Heart of Junk by Luke Geddes

Author:Luke Geddes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

13 SEYMOUR

Wichita was not a city kind to pedestrians, its grid defined by commercial sprawl and characterless residential clusters stitched together by the crisscrossing of I-235 and Route 54, highways that took you nowhere interesting in any direction, not without at least a three- or four-hour drive past state lines. And no matter which way you went, it seemed to Seymour, the last things you’d see before the plains, the prairie, the flats, the empty heart of the country, were a Best Buy, a Dillons grocery store, a sad empty building with unblinking window-eyes where yet another doomed franchise met its bitter end. Even here in College Hill, one of the few areas one could call an actual, walkable neighborhood, no one expected to get anywhere without driving.

Wichitans, Seymour thought, those misguided people who had made the mistake of making the city their home, treated pedestrians with a regional brand of antipathy. The few times he’d gone for his nightly walk—and this was before the panic over little Lindy—cars would slow to a crawl, cast their brights as they followed him home, like they needed to reassure themselves he wasn’t some thief or thug or monster, to make certain he belonged. If Seymour stopped or waved or acknowledged them in any way, they’d roll out of sight, circle the block, and return. By now he had a hard time reminding himself there was anyone in the driver’s seats. He was so unused to seeing a human being outside of his or her car that he tended to think of the vehicles as dumb, overprotective animals that didn’t know any better than to trail him home and nip at his ankles.

So it made sense that when CHAANT, the College Hill AMBER Alert Neighborhood Taskforce (were you allowed to put an acronym within another acronym?) searched for lost Lindy Bobo, they searched by car, scouring the neighborhood with their windows down blasting Lionel Richie’s “Dancing on the Ceiling,” the little girl’s favorite for competition dance routines, wagging high-powered flashlight beams across lawns. A mobile death disco, Seymour had called it when it began, and that got a chuckle even out of Lee, who was a tough audience these days.

What didn’t make sense was that Lee had volunteered his and Seymour’s time toward the search effort. “This isn’t like back East,” he’d said that morning when he’d tasked Seymour with posting MISSING flyers throughout the few blocks of the neighborhood that weren’t yet plastered with them. “You have to actually talk to your neighbors here.”

“Or they won’t invite us to the cross burnings? They’d have to leave their cars first.” When they’d announced to their friends their decision (though really it was much more Lee’s than Seymour’s, and it really wasn’t much of a choice but a consequence, the end result of the shop’s failure and their bankruptcy) to move here, at best they’d reacted with ironic delight, jokes about American Gothic and The Wizard of Oz. At worst, they’d acted as if Seymour and Lee had been sentenced to some sort of shameful exile.

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