Payton Hidden Away Read Free Page B

dump
after he died.
    And there it is;
the old high school, though it’s not quite like I remember. It looks tired, as
if it survived a war. Incredibly, however, it appears as though it did survive
since the old marquee sign out front is welcoming back students for the fall
semester set to begin in just under four weeks.
    The baseball
stadium is on my right, and I’m astounded by how small it seems. The bleachers
can’t hold thousands of people the way I remember them, and the outfield is
mostly brown grass. It’s odd how the memory works. When I was a kid, that place
was larger than life. Today, it just looks like a high school baseball park in
desperate need of some attention.
    I haven’t
thought of these people or these places in years, and if I weren’t here today,
I never would have thought of them again. Even so, I can feel an eerie sense of
wonderment as I drive through town. There’s the old gas-station, but it’s been
remodeled into a bright green and yellow BP. There’s the former Pic ‘n’ Pac
grocery mart, but now it’s called Apples ‘n’ Oranges. I suppose this is
progress, though you’d never know it judging by the lack of cars in the parking
lot. And Gerry’s Auto Sales across the street is boarded up. It doesn’t look
like Gerry has sold any cars there for years.
    There’s Rachel
Roberts pushing a stroller for two while a little girl walks beside her. I
can’t believe I remembered her name just like that. She’s put on sixty pounds
or more since high-school, and she looks tired and sunburned, but it’s clearly
her. I’d recognize her fire-red hair anywhere. She was a popular cheerleader
while I was nothing more than a name in the yearbook, yet I had a gargantuan
crush on her right up until I started dating Kristie.
    And there’s the
Payton Inn, owned by Jim and Sherry Loren. They were always nice folks, though
I once told Sherry a knock-knock joke that she never did get, and I think she
held it against me for embarrassing her. All the high school kids liked the
Lorens because they’d rent rooms by the hour and wouldn’t ask any questions.
It’s not like they approved of teenage fornication, but owning a hotel in a
town that doesn’t need one isn’t exactly a gold mine. They needed the money.
Nobody visits Payton on purpose, so the only customers they could count on were
horny teenagers. Prom night was their biggest night of the year. All the
parents knew what was going on, but nobody said anything because they had done
the same thing when they were the same age. It was a Payton tradition. Half of
the children born out of wedlock were conceived in one of those 26 rooms.
    The Payton Inn
is now a Days Inn. The difference is the sign. The fountain isn’t working, but
it never really worked right anyway, so I guess that’s not much of a surprise.
Sadly, the pine trees the Lorens had planted and nurtured from saplings are now
dead, just skeletons poking at the sky. The neon light that always reads ‘vacancy ’ now only reads ‘ancy,’ and even those letters are blinking on and off as though
they are moments away from burning out for good.
    Pulling into the
parking lot, I hit another pothole and realize the nostalgic dream of Payton County has ended. Shutting of the engine, I climb out. The parking lot is empty, but
the smells, the humidity, and the sounds of my hometown are exactly the same as
I remember them as a kid even though the overall feeling has changed.
Everything is quieter, slower, emptier and weedier. Shrugging off my
disappointment, I walk under the enormous overhang that was once used for
curbside pickup. There just isn’t enough traffic to necessitate anything quite
so fancy, and as if to validate my assumptions, the hotel shuttle is parked out
front, but its front tire is flat, and looks to have been so for some time.
    Discouraged by
the notion that my own cynicism has tainted the perception I have of my hometown,
I step forward, pointedly reminding myself that all