Mr. Tall

by Tony Earley

  “It’s a venomous substance, water,” the dog mused. “My burden and my bane. I thirst, yet I cannot drink. I stink, but cannot bathe. It runs as acid through my dreams.” The dog lowered itself into a crouch and peeled its lips back over a mammoth array of stalactite teeth.

  “Easy there, Lassie,” Jack said. “I’ve got four and a half gallons of water here and I’m not afraid to use it.”

  “And my mouth is dripping with microbial menace. Put the bucket down, Jack. Slowly.”

  “No way, Scooby. Step away from the bridge.”

  The dog stared at Jack and Jack stared at the dog.

  “You have no idea how much I want to rip out your trachea and shake it as I would a fat snake,” the dog said.

  “And I dearly wish that when I threw you off the first bridge you had landed in the creek. What’s it gonna be?”

  “Okay,” the dog said finally. “Victory is yours. My hydrophobia trumps my murderous instincts. Let’s circle clockwise until our positions are switched. Then you go your way and I’ll go mine.”

  “Counterclockwise,” Jack said for the pleasure of being contentious.

  “Fine,” the dog snarled.

  “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “Because I’m a dog.”

  Jack thought about the assertion for a moment. Dogs were a shit-eating, chicken-killing, leg-humping lot, but in his experience had always been truthful. “That seems about fair,” he said.

  The dog took a slow step to its right. Jack stepped to his right. The dog took another step and Jack matched it.

  When they faced each other halfway through the circle, the dog grinned wickedly. “I hope you can swim,” it said.

  “I always did hate a talking dog,” Jack said. He stepped forward and pitched the bucketful of water into the dog’s face.

  The dog screamed and flopped to the ground and writhed in the mud and tried to wipe the water out of its eyes with its paws. To Jack’s amazement and disgust the skin of its face peeled away as if it were a robber’s mask, revealing the marbled bands of gristle binding its great, snapping skull. Its pelt steamed sulfurously and slid from its broad back.

  “Jack, you have rendered me!” the dog cried. “We had a deal! Why did you throw water on me?”

  “I reckon it’s just my nature.”

  By the time the dog finished melting into a malodorous glop of fur and vitals, the water was running shoe-top high over the bridge deck. The creek hurtled through the hollow in man-tall waves bloodied with red clay; downstream it crashed into the gulch-side and erupted into the laurel in bone-white splays of spray. Only the promise of the treasure in Yonder pulled Jack forward onto the bridge. The water ran smoothly over the planks but with fervid velocity; it grabbed at his boots as he shuffled over the slick boards. He was halfway across when the flood, in a flash, bulged and caught him mid-thigh, stumbling him toward the side of the bridge. A regular man would have been washed off. More frightening, though, was that the bridge—while remaining solid beneath his feet—had disappeared from sight. All around him the brown water thrashed and he imagined himself balanced atop a swaying fence post. He couldn’t make himself move another step.

  “Help me, Old Man,” he begged. “Please help me!”

  The voice that answered inside his head wasn’t the old man’s, but a woman’s. He knew the voice better than any other voice, but wasn’t able to place it; it belonged to someone he desperately wanted to remember but couldn’t quite recall.

  “Jack?” the voice said. “Where are you, honey?”

  “I’m almost there,” he answered, without having any idea where there might be.

  “Well, hurry on home, then. We’re waiting on you.”

  We, Jack thought. Who’s we? We was two pages stuck together in a book. And home? Home was a dollar gold piece that hit the floor and rolled away. It had to be around here somewhere. “Watch for me,” he said.

  “All right, then. Bye, Jack.”

  “Bye.”

  Jack blinked and found himself still crouching far out in the heave but suddenly he had worked up a crawful of that Jack, ax-swinging, giant-killing mad. “No, sir!” he shouted at the witch hands of water pulling at him. “Not today. Maybe tomorrow. After a while, but not now.” He tightened his grip on the bucket and eased his right foot forward, then moved his left.

  He ran out of bridge ten yards before he ran out of creek, but the water had curled into an eddy of only moderate coil and he was able to wade through the chest-high swirl. He refilled his bucket with the silted water and held it over his head as he made the last of his crossing. Once ashore he surprised himself by collapsing onto the muddy red road and weeping like a groom’s mother. He cried partly out of gratitude for making it past the black dog and through the flood into Yonder, but mostly in grief at leaving behind the only settlement he had ever known. Had he loved the setting-out skies and dew-tamped roads enough? A bite of dinner by the roadside, a piece of shade in the hot of the day, the sweet waft of wood smoke raveling from a robber’s chimney in the cool of an evening. Oh, if only he could pass through it all again!

  As Jack sobbed the world grew gradually quiet around him; it finally became so still that he leapt to his feet and spun around as if something were sneaking up on him. Somehow the boom of the flood had receded into the distracted mumbling of an inconspicuous creek in the bottom of an anonymous hollow. A crumbling stone abutment lathered over with poison oak was all that remained of the bridge. Across the creek the green dark wood of white oak and pine and laurel and fern through which he had just passed had been lumberjacked from the settlement, leaving no trace. In its place a rough scrub of briars and alder bushes and twisted Virginia pines scraggled the ridges as far as he could see. You might flush up a rabbit in a waste like that, Jack thought, but you’d never roust out a unicorn. He blew his nose out onto the ground and thought, Well, if I chop on this too long I will surely die. He was where he was and he would go where he would go and it was time to get on with his getting on. He turned away and set off up the muddy red road into Yonder, leaning to his left to balance the bucket he carried on his right, and never once looked back at the settlement.

  Jack had traveled no more than a hundred yards up the hill when a familiar-looking black cloud moiled up behind the white treasure box on the summit above him. Surely, surely that anvil-headed son of a bitch hadn’t turned around and come back after him. But it inflated at such a precipitous clip that he thought maybe it had. At the first far-off stomps of thunder, Jack gave up on the switchbacks and cut straight up the hillside. The slope was steeper than it had seemed from the road, and the wet grass was slick. The rising cloud was as black as the inside of a box turtle. Jack estimated that the part he could see was already two mountains and a three-headed giant high—and the damn thing was still rising over the hill. He spied that the treasure box had doors and windows, a sight that heartened him. Maybe the door wasn’t locked, or didn’t require magic spell-words to get it open. Did magic spell-words even work in Yonder?

  He had nearly reached the top of the hill—the treasure house was within a rock throw—when an unfamiliar oppression of tiredness settled on him. He set the bucket down to catch his breath. The coming cloud roiled like boiling blackstrap. Lizard flicks of lightning snapped at the far side of the hill, followed almost immediately by rifled rips of thunder. When he reached again for the bucket bail the words window unit cleaved his skull with such force that he dropped straight to the ground, where he moaned and wept and scraped at the dirt with his heels and clutched at his head, afraid that brain-slop was sludging from his ear-holes. Window unit? he thought. What the hell is a window unit? But then he was standing on a chair in front of an icy blast of air, looking at numbers. When I turn it toward one it gets hotter, and when I turn it toward ten it gets colder. Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten. Tennineeightsevensixfivefourthreetwoone. He turned it back to ten and pulled up his shirt and pressed his belly against the air holes. It must have snow
in there. Mama said, Jack, you get down from there and stop messing with that thing before you break it.

  Window unit.

  And then other strange words hacked into his brain—Microwave Fanny pack Labradoodle—and rushed into the widening cleft—Doublewide Nacho Chainsaw—until the accumulating knowledge of a regular man named John, known since childhood as Jack, began to exceed the ability of that Jack to comprehend. And the words which that Jack had known best—New ground Hardhead Unicorn—mounted a slow retreat into the deepest ganglia of his mind, where they cried out in a fading whisper.

  When Jack opened his eyes, the black cloud churned over him as if trying to figure out whether or not he was still alive, as if to say, If you are still alive I will suck the breath out of you soon enough. He rolled over onto his hands and knees, still drunk on fresh words, and stumbled to his feet. New words still tippled into his skull pan—Pep rally Wide receiver Pepperoni Bra hook—but they stung less and less. He squinted at the white box until it came back into focus. That was his house. And it was a double-wide! By God, he lived in a double-wide! It was wider than wide! Better than good! Fellowship hall Fruit punch Pensacola Trojan. And he was married! He was married and he lived with his wife in a house that was better than good because it was wider than wide! He grabbed up the bucket and staggered forward.

  He had almost made it to the yard when he pulled up short and set the bucket on the ground. Well, shit. He couldn’t think of his wife’s name. He put his hands on his hips and closed his eyes and turned slowly in a circle. Think, Jack, think. She’s the only girl you’ve ever loved! You took baths together as babies and she cried when you peed in the water. You gave her a mood ring in the fifth grade. Hickey Humvee Polyester Snooze button. Susan? Don’t think so. Double play Toaster oven Breast pump Tilt-a-Whirl. Uhura? Nope. What did he call her when he told her good night? What if she didn’t even have a name? Yosemite Pesto Goldfish Bass boat. Daggummit, he hoped she’d be wearing a Name tag.

  The black cloud had grown so tall that Jack could no longer see its top. It dropped a sniffing hound’s snout from its trailing edge. Uh-oh, that wasn’t good. Jack caught up the bucket with the creek water and hurried through the yard. He jumped onto the small porch and jerked open the door. It was dark inside. The first thing he saw was a bald man wearing suspenders talking inside a picture frame on the wall. A witch must have sneaked into the treasure house, but what kind of witch lived in a picture frame?

  Then he saw her. Jill! Sweet Lord, how could he have forgotten Jill? Jill Jill Jill. That one word would be a fair trade for all the other words he’d ever known, or would know. After he’d lost her he had searched for her for so long he’d forgotten what he was looking for. All that setting out. It felt as if he’d been looking for her for centuries, but how could that be?

  When Jill saw him a web of worry lifted from her face. “Jack, honey, where have you been?” She pointed at the bald man talking in the picture frame. “The weatherman says the radar’s got a hook echo on it.”

  He held up the bucket. “I fetched you a pail of water,” he said.

  She blinked at him and he saw in her face that—just for a troubling second—a shade of the old settlement had spirited past her recalling. “Oh, Jack, that is so sweet. But come look at this.”

  The bald witch in the picture pointed at some kind of map covered with what looked like a curdle of blood coiling and uncoiling over top of it. Nothing Jack saw made any sense to him. Why was there blood on the bald witch’s map? Why was everything in the picture moving? He set the bucket on the floor and stepped over to the window. Beneath the cloud snout a thin twist of something like smoke helixed upward from the ground. The helix spun into a writhe of black dirt that braided into the cloud’s sucking maw. A rapid of rain blasted against the double-wide’s side and everything beyond disappeared save for the beating water itself. The house wobbled and strained against its anchors. Well, Jack thought. It’s run us to ground.

  He turned toward Jill just as she stood and faced him. Sonic screwdriver The quicker picker upper Everything must go. “Jill!” he yelled. “We need to get to our place of safety!”

  He saw her sob, and the sight rent his chest with the force of a broadax lopping off a giant’s head.

  “Oh, Jack,” she wailed, “we don’t have a place of safety.”

  Jack opened his mouth to speak but found that the only words he knew were useless ones. All you can eat shrimp. How do you say I have loved you since we first went up the hill lo those many years ago? That I will love you until the end of the last story? No word he could utter would ever reflect the degree to which he meant it. He stepped toward her and shook his head and raised his palms helplessly at his sides.

  “I’ve got to get Little Jack!” she screamed.

  Jack felt as if a catamount had clawed out his heart. He went swimmy-headed. Little Jack. By God, there was a Little Jack.

  Little Jack Little Jack Little Jack.

  “No, wait!” he yelled. “Let me get him!”

  But before he could take a step toward the hallway the sofa rose from the carpet and whirled onto its end and the window frames twisted from their sockets and lifted off into the darkness. Jill’s feet flew from beneath her and she flailed into the air and ripped splayed through the ceiling. The walls of the house lifted from around Jack and the storm jerked him into the howling black. Wild beasts fanged him about the face while he flew and unicorns horned him through the tripes; cuckolded robbers sliced his sinews loose from his bones and a giant sundered his skull bone with a cudgel. He found no joy in the flying and only screaming fear in the falling. And then he lay flat on his back in a field watching pink snow fall from the sky. A flock of blank paper lit gingerly on the ground around him. He listened for Jill to call his name, for Little Jack to cry to be found, but the world was as quiet as a flyleaf. He felt every word he had ever known leaking from his busted crown and he knew that soon he wouldn’t know any words at all.

  Not quite regular man and not quite that Jack, he lay still and considered his condition with the language he had left. The word death meant death, of course, and it meant nothing at all. All it said was, there’s the door, Jack, you get on now, and what good is a word like that? It said nothing about whatever came next. Jack shook with amazement. He had never before set foot in a story with an honest-to-goodness conclusion. He had lived in one continuous tale. All of his life, one page had turned after another and he had set out down another road—looking, he finally remembered, for Jill. But now he understood that every second of joy in the life of a regular man bloomed from the spreading blight of his dying. And he wasn’t ready to leave the page. He had only just set down here, into this brilliant world of numbered mornings, into the finespun possibility of human joy. He wanted to teach Little Jack to play baseball because he had only just learned about it himself. He wanted to brush with his finger the first tress of silver to light up in Jill’s dark hair. He wanted to sit with her on the porch in the bug-chanting twilight and share a cold, sweating beer. He wanted to make pancakes on Sunday morning. He wanted to live as a regular man until his ancient heart said, old friend, I can’t beat no more. Then he wanted to kiss Jill’s hand and laugh out loud because he had chewed every last bit of sweet out of the regular life he had been given. Jack raised his arms toward the tin-colored sky and earnestly spoke to whoever might be listening. “The book,” he whispered. “For God’s sake, don’t close this book.”

  About the Author

  Tony Earley is the author of the novels Jim the Boy and The Blue Star. His fiction has earned a National Magazine Award and appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories. Earley was chosen for both The New Yorker’s inaugural best 20 Under 40 list of fiction writers and Granta’s 20 Best Young American Novelists. He lives with his family in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Samuel Milton Fleming Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

  Also by Tony Earley

  Fiction


  The Blue Star

  Jim the Boy

  Here We Are in Paradise

  Nonfiction

  Somehow Form a Family

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Haunted Castles of the Barrier Islands

  Mr. Tall

  The Cryptozoologist

  Have You Seen the Stolen Girl?

  Yard Art

  Just Married

  Jack and the Mad Dog

  About the Author

  Also by Tony Earley

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2014 by Tony Earley

  Cover design by Matthew Tanner

  Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.