All Flesh Is Grass by Clifford D. Simak Page A

could stand. Old Stiffy Grant laid out in my kitchen just the night before and now along comes Tupper, without a stitch upon him. Eccentrics were all right, and in a little town you get a lot of them, but there came a time when they ran a little thin.
    I still held tightly to his elbow and marched him to the bedroom.
    â€œYou stand right there,” I told him.
    He stood right there, not moving, gaping at the room with his vacant stare.
    I found a shirt and a pair of trousers. I got out a pair of shoes and, after looking at his feet, put them back again. They were, I knew, way too small. Tupper’s feet were all spraddled out and flattened. He’d probably been going without shoes for years.
    I held out the trousers and the shirt.
    â€œYou get into these,” I said. “And once you have them on, stay here. Don’t stir out of this room.”
    He didn’t answer and he didn’t take the clothes. He’d fallen once again to counting his fingers.
    And now, for the first time, I had a chance to wonder where he’d been. How could a man drop out of sight, without a trace, stay lost for ten years, and then pop up again, out of that same thin air into which he had disappeared?
    It had been my first year in high school that Tupper had turned up missing and I remembered it most vividly because for a week all of the boys had been released from school to join the hunt for him. We had combed miles of fields and woodlands, walking slowly in line an arm’s length from one another, and finally we had been looking for a body rather than a man. The state police had dragged the river and several nearby ponds. The sheriff and a posse of townspeople had worked carefully through the swamp below Stiffy’s shack, prodding with long poles. They had found innumerable logs and a couple of wash boilers that someone had thrown away and on the further edge of the swamp an anciently dead dog. But no one had found Tupper.
    â€œHere,” I told him, “take these clothes and get into them.”
    Tupper finished with his fingers and politely wiped his chin.
    â€œI must be getting back,” he said. “The flowers can’t wait too long.”
    He reached out a hand and took the clothes from me.
    â€œMy other ones wore out,” he said. “They just dropped off of me.”
    â€œI saw your mother just half an hour ago,” I said. “She was looking for you.”
    It was a risky thing to say, for Tupper was the kind of jerk that you handled with kid gloves. But I took the calculated risk and said it, for I thought that maybe it would jolt some sense into him.
    â€œOh,” he said lightly, “she’s always hunting for me. She thinks I ain’t big enough to look out for myself.”
    As if he’d never been away. As if ten years hadn’t passed. As if he’d stepped out of his mother’s house no more than an hour ago. As if time had no meaning for him—and perhaps it hadn’t.
    â€œPut on the clothes,” I told him. “I’ll be right back.”
    I went out into the living room and picked up the phone. I dialed Doc Fabian’s number. The busy signal blurped at me.
    I put the receiver back and tried to think of someone else to call. I could call Hiram Martin. Perhaps he was the one to call. But I hesitated. Doc was the man to handle this; he knew how to handle people. All that Hiram knew was how to push them round.
    I dialed Doc once more and still got the busy signal.
    I slammed down the receiver and hurried toward the bedroom. I couldn’t leave Tupper alone too long. God knows what he might do.
    But I already had waited too long. I never should have left him.
    The bedroom was empty. The window was open and the screen was broken out and there was no Tupper.
    I rushed across the room and leaned out of the window and there was no sign of him.
    Blind panic hit me straight between the eyes. I don’t know why it did. Certainly, at that