Girl Gone Missing

by Marcie Rendon

  He looked up at her, amused.

  “Don’t get your undies in a bunch, little sis.”

  His talk was slow. His movements slow too, as he carefully finished rolling the joint he was working on and stacked it with the others.

  “Wanna toke?” He held out the joint from the ashtray.

  “You need to get that shit out of my apartment.”

  “Hey! Hey!” He raised his hands as if she were holding a gun on him. He carefully put the joints into small plastic sandwich bags. The first time he lost count so he ended up counting them twice, his glazed eyes and slow movements evidence that he’d smoked a bit more than just the joint in the ashtray. Cash stood, arms crossed, glaring at him.

  “Relax, little sis. Look, I’m doing what you asked,” he said as he put the pile of weed into a small paper bag and carefully folded it over many times from the top.

  “You need to get that shit out of my apartment,” Cash repeated.

  “Okay. Okay.” He got up slowly and went to his duffle bag, still on the floor near the north wall, Army blanket folded neatly next to it. He rummaged around and came back with a large black plastic garbage bag. He put the joints and paper bag of weed in the larger bag.

  “Back in a flash, little sis,” he said, letting the screen door slam shut behind him, causing him to duck, before realizing it was the door. He saw Cash watching him and laughed at himself, gave her a small salute and headed down the stairs.

  Cash sat down a chair, then got up to heat a cup of coffee for herself. She wondered briefly about throwing Mo out of her apartment, but he seemed eager enough to please her and had taken the marijuana out of her house willingly. Once she had her cup, she poured the grounds out of the coffee pot and made a new pot. Emptied out the cold coffee that was still in her Thermos from the day before. Damn, she’d forgotten to grab a sandwich from the Silver Cup. When that pot of coffee was made, she refilled her Thermos. She wondered if her brother was coming back. She needed to leave for work. She grabbed her work clothes off the floor by her bed and went into the bathroom to change. When she came out, her brother was sitting at the kitchen table. “Goddamn,” she thought, she hadn’t heard him come in at all.

  “It’s cool, little sis, it’s cool. I forgot you’re friends with the fuzz. Won’t happen again.”

  “I gotta go to work.” Cash stood in her small kitchen.

  “Okay if I crash here for a bit? Just in that corner. No more smoke. Promise. Maybe I’ll go down to your bar tonight and shoot a few games.”

  “I guess.” Halfway down the stairs, she turned around and went back up and into her bedroom. She opened her dresser and took out the roll of money she kept stashed there in the bottom of a drawer. Just in case. She stuck it in her jacket pocket and walked out again. “Later,” she said on her way by her brother. He was at the kitchen table, shuffling a deck of cards.

  She stuffed the money up into the springs of the car seat. He might be her brother, but she didn’t know him from Adam. Just after she put the truck into gear, the passenger door opened. The truck jerked forward and stalled out. “What the hell?” she hollered.

  Her brother was leaning in the passenger door, grinning.

  “Wanna go eat? You must have to eat before you go to work.”

  He was already sitting in the passenger seat, picking up the cookies she had bought. He looked like he was ready to rip them open. Cash grabbed them out of his hands and stuffed them under her seat.

  “Those are for a meeting tomorrow night.”

  “Come on. Let’s go eat. I’ll buy. Starvin’ Marvin. That’s me. Starvin’ Marvin. Don’t you cook? Ain’t nothing in that fridge. No wonder you’re so tiny, you don’t eat.”

  He was grinning at her. What bothered Cash is the grin didn’t quite get to his eyes. He didn’t seem mean, but wary or cautious. On edge. Maybe that was the word. On edge. Like he was constantly on the lookout for something.

  “You didn’t put that weed in my truck, did you?” she asked.

  “Nah, man, nah. I wouldn’t do that to you. Come on, let’s go eat.”

  Cash drove to the Silver Cup. They both had the daily special, a roast beef sandwich and mashed potatoes smothered in thick gravy. They ate without talking. Shirley stared at them as she moved back and forth, but she didn’t ask any questions. When they were done, Mo threw a handful of bills on the table and waved at Shirley as they walked out the door.

  “I woulda sold my soul for a meal like that back in the boonies,” he said, climbing into the Ranchero. “Drop me off at that bar and I’ll shoot a few games. Get my exercise walking around the table. Gotta keep my girlish figure.” He patted his non-existent stomach.

  Cash didn’t suggest that he get his exercise walking back to the bar. On the way out of Moorhead, she stopped at the liquor store and bought a twelve-pack. Driving the speed limit and watching for any cop cars, especially Wheaton—she didn’t need to see Wheaton right now—she drank a beer. Once on the job, she avoided talking to any of the other drivers all night. Rather than think about her brother, or the rest of her disappeared family, she put her mind on the Tweed girl and the story she heard in Piggly Wiggly. Was it possible two girls from this farm country just decided to up and disappear?

  Back when the Bakkas girl had run off with the carnie from the county fair, there were rumors of abuse in the home. People whispered about the mom whipping her for not doing the ironing fast enough. About her uncle touching her. Folks said, “She was always a wild one.” Cash didn’t know what was true or not true, but there was a big difference between your family knowing you ran off with someone and your family not knowing where you were at all.

  Where was that town they were talking about in the store? She’d never heard of a town called Melon. Miland? All she really knew was this end of the Valley, which ran from Fargo to the Canadian border. She had been in every little town along the way—and the big ones too. She’d also been in most of the towns on the North Dakota side. The farmers bought and worked land on either side of the state line. Folks talked about this side of the river or that side of the river. Rarely was the state mentioned. From what she could tell, it didn’t matter to them where they farmed, as long as the topsoil was thick and produced the wheat, potatoes and beets they needed. She rummaged around in the beet truck’s glove box, hoping there was a state map in there. No luck. She had one in the Ranchero.

  She usually studied while she waited in line to dump a load of beets. Tonight, she threw her head back on the cracked leather seat and tried to still her mind and body enough to call either girl to her. She stared up into the night sky. Breathed in the crisp night air. And drifted. She felt her being leave her body and float up into the air. Willing herself north, she hovered over the Tweed house in Shelly. An open circle of light invited her down into the girl’s bedroom, where once again the sweater hung. This time it glittered like the stars overhead though there was nothing new there to see or feel. Cash’s being zoomed up and out of the same circle of light and willed herself to go south. She floated along the river, skimming the treetops. She felt neither cold nor wind, just a gentle floating, like lying in an inner tube floating on a still lake.

  She passed over Fargo-Moorhead, the city lights below mirroring the flickering stars above. She followed the Red as far south as it went. She didn’t dare leave her familiar landmark, the river she had known all her life. A series of truck horns jerked her back into her body. It was like the rubber on a slingshot had been released. She started the truck rapidly, shifted the gears and moved forward in line.

  One of the other beet-haulers popped up in her driver’s window when she came to a stop, tapping on the glass. His unshaven face, half-covered by a farmer’s hat, peered in at her. She rolled down her window.

  “You fall asleep in there, Cash? You all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m all right. Must have dozed off for a minute.”

  “Here, I got you some coffee from the shack. Nice and hot.” He held up a steaming brew in
a foam cup. “Another week or so and this campaign will be done. You driving this weekend? Heard some of the farmers are paying time-and-a-half, get this year done with.”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to see.”

  “No one wants to be out here when the snow falls. Stay awake now.”

  Cash lifted the coffee cup in a salute as he hopped off the truck’s running board and moved back to his own truck. She finished out her shift and returned the truck to the farmyard. She scribbled a note to Milt that she wouldn’t be able to work the weekend but would be back on Monday night. She left the note on the truck dash. Once in her Ranchero, she took a drink of the Budweiser she had left open on the floorboards. She lit up a Marlboro and listened to the silence of the night. Then she drove back to Fargo where she sat outside in her truck, drinking another Bud. It was past closing time and she could see the lights on in her apartment. She could see the outline of her brother sitting at her kitchen table. She ate one of the Bismarcks that was starting to get hard, but still sweet. Washed it down with beer.

  Tomorrow, Friday, was when she was scheduled to test out of science and then there was the Indian students’ meeting she had agreed to go to, had bought cookies for. And there was still most of the twelve-pack she had bought before her shift tonight. She killed the beer, grabbed another one and headed upstairs.

  Mo was sitting at the table, seven empty bottles of Schlitz sitting beside him. The only indication that he might be a little drunk was that his eyes were narrow slits. He grinned when she came in. He pulled a wad of ones from the pocket of his flak jacket and carelessly laid them on the table. “Here, some money for letting me stay. These jokers don’t know how to shoot for shit.” He laughed and dealt another card on his solitaire layout. “Got some more beer and hamburger. It’s in the fridge, if you’re thirsty. And eggs. Bread. Some Amerrrican food.”

  “I got school in the morning. Gotta sleep.” Cash walked into the room where her bed was and set the beer on the dresser along with her pack of Marlboros and a matchbook. She grabbed a pair of jeans and T-shirt from her dirty pile of laundry on the floor in the corner, shook them out and smelled them to see if they smelled like beet field. They didn’t. She went into the bathroom and closed the door as best she could before peeing and pulling off the clothes she had just worked in. She put on the ones she had pulled from the laundry pile.

  Back in her room she threw the clothes in her arms onto the floor with the rest of her laundry. She turned on a small lamp she had sitting on the dresser. She stretched up and pulled the string to shut off the overhead light. The bedsprings creaked as she sat down on the bed.

  She drank from the open Bud and lit up a Marlboro, staring at her brother who seemed engrossed in his solitaire game. When the beer was finished, she fluffed her pillow and lay on her side facing the window. Damn she was tired, but wired too. Not sure what to think or feel. She heard the soft tap tap of cards being laid down. She yawned. Heard the shuffle of the deck, a bottle being set down on the table. Another yawn. She put her arm over her eyes to shut out the light.

  As a kid in foster homes, she had a nightly dilemma. Night wasn’t always the safest time. Should she sleep with the lights off so she was harder to find in the dark? Or should she sleep with the lights on so she could see who was coming to get her? Some families forced her to shut the lights off to save electricity. Before she got older and learned better, that would send her into a tailspin of wondering, late into the night, where and how electricity was saved. You can’t see electricity. Except for lightning. So just where and how was it saved? She imagined giant metal storage bins somewhere in the country filled with shooting lightning bolts.

  In one home she also practiced shallow, soundless breathing, hoping to make her body harder to find. Wrapping the sheets around her, mummified, so when hands came creeping in the dark, the slightest tug would wake her and she’d sit up quickly, shoving the hands away. The hands would scurry off with the rest of the body, bare feet swishing on the hardwood floors. She yawned again and folded her pillow in half around the back of her head to shut out the sound of the cards.

  Cash woke to the smell of bacon and the sound of grease spattering. She rolled over, pulled the pillow off her head and glanced at her alarm clock. Seven-thirty. She had a moment of panic thinking she was going to be late for English but then remembered she had taken the test to get herself out of that class. She hadn’t heard yet whether she passed or not. Maybe she would run by Professor LeRoy’s office first thing on campus. Her legs felt stiff and cruddy from sleeping in her jeans. The metal button on the waistband had left a red mark she could see. She sat on the edge of her bed, stretching her legs out in front of herself. She lit up a cigarette and leaned back across the bed to open the window a couple of inches. A cool morning breeze drifted in. No frost out there that she could see. She shut the window.

  She grabbed some clothes and went into the bathroom to change. Her hair was a mess. She brushed it out and wound it in a knot on top of her head with a pencil stuck through to keep it up. When she came out, there was a plate of scrambled eggs, bacon and sliced white bread sitting on the table. A steaming cup of coffee too.

  “Couldn’t find a toaster. Hope scrambled’s okay.”

  Cash sat down. “Thanks,” she mumbled.

  He was scarfing down a plate filled with twice as much food as was on hers. “One thing I missed about being in the real world was real food. You got school, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Work?”

  “No. Taking the weekend off. Got some other things I gotta do.”

  “They said last night there’s some kinda pool tournament coming up in a couple weeks. They said you usually play, some white guy partner.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Can’t?”

  “Got 86’d last time. Some stupid waitress accused me of stealing some beer. Sticking it in my purse.”

  “Did you?”

  Cash breathed a heavy sigh. “I had two beers in the waistband of my pants. Under my jacket. I don’t carry a stupid purse.”

  Mo started laughing. “So you stole the beers and they 86’d you for stealing.”

  “No, they 86’d me for busting up some beer bottles on my way out.”

  Cash by then was laughing along with him. She pantomimed clearing the table with her arm.

  “What’d you do with the beer?”

  “Drank it down by the river,” she laughed.

  “Guess we won’t be playing partners at the tournament then, huh?”

  “Guess not.” She folded some of her scrambled egg inside one of the slices of bread and took a bite.

  “So you go to school and do farm labor. Folks say you’re a pretty good shot at the tables. What else you do? Got a boyfriend?”

  “That’s all I do. School and work.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Not really.”

  Silence.

  “You? What’d you do?

  “Just back in the world. Thought I’d be coming back to farm. No farm to farm now. Might re-up. See how the next couple weeks go. It’s so quiet here. Makes me nervous. Anything exciting ever happen around here?”

  “Not much. There’s a girl missing from up around Shelly. And I heard yesterday another one, younger, is missing from some small town south of here.”

  “Missing?”

  “Yeah, the one from Shelly was in my science class at school. Last week she went missing. Told her folks she was going to the Cities and never came back. Not a wild kid. Smart.”

  “What about the other one?”

  “I don’t know. Just overheard about her in the store yesterday. Some high school student. I was going to go to the library today and look back in the newspapers and see what I could find. But first I’ll have to find the right town. I couldn’t understand if the women were saying Melon or Myland or Midland, but they said just south of here on the border.”

  She jumped up. “I got a map in my truck.”

  When s
he came back up, breathless from running up and down the stairs, Mo had cleared the table. She spread the map out and they leaned over it. Cash’s finger traced the Red River south of Fargo-Moorhead along the Minnesota-North Dakota border. No towns that started with M. Mo was reading the city and town names listed on the corner of the map. He was reading out loud. “Medina, Melrose, Mendota. Those are all too far east. Milaca. Milan. Millerville. Melville.”

  “Wait. Wait. Wait. Where is Milan? And Millerville?”

  “Looks like Milan is on the west side of the state and Millerville way over on the east. Right here. Look, here’s Milan. Right on the South Dakota border. You think that’s it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll look it up in the newspapers when I get to school. Why would a little girl from there go missing?”

  “You said she’s a teenager.”

  “That’s what the women in the store said. Said a kid.”

  “White slave trade.”

  “Huh?”

  “White slave trade.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Maybe they were kidnapped for the white slave trade.” He sipped his coffee.

  “Get real. You read too many true crime magazines out there in the jungle.”

  “No, I’m serious as a motherfucker. Boo-coo girls sold in the sex trade over in ’Nam. Round eyes carry a bigger price. Anywhere in the world for that matter, white girls—blonde and blue-eyed—catch a much bigger price than anyone else.”

  “No-o.”

  “It happens. That’s what I’d be looking for if I had two girls disappear like that.” He drank some more coffee. “Girls that ain’t ever been in trouble? Sure as shit, they been kidnapped.”

  Cash finished her lukewarm coffee. “That’s sick. I gotta get to school.”

  She put the coffee cup in the sink. She filled her Thermos with the rest of the coffee from the coffeepot. She grabbed her cigarettes and matches off the table and left.

  She shivered as she waited for the heat in the Ranchero to kick in. She didn’t believe her brother. She had been through some crap in her life, but even with that, she couldn’t imagine what he was saying.