Do you imagine it’s a sign of how normal and neutral you’re feeling that you think you can tell how this man feels based on the quality of his inhales?The voice sounds like Selma’s; the stupid voice always sounds like Selma’s. Some days Will half suspects her of having installed a chip inside his head.Here’s a normal, neutral question: How are you feeling about how he looks in that wet flannel? The second wet flannel of the day? I mean, how many flannels can one guy own, first of all, but I don’t want you to think I’m complaining, because me personally, my feelings on the wet flannels are?—
Will strangles this thought back with some effort before it can share those feelings, but, grimly, he doubts they would surprise him.
He’s distracted, anyway, when they get the car back to the private access road they illegally came in on. Will had half expected there to be security guards or police there, to yell at Casey for driving through before; he can see now that that was stupid. Nobody cares about this silly little access road.
Also, no one is going to get across this silly little access road, because a large branch has fallen across it since they were last here, completely blocking it off.
“Only way back is the long way,” Will observes, with a slightly nervous glance at Casey. It’s not that he thinks Todd is going to die in here or anything, but he’d rather not drag this on for the poor kid any longer than necessary. “In this weather, working around the damage, it’ll be fifteen minutes back to the main roads at least.”
Casey drums his fingers against the steering wheel. Then an idea seems to occur to him, and he slants a look at Todd. “Hey, kid—you remember last summer when you helped me and Noel dress up the scarecrows for Halloween? And we?—”
“Took the shortcut back?” Suddenly Todd is bright andalert, his sullenness dropping away for excitement. Will, who remembers all too well being a teenager, doubts this is going anywhere he will like. “Of courseI remember, I’ve only beenbeggingyou to take me again, you had to do it theone weekmy phone was too smashed to record!”
“Now, see, I wasgoingto ask if you felt up for it, but I guess that’s a yes,” Casey says with a grin, throws the car into reverse, and turns it around, repositioning it so it’s facing?—
“Oh, God,” Will says, as he notices anticipation start to change Casey’s face, “Casey,pleasedon’t tell me you’re planning on?—”
Will doesn’t bother finishing the sentence, because Casey has already spun the wheel to the right as far as it’ll go, punched hard on the gas, and pitched the whole truck directly into the cornfield.
“I HAVENEVERWANTED TO DO THIS!” Will has to scream to be heard over the sudden cacophony of corn leaves wicking by. Todd, now cackling next to him, seems to be recording out the window, not paying them any attention at all. “PEOPLE DO IT IN MOVIES AND I THINK ‘STUPID. I’M NOT GOING TO DIE LIKE THAT. NOT ME!’”
“WE’RE NOT GOING TO DIE,” Casey howls back, sounding, in spite of the circumstances, a little entertained. “IT’S THE FASTEST WAY.”
Will grips the door handle as tightly as he can, fighting the urge to screw his eyes shut. “TO THEOPERATINGTABLE, MAYBE.”
“WOULD YOU JUST SHUT UP AND HAVE SOME FUN?” Casey somehow manages to sound oddly calm in spite of the circumstances and his volume. “ENJOY SOMETHING, FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE?” Then he cuts a quick, hard-to-parse look at Will—a look that he should, be instead, keeping on theroad, or, in this case, the corn—and adds, almost daring, “ORARE YOU TOO MUCH OF A CONTROL FREAK FOR THAT? LIKE YOUR DAD?”
Will opens his mouth and then, not wanting to prove Casey right, snaps it shut. He folds his arms over his chest and glares out the windshield, prepared to experience, in fact, a number of things. Rage, for one, and terror, for another, and then possibly death by way of inconveniently placed scarecrow, although in Will’s opinion that would be an indignity too far. Even his life has to havesomesense of the mercy rule.
But he finds, to his surprise, that it’s…pretty cool, to roll through the sodden cornfield as though it really is the sort of glossy, waving sea it sometimes appears to be in the wind, from a distance. It’s a similar mechanic, now that Will thinks about it—the empty stalks, still green but stripped of their golden fruit, seem to become something else for being too close, just as they do for being very far away. Briefly, watching the now-fading leaves and left-behind strings of pale yellow corn silk brush endlessly over the windshield, sticking damply before being dragged away by the laws of physics, Will wonders if this is what it would be like to be an ant at the very bottom of a huge jungle, looking up through the layers of unbroken canopy above.
Abruptly, the windshield clears, and they’re barreling towards the road and, oh,God, an oncoming car, which beeps furiously at them. Will grips the armrest again and does close his eyes this time, braces his body for impact, and?—
“We didn’t hit them, you know,” Casey says, sounding quite grim and a little amused, as Will feels the car juddering towards a stop. “If you wanted to open your eyes or whatever.”
Will opens his eyes; the truck is still moving, but it’s on the nice, normal road now, no sign of its misadventure except the various corn leaves that rain has stuck fast against the windshield. Also, Todd appears to be filming him, snickering; when Will pushes the camera down, annoyed, Todd just shrugs andsays, “Be like that, then,” and starts tapping at the screen, ignoring Will entirely.
“I want you to know,” Will says shakily to Casey, as they cruise down the road at a speed that still, to Will, seems somewhat excessive, “that I’ve decided that I hate you. I hate you! Who drives into acornfield? Don’t you have any sense of—of—your own mortality, first of all, but also quite critically,my mortality, and?—”
“Are you dead?” Casey seems quite amused to be asking, which makes Will hate him all the more. “You don’t look dead to me, but I guess you’d know better than I would. Pretty sureI’mnot dead, though?—”
“You might be in ten minutes,” Will mutters, no longer able to keep even the slightest bit of a grip on his tongue. “If you keep driving me soinsane.”
This makes Casey laugh, brief and choked off, and Todd mutter something under his breath that sounds like, “God, get a room.” Casey doesn’t appear to hear that, but Will certainly does, and it’s mortifying enough to shut him up for the remainder of the drive.
As they near the farm, Will sees the access road in is still blocked, but as they’re approaching from the north, Mere is driving up from the south. She pulls over to the side of the road when she sees their car and throws herself out of the driver’s side, running over. Will gets out of the way as fast as possible and then it’s all a blur: her hugging Todd, and yelling at him, and thanking them, and hugging them, and yelling at Todd, and hugging him again, and making him get into her station wagon.
There’s a brief, strange moment that Will can’t totally parse, a half conversation between Meredith and Casey that’s cut off when they notice Will looking. Meredith says something like, “Look, that Town Council meeting—everything that happened, I know I could have been a better friend to—” and then Casey’swaving her off before she can finish, muttering something about how she should forget it, and it doesn’t matter now.
Then she’s driving off, and Will and Casey are alone in the middle of the road, rain still pelting down. A large tree remains between them and the parking lot; there’s not, Will is coming to realize, anyone but Casey to move it. It’s always possible he has a larger staff running around than it appears, but Will’s starting to get the sense that Casey handles most of the work here himself.
He stares, grimly, at the downed red oak, and for a second, it sways in front of him, like the one in the river. Will really, deeply, enormously doesn’t want to deal with it right now; he can’t imagine Casey does, either.
As if reading his mind, Casey says: “Christ. Look, I don’t care whatyoudo, but I don’t have it in me to handle that right now. I’ve had enough close encounters of the wooden kind for one day. You can walk back from here, or you can ride into town with me; I’m going to see whether the whole bridge really blew out. Because, if it did…” Casey shrugs, and then looks at Will with a curiously youthful expression, like a kid lit up with excitement about something as simple as a piece of candy, or an interesting rock. “I think I want to see that, is all.”
There’s a beat, and then Will starts to grin. “You know what? Me too. Let’s go.”
This drive is mostly silent but, somehow, not awkward. Maybe it’s the relief—of Todd being safe, of Todd being out of the car, of not having any barbs left to throw at one another—but whatever it is, it’s nice. Will feels his muscles relax a little as Casey turns on the radio and twists the dial to classic rock, and then a little more when Casey starts humming along, under his breath, with the music.
