Stories About Corn

by Ri, Xesin

  “Did you hear they are going to start planting that high hydrocarbon corn in the north field?”

  “So? So what? I work for ADD, remember.”

  “’So?’ ‘So?’ That stuff is flammable. They say if you toss an ear of it in a fire instead of popcorn you get little flaming balls of goo that pop away from the ear and stick to skin like napalm, does that sound like nothing to you?”

  “Is that true? Where did you hear that?”

  “I’ve heard it many times, from lots of people. You heard about that silo explosion last month in Illinois too.”

  “Yeah, but the napalm stuff, the news?”

  “No, but it makes sense, doesn’t it? They made it so it’ll be like crude oil, only from plants.”

  “I’m told it’s cleaner than that by our people.”

  “If that stuff is flammable, what do you think a ‘strange’ boy like that would do with it?”

  “Loretta, the world’s full of dangers even Des Moines has homicide detectives because things happen. You watch out, you buy fire insurance, you eat healthy as you can and want.”

  “But that’s the—“

  “—Wait. That boy could be inside playing video games day and night and you would never know who he was or come up with terrible plots he might be planning. But, because he’s in the open, because you’ve seen him, the threat, if there is a threat, and I am definitely not saying there is a threat, but that threat, were it a threat, is in the open. It’s like two lions humping—the zebras know things are cool as long as the lioness purrs.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Still true,” smiled Chuck Dean.

  Loretta huffed at him. The buzzer on the oven went off.

  She pulled out the pizza from the oven and set it down to cool.

  Chuck sat and waited while Loretta got out the plates and glasses and then sliced up the pizza.

  She sat down at the dinner table, took up a slice, and chomped down on the hot stuff chewing with her mouth wide open as Chuck came over to get a few slices.

  “C’mon, you’re acting like a little kid,” he said to her.

  Loretta continued to eat the pizza in a gross manner staring at her husband all-the-while, so Chuck took his three slices back to the other room and continued watching television.

  Loretta ate three pieces of the thin crust pizza while Chuck ate four. Loretta picked up the last slice, put it onto a paper plate, covered that one with another paper plate, clipped the paper plates together with a couple of her hair clips and put the whole thing into the refrigerator.

  “I hate when you do that,” said Chuck.

  “Do what?”

  “Use your hairclips for things other than your hair.”

  Loretta sighed; Chuck continued watching television in the other room.

  Loretta went from the kitchen towards Chuck and stopped in the little open area between the two. She looked out the window between the two sheer curtains. She stared from her dark spot straight down the street across the intersection in front of the house. The street was empty in the twilight. The windmills out in the north field had their little red lights on, keeping planes and other low flying things safe. The dark blades slowly cut through sky. The light breeze propelled the unseasonably warm evening air across the land as day began to wane into night. A few of the neighbors had turned on their outside lights; and the street light at the dead end of the street that pointed directly to the north field, that ended only yards from where it began in front of the Dean’s house, one of many dead end roads off the main ring road, was just warming up with a clean bluish-white.

  Loretta moved forward until her forehead was touching the windowpane. She tried to see to the left as far as she could see, towards the Knews’s.

  “He’ll see you if you keep doing that,” said her husband.

  Loretta didn’t answer.

  “Sweetheart, think about what the neighbors will say if you keep this up. They’ll think you are the strange one for staring out the window at everyone. You’ll just be the shadow lady who stares at the neighborhood, do you want that? Really, sweetheart?”

  “He’s not there. And the Knews’s house is dark.”

  “So?”

  “The Knews have those lights that work when there is motion. They stay on for quite awhile. Why aren’t they on?”

  Chuck got up and looked out at the street. Then, standing behind his wife, he pressed his own head against the glass to try and see the Knews’s house.

  “I think I see what happened,” said her husband. “Jake went home while we were eating pizza. Then, hungry, he opened up a box of Fruit Loops.”

  “What?”

  “Listen. He opened the Fruit Loops, and his mother came in and said, ‘those Fruit Loops are for breakfast.’ And he said, ‘I can eat Fruit Loops when I damn well please!’ and then his mother reached out and took the box from him. Unfortunately…she didn’t see the hammer in his back pocket. And, just like Maxwell Silver Hammer, it was soon all over for her. And he stalked down his father and ‘bang!’ dead too.”

  “Jesus, Chuck. Don’t be stupid.”

  “I’m not. Don’t you see? I can see. He then scraped the claw of the hammer on his little sister’s bedroom door. ‘Sister, sister,’ he called out. And she answers, ‘Brother, oh big brother, what were those thuds I heard?’ ‘Nothing, my dearest little sister. Unlock your door.’ ‘No!’ she cried. Then came a—“

  Loretta screamed when the coat rack hit the floor in a colossal crash. Her husband began laughing as he went to get a beer from the fridge.

  “What the hell is wrong with you? Did you break it?”

  “No, no. It’ll be fine,” said Chuck. “I got you going, though.”

  Loretta gave Chuck an angry glare and left the kitchen to go down the stairs into their bedroom where, a moment later, their bedroom door was slammed shut.

  Chuck placed his beer on the kitchen counter as he began lifting the coat and hat rack back up until it was placed firmly against the wall where it had been before he’d kicked it down to spook his jumpy wife. He placed each hat and coat back where it belonged with a pleased smile of triumph. Maybe tomorrow he would hear nothing from his wife about the Knews boy riding his bike and eating a candy bar while staring at the fields or hitting rocks with a hollow red-plastic bat.

  He took one quick look out the window, down the street, as he went back to his throne with his beer.

  There was a bicycle under the streetlight, right at the end of the street, right next to the silvery-new guardrail with the yellow and black reflectors that made four circles, each with an X inside.

  He held his beer and took a sip. He walked back to his seat in front of the television determined not to let Loretta’s paranoia affect him, but it was odd this time. He took another sip and another sip. He switched channels. It couldn’t be that strange. The kid often played out in the fields. Many of the other neighborhood kids played games out there too. They would run around throwing clods of dirt at each other or seeing how far they could make it in the mud on their bikes. But—it also wouldn’t hurt to see what the boy was doing. Wasn’t Chuck a responsible adult?

  “Damn it,” Chuck mumbled to himself.

  Chuck went back to the window and stared down the street to where the dirt bike was just to the left of the center of the pool of light. Chuck pressed his head to the glass looking both ways down the street trying to see what he could see. Nothing. No one was moving or driving or grilling out on their driveways or anything. Then, out of the side of his eye, he saw a shadow move where shadows never moved. He knew, instantly, it was Jake. The boy had climbed the nearly seventy-feet to the top of one of the windmills. The boy crawled out along the top of the turbine where the heavy blades swung very slowly in the weak, warm breeze. He covered the red light briefly and then stood, against the failing light, seventy feet off the ground and seemed to be timing the swing of the blades.

  “Shit!” cried Chuck with wet pain in his eyes. Loretta
laughed as Chuck grabbed at the wet dish rag that she’d thrown.

  “You hit me in the eye!” he yelled.

  “Got you back, Mr. Husband!” laughed Loretta.

  Chuck turned back to the window and the shadow was gone.

  “Where did he go? Did he fall?”

  “Fall?” asked Loretta.

  “Jake climbed one of the wind turbines. He was on the top.”

  There it was. The shadow.

  “Loretta, he’s on that blade.”

  The highest of the three white blades had a boy-shaped shadow clinging twenty-feet from safety of-any-kind while moving up to ninety-feet above the ground.

  Loretta pushed up against Chuck at the window as both husband and wife watched the blade make it over the top of its arc and begin a path back towards the earth. The extra weight seemed to be speeding up its downswing. The boy shaped shadow held tight through the whole swing.

  “He’s got quite a grip,” remarked Chuck.

  “I should call someone.”

  The moment was broken.

  “Call 9-1-1. He can’t stay up there forever.”

  Loretta went to the phone and dialed.

  Chuck watched as the blade, with the shadow, came back to the top faster than before and fell faster than before, and this time the shadow was tossed off on the downward swing.

  “Oh, oh. I think he got tossed off. I think it tossed him off.”

  Loretta got someone then. “A boy named Jake Knews climbed one of the windmills—“

  Chuck couldn’t hear his wife for long as he ran out the door with a flashlight in hand. The beam was already waving back and forth as he ran while Loretta reported the situation. He sprinted across his lawn, the intersection and down the street towards the north field. He ran to the end of the street. He ran past the bike, still under the streetlight which was still brightening under the darkening skies. He ran out into the north field, and as he caught his breath, he was so happy that this had happened after harvest—had the cornstalks been there….

  He found Jake lying on his stomach. The boy’s head was to the side. Chuck wanted to flip him over and nearly did, but he remembered how dangerous it was to move a person in a situation like this.

  Chuck lowered his head and heard before he felt the breathing life flowing in-and-out of Jake. There was a slight gurgling noise. The boy’s eyes were open, but the kid was in Never-never Land.

  Chuck looked back, instinctively looking for help or harm. He’d never seen the neighborhood from this angle. He’d never been out in any farm field in his whole life. He’d driven by them. He’d walked near them, but he’d never been in one. The white base of the wind turbine was just to his right. The harvested field was dark black and getting darker without a moon to give it any life. The homes, his home, seemed quite a long way away. It was quiet. Bugs buzzed about near the streetlight. He looked for Loretta in the window of their house, but he couldn’t see her. No flashing emergency vehicles were shooting across the flat roads on either the left or right as far as he could see.

  Jake sat up.

  “Hey, kid,” said Chuck. “How are you feeling?” he asked as slowly as he could.

  “Who are you?”

  “One of your neighbors. I saw you fall.”

  Jake furrowed his brow.

  “What do you remember?” asked Chuck.

  “Where did I fall from?”

  “From up there.” Chuck pointed to the wind turbine.

  “Oh, right.”

  The kid stood up. Chuck thought of stopping him, but the kid seemed okay.

  “Are you—um, do you feel anything?”

  “Um,” said the kid like he’d been drinking. Chuck knew that it wasn’t alcohol but only the fall that was making the kid think slow. “Ummm…Yeah. I feel like there is something wrong here.” Jake pointed at his side. Chuck pointed the flashlight to the spot, but with all the mud, it was hard to tell if Jake’s side was bleeding a little or a lot.

  “I guess you should put pressure on it if it is bleeding.”

  “The light,” said Jake starting for the streetlight.

  Chuck followed the limping kid not knowing quite what to do. The kid seemed fine, but a wrong move could cause something bad, wasn’t that right? Doing too much? Doing too little? Don’t move the person. What if the person moves on their own?

  As they got nearer the streetlight and the guardrail where the north field ended, Chuck could see red and blue lights flashing in between the homes coming up fast.

  “Slow down, kid. Help is almost here.”

  Jake tripped.

  “Take it easy, kid. Help is almost here. Just take it easy.”

  Something from the kid’s side poked Chuck’s hand as he tried to catch Jake when he tripped again. A bone or something was sticking through Jake’s side. Jake hadn’t tripped this time; he’d passed out.

  “What bone is that?” said Chuck.

  Blood had saturated Jake’s shirt into a dark mess of blood and mud. Blood had begun to come from his nose too.

  Chuck looked up and could see the lights of the police car and the ambulance like the lights were echoes of silent sirens. Chuck held the boy’s hand thinking Jake was dying now.

  Where was Loretta?

  And the police car stopped at the end of the street.

  Chuck waved his flashlight back and forth to get the officer’s attention. The officer shined his headlights and searchlight over, and Chuck saw Jake Knews was even worse off than he thought. His skin was a very pale white where it seemed to cry out from beneath the mud and the blood.

  The officer walked out, flashlight lit and shining all around and then two-feet ahead and then around and down again until he got to where Chuck held Jake’s hand.

  “I don’t know what to do?”

  “What happened?” asked the officer putting on some thin blue gloves.

  Off, behind the cop car, an ambulance arrived. The officer signaled with his flashlight just like Chuck had.

  “He fell. Off the top of that windmill, well—no, he climbed out onto a blade and held on for a spin and then slipped off.”

  The officer stopped and looked up at the three slowly turning blades of the wind turbine. “He fell from there?”

  “Yes, sir. I was sitting with him; then he just got up and started walking back. I think he was going to just get on his bike and ride home.”

  The officer nodded as he looked over the boy.

  The paramedics ran through the mud with a stretcher. They took over caring for the boy with immediate purpose, and Chuck found himself easily pushed back and away.

  The officer started talking to him.

  “Sir, try to focus, sir.”

  “Oh, what?”

  “You saw the boy fall?”

  “Yeah. My wife and I were in our home.” Chuck pointed at the window that directly looked down the street and out at the north field. “Right there, that’s right between our kitchen and den. We were looking out here. She noticed him riding around and around. She didn’t always like him spending so much time in the street. Then we had pizza, and he was gone. I noticed his bike in the, um, the, uh, streetlight there. He was nowhere. Then I saw his shadow on the windmill, and we both saw him. We were both pretty shocked. When he fell, we came back to our senses and called immediately for help.”

  “What was the boy’s name?”

  “Jake Knews. K-N-E-W-S. His family lives just down the street to the right.”

  The paramedics hurried past with Jake strapped to a board, immobilized and stabilized and unconscious.

  “Do you think I could talk to your wife?”

  “Um, yeah, she pretty much saw the same thing, though.”

  “That’s fine,” the officer said as he began walking back towards the lights and homes and the new black, black street.

  Chuck started to follow when the ambulance took off and gave a mighty blow from its horn to clear away some of the people in the street. People were everywhere. They were in
the street, the sidewalk, in lawns, in their doorways and at windows. Chuck had forgotten he had so many neighbors. The officer looked back to make sure that Chuck was still following him.

  “Sir,” said the officer, “you are certain that this is the young man’s bike?”

  “Yes, do you want me to bring it?”

  “No, we’ll come back in a minute. Let’s talk with your wife first.” The officer pointed past his car. “That one there?”

  “Yeah, I guess I left the door open when I ran out.”

  The officer passed behind the shining lights of the police car, and to Chuck, it was like the man had vanished into the sun. Chuck felt, for a moment, great fear.

  “Sir, is something wrong, sir?”

  “No, just lost my bearings in all this light is all.”

  Chuck passed behind the lights and a moment later he could see his home and the officer moving towards his lawn, his car, his garage, his mailbox, his windows, his stuff.

  “Oh, I never got your name, sir.”

  “Charles Dean.”

  “Your wife is?”

  “Loretta Dean.”

  “I’m Officer Smith.”

  “Hello,” said Chuck.

  He noticed the officer was already sweating under the weight of the humid heat the strange weather offered.

  “Some kind of November night, eh?” said Chuck.

  “Yeah, supposed to get hotter tomorrow too. We already switched to our—“ The officer stopped and waited for Chuck to get up to the door and invite him in. “We already switched to some of our winter clothes; hell, I’ve got gloves and a scarf all-ready-ta-go in my car.”

  Chuck nodded and stepped into his house. “Loretta,” he called. “Loretta?” he called again.

  Officer Smith waited downstairs near the door as Chuck called out again and again. Officer Smith clicked off his flashlight and listened to his radio for a moment. “Ah moment, sir. Do you think your wife went to a neighbor’s house? Maybe she was shook up and went to see a friend?”

  “I don’t know,” said Chuck. “Loretta?” he called out faintly as the confusion swept over him. “She was here. I don’t know why she wouldn’t wait for me to return. I thought she would have followed me out there and stood outside with the phone while she was on the line with you guys. But she didn’t.” Chuck looked about him.