The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek

by Rhett McLaughlin

  “Really deep and soul-searching ones,” Janine said, catching a gratifying glimpse in her peripheral vision of an aggravated Big Gary, whom she’d told to hang back so as not to intimidate her interview subjects. “My name is Janine Blitstein. I’m a filmmaker, like you guys.” She tagged that last part on so she could blow their minds a little bit. It worked. Both of their mouths dropped slightly open. “I heard about what happened yesterday. Sorry about your friend.”

  “Thanks,” Side Part said. “I’m Rex, and this is Leif.”

  “Have you made actual movies?” Leif asked.

  “Yep,” Janine said. “Nothing you would have seen, though. I just graduated from NYU film school.”

  “Whoa,” Rex said. “Seriously?”

  “No, I made that up to impress you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Of course seriously! Why would I go around to teenagers I don’t know pretending that I went to NYU?”

  The boys looked at each other, grinning in amazement at the sarcasm coming from this random woman they’d just met. If Janine knew anything in this world, it was that irreverence was the fastest way into an adolescent heart.

  “But…why are you in Bleak Creek?” Leif asked.

  “Well, Leif,” Janine said. “I’m sorta trying to figure that out.”

  Leif and Rex laughed.

  “Truth be told, I came here to make a documentary about the town. Would you be down to answer some questions about yesterday? And I can film you?”

  Rex and Leif wordlessly checked in with each other before Rex said, “Sure.”

  Janine directed the boys to sit on the same side of the table, then plopped down across from them, gleefully noting that Big Gary was still by the door to the kitchen, practically hopping with anger. She hefted the camcorder up to her shoulder, looked through the lens, and pressed record. “So, okay, I heard that you were making a movie—”

  “PolterDog,” Leif interrupted.

  “PolterDog. Like Poltergeist with a dog?”

  “Yeah,” Leif said, seeming a little shocked that she’d gotten it right.

  “Wonderful. Sounds amazing. And you were shooting at this fundraiser so that you’d have a full crowd reacting to what’s happening?”

  “Exactly,” Rex said, similarly astounded at Janine’s level of astuteness, which, from her perspective, seemed more like common sense.

  The boys walked Janine through their version of the whole story, how Tucker had gone rogue, how Alicia had bashed into Whitewood, how Alicia’s parents had called the Whitewood School, how Rex and Leif had witnessed her abduction.

  “Oh my god,” Janine said, realizing that somewhere during her fake interview, she’d become genuinely intrigued by what they were saying. “Did you get footage of her being taken?”

  Rex closed his eyes as if he’d just been pied in the face. “No. We should have.”

  “Uh, don’t be so hard on yourself. It sounds like you were a little busy trying to rescue your friend. But this Whitewood School sounds pretty terrible.”

  “I mean,” Rex said, “it has a good reputation.”

  “You bet it does!” Big Gary said, startling Janine, who hadn’t heard him walk over. “Now I think it’s time to conclude this interview, as I don’t think it’s right for the movie anyway, and I’ve still got a whole lot more to say about these puppies.” He banged his jar down onto the table between Rex and Leif, who both flinched.

  Janine spun the camera toward Big Gary. “So you’re saying the school has a good reputation, even though it sends men to abduct kids in the night?”

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Big Gary said in a quiet voice, looking around nervously. “Don’t go ruinin’ the school secrets like that. It’s part of the process.”

  “Sounds like a pretty messed-up process if you ask me,” Janine said. This was a side of Big Gary that she was delighted to film. She hoped Donna was watching.

  “I don’t care about the process, I care about the results,” Big Gary said, an edge of threat now in his voice. “Why do you think every person who works here has gone to that school? Because it shapes young people into responsible human beings!”

  Janine’s brain went blank for a second.

  “What’d you say?” she asked.

  “I said I’ll only hire kids who’ve gone to that school. Now turn that damn camera off before I do it myself.”

  Janine took the camera off her shoulder and stared at Big Gary.

  “But…Donna…”

  The room started to spin. Janine put a hand down on the table to get her balance, accidentally brushing into Big Gary’s jar and knocking it off the edge. It shattered as it hit the floor, kidney stones fanning out across the linoleum.

  7

  REX BARRELED DOWN the blacktop of Johnson Pond Road, his scooter leg bouncing off the pavement, propelling him at a fraction of the speed of a bicycle.

  The filmmaker woman’s strange, shocked reaction to learning that her friend (her cousin, as he’d later learned) had gone to the Whitewood School had left Rex shaken, convincing him that any additional information that wild boy might have about the school was worth seeking out. Most of the items on Ben’s list were pretty straightforward to acquire—except for the fire extinguisher.

  Luckily, Rex had a connection.

  As he passed the tilled-under tobacco fields that flanked the country road on the way to his destination, he couldn’t stop thinking about how different freshman year would be without Alicia. In the Triumvirate, she’d always been the one who knew how to navigate the weird social pitfalls of school. Now, he and Leif would have to face their most daunting challenge yet—becoming high-schoolers—on their own. And, thanks to him opening his big stupid mouth about his feelings for her, he’d made everything even worse than it already was.

  Sure, Leif had given his blessing in the moment, but things had been slightly off between them ever since. Rex should’ve known that liking Alicia would be a threat to Leif; the same thing had happened the summer between sixth and seventh grades with Julie Adams. Rex had fallen fast and hard, spending nearly all his time with her. They’d even started calling each other “babe.” Because Alicia had spent a good portion of the summer in Virginia with her sick grandmother, Leif had been alone a lot, taking up a series of sad hobbies including metal detecting and soap carving. Rex pictured Leif, alone in his bedroom holding a duck made from a bar of Irish Spring, and felt like a jerk.

  On top of all that, earlier that day, he and Leif had made the gut-wrenching decision to pull the plug on PolterDog.

  “But don’t you think Alicia would want us to finish it?” Leif had asked, standing in front of his bathroom mirror wearing a curly brown wig he’d found in the plastic bin in his garage labeled PROPS. He was hoping Rex would agree that he would make a suitable Alicia replacement for the remaining scenes.

  “Unless we want to write in a part for a bad Richard Simmons impersonator,” Rex had said, plucking the wig off Leif’s head, “I don’t think it’s gonna work.”

  “What if we find another girl to play her role?” Leif had asked. “Like how Elisabeth Shue replaced Claudia Wells as Jennifer in Back to the Future Two?”

  “First off, you’ve always put that on your long list of why the second movie sucked. Also, that’s a switcheroo in between movies. We’d be making the switch in the middle. Wouldn’t fly.” Rex had directed his gaze down to the wig in his hands. “Listen, Alicia won’t be at Whitewood forever. We can finish it when she’s out. We’ll make Sundance next year.”

  He hadn’t really believed that. In truth, he’d developed an abiding sense that nothing would ever be the same.

  Rex now turned in to a gravel driveway, the small wheels of his scooter grinding to a crunchy stop on the loose rocks that led to the house of Travis Bethune.

  Not only was Travis the nicest person R
ex and Leif had ever met, seemingly never disparaging anyone, but he had an untold number of jobs: landscaper, septic tank pumper, chimney sweep, house painter, and, most important, volunteer fireman. He traveled from job to job on his bright red moped and wore a thick black leather belt that held a walkie-talkie, two beepers, a flashlight, a large bowie knife, and a giant key ring loaded with what looked to be thirty keys or more. The teenagers around Bleak Creek regularly referred to him as Redneck Batman. He didn’t seem to mind the moniker, and Rex and Leif didn’t know if that was due to his unwavering positivity or just the general allure of being compared to Batman.

  They’d met Travis a couple of years earlier, during one of Rex’s dad’s barbecue exploits; his grill fire had gotten out of control, accidentally igniting a backyard tree, and Travis was on the team who’d shown up to put it out. Rex and Leif were outside filming the fire, thinking it could be incorporated into their first movie, a messy series of comedy bits—way less cohesive and ambitious than PolterDog—entitled The Bleak Creek Boyz. Once the blaze was extinguished, Travis struck up a conversation with them. Even though they were only twelve and he was in his thirties, Travis took them seriously as filmmakers and mentioned multiple times that he’d be down to do stunts if they ever needed someone. They took him up on it right then and there, filming him jumping out of several different trees once the other firefighters left. He’d been their stuntman ever since.

  Suffice it to say, when Rex realized he needed a fire extinguisher, he’d immediately thought of Travis, who’d called Rex back three minutes after he’d beeped him.

  Rex walked the rest of the way up to the single-wide trailer, which Travis referred to as his “ranch-style house,” despite the wheels under the mobile home being only somewhat obscured by the wood lattice skirting. Travis opened the door before Rex even reached the front steps.

  “Hey, man!” he said, flashing his signature grin. “Come on in. My casa, your casa!” Rex didn’t often see Travis without his utility belt. He seemed smaller.

  “Thanks, Travis,” Rex said, hit with the smell of solder wire and bacon grease as he stepped onto the brown shag carpet. He’d only been to Travis’s house once before, as he always seemed to be out and about.

  Rex had decided to make this a solo trip. Over the years, he’d learned that the best way to get his often-tentative best friend on board with an idea was to just start doing it. He was confident that if he went through the trouble of gathering the items by himself, talking Leif into meeting up with Ben again would be that much easier. He’d already retrieved three of Ben’s requests: a metal rake (from his dad’s shed), hot dogs (from the meat drawer in the fridge), and Cheerwine (from the shelves of the Piggly Wiggly).

  He could have walked into Thomble and Sons Hardware and bought a fire extinguisher with the Christmas money he still had stashed in his Thundercats Lion-O piggy bank, but given the scrutiny he and Leif were already under following the barbecue incident, Rex supposed that going to Travis, the volunteer fireman, was the wiser choice.

  “Glad you’re here,” Travis said. Adopting a serious tone, he added, “You know, I ain’t supposed to share the tools of the trade with laymen like yourself. But I’m willin’ to make an exception for you. Now, whatta you need it for again?”

  Even though he doubted Ben would actually kill them if the secret of his forest hideout was revealed, Rex still felt it was safest to honor the forest boy’s wishes. “Uh, we’re experimenting with some mild pyrotechnics,” Rex said as genuinely as he could.

  “For PolterDog?” Travis asked.

  “Uh, no. A new project. We had to stop working on PolterDog,” Rex said. “You know, because of Alicia.”

  “She quit or somethin’?” Travis asked.

  “She got sent to Whitewood,” Rex said, surprised he didn’t know.

  “Oh, shoot, that was her?” Travis was crestfallen. “She was part of that group makin’ the movie? The ones who bumped Mr. Whitewood?”

  “Yeah,” Rex said, confused. “That group was us, Travis.”

  “What!” Travis’s eyes bugged out. “Oh, wow. That’s— I shoulda guessed when I heard the movie thing. Plus, you’d think I’da seen her at Whitewood.”

  Rex’s knees weakened. “Why were you there?”

  “Work there,” Travis said, putting his hands on the back of one of the folding metal chairs surrounding his dining room table, looking off into the distance pensively. “I cut the grass. Once a week. I like it there. It’s peaceful.”

  “What is— What’s it like inside?” Rex asked. “You think Alicia’s gonna be okay?”

  “I don’t go inside, but oh, yeah, she’ll be good,” Travis said, nodding. “It’s tough, sure, but it does right by kids. Mr. Whitewood is a great man.”

  Hearing that Travis worked there and had no concerns about Alicia’s well-being was by far the most reassuring thing Rex had learned about the Whitewood School.

  “So what’s the new movie?”

  “Oh. It’s, uh, kind of experimental.”

  “You mean, like, about chemistry or somethin’?”

  Rex felt horrible lying to Travis, but it was just too easy. And necessary.

  “Sort of. Yeah.”

  “You boys are so dang creative. A chemistry movie. That sounds awesome!”

  “Yep…”

  “You sure you don’t just want me to come and keep an eye on things when you do the pyro?” Travis asked. “I live for that kinda stuff.” He leaned in and spoke in a whisper, “To tell you the truth, that’s why I’m a volunteer fireman. I love to watch stuff burn.” Catching himself, he said loudly, “Of course, I love puttin’ it out, too!”

  “Uh, well I don’t think you’d find this too interesting. Just sparklers,” Rex said, adding another thread to his web of white lies.

  “Hmm. Yeah. That ain’t really even fire.” Travis paused, looking at the fake-wood-paneled wall. “All right, lemme get it.”

  Travis got up and walked through a bead curtain to the back of his trailer. Rex stood waiting, surveying Travis’s assortment of what looked to be about a hundred California Raisins figurines on the kitchen counter. There were lots of repeats. At least twenty of the one on the skateboard.

  “They’re cool as hell, huh?” Travis said, returning with an ancient-looking fire extinguisher.

  “Yeah, pretty cool,” Rex said.

  “Smartest thing Hardee’s ever did. I wish they’d bring ’em back,” he said, shaking his head. “Anyway, here she is.” He extended the fire extinguisher to Rex.

  “Thanks, Travis. I really appreciate this,” Rex said.

  “My pleasure, buddy.”

  When Rex pulled back onto the road, he realized he’d failed to account for how difficult it would be to ride a scooter while carrying a fire extinguisher. He also wondered if scooting across Bleak Creek with a firefighting device was actually more conspicuous than just buying one at the hardware store. But it was too late to turn back now. At least he didn’t have to go through town. He could get home by taking the slightly longer route on the dirt farm roads.

  As Rex walked along holding the fire extinguisher like a baby, his now useless scooter slung over his shoulder, the handlebars bouncing off his lower back with each step, he was thankful Leif wasn’t around to point out the inefficiencies of his mode of transportation. He was also thankful he hadn’t run into anyone. He’d have to cross over Old Oak Road, but after that he’d be able to walk through the pine tree farm all the way to the back side of his neighborhood.

  After he had walked for a half hour (and taken a dozen or so rest breaks for his weary arms), the sun was dipping behind the trees and Rex had almost made it to the road. Just ten steps more, and then across, and he’d be home free.

  He heard the rumble of an engine.

  Instinctively, he accelerated to a sprint, thinking he could make it across t
he road and into the pines before being seen. Midrun, he turned to look toward the headlights now cutting through the dusk. The roadside ditch was deeper than he expected, and his foot dropped suddenly, sending him into a tumble, the scooter flying over his head and skipping across the road. He caught himself before completely eating it, but not before he lost his grip on the fire extinguisher. The canister bounced off the asphalt, then rolled across the double yellow line.

  He scrambled to pick up the scooter, then frantically kicked the fire extinguisher toward the ditch.

  Before he had a chance to get out of the road, a monstrous diesel pickup was almost on top of him. The truck swerved into the left lane, just missing Rex, then skidded to a stop.

  He looked into the cab, the driver hardly visible in the dying daylight.

  The automatic window slowly rolled down.

  Wayne Whitewood.

  Rex swallowed hard.

  Whitewood didn’t appear alarmed or angry. He just sat there in his light blue dress shirt, staring blankly at Rex like he was sucking his soul out through his eyes.

  Rex looked at the ground.

  “I’m sorry, I just tripped,” he said, an attempt to fill the painful silence.

  He noticed Whitewood tightly gripping the steering wheel, his hands sheathed in white gloves that looked like the ones worn by the First Baptist hand bell choir.

  “Also, I’m really sorry about what happened the other day,” Rex said, continuing the one-sided exchange. “I hope you’re doing okay.”

  Without taking his eyes off Rex, Whitewood released the steering wheel, then methodically took off each glove.

  He held his hands up toward Rex.

  Bright red streaks lined his palms and fingers, some spots blistered, others scabbed. It made Rex’s stomach turn.

  “Um…sir, I am so sorry about that.” Rex had no idea what to do other than keep apologizing.

  Whitewood slowly pulled his hands back down, then carefully put his gloves on. Finally, he released Rex from his stare and turned his eyes to the road, the oversized vehicle beginning to slowly roll forward.