Libbie was taking her time, dawdling in the warm sun-dapple of the afternoon and the church-like hush of the woods, but you had run ahead, urging her to keep up, and that was why you didn't see the man when he emerged from the trees and stepped out toward the path. Libbie didn't see him either, at first. Until he moved, he might have been a tree himself. His big wool coat was dark and rough, like bark, and his hair hung long and wild around his head, tangled with sticks and leaves, and his beard was so full and hairy that it hid much of his face. Only his eyes were clearly visible, red-rimmed and yellowy, their irises the pale green of new moss. He smiled and swayed back and forth, then leaned toward Libbie to sing, in a slow deep voice that sounded as if it were clogged with mud, on breath that smelled like leafy decay:
"Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket, never let it fade away..."
He opened his coat. His body was filthy, his skin blackened by grime, his chest, belly, and groin furred with wiry dark hair, his penis purplish with blood. His eyes gleamed. He leaned closer, and Libbie, entranced by the sight of him, and in thrall to the rough murmur of his song, might have stayed put, she might have allowed him to reach for her and to touch her with his knotty fingers, if you hadn't taken hold of her arm and yanked at her, pushed her off ahead and urged her to run away.
Later, you named the man Deep Eddie. You called him the King of the Wood.
Jack Grandon liked to sit down with a cocktail when he came home from work—at the end of a long day selling houses or whatever it was he did down there at his office: morning meetings, lunch, open houses, driving around in his convertible with young housewives, giving them a glimpse of all their dreams come true—and he deserved it, a little bit of peace and quiet, with the newspaper and the radio. He liked the old standards. A man crooning something sweet. He hummed along, snapped the paper, licked his thumb and turned the page.
You and Libbie were on the floor, playing cards. The game was Spit and it was fast. You played in silence, so the only sound was the swish of the cards, the slap of your hands. Every so often one of you squeaked, you couldn't help it, but otherwise all you used to communicate with each other were hand signals and facial expressions. Wide eyes, mean frown, grimace of concentrated effort.
Mrs. Grandon stood in the doorway. She looked like something from a magazine, all dressed up, an apron on. The smell of meat cooking, and vegetables, followed her as she entered the room. A pot roast maybe. Your stomach growled.
Mrs. Grandon glided over to the couch. She lit a cigarette. Her silk stockings glistened at eye level. She teetered to the song that was playing, blew smoke, tapped ash, then crossed over to the television to turn it on, muting the volume so it was just the picture playing. The music didn't fit the film, which was in black and white, a western. Dust and heat. A man with a hat and a bandana. Horses rearing.
Libbie slapped the pile. She'd won the game, again, because you weren't paying attention. The song changed to something else. Mr. Grandon snapped his newspaper. Libbie smirked at you, signed an obscenity, then scooped up the cards, shuffled, dealt again. The western was interrupted by a commercial. Veddy good, the boy mouthed. And you could smell that pot roast, and you were hoping you'd be invited to stay for dinner. Mrs. Grandon swirled the ice in her drink.
There was thunder in the distance, presaging another storm. It had been raining and storming for days already. One after the other, rolling in over the whole state. Not too far to the south, in Keokuk County, hail had killed a pig, dented cars, broken windows, knocked a hole in somebody's roof. Now it was windy outside and Leo was flying a kite. Every now and then you could see it, waving past the window. A dragon, with fiery eyes, close to the trees.
The commercial was over, and the show was back on again. Mrs. Grandon took a seat on the sofa. She closed her eyes, leaned her head back, bobbed her foot to the music. Mr. Grandon snapped the paper. His wife opened her eyes and saw that his drink on the table was empty. She stood, picked up his glass, and left the room, trailing perfume. You watched her go: her high heels, her delicate ankles, the swell of her calves below her skirt's hem. Libbie had told you that her mother wanted to have another baby, but couldn't do it, but you weren't sure, exactly, what that meant. Couldn't do what?
Leo's kite was outside the window, and you turned to watch it rise and fall. Libbie reached over and pinched you, hard, on the arm, but you still didn't make a sound. You'd owe a dollar if you did. The next game was even faster, and Libbie won again.
Mrs. Grandon returned with another drink for her husband. She said that dinner was almost ready. You were waiting to be asked to stay. You went into the kitchen to wash your hands. You snooped around, opened the oven—bread—lifted the lid on the pot—some kind of soup. You could see that there were only four places set at the table and wondered what you were going to have to do to get an invitation. You peeked at the salad. Reached in and helped yourself to a piece of carrot.
John came in the back door. He was breathing hard, cold and wet. Rags was right behind him, tracking mud on the floor.
John said hello, but you didn't answer, you only smiled, and he smiled back. Signed: Hello! because he'd recognized the game. When you returned to the living room, the radio was off, the television was off, they others were all just sitting there, looking at each other. You signed to Libbie, What?, but Libbie didn't respond.
Mr. Grandon turned told you to sit down.
There was a story in the paper. Something about a man in the park. Some guy who had been seen hanging out in the woods. "This is not a joke, girls," Mr. Grandon said, because Libbie was smiling behind her hand.
Mrs. Grandon had gone pale. "Murdered children," she said, her hand at her throat, but her husband told her to knock it off—the drama, the melodrama. Nobody was dead. There wasn't any murder. It was nothing like that. Just a creep, that was all. A pervert. You didn't know what this meant, but at the same time, you did.
John brought the smell of rain into the room with him. Everyone looked at him, his bone white skin, black hair, wet and clinging to his head. "I heard about it, too," he said. "Some guy. A bum of some kind. Whacking off."
Mrs. Grandon was angry now, but it wasn't clear whether she was mad at John or at you and Libbie or at her husband or at Deep Eddie himself.
Before you could figure this out, Mr. Grandon was asking, "Have you seen him?" Libbie looked at you, and you shook your head.
"Is that a no?"
You had no choice then but to break the silence, and Libbie smirked. "Yes," you said. "I mean no. It's a no. We haven't seen anybody like that." Libbie held her hand out. You gave her the dollar, and she put it in her pocket.
Mrs. Grandon said, "You can't go out."
Outside, it was pouring. You were thinking, good, you'd just stay there. For dinner.
But Libbie could talk now that you had; there was nothing to hold her back anymore. She was on her feet. "What do you mean we can't go out?"
"I mean I want you two to stay away from the park."
"Forever?"
"No, just for now. It's off limits."
You knew, telling Libbie this was just like asking her to do it.
Then the phone was ringing, and it was Josef Krejci, and he was telling you to come home, right now. So, he'd read the paper, too.
Before you were across the driveway, Leo's kite hit the power line, and Wellington Heights went dark.
Another place you and Libbie were forbidden to go on your own was up into the deeper woods of Hollow Hill, so you went there with Matka when she asked you to help her gather the rare and succulent morels that grew in the shaded glens, on the first warm day of spring, in May.
You were embarrassed by your grandmother then—the drab gray skirt and yellowed white apron, the pale dimpled skin of her arms below the short sleeves of her blouse, the lapping rubber tongues of her galoshes in the mud. You were constantly comparing Matka to Libbie's beautiful mother—keeping an agonizingly obvious tally of the one's shortcomings and the othe
r's gifts—but you needn't have been ashamed because Libbie didn't care and she didn't think of her own mother's natural-seeming loveliness as anything more than an annoyance. As far as Libbie was concerned, Mrs. Grandon's looks had made her self-absorbed and vain—she spent too much time in front of the mirror, studying herself, and she walked around her bedroom naked, which Libbie said was disgusting. She claimed she would much rather have had a mother like Matka, whose wholesome fullness, whose modesty and coveredness was much to be preferred.
Matka was as much of a mother as you were ever going to get—and the old woman loved you and said you were a miracle—but still you were ashamed and disgusted by the broad moon of her behind and the cracked plastic bucket that she carried over one arm and the way she had to pull herself along with a heavy wooden stick. Her slowness was so infuriating that you moved past her, to the top of a small rise of land, and stood fidgeting and waiting. The view from there was even worse—it made you even more impatient to have to watch the bob of the old woman's big head, her gray hair dull and dusty looking and glinting with pins.
Maybe you were afraid for her. Or maybe you were afraid for yourself without her.
Matka gripped the hem of her skirt in her fist and lifted it out of the way, exposing the white flesh of her legs above her rolled hose—as pale and yeasty-looking as raw dough—as she struggled to place the stick and heave herself forward, the rest of the way up to the top of the rise, where you stood growling. The bucket banged against her thigh, her galoshes slogged and squelched in the mud and grass, their loose buckles clattering so that even if you couldn't see her, even if you squeezed your eyes shut tight to block out the sight of her altogether, still you would know exactly where she was there in the otherwise hushed thickets of gnarled trees and wild brush that spread out over the gentle roll of land between the river and the road.
When she had caught up, she stopped and put a hand on your shoulder for support. She was breathing hard, and her full cheeks were rosy with exertion; her dark eyes glittered like glass. She pulled a flask out of the pocket of her skirt and took a sip from it, gasping, then tucked it back. You shifted away and slipped out from under her hand. Matka stepped back and leaned heavily on the stick instead.
Libbie was crouched on the ground nearby, her legs folded like hairpins, as she poked at a puddle with a long bent twig. The sunlight fell on her in such a way that the down of fine white hair shimmered on the surface of her bare arms. John had said that bugs and worms and frogs could be spontaneously generated in just such a messy soup of mud and muck, and Libbie seemed to be looking for that, hoping to see it happen. Just as she'd stood outside the bear compound at the park and stared with a kind of eager wonder at the lumbering clumsy stinking beasts after John said that the cubs come into the world as formless blobs of flesh and fur and bones and blood that the mothers hold between their paws and then with their huge hanging tongues lick into sensible shape.
You were leaning back against a tree and idly picking at its bark, when Matka reached out toward you with a grunt and slapped your hand.
"What?"
She slapped your hand again, harder.
"What did I do?"
In the forests of Bohemia, Matka said, when they caught someone harming a tree like that, they nailed his belly to the bark and then they walked him around and around until his skin was torn away and his muscles were shredded and his insides had all come out and undone, unwound from within him to wrap and sheathe and heal the injured trunk. You could, she said, walk through the forest and find remnants of this—bones and bits of cloth and flesh grown into bark, as if the man had in his punishment become the tree, or the tree the man. She sniffed and reared away and spat into the grass while Libbie giggled nervously and you folded your arms around yourself and clenched your offending fingers into fists.
Libbie had found a mushroom and, still squatted on the ground, she held it up for Matka to see. The old woman squinted and shook her heavy head. It was just a common toadstool, she said, a soft white death-cup, not a morel. Disappointed, Libbie tossed the thing away, carelessly, flinching back when it landed in the puddle with a splash. She turned and grinned up at you.
"Look," she whispered, "it's a penis." She sat back and poked at it again, watched it bob and float, whitely, in the murk. And when you didn't answer, Libbie grinned at her again. "Well, doesn't it look like one?"
But the only penis you had ever seen was Deep Eddie's, and this looked nothing like that. You blushed, embarrassed not by what Libbie had said, but at your own ignorance, revealed. Libbie saw this, and it made her laugh.
"It's a penis, and I've planted it here," she said, "so that it can grow up out of the mud big and snaky and wrap around your ankles and pull you in and drag you down all the way to the bottom of the deep eddy and drown you there and eat you!" Laughing, she lunged at you, and you jumped back away as Matka's knife, gleaming, swooped down into the tangled grass and her hand came back holding the golden folded flesh of a morel. She cooked them in cream or baked them with onions or fried them in butter and served them with a tart lemon sauce, but no matter what she did to them, she could never disguise the lingering taste of dirt and decay, the murk and muck of the river bank, alluvial slime, primordial soup, from which some misshapen and grotesque life might decide to impulsively spring.
That summer rolled by, and soon the world was deep into August, floating along on days that were so long and hot and dull, that despite her best intentions Mrs. Grandon couldn't keep you inside. You and Libbie made a plan to go fishing, and you spent the morning creating poles for yourselves out of willow switches and string and safety pins before you took off down Old River Road to what seemed to be the perfect spot, above the roller dam and below the bridge, away from the deep eddy, where the river was wide and still. The afternoon was quiet, lazy, thick with heat. From the cereal mill downtown there wafted the heavy smell of roasted oats and corn. Dragonflies swooped and circled, cicadas screeched in the trees, and a pair of snakes slithered off a rock on the far bank, then skimmed away across the surface of the water as if it were as solid as glass.
"We should cook what we catch," Libbie said, "and eat it." She was lying on her back, dozing, with her pole propped between her knees and her arms folded back behind her head. She had taken to wearing her brother's St. Christopher medal along with the small silver cross that she'd been given for her birthday that year. She'd swiped the medal, she said, but insisted John didn't care. He was too smart to believe in God. Over the summer Libbie's skin had browned and her hair had whitened, changing her in a way that you loved and envied, both. Your own shoulders burned and peeled and burned again, without ever tanning, and your hair always had the same flat colorlessness of coal.
Libbie had been trying to convince you that you ought to be working on a plan for how the two of you would get along on your own if you had to, in case the bomb was dropped and everybody else in the world was annihilated. This was a circumstance that at the time you found appealing. You liked the thought of the two of you and nobody else, having to depend upon each other as you struggled against the elements and the animals to stay alive. You said that if that happened, then you could just go into everybody else's house and eat all their food until it ran out.
Libbie sat up. "But," she argued, "that stuff will be poisoned by fallout."
You smirked at her. "Well, then the fish will be poisoned, too, Libbie, you dope," you said. "We're all going to die," you went on, matter-of-factly. "Might as well get used to it."
You had both already heard your father say that if somebody did drop the bomb there wouldn't be anything left at all—no fish, no people, no trees—and it was foolish for anybody to think otherwise. But that image that he conjured up—of a ghost town world as ruined and empty and lifeless as the shell of an abandoned building—it scared Libbie, even though you pointed out that she wasn't going to be there to experience it anyway, so what's the diff?
"Sometimes I hate you," Libbie said, then stood an
d tossed her pole aside. It whipped across the grass, string and pin snagged on a low bush, and you called out after her as she walked away: "You're not supposed to be alone!" You came up behind her and grabbed her shoulder, but Libbie tore herself away. She took off on a run, but didn't notice until long after she was home that the cross and the medal were gone.
July 2006
Meena Krejci is in her father's car, and she's driving on the Interstate, headed westward on I-80, across the flat farmland of Iowa into the even flatter farmland of Nebraska. It's late in the afternoon and the traffic on the Interstate is light. Meena doesn't know where she's going because she drives without intent, just following the road, blindly, with both hands on the steering wheel and her seat belt securely fastened, and she's keeping in her lane, she's staying under the speed limit, which she's pretty sure is seventy-five but could be it's only seventy, she can't remember.
About an hour ago she crossed the bridge over the Missouri River, between Council Bluffs and Omaha, and now she's in Nebraska. She's trying hard, doing the best she can, to do anything but think—about what she's done or where she's going or what she'll do next. She keeps an eye on the rear view mirror, expecting to see in it a flash of red lights, and she often holds her breath and listens hard, anticipating the sound of a siren's wail snaking into her senses above the rush of the wind, the hum of the engine, and the radio's low drone. When she passes a trooper on the shoulder of the road, ticketing some other more unfortunate driver, she ducks her head to hide from him, but he isn't looking and he doesn't seem to care. To Meena this turns out to be a relief and a disappointment, both at once.
The Minor Apocalypse of Meena Krejci Page 6
