In high school, Becky had taken a gym elective called Self-Defense for Young Women. Now she tried to remember the moves, and couldn’t. The only thing she could remember. .
Deep in the right pocket of her shorts was a key ring. The longest and thickest key fit the front door of the house where she and her brother had grown up. She separated it from the others and pressed it between the first two fingers of her hand.
“Here she is!” Ross Humbolt proclaimed jovially, parting high grass with both hands, like an explorer in some old movie. “Say hello, Natalie! This young woman is going to have a critter!”
There was blood splashed on the grass beyond the swatches he was holding open and Becky wanted to stop but her feet carried her forward and he even stepped aside a little like in one of those other old movies where the suave guy says After you doll and they enter the swanky nightclub where the jazz combo’s playing only this was no swanky nightclub this was a beaten-down swatch of grass where the woman Natalie Humbolt if that was her name was lying all twisted with her eyes bulging and her dress pushed up to show great big red divots in her thighs and Becky guessed she knew now why Ross Humbolt of Poughkeepsie had such red lips and one of Natalie’s arms was torn off at the shoulder and lying ten feet beyond her in crushed grass already springing back up and there were more great big red divots in the arm and the red was still wet because. . because. .
Because she hasn’t been dead that long, Becky thought. We heard her scream. We heard her die.
“Family’s been here awhile,” Ross Humbolt said in a chummy, confidential tone as his grass-stained fingers settled around Becky’s throat. He hiccuped. “Folks can get pretty hungry. No Mickey D’s out here! Nope. You can drink the water that comes out of the ground-it’s gritty and awful damn warm, but after a while you don’t mind that-only we’ve been in here for days. I’m full now, though. Full as a tick.” His bloodstained lips descended into the cup of her ear, and his beard stubble tickled her skin as he whispered. “Want to see the rock? Want to lay on it naked, and feel me in you, beneath the pinwheel stars, while the grass sings our names? Poetry, eh?”
She tried to suck a chestful of air to scream, but nothing came down her windpipe. In her lungs was a sudden, dreadful vacancy. He screwed his thumbs into her throat, crushing muscle, tendon, soft tissue. Ross Humbolt grinned. His teeth were stained red, but his tongue was a yellowish-green. His breath smelled of blood; also like a fresh-clipped lawn.
“The grass has things to tell you. You just need to learn to listen. You need to learn how to speak Tall Weed, honey. The rock knows. After you see the rock you’ll understand. I’ve learned more from that rock in two days than I learned in twenty years of schooling.”
He had her bent backward, her spine arched. She bent like a high blade of grass in the wind. His green breath gushed in her face again.
“Twenty years of schooling and they put me on the gray shift,” he said, and laughed. “That’s some good old rock, isn’t it? Dylan. Child of Yahweh. Bard of Hibbing and I ain’t ribbing. I’ll tell you what. The stone in the center of this field is a good old rock, but it’s a thirsty rock. It’s been working on the gray shift since before red men hunted on the Osage Cuestas, been working since a glacier brought it here during the last Ice Age, and oh girl, it’s so fucking thirsty.”
She wanted to drive her knee into his balls, but it was all too much effort. The best she could do was lift her foot a few inches and then gently set it down again. Lift the foot and set it down. Lift and set. She seemed to be stamping her heel in slow motion, like a horse ready to be let out of a stall.