The runaway boy we all called Cheese spent the spring squatting in the old flour mill. My girlfriend, Lizzie, watched him wash up across a stretch of Mississippi river from her island. She figured he was around our age, seventeen, eighteen, and she let me know he looked “healthy.” We never heard of cops bothering Cheese. We all stepped wide of his mystery. He’d run back inside if you approached him during the day. Folks that partied near the mill at night told of strange noises from the tree line when they tried to poke around. I liked to think he was just old school crazy. But, it was late June without a sighting in weeks and even the pink sky hanging over Minneapolis hadn’t stopped Lizzie from worrying.
“What if he’s dead in there?” she said. “Or police got him? What if he has no one to call?”
I’d been staying with her at her father’s, who was always out hunting or fishing, so I held her line. I said we’d talk to Doug, the mud man, and take a look around. “We’ll bring a baseball bat or something,” I said, back when a free house felt like flooring an armored car.
*
Lizzie’s father was former ATF, and by the house he kept I thought that tracked. I mean, I’m not sure what they do, but the basement was full of whiskey and pipe tobacco. Lizzie said they used to have pottery and plants around until her mother died. At that point her father filled the rooms with firearms. Instead of a house tour Lizzie liked to give friends the glock safari. She’d start it in the kitchen, dipping a hand behind a toaster and lifting slow, teasing you with the extended clip, flashing you a bit of trigger.
“Do you want more,” she’d say, and twist the gun between her fingers.
Upstairs, she’d stop at a doorway with a hand raised and nod her head toward her father’s bed, at a rifle stock peaking out by gator loafers. Before we left to go looking, she produced a pistol I’d never seen. Small, glittering and pink, stashed in an old vanity next to retinol and dried pallets of grayed makeup.
“You’re taking this,” she said and pushed the piece into my hand.
Lizzie’s island and the waterfall that followed made up some bitten placenta of American empire. Flour mills that fed world wars loomed along the banks. Downhill of Lizzie’s street, walking trails snaked a cliff face to the mud pit by the falls. The only waterfall all the way to the gulf.
There was signage promising it was beautiful when the missionaries found it. A two hundred foot drop. A nesting ground for bald eagles. Sacred to the Dakotas. When the friars told the natives of Noah they looked to the falls and knew the flood. Now, the river dropped five yards over concrete walls that held in the crumbling ground.
*
Doug kept tabs on Cheese from his spot at the mud pit. He wore swim trunks and a referee’s shirt while counting people entering the mud, and spraying them down with a hose when they’d finished and walked out. He did this each day of every summer since the mid nineties. I asked him if he’d seen anything.
“Haven’t seen the kid. Folks keep leaving cold cuts and pop out for him. It’s always gone by morning. Maybe it’s Cheese. I know those nuts who like to climb up in these death traps still skip that one. One of them died falling down the grain elevator in the fall. Some nights I see a shadow walking out of there. A muddy shirt and shorts without a face.” Doug shrugged. “Haven’t seen the kid.”
Lizzie asked him,
“How many in the mud today, Doug?” And Doug told her,
“Eight in the mud pit, today. A little gray out, but, it's gonna be a season.” He waved his clicker counter around the empty pit in a ring around his gut. A head of operations. I trusted his projection.
“I’ve been seeing lots of clouds moving behind the sun,” said Doug, and he looked up at the sky.
*
I looked across the water at the mossed arch of the mill’s service canal. Like the upper jaw of a whale, breached and sucking, black water, cardboard and cans. I hovered my hand over my pocket and the pink thing inside. Lizzie crossed a plank bridge behind some bushes that spat you out beside the mill. I shuffled behind. We ducked the arch into the dark. It smelled like strawberries and mint.
A rhythmic sound echoed through the space. We followed the smell and sound around a corner, up some stairs into a warehouse. In the middle of the space sat a desk with few monitors on it and a queen sized mattress on the floor. Beyond it, Cheese stood with his back to us. He wasn’t very tall, but had broad shoulders and a thick neck like a wrestler. A lacrosse stick in his hands, he whipped a ball off the back wall and caught the rebound. He paused. Took a rip off a vape and whipped the stick once more.
Lizzie said, “Hello?”
Cheese spun around, and the ball smacked into his back. I recognized his face.
“Johnny?” I said.
It was Johnny DiNaldi from high school. We’d all graduated the month before. A rich kid from the western suburbs, Johnny came to school muddy, where he slept through class. I only knew him from Xbox live where he’d call out Chief Keef lyrics and gurgle a bong.
Johnny raised the stick in warning, his body squared in the athletic stance.
“I really think you should go.”
“We wanted to help you.” Lizzie said. “But, my boyfriend’ll shoot you if we have to. Show him the gun.”
I pulled out the pink pistol, leveling it at the desktop set up. From the corner of my eye, I clocked Lizzie’s smile.
“We’re just checking on you,” I told Johnny. “Tell us what’s going on.”
“Woah bro,” Johnny dropped the stick and raised his hands. “Point that pink thing over here. On me.”
I tried cocking the slide back on the little gun, but didn’t really commit.
“Just relax,” Johnny said, “You guys heard of BitCoin?” We nodded. Johnny lowered his hands.
“I’m an entrepreneur.”
Lizzie and I exchanged a look. I kept the gun trained on the desktop.
“What?”
“My parents don’t give a fuck.” He kicked the rubber ball across the warehouse.
“But, what about the stories, Johnny? About you and this place? The noises and faceless men?”
Johnny leaned forward.
“Did Doug send you here? 'Cause he can’t stop me from taking the mud.”
“The mud?”
“From the pit.” Johnny approached the desk, kneeled down and pulled a storage bin out from under it. He dipped a hand, lifting up a fistful of mud.
“Something’s going on.” He rubbed the mud into his face and neck. He stripped his clothes off. And then he was gone.
Down the hall we heard a crash. “I think it’s time to go,” I said.
But, Lizzie crouched, slapping fistfuls around her crop top. She rubbed the mud into her face with one hand, while peeling her skirt off with the other and in seconds she was coated, dirty and naked. I watched her run mud through her hair like leave-in.
“There’s something going on,” she whispered. Another blink, and I stood alone.
Deeper in the mill I found the grain elevator, where a boy fell and died in autumn. I looked up into the dark shaft with a phone light and saw the walls were covered in rows of seagulls, all puffed up and sleeping. Might have been a hundred of them. And further up still I could hear Lizzie’s voice, trilling and falling. Like she was singing, or like she was making love.
*
I walked out of the mill and into the night. Doug had gone, and I buried Lizzie’s pistol in the mud pit, planting it as deep as my reach could go. I walked off the island, and out the midwest, to Manhattan, where I do what I can.
In the summer time, I’ll take a walk to the end of the ave, to the bank of the East river. I know a spot behind a market where the mud works just the same. I’ll dig a hole and stir the muck. Strip my clothes and coat my face and my neck, scraping the brown down into my feet. Then, as long as I’m quiet and the weather stays nice, I’ll go anywhere, do anything, making any face I like. I sprint down the ave and no one ever sees it. No sound, no me at all.
