On the Outskirts of Chokecherry Ridge

A creepy small town. A missing girl. Three teenagers in a '69 Chevelle.

Image courtesy Brigitte Werner of Pixabay.

“Listen,” Grandpa said, “Any of them towns with ‘ridge’ in the name? Oak Ridge, Stone Ridge, Ivy Ridge, Chokecherry Ridge -- nothing good ever happens in them towns. You’d best keep clear of all of ‘em.”

We didn’t listen.

Grandpa gave us this speech at least once a week, at least until Mom and Dad decided he should move into that place on the edge of town, across from the strip mall that had half its storefronts boarded up, and next to the big truck stop, with the big green dinosaur in front.

He didn’t talk much after that. The nurses would come around with little plastic cups full of pills and they wouldn’t leave until he’d swallowed them. Jenny always said it was like the nurses waited for us to show up like they needed someone to watch them do it.

“Do you see the way that red-headed nurse always takes his hand real slowly and puts the cup in it, and how she always stands just so, to catch the light coming in from the window?”

Jenny had been in so many school plays that they started letting her direct, so when it came to hamming it up, she was an expert.

But even though Grandpa didn’t talk, as if maybe the pills had paralyzed his voice box, we still went and sat with him for an hour every week, just like Mom wanted us to do. She went about once a month if that, and Dad never went at all, even though Grandpa was his dad.

“Grandkids bring more joy,” was Mom’s excuse, but we knew better.

One October afternoon, when the trees outside the nursing home looked like they’d been colored in with yellow and pink highlighters, we got there just before visiting hours ended. We still had ten minutes, but the woman at the front desk wouldn’t let us in.

“Visiting hours end at six,” she told us. She had short, curly hair with a bad dye job (you could see gray patches she’d missed through the too-dark brown), a speck of pink lipstick on her front incisor, and an ivory cameo pinned to her collar.

“It’s five-fifty,” Derek said.

“We should still have ten minutes,” Jenny added. It was on account of her that we were late. Rehearsal of Oklahoma! ran long because they were having problems with the dream ballet sequence. The actor who had the role of Dream Curly couldn’t do a grand jeté and had given himself a groin pull trying.

Jenny tried to get Derek or me to fill in, but we said no, and went on sitting in the dark auditorium seats while the kids on stage argued about what to do next.

“Visiting hours end at six,” the woman said again like we hadn’t understood her the first time.

“Fine,” Derek said. “Let’s just go.”

“This won’t count as our hour for the week,” Jenny said as we walked back to the car, a ’69 Chevelle that had belonged to Grandpa. Rust scarred its shiny black body, and pieces of foam squeezed out from under gummy strips of duct tape that covered gashes in the leather upholstery. Dad said the car would be worth a lot if we put some work into it, but Mom wouldn’t let him spend money on it, and he wouldn’t let her sell it, so it was ours for as long as their stalemate continued. We joked about how we’d fight over it when it was time to go off to college, but Jenny was the oldest. We knew it would go with her.

“It will count if we don’t tell Mom we were late getting here,” I said.

“Dylan’s right,” Derek said. “Besides, it’s not our fault the old bat wouldn’t let us see him. It’s still not even six o’clock.”

“What’s that over there?” Jenny said, pointing at the strip mall across the street. The boarded storefronts were covered with sheets of paper, each one with a colored square in the middle. From across the street, it looked a bit like a checkerboard. We waited for a lone 18-wheeler to roll through and dashed across the street for a better look.

We counted fifty sheets of paper, wrinkling away from their pasted edges, all with the same photo in the center of a young woman with long black hair and green eyes, wearing a gray sweatshirt and jeans. She held a volleyball in her lap and smiled into the camera. Jenny mused that it must have been her portrait for the senior yearbook.

Under the photo, a few lines of text told us her height, weight, the date she went missing, and that she was last seen walking down a county road on the outskirts of Chokecherry Ridge.

“That’s ten miles from here,” Derek said. If any of us were thinking about Grandpa’s warning at that moment, we didn’t say it.

We got back in the car and headed west. The sun, round and red like one of Derek’s inflamed zits, dipped toward the horizon line. The fading light was almost gone when we reached Chokecherry Ridge, but we could see enough to notice that the very first building on the town’s main street had black soot streaking the bricks above all of its glassless windows. One of the double doors was half burned, and the other was lying in the grass, torn clear off its hinges. The smell of burnt wood, melted plastic and mildew was strong, even with the car windows rolled up.

“They didn’t even board it up,” Derek said. “They must think if someone goes in there and gets hurt, it serves them right.”

A sign in front of it, untouched by fire, said the place was a bar, established in 1889. Next to the burned-out bar was a vacant lot full of overgrown grass and a depression where another building must have been. We rolled past a small cafe, whose OPEN sign glared at us in neon red, though all of its tables were empty. Then, a movie theater with chasing lights was the brightest thing in town, but letters were missing from the marquee.

“Ission I Possible,” Jenny read, giggling. “Should we get tickets?”

“No,” I said, a little more quickly than I meant to. I was sure that if we went into that theater, we’d come out two hours later to find our car missing, but I didn’t want Derek and Jenny to know I was creeped out.

“I don’t think we could if we wanted to,” Derek said. The glass booth with the microphone and the slot for taking cash didn’t have anybody sitting in it. “Those lights are for show.”

Beyond the theater there was another bar, and across the street, a laundrette, a feed store, and a county library. At the end of the main street, there were two churches facing each other. One was made of sandstone with a high steeple that pointed skyward. The other was small, wooden, leaning slightly, with a tiny belfry that looked like it was straining to hold up a bell that was too heavy and dragging the whole building down.

“How is this town big enough for two churches?” Jenny asked.

“Maybe they only use one of them,” Derek said.

“Are there any people in this town at all?” I asked.

We found the answer a few minutes later after we’d driven past the edge of town and found ourselves back on the county road. Wheat fields stretched out on either side of the road. A plume of smoke rose toward the sky, and as we drew closer, we could see the flames. We turned down a dirt road and saw a bonfire that was about the same size as the small church back in town, and a crowd of people stood all around it.

The Chevelle’s headlights caught three of the men in the crowd. They turned and looked right at us. Their tight mouths and hard stares told us we’d better get the hell out of there. Jenny threw the car in reverse. A few miles down the road, she pulled over and let Derek take the wheel. As she belted herself into the seat in front of me, I could see she was shaking. I put my hand on her shoulder. Her skin was warm, and she flinched a little because my hand wasn’t.

“Are you okay, Jenny,” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” Derek said. “We’ll be home in a few minutes.”

For the next few weeks, none of us said a word about our drive to Chokecherry Ridge. Jenny roped us into working on set pieces for Oklahoma! In the movie, a whorehouse scene features a flame-belching kerosene chandelier. The set designer wanted to recreate it, but the school said they couldn’t use real flames and would have to settle for orange crepe paper. Dad let us take an old chandelier from the basement, and we zip-tied some portable fans to each arm to blow the crepe paper up and make it look like leaping flames. It took us several tries to get it right, and some of the theater nerds weren’t all that impressed, but they realized it was the best they were going to get.

We visited Grandpa at the nursing home, though in the weeks before the play opened, Derek and I visited without Jenny. We explained to him why she couldn’t come, but he just sat there, mute, and blinking every so often.

One night, after we left Grandpa, we gassed up the car while the cement dinosaur loomed over us, silhouetted against a lurid purple sky. The car radio was on, and an announcer was reading a news bulletin about a missing girl named Danielle St. James.

“Turn that up,” Derek said.

“....Today marks eight weeks since Danielle St. James was last seen walking near the wheat field on the outskirts of Chokecherry Ridge…”

“Wheat field!” I shrieked. Derek shushed me.

The radio announcer played a clip of the county sheriff speaking at a press conference. “Anyone who has seen anything suspicious in the area in or around Chokecherry Ridge must make a report. Keeping quiet only helps the people who committed this crime.”

We drove home in silence, but before we got out of the car, Derek said, “That bonfire was suspicious. Wasn’t it?”

“It was,” I nodded. “But we don’t know if it had anything to do with that missing girl. She’s been missing a long time.”

“That’s true. And we don’t want to waste the sheriff’s time. We should go back and get some clues first.”

“Yeah,” I said, even though the thought of returning to Chokecherry Ridge made me shiver like I’d just chugged a 32-ounce Sprite with ice in one gulp.

“Let’s not tell Jenny,” Derek said. “This is a project for the men.”

“Right,” I said. Right then, I wanted to tell Jenny so that she could tell Mom and Dad, and they could suspend Derek’s driving privileges until he forgot all about his desire to visit evil little towns.

Derek and I cut sixth period so we could visit Chokecherry Ridge while it was still light out. It was November, and sunset came quicker and quicker each day. I didn’t mind cutting ninth-grade science, but as we drew closer to Chokecherry Ridge, I suddenly wished I was back in Mr. Robinson’s class, holding test tubes of water over burning peanuts, the only “experiment” he ever let us do.

The town looked much the same as it had the last time, though there was scaffolding on the outside of the torched bar, people sitting in the cafe, and clothes tumbling in the dryers of the laundrette. The movie theater’s lights hadn’t been switched on yet. Three men stood in front of the smaller, older church. Their tall, straight-backed figures made the church’s lean all the more pronounced.

One of them crossed the street and knocked on my window. He wore sunglasses that reflected a tiny, upside-down version of the Chevelle, and his lower lip bulged from chewing tobacco. I swallowed hard as I rolled the window down.

“You boys lost?” he asked.

“No, sir,” Derek answered.

“Well, you might like to get going,” he said.

“This is America, sir, and this is a public road. We have as much right to be here as anybody else,” Derek said.

My heart swelled with pride, and at the same time, my bladder felt like it might explode from terror. The man leaned away from the car, spat a stream of brown spit, and walked away.

“The fuck is with these people,” Derek muttered under his breath as we drove out of town. As we passed the wheat field, the setting sun cast a golden light over the dry stalks. Derek turned onto the dirt road and I felt my heart slamming into my ribcage. I had to remind myself to breathe.

At the end of the road was a black pit where the bonfire had been. We got out and walked around it, though there wasn’t much to see, other than charcoal and some logs that didn’t burn all the way.

Beyond the bonfire site, there was a forest of oaks and jackpines. I wandered into it and found something small and white stuck in a shrub at the base of a tree. I reached into the thorn and pulled out a half-burnt piece of paper with Danielle St. James’ picture on it. It was the same missing person’s notice we’d seen pasted to the windows at the strip mall.

“Derek,” I called. When he joined me in the forest, I handed it to him. “Look,” I said.

When we got back on the road, I glanced in the sideview mirror and saw a car behind us. At first, the driver looked like the tobacco spitter from town, but then I realized it was a woman, and the car was an old minivan.

“Don’t be paranoid,” Derek said.

In front of the county sheriff’s office, an American flag flapped in the breeze atop a tall, steel flag pole. Just below it was a black MIA/POW flag. The building looked like a log cabin. Inside, a young woman sat at a reception desk. Opposite her, there was a row of plastic seats and a pair of vending machines.

“I need the bathroom,” I blurted out and pretended not to notice Derek glaring at me.

“Down the hall,” she said with a smile.

I pissed in the urinal and then stood at the sink, running my hands under hot water for a long time, as if the heat would stop the rest of me from shivering.

In the lobby, Derek handed me a Mountain Dew from the vending machine. I didn’t want it but I opened it anyway.

Finally, the sheriff called us into his office. We told him everything we knew, even confessing to cutting class. Derek handed him the piece of paper I’d found in the woods.

“The weirdest part,” Derek said, “Was that the whole town seemed to be at that bonfire that night.”

The sheriff leaned back in his leather chair. “That’s some impressive detective work,” he said. “The farmer who owns that wheat field called us that night, and we made some arrests. We also sent a team to collect samples and evidence from that fire pit. Beyond that, I’m not prepared to say much more. We can’t say too much about open investigations. But…you’re right about the whole town being there. It’s truly odd, unless you know the people of Chokecherry Ridge.”

He shook his head and looked away.

“Listen,” he said, leaning toward us, “I strongly advise you boys not to do any more driving through Chokecherry Ridge. Something went wrong there years ago, and it’s rotten to the core. They hate outsiders almost as much as they hate each other.”

“But, why?” I asked, suddenly as curious as I had been scared.

He rubbed his face with a psoriasis-chapped hand. “I wish I knew. That town is a real sore spot for the county. Causes this department a hell of a lot of problems. It’s just one of those places where nothing good ever happens.”

The sheriff walked us out to our car. “I’m going to have one of my patrolmen escort you boys home,” he said. “You be safe, now. And promise me you will not go driving through Chokecherry Ridge anymore. And for God’s sake, don’t cut class.”

A week later, Oklahoma! opened. Jenny took over the role of Ado Annie from the original actress who broke a rib falling off a horse. During the first show, our chandelier worked, but in the second show, one of the fans died, and some of the crepe paper hung limply over the side of the arm, which meant we had to rush to Target to buy a replacement fan before the third show.

A week after that, the sheriff announced that forensic scientists had found bone fragments in the firepit at the wheat field, and the DNA matched Danielle St. James. The District Attorney indicted three men for her murder, and several more for helping to cover it up.

A day later, I sat in ninth-grade science, copying the graph Mr. Robinson had drawn on the whiteboard. I glanced up at the clock and noticed that there were fifteen minutes left in the period, down from seventeen when I’d looked moments before.

“Oh my god!” cried one of my classmates as she stood at the window. The rest of the class rushed over. A fire raged in the parking lot.

“A car is on fire! A black car -- an old car,” the girl said.

Flames shot out of every window of my grandpa’s ‘69 Chevelle while black smoke blotted out everything beyond the edge of the school parking lot.

Hours later, the sheriff arrested some kid for firebombing our car in broad daylight. No one was surprised to learn that his address was in Chokecherry Ridge.

The day before Thanksgiving, I went to visit Grandpa alone. With no car, I had no other way to get there besides taking the bus.

I found him sitting near a window, the fading afternoon light highlighting the topography of his wrinkled face, and illuminating the glints of silver in his wispy hair. The corner of his mouth twitched like he would say something, but he didn’t.

“Grandpa,” I said. “We should have listened to you. We shouldn’t have ever gone to Chokecherry Ridge.”

He turned his head and looked at me, eyes blazing like they hadn’t done since Mom and Dad put him in this place.

“Chokecherry Ridge,” he said.

This is it, I thought. He’s going to tell me all about that town, and why it is the way it is.

But the light in his eyes flickered for a moment, and then he looked away, sliding back down into mute silence.