The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek

by Rhett McLaughlin

  Leif pressed the light on his calculator watch: 12:09. He was glad to be early—more time to rev himself up to make this happen. He figured the most appropriate moment would be after they’d picked Alicia up and made it to the woods. The woods, after all, were very romantic. While Rex scoped out the shots, Leif would open his heart to Alicia.

  “Hey, dude,” Rex said, gliding up on his foot-powered scooter.

  “You’re still riding that thing?” Leif asked. It was too dark to make out all the features of Rex’s face, which, after his encounter with the raccoon, freaked him out a little.

  “Uh, yeah,” Rex said, “and I’m gonna be riding it for a while. They’re predicting that by 1998, bikes will be practically extinct. No offense.”

  “Who is they? And objects can’t go extinct.”

  “You know what I mean. Obsolete.”

  “Isn’t a bike actually faster and more efficient than a scooter?”

  “See, that’s where you’re wrong,” Rex said, caressing the scooter’s handlebars. “This puppy has serious speed. You’re just not using it right.”

  “I’ve never ridden a scooter.”

  “Exactly. You just proved my point. Now let’s go get Alicia.”

  Leif was not a fan of Rex’s tendency to declare things cool no matter what counterevidence was presented, or the way he took it upon himself to prematurely end arguments to preserve the illusion that he was right. But it didn’t matter, because Rex had already sped ahead with a series of rapid Flintstones-style pushes off the pavement. Leif hopped on his bike and, even with the late start, easily caught up to him.

  As Rex placed his scooter on the grass near the curb, Leif put down his kickstand, acutely aware of the pounding in his chest. Now that he was standing with Rex at the foot of Alicia’s lawn, he was having second thoughts.

  “Call her,” Rex said, nudging Leif with his shoulder.

  “Oh, right.” Leif put one loose fist over his mouth and delivered one of his patented turkey mating calls, a sort of seductive gobble that he’d mastered a few years earlier at Baptist boys’ camp.

  They focused on Alicia’s first-floor bedroom window, her lamp already on, illuminating the opposite wall, which featured her collection of posters showcasing her excellent taste in pop culture, including one of Larry and Balki from the TV show Perfect Strangers. Leif had always wondered if Alicia saw Rex and him as Larry and Balki, and in this moment, as he prepared to profess his deepest feelings for her, he realized that he was definitely Balki. He didn’t know whether that was good or bad. Maybe his proclamation could wait.

  Just then, the window opened and Alicia’s dark curls emerged, blocking both Larry and Balki from view. She flashed a sly grin when she saw the dark outlines of her best friends. Leif grinned back, his second thoughts evaporating. He felt a serenity wash over him. He didn’t need to work on his precise wording—he would let the rhythm of the moment guide him. It was all so much simpler than he’d—

  Suddenly, Alicia screamed, as two hands grabbed her shoulders and attempted to yank her back inside.

  Leif and Rex stared in the darkness, speechless.

  “Get off me!” Alicia shouted, writhing back and forth.

  “Her parents…?” Leif asked, but Rex was already in a crouched run, his backpack sticking out like a turtle shell as he headed toward the window. Leif followed, but this time catching up was harder; he’d never seen Rex run this fast in his life.

  It wasn’t fast enough, though. Just as he got to the window (a full two seconds before Leif), Alicia’s grip on the windowsill gave out and she disappeared.

  “Rex! Leif! Helmmmphsseh!” Alicia shouted from inside. Leif ignored the tiny voice in his head that wondered why she’d shouted Rex’s name first. He peered in and shuddered. Two men in beige coveralls were lugging her out of her bedroom.

  What the hell…?

  “Get off her!” Rex shouted through the window as he climbed in after them.

  “Yeah!” Leif added, following Rex’s lead and wincing as he felt the sting of a splinter from the sill dig into his calf. He had no idea what the two of them would do once they caught up to the kidnappers, but it turned out to be a moot question. Alicia’s door slammed shut when they were halfway across the room.

  Rex tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. One of the men was blocking it. “Come on,” Rex said to Leif. They threw their bodies against the door.

  “Go home, boys,” a strained but familiar voice said from the other side.

  Leif and Rex stopped pushing. They stared at each other, dumbfounded. “Mr. Boykins?” Leif asked.

  “I know you’re trying to help Alicia,” he continued, “but we know what’s best for her.”

  “You don’t understand!” Rex shouted. “Two guys just—”

  “We know, Rex,” Mr. Boykins said. “Please, this is hard enough as it is.”

  Leif heard a scuffling from outside and ran to the window, where he saw the men putting a still-writhing Alicia into the back of a white van parked at the curb. If Leif hadn’t been so busy planning his stupid love confession, maybe he would have noticed it earlier. Rex vaulted out the window past Leif, shouting, “Get off our friend, you jerks!”

  Leif threw himself out the window after Rex, but without deciding exactly how he was planning to land, ended up facefirst in the grass. He leapt up from the ground in time to see the van’s back doors slam and hear the engine rev up.

  “Easy with that lip, son,” one of the men said, still standing by the closed doors. “You could be next.” He popped into the passenger seat and the van took off. Rex had reached his scooter, which he picked up and began wildly propelling down the street with his giraffish left leg. It certainly looked like he was going fast.

  Leif ran to his bike, flipped up the kickstand, and jumped on his pedals all in one motion.

  “Don’t follow them,” Mr. Boykins said from the front porch, clad in a bathrobe, an arm around Mrs. Boykins as she wept into her hands. “Please, Leif. After what happened today…Don’t make this any worse for Alicia than you already have.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Leif said, and he suddenly understood that the Boykinses hadn’t actually been okay with the whole pushing-Mr.-Whitewood-onto-a-grill situation, not at all.

  Leif knew where Alicia was being taken.

  He took off on his bike, Mr. Boykins shouting his name three more times before his voice faded into the distance. Leif was impressed with how far up the street Rex had gotten, but he was clearly out of breath, and the van was almost out of sight.

  “They’re taking her to the Whitewood School,” Leif said.

  “Oh, shit,” Rex said between gasps. “We gotta go there!”

  He continued to swing his leg around and pump his scooter down the narrow road after the white speck in the distance. Once again, Leif had no idea what the plan would be once they caught up to the abductors, but he knew they had no choice but to follow. He felt stupid for not seeing this coming; after you’d grilled the hands of a man who runs a reform school, chances were good you’d end up there.

  Leif had always heard the stories about kids snatched away in the night, but, like most people, he’d dismissed them as urban legends, designed to scare them into being good kids who went with the flow. Seeing one of these snatchings up close, and happening to his best friend, was traumatic to say the least.

  Leif looked for Rex, as he often did in anxiety-provoking situations, knowing that his calmer, less panicky energy would be grounding. But no one was there. Rex had fallen far behind. Leif experienced the briefest moment of satisfaction before rapidly U-turning.

  “Leave the scooter,” Leif said, pedaling alongside him. “Hop on my pegs.” Another burst of intense satisfaction. Rex had been making fun of Leif’s “unnecessary” bike pegs for years.

  “No, you go ahead,” Rex said. “
It’s not the scooter. I just haven’t developed my scooter leg enough yet.”

  Leif couldn’t believe that, even now, in hot pursuit of their kidnapped best friend, Rex refused to admit defeat.

  “Your scooter leg?” Leif couldn’t help but ask.

  “Yeah, the pushing leg. It takes months to have a reliable scooter leg,” Rex insisted.

  “So I’m just gonna take these guys on alone?” Leif asked.

  “No, I’ll definitely catch up. My leg’s about to get a second wind.”

  “We’re wasting time!” Leif could no longer see any sign of the white van. “Just get on my pegs!”

  Rex kept scooting.

  “I agree it’s your scooter leg and not the scooter,” Leif said.

  Rex abruptly hopped off his scooter and tossed it under a shrub on the side of the road. He stepped onto the two pegs jutting out from Leif’s back wheel, his hands on Leif’s shoulders. “Burn it.”

  And Leif did. He pedaled like he’d never pedaled before, rocketing forward even with the extra 150 pounds of lanky human freight. The fiery pain in his thighs was overwhelming, but as the boys rounded the last turn on Creek Road, the white dot reappeared ahead, and that was all the motivation Leif needed.

  Soon the lights at the Whitewood School gate came into view, the only indication that there was anything behind the pine trees lining the road. On the rare occasion when Leif had passed by the school, secluded as it was on the far side of town, he’d been unsettled with how the utilitarian chain-link fence seemed much more like the gateway to a prison than to an educational institution. But that was the least of his concerns now. By the time he’d pedaled them to the entrance, one of the men was locking the gate, then hopping into the van and heading up the long driveway toward Alicia’s new home.

  “Alicia!” Rex shouted, hopping off the pegs and grabbing the fence, shaking it to punctuate his anger. Leif joined him, passionately rattling the links as headlights briefly illuminated one side of the three-story school in the distance before the van disappeared behind it.

  Alicia was gone.

  “We gotta get in there, man!” Rex said, reaching up as if he was about to climb the fence.

  “And then do what?” Leif asked. “Alicia’s parents sent her here. If we somehow get her out, they’ll just send her back.”

  “But…” Rex still had both hands and one foot on the fence. “So that’s it? We’re just giving up on her?”

  “I…I don’t know,” Leif said, wiping his wet cheeks, grateful for the cover of night. “Maybe.”

  “Aaaargh!” Rex shouted, pulling himself away from the fence and violently kicking at nothing. Save for the light from the lampposts on each side of the gate, darkness was all around them.

  Leif stared down the shadowy driveway, feeling like his heart had been injured. It didn’t seem real that he wouldn’t see Alicia tomorrow. Or the next day. She was right there in that building, just a bike ride away, and yet she might as well have been on the other side of the globe. Or in Nebraska.

  “We should probably get back,” Rex said, seconds (or minutes?) later. “I don’t want my parents to realize it’s my punching bag in my bed and not me.”

  “You think they’d fall for that?”

  “No. That’s why I’m saying we should get back.”

  “Yeah.” Leif flipped his kickstand, let Rex step up on the pegs, and started pedaling toward home. “My mom had an overnight shift, so…she’s not even home yet. You want me to drop you off at your scooter?”

  “Nah. I’ll get it tomorrow.”

  They rode to Rex’s house in silence.

  “Hey, Leif,” Rex said out of nowhere, and Leif had the funny thought that maybe Rex had read his mind, that he was about to tell Leif what a great couple he and Alicia would make someday. “Good call on the bike pegs.”

  Or not.

  Leif nodded and kept pedaling.

  3

  IT HAD ONLY been two days, but Janine Blitstein was already tired of Bleak Creek.

  Things that had seemed charming and quaint during her childhood summertime visits now seemed, at best, out of touch and, at worst, annoyingly backward. It completely boggled her mind that her mother had grown up here. Then again, her mom had left town as soon as she could, so in that way it made perfect sense.

  It occurred to Janine why this trip felt so different: It was the first one she’d made on her own. Every other time, her parents had been there to offer their commentary, which, once she and her brother, Jared, were teenagers, was usually her mom railing against the patriarchy baked into Bleak Creek’s churches or the xenophobia hidden beneath the town’s folksy demeanor, and her dad—a Jewish guy from New Jersey—voicing his wry befuddlement at pretty much all of it. But now, a decade or so later, the only commentary was inside Janine’s own head. Her eighty-one-year-old grandmother, GamGam, certainly wasn’t providing any. Which left Janine in a constant state of feeling slightly insane. And lonely.

  “Tell me more about the first kidney stone you remember,” she said now, one eye on the lens of her camcorder, making sure that her grandmother was still framed well.

  “Ooooohhhhh, honey, do I remember it!” GamGam said, leaning slightly forward in her floral chair. “Though, I’ll tell ya, Neenie, I’d like to forget it!”

  “Uh, don’t use my name, GamGam,” Janine said, standing up from behind the tripod. “Remember, just talk to me like I’m a stranger who’s never been to Bleak Creek.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, sweetheart. You’ve told me that goin’ on a dozen times now. Guess I’m not used to bein’ a big movie star yet.” GamGam winked. “Now where was I…?”

  “That first stone.” This was Janine’s second interview with GamGam, and she felt considerably less enthused than she had yesterday during the first. But she knew that if she asked the right questions, she’d find what she was looking for: confirmation that this project—the reason she’d flown down here to stay with her grandmother for a couple weeks—was a brilliant idea.

  “Oh right, my first stone,” GamGam said. “I named it Mildred.”

  “You named it?”

  “I name ’em all! Name ’em after people that did me wrong. But I tell ya, it never matters what I name ’em—they all hurt like the Devil!”

  Nope. It didn’t seem brilliant yet.

  “I wouldn’t wish stones on my worst enemies,” GamGam continued. “Except maybe Evelyn Barber, the one who spread a rumor that I was a Democrat. All I said was that I thought Bill Clinton was a good-lookin’ man, which is true! He’s what you might call…sexy.” GamGam made a clicking sound with her mouth, her go-to way of accenting anything she considered particularly edgy. “But I’m still a Bush lady all the way.”

  “Yep, can’t get too much Bush,” Janine said for her own amusement. “How many people do you know in Bleak Creek who regularly get kidney stones?” She was trying to keep the momentum of the interview going, but it felt like rolling a boulder up a hill.

  “Hmm, let’s see,” GamGam said, staring at the popcorn ceiling. “There’s me, there’s Evelyn,”—she rolled her eyes—“Christine Neally, John Reed, Harriet Logan, Ted Yarbrough…” As the list went on, Janine had a sinking feeling in her stomach. She probably would’ve been better off asking GamGam to explain why she found Bill Clinton so sexy.

  The idea for this project had come to her less than seventy-two hours earlier, while on the phone with her mom, who’d been worried about GamGam’s recent struggles with gout. “Along with all the kidney stones she’s had,” Janine’s mother had said, “it’s made her doctor concerned about—”

  “Wait,” Janine interrupted. “Kidney stones? Plural? I thought it was just the one.”

  “No, she’s passed eleven this year alone. We’ve told you this, sweetie.” Janine hadn’t visited Bleak Creek since finishing undergrad, but she was ashamed
to think she’d tuned out vital information about her beloved grandmother’s health.

  “Eleven in one year? That’s a ridiculous number of kidney stones.”

  “Well, it is and isn’t,” her mother said. “For Bleak Creek, that’s not unusual.”

  “What the…?”

  “I know, right?” Her mom laughed. “Growing up there, I got so used to people passing kidney stones, I didn’t even know it was weird until I left.”

  “Yeah. It’s definitely weird, Mom.”

  “You remember GamGam’s friend Rose?”

  “Nosy Rosy? Of course.”

  “She passed thirty-one last year.”

  “Thirty-one kidney stones? That’s, like, one every couple weeks!” Janine hadn’t been this curious about anything in months. “What the hell is going on in that town, Mom? Like, seriously!”

  And that’s when the idea hit her:

  What the hell is going on in that town?

  “Oh, you’re making it sound way more dramatic than it is,” Janine’s mother said, chuckling. “It’s still just kidney stones.”

  Janine barely heard her, though, as her future documentary’s title dropped into her brain, a gift from the muses after three epic months of creative roadblocks: The Kidney Stoners. A funny yet intriguing doc about her mom’s small southern hometown, a place with a bizarre and unexplained proliferation of kidney stones. This could be her very own Vernon, Florida, the quirky, small-town film from her cinematic hero, Errol Morris. It was perfect. Within twenty-four hours, she and her RCA ProEdit camcorder were on a Continental Airlines flight headed from JFK to Raleigh, ready to make the film that would kickstart her career.