American Elsewhere

CHAPTER NINE




Around nine o’clock every evening Joseph Gradling gets the itch, and this night is no exception. Naturally, as a sixteen-year-old, Joseph is vaguely aware that the itch is a common malediction among his age group: nearly every young boy at Wink High has it in some way or another, though it manifests at different times and they take care of it in different ways. He has heard, for example, of Bolan’s Roadhouse on the outskirts of town, where some of the more adventurous boys have gone to spend money on something alternately described as blissful or repellent. And for the less daring there are smut magazines you can buy at certain stores in town, which quickly attain the value of cigarettes in prison among the student population, and are pored over with the enthusiastic disbelief of Old World peasants reading of foreign lands.

But Joseph is convinced he’s found the best possible way in town: Gracie Zuela, who, for some reason, seems to hold some affection for him, or perhaps even like him. This revelation came to him quite slowly, as he could not believe it for the longest time. But one day, with his hands trembling and heart fluttering, he made some vague, stuttering proclamations to her about his feelings (to his embarrassment, he kept returning to the subject of her “niceness” because she was “so nice”), and, in a development that still confuses him to this day, she smiled and stood on her toes and whispered a time and a place into his ear.

That was the first time they met in the woods outside her home. There have been a few others after that. And with each visit, Joseph has grown aware that Gracie is scratching a deeper itch than the one that originally made him seek relief. There is something to their nocturnal visits, something fleeting and wonderful, that draws him back to this place. He is not sure what it is. But though the itch might be managed, he is now more distracted than ever, yet he is perfectly content with this.

Tonight, Joseph waits in their usual place in the woods, nursing a bottle of gas station champagne and a fearfully powerful erection. He’s brought two bottles, one strawberry-flavored the way she likes it, and he’s about a third of the way through his so he’s feeling a little puzzled by everything. He is puzzled by the way the very trees appear agitated, like a herd of deer that has just caught scent of a wolf. But he is also puzzled by the moon. Tonight it looks slightly pinker than usual.

It is at times like these that Joseph tries to forget why he has no competition for the affections of Gracie Zuela: her house is just on the edge of a No-Go Zone, as his parents have termed them. These are the places no one ever visits, not even during the day. This Zone in particular is the woods on the northwestern side of town, just beside the mesa, and is said to be one of the worst places; but no one has found all of the No-Go places, or if anyone has, they haven’t told anyone about it. And who would ever go looking? The idea is unthinkable.

But Joseph knows that Gracie’s family has an arrangement, so this place is actually quite safe. Though others might fear to come, he knows he can walk here without worry. Or at least without much worry. No one is entirely worry-free when out and about in Wink at night. Everyone knows it’s best to stay indoors. But he checks his watch again and drinks more champagne.

Finally there is a soft footfall behind him. “You came,” says a quiet voice.

He turns and sees Gracie standing behind him. She has always moved very quietly, though recently she seems to be getting quieter and quieter. One day, he thinks, her footfalls will make no sound at all. “Of course I did.” He holds the bottle of strawberry champagne out to her, but she shakes her head. “No?” he asks.

“No,” she says.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Gracie is a slight, skinny creature, with toothpick arms and a stooped posture, but it is obvious she will one day be a great beauty. There is a placid sadness to her deep, dark eyes, as if she is pained by some phantom wound but does not know what to do about it. She stands in the pine needles with her shoulders slouched and her slight body turned away. Her arms are crossed and Joseph’s heartbeat quickens as he sees her fingers curled around her bicep: Gracie is a creature of fine, delicate features, and for some reason the sight of her hands and neck makes something fragile and trembling in him unfurl its wrinkled butterfly wings and take flight.

“So you snuck out okay?” he asks, coming closer.

“Snuck out?”

“Yeah. They didn’t notice you?”

She looks at him, curious. “Joseph,” she says, “my parents know I’m out. Don’t you know what tonight is?”

And at that, his blood runs cold. Joseph looks around at the trees and the cliffs and the queerly colored moonlight, and he realizes he has made a terrible mistake. “It can’t be,” he said. “Not again. Not so soon.”

“It’s been a month,” she says.

“It hasn’t felt like it.”

“No,” she admits. “It hasn’t.”

She holds a hand out for him to take, and, to his shame, he hesitates. He covers it up by fumbling with the bottles, and when he does take her hand it is ice-cold.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ll leave if you want.”

“Don’t leave,” she said. “You can’t come with me. Not past the woods, anyway. But I don’t want you to leave.”

They walk through the woods hand in hand, with the grapefruit moon shining down on them. Up ahead the trees thin out and the rocky side of the mesa begins. In the moonlight the cliffs are white and gray, miles and miles of beautiful desolation. Were the sun up they would be pink and blood-red, but tonight under the clear skies they are like bone.

“Is it bad that I’m here?” he asks.

“It… might be,” she says. “I don’t know. Things are difficult right now. Everyone is upset.”

“What is it? Is it why you left the diner early?” Gracie is currently in training at Chloe’s, and her early absence would normally not be tolerated. Something serious must have happened to excuse her.

“Yes. A little.” She falls silent, and bites her lip.

“Is it something to do with… what it wants?” he asks.

“It’s a he, Joseph. We’ve talked about that.”

“Or that’s what it says it is,” says Joseph sullenly. He wishes now that he had not come. On other nights Gracie is free and fresh and beautiful; he thinks of how he holds her in his arms, her black hair gleaming on the pine needles, her laughter and breath on his neck. But tonight she is a frightened, shy little thing, disappointed with everything that’s ever happened to her.

“It’s Mr. Weringer,” she says.

“Yeah. I figured. Everyone is worried about it,” says Joseph. “I didn’t even think something like that could happen. Did you go to the funeral?”

She nods. “But it’s not that. They don’t think he just died, Joseph… they think he was murdered.”

Joseph is shocked. He almost stops walking altogether. The idea of Mr. Weringer being murdered is even more unbelievable than him dying. “Who told you that?”

She nods ahead to the gray-and-white canyons. “Mr. First, of course.”

His face darkens. “I thought you only saw Mr. First once a month.”

“I visit him, yes, but sometimes he comes to me.”

“And he visited you last night?”

She reluctantly nods.

“In your bedroom?” he asks.

She does not answer.

“Did he visit you in your bedroom, Gracie?”

“Yes,” she says, and there is an edge to her voice. “Are you really interested in this?”

“No,” he says.

“You are. We always talk about this. I’m so sick and tired of talking about this. I wish we could talk about anything else.”

“It’s just… I don’t like you keeping things from me.”

“But you knew I would. Right from the start of this, I told you I would have to.”

Joseph can think of no answer. It is true that she warned him about this. At first he laughed it off, thinking it was a small price to pay in comparison to the rewards he’d get out of it. But with each visit the subject grows heavier and heavier, and it feels like every conversation they have circles it but never truly touches upon it.

But perhaps the problem is that he is getting older, and with each day he grows aware that the entire town is doing the same thing—treading carefully around many anxious, unspoken truths—and this perplexes and saddens him in a way he cannot articulate.

“I’ll tell you,” she says. “It doesn’t matter. I was lying on my bed. About to go to sleep. But then I heard his sounds. It sounds like flutes, when he’s coming. And the doors to my balcony opened, and he came in and sat in the corner and talked to me. We just talked, Joseph. He’s very troubled.”

Joseph, of course, now realizes she was right: he did not need to hear this. He wants to rip his hand free and maybe even push her down. Yet he also wants to pull her close and hold her. It does not feel right, to have her telling him this. It is not right to have to share her. He takes another swig of champagne.

“Everyone in town is upset,” she says. “You can feel it, can’t you? Even you can. Everything is stiff and cold… no one is sure what’s going on, though they won’t admit it. No one is telling anyone anything.”

“But Mr. First tells you.”

“Yes.”

“Is that all he ever does when he visits?” Joseph asks. “Does he just talk to you?”

“Sometimes he just looks. But mostly we talk, yes.”

“About what?”

She is silent for a while. “I won’t give you that, Joseph. I give you a lot of things, but I won’t give you that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it isn’t mine to give.”

“Then what is yours to give?” he asks, and he stops her.

“Jesus,” she says. “I don’t know why I meet you here. You just keep getting angrier and angrier.” She pulls her hand free and begins to walk toward the edge of the trees without him.

Joseph watches for a moment, then runs to catch up. “You keep looking paler. Every month. It’s something he’s doing to you, isn’t it?”

She stops with her back to him. He can tell he has wounded her with this remark, and he half-wishes he could take it back. But he also feels he has a right to be angry. She deserves to hurt just as he does.

“There are some things that are just not for us to know, Joseph,” she says. Her voice trembles. “For me, for you, for everyone. You just have to accept that, okay?”

Joseph swallows hard. Perhaps it is the champagne, but he suddenly feels very ill, his mouth and throat suffused with a putrid sweetness. The world blurs, and he realizes he is tearing up.

To his shame, Gracie sees his tears. “Here,” she says. “Come here.” She takes one of his arms and pulls him into an embrace. Silently they hold each other on the edge of the woods. Beyond them a small, curiously treeless canyon winds through the rocks. To the north the dark swell of the mesa blocks out the clouds. “I wish you’d just stop coming here,” she says softly. “It’s tearing you up.”

“It’d be worse if I didn’t.”

“When you first started coming, I thought it was just for the fun. The play. Nothing more.” Again, skirting the issue at hand.

“It was at first. But it isn’t, anymore.”

“I know. It’s worse that way.” One delicate hand probes along the waistband of his pants until it finds the button. Her fingers deftly open it; she has gotten much better at this as the weeks have gone by.

Joseph pulls away a little. “I don’t want to.”

“But I do,” she says. She looks up at him. “Let me give you that at least. Okay?”

As she works at another button, Joseph fills with self-loathing and rage. He has been coming to these woods to see her for over two months now, and though he knows he has it better than most other boys at school, not once has he had sex with her. She will not even allow his fingers to enter her. That last, most precious privilege is held only by what is waiting in the canyon below, and he hates it and he hates himself for being drawn back here again and again.

She stops as a voice rings out through the woods: “Gracie?”

They both jump. Joseph whirls about, and his heart nearly stops when he sees who is standing across the clearing: it is Mr. Macey, from the general store. Yet he is not at all his normal flirty self: he stands stone-still with his white shirt glowing in the pink moonlight. His face is cold and inscrutable, his eyes lost behind his glasses. He is clearly quite displeased.

“Ah,” he says, “and it’s… Joseph, isn’t it?”

Joseph almost feels sick. If there is one person he would never, ever have wanted to find them here, it would be Mr. Macey.

“You’re not supposed to be here, Joseph,” Macey says in a very soft, calm voice, and though he is a ways away his words resonate through the clearing. “What happens here does not concern you. You’re interfering in another’s business.”

“I’m not… not interfering with her business,” he says, though he sounds as terrified as he feels.

Mr. Macey does not respond: he simply stares at him. He is completely different from how he is in the day; it is as if something distant and unknowable is wearing his body.

“You’re not supposed to be here, either,” says Gracie, much more authoritatively than Joseph. “You’re interfering just as much as Joseph.”

Mr. Macey slowly turns his head to look at her. His expression does not change. Then he walks across the clearing and stands beside them to stare into the mouth of the little canyon below. “Is he awake?” he asks.

“That’s none of your business,” says Gracie.

“He should be soon, correct? Tonight is your night, after all.”

“How would you know?”

“Weringer told me of your arrangement.”

“Our arrangement has nothing to do with you. Or Weringer.”

He turns to look at her. He studies her for a long while. “You know what has happened.”

“I know Weringer died, but so does everyone.”

“You know more than that.”

Gracie does not respond, but she looks slightly nervous.

“You know he was killed,” says Macey.

“I never said so.”

“But you do. I can see it in you. How did you know? This was deduced just recently. Unless he told you. But we have not told him yet.” His eyes swivel in his head to stare out at the canyon. It is an unnervingly reptilian motion, and Joseph feels a bit sick to see it. He does not want to be here at all, does not want to hear any private discussions of the powerful elite in Wink. “So he knew before we did.”

“He had nothing to do with it,” says Gracie, nervous.

Mr. Macey does not answer.

“You know he sees things his own ways,” she says.

“Yes,” says Macey. “And this is why I wish to speak to him. Does he know about the new arrival in Wink? That woman in the red car?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is she connected to what has happened?”

“I said I don’t know.”

He looks back out at the canyon. “Is he awake?” he asks again.

Gracie bites her lip, but gives in. “He will be. Soon.”

“How soon?”

From somewhere down in the canyon there is the sound of soft, atonal pipes, almost like flutes. They make no melody; it is as if the piping is done at random, or perhaps by someone mad.

“Ah,” says Macey. “Then I will go and see him.”

“You aren’t invited,” says Gracie.

“These are extenuating circumstances.”

“But you aren’t invited. These are the rules. And this is my arrangement. There’s never an exception. Isn’t that what Mr. Weringer said?”

Macey pauses, frowning. Joseph can see he’s trying very hard to think of a way around the rules that have governed life in Wink for so long.

Then Macey appears to have an idea. He looks up at Joseph, and something flutters in the back of Mr. Macey’s eyes, and he begins speaking low and quickly in a monotone voice: “Joseph Gradling. Born March fourteenth, 1997. Parents Eileen and Mark. Episcopalian. Good math student. Bad English student. Sometimes at night you sit up in your bed and stare out the window when you know you shouldn’t. Sometimes when you go back to sleep you dream of a green field with a black tower, and at the top of the tower is a blue fire. Someone is standing beside that fire. But you do not know who it is, and you cannot see.”

“Enough,” says Gracie.

“You do not like it here in Wink. You are brazen, condescending. You like to talk and ask questions. You do not like minding your own affairs. You like crossing boundaries, doing what you shouldn’t, knowing what you shouldn’t.”

“Stop,” says Gracie.

“I know you, Joseph Gradling. When you slipped out of your bedroom window tonight you had to lift your hips up, up just a little, for as you slid over the window ledge you felt your penis twitch as it filled with blood, hugely and wonderfully stiff, and you feared it would be pinched between your belt buckle and your belly—”

“Stop!”

“—And you wanted it to be in rare form tonight, didn’t you, Joseph, isn’t that what you thought as you walked across the forest to this place, this place where you should not be, and though you came here for her and her slender hands and heady musk you also came here because you love knowing something you shouldn’t and breaking every rule you can, didn’t you Joseph, Joseph Gradling—”

“Fine!” says Gracie. “Stop! I’ll take you down! Just leave him alone!”

Mr. Macey’s babbling ceases instantly. He stares at Joseph a moment longer before shifting his gaze to Gracie. “So you are inviting me?”

“I am,” she says bitterly.

“Good,” he says.

Despite Macey’s agreement, Joseph is trembling and white, horrified to hear all of his deepest, strangest thoughts and feelings chanted out in a mad rush. Gracie watches him, troubled, but Macey interrupts before she can comfort him.

“There’s no time to waste. I must see him now.”

She sighs. “All right. Follow me, then.”

With one last glance at Joseph, she leads Mr. Macey out of the trees and down into the mouth of the tiny canyon. She looks so little and alone; she seems to grow paler as they enter the moonlight, until her hair and skin gain a faint sheen. Then they pass behind one outcropping, and they are gone.

Joseph stands at the edge of the woods and does not move. He looks out at the mesas and canyons and feels as if he is on a shore bordering a violent, white-watered sea, and Gracie has just jumped down into their depths to drown. He wants nothing more than to go after her, but he knows this would be a terrible mistake, for both of them. There are things you cannot do in Wink, and to upset someone’s arrangement is one of them.

Joseph does not walk back to the road, but along the edge of the woods. He is not sure why; perhaps the woods allow him to indulge his melancholy a little longer. Again, he hears the sound of soft fluting from down in the canyon. He stops; his perspective has changed enough that he can see down the slope to what is happening below.

He would not even admit this to himself, but this is the true reason he stayed: he wants to see, he must see. And perhaps if he claims it was an accident, or only glances at it out of the side of his eye, then all will be forgiven if he is caught.

He stands still, not turning his head, and strains to see everything happening in the corner of his vision. He can see the white snarls of the cliffs, and the smooth white streak of the little canyon floor. There is movement on the canyon floor, though it is difficult to make out: he can see two small figures almost lost in the shadow of the cliffs, staring down the canyon. But Joseph cannot see what they are looking at.

Something has fallen in the canyon. He can see where it’s made an impact on the canyon floor, the sand and dust rising up in little clouds. Yet he never saw anything fall; he sees only where it struck the ground. Then something else falls, now closer to the people in the canyon, and again he misses it. He suddenly feels very worried for the people in the canyon, for what is falling seems very large.

Twice more the things strike the ground, closer and closer, though each time Joseph cannot see any rocks falling through the air or any other object. It’s as if the ground itself is shifting away, but only in select spots and in a straight path leading up to the figures in the canyon. He wonders what could possibly cause such a thing.

The fluting echoes in the rocks again. Then moonlight begins to show between one little figure’s feet and the ground, increasing inch by inch, and to his shock Joseph realizes the person is levitating, lifting several feet straight up in the air…

Or, he wonders, is the person being picked up?

And then he begins to wonder if the puffs of dust he saw in the canyon were footfalls, the pounding footsteps of something invisible to the eye, and if it is lifting up the little person in the valley in a slow, loving embrace, perhaps to touch its cheek to hers and cradle her in its arms, while the other figure in the canyon puts his hands on his hips and watches, disapproving of this naked show of affection…

Joseph falls to his knees and begins to retch, yet even as he does he keeps two things in mind: the first is that he must stay completely silent, for to alert the thing in the canyon would have consequences too awful to imagine; the second is that if what he was seeing was correct, and those were footfalls, then their owner must be vast enough to fill the canyon.

The next thing Joseph knows he is running, sprinting through the pine woods and stumbling through the undergrowth. Finally he vaults over the roadside barrier and tumbles to the ground next to the asphalt. Then he sits there, hugging his knees, and he begins to weep.





WELL HELLO THERE NEIGHBOR