What Happened to Rust Creek

The explosion happened at 3:14 in the afternoon on a Thursday in October. Earl Henderson was in his truck, three miles from town, on a road that had been paved in 1974 and hadn't been maintained since 1989. He was driving slow because the road was slow and his truck was slow and he was slow and that was the way things were in Rust Creek.

He felt the explosion before he heard it. A shake in the steering wheel. A thump in his chest. A sound that started as a growl and ended as silence, like a man who has been coughing for a long time and finally coughs up something and then realizes he can't breathe.

He pulled over. He got out of the truck. He looked toward town and saw a plume of smoke that was black and grey and orange and the colour of something that had been inside a building and was no longer inside anything.

His truck was a 1978 Ford. It had been crashed in a press accident in '78—he was missing two fingers from his left hand—and it had been running ever since, which was to say it had been barely running, which was to say it had been running in the way that old things in Rust Creek run: barely, intermittently, and with the constant possibility that they would simply stop, which is what most things in Rust Creek eventually do.

Earl got back in the truck and drove toward town. He drove slow because the road was slow and his truck was slow and he was slow and that was the way things were.

By the time he got to the edge of town, he knew three things:

One, the chemical plant had exploded. This was what everyone was saying. This was what the radio was saying. This was what the sky was saying, which is to say the sky was black and grey and orange and that's what explosions look like from a distance.

Two, his wife, Doris, was not with him. She had gone to her sister's in Columbus that morning. Earl knew this because they had argued about it that morning, and she had left in a hurry, and he had not gone to see her off.

Three, half the town was gone. Not destroyed—changed. Like the world had moved slightly to the left and some things had fallen off the edge.

He drove through town at ten miles per hour, which is fast for Rust Creek. The strip mall on Main Street was still standing but half of it was on fire. The diner was gone. The post office was gone. The bank was standing but its windows were all broken and the sign was hanging by one bolt and it was swaying in the wind like a man who is about to fall.

Earl parked his truck in the parking lot of what used to be a hardware store and got out and looked around and thought: this is it. This is the end. Not dramatically. Not with a bang. Just... this. A parking lot. A swaying sign. The smell of burning plastic. The sound of sirens that were somewhere else and would be somewhere else for a long time because the nearest fire station was forty miles away.

A woman walked up to him. She was maybe thirty-five. She had a child by the hand—a girl, maybe six, maybe seven—and she was wearing a t-shirt that said Denny's and a pair of jeans that were too thin for October.

"Are you Earl?" she asked.

"I am."

"I'm Rosa. I live on Elm Street. My apartment is... it's gone." She said it the way you say something factual about the weather. "My daughter is with me. I don't know where to go."

"Your husband?"

She looked at Earl the way a woman looks at a man when she is trying to decide if he is useful or dangerous. "Divorced. Two years."

"Okay," Earl said. "You can stay with me. My wife isn't here. The house is... the house is standing."

"Thank you," Rosa said. And then, because she was a woman who said what she meant and did not waste words on things that didn't matter: "My daughter's name is Maria."

"Earl said hi," Maria said. She was holding a stuffed animal that was missing an eye and had a hole in its belly where the stuffing was coming out. She did not seem distressed by this.

They walked to Earl's house together. It was a small house—a trailer, really, but a trailer that had been sitting in the same place for twenty years and had accumulated enough stuff around it to constitute a yard. The trailer was damaged but standing. The roof had been partially torn off. The walls were cracked. The kitchen was flooded with water that had come from the broken pipes.

Earl went inside and looked around and thought: this is not destruction. This is change. The world has moved slightly to the left, and some things have fallen off the edge, and the rest of us are standing in the space where those things used to be.

"Ghost" Jimmy arrived that evening.

He was a man who lived in an abandoned trailer at the edge of the trailer park, a trailer that had no power and no running water and no visible means of support. He was maybe fifty, maybe sixty, maybe neither. He had been homeless for as long as Earl could remember, which is to say for thirty years, which is to say he had always been there, like a piece of furniture that you stop noticing because it's always been in the room.

He arrived bleeding from the forehead and talking about "the red man."

"The red man," he said, sitting on the edge of Earl's couch—which was a couch that had been salvaged from the side of the road and reupholstered with duct tape and hope—"the red man told me to run. He said: 'Earl, run. Rosa, run. The girl, run.' He was standing in the street, and he was red, and he was looking at me, and he was smiling."

"Who's the red man?" Earl asked.

Jimmy looked at him the way a man looks at another man when he is deciding whether to tell the truth. "The man who designed it. The man who designed everything. He's been watching us for a long time. He's been watching this town for a long time. He picked this day. He picked this time. He picked this place."

"Who is he?"

"I don't know. But I saw him. And he saw me. And he said 'not this time.'"

Earl didn't know what to say to that. He was a truck driver, and he had spent his life driving trucks, and trucks had rules: you follow the road, you don't go off it, you don't talk to strangers, you don't stop for ghosts. But the red man wasn't a ghost. He was something else. Something that had a face and a voice and a reason for being where he was.

"I'm going to sleep," Earl said.

"Okay," Jimmy said. "You sleep. I'll watch."

"Watch for what?"

"The red man. He comes back. He always comes back."

Earl went to his bedroom—a small room in a small trailer with walls that were cracked in exactly the shape of the state of Ohio—and he lay down on a bed that had been given to him by a neighbour who had moved away and not taken it with him.

He didn't sleep. He lay there in the dark and listened to the sounds of the house: Rosa breathing in the living room, Maria breathing in Rosa's arms, Jimmy breathing on the couch, and underneath all of it, the sound of the wind moving through the cracks in the walls, which sounded like whispering.

In the morning, the official story came out: industrial accident at the chemical plant. A valve malfunctioned. A tank ruptured. An explosion ensued. Forty-one people died. The town was damaged. Recovery would take time.

Earl listened to this on the radio. He was sitting at his kitchen table, drinking coffee from a cup that was chipped and cold, and he thought about the word "accident." An accident is something that happens by chance. Something that was not designed. Something that was not planned. Something that was not—

He stopped thinking. He drank his coffee. He went outside and looked at his truck. It was crushed. Not destroyed—crushed. Like a can. Like something that had been designed to be crushed.

"Design," he said to no one. "Someone designed this."

Rosa came out of the trailer. She was carrying Maria's hand. Maria was wearing a jacket that was too small and boots that were too big and an expression that was entirely her own.

"What did you say?" Rosa asked.

"Nothing," Earl said. "Coffee's cold. Want some?"

"I'm not thirsty."

"Neither am I. But I'm drinking it anyway."

She looked at him for a moment. Then she nodded—a small, almost imperceptible nod—and went back inside.

Days passed. Then weeks. Then months. The news stopped coming. The reporters stopped coming. The government officials stopped coming. The National Guard stopped coming. The town was left alone, as towns in Rust Creek always are, to deal with whatever had happened to them in whatever way they could.

Earl started driving again. Not his old truck—it was gone, crushed like a can. He borrowed a neighbour's truck and drove it to Columbus to see Doris. She wasn't ready to come back. She didn't say that she wouldn't come back. She said she wasn't ready. Earl understood. He wasn't ready either.

Rosa kept working at the diner—well, a diner that was now a different name, because the sign had been destroyed and the new owner hadn't put up a new one yet. She worked the lunch shift. She picked Maria up from school. She went home. She slept. She did this every day for three months, and then for six, and then for a year, and she did it without complaint and without gratitude and without hope, which is to say she did it the way people in Rust Creek do everything: because there is nothing else to do.

Jimmy stopped showing up one day. He was sitting on the couch, and he was gone the next morning. Earl looked for him—looked in the abandoned trailer, looked in the swamp, looked in the places where Jimmy might have gone—but he didn't find him. Jimmy just stopped being there. Like a person who has existed in a room for thirty years and then simply ceases to exist, not dramatically but quietly, the way a candle goes out when there's no more wax.

Rosa started going to a support group. Once a week, she drove to the church in the next town over and sat in a circle of folding chairs and listened to people talk about things they had lost and things they had survived and things they would never talk about again. She didn't talk. She just sat. She nodded sometimes. She didn't cry.

One afternoon, six months after the explosion, Earl sat at his kitchen table and looked at the crack in the wall. It was still there, in the exact shape of the state of Ohio, and it hadn't changed, and he thought: this is what happened to Rust Creek. Not destruction. Not change. Just... movement. The world moved slightly to the left, and some things fell off the edge, and the rest of us are standing in the space where those things used to be, staring at a crack in a wall that looks like a state, and trying to figure out what comes next.

He didn't know. He was a truck driver, and trucks have rules, and the most important rule is: you follow the road. You don't ask where it goes. You don't ask why it's there. You just drive.

So he drove. He drove his borrowed truck. He drove to Columbus. He drove to the plant site, which was now a field of broken concrete and twisted metal and grass growing through the cracks. He drove to the edge of town and back. He drove in circles, the way a man drives in circles when he is trying to think and the only way to think is to move.

And sometimes, when he was driving at night and the road was empty and the truck was loud and the radio was off, he thought he heard something in the silence between the engine and the wind. A whisper. A voice. A man. Red. Smiling.

"Not this time," it said.

And Earl drove. ## Variant 5: What Happened to Rust Creek

Style Classification: Dirty Realism Tragic Index (TI): 78.0 Dominant Mode: M4 (Intensity: 9.5/10) Suspense Channel: M6 = 4.0/10 Sci-Fi Channel: M8 = 1.0/10 Redemption Coefficient: R = 0.0 Direction Angle: 225 degrees Narrative Style: Dirty Realism

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