You wondered?”

  “Well, it kind of hurts…”

  “What hurts?”

  He was beginning to sound like a twelve-year-old. “When I pee.”

  Beth rolled her eyes. He was hopeless, he was really completely hopeless. It hurts when 1 pee. Well, damn! Was she supposed to feel sorry for him?

  “So who have you been screwing, Joey?” He looked faintly hurt. “Nobody!”

  “Nobody? You don’t get the clap from nobody.” He thought about it. “Last year,” he said. “My cousin took me to a place. In Tacoma.”

  “A place? What, a whorehouse?” I guess.

  “A whorehouse in Tacoma?”

  “Yeah, I guess. Do we have to talk about this?”

  She felt she could only repeat these verbal impossibilities he was pronouncing. She nearly said, “Do we have to talk about this?” Instead she gathered what was left of her composure. “Joey, you screwed a prostitute in Tacoma and gave me gonorrhea. I’m not happy.”

  “It was before I met you,” he said. He added—grudgingly, Beth thought—Tm sorry.”

  “Sorry doesn’t pay for the antibiotics.” She looked away. “It’s degrading.”

  “I’m sorry. All right? What am I supposed to say? I’m sorry.” He pushed forward on the Yamaha’s seat. “Climb on.”

  No, she wanted to tell him. It’s not that easy. Not just I’m sorry. Climb on. You can’t get away with that.

  But maybe it was that easy, and maybe he could get away with it.

  She felt something shift inside herself, the tumbling of a weight in the hollow of her stomach.

  “You got the paint?” Joey asked.

  She was condemned by the weight of the bag in her hand. She held it up to show him.

  “Good.” He stepped on the starter until the motor caught and screamed. He lowered his helmet over his head. There was a second helmet strapped to the bike; Beth put it over her head and tucked her hair underneath.

  Climbing onto the bike, she felt a sudden burst of something she realized was joy… the mysterious, dizzying pleasure of doing something she knew was wrong. Making a serious mistake, making it deliberately.

  “Hurry up.” Joey’s voice was muffled by his visor and the roar of the bike. “Almost dark.”

  She put the motorcycle between her legs and her arms around the bone and sinew of his hips.

  * * *

  He smelled like leather and grease and sweat and wind.

  Beth remembered schoolgirl gab sessions, steamy telephone conversations, the inevitable question: But do you love him? The same question rattled in her head now, high-pitched and girlish and embarrassing. But do you love him, do you love him, do you love him?

  Her first instinct was that the whole idea was ridiculous, even offensive. Love Joey Commoner? The words didn’t connect. It seemed to Beth that he was an inherently unlovable object, like… oh, a garter snake, for instance, or a bait shop, or a can of motor oil. Something only a grubby little boy could approach with affection.

  But that was not the whole answer. If the question had truly been asked, Beth’s truest answer would have been something like: Yes, I do love him… but only sometimes, and I don’t know why.

  She had met him last year during her first month at the 7-Eleven up the highway. Beth had divided the clientele into five basic types: little kids, high-schoolers, suburban family types, bikers, and “Pickup Petes”—the guys who drove pickup trucks with strange accouterments, roll bars or banks of what looked like kleig lights, and who wore those duckbill caps day and night. Joey didn’t fit any of these categories, not even “biker.” He didn’t ride a muscle bike and he didn’t travel with the bike crowd. He always came alone. He shopped for snack food: quarts of ice cream and frozen pies, usually, and almost always on a Friday night. She learned to expect him.

  One Friday he got into an argument with a Pickup Pete who had parked his rig practically on top of Joey’s Yamaha. No damage had been done to anything but Joey’s sense of dignity and proportion, but Joey called the guy a “cross-eyed asshole” and spat out the words with such acidic clarity that Beth was able to hear him quite clearly through the window glass next to the checkout counter. The pickup guy’s response was inaudible but obviously obscene.

  She had watched with startled interest as Joey hurled himself at the man, who must have been twice his age and nearly twice his weight. Suicide, she thought. He’s fucking crazy. But the b oy moved like a whirlwind.

  By the time she remembered to ring for the night manager, the fight was over.

  Joey, needless to say, had lost.

  When she went off-shift at midnight, he was still sitting on the cracked sidewalk outside. His upper lip was split and dripping blood onto the dusty concrete. In the green-and-white glare of the illuminated 7-Eleven sign, the spatters of blood looked both ghastly and unreal—like alien blood.

  She could not say why she stopped and spoke to him. It had seemed like a bad idea even at the time.

  But, like many bad ideas, it had a powerful momentum of its own. Her feet paused and her mouth opened. “No ice cream tonight, huh?”

  He looked up sullenly. “You saw that guy?”

  She nodded.

  “He was fat,” Joey said with a shudder of distaste. She learned later that this was one of Joey’s pet horrors: he was disgusted by fat people.

  “Yeah,” Beth said, “he was.” She remembered the guy as a steady customer—remembered the distinctive way his jeans sagged below the cleavage of his rump. “Gross,” she contributed.

  Joey’s look turned to cautious gratitude.

  Later, Beth would realize that she had seen both sides of Joey Commoner that night. Joey the authentically dangerous: Joey who had called that impressive wall of flesh “a cross-eyed asshole” and leapt at him like a crazed monkey attacking a rhino. Joey had been all fingernails and spit and bony knees and her first fear had been for the bigger man.

  And Joey the vulnerable, Joey the little boy. Joey bleeding on the sidewalk.

  She wanted to mother him and she wanted to offer herself to him. The combination of impulses made her feel like the sidewalk was spinning. “How about a ride home,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Ride me home and I’ll fix up those cuts for you. I have Band-Aids and things. My name is Beth Porter.”

  He climbed onto his motorcycle. “I know. I’ve heard of you.” Well, Beth thought, that fucks that up.

  Same story all over again. She was inured to it; nevertheless it hurt. But he scooted forward. “Climb on,” he said. She didn’t hesitate and she concealed her surprise. She climbed on and felt the leather seat press up between her legs. “Joey Commoner,” he said.

  “Hi, Joey.”

  Zoom.

  * * *<
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  Tonight he took her south along the highway and across the bridge that spanned the Little Duncan River. He turned off the highway and circled back through a raw development of frame houses to the river’s edge. Beth hopped off the bike. Joey cut the motor and wheeled the vehicle down the embankment behind the concrete pilings of the bridge.

  The air was quiet here. Beth listened as the crickets resumed their creaking along the riverside.

  The Little Duncan followed this stony bed to the sea. South across an open field, beyond the hydroelectric towers, the lights of the houses looked too far to reach—the last margin of civilization. North beyond the river was only weeds and the greasy back lots of businesses fronting on the highway. East: the Duncan River cutting back into the foothills of Mt. Buchanan. West: the cemetery.

  Joey knew what most high school graduates in the south end of Buchanan knew, that if you followed the Little Duncan beyond this rockfall and through the duckweed flats, you could sneak into Brookside Cemetery after the main gates were locked.

  Joey took the can of cherry-red aerosol spray paint out of the bag. He balled up the bag and threw it into the moonlit flow of the creek. He tucked the can under his belt, to keep his hands free.

  Beth followed him along the riverbank. She understood Joey well enough to know that talking was over: there would be no talking now, only motion.

  She had the idea that Joey was a reservoir of motions, that he did much of his thinking with his body. She had to work to stay close to him as he scrambled among the weeds and rocks up to the grassy margin of the cemetery. He moved with a feverish agility. If his motions were ideas, Beth thought, they would be strange ones—deft, delirious, and unexpected.

  Maybe they would be dreams. The night had begun to seem dreamlike even to Beth. The Artifact had risen in the sky like a big backward moon. It looked faintly yellow tonight, a harvest-moon color. Beth was as frightened of the Artifact as everybody else, but she took from it, too, a curious exaltation. Hanging in the sky above her, casting its light across the trim grass and gravestones, the Artifact was a refutation of all things safe and secure. People lived their stupid lives in their stupid houses, Beth thought, but this new moon had come to remind them that they lived on the edge of an abyss. It restored vertigo to everyday life. That was why people hated it.

  Joey had gotten ahead of her. He moved in the shadows of the trees, uphill to the three stone mausoleums where Buchanan’s best families had once interred their dead. Too good for burial, the bodies had been enclosed in these stone boxes. To Beth it seemed doubly macabre. She had stood once on a hot spring afternoon and peered through the small barred opening into the darkness inside one of these tombs, a garage-sized building inscribed with the name of the JORGENSON family. The mausoleum had been frigid with undisturbed winter air. She felt it on her face like a breath. It must be winter in there always, she thought. And backed away with a shuddery, instinctive reverence.

  It was a reverence Joey obviously didn’t share. He raised the can of cherry-red spray paint to the wall of the building and began to work the nozzle.

  He worked fast. Beth stood back and watched. He covered the east exterior wall of the mausoleum with a motley collection of words and symbols like a machine printing some indecipherable code. The symbols were commonplace but Joey made them his own: swastikas, skulls, Stars of David, crosses, ankhs, peace symbols. She couldn’t guess what they meant to him. Maybe nothing. It was an act of pure defilement, empty of meaning. The hiss of the spray can sounded like leaves tossing in the night wind.

  He turned to the gravestones then, moving along the hillside so fast that Beth had to run to keep up. He made red Xs across the engraved names and dates. Now and then he would pause long enough to make a skull or a question mark. In the light of the Artifact, the red paint looked darker—brown or black on these chill white slabs.

  It must be like sex for him, Beth thought. This frantic motion. This ejaculation of paint.

  It was a funny thought but truer than she realized. When the can was empty Joey threw it at the sky—at the Artifact, maybe. The can looped high up and came down noiselessly among the graves. Beth approached him, and as he turned she saw the outline of his erection pressing against his jeans. She felt a shiver that was both attraction and revulsion.

  He pushed her down—she let herself tumble—into the high grass at the edge of the woods. It was late, they were alone, and the air was full of scary electricity. A cool wind came in from the ocean with the battery odor of midnight and salt. She let him pull up her skirt. He was like a shape above her, something out of the sky. She lifted up for him as he tugged her underpants away. He breathed in curt, hard gasps. His penis was as hard and as chilly as the night. It hurt for a minute. And then didn’t.

  * * *

  Was this what she wanted from him? Was this why she had adopted Joey Commoner the way an alcoholic adopts the bottle?

  No, not just this. Not just this push and shove and brief oblivion and sticky aftermath.

  Joey was dangerous.

  She wanted him—not in spite of that—but because of it.

  This was a bad and troubling thought, allowable only in the neutral calm that came after fucking.

  He pulled his pants up and sat beside her. Suddenly embarrassed by her own nakedness, Beth smoothed her skirt. Fucking in a graveyard, she thought. Christ.

  She followed Joey’s gaze out across the night. From this hill she could see the lights of downtown Buchanan and the night shimmer of the sea. “Someday we’ll do something big,” Joey said.

  Joey often made this ponderous statement. Beth knew what he meant by it. Something really dangerous. Something really bad.

  He put his arm around her. “You and me,” he said.

  He’s like some kind of wild animal, Beth thought. A wild horse maybe. A wild horse you befriended and who lets you ride him. Ride him at night. To some wild place. To the edge of a cliff. She closed her eyes and saw it. Saw herself riding Joey the wild horse to the brink of a limestone butte. Long drop to the desert floor. Some starry night like this. Just Beth and her wild horse and that soaring emptiness.

  And she spurs him with her heels.

  And he jumps.

  * * *

  Later they saw the lights of the little golf cart the security guard rode through Brookside every night, and they ran down the hill and across the graves to the duckweeds and into the dark ravine where the river flowed. Beth imagined she could hear the guard’s hoots of surprise as he discovered the vandalism, but that was probably her imagination. Still, the idea was funny; she laughed.

  Joey sped away past these houses full of sleeping people, wending a crooked path down Buchanan’s side streets… past the house of Miriam Flett, who turned in her bed at the sound of a motor and Beth Porter’s wild laugh, and thought in her sleep of how strange the town had lately become.

  Chapter 3

  Machines

  Jim Bix was ugly the way President Lincoln was said to have been ugly: profoundly, distinctively.

  His face was long and pockmarked. His eyes, when he focused the full beam of his considerable powers of attention, resembled poached eggs cradled in cups of bone and skin. He wore a brush cut that emphasized his ears, which stood out not merely like jug handles—the image that sprang to mind—but like the handles on a kindergartener’s clay jug, or the discarded work of a tremulous potter.

  It was also a face transparent to emotion. When Jim Bix smiled, you wanted to smile along with him. When he grinned, you wanted to laugh. He was conscious of his own guilelessness, Matt knew, and oddly ashamed of it. He avoided poker games. He told lies seldom and never successfully. Matt had once witnessed Jim Bix attempting a lie: He told Lillian he had broken one of her Hummel figurines, protecting the guilty party, the family dog, whom Lillian despised. The lie had been so incoherent, so patently manufactured, and so blindingly obvious that everyone present had laughed—including Lillian but excepting Jim himself, who blushed and clenched his t
eeth.

  Jim Bix, in other words, was a nearly unimpeachable witness. Matt kept that in mind as he listened to what his friend had to say. From anyone else, it would have been unbelievable. Absurd. From Jim…

  Belief, that cautious juror, withheld a verdict.

  * * *

  Matt opened the door a quarter of an hour before midnight that August evening and welcomed in this ugly and obvious man, his friend, who was also one of the best and most scrupulous pathologists Matt had encountered. Jim accepted Mart’s offer of coffee and settled leadenly into the living room sofa. He was 6’3” from toe to crewcut, and he dominated any room he inhabited, but tonight, Matt thought, he looked smaller—a sag had crept into his shoulders, and his frown hung on his face like a weight. He took the coffee wordlessly and cradled the cup in his hands.

  Matt interpreted all this as fatigue. Early in the year, Buchanan General had been certified as a regional trauma center. This was good news for the administration; it meant prestige and more reliable funding. Among staff, the reaction was mixed. They were handed a wish-list of technological goodies—respirators, bronchoscopes, a new pediatric ICU. But they also inherited a number of difficult cases that would ordinarily have been transferred to Portland. For Pathology, it had meant a huge new work load without the prospect of additional staff. Jim had been working evenings for most of two months now. Of course he was tired.

  Rachel had gone to bed, and the house, with its curtains drawn against the dark, seemed uneasy in its own silence. Jim cleared his throat. Matt said, “How is Lillian?”—disguising the fact that he’d seen her this afternoon.

  “Seems fine,” Jim said. “Kind of quiet.” He ran a large hand through his stubble hair. “We don’t see much of you and Annie lately.”