Gone Girl

when there’s grandkids.’ She wanted to live to see some grandkids. All her friends had some to spare. Amy and I once had my mom and Go over for dinner to mark The Bar’s biggest week ever. I’d announced that we had reason to celebrate, and Mom had leapt from her seat, burst into tears, and hugged Amy, who also began weeping, murmuring from beneath my mom’s smothering nuzzle, ‘He’s talking about The Bar, he’s just talking about The Bar.’ And then my mom tried hard to pretend she was just as excited about that. ‘ Plenty of time for babies,’ she’d said in her most consoling voice, a voice that just made Amy start to cry again. Which was strange, since Amy had decided she didn’t want kids, and she’d reiterated this fact several times, but the tears gave me a perverse wedge of hope that maybe she was changing her mind. Because there wasn’t really plenty of time. Amy was thirty-seven when we moved to Carthage. She’d be thirty-nine in October.
    And then I thought: We’ll have to throw some fake birthday party or something if this is still going on. We’ll have to mark it somehow, some ceremony, for the volunteers, the media – something to revive attention. I’ll have to pretend to be hopeful .
    ‘The prodijal son returns,’ said a nasally voice, and I turned to see a skinny man in a stretched-out T-shirt next to me, scratching a handlebar mustache. My old friend Stucks Buckley, who had taken to calling me a prodigal son despite not knowing how to pronounce the word, or what its meaning was. I assume he meant it as a fancy synonym for jackass. Stucks Buckley, it sounded like a baseball player’s name, and that was what Stucks was supposed to be, except he never had the talent, just the hard wish. He was the best in town, growing up, but that wasn’t good enough. He got the shock of his life in college when he was cut from the team, and it all went to shit after. Now he was an odd-job stoner with twitchy moods. He had dropped by The Bar a few times to try to pick up work, but he shook his head at every crappy day-job chore I offered, chewing on the inside of his cheek, annoyed: Come on, man, what else you got, you got to have something else .
    ‘Stucks,’ I said by way of greeting, waiting to see if he was in a friendly mood.
    ‘Hear the police are botching this royally,’ he said, tucking his hands into his armpits.
    ‘It’s a little early to say that.’
    ‘Come on, man, these little pansy-ass searches? I seen more effort put into finding the mayor’s dog.’ Stuck’s face was sunburned; I could feel the heat coming off him as he leaned in closer, giving me a blast of Listerine and chaw. ‘Why ain’t they rounded up some people? Plenty of people in town to choose from, they ain’t brought a single one in? Not a single one? What about the Blue Book Boys? That’s what I asked the lady detective: What about the Blue Book Boys? She wouldn’t even answer me.’
    ‘What are the Blue Book Boys? A gang?’
    ‘All those guys got laid off from the Blue Book plant last winter. No severance, nothing. You see some of the homeless guys wandering around town in packs, looking real, real pissed? Probably Blue Book Boys.’
    ‘I’m still not following you: Blue Book plant?’
    ‘You know: River Valley Printworks. On edge of town? They made those blue books you used for essays and shit in college.’
    ‘Oh. I didn’t know.’
    ‘Now colleges use computers, whatnot, so – phwet! – bye-bye, Blue Book Boys.’
    ‘God, this whole town is shutting down,’ I muttered.
    ‘The Blue Book Boys, they drink, drug, harass people. I mean, they did that before, but they always had to stop, go back to work on Monday. Now they just run wild.’
    Stucks grinned his row of chipped teeth at me. He had paint flecks in his hair; his summer job since high school, housepainting. I specialize in trim work , he’d say, and wait for you to get the joke. If you didn’t laugh, he’d explain it.
    ‘So, the cops been out to the mall?’ Stucks asked. I started a confused shrug.
    ‘Shit, man, didn’t you used to be a reporter?’ Stucks always seemed angry at my former occupation, like it was a lie that had stood too long. ‘The Blue Book Boys, they all made themselves a nice little town over in the mall. Squatting. Drug deals. The police run them out every once in a while, but they’re always back next day. Anyway, that’s what I told the lady detective: Search the fucking mall . Because some of