In the neck of the cow, there is the slit so he can see, but there is no opening for him to eat. The cow's mouth is not a real mouth. The tongue extending out of it is fabric stuffed with batting. Later he will tell me how during the long hours inside the suit, drifting through the corridors of the mall, children pulling the cow's tail or rubbing the rubber udder on his stomach as if to make the cow let down, he imagined himself a manifestation of all the different insides of the animal, its skeleton, its mass of arteries and veins, its trunks and branches of nerves, its nodes of lymph, its backwaters and oxbows of guts and guts and guts and guts.
When it is time to eat, he can't remove his head, the cow's head, in public. I see him inside the cow in the distance. The cow's black-and-white head extends above most of the shimmering car roofs in the mall's parking lot. Inside the cow he must turn the whole body left and right as he turns back and forth to look for me inside my car in the parking lot. The head above the shimmering roofs and hoods of the parked car does not pivot on its neck. The whole cow cranes this way and that. I have parked over by the war memorial with its display of mottled hulking tanks. Inside the cow, he sees me, waves his now empty hoof. He slowly makes his way through the maze of cars to mine. He leans over the hood of my car once he arrives, catching his breath. He is thinking, looking deep into the pool of polished metal, his reflection, the cow's reflection reflecting back to him through the slit in the throat. Before he gets in the car, he removes the head, twisting it off like a deep-sea diver's helmet. He stores the head in the backseat and gets in the front to eat the lunch I've brought him, hamburgers with the works, waffle fries, and black cow shake from a competitor's place.
He eats. He eats, I think, without thinking, mouth open, exhausted. He sweats inside the cow and, inside the car, the car fills up with the sweet sweat smells and the smell of the sweated onions, the rancid grease, the reeking suit. It is close inside the car, and it is getting closer still. He eats without talking. He eats in silence, a silence only punctuated by the sound of his chewing, chewing. He eats. The empty head in the backseat, I catch its look in the rearview mirror, the big soulful eyes staring back at me into space.
Four Postcards from Indiana
STORY
On the way to Story, Indiana, 315 T'ed into an unnamed road, and, at the junction, the side of a yolk yellow farmhouse stared back at me with four identical windows on the fading façade, each window divided into four picture panes of glass. The green information sign indicated that Story was five miles thataway with an arrow pointing to the right. A white picket fence separated the sign and the road from the house, and, dead ahead, fenced in its own little precinct of half-sized pickets, some kind of monument caught the light already filtered by the gobo clusters of leaves in the copse of tulip poplars in the yard. I parked the car.
Crossing the road, I saw the plinth of stone transform as I got closer, watched as it sprouted shoulders, then grew a head, busting out into a rustic bust, its face pancaked, its contours — the lips, eyes, and eyebrows — charred black. A black widow— peaked helmet of hair. Matte muttonchop shadows burned each cheek. A coy naive sphinx. The stone head's etched left eyebrow arched, waiting for the question already answered. Tattooed on its roughed-out apron of a chest, a hand pointed left to Columbus and another hand right to Fairfax, a town no longer on the map. Take your pick.
“What's your story?“ I asked it.
The cicada brood bloomed and buzzed in the trees. Cardinals chewed out each other, flitted overhead. There, below the folded hands, not much of a clue — a year, 1851, and a diminutive signature of H Cross, its second “s“ washed out as the sandstone melted into the seam at the base. At that angle, the stone head turned into the Hoosier Mona Lisa, the crisscrossed hands, the unselfconscious conscious smile, the eyes half- lidded, backlit by a painted landscape more animated than the foiled subject.
I looked back at the car. I'd left its hazard lamps blinking, the indicator lights signaling that both ways were a possibility simultaneously or that each canceled the other out.
In the end, I turned away from Story, bore the other route toward Columbus — the town filled with autographed churches and fire stations, those modern slabs of steel and glass that just so happened to find themselves planted in what had been an Indiana cornfield. And where I found, in an ordinary gas station, a postcard picturing the corner I left behind — the yellow house, the picket fence, the knob of stone with its unreadable and unreachable directions, and the sign pointing to Story that I sent to you asking one last time: Who should we tell? What should we do? Where should we go? Why?
SANTA CLAUS
“A watch means that conditions are right for a tornado.“ As we drove, I explained the difference between a watch and a warning. This was her first summer in Indiana, and every time she turned on the radio she found herself in another depression, pressure dropping. An imaginary line extending just north of and passing through the counties of La la la and Mmmmm. The Balkan states of the weather map. It would be in effect for a couple of hours.
“Is that us?“ she said.
“It's just a watch,“ I said, and I told her what to look for, though I had never seen one myself. I remembered sightings, hearing of funnels over towns. One Easter. One Palm Sunday. “If you see one, we get in a ditch. Someplace low.“ I remembered feeling this way every spring and summer — too hot, too still. You can hear better. There was this picture in the grocery store encyclopedia of a drinking straw driven into the trunk of an elm. She had seen violent storms in Baltimore but only the leavings of hurricanes, not this kind of wind — all eye and finger, one that can see and feel.
Of course, it started raining, and the voice on the radio tracked the storms, interrupted by the sizzle of static — soft or loud, close or far away. I'm here now, the static said. Teasing. Moving.
“It's not us,“ I said.
In the half-light we passed the statue of Santa Claus, melted limestone, in a field surrounded by broken skeletons of farm implements slick with rain and submerged in mud. Horses, startled by the lightning, shied and ran sideways away from the sound. The book said the statue said: For the Children of the World.
Triple A just mentioned the St. Nicholas Inn, the only motel in Santa Claus. It was made up of little bungalows, Munchkin-size, scattered behind a gas station.
“A mite windy,“ said the woman, letting us into number 4. The baby riding on her hip yelped each time it thundered. “No one stays here. They drive up from Louisville or down from Naplis to see Santa Claus. My baby sees him every day.“
We went into our room and found everything half-sized — the TV, the end table, the bed. “Think,“ she said, “to grow up seeing Santa Claus every day but Christmas.“ Yes, in the part of the world where flying is easy — lawn deer, flamingoes, silked jockeys.
As we slept did we shrink? Were we that small? Did our feet touch the ground? Did we count each other's sheep as they clouded that tiny room? We heard the baby cry all night through the storm.
The next morning I knew the sky was clear before she pulled the drapes and turned on the morning news. Eyes still closed, I heard that a tornado had touched down in the Baltimore zoo the day before. A woman reported that she survived by being blown into the hippo house. A miracle. The world is full of miracles. Closing my eyes again, I see the woman blown into the hippo house. One puff, a blow to the belly, arms and legs trailing, millions of shrimp swimming backwards into the hippo house. Size has no scale. I am asleep again.