Sugar Run: A Novel

by Mesha Maren

  “I’ll be gone one hour, max,” Jodi said. “You’ve got money, right?”

  Miranda stood up and opened the back door, reaching in for Ross. “You want me to order you something?”

  Jodi shook her head and slid over into the driver’s seat.

  In front of the car Kaleb held tight to Donnie’s blue-striped shirt while he ran in place, arms stretched toward the Dairy Queen.

  The Georgia Folk and Country Musicians Museum was located in a former Woolworth’s storefront on Main Street. The name was written in a big neon script and behind the plate-glass windows stood a huddle of dusty mannequins, the men in sequin-studded suits and the women in faded miniskirts, each one holding a cardboard guitar.

  The street was nearly empty, one white Honda in the lot on the side and a Winnebago parked out front. Jodi pulled up behind the Winnebago and turned off the car. She’d stalled the engine twice before even leaving the Dairy Queen lot, her hands shaking on the steering wheel and her mouth dry with fear, but by the time she’d reached downtown she remembered that she liked driving. She listened closely to the cooling engine, closed her eyes, and tried to picture Ricky’s face: the hope in those blue eyes. She counted to three and pushed herself up and out into the fuzzy heat.

  The air inside the museum was slightly cooler but too still; the cavernous room was lit by banks of trembling fluorescent bulbs and partitioned off with beige wall dividers. In the quiet Jodi began to make out the jump-rope tones of a tour guide’s voice from the back of the room.

  “. . . have reached the Lee Golden display, the largest and most central display in the Georgia Folk and Country Musicians Museum, not only because Delray can claim the fame of being Golden’s hometown but also because Lee Golden is an ideal conclusion to your Georgia Folk and Country experience, as his musical style truly blends a bit of all the styles we saw in the other displays, from mountain music to country and even rock.”

  Jodi followed the voice toward the back, peeking into the sectioned-off areas she passed. Each one was set up as a diorama with name plaques, mannequins, and photographs. She passed an exhibit with ancient gray pictures of Fiddlin’ John Carson and a wooden table full of old whiskey bottles; a hawk-eyed man called Gid Tanner; a short-skirted, big-haired Brenda Lee mannequin; a huge photo of a handsome curly-haired Jerry Reed with a shiny red guitar and a woman named Hedy West playing clawhammer banjo at the Newport Folk Festival; Gram Parsons in a bedazzled suit; and then a snapshot of the Allman Brothers.

  “. . . raised here in Delray by his maternal grandparents while his young mother pursued a career in Hollywood. Golden’s vocal talents were recognized early on by the minister at the Baptist church his family attended.”

  Jodi followed the voice back into the Golden section: a display showing a modest living room with an orange shag rug, a green velour couch and gold-framed oval photos of a blond-haired family, and then a chapel complete with a choir of mannequin singers.

  In the tenth display room, she caught up with the group. A tall, broad-shouldered man with an unkempt shock of black hair stood before a graying couple in matching blue visors and sweatshirts. The room was equipped with what seemed to be a six-foot-tall dollhouse—a replica of a totally white turreted and many-windowed building, the wall behind it painted with palm trees, and a sign affixed to the roof that read scientology.

  “December of 1978, thirteen-year-old Lee Golden met Tamara Monti of the Monti Singers at the Celebrity Centre International in Los Angeles, California. Monti, who liked Lee’s abilities in the area of oral sex, invited Lee to accompany her on a worldwide tour as her backup singer and harmonizer.”

  Jodi stopped in the doorway, hand to her mouth, unsure if she had really heard those words—oral sex—blended in so nonchalantly with the rest of the pitch. But Ricky—for it was Ricky, a big life-size, grown-up version of Ricky—kept right on rattling names and dates like he hadn’t said anything unusual at all.

  “. . . broke off from Monti when he was eighteen and started making his own records. Folks called him the new Gram Parsons.”

  “July the eleventh of 1986 he was married to Chelsea Jean Miller, in Los Angeles, California.”

  Jodi ducked behind a partition when the group exited the LA part of the exhibit, then trailed after as Ricky described the breakup of the original band and Lee’s marriage to Miranda Matheson. There was a Tamara Monti–Lee Golden Reunion Tour poster with the names of various European cities and an image of Lee and Tamara on stage with a girl in a minidress who looked very much like a young Miranda. Then there was a framed cover of Star magazine featuring an exhausted-looking Miranda with one baby on her hip and the two others clustered at her feet. Family life doesn’t settle well with the Golden Boy, the caption read. Then a photo of Lee at the Grand Ole Opry, another photo of him on a bucking bull, and a display of the Gemini dressed as cowboys pointing pistols at one another.

  Ricky’s voice faded in and out of the displays up ahead, weaving away from Jodi. She stared down at the splotched brown carpet, feeling heavy with some sort of dread. She wasn’t sure exactly how she had thought this whole thing would go but certainly not like this, with him giving tours in some strange, musty museum and looking like an insurance salesman or a Jehovah’s Witness, buttoned-up shirt tucked into wrinkled khaki slacks and talking about oral sex. This most important moment, this glorious instant of triumph that Jodi had played over and over again in her head was, she now realized, fairly dependent on the image of that little blue-eyed boy’s joy at her return.

  This was all moving a little too fast. She just needed some air, she thought, keeping her eyes on the floor as she walked out the front door, where she was hit with a climbing wave of noise and heat.

  At the edge of the parking lot the yellow-and-black boxcars of a passing freight train flashed through a stand of maples and the rhythm rocked under her feet. She lit a cigarette and leaned against the Chevette. She’d played out this moment in her brain so many times now that the little mind movie she’d made of it seemed more real than this present moment. This present moment in which she’d come here with stolen kids, a probably stolen car too, a car that she couldn’t even really drive, and now she was, what, going to swoop up Ricky and carry him off?

  She’d never really known how to understand Ricky. Simple, that’s how Paula had always explained him, and when Jodi had asked more she’d said that Dylan and Anna had taken him out of school because they claimed he couldn’t keep up well and his temper flared. Seeing him now, though, it occurred to Jodi that he seemed no different from any other undereducated small-town country man.

  He was still living there, though, in that stinking house with Dylan—a prison worse in some ways than Jaxton had been.

  Jodi pinched her cigarette between her teeth. I like the way you do things, Miranda had said. You show up in town with nothing but conviction and an old address. She took a last drag and dropped her cigarette to the concrete. If it was too late for Ricky, then it was too late for her, and it couldn’t be too late for her. She looked up as the sweatshirt couple walked out of the museum and toward their Winnebago.

  From the far end of town the train engine sounded out one long note as it turned the corner, picking up speed. Jodi pushed herself off the Chevette and toward those plate-glass doors.

  “Ricky,” she called. “Ricky Dulett.”

  He stood in the front window among the mannequins and as she came in he turned slowly, his hunched shoulders and black hair silhouetted against the soft afternoon light.

  “Ricky, do you remember—”

  He held up his palm to stop her.

  “Jodi,” he said.

  Her throat drew in tight and she squeezed her eyes shut for a moment to keep back the tears.

  He stepped down off the lip of the display window and walked toward her and there he was, after so many years: Ricky, three feet away.

  “I came back for you,” Jodi said.

  The air in the room sounded huge, sucking in and out with
the rhythms of the air-conditioning units.

  “Oh, yeah?” Ricky said.

  Jodi nodded and looked away. Out front the Winnebago drove off, scattering slices of light all up and down the walls. Jodi glanced back at Ricky.

  “Dylan’s got you working up here full-time?”

  “Most days, yeah.”

  “You just give tours?”

  Ricky stared at her from under his shaggy bangs. “I get a little tired of saying the same things sometimes. Sometimes I’ll throw in something extra.”

  “Oral sex?”

  His mouth twitched into a tiny smile. “Sometimes.”

  “You’re still living with Anna and Dylan, huh?”

  He nodded and turned to walk toward the front glass doors, pulling a pack of Winstons out of his shirt pocket. “Mama and Daddy says I can’t smoke cigarettes.” He looked back at Jodi. “Says I can’t be trusted with fire but the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold—”

  “The bush burned with fire and the bush was not consumed,” Jodi said.

  Ricky smiled fully now.

  “I went out to the house,” Jodi said, following him through the double doors. “Went out looking for you yesterday.”

  Ricky glanced at her, then down at his cigarette. “Can’t hardly breathe in that house,” he said. “Too many cats. Daddy says breeding those special cats’ll bring in the money. The cats breed but there ain’t no money.”

  Jodi lit her own cigarette and dragged deeply. “Remember how Paula and I said we’d come back? Said we’d get you out of that house?”

  Ricky did not look at her.

  “My family’s got land in West Virginia, we can go there. I’m driving up there tonight.”

  Ricky held his cigarette out at arm’s length, then brought it back to his mouth. “I can’t go nowhere.”

  “Sure you can,” Jodi said.

  Ricky inhaled and blew smoke out his nose as he stared off across the parking lot. The air outside was hot but moving now with a wind that stacked the clouds up thick across the horizon.

  “You like working here?” Jodi asked.

  “I get paid.” Ricky brought his digital watch up close to his eyes. “First Friday.”

  “You mean Dylan gets paid.”

  “He’ll cash the check, yeah, and I’ll buy a new CD.”

  “He’s got you working full-time and he gives you enough money to buy one CD?”

  Ricky pointed to the Chevette. “That your car?”

  “A friend’s,” Jodi said, unsure whether to mention Miranda and the boys and the fact that they would be in West Virginia too. It seemed to her that Lee didn’t think so highly of Miranda anymore and she couldn’t tell if Ricky would see her connection to Miranda as a good or bad thing.

  “How fast’ll it go?”

  “As fast as I need it to, I guess.” Jodi shrugged. “You wanna try it?”

  Ricky froze, cigarette halfway to his mouth. “I can’t drive.”

  “Don’t matter,” Jodi said. “I’ll teach you.”

  It began to rain nearly as soon as they’d gotten in the car, big pearls of water that snaked down the dusty glass. In the empty parking lot Jodi pressed her fingers into the back of Ricky’s hand and guided the stick shift as they drove in circles. “Up into first, now wait—you’ll feel when it’s ready for second.”

  After a while Ricky got the hang of it enough and Jodi could sit back and watch fat raindrops drip down the windowpanes and the red neon of the museum sign glow with a smeary light. On the second floor of an apartment building across the alley, a door opened and two little girls scampered out onto the balcony. They stood under the eaves and played a singsong hand-slapping game, their little voices barely audible over the Chevette’s engine.

  Miss Mary Mack-Mack-Mack

  All dressed in black-black-black

  Jodi glanced over at Ricky with his stubbly chin and bent shoulders, hunched over the steering wheel, his hairy hand cupping the gearshift. Looking at him for too long gave her a cool, disquieting shiver of a feeling. She could not square this large, quiet man with the ten-year-old she had met, who was all shining eyes and pure voice. She thought of her own younger self—that wild, sad young woman with her giant hopes of healing all their lives. This Ricky here, in all his grown-up strangeness, was physical evidence of the gap between the plan then and the plan now. But he was also the only remnant of a life map that Jodi had left. If she could not convince him to leave, she would be failing them all—her own younger self, Paula, and that ten-year-old boy with his pet crow—and then it would be true, that thing he must have thought all these years: that she was not coming back, that he was not worth saving.

  “How about when you go to Dylan and Anna’s place tonight . . .” Jodi tried to keep her voice level as a nervous blood rhythm drummed inside her. “How about you get whatever it is you want to keep out of that cat-piss house. I’ll stay in a motel here and you think about it. Whatever you want for a new life, bring it here with you in the morning.”

  Ricky pressed his foot on the brake and slowly looked over at Jodi but his expression was too complicated to read clearly.

  “Dylan comes for me at six,” he said. “I oughta get going before he shows up.” He nodded good-bye and stepped out into the wet parking lot.

  Jodi couldn’t resist the possibility of seeing Dylan. It felt like both the worst idea and also perfect somehow and so she stayed there, motor running and radio on low, in the back of the parking lot. The rain picked up. She could barely see anything through the flashing windshield wipers but a few minutes after six a car pulled in and she rolled down her window to see the Skylark, old now with rust along the front bumper, and behind the glass, a pale face distorted by the rain. Her stomach flew up and the tattered beast uncurled inside her. As she gripped the steering wheel Ricky ran out the front doors of the museum, hunkered against the slanting storm, and disappeared inside the car.

  With its stained carpet and dripping sink, the Belmont Motel wasn’t the most uplifting place to bring Miranda’s little family together but the boys occupied themselves immediately, Ross studying the phone book, Donnie sliding headfirst off the bed, and Kaleb watching a TV show about water moccasins.

  Jodi headed across the street for a six-pack and bottle of bourbon and when she came back into the room she was stunned by their ease and familiarity.

  Miranda lay on the bed, smoking a cigarette.

  “Do you want a drink of Coke?” She held a pop bottle out toward Donnie, who slithered across the carpet, arms tight against his sides, legs stuck together, pumping the air.

  “I’m a guppy,” he said. “I’m a guppy, gup-peeee!”

  “You must be thirsty, flailing all around like that,” Miranda said as he flopped his way up onto the bed and snuggled beside her, nuzzling the pop bottle. She set her cigarette in the ashtray and ran her hand through his hair.

  Jodi smiled, warm and buzzing before she’d even had one drink. They were not yet on the road and time was running out—if she didn’t make it up to West Virginia for her parole meeting the day after tomorrow, she would be in violation—but, finally, everything seemed to be almost coming together and her anxiety was offset by the joyful disarray of Miranda’s family. There was something unspoken, she thought, a kind of proprietary confidence and ease that parents and children seemed to carry with them. The way these four people could make this room home in a matter of minutes, claiming the space and settling in, so self-contained that the world outside seemed unnecessary.

  She’d seen it with her own family, first between her parents and then between her parents and the twins. An inwardness that changed the space around them so that the corner of a restaurant, the sidewalk, or the park was suddenly unquestionably theirs. Somehow Jodi had never been on the inside, though. The link between her parents was so tight they could hardly fit anyone else, but A.J. and Dennis, with their own special birth bond, made space for themselve
s while Jodi was always outside, circling.

  “Gup-peeee!” Donnie heaved himself off the mattress again and thumped his way around the perimeter of the room, following the baseboard.

  Jodi poured generous shots into two Styrofoam cups and carried one to Miranda.

  “You really think they won’t find us here?” Miranda said, leaning close to Jodi.

  “We haven’t done anything wrong. You’re just visiting your children and you’ve still got custody, right?”

  Miranda nodded.

  Jodi settled on the bed beside Kaleb, who watched intently as the TV screen blurred with baby snakes.

  “You know the only reason he hasn’t already taken them somewhere far away is because of his mom,” Miranda whispered in a stiff but not-quiet-enough voice. “He won’t go without her and she won’t leave the country.”

  The female water moccasin will give live birth, the host on the TV announced, sometimes having as many as twenty young moccasins in late summer or early autumn.

  “It’s like every minute of his sleeping and waking life she’s got his balls cupped right there in her hand. You know how hard it is to respect somebody like that?”

  Donnie had completed his circle around the room and managed to squirm his way back up onto the bed. He lay down beside Miranda and butted the bottle of Cherry Coke with his nose.

  “Use your hands, sweetie,” Miranda said.

  He grabbed the bottle with his mouth and, gripping the neck in his teeth, shook his head back and forth viciously.

  “Use your—”

  “He can’t,” Kaleb said.

  Miranda glanced back and forth between her sons.

  “He’s a guppy,” Kaleb explained. “He don’t have hands.”

  Jodi saw the lick of satisfaction in his eye as he said it, the joy of correcting his mother.

  Donnie reared up, bottle still in his mouth, delirious with his brother’s recognition. He leaned back and ricocheted off the headboard and toward the nightstand. There was the smack of contact and then a long silence before the scream.

  He curled on the floor, his face blank white except for the curtain of red all across his chin and neck. The pop bottle, wet with saliva, lay beside his head.