"Shoulda gone east," said Devin.
"Shoulda gone west," said Jake.
"Shoulda pushed you in the mud."
"Shoulda hung you with the rope."
"Shoulda left you two behind!" I blurted out. "How about some ideas on what we oughta do now?"
The disagreeable pair offered no suggestions, but Lydia responded in a way we could all agree with; She sat down by the side of the road, took off her shoes, and massaged her feet. Devin and I joined her. Jake preferred to remain standing.
Devin whipped out his calculator and started tapping on the keys. "What are you doing now?" I asked him. "Speculating on the Market?"
"Sort of," said Devin. "Corn futures. A field this size could yield a handsome return with the right investment strategy." He hit the enter key. "Thought so. At today’s price per bushel, I could make a killing on corn-based ethanol alone."
"I doubt that," said Jake, staring into the cornfield.
"What do you know about it?" said Devin.
"More than you think."
Jake broke off an ear of corn, tore off its husk, and pierced the kernels with his thumbnail. He reached down and grabbed a fistful of dirt, tossed it gently in the palm of his hand, then sniffed it with his long mule nose. "This field shouldn’t be here," he said.
"What’s that supposed to mean?" I said.
"I’m sayin’ it’s not possible."
We got up to examine the corn for ourselves.
"It’s here, isn’t it?" said Devin. "I can see it. I can touch it." He grabbed Jake’s ear of corn away from him and bit into it. "I can taste it. Mmm. It’s delicious, too."
"It’s crap!"
Devin grimaced, then spit out the corn kernels. "The corn is?"
"The soil. It’s crap."
"I thought soil was crap."
"Don’t you know anything? Nutrients. It’s gotta have organic matter. This soil’s got none at all."
"So?"
"So, you couldn’t grow weeds in this stuff, let alone corn."
We all backed away from the cornstalks as if they had a contagious disease.
"You sure about this?" I asked Jake.
"Man, I grew up with this stuff," Jake said. "I was raised on a farm. I know all about growing corn."
"Then how did it get here?" asked Lydia. "If it didn’t grow on its own, someone totally had to put it here." She picked up some dirt. "Somebody had to dig the holes. Things like this just don’t . . ."
Lydia froze as the dirt trickled out between her fingers. She squinted at the earth between the rows of corn. As she bent down for a closer look, her yellow face turned ghostly white.
"Footprints!"
Sure enough. The soft soil had been disturbed by the tracks of a large number of people. The imprints were well-defined as if they had just been made.
Devin kneeled down and felt the footprints with his fingertips. "Someone’s been here alright," he said. "And these prints lead straight into the cornfield. I’m going in to take a look."
"You’re completely nuts," I said. "You’ll get lost if you go in there."
"No, I won’t. If I get turned around, I can find my way back from the sound of your voices. I’ll take Jake with me."
"No, ya don’t!" said Jake. "I ain’t goin’ in there. Ran into a cornfield once when I was six and was almost never heard from again."
"That kinda sucks," said Lydia. "I guess at that age, you probably didn’t know what you were doing."
"I knew exactly what I was doing. I was tryin’ to save our farm. We were about to get kicked off our property, and it was all I could think of.
"My family plowed that land for generations. Then one day, we get a letter sayin’ the land didn’t belong to us, that it was owned by some real estate development company. Turns out our lame-ass forefathers never signed the original deed. Next thing ya know, out comes the marshal and tells us we gotta go. So, I ran into the field, figuring as long as I stayed in there, he couldn’t make us leave."
"That must have been terrifying for you," I said.
"Well, let’s just say I never did it again, and I ain’t doin’ it now."
"Ah, c’mon Jake," said Devin.
"No, sir!" said Jake. "I’m not moving from this spot."
"That figures," said Devin. "Just like a stubborn mule. Once it decides to stay put, a bulldozer can’t move it."
"Listen here, fur face! It took a lotta guts to do what I did. They were takin’ away our home and nobody was doin’ a damn thing about it. Even when the county moved us into that dumpy trailer, I kicked and screamed the whole way."
"Didn’t your father do something?" I asked.
"Pa? That bum? He walked out of the trailer one morning to look for work and never came back. Ma and me drifted for years after that. We moved around so often I’d lose track of what town I was in."
"Oh, I get it now," said Devin. "This explains why you’re so pissed off at the world. You stand in the way of progress, get lawfully evicted, then blame everyone else for your own failings."
"You’re damn right I do!" hollered Jake. "We were decent, hard-workin’ folks, and they had no right to do what they did."
"They had every right. Business is business."
I couldn’t listen to their squabbling any longer. "Excuse me," I said. "You two can trash each other later. I think it’s time we got going."
"But what about the footprints?" asked Lydia.
"Whoever made them are long gone. I suggest that the best thing to do is keep moving."
"I’ve got an even better suggestion. Why don’t we go back to the crossroads. If we’d taken a different road, we might be out of here by now."
"We’ve come this far already. I say we keep going."
"I say we go back."
Devin put a quick end to the argument. "Backward, forward, what’s the difference?" he said. "These roads lead nowhere and we all know it."
Devin had said what none of us wanted to hear. We were stuck on an endless road, surrounded by fake cornfields planted by phantom farmers. We were foolish to believe we knew what we were doing.
All of a sudden, Devin tilted his head upward. He walked into the middle of the road, turned his weasel head from side to side, then put an ear to the wind and listened. "Maybe we don’t have to take the road," he said. "Maybe we could go . . . up!"
I heard the distant sound of a sputtering airplane engine as an object appeared in the sky. It was one of those old-fashioned biplanes used for crop dusting. It waltzed back and forth, blanketing the fields in billowy, white clouds of smoke.
"Who’s for catching the next flight out of here?" said Devin. No reply was necessary. We ran down the road, waving our arms and shouting at the low-flying plane.
The crop duster crisscrossed the field, never straying far from the road. I didn’t quite understand why it was there at all. If the crops were bogus like Jake said, then what was the point? And what about the "dust?" Maybe it was full of DDT. I hoped it was the magical kind: sprinkle some on yourself and you can fly home like Tinkerbell!
We continued advancing on the slow-moving aircraft. Sooner or later we were sure to grab the attention of the pilot. Then we saw something none of us could believe. We stopped dead in our tracks. The plane dropped its smoky cargo as before, but this time, wherever the smoke touched the ground, the cornstalks faded away—dissolved into nothingness, right before our eyes.
Then came the real shocker. Where the corn had been standing, now stood crowds of people!
There were hundreds of them. Men, women, old, young. They were in two groups, separated by the dirt road between them. Something had made them awfully mad, because each side was angrily shouting at the other. They were so pissed off, they looked ready to clobber each another, yet neither side dared to cross the road, as if a raging river divided them.
Many of them wore everyday clothes, while others were dressed in attire I’d only seen in history books. I saw military uniforms: Confederate gray, Union blue, jungle
khaki, desert tan. The people from the past carried burning touches and pitchforks. The modern-day ones waved flags and hoisted protest signs.
I had seen protest rallies before, but never one that displayed so much rage. They chanted hateful slogans through megaphones and bullhorns. You could actually see the hatred in their faces—all but the ones hiding under white linen hoods. It was as if every racist, warmonger, and extremist across the centuries had come together for one giant hatefest.
The crop duster made another pass and released more of its mystery smoke. Again, the crops melted away, replaced by even more protesters. There were thousands of them now. The shouting got louder as tempers flared out of control.
Meanwhile, the plane was getting farther away from us. We had to act fast if we were going to catch up with it. We had two options: go between the angry mobs and pray they didn’t attack us, or bypass them through the cornfield and risk getting lost.
"We’ve gotta take the road," said Devin. "It’s our only chance."
"We’ll never get past them alive," I said.
"We’ll just have to run like hell."
"Yeah, right!" said Lydia. "Like moving targets."
Jake stepped forward. "What are you all so worried about?" he said. "They’re just blowin’ off steam, that’s all. We’ll just walk past them like taking a stroll in the park and we’ll be fine."
"A stroll in the park?" said Lydia. "Is there something wrong with you?"
"No, Lydia," I said. "It’ll be okay. Don’t you see? The left side hates the right side, and the right hates the left."
"I get it!" said Devin. "And we’re middle-of-the-road—literally. We won’t be worth their trouble."
In some strange way, that made sense, although relying on logic in that wacko world could be dangerous. We crossed our fingers and started down the road, anyway.
The noise of the demonstration was deafening. We huddled close together as we passed the thrashing arms and shaking fists. Jake was right. The protesters looked right through us like we were invisible.
We eventually made it to safety. I was so relieved that I was even willing to give Jake a hug for his ingenuity. It was then I noticed that Jake was no longer with us. I looked back and saw him waving to us from the middle of road, right in the thick of the chaos.
Jake pulled on his long mule ears and shouted, "Stubborn, am I?"
"What are you doing?" Devin shouted back at him.
Jake stretched his arms out wide and smiled. "Free Speech, man!"
"He’s insane," said Devin.
"No, he’s not," I said. "He’s in heaven."
At that moment, a beer can grazed the side of Jake’s head. Then a Molotov cocktail landed at his feet, leaving a fiery trail on the ground. More objects flew past Jake as he dodged glass bottles and rocks. The sound of gunshots rang out.
Jake looked at us with terror in his eyes. "Wait for me!" he cried. As he started to run toward us, a tear gas canister landed beside him. He started coughing and became disoriented from the heavy smoke.
"Come on, Jake!" I shouted. But it was too late. The flood gates had opened. The unrestrained rioters poured out onto the road, colliding in the middle like a giant ocean wave against a rocky shore.
Out of nowhere, the crop duster reappeared behind us. It passed over our heads as it raced toward the riot, then shrouded the battle in white smoke too thick to see into.
As the smoke faded away, so did the screams of the protesters. I no longer heard the sounds of shattering glass and gunfire. Sun rays streamed through the mist revealing an empty road. And when the last wisp of smoke had cleared, the cornfield had been fully restored. There were no protesters, or evidence of any violent activity—and no trace of Jake.
In his rush to "let off a little steam," Jake learned how easily too much anger can blow the lid off the best of intentions. I was sorry, now, I hadn’t paid more attention to what he was trying to say. I knew all too well that lonely feeling when no one listens to you.
As we stood there in stunned silence, that chilling sputtering sound was heard once again. A small dot in the distant sky grew larger and larger. The crop duster wasn’t done with us yet.
"Quick!" said Devin, "Into the cornfield before it sees us." We jumped behind the first row of cornstalks and peered out between the leaves. The plane was flying just above the surface of the road. It zoomed past us, but not so fast that I couldn’t get a good look at the pilot. There in the cockpit sat Sergeant Sheep in an aviator’s helmet!
"I hate to tell you this, guys," I said, "but our sheep-headed friend is after us."
"Okay," said Devin. "From now on we keep close to the side of the road. That way we can duck into the field if he comes back."
"And then what?" said Lydia. "Keep walking until we drop dead? We’ll never get out of here at this rate. Sheep or no sheep, that plane’s our only hope."
Lydia bolted into the road waving her arms frantically. "Come back!" she shouted at the plane.
Devin and I chased after her. We caught up to Lydia and wrestled her arms to her side. "Let me go!"she demanded.
Just then, the plane made a sudden turnaround and headed back towards us. We stood there, helpless, as smoke began pouring out from the plane’s belly.
"Back in the field!" shouted Devin.
We ran blindly through the dense cornfield as fast as we could. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the plane leave a trail of smoke where we had just been standing.
As we went deeper into the cornstalk jungle, I heard the sound of a repeat attack. "Get down!" I yelled.
We dropped and covered our faces. The roar of the engine shook the ground as the plane got closer. A powerful gust of wind from its propeller swept over us. This time, there was no escaping the sheep. But then . . . no smoke!
The sound of the plane faded into the distance, and it did not return.
We slowly lifted our heads.
"You think he ran out of juice?" I said.
"Maybe he’s going back to reload," said Lydia.
"If he is," said Devin, "I don’t want to be here when he gets back."
"And which way do you suggest we go, smarty pants?"
Devin thought for a minute, then stood up. "That way," he said, pointing down the path taken by the plane.
"You gotta be kidding," I said. "That mangy animal just tried to smoke us like he did to Jake. Now you want to follow him?"
"Planes need a place to land, don’t they? They need fuel. That means an airport of some kind."
"That’s so retarded," said Lydia. "But right now, I’ll do anything for a change of scenery."
Chapter 6
Who Goes There?
Devin took the lead like a self-appointed general. Lydia followed him, and I brought up the rear. Compared to the obstacle course, navigating the cornfield was a breeze. All we had to do was walk a straight line between the rows of corn until we reached our destination.
Tracking our progress was a bit of a problem. The field was too thick to see through and too high to see over. From time to time, Devin would hoist me up on his shoulders, and I reported what I saw, but my description was always the same: Green Acres as far as the eye could see.
The spectacle on the road was all we talked about. We soon ran out of words to describe Jake’s bizarre disappearance. Really, how many times can you repeat the words amazing, fantastic, and friggin’ before boredom sets in.
With little else to do, we each developed our own theories on what was going on, however crazy those theories might be. Devin held that our minds were being controlled by a master race of space aliens. Lydia reasoned that we were guinea pigs on a TV reality show, and were being "voted off" one by one, by a panel of incompetent judges. I maintained that it was all an elaborate practical joke, and found the whole thing laughable; a good theory, except that no one else was laughing.
Having said all that there was to say, it got very quiet. Our journey had become tiresome, and walking in a straight line, monotonous.
I stared at the ground as I stepped over the footprints of my traveling companions. Watching their tracks pass under me lulled me into a kind of trance. My mind began to wander. I started asking myself questions like: how far do we go before turning back, what happens when it gets dark, and when do we eat?
I shook myself back to reality and refocused my eyes on the ground. Then I realized that the only tracks being made in the dirt were my own. I stopped and looked around. No one was in front of me, no one in back of me. While my mind had been elsewhere, I must have fallen behind the others.
"Devin?" I called out softly. "Lydia?" I said, a little louder. "Devin! Lydia!" I shouted. No response. I began to walk forward again; slowly at first, then increasing my speed the farther I went without seeing them. I couldn’t be sure I was even going in the right direction. For all I knew, I had been walking in circles.
I slowed my pace and came to a stop. Now I’d done it: I was lost in a cornfield, a situation we were all warned to avoid.
Cupping my hands around my little skunk ears and listened intently for any kind of sound in the distance. Instead, I heard something close by. It was a sad sound. The sound of a whimpering child.
I parted the cornstalks to find a small boy, maybe ten years old, sitting in the dirt, crying. A rifle lay on the ground next to him. It looked like he might have been hunting and gotten separated from his party.
As he wiped the tears from his eyes, the boy couldn’t see that he had company.
"Hello," I said.
The startled child looked up. He immediately went for his rifle and pointed it at me. "Who goes there?" he shouted.
I threw my hands up. "Woe, there!" I said. "Put that thing down, kid. You’re gonna hurt somebody."
He shoved the rifle butt firmly into his shoulder. "Identify yourself or I’ll shoot!" The weapon quivered in his shaking hands. "And why you wearin’ that varmint mask? This ain’t no costume party." Then he pointed the gun barrel straight at my head and put his finger on the trigger. "You a Yank?"
"A Yank?" I said.
The Age of Amy Page 5
