Sugar Run: A Novel

by Mesha Maren

  It was not a bell but a piano and the sound of it was breaking open something, pressing insistently in under her skin.

  “Jodi?” Lynn lifted a sweating bottle of white wine.

  Jodi shook her head.

  “You want bourbon,” Lynn said, bending to retrieve a cut-glass decanter from a lower shelf. “Did you always know you were gay?”

  Jodi snapped her head up. Lynn was smiling and blinking, her pupils like tiny, dark stains inside the white lakes of her eyes.

  “Ethan told me about you. He said he looked you up and read about your trial and when he told me the story all I could think was, it’s so sad and beautiful.”

  Lynn walked toward Jodi, the glass of bourbon held high as she twisted the story, turning it around into something pretty. Jodi thought of the priest at Jaxton, begging to absolve her. In the blood of the lamb you shall be redeemed. But how, she had wondered, could blood absolve blood? No, there would be no absolving, only building upward and away, like a grafted branch, growing into something new.

  “It’s you and your girl against the world,” Lynn said, “and then everything spills out of your hands and it’s all unwarranted chaos and—”

  “No, no, it’s not like that at all. It was simple, simple and evil,” Jodi said.

  The shot cancels out all other noise and separates time into two distinct spaces. Jodi stands between them. The wall is dripping red. Below the bright spray Paula is moving, her body unspooling across the linoleum.

  The air smells of the rank heat of doe season: backyards strung with stiffening bodies and clouded with that mineral smell, the oily scent that erupts when the knife slits the white fur belly.

  Jodi drops the gun and it bounces and falls again, this time facing the doorway.

  The stripper is perched on the toilet bowl, her head tucked between her knees. Naked. It seems she is weeping.

  Paula’s shirt hangs open, the last button almost undone. Her chest is pale and unmoving.

  Gravity is reaching, growing up toward Jodi, but she hangs in that moment between the before and after, a scream building steady like a pulse inside her.

  Lynn did not join the party until it was nearly dark. Heat lightning was breaking out over the western ridges and the wind had torn the silk from the trees. Jodi watched Lynn walk outside and then she stood, sick and in need of a bathroom.

  She vomited into the spotless toilet bowl, half-enjoying the raw intensity, and then lay with her face against the cool tile floor and thought of Miranda in the cabin painting her nails and smoking cigarettes, Ricky and the boys sprawled across the bed.

  She left through the front door, grateful that she’d parked far enough away not to be blocked in. As she drove out of Lewisville the houses dropped away and a deep and total blackness set in. She watched the road sweep under her and the movement felt good. It was still possible, she thought. More than possible. With the land in Lynn’s name it would be safe and she and Miranda could take the boys camping and buy themselves a little time to figure out what they needed to do to get full custody. Then she’d come back and own up to it, tell anyone who cared to know that she loved Miranda, and they’d get the boys enrolled in school and buy some chickens. She would put Ricky in charge of the chickens, she thought, he’d like that, although another part of her mind still kept cutting him out of all her plans. Where he would go, she didn’t know, but with all the complications he’d caused she couldn’t quite fit him into her image of a perfect future.

  Just past the first steep curve of the mountain the car’s headlights flashed onto a young deer. Jodi jerked the Chevette to a stop. The doe’s eyes were enormous and mirror smooth and she stared straight ahead, so close, her face vacant with fear. The forest breathed huge around them, the hillside scurrying with unseen movement, and when Jodi rolled down the window there was a tang of smoke. The deer bolted into the trees and she drove on.

  Near the crest of Bethlehem the siren started—a far-off wailing that pulsed closer as Jodi drove up over the top of the mountain. The sky was on fire. Spiking forks of orange flame flared out of the tall white frack tower.

  Through the open window the smell of smoke and fear filled the air. There came a movement from along the roadside, a flap of wings in the trees. Jodi jerked the gearshift and sped up.

  Half a mile from the lane the sirens overtook her, the sickening volume swelling up behind her until the trucks forced her off onto the shoulder and streamed by in coils of red-and-white lights. She ducked instinctively, then cranked up the window, but already the car was thick with smoke and the road barely visible before her. She wished she hadn’t taken that pill from Lynn. Her eyes watered as she edged on and came to a stop just short of a hazy figure silhouetted against a second pair of headlights. The fire was shockingly beautiful, a deep orange that made the night blacker around it. Jodi closed her eyes as a white wall of fear overtook her.

  When she surfaced Ricky was standing at the car window. She pushed open the door and stepped out.

  “What’s happening?”

  Ricky’s face was strange, as still as the deer’s. In his right hand he held a plastic gas canister.

  “Where are Miranda and the boys?” Jodi leaned in toward Ricky.

  The air shuddered orange all around him, full of a sharp almost gunpowder smell.

  “Hurry up and get in the truck,” a voice called.

  Jodi squinted over Ricky’s shoulder. It was Farren.

  “Come on.” She stepped closer to Ricky and reached out for his hand but he turned away.

  The air seemed to be thickening by the minute, a hot wind pressing in on them.

  Jodi ran to the truck and slid in next to Farren. “Where are Miranda and the boys?”

  “Get him in the truck now,” Farren said.

  It took both of them working together, though, under the soaring smoke and shaking sirens, and as they struggled with Ricky, Farren explained what he could understand. He’d seen Miranda go by around five, riding toward town with some man in a blue truck. Next time he came out on the porch, he said, it was near dusk and a big white bus was parked at the end of the lane. By the time he made it down there the bus had pulled away and the smell of smoke was on the wind. He found Ricky out by the frack tower with a lighter and can of gasoline babbling about how the evil came up from that well and was wrecking everything.

  Jodi turned to Ricky where he sat beside her with his head leaned against the passenger’s window, and a fury scorched across her brain. His face was empty as he stared straight ahead. Outside the trees moaned and split under the heat with great popping sounds and Jodi wondered suddenly if this wasn’t retaliation, if he hadn’t somehow known that she’d fantasized about making plans with Miranda and leaving him out. “What the fuck?” She leaned toward him, spitting into his face. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  A hand gripped her shoulder. “There are two problems here,” Farren said, “but only one we can do anything about right now. A bus like that can’t get too far too fast on roads like this. We go now and we can get those little boys back safely.” He did not let go of Jodi’s shoulder until she had relaxed against the seat and then he reached inside his jacket and handed her a small pistol.

  “Just in case,” he said. “They need to see that we’re serious.”

  Jodi’s fingers reached for it but her stomach dropped at the touch of the cold metal. She set it on the dashboard and looked away but she could still feel the presence of the gun and Ricky there beside her.

  The speedometer leapt—thirty-five, forty-five, fifty—and Farren leaned close to the wheel. Snatches of their life flashed in Jodi’s mind and then were sucked away out the window: the kids in the yard with sparklers, the ballooning tarpaulin roof and Miranda’s smooth legs up in the high branches of the sweet gum tree. Jodi felt dizzy in the swirl of images and in that moment it wouldn’t have surprised her at all if she’d woken suddenly in her Jaxton cell to realize it was all of it just a fever dream.

  At the b
ottom of the mountain the smoke thinned. They passed the blinking sign for Slattery’s Girl and Jodi imagined Miranda, head thrown back, laughing behind the bar, and her blood jumped.

  Then they were out of town and back into the density of the woods. The moon came out from behind a bank of clouds and spilled silver over the trunks of the trees. It looked, Jodi realized, quite beautiful and the beauty of it made it hard for her to breathe. She saw her terror stretching, bright and long, as they moved moment by moment farther away both from the boys—out there in front of them somewhere, out of reach—and the cabin, behind them, alone and unguarded against the hurtling blaze.

  The road took a hairpin turn and the three of them leaned into one another, Jodi in the middle, her shoulders knocking against both men as the road reeled before them. And then, unbelievably, on the rise just ahead: the red taillights and tall tinted windows of a white tour bus.

  A spike of electricity zipped up Jodi. She kept waiting for the bus to disappear. A communal hallucination, a wish dream, she thought, but it stayed there, bright and sleek with a giant painting across the side of Lee Golden’s grinning face.

  They overtook it on the next straight stretch. Farren laid on the horn, flashing his blinkers and pressing hard on the gas, the truck fairly panting from the strain as they pulled out in front. Up ahead the blacktop curved into a blind but Farren mashed on the brake and cut the wheel. The truck spun and then halted, blocking the road. Jodi turned to watch as the bus shuddered to a stop too, brakes squealing. It sat about fifty feet back and tilted so that the passenger’s side of the bus was visible through the window of the pickup.

  Everything was still for a moment. Nothing but the motors ticking and the dust swirling in the twin pairs of headlights. Then Farren opened his door and Jodi scrambled after him.

  “I promised Miss Rosalba,” Ricky said, sliding across the seat.

  Farren turned. “You stay here, inside the truck,” he said, pushing the door closed.

  Jodi hovered behind Farren as he leaned against the front tire. The lights inside the bus had gone black.

  “How many people in there, do you think?” Farren asked.

  Jodi shook her head. She wanted to ask what Farren’s plan was but suddenly there came the sound of metal hinging and then a rustle of footsteps. Jodi could just barely make out the silhouette of a man in a white T-shirt walking from the driver’s side around the front of the bus, his slicked black hair shining a little in the thin light. For what seemed like several full minutes no one moved or spoke. The wind slid through the tall trees.

  “That him?” Farren finally whispered, and Jodi opened her mouth to say no when a shot blasted out.

  It took a moment for her to realize that the noise came from inside the pickup.

  Farren turned, eyes big, as the sound blew around them and then everything went still.

  The dust in the beams of the headlights.

  Frozen.

  Then fluid.

  The man in front of the bus door crouched and Jodi rose and saw Ricky, silhouetted in the pickup truck window, pistol outstretched. She was shocked he even knew how to use a gun.

  “Ricky,” she screamed, but her voice was covered over by the bark of another shot and then a return greeting from the bus.

  Farren grabbed Jodi and pulled her down against the tire as the shots rang by. There was a shattering of glass and the windshield exploded above them. Farren lunged up and shouted Ricky’s name and then ducked again as the other pistol answered, a staccato, repeating. Bullets scudded across the dirt and rang against the blacktop, rattling into the metal of the bus and the truck with a tremendous clattering.

  No, Jodi thought, no. It was beyond anger now, beyond anything. She could hear nothing but the enormous ringing inside her head. Her lungs felt small and shallow, incapable of drawing a full breath. She pictured the three little boys and Miranda just on the other side of those bus doors. She pictured Kaleb’s eyes big with fear.

  From around the edge of the truck tire she could see a pair of shadowed legs approaching. She squeezed Farren’s arm. Shit, fuck. Why had she left the pistol in there? Why had he given it to her in the first place?

  Noise and the movement came almost simultaneously, a blast and then the slap and push of air as a body hit the ground with a gargled cry.

  “Ricky?” Jodi screamed, and she rose up to standing.

  But Ricky was still in the window, and in the dirt on the far side of the truck the slick-haired man lay squirming. His leg twitched and Jodi could see the blood.

  The man moaned and his gun went off again but this time pinging in the opposite direction.

  Jodi could feel herself trembling. She thought again of the shuddering wall of flames up on the mountain and she could feel it all, the jagged moments of this night all inside her.

  A slice of yellow light appeared in the doorway of the bus.

  “Cease-fire,” a voice called, “or whatever the fucking hell. Don’t shoot me in front of my sons. I’m unarmed.”

  The slice of light grew wider and Lee Golden walked down and around the front of the bus. “Who the hell’s out there?” He stood, hips squared and shoulders pulled back, calling his questions into the night.

  “Take my pistol, Lee.” The man on the ground moved with a dragging sound.

  Jodi pushed up onto her tiptoes, trying to reach in the window to Ricky but he was on the far side of the cab.

  “Daddy?” a small voice called, and then another: “Daddy, be careful!”

  In the doorway of the bus a blonde figure appeared with three little heads in a row behind her. Jodi felt a salt-surge of too much emotion ringing through her, emptying her out as she stared at Miranda and the boys. A part of her belonged over there with them and she could feel herself separating, raw as fresh-torn skin.

  “Put the gun down, Ricky,” she said.

  How in the hell did they end up like this? She’d built herself around this hope and it had gone off, so wild and wrong.

  “Who are you?” Lee’s voice boomed into the quiet. “Who the fuck are you?”

  From across the road an owl called out a single long note and Jodi pressed herself against the truck door and looked up to the arching branches over their heads and the strips of clouds and constellations above. Fixed and turning. And down below she saw this group she’d caused to gather here and she saw the line of her life, a dark seam twisting always back on itself, and she knew this moment had been coming for a long time.

  She thought of the girl she was before Paula, a girl waiting for happiness to come upon her the way she had seen it happen to other girls when they grew breasts and fell in love. She’d been waiting for change to come marching toward her like a summer storm across an open field but it had not happened like that. It had come up in an unexpected rush from under her feet. And it had all kept building up into the terror and then ebbing out into the everyday gray of prison life and then just as inexplicably she’d been released and left spinning like a broken compass, seeking, with the old plan as the only way to understand anything. Now, though, she felt strangely weightless.

  The land was gone and so was Miranda and she could see now how she’d laid the old pattern over her new life like the fragile tissue-paper outlines Effie had used to cut dresses. She’d carefully unfolded it and tried to fit them all inside, smothering any real chance they’d had. She thought back to her first free moment in that Jaxton parking lot with the Georgia mountains hovering over her and she saw her options drawing out from there like spokes in every direction but it was not until now, in this strange and gutted silence, that she had ever even acknowledged the possibility of other possibilities and the hugeness of the universe.

  “What the fuck do you want?” Lee screamed.

  Jodi breathed deeply, pulling in the silence and focusing. We’re ready now, we’re building. If she could just turn this moment around before there were any more unfixable mistakes. If she could just get that gun away from Ricky and then tell them to go
. . . she’d had no right to pull them in anyway—Ricky, Miranda, Farren—no right to suck them into the twistedness of her own life.

  She felt something turn in her and release and then she rose, pushing herself up and beyond. GO, go, go. She jerked the truck door open and was on Ricky with both arms, not breathing until she had the pistol in her fist. He roiled and turned, nearly overpowering her and she drew back, shaking, pistol held out and pointed at him. He froze. Pale face and shaggy hair outlined against the broken window.

  The silence was as wide as the night sky.

  Her body was empty.

  This was not happening.

  “Don’t move,” she said. She backed away from the truck, the pistol still held out and the weight of it centering her even as she shook.

  “Jodi—” Ricky said.

  She spun toward Farren, holding the pistol level with his face. “Get in the truck and go,” she said. “Those boys aren’t ours to keep.”

  “What—”

  From this distance she could not see the expression in Farren’s eyes but she could hear him breathing heavily. “Go on and get Ricky away from here. I’m not putting this gun down till you leave.” She motioned toward the driver’s-side door. “We gotta let them go.”

  She kept the pistol trained on the pickup until the motor started and the wheels turned, spitting gravel as it lurched forward. And then she was running. She did not look back at Lee. She ran across the pocked asphalt, down the embankment, and on into the blackness of the pines below.

  The forest closed around her, so complete that she saw only flashes of clouded sky. There were voices on the road up above but she kept moving. Sapling branches whipped her face and her feet slid on the slippery needles until she gave in and fell, her body tumbling and the smell of the ground rising around her. The bruising weight of her body against that hard earth felt satisfying, like it might beat this wild sadness out of her for good.

  Half a mile down the slope the pines opened into a small clearing and she steadied herself at the edge, her breath catching in her dry throat. She still clutched the pistol in her right hand. Her arm shook. She closed her eyes. Bits of thoughts buzzed and crackled, the darkness of the night roaring around her, but she found that in the darkness there were little pools of quiet too, not possibilities so much as realities. She had not broken parole tonight, had not been arrested, at least. She owed Ballard a visit in three weeks but if she could keep herself safe . . . Images sifted around her: her hands on the wheel of a semitruck, out on the flats of the desert, driving alone through the night, back toward the mountains. There were other pictures too, flickering at the edges of her mind: the rolling fields of some rich man’s farm in the valley. She remembered the cattle operation her great-uncle had managed for some out-of-state man and that little trailer he’d lived in up until his death. She thirsted for a job like that, a place to be alone, now that the blind and awful weight of hope was gone.