Copyright 2012, 2020 Lisa Summers
Kansas, United States, 2012
Roberta Johnson:
"I was traveling through the corn country of Kansas -- well, that doesn't really narrow it down much, does it? Anyway, my rental car, a domestic piece of tin crap from Detroit, had some sort of engine trouble. I don't know what kind, saleswomen of advanced microprocessor chips aren't expected to know that -- it went "rrr, rrrr," then slowed and coasted to a stop, fortunately by the side of the road and not in the road. All I'd need is to get smashed flat by a speeding corn truck or something.
So, I'm surrounded by fields of corn, as tall as 'an elephant's eye,' if elephants' eyes are all the fuck way up there, a shit ton over my head. In Los Angeles, a girl doesn't need to play fucking basketball to get a guy. She just needs to be beautiful, act cool, and not show that she's a fucking nervous wreck because her goddamned rent in North Hollywood is fucking outrageously obscene. And have a job paying a lot, even if there's a good chance she might get screwed out of her commission by her ass hole boss, and the company's being investigated by the SEC. And that she's a bitch, just because she enjoys it. And hopefully they don't then find out that she's taking kickbacks from the clients for stuff that never gets billed.
It's a good life, Anthony.
So I'm stuck in Butt Fuck, Iowa, or Nebraska or some other piece of Flyover, USA -- oh yeah, Kansas. On a road that's just barely paved - though admittedly better than the 405 -- and about a lane and a half wide, no houses for miles, no Starbucks for light years, and Intelligentsia Coffee not even a dream in the fevered brow of a Los Angeleno standing next to a broken down car and the dried corpse of a black bird.
"Fuck."
Smart phone not smart enough to work in this leftover George Romero movie set. So...I start walking. After perhaps two miles of this green hell, I saw a long dirt driveway, with a mailbox that said "Anderson Farms." Knowing that this is usually how horror movies start, but confident in my Krav Maga skills, I decided to chance it.
Amazingly, I probably walked another mile before I even saw the buildings. Andrew Wyeth would have loved them. Whitewashed Victorian style farmhouse, a bunch of low lying squat rectangular buildings, an old style barn where farmer's daughters get fucked, and what I knew must be a silo. I had no idea what they put in silos. Missiles, maybe.
So I walked up the two steps to the porch of the farmhouse, with the ornate railing around it, and a little metal triangle and a rod hanging by the door. I vaguely remembered a tribute they did at Grauman's a few years ago to an old timey actor named Richard Crenna, and a show he was on called, um, 'The Real McCrows' or 'The Coys', or something. Anyway, it looked just like the front porch in that show, and it flashed on me exactly what I was supposed to do as a visitor to this humble abode. So I rang the hell out of that triangle with the rod, pleased with myself.
I heard crashing inside the house, and a muttered "goldang it!" and the door flung open. A very handsome, but bucolic, stud glared at me, his eyes softening when he took in that I was an extraordinarily exceptional representative sample of the opposite sex.
"Oh, uh, sorry. Um, what can I do for you?" His eyes were a bluish-gray, his hair jet black, and I could at that moment figure out where the whole Superman ex Smallville thing came from. Whoof, were they all like that in the sticks?
***
The attractive, but overly flashy young woman introduced herself to the young man, and told him what her problem was. She didn't hesitate to use her feminine wiles to get him to do what she wanted, pulling her long, brown hair back from her ears several times, and batting the long lashes of her brown eyes at him endlessly. She considered in the back of her mind that fucking him on the way out might be a bright spot in her day.
"So, you live alone here, Jeff?"
"Well, me and my older sister, Emily. We inherited the place when our parents passed. Farm it, raise cows, pigs and chickens -- it keeps us busy. Say, you must be tuckered out after that walk, would you like to come in and have some lemonade?"
"No Long Island Iced Tea?" she asked, jokingly.
"I could make you some tea, or maybe Emily has some sun tea made..." he suggested.
"Um, no," she said. "The lemonade will be fine."
"Did you notice the weather brewing when you walked up here? You might have just beat a bad one cooking up."
"Eh?" she said. "Rain?"
"That's the least of it, around here. Where did you say you were from?"
"Los Angeles. That's in southern California," she added, helpfully if not sarcastically.
"I don't suppose you get many tornadoes in Los Angeles, do you?" he said, seeming a little sharper than she'd first assumed.
"No, everything else -- wait, are you expecting a tornado?"
"Not expecting, just dreading. When it wants you, it'll come for you." He looked at her steadily.
"It's not much of a joking matter hereabouts. If you hear a siren, or we get a call, we need to move as fast as we can for the storm shelter. Emily's not as quick as she used to be, I'm going to ask her down just in case, plus I'm sure she'd like to see a new face." He excused himself and strode up the stairs to the second level.
The woman heard him talking to someone for an extended time, then finally heard two sets of footsteps, one person apparently leaning on the other. Jeff came down the stairs, his arm around the waist of a wan, early-thirties woman with blonde hair, wearing a plain house dress that you might have seen in a movie from the nineteen-fifties. She seemed to have some stiffness in one of her legs. When they reached the bottom of the stairs he saw her to a much used overstuffed chair with a view of the cornfield, through a large picture window.
"Emily, this is -- I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name-"
"Roberta, Roberta Johnson," the young woman said. She was unsure of whether she should stand, or shake this 'Emily's' hand, but decided to do nothing instead.
"I'm pleased to meet you," Emily said. "Jeff said that your car had broken down. He'll be happy to help you out." She smiled, but there didn't seem to be a great deal of energy behind it.
"While we're waiting on Jeff, why don't you tell me about yourself, Roberta? I would think that we're kind of off the beaten track for you."
"Well, yes, you certainly are," she said. "Frankly, my being here is an example of what happens when you don't think things through. I should have just hopped on that connection in Chicago instead of trying to see the USA in my fucking Chevrolet." Her brows knitted together.
Emily looked amused and almost smiled. "Well, you're getting an eyeful of corn, anyway."
Roberta looked thoughtful. "If you don't mind my asking, how did you, er, get hurt? You're not old, did you have a farming accident? Tractor tip over?"
Emily couldn't figure out if she were being arch, or condescending, or was just curious and rude.
"No, this happened in the service. I was stationed in Afghanistan eight years ago. I was in a marketplace waiting to meet a friend, when an insurgent decided to take some people with him to paradise. He blew himself and thirteen people up, and injured a couple dozen more, mostly kids."
"I'm so sorry." That sounded a lot more genuine, Emily thought.
"It's done. Nothing I can do about it. Anyway, I try to help my brother Jeff around here, but he does all of the heavy lifting and most of the rest, too. I do some writing and contribute a little -- not much -- from the stories I sell."
"Oh, how nice," Roberta said. Emily knew that tone of voice. Roberta had weighed her, and found her wanting. She wouldn't exist much longer in Roberta's universe. She had heard that kind of tone a lot when she came back, then just decided to live here in the house, in her stories and in her memories of Kit.
Jeff came in with a tray of glasses of lemonade, and the three sat and drank, and talked about not much of anything. Roberta was in the middle of a long description of the wonders of driving in Los Angeles, when Jeff suddenly leaped up like his ass was on fire.
"Jeff, wha-" began Emily.
"Oh SHIT! We didn't hear the siren, it's a fucking twister!" even as he grabbed Emily and Roberta both by the hand and dragged them toward the back of the house. A roaring sound like a freight train bearing down surrounded them as Emily looked back to see the whole of the picture window and the corn field beyond filled with the second most horrifying sight of her life -- a massive column of whirling black, bigger than any structure, almost bigger than the sky, bigger, bigger, her whole existence noise and whirling wind and explosion god explosion oh kit kit where are you
***
"Emily, I've gone to all the trouble to find daffodils, AND scented candles for our room, you must come and see."
"Kit, you know I've got to finish my story to sell..."
"But Emily, that story is your imagination -- rich, wonderful and so beautiful -- but this is real, this is you and me...together in our little place." Emily could see the charm and love in what Kit told her -- especially the love.
"Okay, I'm sure it's exquisite," Emily said, as Kit took her hand and led her to the bedroom. She clapped her hands together girlishly in happiness at seeing the plethora of blooms, interspersed by small blobs of light, as the candle flames danced in the wake of their passage.
"Love, I wanted to bring you here to ask you something," Kit said, suddenly shy.
"What?" asked Emily, curious.
"Emily, I love you beyond life itself. Will you...will you...marry me?" The look on Kit's face was so scared that Emily at first laughed in confusion, then immediately followed with tears as the enormity of what Kit was asking hit her.
"Oh my god," Emily said. "Oh my god. Yes. Yes. Oh god, yesyesyes! I will marry you!" She threw her arms around the taller woman, and hugged her as if to never let go. The two women held each other tight, as if afraid that the other might suddenly disappear. Emily felt a nagging, unnamed fear. "Something I should remember," she thought to herself, but the fear really couldn't stand against the joy in her heart from being in Kit's strong arms.
"Darling, lie down," Kit murmured in Emily's ear. "You've got a lifetime of tension in you, I want to do something for you."
