Rhett McLaughlin - The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek

“Alicia!” Rex shouted, hopping off the pegs and grabbing the fence, shaking it to punctuate his anger. Leif joined him, passionately rattling the links as headlights briefly illuminated one side of the three-story school in the distance before the van disappeared behind it.

Alicia was gone.

“We gotta get in there, man!” Rex said, reaching up as if he was about to climb the fence.

“And then do what?” Leif asked. “Alicia’s parents sent her here. If we somehow get her out, they’ll just send her back.”

“But…” Rex still had both hands and one foot on the fence. “So that’s it? We’re just giving up on her?”

“I…I don’t know,” Leif said, wiping his wet cheeks, grateful for the cover of night. “Maybe.”

“Aaaargh!” Rex shouted, pulling himself away from the fence and violently kicking at nothing. Save for the light from the lampposts on each side of the gate, darkness was all around them.

Leif stared down the shadowy driveway, feeling like his heart had been injured. It didn’t seem real that he wouldn’t see Alicia tomorrow. Or the next day. She was right there in that building, just a bike ride away, and yet she might as well have been on the other side of the globe. Or in Nebraska.

“We should probably get back,” Rex said, seconds (or minutes?) later. “I don’t want my parents to realize it’s my punching bag in my bed and not me.”

“You think they’d fall for that?”

“No. That’s why I’m saying we should get back.”

“Yeah.” Leif flipped his kickstand, let Rex step up on the pegs, and started pedaling toward home. “My mom had an overnight shift, so…she’s not even home yet. You want me to drop you off at your scooter?”

“Nah. I’ll get it tomorrow.”

They rode to Rex’s house in silence.

“Hey, Leif,” Rex said out of nowhere, and Leif had the funny thought that maybe Rex had read his mind, that he was about to tell Leif what a great couple he and Alicia would make someday. “Good call on the bike pegs.”

Or not.

Leif nodded and kept pedaling.

3

IT HAD ONLY been two days, but Janine Blitstein was already tired of Bleak Creek.

Things that had seemed charming and quaint during her childhood summertime visits now seemed, at best, out of touch and, at worst, annoyingly backward. It completely boggled her mind that her mother had grown up here. Then again, her mom had left town as soon as she could, so in that way it made perfect sense.

It occurred to Janine why this trip felt so different: It was the first one she’d made on her own. Every other time, her parents had been there to offer their commentary, which, once she and her brother, Jared, were teenagers, was usually her mom railing against the patriarchy baked into Bleak Creek’s churches or the xenophobia hidden beneath the town’s folksy demeanor, and her dad—a Jewish guy from New Jersey—voicing his wry befuddlement at pretty much all of it. But now, a decade or so later, the only commentary was inside Janine’s own head. Her eighty-one-year-old grandmother, GamGam, certainly wasn’t providing any. Which left Janine in a constant state of feeling slightly insane. And lonely.

“Tell me more about the first kidney stone you remember,” she said now, one eye on the lens of her camcorder, making sure that her grandmother was still framed well.

“Ooooohhhhh, honey, do I remember it!” GamGam said, leaning slightly forward in her floral chair. “Though, I’ll tell ya, Neenie, I’d like to forget it!”

“Uh, don’t use my name, GamGam,” Janine said, standing up from behind the tripod. “Remember, just talk to me like I’m a stranger who’s never been to Bleak Creek.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, sweetheart. You’ve told me that goin’ on a dozen times now. Guess I’m not used to bein’ a big movie star yet.” GamGam winked. “Now where was I…?”

“That first stone.” This was Janine’s second interview with GamGam, and she felt considerably less enthused than she had yesterday during the first. But she knew that if she asked the right questions, she’d find what she was looking for: confirmation that this project—the reason she’d flown down here to stay with her grandmother for a couple weeks—was a brilliant idea.

“Oh right, my first stone,” GamGam said. “I named it Mildred.”

“You named it?”

“I name ’em all! Name ’em after people that did me wrong. But I tell ya, it never matters what I name ’em—they all hurt like the Devil!”

Nope. It didn’t seem brilliant yet.

“I wouldn’t wish stones on my worst enemies,” GamGam continued. “Except maybe Evelyn Barber, the one who spread a rumor that I was a Democrat. All I said was that I thought Bill Clinton was a good-lookin’ man, which is true! He’s what you might call…sexy.” GamGam made a clicking sound with her mouth, her go-to way of accenting anything she considered particularly edgy. “But I’m still a Bush lady all the way.”

“Yep, can’t get too much Bush,” Janine said for her own amusement. “How many people do you know in Bleak Creek who regularly get kidney stones?” She was trying to keep the momentum of the interview going, but it felt like rolling a boulder up a hill.

“Hmm, let’s see,” GamGam said, staring at the popcorn ceiling. “There’s me, there’s Evelyn,”—she rolled her eyes—“Christine Neally, John Reed, Harriet Logan, Ted Yarbrough…” As the list went on, Janine had a sinking feeling in her stomach. She probably would’ve been better off asking GamGam to explain why she found Bill Clinton so sexy.

The idea for this project had come to her less than seventy-two hours earlier, while on the phone with her mom, who’d been worried about GamGam’s recent struggles with gout. “Along with all the kidney stones she’s had,” Janine’s mother had said, “it’s made her doctor concerned about—”

“Wait,” Janine interrupted. “Kidney stones ? Plural? I thought it was just the one.”

“No, she’s passed eleven this year alone. We’ve told you this, sweetie.” Janine hadn’t visited Bleak Creek since finishing undergrad, but she was ashamed to think she’d tuned out vital information about her beloved grandmother’s health.

“ Eleven in one year ? That’s a ridiculous number of kidney stones.”

“Well, it is and isn’t,” her mother said. “For Bleak Creek, that’s not unusual.”

“What the…?”

“I know, right?” Her mom laughed. “Growing up there, I got so used to people passing kidney stones, I didn’t even know it was weird until I left.”

“Yeah. It’s definitely weird, Mom.”

“You remember GamGam’s friend Rose?”

“Nosy Rosy? Of course.”

“She passed thirty-one last year.”

“ Thirty-one kidney stones? That’s, like, one every couple weeks!” Janine hadn’t been this curious about anything in months. “What the hell is going on in that town, Mom? Like, seriously!”

And that’s when the idea hit her:

What the hell is going on in that town?

“Oh, you’re making it sound way more dramatic than it is,” Janine’s mother said, chuckling. “It’s still just kidney stones.”

Janine barely heard her, though, as her future documentary’s title dropped into her brain, a gift from the muses after three epic months of creative roadblocks: The Kidney Stoners. A funny yet intriguing doc about her mom’s small southern hometown, a place with a bizarre and unexplained proliferation of kidney stones. This could be her very own Vernon, Florida, the quirky, small-town film from her cinematic hero, Errol Morris. It was perfect. Within twenty-four hours, she and her RCA ProEdit camcorder were on a Continental Airlines flight headed from JFK to Raleigh, ready to make the film that would kickstart her career.