by Mesha Maren
“You keep something for me and I’ll keep something for you.”
Jodi looked up and Dennis’s mouth was moving but she could barely hear his words over the sound of her own blood as she stood there, breathless and gutted by her own silence.
“All righty?” Dennis turned and pitched his beer bottle high into the thin blue sky.
June 1989
The parking lot outside the hotel room is empty except for a Ford pickup and a broken bicycle chained to the fence by the pool. Jodi wears her black bra and polka-dot panties, the ones that have almost no holes. She carries in her purse the .38, the room key, and a pack of cigarettes. Under her bare feet, the stairway is hot, all the green paint worn away so that the sun shines too brightly on the bare metal.
The water is moving, sloshing, and flashing, jumping just for her. She takes her time finding the right seat, testing the deck chairs to find one that sits up straight. Later, when her skin feels like a paper flame, she will slide into the water and stay under as long as she can. But for now she will wait.
Jodi wakes sweaty, stretched sideways across a bed and wrapped in yellow-brown sheets.
It was you, she tells the wall where Paula’s shadow hangs even after she is gone. You convinced me I was better than my shitty little past. You convinced me we were part of something brighter than a ten-watt life and I have to believe you.
She wakes to birdcalls, roosters, and the radio-announcer voice of fruit vendors in the street. Melón, papaya, manzana, muy bonita, las manzanas, los melones. Venga! Venga! Leaping from the bed, she pulls the curtains open but the parking lot is bare. It is America here. No fruit vendors, no fifty-cent tacos. Just the bleach-blue swimming pool.
Jodi stands naked, palms against the cool glass of the window, but there is no one there to see her.
August 2007
It was almost eight o’clock by the time Miranda left for her first shift at Slattery’s Girl. Out in the yard the shadows were softening and Jodi watched from the porch, Ricky standing in the doorway behind her. She could feel his restlessness, feel his eyes scanning the yard and that gashed-up ground. For the past three days he had not stopped obsessing over his failure to save Rosalba. No matter how many times Jodi explained that she had just gone back home, Ricky was unconvinced and Dennis’s sporadic visits to the cabin seemed to agitate him even more.
Two days after Rosalba left, Dennis had come to retrieve the cash but in its place he’d stored another smooth leather case, this one full of little white bundles. He’d tugged one of the squares loose and held it up for Jodi to see.
“Now ain’t that beautiful?”
The packet of wax paper was stamped with a picture of a skull and the words master mind.
Jodi shook her head. “What—”
“Straight from NYC. I shouldn’t even be showing you this but this is the shit that’s gonna make us the real money.” His face had glowed with the same grin he’d worn when talking about the bunny ranch. “I just gotta wait until I find the right buyer. People around here are used to that Mexican black tar shit—they don’t even know what something this pure is worth.”
“Where the hell did you—”
“Let’s just call it a gift from the gods.” Dennis snapped the suitcase shut and stood up. His shadow stretched out behind him across the chalky earth, marking a black path straight toward the wood-splitting block.
Jodi’s pulse quickened and again she heard Officer Ballard’s voice: You shall not associate with persons engaged in criminal activity. She was due to meet with him again in two weeks.
“You know why I’m bringing you into this?” Dennis had smiled at Jodi, all balmy and brotherly, as if he’d never threatened her. He winked and then turned away, seeking out a new hiding place, up at the corner of the roof at the other end of the shed. “You know if this works out right, after a while I’ll have the kind of cash to where I could give you a loan for the land.” “Bye!” Miranda waved out the window as she turned the car around in the yard. Jodi waved back, and watching the Chevette’s taillights flare in the tall grass, she thought she’d allowed herself to become more attached to Miranda than she’d really meant to. From the beginning she’d known that Miranda was flighty and irrational but she’d come to depend on her laughter and quick smile and the way she was always adding some spark, setting up a makeshift bar and painting stars across the tarp roof. Somehow even her volatility seemed essential, an important ingredient in this strange new life of theirs, and now just this small change, this loss of their evenings together, felt irreparable.
“She’ll be back?” Kaleb said. Jodi turned to face him.
He was leaned against the doorframe, there beside Ricky, the two of them staring out into the yard.
“She’s just going to work,” Jodi said, but the words sounded to her too much like a hope or a prayer.
“And you’ll help her?”
“Hmm? How’s that?” Jodi knelt beside Kaleb.
His eyes were huge and serious. “Sometimes Mom needs help,” he said.
Jodi let out a long breath. “She’ll be fine,” she said, but she had to squeeze her eyes closed to keep back the emotion. A kid like this never ought to have to say a sentence like that. She leaned forward and kissed the top of his head. “She’ll be okay,” she repeated, and as the sound of the motor faded down the lane she took his hand and led him back inside.
It was a hot night and when she approached the cookstove Jodi could see the flames still leaping there, slivers of orange light visible around the edges of the cast-iron eyes. Rosalba’s absence rang loudly throughout the house. As much as Jodi had hated Dennis suddenly dropping her there, she hated her disappearance even more; it was a constant reminder that she could trust nothing to remain the same for long.
The cabin smelled of burnt beans and wood smoke and as she poked at the dying coals Jodi remembered the heat on heat of Effie’s summer canning and the batch of black raspberries she put up the day before her first stroke.
They’d spent the morning out in the canes together, the vines pricking blood tattoos all up and down their arms. In the afternoon Effie had prepared the canning jars and fed the cookstove with quartered rounds of ash, good for a fast flame. The kitchen was transformed into a syrup swamp of sugar heat. Standing over her biggest cast iron, Effie had cooked the berries down. The tin thermometer tacked to the side of the woodshed read eighty-seven that day but the temperature in that kitchen must have passed over a hundred. Effie had ignored it. She’d stepped with precise movements, dabbing the sweat from her eyes with a handkerchief and lowering the shiny jars of fruit down into the boiling water.
“She’s lonely at night, I know it,” Kaleb whined.
“Who’s lonely?” Jodi said.
“Butter.”
He had not quit talking about that dog all week.
Jodi moved through the cluttered shadows to the table where she lit up the oil lamp. The light formed an oval that enclosed them: Ricky smoking quietly at the end of the table, Kaleb and Ross sharing a chair, with the Farmer’s Almanac spread before them, and Donnie sitting on the floor playing with jacks.
“Miranda says no pet dogs allowed,” Ricky reminded them. “She says you can’t buy dog food on food stamps.”
Jodi pictured Miranda’s face, her green eyes shining with the delight she sometimes took in telling her boys no—her way of acting grown up—and Jodi kicked herself again for getting attached to such a whimsical child-mom. The more she thought about it, the more she felt a pull to go, to borrow Farren’s truck and fetch the dog to spite Miranda for taking the bar job. She needed to get out of that quiet, overheated cabin anyway, needed to do something, go anywhere, just move.
In his doorway, Farren stood silently, staring at the crowd of them there in the dark yard. He brought his cigarette to his lips and the cherry flared with his breath. The gray dog stuck his nose out between the old man’s knees.
“Well,” he said finally, “I’ll come down there with you, I
guess, but I’ve got to finish my dinner first.”
He turned and headed back toward the kitchen. The others followed him into a living room dwarfed by a giant La-Z-Boy. In the blue light of the TV the whole place looked like it had sunk under water. It smelled old and familiar to Jodi, the earthy scent of home-rolled cigarettes and the tang of whiskey.
Farren opened the refrigerator and the yellow light pooled around him. He pulled out a carton of milk and then grabbed a bottle of Jim Beam off the counter. At the far end of the table a CB radio sat, burbling quietly.
As Jodi’s eyes adjusted to the grainy light she saw that all the walls of the narrow kitchen were plastered with magazine pictures. Photos of horses glued up beside pictures of cathedrals and photos of John Kennedy—lots and lots of photos of Kennedy—Bugs Bunny, the state flag, and there, in the corner, three pictures of Princess Diana with her blinding smile.
The boys pushed past Jodi and crowded around the table, watching closely as Farren opened a packet of American cheese. He left the thin plastic wrappers in a pile beside his plate and laid out the pieces of cheese like a puzzle, coupling each one with a slice of baloney and topping them off with dollops of mayonnaise. When the spread was complete, he leaned back in his chair and surveyed it, sipping at his glass of milk-whiskey. The boys’ faces followed Farren’s every movement.
“They’ve eaten already,” Jodi said, leaning against the doorframe. “They don’t need to be begging like that.”
Farren smiled and held out pieces of cheese for each of them to take. “I come from a big family, bunch of always hungry boys,” he said. “Mama used to give us leather strings to chew on, said we just needed something between the teeth.”
They parked the truck in the gravel pull-off beside the river, across the road from a gas station and convenience store called Good Stuff. The boys tore out of the cab, shouting, and Farren opened a cooler he kept in the back and pulled out a bag, heavy with the scent of blood and meat.
“Don’t go down there,” Jodi shouted, trying to keep an eye on all three boys, though all she could really see were morse code blinks of lightning bugs. “Stay up here, don’t go down by the water.”
The river murmured in the blackness below, a wet whisper.
There came the sound of clattering rocks and little feet.
“Ouch,” one of the boys cried. “Don’t push me.”
“Quieten down,” Farren called, coming around the side of the truck. “You want a skittish dog to come, you’ve got to quieten down and let her smell.”
He dropped the contents of his sack in a trail, leading up to the open door of the truck.
Across the road, the Good Stuff store glowed, a small pod of greenish-yellow fluorescence, giving off a warmth that reached a few feet out into the night. Inside, a black-haired woman perched on a stool behind the register, holding an unlit cigarette. The store looked so cozy. Jodi thought of Miranda in her little pink dress, standing behind a counter in a loud and low-lit bar.
Farren watched the boys on the edge of the embankment, pinching and shoving each other. “Where’s their father?” he said.
“They don’t have a father no more,” Jodi said quietly. “Just Miranda and, well, Ricky and me.”
“But she ain’t your kin, though, no? Just a friend?”
Jodi felt her heart kick at the phrase. She tried to catch the look in Farren’s eyes but it was too dark to see. Everything had seemed so safe, so secluded, back there on Effie’s land. But certainly Farren had been watching them, before they even knew him, and what all might he have seen?
“Butter!” Kaleb cried, and Jodi looked over, in relief, to see a yellow shadow dodge toward the cab of the pickup truck.
Farren fetched them a length of rope and dropped them all back at the house. The dog was docile until the truck pulled away and then she leapt, dancing at the end of her tether, barking after the taillights.
“I’m gonna sleep out here with Butter,” Kaleb announced.
“No,” Jodi said, “you sleep in the house with your brothers.”
“But Butter’s alone,” he said, pressing his hands together.
“No,” Ricky said, “she’s here with us.”
Kaleb looked up at him and nodded, his face so serious.
Such a big heart, Jodi thought, ruffling his hair. Sometimes he reminded her so much of young Ricky, up in that oak tree with his rescued bird, and it was for that reason, she guessed, that she’d agreed to follow his whim and save Butter. She’d never quite thought it through before this moment but sometimes, with Kaleb at her side, she felt as if she had young Ricky there, pulled up through the years to complete this dream world.
“Rosalba’s the one we oughta be worrying about.”
Ricky was staring out at the yard.
“That dog’ll be fine,” he shouted. “We need to find Rosalba, though. She’s the one that’s lonely.”
Jodi let all the air out of her lungs. There was nothing more she could say, she guessed. She had said it all to him too many times now. If Rosalba had carved out a distance between Jodi and Ricky, her absence was gouging an even huger hole.
Jodi led the boys to bed and then carried the lantern back toward the kitchen. The moths at the windows moved with her from room to room, thudding against the cheesecloth screens until she blew out the lamp.
“Hey, Ricky,” she called, grabbing the bottle of whiskey and heading outside.
She feared the silence, the empty porch and even emptier bed. She feared her thoughts, swarming like moths inside her brain.
“You want a drink?” She held out the bottle, desperate now for some point of connection.
He took a swig and passed it back. Down at the end of the mountain, the fire of the fracking tower was visible, an orange haze that pulsed through the trees. This town, Jodi thought, no, this whole state, had been trying for so long to find a way. A way to survive and still keep some things safe. Just mineral rights is all you’re selling, the company men had been saying as far back as the Civil War. You keep the land and we take out from under it what you didn’t even know was there anyway. As if anything in this life could be stratified that easily.
She took a long drink and passed it back to him. In the clear silence the motors of the gas trucks were audible, a humming that rose and fell with the shifting gears. It reminded Jodi of termites, the steady chewing, so constant as to be forgettable but working their way in just the same, weakening the walls hourly.
The dog was still now, lying flat but alert in the tall grass. Her ears moved as the wind hush-hushed the oak leaves, and an owl called out in the field.
“Hey, Ricky, you like it here?” Jodi asked.
Ricky was silent and totally still and Jodi forced herself to stay quiet too, to wait it out and not fill up the empty, uncomfortable space. After a while he leaned forward and pointed up to the distance above them. Jodi saw nothing and then, in the patch of smooth sky between clouds, a sharp slash of light. A flicker, and then another and another.
“Falling stars,” she cried childishly, happy for a distraction.
“Meteors,” Ricky corrected her.
They both moved farther down the porch steps, leaning back to better see the trails of light that dropped here and there, and there.
Clouds blew in and obscured the sky and Jodi closed her eyes, picturing the meteor that Miranda had described, a hot light burning brilliantly as it fell, straight into a woman’s house.
“Hey, Ricky,” she said, with her eyes still closed. “I found your newspapers.”
A breeze flapped the cloth in the window frames.
Jodi went on. “It was Dylan that killed Paula’s baby, wasn’t it? Or was it an accident?”
There was no sound now but the train echoing away down in the valley. Jodi opened her eyes and saw that Ricky had fallen asleep.
By midnight the bottle was empty but Jodi still could not rest. She’d lain in bed momentarily but she hated the empty space, hated the distance of time and he
r own counting—seconds to minutes to hours. The whiskey had only fueled her anxieties, her visions of Miranda, half-naked in that shack of a bar, a ring of men surrounding her. Jodi pushed herself up to standing and headed for the door.
The air was much cooler outside, the wind picking up and shaking the trees. No rain yet but she could sense it coming. She walked through the yard and past Butter, who rose and greeted her and then barked at her back until she disappeared around the bend. The plushness of the summer night surrounded her, booming with insect noise, and then the lights of Farren’s house appeared up the road and it seemed that’s where she was headed.
He was in the kitchen, drinking, the rest of the house dark around him, and when she knocked on the back door he looked up as if expecting her.
“That dog giving you trouble?”
Jodi stepped inside, shaking her head. “I’m worried about Miranda. I don’t like thinking about her down at that bar. I just wanna make sure she’s okay.”
Farren cocked his head to the side. “Well, I’ve got to finish my drink.”
They sat at the table and he poured her a whiskey. She sipped the drink slowly, watching the light play over the wall of photos: Marilyn Monroe, Roosevelt, Donald Duck, and the Virgin Mary.
“You were the child that stayed up here with Effie,” Farren said.
Jodi nodded.
“You’ve been gone a long time.”
He seemed to want her to say something more but she was sure he knew her story, at least that she’d been in prison. Small towns always talked and then there were the newspaper stories. Jodi tried to gauge his expression but it gave away no emotion.
