All Flesh Is Grass (3 page)

I heard the crackle and the roar of flames and that jerked me to my feet. I still was fairly wobbly, but wobbly or not, I got away from there. The car was burning briskly and at any moment the flames would reach the gas tank and the car would go sky high.

But the explosion, when it came, was not too spectacular—just an angry, muffled whuff and a great gout of flame flaring up into the sky. But it was loud enough to bring some people out to see what was going on. Doc Fabian and lawyer Nichols were running up the road, and behind them came a bunch of yelling kids and a pack of barking dogs.

I didn't wait for them although I had half a mind to, for I had a lot to tell and here was an audience. But there was something else that stopped me from turning back—I had to go on tracking down the barrier and try to find its end, if it had an end.

My head had begun to clear and all the stars were gone and I could think a little better.

There was one thing that stood out plain and clear: a car could go through the barrier when there was no one in it, but when it was occupied, the barrier stopped it dead. A man could not go through the barrier, but he could pick up a phone and talk to anyone he wanted. And I remembered that I had heard the voices of the men shouting in the road, had heard them very clearly even when they were on the other side.

I picked up some sticks and stones and tossed them at the barrier. They went sailing through as if nothing had been there.

There was only one thing that the barrier would stop and that single thing was life. And why in the world should there be a barrier to shut out, or shut in, life?

The village was beginning to stir to life.

I watched Floyd Caldwell come out on his back porch, dressed in his undershirt and a pair of pants with the suspenders banging. Except for old Doc Fabian, Floyd was the only man in Millville who ever wore suspenders. But while old Doc wore sedate and narrow black ones, Floyd wore a pair that was broad and red. Floyd was the barber and he took a lot of kidding about his red suspenders, but Floyd didn't mind. He was the village smart guy and he worked at it all the time and it probably was all right, for it brought him a lot of trade from out in the farming country. People who might just as well have gone to Coon Valley for their haircuts came, instead, to Millville to listen to Floyd's jokes and to see him clown.

Floyd stood out on the back porch and stretched his arms and yawned. Then he took a close look at the weather and he scratched his ribs. Down the street a woman called the family dog and in a little while I heard the flat snap of a screen door shutting and I knew the dog was in.

It was strange, I thought, that there'd been no alarm. Perhaps it was because few people as yet knew about the barrier. Perhaps the few who had found out about it were still a little numb. Perhaps most of them couldn't quite believe it. Maybe they were afraid, as I was, to make too much fuss about it until they knew something more about it.

But it couldn't last for long—this morning calm. Before too long, Millville would be seething.

Now, as I followed it, the barrier cut through the back yard of one of the older houses in the village. In its day it had been a place of elegance, but years of poverty and neglect had left it tumbledown.

An old lady was coming down the steps from the shaky back porch, balancing her frail body with a steadying cane. Her hair was thin and white and even with no breeze to stir the air, ragged ends of it floated like a fuzzy halo all around her head.

She started down the path to the little garden, but when she saw me she stopped and peered at me, with her head tilted just a little in a bird-like fashion. Her pale blue eyes glittered at me through the thickness of her glasses.

“Brad Carter, isn't it?” she asked.

“Yes, Mrs. Tyler,” I said. “How are you this morning?”

“Oh, just tolerable,” she told me. “I'm never more than that. I thought that it was you, but my eyes have failed me and I never can be sure.”

“It's a nice morning, Mrs. Tyler. This is good weather we are having.”

“Yes,” she said, “it is. I was looking for Tupper. He seems to have wandered off again. You haven't seen him, have you?”

I shook my head. It had been ten years since anyone had seen Tupper Tyler.

“He is such a restless boy,” she said. “Always wandering off. I declare, I don't know what to do with him.”

“Don't you worry,” I told her. “He'll show up again.”

“Yes,” she said, “I suppose he will. He always does, you know.” She prodded with her cane at the bed of purple flowers that grew along the walk. “They're very good this year,” she said. “The best I've ever seen them. I got them from your father twenty years ago. Mr. Tyler and your father were such good friends. You remember that, of course.”

“Yes,” I said. “I remember very well.”

“And your mother? Tell me how she is. We used to see a good deal of one another.”

“You forget, Mrs. Tyler,” I told her, gently. “Mother died almost two years ago.”

“Oh, so she did,” she said. “It's true, I am forgetful. Old age does it to one. No one should grow old.”

“I must be getting on,” I said. “It was good to see you.”

“It was kind of you to call,” she said. “If you have the time, you might step in and we could have some tea. It is so seldom now that anyone ever comes for tea. I suppose it's because the times have changed. No one, any more, has the time for tea.”

“I'm sorry that I can't,” I said. “I just stopped by for a moment.”

“Well,” she said, “it was very nice of you. If you happen to see Tupper would you mind, I wonder, to tell him to come home.”

“Of course I will,” I promised.

I was glad to get away from her. She was nice enough, of course, but just a little mad. In all the years since Tupper's disappearance, she had gone on looking for him, and always as if he'd just stepped out the door, always very calm and confident in the thought that he'd be coming home in just a little while. Quite reasonable about it and very, very sweet, no more than mildly worried about the idiot son who had vanished without trace.

Tupper, I recalled, had been something of a pest. He'd been a pest with everyone, of course, but especially with me. He loved flowers and he'd hung around the greenhouse that my father had, and my father, who was constitutionally unable to be unkind to anyone, had put up with him and his continual jabber. Tupper had attached himself to me and no matter what I did or said, he'd tag along behind me. The fact that he was a good ten years older than I was made no difference at all; in his own mind Tupper never had outgrown childhood. In the back of my mind I still could hear his jaunty voice, mindlessly happy over anything at all, cooing over flowers or asking endless, senseless questions. I had hated him, of course, but there was really nothing one could pin a good hate on. Tupper was just something that one had to tolerate. But I knew that I never would forget that jaunty, happy voice, or his drooling as he talked, or the habit that he had of counting on his fingers—God knows why he did it—as if he were in continual fear that he might have lost one of them in the last few minutes.

The sun had come up by now and the world was flooded with a brilliant light, and I was becoming more certain by the minute that the village was encircled and cut off, that someone or something, for no apparent reason, had dropped a cage around us. Looking back along the way that I had come, I could see that I'd been traveling on the inside of a curve. Looking ahead, the curve wasn't difficult to plot.

And why should it be us, I wondered. Why a little town like ours? A town that was no different from ten thousand other towns.

Although, I told myself, that might not be entirely true. It was exactly what I would have said and perhaps everybody else. Everyone, that is, except for Nancy Sherwood—Nancy, who only the night before had told me her strange theory that this town of ours was something very special. And could she be right, I wondered? Was our little town of Millville somehow set apart from all other little towns?

Just ahead was my home street and my calculations told me that it was located just inside the encircling barricade.

There was, I told myself, no sense in going further. It would be a waste of time. I did not need to complete the circle to convince myself that we were hemmed in.

I cut across the backyard of the Presbyterian parsonage and there, just across the street, was my house, set within its wilderness of flowers and shrubs, with the abandoned greenhouse standing in the back and the old garden around it, a field of purple flowers, those same purple flowers that Mrs. Tyler had poked at with her cane and said were doing well this season.

I heard the steady squeaking as I reached the street and I knew that some kids had sneaked into the yard and were playing in the old lawn swing that stood beside the porch.

I hurried up the street, a little wrathful at the squeaking. I had told those kids, time and time again, to leave that swing alone. It was old and rickety and one of these days one of the uprights or something else would break, and one of the kids might be badly hurt. I could have taken it down, of course, but I was reluctant to, for it was Mother's swing. She had spent many hours out in the yard, swinging gently and sedately, looking at the flowers.

The yard was closed in by the old-time lilac hedge and I couldn't see the swing until I reached the gate.

I hurried for the gate and jerked it open savagely and took two quick steps through it, then stopped in my tracks.

There were no kids in the swing. There was a man, and except for a battered hat of straw set squarely atop his head, he was as naked as a jaybird.

He saw me and grinned a foolish grin. “Hi, there,” he said, with jaunty happiness. And even as he said it, he began a counting of his fingers, drooling as he counted.

And at the sight of him, at the sound of that remembered but long forgotten voice, my mind went thudding back to the afternoon before.

2

Ed Adler had come that afternoon to take out the phone and he had been embarrassed. “I'm sorry, Bob,” he said. “I don't want to do this, but I guess I have to. I have an order from Tom Preston.”

Ed was a friend of mine. We had been good pals in high school and good friends ever since. Tom Preston had been in school with us, of course, but he'd been no friend of mine or of anybody else's. He'd been a snotty kid and he had grown up into a snotty man.

That was the way it went, I thought. The heels always were the ones who seemed to get ahead. Tom Preston was the manager of the telephone office and Ed Adler worked for him as a phone installer and a trouble shooter, and I was a realtor and insurance agent who was going out of business. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to, because I was delinquent in my office phone bill and way behind in rent.

Tom Preston was successful and I was a business failure and Ed Adler was earning a living for his family, but not getting anywhere. And the rest of them, I wondered. The rest of the high school gang—how were they getting on? And I couldn't answer, for I didn't know. They all had drifted off. There wasn't much in a little town like Millville to keep a man around. I probably wouldn't have stayed myself if it hadn't been for Mother. I'd come home from school after Dad had died and had helped out with the greenhouse until Mother had joined Dad. And by that time I had been so long in Millville that it was hard to leave.

“Ed,” I had asked, “do you ever hear from any of the fellows?”

“No, I don't,” said Ed. “I don't know where any of them are.”

I said: “There was Skinny Austin and Charley Thompson and Marty Hall and Alf—I can't remember Alf's last name.”

“Peterson,” said Ed.

“Yes, that's it,” I said. “It's a funny thing I should forget his name. Old Alf and me had a lot of fun together.”

Ed got the cord unfastened and stood up, with the phone dangling from his hand.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked me.

“Lock the door, I guess,” I said. “It's not just the phone. It's everything. I'm behind in rent as well. Dan Willoughby, down at the bank, is very sad about it.”

“You could run the business from the house.”

“Ed,” I told him shortly, “there isn't any business. I just never had a business. I couldn't make a start. I lost money from the first.”

I got up and put on my hat and walked out of the place. The street was almost empty. There were a few cars at the curb and a dog was smelling a lamp post and old Stiffy Grant was propped up in front of the Happy Hollow tavern, hoping that someone might come along and offer him a drink.

I was feeling pretty low. Small thing as it had been, the phone had spelled the end. It was the thing that finally signified for me what a failure I had been. You can go along for months and kid yourself that everything's all right and will work out in the end, but always something comes up that you can't kid away. Ed Adler coming to disconnect and take away the phone had been that final thing I couldn't kid away.

I stood there on the sidewalk, looking down the street, and I felt hatred for the town—not for the people in it, but for the town itself, for the impersonal geographic concept of one particular place.

The town lay dusty and arrogant and smug beyond all telling and it sneered at me and I knew that I had been mistaken in not leaving it when I'd had the chance. I had tried to live with it for very love of it, but I'd been blind to try. I had known what all my friends had known, the ones who'd gone away, but I had closed my mind to that sure and certain knowledge: there was nothing left in Millville to make one stay around. It was an old town and it was dying, as old things always die. It was being strangled by the swift and easy roads that took customers to better shopping areas; it was dying with the decline of marginal agriculture, dying along with the little vacant hillside farms that no longer would support a family. It was a place of genteel poverty and it had its share of musty quaintness, but it was dying just the same, albeit in the polite scent of lavender and impeccable good manners.