Local History

By Tim J Heintzman

Aided by his dead grandmother and haunted by a persistent ghost of his own demise, Eldon Wright must navigate these surreal and other more immediate demons in a test of courage and loyalty during the last days of his final year in high school. Eldon cannot see tomorrow but knows a moment in time can change him, forever.  A real and immediat

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tim Heintzman
• Release date: Sep 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780996310000

Tim J Heintzman

Tim is a freelance fiction writer. He was born and raised in North Dakota, graduated from college with a B.A. in English and Education. He taught high school English for a short time before moving to the East Coast. Baltimore was his home for twenty five years. Tim is the author of a novel and two collections of short stories. He is currently at work on more short stories, a new novel, and has adapted the novel, Local History, into a screenplay. Tim lives in Virginia with his partner, Judy.

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Local History

Copyright © 2013 by Tim Heintzman

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-0-9963100-0-0

The River

The town lay along the river's eastern shore where tall oak and cottonwood and elm were thick along steep banks.  Throughout the day soft chunks of sandy earth fell into the muddy water and sent tiny frogs and minnows flying.  Thick roots grew from damp, sandy walls.  Long hoary limbs dried by the sun reached out over the water.

Patchwork fields of flax, wheat and sunflower flowed north, south and west from the town.  Gray dirt and rust-red scoria roads wandered these fields, passing long belts of tall trees or dense hedges, and sometimes low barbed wire fence that had snared a deer in the winter, whose corpse lay intact in the spring, a small delicate hoof wrapped ingeniously in black, twisted metal.

Late spring mornings were still and the grass would not be dry until noon.  The afternoon sun swallowed shadows and in turn was devoured by them, light and warmth withdrawing up empty side streets like an exhausted wave.  Later in the day the wind would gust through orderly neighborhoods, bullying huge shade trees, its path unhindered by short square buildings and level streets, blowing dust and gravel so to make one thirsty.  But the wind would not stay long.  Around dinnertime a calm would descend, and footsteps on pavement would echo loudly within the stillness.  The sun sank beyond the horizon leaving an orange afterglow that faded slowly, a brief deep blue kept the stars at bay, but then night came quickly.  The town slept.

From its source where three smaller rivers converged the River flowed east for many miles.  It eventually turned south, past the town, towards the sea, turned east again and joined another great river.  The dam north of the town kept other towns in the River's realm of influence from flooding and provided water for an already dry land.  In early spring the river ran high, rising close to the road that followed its course north and south, flooding parks and threatening newer homes along its ragged banks.  People spoke of the river as if it had a mind of its own.  She's moody, they would mutter, or they would curse it as they did a person who had ill-treated them.

Young men swam the river at its most narrow point in summer in response to a dare, to prove to their peers and themselves they could challenge the river and win.  Most survived, but some were either drunk with liquor or their bellies were full, they sank quickly and were retrieved down river, hours or even days later.  It was not uncommon to see a crowd of pink and tanned bodies in bright bathing suits gathered at some point along the water's edge, two and three patrol cars, an ambulance that had driven out onto the sand, blue and orange lights flashing timidly in bright sunlight. Every summer she claims one or two, someone watching the drama would declare, as if the River compelled a human sacrifice.  Mothers were especially terrified, admonishing their children to stay away from it, to be careful oh so careful of the River for it was unforgiving, did not care who it claimed, was indifferent to its victims.  Tragic stories of someone's doom in the muddy water, refined with age and snowballing with fear as they were told, gave the children something to think about before they lollygagged about the River's edge.

It was midnight and a full moon.  You could see for a mile the moon was so bright.  Floyd Wilhelm stripped down to his underwear underneath the bridge on the rocks and dove into the steady current.  He swam toward the opposite shore.  There at that time the narrowest point along the River.  Floyd was an expert swimmer, helped his team get a trophy the year he graduated from school.  He'd gained a few pounds since then but the boy was in great shape.  He swam as hard and fast as he could, expecting the current to carry him down a bit, probably he was thinking to end up just above the marina, 'bout a mile south.  He was doing fine, then he disappeared midstream, just like that.  There he was in the moonlight pushing the muddy water away as if it was a nuisance, then he wasn't there anymore.  They dragged the river for fourteen hours, but didn't find his body.  They never found him.  Figured he was dragged down by the undercurrent, maybe passed out and sank like a rock, some folks even insisted it might've been suicide.  But that wasn't likely.  He had everything going for him.  They never found his body.  He could've washed up shore miles down river and decomposed or been eaten by coyotes, or he might a been eaten by carp lying there on the bottom.  Who knows.  Floyd was a good swimmer and it took him.  Poor bastard.  Died cold and alone out there in that water.  In the dark  He was only a boy, really.  So young.

Parents warned their children . . . there's a monster in there, still alive from prehistoric times.  Like the Loch Ness.  I saw it once.  Ate a dog and a moored rowboat off Desert Point, three mile south the Cove.  Likes children mostly but will eat a dog if the pickings are slim.  You have to stay way from the water's edge because depending on how deep the River is any given day it slinks in and then pounces quick, like a rattler.  You could be talking to somebody, you look the other way and quick as lightning Bingo!  they're gone.  You don't believe me ask the Schultzes how they lost their baby last summer.

Despite the real or imagined stories the River did take a life or two every summer and a grudging respect replaced arrogance, for awhile.  Then another young man tried to swim its width, or someone fell off a boat and never reappeared, or the river swelled despite the dam and snatched a child who was fishing along the thick, muddy bank, or a water skier fell and was lost forever.

To underestimate the River was dangerous, and usually fatal.  It was not to be trifled with.

Eldon

Dawn's first light crept into the room.  A colorless likeness dappled a bedroom wall beyond the foot of Eldon’s bed.  Sunlight, the window frame and shadows of maple leaves all merged, and as he opened his eyes Eldon saw upon the wall a vague, diaphanous outline of a riverbank, a path, and hushed field.  The image shuddered with the morning breeze.  Eldon lay in bed and stared.  He was wide awake, but unprepared for the morning. He shut his eyes tight to try and grasp a thread of fading dream and dispel all the nagging reasons that compelled him to put his feet on the floor, to wake up.  He turned under his covers and looked away from the floor, from the morning.  His first memory still lay in his mind like a faded painting, like the image on the wall.  He was sitting in the sand on a beach, his fair skin shaded by a bright yellow, floppy brimmed hat and long sleeved shirt.  The sun was warm on his back as he stabbed with his plastic shovel at dry, bleached sand.  He filled the bucket up slowly, struggling to hold the shovel with awkward, clumsy movements, spilling much of the sand intended for the bucket back onto the beach.  As he concentrated on the bucket, a puddle of muddy water materialized at the bottom of the hole he had engineered.  After attempting to use the shovel to scoop out the water, which failed, he used his tiny hands as a ladle to push the water up the sides of his hole and out.  The water magically returned.  He had looked up to get his mother’s attention, but she slept soundly in a rented lounger a few feet away.  A rainbow of beach umbrellas stretched in a slow arc in and then out toward the sea.  Gray and white birds with long narrow beaks walked nimbly in the receding surf, and when they ran from the water Eldon laughed.  More birds shrieked overhead.  Countless bodies lay prone gleaming in the bright sunlight, splayed out on vibrant towels.  The ocean’s color alternated between blue and blue-green.  Eldon looked out to sea and saw an enormous ship on the horizon, like the ones in books his father had read to him before he fell asleep at night.  The hole was now half filled with muddy sludge.  Eldon’s smooth forehead wrinkled up and his blue eyes narrowed.  His mouth twisted into a pout and he lashed out at the hole with his small shovel.  He screamed at the water in his hole.  His mother woke with a start, looking frantically to her son, panic and then relief animating her wan face.

Eldon?  What’s the matter?

Eldon turned the bucket of sand upside down into the hole, pushing down hard with his plump hands, packing the surface with the flat end of his shovel, shrieking and indignant.

Eldon.  Stop that, Darling.  Stop that.  Give me the shovel, Sweetheart.  Eldon, stop.

She knelt down beside her son and gently pulled the shovel from his clenched fingers.  He began to cry.

No, Honey.  You’ll hurt yourself.  Let’s go in the water.  C’mon, Sweetie.  Don’t you want to go in the water?  We came all this way.

Eldon pounded the sand with tiny fists.  His mother finally dropped the shovel at his feet.    Good god, take the goddamn thing then.

She fell back into the lounger, retrieved a book and wearily watched her son pound the sand with his shovel.  She was soon asleep once more.

Eldon looked down to the beach before him and saw another little boy wearing an identical hat and shirt.  His twin walked unsteadily into the dying swells.  The white foamy surf gathered around his tiny feet.  His small footprints filled up with the sea.  Eldon watched the little boy get knocked over by an incoming wave.  No one cried out.  No one fetched him from his fate.  Eldon saw the boy’s tiny yellow head, like a blooming flower, reappear, then disappear, until the yellow hat was swallowed by the sea.  This was the first time he had seen himself die, as far as he could tell.  But recently his death had become routine. As common and familiar as rain coming from the sky, or breathing.  A phantom of some sort, identical to Eldon as he saw himself in a mirror, had begun to appear with an eerie and disconcerting regularity, suddenly and without introduction, a silent figure, a harbinger of death.  Stepping in front of oncoming cars, huge unforgiving semi trailer trucks, and trains.  Dropping out of the sky and to certain death.  Drowning in the bathtub.  Bleeding to death from wounds received after plunging through a car windshield.  Struck by lightning in an open field as the sky turned a dangerous purplish hue.  He could not explain this death phantom to himself, let alone to anyone else.  Even Marilyn would think him insane.

Strong smells summoned him from sleep.  Coffee, toasted bread and his mother's hairspray.  An alarm clock exploded next to Eldon's ear, and as he reached over he heard his mother in the hall outside his door.

Eldon, wake up.

Eldon burrowed deeper into a pillow still fragrant with detergent.  The morning light spread from the floor to his bed.  He pulled his feet closer to his chest.  Eldon's delicate eyelids fluttered, sleep's soft hands stroking a pale forehead and humming a gentle lullaby.  In the warm and safe harbor of his bed Eldon found it difficult to believe the light on this floor here in the bedroom was the same light that fell into classrooms at school.  So comfortable in his bed, about to turn the cool side of the pillow against his face.  He did not want to get up and go to the school he hated so much.  He wanted to stay and dream of his grandmother’s face.  But the halls and lockers and faces assaulted him now and the smell of the school cafeteria wafted into his head, the ubiquitous odor of hot cooking oil.

Eldon breathed deeply.  Nausea gripped his mid-section and he was suddenly dizzy.  He threw the covers away, desperate for the bathroom, which stank of hairspray and sweet soap.  He closed the door behind him, turned and willfully threw up into the toilet, a strained, muffled retching.  He waited for the dizziness to stop, wiped his mouth, brushed his teeth and returned to his bedroom to dress.  Thankfully his mother heard nothing.  His mouth burned.

Eldon stopped halfway across the bridge on a narrow walkway.  He waited for a mysterious lump in his breast to dissolve.  He waited for his hands to stop trembling, and steadied himself against rough iron as cold as the river in October.  Mornings were not pleasant for him since school had begun.  Often he lay in bed, as he did this morning, waiting for the bile to rise from his gut.

Broken pieces of glass sparkled like diamonds under Eldon's shoes, between bridge traffic and an iron railing.  The river flowed below, tiny eddies swirling hypnotically on its muddy surface.  A darkness impenetrable lay beneath the thick water, eddies ostensibly benign, surface evidence of an undercurrent, some said, that could drag a person down into murky blackness from which there was no return.  Dark water ate at the base of huge stone columns whose color was like dirty snow.

Half a pint bottle of cheap vodka lay nearby, its label still intact, one part fluttering in the April air.  The floor of the bridge, a swath of thick metal grating, together with the melancholy harmony of rubber tires and air, gave song to a wavering, inexhaustible dirge, a high whine that crept up Eldon's spine.  He shivered every time a car passed.

Eldon looked over the railing and down at the swirling, dangerous water.  Into his vision, from above and behind, a body dropped gracefully, spread-eagled, face down, falling, falling to meet the river's muddy water.  Eldon watched his own body plunge down until it struck the base of a bridge column and glanced off into the river, one of the tiny eddies growing suddenly wider to meet this sacrifice from above.

Heyyyyyyyyyyyyy!  Jump, Asshole! 

Startled, Eldon pushed himself away from the railing.  A flat-gray car full of rowdies roared over the bridge and toward the town, one of the passengers halfway out a window and screaming.

Eldon walked away from the dark water.  He did not want to be late for his first period class.

The school rose up out of the ground.  It was an old building of high windows set inside washed out brick walls that were once a bright sandy color but had slowly matured into a muffled hue of age and disinterest.  The old building reeked of sympathy.

The central stairway was littered with students slouching indifferently, nervously watching, talking the talk, sitting fully stretched out on the stairs or huddled within themselves, in twos and threes, or alone, greedily hoarding those few moments before the class bell as if they were their last.  Feral yelps and harsh calls echoed up and down the halls. Voices on the central stairway rose and fell in low communion.

Jesus, I’m tired.

You’re always tired.

Too early to be in school, for Chrissakes.

Too early to be anywhere.

I didn’t get a proper breakfast.

You’ve never had a proper breakfast.

What time is it?

Half past the monkey’s ass.

I hate looking at a teacher this early in the morning.

I hate lookin at you.

They give me indigestion.

You don’t have anything to indigest, remember?

God.  I can feel the freakin bell about to ring.

All things must pass.

God.  I’m hungry.

You’re always hungry.

The sun’s long shafts of bright light shot through tall glass behind those on the stairway and lay in a pool on the floor, so that the flow of human traffic passed through as if on some badly lit, overpopulated stage.

The first bell robbed sleep from those indignant with the day.  Downstairs in the locker rooms small flakes of plaster dropped to the shower stall floor.  Slowly they all rose from the stairs and reluctantly began to move.  Steps quickened.  Cigarette smoke hung on those who fled church steps across the street and rushed inside to their lockers. 

In the boys’ lavatory on the second floor, Eldon knelt before one of four open toilets that emerged from the wall.  Two white enamel sinks to his right beneath cracked mirrors were bright beyond measure, graffiti carved into plaster just above the tile line, four letter words and simple sketches etched with the thoughtlessness of an embarrassed child.  Some carved into the wall itself.

Eldon smelled the toilet, resisting as much as he could the enormous pressure from Worm’s hand flat and hard at the base of his neck.  He was helpless beneath the hand.  From the corner of his eye Eldon saw stiff, black steel-toed boots that belonged to Worm’s partner, a tall boy with deep set dark eyes and long sandy hair in waves to his shoulders.  This boy leaned against the wall, out of Eldon’s sight, leisurely smoking a cigarette next to a leaded window he had opened to vent the smoke.

Now, Spike?  Worm asked the other boy.

Don’t got nothin to say, Eldon?  Go ahead, Worm.

Eldon heard the lavatory door open and someone enter.  He instinctively rose against the momentary relief of Worm’s hand, but the hand closed tighter, moving his head closer to the bowl.

What’s goin on?  a strange voice Eldon did not recognize.

None of your fuckin business, Spike threatened, and Eldon heard the door open once more.  He closed his eyes.

Spike and Worm left the bathroom cackling like well-lit sailors, their belly laughter lost among a press of time-harried students, the crash of locker doors, a symphony of voices chattering and squawking, the discordance of an orchestra pit tuning before a performance.

Eldon was alone in the lavatory.  He rose from the cold floor and rung out his hair over the sink.  It did not smell so bad.  He scrubbed his face and hands, dried them with paper towels, and washed a second time.  He looked at himself in the chipped, clouded mirror, a reflection fractured.  His dark shirt was spotted wet