In the Tall Grass

He looked at the boy.

“Redeemed!” Tobin shouted, and they laughed together.

Ike and Mike, Becky thought. They laugh alike.

She walked toward it. . put her hand out. . then drew back. What she had eaten hadn’t tasted like grass. It had tasted like sardines. Like the final sweet-salty-bitter swallow of a margarita. And like. .

Like me. Like licking sweat from my own armpit. Or. . or. .

She began to shriek. She tried to turn away, but Cal had her by one flailing arm and Tobin by the other. She should have been able to break free from the child, at least, but she was still weak. And the rock. It was pulling at her, too.

“Touch it,” Cal whispered. “You’ll stop being sad. You’ll see the baby is all right. Little Justine. She’s better than all right. She’s elemental. Becky-she flows.”

“Yeah,” Tobin said. “Touch the rock. You’ll see. You won’t be lost out here anymore. You’ll understand the grass then. You’ll be part of it. Like Justine is part of it.”

They escorted her to the rock. It hummed busily. Happily. From inside there came the most wondrous glow. On the outside, tiny stick men and stick women danced with their stick hands held high. There was music. She thought: All flesh is grass.

Becky DeMuth hugged the rock.

There were seven of them in an old RV held together by spit, baling wire, and-perhaps-the resin of all the dope that had been smoked inside its rusty walls. Printed on one side, amid a riot of red-and-orange psychedelia, was the word FURTHER, in honor of the 1939 International Harvester school bus in which Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters had visited Woodstock during the summer of 1969. Back then all but the two oldest of these latter-day hippies had yet to be born.

Just lately the twenty-first-century Pranksters had been in Cawker City, paying homage to the World’s Largest Ball of Twine. Since leaving, they had busted mega-amounts of dope, and all of them were hungry.

It was Twista, the youngest of them, who spotted the Black Rock of the Redeemer, with its soaring white steeple and oh-so-convenient parking lot. “Church picnic!” he shouted from his seat beside Pa Cool, who was driving. Twista bounced up and down, the buckles on his bib overalls jingling. “Church picnic! Church picnic!”

The others took it up. Pa looked at Ma in the rearview. When she shrugged and nodded, he pulled FURTHER into the lot and parked beside a dusty Mazda with New Hampshire license plates.

The Pranksters (all wearing Ball of Twine souvenir T-shirts and all smelling of superbud) piled out. Pa and Ma, as the eldest, were the captain and first mate of the good ship FURTHER, and the other five-MaryKat, Jeepster, Eleanor Rigby, Frankie the Wiz, and Twista-were perfectly willing to follow orders, pulling out the barbecue, the cooler of meat, and-of course-the beer. Jeepster and the Wiz were just setting up the grill when they heard the first faint voice.

“Help! Help! Somebody help me!”

“That sounds like a woman,” Eleanor said.

“Help! Somebody please! I’m lost!”

“That’s not a woman,” Twista said. “That’s a little kid.”

“Far out,” MaryKat said. She was cataclysmically stoned, and it was all she could think to say.

Pa looked at Ma. Ma looked at Pa. They were pushing sixty now and had been together a long time-long enough to have couples’ telepathy.

“Kid wandered into the grass,” Ma Cool said.

“Mom heard him yelling and went after him,” Pa Cool said.

“Maybe too short to see their way back to the road,” Ma said. “And now-”

“-they’re both lost,” Pa finished.

“Jeez, that sucks,” Jeepster said. “I got lost once. It was in a mall.”

“Far out,” MaryKat said.

“Help! Anybody!” That was the woman.

“Let’s go get them,” Pa said. “We’ll bring ’em out and feed ’em up.”

“Good idea,” the Wiz said. “Human kindness, man. I’m all about the human fuckin’ kindness.”

Ma Cool hadn’t owned a watch in years, but was good at telling time by the sun. She squinted at it now, measuring the distance between the reddening ball and the field of grass, which seemed to stretch to the horizon. I bet all of Kansas looked that way before the people came and spoiled it all, she thought.

“It is a good idea,” she said. “It’s going on for five thirty, and I bet they’re really hungry. Who’s going to stay and set up the barbecue?”

There were no volunteers. Everyone had the munchies, but none of them wanted to miss the mercy mission. In the end, all of them trooped across Route 400 and entered into the tall grass.