She swallowed and shut her eyes again.
When she next found herself awake, she was over Cal’s shoulder, and she was moving. Her head bobbed and her stomach heaved with each step.
She whispered: “Did we eat?”
“Yes.”
“What did we eat?”
“Something scrumptious. Scrump-tiddly-umptious.”
“Cal, what did we eat?”
He didn’t answer, just pushed aside grass spattered with maroon droplets and walked into a clearing. In the center was a huge black rock. Standing beside it was the little kid.
There you are, she thought. I chased you all over the neighborhood.
Only that hadn’t been a rock. You couldn’t chase a rock. It had been a girl.
A girl. My girl. My responsi-
“WHAT DID WE EAT?” She began to pound him, but her fists were weak, weak. “OH GOD! OH MY JESUS!”
He set her down and looked at her first with surprise and then amusement. “What do you think we ate?” He looked at the boy, who was grinning and shaking his head, the way you do when someone’s just pulled a really hilarious boner. “Beck. . honey. . we just ate some of the grass. Grass and seeds and so on. Cows do it all the time.”
“There was an old farmer from Leeds,” the boy sang, and put his hands to his mouth to stifle his giggles. His fingers were red. “He was hungry and had special needs.”
“I don’t believe you,” Becky said, but her voice sounded faint. She was looking at the rock. It was incised all over with little dancing figures. And yes, in this early light they did seem to dance. To be moving around in rising spirals, like the stripes on a barber pole.
“Really, Beck. The baby is-is great. Safe. I’m already doing the uncle thing. Touch the rock, and you’ll see. You’ll understand. Touch the rock, and you’ll be-”
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!”