A collection of stories about The Tract, a small neighborhood wedged into the space between a river and two major roads, built on top of an old landfill on the outskirts of town. Not sure why I want to write these stories, but it seems like I do. Noteworthy people and stories: ===== Missing Child ===== A 16 year old boy (who bicycled around the neighborhood selling dope) had disappeared. He didn't answer the door when his brother knocked one morning. When he tried the door, he found it barricaded with furniture. When he pushed his way in, the boy was not there. His gun and pager were on the table, and the window was wide open. Asking around, the brother finds out he had a girl over the night before, and goes to ask her. Her parents say she is at the hospital, with belladonna poisoning. The boy brought her home in the middle of the night, in pretty bad condition. A few days pass, and the boy does not show up. His friends and family plaster the area with posters of his face, though I don't know who they were hoping would respond. They pretty much asked everybody in the area. A few people did remember seeing him that night. He got in a fist-fight with one of the Barracuda boys (which brought all sorts of suspicion down on him) and an old bum claimed he saw him wading in the river, naked. After a week and a half, his body was found by a fisherman, a mile or so down the river. The short story is that he and his girl apparently had been smoking belladonna, and it drove him out of his mind with paranoia (barricading his room) and hallucinations. He stripped naked and went down to the river, and drowned. A memorial sign was put up at the nearby river park, with a cheesy message about no more children having to die. He was basically an asshole, but everybody seemed to love him once he was dead. ---- ===== Street Drugs and Monopoly Money ===== Desperate for her next fix of heroin, an addict tried the following tricks. * paying with play money, crumpled in a wad and tossed to the dealer as she took the dime bag and ran off. * scraping up some tar from the street and selling it as heroin to make enough money for her dose. ---- ===== Craziness ===== An elderly couple who had lived in the tract for as long as anybody could remember slowly went insane. Some suspected it was from toxins from the landfill on which the tract was built. Eventually he shot both his wife and himself. The house lay abandoned for many years ---- ===== Gorillas and Barracudas ===== Two large mexican families, occupying a number of houses in the tract, had some kind of feud going on. Sometimes they seemed to get along, but other times there were fist fights, stabbings, shootings, and all manner of nastiness between them. Luckily they never (or rarely) involved anybody outside the two families. ---- ===== The Flood ===== Lots of rain and bad management of the Dam led to the river flooding, and the tract being evacuated. The lower tract was covered in 3+ feet of water, and the upper tract in 6-12 inches. As if that wasn't bad enough, the sewage treatment plant a mile upriver also flooded. Not pleasant. ---- ===== Homeless Lady ===== She once had a house by the river, and lived there with her boyfriend of the week and her 3 children. One day there was a kitchen fire that got out of control. The house still stood, but it was condemned. Her children became wards of the state. Her boyfriend took off. She became a scary homeless woman who squatted on abandoned property in the vicinity of her condemned home. ---- ===== Hostage and Suicide ===== Angry at rejection, a young man held his girlfriend and infant child hostage at gunpoint in their house. Police were called, and surrounded the house with guns drawn, hiding behind whatever cover was handy, while they tried to get him on the phone to negotiate. The neighbors watched it all, peeking through curtains, with an admonishment to their children 'If he comes out shooting, you kids hit the floor.' He did come out shooting, but only one shot. At his own head. ---- ===== I can't live without you ===== Upset at rejection, a man stood outside his girlfriend's house and called to her. With her friends for moral support, she told him she would not come. And watched in horror as he poured gasoline on himself, lit a match, and stumbled off down the street. Despite her friends' best efforts, she still went to visit him a number of times in the hospital, up until he died. ---- ===== Life sucks, I'm sorry ===== A professional truck driver came home from a particularly long haul, unexpectedly bearing gifts for his wife and children. He gave them their gifts, told them he loved them, and went into the bedroom and injected a week's worth of heroin. To make matters worse, it turns out he and his wife were never legally married, despite living together and raising children together for 10 years. Which caused all manner of trouble for his family after his death. ---- ===== Angry Kid ===== A boy called Squeaky had quite a temper. He once threatened his friends (most of whom were bigger and older than he) with the ornamental swords his parents kept on the wall. ---- ===== Lots of nicknames ===== Two families with the same paternal naming tradition, and the same paternal name. And married together into one big family with lots of nicknames to differentiate one from the other. ---- ===== Spear Fishing ===== One summer, the boys in the tract decided they had to spear a fish from the river. It took a long time to manage it, and many days out swimming, before the alpha male finally skewered an enormously oversized goldfish with his homemade spear. ---- ===== Witches and Bugs ===== A crank addict became convinced that an elderly woman in the tract was a witch. A real honest-to-goodness pointy-hat-wearing broomstick-flying witch, and she had put a curse on him which caused bugs to crawl under his skin. ---- ===== Blackberry Cobbler ===== After a day spent picking berries down by the river, nothing could be better than kicking back on the porch with a bowl of ice cream and homemade berry cobbler. ---- ===== Methadone ===== For a while, many of the heroin users in the tract made a daily trek down to the methadone clinic rather than the local dealer. I think they were actually trying to get clean, though I'm sure the motivation was largely financial. For most, the clinic eventually became too invasive of their personal lives or too much of a hassle, and they went back to heroin. ----