In the rustic town of Galena, Illinois, on sweltering summer days such as these, the air was always thick with flies. Pesky little things, they buzzed in your eyes and landed on your skin where they would spit on their forelegs and pat around with their dirty sucker-mouths, and Ralph never had enough repellent to take care of them all.
He was sitting with Ned under the rickety wooden lookout which neither of them were healthy enough or young enough to climb. Not in this heat, anyway. Their breaths were coming slow and shallow now, like wounded slinkies on a two percent grade. Their mouths had gone dry and their flannel shirts had gone wet, and just about everything in question had gone sticky as hell.
Ralph mopped his brow with the folded map and looked into the sky and could see only sun up there, glaring down cruel and indifferent. “Ah, geez Louise. What are we doing out here? Look at us, two old farts sitting in the middle of a corn maze. What are we doing? They’re never gonna take us, you know. They’ll just do us like the rest of ‘em.”
“They took me once,” said Ned. “You know that. They took me once.”
“Yeah I know, but these aren’t the old days anymore. I mean, look at us. Really. What are we doing out here? Let’s go indoors somewhere and get us some cheese curds and die ourselves a nice dignified death, huh? Sound nice? Brewskies and cheese curds? Lot better than waiting out here and baking in the sun all day, I can tell you that.”
Ned sighed heavily and licked his lips with a tongue that was too dry to be of help, and he gazed off into the corn with eyes that were glazed and wearied. Eyes that reflected too much of the past to glean anything useful from the present. “I guess I do feel like having some cheese curds now,” he resigned.
They sat there a while longer, blinking flies from their faces, and then decided to unfold the map and find their nearest exit.
The Gasoline Alley was one of those diners that sits on top of a grocery store, run by a small number of sad-looking people who look that way for a reason. The food was shit for the heart, but Ralph and Ned wouldn’t need those soon enough anyway, so in they went through the mosquito-netted doorway and past the bar always draped in shadow and under the fuzzy television caught between channels. It was sputtering something about tripods in Chicago and how the Sears Building was looking a lot shorter these days.
“Two Coors and a thing of cheese curds, Mable,” Ralph said, knocking his fist on the table with its paper menus and its laminated cloth of blue-and-white checkers.
That Mable, after all of these years she was still dolling herself up in her same old waitress garb, and still as skeletal as ever. But she was older now, with sunken cheeks and sunken eyes and a sunken heart, and still the best she could manage was a pseudomorphic smile and some unrefined small talk. Ralph had joked once that she looked like a Martian herself. It was funny then. But that was a long time ago. When laughter mattered.
As Ralph listened to Randy Newman’s acoustic “Big Hat, No Cattle” struggle through the outdated stereo system, he looked around at the pretend buffalo horns and scavenged Illinois license plates hung on the walls, and for a moment he thought to himself, ‘This is what’s become of America. A whole bunch of people, and some of ‘em are pretend people, and some of ‘em are trying to scavenge what’s left of their lives, and some of ‘em are just plain old outdated,’ and just when he thought he was on to something important he saw a framed poster on the wall called “The Shit List” and it made him chuckle.
“Now who the hell frames something like that?” he said, perfectly bemused. He read the list silently to himself, then pointed to one of the items near the bottom and said, “That’s the one I’m having right now. The ‘Gee, I Wish I Could Shit’ shit.”
Ned looked up from his wallet full of photographs and blinked.
“I was going to kill myself three years ago,” Ned said. “It was the darkest time of my life. It was three years ago and suddenly I didn’t have a family anymore. They’d all left me. No one would have found me for days. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
“Here ya go, cheese curds.” Mable slid the plastic tray between the two. “Lemme know if ya need anything else.” And she took off again into the kitchen.
Ralph sat there in his chair, not touching the cheese curds and somewhat shamefully wondering why they had come before the beers. He coughed uncomfortably and shifted his weight a bit. “You wanna talk about this?” he said.
“Naw, it doesn’t matter anymore. Somebody else’ll do the job for me now, you know. Let’s just eat our cheese curds in peace until the end comes.”
They reached in to take their first handfuls of the greasy appetizers and munched silently in the sunny glow of the skylight, awaiting the warm wash of a death-ray which they hoped wouldn’t hurt much––just two old farts surrounded by wall paraphernalia and assailed by the smells of the Gasoline Alley’s deep-frying machines laboring in the kitchen––and neither of them would ever know what had become of their time spent here on planet Earth, nor would they ever understand why there were so few things to smile about on this final day of all days.
BIO: Michael is a graduating student at Whittier College. His professor is Tony Barnstone and he thanks you for your time.
