Bill’s Pasture

A short story
by Cory B. Welch

Bill fumbled with the old scrap of newspaper that bore this headline, coaxed the memories out of it with his fingertips and the tip of the half-forefinger on his right hand. The edges of the clipping had long begun to yellow and fall off. He knew he should have stopped handling the thing some time ago, should have put it in a picture frame or the plastic sleeve of a photo album, but like all relics, it only bestowed its magic when you actually touched it, when you rubbed it between your fingers. Maybe an ink smudge would keep him from washing his hands for awhile, at least until it was time for dinner.

He put the clipping gingerly back into the old coffee can, the can that had faded a bit from red to something more like rusty pink, which had picked up some nicks here and there. Back up into the cupboard the coffee can went, and Bill decided to step outside onto the back porch.

Elnita probably needed some company. Though she was usually pretty content just sitting out there in her chair, staring at the blank, it made Bill feel better at least to sit with her for awhile, even if they didn’t speak a word.

The thwack of the old screen door announced his arrival on the back porch. Elnita didn’t budge, but she did seem to notice him; her energy would shift a little when he came around, Bill often felt. He took his place in the chair beside hers, sighed and grunted when he sat down, not so much because his tired old bones were really that old and tired, but just to attract a little more attention from her. She looked over at him sideways, and her eye glinted a bit in her way, sweetly, but subtly, acknowledging him. That sigh and grunt worked just about every time, Bill chuckled a bit to himself.

The sideways glance passed and Elnita went back to staring out at the blank. Hypnotized by it she was, it sometimes seemed to Bill. And mesmerizing it was, indeed, but maybe a little more for some than for others, he figured. As the years had passed, Elnita had spent more and more time sitting on that back porch gazing steadily, almost unblinking, out at the blank.

Nobody really knew where the blanks had come from. They had kind of just sprung up one night, or one day, or sometime that no one could really be sure of. Because they were next to invisible, nobody could really say when exactly they had appeared. Bill always figured there had probably been some lag time between the actual appearance of the blanks and the time it took for people to discover that they were there.

The particular blank sitting out in the pasture about a quarter mile from Bill’s back porch, Elnita had noticed first. She had told him about it as soon as he had come in from work one day, she had already called it in to the sheriff, and the paper, and the news channel over in Lubbock. He could barely make it out when she first pointed at it, but by the time the sheriff’s deputy and the news crew had gone, he could make out its edges quite a bit better. The next day, in talking about it with a couple of professors from the local college who had come out to his place to investigate, its edges were just about as clear to him as the difference between night and day.

They were called the “blanks,” at least around Bill’s part of the country, because that was just the best name that anybody could come up for them in the flurry of activity during the days around their discovery. They had miraculously appeared, depending on what you meant by miraculous, on a worldwide scale (always in rural areas and out in the middle of the ocean, Bill had heard) and people had to call it something. There were, of course, a variety of technical and academic names for these things, if you were the type of person that cared to keep up with that sort of thing.

Tall, reaching up into the sky, or at least as far as one could see naked-eyed and standing on the ground, the blanks were cylindrical, about fifty yards or so in diameter. Their edges were well-defined, but hard to see at first. Virtually invisible, the surface of these giant cylinders had the slight shimmer of something between mother-of-pearl and the hot, wavy haze of a west Texas summer horizon.

This shimmer would only get stronger and brighter until it felt like it was going to burn your retinas out like the light of an arc welder. Mesmerizing though, it was tough to look away, and Elnita had sure had a tough time of it over the years. After years and years of staring into the blank, Bill wondered what she had seen in there when that shimmer got so bright that it wouldn’t let her go. Fortunately for Bill, if you looked away for a while, or you went to bed for the night, the blanks became nearly invisible again. That was the way he liked to keep it.

Of course, the blanks weren’t just something to look at. Bill was reminded of that on a regular basis as he rubbed the stub of that right-hand forefinger. The day that Bill had come home from work and Elnita said that she had something to show him out back had lingered in his memory quite a bit longer than the second knuckle of that forefinger had.

“All right, I’ll be right there.”

“Bill, get out here now! Something ain’t right out here. I’ve never seen anything like this!”

“All right, all right, I’m comin’.”

He had stepped out on the back porch at Elnita’s insistence, a little irritated because all he really wanted at the time was to get out of his work boots and overalls. By the time he got out on the back porch, Elnita was wound tighter than a steel spring and about ready to bust.

“What the heck are you so riled up about? I don’t see a damn thing out here!”

“Just look! Right out there, just to the left of that old Studebaker! See how the cows are walkin’ a wide circle around it?”

“I’ll be damned. There is somethin’ out there!”

Sure enough, if you followed the outline of the old, rusted-out car just a bit to the left, there it was. A shimmering, flickering line marked the edge of something much bigger: a big, near-invisible silo that shot right up into the sky. Even the old Brahma bull Bill had out in the pasture was a little wary, but he snorted and hoofed the ground at it nonetheless.

A lot had happened since that day. The TV crews, the government scientists, and the military personnel were all gone for years now. Even the military barricade that used to be guarded around the clock, and sure did make it difficult for Bill to tend to his cattle, had been taken down by some engineers from the Army a number of years back.

Of course, all this protection had seemed necessary at the time. Scientists and academics, people and pundits had all done more than their fair share of speculation about where these things came from, what they were for, and what was inside these giant semi-visible cylinders. Extraterrestrial activity, electromagnetic fields, or a sign of the end times were just a few of the more common explanations that were floated during the initial days of their discovery.

In spite of all this activity, intellectual and otherwise, no one had ever really learned much of anything about the blanks. They had been measured, probed, prodded, flown over and around and into, x-rayed, blown up, and otherwise subjected to just about every other method of manipulating an inanimate object that any educated person could devise.

The one thing that was certain about them was that anything that went into one of them was never coming back out. If you put a stick into the side of that giant, shimmering cylinder, you were going to pull back half a stick, and the end would be cut just as clean as if it had been parted with a razor.

There were now a lot of people out there who were missing fingers, toes, hands, feet, and even whole arms from touching or reaching into one of them, usually, it seemed, just to “see what would happen” or to “find out what was inside.” Not a few folks had decapitated themselves by just plunging their whole head in to get a look at what was on the other side of that shimmering wall. A second or two after sticking it in, their bodies would just slump to the ground as their heads were whisked off to only-God-knows-where.

After this was discovered, out came the opportunists, the religious nuts, and the suicides. The opportunists brought forth a whole host of ideas (a few of them not half-bad, Bill figured) about how the blanks might be used to better mankind. Some wanted to dump trash into them, and some even suggested it might be a good way to get rid of the toxic waste that was being buried up around Amarillo. A few doctors had come over from the medical school in Dallas to test the notion that the blank might provide a cleaner and painless way to amputate a limb. Not surprisingly, there were plenty of folks who reckoned it might be a good place to put all those homeless unfortunates or those on death row down in Huntsville.

Of course, the religious nuts thought the thing was probably a gateway to heaven, and so naturally opposed all these practical uses. It seems they didn’t want their afterlife dirtied up with all this chemical, biological, and social refuse. Needless to say, a lot of these folks wound up in the blank anyway, hoping for the best, Bill supposed. (Bill had once joked to Elnita about the religious nuts thinking the blanks were a gateway to heaven, and the suicides were thinking the same damn thing. She didn’t laugh, she tried out of kindness, but she didn’t.)

Things had calmed down a lot since all of this. Some called the blanks the “great equalizer of our time.” Most of those who lived on the fringes of society, either in thought or in deed, seemed to wind up passing through that shimmering wall and never coming back out. After a time, the government decided it was just too expensive to keep protecting these people from themselves. There was no shortage of presidential campaign slogans in those years that included some variation of the phrase “A New Age of Personal Responsibility.” Bill still kept an old Thomson campaign button in his coffee can that said pretty much exactly that.

But, human nature being what it is, the world still produced the occasional person that decided they needed to know what was on the other side of that shimmering wall for whatever reason. Aside from her mesmerization with the phenomenon, Bill and Elnita spent a lot of time out on their back porch waiting to see who or what would be drawn into it. It didn’t happen every day, or even every week, but it looked like today was going to be one of those days.

“You reckon this one’ll make it?” Bill asked her.

In the distance, a little compact car sped across their pasture, faded red and rust, and black where the hubcaps should have been. As the car shuddered over pincushion cactus and prairie dog mound alike, dust spewed into the air, and then hung still, and eventually got lost in the hot shimmer of a horizon.

“This one’ll make it. He sure seems’ta want it bad enough.”

Bill figured Elnita was right about this one too. The two of them had seen so many people drive, walk, run, fly, or somehow wind up going into the blank over the years. She always seemed to just know who was going to wind up going in, and who would back out at the last minute, who would go out into the pasture and just sit there, thinking about it. Bill had often thought about using a pair of binoculars to peer out across the pasture and see what kind of look the person had on their face just before they went in or while they were making up their minds about what to do, but this struck him as a little gruesome, and he knew it would probably show him a little more than he wanted to see.

“Yeah, I reckon so . . .”

Sure enough, the little red car went in fast, just leaving a billowing trail of dust, the only evidence, the only temporary memorial to what Bill figured must have been months, if not years, if not a lifetime, of thinking and deliberating and agonizing. Someone, some family member or friend, would come around within a few days, sheepishly knocking on the door and asking if he had seen someone who looked like this, and was maybe driving that, go into the blank.

Or maybe no one would come. Those were the ones that stuck in Bill’s mind, the ones that no one else seemed to remember. Those were someone else’s memories that Bill was left to carry, left to toil over in the late nights when the coyotes got up too close to the house and kept him awake.

“There is always more time,” Bill thought out loud.

Elnita didn’t respond, but sat quietly in her chair and continued to stare off into the pasture.

Bill let these thoughts and images drift around for a while, then he rocked back and forth a couple times to make getting up a little easier. Taking one last look at the blank and the slow settling of the red car’s dust cloud, he turned and went inside. The screen door jolted him a bit as it slammed behind him. Someday he would remember to quit doing that.

He walked into the kitchen, stood in front of the sink and looked out the window across the pasture. He started to wash his hands for supper, working the lather most of the way up his forearms. Elnita should be coming in to warm up the last of Sunday’s chicken pot pie any moment now, and maybe she would have, if things had turned out a little differently.

While he washed, he looked a little closer at his hands, at his stump of a forefinger. It ached a bit, down into the joint, the flesh covering the tip still pink after all these years. He rubbed it a bit, and thought about how he had lost it, how he had stood at this kitchen window on another lazy summer evening after coming in from checking on the cows, how he had looked out that window and seen Elnita out in the pasture walking towards the blank, slow, but fast as she could, and determined, and how he had run after her, and how she had disappeared right in front of him, and how he had wanted to go in after her, and how he had stuck his finger in, and how he didn’t follow after it.

Copyright © 2008 by Cory B. Welch