Somebody’s going to tell.
First there were miles and miles of corn, menacing field after field of wind’s reflection. In wheat, hay, soybean, one is a fleshy beacon, one rises above. In corn, one is nothing.
But somebody’s going to tell.
You drove north through Iowa moments ahead of a storm, the rain covering your scent, your heat, even the slight press of your tires on asphalt. You would have made a very clever fox. You chose the twistingest road through the tallest corn which rose and shivered and closed around your passing—a wall of dying green.
If you have an ally, let it be foliage.
Because somebody’s going to tell. Somebody always tells when someone else makes a story. And then there is almost always triumph or scorn or outrage or cynicism or shame or condescension or anger or guilt.
Because with a whispered phone call the sparkling-eyed boy told you where he would be, you drove hours to the hunting camp where he, your now married childhood love, was holed up with men, his friends, fragrant and loud, bound by a constant, unswerving patter, as tender as lambs in their rough chins, as coiled as snakes in their silent, deadly rib cages. Here is their tobacco spit in cups; here is their pride at leaving their wives and driving across three states to kill birds. The sparkling-eyed boy sneaked out for one night because you were waiting in a ten-room motel, twenty miles down the highway.
You waited for hours in Room 8 without the comfort of individually wrapped cups or free soap. How many times did you brush your teeth and retouch your lipstick until the brownish red began to cake around the edges? How many times did you lift up your sweater and hold your breasts in front of the mirror? How many times did you pat your calves for the first breath of stubble, run your hands up your thighs to see how you would feel to him? And still you waited. You wrote little notes and placed them around the room: one under the right-side pillow, one wedged between the chrome mirror and the cinder-block wall, one in Gideon’s Bible under Song of Solomon, one behind the toilet. They were witty, wry, sexy. They gave the whole thing away, so you gathered them up and burned them on the gravel outside the door.
And then there he was, and you with ashes on your hands.
But somebody’s going to tell, because drunk men always pee in the middle of the night. The sparkling-eyed boy’s best friend, his cousin, his uncle, the boy with the terrible stutter they take along for amusement, drifted awake one by one to the great pressure of their bladders and shuffled out to piss off the front porch. The first time out they may not have consciously noticed the troubling flatness, the absolute stillness of the wool blanket over the sparkling-eyed boy’s bunk. On the second or third trip, surely a vague awareness stumbled in, a hazy question: Where is he? Certainly his best friend was puzzled. But it’s not like these boys to worry, to wake each other in a flurry of urgent speculations, to need to know anything immediately. Just a simple question followed his friend down as he returned to sleep: Where could he be?
He sat down beside you on the curb and you looked at each other until you forgot to speak or blink. You kept looking at each other because you couldn’t stop. But don’t mistake this for love or longing. It was truly animal—that is, blank, uncomprehending. What is this thing before my eyes? your faces seemed to say. A nose, the collar of a shirt? They mean nothing to me. That ice machine, that clump of weeds, have more goodness and purpose than any two trapped in this particular deadlock. There is a reason why people blink, you realized, why they talk and nod and smile. You looked at this shape in front of you and you thought, Why speak, why fuck, why drive, why eat, why work, why read, why have a list of things you need to decorate your house, why move, why breathe, why write? Then he touched your cheek and said your name and you accidentally smeared ashes on his hands and gave him all the meaning and reason in the world.
Then there were eyelid kisses, yards of delighted skin, embarrassed laughter, breath in your hair, hair in your fingers, fingers covering your wrists, stories of the past, tongues running dry, and not one word about the future. You made a nest and lined it with ten years’ worth of feathers in five hours.
But somebody’s going to tell because people can be very grabby, yes, very greedy, indeed. And if you leave your nest for even a moment, as everyone must, someone is bound to discover it. And though it is still warm and fragrant, they will move in and immediately set to rearranging the feathers. They will see your nest as a mess you have made and will carefully label the exhibits of godlessness, of desperation, and really, if you think about it, of sheer pathos. They will grind the small bits of down and straw under their indignant heels. They might even douse the whole thing with gasoline and set it ablaze, regretting only that you are not trapped inside. They will most certainly talk and poke and bother until you are no longer able to pick your little story out of a lineup. Until you hate it.
You left the motel when he left, unable to stay in that room alone, unable to be the one left behind, no matter the richness of your life. You left your story, your damp nest, and agreed to be a part of someone else’s story, because someone always tells.
You drove home, south, back into the belly of the country, down. And it was fall and that was just a coincidence, but my god everything was dying around you—the corn, the light, your smile, your pride, your conviction that no matter what, you would never do anything really, really bad. You would. You would kill to make this story your own, to keep just one brief eyelid kiss, to make believe any moment in this trip really happened. But on the outskirts of town, under the hard morning light, all truth in this story withered and fell.