By Joshua Vise – September 30, 2024

Published in Mono No Aware by CultureCult Press. Lulu: Paperback or EPUB

Cahokia had once benefited greatly from its location just across the river from the much larger city of Saint Louis, Missouri.  Just after World War II, the population of the tiny town had been a little over 500, but the G.I. Bill had provided soldiers returning from the war the economic means to purchase homes and start families.  Cahokia offered these returning soldiers something that no other place in the region could provide: a wide swath of undeveloped land upon which new neighborhoods could be built, fed by new highway systems that gave these neighborhoods quick access to the industrial and commercial areas of its larger neighbor across the river.  Whole subdivisions sprang up out of the ground seemingly overnight, with prefabricated structures being bought almost as fast as they could be built.  Cheap, clean, safe, and new, these neighborhoods became home for an entire generation of young people in the sixties and seventies, and Cahokia’s population exploded to over 20,000 people within a decade, a population that included Detective Lori Garcia’s parents and grandparents.

The success of Cahokia in the first forty years after the war mirrored its decline in the subsequent forty years as the same forces that propelled it to new heights began to reveal their major weaknesses.  In their desire to build rapidly for an expanding population, construction companies and city planners had sacrificed durability for speed.  The houses that had been built in the postwar boom became great money pits, the cost of their maintenance and upkeep often exceeding the value of the property itself over time.  Those who could afford to leave did so, moving to more prosperous neighborhoods in surrounding towns.  As Cahokia’s fate was tied not only to the fate of its population, but to the fate of its big brother across the river, the economic downturn that began to plague St. Louis in the 1980s spread its tendrils into the surrounding region.  There was less incentive for those that had grown up in Cahokia to stay, with quick access to the city being of little utility in the face of few job opportunities.

The people left behind in the mass exodus found themselves existing at the confluence of the major social forces of blight, disinvestment, poverty, neglect, mismanagement, and crime, and their diminished tax base could hardly provide the funds to address the terrible tide that had arisen, sometimes literally, in front of their doorsteps.  The city struggled to provide basic services or maintain infrastructure, and streets in lower lying neighborhoods flooded regularly, sending rivulets of sewage rippling through makeshift ditches.  A diminished police presence, of which Detective Garcia was a part, found it increasingly difficult to respond to more frequent incidences of drug use, burglary, arson, and murder.  The dark humor that sometimes rippled through the ranks of the police was that they existed not to respond, but to report, meaning that by the time they got to the scene of an incident, they were generally too late to do anything about it.

The entire situation left Lori with a deep pit in her soul.  She had grown up here in the 1980s, and had fond memories of her childhood when the city existed, if not in its heyday, at least in times before the most serious problems began to manifest themselves so overtly.  Good people lived here, and still do live here, and the fact that the city’s current predicament was not of their doing added further heartbreak to the acute sense of helplessness and abandonment that many residents felt.

As she started her car, Detective Garcia’s thoughts lingered on words that the police chief had shared with her when she initially took up her position.  Out there, you’ll need all the charity you can get.  In a place like this, who couldn’t that be said of?

The gravel crunched under her tires as Lori turned out of the parking lot, and her car wound its way through the surrounding neighborhood.  She cruised slowly, taking a moment to study the properties as she passed.  Each one offered its own silent testimony to the struggles facing the community.  All needed a coat of paint, some required more extensive repairs to fallen gutters, fencing, or porches, and a few were obviously abandoned.  One was a shell, the dark vertical streaks climbing up out of the windowless frames hinting at the fire that had claimed the roof a few months, or perhaps years, ago.  The next property over was clearly occupied and well-maintained, furthering Lori’s internal lamentations as she thought about what it must be like for the owners to look from their window and see the blackened skeleton next door.

Imagine if they have kids, she thought.  How could they possibly have a childhood like mine?

Lori turned down a side street, and inadvertently found herself driving through the neighborhood she had grown up in as a child.  A frown crossed her face; this was an area she intentionally tried to avoid, as whatever scenes it offered contrasted too sharply with her childhood memories.  Each time she passed through, she discovered more and more being taken away from less and less, and Lori secretly feared that one day, it would render itself unrecognizable to her.  In fact, some parts of it had already become distorted to the point that they failed to line up with her memories. 

Garcia took her foot off the gas, and the car coasted to a stop in front of a vacant lot, a simple, rectangular concrete foundation bordered by grass flattened from recent storms.  Here and there, puddles of stagnant water reflected a cloudy sky pregnant with impending rain.  Trash collected in the far corners of the lot, pinned by gusts of wind against what remained of the chain-link fence.  Waste disposal was among Cahokia’s underfunded services, and the rusted shell of an old water heater and a few worn tires were scattered about, likely dumped illegally by landlords or tenants of nearby properties.

This depressing lot was all that remained of her childhood home, though the foundation seemed to her much too small to have been the footprint for all of her youthful experiences.  Her mother cooking in the kitchen, playing cards with her brother in the living room, laying on the overstuffed sofa where she would watch Sunday afternoon movies, all of these events occurred in an area that she could cross, front to back, in less than six paces.  Even the scarlet oak tree in what had once been the back yard had been cut down and removed.  Her first dog, a brindled mutt that had a habit of jumping over the chain link fence and running around wildly through the neighborhood, had been buried next to that tree after being killed by an errant driver.  Lori shuddered at the thought of the bulldozer that had torn down their home, and how it must have dispassionately driven back and forth over his grave, unaware of the bones that lay just beneath the surface.  In that context, the sliver of stump protruding from the unkempt, muddy lawn seemed a natural tombstone, not just for her dog, but for her childhood.

The world changes so quickly, she thought.  Maybe everyone feels this way about the past.

Lori shook herself back into the present, and shifted her gaze forward as the first drops of rain spattered on her windshield.  Too much backward gazing would do little to help her in the here and now, and as she accelerated away, she resolved never to drive down this street again.