by Holly Black
They drove in silence for a while. They passed a silo on the left. Nothing else but corn. Nothing passed them going the other way, not even a farm truck.
“Have we passed anything since we got off the turnpike, Vicky?”
She thought about it. “A car and a tractor. At that intersection.”
“No, since we got on this road. Route 17.”
“No. I don’t think we have.” Earlier this might have been the preface to some cutting remark. Now she only stared out of her half of the windshield at the unrolling road and the endless dotted line.
“Vicky? Could you open the suitcase?”
“Do you think it might matter?”
“Don’t know. It might.”
While she picked at the knots (her face was set in a peculiar way—expressionless but tight-mouthed—that Burt remembered his mother wearing when she pulled the innards out of the Sunday chicken), Burt turned on the radio again.
The pop station they had been listened to was almost obliterated in static and Burt switched, running the red marker slowly down the dial. Farm reports. Buck Owens. Tammy Wynette. All distant, nearly distorted into babble. Then, near the end of the dial, one single word blared out of the speaker, so loud and clear that the lips which uttered it might have been directly beneath the grille of the dashboard speaker.
“Atonement!” this voice bellowed.
Burt made a surprised grunting sound. Vicky jumped.
“Only by the blood of the Lamb are we saved!” the voice roared, and Burt hurriedly turned the sound down. This station was close, all right. So close that … yes, there it was. Poking out of the corn at the horizon, a spidery red tripod against the blue. The radio tower.
“Atonement is the word, brothers ’n’ sisters,” the voice told them, dropping to a more conversational pitch. In the background, off-mike, voices murmured amen. “There’s some that thinks it’s okay to get out in the world, as if you could work and walk in the world without being smirched by the world. Now is that what the word of God teaches us?”
Off-mike but still loud: “No!”
“Holy Jesus!” the evangelist shouted, and now the words came in a powerful, pumping cadence, almost as compelling as a driving rock-and-roll beat: “When they gonna know that way is death? When they gonna know that the wages of the world are paid on the other side? Huh? Huh? The Lord has said there’s many mansions in His house. But there’s no room for the fornicator. No room for the coveter. No room for the defiler of the corn. No room for the hommasexshul. No room—”
Vicky snapped it off. “That drivel makes me sick.”
“What did he say?” Burt asked her. “What did he say about corn?”
“I didn’t hear it.” She was picking at the second clothesline knot.
“He said something about corn. I know he did.”
“I got it!” Vicky said, and the suitcase fell open in her lap. They were passing a sign that said: Gatlin 5 Mi. Drive Carefully Protect our Children. The sign had been put up by the Elks. There were .22 bullet holes in it.
“Socks,” Vicky said. “Two pairs of pants … a shirt … a belt … a string tie with a—” She held it up, showing him the peeling gilt neck clasp. “Who’s that?”
Burt glanced at it. “Hopalong Cassidy, I think.”
“Oh.” She put it back. She was crying again.
After a moment, But said, “Did anything strike you funny about that radio sermon?”
“No. I heard enough of that stuff as a kid to last me forever. I told you that.”
“Didn’t you think he sounded kind of young? That preacher?”
She uttered a mirthless laugh. “A teenager, maybe, so what? That’s what’s so monstrous about that whole trip. They like to get hold of them when their minds are still rubber. They know how to put all the emotional checks and balances in. You should have been at some of the tent meetings my mother and father dragged me to … some of the ones I was ‘saved’ at.
“Let’s see. There was Baby Hortense, the Singing Marvel. She was eight. She’d come on and sing ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’ while her daddy passed the plate, telling everybody to ‘dig deep, now, let’s not let this little child of God down.’ Then there was Norman Staunton. He used to preach hellfire and brimstone in this Little Lord Fauntleroy suit with short pants. He was only seven.”
She nodded at his look of unbelief.
“They weren’t the only two, either. There were plenty of them on the circuit. They were good draws.” She spat the word. “Ruby Stampnell. She was a ten-year-old faith healer. The Grace Sisters. They used to come out with little tin-foil haloes over their head and—oh!”
“What is it?” He jerked around to look at her, and what she was holding in her hands. Vicky was staring at it raptly. Her slowly seining hands had snagged it on the bottom of the suitcase and had brought it up as she talked. Burt pulled over to take a better look. She gave it to him wordlessly.
It was a crucifix that had been made from twists of corn husk, once green, now dry. Attached to this by woven cornsilk was a dwarf corncob. Most of the kernels had been carefully removed, probably dug out one at a time with a pocketknife. Those kernels remaining formed a crude cruciform figure in yellowish bas-relief. Corn-kernel eyes, each slit longways to suggest pupils. Outstretched kernel arms, the legs together, terminating in a rough indication of bare feet. Above, four letters also raised from the bone-white cob: I N R I.
“That’s a fantastic piece of workmanship,” he said.
“It’s hideous,” she said in a flat, strained voice. “Throw it out.”
“Vicky, the police might want to see it.”
“Why”
“Well, I don’t know why. Maybe—”
“Throw it out. Will you please do that for me? I don’t want it in the car.”
“I’ll put it in back. And as soon as we see the cops, we’ll get rid of it one way or the other. I promise. Okay?”
“Oh, do whatever you want with it!” she shouted at him. “You will anyway!”
Troubled, he threw the thing in the back, where it landed on a pile of clothes. Its corn-kernel eyes stared raptly at the T-Bird’s dome light. He pulled out again, gravel splurting from beneath the tires.
“We’ll give the body and everything that was in the suitcase to the cops,” He promised. “Then we’ll be shut of it.”
Vicky didn’t answer. She was looking at her hands.
A mile further on, the endless cornfields drew away from the road, showing farmhouses and outbuildings. In one yard they saw dirty chickens pecking listlessly at the soil. There were faded cola and chewing tobacco ads on the roofs of barns. They passed a tall billboard that said: Only Jesus Saves. They passed a café with a Conoco gas island, but Burt decided to go on into the center of town, if there was one. If not, they could come back to the café. It only occurred to him after they had passed it that the parking lot had been empty except for a dirty old pickup that looked like it was sitting on two flat tires.
Vicky suddenly began to laugh, a high, giggling sound that struck Burt as being dangerously close to hysteria.
“What’s so funny?”
“The signs,” she said, gasping and hiccupping. “Haven’t you been reading them? When they called this the Bible Belt, they sure weren’t kidding. Oh Lordy, there’s another bunch.” Another burst of hysterical laughter escaped her, and she clapped both hands over her mouth.
Each sign had only one word. They were leaning on whitewashed sticks that had been implanted in the sandy shoulder, long ago by the looks; the whitewash was flaked and faded. They were coming up at eighty-foot intervals and Burt read:
A … Cloud … By … Day … A … Pillar … Of … Fire … By … Night
“They only forgot one thing,” Vicky said, still giggling helplessly.
“What?” Burt asked, frowning.
“Burma Shave.” She held a knuckled fist against her open mouth to keep in the laughter, but her semi-hysterical giggles flowed around it like effervescent
ginger-ale bubbles.
“Vicky, are you all right?”
“I will be. Just as soon as we’re a thousand miles away from here, in sunny sinful California with the Rockies between us and Nebraska.
Another group of signs came up and they read them silently.
Take … This … And … Eat … Saith … The … Lord … God
Now why, Burt thought, should I immediately associate that indefinite pronoun with corn? Isn’t that what they say when they give you communion? It had been so long since he had been to church that he really couldn’t remember. He wouldn’t be surprised if they used cornbread for holy wafer around these parts. He opened his mouth to tell Vicky that, and then thought better of it.
They breasted a gentle rise and there was Gatlin below them, all three blocks of it, looking like a set from a movie about the Depression.
“There’ll be a constable,” Burt said, and wondered why the sight of that hick one-timetable town dozing in the sun should have brought a lump of dread into his throat.
They passed a speed sign proclaiming that no more than thirty was now in order, and another sign, rust-flecked, which said: You are now entering Gatlin, nicest little town in Nebraska—or anywhere else! Pop. 5431.
Dusty elms stood on both sides of the road, most of them diseased. They passed the Gatlin Lumberyard and a 76 gas station, where the price signs swung slowly in a hot noon breeze: Reg 35.9 Hi-Test 38.9, and another which said: Hi truckers diesel fuel around back.
They crossed Elm Street, then Birch Street, and came up on the town square. The houses lining the streets were plain wood with screened porches. Angular and functional. The lawns were yellow and dispirited. Up ahead a mongrel dog walked slowly out into the middle of Maple Street, stood looking at them for a moment, then lay down in the road with its nose on its paws.
“Stop,” Vicky said. “Stop right here.”
Burt pulled obediently to the curb.
“Turn around. Let’s take the body to Grand Island. That’s not too far, is it? Let’s do that.”
“Vicky, what’s wrong?”
“What do you mean, what’s wrong?” she asked, her voice rising thinly. “This town is empty, Burt. There’s nobody here but us. Can’t you feel that?”
He had felt something, and still felt it. But—
“It just seems that way,” he said. “But it sure is a one-hydrant town. Probably all up in the square, having a bake sale or a bingo game.”
“There’s no one here.” She said the words with a queer, strained emphasis. “Didn’t you see that 76 station back there?”
“Sure, by the lumberyard, so what?” His mind was elsewhere, listening to the dull buzz of a cicada burrowing into one of the nearby elms. He could smell corn, dusty roses, and fertilizer—of course. For the first time they were off the turnpike and in a town. A town in a state he had never been in before (although he had flown over it from time to time in United Airlines 747s) and somehow it felt all wrong but all right. Somewhere up ahead there would be a drugstore with a soda fountain, a movie house named the Bijou, a school named after JFK.
“Burt, the prices said thirty-five-nine for regular and thirty-eight-nine for high octane. Now how long has it been since anyone in this country paid those prices?”
“At least four years,” he admitted. “But, Vicky—”
“We’re right in town, Burt, and there’s not a car! Not one car!”
“Grand Island is seventy miles away. It would look funny if we took him there.”
“I don’t care.”
“Look, let’s just drive up to the courthouse and—”
“No!”
There, damn it, there. Why our marriage is falling apart, in a nutshell. No I won’t. No siree. And furthermore, I’ll hold my breath till I turn blue if you don’t let me have my way.
“Vicky,” he said.
“I want to get out of here, Burt.”
“Vicky, listen to me.”
“Turn around. Let’s go.”
“Vicky, will you stop a minute?”
“I’ll stop when we’re driving the other way. Now let’s go.”
“We have a dead child in the trunk of our car!” he roared at her, and took a distinct pleasure at the way she flinched, the way her face crumbled. In a slightly lower voice he went on: “His throat was cut and he was shoved out into the road and I ran him over. Now I’m going to drive up to the courthouse or whatever they have here, and I’m going to report it. If you want to start walking back toward the pike, go to it. I’ll pick you up. But don’t you tell me to turn around and drive seventy miles to Grand Island like we had nothing in the trunk but a bag of garbage. He happens to be some mother’s son, and I’m going to report it before whoever killed him gets over the hills and far away.”
“You bastard,” she said, crying. “What am I doing with you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know anymore. But the situation can’t be remedied, Vicky.”
He pulled away from the curb. The dog lifted its head at the brief squeal of the tires and then lowered it to its paws again.
They drove the remaining block to the square. At the corner of Main and Pleasant, Main split in two. There actually was a town square, a grassy park with a bandstand in the middle. On the other end, where Main Street became one again, there were two official-looking buildings. Burt could make out the lettering on one: Gatlin Municipal Center.
“That’s it,” he said. Vicky said nothing.
Halfway up the square, Burt pulled over again. They were beside a lunchroom, the Gatlin Bar and Grill.
“Where are you going?” Vicky asked with alarm as he opened his door.
“To find out where everyone is. Sign in the window there says ‘open.’”
“You’re not going to leave me here alone.”
“So come. Who’s stopping you?”
She unlocked her door and stepped out as he crossed in front of the car. He saw how pale her face was and felt an instant of pity. Hopeless pity.
“Do you hear it?” she asked as he joined her.
“Hear what?”
“The nothing. No cars. No people. No tractors. Nothing.”
And then, from a block over, they heard the high and joyous laughter of children.
“I hear kids,” he said. “Don’t you?”
She looked at him, troubled.
He opened the lunchroom door and stepped into dry, antiseptic heat. The floor was dusty. The sheen on the chrome was dull. The wooden blades of the ceiling fans stood still. Empty tables. Empty counter stools. But the mirror behind the counter had been shattered and there was something else … in a moment he had it. All the beer taps had been broken off. They lay along the counter like bizarre party favors.
Vicky’s voice was gay and near to breaking. “Sure. Ask anybody. Pardon me, sir, but could you tell me—”
“Oh, shut up.” But his voice was dull and without force. They were standing in a bar of dusty sunlight that fell through the lunchroom’s big plate-glass window and again he had that feeling of being watched and he thought of the boy they had in their trunk, and of the high laughter of children. A phrase came to him for no reason, a legal-sounding phrase, and it began to repeat mystically in his mind: Sight unseen. Sight unseen. Sight unseen.
His eyes traveled over the age-yellowed cards thumb-tacked up behind the counter: Cheeseburg 35¢ World’s Best Joe 10¢ Strawberry Rhubarb Pie 25¢ Today’s Special Ham & Red Eye Gravy w/ Mashed Pot 80¢.
How long since he had since lunchroom prices like that?
Vicky had the answer. “Look at this,” she said shrilly. She was pointing at the calendar on the wall. “They’ve been at that bean supper for twelve years, I guess.” She uttered a grinding laugh.
He walked over. The picture showed two boys swimming in a pond while a cute little dog carried off their clothes. Below the picture was the legend: Compliments of Gatlin Lumber & Hardware You Breakum, We Fixum. The month on view was August 1964.
“You’re sure!” she cried hysterically. “Sure, you’re sure! That’s part of your trouble, Burt, you’ve spent your whole life being sure!”
He turned back to the door and she came after him.
“Where are you going?”
“To the Municipal Center.”
“Burt, why do you have to be so stubborn? You know something’s wrong here. Can’t you just admit it?”
“I’m not being stubborn. I just want to get shut of what’s in the trunk.”
They stepped out onto the sidewalk, and Burt was struck afresh with the town’s silence, and with the smell of fertilizer. Somehow you never thought of that smell when you buttered an ear and salted it and bit in. Compliments of sun, rain, all sorts of man-made phosphates, and a good healthy dose of cow shit. But somehow this smell was different from the one he had grown up with in rural upstate New York. You could say whatever you wanted to about organic fertilizer, but there was something almost fragrant about it when the spreader was laying it down in the fields. Not one of your great perfumes, God no, but when the late-afternoon spring breeze would pick up and waft it over the freshly turned fields, it was a smell with good associations. It meant winter was over for good. It meant that school doors were going to bang closed in six weeks or so and spill everyone out into summer. It was a smell tied irrevocably in his mind with other aromas that were perfume: timothy grass, clover, fresh earth, hollyhocks, dogwood.
But they must do something different out here, he thought. The smell was close but not the same. There was a sickish-sweet undertone. Almost a death smell. As a medical orderly in Vietnam, he had become well versed in that smell.
Vicky was sitting quietly in the car, holding the corn crucifix in her lap and staring at it in a rapt way Burt didn’t like.
“Put that thing down,” he said.
“No,” she said without looking up. “You play your games and I’ll play mine.”
He put the car in gear and drove up to the corner. A dead stoplight hung overhead, swinging in a faint breeze. To the left was a neat white church. The grass was cut. Neatly kept flowers grew beside the flagged path up to the door. Burt pulled over.
