If they read his stuff, they would call a spade a spade.
At the speed he was driving, ignoring the sign that told him to begin slowing down, it didn’t take long before the place of his birth opened up before him. There was nothing gradual about the reveal—nothing like an anticipatory ascent up a high hill, then getting to the top and seeing the place spread out in front of him. He simply reached the top of a rise he hadn’t known he’d been climbing, and it was there, as if a giant hand had dropped the place down to the earth at the instant before it appeared in his line of sight.
From where he was, gazing past the incorporated areas and the industrial park and taking in the city proper, he was amazed at how familiar it looked, how much it seemed as if he’d just taken his old Mustang to Winifred to see a movie and was on his way home. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting when he saw it for the first time in seventeen years, but if someone had pressed him, he would have bet against it being pleasure. Strangely enough, though, that’s what it was.
Before he started down a hill noticeably steeper than the one he’d climbed to gain this vantage point, he could see enough to determine that while some things looked out of place—structures and cleared plots of land in places he didn’t remember seeing before—for the most part, Adelia looked the same, like the image of it that had burned its way into his memory. It was odd, really. He thought that he could even see the decorations for the Fall Festival around the square.
For generations, Adelia had survived as one small Upstate New York town among many—one that always seemed to be heading toward some ultimate demise that it never quite reached. While everything about the place appeared older with the passing years, there was just enough new construction, just enough new birth, to keep it on the map. At its heart it was a manufacturing town; most of its people had earned a living, at least since the forties, at either the sawmill, the Chevy plant in Winifred, or at Jordan Gum & Machine. CJ had spent a few summers at the latter, scooping large gumballs in and out of the coaters that looked like cement mixers, hosing the coaters out whenever they ran another color, filling the pulley that carried the gum from the forming floor to the finishing floor, losing maybe a gallon of sweat a day as it ran down his arms and into the gum with each scoop. To this day CJ couldn’t see a gumball machine without envisioning hairy, sweat-soaked arms scooping and pouring.
It had been hard work among hard men, most of them twice his age. He’d learned some words he’d never heard before, and witnessed how constant ten-hour days in heat and noise could fray tempers. There was an undercurrent of violence to the production floor that he’d learned to read. Only once had he seen the violence escalate to anything beyond fists. It had happened during a slow period on the production floor, when one of the younger guys had used a marker to color a couple of the white gumballs black and then offered these new licorice-flavored gumballs to one of his shift mates. Though CJ had found the man’s surprised expression amusing after he bit into the gum, he was unprepared for the speed with which the guy had pulled out a pocketknife. He got in two slashes before being held down by others. The practical joker had required several stitches to reattach his ear.
Job prospects like these were, he supposed, what made the arrival of the prisons such a boon to the area. The picturesque landscape did not hint at it, but murderers, thieves, gang members, and shade tree pharmaceutical dealers surrounded Adelia. There were thousands of them, in four prisons set in strategic locations around the county. All had been built within the last decade, and the fact that they were here in Franklin County was a coup of almost biblical proportions. What the mayor had done to convince the state of New York to make this area Prison Central was the subject of much speculation, and yet none of the locals could argue against the economic results.
Many communities might have protested the idea of their small part of the world signing on to receive an