Authors: Jessa Hawke
As Jeff walked the streets now he wasn't that surprised to see how far things had fallen, they were already on the down swing when he'd left. Unemployment was on the rise, and when it came to things like employment there hadn't been anything really meaningful for quite some time. Not that most Iowans needed anything meaningful, but they did require at least a little hope and cheer. Jeff thought maybe it was the only thing his people of the planes had retained from their British ancestry. Hope had turned into something that just wasn't that easy to find. And so the streets sidewalks filled up with the impoverished and more and more people decided that Des Moines wasn't the place for them. And now it seemed like part ghost town at times. Big swathes of the city were barren, with no one in the buildings but squatters sometimes living openly in condemned apartments and old houses from the fifties. Now Jeff didn't like to be out past dark, even in his parents neighborhood of Beaverdale, that had once been a kind of bastion far away from all of Des Moines problems. But not even Beaverdale was safe any longer.
With no where to work the poor couldn't even afford to drink their troubles away in bars anymore. People took to making moonshine and drinking on their stoops like they had done back during the depression. But Jeff didn't think it was depression bad. People could still eat, somehow, even though it was so hard to find employment. And as Jeff walked and thought about employment, on his way down to the local corner store to buy a pack of cigarettes, the wind picked up a flier and flew it right into his face. Well, maybe not right into his face, it seemed to have spent a little bit of time in a puddle before it snapped through the air and wrapped it around Jeff's features. Jeff hoped it wasn't anything negative about being a male stripper. He was a good looking guy and with work around him being so short he figured he'd have to do whatever he had to do to get by. In his mind's eye he'd seen himself in some Chip'n'Dale outfit strutting about a stage, his ice blue eyes, broad shoulders, and rippling muscles on display for the world to see. But when he peeled the paper from his face it wasn't what he thought it would be—no sad story about a washed up male stripper graced the front page. Instead it was an ad for jobs at the next state fair that was coming up soon.
As Jeff looked over the paper he realized that this could be a really great opportunity for him to make some money. The fair offered decent pay, but more importantly, plenty of work. If he worked the near month the Iowa State Fair was in operation he could easily make a few thousand dollars and that could buy him a ticket out of this place. Because that's really what Jeff was afraid of. It wasn't just that he needed a job for change in his pocket: He was deathly afraid that at some point he'd just end up stuck here like everyone else that was stuck here. How else could so many people he knew still be hanging around Des Moines as it withered on the vine? As he walked and looked down at the flier it seemed more and more like some kind of ticket out of there, more and more like it was freedom instead of a piece of paper. Because if he could make the money quick enough he knew he could make it out to southern California in time for the harvest. It would be hard work out there but at least it would be another period of as much work as he needed. Then he could maybe get his own place out there, nothing super nice or anything, but just something so that he wasn't always sleeping in a cot at the behest of a forearm his whole life. Maybe he could get a little place near the ocean. He knew it was possible. Jeff had a couple of Marine buddies out there who might be able to line him up with some work in the far off future. Jeff stopped thinking about it because it was just that, the far off future, and he needed to be thinking about the present.
So instead of walking into the gas station and buying a pack of smokes he turned around and walked home. Jeff's old friend Bill was in town and Jeff knew that if he called Bill and sounded excited enough and shared with him the entire plan of heading east that he'd be on board, and then things wouldn't be so lonely at the circus. Well, it wasn't exactly the circus, but the Iowa State Fair sure could seem like one sometimes. Jeff wondered how Bill would take it.
“Yeah, I get that you're talking about making some money to get out of here,” Bill said. “But we just got here. I mean, you haven't been in town even two weeks and already you're panicking like you've signed some mortgage with a wife you don't like.”
“How long have you been here for?” Jeff asked him as he paced his room, cell phone to his ear. “I don't mean to sound like a dick but you've been here a full year now and you don't look like you even want to leave!”
Bill was a grade ahead of Jeff, so when he'd left to go to a boarding school far away it had been ominous for Jeff whose parents were promising him the same thing if he didn't straighten up. But he hadn't straightened up, so off he'd went. And in accordance Bill had returned a year early, and he'd written Jeff a few times about how things had gotten a lot worse since he'd left. But Jeff hadn't taken Bill all that seriously. It just didn't seem possible that things could plunge down the tubes at such a rate that there wasn't really any chance of ever turning things around. Now Jeff believed him.
“You haven't seen me at all since you've been back” Bill said. “You've been too busy staring at the ceiling and thinking about that one girl, what's her face, from when we were kids. And don't you even try to lie and say that isn't what is happening because we both know damn well that you were head over heels in love with that girl and that's why your parents sent you away, because she was all hippie dippie flower child, smoking pot and trying to get you to fuck her.”
Jeff stopped pacing. He hadn't been expecting Bill to call him out about that. He should have known better than to think that he wouldn't, though. Bill knew him better than anyone, even though they hadn't seen each other in five years.
“So what if I have?” Jeff said. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I'm not saying it does,” Bill said. “But I'm also not saying it doesn't.”
“So what are you saying,” Jeff said. “Just so I know.”
“I'm not sure what I'm saying is anything I haven't already said,” Bill said. “And anyway, sure, I'll work with you at the fair. I guess you're right about me just sitting around here. I mean, I have been here a whole year. And I really have tried to make it work so that I could be close to my family as they got old and I matured. But things aren't the way they should be here. I keep trying and trying and no matter what I do I just can't seem to get anywhere. I think maybe you have a good idea. For the sake of trying everything, I'm in.”
And that had been that.
At least for a little bit because it didn't take long after they hung up for Jeff to start thinking about the girl Bill had brought up. Ariel. How long he'd had that name run through his head again and again. The reason he'd been sent off to boarding school. Ariel. Or was it that simple? It wasn't like Bill hadn't been involved when they'd decided to sneak into school and try to steal the answers to the midterm. It seemed like something they wouldn't really get into trouble for. They weren't technically breaking in, and the teachers whose answers they wanted weren't the kind that would tell the school on them because the school would want to make an example. And that's exactly what the school did when the police pulled Jeff's prints off of one of the filing cabinets he'd gotten into. They didn't have to run everyone in the school's prints, which would have meant collection them to begin with, because Jeff had just gotten in trouble for shoplifting—a handle of vodka in his pants as he shuffled out of a local liquor store had earned him a slap on the wrist from a judge. Jeff had been so sure that not rolling over on Ariel, who'd been his lookout, would get him laid. But it didn't. It didn't get him anything. And in the end the prints at the police station matched with the prints pulled form the cabinet and instead of going on to the eighth grade he'd been forced to drop out and attend an alternate school. Bill's parents had sent him off to where ever he'd gone for the rest of his education, and Ariel had stayed behind.
Jeff wondered if she ever thought about him. She probably didn't. She was the kind of girl who go anything she wanted. Her mom and dad both were doctors with their own practices, which made them actual, no shit, millionaires. So Ariel didn't really have any of the problems that normal people did. When she started high school she wasn't one of the kids that needed to get a job to afford food at lunch; her father and mother paid for everything. When she wrecked her car when she'd had a little too much to drink at a party she wasn't arrested, since the cop new her mom and dad she got a ride home and the assurance of the police that everything would be taken care of, and that there wouldn't be anything like a report to foul up the doctors next day. That was the way her father wanted it and he heartily agreed that what was in order was the kind of donation that would make the police department run smoothly for the next few years—no more baked good sales for them!
But what really infuriated Jeff about Ariel was that he couldn't ever tell if she was actually interested in him, or if it was just innocent friendship. Sometimes they would lie in bed together, at his parents' or hers, looking at the ceiling and talking about life. They would share their hopes and fears with each other, and bond like only a young man and woman can. But anytime that Jeff worked up the nerve to maybe make a move she always had some way out of it. Which was fine with Jeff, if she didn't want it he completely understood that. Ariel was the kind of dirty blonde with hazel eyes and big tits that didn't need to rely on the attention of just one person, and could easily replace Jeff with anyone she wanted. So it wasn't that he wouldn't have understood had she just said no, or had she just slipped away and decided not to explain herself any further. What got him were all the texts of longing after the fact. She'd slip out and text him about how much she thought about him, but of course she never even came close to crossing any lines or boundaries. Ariel was always the perfect little woman, always close enough to caress but far enough away that she wasn't available. It had drove Jeff crazy and still drove Jeff crazy. What made him even crazier was that the last year he'd been in Des Moines, going to an alternative school after being expelled from the old one, Ariel didn't seem to want anything to do with him. Except when she did, then she'd invite him over and lay with her face on his chest and talk about how much she missed hanging out with Jeff and Bill.
That was a long time ago now, and Jeff wondered why he even still thought about it. Probably for much the same reason he still thought about Bill. Ariel and Bill had been such a big part of his development as a human being some days it seemed strange that they all weren't hanging out together, or at least chatting on the phone off and on. But that wasn't how things panned out. When Bill had left he'd been bitter about how everything had turned out. He blamed a lot of what had happened on Ariel, said that if it wasn't for her coming up with the idea neither of them would have ever done it. But did she get in any trouble? No, of course not. There wasn't anything that was going to turn her frown upside down. When the school and authorities had reached out to her parents they had quickly smoothed everything over by writing out another large check. But neither Jeff nor Bill's parents had been able to write out a large check, so their lives changed.
Jeff couldn't help what Ariel was up to now. Maybe it was stupid puppy dog love that wouldn't let him think of anything but her hazel eyes and amazing breasts that he'd felt brush up against him so many times. Maybe it was the way her dirty blonde hair curled as it cascaded down her back. Maybe it was a lot of things. Probably most of all it was that he'd never gotten to sleep with her even after spending so much time hanging out with her. Not that she'd owed him anything, but at the same time she had to have known how he felt about her. But maybe she'd felt the same and just hadn't been able to do anything about it. That's how it went, sometimes. Some people really couldn't express themselves the way they wanted to. Jeff guessed he was one of those people by the way he kept pacing around his room in his parents' house with his fists balled up at his side. It wasn't as easy as just letting someone know how you felt, Jeff decided. So maybe Ariel had felt something all along, and maybe she'd come so close to telling him, but at the last moment decided the time wasn't right. And if that's what she really thought who was he to try to decide the time was right for her? Things didn't work like that. But that didn't mean that Jeff didn't want to ask.
If only he could figure out how to speak with her again.
“I'm telling you it's pretty much a fools errand at this point,” Bill said.
They'd showed up at the fair grounds the next day and asked what they could do to help prepare for the big event. They had both been under the impression the fair wouldn't be kicking off for a few weeks, and both of them had secretly planned on using this time to gauge whether or not they really wanted to work at the fair. But when they showed up some guy on stilts had told them the fair started that day and put them in charge of the knife throwing booth. Supposedly it was supposed to be easy, the easiest thing in the whole fair the guy on stilts had said before striding away. That had been several hours ago.
“How the fuck would you know?” Jeff said.
Jeff had told Bill about his idea to look up all of the contact info for the people in their high school class to figure out where Ariel lived since they'd heard she'd moved and her number was now unlisted. Bill didn't think it was a good idea, at all. Jeff kept trying to explain that he just wanted to talk to Ariel one more time but Bill didn't seem to think that was a good idea either, at all.