Girl Gone Missing

by Marcie Rendon

  She quickly braided her waist-length hair into one long braid and pulled on her jean jacket. She filled her red Thermos with hot coffee and opened the fridge as if there might be food in there. Two bare shelves with a half-dozen carton of eggs looked out at her. She’d have to grab a tuna sandwich at the Silver Cup.

  The evening waitress was used to Cash running in and saying, “Tuna sandwich.” The waitress, who wore her hair in a black beehive, must have seen her coming through the front window because she was already wrapping the sandwich in wax paper: tuna, mayonnaise and a leaf of lettuce between two slices of white Wonder Bread. She put the sandwich in a small brown paper bag and folded it over neatly, just as Cash imagined all the wives of the men she worked with prepared their liverwurst or roast beef sandwiches, neatly wrapped in wax paper, too, but with homemade chocolate cake or chocolate chip cookies thrown in. Some day, Cash might ask Beehive for a slice of chocolate cake to go with her tuna sandwich.

  Cash put the Ranchero in reverse, then headed east to Highway 75 going north of Moorhead. Just as she was signaling to turn on 75, she changed her mind, decided to keep going straight east to the neighboring town of Hawley, where she turned north on Highway 9, a highway that would take her directly into the county seat of Ada. After a few miles she cruised through the small town of Felton, noticing several grain trucks lined up at the elevators. She drove a few miles farther, past the Lutheran Church that sat on the edge of Borup township. Still going north, she rounded a curve on the highway and crossed a bridge over the Wild Rice River, which was not much more than a narrow creek this late in the fall.

  As she came out of the curve, she saw the county sheriff’s car sitting at a gravel county crossroad. She braked to a slow crawl and pulled in alongside the tan cruiser so her driver’s window was directly across from the police car window. She rolled down her window at the same time Wheaton was rolling down his. “Funding the Thanksgiving turkey giveaway?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Nah, football practice is about to get over in Borup and the Ambrose boys will be speeding into Ada. One of them is dating the head cheerleader in Ada and he tries to get there just as soon as they get out of practice. One of these days he’s going to come around that curve and end up in old man Peterson’s field. Figure after a couple more days of seeing me sitting here, he’s going to learn to slow down a bit before taking that curve. On your way to work?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why you coming down 9? Aren’t you driving for Milt over in Halstad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s school?”

  “Okay.”

  They sat there, quiet. Cash watched the sun dip toward the western horizon. Sheriff Wheaton watched the occasional car pass on the highway.

  Cash finally spoke. “Hear anything about some girl missing from Shelly?”

  “Huh? So that’s why you’re tracking me down.”

  More silence, more sky and road watching.

  “Well?” asked Cash.

  “You just focus on your schooling, girl. Leave the police work to me.”

  Cash watched the sky turn to orange, pink and purple stripes over the Red River tree line twenty-some miles west across the flat farm prairie. Almost all the fields were plowed, row after row of black dirt clods stretched for acres. To the north a corn stubble field sat unplowed, most likely being left to winter over. A green John Deere tractor, slowly pulling a plow, raised dust behind it as it traveled down a gravel road a couple of miles over.

  “So where is she?” Cash finally asked. “Who is she? One of the hippie chicks at school said she’s missing from our biology class.”

  Wheaton looked over. “You know her?”

  “No. This chick just says she was in our class and now she’s missing. They live in the same dorm.”

  “She’s the oldest Tweed girl. Three younger sisters. She’s in college over there to get a teaching degree.”

  “But she’s gone.”

  “Yeah, I drove to Shelly Tuesday to talk to her parents after they called me. Good kid. Valedictorian. Her mom’s working at the dime store in Ada to help pay her college tuition. They’re heartsick. The sisters crying. Not a wild kid. Not one you’d expect to just take off and not say anything.”

  “Good kid, huh?”

  “Why, you know something?”

  “Nah, just that the hippie chick said she sits in the front of the class and flirts with the science teacher to get a good grade. Just talk. I better get to work.” Cash put her arm over the back of the car seat and looked both ways down Highway 9 before backing out onto the road and heading toward Ada. In her rearview mirror, she saw Wheaton give a slight wave. She waved back before rolling up her window.

  It was just on the edge of getting dark as Cash pulled into Halstad. She didn’t stop in town but drove on out to Milt’s farm where she exchanged her Ranchero for an International Harvester dump truck. She spent the next eight hours hauling beets back and forth from Milt’s fields to the sugar beet plant just on the northern edge of Moorhead. She figured she made four trips.

  Hauling beets meant driving alongside the John Deere harvester while it topped the beets, removed the green leaves, then picked them up out of the ground and carried them on a conveyor belt to the dump truck. Once the dump truck was filled, Cash drove it to the beet plant and waited in a long line with other trucks. The trucks were weighed and the farmer’s name collected, assuring that the farmer would get paid the correct amount for his crop.

  Some of the drivers sat in their trucks and read the daily newspaper. Others catnapped. Cash often used the time to read her homework assignments. Tonight, her curiosity was on the Valley gossip. After her first truck was weighed, she climbed down out of it and walked to where a group of other drivers were standing around shooting the bull.

  “Hey, Cash, thought you were too good for us already. Too busy stud-y-ing to hang out with those of us still got shit on our shoes.”

  Cash laughed. “Nah. Never too good for you, Bruce.” Throughout junior high and high school, she and Bruce had been regulars in the wheat fields or corn furrows drinking six-pack after six-pack, listening to the country music station piped in from Oklahoma. They would drink until the beer was gone, and neither was able to walk a straight line. But he always drove her back to whatever foster place she was calling home that month.

  He was one of her boy friends, never a boyfriend. White farmers were okay with their sons drinking with an Indian girl, but dating was off limits. She had learned from Bruce that his father beat his mother—“not that much really”—but Bruce had hoped to enlist and head to Viet Nam as soon as he turned eighteen to get away from home. No one ever really seemed to leave the Valley. Sure, they might move to Moorhead or Crookston and get a job inside the sugar beet factory. Or maybe sell shoes at some shop on another small-town Main Street. But really, none of them ever left. They soon found themselves back plowing fields and driving beet truck for their dads or uncles, waiting for one or the other to die so they could take over the family farm.

  For Bruce, some 4F reason kept him out of Nam. So here he was, standing in the chilly October air, smoking Salem cigarettes and bullshitting about who was going to win the World Series, who was knocked up and had to get married, and how that would never happen to him, followed by loud guffaws and back slaps. Soon the conversation would drift back to farming and the best fertilizer to put on the ground in the spring.

  The guys were so used to Cash, who had been working with them in various farm labor jobs since she was eleven, that they didn’t change their talk around her.

  “Give me a cigarette, I left mine in the truck.” Cash reached out a hand to Bruce. She lit up and took a deep drag and coughed. Bruce slapped her on the back. “Don’t choke.”

  “Damn, forgot you smoke these menthols.” Cash coughed but took another smaller drag anyway.

  “You’re going to school up in Moorhead?” Steve Boyer asked her.

  “Yeah.”

  “K
now anything about that Tweed girl that disappeared?”

  “First I heard about it was today.”

  The men all jumped in, a chorus of baritones.

  “Her folks are really worried.”

  “Valedictorian of her senior class.”

  “Remember when Connie Bakkas ran off with that carnie one year after the county fair and her dad had to go down to some place in Kansas to drag her back?”

  “Knocked up.”

  “But this is Janet. That girl is smart.”

  “Got some legs on her too.”

  “Wahooo!!”

  “You wish.”

  Some more backslapping, puffs of cigarettes. Sips of coffee from foam cups that American Crystal had provided in the warm-up shack. But Cash could tell from the looks on their faces that they were worried. Bad things that happened in the Valley were the occasional fight, sometimes a car rollover from kids drag racing down a deserted road, someone got someone pregnant and had to get married. But a town’s top student didn’t just disappear.

  “So what happened?” Cash asked.

  Bruce answered. “I don’t know. Folks say she was going to the Cities for the weekend with a friend from school—go see the big city and all. But her family doesn’t know who she was going with or if she went or came back or where she is.”

  One of the other guys jumped in. “Last they heard from her was on Friday when she called home and said she was going and would call them on Sunday when she got back. She never called.”

  “They got phones in the Cities—I know that,” another guy added.

  “Let’s go, trucks are moving.”

  They dumped the coffee cups on the ground, ground their cigarettes out in the gravel. A roar of truck engines filled the night air as the engines turned over all at once. Gears were shifted into first to move the trucks a couple spaces forward. The trucks that had been weighed were in line to dump their beets on another conveyor belt that would move them to an ever-larger pile of beets waiting to be moved once again into the processing plant.

  Cash dumped her truckload after another half hour and then returned to Milt’s field, where she waited in line for another load and another trip back to Moorhead. And so the night went. She read her English assignment and decided she would talk with Mrs. Kills Horses about testing out of English, which she had overheard from some of the other students was possible. There had been one summer in the fields where she read the entire works of Shakespeare, two whole years before anyone else in her grade level ever heard of the guy. Diagramming sentences and reworking dangling participles had been an evening pastime in various foster homes where punishment often meant long hours isolated in a bedroom. This freshman English class was not only deadly boring, it was an early morning class. If she was able to test out of it, it would give her a couple more hours of free time.

  She read her psych assignment, all about Freud being the father of modern psychology. When she finished her biology reading right around her midnight run into Moorhead, her mind went back to the Tweed girl. As she munched on her tuna sandwich, she closed her eyes and scanned her memory, searching for the girl in class. Cash always sat in the back row in every class, on whichever side of the room was closest to the door. Some of the students always sat in front. Whenever a teacher asked a question, they were the first to raise their hands. From the back of the room it was a sea of blondes. Scandinavian stock clearly dominated the educational system.

  Last Thursday Cash had gotten to class early because Sharon wanted to copy the work Cash had done the night before. They sat at the back of the room. While Sharon cribbed her homework, Cash watched the other students file in, some in groups of three, some alone. The jocks with slicked-back hair and the hippies with scraggly, oily locks lying on their shoulders. Girls came in bell-bottoms or miniskirts.

  Cash had uncanny recall ability. She could pull up a page in her science book in her mind’s eye and re-read it from memory. Likewise she could pull up a day or an event and run it across a screen in her mind as if it were happening in present time. Which is what Cash did now. In her mind, Cash watched the students from last Thursday enter the room. Ah, there she was, the girl who must be the Tweed girl. A tall blonde. Not Twiggy model thin but well-fed farmer thin—walked into the room, wearing a plaid miniskirt and a mohair sweater, a book bag slung across her shoulder. She sat in the front row, front and center. Put her bag under the chair and books on the desk. Still, with her eyes almost shut, Cash scanned the room. Nothing else to see. Sun outside the window. More students coming in. Sharon closing her notebook with a sigh of relief. Mr. Danielson came into the classroom and class started. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Now Cash knew who folks were talking about when they said the Tweed girl.

  Cash heard the other beet truck engines around her roar to life. Stretching her short frame, she pushed in the clutch with her left foot, right foot on the brake and turned the key in the ignition. She kept the truck in first as she let it roll forward to fill the space left by the other trucks. The air smelled of river mud and sugar beets mashed under truck tires. One would think it would be a syrupy, sugary smell, but it was more like stale cabbage. This fall smell was nothing compared to the rotten egg smell that would permeate the Valley come spring when the beets, which are mostly water, unfroze and the resultant fermented water filled the runoff storage ponds at the beet plant.

  Cash was done hauling by two in the morning. She fetched her Ranchero from Milt’s graveled farmyard, lit only by a halogen yard light, hollered See ya, followed by the obligatory hand wave to the other drivers. She sped back to Fargo, where she ran a quick bath, smoked a couple of Marlboros and drank a Bud before collapsing in bed.

  When she woke in the morning, she made coffee and a fried egg sandwich. She didn’t have a toaster or butter so once the egg was fried, she slapped it between two slices of white bread. She ate the sandwich on her drive to school. It took a few turns around blocks near the campus before she found a free parking spot. She grabbed her books off the seat and walked to Mrs. Kills Horses’ office in the administration building.

  Mrs. Kills Horses was talking on the phone, her long black braids hanging over her full breasts. Dangly turquoise earrings matched her squash blossom necklace. She waved Cash in with a hand wearing three turquoise and silver rings. “Gotta get to work,” she said into the receiver before putting the handset back in the cradle. “Good morning, Renee, how are you?” Cash could see that she was dressed in a long denim skirt. With the turquoise and braids, it made Mrs. Kills Horses look all Southwestern-y.

  “Good. I was wondering what I have to do to test out of my English class?”

  “Only the very best students do that, Cash.”

  “I’m getting all A’s.”

  “It’s kinda late in the quarter to think about that.”

  “Well, I’m kinda thinking about it. Maybe if you just tell me who I need to talk to?”

  “You would have to do it this week or it really will be too late in the quarter.”

  Mrs. Kills Horses leaned over her desk and made a show of shuffling papers. When Cash didn’t leave, she picked up a school catalog and made a show of flipping through the pages. Cash sat in a chair and waited. “Ah, here. Professor LeRoy is chair of the English Department.”

  As if you didn’t know.

  “You would need to talk with him about testing out. His office is in Weld Hall. You should really think about this, though,” she said, looking motherly at Cash. “I can call over to the department and check on your grades if you want.”

  Cash, who rarely smiled, smiled. If Mrs. Kills Horses had been the observant type she would have noticed the smile didn’t reach Cash’s eyes. With her fake smile—another skill she was learning at college—Cash lied, “Nah, that’s okay. I’ll talk with my dad about it tonight.” She stood up and turned to leave the office.

  “Tezhi said you were going to come to the meeting on Friday night. You’ll get to meet the rest of the Indian s
tudents.”

  “Tezhi?”

  “He said he ran into you shooting pool in the rec center?”

  “Oh, yeah, Tezhi.”

  “It’s potluck. All the Indian students come. I always make Sloppy Joes.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Tezhi said.” Cash said, rolling the new name off her tongue.

  “We’re going to plan a powwow and symposium, try to bring AIM in to discuss the rights of Indian students here on campus.”

  “I’ll see. I might have to work.”

  “Work? Where are you working? You know, any job has to be reported and that could affect your BIA grant monies.”

  Damn, thought Cash. Seemed like there was more stuff to learn about going to school than there was actual course work. Thank god most farmers had no problem paying cash to their workers. Looking Mrs. Kills Horses straight in the eye, she said, “My aunt might want me to babysit. Would I have to report that?”

  “Gracious, no,” exclaimed Mrs. Kills Horses, her long earrings swinging with her side-to-side headshake. “Just if you are working a job, you know, like waitressing or something.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to do that,” Cash said. She was already out the door.

  “See you Friday! 6:30,” Mrs. Kills Horses called after her.

  Cash walked quickly out of the administration building and took a big gulp of fall air. Being in the brick school buildings, sitting in the classrooms, even those with large windows where she could watch the clouds move across the sky, left Cash short of breath, edgy. She took another deep breath before heading resolutely across campus to Weld Hall.

  Cash paused before knocking at the oak door of Professor LeRoy. She didn’t know what to say to most of the people here on campus. They talked a lot, mostly about nothing. She was used to men who knew what kind of fertilizer to put on a corn field or whose main conversation was about when to spread manure on the plowed fields. And, always, the price of grain on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. The men she knew spent little time talking and a lot of time working. The men here on campus, their work was to talk about books, authors, ideas. But rather than talk about the day’s assigned reading material, class discussions often veered off into anti-war discussions or debates about civil rights. Cash wasn’t sure what either of them had to do with her.