All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories Read online

  "I'll go call Myrt," he said.

  I followed him into the kitchen and stood beside him as he lifted the receiver of the wall phone, holding my breath in a fierce hope that the phone would work. And for once my hoping must have done some good, for when the receiver came off the hook I could hear the faint buzz of an operating line.

  Out in the dining-room, Mrs Donovan was sobbing very quietly.

  Donovan dialed, his big, blunt, grease-grimed fingers seemingly awkward and unfamiliar at the task. He finally got it done.

  He waited with the receiver at his ear. I could hear the signal ringing in the quietness of the kitchen.

  "That you, Myrt? said Donovan. "Yeah, this is Bill. We run into a little trouble. I wonder could you and Jake come over…. No, Myrt, just something wrong. I can't explain it to you. Could you come over and pick up the kids? You'll have to come the front way; you can't get in the back.

  Yeah, Myrt, I know it sounds crazy. There's some sort of wall. Liz and me, we're in the back part of the house and we can't get up to the front. The kids are in the front…. No, Myrt, I don't know what it is. But you do like I say. Them kids are up there all alone and we can't get to them…. Yes, Myrt, right through the house. Tell Jake to bring along an axe. This thing runs right straight through the house. The front door is locked and Jake will have to chop it down. Or bust a window, if that's easier…. Sure, sure, I know what I'm saying. You just go ahead and do it. Anything to get them kids. I'm not crazy. Something's wrong, I tell you. Something's gone way wrong. You do what I say, Myrt…. Don't mind about the door, just chop the damn thing down. You just get the kids any way you can and keep them safe for us." He hung up the receiver and turned from the phone. He used his forearm to wipe the sweat off his face.

  "Damn woman," he said. "She just stood there and argued. She's a flighty bitch." He looked at me. "Now, what do we do next?"

  "Trace the barrier," I said. "See where it goes. See if we can get around it. If we can find a way around it, we can get your kids."

  "I'll go with you."

  I gestured toward the dining-room. "And leave her here alone?"

  "No," he said. "No, I can't do that. You go ahead. Myrt and Jake, they'll come and get the kids. Some of the neighbours will take Liz in. I'll try to catch up with you. Thing like this, you might need some help."

  "Thanks," I said.

  Outside the house, the paleness of the dawn was beginning to flow across the land. Everything was painted that ghostly brightness, not quite-white, not quite any other colour either, that marks the beginning of an August day.

  On the road below, a couple of dozen cars were jammed up in front of the barrier on the east-bound lane and there were groups of people standing around. I could hear one loud voice that kept booming out in excited talk — one of those aggressive loudmouths you find in any kind of crowd. Someone had built a small campfire out on the boulevard between the lanes — God knows why, the morning was surely warm enough and the day would be a scorcher.

  And now I remembered that I had meant to get hold of Alf and tell him that I wasn't coming. I could have used the phone in the Donovan kitchen, but I'd forgotten all about it. I stood undecided, debating whether to go back in again and ask to use the phone. That had been the main reason, I realized, that I'd stopped at Donovan" s.

  There was this pile of cars on the east-bound lane and only the truck and my battered car on the west-bound lane and that must mean, I told myself, that the west-bound lane was closed, as well, somewhere to the east.

  And could that mean, I wondered, that the village was enclosed, was encircled by the wall?

  I decided against going back to make the phone call, and moved on around the house. I picked up the wall again and began to follow it. I was getting the hang of it by now. It was like feeling this thing alongside me, and following the feeling, keeping just a ways away from it, bumping into it only now and then.

  The wall roughly skirted the edge of the village, with a few outlying houses on the other side of it. I followed along it and I crossed some paths and a couple of bob-tailed, dead-end streets, and finally came to the secondary road that ran in from Coon Valley, ten miles or so away.

  The road slanted on a gentle grade in its approach into the village and on the slant, just on the other side of the wall, stood an older model car, somewhat the worse for wear. Its motor was still running and the door on the driver's side was open, but there was no one in it and no one was around. It looked as if the driver, once he'd struck the barrier, might have fled in panic.

  As I stood looking at the car, the brakes began to slip and the car inched forward, slowly at first, then faster, and finally the brakes gave out entirely and the car plunged down the hill, through the barrier wall, and crashed into a tree. It slowly toppled over on its side and a thin trickle of smoke began to seep from underneath the hood.

  But I didn't pay much attention to the car, for there was something more important. I broke into a run, heading up the road.

  The car had passed the barrier and had gone down the road to crash and that meant there was no barrier. I had reached the end of it!

  I ran up the road, exultant and relieved, for I'd been fighting down the feeling, and having a hard time to fight it down entirely, that the barrier might run all around the village. And in the midst of all my exultation and relief, I hit the wall again.

  I hit it fairly hard, for I was running hard, sure that it wasn't there, but in a terrible hurry to make sure it wasn't there. I went into it for three running strides before it tossed me back. I hit the roadbed flat on my back and my head banged upon the pavement. There were a million stars.

  I rolled over and got on my hands and knees and stayed there for a moment, like a gutted hound, with my head hanging limp between my shoulders, and I shook it now and then to shake the stars away.

  I heard the crackle and the roar of flames and that jerked me to my feet. I still was fairly wobbly, but wobbly or not, I got away from there.

  The car was burning briskly and at any moment the flames would reach the gas tank and the car would go sky high.

  But the explosion, when it came, was not too spectacular — just an angry, muffled whuff and a great gout of flame flaring up into the sky. But it was loud enough to bring some people out to see what was going on. Doe Fabian and lawyer Nichols were running up the road, and behind them came a bunch of yelling kids and a pack of barking dogs.

  I didn't wait for them although I had half a mind to, for I had a lot to tell and here was an audience. But there was something else that stopped me from turning back — I had to go on tracking down the barrier and try to find its end, if it had an end.

  My head had begun to clear and all the stars were gone and I could think a little better.

  There was one thing that stood out plain and clear: a car could go through the barrier when there was no one in it, but when it was occupied, the barrier stopped it dead. A man could not go through the barrier, but he could pick up a phone and talk to anyone he wanted. And I remembered that I had heard the voices of the men shouting in the road, had heard them very clearly even when they were on the other side. I picked up some sticks and stones and tossed them at the barrier. They went sailing through as if nothing had been there.

  There was only one thing that the barrier would stop and that single thing was life. And why in the world should there be a barrier to shut out, or shut in, life?

  The village was beginning to stir to life.

  I watched Floyd Caldwell come out on his back porch, dressed in his undershirt and a pair of pants with the suspenders hanging. Except for old Doc Fabian, Floyd was the only man in Millville who ever wore suspenders.

  But while old Doc wore sedate and narrow black ones, Floyd wore a pair that was broad and red. Floyd was the barber and he took a lot of kidding about his red suspenders, but Floyd didn't mind. He was the village smart guy and he worked at it all the time and it probably was all right, for it brought him a lot of trade from out i
n the farming country. People who might just as well have gone to Coon Valley for their haircuts came, instead, to Millville to listen to Floyd's jokes and to see him clown.

  Floyd stood out on the back porch and stretched his arms and yawned.

  Then he took a close look at the weather and he scratched his ribs. Down the street a woman called the family dog and in a little while I heard the flat snap of a screen door shutting and I knew the dog was in.

  It was strange, I thought, that there'd been no alarm. Perhaps it was because few people as yet knew about the barrier.

  Perhaps the few who had found out about it were still a little numb.

  Perhaps most of them couldn't quite believe it. Maybe they were afraid, as I was, to make too much fuss about it until they knew something more about it.

  But it couldn't last for long, this morning calm. Before too long, Millville would be seething.

  Now, as I followed it, the barrier cut through the back yard of one of the older houses in the village. In its day it had been a place of elegance, but years of poverty and neglect had left it tumbledown.

  An old lady was coming down the steps from the shaky back porch, balancing her frail body with a steadying cane.

  Her hair was thin and white and even with no breeze to stir the air, ragged ends of it floated like a fuzzy halo all around her head.

  She started down the path to the little garden, but when she saw me she stopped and peered at me, with her head tilted just a little in a bird-like fashion. Her pale blue eyes glittered at me through the thickness of her glasses.

  "Brad Carter, isn't it?" she asked.

  "Yes, Mrs Tyler," I said. "How are you this morning?"

  "Oh, just tolerable," she told me. "I'm never more than that. I thought that it was you, but my eyes have failed me and I never can be sure."

  "It's a nice morning, Mrs Tyler. This is good weather we are having."

  "Yes," she said, "it is. I was looking for Tupper. He seems to have wandered off again. You haven't seen him, have you?" I shook my head. It had been ten years since anyone had seen Tupper Tyler.

  "He is such a restless boy," she said. "Always wandering off I declare, I don't know what to do with him."

  "Don't you worry," I told her. "He'll show up again."

  "Yes," she said, "I suppose he will. He always does, you know." She prodded with her cane at the bed of purple flowers that grew along the walk.

  "They're very good this year," she said. "The best I've ever seen them. I got them from your father twenty years ago. Mr Tyler and your father were such good friends. You remember that, of course."

  "Yes," I said. "I remember very well."

  "And your mother? Tell me how she is. We used to see a good deal of one another."

  "You forget, Mrs Tyler," I told her, gently. "Mother died almost two years ago."

  "Oh, so she did," she said. "It's true, I am forgetful. Old age does it to one. No one should grow old."

  "I must be getting on," I said. "It was good to see you."

  "It was kind of you to call," she said. "If you have the time, you might step in and we could have some tea. It is so seldom now that anyone ever comes for tea. I suppose it's because the times have changed. No one, any more, has the time for tea."

  "I'm sorry that I can't," I said. "I just stopped by for a moment."

  "Well," she said, "it was very nice of you. If you happen to see Tupper would you mind, I wonder, to tell him to come home."

  "Of course I will," I promised.

  I was glad to get away from her. She was nice enough, of course, but just a little mad. In all the years since Tupper's disappearance, she had gone on looking for him, and always as if he'd just stepped out the door, always very calm and confident in the thought that he'd be coming home in just a little while. Quite reasonable about it and very, very sweet, no more than mildly worried about the idiot son who had vanished without trace.

  Tupper, I recalled, had been something of a pest. He'd been a pest with everyone, of course, but especially with me. He loved flowers and he'd hung around the greenhouse that my father had, and my father, who was constitutionally unable to be unkind to anyone, had put up with him and his continual jabber. Tupper had attached himself to me and no matter what I did or said, he'd tag along behind me. The fact that he was a good ten years older than I was made no difference at all; in his own mind Tupper never had outgrown childhood. In the back of my mind I still could hear his jaunty voice, mindlessly happy over anything at all, cooing over flowers or asking endless, senseless questions. I had hated him, of course, but there was really nothing one could pin a good hate on.

  Tupper was just something that one had to tolerate. But I knew that I never would forget that jaunty, happy voice, or his drooling as he talked, or the habit that he had of counting on his fingers — God knows why he did it as if he were in continual fear that he might have lost one of them in the last few minutes.

  The sun had come up by now and the world was flooded with a brilliant light, and I was becoming more certain by the minute that the village was encircled and cut off, that someone or something, for no apparent reason, had dropped a cage around us. Looking back along the way that I had come, I could see that I'd been travelling on the inside of a curve.

  Looking ahead, the curve wasn't difficult to plot.

  And why should it be us, I wondered. Why a little town like ours? A town that was no different from ten thousand other towns.

  Although, I told myself; that might not be entirely true. It was exactly what I would have said and perhaps everybody else. Everyone, that is, except for Nancy Sherwood — Nancy, who only the night before had told me her strange theory that this town of ours was something very special. And could she be right, I wondered? Was our little town of Millville somehow set apart from all other little towns?

  Just ahead was my home street and my calculations told me that it was located just inside the encircling barricade.

  There was, I told myself, no sense in going farther. It would be a waste of time. I did not need to complete the circle to convince myself that we were hemmed in.

  I cut across the backyard of the Presbyterian parsonage and there, just across the street, was my house, set within its wilderness of flowers and shrubs, with the abandoned greenhouse standing in the back and the old garden around it, a field of purple flowers, those same purple flowers that Mrs Tyler had poked at with her cane and said were doing well this season.

  I heard the steady squeaking as I reached the street and I knew that some kids had sneaked into the yard and were playing in the old lawn swing that stood beside the porch.

  I hurried up the street, a little wrathful at the squeaking. I had told those kids, time and time again, to leave that swing alone. It was old and rickety and one of these days one of the uprights or something else would break, and one of the kids might be badly hurt. I could have taken it down, of course, but I was reluctant to, for it was Mother's swing. She had spent many hours out in the yard, swinging gently and sedately, looking at the flowers.

  The yard was closed in by the old-time lilac hedge and I couldn't see the swing until I reached the gate.

  I hurried for the gate and jerked it open savagely and took two quick steps through it, then stopped in my tracks.

  There were no kids in the swing. There was a man, and except for a battered hat of straw set squarely atop his head, he was as naked as a jaybird.

  He saw me and grinned a foolish grin. "Hi, there," he said, with jaunty happiness. And even as he said it, he began a counting of his fingers, drooling as he counted.

  And at the sight of him, at the sound of that remembered but long forgotten voice, my mind went thudding back to the afternoon before.

  2

  Ed Adler had come that afternoon to take out the phone and he had been embarrassed. "I'm sorry, Brad," he said. "I don't want to do this, but I guess I have to. I have an order from Tom Preston." Ed was a friend of mine. We had been good pals in high school and good f
riends ever since. Tom Preston had been in school with us, of course, but he'd been no friend of mine or of anybody else" s. He'd been a snotty kid and he had grown up into a snotty man.

  That was the way it went, I thought. The heels always were the ones who seemed to get ahead. Tom Preston was the manager of the telephone office and Ed Adler worked for him as a phone installer and a troubleshooter, and I was a realtor and insurance agent who was going out of business. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to, because I was delinquent in my office phone bill and way behind in rent.

  Tom Preston was successful and I was a business failure and Ed Adler was earning a living for his family, but not getting anywhere. And the rest of them, I wondered. The rest of the high school gang — how were they getting on? And I couldn't answer, for I didn't know. They all had drifted off. There wasn't much in a little town like Millville to keep a man around.

  I probably wouldn't have stayed myself if it hadn't been for Mother. I'd come home from school after Dad had died and had helped out with the greenhouse until Mother had joined Dad. And by that time I had been so long in Millville that it was hard to leave.

  "Ed," I had asked, "do you ever hear from any of the fellows?

  "No, I don't," said Ed. "I don't know where any of them are." I said: "There was Skinny Austin and Charley Thompson, and Marty Hall and Alf. I can't remember Alf's last name."

  "Peterson," said Ed.

  "Yes, that's it," I said. "It's a funny thing I should forget his name. Old Alf and me had a lot of fun together." Ed got the cord unfastened and stood up, with the phone dangling from his hand.

  "What are you going to do now?" he asked me.

  "Lock the door, I guess," I said. "It's not just the phone. It's everything. I'm behind in rent as well. Dan Willoughby, down at the bank, is very sad about it."

  "You could run the business from the house."

  "Ed," I told him shortly, "there isn't any business. I just never had a business. I couldn't make a start. I lost money from the first." I got up and put on my hat and walked out of the place. The street was almost empty. There were a few cars at the curb and a dog was smelling of a lamp post and old Stiffy Grant was propped up in front of the Happy Hollow tavern, hoping that someone might come along and offer him a drink.