He was walking, too. Walking for the road-again, almost without knowing it.
“Cal?” Becky shouted.
“This is just nuts,” he said again, breathing hard, shoving at the grass.
His foot caught on something, and he went down knee-first into an inch of swampy water. Hot water-not lukewarm, hot, as hot as bathwater-splashed up onto the crotch of his shorts, providing him with the sensation of having just pissed himself.
That broke him a little. He lunged back to his feet. Running now. Grass whipping at his face. It was sharp-edged and tough, and when one green sword snapped him under the left eye, he felt it, a sharp stinging. The pain gave him a nasty jump, and he ran harder, going as fast as he could now.
“Help me!” the kid screamed, and how about this? Help came from Cal’s left, me from his right. It was the Kansas version of Dolby Stereo.
“This is nuts!” Cal screamed again. “This is nuts, it’s nuts, it’s FUCKING nuts!” The words running together, itsnutsitsnuts, what a stupid thing to say, what an inane observation, and he couldn’t stop saying it.
He fell again, hard this time, sprawling chest-first. By now his clothes were spattered with earth so rich, warm, and dark, it felt and even smelled like fecal matter.
Cal picked himself back up, ran another five steps, felt grass snarl around his legs-it was like putting his feet into a nest of tangling wire-and goddamn if he didn’t fall a third time. The inside of his head buzzed, like a cloud of bluebottles.
“Cal!” Becky was screaming. “Cal, stop! Stop!”
Yes, stop. If you don’t you’ll be yelling “Help me” right along with the kid. A fucking duet.
He gulped at the air. His heart galloped. He waited for the buzzing in his head to pass, then realized it wasn’t in his head after all. They really were flies. He could see them shooting in and out through the grass, a swarm of them around something through the shifting curtain of yellow-green, just ahead of him.
He pushed his hands into the grass and parted it to see.
A dog-it looked like it had been a golden retriever-was on its side in the mire. Limp brownish-red fur glittered beneath a shifting mat of flies. Its bloated tongue lolled between its gums, and the cloudy marbles of its eyes strained from its head. The rusting tag of its collar gleamed deep in its fur. Cal looked again at the tongue. It was coated a greenish-white. Cal didn’t want to think why. The dog’s dirty coat looked like a filthy yellow carpet tossed on a heap of bones. Some of that fur drifted-little fluffs of it-on the warm breeze.
Take hold. It was his thought, but in his father’s steadying voice. Making that voice helped. He stared at the dog’s caved-in stomach and saw lively movement there. A boiling stew of maggots. Like the ones he’d seen squirming on the half-eaten hamburgers lying on the passenger seat of that damned Prius. Burgers that had been there for days. Someone had left them, walked away from the car and left them, and never come back, and never-
Take hold, Calvin. If not for yourself, for your sister.
“I will,” he promised his father. “I will.”
He stripped the snarls of tough greenery from his ankles and shins, barely feeling the little cuts the grass had inflicted. He stood.
“Becky, where are you?”
Nothing for a long time-long enough for his heart to abandon his chest and rise into his throat. Then, incredibly distant: “Here! Cal, what should we do? We’re lost!”
He closed his eyes again, briefly. That’s the kid’s line. Then he thought: Le kid, c’est moi. It was almost funny.
“We keep calling,” he said, moving toward where her voice had come from. “We keep calling until we’re together again.”
“But I’m so thirsty!” She sounded closer now, but Cal didn’t trust that. No, no, no.
“Me too,” he said. “But we’re going to get out of this, Beck. We just have to keep our heads.” That he had already lost his-a little, only a little-was one thing he’d never tell her. She had never told him the name of the boy who knocked her up, after all, and that made them sort of even. A secret for her, now one for him.