René Steinke
The Field
It was a hot day in June, the humidity on her skin like a lotion from the air.
The field was at the end of a dirt road, not far from her house. Isabel wasn’t allowed to go there, but she went anyway because her mother was only trying to keep her from growing up brave.
“Come on!” Isabel rushed Amy along.
Isabel’s dad had bought her the metal detector at a garage sale for her twelfth birthday. “You can find treasure around here,” he’d said, his eyes squeezed narrow from smiling. But he’d said it as if he doubted she ever would.
The field looked dead and full of weeds, the bored-looking oil derrick see-sawing in the distance, but this land had seen things older than her dad and her mom, and Isabel was hopeful there was something valuable to be found there. It was stupid that she was only allowed to use the metal detector around town, searching under swing sets and monkey bars, or beneath the Kroger parking lot.
Amy was tall and cranky and not afraid of most things, which was why Isabel liked her, but she wasn’t allowed to say “lucky,” she had to say “blessed.” They had only about half an hour left before they’d have to head back and recite the lie about where they’d gone: to the drugstore to buy makeup and to treasure-hunt along the dismal strip mall sidewalk. In case they needed proof, Isabel had a packet of eye shadow and an unopened lip gloss in her pocket.
They moved to the brown, cooked part of the field, where the bald dirt was flecked with pitiful hairs of weeds. “This is where I found the bone,” said Isabel. It was long with a curved, beige, shallow bowl at the end. She hadn’t been able to tell what kind of creature’s skeleton it had been broken from. “I buried it again over that way and put a cross on top of it.”
They both held the handle of the metal detector, because it was getting heavy and because they decided to treat it like the piece on a Ouija board, to direct them. Four hands were better than two for divining what you couldn’t see.
“Hold it straight,” Isabel said. She listened for the beep, watched for the light at the handle to flash red. Nothing.
“No offense,” said Amy, “but this is kind of boring. Can’t we go back to your house and watch YouTube?”
“I thought you wanted to find some jewelry.”
“I did,” said Amy. “But if you think about it, who’d be wearing good jewelry out here?”
The field went on for miles, desolate and ugly, the ground flat and utilitarian as cardboard. The torn-looking foliage and brown dirt seemed to be waiting; the silent birds overhead watched.
The light flashed undecidedly.
“Wait,” said Amy. “Is that something?”
Isabel put her eye near the indicator so she could see the spot. She bent down and marked it with the small shovel, then dug a few inches into the dirt. “Do you see anything?”
“No,” said Amy. “Hold it closer.”
Amy knelt on the ground, pointed the metal detector at the hole. The beeping grew more frequent.
Isabel sifted through the dirt and finally saw the dull metal—a rusted post about the size of a serving fork. It could be old or not so old, but still worthless. So far, being twelve was filled with disappointments like this one.
“That’s it?” said Amy, chewing on her thumbnail. Isabel looked up at the clotted gray cloud overhead and saw an open mouthed face that seemed to be laughing.
“Okay, let’s go back.” Isabel handed Amy the lip gloss. “If my mom asks, that’s what you got.”
If you crossed this field and went to the next one, then crossed that field, too, you would eventually get to the oil fields where, years ago, the bodies of 20 murdered girls had been found. Her mother didn’t know that she knew. When Isabel went into the field nearest her home, she talked to the girls, though they were far away. She wanted to be friendly, to let them know she wouldn’t forget how they’d been taken from the earth. She wanted to remember that, before the TV show, before the pictures in the news and the rumors, they had once been as real as she was now. “I’m sorry for what happened to you,” she told them. “If you want to talk, I’ll hear you.” She imagined the voice of a dead girl would be low and hushed like wind blown over an open bottle.
Online, Isabel had found a map hand-drawn by someone named Cobin. It was brown and tattered at the edges, but the markings looked digitized. The dotted lines snaked through a mysterious field supposedly located near the mouth of Clear Creek, and Isabel had a strong feeling it was this field. Cobin’s website didn’t say that, in 1965, some gold coins and part of a
cannon had washed up in Clear Creek. Isabel’s history teacher, who had lived nearby, had told this to the class and when Isabel saw the map, she remembered that.
She’d studied the map so many times, she’d memorized it. But the last time, she noticed a new mark and wondered if Cobin had recently added it. He was too busy to have found the Clear Creek treasure himself. There were so many videos of him finding pirates’ gold coins over in Corpus Christi.
On a Wednesday, she asked Charlie if he’d look for lost things in the field with her. He was thirteen and usually did whatever she asked. He had long hair that fell over his ears, and he wore an expression that reminded her of a good-looking stray dog. She knew if she was caught, she’d get in less trouble if she wasn’t caught out there alone. Her mother thought it was bad manners to yell at Isabel in front of others.
Isabel didn't want to end up as scared of life as her mother was, never doing anything fun, never looking beyond the backyard birdbath. Her mother’s tiny courage was so well hidden, you could only see hints of it in the way she said “goddamn” and slammed her hand down on the nearest surface, or in the way she drove fast and sang loud along I-45. Isabel lied so that one day she could prove herself by discovering treasure, and then her mother would show everyone her own secret bravery. She knew that’s how it would go.
It had just rained, and the front lawn was magnified with green. When Charlie met her at the end of the street, he was wearing sunglasses and cowboy boots. Isabel pointed at his feet. “Those good for walking in the mud?”
He sniffed. “Good enough.” He was exactly her height and had a long, narrow nose and freckles. Anyone could see he was handsome. He was very polite and moved his body as if bragging about it.
He carried the metal detector and even the shovel and wire cutter as they walked to the edge of the field. “Where to?” he said. She recalled the map and pointed in the direction of cement cylinders and tangles of wires, about a hundred yards away.
As they walked, she felt his knuckles graze the back of her hand. On this side of the field, the metal detector beeped hysterically. They stopped and dug in four places. They found rusted screws, metal scraps, the head of a hammer. This stuff seemed to impress Charlie, though she couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses. “I’d like to figure out what it was they were building out here,” he said. He rubbed a metal bolt, seemed to measure it, and the drone of a wasp circled their heads. His workman-like interest crushed her hope of ever finding anything worthwhile.
As they walked again, she noticed a plastic basin nestled in the ground, with an oily green liquid pooled in the bottom, a skin of wobbly rainbow. “What is that?”
“Just rain mixed with oil,” said Charlie. “You know.” He nodded toward the up and down motion of the oil derrick in the distance.
On the way back, they stopped near one of the cement cylinders because the light flashed red. Charlie took off his sunglasses and slipped them into his shirt pocket. He set down the equipment, picked up a small square of metal, and said, “Huh.” Then he threw it to the ground, pulled her around, and kissed her. His tongue was a fish that tasted like metal. He pulled away and said, “You like finding all this stuff.”
“Not really,” she said “Then why do you do it?”
“Because one time, there might be something valuable.”
“Yeah.” He looked at her in a pleading way. “There might be.” Their faces were covered in sweat, and there was a thin, acrid smell through the heat.
As they walked back together, Isabel saw a short woman with long black hair come out of the ranch house at the edge of the field. Charlie stopped, rested the metal detector against his leg, and kissed her again. She thought, “I’m supposed to like this,” but worried about the woman watching them. After the kiss, she didn’t know what to say. As they approached the edge of the field, the woman went back inside her house.
When Isabel got home, she was grounded.
Her dad went into her room, grabbed the metal detector, muttered, “Shitty piece of junk,” and took it out to the trashcan at the curb. When he came back inside, Isabel wept and hugged him and told him she was sorry. “It’s the best present you ever gave me,” she said. “Please!” Finally, he softened in his jaw and shoulders and said, “All right, you can keep it, but only if you promise not to go near that boy or that goddamn field.” She nodded and went out to the trash cans. She had to dislodge the metal detector from the bottles and foil tins, and she shook off the stray coffee grounds. As she brought it back inside, raindrops fell on her face.
If she’d told her dad she needed the metal detector for hope, he would’ve pretended not to hear her. He’d have put on his baseball hat and asked if she wanted to go get ice cream.
She looked online at pictures of the girls who had been killed. One looked like her friend Amy, but with longer hair. One looked like she was about to say something she shouldn’t, something she knew she might regret. Another one’s melancholy forehead didn’t go with her wide, white grin. One wore black mascara like wings over her eyes. Some of them would have been her mother’s age now, if they hadn’t died, and that was confusing, because Isabel pictured them still as girls. She didn’t think about the still-not-caught killer or what he might have done to them. That would’ve been disrespectful. Each girl had lived inside of herself for all of the time before the last day. Each girl had her own private heart and brain. That was why, when Isabel
could manage to go alone, she talked to them out in the field. It was important to tell them that someone remembered them not just dead, but alive— the sneakers they wore, whether they preferred Snickers or KitKats, their detentions and honor rolls, the mistakes they made practicing the piano, their graceful backflips, their in-jokes and nicknames.
Weeks later, when her dad was at work and her mother at a garden meeting, Isabel took the metal detector into the field. “Help me find the treasure,” she said. She recited their names. Christy. Beth. Mary. Alina. Susan. Kathy. Elizabeth. Juanita. Ann. Dawn. Gretel. Nancy. Tammy. Leah.
Carrying the shovel and tools in a bag on her back, she followed the paces on the map and held the metal detector high, though her arms were getting tired. Near the spot she’d calculated, the metal detector beeped and the lights flashed. She set the equipment down and began to dig. Overhead, the sky was blank white. The shovel was harder to pitch as she went deeper. The dirt turned to a clay that smelled of cold weather and the inside of plants. But it was good to be in the field alone, digging, without another person’s clatter and shadow.
Finally, the shovel hit something hard—a sheen of silver just barely visible. She dug around it, then bent down, dropped the shovel. She pulled out the box. It was the length of her forearm, plain and scratched, with a flower molded into the tin.
If she knelt there under that silent sky, with her ears and eyes open, something good was bound to come. She would hear them, and she would be brave. She opened the box.
Inside, against the green velvet, there was a silver ring formed from two hands clasping. A bracelet with a pearl inside a shell charm. A plain gold cross on a broken chain.
René Steinke’s most recent novel, Friendswood, was named one of NPR’s Great Reads and was short-listed for the St. Francis Literary Prize. Her previous novel, Holy Skirts, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. Her essays and articles appear in The New York Times, Vogue, O Magazine, Salon, Bookforum, and elsewhere. She has taught at the New School and Columbia University, and is currently director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Fairleigh Dickinson.