Universal Harvester(20)
Jeremy smiled and gave a very small nod. His father was orchestrating something tonight that didn’t really compare with anything he’d tried before; Jeremy could sense it. It was just dinner, but there was more to it than that. Preparing for it—inviting Shauna, readying Jeremy, accepting it as a natural next step—had involved instinct and intuition: there weren’t any domestic suppliers for these. You had to import them from someplace.
So he felt proud of his dad. He picked up the dish of scalloped potatoes Steve had asked him to get ready that afternoon.
“Potatoes?” he said.
“Thank you,” said Shauna, helping herself.
“Dad says you’re from Nebraska,” offered Jeremy.
“Yes, Lincoln.”
“Cornhuskers,” said Jeremy.
“‘Go Big Red,’” She nodded. “I used to play a little softball, actually.”
Steve reached for the pot roast. “She’s being modest. Her team went to the tournament in ’84.”
“No kidding,” said Jeremy.
“Down in Omaha,” said Shauna. “We came in second.”
“No kidding,” said Jeremy again, comfortably, easily.
“They call it the World Series but it’s really a bracket. We beat Fresno State but we drew Texas A&M in the next round.”
“They play a lot of baseball in Texas,” Steve offered.
“Softball, too,” said Shauna.
“Softball, too,” said Steve. Jeremy looked up from his plate to see his father exchanging a smile with Shauna. Some in-joke, maybe. From the way they looked at each other, you’d have thought they were old friends.
*
“Where did you meet her?” she asked while they were all bringing their plates into the kitchen; she was looking at a family portrait on the wall above the microwave. In it, a younger Jeremy held an oversized wooden alphabet block on his lap, its big blue H facing the camera. His parents were standing on either side of him; Mom, in a sleeveless beige summer dress with yellow trim, had her hand on his shoulder.
“Just growing up, just from around,” Steve said.
“That’s nice,” said Shauna. She meant it; you grow up and it gets harder to meet people, but there are shrinking places in the world where the people you meet growing up are the people you know later on. These places seem less nice when you feel trapped in them, but once you get free they seem sweet. “You all look so happy.”
Jeremy didn’t mean to hold his breath for a half second: it just happened, there at the top of the inhale. “Mom was excited for the pictures,” he said, letting it go. “They were doing Christmas scenes too if you wanted to get your Christmas cards made there, so we did those. We were giving her a little bit of a hard time about it.”
“About Christmas?”
“About how when they brought out the tree you could see her getting really excited.”
“Like a kid,” said Steve.
Jeremy felt pressure in his temples, psychic strain, the sort of stuff he’d once been adept at evading. The moment was tugging at him like it had a hook in the roof of his mouth: they could all stay there, they could see what else might come out. But he picked up a green sponge and turned the water on in the sink.
“Dad, could you put the rest of the potatoes in the Tupperware?” he said.
“I’ve got it,” said Shauna.
*
At sixty-five miles an hour, the cornfields flicker against the window like stock footage; shadows in between the rows pulse steadily in shades of yellow and green and early brown. There are as many bean fields now as corn, but nobody remembers those, their rows green and spiky and nearer to the ground. Corn, though: it hoists itself skyward all by itself, determinate, until the long green leaves on the stalks grow heavy and begin to droop in autumn. From the road it’s like a painting, a huge mural, endless, ongoing.
You see cars pulled over and people who’ve gotten out to take pictures sometimes, around midday—families or couples who’re driving cross-country. There’s plenty of corn west in Nebraska, of course, and more of it east in Illinois, but there’s something about these gently rolling fields that makes people want to get a closer look. Near sunset, long, wheeling shadows suggest a different sort of picture, one with maybe a quiet hint of menace to it. But by then most of the people taking pictures have moved on.
The highway abutting the fields is miraculously uniform for miles on end; this is true on both the east-west and the north-south routes. Are they separate fields on either side of the highway, or does the road mark an artificial division through a single, uniform field? It’s a stupid question, because it only matters to whoever owns the land, but you get all kinds of thoughts when the sun’s strobe-lighting through the driver’s side window all day; and if you let yourself start thinking about the field without the highway, something happens to the way you take in the land. Your inner vision shifts. You think about fields with no one to see them, all that quiet life continuing on with no purpose beyond self-propagation. Tassels rotting in October. It gets to you, if you let it.
But instead of just driving the whole way from border to border, let’s say you get out into the rows, where the growth is thick and tall enough to dampen sound. You notice this effect even before you begin to speak; your ears register how the air’s a little different. “Hello!” people yell, making sure it’s not just some vague feeling they have, or “Is this Heaven?” They don’t mean that; they’re quoting from a movie about a man who builds a baseball field to coax the ghosts of old baseball players into emerging from the corn. There are other times when people go into the fields and yell different things: “Help!” for example, often repeatedly with increasing volume, or “Where are you taking me?” But nobody usually hears them. A few rows of corn will muffle the human voice so effectively that, even a few insignificant rows away, all is silence, what to speak of out at the highway’s shoulder: all the way back there, already fading into memory now. To make yourself heard, you’d need something substantial: the roar of the combine harvester in autumn, mowing all of this to the ground, and then rolling back over the stubble like a ruthless conqueror from an alien planet. Or something greater, bigger, louder. An airplane. But nobody’s going to land any airplanes out here.