Then he heard the two of them thrashing and struggling in the grass, heard Becky’s choked cries, and the man ranting at her. Finally there came screams. . screams that were terribly like shouts of hilarity. Not Becky. The Man.
By that point Cal had been hysterical, running and jumping and screaming for her. He shouted and ran for a long time before he finally got himself under control, forced himself to stop and listen. He had bent over, clutching his knees and panting, his throat achy with thirst, and had turned his attention to the silence.
The grass hushed.
“Becky?” he had called again, in a hoarsened voice. “Beck?”
No reply except for the wind slithering in the weeds.
He walked a little more. He called again. He sat. He tried not to cry.
And dusk was glorious.
He searched his pockets, for the hundredth hopeless time, gripped by the terrible fantasy of discovering a dry, linty stick of Juicy Fruit. He had bought a package of Juicy Fruit back in Pennsylvania, but he and Becky had shared it out before they reached the Ohio border. Juicy Fruit was a waste of money. That citrus flash of sugar was always gone in four chews and-he felt a stiff paper flap and withdrew a book of matches. Cal did not smoke, but they had been giving them away free at the little liquor store across the street from the Kaskaskia Dragon in Vandalia. It had a picture of the thirty-five-foot-long stainless-steel dragon on the cover. Becky and Cal had paid for a fistful of tokens, and spent most of the early evening feeding the big metal dragon to watch jets of burning propane erupt from its nostrils. Cal imagined the dragon set down in the field, and went dizzy with pleasure at the thought of it exhaling a destroying plume of fire into the grass.
He turned the matchbook over in his hand, thumbing soft cardboard.
Burn the field, he thought. Burn the fucking field. The tall grass would go the way of all straw when fed to flame.
He visualized a river of burning grass, sparks and shreds of toasted weed drifting into the air. It was such a strong mental image, he could close his eyes and almost smell it, the somehow wholesome late-summer reek of burning green.
And what if the flames turned back on him? What if it caught Becky out there somewhere? What if she was passed out, and woke to the stink of her own burning hair?
No. Becky would stay ahead of it. He would stay ahead of it. The idea was in him that he had to hurt the grass, show it he wasn’t taking any more shit, and then it would let him-let them both-go. Every time a strand of grass brushed his cheek, he felt it was teasing him, having fun with him.
He rose on sore legs, and yanked at the grass. It was tough old rope, tough and sharp, and it hurt his hands, but he wrenched some loose, and crushed it into a pile and knelt before it, a penitent at a private altar. He tore a match loose, put it against the strike strip, folded the cover against it to hold it in place, and yanked. Fire spurted. His face was close and he inhaled a burning whiff of sulfur.
The match went out the moment he touched it to the wet grass, the stems heavy with a dew that never dried, and dense with juice.
His hand shook when he lit the next.
It hissed as he touched it to the grass and it went out. Hadn’t Jack London written a story about this?
Another. Another. Each match made a fat little puff of smoke as soon as it touched the wet green. One didn’t even make it into the grass, but was huffed out by the gentle breeze as soon as it was lit.
Finally, when there were six matches left, he lit one, and then, in desperation, touched it to the book itself. The paper matchbook ignited in a hot white flash and he dropped it into the nest of singed but still damp grass. For a moment it settled in the top of this mass of yellow-green weeds, a long, bright tongue of flame rising up from it.