Calamity Creek

Fiction by Colleen Quinn

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I’m excited to share today’s selected short fiction, Calamity Creek by Colleen Quinn. Besides being an excellent story, this piece is a great example of how the right details, gestures, and dialogue can conjure a world much richer and more mysterious than what one might think possible in just 2,500 words. Every time I re-read it, something new stands out to catch my attention.

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Calamity Creek

Even as a boy, Jimmy Day had white hair, black eyes, and a red, pinched face when it was cold. In the town of Calamity Creek, it was usually cold. Jimmy’s hair was short and spiky and would probably have thinned from his temples on back. He walked like an old man who had done a lot of physical labor, even when he was a young man who hadn’t done anything. All the men in his family walked like that—his father and his three older brothers—and they sneered when they smiled.

When Jimmy was sixteen, his father’s midnight-blue Camaro was found upside down in Calamity Creek, but Jimmy, the driver, having had his license for all of a week, was not inside it. No one was. The calendar said spring and the first week of April, but the town had gotten four inches of snow the previous night, enough to fill in any footprints that might indicate the direction he went and whether he went on his own or had some help.

Lonny’s Rodeo Inn was a stupid name for a bar—there weren’t any cowboys within five hundred miles of here—but it had been there for so long, people had stopped complaining about it. The red neon bronco bucked up and down all night, never throwing off the cowboy on his back. The town was like that about a lot of things, like it wanted to be somewhere else. There were a lot of Confederate flags around, even though the Civil War was a hundred and fifty years ago and the handful of names carved into the side of the war memorial in the town park had all fought for the North. Of course they did. You couldn’t hardly get any more north than this tiny town in the Adirondacks, not unless you went to Canada. A lot of people did leave. The word “Adirondack” meant bark-eater in the native language because you couldn’t grow food there, nothing but trees, and prosperity continued to elude it.

“I’ll tell you,” said Mikey Owens, one of the regulars at the Rodeo Inn, “if I was Jimmy Day, and I had crashed that car, I wouldn’t want to go home either.” Vernon Day, the patriarch, was known to be handsy. The Day boys often sported bruises, from their father or each other, and their physical tolerance for pain was legendary.

“How did those guys get a Camaro in the first place?” Lucy, the bartender, weighed at least 250 pounds, but she was strong as a lumberjack and known to ask some good questions. “The Days don’t have jack shit.”

Nods all down the bar, the validation of common knowledge.

Lucy continued, “I drive the school bus around that same curve at the bottom of Fairground Hill, and even in good weather, I’d have to be out of my damn mind to take it at more than fifteen miles an hour.” A lot of people in town were like Lucy, doing a few different things to piece together a living.

“Mike, how fast did the sheriff say he was going?”

Mikey Owens had married the sheriff’s twin sister and sometimes he knew more than he ought. “A kid like that? In a new Camaro? Forty, at least. That car went through the guardrail like it was made out of Kleenex.”

A kid like that.

Not so long ago, Jimmy Day wouldn’t have been tall enough to see over the dashboard of a Camaro once he was in it. He was the smallest of the Day boys, and like a lot of runts, he had a mouth on him and an affinity for pranks. He was always running and laughing, trouble following him around like a tin can tied to a goat. In school, one of his favorite ways to disrupt a class was to make himself throw up. He had trained himself to do it somehow, actually worked at it. Say there was a big test coming up. The teacher would pass out the papers, handing a bunch to each kid in the front of a row of desks and telling them to pass them back. That’s when Jimmy would get started.

“Come on, Jimmy,” his friends would whisper, and his narrow eyes bulged, and he made all kinds of squelching sounds in his throat. The minute the paper touched his desk in the very back of the classroom, out it came in a hot splatter, all over his desk, his shoes, the floor, other kids, and the disruption was magnificent. The teacher, even knowing there wasn’t anything wrong with him, had to take him to the nurse’s office. Then she had to get the janitor to clean up the mess, and in the meantime, total mayhem. Not one teacher had ever managed to get a class back on track before the period was over.

He had tried that shit with Lucy, but only once. The custodian didn’t clean the school buses, the drivers did, and Lucy was not having it. She heard the dares and giggles—these kids never figured out that she heard everything—saw all the bobble-hatted little heads twisted around in their seats to watch him, and when he spewed, she stopped the bus hard, and they all hit the seat in front of them and fell back.

Jimmy said, “I don’t feel so good,” and his drool-slicked mouth shined when he smiled.

Lucy locked eyes with the little punk in her rearview mirror and said, “The fresh air might help.” She cranked the lever that opened the door, letting in the cold air, and everyone knew what that meant. Jimmy was kicked off the bus. He would be reported to the school and there would have to be a meeting with his father before he could even think of being allowed to ride again. She didn’t know that Vernon Day would never meet with the school and Jimmy would have to walk three miles each way every day he attended school from that moment on. Jimmy certainly knew it, but he sauntered down the aisle of the bus like she was doing him a favor. He hopped off the bus into a snowbank and loped away, wearing only a jean jacket in twenty-degree weather, turning back only to give them all the finger. Lucy watched him go, straight-backed, surefooted, not bothering to beg or negotiate, and she knew he was tough. If anyone could crawl out of a car crash in Calamity Creek and walk away, it was Jimmy Day.

A creek isn’t a river. Calamity Creek was neither deep nor wide, but it was twisty. You might cross it three or four times going from one side of the town to the other. It was spring, so there was snowmelt, as well as the snow from the recent storm.

“Could be eight feet deep,” Mikey said, unconsciously responding to what everyone in the bar was thinking. “Not ten, or it would be over the banks.” That was enough to drown in, especially at night, if you were already hurt, but it wasn’t enough to disappear in. A body—even a scrawny one—would probably wash up in one of the bends of the creek. A spring current can only get you so far.

The door of the bar blew open and the eldest brother, Crosby Day, walked in. He wasn’t a regular, but neither was he much of a surprise. Vernon always drank at home, but Crosby was known to get out and about. The Rodeo Inn was no place to hide; it was just a room with a bar along one side, a jukebox on the other with a deer head mounted over it, an eight-point buck with a lone red Christmas bulb dangling from one antler. If you weren’t already in the bathroom, then you were seen.

And heard. Crosby had a deep voice. He had picked up some late-night DJ work over at the Top 40 station broadcast out of Plattsburgh. Nobody had jobs anymore. They picked up work or got some hours, that was all.

“Shit,” he drawled by way of greeting as he slid onto a barstool.

“Sorry for your loss there, Crosby.” Lucy set out a shot glass and a mug for him. Crosby had been a shot and a beer man since he was fourteen years old.

“My loss. Yeah, right.”

Mikey Owens said, “I heard they haven’t found a body yet.”

“Well, you ought to know. Why don’t you keep your trap shut for once?”

“No offense,” said Mikey, sliding down to a friendlier section of the bar. Although there was offense and plenty of it.

Lucy had briefly dated Crosby in high school, and she knew they were the same age, about thirty and not getting any younger. He still looked okay, although with his black ponytail and unsmiling face, he looked more like Vernon every day, which was unsettling. You think you aren’t going to be like your parents but try to stop it.

She put one hand on top of his, and it was so wet and cold, it was as if he had been digging around in the snow by himself, looking for his lost little brother.

“They might find him yet. You never know, he could be alive.”

“Not for long, the little shit. I find him, I’ll kill him myself.”

Lucy looked in his eyes and saw the anger, yes, but also pain and plenty of fear. His cold hands gave him away. He had been digging in the snow, but not for Jimmy Day.

“How much was in the car?” She whispered in case Mikey was listening. Having a contact in the sheriff’s office worked both ways.

“Forty thousand,” he said, barely loud enough to be heard. “I am so fucked.”

The car had been pulled out of the water and examined. Calamity Creek had one tourist event every year, the Kalamity Kreek Kayak Klassik, just days away, so it was important to look as normal as possible when the tourists showed up with their little boats.

“If they found anything, would we know?” They both looked down the bar at Mikey, who didn’t notice. He was yelling at the TV mounted above the bar, swearing at the Yankees, even out of season.

“Hard to keep it quiet.”

Forty thousand dollars in missing cocaine money was one of the biggest things to happen in Calamity Creek, but Lucy didn’t think anyone would ever tell that story. Not the whole thing.

“I wish you hadn’t gotten involved.”

“Yeah? Well, I wish I had a job with health insurance. Those guys are going to come down from Montreal and they are going to kill me.”

“You can stay at my place.” Lucy still had a little bit of a thing for Crosby, even after all this time, and his immediate refusal broke her heart a little more.

“No point in putting you in danger. Come out and have a cigarette with me.”

Lucy glanced around the bar to see if anybody needed anything. “You keep your mitts off my spigots,” she warned Mikey Owens.

“You bet,” he cackled and lied.

Lucy preferred to be behind the bar, where it was less obvious how her weight had ballooned. She didn’t smoke much anymore, hating how her vices cost so much money. But it was a clear night, so many stars small and sharp, and they were alone, no traffic on the road, no one staggering around the parking lot. She accepted a cigarette, putting one hand over Crosby’s to draw the match closer.

“You know,” she said. “Those guys could have come and gone already. Maybe they took the money and Jimmy. Maybe they knew he had it and drove him off the road. Does he have a cellphone?”

“No. The most expensive thing Jimmy has got are his boots.”

Timberlands, Lucy was sure of it, and they would look heavy at the ends of Jimmy’s skinny legs. Half the guys in town wore them, whether they needed work boots or not.

Crosby said, “I wish I knew if this thing was over or just getting started.”

“What does your dad say?”

“Nothing, as usual.” Vernon Day was a huge, silent, glowering presence who seemed to fill any room he was in, even the high school gymnasium. One of the reasons it hadn’t worked out between Lucy and Crosby was because she had been so scared of his father. “He’s not in on this anyhow, another way in which I am completely fucked.”

“Crosby, you know you ought to talk to the cops.” The air was very cold, and their breath plumed around them. Standing under the lone streetlight, they looked as if they were on a stage, in a spotlight.

“I’m going to wait and see,” he said flatly, not inviting further discussion.

“Wait for what? He’s your brother, Crosby.”

“That’s right, he’s my brother and I know what he’s like and so do you. Nobody is putting his face on a milk carton. I think he’s gone.”

“Dead gone or gone gone?”

“Gone gone. It’s happened before.”

One of Jimmy Day’s misfortunes was that he resembled his mother. His brothers all looked like Vernon, dark and heavy, but Jimmy had his mother’s platinum hair and her mischievous black eyes. She was too good-looking to stick around Calamity Creek, so she left, without so much as a note, leaving behind four angry boys who only got angrier. Jimmy was a daily reminder of her betrayal and abandonment and was treated accordingly.

“Well, I hope he’s all right.” Lucy dropped her cigarette in the snow and buried it with the toe of her boot.

“He’s just fine,” Crosby said bitterly. “He took all the money I had in the world, stole the car, ruined that, and just kept going. I’ll never see him again. It’s the rest of us who are going to have to pay for it.”

Lucy wanted to say more, but knew they would only start to argue. Over Crosby’s shoulder, she saw a deer trotting down the middle of the road, following the yellow double line. The deer was the biggest she had ever seen, with magnificent antlers and no fear whatsoever. When it got closer, it stopped and stared at them, as if it was wondering what they were doing there.

“Look,” she said, and Crosby turned around.

“And me without my rifle. Never get another shot like that.”

She hit his sleeve lightly. “Don’t be a jerk. It’s a sign.”

“A sign?”

The deer walked to the side of the road and easily jumped over the metal barrier, white hindquarters flashing. It disappeared without a sound, swallowed by the woods all around them.

“He got away,” Lucy sighed with relief, and the two of them stood there in the bitter cold, waiting for something else to come out of the darkness.

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Colleen Quinn grew up in upstate New York and was educated at Syracuse University. She works in advertising and has published over a dozen short stories in publications produced by Owl Hollow Press and New Lit Salon Press, among others. These stories may be found on her website: www.colleenquinn.com. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.