Town where I grew up you had two options: work at the mill or work at the prison. Retirement plans were suicide and also suicide, respectively.
We'd jump off an old railroad bridge into the river in the summer, til the day we found that boy, bloated and fishbelly white. I watched him as he floated by, slow, under the bridge. I watched him til Lorna started screaming, til Tom Mickelson and his deputy waded out there to pull him out of the weeds. We never did much swimming after that.
Lorna was already what you'd call a dramatic girl, emotional. Seeing that dead boy didn't help that none. Maybe the town never changed. Maybe I did. But things was different after that, after that day. And I don't know when, but I realized, not all at once, it came on slow, but I realized that I knew I would die in this town. Not in some fanciful, journal-writing sort of way, "I'll die if I don't get out of here." No, I didn't know the when, but I knew the where. I knew when my time came I'd meet my maker in Smith's Ridge, no matter how far I'd traveled, how I'd labored to keep that dusty nothing of a town at my back. And history would prove me right.
26 February 2012
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