American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Almost as if it is an eye, Mona thinks. As if there’s a bunch of tiny eyes hanging from the inside of the jar, and they are all staring at her.

  She gasps and nearly falls back, but a pair of hands helps steady her.

  “Goodness, dear, whatever is the matter?” asks Mrs. Benjamin’s voice.

  Mona jumps back the other way, for what she’s found in the tea racks makes her just as frightened of Mrs. Benjamin as she is of the thing in her hand. Then she looks around at the tea racks, and sees that all the strange jars are gone: she sees no smoked beakers with labels in an alien language, nor does she see any teas that resemble bizarre scientific experiments. Even the jar in her hand has changed: it does not contain eyes, but jasmine blossoms.

  She looks back at Mrs. Benjamin, and there does not seem to be anything that frightening about her, either. She’s just a worried old lady standing at the door to the tea closet.

  “Did I startle you?” she asks.

  “I… I think I need to sit down,” says Mona.

  “Did you lose your balance?” asks Mrs. Benjamin. She helps Mona to a chair. “It happens to me all the time. One moment everything is crystal-clear, the next the world is wheeling around me. One of the defects of this old body of mine, I suppose.”

  She gives Mona a glass of water. Mona drinks it quickly while glancing back at the tea closet. She is half convinced that at any moment it might change into that room of disturbing specimens again, yet nothing happens.

  “Did Mr. Macey leave already?” she asks.

  “Yes,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “He just stopped by to tell me some news. Or what he thought was news. It’s not news if you already know it, is it?”

  “What was the news?”

  “Oh,” says Mrs. Benjamin vaguely. “You know us old ones. We do enjoy getting into little competitions and skirmishes. Fighting over rose blooms and dead tree limbs and pets and such. And whenever someone hears of a new crime, they rush all over town telling everyone. Even if it is rather petty, once you look at it with some perspective. I suppose we have to find a way to distract ourselves.”

  “Is he going to be all right?” Mona asks.

  “Oh, he’ll be fine,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “He’ll be fine, I’m sure. We’ll all be fine.” And she turns to stare out the window at the forest and the mesa beyond, but there is something in her eye that makes Mona think she’s trying to convince herself as much as Mona.

  “Something the matter?” Mona asks.

  “Why?” asks Mrs. Benjamin. “Do you think there’s something wrong?”

  The answer to this is a resounding yes, of course. Mona feels that magic trick with the mirrors did something to her, like it broke something inside her (with the same little click as that of the two mirrors sliding apart), or perhaps it reached in and opened all the windows in her head. Perhaps that’s why she had that strange moment back in the tea closet.

  Or maybe it’s something worse, she thinks. Her mother was mentally touched, to say the least. But Laura was fine originally, so she must have broken down all at once, at a later age… say around forty. And aren’t these things inherited, Mona thinks?

  “I think I need to go home,” she says.

  “Oh, you don’t look well, dear,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “Are you sure you’re good to drive?”

  “I’m fine,” Mona says quietly, and she thanks Mrs. Benjamin and walks outside and climbs into the Charger. But she does not start it just yet. Instead she just looks at herself in the mirror, examining her eyes, as if she might be able to see a change in them that would tell her if she’s gone as mad as she feels.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When the sun crests the peaks and the afternoon rays come spilling through the valley, Wink slowly fills with the overpowering aroma of pine. It comes from the forest, of course: the sun is literally roasting the sap while it’s still in the trees’ limbs. The outer neighborhoods get the most of it, naturally, and while they claim they love the scent some privately admit that they’d enjoy something else for a change, honestly, even a paper mill would do.

  Helen Thurgreen is one of the few who is perfectly fine admitting such a thing in public. While most residents prefer to keep their dissatisfactions quiet, Helen spends most of her time out in her yard, where the smell is nothing short of overpowering, so she feels she has every right to complain. And she has to spend so much time out in the yard, because somehow her house has become quite the thoroughfare, with thoughtless passersby wracking havoc on nearly every single one of her rose beds.

  She almost curses to herself as she lugs a spade, a rake, and a hoe from the garage. Someone really should have mentioned how popular this route was when they moved in, she thinks. They might have not even bought the place. But people don’t mention much here.

  As she gives one final heave and tears the rake free from a tangle of garden hose, she staggers back and happens to spot what should be the thick, magnificent blooms of a Nacogdoches Rose (a rare transplant); however, three of the most promising buds have been broken off, and dangle dead and browning from the rose’s branches. No doubt it was done by some traveler who carelessly plowed through the poor thing.

  “Son of a bitch!” she says. She will have to fix it, she supposes. There are so many things she needs to fix. But nothing compares to the state of the backyard, which is what’s sent her out on this hot afternoon, rummaging through her garage for spades and rakes.

  “Is something wrong?” asks a voice.

  She looks over her shoulder and sees something unusual in Wink: a total stranger. But then she thinks, and realizes she recognizes this short, striking young woman with the black hair and dark skin: it’s the new girl from down the street, the one who came roaring into town in that ridiculous car and ruined the funeral. Helen had imagined her being a fat, loud creature, but the girl on the sidewalk is fairly becoming, or at least she would be if she cared about her outfit (Helen has never thought much of cutoffs) and her hair (which Helen finds a bit dykey).

  “Oh, hello,” she says to the girl. “No, no. Everything’s fine. Just… swearing at the flowers.”

  “Oh,” says the girl. “I don’t believe we met, ma’am. I moved down the street, I’m Mona.” She aggressively sticks out her hand.

  “Helen.” She shakes off one dirty gardener’s glove and shakes the girl’s hand.

  “Doing some yard work today?” Mona asks.

  “Yes,” says Helen, who wishes the girl would go away.

  But she doesn’t. She looks around at the front beds and says, “Well, you can’t have much to do. These look gorgeous enough already.”

  Helen smiles thinly. The girl obviously does not know what she’s talking about, and cannot see the numerous damages. “Well, it’s not for these,” says Helen. “The backyard’s a bit of a mess.”

  “I see. Sorry to ask, but would you mind if I ask you a question, ma’am? Us being kind of neighbors and all.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Have you lived in this house long?” Mona asks.

  “Oh, God,” says Helen, laughing wearily. “Too long.”

  “Would you have happened to have lived here when a Laura Alvarez lived at the house I’m in now?” She points down the street as if Helen can’t tell where she lives by the absurd red thing parked outside. “That one?”

  Helen thinks. “No,” she says finally. “I’m afraid I can’t recall. I doubt it, though.”

  “She would have worked up at the lab on the mountain. Coburn.”

  Helen frowns at her mistrustfully and glances around. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “You don’t? Wasn’t the town built around it?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she says again. “Coburn was gone long ago.”

  “Do you know how long?”

  Helen, growing impatient, shakes her head. “No. I don’t.”

  “Oh,” Mona says. She looks at the spade in Helen’s hand, then up at the gate to the backyard, which is hangin
g open. Helen cannot help herself: she slowly moves to block the girl’s view.

  “Well,” says the girl, “thanks anyways. If you think of anything, I’d really appreciate it.” She waves and walks back down the street, hands in her pockets.

  “Ta ta,” says Helen. She watches the girl go, happy that the conversation ended there. There are a few subjects you never discuss, and Coburn is one of them, even though its logo—the hydrogen atom encased in light—discreetly adorns nearly every municipal structure in Wink, if you know where to look. Often you will see it tucked away in the corner of a building’s foundation, or engraved on the very, very bottom of a light post; but then you must forget you ever saw it, which of course is no issue in Wink, where knowing how to forget what you’ve seen is like knowing how to blink. And there are much, much harder things to forget than a little logo.

  Helen hauls the yard tools around back. She was not lying to the girl: the backyard is in a bit of a mess. But it’s not the lilies, which need to be thinned, nor is it the morning glory, which is taking over; it’s the enormous sunken hole right in the center of the backyard, nearly five feet across. It’s a very curiously shaped hole, really: it has a large roundish section in the middle, and four rather odd protrusions stick out of its edges, with three bendy ones on one side of the circle and a large square one sticking out of the opposite side. It would be difficult for anyone to imagine what could ever make such a bizarre shape. It could be a sinkhole, one might think, but the rest of the ground is very firm. And it could have been done by flooding or standing water, but these possibilities are ruled out, for those forces take time and this hole appeared overnight.

  Helen throws down her tools and begins hastily filling in the hole. Her husband Darrel, who, as always, is mostly worthless, comes out to watch, but does not offer any help.

  “It’s huge,” he says softly after a while.

  Helen nods sourly as she works at the hole.

  “It came right into the yard,” he says.

  “Isn’t that obvious?” says Helen.

  “They’re not supposed to come in here,” he says. “They stay out in the woods. And we stay away from the woods. Those are the rules.”

  “Do you think,” asks Helen between spadefuls, “that I am an idiot? Do you really think I don’t know that?”

  “Which one do you think it was?” he asks. “We can report him, if we like. We should report it anyway. If there’s anyone left to report it to… I guess Macey will have to do.”

  For a moment Helen stops digging, and looks up. Though the fence around their yard is tall, from here she can see over the top and down into the valley. After years of living in this house, she can see why their yard is such a popular thoroughfare: it’s the lowest and most accessible point between the wooded slopes and the rest of the town. Anything out in the woods would naturally wander this way when trying to get to Wink. And what’s out in the woods, Helen thinks, has never really understood the concept of private property very well.

  At the bottom of the mesa is one barren, treeless canyon that her eye lingers on for a long while. Of course it had to be that one, she thinks. It couldn’t have been one of the little ones. It had to be the biggest. That is just my luck.

  How I hate this house.

  She turns around to face her husband. “No,” she says. “We are not reporting this. Not about him, anyway. Now are you just going to stand there? Or are you actually going to do anything?”

  “My back’s hurt,” he says, defensively.

  “Oh, it’s always your back.” She returns to filling in the hole. “Or your knee. Or your ankle.”

  “I have joint problems,” he says. “It’s genetic.”

  Helen scoffs.

  After a while, Darrel says, “It came right up and stood in the yard. Why would it ever do that, I wonder?”

  “I expect it was doing what everyone else is doing,” says Helen.

  “And what’s that?”

  She lays the spade aside and starts smoothing over the dirt with the rake. Soon she’ll have to lay sod out, and keep it soaked, but in time it should all be patched up, and no one will have any reason to think anything strange has happened here at all.

  Helen says, “Coming to get a look at the new girl.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It’s a bad night, Joseph can tell. He can tell by how the trees begin to devour the sun, and the way the stars stab through the soft blue sky and shine down just a little too brightly. It’s in the way the wind rubs its back on the pines, and they bend a little more than they should. It’s even in the way his family’s chandelier lights the dinner table: the light is flat and lifeless, like it’s cast from a neon light filled with the powdery remains of trapped insects. It makes the food look like gruel and gives skin the look of parchment.

  On nights like this, his family knows, you get your day done as fast as you can, and then you go to bed. It’s not enough to just stay indoors. You don’t even want to be awake. Being awake attracts attention, which you definitely don’t want.

  But awake is exactly what Joseph is, as he lies in his bed and stares at the ceiling. He tries to ignore the shadows dancing across the blinds in his bedroom window. He tries not to think of Gracie, and her cool touch and saddened eyes. She seems so much sadder these days, and since Mr. Macey caught them he hasn’t dared contact her. And he tries not to think of what could be happening out there, among the buttes and bluffs around Wink, or in its darkened streets and alleys, or in the playground at the elementary school. Tonight is most definitely a bad night. One of the worst in a while.

  He freezes, and sits up in bed a little. Was it his imagination, or was there a tap at his window? He soon realizes it wasn’t his imagination, because there’s another tap, this one much louder. Then a soft pitter-pat as something rains against his window, like sand…

  He stands up and walks to his window, but does not open his blinds. They glow slightly from the streetlight outside. He sees something dark fly up and strike the glass on the other side, and there’s another tap.

  Someone’s throwing things at the glass, he thinks. Or are they being tossed by the wind?

  Joseph reaches toward the blinds, but hesitates. He has never heard of someone’s window being tampered with at night… that’s not how things are supposed to go. But what if it’s known that he’s awake? What if this is how his crime is addressed? Maybe this is how it happens…

  But Joseph throws caution to the wind, and he takes one slat of the blinds and lifts it up ever so slightly. A blade of light pokes through, and he squints to see through it.

  His window is on the ground floor, and he can see the edge of the forest just beyond his house. There’s a figure standing just beside the trunk of one tree: a white hand is resting against its bark and is barely caught by the luminescence of the streetlight.

  The hand rises and gestures to him, telling him to come out, and his heart nearly stops. He should never have looked through the blinds, he thinks. This was all a huge mistake…

  The figure seems to grow frustrated at his lack of response. It gestures again, and Joseph is just about to shut the blinds when the hand’s owner steps out into the light.

  It is Gracie. She is dressed in black, except for a checked skirt. Her skin is paler than usual. She looks almost bloodless in the streetlight. She gestures to him again.

  This worries Joseph: they shouldn’t be seeing one another after Macey caught them, and it’s definitely not a night to be going out. He glances around at the trees, then pulls his blinds up and opens his window.

  “What are you doing?” he hisses as Gracie approaches. “Go back home, Gracie! It’s dangerous out!”

  “Not for me, it isn’t,” she says. There is something soft and hollow in her voice. “Come out with me. I need to talk to you.”

  “What? Are you insane? I can’t come out in this!”

  “You can if I’m with you,” says Gracie. “Come out, Joseph. You won’t be harmed.”

&n
bsp; “Mr. Macey caught us, though. We can’t risk it.”

  “Mr. Macey’s what I want to talk to you about.”

  He looks at the trees bending in the wind. They bend so much he’s sure they’ll break. “They’re angry,” he says softly.

  “They aren’t angry,” she says. “They’re scared. Scared and confused. Come out with me.”

  Joseph looks into her eyes. There is something new there, something that shouldn’t be. It’s as if there’s a flaw in their color that’s appeared overnight. “All right,” he says.

  He puts on some slippers and climbs out the window to her. She holds out a hand for him, then leads him away into the woods.

  The woods are cold and strange in the night. The way the wind runs through them makes it sound as if they are filled with voices. Sometimes he and Gracie pass through a glade and it looks like no place on earth: the stones are black and shiny, and boulders with queer angles lean drunkenly against the night sky. Joseph smells the air and realizes it has that electric, ionized scent to it, and he understands she is leading him through No-Go Zones, one after the other. But these are ones he has never seen before, ones no one in town might even know exist. He is almost faint with fear at the idea of it.

  “Where are you taking me, Gracie?” he asks.

  “To the lake, to talk,” she says. “In quiet. There are too many eyes here in the woods. Too many eyes in town, too, too many ears listening to everything and everyone.”

  “And the lake will be safe?”

  “Safer. Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because no one wants to be near the lake,” she says simply.