All Flesh Is Grass and Other Stories Read online

  "Your papa," Tupper said. "Where is your papa, Brad? There is something I have to tell him." And that voice, I thought. How could I ever have mistaken it? And how could I ever have forgotten that Tupper was, of all things, an accomplished mimic? He could be any bird he wanted and he could be a dog or cat and the kids used to gather round him, making fun of him, while he put on a mimic show of a dog-and-cat fight or of two neighbours quarrelling.

  "Your papa!" Tupper said.

  "We'd better get inside," I told him. "I'll get some clothes and you climb into them. You can't go on running around naked."

  He nodded vaguely. "Flowers," he said. "Lots of pretty flowers." He spread his arms wide to show me how many flowers there were. "Acres and acres," he said. "There is no end to them. They just keep on forever. Every last one purple. And they are so pretty and they smell so sweet and they are so good to me." His chin was covered with a dampness from his talking and he wiped it with a claw-like hand. He wiped his hand upon a thigh.

  I got him by the elbow and got him turned around, headed for the house.

  "But your papa," he protested. "I want to tell your papa all about the flowers."

  "Later on," I said.

  I got him on the porch and thrust him through the door and followed after him. I felt easier. Tupper was no decent sight for the streets of Millville. And I had had, for a while, about all that I could stand. Old Stiffy Grant laid out in my kitchen just the night before and now along comes Tupper, without a stitch upon him. Eccentrics were all right, and in a little town you get a lot of them, but there came a time when they ran a little thin.

  I still held tightly to his elbow and marched him to the bedroom.

  "You stand right there," I told him.

  He stood right there, not moving, gaping at the room with his vacant stare.

  I found a shirt and a pair of trousers. I got out a pair of shoes and, after looking at his feet, put them back again. They were, I knew, way too small. Tupper's feet were all spraddled out and flattened. He'd probably been going without shoes for years.

  I held out the trousers and the shirt.

  "You get into these," I said. "And once you have them on, stay here. Don't stir out of this room." He didn't answer and he didn't take the clothes. He'd fallen once again to counting his fingers.

  And now, for the first time, I had a chance to wonder where he'd been.

  How could a man drop out of sight, without a trace, stay lost for ten years, and then pop up again, out of that same thin air into which he had disappeared?

  It had been my first year in high school that Tupper had turned up missing and I remembered it most vividly because for a week all of the boys had been released from school to join the hunt for him. We had combed miles of fields and woodlands, walking slowly in line an arm's length from one another, and finally we had been looking for a body rather than a man. The state police had dragged the river and several nearby ponds. The sheriff and a posse of townspeople had worked carefully through the swamp below Stiffy's shack, prodding with long poles. They had found innumerable logs and a couple of wash boilers that someone had thrown away and on the farther edge of the swamp an anciently dead dog.

  But no one had found Tupper.

  "Here," I told him, "take these clothes and get into them." Tupper finished with his fingers and politely wiped his chin.

  "I must be getting back," he said. "The flowers can't wait too long." He reached out a hand and took the clothes from me. "My other ones wore out," he said. "They just dropped off of me."

  "I saw your mother just half an hour ago," I said. "She was looking for you." It was a risky thing to say, for Tupper was the kind of jerk that you handled with kid gloves. But I took the calculated risk and said it, for I thought that maybe it would jolt some sense into him.

  "Oh," he said lightly, "she's always hunting for me. She thinks I ain't big enough to look out for myself." As if he'd never been away. As if ten years hadn't passed. As if he'd stepped out of his mother's house no more than an hour ago. As if time had no meaning for him — and perhaps it hadn't.

  "Put on the clothes," I told him. "I'll be right back." I went out into the living-room and picked up the phone. I dialled Doc Fabian's number. The busy signal blurped at me.

  I put the receiver back and tried to think of someone else to call. I could call Hiram Martin. Perhaps he was the one to call. But I hesitated.

  Doc was the man to handle this; be knew how to handle people. All that Hiram knew was how to push them around.

  I dialled Doc once more and still got the busy signal. I slammed down the receiver and hurried toward the bedroom. I couldn't leave Tupper alone too long. God knows what he might do.

  But I already had waited too long. I never should have left. The bedroom was empty. The window was open and the screen was broken out and there was no Tupper.

  I rushed across the room and leaned out of the window and there was no sign of him.

  Blind panic hit me straight between the eyes. I don't know why it did.

  Certainly, at that moment, Tupper's escaping from the bedroom was not all that important. But it seemed to be important and I knew, without knowing why, that I must run him down and bring him back, that I must not let him out of my sight again.

  Without thinking, I stepped back from the window and took a running jump, diving through the opening. I landed on one shoulder and rolled, then jumped up to my feet.

  Tupper was not in sight, but now I saw where he had gone.

  His dewy tracks led across the grass, back around the house and down to the old greenhouse. He had waded out into the patch of purple flowers that covered the old abandoned area where once my father and, later, I myself had tended rows of flowers and other plants. He had waded out some twenty feet or so into the mass of flowers. His trail was clearly shown, for the plants had been brushed over and had not had time to straighten yet, and they were a darker hue where the dew had been knocked off them.

  The trail went twenty feet and stopped. All about it and ahead of it the purple flowers stood straight, silvered by the tiny dewdrops.

  There was no other trail. Tupper had not backed out along the trail and then gone another way. There was just the single trail that headed straight into the patch of purple flowers and ended. As if the man might have taken wing and flown away, or dropped straight into the ground.

  But no matter where he was, I thought, no matter what kind of tricks he played, he couldn't leave the village. For the village was closed in by some sort of barrier that ran all the way around it.

  A wailing sound exploded and filled the universe, a shrieking, terrible sound that reverberated and beat against itself. It came so suddenly that it made me jump and stiffen. The sound seemed to fill the world and to dog the sky and it didn't stop, but kept on and on.

  Almost at once I knew what it was, but my body still stayed tense for long seconds and my mind was curdled with a nameless fear. For there had been too much happening in too short a time and this metallic yammering had been the trigger that had slammed it all together and made the world almost unendurable.

  Gradually I relaxed and started for the house.

  And still the sound kept on, the frantic, full-throated wailing of the siren down at the village hall.

  8

  By the time I got up to the house there were people running in the street — a wild-eyed, frantic running with a sense of panic in it, all of them heading toward that screeching maelstrom of sound, as if the siren were the monstrous tootling of a latter-day Pied Piper and they were the rats which must not be left behind.

  There was old Pappy Andrews, hobbling along, cracking his cane on the surface of the street with unaccustomed vigour and the wind blowing his long chin whiskers up into his face. There was Grandma Jones, who had her sunbonnet socked upon her head, but had forgotten to tie the strings, which floated and bobbed across her shoulders as she stumped along with grim determination. She was the only woman in all of Millville (perhaps in all the wo
rld) who still owned a sunbonnet and she took a malicious pride in wearing it, as if the very fact of appearing with it upon her head was a somehow commendable flaunting of her fuddy-duddyness. And after her came Pastor Silas Middleton, with a prissy look of distaste fastened on his face, but going just the same. An old jalopy clattered past with that crazy Johnson kid crouched behind the wheel and a bunch of his hoodlum pals yelling, and cat-calling, glad of any kind of excitement and willing to contribute to it. And a lot of others, including a slew of kids and dogs.

  I opened the gate and stepped into the street. But I didn't run like all the rest of them, for I knew what it was all about and I was all weighed down with a lot of things that no one knew as yet. Especially about Tupper Tyler and what Tupper might have had to do with what was happening. For insane as it might sound, I had a sneaky sort of hunch that Tupper had somehow had a hand in it and had made a mess of things.

  I tried to think, but the things I wanted to think about were too big to get into mind and there were no mental handholds on them for my mind to grab a hold of. So I didn't hear the car when it came sneaking up beside me.

  The first thing I heard was the click of the door as it was coming open.

  I swung around and Nancy Sherwood was there behind the wheel.

  "Come on, Brad," she yelled, to make herself heard above the siren noise.

  I jumped in and closed the door and the car slid up the street. It was a big and powerful thing. The top was down and if felt funny to be riding in a car that didn't have a top.

  The siren stopped. One moment the world had been filled to bursting with its brazen howling and then the howling stopped and for a little moment there was the feeble keening as the siren died. Then the silence came, and in the weight and mass of silence a little blot of howling still stayed within one's mind, as if the howling had not gone, but had merely moved away.

  One felt naked in the coldness of the silence and there was the absurd feeling that in the noise there had been purpose and direction. And that now, with the howling gone, there was no purpose or direction.

  "This is a nice car you have," I said, not knowing what to say, but knowing that I should say something.

  "Father gave it to me," she said, "on my last birthday." It moved along and you couldn't hear the motor. All you could hear was the faint rumble of the wheels turning on the roadbed.

  "Brad," she asked, "what's going on? Someone told me that your car was wrecked and there was no sign of you. What has your car to do with the siren blowing? And there were a lot of cars down on the road…"

  I told her. "There's a fence of some sort built around the town."

  "Who would build a fence?"

  "It's not that kind of fence. You can't see this fence." We had gotten close to Main Street and there were more people. They were walking on the sidewalk and walking on the lawns and walking in the road. Nancy slowed the car to crawling.

  "You said there was a fence."

  "There is a fence. An empty car can get through it, but it will stop a man. I have a hunch it will stop all life. It's the kind of fence you'd expect in fairyland."

  "Brad," she said, "you know there is no fairyland."

  "An hour ago I knew," I said. "I don't know any more." We came out on Main Street and a big crowd was standing out in front of the village hall and more coming all the time. George Walker, the butcher at the Red Owl store, was running down the street, with his white apron tucked up into his belt and his white cap set askew upon his head. Norma Shepard, the receptionist at Doc Fabian's office, was standing on a box out on the sidewalk so that she could see what was going on, and Butch Ormsby, the owner of the service station just across the street from the hall, was standing at the kerb, wiping and wiping at his greasy hands with a ball of waste, as if he knew he would never get them clean, but was bound to keep on trying.

  Nancy pulled the car up into the approach to the filling station and shut off the motor.

  A man came across the concrete apron and stopped beside the car. He leaned down and rested his folded arms on the top part of the door.

  "How are things going, pal?" he asked.

  I looked at him for a moment, not remembering him at first, then suddenly remembering. He must have seen that I remembered him.

  "Yeah," he said, "the guy who smacked your car." He straightened and reached out his hand. "Name is Gabriel Thomas," he said. "You just call me Gabe. We never got around to trading names down there." I shook his hand and told him who I was, then introduced Nancy.

  "Mr Thomas," Nancy said, "I heard about the accident. Brad won't talk about it."

  "Well," said Gabe, "it was a strange thing, miss. There was nothing there and you ran into it and it stopped you as if it had been a wall of stone. And even when it was stopping you, you could see right through it."

  "Did you phone your company?" I asked.

  "Yeah. Sure I phoned them. But no one will believe me. They think I'm drunk. They think I am so drunk I wouldn't dare to drive and I'm holing up somewhere. They think I dreamed up this crazy story as a cover-up."

  "Did they say so, Mr Thomas?"

  "No, miss," he said, "but I know how them jokers think. And the thing that hurts me is that they ever should have thought it. I ain't a drinking man. And I got a good record. Why, I won driving awards, three years in a row." He said to me, "I don't know what to do. I can't get out of here. There's no way to get out. That barrier is all around the town. I live five hundred miles from here and my wife is all alone. Six kids and the youngest one a baby. I don't know what she'll do. She's used to it, of course, with me off on the road. But never for longer than three or four days, the time it takes for me to make a run. What if I can't get back for two or three weeks, maybe two or three months? What will she do then? There won't be any money coming in and there are the house payments to be made and them six kids to feed."

  "Maybe you won't be here for long," I said, doing my best to make him feel a little better. "Maybe someone can get it figured out and do something about it. Maybe it will simply go away. And even if it doesn't, I imagine that your company will keep your salary going. After all, it's not your…"

  He made an insulting, disgusted noise. "Not that bunch," he said. "Not that gang of chisellers."

  "It's too soon to start worrying," I told him. "We don't know what has happened and until we do…"

  "I guess you're right," he said. "Of course, I'm not the only one. I been talking to a lot of people and I'm not the only one. I was talking to a guy down in front of the barber shop just a while ago and his wife is in the hospital over at — what's the name of that town?"

  "Elmore," Nancy said.

  "Yes, that was it. She's in the hospital at Elmore and he is out of his mind, afraid he can't go to visit her. Kept saying over and over that maybe it would be all right in a little while, that he could get out of town. Sounds like she may be pretty bad off and he goes over every day. She'll be expecting him, he says, and maybe she won't understand why he doesn't come. Talked as if a good part of the time she's not in her right mind.

  "And there was this other fellow. His family is off on a vacation, out to Yellowstone, and he was expecting them to get home today. Says they'll be all tired out from travelling and now they can't reach their home after they have travelled all those miles to get back into it again. Was expecting them home early in the afternoon. He's planning to go out on the road and wait for them at the edge of the barrier. Not that it will do any good, meeting them out there, but he said it was the only thing he could do. And then there are a lot of people who work out of town and now they can't get to their jobs, and there was someone telling me about a girl here in town who was going to marry a fellow from a place called Coon Valley and they were going to get married tomorrow and now, of course, they can't."

  "You must have talked to a lot of people," I said.

  "Hush," said Nancy.

  Across the street Mayor Higgy Morris was standing on the top step of the flight of stairs that led
up to the village hall and he was waving his arms to get the people quiet.

  "Fellow citizens," yelled Higgy in that phony political voice that makes you sick at heart. "Fellow citizens, if you'll just be quiet."

  Someone yelled, "You tell "em Higgy!" There was a wave of laughter, but it was a nervous laugh.

  "Friends," said Higgy, "we may be in a lot of trouble. You probably have heard about it. I don't know what you heard, for there are a lot of stories. I don't know, myself, everything that's happened."

  "I'm sorry for having to use the siren to call you all together, but it seemed the quickest way."

  "Ah, hell," yelled someone. "Get on with it, Higgy." No one laughed this time.

  "Well, all right," said Higgy. "I'll get on with it. I don't know quite how to say this, but we've been cut off. There is some sort of fence around us that won't let anybody in or anybody out. Don't ask me what it is or how it got there. I have no idea. I don't think, right now, that anybody knows. There may be nothing for us to get disturbed about. It may be only temporary; it may go away."

  "What I do want to say is that we should stay calm. We're all in this together and we got to work together to get out of it. Right now we haven't got anything to be afraid of. We are only cut off in the sense that we can't go anywhere. But we are still in touch with the outside world. Our telephones are working and so are the gas and electric lines. We have plenty of food to last for ten days, maybe more than that. And if we should run short, we can get more food. Trucks loaded with it, or with anything we need, can be brought up to the barrier and the driver can get out, then the truck can be pulled or pushed through the barrier. It doesn't stop things that are not alive."

  "Just a minute, mayor," someone shouted.

  "Yes," the mayor said, looking around to see who had dared to interrupt him. "Was that you, Len?" he asked.

  "Yes, it was," said the man.

  I could see now that it was Len Streeter, our high school science teacher.

  "What did you want?" asked Higgy.

  "I suppose you're basing that last statement of yours — about only non-living matter getting through the barrier — on the car that was parked on the Coon Valley road."