McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “It’s getting dark,” Kirsten said. “You aren’t scared?”

  The little girl shrugged and chewed the caramel slowly. Juice dribbled down her chin.

  “Let me take you back home.”

  “No,” the girl said.

  “You can’t stay out here all by yourself.”

  The girl recoiled when Kirsten grabbed her hand, fighting back in a tantrum of kicking feet and twisting arms, her thin body jolting away in fear. “Let me go,” she screamed. “Let me go!” The fury in her voice shocked Kirsten into letting go of the hand. The girl ran off through the corn. Kirsten chased after her, but again very quickly the girl was gone, the sound of the wind swallowing the last of her screams. Kirsten stared down the long dark rows but in every direction the stalks swayed and the dry leaves turned as if the little girl, passing by, had just brushed against them.

  When Kirsten finally found her way out of the field she was in another part of town. She walked the length of the street, looking for signs, deciding at last on a two-story house in the middle of the block. A trike lay tipped over in the rutted grass and a plastic pool of water held a scum of dead leaves and twigs. Clay pots with dead marigolds—wooly brown swabs on bent, withered stalks—lined the steps. A family of carved pumpkins sat on the porch rail, smiling toothy candlelit grins that flickered to black, guttering in laughter with every gust of wind. On the porch, wet newspapers curled beside a milk crate. Warm yellow light lit the downstairs, and a woman’s shadow flitted across a steam-clouded kitchen window. The upper story was dark.

  Kirsten heard a radio playing. She knocked on the door.

  A haggard woman in her mid-forties answered. Her hair was knotted up on her head with a blue rubber band, a few fugitive strands dangling down over her ears, one graying wisp curling around her eye. A smudge of flour dusted the side of her nose.

  “Yes?” the woman said.

  “Evening, ma’am.” Kirsten handed the woman a flyer. “I’m with B.A.D,” she said. “Babies Addicted to Drugs. Are you busy?”

  The woman switched on the porch light and held the printed flyer close to her face. Closing one eye, she studied the bold red statistics on the front of the flyer and then flipped it over and looked into the face of the dark shriveled baby on back.

  “Doesn’t hardly look human, does it?” Kirsten said.

  “No, I can’t say it does,” the woman said.

  “That’s what’s happening out there, ma’am. That, and worse.” Kirsten looked off down the road, east to where the pavement went from black to gray and the town ended abruptly and the world opened up to cornfields and darkening sky. She thought of the little girl. About a mile distant a lighted combine moved slowly over a knoll.

  “Smells nice inside,” Kirsten said.

  “Cookies,” the woman said.

  “You mind if I come in?”

  The woman looked quickly down the road and, seeing nothing there, said, “Sure. For a minute.”

  Kirsten sat in a Naugahyde recliner that had been angled to face the television. Across from her was a couch covered with a clear plastic sheet. The woman returned with a plate of cookies. She set them in front of Kirsten and slipped a coaster under a coffee cup full of milk.

  “I work for B.A.D.,” Kirsten said. “My partner and me have been assigned to the Midwest territory. I got into this when I was living in New Jersey and saw all this with my own eyes and couldn’t stand by and do nothing. Those babies were just calling out to me for help.”

  “I’ve got three children myself,” the woman said.

  “That’s what the cookies are for,” Kirsten said. She bit into one of the cookies; the warm chocolate melted over her tongue.

  “Homemade,” the woman said. “But the kids like store-bought. They’re embarrassed.”

  “Homemade is better.”

  “Well, all they want is Wing-Dings and what have you.”

  “They’ll appreciate it later, ma’am. I know they will. They’ll remember it and love you.”

  In the low light, Kirsten again saw the spectral smudge of flour on the woman’s cheek—she had reached to touch herself in a still, private moment as she thought of something she couldn’t quite recall, a doubt too weak to claim a place in the clamor of her busy day.

  “That baby on the flyer isn’t getting any homemade cookies. That baby was born addicted to drugs. There’s women I’ve personally met who would do anything to get their drugs and don’t care what all happens to their kids. There’s babies getting pitched out windows and dumped in trash cans and born in public lavatories.”

  “Things are terrible, I’m sure, but I can’t give you any money. I worked all day making the kids Halloween costumes—they want store-bought, of course, but they can’t have them, not this year.”

  “What’re they going to be?”

  “Janie’s a farmer, Randall’s a ghost. Kenny’s costume was the hardest. He’s a devil with a cape and hood and a tail.”

  If she could coax five dollars out of this woman, Kirsten thought, she could buy a cheap bra out of a bin at the dimestore. Her breasts ached with swelling. When she’d seen the trikes tipped over on the lawn out front she’d assumed this woman would reach immediately for her pocketbook.

  “With a ten-dollar donation, you get your choice of two magazine subscriptions, free of charge for a year.”

  Kirsten showed the woman the list of magazines. “Cosmo ,” she said. “Vogue, Redbook, all them.”

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said.

  The front window washed with white light.

  “You had better go.” The woman stood up. “I don’t have any use for your magazines.”

  On the porch they met a man, his face darkened with the same brown dirt and dust that had rolled through and clouded the sky and eclipsed the sun that day. Golden spikes of straw stabbed his hair and the pale gray molt of a barn swallow clung to his plaid shirt. A silent look passed between the man and the woman, and Kirsten hurried away without a word, down the steps.

  “I thought she was trick-or-treating,” the woman said as she shut the door.

  “Nothing?” Lance said. “Nothing?

  Kirsten tore the wrapping from another piece of gum. They had driven to the outskirts of town, where the light ended and the pavement gave way to gravel and the road, rutted like a washboard, snaked off toward a defile choked with cottonwoods. Every street out of town seemed to dead-end in farmland, and now a combine swept back and forth over the field, rising and falling like a ship rolling over high seas. A wake of dust rose behind it, swirling in the gold light of the floodlamps. The engine roared as the combine moved passed them, crushing a path through the dry corn.

  “A man came home,” Kirsten said.

  “So?”

  “So the lady got all nervous and said I had to go.”

  “Should’ve worked the man,” Lance said. He ran his finger along the outline of her breasts, as if he were drawing a cartoon bust. “We’ve talked about that. A man’ll give money just to be a man about things.”

  “I’m too skinny,” Kirsten said.

  “You’re filling out, I’ve noticed. You’re getting some shape to you.”

  Lance smiled his smile, a wide, white grin with a hole in the middle of it. Two of his teeth had fallen out, owing to his weakness for sweets. He worried his tongue in the empty space, slithering it in and out along the bare gum.

  “I wish I had a fix right now,” Kirsten said. She hugged herself to stop a chill radiating from her spine. The ghost of her habit trailed after her.

  Again the voracious growling of the combine came near, mowing down cornstalks, cutting a swath through the field. Kirsten watched the golden kernels spray into the holding bin. A man sat up front in a glass booth, smoking a pipe, a yellow cap tilted back on his head.

  “My cowboy brain’s about dead,” Lance said. “What do you think?”

  Kirsten had died once, and made the mistake, before she understood how superstitious he was, of telling La
nce. Her heart had stopped and she had drifted toward a white light that rose away like a windblown sheet, hovering over what she recognized as her cluttered living room. She was placid and smiling into the faces of people she had never seen before, people she realized instantly were relatives, aunts and uncles, cousins, the mother she had never known. Kirsten was adopted, but now this mother reached toward her from within the source of light. Her pale pink hands were fluttering like the wings of a bird. A calm told Kirsten that this was the afterlife, where brand-new rules obtained. She woke in a Key Biscayne hospital, her foster mother in a metal chair beside the bed, two uniformed cops standing at the door, ready to read Kirsten her rights.

  “Don’t always ask me,” Kirsten said.

  “Just close your eyes, honey. Close ’em and tell me the first thing you see.”

  With her eyes closed, she saw a child, alone, running, lost in the corn.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  “That’s what you saw?”

  “Start the car, okay? I can’t explain everything I see.”

  She had met him in Florida, in her second year of detention. Her special problem was heroin; his was methamphetamine. They lived in a compound of low pink cinder-block buildings situated maddeningly close to a thoroughfare with a strip of shops, out beyond the chain-link fence, out beyond a greenbelt. At night, neon lights lit up the swaying palm fronds and banana plants, fringing the tangled jungle with exotic highlights of pink and blue. They’d climbed the fence together, running through the greenbelt, vanishing into the fantastic jungle. A year passed in a blur of stupid jobs, stints driving a cab, delivering flowers, and, for Kirsten, tearing movie tickets in half as a stream of happy dreamers clicked through the turnstiles, afterward sweeping debris from the floors in the dead-still hours when the decent world slept. Lance worked a second job deep-frying doughnuts in blackened vats of oil, dressed in a white suit.

  But this, Lance had said, this would allow them to turn their backs on that year, on everything they’d done for living and survival. A regular at the doughnut shop set them up with their kit— the picture ID, the magazine subscriptions, the pamphlets. Although the deal worked like a pyramid scheme, it wasn’t entirely a scam; a thin layer of legality existed, and 10 percent of the money collected actually went to the babies. Another 10 percent was skimmed by collectors in the field, and the remainder was mailed to a P.O. box in Key Biscayne. Of that the recruiters took a percentage, and the recruiters of the recruiters took an even bigger cut. That’s the way it was supposed to work, but upon leaving Florida the tenuous sense of obligation weakened and finally vanished, and Lance was no longer sending any money to the P.O. box. They were renegade now; they kept everything.

  The trail of dust caught up to them and enveloped the car and settled back to the ground. Lance got out of the car. He tried to break the dragging tailpipe free, but it wouldn’t budge. He wiped his hands. He looked at Kirsten.

  “I don’t know,” she said. Down the road the yellow lights of a farmhouse glowed like portals. A dog barked and the wind soughing through the corn called hoarsely. “I’m cold,” Kirsten said.

  “The worst they can do is say no,” Lance said.

  “They won’t,” Kirsten said.

  Lance grabbed his ledger and a sheaf of pamphlets and his ID. They left the car and walked down the road in the milky light of a gibbous moon that lit the feathery edges of a high, isolated cloud. The house was white, and seemed illuminated, as did the ghostly white fence and the silver silo. When they opened the gate, the dog barked wildly and charged them, quickly using up its length of chain; its neck snapped and the barking stopped and when it regained its feet the dog followed them in a semicircle, as if tracing a path drawn by a compass.

  On the porch was a pumpkin, not carved. The white door was coated with dust, and the handprints of an impatient, pounding child were pressed into it, faintly, down low. Before they could knock, an old woman answered with a bowl of candy. Her hair was thin and white, more the memory or suggestion of hair than the thing itself. Her eyes were blue and the lines of her creased face were topographic, holding the image of the land around her, worn and furrowed, dry, finished. She was a small woman, slight in build, like Kirsten. Her housedress drifted vaguely around her body like a fog.

  “Evening, ma’am,” Lance said.

  When Lance was done delivering his introduction, he turned to Kirsten for her part, but she said nothing, letting the silence become a burden. The whole of the night—the last crickets chirring in the cold, the brown moths beating against the yellow light, the moon shadows and the quiet that came, faintly humming, from the land itself—pressed in close, weighing on the woman.

  Finally Kirsten said, “If you could give us a place to stay for the night, we’d be grateful.”

  Lance had only meant to use a phone. He said, “Now, honey, we can’t impose.”

  “I’m tired and I’m cold,” Kirsten said.

  Again the silence accumulated around them like a world filling with water, and now the only sound that would break it would be an echo of the old woman’s doubt or guilt.

  “My husband’s gone up to bed. I hate to wake Effie.”

  “No need,” Kirsten said. “If we could just sleep tonight in your girl’s room, we’ll be gone in the morning.”

  “My girl?”

  “That’s a lovely picture she drew,” Kirsten said, “and it’s wonderful that you hang it in the living room. You must have loved her very much.”

  A quelling hand went to the woman’s lips, keeping quiet the quiet within the house. She backed away from the door—not so much a welcome as a surrender, a ceding of the space—and Kirsten and Lance entered. Years of sunlight had slowly paled the wallpaper in the living room and drained the red from the plastic roses on the sill. A familiar path was padded into the carpet, and a pair of suede leather slippers waited at their place by the sofa. The air in the house was warm, warm and still and faintly stale like a held breath.

  Kirsten woke feeling queasy and sat up on the cramped child’s mattress. She massaged her breasts and pulled aside the curtain. The old couple were in the backyard. The wife was hanging a load of wash on a line, socks, a bra, underwear, linens that unfurled like flags in the wind. The husband hoed weeds from a thinning garden of gaunt cornstalks, black-stemmed tomato plants and a few last, lopsided pumpkins that sat sad-faced on the ground, saved from rot by a bedding of straw. A cane swung from a belt loop in his dungarees.

  “Any dreams?” Lance said. He reached for Kirsten, squeezing her thigh.

  “Who needs dreams,” Kirsten said, letting the curtain fall back.

  “Bitter, bitter,” Lance said. “Don’t be bitter.”

  “I’m not bitter.”

  “You sound bitter.”

  He picked his slacks off the floor and shook out the pockets, unfolding the crumpled bills and arranging the coins in separate stacks on his stomach.

  “Let’s see where we’re at,” he said.

  Lance grabbed his notebook from the floor and thumbed the foxed, dirty pages in which he kept a meticulous tally of their finances.

  “You don’t need a pencil and paper,” Kirsten said.

  “Discipline is important,” he said. “When we strike it rich we don’t want to be all overwhelmed and clueless. Can you see them old folks out there?”

  “They’re out there.”

  “It must be something to live in a place like this,” Lance said. He put down the notebook and peered out the window. “Just go out and get yourself some corn when you’re hungry.” He pressed his hand flat against the glass. The fields to the east had been harvested and were brown and stubbled, heaving in waves to the horizon, where a combine crawled over a hill like a giant green bug. “It looks weird out there.”

  Kirsten had noticed it also. “It looks too late,” she said.

  “That’s the whole problem with the seventies.”

  “It’s 1989, Lance.”

  “High
time we do something about it then.” He pulled the curtain closed. “I’m sick and tired of washing my crotch in sinks.”

  “I’ll go out and talk to them,” Kirsten said.

  “Where’d you go last night?” Lance said.

  She didn’t want to say, and said, “Nowhere.”

  “Get a look at yourself in that mirror there,” he said.

  Kirsten sat in a small child’s chair, looking at herself in the mirror of a vanity that had also, apparently, served as a desk at one time—beside the perfume bottles and a hairbrush and a box of costume jewelry were cups of crayons and pens and pencils and a yellowed writing tablet. Kirsten leaned her head to the side and began to brush her hair, combing the leaves and dirt out of it.

  “Lance,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t take anything from these people.”

  “You can’t hide anything from me,” he said, with an assured, tolerant smile.

  Kirsten set down the brush and walked out into the yard, where the old woman was stretched on her toes, struggling to hang a last billowing sheet.

  “Lend me a hand here,” she said. “The wind’s blowing so—”

  Kirsten held an end and helped fasten the sheet. Wind combing through the standing corn raised a hollow rattle, a dry burr that encircled the yard and carried with it a cloud of dust and chaff that blew and clung to the wet cotton.

  “I probably shouldn’t even bother hanging out the wash this time of year,” the old woman said. She pronounced it “warsh.”

  The combine’s swallowing mouth opened a path along the fence. The old woman shuddered and turned away. Soon the hills would be completely harvested and laid bare.

  “You have a beautiful place,” she said. “All this land yours?”

  “We got two sections. Daddy’s too old to work it now, so we lease everything to a commercial outfit in Kalona.”

  “You must eat a lot of corn.”

  “Oh, hon, that’s not sweet corn. That corn’s for hogs. It’s feed.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “That blue Rabbit up the road yours?” The old man walked with an injured stoop, punting himself forward with the cane. He introduced himself—Effie Bowen, Effie and his wife, Gen Bowen. He was short of breath and gritted his teeth as if biting the difficult air. A rime of salt stained the brim of his red cap.