Sugar Run: A Novel

by Mesha Maren

  The flea market was ringed with produce stands offering the same goods that most folks had overflowing in their gardens at home—string beans, squash, and boxes upon boxes of tomatoes—red, yellow, stripy pink and green. A few enterprising stands offered Georgia peaches and Florida melons. An old woman bent her ear to each watermelon, thumping and listening.

  “They’re all ripe, ma’am,” the flush-flaced man behind the table said. “Fresh from Florida and sweeter than a newborn baby.”

  Miranda led the way past a snow cone stand and a table filled with baseball cards, assorted wrenches, and six naked Barbies.

  “What do you want to look for?” She glanced back at Jodi, her eyes puffy from lack of sleep.

  Jodi shrugged. “A chain saw maybe.”

  “We’ll meet back up at the donut stand in half an hour?”

  “Where are you going?” Jodi stepped closer to her.

  Miranda waved her hand at the rows of tables. “Around,” she said. “I’ll take Donnie, you take Kaleb and Ross?”

  She moved off down the aisle, leading Donnie by his hand as she passed by tables full of costume jewelry and frosted-glass dishes.

  Jodi stood with Ross on her hip and Kaleb at her side. The air tasted of dirty sugar and gasoline. A loudspeaker voice crackled intermittently. Miss Pauleena Hutchins would like to announce . . . Tupperware sale . . . From somewhere down at the end of the field a chorus of dog barks rose and fell.

  Kaleb grabbed Jodi’s hand and pointed toward a red Chevy truck with a man sitting on the hood playing a guitar. The cardboard box at his feet was filled with spotted kittens, a roiling mess of orange-and-white fur. The man smiled at Kaleb and called out to him in song.

  “Have a kitten, sweet little kitten, best little kitten that you ever did see.”

  In the truck window the faces of two girls appeared, freckle nosed, brown haired, and blue eyed.

  “Come on,” Jodi said, staring down the aisle where Miranda had disappeared.

  “I’m tired,” Kaleb said.

  “I know.” Jodi nodded. “Me too. We’ll get some ice cream in a minute. Let’s just see where your mama’s headed.”

  As they neared the end of the field the barking of the dogs grew louder and just past a stand of baby clothes Jodi saw them, chained to a blue pickup, in the shade of two tall pines. There were ten of them, little beagles and black-and-tans and a few tall redbones, and as Jodi watched, Miranda emerged from a row of antiques sellers and walked toward the dogs.

  Jodi pulled Kaleb and Ross back as she ducked behind a fireworks stand.

  “Hey!” Miranda waved to the baseball-capped man leaned up against the truck.

  The line of dogs leapt, pawing the air and choking against their chains as Miranda and Donnie approached them.

  The man spat a line of tobacco. His face looked familiar but Jodi couldn’t quite place it. He lifted off his cap, scratched his head, and put the cap back. Jason—that was it—Jason or Justin or whatever—her cousin, the bouncer, Phillip’s boy. Jodi eyed the man’s dirty jeans, Harley-Davidson T-shirt, and the bright glint of his belt buckle printed with heritage and a billowing Confederate flag.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” he said to Miranda. “This your little boy?”

  “Yeah, you weren’t at Slattery’s last night. You not working there no more?”

  “Not every weekend,” the man said.

  Miranda nodded. “Sheila told me you’d be here today.” She reached down to pet the beagle. “What’s this one’s name?”

  Justin laughed. “I don’t name them.”

  “Why not?” Miranda knelt and her shorts rode up, cupping the bottom of her ass. “She’s so cute, why wouldn’t you name her?”

  Jodi watched Justin watch Miranda’s ass. A poison was forming inside her, making her blood move all sluggish. It seems you’re not gonna do anything, she thought, but just stand here and watch them flirt. She was losing the land and she was losing Miranda. She squeezed Kaleb’s hand harder.

  “Wait, it is a girl, right?” Miranda looked up at Justin.

  “You don’t see a pecker, do you?”

  She patted the beagle and stood up and the other dogs all jumped again, their bugle barks scrambling out loud through the dry air.

  “You got something you could spare to give me?” she said.

  Justin smiled and shook his head but motioned her toward the cab of the truck. “I shoulda known you wasn’t just stopping by to say hi,” he said.

  They huddled there beside the truck for a moment and then Miranda stepped away, the bulge of a pill bottle visible now in her back pocket.

  “Thanks,” she said, grabbing Donnie’s hand. “I’ll see you at Slattery’s?”

  As she came down the aisle Jodi stepped from behind the fireworks stand.

  “Miranda,” she called, pulling Kaleb along with her.

  Miranda stopped, an expression on her face that Jodi couldn’t quite read.

  “So that’s why you’ve been so keen to come here?” Jodi dropped Kaleb’s hand and reached out to grab Miranda’s arm.

  “You fucking followed me?” Miranda freed herself from Jodi’s grasp and walked off fast and angry up the aisle.

  Watching her, Jodi marveled at how much of a space this woman had carved out in her heart, how quickly she’d gone from being a distraction from the plan to being an integral part, and she hated herself for letting it happen that way, for going weak and letting her emotions run her life. Again. The tattered beast perked up its head.

  “At least you could have told me you’ve been taking that shit,” she called out at Miranda’s back.

  Miranda kept walking.

  Jodi caught up and gripped Miranda’s arm again. She leaned in close to her ear. “How many times have you fucked him?”

  Miranda flicked her eyes over to Jodi. “No, never, it isn’t like that,” she said.

  “Sweet corn, sweet corn,” a woman called in a singsong voice as she held a long green ear toward them, peeling back the husk to show the flossy strands and bright gold kernels as yellow as Miranda’s hair.

  “You fuck him at work? Or in his truck?”

  “You better quit that.” Miranda pulled away and turned, looking back down the aisle for her boys, but Jodi leaned in close again and brought her hand up to clasp Miranda’s soft, soap-smelling neck.

  Through the bar windows the late-evening sun angled in and hit the rack of bottles like an explosion. Miranda could not stop staring at the warm glow of the bourbon and the way the light spilled through the vodka bottle, sending out strings of tiny, shivering rainbows. The pills did that to her sometimes—stopped all time while she narrowed the universe to one single moment. The first kick was always like a hand against her back, pushing the swing higher and higher, and then she’d settle into the buzz and move through the night happy, trundling along in her own little train car, separate but connected, pulled forward through the shift. Lately she’d started snorting the pills, now that her body was adjusted to them. She comforted herself with the fact that if she snorted them it meant she used fewer.

  “What is it with this place, really?” Sheila was saying. Sheila was always saying large, clouded things. “It’s this whole entire state. People keep talking about how the frackers are coming in here and then moving on so fast but it’s not just that. It’s like the whole state is in fast-forward.”

  Sheila was nestling bottles of warm beer into the open ice chest. A joint rested, smoldering in the ashtray on the counter before her, inking its dark smell out into the room. Miranda took a hit and moved over to look out the back window.

  “Did you ever notice how everybody here blooms and busts so quick?” Sheila said.

  The sun was notched in the gap between two green mountain peaks.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five,” Miranda said.

  “You know how many people I know who are younger than you and already dead?” Sheila lifted the joint to her lips. “Dead or in prison.”

/>   The last sunlight leaked out across the brown river.

  “You know how old I was when I got pregnant?” Sheila said. “Fifteen.”

  Miranda thought to tell her that she herself had been only seventeen but her voice was unlocatable at the moment and, besides, it was not really a conversation.

  “It’s like we’re all pressing up so fast, we cash out and then there are years and years still left. There’s so much time but none of us know it till it’s too late and we already died or ruined our lives trying to grow up and get out quick.”

  Dots of pollen and dust hung in the light, drifting slowly down toward the water. Fairies, Miranda used to call them. When she was little she would lie on her back and watch the dust motes dancing, watch and watch until she was really seeing nothing but the tiny imperfections in her own vision. Even then, that young, she had been trying to float away from her present reality. She could remember spinning and spinning in the front yard until she fell down in the grass, happy to feel nothing but dizzy, gleefully disconnected from the sick-death smell of her mother’s bedroom and the oppressiveness of her father’s smothering love.

  The bar filled up earlier now that the truckers were on break. While the new frack well was being built the men who drove the gas shipments got a few free days and none of them knew what to do besides drink. Miranda lined up beers and Jim Beam shots before the men even made it through the door. They grinned and nodded, their movements reminding her of her sons, a kind of timid exuberance.

  The room swelled with more and more men as the night continued and Miranda rocketed back and forth behind the bar. She liked the fast-paced energy and as she took orders, her mind ticking off Bud, Michelob, Jim Beam, she felt that she was hovering somewhere just above herself, watching her own bony legs in cutoff jeans pacing up and down the bar and her hands flying efficiently. But other thoughts came too, an image of Ross’s little blood-covered face and Jodi’s smile. She felt a sweet-sad shiver pass through her as she thought of Jodi, up on the mountain, curled asleep and dreaming in their bed.

  Justin showed up to work the door and Miranda begged him for more pills. She’d been holding back, telling herself she’d wait till the end of her shift, but at the sight of his face she knew she couldn’t wait. Speed-freak, he said, laughing, his hand moving down her leg, fingers sliding up under the denim to squeeze the soft rise of her ass cheek. Please, she said, the noise of the room bashing loud around her. He slid his fingers up higher under her shorts and told her to stick out her tongue real quick.

  She shook her head and he laughed. “Wait, you’re snorting ’em already?”

  Miranda shrugged.

  “Be careful, baby.” He pressed two tablets into her sweaty palm.

  Time slowed and sped up simultaneously. Miranda’s movements turned liquid again and the night went rattling along nicely, all the nauseating thoughts of failed motherhood and failed relationships beautifully buried.

  Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on? the jukebox cried, and behind the bar the radio bubbled a different tune, something with a lot of saxophone. Sheila liked to keep the radio on even when the jukebox was playing; late at night she could pick up stations you couldn’t hear during the day.

  “I’ll take another.” A bushy-bearded man pushed his shot glass forward and Miranda filled it, glancing up at his whiskered face.

  These men were the enemy, according to Jodi and Farren, but Miranda couldn’t see the devil in them. They just looked anxious and lonely. She understood that there would be more fracking to come up on Bethlehem, and more than likely on Jodi’s land, but even that did not exactly seem so frightening. She’d been looking for a place to lose herself in and this had seemed like it, but lately she found herself thinking more and more about Lee. Maybe she’d thrown away her life with him too fast. Sure, he was gone on tour too much but Nina’s house didn’t seem so bad to her now: hazy days of soft carpet, endless television, and never having to worry where food and money would come from. Maybe it was not too late to get that life back. This here was not the life for her, not this moldering bar or the tumble-down cabin. Even as she stood there, stocking warm beers in the ice chest, a part of her had already moved on ahead.

  When Dennis’s pickup drove into the yard, Jodi was out back, planting the carrot and turnip seeds that Farren had brought over. She stood there, one hand clutching weeds, the other held up over her eyes as she squinted against the late sun. The truck doors opened with a rusted squawk and three men piled out, dim silhouettes against the wavering green of the grass and the trees. It took her a moment to see that it was her two brothers and Ricky.

  “Lookee what we found,” Dennis crowed. He held a beer bottle in one hand and his baseball cap in the other. He waved his cap in Ricky’s direction and laughed. “Out searching for his ladylove again!”

  Ricky stood on the far side of the pickup, holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and staring off toward the frack tower, where it rose, skeletal through the leafy trees.

  Jodi wiped her hands on her thighs as she crossed the grass. “What’s going on?”

  A.J. was giggling and holding up to his mouth a thin half-smoked joint.

  “Ricky,” Jodi said, “is everything okay?”

  He took the top off the bottle of Jack and lifted it to his lips.

  “I saw her,” he said.

  Jodi stepped closer to him. “What are you talking about?”

  “We found him walking out Snake Run Road, babbling about finding Rosalba.” Dennis took a swig from his own bottle. “I figured he was just a little brokenhearted, hell, sometimes we all just need a drink.”

  “I saw her.” Ricky turned his back to them and hunched over, holding the open whiskey bottle between his knees. “I did see her too in the back of a—”

  “Ricky,” Jodi said. “Rosalba’s gone, you ain’t gonna see her nowhere.” She reached a hand down to rub his shoulder and he sprang at her, lunging.

  “I did see her,” he thundered, dropping the bottle and bringing both hands down onto Jodi’s shoulders. His hands were heavy and his voice, raging loud, sounded just like Dylan’s. “I saw her riding in the back of a pickup, went up Snake Run Road.”

  Jodi closed her eyes and held her body stiff. “Okay, Ricky, okay. You saw her,” she said, and as she stood there, eyes closed, steadying her breath, the her got all tangled up somehow so that she pictured a mountain road winding along and the familiar figure of Paula just around the bend.

  THREE

  September 2007

  The Chevette was gone when Jodi woke. She stood in the kitchen, coffeepot in one hand, staring out the window and listening to the grinding-gear rhythms of the frack trucks in the field. She registered the absence in the front yard slowly and then all of a sudden: Miranda was asleep, the boys were still in their bedroom, and the car was gone.

  She wanted to shout Ricky’s name but what was the point? She was the one who had set it all in motion, back in Georgia with her grand idea: Hey, Ricky, let me teach you to drive.

  She set the coffeepot back on the counter and walked out the door. He couldn’t have gone far yet. Farren could drive her around until they found him but there was one more thing she knew she needed to check before leaving. As she crossed the yard she wished there were some sort of prayer she believed in, some incantation like the one the Catholic priests chanted, something to say to oneself in times like these, but all she could think was No, please, no.

  Butter came out from under the porch and tried to rub herself up against Jodi’s leg but Jodi kept walking. No, please, no. She ducked under the shed roof and pressed onto her tiptoes, reaching up, wanting so badly to feel the firm leather handle, those little metal clasps, but there was nothing at all to feel, nothing but hot, empty air.

  “Fuck,” she said, rocking back onto her heels. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  By the time she arrived at Farren’s, her T-shirt was soaked through and sweat dripped down the back of her neck. His pickup was not in the yard but
she approached the house anyhow, calling out his name and then Ricky’s too.

  From the corn patch out back half a dozen crows rose up, a cluster of black splotches against the hot blue sky. She stepped onto the porch and pressed her face against the front window. The glass was thin and bubbled in places, covered in a yellow-brown dust. She didn’t know why she was wasting time here except that she kept hoping for one of them to show up, for something to change. Peering in at the darkened living room, she felt the panic settle fully in her veins, a deep cold followed by a flush of heat. Fuck you, Ricky. What the fuck have you done?

  She turned and fled, out of the tin shade and into the yellow sun, knowing the road to town was five miles. She was out of shape but filled up with adrenaline. She watched her own feet move across the cracked black pavement and then looked up to the shivery green of the trees all around her. She ran past trailers with yards full of fading plastics—old car seats, lawn ornaments, boots, and coolers—a strew of forgotten items, abandoned midtransit on their way somewhere. In scrappy patches of porch shade dogs lay, raising their heads slowly at her passing, too heat dazed to bother barking.

  Jodi ran until she couldn’t run anymore and then stopped, doubled over the gravel ditch, heaving. She felt a surge of self-pity rise inside her like bile and she reached to greet it but it didn’t work as well out here. In Jaxton she’d had so little control that she’d been able to blame every misfortune on something far outside herself but here the self-pity was not as purely, sadly sweet. It was too tinged with regret and embarrassment and she felt the weight of all her bad decisions caving in on top of her. Why the hell had she let Rosalba stay with them in the first place? She felt fear, yes, but rage too. Rage at herself, at things not working out the way she had imagined. Rage at Ricky. What the fuck had she been thinking bringing him here?

  The heat and the rage mixed until she felt she was moving through it all physically, the emotions and bad decisions, the weather, and all of it. Was it always headed this way? Everything in her life? She thought back to her younger self, back before she ever met Paula, before Effie passed away. She was never too good in school but never too bad either, unsure of what she could expect from life, unsure even of what she wanted, knowing only that she loved that farm and the simple seasonal movements of it. She had pictured that as Effie grew older, she and someone else, a boyfriend or husband—for, before Paula, she had never imagined loving a woman outside of the dreams in her head—would harvest hay and raise cattle in the back pasture. It would never have been an easy life, there was no real money to be made there, but with part-time jobs it could have worked. And that was all she had been trying to find her way back to all this time, the future that had been lost the moment she followed Paula out of that Wheeling casino.