THE HIDEOUS MAN. Can you tell me what he looks like?” the giantess asked Hollis. She tried to hide her stature by leaning toward him, elbows on the picnic table, but he knew. Her left eye drooped a little, almost imperceptibly. Her ear lobes were large but not gangly. Proportional. Fitting for a giantess, he thought.
“It’s hard to say,” Hollis said. He fingered the names of Lil’ Steve and Ernesto carved into the picnic table beside her little red recorder. She said she was a reporter, not a cop, and he believed her. She laughed high in her nose (also relatively proportional) and didn’t smell like fear dressed up as order. Her smell was smooth and papery.
“Other people described a young man in a long coat.”
“Yes.” On the table, her shadow bent toward his.
“That’s who you saw?”
“There’s a great commotion in his face,” Hollis said.
“Commotion?”
“Like before a tremor,” Hollis said. He grinned though he knew he shouldn’t.
“A seizure, you mean?”
Hollis laughed. “No. Like in the earth,” he said. “A tremor in the earth.”
Grackles squawked from the trees.
When she smiled Hollis felt his sinuses open.
“He’s hard to picture? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Like before a tremor,” Hollis said. “All the animals in commotion.”
“Right,” she said, in a voice that nudged him along. She looked at him with her giantess eyes. It was like a child’s game, Hollis thought. She was waiting for him on the other side. Red rover, red rover, won’t you come over?
“Those girls,” the giantess said. “Their families. You can help them.”
An invitation to a party, he thought. A gathering of friends.
The creek was rushing down below, smooth, smooth. They were swimming in it even now. It filled the shallow sea.
The sun slanted through the trees.
“He works downtown,” Hollis said, though he wasn’t sure how he knew this. “One of the big hotels.” With his finger Hollis flicked a J-shaped piece of dried bird shit off the table. He looked at the giantess. Her eyes grew bright.
Red rover, red rover.
41
WHEN ROSA TURNED eight, her dad began dating the woman who would later be her stepmom. A relatively happy period, she remembered. Her dad’s girlfriend was in nursing school in St. Louis, so they’d take the train from Chicago some weekends and stay there. When they came back to their house in Chicago one Sunday night, something was wrong. They stood on the front porch with their suitcases and her dad put the key in the lock and tried to open the door. But it wouldn’t open. In a strange voice, one that made her think again of the woman lying in the field, he asked her to sit down on the steps. He pried open the door enough to find that their bicycles and their fridge were wedged into the narrow entryway to block the door. When they finally got inside, they discovered that someone had broken into the house by smashing through a floor-to-ceiling window in the downstairs family room. It had rained while they were gone, and water pooled on the wood floor beneath the window. The air had a musty smell. The downstairs rooms themselves were empty, everything stolen. The house echoed. She ran up the stairs, where her bedroom was. Near the top landing, her father’s dark blue sport coat lay crumpled against the railing, his empty cuff link box beside it. Her room, though, was as she’d left it. Her treasures—her red guitar, owl bank, art easel, rock polisher and cigar boxes full of polished rocks and bottle caps—all in place. Why had they taken everything else and spared her room? Her treasures? She remembered her dad putting her to bed that night, saying that she shouldn’t be scared, because the reason the thieves broke into the house was precisely because they weren’t there. This made sense to her but also seemed somehow inadequate. Her dad tried to put her at ease. He’d patted her back to put her to sleep after reading to her. But she wasn’t scared at all. She was amazed. All her treasures spared. It seemed a miracle. God intervening even though they weren’t believers. In her mind, she saw again the scene from The Ten Commandments she’d watched on TV the week before, the Israelites painting lamb’s blood on their doors so the shadow of death would pass them by.