by Jesse Jordan
Published 2016 by Medallion Press, Inc., 4222 Meridian Pkwy, Suite 110, Aurora, IL 60504
The MEDALLION PRESS LOGO is a registered trademark of Medallion Press, Inc.
If you purchase this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
Copyright © 2016 by Jesse Jordan
Cover design by James Tampa
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress
ISBN # 9781942546337
Ricki, Ben, Charlie.
To the three of you.
Clink.
“What . . . ?”
—Abraham
1. In the Beginning
The world was asleep.
Two thirty-five on a Tuesday morning and Stone Grove, Illinois, barely registered a heartbeat. A couple cars, a few dogs barking to each other across the distance, and the sound of Route 83 transporting irregular speeders just outside town. Clusters of dark homes sat interspersed with those which maintained the pulsing eyes of overnight TV.
All of this was visible from the catwalk atop the town’s only working water tower, a fat-bodied marshmallow in desperate need of a paint job, chipped white paint giving way to giant used-to-be-true-blue letters: ST N G VE. The tower sat upon a latticework of triangled steel legs and ladders, set dead in the center of the town’s public-works yard, just behind the city hall/police station building.
And there, on that catwalk, in an old gray hoodie and ill-fitting blue jeans, sat a baby-faced boy with unkempt, double-cowlicked brown hair. James Salley, who’d slipped through a small hole in the public-works fence as he had so many times before, sat on the Stone Grove water-tower catwalk on the morning of his sixteenth birthday, willing himself to stand and jump.
What James actually felt at that moment, though, was his resolve slipping. He’d snuck out so certain, made his way through the sleeping town with rage pulling him on. It was wonderful. The sucking sadness that had filled his brain so long was replaced for a moment, pushed out by this beautiful rage.
Go. Get out of here. Do it. They’ll all see and they’ll . . .
And he’d pulled on his clothes and rushed out quick and quiet and headed for the water tower to end it. Oh, god, the sweet rush; the very thought of an end was the strongest tonic he’d ever felt.
But now, sitting up here, James searched for that rage, that righteousness of purpose, and found nothing. Anxiety grew through his body like vines, spreading the realization—You’re not gonna do it.
Shut up!
James squeezed his eyes tight and replayed the events of that day, rebuilding the shame, testing the sharpness of it against his skin.
Nick Schroeder.
Colin O’Connor.
There were others there. Lots of them.
But those two lived in his mind like real life right now—after school, blinking into the afternoon sun, the tug on his backpack.
“Let me see your drawings, Jimmy.”
“How come you never let us see your drawings, Jimmy?” Nick stepped directly in front of him.
James stopped, awkward and unsure.
Nick’s neck muscles torqued like steel cables as he tilted his head. “Slow down, Jimmy. Where ya headed?”
“Look—”
“Why don’t you come to wrestling practice with us?”
James didn’t even answer. Eyes down, willing the moment to hurry up and hurt and end, he just shook his head.
“Who knows, Jimmy? Maybe you’d be good at it.”
Colin answered with that big laugh, that outdoor Midwest laugh.
Nick rolled his head the other way on his thick neck and smiled. “I could show you some moves.”
“Could you just leave me alone, man?” It took extraordinary effort to mumble those seven words, and as they were out, James tried to push past—and then it all happened, too quick for him to dissect.
Pressure on the back of his head as his right leg swept out in front of him, and then he was on his side. A few wood chips from the playground pressed between the blacktop and his ribs, and he tried to wriggle away.
Nick’s grip mocked the effort. “See, this is called a basket cradle.” His other arm scooped up James’s left knee until it was almost touching James’s face. Nick threw his leg over his and rolled him over, pinning his back with both legs.
Tears built as James wriggled, more helpless than he’d ever felt.
“See, from here it’s an easy pin. It’s also real good for a pink belly.”
“Pink belly!” Colin shrieked as he dropped to the tangle of limbs, pulling back James’s shirt to reveal his soft, dimpled belly.
James kicked. His grunts were uneven and came out with desperate squeaks intermingled, but nothing changed.
“Pink belly, pink belly, pink belly.” Colin giggled, licking both his palms and rubbing them together.
Slap.
Slap.
“Stop!” James saw Gail and Maria and Jess and LaMarcus, and some were laughing and some looked like they didn’t want to be watching this, and he couldn’t decide which was worse as the tears started to pour over his face.
Slap.
Slap.
Slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap.
James tried to tell them to stop. He tried to curse them with the worst words he knew. But nothing would come. Instead, he began to sob, and the crying seized his breathing, and his belly burned.
Colin stopped and stood up, wearing a defensive smile. “Oh my god, dude, I barely got you. You’re fine.”
Nick released the hold and rolled up to his feet in one athletic movement. “It’s okay, man. Jimmy’s sensitive. He’s an artist.” He laughed, but no one joined in. He pinched James’s stomach hard. “Got that soft pink piggy belly.”
James pulled his shirt down and noticed Jess walking off, along with a few others, though he couldn’t see who. Nick turned to say something to them, and in the instant he was ignored, James scrambled up, dragging his backpack, and ran. Behind him, Nick shouted something, but mercifully it was lost in the wind and pulse buffeting his ears.
James remembered that feeling of running, tears cooling on his cheeks, stomach on fire, and he stood up on the water-tower catwalk. He leaned against the railing, feeling it press against his sternum. He leaned out over the edge. Push out. Up and out.
James wondered how they’d talk about it at school. He wondered if they’d blame Nick. The idea had seemed like an attack before—an offensive act after so much defense. But now, as he thought about the actual effects, it seemed more like admitting defeat. His suicide wouldn’t destroy or haunt Nick Schroeder. Who knows what Nick would feel? Furthermore, he didn’t particularly care.
Would they see it as confirmation? He was weak: of course he quit; of course he chickened out.
James leaned out farther and concentrated on the ground. He saw himself leaping forward, tipping headfirst. An instant of falling, the ground screaming at him. And then . . . the smash. The crack? What would it be like when he and the concrete collided? He imagined the thunderclap shockwave of it through his whole self.
It was im
possible to deny how terrified he was.
I could do it! I’m not scared.
Who are you trying to convince?
James let out his breath, and the last of his energy went with it—the last of this self-deception. The fog cleared, and the realization sat there, staring at him: You’re not gonna jump. You were never really gonna jump.
Nothing was going to happen. Nothing was going to change. James could see Nick at him again tomorrow. He could see a thousand more lunches eaten alone, a thousand more nights spent in his room, cut off.
James Salley stood on the catwalk of the Stone Grove water tower overlooking the sleeping town, and he saw the rest of his life laid out before him.
And he began to cry.
2. The Ordinary World
James looked down at the plate and the piece of paper whose edge was pinned beneath it. On the plate sat three orange Danish, no longer hot from the oven. James’s mom always made him orange Danish1 on his birthday, though in the past she’d managed to deliver the pastry personally every time.
The letter read:
Hey, Lovie,2
Dad and I both had to work early this morning. Enjoy your Danish! Give me a call later and let me know where you want to go for your birthday dinner.
Love you and Happy Birthday from Mom and Dad!
(Oh, and Dad said to remind you that soccer sign-ups are this weekend.)
Love you.
James put one Danish in his mouth as he headed for the laundry room. It was just as he’d suspected—barely lukewarm, the icing already congealing.
James kicked around the laundry room for a while as he ate, picking up shirts and casting them aside. This step always slowed the process; such is the torture of the chubby, the bulky, the thick—the husky, as Mom liked to say. There are so many ways any shirt can be wrong; so few in which it can be right.
James settled on a loose, long-sleeve T-shirt and returned to the kitchen to eat another Danish and stare at the news on the kitchen TV. It washed over him, the same old stories,3 but failed to penetrate. James replayed last night, wondering now in the bright clarity of morning how close he’d really been. And he replayed the afternoon before with Nick. But now, more than the helplessness and the pain, it was the shame that stung. He could feel new fear being born as he saw himself crying, saw all those eyes on him.
Dread. That was what hit big. Dread to go there, to see any of them.
Was this dread really that different from his regular dread, though? His daily dread? Most likely, he figured, they’ll just ignore me like always.
James grabbed the last Danish and slipped his backpack on. He pushed his feet into sneakers and almost sorta smiled. How many times had he cursed his ostracism, pleaded with God for it to end? And here he was, so used to it that it’d become a source of comfort. It was a blanket, and he wrapped it around himself now for protection.
James scanned the note once more. He crumpled it and tossed it in the garbage, and stepped out the back door.
His parents were around less and less these days. Both climbing and, it appeared to James, terrified that if they stopped for a moment they’d be fired—maybe publicly shamed and put out as well. At least that was how they acted. It seemed things were going well. A few promotions, a few raises. They both drove nicer cars and looked at bigger houses a lot and talked about moving, but that was about it. To James, life didn’t seem much different from back when they treated work like it was just a job.
And the soccer thing. Jesus Christ. At what point exactly did my weight become his business? I’m actually pretty average. Okay, sure, maybe I have a little too much baby fat still, but it’s not like I’m . . .
James thought of those peers of his who had, in the last couple years, grown into sleek missiles of coiled muscle. He still had a soft belly, and his chest was flabbier than he would have liked. He did not, however, have tits. This was an important distinction. Ken Lakatos had tits. Ken was a massive, black-haired awkward kid, and the folds of his chest were a source of constant glee among the boys of George Washington High School. So much so that James, who was in the same gym class, would watch Ken out of the corner of his eye, waiting for the moment Ken removed his shirt in order to remove his own, knowing that whatever ridicule was about to be unleashed on Ken would draw any possible attention away from him. Still, James considered himself far from obese; more importantly, he didn’t recall asking for his father’s help with the issue.
Across the street loomed The Eights, the stretch of four-story, redbrick apartment buildings that ran along the south side of the train tracks.4 James crossed the parking lot and cut between two of The Eights, to where the makeshift track entrance was. Stone Grove, you see, was perfectly bisected by the train tracks. Two parallel steel tracks sitting on rows of wooden teeth, themselves raised on gray-and-white stones, which dipped away to each side, forming little embankments. At the lowest points of these embankments, guarding both flanks of the tracks, were six-foot-tall chain-link fences that, if they scratched you, seemed to instantly convey a subtle itching and burning, a feeling that lockjaw and infection were imminent.
Main Street and Orange Street, being the main north/south thoroughfares, offered breaks in the fences and the freedom to cross, and this arrangement seemed to work fine for all those blessed with automobiles. For kids, though, bolt cutters were visas. A few years earlier, the police made a concerted effort to repair and arrest, but the futility of it soon became so obvious that even the higher-ups understood. After that a kind of unspoken truce was made: We’ll let you keep the access points, but don’t be a dick and cut them every five feet. The citizenry, for the most part, obliged.
James arrived at the farthest east access hole in The Eights as he did every morning, but just as he was about to duck through, he noticed the freight train. Lost in his recriminations of Dad, James hadn’t heard the train until it was close, only fifty feet or so to his left and on the far tracks. For a moment he considered going for it, just sprinting across the rocks and over the tracks. He could probably make it, too. Probably.
He pictured himself running, saw the rocks slipping loose underneath, becoming a conveyor belt, his foot comically shooting out behind him as he falls on the tracks. His head connects with the steel with the grotesque crack of skull meeting metal, and then he just lies there.
His heart picked up, beating with ancient animal purpose as he watched the James in his mind prone on the rail and tried to pull him back to consciousness: He flips open punch-drunk eyes just in time to see the razor-hammer wheel meet the track where his head lies, where it offers no resistance as it bursts.
James shook his head just as the train made it to him and continued past.
He hated the trains. Hated the horns, the screech of brakes, the mind-blanking rumbling roar. But more than anything, James hated how constant they seemed; unable to stop or turn, unfazed by all of us, just unrelenting metal monsters.
This feeling was worse than it had once been. Last February, on a crisp Tuesday morning when everything was covered in a night’s worth of heavy, fresh snow, James walked this same path toward school, his mind on postsleep autopilot, feet following a muscle-memory route, until the moment he ducked through the hole in the fence, when he realized something was very wrong. Cops and firefighters gathered around the tracks about thirty yards to the west, and at the base of the decline, pressed up against the fence, was a body. There was a dark cloth over it, but the wind kept blowing up large enough segments to see a crumpled shape beneath, as if some giant had merely picked up a person, squeezed out everything that made them real, and then dropped the lifeless collection of bones and slack muscle on the ground. One bare foot poked out the entire time, facing James.
It wasn’t until later that day at school that he finally learned what’d happened. Some drunk lady (apparently well known locally for her habitual presence at area bars and occasional explosions of passion and effrontery) was walking home around five in the morning when she—eithe
r accidentally or on purpose—ended up on the same track as a cross-country freight. James still saw her in his mind, especially when it snowed, and he found variations on the foot sneaking into his drawings occasionally, as if her corpse was a germ which had entered through his eye and infected his mind.
James blinked away the vision and leaned back against the fence. And just as he did—at the exact moment his back touched the chain links—he noticed a black SUV in the parking lot across from him.
It was nothing special. Just a truck. Still, there was something about it.
Even though the parking lot was only half full, the SUV was parked all the way over at the east end, so that no other car was within fifty feet of it.
James hiked up the strap on his shoulder and considered the vehicle.
Below the level of the tracks, James watched between the bottom of the cars and the rails, so that he could see the SUV both underneath and between the cars of the train. Through this flipbook vision, James began to feel something was, well . . . off. It was a Cadillac Escalade, and at first he figured it was parked off by itself because the owner was paranoid about damages or maybe having some early-morning affair. But then James noticed the white exhaust drifting away—and then he saw him.
Seated behind the wheel was a single man in dark clothes. It looked like he had blond hair. James couldn’t make out his face because there was something in front of it, something black and boxy. James leaned away from the fence and realized it was a camera—and it was pointed directly at him.
He’s probably just filming the train.
The train? Who films trains?
Well, whatta you think? You think he’s filming you?
I don’t know. It’s weird.
If he’s a pervert, then he’s making the lamest kiddie porn ever.
James could not dislodge the feeling that the blond man was watching him. He looked to the left and saw the end of the train coming around the trees, maybe two or three hundred yards off. He took a few steps in that direction before looking back to the Escalade. It really seemed like the camera followed him. James felt that ugly, little-kid fear tighten his scrotum, and he shook his head because he was being silly. He checked left—the end of the train was a hundred yards away and picking up speed. When he looked back, the man in the Escalade seemed to have noticed it too.