by Mesha Maren
“You come back, though,” he said.
From the end of the table, the scanner radio emitted a crackle of static, as if clearing its throat.
Seven out. . . . Go ahead . . . eighty-six, forty-one.
“Effie would’ve liked that.” Farren stamped his cigarette into the ashtray. “She was always big on coming home. Coming home, staying home. She was dead set on keeping that land. It’s how come her and my brother split.”
Jodi looked up.
“Before she married McCarty, her and my brother Cecil were thick. Mama called it sinning, the way they run together all the time like that.”
She leaned in, not daring to disturb whatever it was that had brought forth his stories. Effie had never talked about her own life; she told endless tales about others but when it came to herself she had saved her words.
“Cecil dreamt up that they were gonna run off to Florida together and live in the orange groves but Effie said she’d never leave this mountain.” Farren flicked his Semper Fi lighter open and snapped it closed again. “It’s more important to come back, though.”
Jodi swallowed half her shot, letting it burn across her tongue.
“Never leave,” Farren said, “and you don’t rightly know what it is you’re not leaving. I thought for sure the only way I’d come home was in a body bag.”
“Vietnam?”
“Korea.” He pronounced the word with the same balance of awe and hatred one might use to say an ex-wife’s name. “Fought at the Frozen Chosin.”
“Frozen chosen?”
“Winter of ’50, I was fifteen, told ’em I was seventeen. My three older brothers was fighting, I thought I’d join too.” Farren emptied his glass, poured another shot, and offered Jodi the bottle. “Wind come in from Siberia, dropped the temperature to thirty-five below. Got so cold the guns jammed and quit working, radio batteries dead, the medics was carrying our morphine syrettes around in their mouths to keep ’em liquid, and frostbite come on quick.” He held up his right hand to show the missing fingers. “The enemies was clear over there, though. You’d shoot you a little Chinese and watch the commie bastard bleed out into the snow and it felt good.”
Forty-five . . . two thirty-five . . . the radio barked from the end of the table.
. . . Need someone to go over to Ruthey Drive and get a readin’ on that plate ASAP.
Three sixteen, twenty-one . . .
Farren knocked back the end of his drink. “Well, I got to go take a piss,” he said, “then we’ll go check on that little lady.”
He made his way around Jodi and down the hall, hand pressed against his homemade wallpaper. The clock on the microwave bled a faint luminescence into the kitchen, and the radio rattled on.
Five thirty work for ya? . . . Yeah, that’ll do. . . . Three twenty-one, ten sixty-one . . . three twenty-one, go ahead. . . . Ten-four.
As they approached the bottom of the mountain the noise of the fracking grew, the low gurgle of trucks in motion and over it a constant hollow knocking sound. The fire at the top of the tower throbbed, a perfect Pentecostal tongue of flame, and the road clogged with traffic. Farren pulled the pickup to a stop as two tankers lumbered out of the lane.
“They’re sucking it fast,” he said. “Ready to move on. It ain’t like the mines, the old type mines. I worked twenty years up at Anjean.” He drummed his fingers across the steering wheel and squinted out at the frack trucks. “That was self-respectful work. We tunneled in for the minerals and left the mountains whole.”
The headlights of the tanker sliced across the dashboard and into the trees. “You grew up here on Bethlehem Mountain?” Jodi asked.
Farren nodded.
“But you’ve had the farm to yourself a long time now?”
He stared out at the road ahead, waiting for the trucks to clear. “Cecil, Jack, and Shane didn’t make it home with me, and Daddy was dead by then too. My sister, Joanie, married a Michigan fellow, took Mother up to live with her.”
“You never married?”
He laughed a short bark of a laugh and pushed the gear shifter up into first. “I seen how marriage treated most folks, your granny Effie included.”
Jodi smiled. She wished he would say something more, anything to help her see what he might think of her and Miranda.
The parking lot at Slattery’s Girl was jammed full. Farren pulled up behind a red Pontiac and kept the engine running but pushed the gearshift into neutral.
“You want a drink?” Jodi asked.
Farren pulled out his tobacco pouch. “You know how much they charge for a beer in there?” He laid out a square of cigarette paper on his knee and sprinkled tobacco along it. “Jacked the price of everything around here when those out-of-state fracking men come in. You know they’re renting trailers for two thousand a month?” He looked up at Jodi, full of disgust. “Got landlords kicking out folks who lived in Render all their lives so’s they can rent to cash-happy fools.”
Jodi shook her head and opened the truck door, happy for his fury at the frackers, though she wasn’t sure what good it could do.
There was movement in the back of one of the cars as she passed and music blaring through the thin walls of the bar. Black velvet and that little boy’s smile. She looked over her shoulder but couldn’t see if Farren was watching. She was overcome suddenly with regret and a tongue-tied stupidness. She hadn’t thought it through this far and now she was quite drunk. Her body seemed distant, her movements slow and a little too loose. What would she say to Miranda? I was worried about you? I’m sorry, I thought . . . I think . . . I love you? And the boys, the boys were home alone and now Miranda would know.
Black velvet, the jukebox crooned.
High above her the red blink of a satellite stitched through the patchy clouds and from down the street a woman’s voice called out the name of a man, or a dog or a child.
The front door swung open and a man stumbled out, unbuttoning his pants and walking a crooked line around the side of the building. Through the open door she could see the counter, a row of baseball-capped heads, and beyond that, a red-haired girl and Miranda, head tipped back, laughing.
June 1989
The chandelier is enormous, dripping with bits of reflecting glass and so heavy that every time she looks at it, Jodi thinks: tragedy. She sees it dropping down onto the heads of the blackjack players and exploding in a wave of glass and blood. So far, though, it has held up.
She orders a Coke from the bartender and winds her way among the slot machines, back to where she can see Paula, settled in at the poker table at the far end of the room. She has been there for the past three hours playing mostly just with two men, one in a white T-shirt and too much gold jewelry and the other, the kind of man you can tell smells bad even from a distance. Through the night there have been other players but none have stayed long. Freshly shaved men whose bland faces scream of Ohio or Indiana. They wander up and stand briefly behind the chairs, shuffling their handfuls of ten- and twenty-five-dollar chips before sitting down, only to rise again after one or two rounds. And others too, men and women whose desperation precedes them, so sure of their failure that they don’t even notice the few hands they do win.
Sometimes Jodi plays the slot machines, losing and then winning back twenty dollars here and there, but mostly she likes to watch Paula. It makes her feel special to be tethered to someone with that kind of power. No matter where they go, it’s the same; after the first few hands, the whole room is wrapped up in her winnings, the dealer stiffens, the cocktail waitresses start bringing out unordered drinks and a manager appears and begins pacing behind Paula’s chair. Her stacks of chips grow, neatly mounting towers of purple and orange, and the other players’ eyes move back and forth between those stacks and their own diminishing chips.
Of course it does not always happen like this; there are nights too when Paula loses and loses and keeps on losing as if falling through the attic and then on down, down, down through every floor of a never-ending house
, crashing into the basement. Her chips grow scarce and Jodi, watching, feels bloated with fear as Paula keeps pushing the tokens out onto the felt.
With enough Dex in her, Paula can keep playing all night and eventually Jodi grows too tired and goes out to the car to sleep. She curls up on the backseat and closes her eyes, the looping music of the slot machines still jingling in her ears.
She wakes to the sound of the car door opening and Paula’s face in the early-morning light, cap pushed back and hair sticking out all wild underneath, hard jaw and high cheeks and that soft, full mouth. Paula lifts Jodi up into an embrace and kisses her so deeply that Jodi’s breath goes away and she is all happy and wrung out—emptied—like after a good cry.
The game this time is held in the back room of a huge steak house. Paula tells the waiter table for two but she leaves immediately, slipping Jodi a flask of bourbon for spiking her Coke and promising she’ll be back to check on her soon.
The enormous red-leather booth feels like it might swallow Jodi whole, like she could lie down in it and be lost forever. When the waiter takes her Coke to refill it she worries that he will smell the booze but he doesn’t mention it, just folds his knees and bows a little as he places it back on the table.
“Anything to eat?”
“In a little bit,” Jodi says, balancing the leather-covered menu between her fingertips, afraid that somehow, just by touching it, she might cause the terrifyingly high prices to be charged to Paula’s tab. The dinners are all more than fifty dollars but down at the bottom, under the heading “Children,” she finds a ten-dollar hot dog and fries.
The french fries are hot and salty and come in a paper cone but the hot dog is covered in too much mustard. Jodi pushes the dog aside and drips ketchup into the cone of fries. She eats slowly to make them last and she is still licking her fingers when Paula comes back.
“Why are you eating this crap?” she says, tipping her head toward the untouched hot dog.
Jodi knows the game is not going well. Paula would not even have come out here if she were not losing.
“It’s the only thing that’s not so expensive,” Jodi whispers, eyeing the approaching waiter.
“And who told you to worry about that?” Paula flips her lighter open and brings it up to the cigarette that Jodi is lifting to her lips.
The waiter bows a little; he has a white towel laid across his right arm.
“Filet mignon, rare. And can you please get rid of this,” Paula says, sliding the hot dog across the table.
After the waiter has left Jodi whispers again. “What about you, aren’t you hungry?”
Paula shakes her head and says she has to go back to the game. It might be a little while, she tells Jodi, just sit tight. She is gone by the time the steak comes and Jodi is so overwhelmed by the sight of the meat she thinks she might start crying.
“Anything else?” the waiter says, and she shakes her head vigorously.
The steak tastes good but she has taken too much speed to really be hungry. She remembers the excitement of the first time she ever ate steak, with Paula, in Dallas, before they left for Mexico. This meat seems to mock her, though, so red and oozing, and the more time that goes by, the more panicked she gets that Paula will return and see that she has not eaten.
The news comes on the television and the waiter leans back against the bar to watch. The Red Sox lead the Blue Jays 10–0 and then the reporter is announcing something about troops and protesters clashing in China. Jodi wraps the steak in her linen napkin and darts across the restaurant toward the bathroom. Safely inside the stall, she collapses onto the toilet and lets out her breath.
The steak has bled through the napkin. It sits heavy and wet in her hands until she turns and dumps it into the little metal basket with the used menstrual pads. She can’t tell if she wants to laugh or cry and she is shaking now with some almost indefinable craving, a loneliness, she realizes; she wishes she had someone to tell this story to—a friend to confide in—someone she could call across all those miles and tell the truth to. Whatever that might be. Lately she feels too invisible, and though she thinks it is pathetic, a part of her wishes someone—the woman at the gas station she held up, or a hotel clerk maybe—would notice that she is really just a kid and ask her if she needs help. When she told her parents she was going they hadn’t tried to stop her. She wishes now that she could at least know that they are worrying. Crossing the border back from Mexico, she’d half-expected the guard to identify her as a missing person, but no, she realizes, her family hasn’t even tried to look for her.
August–September 2007
Miranda locked the front door to the bar and stepped out into the glittering night. After her shifts at Slattery’s she had too much energy to go home and sleep. The sky was soaked with stars as she drove, snaking back roads far up into the hills, her mind sailing out in front of her and an electric energy radiating off her skin.
The pills Justin had started giving her were like nothing she had ever had before. Desoxyn, he called them, little tablets with a spiral on one side and me on the other. They looked like baby aspirins but two of those buddies under her tongue and she was cut free, her mind drawn in cleanly and a blooming euphoria spreading from her chest out to her fingertips.
She hated herself for taking them. It was a distant, glass-framed kind of hate, though, and she could see a shrewish pinch-faced version of herself taunting from her haughty mount, the part of her that had never believed she was capable of staying off pills anyway. I’ll only take them at work, she told her hateful self and then they both laughed, knowing it wouldn’t stay that way.
This pill was made for her, though, she thought bitterly, holding the peachy tablets in her palm. The me was so perfect, selfishness printed right into it: me, Me, me, me, me. . . .
Three, four, five o’clock in the morning: she drove one-lane roads that branched off and led upward, crawling into the crevasses of the mountains and coming out on top. The movement of the car wheels felt smooth and comforting as she smoked and watched a train down in the valley, shivering in and out of the dark trees, the tracks a silver ladder stretching out eternally. The breeze through the window felt exquisite on her skin and she pulled over and closed her eyes, trying to comfort herself: everybody needs something to help them get through their days, right? At least I’m not a goddamn junkie.
She drove on and the train tracks were gone now and the river too; the view was just trees-trees-trees and the sunrise leaking up into the sky. Shockingly green trees, gratuitously green, hung thick with kudzu and ivy, and every now and then the flash of an open field.
Some nights she came home from work and stood in the bedroom, staring down at Jodi: body curled tight under the quilt, eyelids fluttering with dreams. And standing there she was suddenly overcome with a queasy feeling as if she were trespassing.
Other nights she stood in the shed and pulled Dennis’s suitcase down from the shelf. The unity of those little white envelopes calmed her. She ran her finger across them, lifted one out, and put it back. She’d never been much for downers but these little packets, so pale and uniform in the moonlight, were soothingly magnetic, the power they held, there in the shed, just waiting.
Most mornings now, by the time Jodi woke, Ricky was gone. The first day he disappeared she’d searched and called frantically and when she couldn’t find him anywhere on the land she’d piled the boys in the Chevette and drove off looking for him.
Farren’s house was empty with no sign of Ricky and so they’d kept driving and found him, finally, walking along the edge of the road, almost in town.
“Ricky!” Jodi called out, the blood surging up into her face. “Oh, God, you scared me.”
She pulled the car over into the gravel and told him to hop on in but Ricky just squinted and shook his head.
“We’re headed to the diner,” Jodi said. “Let’s go eat some breakfast.”
“No, I’d rather not, thank you,” Ricky said. “I need to keep looking for my
friend.”
He turned and headed back down the road.
Jodi watched him walk off, a huge hole spiraling open inside her. There he went—the very last connection she had to Paula—moving, right now, away from her. And it was the formalness of his words that hurt, that curt distance, the way you would dismiss a stranger who had bothered you while you were busy looking for your friend.
“Hey,” she called after him. “Hey, Ricky, I came back for you. I got out of Jaxton and that’s the first thing I did.”
Ricky turned to face her, cocking his head so he could look straight in the window. “Thank you,” he said, and kept walking.
She watched until the brush and trees blocked him from view. She wanted to tell him she’d seen his news clippings and she understood what it was that he’d been through. But what exactly would that do?
“Jodi?”
A small hand patted her arm.
“Jodi?”
She turned toward the backseat to see three sets of big green eyes.
“Jodi’s crying?” Ross said, pinching his eyebrows together with worry.
“Yeah.” She nodded, her words coming out all slurred. “Yeah, it’s okay, Jodi’s just a little bit sad.”
Back at the cabin she sent the boys off to play with Butter and headed to the woodshed. Although he came up every few days to check on his “investment,” Dennis had yet to retrieve the heroin and its presence pulsed constantly at the back of Jodi’s brain. The sight of those packets frightened her but at the same time there was something ecstatic about their existence in her life, something a little like driving fast down a dark road with the headlights off. She might as well admit to herself that she wasn’t going to get a nine-to-five-type job anytime soon and Dennis seemed to have hit upon the only possible way to make real money in this place. These methods had been here long before any of them were even born anyway: first moonshine, then later weed, and now meth and junk. The very landscape of the mountains had always supported it and in some twisted way this made Jodi feel better as she gave in, as if at least her ancestors would have approved.
