American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  The woods go on and on. Joseph never knew they were so big. But then, he has never really ventured into them before. As a young boy he always wanted to, for what child would turn down an untamed kingdom just beyond his doorstep? But it was drilled into him from the start that his life, like everyone’s in Wink, was to be anchored to the streets and sidewalks and well-lit areas, places of sunlight and fresh breeze. The other places, the places in the forest and those hidden in the canyons, well… those just weren’t theirs to have.

  Gracie holds up a hand, and they stop. She places a finger to her lips. Then she looks up and scans the pines above them. Joseph looks with her, but sees nothing. It feels like they’ve been looking forever when they hear a sound coming from the treetops.

  It’s an awful sound, one that makes Joseph’s teeth hurt, like someone’s taken a swarm of some particularly vicious cousin of the cicada, tossed them all in a bag, and given the bag a shake, pissing them off. And yet Joseph feels there are words in that buzz. The thing in the trees is calling out a message, like a warning—This territory is mine. Stay off.

  Gracie motions to him to stoop down low, and they begin to creep around the area the sound came from. As they pass through one glen Joseph looks up through the branches, and he sees something at the top of a tree, near the trunk. It is dark, but he thinks he sees the silhouette of a man, balanced perfectly on a high branch like a rooster on top of a barn. In the starlight Joseph thinks he can make out the edge of the man’s face, and while he can discern a nose and a mouth, he cannot see any ears, or eyes… as he looks closer, the dark figure shifts a little on the branch, settles back its shoulders, and it lifts its head, and as it does the horrible buzz fills the forest again.

  Joseph feels his heart ratchet up its rate until he can feel his pulse in his eyes. The shadowy figure in the tree trembles as the buzz dies to a close, and he can see the thing begin looking around from the top of the tree, searching for intruders…

  Gracie takes Joseph by the shoulder. “Come on,” she whispers. “Hurry.”

  “I thought you said nothing in the woods would hurt you,” Joseph whispers back.

  “I think so, but I don’t want to test that.”

  They slip around the thing in the tree and come to a path down to the lake. The path is very steep, but Gracie seems to have no issue seeing in the dark, and with her to guide him Joseph has no problem. Soon the trees draw back and the lake emerges: it is not really a lake, but more of a pond, fed by an underground spring. It is long and thin, a gash in the mountain’s side. The waters are so still they are like a mirror, a puddle of stars among the rocks. On the far side is the elderly Miss Tucker’s house. He notes that she is awake, apparently without concern: all of her lights are on, and he can see her moving in the windows. But then, he has heard she has an arrangement, just like Gracie.

  Gracie sits down on a stone shelf beside the lake, and Joseph joins her. “What is it?” he asks.

  Gracie just stares at the pink moon in the skies. Then, “You know I love you, don’t you?”

  Joseph is startled by the question. He is not sure what to say. He has never even considered the question. He longs for her, needs her, yes, but that’s quite a bit different from love.

  “I hope you do,” she says. “You are the only good thing in my life, Joseph. The only normal thing. The only thing that reminds me that I’m a person. My parents don’t, not anymore. Everything changed after they made my arrangement. And Mr. First… God. Sometimes I fool myself into thinking he’s… it’s…”

  She falls quiet. Joseph watches apprehensively, not sure what to do. “What is it?” he asks. “What’s wrong?”

  “Someone needs to know,” she says. “And I want to take care of you.” She steels herself. “You remember the last time you came to see me? When I went to go see Mr. First, and Mr. Macey caught us?

  “Yes,” says Joseph, who honestly wishes he could forget it.

  “They let me stay when they talked. I guess they didn’t think I could hear them, or understand them. It’s not… normal when they talk among themselves. They don’t talk like people.”

  “I don’t know if I want to know this, Gracie,” Joseph says. “I know too much already. I know I used to laugh about things like that, but… but ever since Macey found us…”

  “Macey doesn’t care,” she says.

  “He doesn’t?”

  “No. He has bigger things to worry about. He’s been walking out into the countryside, every night. I’ve seen him.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s been talking. Letting everyone know the news. Gossiping, I guess.”

  “To who?”

  “There are many of them that look like us, Joseph,” she says. “More than you think, probably. That’s what they’d all do, if they could—look like us. But some can’t. Like Mr. First. And others. And they can’t stay in town. They have to find their own way wherever they can.”

  She looks into the waters. Joseph follows her gaze, staring into the starlit lake. It takes him a moment to realize he can see beyond its surface: there are rocks down there, spectral and silvery, and some plant life, like moss or reeds. But some of the plants do not look like reeds. They’re too fleshy, too pale. And they all seem connected to something, like there’s a big tangle of them down in the lake.

  A minnow, no more than a dart of black in the water, comes swimming by one of the fleshy reeds. The flow of the reed changes—from sine to cosine, thinks Joseph, who’s a bit of a math geek—as if it’s resisting the current of the water, which a reed definitely should not do. But then the reed snaps out, silent and snakelike, and he sees a flash of tiny, shining needle teeth, and the minnow is gone…

  “Wh-what’s that?” Joseph stammers. “What’s down there?”

  “It’s why there’s no one near the lake,” says Gracie. “But it won’t bother us. I’ve talked to Miss Tucker about it.” She bows her head. “I listened to them speak, Mr. Macey and Mr. First. They talked like old friends. Which I guess they are. But Mr. Macey… he was terrified. I’d never seen that before.”

  “Everyone seems nervous, after Mr. Weringer died,” says Joseph.

  “And that’s what’s strange. No one’s ever said it—no one ever says anything, of course—but they can’t die, can they? It’s not… allowed. There are rules.”

  Joseph nods.

  “You’re afraid of them, aren’t you?” Gracie says.

  “Shouldn’t I be?”

  “Some, maybe. They’re not bad. They’re just lost. But for the longest time, I thought they weren’t afraid of anything.” She looks back at him. “But I was wrong, Joseph. They are afraid of someone. And they’re afraid of that person just as much as we’re afraid of them.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Mr. Macey came back to Mr. First again,” she says. “He said he’d learned who killed Weringer. Or he thought he’d learned who. He said a word then—I couldn’t understand it—and Mr. First went all quiet. And after that, Mr. First was so dismayed he could barely talk, to me or Mr. Macey. I didn’t know who it was they were talking about, but it’s someone new, and the… I guess the rules don’t apply to them. Whoever this person is, they’re allowed to hurt things, to kill them. I don’t know why they haven’t before now, but that’s what they’re doing. Or what they did, to Mr. Weringer.”

  Joseph huddles close to Gracie on the stone shelf. His intentions are far from amorous: he is terrified, terrified of the thing in the water and those strange glens in the woods, and now she’s telling him about someone even worse, someone that inspires fear in things he thought couldn’t even understand fear. Yet Gracie is still and calm, a stable rock on this dark, swirling mountain, so he clings to her.

  “Why are you telling me this?” he asks.

  “Because I don’t want to see you hurt,” she says. “Things are changing in Wink. Things never change in Wink, but that’s what’s happening now. I want to make sure you’ll be safe.”

 
“Would you run away with me, Gracie?”

  “Run away?” She is quiet. “I’ve never thought about it… I don’t know if… I don’t know if I’ll be able to get away.”

  “But I’d want you to come with me.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Joseph, are you listening? This is much, much more important than you or me.”

  Joseph draws back a little, stung.

  “You don’t understand how bad this is,” says Gracie. “I might be one of the only people who knows what’s going on, thanks to Mr. First. He’s given me certain… authorities, though I’m not sure he knows it.”

  Joseph looks at her out of the side of his eye. She is staring into the dark waters with queerly lifeless eyes. “Is that why you seem so different?” he asks.

  She shuts her eyes. “It gets worse at night. In the day I feel all right, but at night… things change.” She swallows. “I’m in one place… and then, if I’m not looking, I’m suddenly someplace very different. Somewhere with red stars, and many mountains…”

  There is a ripple in the water, then another. At first Joseph is nervous, eyes searching for those fleshy tendrils in the water, but then he realizes Gracie is crying, her tears falling into the pond. It is a disturbing sight, for she cries without moving her face at all: her eyes are wide and calm, with tears simply welling up at the rims to leak down her face.

  Joseph embraces her and holds her close. “It’s all right,” he says.

  “It’s not,” she says. “It isn’t and it won’t be. Not for me.”

  “We’ll make it all right.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll do what we can, I guess. We can’t do anything more than that.” But though Joseph’s words are comforting, he is disturbed. He’s held her as she’s cried before, but not like this, arms limp and eyes wide open as she talks into his lap in a monotone voice.

  There is the sound of singing from the other side of the lake. Miss Tucker has hobbled out of her cabin and is standing on the dock with a lantern, singing a tuneless little reel. There is a splash from the center of the lake, a bit of froth stirred up—perhaps by the wind, perhaps by something else—and he sees the old woman stoop and hold something just above the waters. Perhaps a fish? A hunk of meat? He isn’t sure. There is another splash, and a moan from somewhere near the dock, and she stands back up and wipes her hand on her dress. But now her hand is empty, and she is smiling out at the waters with the fondness of a trainer observing the antics of a well-behaved pet.

  “What I would give,” says Gracie, “for an arrangement as simple as that.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Mona discovers that her house’s attic is stuffed full of boxes, and over the next few days she sorts through them all, trying to see if their contents can tell her more about her mother. Many of them seem to be from the family who lived here before, but every once in a while she comes across a document or artifact of her mother’s that urges her on. And as she works and lives her life in this town, she begins to understand Wink a little more, or she thinks she does.

  Wink is a sunny place, but you never have to go far to find a welcoming porch, or the shade of a pine, or a cool shelf of rock. There you can sit and watch the midday sun turn honeyish and dusky, and soon the streets will echo with the sound of children and the clatter of bike wheels, and people will begin venturing out to knock on neighbors’ doors with pitchers of iced tea or lemonade or martini in their hands.

  Wink is a place where no vehicle ever seems to go faster than thirty miles an hour. The cars drip and slide through the neighborhood lanes with the gentle pace of raindrops weaving down window glass. There just isn’t any need for a rush; nothing is far away, and no problem would ever require you to hurry. If you’re late, everyone will understand.

  And all the cars in Wink are American. Maybe it’s because it’d be tough to get them serviced here if they were anything else, but the residents all take a special pride in it, regardless.

  Everyone freely walks across everyone else’s lawn, and sometimes people even hop a fence; in Wink, this is totally understandable, because what’s mine is yours, my good fella, and maybe I wanted you to swing on by so you could see how my roses are doing, or to have an Old Fashioned and a game of pool.

  Wink is a place of evening baseball and dazzling sunsets and the cheery hiss of dance music through an idling car’s radio. It is a porch place, a place of folding chairs and electric fans and crystal glassware, and pitchers and pitchers of carefully prepared beverages. It is a place of homegrown tomatoes and crawling ivy and roses heavy and drooping with blooms. People get dressed up to go to the diner in Wink: it’s where all the official meets and greets are held, where everyone goes to hear the news, where you take your folks out when you want to treat them to a good time and a good piece of meat.

  Wink is a quiet place, a laughing place, a place where you can throw down a towel anywhere you want and stare up at the pale blue sky and no one will bat an eye, because it’s always early summer in Wink, and such things are meant to be enjoyed.

  Every second is a forever in Wink. Every day is a cool afternoon waiting to happen. And every life is one lived quietly, with your feet up and your sun-dappled lawn before you as you watch the world happily drift by.

  Sometimes Mona feels she has come back to a home she never knew she had. But each time she begins to feel this way, she finds herself watching the children.

  Of all Wink’s pleasant wonders, it is the mothers and the children Mona studies the most. She watches them as they walk down the sidewalks, holding hands; she watches the children playing in the parks, the mothers lounging on picnic blankets, occasionally intervening in some spat; she watches the children sit on the porches as their mothers read them stories from their rockers before returning inside when it’s dark. A single window fills with golden light, the bedtime rituals are completed, and then it winks out.

  Night-night.

  As Mona watches, the old pain in her arm and stomach returns.

  Did Momma have that with me? Mona wonders. Did I? Could I have ever had such a thing?

  Put it away. Push it all away.

  You are empty. Empty.

  Mona asks, and asks, and asks. But she gets no answers. At first she suspects the entire town is hiding something from her. But after a while, she begins to believe them: they really don’t remember her mother’s time here. Was her mother here in secret? Did she live under another name? Was it something to do with Coburn? They cannot say.

  Despite this, Mona’s first weeks in Wink are some of the most pleasurable ones she’s ever had. The afternoons are so beautiful they almost hurt. She has never wanted to shed her life and start anew as much as she does here. She almost wants to give up finding out more about her mother. But then she finds the cans of film in the attic.

  It’s real film, motion picture film, spools and spools of ghostly amber images. She has to find an old-school projector to view it, but this isn’t hard to find in Wink, where the stores keep plenty of old appliances. She has to go through a tutorial to figure out how to feed the film through the projector (a marvelously complicated process), but when she figures it out she returns home, shuts all the curtains and doors, feeds the film in, and turns the projector on.

  There’s a whir, and a blob of dancing colored light appears on the living room wall. She fiddles with the knobs to get it to resolve into distinct shapes, and soon faces and hands emerge from the colorful fog.

  What the camera is projecting is a room. This room, in fact, this very living room in this house, and it’s not empty, but full of people. It’s some kind of holiday party, one set during the summer—on the Fourth of July, probably, judging by the red-white-and-blue cake—and everyone in attendance is about the same age, around thirty or so. The men all wear open-throated shirts with blue or brown sports coats, and the women wear incredibly bright dresses, so bright they look like Christmas ornaments. The air is thick with smoke, everyone has a glass of punch, and
they all laugh as they walk in and out of the French doors in the back. Some of them wave to the camera, or squint irritably when the cameraman turns its blazing light on them. There is no sound, so the images are accompanied only by the rattle and whir of the projector.

  One man calls across the porch to the backyard. Mona can see a woman turn and say something, but she’s far away and out of focus. The man (to Mona he looks like a professional golfer) says something again, louder, and the woman shouts a response so loudly she practically bends double. Mona feels certain she’s just witnessed the “What?… WHAT?” exchange that has to happen once at nearly every big party. The golfer, giving up, waves to the woman, and she comes trotting in, moving very gracefully in such huge high heels.

  It is Mona’s mother, Laura Alvarez herself, wearing an amazing red dress, and she is undoubtedly the life of the party. A silent cheer goes up among all the attendees when she strides through the French doors, and she laughs, embarrassed but gleeful, her fingers fluttering to her chest to calm her heart. And as she laughs, something in Mona breaks, and she begins crying as the ghost of her mother smiles at her from the wall.

  This is all just not fair. It’s wrong—no, it’s just fucking rude—for Mona to see her mother living a happy life among all these happy people. The blurry woman laughing on her wall has no idea that just ahead of her lie years of madness spent in dark rooms, and somewhere in one of those rooms will be a child who can’t understand why every sight seems to make her mother weep.

  Suddenly Mona hates them all. She hates her pleasant neighbors in Wink, she hates the sound of the kids laughing as they fool around on the baseball field, she hates the cheery neon lights and the waves of hello, and she hates the painted people on the town’s sign who stare at the antenna on the mesa with eyes full of hope. She hates them all for having a happiness that is denied to her, because they don’t know, do they? They don’t know what the world is like outside Wink. Those people in the film don’t know that their dreams will come to nothing. They don’t know how things really are, how they will be.