Sugar Run: A Novel

by Mesha Maren

  “Stop.”

  Adrenaline had released into her veins now and mixed with the pills and beer and began to multiply.

  The truck lurched and sped up. Tiffany grabbed Jodi’s hand. Her nails dug into Jodi’s flesh. The train was panting, close behind them. Jodi freed her hand and craned her neck. She spotted two of the other pickups, closing in on their tail, headlights bouncing in the rearview mirror.

  A.J. turned the wheel and pressed the gas. They rolled up onto the tracks. Jodi felt a loosening in her gut. There was no more air anywhere. She closed her eyes. Nothing but the scream of the truck’s motor and the throb of the train, the window beside her jittering in its frame. She was watching it all from outside somewhere, watching herself drift. Utterly aware now of how helpless she was, not just in this moment but in all of it. Out of orbit, untethered, and spinning off into some unknown galaxy.

  The truck bucked up, mounting the wave of sound, the thrumming engine, shrill whistle scream. Fuck, a voice called. Fuck . . . fuck . . . fuck. Jodi curled for the blow.

  And then she was shaking, almost crying, and the sound was all behind them, leaking away.

  May 1989

  The gas station is way out at the edge of Mineola where the two-lane road fades into a single strip of cracked pavement. The brown-haired woman works from five to midnight. Jodi and Paula have cased it enough to see that she is always there alone.

  “I don’t know.” Jodi paces in front of the motel room window; through the curtains she can see across the railroad tracks to the yellow-and-red gas station and the movements of the woman inside behind the counter.

  Paula is measuring out a line of coke on top of the dresser. “They’re trained to cut their losses. You show the weapon and she’ll hand it over so fast.”

  Even from inside their room Jodi can feel the heat. The railroad tracks shimmer with late-day sunlight, and dusty spikes of dried plants poke up out of the parking lot. She hates how the heat comes on so dead and flat every morning, as huge and uniform as the sky. In the dips and gulleys of West Virginia, the days always started off cool and sleepy with a thin green mist lifting up from the river.

  “I’d do it myself.” Paula tilts her head and presses the back of her hand against her nose.

  There is a cluster of industrial tanks back beyond the gas station with metal staircases curving up the sides, and the setting sun paints strips of light across them like the jars of colored sand Jodi saw for sale in Mexico.

  “But when you hold the gun it’s clear you’re not afraid to use it.”

  Jodi turns away from the window and walks to the dresser for her line. The truth is, she loves to hear those words and her blood picks up at the thought of holding the gun like that again, showing its power to some stranger so that they see her, really, truly see her, deeply outlined forever in their brain.

  Paula parks the car in the alley between the Elko Motel and Oasis Liquors but keeps the motor running. Jodi gets out and heads up the street, her purse with the pistol inside hitting her hip with every step. As she walks by the liquor store she notes the neon glow of the alcohol advertisements, the way the warm light expands in the not-quite-dark air and makes her feel that she’s in a scene from some movie. Across the street a pregnant woman is folding towels inside the Thrifty Bundle Launderette and Jodi likes that, the familiarity of it. The world has not stopped spinning just because she is on her way to hold up a gas station. If that woman can just keep folding her laundry, Jodi figures, everything will turn out all right.

  She pulls the pistol out of her purse as she passes the gas pumps, the little pools of oil and fuel reflecting the yellow-green parking-lot lights. The gas station lot is empty but she can hear the wheels of a car out on the road. She tenses but it goes on past, the swoosh of a slow-driving sedan. She walks to the front door and the brown-haired woman behind the counter looks up briefly, then glances back down at the magazine she is reading.

  If no one believes that she—a seventeen-year-old girl in blue jeans and a halter top—will do this, if no one believes this will happen, on this warm early evening on the edge of a quiet town, then maybe, Jodi thinks, she can do it—go on in there and demand the money—and be gone before anything gets disturbed. She and Paula will leave town fast and the woman folding towels at the launderette can stop by the gas station for cigarettes. The gas station attendant can go on with her night, get done with her shift, and drive home.

  The bell on the door clangs. Jodi has the pistol pressed flat against her leg, hidden behind her purse, but the woman is not even watching.

  When she does look up there is a level of simple and obvious disgust in her eyes. What do you want? the eyes seem to say. I hate you already because you’re young and stupid and not yet burdened by compromises and wrinkle lines.

  “Yes?”

  Jodi lifts her right arm slowly. “I need you to empty the register.”

  A bit of color flushes the woman’s cheeks but her eyes are still dull and annoyed. “Is it loaded?”

  Anger floods Jodi’s veins, she fights to keep from saying anything, knowing her voice will come out squeaky. She steps closer and clicks the safety off instead.

  The woman winces and looks toward the register. “You know this won’t change anything,” she says.

  It seems to Jodi that the woman is speaking to her from some other dimension, this bored, motherly voice, undeterred by the cocked gun.

  “Give me the fucking money,” Jodi says. Things needed to start happening faster now, much, much faster.

  The woman presses a button with her coral-colored nail and the drawer slides out.

  “We make a bank deposit at three p.m. so there’s not much in here.” The woman slips out a slim stack of twenties, fives, and ones. “You know this kinda thing won’t change much.” She looks directly at Jodi as she hands over the cash. “You’ll still end up like me.”

  Jodi bucks a little at the words. The money in her hand seems tainted now with this heavy inevitability and it sticks to Jodi as she runs up the street toward Paula’s car, lungs burning, the feeling of it on her skin the way the sensation of a spiderweb stays long after you wipe it away.

  They drive out of Texas and stay in the first motel they can find that doesn’t ask for any ID.

  “Don’t be hard on yourself, we’ll try again someplace else,” Paula says as Jodi counts out $108.00. But it is not the disappointment over the money that bothers Jodi. She cannot figure out how to explain the woman and now, when she thinks about it, she is not even sure that their interaction was not a dream.

  August 2007

  It was after eleven when Jodi woke in the back bedroom at her parents’ place. Sunlight covered the end of the bed and Jim Morrison stared down at her with his sexy-moody face. Through the open window she could hear the buzz of conversation.

  Andy and Irene did not look up from the TV when she passed through the living room. The others were all out on the front porch drinking coffee. Jodi watched them through the kitchen window. She couldn’t remember if Dennis and A.J. had slept there too or just shown up in the morning. Seated behind them, on the stairs, was a wiry, mustached man.

  As Jodi opened the door Miranda pushed herself off the railing and walked toward her, holding out a cup of coffee.

  “Your cousin got me a job,” she said, smiling. “I’m gonna bartend down at Slattery’s Girl.”

  Jodi caught the flicker of flirty excitement in Miranda’s eyes.

  “You remember Justin, don’t you?” Dennis said.

  Jodi took the cup of coffee from Miranda and looked again at the man on the stairs. He looked like an aged version of nearly every kid she’d gone to high school with.

  “Phillip’s youngest boy,” Dennis prompted.

  Jodi squinted. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen any of her cousins, but sure, she thought, that could be him, same small-muscled frame as all the men in her family.

  “You don’t want to work in a place like that,” Jodi said
, passing the coffee back to Miranda.

  Miranda laughed, brushing her hair from her face. “A place like what?”

  Jodi stepped closer, focusing on the freckles scattered across Miranda’s cheeks. “A place that expects you to be a slut.”

  Miranda paused, cup halfway to her mouth. The front legs of Dennis’s chair thumped down onto the porch boards.

  “Not all the girls that work there is like that,” Justin said.

  Jodi glanced back at him where he sat, mouth slack.

  “He works as a bouncer,” Miranda explained.

  Jodi nodded. Miranda was already moving ahead, sloughing off her life like snakeskin. So easy, Jodi thought, you take it all so easy—this is my new best friend now, my new job.

  “You don’t need to be working in a bar. You’ve got kids to take care of.”

  “I know I do. That’s why I want this job. I can make good tips.”

  “But if you’re working at the bar, you’ll sleep days and work nights and you won’t even see them.”

  “I’m always not thinking about the boys, right? Is that it? You ever think that maybe one time I’m making a decision ’cause I am thinking about them?” Miranda turned away. “It’ll only be a few nights a week.”

  Jodi watched the tendons in Miranda’s neck. She looked so fragile, that thin, pale skin and those tiny bones, but she seemed positive that she was bulletproof. Or at least that she could dust herself off after the bullets were removed and that something better would be coming along soon.

  When Jodi and Miranda pulled up in the yard, Ricky was standing on the front porch of the cabin, hands in his pockets. He said nothing but watched closely as they climbed out of the car. The yard was marked with fresh tire ruts, the loamy topsoil churned up in great gashes among the green grass.

  “What all happened here?” Jodi called.

  His shirt was untucked and only half-buttoned, his hair sticking up wild, and as she got closer she could see that his hands were shaking.

  “Ricky, what—”

  “Rosa. They got her.” He looked at Jodi. “I tried. I . . . I . . . they had two guns and—”

  “What are you talking about?” Jodi’s face felt too hot, ears pounding with blood as she ran up the front steps. “Where are the boys? Ricky?”

  “I told the boys to stay quiet for their own lives.”

  Jodi stood so close she could smell Ricky’s sour sweat and see the tiny blue-black whiskers on his chin.

  “What’s going on?” Miranda called from behind them.

  Jodi stepped in closer. She could see the stains under the armpits of Ricky’s cream-colored shirt, the streaks of dirt in the folds of his neck, and the red veins skittering across the whites of his eyes. “Ricky. Where are the boys?”

  He jerked his head back toward the cabin door.

  “Everything’s all right?” Miranda said as Jodi ran, pushed past Ricky and on inside, blinking against the shadows, seeing only the outline of the cookstove, the sink, and then the bedroom door, closed, with a ladder-back chair wedged up against it.

  “Kaleb? Donnie?”

  She shoved aside the chair.

  They were curled up on the floor, heads poking around the corner of the mattress, pupils dilated huge.

  “Oh, no, come here.” She knelt but they did not move toward her. “What happened, babies, what happened?”

  Ross began to cry, quietly, his shoulders shaking and his wet face resting on the corner of the mattress. Jodi crawled across the floor, pulled Donnie in close, and then reached out for Ross, and though he held his body stiff, she hugged him and laid his head down on her lap. His pants were damp and stank of piss.

  Kaleb reached up and ran his fingers across Jodi’s cheek and she realized then that she was crying too, the salty tears running down and stinging her chapped lips.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she whispered, bending over to kiss Kaleb’s head.

  Ricky could not stop stuttering and pacing. Miranda got the boys settled down with her in the back bedroom and Jodi sat with him on the porch until he could get the story out straight.

  He said the men had come in the early-morning hours, in a jacked-up truck, carrying shotguns.

  “She gone on out there when she seen them coming.” Ricky brought his fingers into a fist and then released them. “I tried to say no, tell them we wouldn’t trade her. I would have done more but the boys. She told me to go back and keep the boys safe.” He looked over at the churned-up yard. “I told them we wouldn’t trade. Tried to give the money back but—”

  “The money?”

  “The money they give. They took a bag out of the shed and left money.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He heaved himself up and started across the porch and Jodi followed around the back of the house to the woodshed. From the highest branches of the trees the cicadas called out, a spiraling scream that sounded to Jodi like a soundtrack to true insanity. Ricky stepped around a wheelbarrow with a deflated tire and stood on tiptoe to peer up into the woodshed rafters. “Here,” he said, then moved aside for Jodi to see.

  The bag of sinsemilla was gone but a small brown suitcase sat in its place.

  Jodi pulled and it landed at her feet, throwing up a cloud of cocoa-colored dust. She bent close, the air around her full of the smell of wood shavings and machine oil. The little gold latches sprang at her touch and the lid lifted to reveal an even bed of crisp green money. Jodi’s head pulsed and she let the lid fall down.

  “I told them we wouldn’t trade Rosa. Told them—”

  “Hush, Ricky.”

  She stared off past his darkened silhouette. On the far side of the fence, in what used to be the Caulfield’s pasture, a Hereford lowed discontentedly, calling out to the herd that moved ahead of her. The heifer raised her head and turned her slack gaze toward Jodi, her hide rippling under a haze of horseflies. Jodi looked again at the little suitcase. She lifted the lid and pulled out a packet, flipping the bills between her fingers, stiff as playing cards. Ten packets of five hundred each.

  When she found him, out back of the Gas ’N Go, Dennis was seated on an empty milk crate, talking to a shirtless man with a bald sunburned head.

  “Dennis,” Jodi said, walking toward him across the cement lot.

  He glanced her way and held up one finger. The bald man was telling a story about a bear hunt on Randolph Mountain.

  A brown dog loped out of the shade of the building and into the empty street, his bones slinking under his skin. The outside wall of the gas station was painted with big blue letters—we support coal—and in the oily puddles around the pumps little sparrows dove and rose, shivering water off their backs.

  “Hey, Dennis, what the fuck happened up at my place last night?” Jodi moved in closer.

  “Hold on,” Dennis said to the bald man. He looked over at Jodi, his eyes loose and distant. He lifted his beer bottle and sunlight caught in the liquid and turned the brown glass to shimmering. “What do you mean?” he said, and Jodi could smell the yeasty alcohol on his breath.

  “Where’s Rosalba?”

  “She went back home.”

  “Went back home?” Jodi glanced over at the bald man but he’d gone inside. “You mean an armed posse came and took her away?”

  Dennis’s laughter rang out like buckshot. “Man, Jodi, you sure got—”

  “I’ve got kids living up there is what I got. I’ve got a family I’ve got to think about and I can’t have—”

  “Why, what happened?”

  “I get home and the boys are locked in the bedroom pissing their pants.”

  “Look, I’m sorry, Jo.” Dennis shook his head and lifted his beer bottle to his lips. “Cruz told me yesterday that the state cops have quit prowling. He said he’d be coming to pick up Rosa soon.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “You don’t have to worry about Cruz and his boys.”

  “But where is she?”

  “Rosa? She’s bac
k where she’s been living.”

  “And where’s that?”

  Dennis jerked his chin toward the mountains. “Look, just forget about her. Sorry I had to bring her up there but . . . just don’t worry about her.”

  Jodi looked at him standing there, the sun silhouetting his head, and she wanted to shake him, tell him she needed control over some part of her life.

  “You’re sticking your nose in where it don’t need to go,” he said. “Sorry about the way it went down but—”

  “What about the suitcase?”

  Dennis looked straight at Jodi. “That’s for that weed you’ve been storing. Cruz took it off my hands for me. I’m gonna find all the cash in there? Right?”

  Jodi nodded. “I’m gonna need you to take it away.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “I should never have let you keep nothing up there in the first place and I—”

  “Hold on. I’m trying to help you out here. I don’t see you making money any other way.” He stepped closer to her. “You know what, though? If you don’t wanna look at it that way, I got something else you oughta know.” He pointed his beer bottle at her and there was something dark in his face now. “I know about you and Miranda. Don’t matter how much you lie.” He took a long drink. “I think it’s sick but I ain’t gonna do nothing to you. Some folks around here, though”—he drew a circle in the air with his bottle—“wouldn’t handle it so kindly. Might wanna see those boys raised up in a different, more Christian home.”

  A film of sweat settled on Jodi’s neck.

  “You remember those girls over in Shawnee County,” Dennis said.

  Jodi looked away. She felt faint and dry mouthed as the images rushed across her mind, the story of those Yankee girls who’d traveled through West Virginia back in the mideighties. They’d gotten lost and begged a place to stay off a farmer in Shawnee County. He’d let them sleep the night in his hay barn but folks said when he went to check on them in the morning he’d found something happening there that made him raise his rifle to their heads. State police had come snooping but by then the car and bodies were gone and all the neighbors there stood by the old man, whose character, they said, was impeccable.