The End is Now Page 2

  He was paying attention now.

  He knew exactly what to do to get out of the fields; he hadn’t been so lost in his thoughts that he’d completely lost his bearings. He needed to walk straight about three hundred steps, and then right five hundred steps, and then left six hundred steps. Like that, he’d be out of the cornfields. He could run home, he’d be there before dark — he’d outrace the sun if he had to. Then he could go back to normal things like worrying about the rapture.

  He started counting each step. He knew right where he was the whole time, and once he got near his last few steps he could feel the outside world, taste the fresh air, and imagine what it would look like outside of the green and yellow and brown blur he’d been staring at for the last half hour. And as he walked out of the cornfields something odd happened.

  There was more corn.

  The six hundredth step looked just like every other step. He hadn’t left the fields at all. He closed his eyes and listened. Surely he could hear people playing and talking; there would be cars driving on the road, and these sounds would guide him out of the field. He had miscalculated. But he was close. He just needed a little help to guide him the rest of the way.

  He listened — and — nothing.

  Now he was going to have to do something that would give him away. He’d have to yell. And then everyone for sure would know that he was in the cornfields. They would tell him, “I told you so. This is exactly why we say, ‘Don’t play in the cornfields.’ ” He would tell them he wasn’t playing, he knew exactly where he was. He just got a little distracted. But those logical explanations would fall on deaf ears.

  That was a price he was willing to pay. “Is anybody out there?” Will said, loudly and confidently without quite yelling it. There was still a shred of hope that someone would be nearby, someone who’d guide him out of the fields so he could avoid trouble.

  “Anybody?” He half-yelled again.

  No answer. He started worrying much less about being grounded and much more about dying of thirst in the cornfield. He knew that you died of thirst way before you died of hunger, which seemed weird to Will because he usually felt hungry a lot more than thirsty.

  So this time he yelled, “Please, I’m lost. I need some help. PLEASE!”

  Silence. Someone could hear him. They were just trying to prove a point. They were trying to teach him a lesson.

  “Okay. I’m sorry! DO YOU HEAR ME? I SAID SORRY! I WILL NEVER GO IN THE CORNFIELDS AGAIN!”

  Nothing.

  He walked up and down the rows of corn explaining things over and over. Screaming for help. Admitting guilt. Apologizing. More screaming. And towards the end he started to cry. He didn’t want to. He knew it was such a baby-kid-lame-o thing to do. But he couldn’t help it. If someone could hear him, they were playing a sick-cruel-scary joke.

  But what if someone could hear him?

  He closed his eyes and listened one more time. Not for the obvious things like cars driving and honking or kids playing and laughing or parents talking. No, he listened for the quiet types of things. Like someone breathing or soft footsteps. And then he could hear it. Slow breaths, in and out, from someone else, as if they’d been there all along. He could feel someone else’s eyes burrowing into the back of his neck, he could almost see whoever it was behind him, smiling.

  “Hey, mister, listen, I’ve got a knife so you don’t want to — ”

  And then he ran. It was a trick he’d learned from watching movies. The hero would always act like he was talking to the bad guy, and then mid-sentence, out of nowhere, the hero sprung into action. Except the hero probably wouldn’t have run; he would have turned around and snapped the bad guy’s neck, but Will didn’t know how to break someone’s neck. He couldn’t even punch very hard. So he just ran. He didn’t even look back to see who it was behind him. He knew if he ran in any one direction long enough and fast enough and hard enough, he’d get away from whoever was following him and out of the cornfields.

  So he ran until he was out of breath, until it hurt too much to go on. And then he ran a little farther. When he finally stopped, his face was covered in tears and sweat and dust and pieces of cornhusk. He took off his shirt and wiped his face the best he could. It made his shirt filthy. Another thing to be grounded for. He didn’t care now. He wanted to be grounded. He would give anything to be home, to be yelled at, to be sent to his room for a month. All of that seemed small now. Because he knew how bad the situation had become.

  You could die out here.

  They might not even find you until weeks from now.

  This didn’t even scare him. He just knew it was true. He’d watched survival videos in boy scouts where grown men had gotten lost in the wilderness. In one video a man got frostbite and his leg had to be cut off. In another video a man got lost in the desert, and his face had gotten so scorched that it looked like he had leprosy, and when they found him they tried to give him water, but even a thimble of it made him sick.

  “I’m serious, God, please help me find a way out of here. I’ll be good. Really good. I’ll help others and feed the homeless. I shouldn’t have come here. I know that now. I learned my lesson. But you have to help me. DO YOU HEAR ME? Please, if you’re really out there you have to help me.”

  This wasn’t the first time he’d prayed this kind of prayer. There were two other times (he got lost in Disneyland when he was eight, and Nate had broken his leg when they were tree climbing last summer) and both of those times God didn’t say a word.

  Right now Will didn’t have time to wait on God. He’d have to get himself out of this mess. He needed to run more. But he was tired. His head was cloudy, and everything looked blurry. Even worse, the sun had set. The cornstalks created crisscross shadows all over the ground. The moon was starting to shine now, but just enough to make things seem eerie and alive. There was no point to running anymore. This is where he would end. This would be the final resting place of Will Henderson.

  The winds picked up again, howling and making the cornstalks dance around him. Will was paralyzed. It was like when the nightmares were so bad he couldn’t even scream.

  Then a face appeared in the cornstalks. It looked just like Moses did in all of the movies, only it was made out of the cornstalks coming together: bright yellow eyes, a ripe green mouth, and a cornhusk beard. Will wondered if God was finally about to speak to him. Then again, maybe it wasn’t God at all. Maybe it was an angel. Or maybe the face was Satan or a demon. Maybe it was there to trick Will.

  He’d have to listen carefully to be sure.

  When the face finally spoke, it told Will he had nothing to be afraid of.

  Will said he was afraid of the wind. The wind stopped.

  Then the face told Will about the rapture (only the face didn’t call it that but Will knew what he was talking about), about what would happen in the next week. Will listened; his mind was calm and it soaked up everything.

  When the face finished talking, it went back to looking like cornstalks, and Will was so calm and tired that he couldn’t help but sleep.

  JEFF HENDERSON

  The sun set a Reese’s Pieces orange as Jeff Henderson flipped down his dusty visor. He was driving home from another day of automotive sales on the access road next to I – 70. He could almost feel the cars as they whizzed by him at eighty miles per hour.

  They were all on their way somewhere.

  They didn’t think of Goodland as a town or a city. They thought of it as more of a glorified truck stop. Most travelers know Goodland has a Holiday Inn Express or a Comfort Inn to stay at if they need a place to rest before they head 189 miles west to Denver or 394 miles east to Kansas City. They read the road signs and see that within the city limits there’s a McDonald’s and a Dairy Queen, or a Rusty’s if they want to experience an authentic small-town diner. And observant travelers notice Goodland’s slogan handpainted in white on the side of a splintered maroon barn that reads, “Goodland. Stay a night. Stay a lifetime.” But that’s a
bout all those who drive past Goodland know about the town. To them it lasts for about three exits along I – 70 and then it disappears in their rearview mirror. It’s quickly forgotten with the promise of a bigger, better Dairy Queen forty-five miles ahead in the next town.

  What they don’t know is how close-knit Goodland is. They don’t know about the Goodland fair and livestock show that happens every summer, or that fall is everyone’s favorite time of year because it’s when the cornstalks reach up towards heaven like they are trying to touch God himself. They don’t know that nobody from Goodland actually eats at Rusty’s because they’d much rather go to one of the diners near downtown or the café at the airport. And most of all those tourists driving through Goodland don’t know that the motto on the handpainted sign has everything to do with the belief by some (but certainly not all) that they have been chosen for the rapture. Those who think of Goodland as a truck stop have no way of knowing that to “Stay a Night” means you are a tourist passing through, but to “Stay a Lifetime” means you’ll get the honor of experiencing Goodland’s fate with the rest of the town.

  Jeff Henderson was born in Goodland so he knew all these things. He knew exactly what the sign meant. He passed by it every day, but he never looked at it or read it because to him it was just a piece of the scenery. It was part of the background like skyscrapers are to natives of New York or mountains are to natives of Colorado. He didn’t think of it as normal, nor did he think of it as eccentric. It was something he took for granted. Some small towns have legends of old haunted mansions on a hill or stories of spooky graveyards on the edge of town, and that’s what the Goodland rapture talk amounted to for Jeff. It was a quaint legend which added to the charm of Goodland, but nothing more. Nothing that needed serious thought and consideration, because there were other things in life. Pressing things.

  Everyday things.

  And those were the things Jeff thought about as he drove home from work. At the moment he was thinking about his Ford Taurus, which was too old, clunky, and unfashionable for someone in his line of work to be driving. It was older than both his kids. If he had a promotion he could buy something much nicer and reliable and slick. But just as much, a promotion would validate everything: the hours away from his family, the stress, the phone calls, the hustling, the twisting and scheming, the smile he had to have plastered on his face forty hours every week, the nine to five, the long days without a sale. The blood, sweat, and tears would all be worth it if he could just get promoted to senior sales rep. Even better, he wouldn’t have to put junior sales rep on his business card anymore. Junior. It was so embarrassing. He was a father of two, he was a husband, and he’d been in the business world for a little while now. And he still had a card that said junior.

  Still, worrying about things like business cards and titles was an entirely new thing for Jeff. A couple months ago he didn’t care what was on his business card. He was just happy to have a job. Well maybe not just a job. He’d had lots of those — he’d been a farmhand, he’d framed houses, and he’d been an assistant manager at Señor Clucks.

  For his whole life he’d been paid by the hour. But he’d done whatever it took to survive. Jeff had been living in survival mode ever since his senior year of high school. It was second semester and he was ready to graduate. He was imagining life in college. He didn’t know what he wanted to study, didn’t even care, he just wanted to live the college life. He’d take all the easy classes and party for a couple of years; he’d get serious about his major and figure out life junior year. That was the plan. But then on one ordinary day, Amy came up to his locker and her face was pale. She was already pretty fair skinned, but on that day she looked almost translucent.

  “What’s up, babe,” Jeff said. He was wearing his letter jacket and chewing gum.

  “I’m late,” Amy said.

  “So am I,” Jeff answered.

  “No, I’m really late,” Amy said.

  He gently grabbed her elbow and smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ll go to class with you.”

  “Is that your way of saying you’ll marry me?”

  “Wow. Um, okay, I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of commitment.”

  “Jeff, I don’t think you’re following — ”

  “Listen, you have history, right? Mr. Smith loves me. I’ll give him some excuse for why you’re late — ”

  “No, I’m late. Late, you know — ”

  Jeff stared at his girlfriend blankly.

  “ — Pregnant late.”

  And Jeff aged ten years. He’d never had a steady girlfriend, and euphemisms like late just weren’t in his vocabulary. But pregnant was.

  Everything came flooding in. He could hear a crying baby, smell diapers, and he could see a tiny messy apartment overstuffed with cribs and rattles and toys that blipped, blinked, and beeped. He could also see his college life disappearing. He’d never get to drink beer while standing on his head, never get to write a paper after thirty-six hours with no sleep; he’d never get to tie sweaters around his shoulders and flirt with sorority sisters. His next eighteen years were etched in stone.

  It didn’t even matter that he never really saw himself as the family type. He knew what the right thing to do was. And if he had any doubt, Amy’s parents knocked it away by insisting he make Amy an honorable woman. Jeff agreed that it was the reasonable thing to do. But as soon as they were married, he was just in over his head. All they could afford for a honeymoon was a weekend in Kansas City and when they got home real life began.

  Jeff didn’t know how to act in real life. He’d never been anything but a student. He didn’t know how to support a family or be a husband. There were a whole bunch of experiences like going to college that were supposed to get him ready for all of that. But there wasn’t time anymore. It was as if Rocky had to go straight to fighting Apollo Creed without the jogging in sweats.

  So from the moment Emily was born, Jeff worked whatever job he could to support his family. To make sure Amy and the baby had food on the table, clothes to wear, and a warm roof to protect them at night.

  At Hansley things were different. A friend had helped him get a job there about two years ago and now he finally had a career. For the first time in his life he wasn’t just paid by how many hours he spent at work. Now there was incentive. Selling pre-owned cars would mean he could double and triple his salary.

  The problem was every Friday, Charles Hansley Jr. (Mr. Hansley’s son who’d never sold a car in his life) printed off reports of the top sales rankings of the week. The names of all the salesmen were listed, starting with the week’s best salesmen at the top. Guys like Kevin Grabowski were always in the lead. He wore expensive shoes, had the million-dollar grin, and he was a natural. Sales was in his blood. He was a shark. But Jeff wasn’t like Kevin and that was maybe why his name was always near the bottom. And that made him afraid. He worried that Mr. Hansley would decide Jeff didn’t have what it took to be a salesman. Jeff lived in constant fear of a conversation that would start and/or end with the words, “Maybe you’d be better off in another line of work.”

  Lately he’d decided to change. He could do this. He could be a top salesman. He’d just have to fight a little harder. He’d have to develop a killer instinct. He decided he needed to read business books — everything from motivational books, to books on time management, to books on improving his sales techniques and approach. So, long after Emily and Will had gone to bed, Jeff would sit in the dark with Amy sound asleep next to him and a reading light clipped to his book so he could scour the pages for any insight they had to offer on increasing his sales.

  And the reading helped Jeff. It reminded him that he was dedicated to his job. He was dedicated to his family. He was dedicated to providing them all the stable, normal existence they’d always wanted.

  When Jeff got home he stopped at his mailbox, opened it up, threw a pile of mail into his passenger seat, and then he drove down his long concrete driveway. Coming home always made everythin
g worthwhile. He had a great house out in the country; the nearest neighbor was five hundred yards away. He had a large windmill that faced the Johnson’s cornfield. It was something he’d always wanted. The windmill didn’t even do anything really, it was just there for decoration, but it was so great to own one. Sometimes he would just sit on his porch and drink lemonade and stare at it.

  Jeff walked by the windmill and into his house where the smell of the roast Amy was cooking wafted towards him. It was Monday. That meant they were going to have a real meal. The type of meal that black-and-white television families had, the type where June and the Beav and Wally would laugh and share their day. The type where he could ask his kids, “How was your day at school?” Where they could share the highs and lows of life, where they could be a family.

  Jeff hated that this only happened on Mondays now. He hated that they were getting too old to be a family.

  Emily practically had one foot out the door. She couldn’t wait to leave. Goodland was too small for her. She wanted to go to the University of Kansas, study marine biology, and who knows, maybe take over the world from there. It wasn’t that she was bratty or mean — she was just disinterested. Emily saw her dad as more dorky and goofy, rather than the hero and white knight and rockstar he used to be. Still, he was proud of what she had become. Proud of her good grades, proud that she was planning to be nominated to homecoming court this fall, proud that she’d been elected student body treasurer. He just didn’t want it to be over so quickly. He wanted to raise her all over again. It was so much fun the first time, but so often he was too busy to realize it. And now she would be out of the house. She would go on with her life. She would call on birthdays and visit on Christmas. There wouldn’t be much left to look forward to.