“What’s that?”
Ron’s heart pounds under his Hawaiian shirt, his mouth gone dry.
“I want to see the golden bear.”
“What the hell are you talking—”
“The brazen bear you bring out every winter solstice.”
The janitor smiles and shakes his head, leans against the mop handle. “You’re one of those people, huh?”
“What people?”
“Once or twice a year, some conspiracy freak comes along asking about the winter solstice celebration, and didn’t this town used to—”
“I’m not asking, and I’m not a kook. I was here, sir, twenty-nine years ago, December twenty-second, Twenty-Aught-Four.”
“You must be con—”
“I watched from the balcony while you roasted my wife inside the golden bear.”
For a moment, the theatre stands so quiet, Ron can hear the murmur of traffic out on Main, the janitor staring him down with an oblique combination of anger and fear.
Ron says, “I didn’t come here to hurt any—”
“I told you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you—”
“And I got work to do.”
The janitor turns away and pushes his mop bucket toward the far right aisle that in Ron’s dreams are always lined with white-masked executioners.
-39-
He walks slowly down the sidewalk among the throng of tourists, sweating again after half a block.
The waterfall has dried up, and the sky, so blue and pure all those years ago when he and Jessica first came to town, has faded into a pale and dirty white.
Main Street looks the same, although the two lanes have been divided into four to accommodate the tiny vehicles, and there are traffic lights and automated pedestrian crosswalks now at every intersection. Some of the older buildings have been demolished, but most remain to be dwarfed beneath the five- and six-story apartment buildings.
The “Welcome to Lone Cone” sign boasts a population of just under nine thousand.
Ron glances at the hillsides above town, overridden with condos and trophy homes.
Above them all, a Wal-Mart sits perched on a manmade plateau, and behind it the immense gray peaks stand snowless under the brutal summer sun.
-40-
Ron waits twenty minutes in line for a cup of dark roast, then joins his wife at a table near the window.
“How’s your latte?” he asks.
“Delicious.”
Starbucks world music trickles through speakers in the ceiling like a slow-drip IV.
“Could we spend the night here, Ron? It’s so beautiful—”
“I’d rather not.”
She reaches across the table, holds his hand.
“When we leave here, do you want to show me where you stumbled out of the mountains? Maybe we could stop on the side of the road, say a few words for Jessica?”
“Sure, we could do that.”
“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 who picks you up could be crazy. You aren't supposed to pick up hitchhikers, because they could be crazy. Now if we were to collaborate, I write a scene where a driver kills someone he picked up. You write a scene where a hitchhiker kills the guy who gave him a ride. Then we get these two together...”
