William nods and he waves to make Earl go away, Earl does, waving a broken chain in his hand, thick flakes of dust breaking from its links and falling through the sun-bitten air.
William buries the bottle in the fallow field. If anyone had asked him what he was doing, he wouldn’t have known how to answer. He doesn’t have the words to describe how the field reminds him of himself. The dark shape of it, the earth torn up and left to cool in the dark, a little steam rising. How it feels like maybe the field needs something only William has, and all William has is the bottle.
He waits until Earl shuts the screen door to his trailer, hemming out the darkness and the cool air that it carries. He waits until all he hears is his own breathing and the creek water running, until the two sounds are one sound, the same. Like all he has to do is walk to the creek and open his mouth and a whole stream full of minnows and rocks will come rushing down his throat, running over the bare bones of his ribs, collecting in his fishbowl belly where nothing could ever get out again. William can almost taste the water, sour and green and a little sweet.
William buries the bottle at the edge of the field. The solid door to Earl’s trailer is still open, and the thought of Earl appearing now that he’s had time to drink scares William a little. But burying the bottle only takes a minute. The soil is loose and dark and warm between William’s fingers, and when he is finished, the earth is smooth, like the bottle isn’t there at all, or like it has always been there.
William lives with his mother, who is beautiful, and younger than any other mother William has ever met. Her name is Shannon. She has white-blond hair and a scar in the crook of her arm and even that is beautiful—in the way that it raises up from the rest of her skin, in the way that it curves, in the way that it never changes.
She comes home that night even later than usual. She is smiling though, and she smells like peanuts and sugar. She tells William this is the best date she ever had. That he was tall and wonderful and worked in the mines. That he was in line to be a boss. That he called her “kitten” and took her dancing, like out of a movie, like a real cowboy.
“Have you ever been dancing?” she asks.
William shakes his head. He is sleepy and a little hungry, but more than anything, he is glad that she is home, glad for her noise, which fills up all the empty corners of the trailer. Even the stained yellow carpet seems prettier, golden, as she stands on it barefoot, reaching out her hand to him.
“Dance with me.”
She is a little drunk. A little stumbling. She steps on William’s toes and William laughs. He rests his head in the center of her breasts and closes his eyes and lets her twirl him in slow circles around and around the living room.
William wakes the next morning to the sound of voices. The sound of car tires. A honking horn. He walks barefoot onto the back porch. The air is heavy and mist clings to the tops of the trees. There are more cars outside than he has ever seen and more people, too, gathered around the fallow field. William is shirtless and he feels as though his teeth have been replaced by stones that he has spent the night grinding, grinding into dust.
Earl is at the center of the crowd, kneeling before something William has never seen before, but somehow recognizes. The object stands at the edge of the field where William planted the bottle and, for an instant, William can feel the bottle in his hand, a phantom weight, cool and steady. He makes a fist and the feeling is gone.
The crowd shifts to allow more people in. The thing in the field is taller than any of them, even Earl, who is the tallest man William knows. It has a head-shape sitting on its shoulder-shape, but it has no legs and no arms, either. It is as smooth as the shadow that William casts behind him in the middle of the day, but this shadow is made of bright green glass that shines when the sunlight breaks through the clouds and everybody makes church-sounds, low mmms and ahhs. Most of them are people William has seen before, at Sunday School and at basketball games and at Save-a-Lot on the first of the month. He knows them all, even remembers most of their names, but no one is looking at him. They are looking at what William made. Even though he couldn’t have known what would happen, some part of him believes he had known that something good would come from the bottle, from him. Something beautiful. Something that would draw sixty people into a muddy yard on a weekday morning to stare open-mouthed at a statue grown from fallow ground, and William stares, too. William never wants to stop.
They gather in the yard between the trailers, William and Misty and Penny. The crowd has thinned and Earl is building a new fence around the fallow field. The sound of hammer and wood echo across the bottom so it sounds like the whole holler is being rebuilt.
Penny says, “I don’t know why everybody’s so crazy about it. It’s creepy. Ain’t it creepy?” She looks at William and Misty, who are looking at the field. Penny is starting high school in the fall and she’s never talked so much. Now that she knows the sound of her own voice, she can’t help but say things. Like the minute she stops talking it will be the last, and she has to make sure it’s the right word, the right sound. She says, “And ain’t nobody know where it comes from neither. I don’t hear nobody asking about that. What if somebody planted it on purpose? What if it’s some kind of poison? Mrs. Crawford said it could be a bomb. Or chemicals. It could be some toxic mineral grown up from the mines.”
“I think it’s kinda pretty,” Misty says.
William says, “I think it kinda looks like me.” Especially here, from a distance. All the indents are in the right places—his eyes and his mouth, his ribs and toes. It could be William if he were taller, a William made of glass.
“I don’t see it,” Penny says.
“Maybe from up closer,” Misty says. Penny goes to find out, and calls for Misty to join her, but Misty says William’s name instead and when William turns to look at her, he can’t see anything. Misty’s face has become the yard and the sky and everything in between. Her lips are on his lips, pressing, soft. William blinks when she pulls back.
Misty smiles. “Come on,” she says, and takes off running through the grass.
“Where’s your mother?” Misty asks.
Side by side, bent double so their faces are barely a foot away from the earth, they are looking for worms. Misty’s backyard is the shadiest. The ground is always damp because the trailers have no gutters, so there is nothing to protect the earth from the rain. The ground grows soggy, the soil darkening. Misty’s trailer is farther away from Earl’s, too, which didn’t matter once, but it matters now. Even here, they can still hear the voice of the crowd, can hear someone shout, “Step back!” as William reaches down and digs his fingers into the earth.
“Did you hear me?” Misty asks.
“Dunno,” William says.
“You dunno where she is or you dunno if you heard me?”
“Dunno.”
They find three more worms, all fat and wriggling, their segmented bodies writhing until they are dropped into a Dixie cup half filled with dirt.
Misty says, “My dad hasn’t been home in three days.”
“He working?”
Misty shrugs.
“Don’t he always come back?”
“So far,” she says.
William picks at the dirt under his fingernails. He watches Misty part the dirt with her hands. She is gentle with it. She runs her finger back and forth across the ground until, slowly, the backs of worms appear.
“What’s Penny say?” William asks.
“What’s Penny always say?”
“Something dumb?”
Misty smiles. “Something dumb.”
They walk the worms to the creek. Outside Earl’s trailer, the crowd has thickened. William wants to join them, to hear the things they are saying about the green statue, which has grown another few inches since it appeared two days ago. He wants to hear them talk about how beautiful it is and how strange, how they have never seen anything like it before in their lives, but it seems to scare Misty—the people all knotted together, some they know but plenty they don’t, and the way that Earl drinks right there in front of everyone instead of waiting until he’s inside his trailer like decent folk.