Star Travels Tales of Science Fiction (3 page)

END

The
Lemonade Stand

They led me
into
a field of very long grass, the
backdrop to their small lemonade stand. The little boy selling
crickets in cleaned jam jars convinced me to go with them. His
sister sold the lemonade, and he sold the bugs.

I’d never seen a cricket
in the daylight. I’d only heard them at night. This youngster
readily found crickets, and that seemed unusual. I asked him to
show me how, because I really wanted to find my own cricket bait
for fishing. He’d led me down a steep bank into a field filled with
grass three feet over my own head. The top of each blade where it
had gone to seed was the same dusty blond colour as my hair. In
fact with my khaki shorts and white t-shirt I was pretty well
camouflaged in there. As a slim guy, Id been told once or twice
that I could easily hide behind a single blade of grass.

Immersed in the nine feet
tall grass, I had to trust that the boy knew his way around. His
sister disappeared, and I assumed she went back to her post by the
roadside. He showed me where he caught the little crickets. There
were green ones, brown ones, and some white. He showed me how to
turn over a giant blade of grass to find the alien looking
creatures. Sure enough, there were many. Each grass blade that he
touched appeared to support dozens of the tiny critters. While he
collected several handfuls, I removed the lid from my water bottle
and sipped on the lemonade.

This was another terribly hot
prairie day following weeks of heat and dust. Id lost my way on
this backcountry road, looking for a fishing hole described on my
map. When I saw the lemonade stand, I pulled over, thinking I might
get directions. But the boy and his sister shook their heads. They
had never heard of the lake.

Id purchased two paper cups full
of the lemonade. The older sibling sold the drink for five cents a
glass. The sugary sweet lemonade with bits of pulp floating on the
top left a strange, but not unpleasant aftertaste. I guessed that a
can of frozen lemonade and tap water were its main ingredients.

The boy sold the crickets for
ten cents each. According to local accounts, the trout waiting in
my missing lake were hungry. But for the moment I was lost in the
tall grass. Then I saw the boy’s thin arm waving to me from behind
a particularly thick clump of nearly tree high grass. I moved to
join him, and he put his hand out to stop me.

“Look.” he said, in a whisper. I
drew closer, and noticed he pinched a fat, succulent grass blade so
that it bowed away from the other strands. With a steady hand he
held the blade and revealed that it was thick with tiny crickets.
“Orthoptera, Grylloidea,” he said, and smiled, then licked his lips
as if he planned on eating them himself. The small crickets
clustered like aphids on my rose stems at home. I never saw
anything like it.

He began pulling and picking
them away, careful not to make them jump. He put them into the
quick-seal bug bag he’d pulled from his pocket, and I guessed he’d
be there a while stripping that grass.

“Must be difficult sleeping at
night, in these parts,” I said.

“We don’t sleep,” he said.

“Cause of the crickets?” I
asked, wondering what he meant.

“Yeah,” he replied.

“Why do you get so many crickets
around here?” I questioned again, trying to make conversation while
he filled his bag with the bugs. They appeared docile in his hand,
as if they didn’t mind being picked away.

“The spray,” he said.

“The spray?”

“Yeah,” he pointed up to the
sky.

“You mean the rain?” I asked,
wondering if he must be mistaken.

“The spray for the crops, it’s
like rain. Kills the birds, so the crickets can thrive. The spray
makes the grass grow, and the crickets like it,” he said
cheerfully.

“I see,” I said, but did not. I
think I’ll head back to my car now. Are you all right here by
yourself?

The boy looked up at me,
squinting in the hot afternoon sun. He had brown eyes, so brown
that I couldn’t make out the pupils. He never blinked, only
squinted, and I became uneasy with his stare. “You know your way
back?” I asked again.

He nodded. And he kept staring
at me as I walked away until I could no longer see him through the
grass.

I never did find the road.
At least not for three days.

I tried jumping in the high
grass. I climbed a large rock and still couldn’t see anything
except a sea of grass. I tried following a path of bent and broken
blades only to be led in a circle. I called out and shouted with no
response from the children. I did hear something in the grass, a
mewling sound or small squeak. At one point I thought I heard
croaking, the kind of sound a large frog might make. I checked
around, but not carefully, thinking; no, I wouldn’t know what to do
with any creature I might find.

After fifteen minutes of useless
wandering and hopping, I sat down and began to reassess my
situation. As I calmed myself, I heard the children’s voices,
talking and laughing quietly. I listened carefully, hoping to
follow the sounds back to the roadside and my car. Exactly what
they were saying was not clear. Thinking was becoming more
difficult.

I crawled quietly in their
direction, trying hard not rustle, but an insistent breeze brushed
the blades noisily together, producing a whispering rasp that was
almost indistinguishable from the children’s voices. On my hands
and knees, I peered between the blades and caught a glimpse of the
lemonade stand and the road, or so I thought.

What I actually saw was perhaps
the result of wishful thinking, or a mirage. I don’t know but the
road eluded me. I began to think about the two children. Where was
their house? Fields covered this area for as far as the eye could
see. I didn’t recall a nearby house. I assumed their parents were
working a field and had set their children up, not really expecting
a single individual to show up to the kids’ lemonade stand. But
quite a few nickels and dimes filled their collection jar. Earlier,
when I’d transferred the remaining lemonade into my water bottle;
the girl immediately produced another from beneath her small white
tablecloth.

They’d seemed normal enough. A
little quiet perhaps. I’d purchased several of the boys’ crickets,
not all, because he had quite a few. The boy had carefully taken
the lid off the larger jar in order to extract several crickets,
which he placed in the smaller containers. I’d selected all brown
bugs -- brown -- thinking caddis fly nymph, because trout liked
whatever hatched, and the caddis fly hatch was on. My selection
caused the boy some puzzlement, so I explained my reasoning. He
didn’t complain. In fact, for the first time since meeting him, I
sensed in him a spark of interest. He asked about fishing. What was
it? How did I do it? This last question really surprised me. A
country boy who did not know what fishing was? As I described one
of my fishing adventures, he listened and stared and complied with
my request for brown coloured bait. As he opened the container a
large green cricket escaped, springing from the lip of the jar. I
think the cricket caught a small tailwind, because it launched
itself straight into the middle of the lemonade. We all watched as
it helplessly struggled to escape the liquid. It looked as if it
peddled a bike with a broken chain. At that moment I believed the
sister was going to let the creature drown, but she pulled a long
blade of grass from the side of the road and slipped it into the
jug, allowing the cricket to take hold. Her brother took the grass
with the rescued cricket and put the green swimmer back into the
larger jar, grass blade and all, folding and crunching the giant
stalk until it fit.

I looked at the girl. You can’t
sell that lemonade, now.

She stared back at me. And only
later, as I thought about it, did I realise that she had the same
dark eyed stare as her brother. No visible pupils, no blinking. She
silently picked up the jug, walked over to the field and poured the
lemonade onto the roots of the grass. When she returned, she pulled
another full jug from beneath her table.

How long I’d wandered and
crawled through that maddening field wasn’t clear. After drinking
my full supply of lemonade, I began chewing on the blades of grass.
They were succulent and sweet. I found that chewing on several of
them actually quenched my thirst. Aware of the boys warning about
the spray, I took care to pull the blades from near the ground and
rubbed away any grime, then chewed near the roots and not the tops.
The urge to chew blade after blade was so strong, I began to wonder
if the children were trying to turn me into a cricket to put in a
jar and sell at their roadside stand.

Just as I was about to give up
all hope, I heard a woman’s voice, then the voices of the two
children. They were walking and talking, and headed straight toward
me, as if they were tourists on a hike. “Hey,” I said, scrambling
up to them, spitting away a blade of grass. Before I had a chance
to tell them of my plight, the young woman who was with them began
babbling. She wore a suit, and navy blue pumps. Her bag hung from
her shoulder on a long strap; and she looked like a travelling
saleswoman.

“
I’m Freda. I sell books
to bookshops. I was on my way to a client when I saw this lovely
little lemonade stand,” she said, cheerfully.

The little girl was holding her
hand and staring at me. This woman was over-dressed for the
weather, and her discomfort was beginning to show. Her eye makeup
was running at the corners, and beads of sweat formed over her top
lip, although her rusty coloured hair still held its bounce. She
was overweight, and didn’t look fit enough for any kind of journey
through the field. The little girl slipped a cookie into the
woman’s hand. “Another? Oh, thank you, you sweet child.” The woman
gobbled the cookie. The little boy took her other hand and they
began walking away from me.

“Wait!” I shouted, and there was
such desperation in my tone that they stopped in their tracks, as
if their feet were suddenly nailed to the earth. They all looked
expectantly at me.

“I’m lost,” I finally said. I’ve
been wandering out here for hours.

“Not anymore,” the sales lady
said, smiling. “Join us.”

“Where?” I couldn’t imagine
where the odd trio was going.

“The children promised,” she
said. She released the girl’s hand and finally wiped the sweat from
her brow.

“Promised, what?” I asked.

“To show me the crop
circle.”

I began to laugh then cry, and
they stood there and watched. When I finally regained control of
myself I apologised.

“So I take it you’re not a
believer?” she asked, with an annoyed tone.

I shook my head, no.

“Not a problem,” the woman
responded. “Wait here, well pick you up on the way back,” she
said.

“Oh, no. I’m not letting you out
of my sight. Better yet, I’m not letting these two out my sight.
I’m going with you.”

“Come on then,” she said,
holding the children firmly by their hands.

Off we went.

They made us walk a half-hour in
the tickling, whispering grass. I timed us. Finally the woman
insisted we stop. She needed a rest and she needed to refresh. She
pulled out a small silver flask from her purse. “Lemonade,” she
said, and offered me some. I took it and drank a small mouthful. It
tasted awful. I spit it out.

“What? Was there a bug in it, or
something?”she asked.

“It’s foul,” I said, looking at
the two children.

“It tastes bad because you’ve
been chewing the grass,” the boy said.

“Yeah, well the grass tastes a
lot better than that stuff.”

The two children looked at each
other and exchanged a smile. Then the little boy whispered
something to the woman and she nodded in response. He disappeared
into the long grass.

“Hey,” I shouted. “Where’s he
going?”

“Pee,” the woman said.

“Oh sure,” I said, and sprinted
after the boy, not believing for one minute that nature called. I
nearly kept up to him. But he was fast, like a jackrabbit racing
between the clumps of grass. He was smart too. He stopped running,
after awhile and hid. He had to be hiding. “Come on, kid, the funs
over, time to go home.”

No answer.

I tried again. “Get me out of
here and you can go fishing with me,” I said, and waited. To my
shock the boy answered.

“I don’t know how,” he said.

I needed to keep him talking so
that I could find him, or better yet convince him to come to
me.

“It’s easy,” I said. “I can show
you how to do it.” As I spoke I crept through the grass, hoping to
find and grab him. When I thought I’d discovered his hiding spot,
an island of dark, green, lush grass, I pounced. Crickets leaped
into my eyes, and small ones went up my nose. Frantically, I
brushed the insects away, my eyes tightly shut. I had goose bumps;
I hated the feeling and the idea of all those bugs on me. “Hey,” I
shouted, “kid, are you there?”