Fully Loaded - Blake Crouch [44]
“You regret coming here.”
“No, it’s not that. I always knew I would.”
“Must feel strange after all this—”
The knock on the window startles them, and Ron glances up to see the janitor peering through from the sidewalk.
-41-
Ron and the janitor sit on a bench at the termination of 7th Street, on the bank of a filthy pond inhabited by a single mangy-looking duck.
“We thought you’d come back,” the janitor says. “Right after, I mean. Wise you didn’t.”
“Town’s changed,” Ron says.
“Beyond recognition.”
“Does Lone Cone still practice—”
“God, no. People went soft, couldn’t stomach it. Quit believing in the usefulness of such a thing.”
“Usefulness?”
“You hear about the avalanche?”
Ron shakes his head, swats away a swarm of flies that have discovered the sweat glistening on his bald scalp.
“Second winter after we quit the blot, we caught a blizzard. Hardest we’d ever seen. The slide came down that chute right there.” The janitor points to a treeless corridor on a nearby peak that runs right into the town. “Destroyed fifty homes, killed a hundred and thirty-one of us. I still hear them, broken and screaming under the snow.”
“Some might call that divine retribution.”
“I lost my wife and two sons that night. Almost everyone left after that. Sold their land to developers. Then the second homes started cropping up. Chain stores. Texans and Californians.” He sweeps his hand in disgust at the bustling little city, heat shimmering off the buildings and streets. “Until it became this. I keep saying I’ll leave one of these days. Nothing really left for me, you know? Not my town anymore.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“‘Cause you at least saw this place when it was a piece of heaven. When it was perfect. I almost feel a kinship with you.”
“I had to quit practicing medicine,” Ron says. “Lost everything I’d worked for. Fucked me up for a lot of years.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“But then I met a beautiful woman. We had three beautiful children.”
“Glad to hear that.”
Ron pushes against his legs, groaning slightly as he struggles to his feet.
“My wife’s waiting for me in the Starbucks.”
“We weren’t monsters.”
“I better get back.”
Ron starts walking toward the commotion of Main.
“They’re gone,” the janitor says, Ron stopping, looking back at the small, sad man on the bench.
“What’s gone?”
“The old ways.”
“The old ways had a dark side.”
Ron turns away from him and walks across the heat-browned grass, trying to remember what the mountains looked like without all the glass and steel.
The janitor calls after him, “So do we, Mr. Stahl, and now there’s nothing to remind us.”
-42-
We are spread across the country now, old and dying or dead already, and we have mostly acclimatized to the absurdity of daily life in the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, although occasionally we regress and rant.
To journals.
Our fellow dinosaurs.
To our children who bring their children to visit us in nursing homes.
We go on about how it used to be—the extinct and glorious slowness of life and other artifacts:
The pleasure of eating real food, seeded and grown out of ground proximate to your own doorstep.
Decency.
Community.
Respect for the old traditions.
We tell all who will listen, but mostly ourselves, that we once lived in a perfect little town in a perfect little valley, where life was vivid, rich, and slow.
And once in a while, someone will ask why it can’t be that way again, and we tell them sacrifice. There’s no sacrifice anymore. And they nod with enlightened agreement, that special condescension reserved solely for the old, without the faintest idea of what we really mean.
An introduction to “Serial” by Blake Crouch and J.A. Konrath
Since we first met at Left Coast Crime in El Paso, Texas in 2005, we’d always talked about writing something together. Of course, talking is easier than writing, so we talked and talked and talked but never wrote anything. Then, last year, Joe sent Blake an email:
“Now, let's consider hitchhiking. You aren't supposed to go hitch hiking, because the driver