“All those people. ” Parrott says.
“You never saw that Clarkston, Jalena. It was already vanishing by the time you came. But my God. There we were following a frantic mother on a motorbike straight out of town, in the hopes of saving her son from her very possibly deranged brother, our former colleague and friend, and we all kept getting distracted by the light. And the houses. All those decked-out houses.”
“All done up in black crepe,” says Parrott.
“Lit skulls in upstairs windows, peeking out of drawn drapes,” Rogan adds.
“Whole flocks of ghosts tethered to the rooftops like. I don’t know. Like goats. Just floating around on whatever held them there.” Frazee is still looking at her gloved hands. She has actually turned her back on the grass, though she keeps glancing over her shoulder. “And then there were the kids, of course. Legions of them. People used to come from hundreds of miles away for Clarkston Halloween. From across the Continental Divide, even. From the Dakotas. They’d drive all the way here just to park somewhere on the outskirts of our town and spend as long as they possibly could wandering from haunted block to haunted block, or crawling through Stanton’s maze to get covered in spiderwebs and then rewarded with those brownies at the end.”
“Oh, my God,” says Rogan. “Stanton’s wife’s brownies. Those butterscotch chunks? Those hazelnuts?”
“Everybody, everywhere, just screaming and laughing.”
“Getting grabbed,” says Parrott.
“Getting laid,” says Rogan.
“Sounds Dionysian.” Jalena watches their faces. None of them are looking at each other. They are looking at their laps, or the grass. Yet again, Jalena feels that murmur of disquiet all over her body. “Sounds made up, to be honest. Like you’re pulling my leg.”
“Doesn’t it, though?” whispers Frazee.
And that’s when Green bursts from the truck, which doesn’t stop and veers suddenly as Bemis shouts, “What the fu—” and the door Green has flung open slams shut behind him. Frazee gets flung sideways into Jalena, and Parrott almost tips over the side before Bemis gets the truck straight, jams on the brakes, and brings them to a stop.
“Green!” Bemis shouts, flinging open his own door and racing around the front of the cab through the headlight beams to stand at the lip of the prairie. Parrott has straightened and stood up, and Frazee has got herself untangled from Jalena and hopped out of the truck bed to the gravel. She and Bemis stand together and watch Green lumber at startling speed, like a grizzly roused from hibernation, up a rise that didn’t even seem to be there a moment ago, down a little depression, the prairie nowhere near as flat as it appeared from the road, not flat at all. Green crests another slope, way out on the plain, already, and then he vanishes into the grass.
“Bill, what the hell?” Frazee asks.
Bemis pulls hard at his beard with a shaking hand. “Fuck if I know. He kept asking, ‘You see that?’ I didn’t see shit. And then he just. ” He waves his other hand at the prairie.
“Hey,” Rogan says, having crawled across the bed and joined Jalena and Parrott. “This is it, right? Is it? The exact same place?”
The glance Bemis aims at her is saturated with years-old contempt and resentment, and somehow makes him look even more exhausted than he usually does. “How would we know that, exactly? It’s grass.”
“How did we know then?” Parrott is climbing over the side of the bed, so awkwardly that both Frazee and Jalena have to help her down. “I don’t remember, do you?”
“The coordinates,” Frazee says.
“Which we may or may not have had right.”
“And Maddy Roemer’s bike, where she dumped it on the shoulder.”
“I think we better. ” Bemis says. With a sigh, and a single glance at his ex-wife and her lover — and without even looking at Jalena — he reaches back into the cab, under Green’s seat, and pulls out a rifle.
“What’s that for?” Frazee asks.
But Bemis just steps off the gravel to go find Green.
For a while, they stand and watch as he picks his way. Rises, descends. The same rises and descents as Green? Jalena isn’t sure. Bemis isn’t either, apparently; he keeps stopping to look around. In a surprisingly short time, he is far out toward the horizon, and those sparks of light have started up again, are shooting up not exactly around him, but too close for Jalena’s comfort. Not that he seems to notice. Bemis stops again, appears to bob in place.
Like a surfer sucked out to sea, Jalena thinks. As though the prairie has an undertow.
Then Bemis, too, slips from sight.
“Hey,” says Parrott.
“I see it,” says Frazee, stepping into the grass.
Jalena’s next move is instinctive, immediate. She loves — and doesn’t at all trust — being out here, in all this nowhere, with these people, who might be the only people on the planet, currently, that she could claim to know. Only living people, she thinks, and squashes that thought as she drops her hands to the cold steel sides of the truck and eases over onto the dirt. The one thing she is certain of is that she is going where Frazee goes. She turns toward the grass.
Then she wonders if that is exactly what they’re all counting on: getting her out there, away from the road, and any semblance of safe haven. So they can finish whatever the hell they’ve planned for her. Make her one of them.
She’s at the very edge of the gravel — the grass lapping at her feet like a lake tide, hitting exactly the same spot on the toes of her boots with each new gust of wind — when Frazee drops to one knee. She’s already fifty yards or more away from them. The grass does not rise up, gets no deeper around her. But Jalena could swear it stills as Frazee reaches into it. Her scarves are blowing, but the grass has gone quiet, which makes Frazee look like a Sioux squaw in a Charlie Russell painting, pulling washing out of a river.
From the grass, Frazee pulls up something striped. Even from this distance, Jalena can see that it’s fabric, and also filthy.
In the truck bed, Rogan has stood, now, too. “What is that? Alexa, come back.”
Frazee turns the fabric in her hands. She’s saying something, but her voice is inaudible.
“It looks like part of a prison uniform,” Jalena calls.
But Frazee shakes her head, lays the fabric neatly back where she found it, and smoothes it on the ground. This time, somehow, Jalena hears her loud and clear. “More like pajama pants. Maybe.” Then her head jerks up. “Bill?” she shouts into the dark. Then she’s up, and she’s running.
“Alexa!” Rogan shouts.
“Wait,” Jalena calls, and gets one foot in the grass before Parrott grabs her around the wrist and yanks her back.
“Listen.” Even now, Parrott speaks in that blank, airy whir. But her fingers grip like handcuffs. “Hear it?”
And for just a second, as she starts to shake loose, Jalena thinks she does. It’s faint, far away, out there where nothing is or at least should be.
“Is that a calliope?” says Parrott.
But Jalena is thinking about South Carolina. County fairs, cotton candy in her hand, a beer in her father’s and his other hand on her shoulder. The sounds out here are those sounds — rides, organ melodies in crackling speakers — but even tinnier. Half-strangled. “Could be an ice cream truck,” she says.
Parrott lets go and lights out in the direction of the sound, which is roughly toward Frazee, but at an angle, and the slope she stumbles down is a different one. Jalena almost calls her back. She feels the ghost of her father’s hand lift. Not that it was ever actually holding or steering or protecting her, anyway, even when it was really there.