Straw House

by Daniel Nayeri

  She was holding a tractor’s pull-’n’-play ring. The pull string was frayed at the end. Her basil eyes had been crying.

  “They disassembled the whole thing,” she said. She waved the ring as bloody proof. “I went to put some tools away, and when I walked back to the vegetable garden, I didn’t even see it at first it was so scattered.”

  Sobrino set his cloth down and put his hands into his trouser pockets. “The whole thing,” she said, “chair to chassis. Stupid man, stupid, stupid gang can’t even tell the tractor was already broken.” She wagged the drawstring at Sunny like an accusation or, worse, an appeal. “And I found it, and it was torn apart, Sunny. Even the one-piece molds.”

  The farmer’s daughter let the plastic hoop fall to her side. She trembled. Boy stood behind her with his whole hand in his mouth. They both looked at Sunny, expecting something. Sobrino looked at him, too.

  Sunny pulled a clipped piece of straw from his sleeve so he wouldn’t have to say anything. He looked down at his bare feet and dyed hands, then up at Dot and Pup and Boy and Sobrino. The hens had even paused to look. If the homuncular gang had trespassed onto the vegetable garden, then the rows would be next. He flexed his jaw. They’d need a new tractor.

  Sunny exhaled. It came out in the shape of “Aw, hell,” and he marched past them out the barn and around it to the back lot.

  He approached the back of the barn, grumbling cuss and stuffing his fingers into fists several times. He turned the corner and saw the Growin’ Man lounging in the chicken coop with his hands behind his back and a homunculus standing beside him, holding one of the hens upside down by its wheel.

  The Growin’ Man said, “Heard you comin’ a mile —”

  Sunny punched the dead calm homunculus in the face and grabbed the hen. Then he leaned down into the prone rancher’s face and spat, “Here’s what you heard: You and me dance in the pasture at noon tomorrow. Then I spill you open like that gum-ball machine, yeah?”

  The Growin’ Man chupped and blew a bubble in Sunny’s face. “Ah’m gonna let ’em eat yo pretty little straw heart,” he said.

  Sunny straightened up and looked at the homunculus. It rubbed its cheek, not because it could feel anything in it, but because it puppeted what living things did. Sunny clobbered the homunculus again, across the other cheek, and left, holding the mortified chicken.

  SUNNY DIDN’T GO back to the main bay to work on the bookshelves. He wanted something he was good at. When he passed the front of the barn, he dropped the hen. It went unicycling back into the tangle of chickens, which resembled nothing more than a dust devil made of prairie junk.

  “Sunny!” Boy shouted.

  But Sunny kept going.

  “Sunny?” Dot called after him. Pup came running to tag along. His yap made Sunny look over his shoulder. This time Pup saw the kick coming. In the same motion that Sunny wheeled around to kick the oncoming dog, Pup rounded off his path into a U-turn. Sunny’s sweeping foot just whiffed past Pup’s ear. It flapped like a curtain in the wind. Pup scrambled back to the barn. Sunny nearly lost his footing, swinging around so hard. He cussed at himself and stumbled on.

  “Did you win?” asked Boy, a disastrous question to put to any lawman, because if you had to ask, the answer would always be no.

  Back in the barn, Sobrino didn’t say anything as he fixed the stain job Sunny had botched. He made a soft teakettle noise between his teeth, themselves stained every shade of brown, and soothed the brambling chickens. Pup let Sunny be and resigned himself to Boy’s equally heedless company. Dot pulled down the staircase to the attic and carried up the tractor’s ring.

  To Sunny, the farmhouse porch looked like a merry-go-round come unglued and left piled up with its constituent parts. Fearful toys were gathered into a cavalcade of stuff that couldn’t take care of itself.

  As he passed by, all the toys leaned in his direction. Sunny tried to ignore the shivering of a miniature tambourine in their midst. He stopped at his post and looked down the hill to the hundred-yard pasture. Tall grass swayed like a rattler’s tail. Good chance he’d be lying in that grass the next day.

  He pulled out pieces of straw from his sleeve and let them drop. He rubbed a few stalks between his thumb and forefinger. The owl and the crow were screaming at each other in the oak tree on the far side of the split-rail fence. The remains of Sobrino’s campfire kept Sunny from going over there to escape the pasture and the visions of himself in a standoff with a man he couldn’t quite look in the eye. Even the black embers of a cold pit sent frenzy through his stuffing. A lone spark, drifting like a bee, could send him up in a wicker blaze. He slumped over so far as he leaned on his post that his body made the shape of an S.

  A wind­up monkey with a pair of cymbals made a series of warning clangs on the porch. Sunny looked up from ripping at his sleeves. On the western horizon, a few silhouettes shambled toward the farm. He could tell what they were, even way off in the distance. Like him, the homunculi were effigies, stand-ins for real living folks. They would walk through the night and arrive by the end of the next day. Endless numbers of them could be coming — insensate meat missing whatever it was that would have made them flesh.

  Sunny tried to tighten his jaw, started to say, “Aw, hell,” in a detached, resilient sort of way. But his quavering chin kept harassing the notion. Sunny sniffed hard and ran toward the back of the house, across the rows, toward the vegetable garden.

  Sunny found the first piece of the tractor at the stretch of alfalfa that extended across the entire width of the vegetable garden. He blinked at it and pushed a toe cautiously against it, but it didn’t move. It was a piece of green plastic, basic tractor green, probably from the fender. He surveyed the garden where Dot’s affinity had produced crops, every one of them worthy of the state fair. In town they said she had green thumbs.

  Sunny bent down and poked the plastic. Its sides were per­forated where the homunculus had grabbed it with both hands and ripped off chunks. Sunny imagined the creature getting to the center of the tractor and finding nothing and thrashing at it in some savage frustration — one that made it search in as unlikely a place as farm equipment in the first place.

  It was a fact that the homunculi weren’t afraid of anything because they didn’t care for anything. But as Sunny picked up the first piece of the lacerated plastic, he realized they also were marked by something else. It was wanting that held them upright. They felt just enough to miss whatever it was they were missing. And with the Growin’ Man promising they’d find it here, they were free to try every darn thing to fulfill themselves, even eating the dashboard of a tractor — hoping it could be the heart of them — and letting loose a primal yawp when it cut them going down.

  Sunny cradled the fender and stepped through the alfalfa patch onto soil the machine had plowed just a few days previous. The scattered remains were like disparate flushes of color a kid might scrawl on an otherwise orderly drawing. With the last bit of daylight, Sunny scavenged around the vegetable garden for broken parts to bury up in the attic.

  The ornery crow followed him with short hops from one shrub to another, and a few times when it thought Sunny had stopped listening, it flew onto his hat. By the sound of its cackles, it seemed to get satisfaction out of Sunny’s ineffective swatting. By the day’s end, Sunny didn’t notice it, other than a slight quiver of his ear. Maybe Sunny even got to thinking he deserved it.

  The farm was denim blue in the dusk by the time Sunny hauled a little red wagon, piled high with tractor parts, across the porch. He stopped at the foot of his bedpost. A white paper bird was lying in the dirt. One wing had torn off in the crash. The other flapped to stave off stillness. Sunny kneeled down. The bird was using up the last of its life trying to flutter off. Sunny picked it up. When he turned to place the bird on the wagon, he saw the crow perched on top of the tractor parts, as proud as a cattle king.

  Sunny cussed and flung a dart at the crow, clipping one of its wings as it flew away. The crow squawked and ar
ced behind the farmhouse to find better company.

  As Sunny crossed in front of the porch, the toys didn’t pay any attention. He staggered with his head down, like a beast of burden, pulling a yoke so heavy and leaning so far forward that his nose nearly plowed a furrow in the dirt. The farmer’s daughter must have been soothing the hens to sleep or taking the old man’s counsel over his. Sunny considered regretting a few things.

  It was full dark. The clouds were roughhousing the moon. The Growin’ Man would own the place if he won. He had had no need to go sneaking around the night before. Even if he lost, his full gang would arrive by the next day, and they would overrun the farm.

  Sunny opened the barn door. Inside, the library almost shimmered. It looked like the old man had laid the entire coat of wood stain, evened out the first one, and then gone over it with a finishing lacquer. Where the shelves had teetered or stood crooked, they now stood level. In as much time as it would have taken Sunny to sand a few shelves, Sobrino had carved a vernal wood into each sideboard with his craggy finger­nails. Along the top was a bas-relief of wildflowers in a field, something Sunny couldn’t have done no matter how long he spent. Magic, thought Sunny. There was a bookend the shape of a tortle.

  Every picture book on the farm had been gathered and shelved. Dot must have brought them. Must have put her hand to her heart when she saw it all finished. As he thought of missing that moment, the grin on Sunny’s face fell through a trapdoor. If Sobrino had just left it alone, maybe Sunny’s woodwork wouldn’t have seemed so childish. Sunny stared at Dot’s gift, then finally shrugged, said, “Hell,” and went back to get the tractor parts. He tossed them into the attic without setting foot on the landing. As he replaced the pull-down staircase, Dot showed up with her hair all around her shoulders and said, “Hey, Sunny! Did you see what Sobrino —?”

  Sunny shouldered past her before she could finish. He grumbled, “Whatever,” so she’d know she could’ve been saying anything and it wouldn’t have mattered to him.

  IF YOU GOT to thinking about it, you might think the sun was trying to be obnoxious, rising up every day like it was poking you on the shoulder over and over again with the promise that whether you were sick of ’em or not, you had another day coming. Out by the rows, Sunny opened one eye and licked at the sour film around his mouth. His head hurt from sleeping too long in the heat. Neither Pup nor the carrion crow was around.

  Almost every toy was now coming up in mint condition. The caboose was entirely grown, puffing clouds as it drove between imaginary stations, clambering along the rows, and making high-pitched toots for every whistle-stop connection.

  All the crops stirred a little in the breeze. A yellow kite was only tethered by its buried spool. A pair of purple teacups rattled on their saucers. Even the mulch of rhinestones and jacks were unscuffed and newborn to the world. The farmer had come and gone already. And though Sunny thought he could recall the medley of the farmer’s tune from his sleep, he thought the next time he heard it, he’d tell the farmer to keep his precious humming to himself.

  Sunny had missed the early dawn light by a good margin. In fact, when he got his legs under him, he realized there was no shade to speak of. It was midday. He’d overslept. Dot had left another tin cup of coffee with sugar and cream at his feet. He craned his long neck, but he couldn’t hear the animals baying in the barn. She must have done his chores again. He dragged a hand across his face to wake himself and muffled the sound of “Aw, hell,” which he repeated as he started running to the pasture on the other side of the farmhouse.

  There wasn’t any time to comfort the hens. He glanced over at the porch as he sprinted past. All the toys were gone.

  Sunny had imagined himself the clink-step gunslinger, leaning on his post, maybe even dozing under the brim of his hat, a long piece of straw dangling between his teeth. The Growin’ Man would have come into the pasture and seen the law waiting for him. Instead, Sunny was barefoot and out of breath when he reached the men in the yard. The Growin’ Man’s hands rested on his gut. Only one homunculus stood on either side of him, aimless. A bee zoomed from one to the other, pollinating their hair.

  The farmer’s daughter and Sobrino stood way off to the side, between the gang and the farmhouse. Dot held a long-handled shovel. Sunny tried to gulp his breaths and avoided putting his hands on his knees so he wouldn’t seem weak.

  The Growin’ Man said, “Take yo’ time, son. Wouldn’t want but a fair draw between us.” He chupped his blue and black lips as though he’d told a good one. They stood fifteen yards apart. Dot hollered from over to the side, “We penned up the toys in the house, Sunny. Don’t worry about anything.”

  Sobrino added, “Ayo, Sheriff.”

  The Growin’ Man looked over at the girl and snorted. Sunny held his side and paced a small circle. He considered a quick draw right then to get the jump, maybe put the man down with a single shot. Slowly, so no one would notice, he lowered a dart into his hand.

  “You aren’t thinkin’ of gunnin’ me down like a bandit, aw you, Sheriff?” The Growin’ Man nodded at Sunny’s concealed palm. Then he mused, “Or maybe you’re cold-blooded is all. Fascinating.”

  Sunny tried to speak in a lower tone than was his naturally. “You can still leave on your own, stranger. We don’t want your kind here.”

  The Growin’ Man’s jowls rolled as he laughed. He said, “Oh, but ah want yo’ kind, Sunny . . . which, ah suppose, is the exact nature of our cross-purposes.” He removed his metal lighter from his denim jacket and flipped it open. A flame licked at the sky. He flipped it shut.

  Sunny wasn’t stepping back this time. His fingers twitched. If he let a dart fly, he could probably — he got the image of the Growin’ Man taking ten, twelve darts in his blubber without slowing his charge. Sunny could windmill his arms and send a Gatling’s worth of darts, and the man would still close the distance.

  Sunny shifted his weight and adjusted his grip on the dart. The Growin’ Man chupped his lips and said, “You’re wonderin’ if you can plug me with enough darts to stop my pushin’ this here flame into yo’ chest. Well . . .” He didn’t finish the sentiment, letting it drift into the space between them. A storm wind blew steadily now. The tall grass slapped at their thighs.

  “They do what you want,” said Sunny. “Why do you want to make ’em human?”

  The crow shrieked as it circled above their heads. The Growin’ Man said, “You ought to know. So they’ll take things without my havin’ to tell ’em. They’ll gossip as easy as drinkin’ watah. Be cruel and lie for their own ambitions. Maybe I’ll teach ’em to be afraid, like you ah right now.”

  The Growin’ Man licked his blue and black lips as he toyed with the lighter. The sudden whorl of air around them gave Sunny hope for rain.

  “We don’t do that,” said Sunny.

  “Yes, you do,” said the Growin’ Man, “but ah love that you say you don’t. That’s precious.”

  Sunny noticed the Growin’ Man’s eyes glance in the direction of the barn several times, without him meaning to, it seemed.

  Sunny said, “Aw, hell,” and shouted to the farmer’s daughter, “Dot, where are Boy and Pup?”

  The farmer’s daughter stammered before saying, “Hiding out in the barn. Why does it matter —?”

  The Growin’ Man sneered wide and showed his mouth full of gum balls and chaw. Then he whispered the words, “But you’re too late.”

  A dozen homunculi groaned as they climbed over the split-rail fence. They’d walked all night without rest. They marched across the hundred-yard pasture. Sunny took off at a dead run toward the barn. “Hold ’em back!” he shouted at Dot as he passed. The Growin’ Man lumbered after Sunny. One homunculus staggered toward the farmer’s daughter, the other toward Sobrino. As Sunny sprinted to the barn, he heard Dot grunt as she swung the shovel. A gong and a wooden groan.

  As Dot and Sobrino met the wave of trespassers, Dot sidestepped a lunging tackle, put two fingers to her lips, and whistled. The scree
n door of the farmhouse opened, and every able toy poured into the front yard. The tangle of hens consumed one grown man. The stick horse had made its mind up to be brave and stampeded down the hill with short hops. Even the baby train came to help. It made a nuisance of itself driving in circles underfoot. It caused one man to fall backward over an oblivious sheep grazing in the middle of the fight.

  When he reached the barn, Sunny could hear frantic scratching coming from the attic like he’d never heard before. He ran through the library under a wailing cry of “Sunny!” and came to a sudden stop. Boy sat on a crossbeam, tears running down his rivets. A homunculus stood on its tiptoes and reached up, but it was unable to grab Boy’s foot. The barred back door stood wide open. A second homunculus kneeled on the ground, pulling out the wires from Pup’s disassembled belly.

  Only Pup’s tail was moving. It jerked a little every time the homunculus touched a wire, as if the dog had gone into shock. “Stop,” Sunny whispered. For some reason, he didn’t want to disturb Pup with unnecessary noise. But the homunculus had one absurd purpose, to find the wire marked life. “Stop, stop!” Sunny screamed.

  He held the dart in his hand like a dagger and ran at the two grown men. As he passed the one standing on tiptoes, Sunny made one sweeping motion. He jammed the dart through one ankle and into the other. Then he lifted the skewer as he ran, upending the creature.

  He gained speed and barreled into the man kneeling over Pup. The two somersaulted over each other. When they stopped, the homunculus was on its back, Sunny on top. He stabbed it all over with another dart. The homunculus tried to sit up and reach for Pup, but Sunny shoved it back down.

  Even after the homunculus stopped moving, Sunny kept on. He was poking air holes into a potato, crying as he did. Bits of plant sprayed at his face as he jammed the dart down again and again. His begrieved lowing was the word “Stop, stop, stop” ground up with gagging and tears and strain.