Small Kindnesses
The plan was simple enough, depending on which conspirator you asked. Conspirator #1 would say “We go in, grab our boy, skedaddle.” Conspirator #2 would talk about causing a distraction. Conspirator #3 would mostly explain how they were going to get caught. The plan didn’t get much discussion on the long drive through farmland and forest with gently rolling hills. It was pretty idyllic, even with Pantera blasting to keep their spirits up. Their anger up. And to keep Conspirator #3 from worrying himself into jumping from the moving car.
They made their distraction, scooped up their ‘kidnapped’ friend whose parents had condemned them to the wilderness bootcamp for the terrible crime of rebelliousness—they didn’t see what he’d started doing to the bibles at Barnes and Noble—and zoomed away. Quickly. Wildly. Ecstatic. Fishtailing on the muddy road, the Tercel wrapped itself around a surprisingly sturdy birch and remained there until the next morning. A dark comedy.
The parents would blame themselves for not keeping their precious Joel from the bad influence of secular children, the ones who glommed onto him like used gum under a desk. They would blame the friends for the suicide attempts at the bootcamp, somehow, and they would blame the camp for not being righteous enough to save their boy like the advertisements in the church newsletter had promised.
Marcos, the closest thing Joel could call a friend at the bootcamp—though they hardly spoke—had let him use the smuggled cell to call his friends for the rescue. He felt bad for the kid. Marcos was only a year older, but he’d been at the camp for a month longer, so he was practically a war vet and had learned to somewhat disassociate himself from the surroundings and see it through the lens of an audience rather than a cast member. However, unlike most of the waifs there, he felt the bootcamp punishment was justified for his actions, perhaps through the outsider’s perspective he gained while outside of himself. But the phone, that hardly registered on the guilt meter. Marcos would get out of the camp the usual way, one of his parents died and the other one needed help around the house. He wouldn’t regret giving Joel the phone. Regrets are precious commodities to those who have suffered. Better than sunsets or rainbows, gold or lithium. Fuel for the internal engine, fuel to burn down the shirt factory with a loudly thumping heart.
The enthusiasm of Joel’s friends was what stuck with Marcos, even though he never saw them. Their dedication, their stupid loyalty and loyalty to stupidity was noble in a way that Marcos could appreciate. Could handle in the dark on sleepless nights when warmed by the embers of his actual regrets, of things missed, off-screen screams, the many cliffhangers of cancelled TV shows that littered his past with no resolution or warning enough to give the characters a proper goodbye.
Zebulon Huset is a public high school teacher, writer, and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Gone Lawn, The Southern Review, Fence, and many others. He is an avid advocate of writing exercises and prompts and he publishes a blog and substack called Notebooking Daily. zebulonhuset.com.
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