I like vegetables that grow in the park. I don’t want to make a big deal of it, but wild fruits and vegetables that grow wild by themselves and don’t need any help from anyone like ourselves. More than dandelions, wild onions, tubular things — whatever they’re called. I’m not an expert. Just knew a woman once who during our long walks during the war a long time ago showed me these things and said what a waste. So every day now, more than not having anything to do, I go out finding these things, even in winter if there’s a touch of spring. To all the nearby parks and sometimes by thumb or bus to the faraway ones or greenbelt around the city if I want to store up. And I’m in this one, in the park I most go to as it’s the one closest to home, collecting in my little shopping bag what the park’s got to give for nothing and nobody still yet seems to want. Actually an average-sized shopping bag, not one as small for new shoes in a shoe box the shoe stores seem to give or one of the giant bags the department stores use, when two police cars pull up on the park’s pedestrian paths on both sides of me at the same time. I put up my hands and drop my shopping bag or to be more exact drop the bag first and put up my hands when all four cops jump out of their cars with their guns undrawn and no sight of a billy seen and I say “I didn’t do anything wrong. Just looking for free produce,” I say. “What grows wild and free in the grass and falls without my shakes from the trees. That’s what I like. Mints, ginkgo drupes, all kinds of herbs and chicory roots to mash up and mix in with my regular coffee grounds to cut down the costs, as I’m poor, so it helps, economically for me, nutritionally, even cathartically too.” Jawing on like that. Anything for an excuse. “I’m old. As you can see: in not very hot health.” As I don’t want to rot in the clink. For along with the woman they’re with they’re eying me as if still seriously considering arresting me for stealing what’s city-owned and all, which I’d well understand for them. That’s their job. I mean I could see where they might have a right to pull me in as there are all sorts of ordinances for everything, I suppose, so I’d think surely one for uprooting city property in a public park even if to most people they’re just weeds. But one of them says “Put your hands down, get your bag and beat it.” So I go.
I said to her “You sure you didn’t see what you think you saw on this corner or the corner of Bridge and Sixth or what?” and she said “I’m not certain for sure now, sir, all I know is I saw them, two heads.” I said “Well, which is the way you normally walk to work from home?” and she said “That’s a good way to approach it, beginning the way I walk to work. I usually walk never through this way but one of the other ways, either around the outskirts of the park going right when I reach the park’s entrance at Fourth and River, or straight through it meaning cutting through the park’s middle path straight down it like I’m cutting the park in half till I get to Sixth and Bridge. But never this way going left along River past Fifth to Sixth Street and then down to Bridge, never once, don’t ask me why. It’s no doubt the same distance going first left instead of right, but to me in my mind it seems longer. And I only do go first right around it when I’ve an extra few minutes or two to kill and I don’t want to just cut straight through or when the middle path’s suspicious-looking with people, even when I’m in a hurry or late for work, which is usually why I cut straight through though also at times to hear the sounds and smell the trees.” “What do you say we try the two corners we haven’t tried yet?” I said and the other three nodded as if to say “What do we have to lose as nothing’s going to turn up?” and she said “Maybe it is one of those other two. Could be. I at least passed them before. But not here’s where I saw those two heads, no sirs. I mean, officers.”
I’d seen two things in the grass that looked funny. They looked like human heads. Sticking out of the grass. As if growing out of it. I couldn’t believe it. My eyes again, I thought. At first I was startled. Then skeptical of my vision and then I really couldn’t believe it when I looked again and thought I saw the same thing. Glasses, I should repair my glasses. Get them repaired I mean. Then walked toward them. An optical illusion of some kind, I was convinced, or whatever those things are in the desert that look like one thing but aren’t anything, but sure as breathing my eyes playing tricks. Or nature playing tricks. That’s what they are in the desert: both nature and your eyes playing tricks together or on one another at one time. Or just rocks looking like heads. That’s more likely. This was no desert. But I was wrong. They were heads. I got my own head down close enough to lick them. A man and a woman. On the ground, tucked in the grass. Not easy to detect. Maybe easier for someone with better eyes. But up close easy enough to detect. Looking like two people buried up to their necks. Rather one of them up to his chin, the woman up to her neck. It was a horrible sight. I don’t see how I can say that so dispassionately. Passively, I mean. One of those two words. Maybe another. But how can I think about words when I talk of those heads? That’s because it happened before. How the human bean does forget. Half an hour ago or more. But there they were. And I’ll tell you: still pretty much there now in my head. Woman with her eyes open, man’s eyes closed. This I’ll never forget: both facing one another, lips close enough to kiss. I’d even call it a kiss. Someone had put them there as a joke. When this someone had set up the heads I mean, for certainly decapitating, and that’s the word, two heads, is no joke. I thought: must get the police. Thought: I really should yell my fool head off for help. Thought: now there’s one accidental joke of my own. Thought: those poor people, these poor heads. For I really didn’t know what they were, what name to give them.
Were they married, man and wife? Brother and sister then? Not married, brother and sister, or just friend and friend? Strangers to one another till they met if they ever did meet? Thought: enemies? Maybe enemy and friend. Poor heads. Where were their spirits now? Underground? Circling around my knees? Floating away? Already there if there’s a there? All that’s what I thought then. Or maybe the spirits were still in these heads. Does it take them five minutes to go, ten? But even if I knew how long it takes spirits to go, I’d also, to know if they were gone, have to know how long these heads have been here. But these poor people or heads. Still my thoughts from before. In the grass just sitting there. Sitting heads. Like sitting ducks. That made no sense then and doesn’t now. A boy came over. “What you looking at, mister?” I said “Go away.” He said “Why, you find anything valuable?” I said “It’s something I don’t want you looking at, so go away.” “I don’t want to go away. What is it?” “You want to be useful to me, call the police.” “Call them for what?” “For something you don’t want to see in the grass.” “What’s in the grass?” “Something you don’t want to see.” “And what’s that?” “How old are you?” “Sixteen.” “I thought you were younger.” “I was younger but I’m younger no more. I’m sixteen going on seventeen.” “When going on seventeen?” “Soon.” “When soon?” “Three months. Three months and two weeks and a single day if you have to know. A Tuesday. June 15th.” “I wasn’t contradicting you.” “They why you pumping me dry on it?” “No, you’re sixteen, going on seventeen. Just small.” “That’s what I told you. I don’t lie.” “I wasn’t accusing you of lying.” “You were acting like it.” “I wasn’t even acting like it.” “Then you were getting around to acting like it then.” “I wasn’t even doing that.” “What’s in the grass?” “Yes, you’re old enough to see. But first I want to warn you about what it is so you won’t get shocked.” “I don’t get shocked. Out of my way.” He brushed me aside. Not hard, not light. And said “Good God, two heads. I think I know them too. No, I don’t know them. They look like they’re buried alive up to their heads.” “That’s the image I felt.” “And kissing. Why would someone do that?” “Will you get the police for me now?” “You get them. I’ll stand guard.” “You won’t touch them, move them an inch?” I said. “Who’d want to touch two dead heads?” “We can both get in big trouble if you do.” “I said I won’t. Just go.” “And don’t make it obvious to anyone else what we have hidden here. I don’t think there should be a crowd.” “I might look weird, but I’m not. I wouldn’t want anyone else to see.” “Then I’m going,” I said. “Whatever you do, please don’t stay on my account.”