Just North of Nowhere (34 page)

The big old drive-in gate was open. From inside came a raw crude stink, rich, rancid, sensual. The stink oozed into the world. That was that something, that something that stood in the dark.

What the hell?
Bunch said to himself and went in.

Rabbi Danny Kiddorf came to a screeching stop on the switchback, far side of town. Just ahead, Father Joe Inquist did the same.

Danny gripped his wheel, figured Joe was doing the same.

Okay. Vinnie hadn't seen them, praise God. Nobody had. Probably. The Wagon Wheel was closed, closed and dark. He remembered that. Okay again. He hadn’t really watched but he thought the streets had been empty. Well, Doc Mouth, wandering. Maybe. But that was always. Doc hadn't said anything to anyone in a long time. So that was okay.

Joe Inquist's taillights were bright red. Still has his foot on the brake, Danny figured. He took his foot off his own brake.

Danny's Infiniti, Joe's Ram had flat-out burned Bluffton behind them. They'd passed the last house in town and started up the switchback out of the Rolling valley and into Amish country. At that point three higher cognitive notions gripped Danny. They could be expressed simply: “Where the hell are we going? What the hell are we doing? What the hell!”

“A panic of children,” Danny said aloud. He hit the brakes and pulled over. Like notions must have hit Joe at the same time because the Ram slewed to a quick stop a hundred feet ahead. They sat alone now in their separate vehicles.

A minute more and Joe's back-up light glared white against the dew gathering on Danny's windshield. The truck crunched grit until its big spare tire nudged Danny's hood.

Earlier that evening, before everything, there had been words. The words were between Father Joseph Inquist, pastor of St. Olaf Roman Catholic Church and Daniel Kiddorf, the Rabbi of Bluffton, congregation of one: Danny. Their words were part of a regular Wednesday colloquy at the Wheel. Irish whisky, Cuban cigar smoke and imported Polish vodka had twirled words weekly into a usual round of disputation, debate, discourse, gentlemanly sparing, a sparking of ideas and ideals against the friendly stench and din of the Wheel’s ongoing life.

This one had gone... Well, it had gone over the edge.

Danny oozed ever-cooling sweat and stared at the Ram’s spare tire. When Joe tapped the window, Danny lowered it as though he expected a ticket. “Yes?”

“If you were Catholic,” Joe said, “I could tell you just how big a sin was done back there.”

Danny waved his hand vaguely. “No, no, no, no, no. No! Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe. Joe. Joe! Let me think, here, will you? Okay? Just....”

“Let me in,” Joe said.

Father Inquist slipped into the back and across squeaking leather. He leaned over the seat. “Look: Okay? It's mud.”

“Moving mud. Mud Plus. Mud with a will.”

“Okay, okay. It moves.” He thought for a second. “We can...” Joe made a vague tearing gesture with both hands. “Jesus, Danny we can take it apart. Scatter it, okay?”

“Joe, it moves,” Danny shook his head until the concept found words. “It's alive. Or something... Lord, Joe. Am I telling
you
this?”

“It’s ‘or something,’” Joe said. He chuckled – didn’t mean to – then he stopped. “Yeah. Or something. Look, maybe it's like a colony. Like germs. Or coral. Something, you know? Alive but only on the most rudimentary, elemental level of aliveness. See? Not sentient. Alive but not. You know? Like a plant.”

“A big plant. A big, fast, breathing, moving...”

“Yes, yes. Well, yes.”

“Joe, Joe, Joe, I took mud and sticks. I pressed God's name into it, said some words and it lived. Okay. Can I end it? Do I make it stop living? May I do that? What am I at all? It's father? Creator? Like...”

“...its gardener,” Joe said, “you own the sticks, the skeleton. Your mud, its flesh. It's standing back there on your land. You stuck it together, it's your mud man, like a snowman!”

“Frosty the Golem!”

“Look! It is not...look at me, Danny...look!”

Rabbi Danny Kiddorf turned to face his oldest friend in the world. Joe Inquist's steel-rimmed glasses glowed red in the Ram’s tail light glare.

“It's not human,” Joe said. “It is a thing. It moves. Like a car, like, like a creeper vine. You can stop it from moving because no moral imperative says you cannot. No commandment: 'Thou shalt not scatter mud!' Believe me. I've studied them...the commandments...it's not there.” Joe smiled.

“My people know the commandments, too. God’s stenographer...”

“It is not a life!” Joe said.

Danny wanted, so much he wanted to accept his friend's position on this. But there was that image! The image stayed in him. The trash heap he and Joe had scraped together: sticks laced with rags, the river’s stench in the mud they'd shaped around the spongy armature. The dead fish and sex stink of this small creation, the odor of piss and cow dung. The chill air, the great rolling sky overhead. Their whisky laughter and the Name spoken aloud; the Name written with felt-tip pen on the back of a credit card receipt and shoved into the mouth he'd slit into the sagging wet head that lay on the asphalt by grandpa's drive-in screen.

Then that thing was suddenly and surely not a thing, a Thing suddenly more than its own sum. The Thing arose in a way no human figure could have reared itself, rising without regard to the physics of muscle, bone, connective tissue, weight, balance or will. It flowed upward to stand before them against the sagging ruin of Soam Kiddorf's once-white screen. The thing waited.

“Not a life? You don't know that, Joe,” Danny said.

Joe hung his head for a moment. “Well, yes I don't. But first rain,” he said finally, “a good soaking pour, I bet that'll be it. Washed away. All away.” Joe rubbed the place on his nose where the glasses pressed. “I guess. What do you think?”

Danny looked back at the town below. “Maybe,” he said, “I guess it will.” The night was quiet.

Finally Rabbi Kiddorf said, “So if I were Catholic, just how big a sin is this, anyway?”

Bunch had never been inside the drive-in. The heaved asphalt was dead under his feet. He hated that. He hated the way the river mist lay stagnant here. Here, feet were invisible. Metal pipes rose from the mist. They leaned at angles, lay bent or humped, poking up from the fog like snake heads rising from milky water. Small trees twisted out of the asphalt heaves, prairie grass shot up along with weeds, dead, dried flowers that hadn't dropped yet from their drooping stems at the end of the season. It all hung crackling and whispering as he passed.

On top of all of it, Bunch thought the place was bigger inside, than out. He didn't like that. It was like the world was opening its mouth beneath his feet, setting out to take a chunk from him up to the knees. He hated that.

It was darker there, too. Bunch looked up, once, twice, maybe three times to see if the stars were still shining. They were. Hard, sharp dots. Bright in a sky that was dead black. His toes gripped ground so he wouldn't fall up and off the world.

As he crossed the lot, he glanced at what was left of the screen, half expecting one of the screaming blooded faces to show there. Years before, when he'd sat under his bridge and watched the distant flickers in the night, something big and rotten always raised up to grab someone's head and eat it. Now, he felt like he was waiting for the teeth and claws.

At the center, Bunch stopped.

Words snarled along the peeling plywood screen, high as a kid could reach. Bunch couldn't make out the words, so he reckoned they didn't matter. He wasn't good with writing words, anyway.

As far as Bunch could see into the trees, into the dark corners of the cedar fence, there was nothing here. Only the watery hiss of the river sounded above the night’s silence. No animal screams, joy or pain. No worms chawed dirt, no bug shells clacked the night.

Still, the stink hung in the air. At flood, the Banks always stunk. But this? Breathing deep, Bunch tasted it. The taste skinned his tongue, something had gone sour on the air, the thing that had dragged his sorry ass over here this sweet misty night.

He didn't see it until he closed on the screen and trees again, but there it was. He couldn't figure if it had been there all along, standing alongside the greens and bushes that had sprouted around the old wooden frame or if the something had slipped from the trees without he noticed.

Trash heap
, was Bunch's first thought,
a shitpile
. He took a dozen steps toward it because part of him wouldn't credit what he saw. His gut yelled,
there it is, there's the something, the wrong-thing that's come.
But his legs didn't believe it. Neither did his head so he kept going.

When it lowered its head and turned to him, mouth open, eyes gawking, that was when Bunch realized the shitpile had been staring at the stars.

That's also when Bunch's gut won out over his legs and head. He stopped dead ten feet from the critter.

The critter stared at Bunch. There were no eyesballs, not that Bunch could see, but he figured he was being stared just the same. Two wet lumps above that gaping mouth-hole, but there was sight down inside the thing, he knew it.

The critter took a long rasping gasp like all the air all the world around had sucked down a sinkhole to forever. Cold electric ran up Bunch's back and he braced against being sucked into the critter.

When the beast exhaled, all the winters of the world wrapped themselves around Bunch and he was out like...

The critter knew there was another, another like the colors that had gone. The critter was staring up, however. Small lights. Sharp. Hard. Far. The critter felt their distance, their heat, the cold between them. Sniffed their airs. Below. Close. The earth was covered in a soft wet something that wrapped itself around the critter’s…
Feet.
That’s what they were. The damp, gray softness was
mist.
Yes. And above there were small, hard lights. It could feel them, taste them, but could not know them. Not yet. The critter looked and looked. They were so far. But the color was near. Now very near. The critter turned. The color had warmth, shape. And it had pictures inside it. The critter looked at the pictures. The pictures made noises, were covered in other colors.
Blood.
The word came. Blood and pain and fear, noises called
scream
. The creature felt that and fed it back to the moving warm shape in front.
Man.
A man. From the man came more pictures. Pictures that had filled the big white square nearby. The pictures flickered through her and she gave them back to the Man. And sound. She heard thumps. They came in rhythmic beatings. The thumps became. What? The creature asked, what? Pleasant. The answer came back. Indian. Drum. War. She caught that from the Man. That and Engine Warm. Indian. War. The Man fell down, disappeared into the soft white mist. The images stopped.

The creature moved to the Man, bent to him, moved the mist away from him. He had color, shape, was warm. A thing beat inside him. It was
heart
. The creature searched inside itself. No. No heart…

...then he was awake. All around, Injun drums pounded. Like always, some nights. Dawn was near and he was still frozen, frozen from the winter that the thing had breathed over him, and frozen from lying on the asphalt in the night mists.

When Bunch dared open his eyes, the critter was gone. The sun hadn't risen above the bluffs but morning showed red between the trees, its side of the river, and all the birds in the world sang for light. Them dead Injuns were in a state. Past the trees, their firesparks rose pale into the morning. Lamentation and victory chants mixed with the birds that were all talking, by the hundreds, all at once. Mixed with it were the buzzing sounds of chainsaws, the crack of rifles, the booms of explosions, squeals of tires, cries of fear and pain, roars of animals, critters, monsters. Those sounds, the Injun sounds, they were all fading. The birds were beating them back. The sagging screen was going faint. Pictures, pictures that, dammit, Bunch remembered from back when the drive-in was going full blast were going away, like the stars that dimmed in morning sun. The Injuns and the explosions that had gathered around the place like sweat wasps to a garbage can faded, then were gone. Damn.

Bunch crawled up and scooted out of that moving picture place. The shit heap that had looked to the stars and breathed winter over him was not there. Bunch didn't know where, but it was around. He felt it. It moved somewhere off in the morning.
Looking for darkness,
he figured. In minute or two, Bunch realized he was running. He ran all the way and was waiting in first sun when the American House opened for eats.

A team? The Catbirds? Bunch of kids trying to be not lousy, was more like it! Not one player stood above his game or even
wanted
to. Most would just as soon have been somewhere else – sitting home or lost in the bleachers watching another someone play the game of baseball. A team? Well, they sat together.

The season wrapped on a 17 to 1 loss to the Wolverines. In that game the Catbirds scored their one and only run of the whole long, long season.

That one run, though? It was something! Here's what happened.

The weather turned warm. Ruth Potter started taking afternoons away from the library, away from the capital J-O-B, Job, and from her real work: cataloguing:

The Burroughs Collection:

Glass Plate Photography: Bluffton and Environs

(ca. 1880-1930)

Gift of Hillary Arroyo Burroughs: In Memory of the Artist, her Husband, Rex Aubrey Burroughs

“Not Dead, Just Gone.

Ruth discovered Elysium Park, just two blocks from the library. She chose a bench near the bleachers. Here was green grass and a distant murmur of birds. The few human voices were also distant. Here, away from the reading room's ticking clock, the dust and scent of old molds and damp library paste, real sunlight fell hard and clean on her face.

She should have started making these little afternoon escapes a dozen springs earlier, she really should have.

Suddenly, there came the Consolidated Catbirds! Whatever else a catbird might be, these Catbirds were the Rolling River Valley Consolidated Middle School baseball players. Ruth considered moving to another part of the park. She really did.

She stayed not because of the sport – she was not an aficionado, not even slightly – Ruth Potter stayed (stubborn biddy that she was and proud of it too) because she refused to relinquish that little place of her life she had decided was good and which should be held back from the town.

Catbird games were noisy at first. That irritated her. They became quiet, quickly. That interested her.

After their first loss – the first game – attendance dwindled. After their third game, and third loss, who remained were quiet knots of settled parents. A few smiled bravely. No youngsters came at all after the fourth Catbird humiliation. She wasn't certain, but Ruth thought the team had failed to score a single point in all the games she'd seen.

Even visiting teams seemed to take little delight in the inevitable victories tallied against the quiet Catbirds. The opposition arrived on buses, the players filed quietly to the field, played quickly – each boy patiently waiting his turn to beat up on the Catbirds – then filed back to their bus and left. Done and done, no looking back on that still afternoon.

Ruth moved her spring water and salad dinners to the top of the aluminum bleachers. From there, the setting sun caught her face for a few extra moments each afternoon. The elevation gave her a chilly view of the western trees. Their long black shadows reached toward her along the thick white line that ran from home plate through third base and on to infinity.

Maybe not infinity. To the setting sun, then. Ninety-three million miles, give or take. Ruth swallowed a bite of lettuce.
Close enough to infinity for Bluffton
.
Funny
, she realized in an eye blink,
I know how far from Bluffton to the sun, but not how far a ball travels when struck.

A Catbird tapped the ball gently to the waiting glove of a visitor.
Not far
, she thought. The slight tap was too typical of Catbird play. Each lonely hit invariably found a gloved hand waiting at the bottom of the ball's lazy arc. It was as though the thing were thankful to come to rest.
Such easy humiliation.
And that was
when
they hit the darned things! More typically, a Catbird slipped softly to bat and sat down a minute later, never connecting, often never swinging, not even once.

When opponents hit, now, that ball
went
; flew, lost, into the sun or bounded like a whizzing rabbit to safety in the thick grass tangles beyond where that Bunch person kept the field nice for the boys. Out there, opponent balls – dozens, must be by now – were still in play in the thicket!

Might as
well
have flown to the sun
, Ruth thought

By the time the librarian had noticed all this, parents had stopped attending, even granddads had disappeared. She and Old Blind Ken were the Catbird's only regular audience.

Ruth Potter? A baseball – what did they call them (not aficionado) – fan? Hardly! She watched and chewed her lettuce quietly. She didn’t know the subtleties of the game or the game, itself, for that matter, but from a lifetime of watching them in the dust of her library, she knew 12-year-old boys.

Jill Lukowski wasn’t lousy – no worse than any other coach in the Valley League! Okay, she was
better
than most. She knew the moves and talked the talk till she was blue! Knew how to post a line-up; knew when to pull a pitcher and hold a man on second. Like the good ones, she knew when to kick ass; like the best she knew when to wipe noses. She knew her men...if anyone could truly know the heart of a 12-year-old whose dad had just found another excuse not to show up on game day.

Jill was big. Always had been: baby, girl and woman. She was tall, strong, fast for her size; nice personality –
that
cliché. She smiled, talked slow. People knew she'd thought out what she said. And she knew how to frown. Her frown! It could freeze a ball mid-way from the batter's box to outta-here, turn a dinger to a dying quail and drop it in her fielder's straining glove.

She just about believed she could do that very thing! The problem was, the gloves she coached never strained, were never under, always hesitated elsewhere. The gloves she coached tended to polite deference.

She watched as Whendol Rifkin at left field and her center fielder, Magnus Ingebretsohn, stood frozen. Heads back watching, the two let a weak pop fly find safe dirt between them.

She exploded! “Adda boy, adda boy,” she shouted as the ball bounced, “'After you, Alfonse,' 'No, after
you
, Garcon!'“ Her long lopes carried her half-way from the bench to the infield before she grabbed her senses and backed off, kicking dirt, “'Ats it you Dog Maned Fender Muckers! All forest and no frippin’ trees with you! Right Magnus? That it Whendol?”

She yelled loud enough – another thing she did well – for everyone to hear. Most that end of Bluffton heard. The stands, anyway. The ump. The other team. The few philosophically indifferent parents who'd showed (“It
is
just a game isn't it? And it teaches character, doesn't it? You know? Character?”).

The Eagles' bench gave out a few weak calls of “Ooo, Maggie!” and “Way-ta-go-dere Gwendolyn!” She heard one, “Nice mouth, teach',” but that was it. She had almost cussed out a bench of twelve year-olds, and not one adult had bothered to blink.

Goddamn, but Jill hated swearing – the effort of a weak mind to express itself forcefully! “Frippin'“ was a decent euphemism, and 'Dog-Maned Fender Muckers' apparently was too vague to be offensive. Even the librarian, Miss whatshername, Potter, a regular fan who attended both games and practice, didn’t seem to mind. Too obscure even for Lutherans, ever-alert for euphemism.

Screw it! Sometimes everyone needed his butt chewed, sometimes the coach just had to vent. For her sake, if not the team's!

Deep breath.

The hell with winning. Elysium Park smelled better than school. The air was warm with grass. The breeze from across the Rolling River carried a heady scent of stagnation from the still pond above the old hydro dam. That jumbled together with a rich dead-fish smell of spring mud, below. Somehow it came good, mingled like that. Better than chalk dust. The spillway roar was better than the fly-buzzing silence of year-end classroom daydreams.

And it
was
just a frippin' game, after all, dog-mandit! Frip 'em if nobody knew what she was talking about.

Lyle Younger asked later at the traditional post-mortem pie blast at the American House – Eats.

Jill was enjoying. She'd long ago gotten over disappointment, was in it, now, for the extra couple bucks, the outdoor hours, and the pie and vanilla ice cream afterward at the Eats.

Lyle’s big hand was waving. Big hands on a tiny frame. That's why Lyle was catcher. That and his best friend, Kyle, was pitcher and mostly didn't hit anyone. She heard him, “Ew. Ew, Miss Lukowski...ew...”

“Lyle...?”

Lyle blushed in the silence she'd cleared for him. He squinted to wind his concentration around the question, anticipating the complexity of the coach's answer. He did that even when asking to go to the toilet.

“So, coach? What'd you mean back there, then? You know, there, about the tree?”

“I suggested you can't see the trees for...?” She let it hang, hoping someone would get it.

There was a moment of silence. “Oh, yeah. Sure. I get it. The forest! Oh, yeah. I see...”

“We can’t see the forest for the trees.” That from Kyle Yinger, the pitcher.

“Yeah, for the trees!” Lyle said.

“Yeah!” they said.

“The
frippin'
forest,” someone said.

Laughter around.

“I didn't say that. Did I say that?”

Kyle and Lyle, each waited for the other.

Roy quoted her precisely. “'Adda boy, adda boy. After you, Alfonse,' 'No, no, after you, Garcon!'“ He waited a moment to see if anyone wanted more. “'That's it you Dog Maned Fender Muckers! All forest and no fripping trees with you! Right Magnus? That it Whendol?'“

Laughter. Roy looked up from his book. His eyes found Jill.

Odd kid, Roy. Eugene “Roy” Roy didn’t play; he was team statistician, record-keeper, maintainer of numbers. He sat at the edge of the thing. At his side – here, at the field, in school and always, everywhere – was Leslie B. Fritz, Rolf Fritz's skinny redheaded girl. All skin, scabs and bony joints; same clothes each day, no baths (and her father a teacher who should know better).

Leslie didn't seem interested in baseball, in the team, in the school. She wasn't Roy's 'girlfriend', not really. Yet there she was. Always. Jill had once asked Leslie's interest in the team. Leslie said she was learning. She was going to be a witch. Roy was her familiar. The team was a place to practice her craft because it was so simple, was all physics and numbers and memory. When she got it right, she'd turn it around.

Couldn't hurt
, Jill thought. This was the only team Jill had ever seen where the statistician was the envy of the players.

If Jill knew the way Roy and Leslie worked together, the witch had most probably nudged the statistician into speaking up at the Eats.

Speaking, Roy caught Jill exactly; intonation, pace; her heat delivered with Roy's cold precision; like the numbers he kept, the numbers that
were
the game, but not.

“Right you are, Roy! Give that man a cee-gar! Give the man a chewing gum cee-gar!” Jill called too loud.

Behind the counter, Esther raised her eyes from the travel brochures spread under her arms and elbows. Realizing this was ball-talk, not an order, she bent back to her pictures.

Except for the regulars – Bunch who did odd jobs, Old Blind Ken, Karl Dorbler from the Wurst Haus – the Eats was theirs.

“Check your book, Roy. This was our what? Our how many’th consecutive?”

“Loss?”

She cocked a look at him.

He checked. “Eighty-fifth. Our 85th consecutive loss.”

“Against how many wins?”

He again touched the numbers as though they were Braille. “About... None.”

“Not one?”

He looked again, shook his head. “Not one.”

“Not a one.”

The team had gone off its pie. Each face pulled inside its head. Each head went blank.

“You don’t suck, you know. You know that, don't you?” Jill said it as chipper as she could. Kyle’s face screwed up another couple turns. “Not one of you is that bad.” She saw the looks creeping across their faces. “I don't think this, I know this! I know at least,
I'm
not that bad!”

A few looks turned to smiles; Walter Bowswinger, the utility man, was one big grin.

“We’re not GOOD, don’t get me wrong. Good and bad’s not the point. We’re...” She thought for a second how to say it. Finally, she just said it. “We’re just not there!” She pointed in the general direction of Elysium Park. “We’re not on the gosh darn field.”

This was vague. She hated being vague. Smiles were fading. Boys needed to know
things
, details: how to hold the bat, way to grip the ball pitching really tricky shit. They needed
secrets
. They wanted
stuff
.

Leslie hocked back a load of snot, but there wasn't another sound.

“You all see too doggone much, that’s our problem. You’re all looking at that big green
forest
out there – the
game
! What's a game? A game's a series of plays! You're not looking at the ONE
play
, your play! You don’t get right the heck in there and see what
YOU'VE
got to do to make the game happen! Your part in the damn darn thing.”