Northern Lights

by Raymond Strom

  I sat at the table for two near the window and watched him approach the sheriff and Svenson, who were now outside their cars. He must have called out because they both turned toward him and, after the sheriff reached into his open car window to switch off his lights, let him talk for a minute. Heads nodded all around before he shook hands with each man, then the sheriff and Svenson shook hands before they turned back to their vehicles. A moment later, he took a seat across from me.

  “Where were we now?” he asked.

  “You were just about to hire me,” I said.

  Two

  I was at the More-4-You again the next day waiting for another halfie when Jenny walked up, the morning sun shining around her updo, a golden halo. Her jeans flared wide and rolled up in the sleeve of her T-shirt was a pack of Marlboros.

  “Sniffing for butts?” she asked, smiling, then handed me an unlit cigarette. Before I could stutter a response she continued, “Are you always going to settle for what scraps fall your way? Let’s get out of here.”

  I took the smoke and the fire she offered, then she told me that she had looked for me out at the fairgrounds.

  “I was looking for you too,” I said. “But I must have missed you.”

  “That band sucked anyways,” she said. “I hate cover bands. Write your own shit already.”

  “Fuckin’ A.”

  We stood there a moment, smoking. She looked at me, caught me staring, then I looked away, embarrassed.

  “Anyways, I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I’m going camping with this guy and I know he only wants to fuck me. Would you want to come?”

  Jenny’s brash confidence was infectious. My plans for the day involved walking over to the plastics factory to ask people if they knew my mom but, with Jenny’s company, that could be put off indefinitely.

  “H-h-how do you know,” I stammered, “that I’m not only out to fuck you too?”

  She laughed a single loud “Ha,” like a bark or a sneeze. “I wish,” she said, “let’s get out of here,” then waved for me to follow her as she turned.

  We cut over to the movie theater and took Old Main south from there, past the Arlington, where I pointed out my two windows on the third floor, then stopped in front of the empty shell of Kristina’s Pet World, the store Jenny’s mother once owned.

  “There used to be a time,” Jenny said, “when you could do all your shopping downtown, walking from store to store, hearing the different bells clang as you enter. People used to wave at each other on the street, but now we all drive out to the Walmart, fill our cars, and drive back home.”

  She went on for some time about the sadness she felt when her mother’s store had closed, a little fire inside her that flared up with every new store closing, and said that it was nothing compared to how her mother had taken the news.

  “You try to tell people there’s more to life than low prices and a convenient location, but no one listens. For every closed store downtown, someone like my mother is wondering why their luck has run out.”

  We stood there staring at the papered-over store window for another moment before Jenny flicked her cigarette butt into the street and bolted down the sidewalk past the post office where the downtown business area petered out, giving way to wooden houses set on green lawns and shaded by leafy trees, bicycles turned on their sides along the stone walks that led to the front doors. A few blocks down, we came to a Dairy Queen with a steep red roof and Jenny turned down the road. In the front yard of the house just up Ash were two people I recognized, sitting on the grass beneath a towering willow, eating ice cream cones.

  “Lucky!” the young man yelled and stood. His ponytailed companion stayed seated, focused on the ice cream melt dripping down her fingers.

  “You guys know each other?” Jenny asked.

  I shrugged.

  “The name’s J, just the letter,” he said, putting his hand out between us. “And that’s Mary. You should see the stuffed animal we got with your luck. It takes up half of Mary’s room.”

  “Glad to help,” I said, then told him my name and shook his hand. Mary looked up at me and we exchanged nods. Jenny said her hellos.

  “I live here now,” J said, hooking his thumb over his shoulder at the two-story wooden house with a peaked roof behind him. It was like all the others in town, but a little more unkempt, like it belonged on the other side of the tracks. The white paint was peeling, window screens were hanging at odd angles, the grass grew in tufts or not at all.

  “If I lived next to a DQ,” I said, “I’d weigh three hundred pounds.”

  “I haven’t moved my stuff in yet, but give me some time and I’ll see how much ice cream I can eat.”

  “So you’re new here?” Mary said. “I haven’t seen you around. Before last night, I mean.”

  “Got here yesterday,” I said.

  “Of all the places in all the world, why would you come here?” J asked.

  “I’m looking for my mother,” I said. “I thought she lived here but I found out yesterday that she moved. I’ve talked to a couple people who knew her, but I don’t know what I’m going to do. I have no idea where she went. Jenny asked me to go camping, so here I am.”

  “Great,” J said, cutting a squint at Jenny, “the more the merrier.”

  “You don’t know where your mother is?” Mary asked.

  “My parents divorced when I was young,” I said, “and I didn’t see my mother much after that, only once. She sent me a Christmas card a few years back.”

  “What about your dad?”

  “He’s dead,” I said, not wanting to go much further with it. “That’s why I’m looking for my mom.”

  “A sleuth,” Jenny said. “Following leads, sniffing around. Fun! I’ll help you.”

  “So, you’ve been here long enough to see the whole place,” J said. “What do you think of Holm?”

  “Well, you guys seem cool,” I said, “but most of the people in this town are assholes.”

  J laughed when I said this but Mary recoiled, as if what I said had stabbed her in the stomach. I asked J if he had problems around town, if he had ever been called a faggot by a group of guys passing by in a pickup truck. Though he did have pretty-boy looks—big brown eyes and a confident, if slightly uneven, smile—his hair wasn’t quite long enough for him to be taken for a woman, and the hints of tattoos on his arms, peeking out from under the half-rolled sleeves of his flannel, gave him a jailhouse look. My guess was he had been spared the humiliation thus far.

  “I’d kick a guy’s ass if he said that to me,” he said. “Do you need me to do that for you?”

  “No,” I said, “I can handle it. I was wondering if it was only me.”

  “Let me know,” J said.

  “Anyone with hair like that would get it,” Mary said. “People here are very conservative. They wish it was the fifties. Why don’t you cut it?”

  “Because that would be giving in,” Jenny said. “Why does some asshole have the right to tell him how to wear his hair?”

  “If it’s easier . . .” Mary said, trailing off at the end.

  “Do you live your life by what other people expect of you?” J asked. “Do you always do what’s easiest?”

  “I guess I do,” she said.

  “That’s sad,” J responded.

  This put Mary in a sour mood, so she averted her eyes and stopped talking, but a few jokes and gentle nudges got her back on J’s side again. Soon we were all laughing and J pulled a beat-up cigarette pack from his pocket, dug deep inside it with his finger and thumb, lit what he found, and passed it around. Shorter and unfiltered, it wasn’t the same kind of cigarette Jenny had given me earlier. I didn’t mention until we finished that I had never smoked marijuana before.

  “Shit, man,” J said. “Would you jump off a cliff if everyone else was doing it?”

  “No, no,” I said and laughed.

  “I mean it,” he replied. “That’s where we’re headed. It’s right on the way to the camp
ground.”

  * * *

  The St. Croix ran through a craggy canyon and the cliffs on each side were two hundred feet high in places. We had been on the road for an hour, through cornfields, small towns, the occasional forest, and I had assumed we were on our way to a small rock quarry but the river was immense and I lost myself in the blanket of diamonds the sun lay on the water as we passed out of Minnesota and into Wisconsin.

  “We’re going to jump into that?” I asked, hoping the fear in my voice was contained.

  “Yep,” J said, “right over there.”

  J pointed out a ledge from the bridge and Mary turned her long brown Buick north on the far side of the river. Signs that read NO CLIFF JUMPING and NO PARKING were posted every hundred feet along the road.

  Mary pulled onto the shoulder when she thought we had reached J’s cliff and turned on the flashers. The road had veered a ways off from the river so we had a good piece of forest to walk through. The brush was thick but we made our way with J leading, lifting low branches for the rest of us to duck under. Then we came up to a fence that had been put up around a large, deep crevice. Trees and other brush grew out of the rocky hole.

  “I think we should turn back,” Mary said. “Those signs on the road and this fence. We could get in trouble.”

  “It’s a swallow hole,” Jenny said. “It means there are caves below us.”

  “But couldn’t the whole cliff face fall off at any second?”

  “It will fall eventually.”

  “Eventually. The earth will be swallowed by the sun eventually,” J said, making his way around the fenced-off area, “but not today.”

  He disappeared into the woods and I followed. After a moment, I heard Jenny and Mary crunching through the brush behind us. The trees thinned out and then we were on the cliff, the river below and the other cliffs on both sides of the river overgrown with the same scrub trees and pine as far as one could see. Before I could say anything J, suddenly barefoot and shirtless, emptied his pockets and ran, jumped without even looking for safe landing.

  “WHOOOOOOOOO-EEEEEEEEEEEEEE.”

  Stepping to the edge, I expected to find J’s broken body on the rocks below but saw instead that the cliffs dropped straight into the water. I didn’t see him at first but after a moment J came up for air, a tiny face looking up at me and waving, treading water in the weak current. It was a long ways down, but J had survived so I kicked off my shoes and stepped to the edge.

  “I don’t think you should jump wearing those jeans,” Mary said.

  “Or your shirt,” Jenny said.

  “And you might want a running start.”

  But I paid them no mind. I wasn’t one to undress in public and the joint we had smoked earlier hadn’t left me exactly clear-headed. An odd leap later I was in the air over the St. Croix, breaking into a clockwise spin as I fell. Seeing the worried faces of Mary and Jenny looking down at me gave me a sharp sense of regret but the spin continued. Downriver I could see the bridge we had crossed. Upriver, in the distance, another bridge. Just before I hit the water I saw a group of four sunburned people floating in inner tubes, a beer cooler taking up the rear in a fifth tube. Splash.

  The river was very deep. Ten or fifteen feet deeper, J had mentioned, than the usual forty. Underwater the whole scene turned blue, the sun illuminating the thick forest of weeds that grew along the river bottom. My corkscrew descent continued as I sunk, so I turned back toward the cliff, swimming, but I kept sinking. I kicked but a weight held me in place. Mary had been right about my jeans.

  As I continued to sink I undid my pants and pulled them down, off my legs. Unsure what to do, I bit down on a belt loop and began to swim again but then my head was sinking and I could no longer keep my eyes open. It was a great relief to let go. Light as smoke I rose upward and cliffward, reaching the rock wall first. Blindly feeling along the edge I moved slowly toward the air. To hit a jutting rock with my head now would be trouble. I came up safe but opened my eyes in darkness.

  There was no place to go but I could breathe. I coughed up the water I had swallowed while I held on to a submerged stalactite and a moment later my eyes adjusted. A dim blue light shone from beneath the water reflecting barely visible twinkles on the rock ceiling not more than two feet above me—I had swum into a cave. I remained a moment, treading water while holding on to the wall with my hand, and watched the way the light split, the odd reflections a web dancing over all I could see, like the battle between the sunlight and the flashing traffic signal on the wall in my bedroom.

  A strong kick popped me out of the water high enough to graze my head on the cave ceiling. Had the river been that much higher I would have drowned, my lifeless body trapped in this pocket until the river came down in a few weeks, and no one would’ve known, the only evidence I existed the shoes I had left with Jenny and Mary and the backpack on my bed at the Arlington. A streak of laughter rose up in me then, my body convulsing in its only defense against fear, until the hanging rockcicle onto which I held snapped off, dropping me underwater again, into a thrashing of blue light and darkness until I came up with another rocky handhold to keep my head above the surface.

  The way I had come was the only way out so, after calming to the idea that I could have died, I took ten deep breaths and swam toward the light until blueness was all I could see. I rose to the surface to hear my name being called from all around. J was treading water about fifty feet away, screaming. Jenny and Mary were shouting from the cliff. The group of people in inner tubes must have heard my name and added their voices to the search.

  “There!” Jenny yelled from up on the cliff. “Shane!”

  “I lost my pants!” I hollered back. It was all I could think to say.

  A man jumped out of his inner tube and swam over to me. He took me like a cape and draped me over his back then swam us over to his friends. He put me in his tube, then swam next to it, guiding it down the river. The lady a tube over handed me a beer and we floated to meet J.

  “Goddamn, Lucky,” J said with a gaping smile as he hung on to the side of the tube. “You’re really pressing it. Let me get a sip of that beer.”

  J took a long drink from my beer, then handed me back the empty can as our new friends in the inner tubes led us to the nearest place we could climb the cliff—the long incline under the bridge we had crossed from Minnesota. We zigzagged back and forth up the rocky valley wall toward the abutment and when we got to the top we found Jenny and Mary waiting with the car.

  “That’s it,” Mary said. “No more cliff jumping.”

  “No shit,” J said.

  “Nice shorts,” Jenny said, pointing at my plaid boxers, red, white, and blue. “Very American.”

  Jenny handed me a cigarette and we saw my hands were shaking but no one mentioned it. J had Mary pop the trunk and he dug in there for a while before coming up empty-handed.

  “Thought I had some pants in here but it looks like you’ll have to wear your undies.”

  * * *

  The campground was more of a party than a rugged experience of the outdoors. A three-day music festival was taking place at the adjoining amphitheater so tents were popped wherever they could fit. It was not the quiet isolation I had been expecting, having imagined that we would be alone in the woods, the only tent for miles. Mary was quite upset and grumbled about how crowded the place was as she steered the car through the masses.

  “You knew this was happening, J,” Mary said. “We could have gone camping anywhere but you tricked me into driving out here so you could buy drugs.”

  “I’ll find us some tickets,” J said, “if you want to go.”

  “Four tickets? Yeah, right.”

  “You think I can’t?”

  “You can, but I know you won’t.”

  As they went on bickering in the front seat, Jenny tugged on the sleeve of my shirt.

  “Wait until tomorrow morning,” she said. “You’ll see. Once everyone goes to the concert, all of this will be ours.”


  Mary found a spot way in the back of the field and J set up our tent. Even in our isolated corner the sound of the campground was a dull roar that grew louder and louder as the other campers filed into their spaces, leaving hardly a spot of grass between the pop-tent bubbles and the other multiroom canvas houses. People walked the road through the campground selling drugs and firewood, yelling whatever they were selling to anyone listening. Cocaine, weed, one guy was even selling balloons.

  “Balloons?” I asked Jenny.

  “It’s not what you think,” she said. “Do you have ten bucks?”

  I unbuttoned the pocket of my flannel shirt and pulled out my spending money, a ten and a one still wet from my jump in the river, then we walked off after the balloon guy and when we caught up with him Jenny asked him for two. He wore a tie-dyed shirt that read Not Fade Away across the front and had long blond dreadlocks tied into a bundle behind him.

  “Are you two excited to be alive today?” He smiled two rows of perfect teeth, straight and white.

  “He almost died jumping in the Saint Croix,” Jenny said.

  “That’s crazy,” he said. “I met the guy who pulled you out an hour ago. You are damn lucky.”

  “People keep saying that,” I said.

  “What happened?”

  We sat down in the grass and, while I told him about my jeans and the cave, he prepared Jenny’s balloon. He spun a gas cartridge into a silver cylinder, then fit a balloon onto one end. A slight twist of his hands caused the balloon to inflate to the size of a beach ball. He pinched the balloon by its neck and handed it to Jenny. Then, after throwing the spent cartridge in the grass, he prepared the next one for me.

  “Why were you wearing jeans? It’s hot as fuck and you were going swimming.”

  “I don’t wear shorts,” I said.

  “There are nice shorts out there,” the guy said, looking down at my boxers. “You just have to look.”

  The hiss of the canister came to a stop and he handed me my balloon. I tried to give him my ten, but he waved his hand between us.