Home of the Cheese Curds

In the rustic town of Galena, Illinois, on sweltering summer days such as these, the air was always thick with flies. Pesky little things, they would buzz in your eyes and land on your skin so they could spit on their forelegs and pat around with their dirty sucker-mouths, and Ralph never had enough repellent to take care of them all.
Him and Ned were sitting under the wooden lookout which neither of them were healthy enough or trim enough or young enough to climb. Not in this heat, anyway. Their breaths were coming slow and shallow now, like wounded slinkies on a two percent grade. Their mouths had gone dry and their flannel shirts had gone wet, and just about everything in question had gone sticky as hell. Ralph mopped his brow with the folded map and looked into the sky and could see only sun up there, glaring down cruel and indifferent.
“Ah, geez Louise. What are we doing out here? Look at us, two old farts sitting in the middle of a corn maze. What are we doing? You know they’re never gonna take us. They’ll just do us like the rest of ‘em.”
“They took me once. You know that. They took me once.”
“Yeah, but these aren’t the old days anymore, Ned. Look at us. I mean, look at us, really. What are we doing out here? Let’s go get indoors somewhere and get us some cheese curds and die ourselves a nice dignified death, huh? Sound nice? Brewskies and a thing of cheese curds? Lot better than waiting out here and baking in the sun all day.”
Ned sighed heavily and licked his lips dryly, his tongue sticking there a minute, and he gazed off into the corn with eyes glazed and wearied from a lifetime of grief.
“I guess I do feel like having some cheese curds now,” he resigned.
They sat there a while longer, blinking flies from their faces, and then decided to unfold the map and find their nearest exit.

The Gasoline Alley was one of those diners that sits on top of a grocery store, run by a small number of sad-looking people who look that way for a reason. The food was shit for the heart, but Ralph and Ned wouldn’t need those soon enough anyway, so in they went through the mosquito-netted doorway and past the bar always draped in shadow and under the fuzzy television caught between channels. It was sputtering something about tripods in Chicago and how the Sears Building was looking a lot shorter these days.
“Two Coors and a thing of cheese curds, Mable,” Ralph said, knocking his fist on the table with its paper menus and its laminated cloth of blue-and-white checkers.
After all of these years, she was still dolling herself up in her same old waitress garb, and still skeletal as she ever was. But she was older now, with sunken cheeks and sunken eyes and a sunken heart, and still the best she could manage was a pseudomorphic smile and some unrefined small talk. Ralph had joked once she looked like a Martian herself. It was funny then. But that was a long time ago. When laughter mattered.
As he listened to Randy Newman’s acoustic “Big Hat, No Cattle” struggle through the outdated stereo system, he looked around at the pretend buffalo horns and scavenged Illinois license plates hung on the walls, and for a moment he thought to himself, ‘This is what’s become of the human race. This is what’s become of America. A whole bunch of people, and some of ‘em are pretend people, and some of ‘em are trying to scavenge what’s left of their lives, and some of ‘em are just plain old outdated,’ and just when he thought he was on to something important he saw a framed poster on the wall called “The Shit List” and it made him chuckle.
“Now who the hell frames something like that?” he said, perfectly bemused. He read the list silently, then pointed to one of the items and said, “That’s the one I’m having right now. The ‘Gee, I Wish I Could Shit’ shit.”
Ned looked up from his wallet full of photographs and blinked.
“I was going to kill myself three years ago,” Ned said. “It was the darkest time of my life. It was three years ago, and suddenly I didn’t have a family anymore. They’d all left me. No one would have found me for days. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
“Here ya go, cheese curds.” She slid the plastic tray between the two. “Lemme know if ya need anything else.” And she took off into the kitchen again.
Ralph sat there in his chair, not touching the cheese curds and somewhat shamefully wondering why they had come before the beers. He coughed uncomfortably and shifted his weight a bit.
“You wanna talk about this?” he said.
“Naw, it doesn’t matter anymore. Somebody else’ll do the job for me now. Let’s just eat our cheese curds in peace until the end comes.”
They reached in to take their first handfuls of the greasy appetizers and munched silently in the sunny glow of the skylight, and neither would know when the death-ray finally washed over the Gasoline Alley to take out its deep-frying machines and its wall paraphernalia, nor would they ever know what had become of their time spent here on planet Earth and why there were so few things to smile about on this final day of all days.