Department of Student Loans, Kidnap & Ransom

by Christian Hale

  *****

  The Executioner sat on his mother’s porch with the silence of Cairo, Illinois, flowing around him. His mother had welcomed him back warmly, as she does every two or three years. She had become accustomed to not asking him questions upon his returns, and this time was no exception – even though she sensed something was wrong. But asking a man about something he doesn’t want to talk about was not a thing that was done in this part of America.

  The Executioner had long ago paid off the mortgage on his mother’s modest house, and the car he arrived with was now the second car that he had given her. His savings accounts were all set to transfer to her if he went longer than three months without logging in to check his balance. The Executioner no longer had any worries about his mother being alone and broke. For her part, she accepted his claim of having found work in the private security industry overseas, a believable story in a nation that exported only two things worth mentioning: shale oil and mercenaries. But his time in prison and his total lack of military or law enforcement experience made that claim not entirely believable.

  The house he had paid off was, like every other in Cairo, a short walk away from the Ohio River. As the temperature dropped off in the late afternoon, his mother suggested they head downriver towards the Mississippi. As they walked, he surveyed the remains of his hometown. While Cairo was once a prosperous transport center that serviced a thriving ferry and railroad hub, the town had long ago entered into a terminal decline. The opening of competing railway lines had devastated the rail trade, while the building of bridges over the Ohio River destroyed the ferry business. These two blows were later compounded when the new interstate highway skipped around the city. Finally, recurring race riots fitted the coffin of Cairo with its nails.

  The Executioner marveled at his hometown. It had been in a death spiral since the 1890s. The sad empty fields and forests of Detroit were relative newcomers to decline. But like that once great city, Cairo clung to life like an animated corpse. On the river the occasional barge floated downstream – a brief sign of life. He wondered how his ancestors had ended up in Cairo, and why they didn’t leave. Turning his attention to the unchanging river on his left, he avoided looking at Cairo on his right.

  His mother decided that they would walk to the state park at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio. His mother, in her early seventies, was a steady but not very fast walker. It was going to take some time. But The Executioner didn’t have any plans. He wasn’t going to leave for a few more days. And here in Cairo he had nothing but time.

  The reason for the long walk was soon revealed by his mother.

  “We need to talk about your sister,” she said.

  The Executioner did not say anything in response.

  “I’ve accepted that she is no longer with us. I gave up hope long ago,” she added. “And, now, you may think that hearing what I’m about to say is a burden that I should keep to myself. But I have my reasons.”

  To their left, a towboat struggled to pull an empty barge upstream against the current.

  “Right after you went to prison, your sister moved to Chicago to look for work. She wasn’t in community college like she told you. She worked as a waitress for a while, but after six months I lost contact with her. Nobody disappears like that. She could contact me in a second if she had wanted to. But she didn’t.”

  The Executioner knew that she was dead. There was no body. No story. No confirmation. But he knew.

  He wasn’t sure why his mother was telling him this.

  “You know, when you were in prison, I had Helen next door watch over the house and I moved to Chicago to find her...or rather to find out what happened to her. I never told you that. I thought I would last, at most, a week in the city. But there I was, with a paper bus route map, a city directory printed out, and a list of doors I was going to knock on.”

  “And the only people who helped me were these women who volunteered for a community organization that helped women in trouble,” said his mother, now emphasizing her words. “Some were church-goers, some were feminists or something like that, and some were mothers who had gone through what I was going through at the time. And these women at the community organization were the only ones who would help me.”

  “And do you know what they told me, what I came to learn?” she asked rhetorically. “It was that the police in Chicago only work to solve crimes that they can make money from in the process. I didn’t understand it at first. But as I was told, the police can take a cut from a drug dealer, they can extort a businessman, they can take a bribe from a politician, they can take a share of whatever stolen goods are recovered, but a missing girl who is probably dead is not something you can make money off of or get recognition for. Certainly not a girl who doesn’t have any important family.”

  The Executioner’s mother was telling him the story of the new America. It was a story that he recognized. It was not a surprise. But it still hurt.

  “This is something that I can not make peace with. I pray to God, I ask Jesus for help, I do what I can, but…your sister did not deserve this. She was…she was garbage. To everybody, she was garbage. To the men who used her, to those who bought her, to those who sold her. To the police who didn’t care. To the government people only worried about their own kind. To the people in this country who live comfortably and just figure that if something bad has happened to someone then they must have done something to deserve it.”

  She paused for while to contain her anger.

  “You know,” she continued, accustomed to her son’s silence, “our family was originally from northern Illinois, since before the civil war. But for some reason, every generation of men in the family would move farther south. I’m not sure why, following jobs and opportunities and marriages I suppose. But finally we got here, to Cairo. We’ve bottomed out on the state map, there’s nowhere lower to go. It’s just this river. And I knew…I knew that you and your sister would look beyond this town and get away from this river. I knew it would happen. But I didn’t think this would happen.”

  The Executioner’s mother sighed.

  “What I’m saying to you is this: I want you to never come back here. Visit, yes. But don’t return here to raise a family or to make a life. The men in this family should have pulled up stakes and moved long ago. This land is for the dead, and for the dying. For those that are done with life. And I’m not just talking about Cairo.”

  They finally reached their destination, the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi. A run-down state park still functioned, serving mainly as a picnic and barbeque spot for the Illinois National Guard soldiers who ran the patrol boats and manned the checkpoint on the bridge that connected them to Missouri. The Executioner and his mother looked out over the water, now silent with no barges in sight.

  “The Ohio is usually dark green, and occasionally it’s almost blue,” she noted. “Sometimes I like to imagine that the water is clean and pure, even if I know that’s not the case with this river. But the Mississippi is always muddy. Always. And that dirty little river takes the Ohio’s name away. It just...goes away. The Ohio is larger than the Mississippi, but its name disappears here, at the confluence. It’s not fair, if you really think about it…”

  The Executioner hadn’t said a single word in over an hour.

  Now, standing on the southernmost tip of land in Illinois, he stood silently next to his mother. He looked to the left, over the Ohio River and towards the forests of Kentucky as they slowly swallowed the remaining farms of Ballard County. He then turned to his right, towards Missouri. He couldn’t see past the line of trees on the bank of the Mississippi. Nobody talked anymore about what was happening on the other side. The Executioner, like everybody else, had grown used to the stories, slowly accepting them into their idea of what their country was. Things change; people adapt.

  Slowly, another barge moved down the Ohio River and entered the Mississippi. He still loved the river, but he knew that he could
never come back.