by David Kummer
People who only think about themselves are the worst. I hated the lot of them. And I’d never get like that. My vocabulary extended beyond “I” and what “they” could do for the all-powerful “me.”
Bruce would’ve known what to do, what to say to Mason. At least Bruce still talked to me. He even called me once on my cell, now that we’d exchanged numbers. We talked for about half an hour, and I hadn’t thought to bring up these issues plaguing me. I wanted to tell Bruce how right he’d been about me. “Don’t ever feel like you’re meaningless,” he’d told me at that dinner. Suspiciously poignant. Almost like a mind reader. If only he knew how much I needed him to stick around.
Dad asked me toward the end of that week if Mason wanted to come over on Saturday and bale hay. He’d been planning to run through two of the fields —the ones we typically baled in squares— and needed my help. We also could use a second “strong, young man,” he suggested. I begrudgingly texted Mason, praying he’d decline. I mean, I’d asked earlier that week if we could hangout and he’d refused that invitation. Why accept this one?
Naturally, he said he would be there by eight. So, I waited all of Saturday for him to show up. The narcissist I couldn’t get ahold of but couldn’t completely avoid.
* * *
The process of baling doesn’t lend itself to small talk. My father would drive the tractor in strips through the field, over the hay that he’d cut down earlier. Strewn all around, as if some giant had taken a sickle and knifed through fifty-foot-tall grass. I suppose that analogy wasn’t far off from the truth.
Attached to the back of the tractor was the actual machine, a short, stumpy little devil that ate up the loose hay. Through some complex, incredible process, the noisy, sputtering beast would release a rectangular bale of hay. Tight and compressed, the twine would cut into your hands as you lifted the bale off and threw it behind you. A wagon, the kind I would take haunted hay rides on as a kid, waited for every block we threw at it. It was my job to stand, precariously balanced, at the back of the baler and chuck these heavy objects behind me.
Doing all this for no money, no benefit at all. Not super fun.
At this stage, Mason would prove helpful. With him standing on the wagon and stacking the bales as I tossed them, we could torch through the fields at a much quicker rate. We might get one field every ninety minutes with his aid. Without having to organize the bales alone, the whole process felt a lot more relaxed.
On the night in question, Mason and I hardly spoke to each other. We shared a few moments of laughter, such as when one bale toppled off the wagon and we had to shout incredibly loud at my father to stop. The combined noise of the tractor’s engine and the baling machinery made this difficult.
For stretches of five to ten minutes, we worked like dogs. With stinging lungs and trying to ignore the biting cuts on my palm, I sent the bales toward Mason as quickly as possible. By the time I took a breath, another one appeared. After about three-fourths of the field had been scraped clean, the wagon could hold no more. Dad ushered us off and drove away to retrieve a second wagon. He had three of them, identical in every way, because we never had time to move the bales inside the barn. Instead, they would loiter on the wagons for two or three days before we worked up the nerve to go at it again. Moving bales off the wagons and into the barn was a much simpler process but no less time-consuming.
“I’ll never understand how it does that,” Mason commented as we slouched against the exterior side wall of my house. My father had driven off a moment earlier to fetch the second wagon and now disappeared from view. “The baler,” he explained.
“It’s pretty cool,” I said. “Cool,” a calloused and nonchalant description, was our way of avoiding genuine feelings.
“My hands hurt so goddamn bad.” He chuckled and then rubbed a finger along his palm, wincing at the touch. “I always forget how much it sucks until we do this.”
“I can’t believe this is the first time and it’s already July.” I didn’t look at him, but knew he agreed. “Usually we’ve baled three times by now.”
“How’d he do it without us?”
I shrugged. “Hired some local guys. Amish, probably.”
“You should tell him to do that more often.” Mason glanced at me from the corner of his eye. He took a deep breath. I thought, for a moment, an apology was coming. At least an explanation for his behavior in past weeks. Instead, I noticed something over his shoulder and gasped.
I ran past him and rummaged in the bushes. He called out, but I didn’t pay attention. After some riffling, I extracted the empty vodka bottle from earlier that week.
“Thank god he didn’t see this,” I said. We shared hearty laughter over that for a minute.
Until my father returned and beckoned us to hop on the wagon, I stared across the fields, acknowledging the difference from just an hour ago. Without grass, either tall and waving or dead and layered, these stretches of land were bald. Horrifically so. Like in the dead of winter, they were an ugly scar on the land. A reminder, I suppose, that while everything out here would die one day, some did seasonally.
It only took us a quarter-hour to complete the first field. Once Dad had passed through it for the final time, he drove toward the house and the barns. The wagon was barely full, so I didn’t understand until he parked the train of equipment next to the house and hopped off the tractor.
“Break time,” he called out, gesturing for us to follow him.
Five minutes later, Mason and I reclined against the hood of my truck, water bottle in one hand and Payday in the other. My father’s silhouette moved around the kitchen for a minute and then into the depths of the building. Mason shot me an inquisitive look but didn’t ask anything. I expected that he’d gone in to see my mom. Ever since his humble and unexciting return from exile, he liked to take breaks such as this and have a quick word with her. Some kind of assurance that he hadn’t run off, I guess. On days when he worked at the power plant, he would call once or twice, and they’d chat for about ten minutes. My mother always conversed in a hushed tone and occasional giggles, like some kind of virgin school girl.
The sky had morphed from its cloudless, blue expanse of earlier to a deep purple. In the far distance, where the sun had disappeared an hour ago, the horizon still glowed with an eerie, red distinction. For the rest of the heavens, they were like a misty, purple marble, and we were trapped inside. I guess in some ways, everything is a cage.
That scent of hay would stick in my nostrils for hours afterward. Even when I first woke that next morning, it would cling to my mind. Putrid and earthy, I’d always compared the smell of bundled hay to rotting vegetables. A barn full of that stuff could knock someone down flat, which was part of the reason we procrastinated from storing the bundles in their proper place.
For the time being, though, I drank in the fresh air, back against my reliable truck, and tried to make out constellations in the stars. Little specks of light peeking through our purple marble. I never could find any pattern. They were like the work of a haphazard artist, one who throws their paint against a background and hopes for the best. If you got lucky and watched a long time, some star would eventually fall in fantastic colors, ending its descent in the middle of nowhere. At this thought, I couldn’t help but smirk. Bruce Michaels, it could be said in the most cliche of phrases, had been a shooting star. And this, Little Rush, his obscure landing spot.
“You been doing alright, man?”
I turned to look at Mason, whose question had come from nowhere.
“Yeah, why?”
He shrugged. I wondered if Willow told him about the texts. I hoped not. If there was one person I didn’t want to know about my inner turmoil, it was Mason.
“We should hang out sometime,” I ventured, watching for his reaction.
Mason picked at something on his palm and nodded vaguely.
“Maybe a party or something?”
“Nah.” His response, so quick and acute, caught me off guar
d.
I twisted my torso to either side, trying to crack my back. In reality, I just wanted to get a better look at his face. Standing in the shadows of my home, it was impossible to make out any emotion. His eyes were as barren as the fields stretching around us.
“It was pretty fun, honestly.” I said this unsure whether or not it was a lie. Perhaps the party itself hadn’t been fun. Maybe it even started this downward spiral for our friendship. But the closeness to Mason, the proximity to humans… that had been nice.
“I don’t think I’ll host another,” he said. Though the sentence started in ambiguity, his tone served as the seal on a decree. No more parties, indeed. That was that.
“That’s a shame…” A moment slipped by. “Everything alright?”
“Just leave it alone, okay?” He let out an aggressive, pent-up huff of air and then moved away from the truck. “Y’know, it’s late. I think... I’ll just head home.” Without even turning to look at me, he raised a hand in the air and started toward his convertible. “Got shit to do,” he murmured, barely audible.
“What the hell, dude?” Taking a few steps after him, I moved in front of his convertible. Even as he opened the driver’s door, I rested my hands on the front. Our eyes met and I saw, now free from the shadows, that his were narrowed, nostrils flaming.
“Move, Hudson.”
“No.” I crossed my arms and hoped that my father wouldn’t come out at that second. I didn’t want any interruption. I wanted this and wanted it now. “What’s up with you lately? You’ve been a real piece of shit ever since that party, and now you’re just ditching? I just want… answers.”
Mason worked his way into the driver’s seat and started the car. Now staring through the windshield, he raised a hand and flipped me off before slamming the door shut.
“You’re so fucking dumb,” I yelled at him, hoping it wouldn’t carry inside the house. I punched the hood of his car as hard as possible. Instant pain shot through the cuts on my palm and up my forearm. But I didn’t flinch, didn’t even grit my teeth at the sensation. I just let it pass through me like fire whiskey. “Get out of the car and talk!”
Mason revved the engine, as if to threaten me. Still, I held my position and refused to shift.
He rolled down the window and stuck his head out just enough to yell, “Fuck you, Hudson. Get outta the way.”
I punched his hood once again, the contact hard enough that I expected it would leave a dent. My hand burned pretty good after that. Clenching both fists, I drilled him with an expression that could’ve killed small animals. “You motherfucking—!”
I jumped out of the way just in time, my words cut off. Mason sped past me, throwing up gravel behind the car. I stood in the darkness, shoulders heaving, and watched him speed away. The red taillights shrinking to little pinpricks before they were gone entirely. His car swerved onto the country road, and his engine sounded like a lion as he raced away.
With my rough and blistered hands, I grabbed at my face and focused on not crying in the middle of the driveway. My father would exit the house soon, and I’d have to make up an excuse for why Mason left. Then the work would commence. Would go on until nearly midnight.
Those taillights were burned into my mind. Every time I closed my eyes, I could see them. And his words, his voice, tearing into me.
Mason. What a…
There are no words for when your closest friend has become somebody else. Just a numb feeling, an empty crevice that fills with boiling hatred, stomach-churning rage. But for the time being, a nothingness that threatened to make me puke.
9
Little Rush
(The Journalist)
Gina hunched in her chair, fingers paused on the keyboard. She strained, trying to crack her neck, and ended up gazing out the window to her left. Outside, the downtown streets were wrapped in a late-night fog. Or perhaps early morning. A slight rain fell, almost like a mist from the sky, and mingled with the fog across Little Rush. She’d grown used to this aspect of the city. Nearly every morning, the streets would fill with a cool, soothing cloud. Something about the river, she assumed. She’d had her share of fog in California, just nothing this… cold.
Her face cracked in a smile, thin and wistful. Gina sighed, leaned back from the computer. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine that day, when she would leave Little Rush. Would they know her name by that point, as well as they did Bruce’s? The story in her back pocket… it would explode onto the national scene in just a few days. Carry her to new heights.
The email she’d just sent held the final version of her article. A lengthy, five thousand word answer to that question she’d initially started with. The question, scrawled on a post-it note, stuck to the back of her laptop this very second. In her scribbled writing, it asked, “What exactly happened, and what does he remember?”
That question had been the basis for her investigation, research, every interview with applicable people. Madeline had been shy about the process. Even after the initial accusation, about Bruce Michaels, the girl rarely opened up. Gina herself had to coax more information about the story after Madeline began. The place, the time, the context. Gina had written down everything, sifted through it, and then got to work.
Such a remarkable, heart wrenching article to write, and yet it had led her to Little Rush. This quaint, amusing town. Her home for the last two months and for another week at least. But then everything would be over. All her efforts published. The truth revealed. And her status… elevated.
In a day or two, she’d receive an electronic copy of the piece before it hit the presses. Gina stood from her computer and stretched like a cat. In the meantime, she would sleep. The world, soon enough, would understand what she’d uncovered. All the secrets of Bruce Michaels. Wildly popular actor and generally good guy. Not a bad bone in his body, they said.
Gina chuckled and glanced in the direction of her computer once more. Eager for that email. The finished copy of her article.
Like an atomic bomb, she thought to herself, staring out the window once again. Deep, calming breaths. And I get to watch it fall.
For the time being, everybody would sleep, unaware, absent-minded. The threat of truth perched above their heads. Ready to kill.
Poor Madeline, she thought, closing the laptop and leaving her in total darkness.
Guilt gnawed at her sometimes, but she’d learned to block it out. This was all for the good of the masses. Her audience. Madeline was just one young woman with a troubled history and a dark future. Especially after this article. Especially when her name got out.
These things have to happen. Gina readied herself for bed and tried not to think about the ripples. Focused on the stone as it dropped into the lake. It’s all worth it.
10
Jed
I noticed him first, sitting alone on one of the benches that lined the downtown sidewalk, staring out at the river. His eyes were glazed over, hands folded in his lap. The man’s frame, once buff and proud, slouched in the seat. His arms were wrinkled, almost sickly, and his skin even paler than my own.
Approaching him by myself, I couldn’t help but notice the groups of people walking by. Some of them glanced at him, but not all. I got the impression that everyone had seen him in person once or twice before, so the shock didn’t register now. He was, more or less, just an old man inhabiting a bench by the river. And there were plenty of those kind around.
For myself, though, seeing Bruce Michaels in the flesh did a number on my breathing. I had to stop and compose myself.
What an absurd setting. This little river, our local gem, like a masterpiece of art that’s been forgotten in the garage. We’d all grown so accustomed to it. The picturesque curves and the postcard-worthy bridge. Even on today, when the sky threatened storms and you couldn’t see any blue past those angry clouds, it held a charm that I often forgot to appreciate.
This man, from the bright lights and noisy streets of LA, appreciated Little Rush. Its natural
beauty, its intrinsic peacefulness. Maybe I had something to learn from him. Maybe we all did.
“Mr. Michaels?” I approached him and extended a hand.
His chin rose ever so slowly, scrutinizing my appearance. I’d worn one of my nicer, summer suits. It might look out of place down here by the river, but I suppose this qualified as a business meeting. Bruce Michaels, himself, had dressed in shoddy jeans and a wrinkled button-up, which only made me regret the suit more.
“Cooper,” he said, voice like gravel. Then a chuckle. It sounded like the noise got caught halfway up his throat. “Call me Bruce.”
“In that case, call me Jed,” I assured him. Without dancing around the subject, I gestured at the sidewalk and asked, “A meeting, then?”
Bruce staggered to his feet, leaning heavily on the sides of the bench. A group of boys ran by, half of them shirtless and sweat-soaked. The local cross country team, most likely. Once they’d passed, I started down the sidewalk at an agonizing, methodical pace. Bruce kept step with me fine, but on the off chance he had knee problems or something, I didn’t want to push too hard.
“That bridge up there.” He pointed ahead of us where it crossed over the Ohio and touched down on the Kentucky side. His eyes were on fire as he stared, transfixed by the appearance. Surely, he’d seen loads of bridges in California, even the Golden Gate probably. “Can we cross it?”
“Technically, yes, but with this weather” —I jerked a thumb at the sky— “perhaps it’s not the best idea.”
He grunted and we went on, following the river’s path. I brought up an advertisement campaign once or twice, but Bruce seemed reluctant to dive in right away. He wanted to tease out this conversation, really press my patience. Maybe on purpose, or maybe he just felt sociable. People like him, their productive days running out, always talked more. At least it seemed so to me.