Just North of Nowhere

by Lawrence Santoro

  Feeling was, the Kiddorfs just gathered stuff and sold it back upriver.

  “Uf-dah! Imagine selling stuff to poor folks who lost it firstwise!”

  “Them Jews,” some said, a little chuckle gathering in their throats.

  Or they said, “Them Jews kept that all that crap 'til it got valuable again then sold it dear downstream where people are rich. Imagine?”

  “Inland beachcombers,” someone called the Kiddorfs. “Smart Jews,” most said.

  In the 1920s, Soam Kiddorf stuck an outdoor movie picture place at the wide spot on the Banks. He built a little levy to keep the worst of the floods from swamping the place in shit, junk and dead things. He built a big wooden screen he painted white every couple years, set out some benches on the grass that never did come in right. He built a little shack to sell candy and ice cream cups. That was it.

  Folks walked hand-in-hand from town or bicycled side-by-side. One or two drove. They paid their nickel, sat butt to butt on the benches under the stars and watched the screen flicker with Hollywood stars and mayflies till daybreak. Trees all around, the river hushed the night. Nights like that, even the high water stink went pretty.

  Late 1930s, Soam burned the benches. He covered the place in asphalt and painted lines for cars to park, noses pointed at the screen. Folks liked that; felt up-to-date. A family drove in, parked, watched and if they didn't have to go pee or have themselves some candy or a cool drink, they never left the comfort of their vehicle from home curb to back again.

  Here’s a funny thing: Coming or leaving, when folks left their headlamps on and whited out the moving picture for a few seconds, people got hot. They hooted and honked and made such a fuss, even those who didn't much mind a quick smear of light playing across the screen would get pissy over the racket everyone else was making and start yelling their own damn selves.

  Soam Kiddorf hated that.

  His son, Abe, a poet and student of human nature, hung a sign at the entrance: “Look On the Screen! Such Magical Sights. But Please Remember your Neighbors and Turn Off Them Gol Durned Lights!”

  Worked. People chuckled, when they handed young Abe their ten-cent admission, he was a better business guy than a poet. But they remembered that silly verse. And when folks forgot and turned on their lights during the cartoon or shorts or when flailing arms or knees accidentally hit the switch during the feature, the crowd shouted: “Remember the Magic!” Or “The Gol Durned Lights!” Everyone laughed, the lights went out and everyone was happy.

  “Remember the Magic!” Where had that come from?

  Kiddorf’s Magic Light Drive-In—that was the name of the place – was a seasonal business. Every year when the leaves got red and spun into little whirlwinds at the corners of the lot, when the nights went crisp and a whiff of log smoke and burning leaf sifted down the air, Soam and Abe closed the drive-in’s big car gate for the year. On the marquee Abe Kiddorf spelled out: “Closed For The Season. Reason? Freezin!”

  Folks chuckled all winter whenever they drove past the empty place and saw that.

  By 1960-something people pretty much didn’t come. TV. The Kiddorf closed one fall and that was that. Sign still says: Close For The son. Rea ? Free in’!

  By then, there were only three Kiddorfs. Abe, the old man by then, his wife, Ruth, and their baby boy, Danny.

  Bunch stood ankle-deep in cool night mist. Across the road, the big door in the shaggy cedar fence was open. He could see in. The drive-in screen, sagged, leaned hard toward the trees. It'll fall flat down, Bunch reckoned, pretty soon and good riddance, too. Forget that, though. Something was in there. In there now. Something was standing still in the dark. Bunch couldn't see it, but he felt it. Damned thing was making his guts go squirmy. Bunch had smart guts, you betcha.

  Bunch also didn't like cars screaming the roads, late night. Pretty soon somebody goes smash on a deer or some other critter, and boom – like that – there'd be a catterwhompus: a red-wet road mess, Vinnie Erickson, out on the blacktop, flares and bull horn, a bossy pain in everyone's ass till dawn! No sir, Bunch did not like crazy drivers. They made him want to start in talking and talking and talking.

  He'd been sound to sleep. A misty rain had swept the valley earlier. It was a night just to lie there under his bridge. The rain was done now and Bunch was half awake, half not. The river ran, talking to itself. Maybe Bunch was half-way thinking Cristobel Chiaravino, long black hair drippy wet from her shoulders, that white streak...

  That was one minute.

  The next, he was tingling, not from Cristobel’s rain-wet hair, no. A set of voices was whispering up the water from the Banks, from the old moving picture place. A couple of slashlight beams wiggled around the sky. Guys laughing, singing; guys who didn't know about being out after dark. After a bit, there was quiet. Then, out of the quiet, a dark stillness rose. Worse than whispers, the silence made Bunch go all ready. A minute later, a sudden explosion of shouts and hollers comes rattling upstream. Then more, screams and crashing bushes, cracking branches. Flashlight beams panic-slashed the sky.

  Bunch shot out of his bag and waded into the river. The cold stream woke his ankles and privates and he stared down the dark. From down there, two car engines burst to life.

  That was that. He padded ashore, climbed the slippery bank to the road. His toes clenched the asphalt when the two vehicles that had roared to life moments before came screaming at him, machine panic, running down the night.

  Bunch dove for life into the bush.

  Stinking steel and smoky tires burned road past his nose. Spalls sprayed over him as the two cars gripped the curve and were gone, chattering red light and booming hollow metal, sparks dragging along the blacktop toward town.

  By the time Bunch pulled himself back onto County H, everything for miles around was just too damn still.

  Bunch stood like a jerk and gave a good dirty look at the place those two idiots weren't anymore. By now, he reckoned, they were in town or through it.

  Fuss over.

  Maybe.

  Nope. Not quite. Something hung in the air. Something didn't make a noise, didn't shake branches or go flashing lights. That something was down where the cars had been, an empty place Bunch couldn't figure. He didn't know for a truthful fact, but he'd bet them two crazy driver's had left this...this something...behind, something for someone else to reckon with.

  For Bunch to reckon with. He couldn't see it, but it was tickling his hairs, this something down by the old drive-in.

  Now, Bunch was used to weird. He didn't scare like folk, certainly not like the terrorists who got jitters every time the wind whistled off the bluffs or when a tree wiggled in the night or some critter made a noise around a bend in the trail.

  Still, Bunch hated the drive-in. Day or night, he went a little gut-goofy passing it. Maybe it was all those faces had flickered across that big white board all those years. Maybe it was the noises had come from there. Maybe it was the people who'd sat and stared at that place in the night, all the attention paid that one white hole in the night, all the passion spent on the flickers that crossed it.

  Since the show closed, the screen had drooped more every year. Last year a couple panels had warped right off, dangling. Now the whole thing looked near ready to go.

  From under his bridge the screen was just an eyesore over his shoulder, days and dreaming memories, nights. Every now and then, he'd wake at three, four in the silence and there it would be, a memory of when the pictures had been in season. Images danced behind him in the dark. Grabbed his jewels, that memory. Bloody corpses, chain saws slashing. Those things could be. That stuff he'd seen out in the world.

  Bunch padded barefoot the hundred yards down the night-cold asphalt toward where the screaming fuss had been and that new stillness now stood. Around the corner, the screen rose out of the trees.

  A night of hard stars: tiny ones, big ones, all kinds and colors, fuzzy stretches where they crowded, close as a puff of winter breath. The whole thing turned, lock
ed together, rolling slow against the dark. Starlight glazed the road. The road already ran white with mist that had crawled up from the river. It flowed like a sister to the Rolling.

  The big old drive-in gate was open. From inside came a raw crude stink, rich, rancid, sensual. The stink oozed into the world. That was that something, that something that stood in the dark.

  What the hell? Bunch said to himself and went in.

  Rabbi Danny Kiddorf came to a screeching stop on the switchback, far side of town. Just ahead, Father Joe Inquist did the same.

  Danny gripped his wheel, figured Joe was doing the same.

  Okay. Vinnie hadn't seen them, praise God. Nobody had. Probably. The Wagon Wheel was closed, closed and dark. He remembered that. Okay again. He hadn’t really watched but he thought the streets had been empty. Well, Doc Mouth, wandering. Maybe. But that was always. Doc hadn't said anything to anyone in a long time. So that was okay.

  Joe Inquist's taillights were bright red. Still has his foot on the brake, Danny figured. He took his foot off his own brake.

  Danny's Infiniti, Joe's Ram had flat-out burned Bluffton behind them. They'd passed the last house in town and started up the switchback out of the Rolling valley and into Amish country. At that point three higher cognitive notions gripped Danny. They could be expressed simply: “Where the hell are we going? What the hell are we doing? What the hell!”

  “A panic of children,” Danny said aloud. He hit the brakes and pulled over. Like notions must have hit Joe at the same time because the Ram slewed to a quick stop a hundred feet ahead. They sat alone now in their separate vehicles.

  A minute more and Joe's back-up light glared white against the dew gathering on Danny's windshield. The truck crunched grit until its big spare tire nudged Danny's hood.

  Earlier that evening, before everything, there had been words. The words were between Father Joseph Inquist, pastor of St. Olaf Roman Catholic Church and Daniel Kiddorf, the Rabbi of Bluffton, congregation of one: Danny. Their words were part of a regular Wednesday colloquy at the Wheel. Irish whisky, Cuban cigar smoke and imported Polish vodka had twirled words weekly into a usual round of disputation, debate, discourse, gentlemanly sparing, a sparking of ideas and ideals against the friendly stench and din of the Wheel’s ongoing life.

  This one had gone... Well, it had gone over the edge.

  Danny oozed ever-cooling sweat and stared at the Ram’s spare tire. When Joe tapped the window, Danny lowered it as though he expected a ticket. “Yes?”

  “If you were Catholic,” Joe said, “I could tell you just how big a sin was done back there.”

  Danny waved his hand vaguely. “No, no, no, no, no. No! Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe. Joe. Joe! Let me think, here, will you? Okay? Just....”

  “Let me in,” Joe said.

  Father Inquist slipped into the back and across squeaking leather. He leaned over the seat. “Look: Okay? It's mud.”

  “Moving mud. Mud Plus. Mud with a will.”

  “Okay, okay. It moves.” He thought for a second. “We can...” Joe made a vague tearing gesture with both hands. “Jesus, Danny we can take it apart. Scatter it, okay?”

  “Joe, it moves,” Danny shook his head until the concept found words. “It's alive. Or something... Lord, Joe. Am I telling you this?”

  “It’s ‘or something,’” Joe said. He chuckled – didn’t mean to – then he stopped. “Yeah. Or something. Look, maybe it's like a colony. Like germs. Or coral. Something, you know? Alive but only on the most rudimentary, elemental level of aliveness. See? Not sentient. Alive but not. You know? Like a plant.”

  “A big plant. A big, fast, breathing, moving...”

  “Yes, yes. Well, yes.”

  “Joe, Joe, Joe, I took mud and sticks. I pressed God's name into it, said some words and it lived. Okay. Can I end it? Do I make it stop living? May I do that? What am I at all? It's father? Creator? Like...”

  “...its gardener,” Joe said, “you own the sticks, the skeleton. Your mud, its flesh. It's standing back there on your land. You stuck it together, it's your mud man, like a snowman!”

  “Frosty the Golem!”

  “Look! It is not...look at me, Danny...look!”

  Rabbi Danny Kiddorf turned to face his oldest friend in the world. Joe Inquist's steel-rimmed glasses glowed red in the Ram’s tail light glare.

  “It's not human,” Joe said. “It is a thing. It moves. Like a car, like, like a creeper vine. You can stop it from moving because no moral imperative says you cannot. No commandment: 'Thou shalt not scatter mud!' Believe me. I've studied them...the commandments...it's not there.” Joe smiled.

  “My people know the commandments, too. God’s stenographer...”

  “It is not a life!” Joe said.

  Danny wanted, so much he wanted to accept his friend's position on this. But there was that image! The image stayed in him. The trash heap he and Joe had scraped together: sticks laced with rags, the river’s stench in the mud they'd shaped around the spongy armature. The dead fish and sex stink of this small creation, the odor of piss and cow dung. The chill air, the great rolling sky overhead. Their whisky laughter and the Name spoken aloud; the Name written with felt-tip pen on the back of a credit card receipt and shoved into the mouth he'd slit into the sagging wet head that lay on the asphalt by grandpa's drive-in screen.

  Then that thing was suddenly and surely not a thing, a Thing suddenly more than its own sum. The Thing arose in a way no human figure could have reared itself, rising without regard to the physics of muscle, bone, connective tissue, weight, balance or will. It flowed upward to stand before them against the sagging ruin of Soam Kiddorf's once-white screen. The thing waited.

  “Not a life? You don't know that, Joe,” Danny said.

  Joe hung his head for a moment. “Well, yes I don't. But first rain,” he said finally, “a good soaking pour, I bet that'll be it. Washed away. All away.” Joe rubbed the place on his nose where the glasses pressed. “I guess. What do you think?”

  Danny looked back at the town below. “Maybe,” he said, “I guess it will.” The night was quiet.

  Finally Rabbi Kiddorf said, “So if I were Catholic, just how big a sin is this, anyway?”

  Bunch had never been inside the drive-in. The heaved asphalt was dead under his feet. He hated that. He hated the way the river mist lay stagnant here. Here, feet were invisible. Metal pipes rose from the mist. They leaned at angles, lay bent or humped, poking up from the fog like snake heads rising from milky water. Small trees twisted out of the asphalt heaves, prairie grass shot up along with weeds, dead, dried flowers that hadn't dropped yet from their drooping stems at the end of the season. It all hung crackling and whispering as he passed.

  On top of all of it, Bunch thought the place was bigger inside, than out. He didn't like that. It was like the world was opening its mouth beneath his feet, setting out to take a chunk from him up to the knees. He hated that.

  It was darker there, too. Bunch looked up, once, twice, maybe three times to see if the stars were still shining. They were. Hard, sharp dots. Bright in a sky that was dead black. His toes gripped ground so he wouldn't fall up and off the world.

  As he crossed the lot, he glanced at what was left of the screen, half expecting one of the screaming blooded faces to show there. Years before, when he'd sat under his bridge and watched the distant flickers in the night, something big and rotten always raised up to grab someone's head and eat it. Now, he felt like he was waiting for the teeth and claws.

  At the center, Bunch stopped.

  Words snarled along the peeling plywood screen, high as a kid could reach. Bunch couldn't make out the words, so he reckoned they didn't matter. He wasn't good with writing words, anyway.

  As far as Bunch could see into the trees, into the dark corners of the cedar fence, there was nothing here. Only the watery hiss of the river sounded above the night’s silence. No animal screams, joy or pain. No worms chawed dirt, no bug shells clacked the night.

  S
till, the stink hung in the air. At flood, the Banks always stunk. But this? Breathing deep, Bunch tasted it. The taste skinned his tongue, something had gone sour on the air, the thing that had dragged his sorry ass over here this sweet misty night.

  He didn't see it until he closed on the screen and trees again, but there it was. He couldn't figure if it had been there all along, standing alongside the greens and bushes that had sprouted around the old wooden frame or if the something had slipped from the trees without he noticed.

  Trash heap, was Bunch's first thought, a shitpile. He took a dozen steps toward it because part of him wouldn't credit what he saw. His gut yelled, there it is, there's the something, the wrong-thing that's come. But his legs didn't believe it. Neither did his head so he kept going.

  When it lowered its head and turned to him, mouth open, eyes gawking, that was when Bunch realized the shitpile had been staring at the stars.

  That's also when Bunch's gut won out over his legs and head. He stopped dead ten feet from the critter.

  The critter stared at Bunch. There were no eyesballs, not that Bunch could see, but he figured he was being stared just the same. Two wet lumps above that gaping mouth-hole, but there was sight down inside the thing, he knew it.

  The critter took a long rasping gasp like all the air all the world around had sucked down a sinkhole to forever. Cold electric ran up Bunch's back and he braced against being sucked into the critter.

  When the beast exhaled, all the winters of the world wrapped themselves around Bunch and he was out like...

  The critter knew there was another, another like the colors that had gone. The critter was staring up, however. Small lights. Sharp. Hard. Far. The critter felt their distance, their heat, the cold between them. Sniffed their airs. Below. Close. The earth was covered in a soft wet something that wrapped itself around the critter’s… Feet. That’s what they were. The damp, gray softness was mist. Yes. And above there were small, hard lights. It could feel them, taste them, but could not know them. Not yet. The critter looked and looked. They were so far. But the color was near. Now very near. The critter turned. The color had warmth, shape. And it had pictures inside it. The critter looked at the pictures. The pictures made noises, were covered in other colors. Blood. The word came. Blood and pain and fear, noises called scream. The creature felt that and fed it back to the moving warm shape in front. Man. A man. From the man came more pictures. Pictures that had filled the big white square nearby. The pictures flickered through her and she gave them back to the Man. And sound. She heard thumps. They came in rhythmic beatings. The thumps became. What? The creature asked, what? Pleasant. The answer came back. Indian. Drum. War. She caught that from the Man. That and Engine Warm. Indian. War. The Man fell down, disappeared into the soft white mist. The images stopped.