by David Kummer
She’d been lying. I had no doubts anymore. Not a Little Rush journalist, no article in next month’s paper. No, that scheming bitch was something else entirely. Something more sinister. A trap.
This in itself didn’t unnerve me. I’d had plenty of lying, filthy bitches investigate me, and even confront me. What really bothered me was the name. The one nobody else should’ve known. The one that I didn’t want any connection with.
I did know a Madeline Suso. And god dammit, I’d done my best to forget.
2
Hudson
“So you really tried to take on the Blough kid?”
I chuckled and glanced at Mason. He lay completely still in the bed of my truck, a beer bottle in hand. The moonlight glinted off its dark surface and off those dazzling teeth as he smiled. I took a sip from my own and set it down. I leaned to the side and took a moment to observe the stars. With the sun finally absent, the outside world felt decent again, not sticky like earlier.
In Little Rush, there’d be a certain kind of humidity and heat that only came after a heavy June rainstorm. For a day or two after, it’d be so hot that every time I stepped outside it felt like walking into a sauna. Only there was extra light glaring in my eyes and I was fully clothed instead of draped in a towel. The air thick as fog, and the entire day I’d think, This is the hottest weather I’ve ever felt. Eventually that all subsided, only to return with a vengeance at the next thunderstorm.
“I really did.” Mason chuckled finally. After a weekend to recuperate, battle scars were easier to laugh at. He shrugged his shoulders and downed the rest of his beer. “Hand me another.”
I obliged and dug through the cooler full of ice and bottles for a minute. “Only a few more.”
“Which of us is gonna drive home?” he asked, eyebrows raised.
I took a long gulp. “Pretty sure this is our home, now.”
“Touché.”
My truck sat at the edge of a field, one that nobody had used for a few years. If you knew where to look, a little dirt path cut off from the country road and let out to this spot, right next to the trees. We came here every so often when the cabin was being used by his dad or whenever we just liked the idea of getting wasted outside. It also made for a great place to smoke weed, but we rarely had any.
The forest rustled briefly as some deer emerged and pranced across the field. They paid us no mind, and we didn’t call out or anything. The beautiful animals went their own way, and we stayed in our spot, watching them for a moment. Soon they were out of sight, into the darkness and through the other side of the clearing, just as they’d come. A slight rustle and then empty space.
“What happened with you and that girl?” Mason asked me after a long pause. He didn’t glance my direction. In fact, he stared completely away. That’s how I knew he was hesitant to bring it up. “You never really explained. Just said…”
“Nothing scandalous.” I laughed, and it sounded more jaded than I intended. “I almost wish it had been. The truth is, we were just making out. Down by that creek, you know, on the grass? And then… I dunno.” A fresh drink bought me a moment to organize my words. “It just kinda fizzled out. Can’t really explain it.”
“Shame.” Mason picked up his empty bottle and stared into its glass depths. “She’s pretty hot. Way out of your league, man.”
“Trust me, I’m aware.” I leaned back and let out a deep, exasperated sigh, the kind that Mason would usually make fun of. Something held his tongue, though.
If only to change the subject, I remembered the ten-dollar bill in my pocket and extracted it with some effort. Mason watched me, eyebrow raised, as I writhed around for a second. Then I pulled out the wrinkled, dirty bill and offered it.
“Here,” I explained, “this should cover my booze for tonight.”
He batted a hand through the air and shooed the money away. “I told you, stop trying to pay me for this. You’re doing me a favor by just being here.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it.” I narrowed my eyes, but when he wouldn’t budge, I stuffed the crumpled money back into my pocket. “Thanks, though. Honestly.”
He didn’t answer. Neither of us felt very emotive.
Mason never let me pay him back for alcohol. Not even back in our freshman year of high school and the summer immediately after. Over that timeframe, we spent countless nights here. Those days, when Mason had his license but neither of us held down jobs, were some of the best. Carefree, dripping with potential. The first time I ever tried alcohol was in this field, when an older kid bought Mason a bottle of vodka. I always hated that stuff, and Mason would poke fun at me for it.
Then, once we discovered beer as a suitable drink, the nights really got wild. Two or three times a week, we’d lie to our parents, make up some awful excuse, and escape here. Sometimes, driving back at two or three in the morning, we’d feel on the brink of death. Drunk driving on a country road, the lights swimming around us. Mason, hands on the wheel, really had to focus. I would just lean back in my seat, enjoy the night air, the potential that any moment I might not exist any longer. It didn’t hurt that this beer bliss didn’t cost a cent.
We spent hours in this field, talking about nonsense. Before jobs, before girls, before any actual problems. Thinking about adulthood. Sorting through our fears and our overwhelming dread. Mason, back then, was more open to these kinds of airy, philosophical conversations. We both agreed on one thing. That we could feel the unavoidable weight pressing on our heads, threatening to crush our bodies into paper. Something about growing up. Something about the world shrinking in on you. It all just pressed so hard.
Back then, we spent many conversations on this topic. Together, Mason and I had decided the best way to fight this feeling boiled down to two goals. Stay young and stay wild. We were immature kids, really, and it was a bit embarrassing in hindsight, but I didn’t hate the memory.
As Mason and I carried on a flimsy, unimportant conversation, I realized that we had both failed. Terribly. Since we decided on those goals, Mason had become a gym rat, obsessed with the physical, reluctant to step away from this stage where we’d grown up. And me? I fit a different set of descriptions. Depressed, lost, wild in a harmful way. In reality, though, I had tightened. Formed a suit of armor around myself and refused to open. At least Mason could enjoy life. At least he felt emotions intensely and… lived. I didn’t do either. I failed. Now I could almost imagine death, like a wild animal in the clearing, creeping near my truck bed.
A pause fell over our conversation. I couldn’t remember who had spoken last and didn’t care. To avoid the dark thoughts growing in the corners of my mind, I breached the subject we’d been dancing around for a few minutes. “What about you and Willow? Things still… good?”
“Suppose so.” He tapped on the glass bottle now, then rolled it up and down on the truck bed. It made a weird noise, rumbling against the aluminum. “She said something, though… about wanting to move away. I dunno how that’ll work.”
“Right.” I set aside the beer bottle for a moment. Number five or six, I couldn’t remember. But I could feel the alcohol, without a doubt, and wanted a few minutes of clarity for this conversation. Then I would blackout, sure. “You don’t want to, I assume?”
“I really don’t know.” He held the bottle up again, admiring it. Mason gets really intimate with beer bottles once he drinks them. I don’t understand it. Not any weirder than biting fingernails, I guess. “I want… her. But I also want… everything I have here. You know?”
“Right, yeah.” That wasn’t entirely true. I wanted nothing here. I wanted to leave as soon as possible. But I guess Little Rush had a bit of charm. I could relate to his struggle in some ways, but really more to Willow.
Without warning, Mason chucked the bottle high in the air. It arced away from us and crashed to the ground somewhere in the field. I could hear the glass shattering, but muffled. Then he leaned back fully, crossed his arms, and huffed.
“Sorry,”
he murmured. “I know you hate when I do that.”
“It’s fine.” I cleared my throat. I did hate when he littered out here, but he’d mostly cleaned up that habit. Honestly, since getting with Willow, he’d cleaned up a lot of habits. “You know what I think?”
He turned his head and eyed me.
“If this was my last day alive,” I said, picking up my half-full bottle, “you know what I’d do? Just come out here, get drunk as fuck. And run around naked.”
Mason chuckled at that, and I broke into a grin.
“Not tonight, please,” he said. “If that girl ran away from just you in your boxers, I can’t imagine—”
“Shut up or I’ll cut you off,” I said, laying a hand on the beer cooler.
“I’ll beat you up.” Mason sat up woozily and pointed a finger at me, his smile more radiant than it ever got when sober.
I raised my eyebrows. “Oh yeah? Wanna lose two fights in one week?”
It had been months since we drove out here and spent the late hours drinking, the early hours drunk. Just the two of us. No worries, no cares. The talk usually turned to girls, and Mason would inevitably discard a bottle or two in the most dramatic fashion. But it felt comfortable. That was more than most days could claim.
The hours wore on and on. We waited breathless for the sunrise. Coming down from our drunken mountain, neither of us were shy about our emotions in that moment. We each longed to watch it peer above those trees and paint the sky with brush strokes too godlike to truly emulate. We waited for what felt like an eternity, the conversation shifting and dying altogether at times.
I felt bad, in certain moments, for not telling him about Bruce. I knew, deep down, that I should share that experience with Mason. We’d both loved the actor for so many years, it was wrong to keep him to myself. But Bruce had chosen me to share that conversation with, not Mason. Maybe it was a jealousy thing, like I finally had something Mason didn’t, or perhaps I just worried about being that open with another teenager. Whatever the reasons, I held my tongue. What did one more regret matter on a pile that had grown so high?
And I knew more soft regrets waited in the future. College approached. Adulthood. Career choices. Marriage, funerals, children. A world of mistakes made and lived with. If I was a sponge and alcohol the squeeze, so many regrets would pour from my body. And it only got worse with each passing year.
Mason ached with questions. I could see it in his eyes that whole time, sitting in the bed of my pickup. He struggled, already, with so much. To stay in Little Rush or stay with Willow? Could there be a compromise? Did he have any choice in the matter? Would he run his father’s business well?
And myself, I stared at the sky that early morning, looking for my own answers. Would I really be trapped here, to a factory lifestyle or a job I hated? Could I ever leave this place, even if I desperately wanted to? And if I stayed, would I survive?
When the sun did finally rise, it found us both asleep on the truck bed, snoring loudly. Beer bottles scattered beside us, one of them having spilled. My bare heel in the liquid puddle. Two caged teenagers, a glorious sunrise, and the fog rose from the ground like the regrets we’d been avoiding all our young lives. But there were no answers in the fog and there was no help in the sunrise.
3
Jed
Main Street was the hub of downtown Little Rush, with most of the stores and restaurants, along with a plethora of loft apartments and houses. It could be imagined as two separate areas, with Allen’s Burgers serving as the link that connected them.
The eastern half was mostly commercial spaces. Stores lined both sides of the street, with a smattering of restaurants, coffee shops, a few inns, a nail salon, and everything else that made up the tourism center of the city. There were elegant churches with their steeples jutting into the clouds, an ornate fountain set just off Main Street, and the large courthouse, marking the end of this area where the road shifted into a highway. From there, it ran across the Ohio in a wide bridge and vanished.
The western sections of Main Street were almost entirely houses, along with a public school that’d seen better days. All the buildings were different shapes and colors, the only common denominator being their age and similar architecture. When driving through downtown Little Rush, it was evident that little had changed in the past century. Other than the vacant factories, mills, and windows with “For Rent” signs, most things were preserved from decades ago.
Conjoining these two worlds was a brick building that’d been in operation for almost a hundred years. Allen’s Burgers, a staple of downtown, and one of the places I found myself all too often, never for a good reason.
They called them sliders, the tiny grease burgers that were served on chipped plates. This restaurant had a distinct smell like nothing else in Little Rush. Just walking by outside, you got a whiff of it. Very effective marketing. I wasn’t sure what the oldest restaurant in town was, but it had to be way up there. It’d been around since I could remember. And since I could remember, I’d been a regular.
Allen’s Burgers was just a blink along Main Street but packed a punch. It was the go-to for hamburgers, when you wanted good ones and not McDonald’s crap, especially for teenagers wandering around at midnight. It was about the only thing still open that late other than Taco Bell on the hilltop. Allen’s had also been serving breakfast for a few years and the same crowd would filter in. Everybody came to talk, to laugh, and to enjoy food that felt like a blood clot as it dropped to your stomach.
As a high-schooler, I’d spent many evenings there, even a few afternoons whenever I’d skip the back-half of the school day. Allen still ran the place back then and could be found on any given day. Flipping burgers, serving sodas, teaching new employees how to use the clunky old milkshake machine. He and I struck up conversation easily. I think those meals were the first time I envisioned myself as a businessman. He convinced me I could own a restaurant, actually succeed, if only I stuck it out through high school and applied myself in college. So I’d done just that.
Allen was the kind of guy everybody knew by his first name. I’d see him around town, every once in a while, and at the local high school basketball games. Never got into any trouble. Never had his name run through the mud. An all-around good guy. Still, we all saw it coming after his retirement. Once he gave up the restaurant, Allen only lived another six months. That may have been the best-attended funeral I ever witnessed in Little Rush. More people showed up than for the previous mayor when he’d died. They held Allen’s at the biggest church in town, but even that couldn’t fit everybody.
“Hey there, Jed. Long time,” Sondra called out as soon as I stepped in the door.
I waved at her and chuckled. The door shut behind me with a jingling of chimes, and then aromas blanketed me entirely.
There were two seating areas at Allen’s Burgers, each with its own entrance door. One was a typical dining room, with ten tables, four chairs at each one. They were all retro-looking, cold metal, old-fashioned ketchup and mustard on the tables. The second area, where I preferred to sit, was bar-style, with about a dozen stools along a counter. Same deal with the retro look and everything, but a bit more personal. The workers were always talkative, the crowd interesting, and an unused jukebox sat in the corner, giving off a nice vibe.
You never knew what kind of crowd would be at Allen’s on a weekday evening. I wouldn’t be there myself, except that Lucy and I had ourselves a pretty serious fight about two hours earlier. The topic wasn’t important because honestly every fight was the same. We bickered about how often I worked, though that never came up word-for-word. Other problems bubbled to the surface. We yelled, and she cried, and nothing ever got resolved. This time, though, she’d announced her intention to make popcorn for dinner and told me to “get the hell out or get back into your study.” I had no intentions of working, so I left the house and strolled around downtown a bit. When I finally felt hunger gnawing, the smell from Allen’s brought me around.
“The usual?” Sondra asked as I located my stool.
I nodded at her and settled onto it.
“Coming right up, honey,” she quipped, and set to work on my order. She snapped at a young woman passing by to get me a Coke.
The gentleman beside me turned on his seat. He already had a plate of two sliders sitting on the countertop with what appeared to be relish piled on. His hands, clasped around a large mug, were rough. I recognized his dark shirt and blue jeans as the typical uniform from one of the factories. He extended a cold, damp hand to shake mine, and I could read his shirt. “Rush Industries.”
“How’s it going?” His voice hit like gravel, probably a smoker. His hair was dark and thinning, with a battered IU ball cap on top.
“Fine.” A different waitress I didn’t recognize handed me a soda, and I thanked her quickly. Then she disappeared into the recesses of the kitchen, probably to a table on the other side. I turned my attention to the man, who I didn’t remember from the typical Allen’s crowd. Then again, it was easy to miss people. “Eat here often?”
“Nah.” He took a long gulp of beer and set his mug on the counter. Wiping his mouth, he elaborated, “Usually out with some buddies.” A grin broke out underneath that messy beard. “I seen you around here, though. Couple’a times, I’d say.”