by Jess Lourey
This weather is bad for farmers and good for business, I thought, turning into 4Ts. The store was packed, jammed with sunburned tourists just off the lake and looking for distraction and relief from the heat. The small, crowded front room that made up the Tina portion of the shop smelled of coconut sunscreen and pine-scented mosquito repellent. I wove my way over to the ring display at the back of the store near the till, hundreds of handcrafted silver circles displayed in black velvet. They were plain, or had semi-precious stones like amethyst and garnet worked cleverly into them, or held intricate designs. It was a wonder everyone didn’t steal from Tina, what with all this glittery splendor within easy reach.
Behind the counter, two young women, presumably Annika and Kaitlyn, smiled as they answered questions and rang up sales. They were both comfortable with their jobs, reaching smoothly around one another to grab gift wrapping, a calculator, a ring sizer. Kaitlyn was a typical Battle Lake high school graduate—fresh, blue-eyed, and blonde. She was curvy and wore a royal blue sundress that showed off her strong shoulders.
Annika was also blonde, but her height set her apart from the crowd. She was at least six feet tall, maybe a little more. She dressed boldly for a tall woman, wearing a hot pink tank top over an acid green and yellow skirt. I remembered those colors from my high school years in the ’80s. They didn’t look good then, but it might have been because they couldn’t compete with the big-hair-with-claw-bangs, Dynasty eye makeup, and pinned jeans we all wore with them. On Annika, the colors looked electric and attractive. They almost distracted from the very expensive-looking jewelry dripping from her wrists, fingers, neck, and ears.
I grabbed from the display box a tiny yin yang ring that I could give away to one of the kids next Monday, in honor of the August Moon festival, and made my way to the till. Kaitlyn was free, but my target, Annika, was busy, so I pretended to dig through the basket of elastic toe rings at the front counter. When a woman as pink and skinny as a newborn pig asked Kaitlyn for help clasping a necklace, I pounced on my prey.
“Hi! Can I buy this ring?”
“You sure can. Those are very popular this week.”
“I guess, with the festival coming up on Saturday. Say, aren’t you from Henning?”
She looked at me curiously, then went back to removing the price string from my purchase. “Born and raised. Are you from there?”
“No, I live in Battle Lake. I’ve seen you around, though. I work at the library.”
“Oh, sure. You’re Mira, right?”
“Right. Oh jeez, that’s a gorgeous bracelet,” I said, pointing to her tennis bracelet of tiny green jewels. “Did you get that here?”
She smiled. “No. We’ve got nice stuff here, but it’s more for the tourist crowd, you know?”
“Sure.” On her right wrist she wore four golden bangles, along with the green-jeweled tennis bracelet. She had matching earrings and a necklace, each with a larger, teardrop version of the green gem. Her fingers sparkled as well. For all I knew, she could be wearing $19.95 worth of cubic Zirconia or $1995 worth of emeralds. Either way, Tina must certainly have noticed the extravagance, so I didn’t have anything new to report. Besides, the fact that Annika owned nice-looking jewelry didn’t prove a thing. “You guys get much shoplifting here?”
“We’ve got mirrors,” she said, nodding over my shoulder. “We try to keep a good eye on things, but sometimes people get a five-finger discount. It’s mostly old ladies in their fifties, if you can believe that.” She took my money, made change, and handed the package to me.
“Thank you,” I said. I glanced at Kaitlyn on my way out. She was the picture of youthful innocence, and I didn’t want to ask her questions in front of Annika. They would be sure to talk about it after I left, and if one of them was the embezzler, she would be on her guard. I would come back on a day when only Kaitlyn was working, or Kaitlyn and the other girl, to see if they’d offer anything about Annika or any other suspicions they had. Of course, since the stealing wasn’t shift-specific, two of them could be in cahoots, but that seemed unlikely. Stealing from a till seemed like an activity best done alone.
I strolled over to the Turtle Stew and relished the familiar sight of the red Naugahyde booths, bustling wait staff, and tables crammed with hungry, happy people. It smelled like fresh-baked bread and slow-cooked meats, with an undercurrent of sauerkraut, or some other exotic German fare. The Stew was a full-service restaurant with a set-up bar, which meant that if you wanted hard liquor, you had to bring it yourself. The locals were usually four to a table, couples who would play 500 or Solo after supper, a big bottle of Canadian Club in a handcrafted carry case between them. Out-of-towners sipped wine or 3.2 beer, which you could buy on site.
When it was my turn to order, I picked one of my favorites, my tummy feeling warm at the thought of the comfort food. “Tuna casserole, green beans, and a salad with French dressing on the side. Can I get sunflower seeds on that? And it’s to go.”
I read the community board as I waited, my food anticipation high dulled by the thought that this might be the last time I’d buy takeout from the Stew. Oh, well. I can always visit. In less than twelve hours, I’d gladly have given a kidney to return to the normalcy of that moment.
I woke early on Tuesday morning, feeling so organized that I managed to take Luna for a forty-five-minute walkjog before I headed off to work. It was hot out like an orange stovetop ring, but I was in too good a mood to complain. I had found a fantastic librarian to take my place and do a much better job than I ever could, Ron Sims knew I was leaving and hadn’t been mad, and I had my whole future ahead of me. Starting over is hard, I acknowledged, but I was brave for trying. I wasn’t a quitter, I was a leader. I could enroll in some grad classes at the U of M, maybe land a TA position if there were any left, and force some direction back in my life.
That’s what I told myself as I steered the Toyota along snaky Whiskey Road, one bare foot with blue-painted toenails resting on the driver’s side window, the other on the gas pedal. I was heading to work three hours early to clean the library from top to bottom and get it ready for its new boss. I reached over to crank up the Tom Petty song leaking out my stereo and riding the acrid air, wondering about the high whine in the song, almost like a siren. I had never noticed it before. That’s when I spied the cherries in my rearview mirror. “Shit!” I pulled my left foot down. It wasn’t illegal to drive with one foot up, was it?
I slowed the car, my heart racing, and pulled off on a flat spot. I squinched my eyes shut and tried to hide in my shoulders, hope hope hoping it wasn’t Gary Wohnt. We didn’t get along so well when he was a regular guy. Now that he had Jesus in his life, I was sure he was going to be that much crabbier.
When the cop car raced past, scaring up dust on the shoulder as it swerved around me, my head shot up like a turtle. I hadn’t been the target, and there was no one else on the road. I peeled out after the royal blue vehicle without thinking. A police car in full rush at seven a.m. on a Tuesday meant something terrible had happened, probably an accident or a fire. What if it was Mrs. Berns hurt, or Johnny Leeson’s poor mom, or even, I suppose, Kennie Rogers? I was better off being at the scene to help rather than growing gray hairs at work, worrying about my friends.
The Battle Lake police car had a good lead on me, but I could hear its sirens to the south as I hit Larry’s Grocery, so I turned right toward 210. I spotted the cop car zooming toward Clitherall, tractors, pickups, and minivans pulling off the road to let it through. I knew everyone who saw it race by had a freezy grip on their heart like mine, wondering if it was their neighbor, their husband or wife, their child that the police were going to try to save.
I was cruising seventy-five miles an hour, but as I crested the hill where I could turn left to enter Clitherall or right to go to Koep’s Korner, it became chillingly obvious there wasn’t anyone available to give me a ticket. A half a mile ahead of me, all three local police cars were turning north. I rode the brakes, recognizing the bac
k road they were veering onto. Clitherall Car Wash, the locals called it, because it took a sharp turn that no one was ever prepared for, particularly a person leaving Bonnie & Clyde’s. To the east of the razor curve was a large swamp, complete with cattails and sludge, that had christened many a vehicle full of drunk teenagers, tipsy housewives, and beer-chugging farmers.
As I turned down the Clitherall Car Wash road, a heavy, salty-bitter taste formed in the back of my throat. Somebody was seriously hurt, and I was about to find out who. I flashed back to the night the police had called my mom and me in to identify my dad’s car. His body had been burned too severely for a visual identification, but it’s hard to significantly alter the appearance of a 1980 Cavalier. It was his car, bent like a Coke can under a giant’s fist, the stench of cooked flesh still strong on it. Somehow, the Paynesville driver’s ed instructor got his hands on the wrecked car and set it up as a permanent, “don’t drink and drive” display, one that I was forced to walk past to get to school my junior and senior years. Even though the interior had been power-washed, I still imagined that smell, was embarrassed by it, was certain all my classmates could also smell my dad roasting next to an open bottle of vodka.
I never wanted to witness something like that again, but I couldn’t stop myself. I numbly noted the brown and orange-trimmed fishing shack to the left, contrasting with the bright green swamp grass of the shoulder against wheat-brown cattails to the right. Then I registered a group of people standing in the ditch at a low point in the road, at the spot just before it shrieked left toward Bonnie & Clyde’s.
I parked a hundred feet away from the gathering. I slid out of my car, the sound of the door clicking shut behind me muffled in the oppressive air. I floated toward the police cars, hearing but not understanding the shrill buzz of a woman, weeping. No one noticed me as I rounded the police car closest to the group and walked down through the sand-sprayed grass.
I smelled it before I saw it, that metallic, gory smell of violent death, playing through the fresh country air. A cluster of police surrounded the weeping woman to my left, and straight ahead two more officers crouched around a female shape on the ground. It was her hand I noticed first, unwrinkled, freckle-free, taut, spread out on the ground like she was jumping off a barn beam into a pile of hay and hadn’t yet landed. She was no farther away from me than a clerk at a drive-through, but I felt like years and miles obscured her. Around me, people buzzed and moved, and I felt invisible.
I followed the arm up, noting the dark green cloth covering it. Her hair was long, dark and messy, splayed over her head like a fright wig where it wasn’t matted with blood. My eyes skimmed over the dip in her back, about the size of a baby’s fist, couldn’t process that detail, and traveled over to where her other arm should be. I couldn’t see it. It must have been twisted under her body. She was wearing a skirt, short, pleated, and trimmed in white. Her legs were bare, firm and strong, and on her feet were white socks and sneakers. One shoe was untied, and the leg it was on was twisted gruesomely around so her toes were almost pointing up at the bright, unforgiving sky. I glanced back at the depression in her torso, relatively clean and round at the entrance point, though it looked like it had been made with an elephant gun. The dead girl was a cheerleader, and she had been shot in the back.
“What are you doing here?”
I couldn’t pull my eyes away. They were stuck on that murky hole and the missing flesh that should have protected her heart. I fancied I could see the bright grass underneath her through the wound, but then realized it was mucky bones, shattered, sharpened, and reflecting sunlight.
“I said, what are you doing here?”
A hand grabbed me, roughly, and I caught a glimpse of Gary Wohnt before I wobbled to the other side of the road and threw up. Between retches, I scoured the ditch for more dead bodies, or body parts, but the grossest thing on this side of the street was coming out of my mouth. When my stomach settled, so did my ears. I heard the woman who found the cheerleader describe how she was staying at a local resort and had been jogging. The tourist was near hysterical and had nothing to offer.
I spit and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. I felt empty, but far from cleansed. My nose and throat burned, and I needed a shower. I knew that dead girl.
I lurched into my house like brain-eating zombies really had attacked me. Tiger Pop and Luna followed. When I tumbled onto my couch, Luna snuffled my hand and Tiger Pop laid across my lap. My head was empty except for the picture of the ragged wound in Lucy’s back—Lucy, who loved books more than anything and always looked for the best in people. I wondered if her parents knew yet, if they were just puttering around their house, waiting for her to get home from summer cheerleading practice, if Gary Wohnt was about to knock on their door and ruin their lives. Lucy’s parents were dairy farmers, the old-fashioned kind who believed in hard work and good manners. They were also the ones who had given Lucy the lovely gold charm bracelet with red dangling hearts on it that I had seen on her cold gray wrist as she lay sprawled in the ditch.
Dark thoughts chased each other in my head like wild animals, their claws ripping and slashing until I had a bleeding muscle of a headache. I don’t know if I passed out or fell asleep, but when I next looked at the clock, I had lost an hour. It was nine a.m., and I was soaked in sweat. I concentrated on the blinking numbers on my VCR, orienting myself to the room, the house, the town, the planet. None of it felt right. All I knew for sure was that I was in Battle Lake, and sweet young Lucy—the girl who was going to St. Cloud State after her senior year to major in elementary education, who liked to party with her friends but always showed up for work early and with a smile on her face—had been shot in the back. I stumbled off the couch and stepped out into the oppressively hot day.
A cow lowed in the distance, and I could hear families already splashing in the lake near the Shangri-La Resort. My sweet garden stretched out in front of me like a black, freshly dug grave. I strolled over to it, walking lightly, and bent down to rub my cheek against the soft and spicy tomato leaves. For the whole month of June, I had eaten fresh lettuce, radishes, and peas. As those crops waned, cherry, pear, and beefsteak tomatoes, baby potatoes, kale and chard, and onions replaced them. All the plants were robust and tall, and it was easy to separate the week’s growth of weeds from them. I plucked and pulled for several minutes, moving back to put weeds on the same pile. I tasted salt and dirt as I worked, the combination of steamy air and dusty soil making for a fine layer of black earth clinging to my moist skin.
My weed pile was not impressive, but then again I was meticulous about my garden. Here was my order and structure. It was the one place in this whole world where I could feel safe and necessary. I could nurture without being seen and without fear of criticism, permanent loss, or shame. I gathered up the weeds and tucked them around the base of my three cabbages, each of them nestled in a bottom- and top-less giant tomato can, shoved deep into the earth to keep grubs from getting the roots. The weeds would keep the moisture in and deter new weeds from taking root.
My brief bout of weeding finished, I stood up and heard both knees creak. The sprinkler lay next to the garden where it had been earning its keep and then some for the last four dry weeks. I centered the oscillating waterer and cranked the faucet on the side of the house, watching the cool water spurt into the air before it got sucked greedily into the bone-dry earth. The sprinkles were soothing, soft rain feeding my hungry plants. Without any concrete plan, I stripped off my clothes and lay down next to the sprinkler, between the potatoes and peppers. The oaks and lilacs were thick around my yard, creating a natural barrier to any wandering eyes, but it wouldn’t have mattered because at the moment, I didn’t feel connected to this world’s rules.
As the water washed over my naked body, making tiny clean spots on my dirty skin and reflective pools in my tender parts, I became aware of my roots leaking into the ground, looking for purchase. Water began to puddle, seeking out the dry, powdery dirt still protecte
d under my back. I thought I heard the plants sigh. I got up, turned off the water, and went inside to get ready for work all over again.
I opened the library a half an hour late, seeing Lucy’s smile in the unshelved books. I even thought I heard her giggle once, but when I went to the stacks where I had heard the sound, no one was there. The library was a lonely place to be on this day, and I was grateful when the door opened, even if it was Kennie who walked through it. We hadn’t seen each other since she had melted a little on my couch in July.
“I see you’ve pissed off God. It’s a growing club.”
“What?” The question was as much directed at her outfit as at her statement. She was dressed in head to toe leather, from the animal skin do-rag holding back her brittle platinum hair to the Bedazzled vest to the chaps-over-tight-leather pants that would make Cher feel exposed. I looked over her shoulder at the shimmering heat rising off the paved parking lot and back at her tightly sealed, oily body. All I could think was “mushroom farm.”
She thrust a stapled sheaf of papers at me. “See for yourself.” Her outrageously orange lipstick curled in a smile, nearly colliding with her Anna Nicole fake eyelashes. The sheaf was a petition, and the cause being supported was succinctly and clearly stated at the top. “Ban the Battle Lake Public Library until decency returns. Sign below if you support removal of the Godless literature currently being promoted.” Alicia Meales’ signature was the first, followed by 112 others, including Gary Wohnt, Elvis Aron Presley, and Ima Pigglicker.
“Jesus. Where’d you get this?”
“I’m the mayor of this town, and I got my finger on the pulse. You’all’re lucky we’re friends so I can look out for you. I’m passing this on as a heads up, but it’s just one of three going around town. It’s burning up the streets in Clitherall. People can’t sign it fast enough.”
