Everything, Somewhere

by David Kummer

  He had a life set up for him. He’d take over his dad’s business, probably. Easily. Whereas I… I slaved away my summer with three online courses, two of which were business-focused. I had to work my ass off, climb out of my parents’ rut. Not only that, but being a woman and aiming to work in the business world wasn’t exactly… ideal. I had nothing set up for me. Not a single step. My future was a wild jungle, and I had nothing to cut through it apart from my own self-taught skills.

  Mason’s neighborhood looked down on those living at Liberty Apartments. On “poor.” And yet I felt like the people at Liberty had certain characteristics those people didn’t. Some they passed on to me. Toughness. Integrity. I didn’t know if it was a conscious thing or just the way we all filled our roles. But some of the conversations I had… It’s undeniable that those in Liberty had just as much potential, just as much “talent,” as those with all the money. Only they could get help for things like addiction or debt, and we couldn’t.

  Again, I didn’t think about any of this on a daily basis. And yet when I did, when I got sucked into that black hole of spiraling thought and self-doubt, I couldn’t help but compare Mason’s situation to my own. Especially to the times when we lived at Liberty. Back then, I walked everywhere. That sidewalk between our apartment and Kroger set the scene for most of my pre-high school memories.

  Like the kind, old black guy who always rode his bike to Kroger and back, one hand holding groceries and the other steering in wild movements. He always grinned at me and my friends, even threw us packs of unopened gum sometimes. He had this crazy look in his eyes that now I’m pretty sure was drugs, but back then I thought he just loved his life. I never learned his name, though. Not sure I ever had a conversation with him. Two or three dozen times, he threw us bubblegum. I loved that about him. There weren’t many black people around town, and I do wish I could’ve talked with him, just once. But in hindsight, I’m glad I never knew his name. It would’ve made what came next even worse.

  The day he swerved into the road and flew into the air. His bike a twisted mess, his body lifeless on the ground. A pool of blood. I remember those details. Remember feeling intense pain in my stomach. The horrible coincidence that I’d been walking by. And then nothing more.

  I often wondered what that man would’ve become, if only he got the necessary help. Such a genuinely good person, held captive by some surface-level addiction. I would’ve liked to be friends with him. Wished I could help.

  Mason and even Hudson didn’t understand. They never would. The former was a rich boy, though I didn’t hate him for it. I honestly loved him. And the latter was a farm boy. Not rich by any means, but he didn’t go hungry at night. He had a job because he wanted one, not out of necessity. I started working when I got tired of a grumbling stomach keeping me awake.

  They had families in Little Rush. Roots. A history. I had nothing.

  They never walked beside a field of knee-high grass, trudging two miles in triple-digit heat just to buy that night’s dinner. And they never had to choose their food methodically because when food stamps is the menu, picky isn’t an option. They didn’t form integral, childhood friendships that ended when that middle-schooler went to juvie or died from lack of health insurance. I wanted to leave town more than anything. I wanted to find a place where I could make a better life, where I could have a better home. Somewhere out there, I wanted to go. I just didn’t know where yet.

  Everybody had reasons for wanting to leave Little Rush. The thing is, most people also had something holding them down. For me, I had nothing. Except for Mason and the town’s magnetic pull.

  I’d never been one to give up my dreams or my style or my beliefs just to appease somebody else. I didn’t conform. It was something I promised myself time and time again. But it’s difficult, I guess, when it’s somebody you love. That conversation is harder to have.

  Swimming with an anchor chained to your leg is no fun. Especially when the tide is rising. And god dammit, that thing rises fast entering senior year.

  Just believe, I told myself as Mason’s car disappeared around a corner. I glanced in the other direction, toward the hippie shop, and wondered what the sign said today. Just believe. I stood on the sidewalk, beside the mouth of an alleyway. Halfway down, a rusted door, then a staircase, then my dad. Keep believing in the feeling and you’ll be just fine.

  3

  Jedidiah

  We thought of Little Rush as home, as the place we would grow and marry and raise children and die. We thought of it as the town which had everything, just enough of it. I still remember the night Lucy and I went on our first date. The downtown road illuminated by streetlights, her gorgeous, 80’s style hair. She could’ve been a model, I swore it then and always would. Back then, in simpler times, we could just enjoy the city. We didn’t have to think about leaving versus staying or about the way our children would rattle the caged walls of this old town.

  Mason and his friends weren’t what you’d call perfect kids. They were wild. They drank, they got in trouble, they ran around late at night doing god-knows-what. But all of that… I expected it. I could relate to it, understand in a way. The part that I couldn’t quite get, the part that really drove a wedge between my son and I… The way his eyes locked on every sun setting behind every dilapidated barn, as if they were clues to a mystery I didn’t know of.

  Business consumed me, and yet I could never pull away. Because of it, I didn’t see as much of him as I wanted. And when I did, he was standoffish, uncomfortable, vacant. He felt trapped, by Little Rush and by our family business. He didn’t say it, wouldn’t admit to me that he did, but I could tell. And I had absolutely no clue what to do about it.

  This inability caused me great distress. In every other area of my life, I didn’t have this… mental block. In business, I could get shit done. More than anyone else in this town, save for maybe Blough, I could honestly call myself a self-made man. I practically built this house, started this family. They depended on me, and I never let them down. Perhaps that’s why I found work so… relieving. It was my comfortable place, an area I excelled at and knew it. The whole town did.

  This little town, without a spark for so many years… and then such electric news? Bruce Michaels. The famous, the self-aggrandizing, the hardened vet of Hollywood’s battlefront. From LA to Nowhere, Indiana, the headlines read. And sure enough, Tim called me not long after to confirm the news. As the mayor, I expected him to have more info. But, alas, no luck. Nobody knew why or when, only that it would happen. Bruce Michaels, larger than life itself, had sold his mansion and chosen Little Rush as his new home. What a mess it caused me.

  An onslaught of messages began with my elbows resting on a pile five-papers deep. Static from an old radio near my ear lulled me into a daydream. The pen fell from my hand, landed next to my buzzing cell phone. Text after text. Person after person. Even at my home office, I couldn’t escape them.

  #: Have you heard?

  #: This is huge news! For everyone!

  #: Ad deal?!?!?

  #: Where’s he moving? One of YOUR properties???

  Sometimes, I wished I had never bought that first restaurant. A pizza restaurant. That’s all. And now… this.

  Don’t get me wrong. I worked for everything I owned, worked hard, in fact. A fairly large house, a cabin on the Rush Creek, three really nice cars. The ability to retire in another six or seven years. My money— I earned it right here, in Little Rush. I owned four restaurants, including the best pizza place for miles around. It had this weird half-pizza sticking out from the roof, something like twenty feet wide. It was enormous and that really brought people in, I guess. Once that business brought in some cash flow, I invested in properties at first. If the pizza restaurant was my first genius move, my second had to be the stocks.

  A good friend of mine, owner of a local bank company, got bought out by a larger organization. He told me ahead of time, just enough for me to throw myself all-in on the stock market. It we
nt better than even I expected. That local bank, one of the few traded on the NYSE, boomed soon after. I had the intuition and the gumption to invest everything into it. Idiotic amounts… and it erupted from there. All of a sudden, I had more money than I knew what to do with. A normal man would stop there. Only I doubled down, and so my fortune is different.

  Real estate, apartments, properties. That was the only way to build up real wealth in a town like Little Rush. I had no doubt that in one of the bigger cities, my net worth would be laughed out of the building. Not here. I had over a hundred properties now. The four restaurants might be my public front, but they were pennies compared to what I’ve achieved.

  And it’s not like I’m a stingy bastard. I donated money to the local high school, to kindergarten tee-ball teams, to local business ventures, to charities, to the downtown food bank. But maybe it wasn’t enough, and maybe it wasn’t worth it.

  Day after day, hour after hour, I poured over documents. I spent most of the week and a lot of the weekends buried in paperwork, phone calls, emails. My home office flooded with binders full of plans, scrap sheets of ideas, to-do lists, phone numbers to call. This work, my comfortable process. A to-do list that never ended, nor did I want it to. In a home I felt quite proud of, this office was my only real safe place. Outside, there were relationships, emotional cues, gray areas. In here, numbers, black and white, profits. A lifetime of work gone by, and yet another lifetime ahead. The chair worn down by the shape of my body. A small radio next to my desk, where I’d often have the weather or the local news. Sometimes it just emitted a low tune from the local music station. I let it play. Just to stay connected. Just to feel like a part of Little Rush.

  All the money I made, I funneled right back to that complicated city. And what a city it was.

  Little Rush. A beautiful mess of contradictions. For somebody like me, who lived here so many years and saw the city way back in the 80’s, I could appreciate it more than Mason or any of his friends. By the time I realized what the empty factories meant and the way the landscape was shifting, all that remained of peak Little Rush was stories.

  The old folks at the breakfast grill were eager to tell them. The men who sat with my father, late into the night, were desperate to share their tales. Like an ancient language, the last of a dying culture were relentless in explaining, in passing on, in preserving what they knew. To his credit, my father always listened, always lit their cigars, and another and another until the hours burned into nothing but ash. The city, nothing but ash.

  Those old folks told him stories, and through him, they told me. Stories of a town where the factories weren’t empty and the railroads were active, even bustling. They’d been reduced to scars on the land now. Vacant tracks that teenagers roamed, smoking and drinking and everything else. I did it too. I was just as wild. But I saw those railroad tracks in a different light as age gnawed at my bones. They were nearly holy, and me their reverential patron.

  The factories were almost all decrepit. Around them, the lawns grew tall, and their walls were barren, sun-bleached, fading. On the hilltop, they could blend in with the wild landscape. Up there, the modern stores and restaurants and churches were built among the ruins of that old town. Abandoned factories are easier to ignore when they’re just a blip on the side of a road, and beyond them more fields anyways. But in downtown Little Rush, the factories were unavoidable.

  They filled blocks at a time. Broken windows, leaning doors, missing bricks. So much of downtown had been preserved, those buildings were right at home, in a sense. The architecture mixed well with the surrounding streets. The walls were the same, sidewalks beside them untouched and cracked. You could almost picture it. Workers that filled those buildings, dripped sweat in them, slaved away their lives in them, even stepping on those same sidewalks as me. It all blended together, times and places and stories. Only, the factories were forgotten. They served no purpose but for the teenagers to run wild in. A sort of modern wilderness, you might say.

  Every once in a while, somebody came along, sure. Some out-of-towner who bought up the place and fixed it, transformed it. They were turned into nursing homes or business centers or even a factory once again. But those moments, those victories, were few and far between. There was no point in razing the buildings, either. And no point in leaving them up. They were ghosts, and also the ghost town. Life bubbled around them, in Little Rush, but it was something like large stones in a creek. Water gushes around, against, and over. The stones are unmoved, stepping stones for the gods. And for teenagers in the forest.

  My phone buzzed again. I ran two hands over my face and took a deep breath, trying to focus. Deep breaths. The memories faded of that lost city and of my father. Both of them buried nearby. And based on his lifespan, who knew how long until I’d join them?

  I lowered my eyes to the screen, saw the text. The name didn’t matter. Just another name. Another adult, struggling with their bills and kids, who worked under me… and was probably a better person.

  #: By the cemetery? Are you KIDDING me???? Why not that new house near the river??

  A grin spread across my face, almost against my wishes. They were all so… excitable. Old enough to understand the magnitude of the news. Young enough to feel that energy coursing through their bones. But I knew better. I knew about Little Rush, more than they could.

  Maybe Bruce Michaels is a big deal, at least for now. And he will be for a few weeks, maybe even a few months. I told myself that and knew it was true. With time, though, even the brightest of stars would fade in this empty sky of a town. He would move out or he would stay, but either way, he’d be forgotten.

  I had to ponder the question though. I couldn’t help it. The eccentricity of the decision… Fascinating.

  Why did he buy the house near the cemetery? I could guess the answer. It was far from the river. Far from Main Street and the courthouse. Far enough from Rush Road, the lifeblood of the hilltop. Way out there, that field of gravestones is lonely. That entire area on the edge of the city limits. Like a distant galaxy yet to be colonized. And his star moved toward that blank stretch of sky, away from the other constellations. To be alone. Maybe that’s the point.

  I returned my attention to the to-do list and the pen that I’d dropped. Despite my childlike wonder, it would be irresponsible not to capitalize on this surge of attention. This town would get a boost, alright. I needed an ad campaign with Bruce, something to bump up business another notch. I also needed a few well-timed posts, a tweet, something that might go viral. And merchandise. Shirts with Bruce and with my restaurants. Lots and lots of shirts.

  Before any of this, I’d have to meet with him. Ideally, Bruce would stop by for dinner one night, and we wouldn’t make a big deal of it. Just a quiet, home-cooked meal. Isn’t that what he wanted here?

  To achieve this goal, I direct-messaged his Twitter account as soon as the news broke. (I already followed him, but then again who didn’t?) Three times that week, I sent him a short, brief explanation of my role in the community and my intentions for meeting him. None of them were even opened, so I gave up. Over the next few days, I resigned myself to an in-person introduction as soon as I got the chance. Not that it stopped me from checking Twitter, praying for an update.

  “When’s he moving in?” Lucy asked me one day from her recliner in the living room. Her interest was genuine but also nonchalant.

  She didn’t quite understand how important this whole deal was to me. Even after years of marriage, decades even, she hadn’t taken much interest in the business side of our life. I didn’t blame her. In fact, I admired it. To enjoy Little Rush as a town without one eye always on the factories, on the railroads… That would be sublime. Lucy could look at the river and see a postcard, as it was meant to be. I would, from the same view, see a forgotten industry, a source of income that had dried. The rising, falling demons of Little Rush.

  “Nobody knows,” I recited the answer I’d given dozens of people already. “Whenever he wants
.”

  “How does no one know?” she asked skeptically, setting down her cup of morning coffee. She leaned back in her recliner and stared at the ceiling. “What about his real estate agent? Or Mayor Johnson?”

  I shrugged my shoulders, kept my eyes fixed on the television that cycled through the same news. “Nobody. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.”

  * * *

  My fingers tapped away on the pure screen of my iPhone. I felt Lucy’s eyes across the dinner table, glaring at me. Mason’s chair, to my immediate right, squeaked a bit as he reclined. They were both looking at me now, without a doubt. The dining room set so nicely, a real piece of work. Better than your average weekday. A chilled bottle of wine on the counter. And yet I slouched there, on my phone, typing away like some teenage girl who won’t get off a screen.

  “Jedidiah.”

  I always hated when she used my full first name, but she already knew that.

  The dinner was nice enough. It’s not that I hadn’t wanted it. I just hadn’t had time. Right when I’d taken a break from “work stuff” (as I described to them) and called for us to eat the delicious meal, Henry started texting me. The poor guy never picked a great time for phone conversations. At least he knew how to text now. That was improvement from three years ago.

  “Jedidiah,” she said again, my wife’s tone a bit more terse.

  “Sorry, sorry.” I finished the sentence I was texting and glanced up. “Henry. You know.”

  She rolled her eyes. Mason shifted next to me, ate a cooked carrot from his fork with overly lazy movements. I guess this meant he didn’t want to sit any longer. Then again, neither did I.

  H: Guys at the plant today were crazy bout the news.

  I chuckled at Henry’s response. I never understood how he did it. Working forty-plus hour weeks at the power-plant, along with those fields where he grew that particular grass that turned into hay when you cut it. I never understood his farming, not how he had time for it or even the process. The guy was an animal, absolute hog. One of the best men I’d ever known, truly. Great wife, great kid, great house. Just a great guy.